“Just calm down, Elizabeth, okay? You’re really freaking me out. Look, I’ve got something else to show you.”
Dakota held an ornate knife in her hand. The blade was curved like a crescent moon, and the handle was carved out of some sort of bone. Elizabeth looked closer at the intricate detail on the handle. It was a goat.
“I found Roland de Winter’s ritual room.”
“What the hell is that?”
“It’s called an athame. It’s a ritual dagger used by primitive religions.”
“Used for what?”
“Magic,” Dakota said, “Summoning primal power, sacrifice.”
“You’re telling me this is the knife Roland de Winter used to kill young girls?”
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?
Dakota looked hurt. “I thought you would be interested.”
“How many times do I have to tell you I am not interested in the fucking occult?
Elizabeth pushed back the covers and sat up on the side of the bed. Her head felt swollen and buzzed with the muffled sound of distant bees.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m getting out of here.”
“You’re in no condition to go anywhere. You can barely walk.”
“I can handle myself. Just get out of here. Go. You’re doing me more harm than good with all your bullshit.”
“Suit yourself.” Dakota looked at her like she was a child ordering her mother out of her room. Shaking her head, she got up and left the room.
The madness had to stop, starting now. No more astrology, no more therapy, and no more Morphenol. She would call Gavin and he would come and take her away. She would do anything the studio wanted. Commit herself to a real mental hospital if that’s what it would take. She didn’t want to be someone’s guinea pig any longer.
Elizabeth found her housecoat and wrapped it around her shoulders. Her movements were sluggish. She padded barefoot across the carpet to the door, opened it a crack and stood listening and waiting. If she made it this far without feeling light headed, then she could make it downstairs to the parlor. Confident that the upper hall was clear, she glided toward the staircase, slipping silently down the steps and into the parlor without running into anyone.
As she dialed the number to Gavin’s office she remembered the last time she had tried to reach him the phone and the call had gone unanswered. Now she prayed that she would get through to him without any difficulty. She listened to the sound of ringing on the other end. Once, twice, then the receiver was lifted and she heard a soft voice say, “Hello?”
“Gavin, please. It’s Elizabeth York, I must speak with him.” The words poured out of her in a frantic rush.
“Who?”
Don’t do this, oh God, please don’t to this to me.
“Gavin Danvers,” she nearly shouted.
After a pause, the voice said. “There’s no one here by that name.”
“That’s impossible, there must be some mistake,” but she realized she was speaking to dead air. The connection had been broken.
She depressed the receiver and when the dial tone returned she dialed zero. The operator searched for the number of the Gavin Danvers Agency and then in her flat emotionless voice said, “There is no such listing.”
“That’s impossible!” There was no other word for it.
“I’m very sorry, madam.”
Oh, I doubt that. I doubt that very much.
She hung up and lifted the receiver one more time. She dialed the number to Diane and Camilla’s home. Their Mexican housekeeper picked up the call immediately.
Two minutes later she slammed down the phone in anger and disbelief. The woman didn’t understand English and didn’t seem to know the names of Diane and Camilla. Maybe in her haste she had dialed a wrong number. She would have to go back upstairs for her phone and address book, but Gavin’s number was one she knew by heart. And it was impossible, yes, impossible, that his business didn’t exist. People just don’t vanish out of your life as if they never existed.
Should she try to make a run for it? All she needed was to get dressed and grab her purse. She could leave everything else behind. If security let her through the gate, she could make it down to the main road. Someone would drive by and pick her up and she would be back on Mulholland Drive in no time at all.
In the short time she had been in the parlor the light from outside had grown darker. She drew back the edge of the curtain covering the window. The wind was up, wrestling with the shrubbery and trees which lined the driveway. Beyond, full bodied clouds, gray with the threat of rain, crept in from the sea.
Elizabeth shuddered and clutched her housecoat about her. She pressed a hand against the archway to steady herself. Her mouth felt stuffed with cotton, her lips like sandpaper. She tried to wet her lips with her tongue, but she was so dehydrated her mouth couldn’t produce any saliva. Who was she kidding? She was in no condition to make it down the driveway.
She crossed the hall to the drawing room, hoping to find water on the bar, only to find Jewel ensconced in her corner by the bookshelves, the perpetual litter of manuscripts and notes scattered on the couch around her.
Jewel peered at Elizabeth over the top of her half moon reading glasses. “What are you doing moping about?”
“I’m not moping.”
“You’re moping. Your lower lip is quivering and you’ve got that hang dog look on your face like you think everyone is out to get you.”
“Why do you insist on antagonizing me all the time?”
“No one’s antagonizing you, sweetheart.” Jewel took a long drag on her cigarette, scrutinizing Elizabeth through the haze of smoke that billowed about her. “I keep telling you this isn’t all about you. You have this distorted notion that it’s all about Elizabeth York. But, it’s not. It’s much more than that.”
Elizabeth poured a glass of soda water and, drinking it quickly, poured another.
“What are you talking about?”
“You still believe Sven Lindstrom was the victim of some random satanic madman, don’t you? Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that he was killed for a reason?”
“What a hateful thing to say.”
Jewel snorted. “If this so called Pentagram Killer was some random murderer getting his rocks off by slicing up his victims and setting it up to look like the work of devil worshippers, why did he stop at three?”
“I don’t understand.”
“If he was killing in the name of Satan, and still hasn’t been caught, why haven’t there been any more murders? Do you think someone with satanic blood lust is going to kill three people and live happily ever after? Those three men were killed for a reason, and you know it.”
Elizabeth turned her eyes away from Jewel’s penetrating gaze, but she couldn’t escape the woman’s insinuation. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Jewel said, puffing smoke into the air, “what’s the connection between Scottie Ferguson, Sven Lindstrom, and Peyton Mills?”
“There isn’t a connection. They barely knew each other.”
“Don’t kid yourself, honey. What do you even know about Sven Lindstrom?”
“He was a good man,” Elizabeth said, “a loving man.”
Jewel mimicked her, “‘A good and loving man.’ Give me a break. You’re nothing but a sentimental schoolgirl caught up in the attentions of an older man. You don’t really know anything about him at all. Sven Lindstrom was nothing but a Swedish art hack. Have you actually watched those flicks? Overblown symbolic crap you’d have to be on drugs to understand. So how is it that he came to Hollywood and became an overnight sensation,” Jewel snapped her fingers, “just like that? Only in Hollywood, right? Well you’ve got it wrong, sister, dead wrong. Nobody gets anywhere in this town without a little help, and if you don’t get it from your friends, you have to get it somewhere else.”
Elizabeth pinched her lower lip. She didn’t like where this was
going. She wanted to clamp her hands over her ears and run from the room, but she could not pull herself away from what Jewel had to say.
“What about Ferguson and Mills? Did they struggle for years to get where they did? They came out of nowhere and arrived at the top of their fields. The cinematographer steps out of film school and immediately starts racking up international accolades, and the screenwriter snags an Oscar for his first script – his first script. No one is that lucky, not without someone else pulling the strings. Take a good, hard look at Hollywood. We’re surrounded by the best and the most beautiful. You can’t eat lunch without seeing an Oscar winner at the next table, actors, directors, producers, you name it. Half of them are no talent hacks, and the truth is they didn’t get where they are without a little outside help.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that given the chance, anyone in this town would sell their soul for fame and stardom.”
“My husband did not sell his soul to the Devil, if that’s what you are implying.”
Jewel stubbed out her cigarette. “It’s time to wake up.”
Wake up, Betty.
“It’s not true.”
“You’re a real mess, you know it? You’ve been here how long, a week? And you can’t even see what’s right under your nose.”
“Stop doing this to me.”
Jewel picked up the little black book Elizabeth had found in her suitcase the day of her arrival. She gave the book a shake and a photograph drifted out onto her lap. Jewel picked it up between two blood-red fingernails.
“Have you seen this?”
“Dakota showed it to me.”
“Have you looked at it?”
“I don’t want to see it.”
“You need to look at it. Go ahead. Take a long hard look,” Jewel held up the black and white photograph for Elizabeth to see. “Take it. Look closer. Tell me what you see.”
Elizabeth looked at the photograph. It was taken in this very room. More than thirty years had passed, but the room had changed very little. In the center of the shot was Roland de Winter, movie star handsome in his black tie and tails and the trim black Van Dyke beard which gave him a sinister look. His piercing eyes gazed out at her from the photograph. Beside him sat a woman with black hair in a bejeweled white dress, Madelyn de Winter, and on her lap sat a thin blond boy about the age of eight.
“Closer,” Jewel said.
Elizabeth scanned the other people in the photograph, several other men and women, all as elegantly dressed as the de Winters. Then her eyes were drawn to a young girl standing at the left of the entourage. Elizabeth looked at Jewel, and then at the photograph.
“It’s you.”
Jewel purred.
“It was you. You killed him.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Why not? You’re prone to violence. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You can’t control your anger. You’ve physically assaulted your critics. I saw you throw a chair at a man on The Merv Griffin Show.”
Jewel only laughed.
“You’ve been a part of this dirty little cult all along, haven’t you?”
“Oh sure, I’ve been around awhile, but I’m not the only one. You need to look a lot closer.”
Her eyes scanned the faces, moving from left to right across the photograph and back again.
And then her eyes came to rest on the little boy sitting on Madelyn de Winter’s lap. It was easy to see how she missed it at first, but now she could see the resemblance in the pointed shoulders, the narrow face, the thick glasses.
A crack of thunder rattled the windows in the drawing room causing Elizabeth to nearly jump out of her skin.
“It can’t be,” Elizabeth said.
“It is,” Jewel said, “none other than Clark de Winter.”
“It can’t be true.”
“It can and it is. Why do you think he set up his clinic in this crazy house to begin with? Because he is the rightful heir of La Casa del Mar. De Winter died in prison and his wife took little Clark and fled to Switzerland. After all his father’s infamous notoriety, can you blame her? And now Clark de Winter, better known as Clark Abernathy, has returned to claim his inheritance where he can pump his victims full of his hallucinogenic wonder drug.”
Elizabeth’s eyes grew wide. She looked around the room, glancing toward the hallway in the direction of Dr. Abernathy’s study, as if he would come running after her with his spurting hypodermic needle at any moment.
This could not be happening. But it made sense, perfect, horrible sense.
Jewel threw back her head and laughed her deep throaty laugh.
She had to get out of here. Now. She’d crawl if she had to.
Elizabeth ran from the room, Jewel’s laughter rising in pitch and growing louder in her ears until it sounded like something else altogether.
It sounded like a goat laughing at her.
Chapter Thirteen
Elizabeth clutched the banister of the stairway, using it to support her and pull herself up the stairs as fast as she possibly could. Her mind reeled with the horrors. Abernathy was the son of Hollywood’s most notorious practitioner of Black Magic. Gavin had sent her here and then conveniently disappeared. Dear God, had this been his plan all along, to deliver her to the gaping maw of evil? She didn’t want to believe that the man who had been her agent and her friend would betray her this way.
Wake up, Betty.
Sent to this place where who knows how much depravity had gone on in the 1930s, drugged out of her mind, all these things planted as evidence to make her seem like she was loosing her mind, murders committed in an attempt to make it seem like she had done them, even Dakota’s phony astrological chart implying that she had a split personality.
Wake up, Betty.
She was wide awake now, oh yes, indeed.
Another clap of thunder boomed over the house. The lights flickered. There was one last hope, the last person she could trust. She hurried down the hall in the men’s wing and beat her open palms against his door.
“What’s happening?” Bryce said as he opened the door.
“Thank God you’re here. I need your help.”
The hall was bathed in a heavy gloom. She could hear the wind and rain beating against the walls and windows of the house.
“What is it?”
“I need to get out of here. Now. Will you take me?”
Bryce eyed her with concern. “Has Dr. Abernathy discharged you?”
Elizabeth knew she must seem desperate, or crazy, or both. “Please don’t ask me any questions. Will you take me? Just say you will.”
“Of course I will, but I don’t understand.”
“I don’t have time to explain. Just let me pack the rest of my things. I’ll only be a few minutes.”
“You want to leave now?” The expression on his face was a mixture of bemusement and bewilderment. The house trembled as another volley of thunder shook its foundations.
“Can you?”
“Sure. Of course.”
Elizabeth clutched his sleeve. “Bryce, promise me you won’t say anything to anyone, not even to Dr. Abernathy.”
“What’s this all about?”
“Promise!”
“Okay. Okay. I promise.”
She kissed him quickly on the cheek, then on second thought touched his mouth with her fingers and kissed his lips.
In her room she threw her suitcase open on the bed, dragging clothes from the hangers in the wardrobe, stuffing them haphazardly into the suitcase. She’d have time to sort everything out later. The important thing was to get out of here as soon as possible while she was still lucid. And alive.
The glass rattled in the window as another bolt of thunder assaulted the house. An icy chill crept into the room. The lights flickered again. In the next moment they went out altogether. She knew there was a candelabra on top of the dresser. Her fingers scrabbled across the top of the dresser until they found the book of match
es. Her hands shook and she had difficulty ripping a match from the book. She struck the match several times before it lit. Touching the match to the candles, they burst into flame, dispelling the shadows.
Elizabeth jerked open the top drawer of the dresser, toppling one of the candles from the candelabra onto the top of the bureau.
The thing in the drawer looked less realistic than the other ones. Whoever had made this one had less time to spend on details, but the shank of straight, blond hair was unmistakably Dakota’s.
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