The Children of Red Peak

by Craig DiLouie

Deacon pulled out his phone, which had three unread texts from Beth.

  Coming to LA. Driving to Bakersfield tonight to meet

  Angela and David

  We’re going to Red Peak

  Text me in the next hour if you want in

  He thumbed his reply.

  Yes

  Pick me up?

  I’m in Industry southeast of El Monte

  Moments later, a message flashed:

  K

  Txt address

  Will txt when close

  Deacon wasn’t sure where the hell he was. Under LED lights sweeping the stage in slow, colorful arcs, Mono No Aware started its first trippy song, alternating stretches of placid swirl with sudden, furious bursts of metal madness. He loved this band, but he was barely listening. He opened his GPS and texted Beth the address before pocketing his phone.

  And that was that. He was going back to Red Peak.

  Laurie returned with her drink. “Cage wasn’t lying.” She held her plastic cup high to inspect the yellow liquid. “Tastes like horse piss, but it has a real kick.”

  “I need to talk to you,” Deacon shouted back. “Outside, where I can hear.”

  She scowled. “Goddamn Frank. Right? Okay, let’s go.”

  They wound their way to the exit and distanced themselves from the crowd of smokers outside. Laurie took out her earplugs, specially designed musician plugs that allowed her to hear the music but at a lower sound level. Deacon looked around for a trash can for his unfinished wine.

  “I’ll help you with that.”

  She swiped the wine from his hand, tossed it back, and flung the cup onto the ground among other litter. “So what did Frank say?”

  Deacon lit a Camel. “You know what he said.”

  “Asshole.” Laurie took one of his cigs and bent her head to accept a light from him. “He doesn’t understand the art.”

  “That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said. “I’m leaving town for a couple days.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “I’ll be back Saturday, Sunday at the latest.”

  “Sure.” She blew an angry cloud of smoke and flung the cigarette onto the street, where it landed with a burst of sparks. “Next, Bart will find Jesus, and Steve will catch butt cancer. Oh, and Joy’s gonna be a mommy.”

  “It’s not like that—”

  “I mean, why would we actually want to succeed as a band when we’ve been struggling for years? Who needs a fucking holy grail, anyway? Who actually likes cake?”

  “I’m going to Red Peak.”

  Laurie shrugged. “And you think that means something to me.”

  “I can’t sing without it. The worse it is, the better I sing.”

  Her glare softened. “You’re pathetic.”

  “Probably.”

  “Why can’t you just get hooked on heroin like everybody else?”

  The closest thing to a blessing Deacon would get out of her. He smiled and dropped his own cigarette to grind out with his heel.

  “There has to be a better way to make art,” she said. “I mean, to feel something, anything. To be a whole person.”

  “I don’t know how to be anybody else.”

  “You going back inside?”

  He shook his head. “I’m leaving now. Answering the call.”

  “The ‘we played so beautifully’ girl.”

  “All of us. We’re going back. Tomorrow is the big fifteen.”

  Laurie’s irritation morphed into an envious expression. She wished she was going. Whatever he suffered, she’d gladly take it on to be a part of it. Her hands twitched at her sides, the start of a hug, but hugging wasn’t in her nature.

  He hugged her instead. “If something bad happens to me and I don’t come back, the album is all yours. You’ll know what to do with it.”

  She pushed him away. “Piss off. Go do your vision quest. And get your ass back here by Sunday, or I’ll hunt you down.”

  “Have fun with your networking. Give Frank hell.”

  “You can count on that.”

  Then she was gone. Deacon waited in the cool night under the glaring streetlight, chain-smoking. Mono No Aware finished their set, and the house music returned until Sweet Fetish started banging out its first song. Soon, Beth would arrive to take him into the unknown. Whatever happened next, it’d be a relief to get away from the band for a while. Laurie and Frank could fight without him.

  His phone vibrated with an incoming text.

  Here, it said.

  Beth’s Mercedes flashed onto the street. He waved at the headlights, smiling in a brief burst of joy. This was happiness the way he was used to it. Fleeting.

  The car stopped. Deacon climbed in, and she took off back to the I-5.

  He studied her profile as she drove, wondering what he was in for during the trip. She no longer wore a corporate jacket and skirt, but instead a gray T-shirt tucked into jeans. Her long hair flowed free around her shoulders. The car’s interior smelled like alcohol and breath mints.

  He said, “I’m sorry I’ve been unreachable.”

  Sorrier than she knew. Beth’s voicemails and texts had savaged him, all of which he’d taken on stage to deliver his greatest performance ever at Utopia.

  Like he’d told Laurie, he couldn’t sing without it.

  “I understand,” she said.

  “You do?” It hardly made sense to him.

  “If you hadn’t done it to me, I would have done it to you. I would have boxed you up and drowned you until you saved yourself by running. If I’m mad, it’s only because you beat me to the punch. Bastard.”

  “I didn’t want to do it.”

  Beth nodded behind the wheel. “You did what you needed to do. What I’d need to do.” She smirked. “Which is screwed up. I’m tired of pretending otherwise.”

  “You won’t believe this, but I do love you.”

  “Why wouldn’t I believe it?”

  “I’ll never love anybody else.”

  She patted his knee. “Sometimes, silence is cool.”

  They drove in that silence to the I-5, which took them north into endless fog.

  Rare in August, tule fog formed when the interior became very hot and pulled cool air from the coast. Something about it stirred Deacon’s soul. It was pleasing to see a metaphor for his life manifest itself on this pilgrimage.

  Beth stayed quiet the entire ride up from Los Angeles, staring out the windshield into the swirling mist while classical music lilted from the speakers. Deacon glanced at her GPS, which told him they were getting close to Bakersfield.

  She said, “You’re going to need sunscreen and a jacket.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, as you know, where we’re going will be blazing hot in the day and very cold at night.”

  “I’m going as I am,” he said. “If I suffer, I suffer.”

  “Why?”

  “If something’s there, it wants me to.” The Spirit, God, or whatever it was. Deacon thought about it more and added, “The suffering could be a means, not an end. It wants us to love it more than we love ourselves.”

  Then again, he didn’t have a clue what God wanted. His upbringing should have made him an expert. Years spent studying a book written over centuries by men claiming a secret knowledge of the divine, an invisible world populated by fantastic beings that defied human comprehension. As a child, he’d absorbed the stories with wonder and accepted the simple truths they told.

  As an adult, however, he found the book to be filled with vague rules and contradictions, betraying an imperfect understanding and defying the notion of direct divine authorship. And it was one religion among thousands through the ages, progressively evolving to shape the divine from natural to superhuman to abstract, all groping at the same questions: Who made us? Why are we here? What happens after death? The answers guiding behavior, often forming covenants that changed the course of history. Many peoples, many different covenants.

  All things considered,
Deacon didn’t know a damn thing about God, not really, and even less about the thing that lived on the mountain.

  “I wonder if we’re anthropomorphizing it,” Beth said. “Whatever it is. Maybe it’s unknowable. Maybe it’s a force like a hurricane or gravity, and not an intelligent being.”

  “I guess there’s only one way to find out.” Make the climb on faith. Maybe whatever was up there couldn’t be defined by rules, but he still believed it was comprehensible.

  She tightened her grip on the wheel. “What if there’s no it there at all?”

  “What if we’re following in the Rev’s footsteps, confusing hope with reality?”

  “Creating a story so it all means something. Right down to false memories.”

  Deacon shrugged. “I’m not sure which is worse. That I actually saw dead people roll up a hill and fly into a pillar of fire, or that I made it up.”

  The car crawled along the highway. Fog swirled in the headlights, shrouding the road. The morning sun would burn it away, and all would be revealed.

  21

  RETURN

  At sunrise, Beth drove them from the hotel to the cemetery where Emily rested. She got out of the car holding a hot cup of Starbucks while Deacon lit a cigarette and pondered the rows of tombstones stretching into the thinning mist.

  “I caught your show,” she said. “At Utopia.”

  A smile flickered across his face. “You did?”

  “The song you wrote. I liked it. It made me remember the good stuff.”

  “The good stuff hurts too.”

  “Not to me,” Beth said. “The good stuff is everything.”

  Headlights glimmered in the fog. David’s Toyota hummed onto the lot and parked next to Beth’s car.

  Angela got out first. “Jesus, look at you two. You went and grew up.”

  Deacon hugged her. “Real good to see you, Detective.”

  She gave his back an indulgent pat. “Okay, Deek.”

  Beth hugged her next. “I can’t believe it. You look great.”

  “Good to see you. Why are we meeting here?”

  “Emily’s death brought us to this journey.” It seemed so long ago, though it’d been less than a month since they’d buried her here. “It seemed appropriate.”

  David got out of the car. “So I guess we’re doing this after all.”

  Deacon shook his hand. “Welcome back, Dave.”

  Beth tensed to embrace him but hesitated.

  He hugged her. “I’m happy to see you.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  He’d forgiven her for making a pass at him at the conference, as she’d forgiven Deacon. No stones in these glass houses. They’d go to Red Peak with a clean slate.

  Beth led the survivors into the graveyard and found Emily’s headstone. There, they stood in silent recollection while the strengthening sun burned away the fog to reveal rows of tombstones shaded by mesquites and palms. Beth once considered Emily her best friend. Her mind raced through fragments of memories, little moments of shared secrets and laughter.

  “For Pete’s sake, just tell him you like him.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  Emily rolled her eyes. “Everybody knows already.”

  Beth shoved her. “Shut up, ‘everybody knows’!”

  “You should do it soon. I’m being serious now. Time is running out.”

  “I know she’d love seeing us together again,” David said.

  Beth nodded and wondered if this had been Emily’s plan all along.

  Deacon turned to Angela. “What now?”

  Though the difference in their ages was now negligible, they defaulted to viewing David’s big sister as older and wiser and therefore the leader.

  Angela said, “We go to Red Peak and find out if we’re crazy or there really is something there that took our families and friends.”

  “If we’re crazy,” David said, “we’ll put all this behind us for good, right?”

  If nothing happened, he wanted to see them all free themselves of the rabbit hole instead of doubling down on their beliefs.

  “You still don’t buy it,” Deacon said.

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t see what you saw. I’m going into this with an open mind. That’s all you’re gonna get from me.”

  “I think we’re all on the same page,” Beth said. “Let’s grab some breakfast and hit the road. On the way, we can talk. No more secrets.”

  Angela said, “You heard the lady. Let’s go.”

  On the long drive to Medford in David’s mini SUV, they shared their stories. The ritual, the pillar of fire shooting up from Red Peak’s summit, the awful horn, the bodies tumbling up the slope to fly into the flames. The fate of loved ones. Josh dying in the truck. Wyatt making a run for it until caught by his father, who cut his throat. The Wardites, the deputy, and The Restoration, who all disappeared on the same site.

  The stories coalesced into a single account of what happened at Red Peak the last night and since. The separate accounts so similar even David, the skeptic, grew quiet behind the wheel as he took it all in.

  In Medford, they stopped at a gas station and piled out to stretch their legs. Deacon went inside to buy cigarettes. Angela walked off to call the sheriff’s department and tell them their plan to visit Red Peak.

  Beth stood with her back against the car’s warm metal and watched people drive past, living their own stories, oblivious to the mysteries that lay mere miles away.

  David unscrewed his gas cap and started pumping. “So we’re going to find out if something is at Red Peak. Some weird force.”

  “That’s the plan,” Beth told him.

  “What if there is? What then?”

  “We get answers.” Know the thing that had taken her parents, as much as it was knowable, and hopefully learn what it had done with them.

  “Okay, great. Then what?”

  “Answers aren’t enough?” She hadn’t thought beyond that.

  “Everybody wants something besides answers,” David said. “Angela wants to find something up there so she can punish it. What do you want?”

  They sought Oz the Great and Powerful, who might grant them all a wish.

  Beth considered her answer. Just going to Red Peak had been enough for the moment, a cathartic release that had silenced the scathing voice in her head. What else did she want?

  She said, “I don’t want to end up like Emily.”

  He blinked in surprise. “Do you think about it? You know…”

  “It’s still in me.”

  David shivered. “Okay.”

  It was in him too, apparently. She didn’t tell him that she believed she hadn’t been left behind after all. That she’d chosen to stay. That she now hoped she might be given another choice.

  Beth doubted he’d understand the difference.

  He removed the nozzle and screwed the cap back on. “I hope we get the answers you want.”

  “What about you? What do you want?”

  “I guess I want to stop being afraid of it.”

  Deacon returned cradling an armful of bottled water, Angela right behind him.

  She pocketed her phone. “The search for The Restoration is over. There are no police at the site. We’ll be on our own out there.”

  David looked at them. “This is it, then.”

  Angela nodded. “Everybody ready for this?”

  Beth wasn’t sure, but she said she was anyway. Ever since James had helped her surface her memories, she’d steadily given up control to Red Peak. Chosen a psychic path far less traveled.

  She was about to find out where both would take her.

  The car rocked on the rutted track that snaked through the foothills and gorges at the edge of the Inyo range. Nobody spoke during this final stage of their journey.

  Beth remembered the long bus ride to the holy mountain and felt the same excitement now, a mix of anticipation and relief.

  In 2005, the apocalypse was imminent, but she’d sp
ent half the trip staring at the back of Deacon’s head several rows ahead. Young love, so ridiculous and beautiful and powerful. She’d gotten off the bus feeling both let down and relieved that the world didn’t end then and there.

  Beth now gasped as Red Peak came into view and triggered a flood of emotions. It was smaller than she remembered. The first time she’d seen the mountain, it had inspired awe, as if it were a very real Olympus. Now it seemed lonely and desolate. Angry rather than hopeful, ominous instead of majestic.

  Then the camp appeared, still standing where they’d left it, waiting to tell her that in all endings there is a beginning. The stairs still there to welcome pilgrims wishing to make the climb.

  David parked near the Temple, and they got out, taking their time, as if they no longer trusted their balance. The sun glared down on them, the desert heat an almost physical force.

  Beth broke out in instant sweat.

  The elements had scarred the shacks, but otherwise they stood eerily intact, as if the Family had all gone to pray or fetch water. Beth could see them in her mind, excitedly spilling off the buses carrying their luggage and crying babies, the children bolting amid laughter to explore their new home.

  “We’ll make the best of it,” Daddy said.

  “The ‘best of it’?” Mom laughed. “It’s perfect.”

  Now it was sad and pathetic.

  Beth gazed down the slight incline toward the shack where she’d lived for three long, hot months. While it briefly had been her home, it wasn’t the right place to say goodbye to her parents. Beth gravitated toward the Temple. The door was ajar, a dark maw emitting a musty stench. A large crack like a black lightning bolt ran down the front of it.

  She turned to her friends with a questioning look, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to go inside.

  David paled. “I’m not going in there. No goddamn way.”

  His sister walked off a short distance and knelt to touch the ground. “This is where Mom died. Josh too.”

  He turned away. “Yeah.”

  Deacon stared off at some distant point, wiped his eyes, and sniffed.

  “You okay?” Beth asked him.

  He pointed. “See that boulder? I hid behind it most of the night. From there, I saw Wyatt’s dad hold him down and…” He pointed again. “Right there.”