Maps of Hell (15 page)

That wasn’t the only thing that was bothering Joe Greenbaum as he finished his morning delivery of doughnuts. Ever since his friend Matt Wells had disappeared—in fact, ever since Matt’s partner, the high-flying policewoman, had gone missing in the Shenandoah Valley—Joe had been picking the brains of his FBI insiders. They had been unable to help in any conclusive way until earlier that week when, to Joe’s amazement, he learned that Matt was a suspect in the murder of a black man who owned an occult supplies store. Apparently his fingerprints had been found in the victim’s apartment; as far as Joe was concerned, that had to be bullshit of the finest quality. He’d known Matt Wells for years. They had first met at a crime-writing conference in D.C., had instantly bonded and had kept the bar open all night. Since then, they had e-mailed back and forth on a variety of subjects. Joe had also seen Matt several times since the policewoman disappeared. The Brit had been angry, overemotional and suspicious, but no way had he turned homicidal. Joe was 100 percent positive that both Matt and his lover had been kidnapped. He’d pulled every chain he had, but no one had a clue. And now Matt was a murder suspect? Screw that.

Joe Greenbaum shook his head. He had been looking into the D.C. murders and he had some ideas he wanted to bounce off Matt. Where the hell
was
his erstwhile drinking companion? If he didn’t show up soon, Joe was going to have to make a move on the people the Englishman had been looking at. And that could have very serious consequences for all concerned.

I
sat motionless in the pickup as Mary Upson slowed before the bulky Maine state trooper. The early-morning light wasn’t strong enough to raise more than a faint glow on the waters of the lake, the dark green of the pine-covered mountains stepping back into the gloom.

“What next?” I asked.

“Cool it,” Mary replied, keeping her eyes on the man ahead. “He’s looking out for my car, remember, not my mother’s pickup.”

That was true, but I presumed our descriptions had also been circulated. I was holding the pistol out of sight, not that I wanted to use it. Something my friend Dave had said during some kind of small-arms training session in some desolate hills came back to me. “Bear this in mind,” the ex-SAS man had said with a thin smile. “If you aim your weapon at someone, you’ve got to be 100 percent sure that you’ll pull the trigger. There’s no room for doubt.”

And that was the problem. I had plenty of doubts about pointing my gun at an innocent law enforcement officer. For a start, what happened if he tried to pull his own weapon? Would I shoot him? The answer had to be no. I wasn’t interested in injuring or killing people unless they harbored similar intentions toward me. Besides, firing a shot would get us noticed, even in the back of beyond.

Then I realized that my thoughts had run away with me—the impact of the wheel on my forehead was obviously still having an effect. Mary was already talking to the trooper.

“…my great-aunt Lucy Heaton. She’s taken a turn for the worse and we’re going to help her out.”

The man was in his late forties, his cheeks and belly bloated. If it came to a foot race, I had the edge.

“Ah, right,” he said, smiling back at Mary. “Got elderly folks in my family, too. You go ahead. Say, you haven’t seen a green ’98 Toyota Tercel, have you?”

Mary shrugged.

I leaned across. “As a matter of fact,” I said, putting on what I hoped was a convincing American accent, “I did notice one of those. A man and woman inside?”

He nodded, his eyes wide. “That’s right, sir.”

“Now, where was it?” I said, prompting Mary. I didn’t have a clue about the local place names.

“Oh, I remember,” she said. “We passed them the other side of Rumford. Didn’t look like they knew where they were going. They finally took the 108 toward Canton.”

“Is that right?” The trooper stepped back. “Thanking you, ma’am,” he said, turning toward the patrol car.

I watched as he got on the radio. “Nicely done,” I said. “But I suppose there’s a risk.”

Mary glanced at me. “Why?”

“If our friend’s bosses ask him for a description of us as witnesses, we may be shafted. Not all state troopers will be concentrating only on what people are driving.” I thought about that. “On the other hand, we’ve both got injuries on our foreheads. He’d be justified in assuming they would have been mentioned.” I looked over at the trooper. He was talking animatedly into the handset. “Get moving. He hasn’t got our names and, if we’re lucky, he won’t take note of the plates.”

Mary took us slowly through the small town. There were only a few people around so early in the morning.

“Lucy Heaton?” I said, smiling.

She laughed. “Came up with it on the spur of the moment.”

“What if he was the kind of cop who knows everyone?”

“Oh, I guess I’d have said she was staying with friends. If he’d asked me their names, I’d have lied again.” She turned toward me. “And if that hadn’t satisfied him, I suppose I’d have hit the gas.”

There was a look in her eyes that was alarming. I remembered what her mother had said. It wouldn’t do to get too close to Mary Upson. On the other hand, the more I knew about her, the better prepared I’d be.

“I wish I knew why you’re helping me,” I said, realizing I was still gripping the pistol. I put it on the floor beside my seat. “I mean, you’re putting yourself at risk.”

“Am I? You’ve been holding a gun on me since we left Sparta.”

“Good story. It’ll probably stick if you hold your nerve.” I looked at the line of her face. She was determined enough, I could see that. “This is some kind of thrill for you, isn’t it? Pretending we’re Bonnie and Clyde, lying to cops—a lot more exciting than being a small-town schoolteacher.”

Her cheeks reddened. “Screw you, Matt,” she said angrily. “You just don’t get it, do you?”

“Men are dumb,” I said, holding my gaze on her as she swerved past a truck and accelerated hard.

“Yeah, you got that right.”

I sensed that she needed to unburden herself. That could be tricky, especially if it created an intimacy between us, but I needed to find out more. I still had a suspicion that her presence was too good to be true. On the other hand, she’d already showed with the cop that she was a good liar. Would I be able to tell if she spouted a stream of bullshit?

I decided I’d give it a try. “Let me put it another way. Most men are dumb, but I’m not most men.”

“You sure aren’t, Matt Wells.” She smiled sadly and drew her sleeve across her eyes.

“What is it, Mary?” I asked, resisting the temptation to touch her. She suddenly looked inconsolable.

Shaking her head, she didn’t speak for some time. Her damp eyes were fixed on the road ahead.

“I’m sorry,” I said, after she seemed to have calmed down. “This is getting to you, Mary. Stop the car, go back to your mother.”

“No!”
Her voice was shrill. “I’m not a child. I don’t need my mother. I don’t want my mother…” She hit the brake and turned without warning into a turnoff.

An eighteen-wheeler loaded with logs roared past from behind, the same logo with the open newspaper on the cab door as the one from yesterday. I started gathering up my gear. At least there was traffic on the road and hitching would be feasible.

“No!” she screamed again. “No, Matt. I don’t want you to go. I want…I want to help you.” She slumped forward, sobbing.

This time I did touch her, my arm going round her shoulders. “Listen, Mary, whatever’s troubling you, I’m just making it worse.”

“No…no, you’re not.” She tried to get her breathing under control. “You’re…you’re the best thing that’s happened to me for a long time.”

That was exactly what I didn’t want to hear. Now it seemed that Mary wasn’t helping me out of a sense of injustice. I’d engaged her emotions, which was flattering but dangerous. The blonde woman whose name still escaped memory rose up before me. I loved her and she loved me—of that much, I was certain. Which meant that by leading Mary on in any way, I was exploiting her. That made me feel slimier than a worm.

She sat up and turned her red eyes and damp face to me, but she was smiling. “It’s all right, Matt,” she said, looking in the mirror and putting the car back in gear. “I’m going to tell you something, but you have to promise never to tell anyone else, okay?”

I looked at her as we moved back onto the road and picked up speed. “Okay,” I said, wondering what I was getting myself into.

“I mean it, Matt,” she said, her voice even. “The last person who talked had his tongue cut out.”

My stomach did a somersault. Then I was taken on a walk through hell.

The Antichurch of Lucifer Triumphant was established in the town of Jasper, Maine, in 1846 by a logger named Jeremiah Dodds. Jasper was in the far north of the state, deep in the forest. Back then, there was no shortage of extreme religious sects, but the overwhelming majority were Christian. Jeremiah Dodds had no truck with Christianity, having been abused by a minister when he was a boy and savagely beaten by his father when he spoke about it. As a young man, he had consoled himself with the strong drink and the slack-jawed women ever present in logging camps. But, as he got older, those pleasures failed to divert him. One of the advantages of his enforced attendance at the church school was that he had learned to read and write. The only book that was readily available in the wilderness was the Bible and Jeremiah Dodds started to study it again in his thirties, but with a zeal possessed only by the true contrarian. The result was the antiGospel of Lucifer, a savage perversion of its New Testament prototype that set out a new faith based on violence and devotion to Satan. While Christians worshipped the blood of the Lamb that had been spilled for humanity, Luciferians saw holiness in terms of spilling human blood.

The Antichurch flourished in the great wilderness of the Maine forests, where the daily struggle to stay alive drained what little good there was in the loggers—they viewed themselves as nothing more than the timber barons’ slaves. That mentality made them easy converts to Jeremiah Dodds’s preaching. Anyone who objected was whipped from the settlements where he prevailed and hunted through the woods, ending up as a source of blood for the congregation’s monthly rites. Soon there was no opposition and Dodds reigned supreme in Jasper and its neighboring towns.

So supreme was the Antichurch that it ran out of victims. That was the beginning of what was called the Great Trouble. For Jeremiah Dodds wasn’t satisfied with the substitute blood of moose and bear. That, he proclaimed, would please Lucifer only for a short time. The congregations had to look for human victims in towns and camps where traditional Christian beliefs still held sway. So blinded were the faithful by the seductive power of the antiGospel and the subtle guile of Dodds that they covered huge distances, even in winter, to bring back living sacrifices. They preferred women and children because they were easier to carry—and because they provided the men with what were known as “virtues of the flesh” in the hours before they met the knife. The “virtues” were enjoyed in public and the lash was not spared, the only stipulation laid down by the antigospel being that the offerings to Lucifer were to remain conscious throughout. For it was said that the road to Hell was too splendid for even a second of the journey to be missed. However, their eyes were put out as soon as they were dead; to see the glories of the underworld was a privilege reserved for Luciferians.

The inhabitants of other places, those who retained some decency, resisted the unseen menace that haunted the pine forests as best they could. Initially, the disappearance of wives and offspring—the Luciferians never took whores, seeing them as fellow spirits—was put down to wild beasts. But finally the stories of the few Luciferians who broke free and survived could be ignored no longer. Parties of heavily armed men set out to confront the raiders in their base. For, rumor had spread that the town of Jasper was a sinkhole of corruption, a modern-day Sodom where the filthiest of unholy ceremonies were practiced, with victims being sacrificed on upturned crosses. With wholly justifiable rage and a less commendable desire for revenge, the true believers fell upon the abomination that Jeremiah Dodds had created. The Luciferians disappeared without trace. Jasper was burned to the ground and its name expunged from the maps. The arch blasphemer and murderer Dodds was hanged from the tallest tree, his face beaten to a pulp and his innards loosed upon the ground before his spirit went to its foul master below the earth. As a final, ironic affront, Dodds’s eyes were torn out so that he wouldn’t be able to see Lucifer’s realm. For decades, people were reluctant to go within a hundred miles of where Jasper had been, lest a fearsome creature, its blinded face twisted and its feet tangled in its own entrails, should come upon them and drag them screaming to hell.

Such was the end of the Antichurch of Lucifer Triumphant, at least as far as the civic and religious authorities were concerned—in any case, they only heard the stories months after Dodds and his congregation had been eradicated by the mob. But the truth was that there were still people who enthused over the antiGospel. Despite strict repression of the text, it had remained in existence, circulated by subsequent generations of Luciferians with extreme caution—every copy accounted for, reproduction in any form forbidden on pain of death. Recently a Bangor man by the name of Regent, who had feigned devotion to the Antichurch, started to transcribe the text onto a Web site; he had never been seen again. He became the first human sacrifice in several years, his tongue and genitals sliced off while he was still conscious. His blood was drained and drunk by the faithful before the flesh and organs were stripped from his bones and burnt on the Antichurch’s altar, beneath the obligatory inverted cross.

The word of Jeremiah Dodds was still alive in the evergreen forests of northern Maine and it was spreading. There was even a small congregation in the town of Sparta, one attended by a recent recruit to the cause.

“What?”
I gasped. “Your mother is one of them?”

Mary nodded, her face damp with sweat despite the cold in the pickup. “I found her diary.”

“But aren’t you in danger? Do these lunatics have any idea that you know about them?”

“I doubt it.” She glanced at me. “I’m not sure I’d be walking around in one piece if they did. I don’t think Mom knows, either.”

I thought back to the wrinkled old woman. She had alarmed me enough with her shotgun threats before I knew she was a member of the local satanist coven. Then I wondered about Mary. Was she more involved with the Antichurch than she’d admitted? Had she perhaps singled me out as a potential sacrifice? I twitched my head and tried to get a grip. She was driving me away from her mother. Then again, there might have been another altar in southern Maine. No, she would hardly have told me about the Antichurch if she were a member.

“Why are you telling me all this?” I asked.

She bit her lip. “Because I’m frightened, Matt. I needed to share the burden.”

I reckoned she was being straight with me. But there was something familiar about the story, something hovering on the margins of my memory….

“How many members of this Antichurch are there?” I asked.

“Around ten, I think.”

“Are there any other branches?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. They’re so paranoid about the antiGospel getting into the wrong hands that they prefer to limit their numbers.”

“And what about Jasper? Have you any idea where that was?”