In the back was a curtain. Behind it was a black-draped altar. Stage dressing?
Ed couldn’t believe Spunk hadn’t noticed them by now. Was he that involved in his work?
“Don’t move!” Ed yelled.
Tom and he stepped closer, away from the stairs, guns leveled.
Spunk turned to smile. He spoke: “Snake bites. Did you know they applied ice to the bites in order to slow down the boomslang’s envenomation? It actually resulted in more amputations—and the Cold rocked back on her livid blue haunches and howled with laughter. The Goddess associated with birds is often paired with snakes as well. Hi ho and ring-a-ding bell. Spirals and double chevrons, one chevron inverted.”
“I said don’t move!” Ed repeated, growling between clenched teeth, annoyed that neither he nor his partner had recognized the sound of camera clicks—duh, they’d even seen the photographs upstairs.
“Oh, I really can do so much more with the new equipment. No more instant Polaroids. Not for Book Two!”
Ed commanded, “No more talk.” He aimed for Spunk’s legs. “Bend slowly at your knees. Set the camera down with your right hand. Then put both hands flat on the floor in front of you. Keep slowly lowering your body until your face is on the floor.”
And Spunk did. Amiably. He showed no signs of being upset at being caught.
The soles of his bare and rather tiny feet and between his toes were slimy with the victim’s bleed-out. Both cops wondered how he could take pictures without slipping.
“Hmmm,” Tom muttered as he cuffed Spunk from behind. “Sponges. He wipes his feet, starting at the bottom sponge and going up. Doesn’t want to track up the house. Remember the slippers outside the door?”
“Wonder how often he has to change the sponges,” Ed snorted, working together on either side to hoist Spunk upright. Ed nodded at the lounge. “You know her? I don’t.”
Tom shook his head no. But they hadn’t known about the last murder either. She probably hadn’t even been reported missing yet. She appeared to have only been dead for a few hours.
The alkaline smell was developer fluid, for the photographs. He’d have to develop them himself. Couldn’t very well drop them off at the drug store.
No wonder he’d sprayed for bugs. That much meat attracted roaches.
“Can’t smell anything anymore,” Ed commented. “The developer’s burned my nasal passages. I can’t believe it doesn’t reek down here from the blood.”
“Or from decomposing flesh,” Tom added. “It probably does. Gotta be the bug shot.”
Ed elbowed Spunk. “What’s this book open over here?” It reminded him of a trade-paperback Bible.
Spunk replied, “Ahhh, our first book. necrOmania seXualis. I’ve been working on the illustrations for the sequel.”
Tom recited Spunk his rights.
The beast was well-muscled for a short man. Looked as if he’d once been fat, then started working out. Spunk sighed. “You won’t let them ruin the film, will you?”
“Don’t worry,” Ed replied. “We want those pics nice and crisp.”
Tom laughed. “Can you believe this guy?”
Suddenly the perp became upset. “What time is it?”
“About eight,” Tom told him. “Way past your bedtime, tiger. You’ve been bad. No TV for you tonight.”
“How long will it take to get me booked?” Spunk started to fidget.
“Hours,” Ed answered. “Why?”
“I’m entitled to a phone call, right? Can I make it now? There’s a phone in the kitchen. I’ve really got to make this call.” Spunk licked his lips. Both detectives noted with disgust that drool ran down his sleek chin. It was pink from the blood he’d licked from the floor while being cuffed.
“Later,” Tom replied impatiently.
“But it’s important. I’ve got to call now! Please? I’m cooperating. I even left everything unlocked. I mean I know I had to air the house after I sprayed for the roaches, but you had no trouble getting into the car, did you? The screens weren’t locked and they might’ve been.” He wriggled in his cuffs. “I know I have a legal right to a call—and I want it now!”
“No!” Tom and Ed shouted in unison.
“You can make it at the station,” Ed added, pulling toward the stairs. “We’ll even let you have two.”
Spunk bordered on desperation. “Can’t. Wait... I’ve got to tell her while it’s fresh in my head. The details always come out better. Particularly when I want to be encouraged. You can do the rehearsed bit okay when you’re going for pure shock, but it doesn’t work as well when she’s a cheerleader. Please? I—want—to—MAKE—A—CALL!”
Spunk screamed and wouldn’t go up the stairs. He struggled, trying to wrench his hands free of the cuffs. He tried to bite Tom, falling, breaking his jaw against the concrete floor and shattering several teeth. Ed grabbed as he fell and—aw, shit!—made contact with the erection inside the man’s jeans. Ed snatched back his hand, freaked out.
He was even more frazzled when the dick slid down a pant leg and came out onto the floor.
A dildo.
Spunk’s shirt ripped, almost as loud a noise as his high-pitched shriek. They wrestled him still, then stared at two ragged circles where breasts had been removed.
– | – | –
Chapter 4
A crime scene unit combed through T. Spunk’s house the rest of that night and into the next day. The media, stationed outside, filmed as buckets of body parts and crates of Spunk’s artwork were carried out by grim-faced investigators.
There were several boxes of necrOmania seXualis. The cops only saw a couple copies last summer. The station where detectives Poe and Larson worked had a copy in its evidence room, in a case involving animal mutilation. Most had heard of the book but few in the city had ever actually seen it. It was an urban legend.
“So Spunk did the artwork for this book?” Captain Prohaska asked, standing in Spunk’s basement, peering at a box of books. “I use the term ‘artwork’ loosely.” He then stepped over to a cardboard mat with ten photos laid out in sequence. “You say these were meant for a sequel?” The photos were unadulterated, no drawings added yet.
Ed nodded. “There were framed, finished ones upstairs. Alongside the originals for the first book. Quite a difference between the two, considering the photos from Book One are done with a simple Polaroid, instant snapshots. Didn’t find any writing for this second book—at least not yet. Maybe Spunk was doing the sequel on his own.”
On the mat in front of them was a stream of photos using the deceased Shelly Greene as the model. In pic #1 she lay on her back on the altar found stored behind the curtain in Spunk’s studio. She was clearly alive at this point, drugged so she wouldn’t struggle. There seemed to be no fear in her eyes so he must’ve doped her but good. Her head and shoulders leaned off the edge closest to the camera. In the second photo her throat was deeply cut. A third was a close-up, displaying how it would take only one more swipe to sever the spinal cord to decapitate her. The remaining photos were of the resulting blood-shower. Spunk used slow 1/15 second film to catch the falling blood, a dramatic cascade of photographic crimson droplets, matched vertically by the rippling current of Shelly’s long dark hair.
Ed bobbed his head. “Apparently T. Spunk is listed along with the author, Pirsya Profana. But there’s nothing in the house with her number or address. And Spunk had no computer. What with all the on-line stuff these days…I’d have thought we’d find him linked to every sick website out there.”
“What does the doctor say about the wounds to Miss Spunk’s chest?” the captain wanted to know, not looking away from the photos, trying to imagine how anyone would use them with hand-drawn illustrations to create ART. “Weird. I just said Miss Spunk. But I still keep thinking of her as him.”
“Me, too,” Tom admitted. “I just can’t get used to it.”
“Same problem,” Ed added. “To think of a woman, doing this.”
“Doc says it was
self-amputation,” Tom explained. “She couldn’t afford a medical sex-change. Most insurance won’t pay. So she mutilated herself and has been using illegal steroids. And it isn’t really Miss Spunk. Her real name is Calia Abrams, formerly an architect. Thelonious Spunk’s her ‘artistic moniker’.”
“We’ve located her ex,” Ed put in. “A nurse named Robin Pittman. Says she hasn’t seen Calia for a while. Miss Pittman’s teenaged son did a swan dive off a bottle of Halcion last September.”
Ed turned to stare at a sticker tacked to a basement wall. It read, THE F STOPS HERE.
“Well. The original photos from the first book will help close some cold cases,” Prohaska said.
Larson rubbed his nose, sinuses overflowing from bug shot and developer.
They’d packed up the originals framed upstairs. The recent ones with sketchings beyond photographic edges were nothing short of amateur nightmares.
In one was an especially pale woman with an auburn frizz of hair. Trilla Conche, missing since April 27. Taken in sharp profile, using rim-lighting against a black background. High speed Ektachrome, 1/250 second. The head, decapitated, was probably suspended from clear fishing line. Against the black was only this wreath of kinky, blood-red hair and a touch of the white highlights of her equally bloodless face, ebon shadows carving cheekbone, jawline, behind the bridge of her nose.
Startling. Even the lips were chalky, the only visible eye rolled up to white like an egg—no color from the pupil. The drawing bleeding out from it was in red ochre daubed within thin black ink lines. An ectoplasmic twin seeping from the dead woman’s forehead, made of the blood the other lacked. This one had a frizz of milky hair, bleached—or frightened—to white.
Another was Karen Woodruff, gone missing May 7. She’d been photographed in a darkened bathroom, lying in a tub surrounded by a sea of lime Jell-o. A single shaft of brilliance—using a snoot on a floodlight—illuminated her torso. It especially highlighted the wet, sheer-as-tissue folds of a clinging nightie, hugging the contours of pendulous breasts, nipples icily erect, smooth belly and every line in the indented navel knot, each pubic hair coiled in its forest at the juncture where her legs crossed high. Spunk’d used high speed film again, a fast shutter. The top of her head had been sawn off, maggots feasting on brains and Jell-o. The drawing extended from the pic was a forest overrun with creatures half maggot/half wolf.
(The book necrOmania seXualis had a photo in it of another woman in a bathtub. She was pregnant, wore a silver mask, and was covered in ice cubes.)
Other pics:
…Body cavity, disemboweled, filmed zoom with a fish-eye lens. The cavity became a 180 degree bowl with every streak sharp as a razor, these lines written in tiny script:
Antimony’s Queen. Conceptus in Fugue Raptures. Buried Alive Here.
Had Spunk composed it or the elusive Profana?
…Two black and white shots, one pubic with legs fully spread, the other the victim’s (smiling?) mouth. Spunk had used an electronic flashlight and a reflector to get exquisite skin detail. All distortions were overcome by employing a long lens with extension tubes. Then she put the mouth photo sideways, a slide of it against a wall, and projected the slide of the labial shot over it. Photographed the overlap of lips and lips, clitoris over tongue, teeth in self-sharking juxtaposition to the vaginal opening. And around the photo were drawn thrashing shark fins, digging into a feeding frenzy center.
Another photograph was the act of a head being struck. Sandra Dickens, missing since April 15, the Good Friday and Easter packages victim. She’d been bound upright in a straight-back chair. Behind her, not clearly visible, was some sort of Rube Goldberg machine working off a timer, moved in a series of levers, springs eventually causing a machete mounted with a bolt through the handle to swing a full 360, cutting swiftly and terribly—with sufficient force to remove her head and keep moving until the blade returned to its initial position. A zoom lens increased the appearance of speed and motion. How had Spunk positioned Sandra just right to have the head shoot straight toward the camera? With the fully extended lens, the moving head filled the screen. Then Spunk zoomed back, shortening the focal length at the same time she pressed the shutter, exposing for a half-second. The effect streaked to all edges outward from the flying head. Sandra’s look of horror at what was happening to her was apparent even in the facial blur. Her eyes bulged while dribbling pearl tears, hair whipping, a coil of approaching motion, a spray of blood creating yet another coil. The machete swinging behind it made a third coil. The effect was reminiscent of a nebula’s spiral arms. These arms extended into a weave of space, nothing more than shadows, all entwined in unspeakable yet explicit orgy.
Ed recalled a single severed head in the first book. Sitting on a table. Way more decaps in these pictures, he thought.
They searched the house for the device Spunk used to decapitate Dickens. No luck. She must’ve junked it.
“That nurse say anything about Spunk’s artwork?” the captain asked.
Ed hunched, reaching back to scratch an elusive itch between shoulder blades. But as soon as he raked at it, it moved. He thought of all the deceased bugs upstairs. In the boudoir where sheets were lined with organ meat, one word fingerpainted on the pillow—SCRAMBLED, perhaps so that when the artist lay down her head to sleep, she was assured to dream of inspirations dead. In the lavatory, the tub was full of things she’d left out of the brown packages, literally a bloodbath.
“Nurse said Calia was normal until two years ago,” Ed told Prohaska. “She was an architect, a tendency to doodle funny pictures as she talked on the phone. Then Calia was gangraped two years ago. Made the media in a big way. Hate crime. Half her assailants were women…”
Prohaska’s eyebrows raised. “I thought I recognized the name.”
Tom nodded. “Yeah. It was a big deal. Security camera backed up her IDs and they all went to jail. She also filed a civil suit and won a huge judgement. Seems they did some serious damage…”
“Brain damage?” Prohaska’s shoulders slumped. “I can see the insanity plea now.”
“Nurse says Calia got really strange, secretive. Then moved out,” Ed continued.
The captain said, “Woman is victimized for being a woman in a man’s role, to the people who attacked her anyway, so she goes out and turns herself into a man who stalks and victimizes women. Talk about fucked-up role reversal.”
A cop poked his head around the basement wall. “Got something you might want to see.”
Prohaska waved him over. “More pics? Anything different than what we’ve seen so far?”
“You could say that.”
Three pics, one of Calia Abrams naked, scarred yet still with breasts, about thirty pounds heavier. Second one blurred, Calia in part, also with the hands, feet, and bushy tail of a white dog. Third pic, just a big white hound with a little of Calia’s face superimposed over the dog’s.
“She trying to say she’s a werewolf?” Tom asked of no one in particular.
The cop laughed nervously. “Think she knew any of those howlers we arrested in the park?”
“I wish she wasn’t sedated,” Ed commented. “I’m curious about who she wanted to call.”
««—»»
Going into the studio that day, Renae saw them: one of those peculiar gangs springing up on the streets lately, a little Frankenstein, a little Kafka, all scars and freakishness… Thus are we all reborn monstrous. Some of their injuries looked like make-up. Others had real ones, plentiful. Little digs, suture marks. A few underwent surgeries to make of themselves a strange, shocking ‘other’. Quite a statement about pressures to conform to a particular beauty ideal… an ideal society imposed, and they rejected.
They stared sullenly as she entered the building. Their flesh a bit green—how had they managed that effect? Lots of under-eye concealer spread everywhere. Or a creepy body paint located in a costume shop. They practiced the same shuffle in their gait, gracefully clumsy, jangling at joints not perfectly c
onnected at the seams.
Their glares seemed to say, Think you’re the real thing, huh? You’re nothin’ but wannabee dead. We’re the genuine article. Beauty is melodramatically skin deep. This here’s the cure for life.
Now Renae sat on the live set, unused as a film broadcasted across the airwaves. Lots of red velvet and black lace, gargoyles leering down from niches and the tops of marble columns. She made notes for reviews of two rental movies just released. One was a vampire film, Pearl Incisors. Romance and decadence. Drawing theatrics with pretty victims and even lovelier beasts. The other was an ultra-violent slaughter fest, Foam. The title referred to the lead character’s mouth, frequently sputtering rabid flecks. Insane and disfigured killer with a super imagination about gory ways to dispatch the rest of the cast. No finesse, plenty of graphic action.
Renae had already watched both at home. She often saw them for the first time with Eddie at their apartment, getting his very conservative opinion. She brought them back to the studio to take a final view before writing finished ideas.
She considered which horror-loving crowd each appealed to, each group as distinctive as night and… er… well… pure chattering chaotic oblivion full of the light from a nuclear blast. The accompanying shrieks creeping through the earth to crumple tectonic plates, their soul silhouettes blasted onto concrete.
Renae favored the first crowd—fantasy-lovers which leaned into scented dusks and promises of everlasting. As opposed to the second. She couldn’t scar herself as the characters she’d seen outside the studio. Yet she understood them (even if they thought she didn’t and regarded her with contempt). She’d never seen herself as beautiful. When she looked into a mirror there was a dark blur. She’d had her eyes checked. No defects. The problem was psychological. She refused to see a shrink. She’d had her fill as a teenager. It could only remind her of that time when she’d been young, poor, crazy, living in Nubbing Cove. And… And…
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