Last Days (24 page)

They looked at each other with wild and watery eyes. Neither of them spoke, or could speak for a long time.

Dan sat on the end of Kyle’s bed and stared into his third neat whisky. ‘We can’t.’

‘Don’t start with that quitting shit. I booked the tickets online.’

‘Mate. This isn’t right.’

‘Right? This is our future. We finish this film, we’re out of shit town, for life. What we always talked about. After this, 208

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we can make anything we want, our own way, with a decent budget. Think about that. I cannot, simply cannot work one more shift in that warehouse. Mate, please.’

‘Kyle . . . it’s too much. What if that shit comes into my flat? You ever think about that? I can’t believe you’d even consider going to where they killed each other. After this?’

‘Dan—’

‘That’s a warning!’ Dan pointed at the entrance into the hallway. ‘You hear me? A bloody warning, mate.’ Dan stared at his hands, then gulped at his whisky. ‘And what about the figure in the Clarendon Road house? I can’t stop thinking about it. That wasn’t a stain or dream, Kyle.’

‘Some junkie. Homeless type,’ Kyle said quickly, hoping more than believing it was even plausible.

‘You don’t know that. Bits of him were transparent. And where was he hiding? Think of that. We checked the whole floor.’

‘But not the loft on the second floor. He could have come from there.’

‘Possible. But we would have heard him coming down. A projection maybe? Could Max be sending us up?’

‘Fuck knows. But if it . . . if it actually was something, there is no way on God’s earth we are quitting. I mean, come on. Get fucking real.’

‘What did Max say about it?’

‘He wants to wait for the US footage before he makes up his mind. He had to rush off to Susan’s funeral.’

‘Convenient. You still think he’s bullshitting us?’

‘Hard to tell.’

‘Why does he want the main focus of the film to be on the paranormal elements? Maybe because he thought we’d 209

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find something? And now we’re up to our plums in

head-expanding strangeness.’

Kyle watched fear flicker in Dan’s eyes. He’d rattled his friend’s fragile confidence again; he should never have shown him the thing in the cupboard or the bathroom in Caen. But it would have been wrong not to, though it had crossed his mind. He tried to alleviate the tension. ‘That’s our area of expertise. Kind of makes sense. If you think about it.’

‘That’s Max’s line. So again, I am worried we are now talking ourselves deeper into something really weird and—’

Kyle cut him off. ‘I want to do more diaries. To camera.

About stuff off the record. About our unexpected involvement in the story because of the freaky material we’ve uncovered. And Max is not going to see these segments until after the final edit. Call it security.’

‘I read the contract again today. He doesn’t even want to be referred to on film at all. Says he’ll use a pseudonym for the credits. Because of his reputation? Smells funny to me.

Bit like bullshit.’

‘Which is why we are going to involve our executive producer in ways he can’t imagine.’

Dan nodded, but took another nervous swig from his glass.

Kyle struggled to maintain a smile. ‘This is getting even better. We now have a story within the story. Another layer.

About Max. And about us.’

‘About what we’re drawing out. You ever think of that?’

‘Another reason why this is too good to bin. That one scene in Holland Park will get this on a million screens.

Maybe cinema screens.
Cinema.
’

It failed to reignite his friend’s enthusiasm.

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‘I can clear my entire debt with the fee, but only if we complete. You’ll be able to lay off those weddings too.’

Dan nodded, but still didn’t look convinced.

‘Four shoots. Four days. That’s it. A wrap. Four bloody days. Come on. In America. America! Then you’re done.

Thirty grand in your pocket. Finger Mouse and me do the edit. And you step away until the premier. Until the festivals.

Eh? Cannes. Sundance. They’ll lap this shit up.’

Dan looked at his feet. ‘Mate. I don’t . . . I don’t think I can.’

‘That’s just great.’ Kyle nodded. ‘Because I can’t do it without you.’

‘Please, Kyle. Let this one go.’

‘You’re a genius with a camera, Dan. It’ll look shit without you.’ Kyle nodded at the laptop. ‘And that’s my future. Right there. I don’t take this opportunity, I might as well cut my own throat right now.’

211

WHITE NIGHT

‘Don’t eat the brains. They’ll make you even crazier.’

Brother Belial, Arizona 1974

Irvine Levine,
Last Days

FOURTEEN

blue oak copper mine, sonora desert,

arizona. 19 june 2011. 2 p.m.

‘I feel like I’m standing on the surface of a distant planet.

Everything looks alien out here. The vegetation, the colours of the landscape, the sky, the rocks, even the air. High temperature today was thirty-eight degrees Celsius. The hottest part of the day has passed, but I can still feel the water being sucked out of my body and it’s only foresummer. In summer, temperatures soar to forty-three degrees. Which begs the question: why would anyone choose to live here, in 311,000

square kilometres of desert? One of the biggest deserts in North America. You could fit all of Great Britain inside the Sonoran desert and still have 100,000 square kilometres of sand left over.

‘The desert covers massive areas of Mexico, California, Arizona and New Mexico. It also contains some of the remotest parts of the United States. Places where you can remain unobserved. So it seems logical to assume isolation was Sister Katherine’s motive for relocating The Temple of the Last Days here in early 1973.

‘After five itinerant months in California, she claimed she had received a second vision that featured a new refuge for 215

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her Temple: a disused copper mine in a desert. But it is now believed that one of the bikers that the group bought drugs from in LA had told her about the place. An area where organized criminal gangs smuggle more migrants and drugs into North America from Mexico than anywhere else. It’s a borderland—’

Dan looked up from the viewfinder. ‘Dude. Sorry. I’m getting too much glare from the metal roof. Need to move the camera. About six feet stage right, where you are sitting. Let’s get this done quick. Light’s all kinda going reddish now, on that wall behind you, which is very cool. Shift your arse.’

‘Here?’

‘Perfect. Carry on from there with your borderland shit.

Then I want to get that sky.’

Kyle went back to his script, laid in the dust beside the DAT sound recorder, and continued with his audio narration while Dan shot close-ups of another of the surviving buildings. ‘Right. OK. It’s a borderland. Where strange cargos and traffic pass through, often undetected, and is pretty unwelcome north of here. It’s also an area where small towns and businesses were regularly abandoned over the last century.

Where only their ruins are left behind. Like here: Blue Oak.

Thirty kilometres east of Yuma, off the Interstate Highway 8, in the Fortuna Foothills, is an abandoned copper mine.

The last miner to leave here worked the mine up until 1946.

It remained empty until 1973. But that year it received a new set of tenants. People stranger than anyone could remember seeing in these parts before, and probably since.

‘The advance party of The Temple of the Last Days occupied these dilapidated buildings in the winter of 1973. Only 216

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four original members from the European group now remained with Sister Katherine. But over the next few years many others would come and join them and those she recruited in LA. At its peak in early seventy-four, over forty men, women and children would form a permanent community and scratch out an existence in this remote and desolate corner of the world. New arrivals included the ex-convicts Brothers Belial, Moloch and Baal, who became central to the new Seven leadership. Along with their leader, their names would go down in infamy. What happened to the other members remaining here in 1975 finally put Blue Oak on the map.’

‘Dude, you done?’

‘Yeah. I’ll get Lieutenant Conway to walk us through the crime scene. Can you light the temple shack for both cameras? Save time. Rest of it, leave for now.’ There was more light at the mine than at the farm in Normandy, and even though there was a shallow depth of field in most of the buildings with intact walls, as long as there was no movement Dan could shoot with a wide-open aperture and really get the ruins in their own light.

‘Will do. Tripod?’

Kyle winced. ‘I’m actually thinking tripod for stability second time out. Do it first with the Canon on your shoulder.

On the walk-through.’ Though they distrusted handheld filming, some moving Steadicam footage would add variety to a visual palette.

Dan nodded his assent and frowned in concentration as he wrestled with the directions from a technical point of view.

‘And, mate,’ Kyle said, quietly, ‘it’s great to have you here.

I mean that.’

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Dan looked at him and nodded. ‘Just don’t let Conway step on a bloody snake.’ He returned to his camera.

Kyle sucked water from a bottle so hard the plastic crushed in the palm of his hand. He walked across to Lieutenant Conway, who still stood with his back to them, having shown no interest in their shoots of the exteriors of the dilapidated settlement and the establishing shots of the desert. He stood impassively, and alone, to one side; sunglasses off, eyes screwed against what remained of the glare, his attention fixed on a copse of dead trees.

What surprised Kyle most about Conway was why anyone with so fair a complexion would live his entire life in a place where the sun burned the ground to dust. Continents of marmalade-coloured freckles joined up all over his pudgy forearms and face and then darkened, like the marmalade was now burning. In between the freckles and moles his skin was the pink of ham. What was left of his hair, cut neat to the nape of his neck and dark with sweat where it poked beneath an Arizona Diamondbacks baseball cap, must have once been a bright Gaelic orange. His eyelashes were still gin-gery. Scottish or Irish stock, with skin suited to a wet, cold climate in the Northern hemisphere. And he looked like he was about to have a massive coronary any moment. Wet with sweat front and back, his short-sleeved shirt bulged from a round torso packed inside it; the patterned tie about his bulbous throat looked like it was slowly choking him.

When they first saw the old cop thrust himself out of an enormous Lincoln and waddle across the lot towards the diner in Yuma, Kyle and Dan’s first instinct was to grin. His black pants were pulled up well above his stomach button, leaving a few inches of white sports sock visible on thin 218

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ankles above polished black shoes. But when he entered the chilly conditioned atmosphere of the restaurant, the emerald sharpness of the old man’s eyes killed their smiles in a heartbeat. They found themselves taking Lieutenant Conway seriously, very quickly.

Out at the mine, the retired police officer remained inscrutable, his hard eyes stuck in a permanent squint inside their doughy sockets. They neither put Kyle at ease, nor gave away anything on Lieutenant Conway’s mind, besides a grumpy preoccupation with matters unshared. In the journey out to the mine, he’d said little: short perfunctory statements about the landscape, or the weather. All delivered quickly, without emotion, and only when prompted by Kyle’s fruitless attempts at conversation. But Conway said he had liked Tony Blair. ‘Always us, ain’t it. Sortin’ out the world,’ was the closest thing he’d thus far expressed to an opinion. He made Kyle feel diffident, and younger somehow. Dan was just wary of him.

‘Looks like something out of a western,’ Kyle said to Conway and nodded at the thin black trees. But immediately regretted the words the moment they were out of his mouth.

The ex-cop never showed any sign of hearing him.

‘Still the same as they was,’ Conway eventually said to himself, or possibly to Kyle.

‘Sorry?’

‘Desert Ironwood.’

‘The trees?’

‘Desert gets a lot of rain. Most people don’t know that.

Even in summer. And this one gets more than most. Summer comes, these trees bloom. Like evergreens. We had eight inches so far this year. But these are still deep winter 219

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Ironwood.’ The detective turned and walked away from the trees, leaving Kyle stood before the dusty black limbs, so old they were fossils, the branches skeletal, spiky. Much of the tree lay like driftwood on the cement-coloured grit beneath his boots.

‘See here.’

Kyle turned to Conway. The cop pointed a plump hand at some weeds that resembled dead tomato vines in the dirt.

‘Devil’s Claw. Should be flowering. Over yonder, is Fairy Duster. Real pretty in summer. Pink flowers in a bloom. But not here.’ Kyle followed the detective’s directions to a wide swathe of bracken and dead bushes, but saw no flowers. He squinted in mystification at Conway, who cut a hand through the air. ‘Where them Saguaro cactus start? See them out yonder? Mixin’ it with the creosote bush and where the ghost flower starts up agin? And them small yella trees all about is Palo Verde. About sixty feet out. Ya see it?’

‘Right.’ Kyle swallowed his disappointment. He hated the way a camera made people act up, but couldn’t deny his dismay at a total indifference to filming either.

‘That’s where the desert starts agin. Right beyond that fence. Desert’s full of life. Don’t let no one tell you different.’

Kyle looked out at the remnants of the split-rail fence, and beyond it to where some greenery and dots of colour appeared upon the greyish dust. Then frowned at the old man, still not understanding. Sweat dislodged from his brow and ran into his stinging eyes. Outside his temporary blindness, he heard Conway say, ‘But right here where we is standin’ is dead. Nothing growin’. Same as it was in seventy-five.’ Conway licked his thin lips. His deep-set eyes gave nothing away. He tugged his baseball cap off and whisked a 220