When the Darkness Falls

by Gonzalez, J. F.

  Somehow, I made it through the rough spots. I was a functioning smack addict for three or four years. Another boyfriend I had was a dealer, so I had a steady supply, enough to keep me going. I also didn’t have to work for it (thinking back on it, I guess you could say I put out for it, but we won’t go there). Finally, as most addicts will say, I got sick and tired of being sick and tired and I left Ben and went to a recovery center in North Hollywood called Cri-Help and literally got down on my hands and knees and begged them to help me.

  I was there for nine months. It was a hardcore recovery center. It was like being in the army or something. I had jobs to do (keeping the place clean, doing volunteer work, attending meetings every day, that kind of thing). But finally I made it through the program in December of 1992 and have been clean ever since.

  During the whole time I was using and when I was in Cri-help, I was still playing with the computer. I used the computer with Ben to manage his business. (He was one of the big distributors for Black Tar Heroin in the LA area, and some of his clients were big spenders—I tracked everything on an Excel spreadsheet.) I continued using my computer skills at Cri-help, and shortly after I completed the program, they helped me get a job at an insurance company. To make a long story short, I worked my way up the ladder, bought a computer for myself, haunted the internet at night, and when the World Wide Web started catching on in ‘95 or so I taught myself html and Java programming and began my own Web Design business in early ‘97. Been in business for myself ever since.

  Oh yeah, and I also met my husband, Jim Stewart, at the insurance company I worked at. He was the first ‘real’ boyfriend I ever had; was the first guy I was with since becoming clean, and we got married in ‘96 and had Mitch, our son, two years later. I never thought life would be so wonderful.

  Then, wouldn’t you know it, I got nostalgic, typed in ‘Gardena High School’ in a search engine, came up with Classmates.com, looked at the names of all the people in the class I would have graduated with (not recognizing most of them) and saw your name as well as a few other people I remember, and took the plunge. I wanted to find out if anybody knew what happened to Brent Katsamata and Joel Brandt, so I left a message on the message board pertaining to that. I didn’t get many responses, then somebody (I don’t remember who) left a message saying she heard Joel was in prison or something.

  Now I was intrigued. I left a message back, asking for details. The woman wrote back (e-mailed me, actually), saying she heard Joel had moved to Florida, but had come back to Gardena. He’d killed a woman, who I later found out was his wife. Joel was actually caught at Forest Green Cemetery, and he’d brought his wife’s severed head with him. Pretty sick, huh? Guess whose grave he was found at?

  You guessed it. Ol’ Archibald Lasher.

  I found all this out later, a week after the woman e-mailed me the info. I went to the Gardena Valley News and read the stories on their micro-film. Then I searched the paper for similar stories about Brent Katsamata. For some reason, I knew what I would find before I even found it.

  Getting long. Continued in the next...

  Later!

  Julie

  *

  Subj: What Happened at Forest Green Cemetery, Part 4

  Date: 3/14/01 7:43 PM Pacific Standard Time

  From: InRecvry@earthlink.net (Julie Stewart)

  To: Phantasmjg@aol.com (Jesus Gonzalez)

  Okay, back to Brent. It seems that shortly after high school, Brent got a girlfriend pregnant and she had a baby, a daughter. Brent didn’t find out about it till a few years later. (Another classmate of ours, Tracy Melgosa, who I got reacquainted with at Classmates.com, told me about it.) Anyway, he started a relationship with his daughter and her mother even though he was involved with somebody else and eventually got married to this other woman. He got divorced a few years later. Anyway, maybe five years after his divorce, he went to his daughter’s home and brutally murdered her in her bedroom. Cut off her head, ripped her heart out, the whole nine yards.

  I don’t even want to tell you what he did with the body. I will tell you, however, what was found with the body.

  Oh, by the way, both Joel and Brent are still alive, although both of them were committed to psychiatric hospitals. Atascedero, I think. From what I later found out, they are—pardon the expression—“crazy as a bunch of fucking loons.”

  Okay, I’m sure you’re probably shocked to hear all this, especially since you used to be friends with Brent. All that I’ve told you is true, and no, this isn’t a figment of my imagination, nor is it drug induced. I’ll include some URL’s at the end of this narrative to a few of the online news articles and research stuff I found.

  Anyway, what was found in Brent’s daughter’s room with the body was some weird symbol drawn on the floor in the girl’s blood, along with some black candles. The police said the killing was cult related. In my research, I also found that the murder Joel committed was cult related, too. I’m guessing that Mark’s death was cult related as well; the weapon Tina used to kill him with was a long ceremonial dagger she’d bought a few days before. But at the time of Mark’s murder, the police didn’t consider it to be cult-related; they simply chalked it up to a lover’s quarrel since they’d been lovers, and I had been messing around with Mark and all. They figured she got jealous and killed him.

  Well, trust me, she wasn’t jealous, it was a cult-related murder! I know so because I later found out a lot of shit that really freaked me out and is gonna freak the fuck out of you, too.

  Okay, when I found this out about Brent I did more research. I started on the Internet, then went to some bookstores. I did some more background investigation on Archibald Lasher’s crime spree, and actually talked to the son of one of the detectives that was on the case. Apparently the case was big in its day, and this man, a guy by the name of Angus Scott, told me all kinds of stuff. In fact, Angus’s father had kept a journal, and he let me read the entries pertaining to the Lasher case. Here is a summarized version:

  Lasher had been a farm hand, all right. Gardena was pretty remote back then and not built up much. Downtown Gardena existed, three whole square blocks of it, so the section where Gardena High is now, and the surrounding neighborhood, was farms. The cemetery was there, I think, but not much else.

  Anyway, according to Detective Scott, Lasher used to drive into LA and Hollywood a lot in the 20’s. He was quite the party-animal apparently. Anyway, around 1921, maybe 1922, he attended a lecture by Aliester Crowley and got interested in the occult. He joined the Order of the Golden Dawn, then later the Ordo Templi Orientis, which was an ancient German Secret Society (related to the Knights Templar, or so they liked to think). It was then that he became involved in yet another group, one called The Children of the Night.

  Information on this last group is sketchy; it’s so sketchy that it took me a long time to get information on them. They were very secretive, and the information I got was from a writer who wrote a book on Satanic Cults (his book, by the way, is called Satanism: An Anthropological Study, and his name is Arthur Meadows). Okay, get this: they (The Children of the Night cult) apparently paid homage to a demonic entity named Belial. This stuff isn’t in Arthur’s book, by the way. He told me all this stuff over the phone and in e-mails. According to Arthur, they paid homage to Belial and according to their creed or whatever, one who became a deep worshipper of Belial had to prove their alliance to him by performing a blood sacrifice in his name...and the blood sacrifice had to be one who the follower loved the most. Sort of paralleling that Biblical story of when God told Abraham to sacrifice his son to prove Abraham’s love for him. Well, this worked the same way. The more Lasher got into it, the stronger Belial’s influence on him was until he was under the demon’s spell. Belial was by now compelling Lasher to bring him a blood sacrifice, and Lasher was trying to resist. The person he was closest to, the person he loved the most, was his son. So, he committed those other murders, hoping that would appease the demon but it never worked. H
e was finally caught for the murders and executed, and that’s the story he told all the detectives.

  Naturally, they didn’t believe it. They probably thought he was trying to cop an insanity plea.

  Okay, so some psycho in the twenties gets a burr up his ass about the occult and decides to go killing people. Big fucking deal, right? Where do Joel and Brent and Tina come in? Why the fuck am I so scared? I bet that’s what you’re thinking, right?

  Here’s why, and this is based on my research and talking to Joel and Brent’s family, and later Tina’s family. I got in touch with all of them after I found all this out, and they told me what was going on with them in the years after our little incident at Forest Green Cemetery.

  My feeling is that Belial was pissed. He’d done all these things for Archibald Lasher and the bastard didn’t live up to his end of the bargain. He’d been promised the perfect blood sacrifice and was denied it. And he was hungry for it. And somehow he was trapped between the spiritual world and our physical one. Archibald’s death was the cause of that, and he waited over fifty years for the perfect open vessel to jump in and influence. The perfect vessel that was fully open, ready to receive anything.

  Meaning a bunch of stoned teenagers hanging out at a fucking cemetery.

  I’m sure lots of people walked by Archibald Lasher’s grave all the time. Probably drunk and stoned people, too. The trick is, we *willingly* went there, day in, day out. When we found out who Archibald Lasher was, we sought his grave out. We wondered about him, talked about him, tried to imagine what it was like for him back then. And we were under the influence of drugs, the perfect state to be in to be receptive to psychic and spiritual influence. Think of it this way: Samadhi is a state in Eastern religious disciplines in which man achieves union with the Infinite—the spirit world. Psychedelics have long been known to be a short-cut to Samadhi. Eastern mystics have also warned that shortcuts can be dangerous. Once the doors of consciousness are thrown open, those without the proper discipline (like us) cannot control what gets in (like Belial).

  Naturally, that was all Belial needed.

  I think it got Tina first. I think she saw what Belial offered her, and she caved in easily. Only she never got to finish the ritual.

  But that psychic link was still there. It sought Joel next. It took awhile, but the link was never broken. Joel kept tripping and getting stoned after that, so it found its way to him. And he resisted. But he finally did it, five years or so after we graduated.

  It got to Brent next, and it stayed with him for almost ten years. Get this: apparently there is some speculation Brent may have killed a bunch of people prior to him murdering his daughter. There isn’t any hard proof, but the way he killed his daughter, and some other circumstantial evidence makes the cops think Brent may have murdered 20 people between 1986 and the day he killed his daughter in early 1997. It was in 1986 that Joel killed his wife and was caught. I think it got to Brent right after that, and Brent tried to resist, appeasing it with other murders that started in 1986. By the time it got to him, Brent had virtually stopped getting stoned, but I think it still got to him; by then it didn’t need that link.

  Brent also had a stronger will then, so Belial had quite a fight, which is why I think it took ten years for Brent to finally succumb. I think Brent was following Archibald Lasher’s plan, only it didn’t work.

  Now it’s after me.

  How could it get to me if I haven’t been doing drugs for years? I’ve done acid probably a hundred times. And that shit stays with you. Occasionally, I still get flashbacks. I think that’s all it took.

  I’d started feeling weird a few weeks before I even went on Classmates.com and found all this stuff out. It was a feeling I couldn’t explain at the time, but now I recognize it; it was as if something was invading me. Some other entity, totally independent of me, had taken host inside me. And it was massaging my brain, nestling into me, getting ready to take control.

  The minute I found all this out it started making demands. It started playing with my synapses, releasing pleasure-reward centers. I learned about this in rehab, how drugs reward our pleasure centers so we keep doing them, pushing that button to feel good, like a rat in a controlled experiment that keeps pushing the button for food.

  I recognized it for what it was and that’s when I got the fuck out of my house. You see, I wanted to save my husband and son. They are the two people I love more than anything else in the world. Next to you, they are the only people I’ve ever really loved.

  So that’s why I left. That’s why I’m e-mailing you now because I really need your help in this. I can feel Belial’s strength growing stronger, and I just pray to God that maybe if I keep running he won’t find me and march me back to California where you and my family are and

  *

  Author’s Note:

  The above series of e-mails are cut and pasted into this document verbatim as I received them. My lone correspondence to Julie I’ve included here is intended to provide verisimilitude to her narrative; my only prior communiqués to her bear no relation to the events described above.

  Naturally I was curious, then alarmed when her message ended so abruptly. I never did receive a follow-up e-mail. I tried e-mailing her several times to no avail. So I did some research of my own (it’s a writer’s pet peeve). I contacted the LAPD and the Gardena Police Department, first in an attempt to report that I was afraid Julie might have caused harm to herself. An officer from the Gardena Police Department returned my call a few days later to report that Julie had left her family a few weeks before, and that they were investigating my story. I was alarmed at this, and then turned to my second phase of research: verifying Julie’s story.

  Surprisingly, I found her accounts of Joel and Brent being convicted of murder to be true. With the help of a friend who is a skip tracer, I was able to locate Julie’s husband. I was able to very quietly verify that, yes, Julie had left her husband and child very suddenly over a month ago. A missing person’s investigation is still going on, but according to my skip tracer friend it is believed she left on her own and no foul play is involved.

  I did research her claims about the so-called “Children of the Night” eventually locating the book in question, and the author. According to Arthur Meadows, what he told Julie was based on his own speculations, and he’d told her that she shouldn’t construe his opinions—which he felt may or may not be true—to be genuine facts. He revealed to me that despite an exhaustive research, no such cult with that name existed then, although it was rumored at the time that a cult did, in fact, hold rituals and paid homage to Belial. He claims he got the information on the cult from a man who allegedly knew a member.

  Julie’s claims of Lasher’s statements to Detective Scott are factual, however. (I found this out through the LAPD and the Freedom of Information Act.) I researched the demon Belial and found no reference to the claims made by Julie. According to the Penguin Encyclopedia of the Occult, Belial is the evil spirit of darkness and godlessness in the Jewish myth of old Palestine. In the Old Testament there is mentioning of Belial-men: they are those who oppose law and order. Other research suggests Belial is simply a synonym for Satan. In Paradise Lost, Milton distinguishes Belial from Satan, regarding him as the demon of impurity. In the Old Testament, the word is not a proper name, but a common noun usually signifying “wickedness” or “extreme wickedness.” There is scant information on worshippers, although modern day practitioners of the occult, most notably LeVeyan Satanists (adherents to the late Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan) invoke his name in rituals, but this is mostly for dramatic effect since they don’t believe in the devil anyway.

  I did, however, find Julie’s story fascinating and rather disturbing. Who knows whether any of her claims are true? I am surprised (and sort of touched) by one claim of hers, though: that she loved me. Looking back, I can see it; we did have a special relationship in high school. We’d known each other since fourth grade, and became close friends through junio
r high and high school. I think she was closer to me, in some ways, then she was the other friends she hung out with at the time. She certainly seemed to divulge a lot of personal things to me back then, and I think she did so because she felt she could trust me. After all, we were friends.