Last Days, page 20
Off camera Kyle nodded. ‘But what about the mist that you and your partner saw. And the sound of the dogs?’
Conway shook his head. ‘Hell, they’s always loose ends, son. Desert can play tricks on your mind. Acoustics. Atmospherics. Lived out here all my life and this place is still full of surprises.’
Conway nodded to himself for a while, with his eyes screwed up so tightly they disappeared inside his fleshy sockets. ‘Footprints was more difficult to explain. Most got destroyed by patrolman boots. Me and Jiminez’s too. But that couldn’t be helped. You had so many men up here, running around, the footprint evidence mostly got wrecked. But the ones they found in the blood, SID photographed. Same out by the wire. And they was long. All bone.’
Kyle swallowed the lump in his throat to calm his voice. ‘The bite marks . . . on the victims? You said you didn’t believe they were made by a weapon.’
‘Or them claw marks on the shoulders of the dead. Then there was the smell of bad meat. And them pictures they found on the walls. We never figured it out. SID took photos of the wall of that building where me and Jiminez found the bodies. Never took much notice of the walls when I was up here that night, but I seen the photos once afterwards. Gone now. Sun and wind been on the wall near forty years. Musta faded them pictures away.’
Kyle’s temperature plummeted. His voice came out thin and high and strained; beside him, Dan’s shoulders stiffened. ‘Pictures? They were pictures, not symbols?’ Levine had not mentioned anything other than the daubing of occult and satanic symbols upon the walls of what was known as the temple, or the first murder scene. And the only pictures of the crime scene in Levine’s Last Days, and only in the third 1978 edition at that, featured aerial shots of the mine, the blood-stained planks of the temple building, the lumpen bodies out by the split-rail fence, and the haunted expression on Brother Belial’s gaunt, bearded face in the back of a police car, taken by an opportunistic press photographer on the night of the murders.
‘Hippies done drawings of something with no skin on it. Weren’t no trial so the photos are still in the police files. Never wanted to see them again myself. Twisted shit you ask me. Course, the press had been saying for a year the whole thing was a satanic ritual. With human sacrifice mixed in, once it reached “a critical point of frenzy”. Most folks still believe it went down that way.’ Conway winked. ‘But I reckon’ a whole bunch of them assholes got clean away. Belial, Moloch and Baal done some of the killing for sure. But they weren’t alone on that account. No, sir. Some more of them crackers musta lit out. Done some bitin’ and then split. World went mad out here a long time before me and Jiminez rolled up. That’s for sure.’
Dan looked out to the desert, where Conway and Kyle now stared. And together, they all felt the chill of twilight begin to prickle against their sun-baked arms and upon their tight faces.
FIFTEEN
ROUTE 66 BAR AND GRILL, YUMA, ARIZONA. 19 JUNE 2011. 10 P.M.
Since saying goodbye to Conway, Kyle’s anxious swings between belief and disbelief accelerated towards panic. The volume of the music sped up his thoughts when they needed to slow down. He felt nauseous and tense from smoking too much during the heat of the day, was dehydrated and his head was on spin cycle. He felt a temptation to hold onto the table.
It just wasn’t possible, any of it; just wasn’t possible that ‘beings’ and ‘presences’ were part of The Last Gathering and The Temple of the Last Days menagerie. But there it was: on the walls in Normandy, in Caen, in London, including his own, and now a copper mine in Arizona. Kyle closed his eyes and tried to regulate his breathing. He desperately wanted the answers to two questions: what the fuck was going on? And were they in danger?
‘Dude, you’re missing this.’
Kyle glanced up from the tabletop. ‘What?’ Behind Dan’s bulk, the bar-room returned to focus. A place half lit with subdued orange lamps, shielded behind scallop shades, tinting the entire space the hue of beer held up to a light. On the panelled walls, sports pennants and photographs fought for space with hockey and baseball memorabilia. A jukebox flashed. Strip lights hovered over a pool table in the back.
Dan’s mouth and chin shone with grease from devouring the heap of chicken wings in a wooden basket that had not long been placed before him. A deep slug of Samuel Adams draught made his eyes water. ‘Man, this is so cold. My hand’s stuck to the glass.’ Dan looked at the ceiling and smiled. ‘George Thoroughgood and the Destroyers. Haven’t heard this since we were at college. Before that, they played the Georgia Satellites. You’d never get that in a pub back home. Oh, oh, what’s this? I know this . . . Motley Crue. “Home Sweet Home”.’
Kyle attempted a smile to complement Dan’s enthusiasm; Dan had never been out West in the States before, only New York. Everything fascinated his friend: the road signs, the food, the motel, the cars, the advertisements beside the highways, the strip malls and street lights, the buildings, the mountains; and he’d never seen a desert before. He was like an overstimulated child. ‘You’ll sleep well tonight.’
‘Hope so. After a few more of these. You want that salad?’
The bowl of Caesar salad with Texan toast covered half the table. There must have been a kilo of bacon and two lettuces bigger than his head inside the bowl. Kyle pushed it towards Dan. ‘You keep eating like Elvis and we’re going to have to get you a leisure suit to go home in.’
‘Piss off,’ Dan said, around a mouthful of croutons.
‘You’re supposed to eat the leaves too. Not just the crunchy carbs.’
Dan raised his middle finger. ‘You look shattered. The driving?’
Kyle shrugged. ‘Yes and no.’
‘This is some seriously disturbing shit for sure.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘I mean, all sat beside each other with their throats cut. In that room. I went cold, mate. And the others torn up by the fence. They shot those poor bastards when they ran, then let the dogs savage them.’ Dan shook his head and wiped at his mouth with a napkin the size of a towel. ‘And the kids. The dirty kids in the shed. In that terrible place. Why’d they go to these . . .’ The animation, even the life, seemed to slip from Dan’s face and Kyle knew his friend had thought of the farm in Normandy. ‘At least no one lost a leg this time.’
They stared at each other. And then they were holding each other around the shoulders and laughing. Laughing so hard Kyle thought he might start crying. The waitress came over and joined in, though she had no idea what amused them. But she was easy on the eyes, had a sweet laugh and Kyle was glad to have her close. She took an order for another two beers from Dan. Over the PA, Cinderella started playing ‘Gypsy Road’.
Kyle mopped at his eyes with a clean napkin. ‘I needed that.’
Dan nodded. ‘Me too. But it’s not funny about Gabriel. Just so you know. I have no idea why I’m laughing.’
They exchanged another smile. ‘You’re sick. But I’ve said it before, this is dynamite. We’re making a great film. I mean it, a great film. I know this is hardcore. Upsetting. But you do know that this is really something? Tell me you know that.’ Kyle wondered who he was trying to reassure.
Dan nodded. ‘Shit, yes.’
‘Been saying it all along.’ The brief rise in his spirits faltered when he silently acknowledged he’d actually been saying it for his own sake.
Dan sat back in his chair. ‘But that was only the first shoot out here, mate. I’m kinda bricking it about what we might end up with.’
Kyle looked at the sauce bottles instead of Dan. ‘So far so good. Another decent interview but nothing . . . nothing else. You finished the Levine book?’
‘Not yet. I started to think the less I know about this shit the safer I’ll be.’
‘You need to read it. I learned things today that weren’t in there. The dogs. Again with the dogs. Conway said they were in the air. The air. Levine says they ran away, frightened. It’s what the police said at the time. But we have canine sounds on the audio track from London. The tenants in the Clarendon Road house heard them too. In Normandy dogs feared the farm. And the footprints at the mine? In Last Days, Levine makes a big deal about the footprints, because he reckoned some of the killers got away. The police never disclosed what the footprints looked like. Levine claimed they were prints from bare feet. Crazy hippy bare feet. But Conway said they were all bone. Bone. My wall, mate. Bones. The bathroom in Caen. Bones. The temple in Normandy. Bones. Figures of bone. Bone. You making a connection here? We have a whole new story I never anticipated. It’s priceless.’
‘That’s one way of looking at it. But can you stop now, please? I’ve got my own room and none of those lights Max gave us.’
‘I have one. A visor. But no bloody spare adaptor.’
‘You think they are some kind of protection?’
Kyle shrugged. ‘A hunch. Max’s whole flat is lit up with them. His bathroom stank of paint. Like it had been redecorated. Think about that. The daylight simulator made that mark disappear in my kitchen. And he insisted we use them.’
‘So what about me?’
‘You’re all right. You haven’t had any dreams. And anyway, let’s just say these stains . . . whatever, are unnatural. I sound friggin’ ridiculous for even suggesting it. I know it. But a stain, and some stupid dreams, can’t hurt you, right?’
‘You can use the adaptor from the camera.’
‘You big beauty. And three more shoots. Then you’re free of this. You won’t have to think about it again. So go easy on the sauce. We got an early start tomorrow and I want to do the rough cut before I turn in.’
‘Lot can happen in three days.’
Kyle didn’t take the bait.
‘What time we off in the morning?’ Dan asked.
‘About eight, so the alarm will be set for seven. We go back to the Fortuna Foothills to meet the rancher’s son. He’s coming down especially for us. Max wants the record straightened about what the current owner’s dad knew about the cult. We drive up to Phoenix the day after for the homicide cop. Red-eye from Phoenix to Seattle night after that for Martha Lake.’
‘What about outside Sister Katherine’s house? You said Chet Regal lives there. That could be cool. His private life was a bigger box office than Michael Jackson’s.’
‘No time. Screen shots of the mansion, voice-over.’
‘Packs it in, doesn’t he? This should be spread over a week with those two ten-hour flights either end. It’s not like Max is short of cash.’
‘He wants the shoot done fast. Took him ages to coax all of these people out for interviews. He’s scared they’ll change their minds. Get cold feet.’
Dan played with a French fry that had escaped his mouth. ‘That’s what he says.’
And now Dan had mentioned it, this additional doubt about their producer’s intentions behind the tight schedule added itself to his own nauseating mix of uncertainty and confusion.
SIXTEEN
8 BALL MOTEL, YUMA. 20 JUNE 2011. MIDNIGHT
Kyle’s head dropped, again, over the open laptop on the little table under the television. He yanked his head upright, wiped at his mouth. Fox News flickered above him.
Emilio Aguilar’s small round face appeared on Kyle’s laptop screen and his soft voice, lilting with a slight Mexican accent, filled his earphones. Kyle sat back in the chair and gulped his coffee.
At first light, they’d headed into the Fortuna Foothills, back towards the mine to get the interview at the neighbouring ranch. Kyle still had half of Aguilar’s testimony to rough cut and there were only seven hours until the alarm began to shriek before the long drive to Phoenix. But since he started work his consciousness repeatedly slid towards a coma of sleep. He hadn’t slept on the plane from London to Arizona either; had been engrossed in redrafting the script for the US shoots, cross-referencing it with Max’s schedule and notes, and Levine’s Last Days. The heat of two days in the desert sucked out the last of his energy and two beers in the bar earlier functioned like intravenous sedatives. After the interview at the ranch, Dan even fell asleep at a table in a diner. Even through the wall of his motel room, he could hear Dan snoring on the other side; he sounded like something that needed oil.
But Kyle was in no hurry to sleep. Not after what Conway had told them the day before, which Emilio Aguilar only made worse that morning. And closing his eyes was the last thing on his mind after the previous night’s broken sleep. The actual dreams he couldn’t remember in any detail, but he’d woken three times in darkness, with either a shriek or a gasp, when convinced that small cold hands were placed in his own. Hands that tried to pull him off the bed. After the third episode at 4 a.m., he’d hit the shower.
‘Shit. Enough.’ Kyle dragged his fingers down his face, held his eyes open. Stood up and stretched. Went and poured more coffee from the little jug into his mug. Dribbled some Wild Turkey into it. Then sat down before the laptop and rewound the Aguilar interview to the part before he fell asleep.
Max’s production notes highlighted the significance of the Criollo Ranch, neighbouring the mine, on the Night of Ascent in 1975. Before Sergeant Conway and his partner, Patrolman Jiminez, rolled up to find the bodies, the now deceased owner of the ranch, Ramirez Aguilar, had been the closest thing to an eyewitness of the night’s events.
Irvine Levine had interviewed Ramirez Aguilar in 1975, but his testimony rang like the ravings of a crank in Last Days. Something that had pretty much discredited Aguilar senior as a credible witness to any serious investigation. Ramirez Aguilar had appeared in one of the seventies documentaries too, and then refused to speak about the cult again, to anyone.
The ranch was located two miles west of the Blue Oak Copper Mine. Emilio Aguilar, Ramirez Aguilar’s son, had been waiting there to give them the interview Max had set up. He only agreed to the film because he wanted to speak in defence of his father’s bizarre testimony about events at the mine preceding the murders. And like Conway, Kyle soon learned that he’d refused a fee from Max. For some, it wasn’t about money.
The sound was good because Dan had set it up; it filled his cans.
‘My father often talked to us about the mine. The Temple of the Last Days was probably the only interesting thing that ever happened in all the years he lived out here. And for the first year he even had a good relationship with them. I don’t remember much at all. I was maybe two years old when they came here and lived at the mine. So I must have been around five when the police raided it. But at home, my father talked about the people from the Temple often. Sometimes, he said, they would come by here and talk to him. Sometimes they did work at the ranch. Cleaned the stables. Fed the horses. Groomed them. Stuff like that. The young people. They liked hanging around the horses and my father. My dad liked most of them also. Some of the younger girls he felt sorry for. He used to say, they are only children. He worried about them. He used to tell me and my brother how lucky we were, that we had a happy home, and didn’t have to run away and join some hippy cult.
‘And people would come through asking for directions. Because they had heard about the mine and the community down there. They came in cars and buses for a while. Back then my dad said they were all looking for something. You know, something new and exciting. Others were running away. You know, from bad homes. Things like that.
‘He told us that he would come across the Temple people in the desert too. He took people from the city on trail rides through the foothills and into the Laguna mountains. It was the only work here for him then, and there were still some horses for people to ride. And they would come across the Temple people wearing their robes. Sometimes they would be naked. You know, the girls too. They always had a pack of dogs with them, like wolves. Alsatians, Huskies, some strays.
‘My father found the Temple people to be very strange. They were always polite. Friendly, you know. But sometimes they would preach too much.’
‘Did he ever tell you what they said to him?’
Emilio laughed. ‘My father called it hippy bullshit. They used to say to him they had left the world behind. That the world was coming to an end anyway. Things like that. It was all ego out in the world. You know, war and poverty and racism and violence. They said the last days were coming down. All the signs were there to see. Vietnam. Riots. The bomb. And that they were here to unlearn everything. To get rid of their education and family and personalities and responsibility. To free themselves of society. Everything it had taught them. They said they had a new family, a new society, which provided everything you needed once you let go of everything you didn’t need. Every man was a god. Even my father. Who wasn’t very religious. What they said made him laugh. They were looking for God in themselves so they could be God too. They were all called Brother or Sister something. They said they were children. They said they were animals. They said they were becoming angels. Pretty crazy. They were always on drugs. My father thought they were drunk. He could tell they were high on something because of their strange eyes. Intense, you know. And their crazy talk. But it was drugs. We know that now. Learned that from the police and the papers.
