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.”
“He kills his family and then donates books?” I asked.
Ed didn’t smile. “Believe it or not, Joe was a smart man, well-read, quiet, but strong. Admired, here in town, too. When a man cracks, you never know where the light’s gonna show through. I guess with Joe it just showed through a bit strong.”
“Did you know them well?”
He shook his head. “Barely. I was involved in the library here, but also the County museum over in Berdoo. Joe was always nice. Careful with books, too. That’s about how well I knew him. A hello-goodbye-nice weather kind of thing. It bothers you too, though, huh?”
I assumed he meant living in the house, knowing about the murders. “Not too much. I find it more fascinating than frightening.”
“Well, always got to be some mystery in life, anyway, stirs the blood up a little, but it seems strange to me she never showed.”
I asked, “Who?”
“The oldest one. Kim. She was sweet and pretty. Fifteen. Some say she ran about a year before the killings—she may have had a boyfriend here, met on the sly because her folks were real strict about that kind of thing. Maybe she ran off with him. Maybe she did the killings, gossip was. But I don’t think so—she was fifteen and sweet and small, like a little bird. Me, I think she got killed, too, only Joe, he did it somewhere else. I hope I’m wrong; I hope that pretty little girl is all grown up and living across the world and putting it all behind her best she can.”
6
My wife was sitting at her canvas, painting, and I arrived swearing, as I went through the area packed with art supplies that surrounded her. “Damn it all,” I said, “this is the only garage in creation without garage things.”
“Damn right,” she responded, “now take your damn language and get the hell out of here.” All of this in a calm, carefully modulated voice.
I gave a false laugh and slapped the inside wall with my hand. “Now, where in hell would a shovel be when I need one?”
Jackie pointed with her paintbrush to the courtyard. “He’d know, Mister Brainiac.” She looked more beautiful now, with the late afternoon light on her hair, her face seeming unlined, like she always had, to me, and it amazed me, that moment, how love did that between two people: how it takes you out of time, and makes you virtually untouchable.
I turned in the direction of her pointing—it was to Stu, our gardener, kneeling beside the bird of paradise, trimming back the dying stems that thrust from between the enormous, stiff leaves. I went out into the yard. “You have a shovel I can borrow?”
He didn’t hear me at first.
He was humming. When he noticed my shadow, he turned toward me.
He’d begun to look older than his age. Not on the surface of his skin (except in laugh and smile lines), but in something I’d seen mainly in cities: a hard life. Not difficult, for all lives are difficult to varying degrees and some people suffer with more relish than others; but hard, as if the lessons learned were not pleasant ones. I had always thought the gardening life would be a fairly serene one.
“I need a shovel,” I repeated.
“No problem,” he said, and stood. He led me out to his truck and reached in the back of it, withdrawing a hoe and a shovel. “I assume,” he said, “You’re planting.”
“Just digging,” I said.
He nodded, handed me the shovel, and set the hoe back down.
“You’ve done a good job around here,” I said.
He almost smiled with pride, but another kind of pride seemed to hold him back. “It’s my life,” he said simply, then returned to work.
I watched him go, his overalls muddy, the muscles in his back and shoulders so pronounced that he seemed to ripple like something dropped into still water. Then I turned. I didn’t know if I was going to bury a dead animal, or to dig something up, something that had been in the ground for four decades. I used the shovel to press my way through the blackberry bush fence that had become thin with autumn, and headed into the field.
The stink of the dead pig came back to me, along with the scent of its orange blossom garlands. There was a wind from downfield, and it brought with it these, and other smells: of car exhaust, of pies baking, of rotting oranges and other fruit ripening. It almost made bearable the task I was abou
t. When I got to the brief clutch of orange trees, I saw the flies had devoured much of the dead animal, but, oddly, the local coyotes had left it alone.
Behind me, a man’s voice: “You planning on burying it?”
I turned; it was Stu, the gardener. He shrugged. “Decided to follow you out here. Figured you could use some help.”
He reached up to a branch of one of the trees and plucked off a small blossom. He brought it to his nose, inhaled, and then to his lips. It seemed to me that he kissed the blossom before letting it fall.
“Do you know anything about this?” I asked, indicating the pig. “Local kids?”
Stu shook his head. He had kind but weary eyes, as if he’d been on the longest journey and had seen much, but now wanted only sleep. “You won’t be burying the pig, will you, Mr. Richter?”
“No,” I said.
“What the hell,” he said. “I know you know about it.”
“What’s that?”
“I hear her sometimes,” he said, “when I touch the leaves.”
“Who?”
He looked dead at me, almost angrily. “I don’t have nothing to hide. I didn’t put her there.” He pointed to the ground beneath the dead pig.
“The dead girl.”
He whispered, “Not dead.” His eyes seemed to grow smaller, lids pressing down hard, like pressing grapes for wine, tears. “I don’t believe it.”
“You were her friend,” I said.
“I love her. I always will love her.” Stu wiped at his eyes. “Look around. This field used to be nothing. Dirt. Nothing would grow. No orange trees. And your house, dead all around, a desert. But she’s done this.” He spread his arms out wide, as if measuring the distance of the earth.
“Did you do it?” I asked, even though I didn’t want to.
“I killed the pig, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s an offering.”
“To whom? To Kim Redlander?” I glanced at the ground, wondering how deep she had been buried; buried alive for a mystery more ancient than what was written down in a book.
“To the goddess,” he said.
We went out into the field, as two farmers might after a long day of work, and spoke of the past.
He said, “I have faith in this. I have faith. It wasn’t strong at first. He told me he and her mother went all crazy and it was their festival time or something, and what he did to the other kid — and to Kim — was because she didn’t come up that spring. He went wild, Joe did. I read all the books, later, and I came to a kind of understanding. I spoke to Joe before he killed himself. He lost his faith, you know? He didn’t believe anymore. But I had nothing but faith. I know she’s there. Look.” He showed me the palm of his dirt-smeared hand. “She’s in the earth, I can see her, there.”
Joe Redlander and his family buried their daughter alive, I thought.
For the Mother of Creation, buried her in the earth, Persephone going to the underworld to be with her sworn consort, and they must have expected her to return in the spring. A family of religious nuts, and one teenage boy, hopelessly in love with a girl.
In love forever.
“It never happened,” Stu said, “that’s what her dad told me. They waited in the spring, and she didn’t return. But I knew she was still here. I know she’ll come back, one fine spring day. Till then, gardening seems to bring me closer to her.”
“She’s dead, Stu. I know you weren’t responsible. But she’s dead. It’s been over forty years.” I was shivering a little, because I sensed the truth in his story.
He looked across the land, back to the orange trees. “She’s in everything here, everything. You may not believe, but I do. I’ve known things. I’ve seen things. She’s down there, fifteen, beautiful, her hands touching the roots of the trees. She’s going to come up one day. I absolutely know it.”
As we both stood there, I knew that I was going to have to fire Stu, because there was something unbalanced in his story, in his fervor. I didn’t think I could bear to look out the windows and see him gardening, thinking of love and loss as he tended flowers.
I knew I would lose sleep for many nights to come, looking out at that field, wondering.
7
Then, one night the following April, someone set fire to the field, and in spite of the best efforts of the local firemen, my wife and I awoke the next morning and found we were living next door to a blackened wasteland. I got my morning coffee and went to the edge of the field, near the road. The orange trees were standing, but had been turned to crouching embers. I walked across dirt, stepping around the bits of twig that continued to give off breaths of fugitive smoke.
Where the girl had been buried: a deep gouge in the earth.
I watched the field after that but saw nothing special. In a month new grass was growing, and by summer, only through the dark bald patches could anyone tell that there’d been a fire at all.
And today, while my wife painted a picture of the courtyard, I went into the garage and found an old tool, a scythe. I took it up and went out into the field to mow. This action was not taken because of some fear or knowledge, for the Mystery remained—I didn’t know if some animal had been digging at the hole where Kim Redlander was offered to the world, or if Stu himself had dug her up days before, moving rotting bones to another resting place. I didn’t go to the field with any knowledge. I went singing into the field, cutting the hair of the earth, propelled by an urge that seemed older than any other.
Some have called this instinct the Mystery, but the simpler term is Stu’s:
Faith.
I swiped the scythe across the fruit of her womb, then gave thanks and praise to the Mother all that day, for I could feel Her now, walking among her children; I spilled my own blood in the moistened dirt for Her.
My wife called to me, waving from the yard, and I turned, holding fast to the bloodied scythe, while I heard a young girl whisper in my ear that faith demands sacrifice.
Life was precious, for that moment, full of meaning, and wonder.
I walked wearily but gladly across the field, and when I reached my wife, her face brightened.
“You’ve found it,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Your joy,” and she seemed truly happy for me.
“I have.”
I thought of Joe Redlander, and Stu, and Kim, the believers who brought me to this place.
The scythe seemed to shine like a crescent moon in my hand as I brought it across my wife’s neck.
The Night Before Alec Got Married
1
You can never be too sure or too stupid, but you can be too horny—Alec DelBanco, he was smart, but men are never very smart in that one area, and it got him right where you don’t want to be got, not if you’re twenty-four and on the run because something’s after you, only it doesn’t have a name and maybe it doesn’t even have a face but you can see it sometimes in their faces looking out at you like it’s some kind of tourist on a world cruise and you’re one of the Wonders of the World to It.
You call it an It because you don’t know if It’s been noticed by anyone else, and you can’t really talk about It, because if you did, maybe that’s when It would get you.
It got Alec that night, and he didn’t even have to say one word about it. Boy, was he smart, he was practically Phi-Fucking-Beta Kappa from Stanford, and then the job with Kelleher-Darden with an eighty-thousand-a-year salary for a twenty-two-year-old asshole you used to get drunk with—well, everybody figured Alec had just grabbed the golden ring and had not let go.
And handsome! He’d been a stud since the age of twelve, if you remembered far back enough when every girl you’d ever had a crush on seemed to only want to get near you so they could get within breathing distance of your friend. Still, Alec Delbanco never forgot a friend, and you got some fringe benefits from knowing him all those years, beautiful girls who wouldn’t normally give you the time of day all around you—you couldn’t touch them, of course, not in the light
of day, not with them in the room, that is, but, oh! when the lights were out and you were alone in bed with your hand and a little imagination—you had them all every which way but loose!
You loved Alec, though, really loved him.
Like a brother, I mean, because you’d practically grown up with him since you could remember. He was better than a brother, too, because your own brothers were kind of missing something in the compassion department.
I wouldn’t fuck a guy, no way, but if I had to fuck a guy—I mean, like the Nazis had me in this torture rack and told me I’d have to fuck a guy or get it cut off, well, I couldn’t fuck just anyone—it would have to be Alec, and not just ’cause he was pretty, but because I have feelings for him—but not like you think.
Once, in the showers after gym, he was leaning around to get his towel, and I swear to God this is true, I thought he was a girl, from the back, he’s all lean and muscular, but I thought he looked like, you know, one of those Olympic women swimmers, taut and strong but kind of attractive, too. So, yeah, if pressed into it, I guess you could say I’d do him.
But this isn’t about me or what I would do if the Fourth Reich came along—and it just might if you read the papers—it’s about Alec and the night before he got married. His girl, Luce, was out with a whole gaggle down at the Marina getting toasted on margaritas and opening cute little presents, while you and me were over on Sunset trying to find just the right pro to come in and do a little dance over Alec’s face when he least suspected it. I didn’t like Luce too much—she was always kind of a bitch to me, almost like she thought I wanted Alec more than she did. I’ve got to be honest here, I would’ve preferred Alec to marry a hooker and at least be happy rather than wed Lucille C. St. Gerard, a fifth generation Californian from Sacramento who debuted at every second-rate cotillion north of Bakersfield.
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 41