THE GLUB WEEVIL

THE GLUB WEEVIL
by David Wright

1986. It was the best of times; it was the…

Nope. Not going to start that way. It’s been done before. Suffices to say, it should have been the best of times. I’d just graduated from high school. I had a new girl, an old car and You Give Love a Bad Name was still going strong on the radio. It should have been the greatest summer of my life. And it would have been, if not for the Glub Weevil.

I know you think I’m joking—making some excuse for the way things turned out, but it was real. It was all real.

Most people think it started with a few left feet. Strangest thing. A left foot washed up on English Bay, size seven, women’s, still inside a water-logged Adidas running shoe. And then another at the Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal, also size seven, also a left foot, but from a different person, presumably, unless there was some lady out there born with two left feet, now footless.

And then there were the plastic bag murders.

The police found a black plastic garbage bag exactly one mile north of Horseshoe Bay on the Squamish highway with a leg in it. And then a mile farther on, another bag, this time with the other leg. And then the next mile, an arm, and then another arm. And so on for a few more miles until they finally found the last bag with a head in it.

I know you think I’m exaggerating if not outright lying. Who wouldn’t? This was Vancouver in the 80s and 90s, not Miami. But it was real. Look it up. It’s on the internet. Today, there’s no mention of the Glub Weevil, of course, or a detailed account of the contents of each plastic bag. I believe the term used by the media is just “body parts.” But still, it’s enough to fire the imagination.

I tell you all this to explain, at least in part, what came after and how it all got started. It was August 13^th, 1986. I had just dumped my old job at McDonald’s in favor of a more lucrative opportunity at the docks. I say “old job” but really it was my very first job, not counting my paper route, and I’d only worked two shifts before quitting.

This was during Expo 86 and McBarge, officially dubbed the Friendship 500 although nobody ever called it that, was probably the coolest McDonald’s gig a guy could get. No really. It was a massive, two-story McDonald’s inside of a space-ship-looking barge floating in False Creek in downtown Vancouver. The job even came with a free pass to Expo, which was where I spent every spare evening and weekend with Lily, my 22-year-old girlfriend, necking under the fireworks. I’m not joking. Lily was 22 years old, smoking hot and Asian. But this was Vancouver in the 80s and the mixed couple thing was trending, along with big hair and spandex, and Lily went for all three.

But back to that bit about the new job. Since I already had a season’s pass to Expo that my parents had given me instead of actually paying me for painting the house, I didn’t really need the McDonald’s gig. And at $3.65 an hour, it didn’t even compare to what I would get at the docks, which was an unbelievable $10.00 an hour.

Normally, dock jobs were all sewn up by the longshoremen, perhaps the strongest union in the world. And you didn’t have a chance in heck of getting on with the longshoreman unless you were over 21 and had an uncle or a dad or a brother who could put in a word. I had none of these but I did have a shady friend who owed me a favor.

“Don’t show up until midnight, and don’t hang around after your shift either.” Bobby spoke in short jabs, snapping at each point with a puff of ash. “They catch you and I’ll get canned. That’s how it works here.”

He went on to explain how human waste had a tendency to roll down hill. Those weren’t his exact words, but you get the gist.

Bobby was tough, even by East Van standards. He drank, smoked, swore, did pot, the occasional B and E, and all before his eighteenth birthday. Sure, I was afraid of the guy, but he was also my best friend, and dating my sister so that made me untouchable, at least until they broke up. That being said, I could still screw it up.

“I won’t screw it up,” I said.

He peered at me through the corner of his bloodshot eye, and then grinned.

“Nah,” he said. “You’re too smart for that.” He tussled my hair like an old annoying uncle, perhaps forgetting that we’d graduated the exact same year, although I’m not sure he technically graduated. I’m not even sure he finished a course besides shop.

Security at the docks wasn’t a big thing back then, not like it is today. No cameras or electric locks. Just an old, fat night guard patrolling with a flashlight and a two-way radio from RadioShack. He never even blinked when I passed him. Presumably he knew all about the illegal, underage night crew and how to keep his mouth shut.

Once inside the gate, I was at a loss. The day workers had left hours ago and the docks were literally miles long, blanketed in a wet, black fog that tasted of salt and creosote. Bobby had given me a name, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember it. Was it a person’s name or the name of a ship?

And then I saw Bobby on the gangplank in his plaid wife beater, waving his thick arms over his head. I waved back stupidly and splashed through a muddy puddle in the cracked asphalt to get to where he was madly gesticulating.

“Cheese, Mike. I told you not to be early, but that doesn’t mean be late, neither. You gotta meet the big man tonight.” He wasn’t mad, just sounding off. I knew the difference. Bobby was always sounding off about something. If I wasn’t late, I would have been early. There was no such thing as on time. “You bring your I.D.?”

“My what? You never said—”

“Good. Never bring it, not even a library card. If you get hurt and the longshoremen get nosy, boss man needs plausible deniability. You just wandered in off the street. You don’t work here. Got it?”

I didn’t get it, not really, but I shrugged it off. The bit about getting hurt wasn’t sitting too well. It was dark, with lots of heavy machinery about, and no longshoreman’s union to cover my backside. If I died, would they just dump my body overboard? What would my mom think had happened to me? And Lily? How long before she moved on to some college guy?

These were the thoughts that swirled through my 17-year-old brain as I followed Bobby up the ramp into the Jolly Roger. That was the name I’d forgotten. A joke, I guess. But this Jolly Roger was no pirate ship, more like an old garbage scow barely afloat. It had to be decades old if not a century, the signs of wear and tear everywhere from bow to stern. But someone, maybe the boss man himself, was determined to bring her back from the jaws of death. And that’s where we came in. In retrospect, trading the new McBarge for the old Jolly Roger was perhaps not the best career decision.

Bobby led me gingerly past the Jolly Roger’s primary cargo, what looked to me to be the scraps of a thousand abandoned pinball machines. Used to be, you could find a pinball machine in every gas station and coffee shop from Vancouver to 100-Mile House, and then poof, nothing but Space Invaders and Asteroids. I guess they had to go somewhere. But where the Jolly Roger was shipping them, I didn’t have a clue. Just another graveyard, no doubt.

We reached the tiny pilot’s cabin mid ship and Bobby ushered me inside. Here a greasy-looking midget in a green raincoat cursed and banged his way around an open gearbox with a wad of spit running down his three-day-old beard and an overly large lug wrench in his huge calloused fist.

“You the mechanic?” he snapped, standing to his full height of five feet and jabbing the lug wrench in my direction.

“Yeah,” Bobby intervened before I could deny it. “Apprentice,” he clarified, although that was no less a lie than the first.

The boss sized me up with a suspicious glare that lasted not nearly long enough for a wise assessment and then took a long gulp of his Budweiser. “Good,” he pronounced, tossing us a can each. We were underage, but back then nobody made it to 19 without at least trying a beer. “Get your asses down to the bilge pump. It’s sprung a leak again.”

“The bilge?” Bobby asked.

“Yeah. You deaf?”

Bobby spared me a quick glance and scratched the stubble on his chin nervously. And that got me nervous too. Bobby was never nervous, not even when he got snatched up by the cops with a bag full of weed in his trunk and a stolen cassette deck in his dashboard.

“Yeah, it’s just that, you know, after what happened last time…” He trailed off, scratching his chin again. “It’s just like what you said. We wouldn’t need to go back down there ever again.”

            “What you scared of? The boogeyman?” He cursed a stream of blasphemy that made my cheeks flush. It would have been funny except that it seemed to be hiding something, maybe fear. “Just get down there and do your job. Or maybe I need to find somebody else, somebody who’s not afraid of the dark,” he threatened.

“No, we got this, right?” Bobby turned back to me for support.

I shrugged. “Sure,” I said, but what did I know?

Once we got back out onto the deck, I asked the obvious question.

“So, what was all that about?”

Bobby shook his head. “Nothing. I just don’t like going down there.”

I knew there was more to the story. Bobby was always, well, fearless, even when he shouldn’t have been. I never thought anything could back him down. But I was wrong.

“So now I’m a mechanic?” I said, trying to lighten the mood.

He smirked. “You better be. That AMC Pacer your grandma gave you is a real lemon.”

“Gave me? Like heck. I paid a grand for it.”

Bobby laughed. “You fool.”

We reached the metal stairwell and began our descent into the bowels of the ancient barge. The stench of creosote and bilge water was overpowering, forcing me to gag into my sleeve. No amount of money was worth this smell.

“You get used to it,” Bobby remarked, although it was clear from the sour look on his acned face that he hadn’t.

We exited the stairwell into near blackout. Bobby unsheathed a metal flashlight and banged it to life. There was a flash of wild hair and a scream that made my flesh crawl. I bounced back against a bulkhead involuntarily as Bobby struggled with a dark shape. The fight lasted maybe a few seconds before Bobby managed to shove the ninety-pound banshee down and shine the light in her eyes.

“Cassandra!” he barked, his voice cracking. And then he swore at her without anger, more in relief.

“Scag?” she mumbled. I didn’t know if she was swearing at him or just coughing.

“No, I don’t have no dope, you crazy whore.” He waved his flashlight menacingly. “Get!”

She snarled and spit at him like an animal before being swallowed by darkness. Bobby turned his light on me trembling in the corner and barked a bitter laugh.

“Glad to see you’ve got my back, tough guy. Come on. Let’s go,” he said, wheeling back to the dark corridor.

I peeled myself off the bulkhead and followed mutely behind him, chasing the light. I gathered that Cassandra was just another homeless prostitute, hooked on drugs. Vancouver was a port city and always had a drug problem. It was nothing like what it would be in later years, but still bad enough to be noticed. I never could understand what drew girls, or guys, for that matter, to that kind of lifestyle. It wasn’t like anybody graduated from high school and said, “I think I’ll be a homeless hooker.”

How old was Cassandra? Maybe twenty? Maybe younger than my girlfriend. Life on the street could be hard on the body, and the soul, shrivelling you up to nothing, worse than nothing, some kind of snarling, vicious animal.

The barge creaked and moaned, sounding almost human. Bobby mumbled something about the metal contracting but he wasn’t entirely convincing. If Cassandra was down here, who knew what else we’d find?

Bobby’s bouncing light veered down another endless passageway that reeked of engine oil. “It’s down here, I think.”

It occurred to me that Bobby may not have known for sure where he was going. The rusted old barge was enormous and in the dark, practically a maze. If we passed through the wrong set of doors and couldn’t get back, we could be trapped down here forever. Who would come find us? That old midget in the raincoat with his cans of warm beer? I wouldn’t count on it.

Bobby’s light stopped before a metal door with a big wheel lock like in a submarine.

“Pressure door. You know, in case the bilge room floods,” Bobby explained, not bringing me any comfort whatsoever. “Here, take this.” He shoved the flashlight into my gut and began yanking on the iron wheel. After a few grunts and curse words, the wheel began to turn and the door opened, and with it the foulest stench yet. I couldn’t take it, not this time, and puked over my shoulder. So much for my Quarter-Pounder-with-Cheese.

“You’ll have to clean that up, you know.”

“What for?” I mumbled, wiping my chin with my sleeve. “Who’s gonna see it?”

Bobby shrugged in agreement and then pushed through the door. Oddly enough, the bilge room, for all of it’s foul stench, had lights and power. A pump was working, creating an enormous racket that was sure to make me deaf in a few years, but nobody seemed to worry about stuff like that back then. No wonder there are so many deaf old guys nowadays.

Bobby examined the bilge pump from all sides and scratched his chin with an oil-stained fingernail, bitten near to the stub.

“You see a leak?”

I studied the alien piece of machinery, much like a monkey reading a newspaper, and made a profound assessment. “Nope.”

Bobby shrugged, wrenching the radio from its Velcro strap.

“Hey, ah, Biggles, you read me?”

There was static. A squeak. More static.

Bobby pressed the red button and tried again. “Biggles, come in, over.”

More static. Great. Now the radio wasn’t even working. I felt a trickle of cold sweat forming just on the ridge of my hairline, and yet my fingers were going numb from the cold. It was a hot summer night outside but only a degree above freezing down in this barge.

“Yeah, I read you.” The boss man’s creaky voice sounded tinny over the radio. “You fix that leak yet?”

“That’s just it, boss. There ain’t no leak.” Bobby sounded deferential, almost like he was lying, which was odd since he was actually telling the truth for once.

“Pressure gauge says there’s a leak in the bilge pump and pressure gauge don’t lie.” Biggles snapped back, sounding very much like a fortune cookie. “You’ll have to climb down into the bilge deck to find her.”

“Say again.”

“You heard me. And don’t make a career out of it neither. You’ve got a dozen more jobs to do tonight or you don’t get paid a dime.”

“We’re on it.” Bobby turned a dial on the radio and it went silent. “I gotta go down there,” he said, his voice shaking.

“Down where?” I glanced around the bilge room looking for more stairs, but there were none, just nameless clumps of machinery and welding tools that could have been magic wands for all I knew.

Bobby grabbed a handle in the metal floor and yanked on it. A square trap door about a yard across opened up, exhaling a noxious fog of putrid odor. I covered my mouth and nose just in time to fend off another bout of painful puking.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Bobby’s head was cocked sideways.

“You hear that?”

“What?” I listened, but what could I possibly hear above the sound of the near deafening bilge pump? Bobby shook his head as if changing his mind, and then handed me the radio.

“I’m going to take a look. If anything goes wrong, you call it in.”

I looked at the radio. “Call what in? What the heck are you talking about?”

“Just hand me the flashlight. You probably won’t have to do anything. Just in case, you know?”

“In case of what?”

I handed him the flashlight. He tucked it in the Velcro strap on his belt and then reached for the welding torch and sparked it to life. A blue flame shot out, blinding me momentarily. Wasn’t he supposed to have a mask or something? Before I could ask, he disappeared down the hole, trailing the gas line behind him.

I waited. The bilge pump beat a hellish tattoo into my eardrum.

What kind of plan was this? What if he dropped the flashlight into the black bilge water? How would he ever find it again? How would we get back? What if he fell in? Would he drown? Or freeze to death? And even if I called little Biggles on the radio, was he going to come down here and save us? The unanswered questions compounded one on top of the other, and along with them, my anxiety. I felt an unbearable claustrophobia, like something inside me was about to crack.

And then I heard it.

A low howling, like we heard before, but much louder. Just the iron contracting, I told myself, but I didn’t believe it. The sound went on and on even above the constant thumping of the bilge pump. A deep wail, a human wail, that plumbed the very depth of despair.

“Bobby?” I called down the hole.

No answer, except for the long, incessant wail.

I peered down, down into the black abyss. A light was bobbing somewhere miles below, the acetylene gas line dancing like an Indian cobra. And then a sharp thud rocked the metal floor, echoing up through the iron bulkheads. An earthquake? A torpedo strike?

The lights flickered, giving me just the premonition of terror, before going out completely. The bilge pump ceased its infernal drumming and all at once I was lost in an infinite world of wailing terror.

“Bobby?” I screamed again, feeling my way to the open trap door, and the long ladder to nowhere. “Bobby, the power’s out. What happened? You okay?”

No answer.

I turned the nob on the radio. “Boss man, Biggles,” I said, and then remembered I had to press the red button. I felt around blindly with my fingers until I found it. “The power went out,” I screamed into the radio. “We’re trapped down here. You have to come get us.”

Static answered.

“Stupid thing,” I cursed, or as close to a curse as I ever got back then.

I saw light flash in the hole and leaned toward it. It flashed again, drawing nearer. Hope revived. “Bobby? Bobby?”

A face appeared, but it was not Bobby’s. It was not even human. A long, drawn snout. Eyes blazing red. Fire flaring from huge, round nostrils. Two arms—but not arms—appendages with giant pincers shot out of the hole, snapping like angry lobsters, reaching for my throat.

I fell back against the iron floor, smashing my head against the bilge pump. The monster vanished in the pitch black, but I could still hear it breathing, great heaving gasps, and the pincers still chopping angrily into the foul air.

My hand went to the back of my head reflexively, feeling the wetness of blood soaking my hair. My brain was foggy with concussion and my stomach turned. I would die down here, alone, in the dark, just another victim of an impossible creature, a myth from children’s nightmares.

And it was all Bobby’s fault.

The thought came to me like a flash of insight. Bobby was responsible. He had drawn me here, fed me to this monster. He had always hated me, ever since we were children. He wanted my girl. My life. But he couldn’t have it. I wouldn’t let him. I would fight him with every fiber of my being.

I pitched onto my back, just as the monster found me, the light of its flaring nostrils revealing the full horror of its face. Terror flooded my brain like crack cocaine, daring me to lie still and die. But I would not. I was going to fight, rage my only weapon.

Reaching wildly, blind with terror, emboldened, maddened beyond all fear, my hand fell upon something hot and metallic. As if by magic, the welding torch appeared in my fist. Without hesitation, I turned it on the Glub Weevil, straight into its demonic eyes.

Its scream sounding almost human. Its right pincer came up, threatening to gouge at my neck. I came down with the torch, a blue beam slicing through the appendage like Excalibur through countless dark minions. Blood, black and angry, spurted, hot arterial spray hitting my face, filling my heart with shameful ecstasy. Again and again the blue light descended. Again and again the dark mass rose up against me.

I could feel the first glow of my rage waning and fatigue pour over my shoulders like an icy waterfall. The rush of adrenaline, once giving me power, had now left me drained and helpless. My mind filled with fog and despair, and then nothing but darkness.

I awoke sometime later—maybe an hour, maybe a minute. I could not tell. I felt only the sense that eons had passed. I was no longer in the icy depths of that cursed barge, but in the boss’ stuffy cabin.

“There you go, kid. Coming around?”

His voice was distant, like an echo, like I was hearing it three times. Or maybe he was saying the same thing over and over again. I didn’t know. I tried to sit up but my skull screamed. I saw the floor was flooded with puke, but I couldn’t smell it.

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”

“So what happened down there?” Biggles asked, his voice strange, almost like he was talking to a child. “He do you wrong?”

I tried to remember, but my thoughts could only reach back to the darkness, and nothing before it. I shook my head and cringed when it screamed.

“That’s all right,” Biggles said, leaning back in his ripped chair slowly. “Don’t sweat it, kid. I won’t say nothing, and neither will you. Bobby was no angel. We all know that. I’m sure he had it coming. So this is what went down.” He leaned forward, locking me with a serious stare. “You kids just came in off the street looking to get your jollies, maybe drink a beer or two. I never even met you, never knew you were on board. Got it?”

I nodded. It seemed familiar, something Bobby had said a long time ago, or maybe an hour ago.

“Let me hear you say it now,” Biggles continued. “You never met me before.”

“Yeah.” My voice was hoarse. “I never met you before.”

“And then your friend just fell in the bilge pump, got kind of messed up. It was an accident.”

What was an accident? Where was Bobby? Why wasn’t he here right now giving me a hard time? I glanced down at the stickiness on my chest. My Bon Jovi hoodie was soaked through to my skin, the blood sticking to my nipples. Why was there so much blood?

And then it came to me—a massive data dump. The Glub Weevil. The fight for my life. And Bobby dying down in that hole.

I must have freaked out right then because the little man put his big hands on my shoulders to keep me from bolting. He was unexpectedly strong, like a lot of old guys who had worked their whole lives with their hands.

“No, no. It’s not your blood,” he said. “You’re okay, so just simmer down. It was an accident.”

“But the Glub Weevil!” I screamed. “I killed it. I sliced it into sushi with the welding torch. There was so much blood.”

Biggles shuddered visibly.

“No, kid. Listen to me. Don’t say anything about that. They’ll throw you into the loony bin and you’ll never get out. And then I’ll get canned.” He leaned even closer, his hot, meaty palms sliding up my neck to my cheeks. “It was an accident. Let me hear you say it.”

I hesitated, my brain swimming in impossible memories. “An accident?”

“That’s it. Say it again.” He nodded.

“It was an accident. It was an accident.” I repeated the words over and over again until I almost believed them.

The police arrived half-an-hour later. I guess Biggles finally called them. But really, he had no choice. Bobby may have been from East Van, but he still had a mom. And if the police somehow tracked him back to the barge, then it wouldn’t look to good for Biggles. Better to get ahead of the story, provide a narrative that everybody could get behind.

“It was an accident,” I repeated dutifully when they questioned me. I cried a lot, which probably helped. At any rate, the interrogation didn’t last too long. I was still in rough shape because of the concussion and spent a few hours in the hospital. Four days later, there was a funeral for Bobby–closed casket.

The rest of the summer of 1986 was mostly a blur. My AMC Pacer broke down, and without a job to pay for the repairs, it just ended up on some scrap pile somewhere. And what happened with Lily wasn’t her fault. I wasn’t much fun to be around anymore, especially without a car, and so she eventually took up with a handsome college senior like deep down I always knew she would.

I won’t summarize the next thirty-four years of my life. The booze. The drugs. Cassandra’s left foot, and four others that no one seemed to miss. Then came the plastic bag murders, and countless others that nobody knows about. Suffices to say, it wasn’t the best of times, but not the worst either, for a serial killer.

I suppose I could blame the Glub Weevil, say he made me do it, sucked the life out of me on that night of horror back in ’86, leaving my soul nothing but a dried-up raisin in the desert. But I never spoke of it again, and no one else did either. So maybe, you know, it was never there all.

Fiction © Copyright David Wright
Image by B. Hunter