Last Days, page 25
Kyle swallowed and took a deep breath. ‘Getting taken out of themselves. At night. Asleep. Did you . . .’
Martha looked at Kyle intensely and in silence, as if suddenly wary or even suspicious of him. When she lowered her eyes to the table she nodded. ‘Few times I told myself it was the LSD that made me . . . made me feel like I was inside something else. Some other thing that weren’t right. Like I had been pulled outta my own skin.’
Kyle forced himself to focus on the script. Looked down at his papers and tried to stop his jaw from trembling. Saw the slides of the missing Temple followers’ faces. The individuals the police looked for after Martha and Bridgette gave their statements back in 1975. It would be more poignant if Martha could name them for the film. He cleared his throat. ‘You always claimed some of your friends were murdered. Who else besides Adonis and Ariel? Who never came back?’
‘Sister Urania, who wouldn’t hear a damn bad word said against Katherine, not ever. She come over from France. Same as Sister Hannah. They was older. Nice girls. English. Urania was the one I told you gave up a big inheritance to the Temple. Millions. Every penny. Used to think on that when I saw her knee-deep in a dumpster in Yuma, fetching garbage out to feed her child. But same as Hannah, she would never have run. She was in it to the last drop of her blood, an’ I reckon she gave that up too. Once Ariel and Adonis was both taken care of, it got easier for Belial, Moloch, and Baal. Killin’ was easy once they lost their cherry. And them orders came down from Katherine’s place, no lie. That’s why she was holed up out of state, so she couldn’t get blamed for nothing. But Sister Urania and Sister Hannah, they never ran. They got picked out as favourites for something special that they called Ascent. Part of Katherine’s plan. It was foreseen. They told us that much.’
‘Was that the first time you heard “Ascent” mentioned at the mine?’
‘Guess so.’
‘Is this the reason you finally ran? You and Bridgette? Because you were afraid for your own lives, and those of your children?’
‘Main reason I left was ’cus she stole a baby. Katherine. Oh yeah. Prissie’s baby was gone one day from the shack we called the nursery. Brothers Moloch and Baal musta took the boy to Katherine. We heard them leave in the VW van early one morning. Prissie snuck out like she always did to check on her little one in the nursery and saw he was gone. Moloch and Baal came back to the mine late the next night without the baby. Never saw that child again till he was in them police photos. Little boy. The clean boy the police called him. He was one of the kids they found in the mine at the end. I was shown photos by the police, to identify the children they pulled out of there.’
‘What was Prissie’s reaction to this?’
‘Prissie tried to stay her grief. But she couldn’t. We all tried to talk her round, told her all that bullshit again about the children belonging to the Temple, not their parents. The Seven who was still around got real nervous after they took the boy though. More than when they killed Ariel and Adonis, or Urania and Hannah. It was like murder was one thing, but snatching babies was on a whole new level. Kinda fucked-up, you ask me.
‘But then Prissie was gone too, no more than a week after her baby went missing. We were told she ran. Told she was an apostate. That her name was never to be spoken again in paradise. Paradise, ha! But they killed her. Sure enough. So Katherine could keep her baby over in the big house in California. She couldn’t have kids herself, but she made us girls have them and hated us for being able to.’
‘Did you hear members of The Seven admit to murdering Sister Priscilla?’
‘No. But they did her, for sure. I know ’cus we were all sent out to work the fence without Prissie, who wouldn’t speak, or get up from the floor of the temple since they took her baby boy. When we came back in for lunch, Prissie was gone, and so was Brother Belial and Brother Moloch.
‘Prissie’s still out there, somewhere. Buried in that desert. Cops never found her. Same as the others. They all dead and buried in the desert. Police never looked too hard for the bodies neither. What was the point once Belial was dead? There was no one left to put in the electric chair.’
‘You and Bridgette took your babies with you when you ran. But what about the other children?’
‘There was five kids found at the end. Two older kids that came over from France in seventy-two. Sister Urania’s girl and Sister Hannah’s son. Other two boys belonged to Rhea and Lelia, who was shot dead trying to run on the Night of Ascent. And Prissie’s little boy was the fifth child they pulled out of there. But when me and Bridgette ran, them five kids was the only children still out there. Loads of kids had come and gone with their mothers since the beginning at the mine, but they all left with their mothers. Only kid who died there was the little ’un in seventy-three who didn’t last a week. Was no doctors out there. His mother, Sister Eleos, she died of a drug overdose in San Francisco in seventy-seven. She was livin’ with Sisters Gehenna and Bellona, who was two of The Seven that Katherine sent up to San Francisco to start a new branch in seventy-four. After all she’d been through, Eleos still went and lived with them wackos once it was all over and done with at the mine. Beats me why.’
Martha shook her head, then looked at Kyle and pointed her cigarette at him. ‘But no way Katherine was taking my baby. What she want a baby for? She didn’t even like kids. Locked ’em away. Restricted access to them. So now we gotta just let her take ’em away from us at the mine like they was her own? No way. Not my boy. Or Bridgette’s. So we ran in the middle of the night. Cut a hole in the fence just before we broke from working on the last stretch of wire that final day, and we took off. Made it to Mr Aguilar’s ranch, and he drove us into town. That man saved us. Belial knew it too. They was going to go and kill him anyway for helping Sister Prissie that first time she run. There was a lot of fighting talk when they came back with Prissie in the van that day. Belial was bragging about how he would “snuff that apostate wetback”.’
It was no wonder Irvine Levine concentrated on the criminal aspects of the cult strewn all the way from London to Arizona; did he need anything else?
A long silence followed Martha’s disclosure about the children. Kyle eventually broke it. His desire to know about the Night of Ascent was making him breathless. ‘Martha, less than three months after you and Bridgette escaped from the mine, the Night of Ascent was called by Sister Katherine, and nine people were murdered at the mine in one hour, including Katherine. The police evidence suggests that four of the victims tried to escape from something . . . some kind of final ritual. A ritual that involved the willing execution of four members of The Seven and Katherine herself. Did you have any idea this kind of mass suicide was coming? Or can you give us any clues as to what happened that night?’
She shook her head, sighed. ‘Something was coming, sure enough. A whole lot of killing. We were all on a one-way ticket. Like I said before, everything was leading to something that only Katherine knew about. That bitch had plans she weren’t wholly sharing. But what happened out there that night . . . I can’t say. There was a lot of paranoia, right through seventy-five. Katherine lost that trial against Levine. An’ we were told that apostates were building a case against us with the police, the CIA, the FBI, the government . . . Everybody was out to get us. I believed it. Brother Moloch told us that if the government came for us before the Night of Ascent, we would fight to the last man to defend paradise. If we were too weak to fight, we were to kill each other, then ourselves. They never said what the Night of Ascent was, but me and Bridgette didn’t like the sound of it. You know, it just had that tone.
‘I always reckoned the killings that night was because The Seven got spooked after me and Bridgette ran, considering what we knew about the murders of Urania, Hannah, Prissie and the boys. Katherine was crazy anyway by then. And all them drugs she’d been taking in California musta ratcheted up her paranoia to the next level when me and Bridgette lit out. Police said the murders happened in some kind of leadership battle. That’s bullshit. No one ever opposed Katherine beside Ariel and Adonis, and look where that got them. Other people said it was some kind of sacrifice, to the devil.’ Martha shook her head. ‘It weren’t the devil. Don’t you believe it.’
‘It’s been said that Katherine claimed she was immortal. An eternal saint. That all of those she blessed could be too. But if she were immortal, do you ever wonder why she had herself killed?’
Martha shrugged, then drew further down inside her cardigan. She began playing with the cigarette lighter again. ‘Lately, I’ve been considering other things. You know, other possibilities. Right around the same time Max got in touch, which was kinda weird. ’Cus I could tell from his voice that he was spooked by something too. Not long after he called, Bridgette gave up.’
‘Gave up?’
Martha looked at Kyle with her watery eyes, and swallowed. She was frightened. ‘You got to understand. There was some things we experienced . . . that we saw . . . that was just about as bad as knowing people were getting killed. Police always said it was the drugs that made us see stuff. Been telling myself my whole life after I ran from that temple that the police were right about that. That we were hallucinating. Now I know different. So did Bridgette. We never got away. No, sir. Not really. No one did. Whatever it was Katherine brought over with her from France came back. Old friends. Belial was right. What he said in prison to the cops about them coming down. You know, being around us. I don’t think not one of us ever got free.’
‘Old friends. Blood Friends. I keep hearing these names. Were they part of the Night of Ascent?’
Martha nodded. She stared at her hands. ‘That’s what I been thinking.’
‘Who were they?’
‘What are they, is the question you should be askin’.’ Another cigarette was sparked up, her voice trembled with emotion. ‘We’d been calling down what we had become. That’s the best way I can say it. For over a year. Late in seventy-four, an’ seventy-five. We weren’t the blessed, we was the opposite. We were damned. Like they is. The friends. There was nothing holy or right about any of us. Not by that time. We’d all lost our way. Maybe some of us before we even got to that mine. But that was the point. We were ready by the end. Crossed every damn line and was all broke down inside, in spirit you know? Ready. Ready for something. For them. All we had was the Last Days. And them was the last days, in that summer. Only thing I had to get me to step off that crazy train was my boy. We were young and stupid. Me and Bridgette. But we were mothers. It’s like we knew, you know? Inside. Knew we had to get out right then. It was now or never. Sink or swim.’
Martha reared up in her chair, her face terribly pale, and unleashed a long mournful sigh that ended as a moan of profound distress. Dan and Kyle flinched.
‘Jesus. Sweet Jesus.’ Her voice swelled with anguish, her eyes shone wet. ‘We were killers. Turned the other cheek when someone got raped. Murdered. When some girl’s baby got . . .’ Martha covered her eyes with her forearm, sank to the table and sobbed into her sleeve.
Kyle and Dan exchanged looks. Dan’s face jumped with nerves, was pale, tight-lipped. Kyle nodded at him, mouthed keep rolling. Dan returned to the viewfinder of the camera.
Martha sobbed for over five minutes, head down between her arms. Kyle didn’t want to walk into shot and comfort her. It would have been wrong; wrong for the moment, for the scene, for the film. Let it play, he said to himself. Let it play. He’d put the whole thing in the damn film; make people sit through it. This wretched woman’s grief, her misery, her mourning, her guilt and her regret. Hear every sob, see every tear, witness every heave that wracked that thin, broken body. Susan White’s astonishment, Gabriel’s terror, Martha’s grief: let it play.
As her sobs subsided into sniffs, Martha spoke in a broken voice. ‘We dreamed of the burning. Of the bodies on stakes. We saw the bodies eaten by birds and dogs. We all saw the flames and the ash in the rain . . . That’s how it started. In them sessions. That’s when they come.’
Kyle felt as if he’d stuck a wet finger into a light socket. Something jolted out of his memory. A series of murky, vague images. Jump-cuts through a nightmare featuring some kind of slaughter in progress, in the rain and smoke and ash. He’d dreamed of it when he came back from France.
‘The sessions . . .’ His voice was a rasp. Dan looked across at him, but Kyle never removed his eyes from Martha. Who sat back in her chair. Shook her head with her hands over her face. ‘The world stops turning. Goes quiet. Still. But it ain’t natural. Then you get the smell. The scent. Ain’t nothing changed ’bout that. Still the same.’
‘When does . . . did this happen, Martha?’
‘In them sessions. We all saw it. Every one of us. We seen the same thing. Them dead people all cut up and burned. In the sessions we all started seeing it. When we was tired. From all the confessions. We all saw it.’
‘A vision?’
Martha nodded. Wiped at her red eyes. ‘Why am I seein’ it again if it was the drugs? Only drugs I take now I get from the doc.’
Kyle swallowed the lump in his throat. ‘You all saw the same vision, in the temple at the mine, of people being . . . tortured in the rain?’
‘Weren’t just that. Before me and Bridgette ran, she seen something else. Outside the temple. One of the last sessions we ever did. She got spooked inside that room. We all did. But she got sick with the smell. And when . . . when they came in and they touched against us . . . in the air . . . Bridgette left the temple. Ran outside to puke. And she told me later the sky was changed. Different. She said she could smell what we had been dreamin’ of. And the sky was full of fog . . . yellow, dirty. Kind of a long way off, but coming down fast. She said there was voices too. In the distance, above her head. Saw two dogs go running at the fog or smoke, raising hell. And they never come back out . . . right before her eyes. They just disappeared. Then she said the dogs was over her head, up in the sky. And the air, she said it was kinda wavy. Like in the heat, if you looked out across the sand when it was real hot. But coming down. Waves coming down from where them dogs were screamin’, in with all them people she couldn’t see. Up there. She weren’t no liar. She seen it.’
Aguilar’s son had said the same thing about a mist; Conway had seen the tail end of some similar atmospheric effect. And had Kyle not suffered some kind of vision, a hallucination in the fermette in Normandy . . . after he had been touched in that lightless barn . . . Oh Christ! . . . and what of his dreams?
Martha wiped at her eyes again, swore to herself under her breath, and reached for the whisky bottle. Dan looked at Kyle, who could not break his own stare from the tabletop, which he was unable to focus on.
‘Looks like you seen your own ghost and could use a shot a this.’
Kyle looked at Martha, nodded. Dan fetched two glasses from the shelves beside the cooker. ‘You too, huh, big guy?’ Kyle heard Martha say from outside the swarm of thoughts and white noise that filled his head. ‘You said . . . Martha, you said, that it’s still the same. What did you mean?’
Dan lumbered back behind the camera. Martha pushed a glass of whisky across the table at Kyle. She smiled bitterly. ‘I guess I’m sayin’ that no one ever leaves the Last Days. Once you is in, you is in for life. And maybe after that too.’
Kyle wanted to scream, but I was never in it!
‘There’s things happened out there.’ She looked at the ceiling. ‘Things that no one would believe less they seen it theirselves. Weren’t natural. Things I put down to the LSD were real. Was a time I saw Katherine walk a yard clear of the ground in that temple. She just came out of her chair, calling out that they were here. “Among us. Among us!” she was calling out like a crazy woman. ’Nother time she showed us her sin coming out. And I ask you: you ever seen a woman, or a man, spit out frogs? An’ these itty-bitty snakes? Outta their friggin’ mouths?’
‘You saw that?’ Kyle barely heard his own voice. He cleared his throat. ‘We saw . . . I saw the same thing. In Normandy. In her room . . . bed. They were in her bed.’ He wasn’t sure who he spoke to. Perhaps only himself.
Martha looked at him with what seemed to be distaste, or pity, or fear. Maybe all three of these things. But in her bloodshot eyes and in the way she pulled her lips back from her discoloured teeth, he also saw what could only be described as recognition. ‘Like I was saying. We were all contaminated. Marked. Whatever you want to call it. And it’s come back again.’
‘What? What has?’
‘The dreams. And the changes that come with the dreams. When your own hands and feet, arms, legs ain’t your own. Last two places I had, I started waking up in another room. Not one I even recognized. That’s why I moved. But it did no good.’ She shook her head, and sighed, resigned. ‘At the mine . . . like I said, somethin’ would git me outta myself. At the mine I used to dream that I was above the desert. Just up there, over it, looking down. Back then I told myself it was drugs. Fuck knows we took a few. But these past few months when it all started up again, I been thinking that it was not enough for Katherine to take our money, our freedom. Not enough. It was like she wanted our bodies too. Who we were. Our minds. Us, as people, she hated it. Did everything to get rid of us, inside. It’s why she took the kids. She didn’t want us inside our own children. She wanted them empty.’
‘Martha, where is your son?’
‘Safe. Courts took him because of the way I was living. Then I got him back in eighty-three. Never got my shit together that time neither. But I got it together enough to put him somewhere safe. ’Cus it was never over. Not in seventy-five, not today. Bridgette knew that.’ Martha teared up again, looked away from them, at the window. ‘I’m the last. Katherine came back for the rest of them.’ She nodded to herself. ‘And I can’t run no more. It stops here.’
She turned her head quickly to face Kyle, at where he gaped at her, ashen-faced, across the table. ‘Something you should see. Max wants you to film it.’
