Just as he feels Polly’s life in his hands, under his complete dominion, slipping away, just as he becomes the god who decides she dies, on that eclipse of time during which he might’ve allowed her sorry life continuance, or not . . .
Stumpf too had had a good time with Polly—he and Stumpf—as when Polly had taken her last gasp, tasted her blood spewing from both sides of her mouth, deepening that faint provocative tincture painted in her cleavage. It’d all made Stumpf and him giddy and wet.
From high atop the Ferris wheel, the killer stared down at the gathering crowd around the lagoon boat rides. Uniformed police’d converged on the Lover’s Lane Canal.
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Other passengers on Mr. Ferris’s wheel noticed all the to-do at the lagoon, seeing a strange fire on the water. While Stumpf appeared a gentleman alone on the wheel, he’d in fact begun the evening with two lovely companions. They’d taken two boats out on the lagoon—double the pleasure.
His friends remained in the lagoon far below. One in the water, at least in part, the other in a now flaming rowboat; both dispatched by the Phantom.
Through the trees, flames winked, and Stumpf watched authorities hook and drag the fiery craft ashore. Desperately, men doused his latest victim.
The killer saw from this moving position, every second another perspective. Interesting altogether, each separate moment of the ride as if sitting inside one of those handheld daguerreotype machines people paid to watch at the 3
Penny Opera on Lincoln and Fullerton.
Around him, he heard others speculating from the safety of their perch on the excitement below. A series of gasps, whispers, cooing like pigeons, and the sound of giggling and kissing.
A slight scent of kerosene adhered to him, and his nails had become ragged at having scaled the bridge abuttment from the lagoon. But he had soaked a handkerchief before then to swipe at the larger, noticeable blood splotches on his boots, pants leg, and cape.
He gave more thought to the girl in the flaming boat.
Most assuredly as lurid an image as anything created by Edgar Allan Poe. It must garner front-page attention and eclipse the Columbian Exposition. As the giant wheel lifted up and up again, he braced himself and watched the activity he’d set in motion below. When the wheel stopped with him atop it, he stood to open a small window. He shouted into the wind as he had that night with Polly Pete, perhaps in this very gondola, crying against the wind, “I’m King of the Fair!”
*
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The Ferris wheel continued its rise and fall. Above the killer in black, Ransom and Jane Francis peered out over their gondola to get a look at the noisy fellow some six or seven cars below. Ransom stood, giving the gondola a start backward in reaction to his weight. Jane gasped, but in a moment she, too, was standing to see the man who’d been shouting from below, now coming round, lifting as they descended. “He looks like Dr. Jeykll, I think,” she commented.
“You mean Hyde, don’t you?” They faintly heard the wheel operator at the bottom shouting up. “In your seats! Sit the bloody hell down!” They did so and rocked the gondola more as a result. Then Alastair again craned to see all he might, and she thought him so childlike in his enthusiasm, and so she began rocking and rocking the gondola in a madcap fashion she believed he’d enjoy, when suddenly the suspended car holding them began to sway too dangerously for comfort.
He threw his arms round her, pulled her into his chest, and she felt safe there, no matter what, while below them in rotation, the single man’s rantings had only increased with maniacal laughter.
“You bitch, you’ve just laughed your last,” the killer shouted and backhanded the spectral image of Polly Pete whose eyes opened on him despite her head wobbling near off. His erection came with her pain even if she wasn’t really present.
Still she sat here bleeding and whimpering, and the more she bled out, the tighter the garrote and the more sexually excited he became.
“We should make love right here!” Polly’s ghost whispered in his ear.
“There isn’t time . . . or space!” As beautiful and wild as CITY FOR RANSOM
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Polly’d been, he knew he could not keep her. He could not keep any of them.
She persisted, grabbing his crotch. “What? Are you afraid? You’re not one of those who can’t get hard in a woman?”
“Shut up! You don’t know what you’re bleedin’ talking about! Shut up!”
“What are you in real life, heh? A lawyer, a professor, a doctor, perhaps?”
“I’m none. Now, Polly, be a good girl, least till we’re at your place.”
She pouted. “You’re as boorish as Ransom, wantin’ me to be a cultured lady till we’re in bed!”
In the end, the gondola and Polly both settled down, and they sat safe and secure in their seats, and he stared at her, thinking she had a death wish. She needed Stumpf to kill her. She wanted it; begged it.
“Yes and I want it again,” her spirit said in his ear.
He regained himself—in the here and now place—and watched the building excitement he’d created below. Stumpf had given him a quota, and he always demanded more blood; always from the back of his head came Stumpf’s voice. Not even lively Polly had been able to drown out that voice.
With their ride over, he and Stumpf and the ghost of Polly stepped from the gondola to an angry operator who failed to appreciate his antics. A tip shut him up, and as the killer joined the maddening crowd on the fairway, he heard the operator also shake down Ransom for a tip.
He soon sat on a bench deep in shadow, nerves raw and exhilarated at once. Polly had been right. He’d never enjoyed normal relations with a woman. Born incapable. Withered testicles and deformed penis. Nothing whatever doctors could do. Despite the efforts of his mother to take him to the best surgeons on two continents, including Christian Fenger.
They opened his urinary tract, but they couldn’t produce a 210
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miracle any more than God himself might. No one could induce
That came only with the kill, only in
He’d spent countless years in and out of hospitals, as Mother refused to accept his condition as irreversible. How many silent nights he’d spent with Stumpf—as his mother insisted on calling it, a name from his nursery, from his sleep murmurings. Mother was the only one on the planet who’d unconditionally loved him. When she’d died, penniless, he’d had to bury her in that damned Potter’s Field. Although starving, he’d refused to sell her body to the
