Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts Page 5
You have no plan, as you pull your hand free of the manacle. No idea what you’ll do with your liberty, with the next few seconds, with the rest of your life. Just as your hand slips its bond, you hear Detective Laughton’s tread on the stairs, his trance apparently broken during Dr. Mirakle’s soliloquy.
Surprised, Dr. Mirakle turns and fires before he has even seen. The bullet strikes Detective Laughton in the stomach, and you hear him make a sound like a bleating sheep. Without thinking, without time to think, you rush toward him and Dr. Mirakle, seeing your movement, turns to fire on you. But Erik is faster, is already moving to intercept you, and Dr. Mirakle’s bullet strikes him instead. He stumbles and collapses at your feet with a whimpering, deflating sound.
Dr. Mirakle stares, at Erik and then at the gun in his hand. “What have you done?” he asks. You’re already running as the gun raises again to follow you, already going to do the only thing you can think of to do as you throw the lever that opens the big iron cages.
The gun roars again, and you feel a blast of heat in your leg and you fall, but your work is already done.
Dr. Mirakle is right, animals aren’t vengeful. But the animals in the cages lack Erik’s loyalty to their maker, and as soon as their prisons are open they all rush for the stairs. Dr. Mirakle is terrified now, mad, and he fires wildly at them as they charge. The bear, ignoring his desperate shots, brushes him aside with a blow that lays him open and smashes him against the basement wall like a broken toy.
Erik, wounded but not yet dead, throws himself in the way of his master’s killers. He catches the front legs of the wolf as it pounces, and they go down together in a frenzy of blood and fur, but the fight cannot last. Erik is wounded, and in seconds the wolf raises its bloody muzzle and follows the others to the stairs. Only the panther stops at the foot and turns back, looks once at you where you lie on the floor. Then she too, is gone.
***
The rest becomes a blur. Dimly, you remember crawling to Detective Laughton’s side and finding him alive but unconscious. You remember the police arriving, though you don’t remember what you tell them. It doesn’t really matter. As far as they’re concerned, Dr. Mirakle’s collection of human skins and his now-absent menagerie are simply two different halves of his clearly fractured psyche, the unrelated eccentricities of a lunatic.
Detective Laughton must suspect that something more than murder went on there that night, but he never asks you about it. You give up criminology, and though your family is obviously disappointed and confused, Detective Laughton rests his hand on your shoulder and nods, as though he understands.
Throughout it all, and for the rest of your days, it’s the backward glance of those yellow eyes that haunts you. You keep in touch with Deidre’s family, and they move on, and they never see her again, and you never tell them what you know, or think you know. You think about it every day, though you try to forget. It’s there in every crowd, in every handshake. Even when you’re an old man, retired and with a bad heart, you still can’t help but wonder, when you look at yourself in the mirror every night, what sort of beast is staring back at you, waiting.
Author’s Notes:
Okay, hands up if you remember those old Crestwood House Monster books; the first series had orange covers, the second series had purple, both were retellings of classic monster films, complete with lots and lots of black-and-white photos. When I was a kid my school library had most of them, and I read them compulsively.
I think a lot of the way my imagination works was formed by paging through those old books and others like them, staring hard at the stills from movies that I had never seen, and imagining what they must have been like. Years later I would see most of those movies, and many of them would be wonderful in their own right, but they were never quite like the movies that screened in my mind when I pored over those images.
“The Murders on Morgue Street” is kind of inspired by Poe’s original story, and kind of by Clive Barker’s retelling from The Books of Blood, but mostly it’s inspired by the wonderful 1932 adaptation starring Bela Lugosi. Or, more accurately, it’s inspired by the Crestwood House book about the movie, from which I lifted the names of Dr. Mirakle and his ape, Erik. Detective Laughton is named—I think unconsciously, at the time—for the great Charles Laughton, who I first encountered in The Old Dark House, probably my favorite horror flick of the ’30s. Laughton was also in Island of Lost Souls, which left an imprint on this story as well, along with some of the great Val Lewton films of the period.
I originally wrote this—in a very different form—for a Poe-themed anthology many years ago. It didn’t make it in, but I liked the idea, so I kept tinkering with it and rewriting it now and again over the years until it ended up in the shape you see here. This is its first time in print.
Ripperology
“It is a blessed condition, believe me.
To be whispered about at street corners.
To live in other people’s dreams, but not to have to be.”
—Candyman (1992)
It was my grandfather who taught me the difference between a man and a monster. I remember him saying, “When a man dies, that’s the end of his power. A monster is different. When a monster dies, its power is just beginning.” We were watching Bela Lugosi as Dracula at the time, on the big old black-and-white, wood-panel TV that sat in my grandfather’s living room until the day he died.
He died in his sleep. Nothing terribly dramatic. They said that his heart just stopped. Though he had always seemed old to me, he never seemed weak or sick. In his last years, he often sat very still, staring off at nothing, or at something only he could see. He seemed like a golem, like a figure carved roughly from stone, hard and unyielding.
My grandfather was Jewish, by birth but not by practice. He had survived the Holocaust, had a number tattooed on his wrist and everything, just like in a movie. My mother said that he had been religious when he was a boy, but that the Holocaust had knocked his faith right out of him. I asked him once if he still believed, and he told me, “I believe in the God of Abraham, and that God is a motherfucker.”
My mother and I lived in his house when I was growing up, until he died. When I broke one of his rules, he would whip me with his belt. I can remember the sound that belt made when he took it off; a clear, purposeful sound. I was afraid of him, but I was also enthralled by him. When he told me something, I listened as I never listened to anyone else, before or since.
When he died, my fear and my fascination died with him. I guess he was just a man, after all.
***
Why do we have a name for the study of Jack the Ripper? Why are men fascinated by him after all these years? Why the books, the movies, all of it? Jack the Ripper killed five people. Just five. And that’s assuming that all were killed by the same hand. Others have killed more, in much more spectacular fashion, before and since. Sawney Bean and his clan, eating people in the Scottish hills of the 15th Century. Just five years after the Ripper murders, H. H. Holmes killed as many as two hundred people in ways a thousand times more fanciful and grotesque than anything the Ripper was ever accused of, but hardly anyone knows his name today. What’s the difference?
It’s really quite simple. With Holmes we have a name, a face, a photograph. We feel that we know him. We can say, “He did these black deeds, but he was still only a man.” The power of the Ripper comes from the fact that he isn’t a man. The hand that held the blade may have belonged to a man, or a woman, or to several people. That isn’t important. It doesn’t matter if the name was Sir William Gull, Lewis Carroll, or Mary Pearcey. That is why the legend of the Ripper is immune to every explanation, every suspect. No theory will ever satisfy, because the Ripper was much more than the hand that held the knife. Something that probably didn’t yet exist at all when the first throat was cut. Something that may not have existed yet even when the last woman was dead. Its first faint stirrings could be felt when the killer was given a name. The heartbeat quickened as letter
s began to pour into police stations and newspapers, claiming to be from the Ripper. Suddenly, the Ripper was no longer just a killer, but had become something that was alive in every heart, sending letters out not by human agency, but from Hell itself.
No theory, no proof, will ever quench men’s thirst for the Ripper legend, because the Ripper can never be contained by any one suspect, or conspiracy, or narrative. In Madame Tussauds’ Chamber of Horrors he is represented only by a shadow, the last and final word on the Ripper’s legacy.
—from Every Man Jack, by Derek Midwinter
***
Derek’s table was next to mine at the Ghosts and Gangsters Convention in Chicago. During one of the many lulls between people walking by and listlessly fingering our books before moving off without buying a copy or asking for an autograph, he leaned over and introduced himself. “I need a beverage if I’m going to make it through this,” he said. “You watch my table, and I’ll bring you back something?”
He wore a three-piece suit, even though most of the other people aimlessly making the rounds were dressed in black t-shirts and jeans. His hair was long and white, with a beard to match, though he seemed to only be in his energetic fifties. When I shook his hand, I noticed that it felt strangely dry and smooth, like worn leather, like he was wearing an expensive glove. When I notice things like that, I try to imagine myself writing them down in a notebook in my head, so that I’ll remember them later, when I’m back in front of my computer. I picture the words appearing in the notebook, written down by a phantom pen, like an expensive glove. It’s my process; it works for me.
When Derek came back from the bar with a glass of beer in each hand, we got to talking, and that’s when we learned that we both lived in Kansas City. If you spend any time at all in any kind of niche hobby, you quickly figure out that it’s a small world. Anyone who does anything in it gets to know almost everyone else, and that goes double if you live in the Midwest, rather than New York or LA or someplace. It may not have been a lot, but it was enough to get us talking that night at the convention, and that was enough to get things started.
Derek stood out. He was what you’d call gregarious, though it also didn’t take him long to put people off. He spoke like a lecturer, and I wasn’t surprised to learn that he’d been an attorney before going on disability due to an undisclosed condition. He walked with a slight limp, but rumor had it that it was a psychological malady that kept him from practicing, rather than a physical one. Whichever it was, Derek never shared the nature of it with me.
He’d written two books on Jack the Ripper, one on Ed Gein, one on H. H. Holmes. All of them nonfiction, none of them really about the murders themselves. Instead he concerned himself with the cultural repercussions of the crimes, the narratives that had been built up around them. The ties between Ed Gein and Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and our modern idea of the serial killer, that kind of thing. “People like to compare actors and superheroes to the gods and demigods of Greek myth,” he said in a lecture at that same convention, “but really it’s the murderers who form the backbone of our cultural mythology. What does that say about us?”
He was at the convention peddling his second Ripper book, and from talking to him I quickly learned that, while he had come to Ripperology rather late in his career as a ghoul (his word), it had rapidly become the focus of his mania. He’d gotten his start in the field as a collector of murder memorabilia. The old-fashioned wire glasses that hid his dark eyes were actually part of his collection, worn by a clerk who worked the Holmes case in 1893, painstakingly restored and fitted with Derek’s prescription. “No reason to assume that they saw anything to do with it, of course,” he told me once, leaning conspiratorially over his beer, “but then again, no reason to assume they didn’t, either.”
***
The first time I went to Derek’s big house on Holmes Street—not an accident, he told me—it was to see his collection. I was writing my third and longest book for Cold Blood Press, purveyors of local-interest true crime fiction, about the Bloody Benders. When Derek learned that, he told me that he had, in his collection, several pieces from the old Bender Museum in Cherryvale, from when it got shut down and turned into a fire station.
Derek was a bachelor, with a grown daughter from a marriage that had ended fifteen years before I met him. His house was nice, clean and meticulous, filled with books and real wood furniture. He had a wine cabinet, though I only ever saw him drink wine on two occasions.
He kept his collection in the basement. It wasn’t at all dim or disordered, like it would have been in a police procedural or a scary movie. Derek was a collector, not a hoarder, and his collection was as meticulously organized as a museum vault. Carefully preserved, coded and catalogued, grouped together by murder and ordered by year. Nothing very new, aside from a few Ed Gein pieces left over from when he was researching his first book. Mostly, he was fascinated with murders from around the turn of the century. But there weren’t any Jack the Ripper pieces in his collection.
When I asked him about it, he just shrugged, but then he brought it up again, out of the blue, later that night. “I don’t really know why,” he said, suddenly, in the midst of a lull in conversation. “My mania for collecting just seems to have petered out about the same time my mania for the Ripper really came on. Not that Ripper memorabilia is exactly easy to come by, anyway.”
He may not have known why, but privately I think that it was just the evolution of his obsession. While he may have started out as a collector, it was always the way that we mythologize killers that really interested him. His collection was just an entry point to understand that process, beginning with fetishizing the accoutrements of the crimes, and moving from there to the metaphysics of the crimes themselves. Though Ripperology was never my thing, I’d read a few books on it before, and I read both of Derek’s, and Derek was the only Ripperologist I ever knew of who didn’t have a theory as to Jack’s identity. In fact, Derek seemed to think that there was more to the Ripper mythos than any one identity could ever contain. That was essentially the thesis of his second Ripper book, Every Man Jack.
After Derek’s death, the police asked me if I was his friend, and I wasn’t sure how to answer. I guess that I was probably the best friend he had. We were both bachelors, both writers, both in the same field. We lived twenty minutes away from one another, in good traffic. I went to his house a few times, he came to mine more seldom. We used to meet for drinks at a bar on the Plaza called Sullivan’s. I knew him for six years, but I never met his daughter, he never even told me the name of the firm where he used to work. When we got together it was our interests we talked about, not our lives. For the first two years, I assumed that Midwinter wasn’t even his real last name, just something he put on because it looked better on the cover than Jones or Meyers, until I happened to see a utility bill on his kitchen table addressed to it.
***
Unlike my grandfather, Derek didn’t die quietly in his sleep. And unlike my grandfather, I wasn’t the one who found his body. He had a lady who came in twice a week to dust and vacuum and do the laundry, and she found him sitting in a chair in his basement, surrounded by his collection, a cutthroat razor in his lap and both of his hands nearly hacked off. The wrists not just slit, but sawed through, cut all the way around to the bone, as though he was trying to remove his hands like gloves. The coroner said that the tendons were severed in both hands. They had no idea how he’d managed to hold the razor at the end. The working theory was that he gripped it in his teeth.
He left behind no note, no indication of why he had done it. The police conducted an investigation, but there was no sign of forced entry or burglary, and they had no leads. Derek kept a careful catalog of his collection, and every item in it was accounted for. All signs pointed to a bizarre and inexplicable suicide, case closed. It’s what everyone assumed, his daughter included, and in their assumptions you could hear, unvoiced, the old refrains about his undisclosed mental condition, ab
out the morbidity of his hobbies. I was asked only cursory questions during the investigation, and I didn’t have anything to add that would shed any light.
I went to Derek’s house for the last time when the estate sale was happening. His daughter lived in Seattle, and while she flew down for the funeral, she had everything sold through an agency. Derek’s collection went up on an online auction site and brought quite a bit of money. I didn’t buy anything from it, though I bought a chair from his house at the regular auction, one that I used to sit in next to the bay window when we would drink and talk about crimes committed before we were born.
They moved most of the furniture out onto the lawn to sell it. Somehow, doing that divorced it from him, made it into just stuff, all disarrayed and random. Like a dissection or an anatomical chart, just shapes now with numbers tacked on, nothing left that resembled a person, resembled a life. People were wandering through it in the fall weather, kicking dead leaves off the lawn and pulling the drawers out of dressers. I was standing on the front walk, looking up at the house, and my glance fell on the cupola window above the front porch, where Derek used to sit and watch the traffic go by when he couldn’t sleep. A figure was standing there, just a shadow against the glare of the window, but one that I knew instantly, though I had never seen it before. It was a figure that anyone alive would recognize. Tall and indistinct, in a top hat and cape, his white-gloved hands crossed at his waist.
Maybe I should have gone in then and investigated. Maybe I would have found that it was just some eccentric collector, another enthusiast come to gather memorabilia from Derek’s old life. But seeing that figure there, feeling his unseen gaze on me, I felt sick, like the sidewalk was buckling under my feet, and I turned and walked away, sat sweating in my car on the side of the road until I felt well enough to drive home.