The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

THE UNINVITED by Christopher Fowler

The elaborate silvered gates stood wide apart, ready to accept guests. You couldn’t arrive on foot, of course; there was nowhere to walk, except in the drive or through the sprinkler-wet grass, and it would have looked foolish climbing towards the house in the headlights of arriving cars.

Inside, the first thing I saw was an avenue of rustling palms, their slender trunks wound with twinkling blue and white lights, like giant candy sticks. Two robotically handsome valets in gold and crimson jackets were parking the cars, mostly sparkling black Mercedes, Daimlers, Volvos. The staircase was flanked by six teenaged waitresses in tiny red Santa outfits tentatively dispensing delicate flutes of champagne. A floodlit house, oblong, low and very white, was arranged on two levels between banked bottle-green lawns. I could hear muted laughter, murmuring, a delicate presence of guests. I saw silhouettes passing before the rippled phosphorescence of a pool with translucent globes pacing its perimeter. There was no sign of our host, but on the patio a butler, chef, bartenders and waiters were arranged behind banks of lurid, fleshy lobster tails and carrot batons.

There was a muffled beat in the air, the music designed to create ambience without being recognizable, Beatles’ songs rescored for a jazz trio. It was the end of the sixties, the age of Aquarius. Smokey Robinson and Dionne Warwick were in the charts, but there were no black people there that night except me.

In Los Angeles, parties aren’t about letting your hair down and having fun. They’re for networking, appraising, bargaining, being seen and ticked from a list. There were two kinds of guest roaming the house that night, ones who would have been noticed by their absence, and others who had been invited merely to fill up dead space. It goes without saying that I was in the latter group. Only Sidney Poitier would have made it into the former.

It was the home of Cary Dell, a slow-witted middleweight studio executive at MGM, and I remember seeing plenty of almost-familiar faces; Jacqueline Bisset, Victoria Vetri, Ralph Meeker, a couple of casting directors, some black-suited agents lurking together in a corner, fish-eyeing everyone else. The important people were seated in a semi-circular sunken lounge, lost among oversized purple cushions. The area was so exclusive that it might as well have had velvet ropes around it. Everyone else worked hard at keeping the conversation balloon-light and airborne, but couldn’t resist glancing over to the pit to see what was going on at the real centre of the party.

There was another kind of guest there that night. Dell had invited some beautiful young girls. No one unsavoury, they weren’t call-girls, just absurdly perfect, with slender waists and basalt eyes. They stood together tapping frosted pink nails on the sides of their martini glasses, flicking their hair, looking about, waiting for someone to talk to them.

Parties like this took place all over the Hollywood hills; the old school still arrived in tuxedos and floor-length gowns, but studios had lately rediscovered the youth movie, and were shamelessly courting the same anti-establishment students they had ridiculed five years earlier. I had made a couple of very bad exploitation flicks, usually cast as the kind of comic sidekick whose only purpose was his amusing blackness. Back in those days I believed in visibility at any cost, and always took the work.

I had a feeling I’d been added to the guest list by Dell’s secretary in order to make up numbers and provide him with a sheen of coolness, because I wore fringed brown leather trousers and had my hair in an Afro, and hadn’t entirely lost my Harlem jive. He sure hadn’t invited me for my conversation; we’d barely spoken more than two words to each other. If we had, Dell would have realized I came from a middle-class family in New Jersey, and I might not have got the work.

I remember it was a cool night toward the end of November. The wind had dropped, and there were scents of patchouli and hashish in the air. The party was loosening up a little, the music rising in volume and tempo. Some of the beautiful girls were desultorily dancing together on a circular white rug in the lounge. I had been to a few of these parties and they always followed the same form, peaking at ten-thirty, with the guests calling for their cars soon after. People drank and drove more in those days, of course, but nobody of any importance stayed late because the studios began work at 4 a.m.

I was starting to think about leaving before undergoing the embarrassment of waiting for my battered Mustang to be brought around front, when there was a commotion of raised voices out on the patio, and I saw someone – a gaunt middle-aged man in a black suit – go into the pool fully dressed. It was difficult to find out what had happened, because everyone was crowding around the water’s edge. All I know is, when they pulled him out of the chlorine a minute later, he was dead. I read in the LA Times next day that he’d twisted his neck hitting the concrete lip as he went in, and had died within seconds. He was granted a brief obituary in Variety because he’d featured in a lame Disney film called Monkeys, Go Home. I remember thinking that the press reports were being uncharacteristically cautious about the death. I guess nobody wanted to risk implying that Dell had been keeping a disorderly house, and there was no suggestion of it being anything other than an unfortunate accident. Dell was a big player in a union town.

As I drove back to the valley that night, passing above the crystalline grid of the city, I passed one of the beautiful girls walking alone along the side of the road with her shoes in her hand, thumbing a ride, and knew she’d come here from the Midwest, leaving all her friends and family behind just so she could be hired as eye-candy to stand around at parties. I remember thinking how nobody would miss her if she disappeared. I felt sad about it, but I didn’t stop for her. Black men didn’t stop to pick up white girls back then; you didn’t want a situation to develop.

The work dried up for a couple of months, but on a storm-heavy night in February I was invited to another studio party, this time at a more low-key affair in Silverlake, where single palms crested the orange sky on the brows of hills, and Hispanic families sat in their doorways watching their kids play ball. You can tell poorer neighbourhoods by the amount of cabling they carry above their houses, and this area had plenty. I pulled over by an empty lot and was still map-reading under the street lamp when I heard the dull thump of music start up behind me, and realized the party was being held in a converted brownstone loft – they were pretty much a novelty back then – so I parked and made my way to the top floor of the party.

The building’s exterior may have been shabby, but the inside was Carrier class. The whole top floor had been stripped back to brickwork and turned into one big space, because the owner was a photographer who used it as his studio. He handled on-set shoots for Paramount, and had coincidentally taken my head-shots a couple of years earlier. It was good to think he hadn’t forgotten me, and this event was a lot friendlier than the last. I recognized a couple of girls I’d auditioned with the month before, and we got to talking, then sharing a joint. The music was Hendrix - Electric Ladyland, I think. Pulmonary gel-colours spun out across the walls, and the conversation was louder, edgier, but it was still a pretty high-end layout.

It was the photographer’s thirtieth birthday and he’d invited some pretty big names, but it was getting harder to tell the old money from the new, because everyone was dressed down in beads and kaftans. The new producers and actors were sprawled across canary-yellow beanbags in a narcoleptic fug, while the industry seniors stuck to martinis at the bar. I was having a pretty good time with my lady-friends when I saw them again.

Perhaps because nobody had noticed me at Dell’s house, I noticed everything, and now I recognized the new arrivals as they came in. There were four of them, two girls and two men, all in late-teens to mid-twenties, and I distinctly recalled them from Dell’s Christmas party because they’d stood together in a tight group, as though they didn’t know anyone else. They were laughing together and watching everyone, as though they were in on a private joke no one else could share.

I admit I was a little stoned and feeling kind of tripped out, but there was something about them I found unsettling. I got the feeling they hadn’t been invited, and were there for some other purpose. They stayed in the corner, watching and whispering, and I wanted to go up to them, to ask what they were doing, but the girls were distracting me and – you know how that goes.

I left a few minutes after midnight, just as things were starting to heat up. I went with the girls back to their hotel. They needed a ride, and I needed the company. When I woke up the next morning, they had already vacated the room. There was only a lipstick-scrawled message from them on the bathroom mirror, plenty of kisses but no contact numbers. I picked up the industry dailies in the IHOP on Santa Monica, and there on page five found a report of the party I’d attended the night before. Some high-society singer I’d vaguely recalled seeing drunkenly arguing with his girlfriend had fallen down the stairs as he left the party, gone all the way from the apartment door to the landing below. He was expected to recover but might have sustained brain damage. Fans were waiting outside his hospital room with flowers.

Two parties, two accidents – it happens. There were studio parties all over town every night of the week, but it felt weird that I’d been at both of them. You had to be invited, of course, but there wasn’t the strict door policy that there is now, no security guards with headsets, sometimes not even a checklist. People came and went, and it was hard to tell if anyone was gatecrashing; the hosts generally assumed you wouldn’t dare. They were insulated from the world. I remember attending a shindig in Brentwood where the toilet overflowed through the dining room, and everyone acted like there was nothing wrong because they assumed the maids would clear it up. Hollywood’s like that.

Maybe you can see a pattern emerging in this story, but at the time I failed to spot it. I was too preoccupied; with auditions, with my career, with having a good time. The town felt different then, footloose and slightly lost, caught between classic old-time movie-making and the rising counterculture. They needed to cater to the new generation of rootless teens who were growing impatient with the world they’d been handed. The producers wanted to make renegade art statements but didn’t know how, and they couldn’t entirely surrender the movies of the past. People forget that Hello Dolly! came out the same year as Easy Rider.

Strange times. In Vietnam, Lt William Calley’s platoon of US soldiers slaughtered 500 unarmed Vietnamese, mainly women and children, at My Lai. Many of us had buddies over there, and heard stories of old women thrown down wells with grenades tossed in after them. Those who were left behind felt powerless, but there was an anger growing that seeped between the cracks in our daily lives, upsetting the rhythm of the city, the state, and eventually the whole nation. I’d never seen demonstrations on the streets of LA before now, and I’d heard the same thing was happening in Washington, Chicago, even in Denver.

But nothing affected the Hollywood elite; they hung on, flirting with subversion when really, what they wanted to make was musicals. They still threw parties, though, and the next one was a killer.

This was the real deal, a ritzy Beverly Hills bash with a sizeable chunk of the A-list present, thrown in order to promote yet another Planet Of The Apes movie. The sequels were losing audiences, so one of the executive producers pulled out the stops and opened up his mansion – I say his, but I think it had been built for Louise Brooks – to Hollywood royalty. This time there were security guards manning the door, checking names against clipboards, questioning everyone except the people who expected to be recognized. Certainly I remember seeing Chuck Heston there, although he didn’t look very happy about it, didn’t drink and didn’t stay long. The beautiful girls had turned out in force, clad in brilliantly jewelled mini-dresses and skimpy tops, slyly scoping the room for producers, directors, anyone who could move them up a career notch. A bunch of heavyweight studio boys were playing pool in the smoke-blue den while their women sat sipping daiquiris and dishing dirt. The talent agents never brought their wives along for fear of becoming exposed. I’d been invited by a hot little lady called Cheyenne who had landed a part in the movie purely because she could ride a horse, although I figured she’d probably ridden the producer.

So there we were, stranded in this icing-pink stucco villa with matching crescent staircases, dingy brown wall tapestries and wrought-iron chandeliers. I took Cheyenne’s arm and we headed for the garden, where we chugged sea breezes on a lawn like a carpet of emerald needles. Nearby, a fake-British band playing soft rock in a striped marquee filled with bronze statues and Santa Fe rugs. I was looking for a place to put down my drink when I saw the same uninvited group coming down from the house, and immediately a warning bell started to ring in my head.

It was a warm night in March, and most people were in the torch-lit garden. The Uninvited – that’s how I had come to think of them – helped themselves to cocktails and headed to the crowded lawn, and we followed.

“See those people over there?” I said to Cheyenne. “You ever see them before?”

She had to find her glasses and sneak them on, then shook her glossy black hair at me. “The square-jawed guy on the left looks like an actor. I think I’ve seen him in something. The girls don’t seem like they belong here.”

“What it is, I’m beginning to think there’s some really harmful karma around them.” I told her about the two earlier parties.

“That’s nuts,” she laughed. “You think they could just go around picking fights and nobody would notice?”

“People here don’t notice much, they’re too busy promoting themselves. Besides, I don’t think it’s about picking fights, more like bringing down a bad atmosphere. I don’t know. Let’s get a little closer.”

We sidled alongside one of the men, who was whispering something to the shorter, younger of the two girls. He was handsome in a dissipated way, she had small feral features, and I tried figuring them first as a couple, then part of a group, but couldn’t get a handle on it. The actor guy was dressed in an expensive blue Rodeo Drive suit, the other was an urban cowboy. The short girl was wearing the kind of cheap cotton sunflower shift they marked down at FedCo, but her taller girlfriend had gold medallions around her throat that must have cost plenty.

Now that I noticed, they were all wearing chains or medallions. The cowboy guy had a pony tail folded neatly beneath his shirt collar, like he was hiding it. Something about them had really begun to bother me, and I couldn’t place the problem until I noticed their eyes. It was the one thing they all had in common, a shared stillness. Their unreflecting pupils watched without moving, and stayed cold as space even when they laughed. Everyone else was milling slowly around, working the party, except these four, who were watching and waiting for something to happen.

“You’re telling me you really don’t see anything strange about them?” I asked.

“Why, what do you think you see?”

“I don’t know. I think maybe they come to these parties late, uninvited. I think they hate the people here.”

“Well, I’m not that crazy about our hosts, either,” she said. “We’re here because we have to be.”

“But they’re not. They just stand around, and cause bad things to happen before moving on,” I told Cheyenne. “I don’t know how or why, they just do.”

“Do you know how stoned that sounds?” she hissed back at me. “If they weren’t invited, how did they get through security?” She reached on tiptoe and looked into my eyes. “Just as I thought, black baseballs. Smoking dope is making you paranoid. Couldn’t you just try to enjoy yourself?”

So that’s what I did, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the guest dying in the pool, and the guy who had fallen down the stairs. We stayed around for a couple more hours, and were thinking about going when we found ourselves back with the Uninvited. A crowd had gathered on the deck and were dancing wildly, but there they were, the four of them, dressed so differently I couldn’t imagine they were friends, still sizing things up, still whispering to each other.

“Just indulge me this one time, okay?” I told Cheyenne. “Check them out, see if you can see anything weird about them.”

She sighed and turned me around so that she could peer over my shoulder. “Well, the square-jawed guy is wearing something around his neck. Actually, they all are. I’ve seen his medallion before, kind of a double-headed axe? It means God Have Mercy. There are silver beads on either side of it, take a look. Can you see how many there are?”

I checked him out. The dude was so deep in conversation with the short girl that he didn’t notice me. “There are six on each side. No, wait – seven and six. Does that mean something?”

“Sure, coupled with the double axe, it represents rebellion via the thirteen steps of depravity, ultimately leading to the new world order, the Novus Or dor Seclorum. It’s a satanic symbol. My brother told me all about this stuff. He read a lot about witchcraft for a while, thought he could influence the outcome of events, but then my mother made him get a job.” She pointed discreetly. “The girl he’s talking to is wearing an ankh, the silver cross with the loop on top? It’s the Egyptian symbol for sexual union. They’re pretty common, you get them in most head shops. Oh, wait a minute.” She craned over my shoulder, trying to see. “The other couple? She’s wearing a gold squiggle, like a sideways eight with three lines above it. That’s something to do with alchemy, the sign for black mercury maybe. But the guy, the cowboy, he’s wearing the most potent icon. Check it out.”

I looked, and saw a small golden five lying on his bare tanned chest. Except it wasn’t a five; there was a crossed line above it. “What is that?”

“The Cross of Confusion, the symbol of Saturn. Also known as the Greater Malefic, the Bringer of Sorrows. Saturn takes twenty-nine years to orbit the sun, and as a human life can be measured as just two or three orbits, it’s mostly associated with the grim reaper’s collection of the human soul, the acknowledgment that we have a fixed time before we die, the orbit of life. However, we can alter that orbit, cut a life short in other words. It’s a satanic death symbol, very powerful.”

I got a weird feeling then, a prickle that started on the back of my neck and crept down my arms. I was still staring at the cowboy when he looked up and locked eyes with me, and I saw the roaring, infinite emptiness inside him. I never thought I was susceptible to this kind of stuff, but suddenly, in that one look, I was converted.

We were still locked into each other when Cheyenne nudged me hard. “Quit staring at him, do you want to cause trouble?”

“No,” I told her, “but there’s something going down here, can’t you feel it? Something really scary.”

“Maybe they just don’t like black dudes, Julius. Or maybe they’re aliens. I really think we should go.”

Just then, the Uninvited turned as one and walked slowly to the other side of the dancing crowd until I could no longer see them properly. A few moments later I heard the fight start, two raised male voices. I’d been half-expecting it to happen, but when it did the shock still caught me.

He was in his late fifties, balding but shaggy-haired, dressed in a yellow Keep On Truckin’ T-shirt designed for someone a third his age. I saw him throw a drink and swing a fat arm, fist clenched, missing by a mile. Maybe he was pushed, maybe not, but I saw him lose his balance and go over onto the table as if the whole things was being filmed in slow motion. The kidney-shaped sheet of glass that exploded and split into three sections beneath him sliced through his T-shirt as neatly as a scalpel, and everyone jumped back. God forbid the guests might ruin their shoes on shards of glass.

He was lying as helpless as a baby, unable to rise. A couple of girls squealed in revulsion. When he tried to lift himself onto his elbows, a wide, dark line blossomed through the cut T-shirt. He flopped and squirmed, calling for help as petals of blood spread across his shirt. The music died and I heard his boot heels hammering on the floor, then the retreating crowd obscured my view. Nobody had rushed to his aid; they looked like they were waiting for the Mexican maids to appear and draw a discreet cloth over the scene so that they could return to partying.

Why didn’t I help? I have no answer to that question. Maybe I was more like the others back then, afraid of being the first to break out of the line. I feel differently now.

Cheyenne was pulling at my sleeve, trying to get me to leave, but I was looking for the Uninvited. If they were still there, I couldn’t see them. They’d brought misfortune to the gathering once more and disappeared into the despairing confusion of the Los Angeles night.

As I had twice before, I found myself searching the papers next morning for mention of the drama, but any potential scandal had been hastily hushed up. I lost touch with Cheyenne for a while, even began to think I’d imagined the whole thing, because the next month my career took off and I stopped smoking dope. I’d landed the lead role in a new movie about a street-smart black P.I. called Dynamite Jones, and I needed to keep my head straight, because the night schedule was punishing and I couldn’t afford to screw up.

We wrapped the picture in record time, without any serious hitches, although my white love interest was replaced with a black girl two days in, and our big love scene was cut to make sure we didn’t upset the heartland audiences. Perry Sapirstein held the wrap party at his house on Mulholland because they were striking the set and we could keep the studio space. I figured it was a good time to hook up with Cheyenne again -she’d been in Chicago appearing in an anti-war show that had tanked, and wanted to get a little more serious with me while she was waiting for another break out West.

I thought I’d know everyone there, but there were still some unfamiliar faces, and of course, the Beautiful Girls were out in full force, hoping to get picked for something, anything before their innocence faded and their faces hardened. The Hollywood parties were losing their appeal as I got used to them. I could see the establishment would never be unseated from their grand haciendas. They flirted with rebellion but would revert to type at the first opportunity, and everyone knew it.

I’d forgotten all about the Uninvited. People were caught up in the events unfolding in Vietnam, and fresh stories of atrocities on both sides were being substantiated by shocking press footage that brought the war to everyone’s doorstep. I didn’t meet anyone, ever, who thought we should be there, but I was in liberal California, and it would take some time yet for the mood to sink in across the nation. The sense of confusion was palpable; hippies were hated and feared wherever they went, and the young were viewed with such suspicion beyond the Democrat enclaves that it felt dangerous to step over state lines. Folks are frightened of difference and change, always were, always will be, but back then there were no guidelines, no safety barriers. There was no one to tell us what was right, beyond what we felt in our hearts.

We couldn’t see how far we were blundering into darkness.

Even in the strangest times, somebody will always continue to throw a party and act like there’s nothing wrong. So it was on Mulholland, where the gold tequila fountains filled pyramids of sparkling salt-rimmed glasses, and invisible waiters slipped between the guests with shrimps arranged on pearlized clamshells.

Everything was strange that last night I saw them. I remember being freaked by shrieks of hysteria that turned into bubbles of laughter, coming from the darkened upstairs floor of the house. I remember the hate-filled glare of a saturnine man leaning in the corridor by the bathroom. I remember going to the kitchen to rummage for some ice and seeing something written in maple syrup on the bone-white door of the fridge, the letters running like thick dark blood. I peered closer, trying to read what it said, expecting something shocking and sinister, only to feel a sense of anticlimax when I deciphered the dripping, sticky word:

HEALTH

So much for Lucifer appearing uninvited at Hollywood parties.

But the second I dismissed the idea as dumb, a scampering, shadowy imp of fear started scratching about inside my mind again. The more I thought about it, the more the room, the house and everyone in it felt unsafe, and the sense kept expanding, engulfing me. Suddenly I caught sight of myself reflected in the floor-to-ceiling glass that separated the kitchen from the unlit rear garden, and saw how alone I was in that bright bare room. There was no one to care if I lived or died in this damned city. Without me even realizing it, everything in my world had begun to slip and slide into a howling, emptying abyss. There were no friends, no loyalties, no good intentions, only the prey and the preyed upon.

No haven, no shelter, just endless night, unforgiving and infinite.

If this was the effect of giving up marijuana, I thought, I really needed to start smoking again.

But the line of safety was thinner then. We felt much closer to destruction. These days we live with the danger while cheerfully ignoring the data.

I once attended a class on the structure of myths at UCLA where we discussed the theme of the uninvited guest, the phantom at the feast, the unclean in the temple, the witch at the christening, the vampire at the threshold, the doomsayer at the wedding, and all these myths shared one element in common; someone had to invite them in to begin with. I wondered who had provided an unwitting invitation here in California.

I remember that night there was a very pretty blonde woman in the lounge – although I only saw her from the back – whom everyone wanted to talk to. One of her friends was drunkenly doing a trick with a lethal-looking table knife, and I thought what if he slips? And just as I was thinking that, I became aware of them, standing right alongside me. I turned and found myself beside the square-jawed one who looked like an actor. His grey deep-set eyes stared out at me very steadily, holding the moment. The light was low in the main hall, which was lit only by amber flames from an enormous carved fireplace. I saw the Satan sign glittering at his neck, and he smiled knowingly as I flinched.

“Who the hell are you?” I half-whispered, finally regaining my composure.

“Bobby.” He held out his hand. “You’re Julius.”

“How do you know who I am?”

“I have friends in the business. We know a lot of people.”

I didn’t like the way he said that. “I’ve seen you before,” I told him. “Seen your friends, too.”

“Yeah, they’re all here. We hang out together.” He pointed. “That’s Abby, Susan, Steve.”

They all looked over at me as if they’d picked up on their names being spoken. The effect of them moving with one shared mind was unnerving. I meant to say “Who do you know here?” but instead I asked “What are you here for?”

Bobby was silent for a moment, then smiled more broadly. “I think you know the answer to that. We’re here to taste death.”

“What do you mean?”

He looked away at the fire. “You have to know what dying is before you can know life, Julius.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“I mean,” Bobby leaned in close and still, his eyes filling with morbid compassion as they stared deep into mine, “we’re leading the rise to power. We’ve already started the killing, and this city will become an inferno of revenge. The streets will run with blood. There will be a new holocaust, revolution in the streets, and the world will belong to the Fifth Angel.”

“Man, you’re crazy.” I shook my head suddenly tired of this white supremacy crap. I’d just spent two months mofo-ing around in some Stepin Fetchit role given to me by rich white boys, and I guess I’d just had enough. “Bullshit,” I told him, “if the best thing you can do to start a revolution is shove a few drunks around at parties, you’re in trouble. I saw you at Dell’s place. I know you pushed that guy into the pool and broke his neck. I saw you in Silverlake, and at the house on Canon Drive where that guy was cut on the table. I know you don’t belong here, except to bring down chaos.”

“You’re right, we don’t belong here any more than you do,” he said, distracted now by something or someone moving past my left shoulder. “There’s no difference between us, brother. The rest of them are just little pigs.” He exchanged glances with the others, and the two girls turned to go, slipping out through the crowd. He pushed back to take his leave with them.

“Wait,” I called after him, anxious to keep him there. “How did you get in through security?”

Bobby looked over his shoulder, quiet and serious. “We have friends in all the places we’re not invited.”

“Nothing’s going to happen tonight, right? You’ve got to promise me that.”

“Nothing will happen tonight, Julius. We’re leaving.”

“I don’t get it.” I was calling so loud that people were turning to stare at me. “Why not tonight? You made this stuff happen before, why not now, right in front of me? Let me see, Bobby, I want to understand. You think you can summon up the devil?”

His eyes were still focused over my left shoulder. “The devil is already here, my friend.”

I twisted around to see who he was looking at, but when I looked back he had gone. They had all gone. And the tumble of the party rushed into my ears once more. I heard the blonde girl laughing as the man fumbled his knife trick, and the point of the blade fell harmlessly to the floor, where it stuck in the wood.

When the girl turned around, I saw that she was heavily pregnant, and heard someone say, “Come on Sharon, I’m going to drive you home, it’s late. What if Roman calls tonight?”

She lived on 10050 Cielo Drive, I heard her say. And she had to get back, because the next night she was expecting her friends Abby and Jay, and they’d probably want to stay late drinking wine. She wasn’t drinking because of the baby. She didn’t want anything to happen to the baby.

The next day was August 9th, 1969.

It was the day our bright world began its long eclipse.

They caught up with Charlie and his gang at the Spahn ranch, out near Chatsworth, but by then it was too late to stop the closing light. There were others, rootless and elusive, who would never be caught.

I remembered those parties in the Hollywood hills, and realized I had always known about the rise of the Uninvited. Much later, I read about Manson’s children writing Helter Skelter on their victims’ refrigerator door, only they had misspelled the first word, writing it as Healther.

I saw how close I had come to touching evil.

The world is different now. It’s sectioned off by high walls, no-go zones, clearance status, security fences, X-ray machines. The gates remain shut to outsiders unless you have a pass to enter. The important parties and the good living can only continue behind sealed doors. At least, that’s what those who throw them desperately need to believe. That’s what I need to believe.

I married Cheyenne. We have two daughters and a son. Against all reason, we stayed on in California.

And we no longer know how to protect ourselves from those who are already inside the gates. I guess we lost that right when we first built walls around our enclaves, and printed out our invitations.