Hymn

by Graham Masterton

  Lloyd turned to the report of the burned-out bus, to see if any of the names of the eyewitnesses matched those of Celia’s burning. The story stated that:

  . . . the only witness to the burning of the bus was a 12-year-old Pechanga Indian boy, nicknamed ‘Tony Express’, who has been blind since birth. Tony told Highway Patrol officers that he had heard a man’s voice shouting words that sounded like ‘You knew us’ in the vicinity of the bus while it was ablaze.

  Apart from a guess that the man was elderly, however, he was unable to identify any marked accent or linguistic peculiarity which might have given detectives a pointer.

  Lloyd looked back at the photograph of the man and the woman watching Celia burn. The man’s face was in shadow, because of the wide brim of his hat, but his stance and the stoop of his shoulders suggested to Lloyd that he was about sixty, sixty-five, maybe even older.

  But ‘you knew us’? What did that mean? Maybe he had torched the bus because the people in it could identify him. ‘You knew us’? ‘You knew us’?

  With that extraordinary power of which the human mind is sometimes capable—the power to add two and two together and come up with seven and a half—Lloyd found his eyes drawn across the coffee-table, past the spread-out newspapers, to the photocopies that he had made of Wagner’s libretto. The name was written in pencil, almost as an afterthought. Junius, Junius. Pronounced, in German, not with a ‘J’, but a ‘Y’. As in, ‘you-knew-us’.

  He sat staring at the libretto, feeling chilled and excited but not knowing what to do next, in case he broke the spell. It fitted too damn well to be true, like a crossword answer that seems to fit all of the spaces and all of the known letters but turns out to be ‘banished’ instead of ‘boneyard’.

  Could it really be possible that some elderly man had been standing watching that bus burn, with thirteen people inside it, shouting out, ‘Junius!’? The same opera that somebody had broken into his house to look for? The same opera that . . .

  He closed his eyes in painful realization. The same opera that Sylvia Cuddy had had in her possession when she was incinerated in her apartment.

  He poured himself another large whisky and paced up and down the living-room, his head churning with ideas. He could tell Sergeant Houk everything that he had guessed. But what did it really amount to? Would Sergeant Houk follow it up? And if he didn’t follow it up, would he take active steps to prevent Lloyd from following it up? Lloyd knew how much police detectives disliked amateurs . . . even certified PIs.

  In any case, what did his discoveries really amount to? The coincidental appearance of the same bystanders in two news photographs . . . the coincidental death-by-burning of three members of the San Diego Opera in as many days . . . and the phonetic similarity between ‘you knew us’ and ‘Junius’.

  Not exactly what any hardnosed detective would call clues.

  But Lloyd was so hurt and shocked by what had happened. Inside of him, such a rage had built up against whoever was responsible for Celia’s burning, that he was prepared to pursue any fragments of evidence, no matter how circumstantial, no matter how coincidental—so long as he found out eventually who had done it, and why, and so long as he made them suffer as deeply and as savagely as he had, and Celia had, and Marianna had, and now Sylvia, too, whose death had agonized him so much that he could scarcely cry.

  Tomorrow he would find this Otto character, if only to eliminate him from his investigation. Then he would drive out to the desert and find the Indian boy called Tony Express. He was determined to try anything and everything. He had far more time to spare than Sergeant Houk, and a far fiercer motivation for finding out what had happened.

  He went into the kitchen, spooned out heaps of arabica coffee, and switched on the percolator. He wanted to stay sober from now on. No more self-pity, no more tears. Nothing but revenge.

  The coffee had begun to ploop-plip noisily when the telephone rang.

  ‘Mr Denman? Waldo. We’ve taken the last orders, I thought you would like to know that everything is very well.’

  ‘Thanks, Waldo, I appreciate it.’

  ‘The new-recipe bouillabaisse was not such a success. Louis thinks it has to have a different presentation somehow. It is too messy for somebody who is all dressed up for a special dinner. Too much shell, too many bones.’

  ‘All right,’ said Lloyd, not really listening. ‘Tell him to work on it.’

  ‘Oh . . . one thing. A man called to tell you that the charm did not belong to Ms Williams. He said his name was . . . wait a minute, please, I have it here. “Uncle Tug”. You know this Uncle Tug?’

  ‘Sure, I know him,’ said Lloyd, with a frown.

  ‘He said the charm did not belong to Ms Williams, and to call him.’

  ‘Okay, then, I will. Thanks, Waldo. Anything else?’

  ‘Everything’s smooth, Mr Denman. Don’t worry about nothing.’

  Lloyd went through to the living-room and found the San Diego telephone directory. He leafed through it until he located the Rosecrans Avenue McDonald’s, and punched out the number. It took a long time for anyone to answer, and when a girl’s voice eventually said, ‘McDonald’s, how can I help you?’ she sounded flustered and distinctly unhappy. Lloyd was sure he could hear sirens in the background.

  ‘I’m trying to get in touch with one of your chefs,’ said Lloyd. ‘A guy who calls himself Unca Tug?’

  The girl seemed to find it a struggle to reply. Lloyd heard more sirens, and somebody shouting.

  ‘Hey, is everything all right?’ he asked. ‘It sounds like you’ve got yourselves some kind of panic down there.’

  ‘It’s Unca Tug,’ the girl wept. ‘His car caught fire.’

  ‘What?’ Lloyd demanded. ‘His car caught fire? He’s not hurt, is he?’ Understanding at once from the way the girl was sobbing that he must have been hurt, that he must have been worse than hurt, that he was dead.

  The girl couldn’t speak. Lloyd didn’t know that it was Sally, Bob’s manageress, but he could tell that she was somebody who had cared for Unca Tug very deeply.

  A young man’s voice came on the phone. ‘I’m sorry, mister. Things are pretty crazy down here at the moment. A car blew up and one of our chefs got himself killed. I’m sorry. Maybe you could call back later.’

  There was nothing that Lloyd could do except to hang up the phone and sit back on his sofa and wonder what the hell was going on. Another fire? Another death by burning? This was beginning to look like very much more than a series of coincidental accidents. This was beginning to look like somebody had opened up the oven-gates to hell, and was pitchforking people in there like Old Nick himself.

  La Traviata came to its climactic ending, and suddenly there was silence. Lloyd felt very alone, and frightened, too. Frightened of his own imagination, frightened of fire, and frightened that people and things that were well beyond his comprehension might be walking the earth—even tonight, in ordinary familiar North San Diego County, while the insects sang and the breeze quietly blew from the ocean, and the moon rose from behind the mountains like a bleached shriek.

  Joe North met him at the Science Museum in Balboa Park. It was one of those hot glaring afternoons when every tree and building seemed to have been drained of its colour; even the sky was white. Lloyd paid the museum entrance for both of them, and then they wandered into the main hall.

  For a while, they stood side by side watching a small plump boy pedalling a fixed bicycle until he was red in the face, trying to generate enough electricity to light up the headlamps of a sawn-off Ford Fairlane.

  ‘Nice going, kid,’ said Joe, slapping the boy on the back. ‘How’d you like a job lighting up Civic Theater?’

  The boy stared at Joe as if he were mad. His black friend across the hall called, ‘Look out, man. Gays!’

  Joe stared at Lloyd and then inspected his own clothes. He was an assistant s
cenery designer at the San Diego Opera, and he looked it: thin and nouveau-hippie, dressed in off-white chinos and a red splattery shirt. His nose was noticeably pointed and he wore a natty little clipped moustache under his nostrils.

  ‘Hey, do you think we look like gays?’ he asked Lloyd.

  Lloyd shrugged. ‘Even if we were, I wouldn’t go for that ugly kid.’

  They climbed up to the mezzanine, and sat on either side of a vertical perspex screen, face to face. If Lloyd twisted the knobs on his side of the screen, he could gradually impose his own reflections on Joe North’s features, until Joe North turned into him. On his side of the screen, Joe North could do the same.

  ‘Tell me about Otto,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘Well, Otto . . .’ Joe replied. ‘What can I say? Very strange guy. Very charismatic, no doubt about it. One of those people you can’t take your eyes off of.’

  ‘What did he look like?’ asked Lloyd.

  ‘Sixtyish . . . no, probably older. Real dried-up looking, you know? Like you leave a bell pepper out in the sun.’

  ‘But where did he come from? How come he got himself attached to the Opera?’

  Joe cleared his throat with a high, hammering cough. ‘I thought you would have known him already. Like Celia obviously knew him so well. It was Celia who introduced him to the opera company. She brought him around when we were rehearsing that Opera Gala Night, what was that, April last year? She said he was starting up kind of a bornagain study group . . . couple of times a week.’

  Lloyd twisted the knobs underneath his screen, and gradually his face melted into Joe North’s face. The effect was unnerving, as if his whole personality had disappeared. Just like looking into a mirror, and seeing somebody else altogether.

  Joe said, ‘Otto gathered us all around him on the stage. He had this woman with him . . . Jeez, you never saw such a woman. The Valkyries in the flesh. She didn’t say too much, but she gave me the feeling that if you couldn’t arm-wrestle her in three seconds flat, she’d treat you like dog-meat for the rest of your life.’

  Lloyd sat back. ‘What was her name? Did you ever find out?’

  Joe shook his head. ‘I heard it, you know? But it was like German, I couldn’t remember it. Something like “Helmet”, I don’t know. Helmet, Earwig, I don’t know.’

  ‘What did Otto say?’ asked Lloyd.

  On the perspex screen, Joe’s face began to recede, and Lloyd’s face appeared in its place. Joe’s voice came out of Lloyd’s unmoving lips.

  ‘He said that we’d all been suffering all of our lives from like a total misconception of what living was all about, you know? He said that we pretended to believe we had souls and that our souls were going to live for ever, but they weren’t—not so long as we stayed in these rotting bodies.’

  Joe hesitated, and then he said, vehemently, ‘He really got through to us, man. Do you know that? He made us understand that right from the very second we were born, our bodies had already started to die. We’re so incredibly vulnerable, you know? We can drown, we can fall off of a building. Some terrorist headcase can blow up our plane. Some asshole cabdriver can knock you down in the street. You know the woman who wrote Gone With The Wind, some cabdriver knocked her down in the street? Otto really made you feel, where’s the logic in that? Where’s the sense? What’s the point of being born if all you’re going to do at the end of it is die?

  ‘A germ can kill you, for Christ’s sake, that’s what Otto said. Something you can’t even see. You can be the kindest most philanthropic person in the whole entire universe, you can be a genius, you can be Einstein. But it only takes one germ, and all of that genius is wiped out forever. All of that kindness, all of that talent, snap! and it’s gone.’

  Lloyd stood up, walked across to the mezzanine railing, and looked out over the main hall of the science museum. Joe got up, too, and stood beside him.

  Lloyd said, ‘Some people say that if it wasn’t for death, life wouldn’t be worth living.’

  Joe nodded. ‘In the end, yes, that’s what I said. Otto was too goddamned what’s-it’s-name. Fanatical, I guess. Totalitarian. I never liked nobody telling me what to do. Not even my mom. But for a while there, right at the very beginning . . . well, I guess he made me believe that I could live for ever. And a whole lot of the others went on believing it.’

  ‘How many joined the group?’ Lloyd asked him.

  ‘From the Opera? I don’t know. Maybe five, maybe six, maybe more. I went to the first couple of get-togethers myself, but like I said, Otto was too totalitarian for me. Those weren’t discussion groups. Those were Otto-telling-you-how-it-was groups. He said that the pagans of northern Europe had discovered the secret of eternal life centuries before Christ, you know? But apparently the secret was lost when they were conquered by the Romans and interbred with other, inferior races.

  ‘He was incredibly racist. I mean it was like listening to Adolf Hitler. But he always held out this promise that everybody in the group was going to live for ever, and a whole lot of the group really seemed to believe him.

  ‘He said that a new master race was going to be born, a real master race, brilliant and pure and totally dominant. They would rule the whole world because they had no need for fear, or violence, any of that stuff. And the reason for that was, they were going to be immortal. They couldn’t die.’

  Joe took out a pack of banana-flavoured Hubba Bubba and unwrapped a piece. ‘That was when I bowed out. I can make some pretty wild leaps of the old imagination, you know, especially when I’ve been freebasing, but no wrinkled old gent in a business suit can make me believe that I’m going to live for ever.’

  Lloyd said, ‘Did Otto explain to you how you were a going to live for ever?’

  ‘Unh-hunh, not to me. I didn’t stay around long enough to hear that bit. But there was a whole lot of mumbo-jumbo about secret hymns and special rituals and something they called “Salamanders”.’

  ‘Salamanders, what were they?’

  ‘Search me. I never found out.’

  ‘But Marianna stayed on, didn’t she?’ asked Lloyd. ‘Didn’t she ever talk about what they were doing?’

  ‘Not a syllable, I’ll tell you. All the people who carried on the study group kept totally silent about it. It was all some terrific secret. I used to ask Marianna about it, but all she said was “Wait and see . . .” I said, “Wait and see what?” but all she said was “Wait and see . . .”’

  ‘Did it change her at all, going to Otto’s group?’

  Joe nodded. ‘It changed everybody who went there. Not for the worse. I mean they didn’t get depressed or unhappy or anything like that. Marianna was really light and bright, always singing, always happy.’

  ‘But?’ asked Lloyd.

  Joe glanced at him quickly. ‘Who said anything about “but”?’

  ‘You did. I heard it in your voice.’

  ‘Well, for sure. There was a “but”. And the “but” was like Marianna never really related any more. You see that perspex screen back there? After she started going to that religious study group, I always felt like Marianna was talking through perspex. No contact.’

  Lloyd said, ‘Where did the group meet?’

  Joe nodded. ‘Otto rents this house on Passeo Delicias, out by Rancho Santa Fe. Well, I assume he rents it. Way back off the road, really secluded. Not one of your really expensive Rancho Santa Fe properties, though. It’s pretty rundown. We used to meet in this kind of converted garage. The whole driveway was always jam-packed with Mercedes—four or five of them, one of them like Rommel’s staff-car, something like that. Sometimes the group met in different places, from what Marianna told me, but most of the time they met there.’

  Lloyd slowly rubbed his forehead with his fingertips, around and around. Then he said, ‘Do you have any idea what this Otto guy was really into? I mean, he was obviously peddling the idea of the life everlast
ing. All this talk about the body decaying with the soul trapped inside it. But what was he into? Did he charge for these meetings? Was it money he wanted? Or what?’

  Joe slowly shook his head. ‘Beats me. He never asked any of us for a penny.’

  ‘And he was really offering immortality?’

  ‘That’s what he said. But I guess that message is nothing new. When you think about it, what does every TV ministry peddle? What does every spiritual healer promise you? Everlasting life, that’s what it’s all about.’

  Joe looked at Lloyd with narrowed eyes, and lifted one finger. ‘He made one promise, you know, that day he talked to us on the stage. He said, “any one of you who chooses to follow me, that one is going to live for ever and a day, I promise.” And he didn’t just say “I promise”, like he was selling brushes or something. He said “I promise” like it was a cast-iron guarantee.’

  ‘And Marianna believed him? Just like Celia must have done?’

  ‘I guess. She kept on going to the meetings.’

  Lloyd said, ‘I’m just amazed that Celia never mentioned anything about it. Not one word.’

  ‘Maybe she thought you wouldn’t like the idea.’

  ‘Too damn right. But you didn’t like the idea, either, did you, and that didn’t stop Marianna?’

  ‘Come on, Lloyd, Marianna wasn’t my wife-to-be. We were just good friends, who occasionally made it together. Blow hot, blow cold, you know the kind of deal. I wasn’t in any kind of position to tell her anything.’

  Lloyd said, ‘It’s the group, no doubt about it. It’s Otto. They joined that group and Otto screwed their minds up. Like the Bhagwan, like the Moonies, like any one of those nutty religions. He promised them life everlasting and they believed him. How could anybody have acted so damned stupid?’

  A museum orderly was eyeing them suspiciously. They must have looked and sounded like two quarrelling lovers. It was bad enough that a couple of ugly kids thought they were gay. Joe said, ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’