by Phoef Sutton
Noel raised his hand. Will nodded to him, giving his assent. “My name is Noel. I’m a Targeted Individual.” A man in a suit sitting next to Gail crossed his legs in what seemed to Crush to be a rather annoyed fashion. “Hi, Noel,” everyone said.
Noel began. “Some of you have heard this before but I feel the need to share it again.” He looked straight at Crush and Gail as he spoke. “This is my story.”
The man sitting next to Gail sighed. Crush noticed that he wore a white surgical mask over his face. This place was full of all kinds of crazy, Crush thought as Noel opened a worn spiral notebook and prepared to read from it.
Crush frowned and whispered to Gail, “This is going to take some time,” and Gail shushed him. She had no idea.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE STATEMENT OF NOEL ZERBE
First of all, let me state categorically that I do not know what became of Renee Zerbe. I hope she rests in peace, as the saying goes. But I fear her fate is a far, far worse one.
I’m speaking of the first days of the twentieth century. January of the year 2001. (And don’t tell me that the century started in the year 2000. I can count. I know there was no year 0 in the Gregorian calendar.) I was enrolled in Pasadena Preparatory School at that time and had no notion of the plans and machinations that the Overlords use in plotting against us. I was more interested in the eldritch secrets of the past: sorcery, wizardry, and necromancy. With some close friends, I played various games in which we took the characters and guises of ancient and powerful characters. Dungeons & Dragons. Call of Cthulhu. Shadowrun. These were called “role-playing games” by amateurs, but for those with more awareness of the arcane past, these “innocent pastimes” provided rituals through which one could gain access to the Ancient Knowledge.
My comrades in this quest for enlightenment were varied and joined me for a variety of reasons. Some, like my twin brother Kendrick (called K.C.), did so out of a sense of filial responsibility. My sister Angela pursued arcane secrets mainly to make our father angry. Others, like my cousin Renee, did so out of genuine curiosity and desire to know more of the secrets of the past and the present and the future. Some, like my muscle-bound and rather dim-witted half-brother, Caleb, did it out of stupid loyalty. There were others, like Evan Gibbard and Sonny Kraus, who mainly took part in the investigations from a decadent desire to taste taboos of any sort. They were merely placeholders. Spear carriers in the production I was trying to mount. Renee and K.C. were my real coconspirators.
After a time, these store-bought games and rituals became dull and pedestrian to me. I needed to reach deeper into the primordial source of the unknown. I needed to touch the real, antediluvian depths of the forbidden and the fiend-inspired! I needed to find a place where the veil between this world and the other was thin and could be pierced with incantations of proper antiquity.
There was but a single place in all of Los Angeles County that fit my needs. It was, oddly, right in my own backyard. Or near to it. At the northern end of the Arroyo Seco was the aptly named Devil’s Gate. From time immemorial there have been hushed whispers of the nature of that unholy landscape. Tales that spoke of it as the very gateway to Hell itself.
The Devil’s Gate was an ancient formation on the rock face of the Arroyo Seco that, some said, bore the image of Satan himself. At the very least, the jagged boulders resembled the face of a terrible, demon-like, horned creature, its features contorted in laughter at some unheard, undreamed-of jest. The Tongva Indians, in the time before the Europeans came, told of eerie, nightmarish sounds that the water made as it ran through the gorge. Sounds like the cacophonous laughter of many malignant spirits. The indigenous peoples shunned the place as evil and malevolent.
In the 1920s, the Army Corps of Engineers, in their wisdom, decided to build a dam there to control flooding. And thus they preserved the Devil’s Gate and kept it dry. They even built a tunnel through it. Why? No one can say.
In the 1940s, a society of occultists became fascinated with the Devil’s Gate Dam. The group was led by esteemed rocket scientist Jack Parsons, one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and a follower of infamous British occultist Aleister Crowley. Rumor has it that they performed rituals that were intended to open a portal to Hell itself.
In the 1950s, Jack Parsons was killed in a mysterious explosion that demolished his mansion on Orange Grove Boulevard.
After that, the strange incidents at Devil’s Gate Dam took a more sinister turn. Several children were reported missing in the area. In time a serial killer, Mack Ray Edwards, took credit for the disappearances. Edwards was a highway construction worker, and the children’s bodies were found buried in the concrete foundation of the freeway that borders the dam. Before he hung himself in a cell in San Quentin State Prison, Edwards is reported to have said that the devil made him kill the children.
But the disappearances at Devil’s Gate did not stop with Edwards’s death. Two other children vanished into thin air. One was hiking with his parents; he walked ahead, turned a corner, and simply disappeared. The other, returning to a campsite, was never heard from again.
Some believe that the rituals Jack Parsons and his acolytes performed in the Arroyo had succeeded all too well in opening that portal to Hell and transforming the area into a magnet for some unknown malignant force. Others say that it is merely a coincidence that so many tragedies have occurred in this one spot. No one truly knows. The strange face in the rock refuses to divulge its secrets. Whatever joke it laughs at remains a mystery.
Needless to say, the Devil’s Gate Dam offered too tempting a target for our teenage explorations into the unknown to be ignored. On the appointed night, my crew was assembled at the top of the dam, ready to descend. The Colorado Boulevard Irregulars, we called ourselves. Named after the main thoroughfare in Pasadena, Colorado Boulevard, and the juvenile helpers of Sherlock Holmes, the Baker Street Irregulars. K.C. had come up with this rather whimsical name and I let it stand, because it amused me.
It had not been easy to gather the Irregulars. It was just after the New Year’s holiday and family obligations had nearly put an end to my well-laid plans. It was only after considerable cajoling and wheedling on my part that I was able to cobble the band together. Angela stayed home, flatly refusing to go along. Gibbard and Kraus had only been able to join us by claiming they were doing charity work for their church. (Which, in a way, they were.) K.C., of course, was always at my beck and call. Being as he was my identical twin and the younger of us, I held some sort of psychic thrall over him. And Caleb, my idiot stepbrother, was easily influenced.
But Renee, the most important and the most necessary of the Colorado Boulevard Irregulars, was the most difficult to recruit for the occasion. The reasons for this difficulty were twofold. First, she had been selected as the Rose Queen. This was part of a primitive midwinter festival of harvest and rebirth known as the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena. Every year, a beautiful, nubile young virgin (it was hoped) was selected from the residents of Pasadena to be a sacrifice to the floral gods. Not an actual sacrifice, you understand, at least not normally. No blood is shed; no organs are removed. America has grown too sophisticated for such aboriginal practices. It is more of a ceremonial sacrifice. Renee would ride on a structure made of dying flowers and offer herself to the crowds and the television cameras and the Goodyear blimp and the Blue Angels as they jetted high above. She would be an offering to the New Year in the hopes that it would be a propitious one and that all would have good luck in 2001. From the viewpoint of the future, one can only say that it did not turn out that way. Not at all.
Renee viewed her position as Rose Queen from a sardonic outlook at best. Her mother, a transplant from Europe, had wanted the honor for her daughter far more than Renee ever did. Renee had seen it more as a social experiment. She wondered: Could a liberal, atheist, communist anarchist really obtain this most Republican of honorifics? If she did her hair and her lips and her nails just so, would t
he powers-that-be not see past her perfect, smiling exterior and into the dank darkness of her decadent soul? As she waved to the crowds on Colorado Boulevard, she would think of it as a practical joke on the whole of America.
But that wasn’t the reason it was hard to get her down in the Devil’s Dam. There was a more mysterious reason. Renee’s research. She was mum about it and shared few details with even her most intimate friends, of which I was surely one. All she would say was that her investigations involved tracing her own genealogy back to France, back to Germany, back to the Gauls, back to the Romans and beyond. She said there were dark secrets there. Secrets that would make the blood of even the strongest man run cold. Secrets that would make those hidden in the Devil’s Gate seem like mere child’s play. Secrets that were among the darkest and most horrible the world has ever known. Secrets that had recently led her father to take his own life, during the celebration of the Tournament of Roses.
After that, the black cloud that had always hung over my cousin Renee seemed to descend upon her and swallow her whole. Her father consummated the true meaning of the Tournament by taking his life during the parade. Still, I persuaded her to take time away from her grief to join me in my investigations into the nature of reality and unreality. To join me in delving into the cryptic mysteries of the Devil’s Gate Dam.
We stood atop the soaring arches of the Devil’s Gate Dam just as the sun was disappearing in the west. In the fast-fading twilight we descended the impossibly narrow concrete steps from the top of the levee down into the depths of the Arroyo. It is the nature of Southern California that the land is bone-dry 364 days out of the year, so the dam that was built to hold back flooding waters stood on a dusty, parched riverbed for most of the year. Therefore, as we walked single file down the precarious staircase into the dark ravine, we arrived on land that was as arid as the surface of the moon.
We brought some equipment with us. Flashlights to illuminate our way. Cell phones to communicate with each other. Candles, matches, ropes, and chalk for other purposes. K.C. had even brought a first-aid kit, in case of unforeseen accidents. He was so responsible.
We stood on the floor of the ravine and gazed up. A gorge of problematical depth rose above us on all sides and, as we approached the Devil’s Gate, the beams from our flashlights played eerily on the rugged granite cliffs and crossed each other like the arms of an iridescent octopus swimming in the depths of a murky ocean.
As we crept across the Arroyo, a wild screaming suddenly filled the air, like the crazed laughter of a thousand maniacal children. Gibbard yelped like a little kitten and nearly dropped his light. Renee snorted derisively. “Calm down,” she said. “It’s just the feral parrots of Pasadena. You’ve heard them before.” The tropical birds had supposedly escaped from a private aviary in the 1930s and found the warm climate of the Southland perfectly hospitable for them and their descendants.
“Yes,” Gibbard said. “But not at night. And not sounding like that.”
“Perhaps they’re imitating some sound they’ve heard in the area,” Renee said. “Parroting the Demon’s laugh.”
“That’s not funny,” Gibbard said.
“The Demon thinks it’s funny,” said Kraus. “Listen to him.” And the parrots kept up their loud, incessant gibbering from above.
“Don’t make fun, Kraus,” I said. “He’s right to be afraid. You don’t understand what the parrots are saying. They are imitating an ancient language known only to a few expert scholars of archaic lore.”
“You’re so full of shit. What are they saying, then?”
“That they are psychopomps.”
“You’re making that up.”
“Not at all. A psychopomp is a spirit who escorts newly deceased souls from this world to the next. Like whippoorwills or ravens. Or the Grim Reaper, if you insist on being obvious.”
Gibbard covered his ears. “I wish they’d shut up!”
“Oh, no you don’t,” I said. “As long as they’re still calling out, that means they’re waiting for a soul to be delivered to them. But once they’re silent, once they fly away, that means they have one in their clutches. That someone has died and they’re carrying his soul to Hades.”
Kendrick gasped, but when I looked over at him I saw that his ejaculation was not caused by what we were saying. Rather it was occasioned by what K.C. saw in the beam of his flashlight. There rising before him like a cyclopean monstrosity was the Devil’s Gate itself. It looked far grander and more horrendous than I had anticipated. The twisted, gnarled expression seemed to burst forth from the granite and cry out either in anguish or ecstasy or both. The jagged horns on the monster’s forehead seemed to stab at the stars like daggers of stone.
“Is that it?” asked Caleb in his halting, lumbering tone.
“Yes, that’s it, Caleb. We can set up the ceremonial circle now.”
I used the rope to fashion a crude ring, and with chalk I drew the hoary symbols I had learned from an ancient book of proscribed and unnamable lore. I won’t tell you the incantations and rituals we performed; it wouldn’t be wise. I can say only that it took some time and that while we held hands and chanted, a wind commenced to blow. The gust, trapped in the wind tunnel of the Arroyo, began to spiral and twist into a sandstorm, what we call in the terminology of the region, a “dust devil.” Appropriate, no? The parrots cried out in a deafening cacophony, all but drowning out our intonations.
What was the purpose of our incantations? To open the gate to the other world. To communicate with whatever lay beyond. I should have suspected, but didn’t know, that Renee had a more specific goal in mind.
The moment we finished with our ululations, the winds ceased too, but the birds continued with their harsh cries so that we did not realize it at first. And the moment we knew that the miniature twister had ended, our attention was drawn to yet another sound. A low moan that came from the bottom of the Devil’s Gate. A bass vibration that rumbled in my rib cage and made my teeth rattle. I looked to the others and saw that they could hear it, too. Or rather they could feel it, in their bones.
Kraus and Gibbard took off for the stairs, climbing and stumbling for the safety of the outside world. I let them go. This was no place for dilettantes. Renee turned her flashlight toward the source of the sonorousness. There was an old, rusted gate set into the granite wall of the gorge and, beyond that, there was a dark and ominous tunnel leading off into the unknown. The sound boomed out of that tunnel, as if it were a speaker in the stage equipment of some cosmic rock band.
She approached the gate and reached out so that her fingertips brushed the bars. They vibrated to her touch. “It’s behind here,” she said.
“What’s behind there?” Caleb intoned.
“The psychopomp,” Renee said. “Or whatever we summoned.”
K.C. heard that and fainted dead away. “For God’s sake, brother,” I said, shaking his shoulder. “It’s only the wind.”
Renee shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. Then she made her move. Renee, it should be understood, was small but very athletic. She had been a gymnast in her younger days. So when she climbed up the gate and slipped between two broken bars, then dropped down onto the other side, I wasn’t surprised. I was appalled, not surprised.
“Renee,” I said, supplicating. “What are you doing?”
“Exploring the unknown,” she said. And then she was gone, running off into the darkness. The parrots screamed louder as I tried to climb the gate and follow her, but to no avail. I wasn’t the gymnast that Renee was, and I slipped back down the bars, tearing my palms and skinning my knees. I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and dialed Renee. She answered, her voice sounding distorted due to the echoing from the tunnel walls. “Hello, Renee here! What’s up?”
“Come back! You don’t know what you’re doing!”
“I know exactly what I’m doing! I’m going to see my father!”
“Don’t! Don’t open that door, Renee!”
“It’
s already open!”
“Come back here this instant!” I cried.
Caleb lumbered up beside me and grasped the bars in his big, beefy hands. At first I didn’t know what he was doing, then I began to hear grunting noises coming from low in his chest and I understood. The big man had sensed my distress and was trying to bend the bars so I could pass through. A loyal creature, always.
I heard Renee gasp over the phone. “What?” I asked her.
“My God, Noel! If you could only see what I’m seeing!”
Was she teasing me? I cursed the bars that were keeping me from her and yelled over the shrieking parrots. “What? What do you see?”
“It’s terrible, Noel! Monstrous! Unbelievable!”
Caleb grunted more loudly and strained at the bars, the veins in his arms bulging with the effort. “What is it, Renee?” I shouted into the phone.
“God! I never dreamed of this!” she said, her voice trembling.
“What?”
Through the phone, there was a sound of shuffling feet. Of quick steps. Of running. Then Renee’s voice came through. Panicked. Unnerved. Terror-stricken. “Noel! Oh God, I should never have come! Leave! Get out! Run! It’s your only chance!”
“What…”
“Don’t ask me to explain! Beat it! Go!”
My mind whirled. Caleb grunted, braced himself, put all his strength into his arms while I screamed into the phone and the parrots squawked ever louder and louder. The phone signal began to cut out. I could only hear fragments of what she was saying. “…hellish things…curse…legions…”
“Renee, are you there?” Then, all at once, silence. Silence more deafening than the loudest noise. The parrots suddenly and without warning ceased their chatter and took wing, flying en masse over the face of the moon, so that their bat-like shadows flittered over the mouth of the tunnel. And the low, rumbling sound was gone too. So was any audible trace of Renee from my phone. “Renee!” I shouted. “Are you there?”