Bed of Nails

by Michael Slade

  “So you’re sitting at your desk about to write,” said Wes, “trying to think of something to write about. That’s when you recall what I said about selling your soul to the demon that is you, and you wonder what the hell I meant by that. Well, look at me.”

  “Surprise, surprise,” said Bret.

  Wes ignored him. “Who here knows what Creative Anachronism is?”

  A few hands.

  “Creative Anachronism is a worldwide organization of followers attracted to medieval times. As a hobby, they dress up in the costumes of pre-seventeenth-century Europe to reenact everyday life as they believe it was in that nonindustrial era. Born out of the late sixties, it appealed to the mind-set of back-to-the-land hippies, like my father and mother, who were flower children in the Haight.”

  “Peace, love, and have a nice day,” mumbled Bret.

  “Thanks to LSD, my dad soon tired of playing that game. What he desired wasn’t fairs and get-togethers but a time machine to take him back. Unable to obtain that, he moved my mom, my sister, and me to the backwoods of British Columbia to cut us off from modern times. We dressed like they did in the 1600s, and lived in a house without electric power and running water. We had no machines of any kind. The Amish were futurists compared with us.

  “Then one day, a black goat was born in our barn. My dad saw the meddling of witchcraft in that, and because my mom and sister were the only females around, he became convinced that they were possessed. In the end, he went berserk and hanged the two of them from the sturdiest limb of the oak behind our house. Overwrought by what he had done, my dad then hanged himself from the same tree. I was four.

  “Three days later, a pair of lost hikers found me sitting on the ground, staring up at the three of them suspended in the air. My memory has shut out their faces. All I can recall is the ring of flies around my father’s head.”

  Wes held up his book a third time.

  “Halo of Flies,” he said, and this time elicited no snarky comment from Bret.

  “The point I’m making,” Wes said, “is that if you want to tap into horrors that will cause readers to shiver and shake, you must delve down into the landscape of your own damned soul. To be a best-seller, a book has to resonate. A year and a half ago, up in Vancouver, there was a murder in which the body was strung up like the Hanged Man card in the tarot deck. The tarot image has a nimbus around its head, and that got me thinking about the halo of flies around my dad’s head. I transposed that personal horror to the characters in my book, and that’s why I’m sitting up here in front of you.”

  “Wrong,” said Bret. “It’s because you cribbed my idea.”

  “Don’t be an ass. The Tarot murder was all over the media in Vancouver for weeks.”

  “But I turned it into a novel.”

  “So did I.”

  “Crown of Thorns came first.”

  “Bullshit, Bret. The story of my dad hanging my family was in all the papers thirty years ago. What motivated me to write Halo of Flies is there in black-and-white for you to look up. What motivated you to write Crown of Thorns? The belief you’re Jesus Christ?”

  Laughter.

  “Now if Bret can find the courtesy to let me finish what I’m trying to pass on to you, the moral of my personal experience is this: You each have the genesis of a horror novel in your background. Perhaps you were sexually abused as a child, or you wandered off from a campground and got lost in the woods for a night, or like Clarice Starling in the novel The Silence of the Lambs, you had to listen to lambs having their throats cut out in the barn. It could be anything, so that’s why I say I don’t know the what of your personal inspiration, but I do know where you’ll find it, and that’s in your deepest fears. Do you want to know mine? Read Halo of Flies.”

  Wes reached down beside him and did something out of the sight of the audience. The explosion of music that filled the room from a ghetto-blaster was so loud and unexpected that everyone jumped. What Wes was playing was Alice Cooper’s “Halo of Flies.”

  Just as suddenly, the barrage stopped.

  “Think about that,” he said.

  Ralph was breathing heavily next to Zinc.

  “Y’ okay, Ralph?”

  “A shock like that, I could be dead of a heart attack.”

  “Cannibals!” Wes abruptly shouted. “Do I have your attention? If you want something to write about, write about that. ‘Okay,’ you’re asking, ‘what do cannibals have to do with me?’ Well, you’ll find a connection if you dig deep enough. I can tell you how to find it, but I’m sure Bret wants me to give up the mike.”

  “No!” yelled a voice in the crowd. “Feed us, Wes.”

  “Lunchtime,” someone bellowed.

  The room took up the chant.

  “Lunchtime … lunchtime … lunchtime …”

  “This guy’s a natural showman,” Zinc commented, trying to make himself heard through the din.

  “Lawyers!” scoffed Ralph for the second time. “Selling snake oil is their trade.”

  Wes held up his hands. “Back by popular demand,” he announced. “What I want each of you to do is to dig waaaaay back. Back to the days when hominids evolved from apes. Come on, people. Feel your DNA. In your skulls are three integrated brains, and the inner two are the ones we got from lesser beasts.

  “Cannibalism is rare among nonhuman primates in the wild. But there is an exception: chimpanzees. Among chimps, cannibalism is a common act. Chimps are the most carnivorous of apes, and we share 99 percent of their genes.

  “Are there any carnivores in the room?”

  More palms shot skyward than at a Nazi rally.

  “‘Taphonomy.’ There’s a useful word. That’s the analysis of human bones after death. The science that records the death history, as opposed to life history, of deceased individuals. By examining the tooth marks on ancient skeletons, taphonomists can identify the species that gnawed off their flesh. From Homo erectus in northern Spain eight hundred thousand years ago, to Gough’s Cave at Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, England, twelve thousand years ago, to Fontbregoua Cave in southeastern France seven thousand years ago, to the Celts of Eton in Iron Age Britain three thousand years ago, to the Fremont Culture and the Anasazi Indians in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest one thousand years ago—time after time, scientific evidence establishes that man was eating man.

  “Cannibalism, folks. Man-eaters evolved into us.”

  “I’m a vegetarian,” a woman called out.

  “Eat her!” a man retorted, to laughter all around.

  Wes glanced down at the table. He was consulting notes. His facts and figures had been researched. Bret, on the other hand, faced an empty surface. Ill-prepared, he would wing it.

  Oops, thought Zinc.

  “Are there any Scots in the audience?”

  “Aye, laddie.” A new voice.

  “Consider the case of your countryman Sawney Bean. Sometime in the 1600s, he and his incestuous brood hid in a cave on the Galloway coast, less than ten miles east of Edinburgh. When the king’s men hunted that clan down, their hideout was exposed as a charnel house with dried, salted, and pickled people hanging on hooks.

  “That’s your background, Scotty. Build on it. Consider what goes into that haggis served at a Robbie Burns dinner and you’ve got a horror story.

  “Who has Chinese ancestors?”

  Several waving hands.

  “Those hands I see. Ko Ku, anyone? Cannibalism was thought—and is still thought—to have a medical and nutritional purpose. Dating back to the Tang Dynasty of the seventh to tenth centuries AD, the remedy of Ko Ku dictated that a faithful child cut off a portion of his thigh or arm and serve it to an ailing relative as the last medicinal resort. Princess Miao Chuang offered her severed hands to her father, so she was deified.

  “Now what about you, ungrateful child that you are? A traditional parent has slaved his entire life, day and night, in the family restaurant so that you can hang out at the mall. Now he’s got brain c
ancer and thinks he needs a dose of that remedy to survive, so at night he tiptoes into your room with a meat cleaver from the kitchen to harvest the filial medicine you haven’t offered to Dad.

  “Chop. Chop. Munch. Munch.

  “Don’t like Ko Ku? Try Ko Kan. That’s when you offer your liver instead, preferably by cutting it out yourself. Traditional Chinese medicine recommends thirty-five human body parts that will cure various ailments if consumed. China currently has a ‘one-child policy’ to curb population. The result is that on the mainland and in Hong Kong, there’s a thriving black market in human fetuses to eat for rejuvenation. Today, an aborted baby costs three hundred dollars.”

  “Anyone for takeout?” someone shouted.

  “Now, now,” Wes said. “Westerners can’t be smug. Surely you’ve heard of placenta-eating? Look it up. You’ll find all kinds of recipes on the Internet. Supposedly, it reduces the effect of postnatal depression in new moms. Any women here ever suffered from that? Well, there’s your story. The mother of a newborn has postpartum depression. So first she eats the placenta, and when that appetizer works—or doesn’t work—she goes for her baby.

  “In the 1800s, eating ground-up Egyptian mummy was a common cure-all in Europe. Ever had food poisoning? Use that experience. Curse of the mummy is a time-honored theme. A bad dose of mummy and the cure could be worse than what ails you.

  “Do we have any teachers? Good,” said Wes on seeing several hands. “Imagine you’re teaching in Guangxi during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1968. Mao set his fervent young Red Guards loose to express their class hatred, and in one school they turned on their teachers and ate them as food. Is the duty of a teacher not to feed young minds?

  “Have we any sailors? All hands on deck.”

  More waving.

  “Avast, ye hearties. ‘The custom of the sea’—that’s the euphemism for eating the crew to survive in extremis. In 1710: the Nottingham Galley, a clipper ship out of Boston. They ate the carpenter. In 1765: the Peggy, bound for New York. They ate the black slave. In 1816: the Medusa. It hit a reef off Africa, forcing a hundred and fifty people onto a raft. Only six men weren’t eaten. In 1821: the Nantucket whaler Essex was rammed by a sperm whale halfway between Hawaii and the Galapagos Islands. The incident is immortalized in Moby Dick. The human body yields, on average, sixty-six pounds of edible meat. That was the food in the lifeboats. In 1845: the Franklin Expedition. While trying to find the Northwest Passage across Canada’s Arctic, Franklin and his crew got stuck in the ice. A nine-hundred-mile death march to civilization degenerated into man eating man.

  “So, sailors, ask yourselves what you might do if your only chance of survival was the meat on your buddy’s bones. And hey, if you can’t get your imaginations around that, ask yourselves what he might do to you.

  “Are there any hikers or skiers in the room? The Donner Party. That’s one you probably know. While heading west to California in 1846, they ran afoul of winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Of those eighty-seven pioneers, half were eaten in an orgy of cannibalism. Same with Alfred Packer in 1873. He ate four gold prospectors. Snow’s a good setup for lots of horror stories. The famine in the Volga after the Russian Revolution, the siege of Leningrad by the Nazis in the Second World War—both forced Russians to eat Russians. The winter of 1999 saw meat shortages in the Ural Mountains, so Alexander Zapiantsev invited the residents of his apartment block in for a New Year’s Eve dinner. Unknown to his guests, the roast he served was Valdemar Suzik.”

  Wes cupped an ear.

  “Do you hear that? Sounds like a faulty aircraft engine to me. Is a plane coming down? Yep, it crashed in the Andes. Back in 1972, the Old Christians rugby team was marooned for seventy-two days in alpine snow. The sixteen who were finally rescued had fed off the flesh of their dead comrades. Though not a balanced diet, human meat had provided all they required to face one of the worst climates on earth. They consumed the heart, liver, kidneys, intestines, bone marrow, and brain. The more squeamish ate just the muscles. Only the heads, skin, lungs, and genitals were discarded. One of those cannibals went on to run for president of Uruguay.”

  While Wes was holding the floor, Zinc had his eye on Bret Lister. The elder author had painted himself into a corner by his lack of preparation for his challenger’s onslaught. The room had called for Wes, and he was delivering the goods. So the only way Bret could jump back in the game was to intercept the ball, and he didn’t seem to have the vignettes to rival Wes’s command of the subject. All he could do was sit on the sidelines and watch Wes perform while the veins in his temples stood out and his jaw muscles jumped.

  “Do we have any travelers? Any Conquistadors? There’s no need to go far—just to Mexico. Imagine you’re with Cortez, back in the 1500s, and you chance upon a pyramid when the Aztecs are sacrificing. Here is a culture where cannibalism sits at the heart of highly elaborate religious rituals. A priest is sacrificing a victim on top of the temple. He hacks out the still-beating heart and offers it up to the gods. The heartless remains tumble down the steep steps of the pyramid, then roll toward the priest’s assistants, who are waiting at the bottom. Looming near them is a towering trophy rack with thousands of human skulls strung side by side on horizontal rods tiered layer upon layer toward the sky. The body is spirited away to vaults underneath the temple, where others have the task of draining the blood and portioning off the flesh for high nobles to eat. Except for the skull, which will adorn the trophy rack, the bones will be used as kitchen utensils or musical instruments, for the Aztecs let nothing from a sacrifice go to waste.

  “Do you know what Jeffrey Dahmer said when he was arrested? ‘Maybe I was born too late. Maybe I should have been an Aztec.’”

  A pause.

  Wes let that sink in.

  “Cannibals!” he said. “We began with that single word. I’ve tried to conjure up the multiple stories that might spawn from the personal demons within each of you. Will you write a best-seller? I can’t say. But I do know you won’t write a best-seller if you’re afraid to sell your soul to whatever demon eats at your mind.

  “Consider the reader. What do you share in common? Three fairy tales from childhood? Hansel and Gretel to be cooked in the oven of the old witch. Fe-fi-fo-fum. That giant smells the blood of an Englishman. Will Jack’s bones be ground to make his bread? Little Red Riding Hood. That wolf in Granny’s bed. ‘My, what big teeth you have, Granny.’ ‘All the better to eat you with, my dear.’

  “Why do those horrors captivate kids? Why do we recall them now? I’ll tell you why. Because man is and always has been a cannibal. But we manage to suppress the urge—though not the fear—by means of the artificial construct of civilization.

  “How many people here have ever seen a corpse?”

  Not many hands.

  “How many people here kill and butcher the meat they eat?”

  No hands.

  “Do you not find that strange? Eating and dying are our two most basic functions. So why have we obfuscated both into taboos? Hospitals and undertakers insulate us from death. We no longer buy meat chopped off by the butcher, but instead prefer chicken breasts wrapped in plastic and burgers frozen in boxes. What is it about visceral content that makes it taboo? Our inclination?”

  Wes tapped his index fingers against both sides of his head, above his ears. “The temporal lobe. Home of the id. Psychiatrists consider it to be the primitive instinctual part of our brains. Anger, fighting, fleeing, sex, and violence. Irrational behavior lurks here. And so do those prehistoric cannibals who became us.”

  Wes tapped his forehead. “The frontal lobe. The censuring device that keeps the id under control. If there’s damage to the frontal lobe, our capacity to inhibit primitive urges fails, and that can release the horrific monsters we encounter in the news.

  “Nature or nurture? That debate is bullshit. A troubled childhood can make matters worse, but modern science gives us a glimpse into our brains. And what we see in PET scans—positron em
ission tomography—of serial killers’ brains is a lack of activity in the prefrontal cortex. That’s like having a broken emergency brake on your car. If primitive behavior manifests itself, there’s no way to stop aggressive, outrageous acts. What cannibal killers are doing is traveling back in time to the era before there was a man-eating taboo.

  “‘Taboo,’” continued Wes, “was a term used by Freud. To him, it meant forbidden acts for which there nonetheless exists a strong unconscious inclination. Incest was Freud’s focus. We all have that impulse buried in our minds. Cannibalism too. That’s why it’s taboo. Because we all know unconsciously that it’s a human tradition, an urge from deep within our primitive past. Where there’s taboo, there will be taboo-breakers.

  “I know that.

  “You know that.

  “And so does the reader.

  “Consequently”—Wes held Halo of Flies aloft—“what you aim to do is what I hope I’ve done in this novel. Tap into your own fear of what is taboo so that what you write will activate your reader’s dread, since we all share a collective unconscious. The baggage of evolution.

  “Now back to the beginning, to my initial question. How many of you are really serious about being horror writers? Because if you are and you want to venture to the heart of cannibalism, you can still sign on for the Odyssey. The word ‘taboo’ wasn’t coined by Freud. It was picked up by Captain Cook in the South Pacific. The Polynesian word tapu refers to things you cannot do, so if you want to accompany me to the realm of the most ravenous cannibals in history—”

  Wham!

  Bret slammed his palm down on the table with such force that the notes in front of Wes jumped off its surface.

  “Now just a goddamn minute!” Bret exploded. “That was my idea! The Odyssey is my group! I booked the flight! I made the arrangements! And I don’t need some johnny-come-lately hijacking the trip that I put together!”