Ed Gorman: Voodoo Moon

Thirty-some years ago, the fireman found the skull. He was searching through the debris left in the ruins of the psychiatric hospital.

This was a routine part of his job and nothing special. Firehouse lore had it that once in every firefighter's life, he would find something valuable. A diamond. Rubies. A stash of money.

But on this particular day, in this particular circumstance, in the mind of this particular firefighter, there was no thought at all of riches. There was thought only of his wife and the arduous pregnancy she was enduring. The doctor had said that a third pregnancy could be troublesome, maybe even dangerous, for her. But she was adamant. They had two girls. She knew how badly the firefighter wanted a boy.

He'd kill himself if she died in childbirth. That was what he told himself, anyway. In truth, Amy and Cindy would need a dad more than ever. And so he'd be there for them. But he'd be lonely. Miserable.

Please, God , he prayed, as he and six of his fellow firefighters sifted through the debris. The fire marshal followed in their wake.

What he did was trip over the skull.

He was in what had been the subbasement of the psychiatric hospital and tripped right over it.

His rubber-gloved hand dipped to pick it up.

Ash and dust had blackened the otherwise white skull.

Behind him, the fire marshal said, "Let me see that. You keep on looking."

In the next ten minutes, he found the rest of the skeleton. By this time, everybody had gathered in the subbasement area per the instructions of the fire marshal. They searched the rubble, too.

There were a lot of weird stories about the psychiatric hospital. Halloween campfire stories for adults.

About how madmen with butcher knives frequently raped the attractive female patients.

About how some patients were tortured with whips and arcane devices from the Inquisition.

About how lesbian nurses took advantage of some of the patients.

And how strange Haitian voodoo rites were frequently held in the subbasement.

The stories flourished, as gossip always does, irrespective of the fact that they weren't true. A madman with a butcher knife would never get far in the heavily patrolled halls. Whips would tend to leave telltale signs for visiting family members to see. And crazed lesbian nurses played well in the steamy thirty-five-cent paperbacks of the day but were mere fantasy.

But strange Haitian voodoo rites…

The state police lab was run by a man named Dick Hampshire. He was, in order of preference, a University of Iowa Hawkeye fan (football, basketball, swimming, marbles, he didn't give a shit), a husband, a father of four, and a member of the American Legion.

He was also a skeptic when it came to the bombastic assertions frequently made by his bucktoothed assistant, Tom Watson. Watson loved high drama. He'd even once suggested that a rather routine homicide had been committed by space aliens, owing to the appearance of crop circles near the murder. A most fanciful lad was he.

Hampshire put up with him because he made for good brewski stories. "You know what that dumb sumbitch told me today?" or "Listen to this one. That dumb asshole really topped himself this time," or "You're not gonna believe this one; I swear to God, you're not gonna believe it." His crowd loved hearing his Tom Watson stories as much as Hampshire loved telling them.

So a few days after the skull and bones were found in the rubble of the asylum, and after twenty-six hours of examining the bones, Watson knocked on Hampshire's office door and said, "Those bones?"

"Yeah."

"Cannibalism."

"Aw, shit, Tom. Please. I'm not up for it today. I'm really not. I've got that asshole from the Highway Patrol crawlin' all over me."

Of course, all the time Hampshire's thinking, What a great Watson story this'll make. Cannibalism. You don't get much better than that .

"And that isn't all."

Hampshire sighed. This one was going to be even better than the crop circle deal. "OK, Tom. Lay it on me. I'll forget all about how well that Highway Patrol captain knows the governor. Just tell me."

"One of those odd necklaces we found on one of the bodies?"

"Yeah."

"Guess what it was made of?"

"Just tell me, Tom. Skip the buildup."

"Human vertebrae."

"Bullshit."

"I've got it all set up for you to see."

"This is crazy."

"Well, there were a lot of rumors about voodoo being practiced there by some patient name Renard."

"This is all I need," Hampshire said. "The Highway Patrol accuses us of sloppy lab work that cost them an important case in court-and now we're gonna start talking about voodoo and human necklaces?"

"It's true," said young Tom Watson. "It's absolutely true."

And it was.

Hampshire spent the next four days examining various bones, teeth marks, gashes, and the pattern of human bite marks and concluded…

But that wasn't all.

One of the firefighters had found a small, oval-shaped metal canister filled with a soupy mixture of some kind.

The stench was so bad, Hampshire skipped not only lunch but dinner, which his wife, who'd fixed a roast, was not happy about.

Hampshire spent two days breaking down the contents of the canister, and when he had drawn his final conclusion, he said, "Watson, c'mere."

"You OK, chief?"

"No, I'm not."

Watson stood next to the canister and bent to peer inside. "Oh, God, that smells awful."

"You wanna know why it smells awful, Tom?"

"Why?"

"Because it's not soup. At least not as we think of soup. It's a kind of stew made of a human heart, genitals, and a human spine ground to a fine powder. Then stirred up with human blood."

"Oh, God."

They weren't going to be telling Tom Watson stories anymore.

They were going to be telling Dick Hampshire stories…

Way up here, at certain times of year, you can sometimes hear them screaming, more than twenty people who died in the asylum fire over thirty years ago.

At least, that's what some of the locals tell you, about the screaming, I mean.

I thought about that as I steered my rental Chevrolet through the countryside that graceful, warm autumn morning. It was weather so gorgeous, it made you a little crazy. You didn't quite know what to do with yourself, it was so exhilarating. Green rolling hills, trees still full and furious with color, black and white dairy cows, green John Deere harvesters, and lazy silver creeks winding past small, white, tidy farmhouses and clean red barns. Hard to imagine the screams of the dying up in these smoky hills on such a day.

The fire-gutted Sterling Psychiatric Hospital wasn't difficult to find. It sat on top of a very high hill. And it had a TV production van from Dubuque parked in front of it. Tandy West was already at work.

You probably know the name. The waif on Mind Power , cable TV's second most popular show a few years back, as the publicists had been eager to tell you then. They weren't so eager to tell you that now, since the show had slipped to the mid-twenties in the ratings and was facing cancellation.

Five years ago, a year after my wife died, I was asked by a law firm to investigate the murder of which their very wealthy client had been accused by an exceedingly ambitious county attorney. Said wealthy client wanted a bona fide FBI psychological profiler to work for him, which was me, or at least was me when I worked for the bureau; he also wanted a psychic who'd worked successfully with police departments before, which was Tandy West, who was twenty-one years old at the time. That's how Tandy and I met.