Last Days (22 page)

Even without the one hundred grand he’d have made the film. Was touched too profoundly by its prospects to walk.

The travel, the insomnia, the interminable waiting around on 189

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shoots, the weeks of wading through rushes, overseeing the final edit, all of that in the months ahead was already worth it.
And always was.
Because making a film was everything.

Dan could survive without it. He had harder skills. Loads of paid work. But he needed Dan. His best friend. And best friends helped each other out.
Let him sleep in his own
bed for a night and then talk him round.
Dan would come through. Dan always did.

190

TWELVE

west hampstead, london,

16 june 2011. 10 p.m.

True to his word, Max had four boxes of SAD lights delivered by express courier. They’d arrived before he got home and Jane downstairs signed for them. Imagining the dust, hair, scratches and stains of his pit revealed in forensic detail by Max’s indoor sunlight, he left the lamps inside the boxes, stacked up in the lounge.

To divert his anxiety, with a stomach sloshing with a bilge of brandy, whisky and fruit cake, he took his laptop to the desk, went through Max’s production schedule, and made more notes for the US section of the film’s script. Two interviews had been arranged by Max with two cops involved in the 1975 Last Days murders: the first patrolman on the scene of the bloodbath at the Arizona copper mine, and the lead homicide detective who investigated the case that more or less ended when Brother Belial hit the bricks of the rec room in the Florence penitentiary.

They had another shoot with the son of the man who owned the horse ranch neighbouring the copper mine. The final shoot was with the only surviving adult member of The Temple of the Last Days who had been present during 191

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the cult’s final year: the money shoot with Martha Lake.

She’d never spoken to the makers of the four existing documentaries; films that only made assumptions about what occurred at the copper mine, up to and including the Night of Ascent. Even Irvine Levine’s guesses about what happened were pretty wild, so Kyle had decided to reserve judgement until he interviewed them all himself. Max didn’t want them filming the San Diego mansion Sister Katherine had resided in for two years before the Night of Ascent. The notes said screenshots would be sufficient, though Kyle wasn’t sure he agreed.
Variety
claimed it was now owned by Chet Regal, the terminally ill Hollywood badboy, which gave the location a cool Kenneth Anger
Hollywood Babylon
vibe.
But you
can’t have everything
.

Two of the documentary films about the cult were made in the seventies, two in the eighties. Since his first meeting with Max he’d seen them all. Terrible recreations with amateur actors plagued them. Bits of the same bleached news footage in every one too: cops and lawyers with sideburns and collar-length hair, aviator sunglasses under the desert sun at the copper mine, or walking into the courthouse in Yuma; black-and-white cars lined up and cops herding skinny figures under blankets into the halls of justice; women reporters in flared pastel trousers and fitted blouses, their thin wrists holding microphones like steel toffee apples; the governor of Arizona in black-framed glasses speaking on national news; the police chief sweating, the Coroner, the DA, all the boys from City Hall.

And the very same photos in the plate section of Levine’s
Last Days: True Crime Bestseller
paperback had been re -

192

LAST DAYS

cycled
ad infinitum
: the black-and-white photographs of the young members of The Temple; long-haired, perfect teeth, eyes smiling in high school yearbook photos, in graduation snapshots taken in better days; or lean and haggard and doleful, dead-eyed or excitably defiant, in the Arizona Police Department mugshots of the cult members who had run away before that infamous night in 1975, and then been rounded up from whatever failure at living a normal life had befallen them.

Only one of the documentaries,
Children of the Beast
, had a decent production budget because there were several minutes of helicopter footage of the mine, of Sister Katherine’s mansion from above and the distant Sonora desert looking like the baked surface of an uninhabited planet, where the cult had frolicked and then hunted each other with high-powered rifles when it all went to shit.

There was still a lot of hearsay in
Children of the Beast
, as well as its rivals, from people not directly connected to the cult. Three old television celebrities from seventies Holly -

wood rambling on about Katherine’s charisma, her allure, her uncanny ability of telling them exactly what they were thinking and feeling, as she sashayed around B-list parties wearing Chanel and Yves Saint Lauren; told them things they had never told anyone before . . .
blah blah blah
. . . things they could not articulate to themselves . . .
blah blah blah
.

There was a clumsy and unrevealing probe around her connection to Scientology in all four films, and a facsimile of Katherine’s arrest for running a brothel in London in the early sixties. Somewhere upon its lurid cover, every DVD case featured either the famous pop-art portrait of Katherine – a 193

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cross between an overweight Elizabeth Taylor with long Mona Lisa hair, the smile equally beguiling – or the one re -

interpreting her as a jowly, red-eyed false messiah.

Not one of the other film-makers visited the French farm or the Holland Park headquarters, he guessed, due to budget implications. There was nothing in any of the films about the paranormal aspects of The Last Gathering, aka The Temple of the Last Days, that he’d literally walked into. Instead, they all dealt with the murders, the blood, the mute, naked children, the decapitation of Sister Katherine. Before Jim Jones trumped Sister Katherine three years later, during his notorious White Night in Guyana, by poisoning nine hundred of his own followers with fruit squash and strychnine.

When he was done with the script, the flat stank of stale cigarette smoke and the cat was asleep in the middle of his pillow. The television went on and off. Kyle checked his emails. No word from Dan. He sorted his laundry and began packing a rucksack for America. He’d redraft his script and do the shooting log the following day, then revise it on the ten-hour flight. Get to the shoots early and scope out the sites, while also working out the best compositions. The last four interviews were going to be done in record speed.

On the sofa, he flicked through the plate section of Irvine Levine’s
Last Days
, because he couldn’t leave the book alone for long. Stared at Sister Katherine’s plump, though not un -

attractive face. Then stared at the dark Rasputin looks of Brother Belial on the opposite page; the thin bearded visage of the man who helped shoot and kill four of his temple mates who tried to run on the Night of Ascent, then murdered Sister Katherine and cut the throats of four of his comrades in The Seven, before being found by the police at 194

LAST DAYS

the copper mine with five raggedy children, forty minutes after the owner of the neighbouring ranch raised the alarm about a fire, a UFO, barking dogs and the sound of gunshots at the Last Days commune.

Dogs. Always with the dogs.

Kyle drifted over to his bed. He tried to move the cat, but its eyes went black as olives and the claws on one paw were shown. ‘Fuck’s sake.’ He fell asleep curled around the cat, one hand under his head.

And came half awake into darkness and from a place al ready distant in the vague memory held by the last fragments of sleep. From a place hazy with soot, with smoke. Where wet stones ran with rain. Where strained and yet indistinct faces yearned upwards at colourless gases. Stripped, lean and smeared ruddy, they were more bone than meat. Straw and dark clods of refuse were strewn in the mud below their thin feet, suspended above the terrible ground. Rutted clay puddled with swirls of oil on unclear water and foamed with stagnation.

A feathery clatter of dry wings beyond the smoke.

Distant clashes of dull metal.

A place of winter colours in faint light and ponderous air.

And then him, in here . . . above his own bed, in the darkness of his room. The light about the curtains was millimetre-thin and silvery. He was insubstantial and hovered above the mattress. Joints bulged above and below his leg bones. Pelvis wide, stomach hollow, ribs a prominent racking: he could sense every inch of his wastage. Scrawny-throated, he murmured for water. Parched and lipless, his death-mask face lay in a fanned halo of colourless hair, wisps about a 195

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skull patchworked with blemishes and prominent blood vessels gone to black.

And too long, too long, these feet that hung in the cold air, and this length of clawed finger on gristle hands too weary to move from where they had been cast outwards like the crucified of the air. He was gone from himself and was inside this thing.

Twisting, he fought and struggled to wake the moment he half comprehended this entrapment inside something frail and unfamiliar above the bed; a body that still rose gently to the ceiling he could not see. And the very notion of who he was writhed in search of a return to whatever flesh had once clothed his own bones.

Nearby, beyond him, in the darkness, there was a

scratching and bumping, then a frantic
bang bang bang.
The noise erupted from another room, but one close by.

And then he dropped. And came awake from a sense of being in the air. Was shocked into a palsy, a jerking in disorderly bedding, and left panting, turned on his side, cramped over, bent in half.

Slowly, he explored his face with tremulous fingertips. Felt stubble around an immediately familiar mouth: his snub nose, his tatty hair. The rush of recognition spread and he lengthened his own back, his own legs and arms. Clenched his fists and curled toes.

Sat up.

There had been bumping, but now there was only

scratching. Frantic carpet pulling.
The cat
, somewhere out by the front door.

Kyle rolled across the bed and turned the bedside lamp on. Squinted in the light that bruised his eyes. Staggered from 196

LAST DAYS

the bed and crossed the room that functioned as the bedroom and living room. Snapped on the hallway light and peered down the corridor.

The cat turned its head briefly from where it crouched at the front door, nose dipped to the thin crack between the mat and the door. It glanced at him only to flash eyes gone to ebony marbles in fright. Its hackles were up.
Out, out, out;
let me out.

Feet numb and dragging like he had a trapped nerve in his groin, Kyle careened down the hallway, past the kitchen and bathroom; the caravan dimensions and dollhouse appli-ances were in darkness beyond doors pulled to but not closed.

Somewhere within the murk of the kitchen was the litter tray.

A backup. Maybe the cat couldn’t wait to go, had held on, but had reached the critical moment and was embarrassed and unsettled as cats can be about such matters.
Better get
it outside.

Wakefulness complete, Kyle shivered in the cold. If he let the cat out, he’d have to go down a flight of stairs to let it into the communal garden at the back of the block. ‘I thought we were past all that. Thought you could wait until the morning. Eh?’

Catch off, lock unlatched, he only managed to open the door a fraction before the cat fled out, slippery and sinewy as water, through the crack and onto the unlit stairwell.

Shivering in his briefs, his body still frail with the residue of a troubled dismorphic dreamtime, Kyle knocked the staircase lights on and padded down the dusty carpeted stairs to the ground floor, pondering the nightmare all the way to the bottom: he’d never experienced anything like it, anything so vivid. Twice now. Out of his body, and off his bed like he 197

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had become lost outside of himself, or been taken and put somewhere else, far worse.
Why?
Those things on the walls in France and London, flashed, then flickered inside his mind.

Cold air seeped under and around the back door and broke the uncomfortable enquiry of his thoughts, returned his focus to the real world. No trace of dawn outside; sky black, clouds concealed the stars.
What time is it?
The cat climbed the wood and reached out its front legs to hurry him.

Still frantic and coal-eyed, muscles tensed and twitched under the bushed-up fur. And then it was gone, without a sound or backward look, into the garden darkness. ‘Not coming down again tonight,’ he said, but the cat wasn’t listening. It had already scattered away through the overgrown yard.

He might need the bleach and a rag, a plastic bag, from under the kitchen sink to clean up and dispose of the mess in the litter tray, or worse. A hassle that should have been unbearable at this time of night, though he discovered he was glad to be awake. To not be in,
or above
, his bed any longer.

The lights would stay on. He’d doze again when the sun rose. Still be up in plenty of time to start work. Would be no time for the gym, again.
Pity that.
A trivial matter compared to the simple and profound relief of being awake. Of not being stuck inside a nightmare.

But back inside the hallway of his flat, he paused under the overhead light. Raised his chin and sniffed at a scent of burned hair, a whiff of decomposition. And more: old water, damp clothes forgotten in dark unheated rooms. Something else too . . .
What was that? That smell?
The moist ashes of a dead fire. Like a garden fire full of newspaper that had been hosed down.
In here? How?

He checked the bathroom. Could smell the mildew on the 198

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wall above the cistern, his own musty animal scent on the one bath towel that needed washing, the scent of once wet but now dry lino, the municipal scents of old bleach and dis-infectant. He went further inside. Sniffed. A sickly tang of cheap spray-on deodorant that left white grit inside the armpits of his shirts. Distant deep-well smells of the toilet, seat up. He had a good nose; had never taken cocaine, a rarity in film and television production. But there was nothing amiss in the bathroom. The walls were clear.