Got Brains?

Today I have another tale to tell, a tale of decapitation, a mad scientist, and Section 8 housing, and it takes place right here in the suburban paradise of the San Fernando Valley, specifically the little community of North Hills, just north of Van Nuys. I was riding my skateboard down Nordhoff Street this afternoon and missing all the hookers that used to hang out on Sepulveda Boulevard before the big crackdown a year or two ago, when I saw some five-ohs racing down Nordhoff Street and turning (illegally) onto Columbus Avenue (a.k.a. Crack Alley), sirens blaring like a pack of howling wolves. One unit after another raced around the corner and went shooting down the street. My immediate thought was that something very, very bad must be happening and I should definitely not go near Columbus Avenue. I should just continue on to the local library to return my books and then head home to study and check my stocks on the internet like any normal person would. So of course I turned onto Columbus and followed the line of police cruisers…

Rolling down the street after the cops, I saw them turning onto Memory Park Lane, a little street that ended in a cul-de-sac off Columbus. I got there just in time to see them hauling out a man in handcuffs dressed in a hospital greens and splattered with blood. He was screaming over and over, “BRAINS! BRAINS! THEY WANT MORE BRAINS! I HAVE TO GIVE THEM MORE B-R-A-I-N-S!!! while desperately trying to get away from the police officers dragging him to a waiting car. An ambulance was on the scene and a gurney a with a body on it was being hauled out of the man’s apartment. A woman nearby was sobbing loudly and pulling out tufts of her own hair, obviously insane with grief, likely the vic‘s mother. A female officer was holding her back, trying to calm her down, but she broke loose and grabbed at the body on the gurney, causing the sheet over it to fall off, revealing the nude body of a jailbait betty with the top of her brain-box neatly sliced open to reveal her empty skull. Several onlookers screamed at the gruesome sight; a fat, silver-haired mama-san in an ugly dress feinted, and a young gangster with a red scarf on his head and tattoos up and down his arms fell to his knees and vomited in the gutter. The police started moving people away and taping off the area around the apartment.

A couple of cholos in ray-ban mode were snapping pictures of the dead girl with their phones and yakking away about how they had used her the night before as if nobody white could possibly understand Spanish. I rolled up to them on my board and asked them what they knew about the girl and what went down. They said her name was Lulu, she was fifteen, smoked crack, and turned tricks in her apartment in exchange for cash and drugs while her mom was at work. These dudes had just done her the night before with a bunch of their amigos, gangbanging her in exchange for a wafer of crack and six-pack of beer. The guys were back to do her again when they saw the police rolling up in front of her crib. I had them send me the pics and asked if they had another wafer. They said they each had a couple on them but it would cost me $150 to get one. Of course, I’m not one to carry that much cash, so I said that was just too rich for my blood and skated away to tip off one of the cops about the two of them. Call it “karma a la Nightfox”, I don’t like drug dealers and can’t stand people who laugh when some kid gets dead.

The crowd started to disappear as the body was hauled away and a forensics team showed up to go over the apartment. The five-ohs were telling people to go home and the girl’s mom was taken to the station to make her statement. It was time to bail, so I skated onward to finish my original mission, returning some books to the public library over on Nordhoff and Woodley. After that I caught the bus and headed back to my crib.

Of course, as soon as I got home I was listening to my police radio, hearing the five-ohs flap their teeth-holders about the screaming barmy who killed the girl, one Dr. Victor Joseph Akeley, a lab tech at the county coroner’s office, of all things. I hacked into the employee records in the coroner department’s computer and found his file, and then emailed it to everyone I knew who had ever dealt with anyone from the morgue or police department. Sure enough, a fellow creature of the night, McGee-Lo-Teen, said he knew the guy from when they both worked as orderlies in an emergency room out in Panorama City, but that he had been an army surgeon during the Gulf War until he went AWOL in Saudi Arabia. Seems he was also a serious UFO freak, convinced he had been abducted and experimented upon by aliens once as a child and later in Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Shield. McGee-Lo-Teen said the guy was creepy but extremely intelligent and talked incessantly about neurology, cloning, and organ transplantation.

Once I had the scoop on Akeley, finding his address on Louise Street in Lake Balboa was a snap and I didn’t need no stinkin’ warrant to break into the dude’s house and do some investigating. This house was a tiny shack of a thing with an overgrown yard and positively feral hedges obscuring the view of the place from the street. A hopped fence and jimmied window got me in quick. Sure enough, this guy was an experienced surgeon. There were medical texts and journals strewn around his living room, preserved organs and tissue samples in jars of formaldehyde on shelves, boxes of medical supplies and various drugs (yay, free morphine and sterile needles!) stuffed into cabinets and drawers in the kitchen where cookware should have been. His bedroom was almost bare, just a bed, a nightstand, and closet full of work clothes and medical greens, most of them bloodstained and tattered, some obviously from his years in the military. Oh yeah, there was a pentagram in a circle surrounded by occult symbols drawn in blood on the floor, but who didn’t see that coming? At the bottom of his closet however was something more interesting, a false panel in the floor. I lifted it up to find a hole large enough to use as a crawlspace that went straight down into the ground. A low hum sounded in the dark, barely audible as I leaned forward and peered down the shaft. I shot my penlight down the hole and saw a ladder, so I started scrambling down into the pit not knowing what to expect. This bottom was a good thirty feet down, where it widened into a small room dug out like a large foxhole, probably ten feet on a side and roughly square. The floor was lined with bricks and the walls reinforced with two-by-fours. I found a switch and turned on the feeble light Akeley had hung from the ceiling. The cable leading to the light also lead to a large makeshift cryogenic tank, filled with dry ice and some sort of preservative fluid, the source of the humming sound that filled the chamber, before disappearing into the far wall of the chamber. Peering through the glass on the front of the long freezer case, I could just barely make out the contents, a collection of brains being kept frozen, each one about the size of an adult human’s cerebrum. At one end there was a fresh human head with the skull cut open to expose the brain, no doubt a work in progress.

I had been prepared for that sight after seeing the dead girl earlier. But finding the pile of corpses rotting in a pit sealed with a stolen manhole cover behind the freezer with their skulls sliced open was not something that I had anticipated. This is not something you want to see (or smell) right after lunch. Seeing the maggots and beetles coming out of their nostrils and mouths, and getting a schnozzle full of that rancid meat odour made my stomach flip like a drunken monkey kung fu master on roller-blades, so I bamfed out of the crypt-like chamber ASAP. I had to escape that creep show, it was making my skin crawl and I had no desire to lose my lunch. I tagged my personal logo on the wall with a kind note to the police ("Late again guys…”) and a big arrow pointed at the secret entrance to the dugout vault. The five-ohs were not going to like being scooped on a serial killer case, but I called the anonymous We Tip line and gave them a clue, then split Akeley’s crib and headed home. Welcome to your Elvis Year, Victor J. Akeley…

So, fellow creatures of the night, what did this lizard brain think he was going to do with all of those preserved brains? And why was he so desperate to get more? And, even more ominously, whom was he getting them for?

A Headline Not in the Paper

Scared to Death?

Not many people read news reports from all of the places that I do, just those who see the Big Picture, that obtuse angle of perception that makes other people anxious, so they change the subject and end a conversation as if the one speaking to them was somehow contagious. I have learned not to discuss these things with just anyone, so I will record my findings here on the Internet and occasionally try to find clues to map out the world that is hidden under the day-to-day life that the mundanes think of as reality.

This morning I got up early, before the crack of noon, and saw the same news story in Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, London, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, and Sidney. In each of those cities a body had been found in a locked room, no signs of forced entry, no signs of foul play, just an otherwise healthy and normal person who had apparently died of heart failure. I will not be discussing this with my neighbours either, just you, my fellow creatures of the night…

Living in the wilds of the San Fernando Valley, land of porn studios, the Galleria, Valley girls, and all-night hookah lounges, it was easy to take the express bus over the hill and then catch another one to the scene where one of the bodies was found, an apartment complex in the Pico-Palms area of West Los Angeles. Walking down from Robertson, everything looked normal. The sun was shining, there was a light breeze, and the mercury was up to 78 degrees. The local Sikhs were in the park by their ashram fencing with wooden tulwars in their gleaming white uniforms. Kids were playing football in the street, worn out sneakers dangled from the telephone cables over intersections where drug deals took place, and the local Pakistani transvestite was dressed in black with a lace veil over his face, roller-boogieing up and down the sidewalk while listening to his walkman. It was just a typical mid-winter day in West Los Angeles.

I skated down Wooster and over to Shenandoah, went past Sawyer half a block and spotted the apartment complex. Some yellow crime scene tape was dangling from the door, but it looked like most of it was decorating a nearby magnolia tree. It was the middle of the day, there was no one around, so I let my self in, picking the lock and quietly ducking into the apartment. It was a typical lower middle class apartment, lots of sports memorabilia, a huge stereo system, lots of magazines and cds, no books anywhere other than the Bible and the Illuminatus Trilogy. Everything was pretty normal, typical guy stuff, not real clean or tidy but not a complete pigsty. It was definitely a single guy living here, but it looked as though he had female company now and then, so he was neither a hermit nor a loser, just a young guy heavily into the Lakers and Tupaq Shakur.
I snagged some cds and porno mags that caught my eye, stuffing them into my knapsack, then started looking around the apartment for clues. The kitchen was dusty and offered up no clues besides the fact this guy never cooked anything that wasn’t heated in a microwave oven. The bathroom had the first sign of trouble, a medicine cabinet full of tranquillisers and uppers, as if this dude didn’t know whether he wanted to sleep or not.

The bedroom looked like another dead end, just a DVD collection (a.k.a., more free porn for me…), more magazines, lots of gangsta gear, some weed (woohoo!) hidden under his mattress, and a blinking answering machine. I checked his messages. He had one from his girlfriend, one from his other girlfriend, one from a homey, and one from a neighbour. The third, one spoke volumes: "Yo, boy, how you sleeping? Those fucking nightmares go away? Gimme a call…" That was worth the price of admission right there. But the fourth message was the clincher, the voice of a really torqued off lady screaming in to the phone: "WHAT THE (expletive deleted) IS (expletive deleted) GOING ON DOWN THERE?! STOP (expletive deleted) SCREAMING, ITS (expletive deleted) 3 A.M.!" There was nothing else worth seeing in the rest of the apartment, so I snagged his DVD player and booked, skating back up to Pico to catch the bus back to beautiful downtown Van Nuys (cough).

When got home I opened up my laptop and used my backdoor to get into the coroner’s files. You have to love a coroner’s office with a weak firewall; there is just no end to the stuff you can dig up. There was no mention of drugs in the cause of death, just a trace amount of a sleep aid. From the look of things this dude had maybe taken a tranquilliser a day or two before he died. The medicine cabinet clue is a dead end as far as cause of death is concerned. But then I saw the photos taken at the scene and by the coroner. This dude’s face was frozen in a scream, his eyes bulging out and his tongue hanging out of his mouth. The approximate time of death was (drum roll…) 3 am. For whatever reason, this dude died screaming at three in the morning of an apparent heart attack despite a lack of any previous health conditions and no sign of drug interactions in his body.

I needed to get the scoop on the other deaders and I knew there would be smoke offline as well as in the net, so while I researched the other cases I sent an email to my fellow nocturnal prowler, CKi, a freelance reporter on assignment now in Sidney. Through the internet I found out all the deaths apparently happened at the same approximate time, 3 am PST, all the dudes were in good health but had shown signs of problems sleeping, and none of them had high levels of drugs or toxins in their systems. But CKi found out something that was not in any of the official police reports through a connection in the Sidney police department, namely that the victim there had also been complaining of nightmares that were especially terrifying. So, just like the victim in Los Angeles, the one in Sidney was having nightmares. Were the others? I have no idea. But could a nightmare kill someone? What could these poor bastards have dreamt about that was so horrible that it scared them to death? Do we really want to know?