Last Days (33 page)

Martha gasped and successfully suppressed a coughing fit, wiped at her eyes. ‘You know what they always told us? Huh?

They told us that we were forgiven, that our actions were blessed. Katherine told us we were perfect. We had tran-scended. We believed her. Had to. What we was doing was too awful to think about. All we needed on this earth were her blessings. That power was given to her by
others
. By friends. Old friends. That’s what she and The Seven always said.’ Martha broke off and looked up at the ceiling; she smiled her sinister smile again. ‘Friends none of us needed, that’s for sure.’

Kyle recalled what Detective Sweeney had said about Belial looking at the ceiling of the interview room when he mentioned ‘old friends’. His thoughts tripped over one another.

His skin chilled, his neck prickled. He looked across at Dan, who hadn’t broken his gaze from the viewfinder, but his face was pallid, twitchy.

Martha returned her attention to the table, poured herself another generous measure of whisky.
‘
And you know what?

We was punished if we showed any guilt for what we did to each other. So you learned to not show it. Ha! But if she was so clever, if she could see inside us, how come she never knew me and Bridgette were going to run that night? How about that, bitch?’

Kyle cleared his throat, not sure who the ‘bitch’ was that Martha referred to. ‘You’re absolutely certain, Sister Katherine ordered the killings?’

‘Sure. The Seven never done a thing without her say so 292

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first. And in seventy-five it all went to hell. The Seven was doing things with people they took away from the group. We didn’t know what, but it was something to do with the

“friends”. Some people came back from the desert crazy.

Couldn’t speak or tell us what went down out there. Like Brother Ariel and Brother Adonis. Just before they ran they also seen something out there in the desert. Was showed something real bad by The Seven. They’d been raped sure enough, but it was something else that finally sent them boys running for their lives. Then a couple of girls who went out with The Seven never come back at all. It’s like we was all being tried out for something.’

‘Something? Can you elaborate on what Sister Katherine’s aims were?’

Martha shrugged, but looked frightened. ‘Hard to know.

She broke us all, and them kids. Made us weak. So she could mess with our heads. We was prisoners. Isolated. And people was sayin’ some real crazy things in seventy-five. They was losin’ their minds. Hard to say what was what. Some was sayin’ they was gettin’ taken out of theirselves when they was sleepin’, and findin’ it hard to get back. We didn’t know what was friggin’ real and what was a bad trip. But it was all for somethin’ Katherine was plottin’. Somethin’ we had no say in, and woulda said no to, so she kept exactly what it was to herself. I ain’t sure even The Seven really knew what it was all for, whatever the fuck she had in mind out there in the desert. But when they started takin’ folks out at night, it felt like the end for us all was pretty close. Guess I was right about that.’

Kyle swallowed and took a deep breath. ‘Getting taken out of themselves. At night. Asleep. Did you . . .’

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Martha looked at Kyle intensely and in silence, as if suddenly wary or even suspicious of him. When she lowered her eyes to the table she nodded. ‘Few times I told myself it was the LSD that made me . . . made me feel like I was inside something else. Some other thing that weren’t right. Like I had been pulled outta my own skin.’

Kyle forced himself to focus on the script. Looked down at his papers and tried to stop his jaw from trembling. Saw the slides of the missing Temple followers’ faces. The individuals the police looked for after Martha and Bridgette gave their statements back in 1975. It would be more poignant if Martha could name them for the film. He cleared his throat.

‘You always claimed some of your friends were murdered.

Who else besides Adonis and Ariel? Who never came back?’

‘Sister Urania, who wouldn’t hear a damn bad word said against Katherine, not ever. She come over from France. Same as Sister Hannah. They was older. Nice girls. English. Urania was the one I told you gave up a big inheritance to the Temple. Millions. Every penny. Used to think on that when I saw her knee-deep in a dumpster in Yuma, fetching garbage out to feed her child. But same as Hannah, she would never have run. She was in it to the last drop of her blood, an’ I reckon she gave that up too. Once Ariel and Adonis was both taken care of, it got easier for Belial, Moloch, and Baal. Killin’

was easy once they lost their cherry. And them orders came down from Katherine’s place, no lie. That’s why she was holed up out of state, so she couldn’t get blamed for nothing.

But Sister Urania and Sister Hannah, they never ran. They got picked out as favourites for something special that they called
Ascent
. Part of Katherine’s plan. It was foreseen. They told us that much.’

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‘Was that the first time you heard “Ascent” mentioned at the mine?’

‘Guess so.’

‘Is this the reason you finally ran? You and Bridgette?

Because you were afraid for your own lives, and those of your children?’

‘Main reason I left was ’cus she stole a baby. Katherine.

Oh yeah. Prissie’s baby was gone one day from the shack we called the nursery. Brothers Moloch and Baal musta took the boy to Katherine. We heard them leave in the VW van early one morning. Prissie snuck out like she always did to check on her little one in the nursery and saw he was gone. Moloch and Baal came back to the mine late the next night without the baby. Never saw that child again till he was in them police photos. Little boy. The clean boy the police called him. He was one of the kids they found in the mine at the end. I was shown photos by the police, to identify the children they pulled out of there.’

‘What was Prissie’s reaction to this?’

‘Prissie tried to stay her grief. But she couldn’t. We all tried to talk her round, told her all that bullshit again about the children belonging to the Temple, not their parents. The Seven who was still around got real nervous after they took the boy though. More than when they killed Ariel and Adonis, or Urania and Hannah. It was like murder was one thing, but snatching babies was on a whole new level. Kinda fucked-up, you ask me.

‘But then Prissie was gone too, no more than a week after her baby went missing. We were told she ran. Told she was an apostate. That her name was never to be spoken again in paradise. Paradise, ha! But they killed her. Sure enough.

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So Katherine could keep her baby over in the big house in California. She couldn’t have kids herself, but she made us girls have them and hated us for being able to.’

‘Did you hear members of The Seven admit to murdering Sister Priscilla?’

‘No. But they did her, for sure. I know ’cus we were all sent out to work the fence without Prissie, who wouldn’t speak, or get up from the floor of the temple since they took her baby boy. When we came back in for lunch, Prissie was gone, and so was Brother Belial and Brother Moloch.

‘Prissie’s still out there, somewhere. Buried in that desert.

Cops never found her. Same as the others. They all dead and buried in the desert. Police never looked too hard for the bodies neither. What was the point once Belial was dead?

There was no one left to put in the electric chair.’

‘You and Bridgette took your babies with you when you ran. But what about the other children?’

‘There was five kids found at the end. Two older kids that came over from France in seventy-two. Sister Urania’s girl and Sister Hannah’s son. Other two boys belonged to Rhea and Lelia, who was shot dead trying to run on the Night of Ascent. And Prissie’s little boy was the fifth child they pulled out of there. But when me and Bridgette ran, them five kids was the only children still out there. Loads of kids had come and gone with their mothers since the beginning at the mine, but they all left with their mothers. Only kid who died there was the little ’un in seventy-three who didn’t last a week.

Was no doctors out there. His mother, Sister Eleos, she died of a drug overdose in San Francisco in seventy-seven. She was livin’ with Sisters Gehenna and Bellona, who was two of The Seven that Katherine sent up to San Francisco to start 296

LAST DAYS

a new branch in seventy-four. After all she’d been through, Eleos still went and lived with them wackos once it was all over and done with at the mine. Beats me why.’

Martha shook her head, then looked at Kyle and pointed her cigarette at him. ‘But no way Katherine was taking my baby. What she want a baby for? She didn’t even like kids.

Locked ’em away. Restricted access to them. So now we gotta just let her take ’em away from us at the mine like they was her own? No way. Not my boy. Or Bridgette’s. So we ran in the middle of the night. Cut a hole in the fence just before we broke from working on the last stretch of wire that final day, and we took off. Made it to Mr Aguilar’s ranch, and he drove us into town. That man saved us. Belial knew it too.

They was going to go and kill him anyway for helping Sister Prissie that first time she run. There was a lot of fighting talk when they came back with Prissie in the van that day. Belial was bragging about how he would “snuff that apostate wet-back”.’

It was no wonder Irvine Levine concentrated on the criminal aspects of the cult strewn all the way from London to Arizona; did he need anything else?

A long silence followed Martha’s disclosure about the children. Kyle eventually broke it. His desire to know about the Night of Ascent was making him breathless. ‘Martha, less than three months after you and Bridgette escaped from the mine, the Night of Ascent was called by Sister Katherine, and nine people were murdered at the mine in one hour, including Katherine. The police evidence suggests that four of the victims tried to escape from something . . . some kind of final ritual. A ritual that involved the willing execution of four members of The Seven and Katherine herself. Did you have 297

ADAM NEVILL

any idea this kind of mass suicide was coming? Or can you give us any clues as to what happened that night?’

She shook her head, sighed. ‘Something was coming, sure enough. A whole lot of killing. We were all on a one-way ticket. Like I said before, everything was leading to something that only Katherine knew about. That bitch had plans she weren’t wholly sharing. But what happened out there that night . . . I can’t say. There was a lot of paranoia, right through seventy-five. Katherine lost that trial against Levine.

An’ we were told that apostates were building a case against us with the police, the CIA, the FBI, the government . . .

Everybody was out to get us. I believed it. Brother Moloch told us that if the government came for us before the Night of Ascent, we would fight to the last man to defend paradise.

If we were too weak to fight, we were to kill each other, then ourselves. They never said what the Night of Ascent was, but me and Bridgette didn’t like the sound of it. You know, it just had
that
tone.

‘I always reckoned the killings that night was because The Seven got spooked after me and Bridgette ran, con sider -

ing what we knew about the murders of Urania, Hannah, Prissie and the boys. Katherine was crazy anyway by then.

And all them drugs she’d been taking in California musta ratcheted up her paranoia to the next level when me and Bridgette lit out. Police said the murders happened in some kind of leadership battle. That’s bullshit. No one ever op -

posed Katherine beside Ariel and Adonis, and look where that got them. Other people said it was some kind of sacrifice, to the devil.’ Martha shook her head. ‘It weren’t the devil. Don’t you believe it.’

‘It’s been said that Katherine claimed she was immortal.

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An eternal saint. That all of those she blessed could be too.

But if she were immortal, do you ever wonder why she had herself killed?’

Martha shrugged, then drew further down inside her cardigan. She began playing with the cigarette lighter again.

‘Lately, I’ve been considering other things. You know, other possibilities. Right around the same time Max got in touch, which was kinda weird. ’Cus I could tell from his voice that he was spooked by something too. Not long after he called, Bridgette gave up.’

‘Gave up?’

Martha looked at Kyle with her watery eyes, and swallowed. She was frightened. ‘You got to understand. There was some things we experienced . . . that we saw . . . that was just about as bad as knowing people were getting killed.

Police always said it was the drugs that made us see stuff.

Been telling myself my whole life after I ran from that temple that the police were right about that. That we were hallucin ating. Now I know different. So did Bridgette. We never got away. No, sir. Not really. No one did. Whatever it was Katherine brought over with her from France came back. Old friends. Belial was right. What he said in prison to the cops about them coming down. You know, being around us. I don’t think not one of us ever got free.’

‘Old friends. Blood Friends. I keep hearing these names.

Were they part of the Night of Ascent?’

Martha nodded. She stared at her hands. ‘That’s what I been thinking.’

‘Who were they?’

‘
What
are they, is the question you should be askin’.’

Another cigarette was sparked up, her voice trembled with 299

ADAM NEVILL

emotion. ‘We’d been calling down what we had become.

That’s the best way I can say it. For over a year. Late in seventy-four, an’ seventy-five. We weren’t the blessed, we was the opposite. We were damned. Like
they
is. The
friends
.

There was nothing holy or right about any of us. Not by that time. We’d all lost our way. Maybe some of us before we even got to that mine. But that was the point. We were
ready
by the end. Crossed every damn line and was all broke down inside, in spirit you know? Ready. Ready for something. For
them
. All we had was the Last Days. And them was the last days, in that summer. Only thing I had to get me to step off that crazy train was my boy. We were young and stupid. Me and Bridgette. But we were mothers. It’s like we knew, you know? Inside. Knew we had to get out right then. It was now or never. Sink or swim.’