They

by J. F. Gonzalez

  His mother’s sister, Mary, came to the house upon receiving a phone call from Vivian, Jesse’s mother. When she saw her nephew in such a despicable state seated at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of Albondigas soup, his mother clutching his arm and weeping, Mary called an ambulance. Jesse was taken to El Paso County General Hospital and placed under psychiatric observation at the request of his parents. He was transferred to a mental hospital in Las Cruces, New Mexico two weeks later where he spent the next four months. The official diagnosis was a complete nervous and mental breakdown.

  Jesse’s family tried to find out what happened to Gladys and Frank, but the court system prevented them from doing much regarding gaining custody of the boy. Gladys contacted Vivian and assured her that she and the boy were fine. It was through Vivian that Mike and John first heard about the adoption of Jesse’s daughter. John was able to visit Jesse in El Paso at the hospital and came away concerned, confused and frightened. John later told Mike that looking at Jesse’s face, into those eyes, was like looking into the bottomless pit of a fear born of hell.

  Released to the custody of his parents in the middle of 1969, Jesse took work with his brother-in-law, who owned a cleaning service. He wouldn’t talk of the incident that led to his breakdown, and on the advice of Jesse’s psychiatrist the family refrained from asking him. Jesse was supposed to have continued therapy sessions, but he stopped going after a few weeks, and no amount of persuasion could get him to return. While he appeared to improve upon his release from the hospital, enthusiastically smiling and hugging family members, engaging in conversation, he appeared troubled, as if something had been released inside him that held him back emotionally. Mike saw this on a visit to El Paso that summer with his wife and two children. He’d suggested the trip to his wife as an excuse for her to finally meet his extended family, but he really wanted to pay Jesse a visit. What he’d seen was shocking.

  “He just wasn’t the same man,” he told Vince as the three men sat in the den that evening. “He appeared to be the same, he talked the same, we had the same conversations we always had. But there was something missing. Something….some part of his personality that was dead.”

  If Jesse showed signs of improvement, those signs were dashed in December of 1969 with the arrest of Charles Manson and “The Family.” Diane later told Mike that Jesse was seated at her kitchen table when it happened. Her husband Carlos had passed the El Paso Times to him nonchalantly as he always did, and Jesse took one look at the front page, Manson’s long-haired, demonic figure grinning evilly at the camera, and he’d lost it right there. He began shaking, the newspaper crumpling in his hands as he gazed down at the story. Diane had asked, “What’s wrong? Are you okay?” Jesse hadn’t replied. He put the paper down and stared out the window into space. His eyes had gained that faraway look of catatonia again.

  Carlos had noticed the sudden change and at the time didn’t pay much attention to what could have caused it. Diane rang Jesse’s psychiatrist. Before she could get him on the phone, Jesse rose from his chair and skirted out the side door. Leaving again.

  This time for good.

  John Llama and Mike Peterson did all they could to search for their friend, but to no avail. They put out missing-person bulletins, scanned newspapers, put out the word of Jesse Black’s disappearance with flyers with his picture on it. None of it helped. The years went by. In 1980 John Llama, who was now the senior partner in the law firm, started up the investigation again. With a wealth of investigators at his fingertips in his law office, he felt he had the resources to make this effort more professional and not the half-hearted attempt he and Mike had tried previously. In the decade that passed they’d kept in touch with Jesse’s family, hoping to gain some kind of insight to their friend’s disappearance and final years in Los Angeles. The closest they’d come was some of the investigations Diane and Carlos had launched in the years following Jesse’s final disappearance. “Gladys was involved with some dangerous people in California,” she told Mike at one time. “People who were involved in a huge underground crime cartel. I don’t know what kind of activities they were involved in, but it was huge. And dangerous. I think Jesse found out about it and they did something to him.”

  Diane and Carlos did some minor poking around on their own, contracting the help of a business acquaintance of Carlos’s who was a private investigator. The investigator worked for them for about six months in 1976 and came back one night in December of that year breathless. “You have to take me off this case,” he’d said after they let him in their home upon his return from California.

  Why? they’d asked, alarmed.

  The investigator laid it all out. While he couldn’t gain solid proof for this theory, he was fairly confident that the people Gladys was involved with were members of a dangerous satanic cult. At least that’s what he learned from the people that would talk to him about it. He’d talked to police officers, detectives, people in the Haight Ashbury district, and while he hadn’t talked to anybody directly tied to Gladys herself, the people he interviewed told him the same thing. A large satanic cult was in operation, had spread nationwide and had members in various parts of the world. The private investigator showed Gladys’s photo to a few of the people he’d interviewed, and the ones that recognized her admitted that the company she kept was cult related. She might even be a member of the group herself. When the investigator tried to learn more about the cult, everybody clammed up. Nobody would talk to him about it. You don’t understand, they all said. These people are bad. They know all, they see all. They have heavily infiltrated modern society and they are everywhere. Especially here. If I tell you anything more about them they might find out and I don’t want to even think what might become of me.

  The police hadn’t been much help either, neither denying rumors of a cult nor confirming one. Despite vague rumors of a cult compound in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the investigator wasn’t able to learn much else. He was just about to launch into phase two of his investigation when he woke up one morning to the sound of a knock on his hotel room door. Upon opening it, he’d found a gift-wrapped box in front of the door. Curious, he’d brought the box in and carefully opened it.

  Carefully wrapped in tissue paper was a severed human finger. Along with a single note, written in a blocky script on a tattered piece of notebook paper. Cease your investigation, was all it said. The investigator heeded the warning and took the first flight out of Los Angeles back to Texas.

  This troubled Diane and Carlos. They’d been in the process of trying to gain custody of Frank, who’d just been released to his parents after the criminal charges against them were mysteriously dropped. Now with the new information that Ray Allman—their private investigator friend—had learned, they were prepared to use it against the couple. But before they could get started, two things happened.

  In early January of 1977, two men in ski masks forced their way into the house. Carlos was at work, the kids at school. Diane and the maid were at home, tending to chores when the gunmen broke in. They herded the cowering women into the bathroom and locked them in, telling them that if they didn’t shut the fuck up they would be shot in the fucking head. Diane had quickly quieted Maria down, and the two women sat in the bathroom clutching each other fearfully as the sound of footsteps traveled through the house. The men seemed to know exactly where they were going, for there were no sounds of ransacking as would have been prevalent in most home burglaries. Five minutes later they heard the front door open and close, and then the sound of receding footsteps. The women sat in the bathroom for another forty-five minutes before Diane tried opening the door, which was locked from the outside. It took the women another fifteen minutes to break the lock on the bathroom door and, once they were out, Diane headed for the phone in the master bedroom and called the police.

  The only thing that was stolen was twenty-five thousand dollars in cash that Carlos had stashed in a metal box, stored on the upper shelf in the closet. The men had taken the
box with them. Nothing else in the house was touched or stolen.

  The police questioned them extensively. Were they certain that nobody but Carlos and Diane knew about the money? Had they mentioned the whereabouts of the cash to anybody outside of the family? The answers were no. The police checked out Carlos, thinking he might have hired one of his workers to steal the money for some illicit purpose, but could find nothing to support this theory. The night after the robbery, Diane had turned to her husband in the darkness of their bedroom. “This was a warning, Carlos.”

  “A warning?”

  “A warning from that…devil group of Gladys’ in California. I can feel it in my bones. Somehow they found out we hired Ray to do that investigating. Gladys must be angry at us for trying to get Frank out of that house.”

  “But that’s ridiculous, honey,” Carlos had said in a whispered voice. “How would they know we even had this cash in our house? And how would they have known its location?”

  Diane had shuddered. “They knew. The devil told them where it was. How else could those men have gone right to where we kept the money?” And then she’d crossed herself and mumbled a prayer of protection.

  Two weeks later they got a call from California. It was Gladys. She told Diane that she and Tom had talked things over and that she was sending Frank to El Paso to live with her and Carlos. She felt it would be better for the boy to have a change of place. Diane didn’t mention the breakin to her former sister-in-law; she merely mumbled thank you and two days later they picked up Frank at the El Paso International Airport.

  When John Llama started his investigation, he started where Diane and Carlos had left off. He obtained the files Ray Allman had left with them (securely locked in a safe deposit box at a bank), and started verifying what Ray found. For the first year John didn’t learn much, except that the group called itself The Children of the Night. He learned they were involved in a lot of criminal activity: child pornography and regular run-of-the-mill porn, drugs, white slavery, weapons smuggling, and prostitution. They also had several legitimate business interests, and it was this route that John chose to take. For the first year of investigating he grew frustrated at always hitting dead ends; the cult members went by so many aliases and code names it was hard to tell one from the other. Another thing that hindered his progress was, despite the evidence the group was nationwide, possibly worldwide, there was no evidence to support the theory. It appeared that the group went by different names in different parts of the U.S., with a group in New York meeting as “The Children” and a group in Alabama meeting as “The Children of the Night.” John pressed on, uncovering information about The Children of the Night, eventually making the connection that it was this name that the group was most commonly known by.

  During the time John was conducting his investigation, Mike was only fleetingly aware of it. John would call him from time to time to discuss details. He told Mike he was being extremely careful; he’d lifted all of the preliminary duties from his assistants at the office, taking the case on himself. He didn’t trust anybody with any of it. He was also being careful to destroy whatever notes he had and stored other items in a safe deposit box. He gave Mike a key and made him memorize the box number and what bank it was at. Mike was concerned and wanted to help his friend, but he didn’t want to let his wife, Carol, in on it. She would be petrified and would forbid Mike to even lend a hand. So he sat idly by on the sidelines while John did all of the work.

  In the end they got to John so swiftly that even Mike was surprised at their skill and deftness. To this day, he still didn’t know how they found out. Maybe the group found out who John was and brought him into the fold secretly, setting up people to meet him at business functions, passing themselves off as businessmen or lawyers John might have met at some meeting or party. Mike recalled John telling him about a few social mixers he’d attended in his off time; he’d surely been attending a lot of them since his divorce from Connie, and Mike was afraid John would start drinking again (he’d developed a drinking problem in college that lasted through the early years of his law career). But John seemed to be doing fine and Mike didn’t press it.

  Mike remembered the day in the Spring of 1982—it must have been mid April, or so—when John called him at three a.m. Mike had picked up the phone by his side of the bed, irritated at being woken up at this hour, and at first John’s slurred voice was unrecognizable. “John?”

  “It’s me, Mike,” John had said. Mike could tell right away that John had fallen off the wagon. It had been three months since they’d spoken, and John had been doing fine then. Suddenly concerned, he started to ask John if he was okay when John cut him off. “There’s no way we can find out anything else about Jesse, Mike. Better chalk him up as being dead. Dead and gone. No way.”

  “John what are you talking about?” Rising fear wormed its way into Mike’s gut.

  “They’re everywhere, Mike.” John paused and Mike could hear the tilt of a bottle on the other end of the line. “They’re fucking everywhere.”

  Dread filled Mike. He had the sick feeling he knew what John was talking about.

  “I don’t know how they found me. I went to a party with an associate of mine, guy who’s president of a big firm downtown. It was supposed to be at the home of an investment banker. I was interested in offshore investing. Paul really sold me on it and he promised me this guy knew what he was talking about.”

  “Who’s Paul?” Mike had asked gently. He’d picked up the phone and moved out of the bedroom and into the hall where he wouldn’t disturb Carol, who moaned once and turned over in her sleep.

  “Guy I met at a seminar a few months ago.” John seemed to struggle with the memory. “Nice guy…or at least I thought so until Tuesday.”

  “What happened, John?”

  Another hit off the bottle. “Guy’s one of them,” he slurred. “Fucking devil worshipper.”

  Mike felt himself go numb with fright.

  “Got to the house for the party,” John said, slurring his words bad now. “Everything was cool for awhile. It was a biiigg house. Fuckin’ mansion in Bel Air. Beautiful. There was this little babe that was so hot for me…ya shoulda seen her, Mikey…fucking tits to die for, a body that wouldn’t quit—”

  “I’m listening, John,” Mike had said calmly, trying to quell the beating of his heart. “Tell me what happened.”

  There was a pause for a moment, as if John was trying to muster the courage to tell him what happened. He started slowly. “I don’t remember her name. I think it was Susie. She offered me a drink. I thought ‘why not,’ and she went to the bar and brought me one. It tasted okay. But after awhile I started feeling funny. She started flirting with me…little cock teaser. Then I started getting dizzy. I reached out and grabbed her shoulder to support myself ’cause I felt the room spinning. I dropped the drink and then there was a hand on my shoulder helping me up. I remember being led out of the room and a voice…a real big voice, almost hollow sounding, saying something like ‘we’ll begin once it’s taken full effect.’ ” He paused again. “It was then that I realized I’d been drugged.”

  Mike didn’t say anything. He listened with sinking dread as John continued.

  “The next thing I know I woke up in a big room.” For a moment the slurriness of his speech was gone as John struggled with the memory. “I was naked, laid out in the middle of the room. It was lit by candles. Dozens of them. There were people in the room, still dressed in their suits and dresses. Paul was standing in front of me, looking down with a scary look. I swear to you, Mike, that man had murder in his eyes. And something more than murder. Evil. Corruption. They all did. I tried to sit up, but I felt the room spin. I tried to fight the dizziness and felt myself getting sick. Then I threw up all over the floor. And they laughed.”

  The rest of it had been a blur for John. He didn’t remember much and still didn’t realize what had happened to him, or if any of it was simply a figment of his imagination. He thought he was torture
d, that hot spikes were being burned into his flesh; he recalled figures standing above him and jabbing long sharp objects into his body as he writhed and screamed on the ground in excruciating pain. He thought at one time he awoke over a steaming pit of filth, his face held over a cauldron of human excretions. He felt a hand grip the back of his head firmly and push him into the steaming mess, feeling the texture of the warm wetness; lumpy, damp, mixing the stink of piss, vomit and shit. He felt it ooze into his nostrils and throat and he gagged. His stomach churned and he threw up again, the warm steaming mess joining the mixture in the bowl and he was forced to lap at it until he threw up again, he kept throwing up until his stomach muscles convulsed, wrenching his guts dry. He’d dropped to the floor in exhaustion, breathing heavily, and then he felt the searing pain as the red hot lances stabbed into his flesh again.

  This continued for a long time. How long, John didn’t know. At one point, he woke up to see the group of people stripped naked, hovering over a lone nude figure on the floor. The figure was a female and very dead. Her chest had been cut open and the woman that had been flirting with him reached into the corpse’s chest and pulled out her heart. She took a bite out of it and then John felt strong hands grip his arms and herd him over to the body. He was pushed toward the corpse, a hand clutching a bloody hunk of meat was thrust in his face and before he passed out again he saw one of the men, his erection hard and sticking up stiffly, move the corpse’s buttocks up into position for penetration.

  The next thing he remembered was being thrown out of a moving car. He hit the pavement hard and rolled toward the curb, covering his head with his arms. When he came to rest he scrambled to his feet. The car he was thrown from was already receding in the distance and he looked around. His clothes were on; his tie unknotted and hanging limply from his neck, shirt unbuttoned, his suit coat rumpled and dirty. He was in a ritzy neighborhood, probably somewhere near Bel Air where the party was held. For a moment he didn’t remember what he was doing there, but then suddenly the memory came screaming at him. He yelled and began running down the moonlit, quiet street.