Bed of Nails (38 page)

As I draw the knife across her neck, the clock strikes one, a single
bong
from St. Mary’s Whitechapel, here in the East End …

This is a work of fiction. The plot and characters are products of the author’s imagination. Where real persons, places, or institutions are incorporated to create the illusion of authenticity, they are used fictitiously. Inspiration was drawn from the following non-fiction sources:

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The Jack the Ripper A to Z.
London: Headline, 1991.

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Mechanicsberg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1997.

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London: Bodley Head, 1965.

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(Sydney).
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Davenport-Hines, Richard.
Gothic: 400 Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin.
London: Fourth Estate, 1998.

Davies, Paul.
How to Build a Time Machine.
London: Allen Lane, 2001.

Davis, Richard, ed.
The Encyclopedia of Horror.
London: Octopus, 1981.

Editors of Consumer Guide.
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London: Pan, 1984.

——.
The Murderers’ Who’s Who.
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World Horror Convention
—
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——.
A Pictorial History of Horror Stories: Two Hundred Years of Spine-Chilling Illustrations from the Pulp Magazines.
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——.
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In the time since Alexis Hunt researched
You Are What You Eat
there’s been a “zombie apocalypse” of modern man-eaters. From many, four alleged cases:

“The Master Butcher”: In Germany, 2001, Armin Meiwes posted an Internet ad seeking a young man willing to be killed and eaten. After he and his volunteer tried to eat that man’s severed penis, Meiwes killed the victim in his Slaughter Room, hung the body on a meat hook, and consumed frozen parts over the next few months. The videotaped crime inspired the rock group Rammstein to record
“Mein Teil”
(“My Part”), with words
“Denn du bist was du isst …”
(“Because you are what you eat …”).

“The Causeway Cannibal”: A decade later, in 2012, Rudy Eugene, who had stripped himself naked, attacked a homeless man on the MacArthur Causeway in Miami, Florida. He chewed off most of the victim’s face above his beard, blinding the man in both eyes, before police shot him dead. A security camera on
The Miami Herald
building recorded the crime.

“The Greyhound Bus Beheading”: In 2008, on a Greyhound bus nearing Winnipeg, Manitoba, Vince Weiguang Li began stabbing his sleeping seatmate in the neck and chest. Having decapitated his victim, Li displayed the severed head to passengers fleeing the bus in horror. Left alone in the vehicle, he cut parts from the body. The Mounties who arrested Li found an ear, nose, and tongue in his pockets. Both eyes and part of the heart weren’t recovered, prompting authorities to allege Li had consumed them. He was found not criminally responsible on account of psychosis.

“The Canadian Psycho”: In 2012, a human foot was mailed to Canada’s prime minister. The same day, a hand was in the post to another political party, and a decomposing torso was found in Montreal, Quebec. Footage from surveillance cameras led to Luka Rocco Magnotta, a gay porn actor and model in whose apartment the body was butchered. An Internet video titled “1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick” was linked to the crime, and alleged by police to show acts of cannibalism. Soon, a foot and a hand were delivered to two Vancouver schools. Finally, the head was recovered from the edge of a Montreal lake. The Mounties launched a manhunt through Interpol, and German police arrested Magnotta in Berlin.

By coincidence, I had lectured twice at the Vancouver school that got the foot.

*   *   *

The question every author hears is “Where do you get your ideas?”

On September 5, 1970, while high on a mix of LSD and alcohol, Dale Nelson murdered eight people (including five children) in central British Columbia. The Mounted Police captured him the following day.

A plea of insanity failed at his trial. Nelson was sentenced to life in the British Columbia Penitentiary. Because he had cut the stomach out of a seven-year-old girl and consumed its undigested breakfast cereal, he was nicknamed “Cornflakes” by the other cons.

By the 1970s, the century-old B.C. Pen was an antiquated, overcrowded time bomb waiting to explode.

On February 17, 1975, I was working late at the office when the phone rang. It was the B.C. Pen. A client of mine had seized an athletic instructor and was holding him with a homemade knife to his throat in a toilet stall off the prison gym. Two hundred inmates were milling about between guards and the hostage-taker, threatening to riot if forced back to their cells. The warden wished me to attend the prison as soon as possible to convince my client to give up the knife.

“He’s pretty shook up,” I was warned.

Having been in the thick of the Gastown Riot in 1971 (police on horseback charged and clubbed protesters in Maple Tree Square out front of my office), I knew the danger of getting caught up in a riot. On the other hand, next day’s headline could read “10 Killed at B.C. Pen. Lawyer Failed To Show.”

Under sweeping spotlights, the Pen was ringed by cops with shotguns and German shepherds. As I met the warden, he flipped open the cylinder of his revolver to check its rounds. Beyond the throng of newsmen, a talk show host was broadcasting live.

To reach the toilet meant parting the mob of volatile inmates. My law firm had recently prosecuted the Supreme Court assize: all the murders tried in Vancouver over a two-month stretch. Consequently, we’d put away several of these cons for life.

Having run that gauntlet, I found my client in a desperate state. The Pen was a “chicken coop” in which he was “treated like an animal.” Several times, he’d slashed himself to get psychiatric help. Now, he was “sick of all the head games,” “bug juice,” and being “thrown in the hole.” The final straw was “Cornflakes” incessantly goading him: “What did you have for breakfast?” “What did you have for lunch?”

After I reached a deal that would see my client transferred immediately to the treatment center at another prison, with no charges laid, he dropped the knife. After midnight, a car sped him, me, and the warden away from the prison.

In 1980, the B.C. Pen was closed, then demolished.

“Cornflakes” died of cancer.

*   *   *

In 2001, I was a guest of honor at the World Horror Convention in Seattle. During a panel on “How to Write a Horror Best-seller: Is There a Demon You Can Sell Your Soul To?”, I was challenged to write a novel around three words: “Ted Bundy’s house.”

The following year, I vacationed in the Cook Islands, where an
ariki
on Atiu kindly allowed me to hack my way into the tropical jungle and descend to an underground burial cave crammed with skulls crowning piles of bones predating Captain Cook. So cramped was the clammy tunnel that I was down on my hands and knees, and when I lost my balance while turning around, my outstretched palm got pierced by an ancient rib bone that I imagined was imbued with a cannibal curse.