Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  Within weeks of being settled, I knew I had nothing to do with my time. I found myself going into town on small, useless errands, to get paper clips, or to see if I could find The New York Times at some newsstand within a fifteen mile radius. The town, while not worth describing, was less planned than it was spontaneous; it had been a citrus boomtown before the Second World War, and after, it was a town for people to find cute places in, but to not do much else. From the freeway, it looked like stucco and smog, but from within, it was pretty, quaint, quiet, and even charming on a cool October afternoon. The library captivated my interests, since I had been a history teacher and was an avid reader. It was full of documents about the town and its architecture, fairly unique to southern California, because most of its buildings were a hundred years old rather than built since 1966.

  I found our house, Tierraroja, had at least one story about it. This I learned, briefly, at first, from a local newspaper account from 1952. It seemed the Redlander family had left suddenly, and the house was empty; no one could discover the mystery of their whereabouts. When I went to the librarian, a man named Ed Laughlin, he asked me why I was so interested in the house.

  “I live there,” I said.

  He smiled. “Yeah, right.”

  “No, really. My wife and I moved in the middle of September.”

  He chuckled. “Who’s your realtor?”

  I told him the name.

  Again he laughed. “Should’ve known. She’s been trying to unload that place for two years.”

  “Are there ghosts?” I asked, hoping that there might be just for something different.

  He shook his head. “Nothing that unbelievable. Just that old Joe Redlander chopped up his wife and kids one night. Nobody knew it until about a year after they were gone. The new owners found body parts all over the place, hidden in secret places. They found Joe eventually up in Mojave, but he claimed he didn’t do it. He’d found them like that, he said, but the police weren’t buying because first off he ran and second off his prints were all over the ax. Heard he blew his brains out up in Atascadero or someplace like it.”

  2

  I parked in front of my wife’s studio; the doors were open, letting in the last of October sun, almost a light blue sunlight, through her canvases and jars, making her brown-gray hair seem almost cool and icy. I went up to her, kissed her, and looked at the painting she was doing. It was from memory, of the pond that had been behind her mother’s house back in Connecticut. She had just put the light on the water; and it wasn’t New England light, but sprays of California light. I waved to Stu, our gardener, who was trimming back what had in midsummer been a blossoming trumpet vine, but which was becoming, as winter approached, a tangle of gray sticks.

  “He’s so dedicated,” Jackie said, “I think I’m going to ask him to sit for a portrait. His face—it has those wonderful crags in it. He’s just about our age, but he looks younger, and then, those lines. And the way he holds the flowers sometimes.” She shook her head in subtle awe, and I wondered if my wife was in the throes of a schoolgirl crush on our gardener.

  “We had some murders in our house,” I told her, figuring it was the best way to make her think of something other than Stu.

  She grinned, shaking her head at me as if I’d been a bad boy. “Good God, you’d think you’d have better things to do than make up stories just to frighten me.”

  “No, really. I was down at the library. The guy who named our house killed his family. You’re not afraid, are you?”

  She gave me what I had come, through the years, to call her Look Of False Brain Damage. Then she set the large flat board she used as a palette down on the cement floor, and began dipping her brushes in turpentine.

  “Well, I’m finished for the day,” she said. “You making dinner, or me?”

  I shrugged. “I guess I can. Spaghetti or chicken?”

  “Spaghetti’s fine,” she said, and then, bending over, picked something up. It was the urn. “I still can’t get this lid off. I’ve been prying and prying. Think my Mister Strongman can do it?”

  She passed it to me. I made a brave attempt, but could not get the old ashtray off the urn.

  “You tried melting the wax?”

  She shook her head. “Not yet. You’re so smart and strong,” mocking me, “I’m sure you can get it open for me.”

  I gave the urn a good shake, and heard that thing inside it again. Hard. Like a large rock. “You know,” I said, “this guy Redlander chopped his wife and kids up—there were three—and then put their body parts in weird places in the house. Maybe they didn’t find all of them. Maybe one of them’s in here. Maybe it’s the missing hand of little Katy Redlander.”

  Jackie made a face. “Don’t you dare try and scare me.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “it’s Mrs. Redlander’s left breast, all hardened around the mummified nipple.”

  I didn’t bother trying to open the urn until after dinner. Jackie went into the living room to watch TV, and I stayed in the kitchen. I turned on the gas stove and put the edge of the urn’s top near it. Wax began dripping down into the flame, making blue hisses. When the wax seemed to be loosening enough, I pulled on the ashtray, and it made a sucking sound. Then I twisted it, and it came off. I wondered if, in fact, little Katy Redlander’s missing hand might not be inside the urn. I sniffed at it, and it smelled of tobacco. I held the urn up and tipped it, and out dropped a smoking pipe.

  I picked it up off the floor, setting the urn on the edge of the counter. I sniffed the pipe. Smelled like cherry tobacco. A very uninteresting find, although the pipe was quite beautifully carved in rich red wood, a satyr’s face. A satyr, I thought, to chase the nymphs of fate on the outside of the urn. Carved clumsily, as if by a child, into the base of the satyr’s bearded chin, were the initials “J. R.”

  Joe Redlander.

  “So that’s why it’s covered with an ashtray,” my wife said when I showed her. “Somebody was trying to quit smoking.”

  “So he seals his pipe up and hides it.”

  “Or has someone else hide it for him.”

  “Joe Redlander,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “The guy—you know, the guy I told you about.”

  “Oh, right. The Lizzie Borden of Groveton, California.”

  I paced about the room, holding the pipe in one hand, the urn in the other. Jackie kept shooing me around so she could watch TV in peace, but I kept crossing in front of her. “His wife wants him to quit smoking the pipe. But he wants it. So she seals it up and hides it. He begs her for it. He begs the kids, maybe even bribes them, to show him where Mommy put it. But the kids know better, or else they don’t have a clue. And then, when it gets to be too much, he gets the ax he’s chopped up all the wood with that afternoon, and he says, ‘Dolores.’”

  Jackie interrupted. “Dolores?”

  “Whatever,” I said. “Joe says, ‘Nancy, if you don’t tell me where my pipe is, I’m taking you and the kids out.’ And she thinks he’s joking, so she laughs, and he,” and here I mimed whacking my invisible wife with the pipe.

  As if she had a moment of supreme victory, Jackie said, “Ah, just like you and your pistachio ice cream?”

  “I never chopped you up for that, did I?”

  “You would’ve liked to. You were going to become a blimp the way you ate it. I did you a favor by throwing it out. The way you whined for days after that, you’d think I took away your soul.”

  I made a Three Stooges eye-poking gesture at her and an appropriate noise. “Okay, anyway, so then he goes to the kids, and they’re screaming, so he does them, too. And to think, if he’d only looked behind the old wrapping paper…”

  “The paper was old,” Jackie said, “but I don’t think it was from the fifties. And that pipe could’ve belonged to anybody. Jesus, Jim, you need a hobby.”

  “Look at the initials,” I said to prove my case, passing the pipe over to her.

  She looked at the pipe, its carved face, an
d then squinted at the satyr’s beard.

  “J. R.,” I said, “Joe Redlander. The man who killed his family.”

  “Your initials, too, Mister Smartypants. Could be James Richter,” she reminded me, “maybe the pipe’s meant for you.”

  Later, I put some tobacco in the pipe (for I was an inveterate smoker) and lit up, as if this would give me some inspiration.

  3

  I found the old crime, and the pipe and urn, occupying my thoughts after that. The wrapping paper wasn’t from the fifties, I discovered, but a kind that was sold by Girl Rangers in the mid-seventies. So, I figured, someone else had found the urn, too, and had hidden it. Maybe someone else knew of its secret. I went to the linen closet and looked back at the cubbyhole where the urn had been secreted; I reached back to it and found that by pushing one of the shelves aside, there was another hiding area. I moved the towels around and brought the shelf out. I leaned forward and reached back into this newfound hole, and came up with only a wadded scrap of notebook paper. It was wrapped in a spider web, which I dusted off, and then unfolded the paper. It was yellowed, and the kind that had large gaps between the thin red lines—the kind of paper children use before they’ve become adept at rocker curves and the like. In scraggly block letters in ink, it had several figures written across it. It actually looked like a pictographic language, until I realized that it was not some ancient tongue recorded, but the doodlings of perhaps a six-year-old. At the bottom, an initial: “K.” I folded it neatly and put it in my pocket. I would ignore it, perhaps throw it out. I didn’t even tell Jackie about finding it, because I didn’t want her to know the extent to which I was fascinated by the story of the Redlander family.

  I went back and read the obituaries of the old local newspaper, The Groveton Daily. For 1952, March 17, it listed Virginia Redlander and her children, Eric, eleven, May Lynne, nine, and Katherine, seven. So there was a Katy Redlander after all, I thought, how clairvoyant of me to have guessed it, considering I couldn’t predict weather or my own wife’s mood with anything greater than five percent accuracy. So little Katy had written what looked like a highly stylized hieroglyphics and had put it back in her secret place, not far from the urn.

  “Or maybe you’re just bored to death,” Jackie said when I finally showed her the wrinkled piece of paper that had occupied my mind for three nights in a row.

  We were in bed, and she was feeling amorous, while I was being indifferent to sex. “These diagrams,” I said, pointing to the one that looked as if it had an eye in the middle of it, with some kind of strange animal (a unicorn?) in its iris, “you think a second-grader really did this?”

  “My exact question to you,” my wife said, turning over finally. “I think, Jim, maybe you need to go back into teaching at least part-time or as a substitute, because you’re driving yourself and me crazy with all this weirdness.”

  I hadn’t even noticed how weird I had become in the past few nights. I looked around my side of the king-size bed, and there were books on Egyptology, and runes, and Greek mythology. I had checked out half the local library’s classical section, because those diagrams of Katy’s resembled a mix of mythic images, and I wondered if there were some key to it all.

  But I was being weird. So I leaned into my wife, kissing her neck. “I love you,” I said.

  “I was sure you were enamored of Katy Redlander’s ghost.”

  “I’ll throw those things out tomorrow,” I whispered, and she turned her face so I could kiss her, and we made love that night, but it was not like it had been when I’d felt more vital. I knew, at my age, I was still fairly young, but I did not believe it, and as my wife and I held each other, afterward, I wondered why it was not as interesting as when I was twenty, or thirty, or even forty, why sex and even food were pleasures that were losing their taste for me; and I wondered why life had to slip like that, why, I thought, looking out the window at the few deciduous trees in the yard, their leaves having turned the pale yellow of California autumn, why can’t we be like leaves, more beautiful when we are closer to the ends of our lives?

  I thought I saw something there, as I looked at the trees, something dark against the floodlights, not quite human, trotting away from the window as if it had just watched us.

  4

  In the morning I went to check the window, as if I would see footprints, but there were none. Jackie skipped her painting that day, and was going to drive into Los Angeles to visit with a friend, so I took to wandering. The empty field that bordered us beckoned me with its orange trees, for they held small but juicy yellow-green fruit, and I decided it was high time to pick an orange right from the tree. The grass in the field was just turning green again because of a recent rain, and I waded through it, mindful of snakes and fire ants. When I approached the fat orange trees, I glanced back at my house: It seemed tiny, like a house on the edge of a toy train track. The trees were powerfully aromatic, for some tiny white blossoms still clung to the branches; most of the oranges were wrinkled and inedible, but there were a few, at the highest branches, that were plump and only just mature. I got a stick and knocked on the uppermost branches until I managed to bat one down. It rolled into the rich earth that was dark and grassless between the several trees, and I went to retrieve it.

  There, on the ground, someone had drawn, with a stick, one of the same diagrams I had seen on Katy’s paper.

  The eye with the unicorn.

  I looked around the other trees, and by each of them, another drawing or diagram. A sketch of a dog? Or a pig? And then several lines with forked endings—snakes?

  But something else, too, there, in the dirt, beneath one of the orange trees: an animal, torn up beyond recognition, the size of a small dog.

  Dressed as if for a celebration with dozens of tiny orange blossoms stitched with a gay red thread through its mouth and around its eyes, and sutured along its guts.

  5

  It was a pig, as best I could determine, because in spite of its mutilations, its corkscrew tail was intact, and rather than stink of slaughter, it smelled fragrant with orange and just the scent of mint and sweet pepper—both of which grew wild in any direction across the field.

  Children, I thought, and then: Katy Redlander.

  The conflicting thought: but she’s dead.

  Then: a playmate.

  Some friend of hers from 1952, who giggled over arcane rituals they’d found in—a book? The Golden Bough? Or Jasper’s The Birth of Mythology!

  Some friend who grew up—would be, what? Forty-nine or so now? And still believed in ritual sacrifice in a sacred grove?

  I had read reports of Satanic cults in surrounding towns, and of fringe fundamentalist groups that held snakes and drank poison—how far from that was this?

  I left the animal there and went to spend the rest of the day in the library. I looked up pigs in both the Frazer and Jasper texts. In Frazer, pigs were associated with the Eleusinian Mysteries, the rites of Demeter, and the loss of Persephone for half the year—a resurrection cult. But it was in Jasper’s Birth of Mythology that I struck gold. In the fifth chapter, on mystery cults, Jasper writes:

  “What 20th century man fails to realize about these so-called ‘cults’ is that these rites brought the god or goddess closer to man, so that man, in his ignorance, would be inducted into the mystery of creation. The virgin would be buried with the other offerings for a moon, during which time the participants would dance and sing themselves into a frenzy, and fast, and often commit heinous acts as a way of unleashing the chaos of the human and divine soul, intermingled—all in the name of keeping the world spinning the correct way, of keeping it all in balance. Thus, when the virgin was buried alive, it was not an act of cruelty, but of unbound love for the child and for the very breath of life, for the virgin represented the eternal daughter, who died, was buried, and then resurrected into the arms of the Great Mother after a time in Hell. This is not so different from the rites of crucifixion, and burial of Christ, after all? And in this act,
the young woman who was sacrificed mated with the God, and returned to impart wisdom to the other participants in the Mysteries…”

  Beneath this were the diagrams I had found in the wadded paper.

  On the following page, a color plate showing the urn, of which mine was an obvious replica, of what I had thought were the Three Fates, dancing.

  The caption beneath it read: “The furies in disguise, dancing to lure youths into their circle, so that they might torment them into eternity.”

  I remembered a quote from somewhere: “Those whom the gods would punish, they first make mad.” And the story of Orestes, who had brought tragedy and dishonor down upon his House, tormented by the Furies in their most horrible aspect.

  Joe Redlander with an ax in his hand, holding down little Katy’s neck while he went chop-chop-chop.

  I could picture the house in disarray, the walls splattered with red, the boy trying to crawl away even while his father slammed the ax into his skull; and the mother, dead, cradling her other daughter, as if both were sleeping on the small rug in the hallway.

  I closed my eyes, almost weeping; when I opened them, I was still in the armchair of the reference room of the library. Ed Laughlin, the librarian I’d spoken with before, stood near me. He wore a pale suit that hid most of his paunch; his hair was slick and white, drawn back from the bald spot on top of his head. He squinted to read the cover of the book I had in my hands.

  “You feeling okay?” he asked, then, before I could answer, he said, “Ah, the ancient world. Fascinating. Coincidentally, I hope you noticed who donated most of our reference works on mythology, particularly fertility cults.”

  He gestured for the book, and I handed it to him. He flipped it closed, then opened it to the inside cover. He passed it back to me.

  I was not surprised.

  The bookplate read: “From the Library of Joseph and Virginia Redlander.”