They (22 page)

“The question that now remains is the one I posed before,” Frank said. “Why are we having these dreams now, and why does it seem that these people—whoever the hell they are—seem to be coming back for us?”

They looked at each other across the breakfast bar. Finally Vince answered that question with the best answer he could summon up. “I don’t know.”

They left the house five minutes later for their meeting with Mike.

Mike Peterson was already seated in a back booth when they arrived. There were two families seated at tables in the front of the restaurant; aside from that, the place was empty. Mike had already ordered a pitcher of Iced Tea, and as Frank and Vince stepped into the corner booth, obscured by shadows and lit by shaded lamps that hung from the wall, he saw Mike Peterson was a middle-aged man who appeared to be in reasonably good health. He was dressed in blue jeans, a white T-shirt with the words
Palm Springs
stitched across the chest, and white sneakers. His graying blond hair was swept back over his head, making no effort to conceal the bald spot that had taken root at the cap of his forehead. His eyes were blue and sparkled with a sense of wariness as he regarded Vince.

After introductions were made, the men sat down at the table. Mike got down to business immediately. “How do you feel about all this, Vince?”

Vince shrugged. “Overwhelmed is the best way to describe it.”

Mike nodded. “Frank felt that way, too. So did I. The important thing to remember is that it’s okay to feel overwhelmed. It’s okay to think what Frank has told you is something paranoid, something that couldn’t happen. It’s a normal reaction. You wouldn’t be human if you felt otherwise.”

Vince thought that was a strange thing to say.
You wouldn’t be human otherwise
. But he kept quiet about it and let Mike continue.

“Before we go on,” Mike said, trading glances between Frank and Vince. “Does anybody want anything to eat?”

“Yeah,” Frank said. He rose to his feet and clapped Vince on the back. “How ’bout we order some chow?”

“Great.” Vince got up and followed the two men to the front counter of the pizza parlor. His stomach was rumbling; he hadn’t eaten all day.

They put in their order—a large deep-dish pizza with pepperoni and olives—and returned to their corner booth. Mike introduced himself to Vince more formally and gave him his background.

He explained that he was a retired high school history teacher. The reason he’d become involved in this was simple: Jesse Black, Frank’s natural father, had been his best friend. They’d grown up together in El Paso, Texas, had even gone to college together, served in the military. Then Jesse had moved to California where the job prospects in computer engineering were in their infancy stages. Jesse had earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics, and the most he could have gotten on the employment ladder in Texas would have been teaching high school math. “Jesse was more ambitious than that,” Mike explained as they waited for their order. “So he moved to California in 1960, landed a job as a Computer Operator at an insurance company. He met Gladys Silva in 1962, they were married the following year, and Frank was born the year after that.” Frank remained unemotional as Mike gave Vince the brief history lesson. “For the first three years of their marriage, all appeared normal. At least on the surface.”

Mike turned to Frank. “Are you sure you can hear all this?”

“You’re talking to a guy who once wrote a scene in a horror novel about a man who was pulled through a quarter-inch drainpipe,” Frank said, waving for Mike to go on. “I’m fine with it. Really.”

The trouble was, Vince didn’t feel one hundred percent fine with it. It was already gearing up to be grim. Mike Peterson continued: “By this time I was living out here as well, in Anaheim. I was married, and my son was born two months after Frank. In fact, I was in Jesse’s wedding, along with another old buddy of ours who’d also moved out to the West Coast. A guy by the name of John Llama. Anyway, the three of us were so busy back then with raising our families and getting started on our careers; John was a lawyer and had just gotten a job at a pretty prestigious firm downtown; I was teaching; Jesse was working his way up the corporate ladder. Our wives were able to stay home and raise the kids, be housewives. Back then it was financially possible for young wives to stay at home and raise kids while the husbands worked.” He paused, as if coming across the first rocky bump of the narrative that would take him down to hell. “Jesse didn’t tell me anything about what happened between him and Gladys, what caused her to…do what she later did. He didn’t tell me anything until years later. In fact, what I’m going to tell you is what John and I have been able to piece together throughout the years, with the help of Frank’s aunt Diane, Jesse’s sister.” He paused again, choosing his words carefully. “It seems that at some time when Frank was between the ages of one and two, Gladys met a group of people that we can simply call ‘hippies’.”

Vince was nodding slowly through all this, listening carefully. Mike continued: “Gladys had some emotional problems before she and Jesse were married. That was all Jesse confided in me. Her mother had been an alcoholic, her father wasn’t much better; buried himself in his work to escape the mother’s drinking. Needless to say, there’s probably more that went on in that household that Jesse didn’t let on. With what we know about dysfunctional households, there was probably a great deal of abuse that went on. I’m sure Gladys suffered quite a bit of it. How much, we’ll never know. But Jesse loved her, and he was determined to do everything he could to make her life better for her and Frank. He started working longer hours so he could afford to move his growing family to a small house in Hawthorne. It was at this point that John and I assumed that Gladys met the hippies—and I’m sorry to use that term, because that’s the only word I can think of to describe them.”

“They were hippies,” Frank said, taking a sip of iced tea. “It was the sixties. They were fucking hippies.”

Mike nodded, a slight smile on his features creasing his face at Frank’s outburst. “Okay, they were hippies. Maybe they weren’t normal hippies—the kind that were largely benevolent, into the peace and love movement and all that pacifist bullshit. But they surely dressed like them. John and I think they might have lived next door to Jesse and Gladys and were nothing more than college kids. Gladys would have had a lot of time on her hands during the day and through most early evenings.” He glanced at Frank. “Frank himself doesn’t remember any of this period, but from what we’ve been able to gather, the hippies turned Gladys on to LSD and pot. They also introduced her to some weird spiritual stuff that probably didn’t amount to much at the time, but which soon got worse. Did Frank tell you about The Children of the Night?”

Vince nodded.

“We think they may have been early members. Of course, everything they involved her in was drug related and mixed with some of their teachings. Whatever it was, it was attractive to Gladys. She began neglecting Frank, and Jesse noticed quickly. This led to fights between them. Jesse’s mother, who used to fly out from El Paso frequently to visit, tried to help out. She was very troubled by it. At one point, Jesse took Frank to his in-laws during a brief separation.” A slight grin cracked Mike Peterson’s features. “Jesse didn’t care much for Gladys’ folks, but he also didn’t think her mother was that bad. Maybe she wasn’t. He certainly seemed to trust them with Frank more then he trusted his own wife.”

Vince and Frank waited while Mike drank some iced tea. “To make a long story short they reconciled, moved out of the house and bought a place. I remember that house. It was in Gardena, right off Sepulveda and Vermont. It was a small two-bedroom place and the garage had been converted into a den. A nice place for a young couple to get a start. Jesse had been promoted to shift supervisor by then and was still working a lot. But he was doing it to build a nest egg for him and Gladys. He said they wanted another child.”

He stopped at this point, his eyes flicking to Frank as if dreading to go on. Frank nodded at him, encouraging him. Frank’s features were stony, almost cold, with a faint underlying of dread.

“Jesse tried to keep things going as normal as possible, but the influence of Gladys’ friends was strong. They kept showing up when Jesse was working, and it was then that she began having affairs.” He cleared his throat, looking down at the table. “Sometimes she would engage in sex in Frank’s presence.”

Vince looked at Frank, who didn’t meet his gaze. He turned back to Mike. “How could you know this if Jesse never told you anything?”

“It all came out during my therapy,” Frank said softly. He looked at Vince. “Trust me, I went through a lot of regression therapy. My earliest memory was when I was three, which corresponds to around the time Mike is telling you about now. Only my earliest memory is of San Francisco, after we moved there. Not Los Angeles. I had to be taken back through my memories to remember what…I saw my mom doing.”

A worm of unease began to gnaw at Vince’s belly. He took a sip of iced tea.

“Gladys didn’t move to the Bay Area until she left Jesse. I was the first person Jesse called when Gladys left. He was scared and angry; he didn’t tell me anything about Gladys having affairs, or anything else that had been going on. Just that they’d been having problems again and that she left. He tried to get Frank from her, but Gladys won a court order placing Frank in her custody. She was also pregnant.” Mike lapsed into silence for a moment and Vince felt his heart pounding.
She was also pregnant
.

He glanced at Frank, who didn’t return the look. Frank sat motionless, stony faced. He looked like he’d heard this story many times, but hearing it again was just as gruesome as hearing it for the first time. Vince swallowed a lump in his throat and tuned back in to Mike’s narrative.

“She moved to the Bay Area, taking Frank with her. He’d just turned three.” Mike spoke slowly, his voice lowered. “She went to San Francisco with a group of people she’d met in L.A. They settled into the Haight Ashbury scene quite easily, and it was there they met core members of The Children of the Night, who had infiltrated the hippie scene very successfully.” He paused. “They got Gladys into the group somehow and this was where she met your mother, Maggie Swanson.”

Vince didn’t feel anything as Frank took over briefly. “From what we’ve gathered, Maggie got involved with the group from a guy she met at UC Berkeley, a guy named Tom McDonald.”

The name clicked and Vince placed the name with a face. That smiling Dad Face of his youth in California. “My dad.”

Frank nodded. “We don’t know if he was your real father or not. There were a lot of orgies and love-ins going on at the time. Plus, about a year before you were born your mother and other members of the group went on a spiritual pilgrimage to the Middle East. They were there for
almost a year. It’s possible you weren’t even born in this country; we ha
ven’t been able to pinpoint your exact birthplace. If your mom became pregnant with you there, your father could have been one of the male members of the group. But anyway, that’s where our mothers met, at one of these gatherings that was, in reality, a Children of the Night meeting. They encouraged the orgiastic behavior, the drugs. It was hippie heaven.”

Mike picked up the narrative. “Gladys fell in hard for Maggie and Tom. They became lovers, and with her drug use so high she wanted to be a part of them. Maggie and Tom were already pretty ingrained in the cult and they brought Gladys in. They…I don’t know how to say it, but… they had some kind of spell over her. Made her believe that the coming of Armageddon was near and that they were on the winning side.”

Frank nodded. “She was also most likely brainwashed into believing that their dedication and worship of Satan was, in a way, a glorification
of God as well. Because if God had this whole scenario planned out befo
rehand as prophesized in the Bible, then they figured that serving the Prince of Darkness wouldn’t be bad…they’d be essentially doing their part to fulfill Biblical prophecy.”

“But this group took things a step further,” Mike explained just as he was interrupted by a voice announcing over the intercom that their pizza was ready.

Frank rose to get it and after he came back and they’d served themselves and begun eating, Mike continued. “I’d like to focus on another group for a minute. The End Times Church believed that Jesus, God, and Satan should be equally recognized. One does not exist without the other. In time, members began to focus on certain aspects of the religion; some were devoted followers of Jesus, others concentrated on Satan. The hub that connected them was that they believed in the literal prophecy of Armageddon as prophesized in the Book of Revelations. They also saw themselves as playing key parts in it. It was around 1966 or so that the Satanist sect broke off from the original church in an effort to wholly worship evil and bring about the coming of the Anti-Christ. The Black Cross has been credited with being this splinter group that broke away from the End Times Church. There’s no real hard evidence the Black Cross exists now. Through the research Frank and I conducted, we’ve come to learn that the Black Cross was merely a front group for an older organization.”

“The Children of the Night,” Vince said.

“Yes,” Mike said. “The Children of the Night had infiltrated the End Times Church early on. By the time they initiated the break, their goals were more solid thanks to their leader, a middle-aged wealthy business tycoon named Samuel F. Garrison. They didn’t just see themselves as overthrowing Christianity, they now saw themselves as going into battle with God, who they perceived as being not only weak, but also a blind idiot god who was indifferent to his creations. Their goal was to play a key part in the Battle of Armageddon.”

“You mean as in, actually participating?” Vince asked between slices of pizza.

“Yes,” Mike was eating slowly too, and he chased a mouthful down with a swallow of iced tea. “Their goal became clear: the total destruction of the Christian Church and the return of Satan to his rightful domain: earth.”