Last Days (35 page)

‘Lights? What lights? Max?’ Dan said.

Martha nodded without looking at him. ‘It don’t matter none. They juss keep coming. Last night they chewed through the wires in here like rats, with what they’s got left for teeth.’

Kyle put his hand on Dan’s thigh and pulled himself to his feet.

‘Thought they was birds the first time. When I went into 308

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the spare room I had in my old place it sure smelled like a whole flock of dead ones that could still sing. Thought a pipe had burst too. But it weren’t. It was them. Coming for me.

Same as they come for Bridgette.’

‘She told you that? Bridgette?’

Martha nodded. ‘Out in her place in Denver. We spoke every day on the phone since it started up again. They came for her first. She said . . .’ Martha’s voice trailed off, and she touched at the corner of an eye, sniffed. ‘She said they was going to take her into the sky, like they did with them dogs at the mine. “But not . . . not if I ain’t here for them to get a hold of.” That was the last thing she told me.’

Martha turned away from the roof and walked to the hatch. ‘I’m beat. Can’t do no more. There’s nothing else to tell. Just one more thing I got to show you.’ She paused and looked back at Kyle with her red and shining eyes. ‘Sometimes they leave things behind.’

It was a shoe, and probably the most horrible thing of all, amongst all of the horrid things she had recounted and then shown them.

Kyle couldn’t touch it. Dan filmed it closely, at where it sat on a sheet of newspaper in the middle of Martha’s kitchen table. ‘Found it in the attic. Left behind. Means they’s real close.’

It was small enough to fit a child. Hard as wood and black as coal. Charred perhaps, or petrified, but once leather. The little pointy toes curled at the tips. Small holes were visible on the uppers, and fragments of stitches where the worn sole met the heel and toe of the shoe.

‘You seen anything like this before?’ Kyle asked Martha, 309

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who stood by the big sink, smoking and staring out into the overcast sky.

She nodded. ‘Katherine and The Seven called them “heavenly letters”. Said it was “mana”. A sign, you know. For the time of ascent. They kept bits of clothes in this chest. Collected them. They looked real old and burned. Scraps they found in the desert to start with. Belial would bring them back to the mine. Then they was appearing on the floor of the temple after the sessions. First I thought it was a trick, because Katherine had plenty of stuff like that she brought from France. Her holy relics. She showed us. But like I said, we brought things down. Inside that place, to be with us.

Never saw who left them, but we smelled whoever they belonged to sure enough. Just like there was dead men standing right next to us in the dark.’

‘What is it? What did she say to you? Back there?’ Kyle asked when Dan slumped into the passenger seat and expelled a deep, weary sigh.

Because he had the keys and because he was desperate to leave the house, Kyle was first back to the car, and he’d remained speechless with shock until he’d loaded the back seat and trunk like an automaton. But he’d seen an intense exchange between Dan and Martha on the porch before they said goodbye.

Dan turned to Kyle. Though his unshaven face betrayed some relief that the shoot was over, it remained tense. ‘She said that we’re not the first.’

Kyle’s teeth were clenched in a grimace. He eased his jaw apart. ‘Eh?’

‘Not the first “movie people” that Max sent out here to 310

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interview her. Someone else was here. Last month.’ Dan looked puzzled. ‘Maybe it was too freaky even for him. I could excuse that.’

‘Who?’

‘Malcolm Gonal.’

‘Gonal!’ Kyle raised his hands and then slapped them onto the steering wheel. ‘Fucking Gonal! Why didn’t Max tell me?

He builds the whole thing up to me as some kind of exclusive project that only I could make happen because he was let down by his team. It was bullshit. It’s all bullshit. Gonal was his fucking team! That fucking fraud.’

‘Max told Martha not to tell you. Said that if she did, she wouldn’t get paid. She wants to give the fee to her kids, so she agreed. But . . .’

‘What?’

‘But she could see . . . she could see that we’re involved.

She guessed we’ve seen things. Said she knew “pretty quick”.

And she warned me, mate. Warned me to stay away. To not make the film. Because we are in danger. Serious danger.’ Dan looked through the windscreen at nothing in particular. ‘Bit late for that, I told her.’

Kyle thrust his face into his hands. He dragged his fingers down his cheeks, opened his eyes wide to cleanse them with sunlight, to rinse them of the appalling darkness of that house.

Dan nodded. ‘Max is using us.’

‘But I don’t know why.’

‘What do we do?’

Kyle rested his forehead on the centre of the steering wheel, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m tired. I’m just so bloody tired.’

‘I need a drink.’

311

TWENTY

the regal motel, seattle.

22 june 2011. 10 p.m.

It had gone dark. Outside his room the distant traffic sounds were relentless. One more thing to keep him awake.

Kyle sat in silence, propped up by pillows on top of his bed. In both shock and a half-suspended disbelief that he was in possession of such strange material, and that they had been privy to so much tragedy second hand, he’d spent the afternoon and early evening methodically working his way through a rough cut of Martha’s testimony, before going back over the Sweeney and Aguilar interviews to check on corroborating details. Keeping his hands and mind focused was the only thing that prevented what felt like a total mental breakdown within a maelstrom of terror.

Dan had obsessively cleaned the lenses, checked the camera functions, and recharged batteries while Kyle worked on the edit. ‘There’s shit all over these lenses,’ he’d said when Kyle asked him to take it easy and go into Seattle and relax while he worked on the rough cut and hardcopy shot log. It was the most they’d said to each other since checking into the motel. Early the next morning they would fly back to London. The last interview was a wrap and they should have 312

LAST DAYS

been out celebrating with a steak and a few beers. Both of them knew it, but didn’t raise it. They’d huddled together within a silent, uncomfortable anticipation. An anxiety about what happened next. Because nothing felt finished. It was as if they had learned just enough to become implicated in a thing with terrible repercussions they didn’t understand.

Earlier that day, his fascination with the cult had finally turned the corner into a profound disgust and his irritation with Max had evolved into a rage that left him dizzy. Now the shoot was over it was as if his fear and confusion and dread had waited to really kick off. Organizing the shoots, travelling, filming, making rough cuts, half absorbing the madness, and pipe-dreaming the film’s potential, the effects of his exposure to such dysfunction had built without being fully confronted. He only acknowledged it now. And it felt too late to rewind to a place of safety and familiarity.
Typical
. He had been committed, absorbed and unthinking.

Intentionally, because the story was so good. So good he felt like he’d been damaged by it, permanently.

Every bit of secondary reading and research he’d fast-tracked into his mind since taking the assignment had coalesced into a size and weight sufficient to pull him down.

In planes and hotel rooms and inside his flat, he’d read and watched anything he could acquire connected to sixties and seventies cults to try and gain perspective on Sister Katherine and her merry band. And he’d found little he liked. In a fort-night he’d saturated himself with manipulative sociopaths, malignant narcissists, murderers, sadists, rapists, violent criminals, ludicrous messiahs and absurd prophets. Let it spin round with nervous energy, tobacco, lack of sleep, takeout food, and hard liquor. Terminal harm. The nightmares.

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Hallucinations. The things on the walls. It all had to come back out sometime.

Through the coming night, he expected to endure the same restless and haunted dreams plaguing him since Normandy.

And when he was back in his own bed, what then? Would normal sleep be possible again? If so, when? Sleeping pills and a psychotherapist: maybe it was time for that. He now wondered if the Last Days had somehow become entangled with all of the unresolved ambition and angst and disenchantment inside him. He didn’t know, but what he had learned the hard way was that he no longer knew when to apply the brakes. Was there anything he wouldn’t film with the same fastidious compulsion?

At ten, he closed his laptop and peered around plain white walls lit by Max’s dawn-light visor. It had become a habit.

Dan stowed the equipment in his room next door, walked back into Kyle’s and slumped in the chair in front of the tele -

vision. Slowly, he worked his way through a bag of fries and the fried chicken pieces inside the cardboard box on his lap. Kyle hadn’t touched his own food. He stared at the mirror on the wall at the foot of the bed, and uncapped a bottle of Wild Turkey. Two crumpled beer cans lay on the bedside table. Red-rimmed eyes in a pale face emphasized the dark rings under his eyes. They looked bruised. The face familiar to him since he met Max. A coincidence? Not likely.

A big reckless swig drained the whisky from his glass.

Without looking at Dan, in a room as bright as a solarium, he began to speak as much to himself as anybody else. ‘You know, Sharon Tate was eight months pregnant when she was stabbed sixteen times by a twenty-one-year-old girl. A member of Charles Manson’s Family called Susan Atkins.’

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Dan watched Kyle with the same uncertainty with which he had considered his friend since leaving Martha Lake’s house. Dan had seen him look this way before; when his idea for a Ufology documentary was stolen by Unreal Pictures, when his last two girlfriends dumped him for ‘wankers higher up the food chain’, and after his last three funding applica-tions were rejected. Falling down in front of Dan was becoming another bad habit.

‘Three of his group, known as the Family, also killed Tate’s house guests. Shot, strangled and stabbed three people, as well as a fourth victim who just happened to be leaving the house that night when the killers showed up. That guy really lucked out. He’d only been visiting the caretaker.

‘The killers wrote graffiti on the walls in the victims’ blood.

They wrote “Pig” on the front door. Manson had sent his young followers on a “creepy crawly” to kill a record producer. A guy who used to live at the address, who’d rejected Manson’s music. But the guy had moved out and rented the house to Sharon Tate and Roman Polanksi.

‘The next night, Manson’s assassins drove to another house in LA. Could have been selected randomly, or it was somewhere the cult had hung out before. Didn’t matter. The married couple they murdered were strangers. They wrote

“Death to Pigs” and “Rise” on the walls. They used the victims’ blood again. Daubed “Healter Skelter” on the refrigerator door. It was supposed to read “Helter Skelter”, to kick-start Manson’s race war as foretold in the lyrics of the Beatles’
White Album
, but they couldn’t even bloody spell it.’

‘Kyle. It’s over, yeah?’

Kyle ignored him. ‘Manson’s Family also killed or tried to 315

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murder anyone that turned witness or stood up to Charlie.

They once tried to kill a girl using a hamburger laced with LSD. Manson even had his own defence lawyer murdered during the trial.’

‘Kyle.’

‘The youngest of the killers in the Family was seventeen.

The oldest was twenty-six. Most of them were about twenty.

And when Manson was in prison, his followers carried out armed robberies, kept up the murder count, planned to hijack a 747, and to kill a president. They came close with President Ford. Manson’s number one, Squeaky, got two feet from the President in his motorcade. She was dressed in a nun’s habit, but the gun didn’t go off. She hadn’t chambered a round. She still lives close to San Quentin prison to be near Charlie. She thinks he’s Jesus.’

‘Mate. Please.’

Kyle poured another shot of whisky. Gulped at it. ‘The Reverend Jim Jones had nine hundred of his followers poisoned or shot during his White Night in Guyana in 1978. A mass ‘suicide’. The first to die were a woman and her one-month-old baby. Many of his people took the poisoned grape squash willingly. They queued up to drink strychnine from paper cups, or to be injected with it. A doctor prepared the poison in a vat. But about sixty people refused to go and were murdered. They were shot by the security guards, or forcibly injected with strychnine. The children that resisted had strychnine fired down their throats with syringes. The killers aimed for the swallow reflex to make sure the poison went down. They died in agony. Contorted. Bleeding. Vom-iting. And all the while Jones droned and screamed through his PA system—’

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Dan stood up. ‘OK! OK! I get the picture. Fuck’s sake, Kyle! Enough already. Jesus Christ.’ Dan’s face was not only fixed with disapproval but distaste. ‘You’re getting way too far into all this. Now is not the time. I came out here for you. I didn’t bloody want to.’

Kyle surged with fury. Dan had not read any of the research notes, and still hadn’t even opened Levine’s
Last
Days
; he doubted Dan had even pursued a single Google search into
what
they were filming, what they had investigated, dug up, and maybe even brought back. Because Dan didn’t need to. He just messed around with the camera and the equipment, snarfed junk food, guzzled beer, snored like an oaf and kept him awake after he did all of the driving, the thinking, the planning. How could this still only be a job to Dan? A favour? How could he maintain the indifference?

‘Into it? Did you say
into it
?’

Dan read Kyle’s expression and looked away. Then peered back at him, warily. ‘You know what I mean.’