Free Ripper by Michael Slade Page B

cards divine what will be.
    The Hanged Man.
    Judgement.
    And the Devil.
    What in hell did they mean?
    Robert DeClercq had seen more of death than was healthy for any man. Not clinical death, sanitized, like a pathologist sees, but death in situ with all its pathos and wrenching raw emotion.
    His first year in harness, he'd arrived at a farmhouse in rural Saskatchewan to find a woman sprawled on the kitchen floor, a long-handled wood ax buried in her skull, two bloodied kids clinging to her screaming in rage at what their father had done. In Alberta he had been introduced to Seppuku when a visiting Japanese businessman spilled his intestines onto the carpet of his hotel room. Four men had been ice-picked to death in a filthy Saltspring commune, the aftermath of a feel-good acid trip that went bad. Handprints clawed in blood along a Manitoba garage told the story of a homosexual lovers' spat settled with a razor. In Newfoundland an old priest had smothered in church while masturbating with a masochist's plastic bag over his head. A Yukon politician had stuck a shotgun in his mouth, pulling the trigger with his toe, soon so stiff from cadaveric spasm it had to be broken to free the barrel. A Jamaican nanny in New Brunswick had been skinned alive by a patient on the run from the local asylum. Ten years after an Ottawa bomb had blown a car apart, the driver's mummified hand was found on the roof of a nearby apartment block. A man pushed through a fifth-story window in Quebec had been left to die impaled on a spiked iron fence. Protesting a parking fine at city hall, a Nova Scotia motorist had doused the clerk with lighter fluid then had set him aflame. DeClercq had opened a shopping bag abandoned in P.E.I, to find a newborn baby strangled with its umbilical cord. He'd collected the limbs of a teenager scattered along a railway line after they were methodically thrown from a commuter train. The worst was a_ Yellowknife autopsy in 1969 when the corpse, already certified dead from asphyxiation, had cried out and died from shock when the pathologist cut open its chest. So many cases. Hell on Earth . . .
    What made DeClercq a good detective was occult intuition: the fact he'd trained himself to tap his jungle sense.
    Early in evolution, back when we were apes, jungle sensitivity ruled our lives. Animals have a built-in clock. They turn up the minute it's time to eat. Animals have a built-in homing device. Abandoned thousands of miles from home, they've been known to return to where they live. Animals have an intuitive sense akin to "second sight." A dog will stand by the door prior to its master's return even when its owner's gone for an unset duration. Human beings have these latent powers, too.
    The subconscious mind—our "jungle sense"—works with a speed and accuracy beyond conscious grasp. It makes connections missed by rational thought, for certain facts become invisible in bright light. As a boy DeClercq had noticed on a still day you can hear people talking miles away. In school he'd learned our nervous system has small gaps, synapses that filter out "background noise." If not for them we'd be aware of every aspect of our environment, greatly diminishing our powers of concentration. Existence—for LSD affects these synapses—would become an endless acid trip.
    Intuitive people are able to plumb levels of subconscious meaning. The word "occult" means "unknown" or "hidden." The occult mind is a spider at the center of a web, attune to vibrations pulsing along the strands. An occult experience occurs when subconscious insight enlightens the consciousmind. Threads of meaning reach out to bind reality together, solving problems that defy rational thought. Such intuitive powers are what we've learned to block, so the trick is to bring this "sixth sense" into everyday life. Only by ignoring our rational filter can subconscious truths be grasped, so occult intuition is developed by willed unwilling. DeClercq had trained himself to