Christopher Fowler - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 10

The pioneer squad of the Heroes advanced, peered into the truck and its cab. Reported that the truck itself was empty, but that the cab contained a comatose Black man holding onto an empty brandy bottle and a plastic bag (the Taino and Arawack presence in their native island had been absorbed too long ago for them to recognize the Mustee as half-Indian); in fact the slack of the bag was wound tightly around his hand. The Christian Heroes held a brief council, then deployed their forces. “Andale! La bolsa! cried the smallest Hero, as he was hoisted into the open cab window, with a very sharp knife, and very deftly cut the plastic and snatched the bag away.

A jacket was tossed over the plastic bag. The Heroes wandered away and eventually returned to their headquarters, a semi-occupied storeroom behind a small botanica, whose proprietor was an honorary Hero. There the reeking bag or bags were opened. Alas! No grass! Some of the Heroes uttered exclamations, not of enthusiasm.

But the honorary member, with a look of the utmost gravity, had his own exclamation to utter, as he knelt and crossed himself, “Esta la cabeza de Santo Mumbo!”

Something of Africa was after all recognized in the eclectic pantheon of the Christian Heroes. One by one, the others knelt down and followed his example.

Sergeant Reilly said, “Urright, here’s anudda one, from one o’ dem buhyn-dout houses on Corona Street. Tullaphone call says dey, om, wuhyshippin da Devil’s head wit dead chickens, and alia dat blasphemy stuff.” He gave his own head an angry shake as though regretful that all of that blasphemy stuff had not constituted an indictable offense in New York State since 1797 (People v. Jemima Wilkerson); “So, om, Lopez? Levine? And take the visitin Royal Canadian witchuz and tull um t’muffle his hawss’s hoofs. Hoar, hoar!” Reilly went back to his coffee.

“Worshipping the Devil’s Head!” exclaimed Corporal Clanranald. “Eh?”

All the police repeated, “Eh?” in chorus, and laughed heartily.

All had been very interested that a corporal from the RCMP would be with them a little while as part of a crash course in Urban Crime. All had been disappointed that the corporal had not worn his scarlet mountie coat, but his accent was meat for much merriment.

Corporal Clanranald, of, originally, Trail, B.C., to whom Urban Crime had largely meant drunken peasoupers peeing in the streets and drunken Indians ineptly trying to take the tires off cars not theirs and mashing their fingers in the process, and drunken Manitoba-French Metis singing Voyageur songs under the street lamps at 2:00 a.m. - to Corporal Clanranald, New York City Urban Crime was Something Else. But even so, “worshiping the Devil’s head” was something else yet. The benign Sunday Schools of the United Church of Canada had not prepared him for metropolitan diabolism.

The police car slowed down in that Borough where Thomas Wolfe had long ago heard the peaceful sound of a million Jews turning the pages of the Sunday Times. Times had changed. “Here we are, Corp, see? Some kid, I guess he was laying chicky, he just run in t’give the word. ” Then, and only then, as the car was parked in front of a smoke-streaked apartment-building, whose doorless door-way was heaped with rubbish, did they briefly turn on the siren.

Absolute shells, wreckages of other fires, or mere heaps of rubble, cellars of demolished houses, houses which had been burned repeatedly long after any insurance could possibly have been issued: this is what else they saw on Corona Street in that block.

Visiting RCMP Corporal Clanranald, hissed and pointed, “Look, they’re running out the back and getting away!”

“Fine, we don’t want ‘em,” said Lopez.

“The Tombs is full enough as it is.” Levine said.

The three men got out of the car and gingerly entered the building. Stale reek of smoke still clung to it. Doorways gaped. Now suddenly galvanized, Lopez and Levine loudly clumped their feet on the steps, called out, “ Police!” A last clatter of their feet; then silence.

On the second floor an entire wall had been knocked out, and in the large room which had resulted they found the evidence of the ceremony they had interrupted. On the walls were holy pictures of Mother Mary and the Caribbean Indian Saint, Maria Lionza, riding nude upon her horse; all affixed with thumb-tacks or scotch tape. On one wall hung a crucifix. In front of the crucifix was a table and in front of the table lay three headless black chickens and three headless white chickens. Their heads were on the table, so was smoldering incense, so were piles of wilting fruit and flowers, and little bowls piled with unknown substances, also cigars and candles red and yellow and blue and black. So was -

Clanranald pointed. “My God! What is — that?”

In the center of the table it sat. Its mouth was smeared with fresh blood, and it seemed to leer at them out of the side of its single open eye. Slyly.

“Oh, that’s horrible! What is it?”

“Werentcha fetening? That’s the Devil’s head. It looks like it, too,” said Levine. “Gevalt, whadid they do, somebody rob a grave? Stay here, Royal, will ya? We gotta look around and radio da phatagraphers. Be right back. ”

Malcolm Clanranald would easily have preferred to do other things than stay there, but he stayed as ordered, as he told himself, he would have done in the frozen northern Yukon. It was then, under the unremittent gaze of the horrid head on the. table. altar? … he bethought himself of his own small personal camera; and took it from his pocket, and snapped a few photographs to show the folks in B.C. before Lopez and Levine returned, eventually followed by the official police photographers.

What became of the head after its removal to the New York Police Lab, he never learned. For soon the course in Urban Crime was completed, and Clanranald was back in Canada. There he developed the photographs himself, and there one of the folks in BC had connections with a sensationalist newspaper. The corporal was not an especially talented photographer and most of the shots were ho-hum. But one single one was clear enough and ghastly enough to be picked up by a press syndicate.

So for the first time, in newspapers throughout North America, appeared the likeness of a Paper-Man’s head. Though none of the caption-writers called it by that name.

Genevieve Silas, Selby’s widowed sister-in-law and housekeeper, had made fish cakes and baked beans for breakfast again — often had he told her that he detested them at all times, and especially for breakfast: uselessly. So he was not in the best mood when the phone rang. “Silas here.”

“Yeah, well this is Riordon here. What the hell have you been doing with the head I examined? What’s it doing in New York?”

It took a few seconds for Silas to isolate this Riordon from the vast number of tribesmen of that name. “Doing with it, my dear Doctor Riordon; the object is in a locked cabinet in a locked room, and has certainly not been in New York City.”

The dental surgeon’s voice cut in on his polite protest. “ Worshipping the Devil’s Head, the papers say.”

“Well, they do sometimes turn up as cult objects, yes, but I never heard of one in New York!”

Riordon did not believe him, and Riordon did not believe that he had seen no such picture in the newspaper. Riordon said the New York City police had somehow had the teeth examined by someone who knew something. And this someone said that the teeth of this evidently ancient head had been not only recently drilled, but drilled by the new experimental Davenport drill, “and you know how many of them there are. Damned few. If this gets traced to me, well, God won’t help you.” With these cryptic words, Edward L. Riordon, doctor of dental medicine, hung up.