They

by J. F. Gonzalez

  “That’s fine,” Vince said. They carried their luggage down the short walkway to cabin number 5 and waited while Mike got it unlocked.

  The room was small, with the bed, the cot, a small dresser, a small television mounted on a stand bolted to the wall, and nothing else. There was a small bathroom off the entrance. “What do you expect for thirty bucks a night?” Mike said, flipping the light on.

  It was just after twelve-thirty in the afternoon. Vince flopped down on the bed. “Well, what do we do now?”

  “How far is Lititz from here?” Mike asked.

  “About ten, fifteen minutes maybe,” Vince said.

  “Does Reverend Powell have any other job outside of ministering to his church?” Frank asked.

  “When I lived out here I remember he used to be a general contractor,” Vince said. “I think he’s still doing that.”

  “So if we call him at home he might be there,” Mike said. “Unless he’s off at a job site.”

  Vince nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Why don’t you give him a call? Tell him you’re in town and see if he’s willing to meet with us. Is there a library around here?”

  “Yeah, there’s one off 272,” Vince said, motioning outside. “It’s probably about a half-mile walk or so.”

  Mike turned to Frank. “If the Reverend is in, why don’t you head over to the library and do some research? Check out back issues of area newspapers and see if there are any stories of unusual crimes that have occurred in the past few years or so. You know what to look for.”

  Frank nodded. “Sure thing.”

  “You have your cell phone with you?”

  Frank nodded, patting his hip pocket.

  “Keep it on. I’ll call you from the Reverend’s home if anything happens. Otherwise, let’s plan on meeting back here in three hours.”

  “What are we going to tell Reverend Powell?” Vince asked.

  “We’ll tell him the truth,” Mike said. “Surely as a man of God, he’s going to have to believe what we have to tell him.”

  Vince picked up the phone and began dialing Reverend Powell’s number from the business card he’d given him last week.

  WHEN MIKE PETERSON and Vince Walters pulled up to Hank Powell’s house he was waiting for them on his front porch. He looked paler than the last time Vince had seen him and his eyes had a haunted look. He kept looking out at the cornfield across from his home. “Come in,” he said, ushering them in the house. “I’m glad you could get back here so quickly.”

  Vince introduced Mike to Reverend Powell and the two men shook hands. Vince had explained to Hank on the phone that he’d just arrived back at Lancaster County with two friends who were helping him unravel the mystery of his mother’s death. He’d told Reverend Powell that Mike had information on his mother’s background and upon hearing this, Hank had told Vince in a breathless tone that he’d found the box Maggie buried. “I’ve made some startling conclusions that I hope and pray to God aren’t true,” he’d said. “Perhaps your friend can help me understand it.” Excited by the fact that Reverend Powell had found the box, Vince told Mike, who suggested they head over to Lititz immediately.

  Reverend Powell closed and locked the front door. It was ninety-five degrees outside with high humidity, making it feel like the tropics. The house was cooled by central air conditioning. Reverend Powell patted the butt of a handgun he had tucked into his belt. “Don’t mean to startle you with this, but ever since finding…what I’ve found out, I’ve been a trifle scared.”

  “That’s understandable,” Mike said. “We’ve been taking our own precautions as well.”

  Reverend Powell nodded, then turned to Vince. “It’s downstairs.”

  They followed Hank Powell downstairs to the basement. Reverend Powell motioned to the sofa and chairs in the den. “Have a seat. I’ll go get it.” He headed toward the storeroom.

  Reverend Powell unlocked the door to the storeroom and Mike and Vince waited by the pool table as he rummaged in the cubby and pulled the box out. They retreated to the den and sat down. Reverend Powell opened the lock with a key and looked at Mike Peterson. “I’m hoping you’ll be able to make some sense of this. I…I have my own suspicions based on…what I’ve seen here, but…I don’t know if I’m just being paranoid or what.”

  Hank handed the box to Mike, who positioned it on his lap. Vince was sitting next to him on the sofa and the minute he saw the pictures, a thousand memories exploded in his mind. They came as a kaleidoscope of images; playing on the back porch of an apartment building somewhere in a big city; sitting quietly at the feet of his mother as her and daddy’s friends gathered at the house (but was it really daddy or was it Tom?), their dress and hair counter-culture-like; the long-haired bearded man trying to kill him as his mother screamed and the others made a mad grab to save him; sitting on a raised dais in a darkened room as black robed adults bowed before him.

  “Oh my God,” Vince whispered.

  “What?” Mike said, pausing from his perusal of the photo album.

  “Looking at these brings back so many memories.”

  “Good,” Mike said, turning back to the photo album. “That’s what we’re here for.”

  Reverend Powell was watching them from his perch on the easy chair. He looked nervous. He rubbed his mouth with his left hand, glancing up the basement stairs every so often as Vince and Mike went through the photo album.

  “That’s Gladys,” Mike said, tapping a photo that Vince remembered from when they’d lived in Orange County. The photo showed a woman in her late twenties or early thirties seated at a table with a man around the same age. They were smiling into the camera. The perfect picture of early seventies normalcy.

  “I remember her so well now,” Vince said.

  When they got through the last photo album, they turned to the clippings. At first the clippings held no significance for Vince, but Mike seemed to recognize something. He began nodding. “Yes, just as I thought,” Mike said. Vince tried to draw some kind of correlation to what he was seeing—clippings about dead dogs, missing people. He didn’t remember anybody he or his mother knew going missing.

  When Mike came to the clippings on the Manson family, Vince felt no particular kinship there, either. “I don’t get it,” he said, looking at Mike.

  “This all corresponds to what John and I dug up,” Mike said, flipping through the clippings quicker now, nodding along. “Everything she saved here is stuff I’ve already connected.”

  “Then it’s true then?” Reverend Powell said in a fearful, trembling voice. Vince felt his stomach plunge down an elevator shaft as he looked at the man. He’d never felt the aura of fear so much as he did that minute when he looked at Reverend Powell. Hank fidgeted on the chair, his hands moving nervously, licking his lips. “I have been praying to the Lord ever since I found this box that it wasn’t true.”

  “Does all this stuff mean that the cult my mother was involved with had something to do with Charles Manson?” Vince asked.

  “No,” Mike said. He got to the end of the clippings and put them back in order carefully. “They didn’t have anything to do with the Manson family, although there has always been speculation that they might have crossed paths.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Mike closed the lid to the box and snapped the lock shut. “There have been a lot of theories about the reasons Manson ordered the Tate-LaBianca murders. One of the most vague and outlandish is that Manson had volunteered to have the murders carried out for somebody else. Somebody who was a powerful member of a satanic cult. Of course, Manson himself denied this, as did those convicted of the murders. They’re right, of course.”

  “So you are saying that Maggie was involved with Satanists!” Reverend Powell asked, his eyes wide with fright, almost pleading for this to be a cruel hoax. His voice rose in a shrilling crescendo. “Is that it? Were Maggie and Vince exposed to Satan and—”

  “Calm down, Reverend,” Mike said. He set th
e box down on the sofa beside him. “I’ll explain everything.”

  “I think I’m going to need a drink,” Reverend Powell said. He rose to his feet and headed to the bar. He didn’t offer Mike or Vince anything; he merely opened a bottle of Jack Daniels, poured himself a shot and drank it down. Then he poured himself another and slammed it down. His face reddened. He sighed. “Okay. Lord forgive me for this weakness, but I can’t bear to hear another word without taking some of this to calm my nerves.”

  Mike headed toward the rear of the basement, carrying the box. He placed it on the pool table and approached the bar. “I think we could all use a drink.”

  Vince joined Mike at the bar as Reverend Powell stood behind it, leaning against the polished wood surface. Hank handed them each a shot glass and asked if they wanted something to chase it with. When both men nodded, Hank opened a small refrigerator under the bar and pulled out two bottles of Budweiser. He opened them and set both bottles on the bar and went for a third. Mike set them up for a shot and the three men pounded them back. Vince felt the bourbon scorch his throat, warming him up. He took a sip of beer, which felt good as it went down his throat.

  Then Mike told Reverend Hank Powell what he, Vince, and Frank had discussed the past three nights.

  Reverend Powell listened, his eyes riveted on Mike as he drank silently. Listening to the narrative again was just as frightening as it had been the first time around. For some reason it brought him closer to the series of events that had fallen into place. For Vince, listening to Mike retell his side of the story, how his best friend had been waylaid and destroyed by the cult, hearing it again from his own lips, brought the horror to shuddering realization. This was a man who had lived it, who knew the parties involved. He had met Gladys and her husband; he’d possibly known Gladys when she was living her secret life as a bloodthirsty devil-worshipper. This wasn’t just another sensational story cooked up by rabid Christian fundamentalists. This was the real thing, spun with plain truth by a man firmly grounded in the secular world.

  When Mike was finished Vince saw that Reverend Powell had already finished his first beer and was reaching for his second. Despite the shots he’d pounded down—four by Vince’s count, he didn’t appear drunk. “I knew it,” Reverend Powell said. “It was just as I thought. Maggie was involved with Satan and broke away. Praise the Lord that she saw the light and was saved.”

  “That still doesn’t explain the Manson clippings,” Vince asked.

  “The group Maggie and Gladys were involved in, The Children of the Night, was an offshoot of an apocalyptic cult called The End Times,” Mike explained. He nursed his beer as he spun the narrative. “They were formed in the mid 1800s in England by a fanatical Church of England minister named Graham Peters and his common-law wife Sally. Their belief system was based on the theory that it was God’s will for Satan to fall from grace and that following Satan was part of God’s will since it was all part of his plan for us humans.”

  “In other words, both are working for the same goal—the coming of Armageddon.” Reverend Powell understood loud and clear.

  Mike nodded. “That’s the short end of it. The End Times preached that Armageddon wasn’t far off. And that the quicker it came, the quicker it would be for God to take his chosen people up in the great tribulations. But in order for that to happen, there had to be an Anti-Christ born as prophesized in the Bible. So what happened was that the group split—one part remained devoted to the Christian side of the sect, the God part, if you will. The other half formed an alliance with the dark side and became The Children of the Night. Over the next hundred years they rubbed shoulders with many infamous occultists and killers, finally evolving into the current group headed by Sam Garrison.”

  “The group my mother was involved with,” Vince said.

  “Exactly.”

  “How did Maggie get involved in such…in such wickedness?” Reverend Powell looked like he couldn’t believe that somebody he had known, somebody from his own church, could have been a blasphemous devil-worshipper.

  “By all accounts, it appears that Maggie got involved through the original cult,” Mike continued. “When The End Times Church came out to California in late ’64, the counter-culture scene was already in full swing in the Bay Area. They were the first to capitalize on recruiting the flower children. At first their recruitment efforts weren’t successful. After all, this was the beginning of the hippie-movement, and people were experimenting with mind-altering drugs and alternative eastern religions. They were frustrated by the hypocrisy and failures of religious and political institutions that preached a Christian tolerance while supporting the ecology-destroying practice of big business, racial intolerance and the war in Vietnam. The End Times was rooted strictly in the prophesies of the New Testament. That was a little too close for comfort for those that had run away from home to explore religious beliefs anathema to their parents. But the End Times weaved their dogma in with a kind of mysticism that appealed to some of the dropouts. They encouraged sex, love, free will, and a communal type of living. And they also encouraged a dual acknowledgement to two gods—Yahweh and Satan. Yin and Yang. Graham Peters prophesized that in order for the biblical prophesizes to come true, the Lamb and the Goat must come together—pure love from Heaven united with hate from the depths of hell. Armageddon would begin. Those committing to either path would achieve salvation when the battle was over because those involved would be fulfilling God’s word. Everybody else—primarily every other religion—would be swallowed up in the great battle and destroyed.”

  “That is the…” Reverend Powell sputtered. He was so flabbergasted he couldn’t finish.

  “I know how you feel,” Mike said. He took a sip of beer. “It sounds insane. And in 1966 and ’67 it probably sounded no more insane than the dozens of other crackpots out there proselytizing among the counter-culture crowd at Haight and Ashbury. But they’re also the kind of ideas which would have been easy to find a receptive ear.”

  “And they found it with my mother,” Vince said.

  “They did,” Mike said, nodding. “One of the things I found out about Maggie was that she came from a very repressive background. Her father was a rabid fundamentalist minister and he was very strict. From what Frank’s father told me, Gladys came from a similar background. They would have been eager to embrace such ideas since they corresponded with belief systems they had grown up in. It would have made them feel powerful, that they felt they belonged to something far greater than anything they’d ever experienced. It would have allowed them to be manipulated more easily. In fact, shortly after your mother joined the group, they made a pilgrimage to the Middle East. From what I gather, they participated in several archeological digs in what is now modern day Iraq. It’s also suggested they performed several rituals there, possibly a soul-cracking ritual on your mother.”

  “Soul-cracking?”

  Mike explained. “It’s a ritual designed to literally crack the soul of the intended victim with the goal of letting elemental forces out into our world. Think of it as being used to provide a gateway, a door.”

  Vince thought about this, trying to wrap his head around it. Everything was coming at him so fast.

  “We aren’t certain of this,” Mike continued. “But one member who defected from the group shortly after they returned to the states told a source I was able to talk to. The soul-cracking ritual is very rare, and is only performed by extremely experienced magicians.”

  “Why would they do this?” Vince asked.

  “We don’t know,” Mike said. “You were conceived around this time, and it’s possible you were born in Iraq, not in California as your birth certificate states. When the group arrived back in the states in July of 1966 they came home with you and several rare artifacts dating back to ancient Summer. One of the members had a permit to bring the items into the states—he’s a well-known archeologist with a major university on the west coast.”

  “Do you suppose this soul-cracki
ng ceremony later drove my mom crazy?” Vince asked. It made sense to him. The emotional trauma they would have inflicted on her could have been suppressed for years until it eventually manifested in her extreme shift to Evangelical Christianity.

  Mike nodded. “Yes, it’s very possible.”

  “So if this ritual worked, what would they have let out into the world?” Vince asked, mostly to himself.

  “We’re not sure, and keep in mind we’re only going by second-hand information,” Mike said. “The cult member who spilled this all to my source later disappeared.”

  “So Maggie somehow wound up with this splinter group,” Reverend Powell mused. “This Children of the Night group?”

  Mike nodded. “Yes, because unlike what mainstream Christianity teaches, serving Satan ultimately serves the will of God. As to what led her to…join this splinter group, I still don’t know.”

  “Could it have been Tom?” Vince asked.

  “Possibly.”

  “That still doesn’t explain the Manson family aspect of this thing,” Reverend Powell said.

  “By 1969 The Children of the Night were a very powerful, very secret satanic organization,” Mike continued. “They’d been around since the 1920s, but in the 1960s they’d experienced a resurgence of sorts. They were headquartered in San Francisco, and Samuel Garrison led them. Part of their goal was to spread total chaos in order to aid in the breakdown of society. They promoted the total worship of evil. They became so secret that contact between them and The End Times was completely severed. Because there are some vague connections between Manson’s group and The End Times when the Family was in the Bay Area, it is believed they remained in contact with select cult members, including the satanic faction—The Children of the Night.” Mike Peterson looked grave. “The theory is that Garrison ordered the bloodbath in August to stir things up and that Manson’s group not only did it, but took the fall.”