The Mammoth Book of Terror

by Stephen Jones

  I had been doing my research for some time – far longer than originally intended, for research, by its very nature, feeds upon itself and grows, extends and spreads strange and devious branches from the fundamental roots – and so, quite naturally, I came to know a number of people connected with the museum and the university and, by extension, the morgue. I became acquainted with Detective-Inspector Grant of the homicide squad and with Doctor Ramsey who performed the autopsies for the police. With Ramsey, in fact, an arrangement had developed. We found that our homes were quite close, in the same suburb, and in time we began to share the task of driving into town, alternating our motorcars to lessen the traffic and parking difficulties on the campus grounds. He proved an interesting and congenial fellow and the arrangement was very satisfactory. We became more than acquaintances, if less than friends. And it was through Ramsey, indirectly, that I came to see the first body . . .

  It was my day to drive and I’d left the museum library and walked across the campus to the medical centre. It was a fine autumn day with brilliant leaves floating like colourful barques on a gentle breeze. Young couples strolled hand in hand across the lawns, and students reclined in the lee of oak and elm, talking of philosophy and love. It was a pleasant setting, slightly tinged with nostalgia – not at all the sort of time and place in which to encounter horror. I went into the medical building and down resounding corridors to Ramsey’s office. He wasn’t there, and his secretary told me he had been summoned to the morgue. She wrinkled her nose at the word and I didn’t blame her. I had no liking for the morgue myself. It was not a place to spend an autumn day. But I went on down the stairs and along a corridor and entered the antechamber, a stark room with a tiled floor and a ramp leading up to street level and large metal doors. It was down this ramp that ambulance and hearse descended to disgorge their still burdens before rising, lightened once again, into the sunlight. It was a place of grim silence and foreshadowing. Worst of all, to me, was the smell – that sharp antiseptic scent. Does any odour smell as much of decay and corruption as antiseptic? It eats at the very core of sensation, invoking the essence of death – of more than death, of that which has never known life. The scent of decay and disease is foul but natural, that of antiseptic carries the stench of sterility. It parted like morbid mist before my passage and dampened my footfalls on the tiles.

  I stopped at the glass cubicle.

  The attendant looked up reluctantly from a lurid paperback, recognized me and nodded. The nod served to lower his eyes once more to the novel and he was already pursuing his pleasures as he gestured me through. I passed on to the operating-room, where Doctor Ramsey was washing his hands at the sink. His white gown was splattered with dark stains and he washed his hands carefully, rubbing them together like struggling serpents in soapy froth. There was a slab in the centre of the room and a shrouded form on the slab. Ramsey looked up with a solemn face and nodded. I advanced, avoiding the slab.

  “Will you be long?” I asked.

  “No. The necropsy is finished. I’m waiting for Grant to arrive. Identification.” The way he said it you could tell he didn’t like that part of it. Maybe he didn’t like any part of it. He took off the blood-stained gown and stuffed it in the hamper.

  “No sense letting them see the blood, eh?” he said. “Somehow the relatives always react more to seeing blood on a gown than to seeing the corpse.”

  “Accident case?” I asked.

  “It was no accident.”

  I looked at him. He shrugged.

  “The man was strangled,” he said.

  “Oh. Hence Inspector Grant of homicide.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’ll wait outside.”

  Ramsey moved his head.

  “Yes. An unpleasant case. The only relative is a niece. Young, I gather. I hope they weren’t very close. It’s always rough when they were. And pointless.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “We know who the man was. No doubt of that. But legal procedure demands positive identification by a relative. It’s funny how authority must always punish the innocent in the search for the guilty. Or maybe not funny.”

  “Indicative maybe.”

  “Maybe,” he said, and showed a sad smile. I turned to leave, and just then Grant came through past the cubicle. A uniformed policeman and a girl followed. Grant’s face was set and the cop looked stern. The girl was quite young and gazed around the room with big eyes. She seemed frightened. Of authority, perhaps. She was also rather pretty – pretty enough for the attendant to raise his attention from the vicarious thrills of his novel and regard her bottom. It struck me as a reaction perfectly suited to an attendant at a morgue. It annoyed me, too. But the man was young and had seen a good many bodies wheeled past his cubicle. Perhaps the sum total of his experience rested in the passage of death, and one must be tolerant.

  Grant spoke softly to the girl, gestured to the cop and crossed the room. I noticed that his countenance was set more rigidly than normal and a lock of hair had fallen over his brow. He looked very much the way a police detective is supposed to look.

  “Finished?” he asked Ramsey.

  “Yes.”

  “Lab boys been here?”

  “Yes. I sent my report round with them.”

  Grant seemed to notice me for the first time. We exchanged quiet greetings and he turned back to Ramsey.

  “Anything that will help us?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. Must have been in his seventies. Hardening of the arteries, chronic . . .”

  “Skip that. We know who he was, we can get those details from the reports. Not that they’ll mean a goddamn thing. I mean any clue as to who did it? Or why?”

  “Nothing. Nothing I could see. Not my job.”

  “It was strangulation, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh yes. Definitely.”

  Something in the doctor’s tone caused Grant to look sharply at him.

  “I mean his neck wasn’t broken. He was asphyxiated. Must have been a rough death.”

  “They’re all rough,” said Grant, and his eyes shifted towards the girl. She was standing just inside the door, very pale, very frightened. The attendant was still regarding her. “This is the rough part for us. The identification. The girl’s only nineteen, hardly knew the old boy, and we have to put her through this. Well . . .”

  He gestured. The uniformed cop took the girl’s arm and led her forward. Ramsey walked over to the head of the slab and Grant stood beside the girl. His shoulders shifted. I had the impression he wanted to put his arm around her. But he didn’t. He was a policeman and he couldn’t. He nodded and Ramsey drew the sheet down. He drew it down only enough to expose the face and I heard the girl draw her breath in with a sort of whimper. I looked down. I was surprised to see how old the man had been. I’d heard Ramsey say he was in his seventies, but somehow it hadn’t registered – age seems irrelevant in discussing a corpse. But seeing him was different. Ramsey had obviously done his best to make the face seem relaxed and natural. But even so I could tell he’d died hard. The lips were forced upwards by the pressure of a swollen tongue and the eyes bulged beneath closed lids. The girl stared for a moment and then covered her face with both hands and turned away. Ramsey drew the sheet back over the old grey face.

  “Miss?” Grant said gently.

  She nodded behind her hands. It wasn’t exactly a positive identification, but it satisfied the formalities, and Grant turned to the cop and said, “Take Miss Smith outside.” He waited until they had left, then sighed.

  “This will be a bad one,” he said. “There’s always so much public outrage when some old guy gets knocked off. So much interest and interference. And there seems to be no motive behind this one. Just a nice old guy. Killed in his own room. His landlady sort of took care of him, I guess. Anyway, she found the body this morning. Bringing him a pot of tea. He was on his bed and she thought he was sleeping. Then she looked down . . .well, you know how they look with their tongues stickin
g out black and their eyes popping. She dropped the teapot, I can tell you that. The killer must have entered by the front door. Just walked in. Had to go right past the landlady’s room, too, but she heard nothing. I think she’s a bit deaf, although she got annoyed when I asked her about her hearing. Must be deaf or she wouldn’t have been annoyed, eh? Just walked in cool as a cucumber and strangled the old boy and walked out again. Obviously not robbery. Nothing missing. Hell, he had nothing worth taking as far as that goes. Lived on a pension. Trimmed the hedge in return for his meals. Had a few friends his own age and drank an occasional glass of beer with them. No enemies as far as we know. No opportunity to make an enemy, the way he lived. Just a quiet old chap waiting to die . . .”

  “Well, the waiting is over,” Ramsey said.

  “For him, yeah.”

  Ramsey and I both looked at Grant.

  “For us, it’s just beginning,” he said. “A crime without motives. Well, you know what that means. We wait for the next one.”

  “You think he’ll kill again?” I asked.

  “The mad ones always do,” Grant told us. He pursed his lips; became aware of the displaced lock over his brow and brushed it back impatiently. “They kill and they kill again, and all we can do is wait until a pattern develops, a general motivation rather than a specific motive. Oh, we get them in the end. The pattern always emerges. But it isn’t a line on a graph or a pin stuck in a map. The pattern is made by the corpses of the victims. A man can have nightmares about that, you know. Any man. You dream of a tapestry, and it’s all vague shapes and forms and then you get closer and see the design is made up of dead men. It isn’t a tapestry then, it’s a filigree of intertwining limbs and arched torsos. And faces. The faces staring out from the pattern, mouths open in silent screams of accusation, eyes wide in sightless fear. A man . . . well, he dreams.”

  Grant broke off abruptly; looked rather ashamed of the intensity with which he’d been speaking and jammed a cigarette in his mouth. It was the first time I’d ever thought of a policeman as human, I think. He puffed on the cigarette, his cheeks sinking in, his eyes thoughtful.

  “Would you say it was the work of a madman, Doc?” he asked. “I mean, from the examination . . .”

  Ramsey looked troubled.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Some aspects . . . and yet . . . Well, it’s all in my report, Inspector. Black and white. It will mean more if you read it than if I talk about it. A report is always more objective and logical.”

  “Sure. I’ll read it.”

  Grant turned as if to leave and then turned back, the cigarette in his teeth, his cheeks hollow.

  “I’m delaying,” he said. “I don’twant to face that kid again. Have to, of course. But what if she asks me why the old man was killed? People ask cops things like that, you know? And will she feel better if I tell her it was a maniac? That there was no purpose, no reason; that nothing was gained by his death? Oh, I’m supposed to tell her I can’t discuss it at the present time. Against regulations. Not allowed. But will that make her feel better? You drag some kid in and make her look at a dead body . . . ah, hell. It’s not pleasant, Doc.”

  Ramsey nodded; looked at his hands thoughtfully. His hands had been scrubbed spotlessly clean, and there was nothing there to see. But he looked. I stepped back, feeling I was intruding. Grant’s eyes had gone blank and his brow furrowed. The ash dropped unnoticed from his cigarette, a long ash that disintegrated when it hit the tiles and looked very improper in that sanitary and disinfected chamber. Somehow the ash looked too clean on that sterile floor.

  “I hope to God it wasn’t a maniac,” he said very softly.

  Ramsey lowered his eyes. I took another step back. Then Grant turned sharply and walked out with his shoulders square. The attendant did not look up from his book, and it was some time before Ramsey looked up from the floor . . .

  We left the building and walked across to the parking lot. Most of the motorcars had gone by this time and the big concrete space looked strangely abandoned and neglected and forlorn. Ramsey hadn’t spoken; he seemed to be pondering something – something both disagreeable and interesting – his expression that of a little boy using a stick to poke at the decaying carcass of a dead animal. He was thinking about the murder, of course, and I sensed he was considering that part which was in his report and which he hadn’t wanted to talk about. It had captured my interest and, by this time, we were close enough to speak openly.

  “Well? Was it a madman?” I asked, when we were in the car.

  Ramsey shrugged.

  I made an elaborate task of fitting the keys into the ignition but did not start the engine.

  “There was something – some aspect – in your report, which troubles you, wasn’t there?”

  “There was, yes.”

  “None of my business, of course . . .”

  He waved a hand.

  “Oh, it isn’t that. It troubled me because . . . well, because it was unusual. And gruesome. I’ve been a doctor too long to get upset by violence and bloodshed, John. But this was different. It was . . . well, calculated. Ghastly but calculated. The fact itself implied frenzy and rage, and yet there was none of that in evidence. It was as if the killer had coldly and deliberately set about his ghoulish act .

  The term startled me.

  “Ghoulish?” I asked.

  “Oh, perhaps I’m being too dramatic. But . . . well, when behaviour normally associated with maddened impulse and blind fury is suddenly transposed to an act of rational logical expedience . . . well, it shakes a man. We are all prisoners of our own perceptions, you know. We have all learned to see things in a certain way and to interpret them in the light of our training and experience. And when a familiar object or action is suddenly glimpsed out of context . . . seen from a different angle . . . it causes turmoil within our preconceived limitations. It takes a while to get our bearings, to adjust our stance, to focus properly . . .”

  “What on earth happened?” I asked.

  Ramsey didn’t seem to hear my question.

  “When I was younger, I used to ice-skate,” he said, speaking slowly. I blinked. I thought he was deliberately, and rather discourteously, changing the subject, and I reached for the ignition keys. But Ramsey continued. “I learned to skate quite well,” he said. “I was never particularly adept at sports or games but in ice-skating I seemed to be more talented than most. I enjoyed it enormously. I learned to figure-skate, to cut designs across the ice. People used to watch me, admiring my abilities. But there was one strange thing. I wouldn’t skate when it was dark. All the young people used to go to the rink at night, but the very thought gave me a chill. I had a vague dread – a fear even – of what lay beneath the ice at night. I visualized it – saw it in cross-section, as it were. There I was, cutting my smooth figures across the flat, predictable surface of the ice, and beneath that level there was the dark body of unfrozen water. The ice and water were related and yet they were not the same. I fashioned my designs at one plane while beneath me lay uncharted depths and inconceivable forms. So it is with life – with the human mind. We live our allotted years and carve out patterns upon a solitary level of existence, content and satisfied perhaps, and then something happens which opens a window, just for an instant, through the surface and allows us to glimpse the deeper, darker dimensions with which we share existence. We peer through this hole, we see cowled shapes and malformed concepts bloated in the waters and we shudder and look away until the ice freezes over once more and our world is smooth and flat again. Our world is as we know it, as we wish it, and we skate off and leave our pitiful little etching under our runners. And yet, from time to time, those broken areas of open waters appear to disrupt our placid world. Most men shun the glimpse, ignore the depths, pretend the ice is solid. But not all men. In the minds of a few, the hole does not freeze over quickly enough, they stare too long through the break – long enough for something to rise and crawl from that hole and take possession of the upper level
s . . .”

  Ramsey coughed and looked out through the windscreen.

  “Madness?” I said.

  “Who knows? Not sanity, surely. But madness belongs to our surface ice. After all, it is we who have defined it. It is our minds which have hardened into ice. What may come up from below, from those regions we have not labelled and named because we have not conceived of them . . .”

  He shrugged and we sat in silence for a time. I began to feel uncomfortable and once more reached for the ignition. Ramsey’s eyes slid sideways at the motion.

  “Yes, I am surely being too dramatic,” he said. “I was reacting to a personal awareness. The facts scarcely warrant such imagery. And yet they are disturbing. I expect I owe you an explanation.”

  I was far too curious to decline. I waited. The keys still waited in the ignition. Ramsey, who seldom smoked, asked for a cigarette. He inhaled and then studied the smoke, as if wondering whether he were doing it properly. Then, his voice very matter-of-fact now, he said, “The remarkable aspect of the murder is this: the victim was killed by human teeth.” And he stared at me.

  “Good Lord,” I said.

  Ramsey nodded.

  “But you told Grant he’d been strangled . . .”

  “And so he had. Indeed he had. He had been strangled by the pressure of human jaws.”

  I shook my head.

  “That is the extraordinary thing – the combination of the two. I’ve seen corpses who had been strangled by human hands before. I’ve heard – although I’ve never encountered it, thank God – of instances where a man, in a fit of blind rage or insane passion, had committed murder with his teeth. But the combination is quite unique. The flesh was not even broken on the throat. There had been no attempt to tear or slash, nor even any bloodshed. The pressure of those jaws had been applied slowly and carefully. Thoughtfully, even. Obviously, the killer did not want his clothing stained by blood. It appears he had used his teeth strictly for convenience. For efficiency.”