Last Days (31 page)

As the investigation drew on, there were pictures of her leaving the police station in Phoenix, wearing tight leather knee boots and a dress coat, a subtle smile at the corners of her mouth and shining within her big eyes. There was another of her in strappy high-heeled sandals, a lilac-coloured suit 274

LAST DAYS

and sheer pantyhose on long legs that returned the press photographer’s flash to illuminate the pornographic fantasies of the average American male. She’d not long crawled out of hell with a baby on her back, but Kyle was tempted to believe she enjoyed the attention by that stage of the investigation.

Martha was off the hook. Martha had escaped. Star witness, cult fox, killer starlet, heroic mother, depending on which tabloid was read back then by people thirsty for gore and desperate for sensation. The media’s obsession with Martha Lake had been erotic in its intensity, and agape in its incredulity that such a beautiful young girl-next-door could have been mixed up
in all that
.

A terrible book was ghost-written for her in 1976 called
A Mother’s Tears, a Child’s Cry
, which she later denounced as total fiction. Kyle had tracked down an old paperback from an eBay seller. After reading Levine’s book, he merely skimmed through
A Mother’s Tears
and its hyperbole-riddled fixation with the sexual antics of the cult; there was noth -

ing about the bloody climax of Sister Katherine’s
paradise
because Lake had not been at the mine in July 1975, and there was little information about the group’s hierarchy or rituals because Lake had probably not been consulted when the book was written. A movie made for TV based on the book called
Bloody Martha
, which credited her as a producer, was a take-the-money-and-run collaboration if ever he’d seen one. The film still hadn’t even made it on to DVD; he’d checked.

But the forced couplings, the drug frenzies in Eden, the unknown father, her intimate proximity to a pack of crazy-faced Satanic killers at an abandoned copper mine, all trailed behind her like a comet’s tail. An imaginary force that lifted 275

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her out of the frame of the press photos. For nearly two years she’d danced with the devil and opened wide to eat from his table out in the moonlike Sonoran desert. She had a mystique, beauty and enigma that must have made Sister Katherine’s ashes whirl like a dust devil within her munici -

pal grave. Katherine went down in popular history as a fat frump, an obese Countess Bathory, a manipulative psycho.

While Martha Lake, and the recently deceased raven-haired beauty, Bridgette Clover, came out of that mine fantasized about like Playboy centrefolds and revered as feminist anti-heroes. Film critics still hailed them as the precursors to the hard-body scream queens that populate trashy horror slashers. They had the requisite beauty and a proximity to genuine evil, if not a potential participation in it, to become icons.

Until 1981, when the wild-eyed and feral creature that Martha became saw her celebrity dwindle onto the lesser pages, revealing tawdry stories of substance addiction, alleged promiscuity, credit card fraud, and the familiar saga of a child being taken into care of the court. The money was gone, the looks were going. And then she vanished for thirty years.

Until tenacious Max found her three months prior to their interview for the film.

And he was actually going to meet Martha Lake in a few hours. ‘Where you been all my life, Martha?’

Dan turned in his seat with a groan.

276

NINETEEN

seattle. 22 june 2011. 10 a.m.

The woman who answered the door to Kyle and Dan was barely recognizable as the Martha Lake circa seventy-five, or even eighty-one.

Within a wooden door frame that looked like it suffered from seborrhoeic dermatitis, Martha Lake was famine-thin under a shapeless cardigan and sweat pants. A stringy neck stretched to a face collapsed with so much regret, disappointment, sorrow, and hopelessness, it carried a misery sentence of another decade more than any woman of fifty-eight years would wish to serve. The broad bone structure was still in evidence, beneath the deeply lined skin that hung from it. Down-turned and haggard, her mouth hadn’t released much laughter since 1977 when she was flown from one top-of-the-town party to another. The big passionate lips had vanished into the grooves around her mouth and scoring her chin. That proud and secret smile from the news footage of seventy-five was now a muzzle. Pulled tight into a pony-tail, her hair was white strung with gunmetal grey.

But the eyes were classic Martha Lake: handsome, intelligent, alert. Timeless. Kyle had stared into them for a long time while he researched her online, but now they were 277

ADAM NEVILL

staring back at him he found himself diffident and nervous, as if overwhelmed by an authority he’d hitherto underestimated, or as if suddenly confronted by a girl he hadn’t realized he’d been stalking.

She caught his reaction. Seemed to like it. Smiled without moving her mouth. Behind her a malodour of cheap cigar -

ettes and unkempt living spaces issued from the murk of her home. ‘Nice to see I can still turn heads.’ Her laugh was a wet catarrh grumble; her teeth were mostly brown. ‘Come on in, kids.’ She peered over their heads, up and down the street quickly, then stood aside on grubby slippered feet.

The world inside Martha Lake’s rented Folk-Victorian house, with its pointed gables, weathered spindles and gin-gerbread details over the peeling porch sunk into an overgrown yard, was missing some essential colours. Silver had gone from the places where the thin light seeped. Warmer tones of the reds had been drained from the hardwood floor and banisters. Anything once white only emitted a grey or a dull-brown spectrum. Door frames and skirting boards were chipped and scuffed. Ancient wallpaper of a wintry green stifled visibility to eye level, before plaster painted the tone of artificial limbs took over and grew sickly to the murky ceiling and its cracked plaster mouldings.

The building that opened around Kyle was vast and gave the impression not so much of vacancy but of its abandon-ment in another time. The silence and stillness slowed Kyle’s mind, but never put it at ease; in fact, the atmosphere immediately turned his spirits downwards.

Sunlight failed to move much further than the glass it came in through, and left vague blue stripes across the ceiling in 278

LAST DAYS

the hallway Martha led them along, to the kitchen. ‘Spend my time in here.’

In the kitchen, pale blinds were half drawn behind grubby net curtains, about which a dwindling brown light hovered.

The swept but scratched lino on the floor of the kitchen was patterned with daisies, but their two-dimensional floral beaming did nothing to enliven the room. Wooden wall cabinets painted yellow were now faded to a soiled vanilla. Clear plastic door handles were cut like jewels. Kyle’s nan had similar; same for the big enamel sink, the wooden table with four simple chairs, the blue and white check tablecloth.

Beside an ancient-looking metal stove, Martha’s glasses and mugs and plates were stacked neatly, but tidiness would never make the kitchen look homely. One of those rooms in one of those houses that made him feel like an intruder within, and a witness to, the meagreness and poverty of the aged.

He came to this dreadful place exhausted, but the room made him feel so forlorn his movements diminished to a shuffle. But it was a damn good location for the interview; a Hollywood art director couldn’t have designed better. It was a further representation of Martha’s decline, of what became of the survivors; another of those places where the bloody memories of the cult’s vertical ascent into chaos were stored.

In the dim room Martha’s face glowed faintly like unsalted butter. The table before her chair was covered in an assort-ment of medication in blister packs, beside a bottle of Four Roses bourbon. ‘You want?’ she said, when she saw Kyle spy the whisky before looking away.

Kyle nearly said
not this early
, but shook his head instead.

‘No, thanks.’

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‘Coffee in the pot. Fresh made.’

‘Dan?’

‘No, ta.’ Dan began setting up the lights, and unpacking the sound equipment; content to be the silent member of the crew, not so much indifferent as happily irrelevant to the ‘talent’.

Kyle poured himself a cup, and one for Martha. He was too on edge to ask her where the sugar was. He’d wince it down black and bitter.

Kyle also knew from Max’s notes that Martha had three children by three different men, and the only father that remained a mystery was the father of her eldest son, who was conceived at the copper mine in 1973. The other fathers and all of the children appeared long gone. He wondered whether one of the dim rooms outside the kitchen held their images inside frames.

‘Big place for one person.’

Martha gave Kyle a knowing smile. ‘Takes longer to fill.’

He wasn’t sure what she meant. Dan did a light-meter reading behind Martha’s head. And he looked really uneasy as he did so.
One more shoot, mate. Last one
.
The last one
of the Last Days.

Martha took a deep draw on her cigarette. ‘It’s the third place I rented this year. Gotta keep moving. Past keeps catchin’ up.’

‘The press?’

Martha smiled her brown smile and stubbed out the cigar -

ette. Took another from the packet on the table. Lit up. ‘You don’t know nothin’, do you?’ She shook her head and pulled a long draught of thick smoke into her lungs; its passage downwards sounded like it rasped through a series of small holes inside her chest.

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LAST DAYS

Kyle smiled and hoped to disarm what he intuited as mockery. ‘I’m hoping you might change that,’ he said. ‘We’ve interviewed the police who worked the case, and the son of the man who once owned the ranch nearby—’

‘He dead? Mr Aguilar?’

‘Er, yes.’

Through a veil of cigarette smoke, Martha’s eyes narrowed. ‘How’d he go?’

‘Umm, not sure. His son never said.’

‘God rest his soul. He’s the only reason I’m sittin’ here now.’

Kyle nodded. ‘His son spoke highly of him.’

‘Back then police didn’t bother groups like we had, lest you gave them pretty good cause. Different now. But out at the mine there was no one to help us right till the end we knew was comin’. ’Cept for Mr Aguilar. He tried to help Prissie too.’ Martha stopped talking and shook her head.

‘Sister Priscilla?’

Martha snorted. ‘What you know about Prissie?’

‘Not much. Just that Mr Aguilar sheltered her after she ran. But then she just gave herself up to the Temple.’

Martha nodded. ‘Damn fool. But I can’t blame her.’

Kyle looked at Dan to see how close he was to readiness.

‘Why?’

‘She went back for her baby boy. Couldn’t get no further than that ranch. Broken heart brought her back to the mine.

But she shoulda kept goin’ and gone straight to the police.’

She suddenly clapped her hands, startling Kyle and Dan. ‘Ha!

Shoulda, coulda. Story of my life!’ She threw her head back and cackled until a wet cough wracked her entire body. Dan’s eyes went wide; Kyle went for water.

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Martha wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her cardigan, and wheezed like she was sucking air into her lungs through a wet cheesecloth. She nodded her appreciation for Kyle’s assistance with the water, for the hand on her shoulder. When her breathing returned to a semblance of normality, Dan said,

‘Ready when you are, boss,’ from behind the tripod-mounted camera.

They’d shoot this naturally because Kyle wanted it to be what it was: an anxious woman with lined skin, smoking in a dismal kitchen and talking about the imprisonment and murder of her friends. A time in her life she’d never escaped.

This was her last chance to do something and she wanted to take it. Like it was a statement, if not a will. That’s how she made it feel.

‘Martha, you are the only living survivor of The Temple of the Last Days who was an adult member in its . . . well its final days in the Sonoran desert. The spring and summer of 1975. We’ll never know, but the children who survived the Last Days were probably too young at the time of their rescue to remember much about the cult. And the death by suicide of Bridgette Clover, earlier this year, makes you the only known living memory of the Temple in its final incarnation.’

Martha nodded her head and raised her jaw with what looked like stubborn pride. ‘Got that right.’ Besides the cigar -

ettes and whisky, Kyle wondered if anything else could give her satisfaction at this point in her life.

‘So would you begin by telling us a little about how you came to be a member of the Temple?’

She told them a lot more than a little. Like Brother Gabriel and Sister Isis before her, Kyle assumed from Martha Lake’s 282

LAST DAYS

narration that she didn’t get out much. She also displayed the same unnerving eccentricity that incubates in a lengthy isolation. He wondered if they had all been fundamentally damaged before their time in the cult, or whether the association made each of them irretrievably alien in the ordinary worlds they later tried to inhabit. Susan and Gabriel had become gregarious enough in the company of him and Dan, but both exhibited the signs of a consistent failure to make a lasting contact with others in any way meaningful enough to renew a membership in society. They were all misfits and outcasts. And they made him feel his time with them had to be kept short, as if they were contagious. Only Max appeared to have flourished post-Katherine, but then, he was hardly normal either.

Martha’s story of the early days would have to be cut tight to a voice-over. If anything, it was typical enough to be a cliché: a girl from a poor home with a violent and mostly absent father and an alcoholic mother. A girl who dropped out of high school and ran away to San Francisco. Followed that up by experimenting with drugs and communal living in the euphoria of the sixties youth revolution. Drifted down to LA with some biker drug-dealers and hooked up with enig-matic Last Temple types wearing their robes on Santa Monica Boulevard, with their intense eyes and their talk of the God in you and salvation and paradise.