Hell You Say

by Josh Lanyon

  I typed a note to Jake, offering my theory and telling him where I was going. I saved it in my e-mail drafts folder. Then I went upstairs and dug out my Grandmother Anna’s gun.

  After two uneasy hours of sleep, I got up, pulled on Levi’s and a bulky sweater, and phoned a taxi, which let me out in front of the hotel.

  West Hollywood looked like a ghost town. I got into the Forester and pulled onto Sunset. No sign of a red Corolla; hopefully, Jean had abandoned tracking my real-life adventures. Either that, or she wasn’t so dedicated to stalking me that she was willing to sacrifice beauty rest.

  The sun was up by the time I got across town. The wind blew hard; trash swooped and cart wheeled along the street as the Santana scoured the city.

  I slowly cruised Hobb Street, keeping an eye out for 9182. Graffiti marked the walls and sides of buildings.

  I spotted the building from down the street. It was an old structure painted a vivid purple, probably a nightclub at one time. There was a startlingly well-drawn, life-like painting of Baphomet, the winged humanoid goat symbol used by Satanists, on the parking lot side of the building. The windows were all boarded and covered with iron bars.

  Interestingly, though just about every flat surface on this street was covered in graffiti, the grotto had not been defaced by so much as a pen mark.

  There didn’t appear to be a sign of life on the entire block. An abandoned doughnut shop stood on one side, and on the other, an auto body repair place surrounded by a tall fence topped with rolls of barbed-wire. A disgruntled rottweiler paced along the fence.

  I tucked the gun into the waistband of my Levi’s beneath the bulky sweater, got out, and went around to the front of the church. I tried the door. It opened. I stepped inside.

  The deep gloom was broken by a candle on the ledge of a boarded window. A black candle. This must have originally been the front lobby. I went through to the main room, following the trail of flittering candles.

  I saw that the walls of the building were covered in ornate artwork, but I couldn’t make it out, although there were several sets of eyes painted in phosphorescent colors. It was cold and stank of pot and incense and bad plumbing.

  There was a stage in the front of the main room. A chair was placed in a giant pentagram. Black candles burned on the outermost points of the pentagram.

  Oliver Garibaldi sat on the chair. As I made my way toward him, he smiled. It was an uncanny smile.

  “Ah. As I expected,” he greeted me. “I am never wrong about these things.”

  I’m never wrong? Who besides Republican presidents and evil masterminds can say that with a straight face?

  “Thanks for the invitation.” I looked around myself curiously. “Not sure why I thought it would be more…plush.”

  “Humble beginnings.” He smiled again, the candlelight throwing shadows across his rough features.

  “Humble beginnings? Is that what it’s about?”

  “What do you wish it to be about?” He shook his head. “Persistence such as yours deserves reward, but I’m afraid you will be disappointed with the truth.”

  “Try me.”

  “What did you wish to know? Ask me whatever you like. We have nothing to hide.”

  “Then why the cloak and dagger stuff?”

  He laughed. “But you love the cloak and dagger stuff, as you call it. Everyone does.”

  “So there’s no penalty for betraying secrets?”

  “There is a penalty, of course. Not the penalty you seem to imagine. We don’t kill people because they choose to abandon their faith. To find themselves on the outside is usually punishment enough.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement in the deep shadows of the room. I realized that we were not alone in the room and felt a tingling at the back of my scalp.

  Into my distracted silence, Garibaldi added, “Surely you understand the need for discretion. Death is often the price for nonconformity in our society.”

  “Speaking of death,” I said. I made an effort not to look into the crowded shadows. The gun was a comforting weight against my back.

  He laughed with genuine amusement. “When your delightful mother informed me that you wrote mystery novels, I at once understood both your inquisitiveness and your conviction that a dark and deadly secret waited to be revealed.”

  I’ve never understood why in TV crime shows the sleuth makes a point of arguing with the villain and revealing all the reasons why he thinks the bad guy is guilty. I thought my best bet of walking out of there in one piece was to allow myself to be convinced of Garibaldi’s blamelessness. I took it as a positive sign that he was bothering to chat.

  I said calmly, “So Blade Sable wasn’t involved in these ritual deaths? But then why lie about its existence, about the existence of the Scythe of Gremory?”

  “Because people hate and fear what they do not understand. Tell me of a great religion that has not faced persecution by nonbelievers and infidels. Add to this the fact that we are extremely successful, and I think you will understand why I wish to protect the anonymity of our members.”

  “I think I can understand that.”

  “Yes. As I can understand your desire for knowledge, for the truth at all cost. You remind me of myself many years ago. That is the great difference between our religion and the others. We don’t lie to ourselves.”

  “When you say that you are extremely successful…”

  “Ours is an invitation-only membership. Most exclusive. Many of our older members are wealthy or well-established in their chosen profession, but this is not the criterion for membership. We seek those with a desire for the truth, with — like yourself — a questing spirit. We look for persons of intellect and reason, persons of quality.”

  I hated to interrupt the sales pitch, but when he paused for breath, I interjected, “That’s flattering. But you’re not Satanists, correct?”

  “No.”

  “But you do worship the demon Gremory?”

  He hesitated. His eyes swerved to the shadows, and I grasped that, unlike Garibaldi, some of the congregation might not have outgrown their need for that old-time religion, complete with fortune-telling demon dukes.

  “Worship, no. The demon is a tool, a facet of magic.”

  “You do believe in magic?”

  “We all believe in magic. Those who deny its existence the most fiercely are those who most believe.” He made an easy movement as though brushing aside cobwebs. “Magic is as real as love or oxygen or anything else that is real, but cannot be seen.”

  I didn’t see any point in debating this. I tried to figure out how to ask him who he thought had killed three people and written Gremory’s sigil in victims’ blood, if not one of his own disciples. He said, “You’re a young man, and yet I sense that you’ve had cause to consider your own mortality.”

  He might have learned that from Lisa or even Bill Dauten, but I had a sudden visual of Velvet standing at my desk holding the vial of my heart meds.

  “On occasion.”

  “Do you believe there’s anything beyond this existence?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does it matter to you? Would the knowledge change any choices that you’ve made?”

  “No.”

  He nodded, as though this were the answer he had expected. “You have learned to live within the moment. What if it were possible to have all that you wanted on this Earthly plane? Wealth, power, sex…”

  “In exchange for?”

  “What do you have to offer?”

  I grinned. “My immortal soul?”

  He smiled too; his teeth looked sharp and yellow in the candlelight. “And we accept. It is the requirement of every religion, is it not? Is there any faith that does not demand spiritual commitment? But we are a bit more pragmatic in our approach. That is the secret of our success: practicality.”

  Sprinkled with terrorism and vacuum-packed to seal in evil.

  “Does that translate into dollars and cents?”
>
  He smiled. “No more than you can afford, no more than membership in any exclusive organization would cost you. Tithing is a time-honored tradition, is it not? I think you will be pleased to learn that there are less tangible resources we most value. You possess many of these: creativity, imagination, energy, and contacts.”

  “What would I be required to do with these resources?”

  “Nothing that you were not willing to do. As you surmised last night, we are a kind of service organization, a network, not unlike the…er…Lions Club.”

  Or maybe the VFW? It would be hard to think of a more foreign war than the one for souls.

  I said — and I didn’t have to fake sounding genuinely troubled — “But wasn’t Kinsey Perone the Adept of Blade Sable?”

  He looked a tad irritated. “Adrien, my dear, I have no idea who Kinsey Perone was. I know that she was not a member of Blade Sable. I know each and every one of my sons and daughters. Perhaps she had hopes of joining us one day, but my understanding is that she was an unstable girl. Unstable personalities are attracted to us as they are attracted to fundamentalist religions everywhere.”

  I nodded thoughtfully.

  “Shall I tell you what I think, what I have believed since the day you came to my home seeking answers? I think you are searching for that which is missing in your own life. I think that is what this quest to find an imaginary murderer is really about.”

  “Inquiring minds want to know.”

  He said gently, “Always the joke, the flippant comment, the laughter that keeps the wall intact. But behind the wall, I sense a great emptiness, loss, loneliness…”

  My mouth was unexpectedly dry. The tug of his personality, his certainty, his calm was overwhelming. My pulse sped up with a mix of anger and fear.

  “We could help you, my dear. That is what we do. We help our brothers and sisters realize their dreams — most dreams are easily realized, did you know that? Most people do not long for much that is not attainable through a certain amount of focus and effort. Everyone wants something.”

  I said interestedly, “Can you guarantee perfect health?”

  He studied me, then smiled that unnerving smile. “But that’s not what you most want, Adrien.”

  * * * * *

  I called Jake from a phone booth in a gas station a few blocks away from the Little Purple Chapel.

  As I waited for his cell phone message — no way was he going to be live and in person at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning — I tried to figure my best angle. Obviously I couldn’t tell him the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

  I was still floating scenarios when Jake’s voice said crisply, “What’s up?”

  “I —” I floundered.

  His voice dropped, he spoke close to the phone. “What’s wrong?”

  Jesus, it was just Jake. Not exactly cause for cold sweat and stomach cramps. I said, “I think there’s a place in East LA you need to check out.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s a possibility that it might be where they killed the Perone girl. She wasn’t killed at the scene, right? None of them were. So there’s a chance this might be the place.”

  “Did you get that from the kid?”

  “The kid?”

  “Angus,” he said tersely. “We know he spent Wednesday night with you. Did it not occur to you that he was being watched?”

  “Not by the cops.” I added, although I wasn’t sure why, “I let him sleep downstairs. He didn’t have any place else.”

  “You seem hell-bent on getting roped into this investigation.”

  Which would endanger Jake. Got it.

  I said, “Yeah, something Angus said makes me think this might be the place. Can you get a search warrant?”

  He didn’t answer that, saying instead, “Do you know where he is?”

  “Angus? No.” His words sank in. I felt a tingle of alarm. “You don’t think something happened to him?”

  “I have no idea. We lost him shortly after he left the bookstore.” He said into my stricken silence, “Relax. My thought is he ditched us.”

  I let my breath out on a long sigh. All at once I was very tired. I wanted to go home and sleep for a year. The problem was, unless I was mistaken, I had been made an offer I could not refuse. From now until this mess was resolved, I needed to sleep with one eye open.

  “Will you try to get a search warrant?”

  “You sure there’s something to find?”

  “I’m not sure, no. But I think there’s a strong possibility.”

  He was silent.

  “I also think that there may be a chance that Gabriel Savant is alive. If so, they could be holding him there.”

  Jake swore under his breath.

  I waited, knowing that it all hinged on how much he trusted my instinct and my judgment.

  “Why did you wait till now to tell me this?” he asked finally.

  Right, he thought I’d been sitting on this information since Wednesday. I said, finding it unexpectedly hard to get the words out, “I was afraid you’d…misread my reason for calling.”

  Silence. He cleared his throat. “Yeah. Well. I’ll see what I can do. No promises. What’s the address?”

  I gave him the address, clicked off before he could.

  * * * * *

  I rounded the corner to pull into the back parking of Cloak and Dagger when I noticed commotion out front of the bookstore. I pulled to the curb, got out, joining the crowd outside my front step.

  Three women in white gauzy dresses stood inside a large ring of white candles. They were chanting.

  By the power of She

  By the power of He

  By the power of Three

  We call upon thee and CAST YOU OUT!

  The tallest woman, a freckled, rawboned, red-haired lady, sprinkled water from a silver bowl in three shakes of her hand.

  Next to her, a plump, middle-aged woman in spectacles solemnly rang a silver bell three times.

  Holy moly. It was the Wiccans from Dragonwyck. Despite the early hour, their performance was drawing quite an audience. The Sunday before Christmas is one of the busiest shopping days of the year. People who normally react like vampires to cock’s crow hit the streets early, shopping lists clenched tight in their sweaty paws. Several people poked their heads out of shop doorways to watch.

  The third woman, whom I did not recognize, made a production of pulling out a decorative-looking knife. The crowd around the ring of candles backed away. She held the athame in front of her and began to trace the outline of a pentacle over where I had scrubbed and painted over the inverted pentagram.

  “What are they doing?” one woman asked another bystander.

  That bystander shrugged, but another answered knowledgeably, “A purification rite. I saw this on the Discovery Channel.”

  I edged around the crowd toward the front of the bookstore. Velvet must not have arrived yet. The doors were still locked, the security gate pulled across the front. But the lights were on inside.

  By the power of the pentagram we lay

  Protection here both night and day

  We now invoke the Law of Three

  This be our will, so mote it be!

  Three more shakes of the bell, three more sprinkles of water, and the show was over. The Wiccan I didn’t recognize pulled out a candle snuffer and went counterclockwise around the circle of candles, putting them out. The other two began to shake hands with people, murmuring those “Blessed be’s” as they worked the crowd.

  I approached the plump lady who had given me Selene Wolfe’s business card. She looked up, beaming. “There you are! Blessed be!”

  “This is a surprise,” I said.

  She took both my hands and squeezed them tightly in hers. “I know. But we tried, you know. We had so little to go on.”

  The tall one, who I seemed to recall had been named Ariel, reached us. She also took both my hands and squeezed them warmly. It was hard not to feel touched by
all this apparent goodwill. “Blessed be!”

  “Hi again.”

  She shook her head at me as though I were a naughty little boy. “It took us such a long time to find you,” she said. “You didn’t contact Selene for ages!”

  The third woman approached, nodded gravely. “Blessed be.”

  “Blessed be,” I said, giving up. “And…er…thanks.”

  She nodded, like, Damn straight! And don’t let this demon stuff happen again! Then she turned to the other two. “I’ve got to get home. I’ve got so much shopping to do, you would not believe!”

  There was a sudden flurry of activity while they gathered their candles and chalice and bag of salt. The crowd had mostly dispersed by now. I glimpsed Velvet moving around inside the store. Had she barricaded herself in?

  I went to move my car. The last I saw of the three witches, they were squeezing into a blue pickup truck. I pulled around the corner, parked in back, and slipped in through the side.

  Velvet was behind the counter. She glared at me.

  “Give me ten minutes,” I told her, starting the stairs to my living quarters. “I want to take a quick shower and change.”

  “Forget it,” she said. “I quit.”

  I stopped. “Huh? Why?” I came back down the stairs. “What’s going on?”

  “What’s going on is that I quit. That’s all.” She was stuffing her personal possessions in her knapsack as fast as she could jam them in.

  “But why?”

  She glared at me. “But why? Why? Because of that!” She beckoned toward the front of the shop and the street now empty of bell, book, and candle. “Because every day is Halloween around here.”

  I stared, perplexed.

  Wrong again, Adrien. Apparently she was not a foot soldier in the shock troops of The Damned. What did I know? Maybe she really was just a freaked out and much put-upon sales associate in a bookstore.

  “Hey, but that’s over. From now on it’s strictly business as usual.”

  As I told her this, I mentally crossed my fingers. I was pretty sure Jake would get a search warrant, and I was pretty sure what a search of the Hobb Street building would reveal.