“What have you got there?”
“What?”
“This.” Jazz pointed to the back of Matthew’s neck. “Looks like a hickey. You get a tattoo of a moth?”
“Nothing.” Reaching up, Matthew ran his hand over his neck, his fingers at once languid and fleeting, flickering in a sense with a strange motion. When he straightened his collar, the thing was gone.
“Oh, I thought you really did get a tattoo. I forgot how good you were at sleight of hand. Hey, you pierced at all? I hear it’s big in the theater district, getting needles in your eyebrows and stapling your tits.”
“I’ll see you later.”
“Yeah, okay,” Jazz said. “Hey, maybe tonight. Bosco Bob is having a party. As usual, everyone is invited out to their place.”
That surprised him, that the gatherings should be allowed to continue, when strength of friendship and family were so reprehensible to the Goat. “Jello’s dad still throwing bashes?”
“Always. Never a particular reason needed for the richest folks in the country to party. I just thought it might be nice if you stopped in for a drink or ten and said hi to the neighbors.”
“Maybe I’ll show,” Matthew said, liking it less and less. Everyone congregated together, all their vices centered, like prisoners corralled. He saw the danger in it now, and wondered if the morality and malfeasance would balance out.
“Have you seen Helen?” Jazz asked.
“No.”
“All right, I won’t break your arm about any of it. But hey, just remember one thing, brother.”
Matthew turned.
Jazz ground out his cigarette against the window screen and smiled. “Never fucking punt.”
Chapter Ten
He got out of the boardinghouse without talking to anyone else, slipping past Jodi and her father, who were both in the kitchen cleaning the breakfast table. His stomach grumbled at the smell of ham and eggs, and he couldn’t recall how long it had been since he’d last eaten. Along with the aroma of bacon and hash browns came the fragrances of winter mint air freshener, lemon furniture polish, and pine disinfectant following him out onto the porch.
Jazz’s ’71 Mustang was backed into the driveway, and Matthew could see it had had plenty of additional body work done in the last few years. He stared at the seat where he and Helen had first made love, and thought of what it had meant then, and now. A pang of remorse knifed him in the midriff, and he nearly groaned in pain. So much he’d given up, too much, and still Jazz and A.G. had forgiven him, and he remained tied to Helen.
With the chilling October wind blowing in roughly from the east, the day grew colder than he expected. Matthew jogged down the sidewalk, occasionally ducking tree branches, past acquaintances raking and bagging leaves on their sloping lawns. Those who glimpsed and recognized him smiled in surprise, waved. Pumpkins and lopsided scarecrows were propped on porches. Nobody realized just what the holiday meant. He waved back but wouldn’t stop.
Up ahead, on one side of Manor Lane, crows rested on telephone wires, fluttering wings in the winds, waiting and resolute, definitive in their mastery of the moment, with the sharp noise of feathers riffling in the cold.
There should have been a rule book, or a special illustration, or a specific play that Matthew could run, a certain way for him to act—there should have been someone to confide in besides A.G., a relative or a priest, or a teacher, someone other than the crows who could understand what lay at the heart of their home.
The week before, by way of fending off the paralyzing dread, he’d tried to restore his belief in himself and in his God, using what little faith remained to reinforce his flagging will. He prayed the Christian prayers his mother had taught him, then recited the black incantations to see if the power still dwelled within him, the angels Azriel and Gabriel perched outside his door. He reread the high school love notes from Helen that he still kept as bookmarks in the Bible, going out of his mind in the late hours of night, as shadows and scars ceaselessly whispered about death and A.G.
I’m not a poet, don’t forget (I know you won’t). Hey, I like the loose rhymes all right, but listen to what I have to say to you:
I take from you the strength of your grin
the love of your lips
now the tip of your tongue
while down below me your hair
tickles my belly
and I cry into the character of your eyes
as we fold into moonlight
ocean ears
a sand dune smile
nuzzling my neck
licking dimples and you call me Darla
as I reach over these sheets
to the rhymes of the lapped beat
of our whitecap water madness might
teeth
at the edge of a tasty lace throat
you’re touching the pulse
so you’re nibbling on my chin
and I am lower and higher
in your hot hand of fire
throwing ourselves all over the night
I love you! (Yes I do!) xxxxxxxxxxxxx
He had awakened in the warm light of dawn, lying on the living room floor, curled under an end table with grit stuck to his teeth and empty’ tequila bottles scattered, his plays torn from the bookshelves. He rolled onto his back, once again scared enough to call random phone numbers and murmur into the receiver, begging help and weeping without humility, thinking that he, Matthew Galen … he could redeem himself, he could recover what had been lost … he could be the scalpel that made the incision to cut out this cancer of hell.
He made phone call after phone call, mixing the beer with tequila and vodka and rolls of antacids, babbling into the receiver about Thoth and Amon, and the gris-gris pouch of power, how the Kaballah made perfect sense if you only thought about it, and the lower hierarchies of Pandemonium where the daemons weren’t nearly as evil as men, but inflicted themselves upon you just the same. Women cursed him, you rotten lunatic, and don’t ever call back or else … Matthew played with the cord, wrapping it between his fists, winding it tighter and tighter. It was a perfect garrote. Some lady told him that if he wasn’t even going to at least breathe heavy or moan or make obscene suggestions that might actually help her through her sexually repressed upbringing by strict Catholic parents, giving her the freedom to fantasize, then why bother, didn’t he know it was much healthier to use fantasy to lead a more productive sex life, and that if he wasn’t going to at least offer the chance to mutually masturbate then he wasn’t worth talking to in the first place, and she’d join a guy name HardOnFreddy in a private chat room on the net and do a little cyber instead.
He redialed. His vision kept unfocusing, eyes swiveling, and he spit into an ashtray with the burning bile seeping down his chin and saturating his shirt, while he called number after number.
Until one lovely-voiced girl spoke in his ear, telling him to be honest, to speak his mind, everyone needs a friend, she would help him, yes, and she would listen to him—You’re not all alone, do you hear, do you understand?—and she breathed into the line, breathing for him, taking his breaths the way Helen used to do, and he couldn’t say anything more beyond that point because the scars were screaming. He couldn’t even plead his case and offer up his terror. He’d slipped and fallen on his face and the scars laughed out loud, and she asked if there was somebody there with him. He didn’t want to hang up on her, so beautiful, that voice, so needing and wanting in her own way, but he had no other choice. She might’ve been crying by then. He hung up.
Matthew ran past the crows.
Pacing a six-minute mile, he decided he had to get more information before he’d have an adequate plan of action. He didn’t know enough about the movements of the Goat in the five years he’d been away.
Start back where it all began.
He’d return to the library where he’d first studied his craft, searching for the names of the people who’d vanished, their ages, where they’d most likely been abducted.
See if he could find the pattern.
After fifteen minutes he came to the intersection of South Windsor and Metacomet Roads, slipped between parked cars, and took a diagonal shortcut behind Mrs. Friendwald’s large greenhouse, hopping fences and sprinting by a spinning clothesline that flapped girdles in his face.
Which brought him, sweating, to the library. Scanning the faces of librarians, he walked past the reference section and made his way to the microfiche, coming full circle again, as he always had and always would.
When he was thirteen and he’d begun his research he’d found books here not always in the card catalogues, The Complete Encyclopedia of Satanism opening before him on the shelf, others waiting for his arrival: Dissecting Demons, Witchcraft and Idolatry, Europe’s Inner Demons, and Mystification and Enrichment in the Black Day. The librarians were the same, barely appearing any older, as if they’d been placed here for only this purpose. He could remember further back to when he came in with his mother and took out The Five Hundred Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins and Green Eggs and Ham.
The computerized magazine and newspaper index showed him what he needed to know, and he loaded the machine with spools of microfiche containing those issues of the Gazette that he required.
The resonant background noise distracted him from reading. Years ago, you couldn’t even sneeze without getting dirty looks from the ladies, their fingers pointing at you like claw hammers, myopic eyes staring as mean as a pig’s. Only Millie, the head reference librarian, ever smiled, looking at him now but too blind at that distance to see him. He squinted at the screen.
For the next three hours he read everything he could find pertaining to the missing victims and A.G.’s subsequent breakdown and arrest; he searched for any other news between Summerfell and Gallows that seemed out of the ordinary.
Jesus, there was a lot.
He came away with facts, but no design.
At five in the afternoon on April 30, Ruth Cahill left her job as advertising consultant to meet her fiancé for dinner at a recently opened restaurant downtown. Six hours later, A.G. himself put in the missing-persons call to Sheriff Hodges after finding her condo empty and phoning all mutual friends; the sheriff put out the word to deputies and highway patrol despite the twenty-four-hour required waiting period. No suicide note was found, no ransom letter ever sent. Search parties combed the woods, beach, inlets, lake, and other secluded areas where a body might have been disposed. “We are following several promising leads at this time,” Hodges boasted. “We’re certain well soon discover the whereabouts of Miss Cahill.”
April 30.
Matthew sat back in the chair. He stared into his palm, and could see the subtle wrinkle at that day, reading the flow and ebb of murder, though his lifeline occasionally shifted.
April 30, Beltane, one of the great Celtic solar and fertility festivals, symbolized by bonfires in the preparing for Maypole. People danced deosil, clockwise in turn with the natural order, around the fires. Eventually Christianity absorbed the festival, and church services replaced the pagan rites. A priest would lead the congregation to the fields and light the fire himself.
Why would the Goat choose such a benevolent, though powerful, sabbat to begin the madness again?
On June 3 Tina Barnett, twenty, disappeared while walking to the Head Shop Hairstylists, where she worked part-time in the afternoons. Having recently relocated from Los Angeles, she had no family and few friends in the area. Several of those interviewed spoke of her with a general sense of distaste, even contempt. Tina Barnett was a young woman with a history of alcohol and cocaine addiction who’d voluntarily admitted herself into the Panecraft drug rehab program. Some believed she’d simply fallen off the wagon and returned to L.A., bored with the slower pace of a small town. Most of her few belongings were gone. Because of that, it took months before a possible connection was made between the two women. Symbolically, she was buried in the back pages until the next woman vanished.
No corresponding sabbat.
Person or persons unknown set fire to ten neighborhood house cats.
Swastikas were drawn in lipstick on the faces of seventeen newborns in the viewing nursery of the maternity ward of Summerfell General.
Joanne Sadler was sixteen, attractive, and wanted to be a poet able to make a living from her work, which she realized was nearly impossible. She was an honors student. Her poetry had already been published in numerous literary magazines, journals that had rejected Matthew when he was her age, and several times since. She vanished from the high school on the morning of July 28, after attending the first half of her Advanced English summer class. At 10:30 there was a twenty-five-minute break for lunch, during which some students went outside and relaxed from the intensive writing course. When class resumed Joanne’s seat remained empty and Mr. Spinetti questioned her friends, all of whom believed her to be in the bathroom. She never returned, and wasn’t the type of girl to cut school at all, much less a summer class three hours long that counted for three times as much at the end of the session.
By two A.M. the following morning Joanne’s hysterical mother lay tranquilized in Panecraft. The newspaper photograph showed her husband beside a hospital bed, his wrung hands knotted atop his wife’s sleeping form, hollowed eyes nothing but two charcoal slashes.
Only three days from Lughnasadh—Lammas—on July 31, a holiday celebrating the ripening of apples, and more important that of winter wheat, which was made into loaves and then blessed in church. It was also a day of accounts, when Scottish farmers took their first grain harvest to pay the rent.
A day of collecting.
Still, such a nurturing sabbat. Why take her then?
In church, one out of every ten missals was inexplicably replaced with a copy of Anton LaVey’s miserably self-indulgent The Satanic Bible.
August 3. With the worst thunderstorm the county had seen in five years uprooting trees and sinking boats in the harbor, Steve Callaghan and Dominic Lowe decided to rob the local Stop-’n’-Shop. Their faces and voices were recorded clearly on the store video camera—Steve taking a bite out of a fruit pie as he shot the night clerk in the face, and Dom’s moronic giggling loud and much less than human as he vaulted the counter, kicked the dead clerk in the head, and poured half his stolen beer over the body. Their car was found the next day, less than a mile away, in an empty patch of scrub wood, the gun on the floor of the passenger side. The five remaining bullets had been fired into the dashboard and windshield, splayed as if fending off multiple attackers—the stolen $64.43 lay scattered on the front seat. There was no blood of any type.
They were two seventeen-year-old cracker thugs who never came back and would never be missed, not by the elderly neighbors they tormented or even their own white trash families. Police were hesitant to add this case to the others, but it appeared, for the time being, that no other scenario could be worked out. Hodges refused to give comment, but the questions were obvious.
Only three days after Lammas—balancing out the murder of Joanne Sadler? The account paid?
The front door of the Sauter house was equipped with three interior locks that Mr. and Mrs. Eric Sauter heard snapped in place behind them by the baby-sitter as they left their home on the evening of September 21. Their next-door neighbor, eighteen-year-old Donna May-banks, was a thoroughly amiable, somewhat neurotic girl who constantly complained about her cheekbones and fat thighs, but proved especially capable of taking charge of their sleeping four-year-old daughter Sarah while the Sauters attended a real estate business seminar.
“She never thought she was pretty enough,” Mrs. Sauter told the Gazette. Donna had begun her freshman year at Gallows Community College, her major being oceanography. When the Sauters returned at ten that night they found their daughter on the couch with her I Love You Truly Trudy doll sitting upright beside her, the child eating potato chips and melted ice cream, watching the most visceral scenes of a slasher flick on cable television. Donna’s tattered copy of Jackie Collins’s Ro
ck Star lay beside Sarah on the sofa. When questioned, the child told her parents that she’d been awakened by extremely loud laughter, and came downstairs to find Donna gone. The front and back doors remained locked from the inside. None of the windows appeared to have been tampered with.
A keen-eyed deputy found that I Love You Truly Trudy had been smeared with a dab of blood between its plastic legs, as if signifying menstruation.
The autumnal equinox, September 21, when day and night, male and female forces are equal, a time of second harvests when the Eleusinian rites are performed in the name of Demeter and Persephone. Why wasn’t the child harmed, if the Goat was taking blood? Why the little gibe with the doll? Matthew thought that Donna being a student of oceanography might have something to do with her being chosen; perhaps she’d strayed into the caves, studying the tides. Perhaps Elemi the fishboy was still around.
He added up the days, seeking another cycle, checking meteorological reports to see if lunar phases were catalysts. He sought out distances between events, looked for angles, degrees. A.G. was altogether separate.
As he rose from the microfiche table Matthew turned and saw Jazz standing behind him, reading the articles over his shoulder.
“Jazz?”
Pale and looking spaced, Jazz nodded as if hearing him from a distance. “Hey.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I checked some of your old haunts and figured you’d be here,” Jazz said quietly, motionless and paling even more. “You’ve been busy, Mattie? Think you’re going to help your old buddy.” His voice warbled. “I thought you’d want to know that they just found one of those missing kids.” Trembling, sweating now and looking sicker, Jazz fell into the chair. He glanced at the screen, and looked up at Matthew as if seeing him for the first time. “My girlfriend works the switchboard. Cindy Banks, captain of the debate team, remember her? She gave me a call.” Jazz bent forward. “A.G. should die, you know. Mattie, it’s all become such a fuckin’ mess.”
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