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Chapter Four

LONG AFTER VINCE Walters left her house, Lillian Withers still couldn’t get the thought out of her mind that she almost lost her composure when Vince asked if Maggie had told her anything about her past besides what Vince already knew.

She’d never been a very good liar. How Vince swallowed that one, she would never know.

She sat in the easy chair, her Bible opened to Revelations. It was ten-thirty p.m., and the night was warm. It had climbed to ninety degrees today and it was close to seventy now. A very comfortable evening. They’d spent the day making Maggie’s funeral arrangements, then had gone out to dinner at a steakhouse called Hoss’s and Vince filled her in on what he’d been up to. Graduating top of his class at the University of California in Irvine with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Administration with an emphasis in Economics and a double Masters Degree in Economics and Business. He was the Director of the Western Division at Corporate Financial and was doing quite well. With the exception of losing his young wife, Laura, almost a year ago to that horrible car accident, life had been pretty good to Vince Walters. The Lord had blessed him.

Or had He? Lillian skimmed through the Bible, thinking about all that Vince told her. First the loss of his wife, which he was still trying to get over, and now this. Lillian would never wish something like that on her worst enemy. Not that she had any, but she couldn’t fathom it anyway. It was all so horrible. She fully understood now why Vince had broken down earlier that day. She supposed it was perfectly all right for him to not mourn Maggie’s death. She hadn’t been much of a mother to her son in the last few years before he’d left for college. Vince had every right to feel some sort of resentment toward Maggie. Lillian only hoped he would find it within himself to be able to forgive his mother.

Lillian traced her finger down the pages of the Bible, finally stopping at Chapter 20, verse 7. She read the verse aloud to herself. “When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth—Gog and Magog—to gather them for battle.” She paused, reading through the rest of the passage to herself. Then she closed the Bible and looked out the window into the night beyond. “When the thousand years are over,” she murmured. There were many that believed the thousand years hadn’t started. There were others who believed that the thousand years was almost at an end, right now in these final years of the twentieth century. Maggie hadn’t subscribed to that belief. She’d held the opinion that the Beast was alive and well in this country and that his time was close at hand. This belief had taken root more strongly in the last ten years, and within the last few years she’d been almost paranoid about it. It got to the point that she’d almost had her phone unplugged because she thought the Beast was going to call her in the middle of the night to tell her that he was going to claim her as his own. Her fear had been so insistent that Lillian had convinced her to talk to Reverend Powell about it. But the talk with the Reverend hadn’t done much to calm Maggie of this fear. The best Lillian had been able to do was convince Maggie to buy an answering machine. “This way you can screen your calls,” she’d told Maggie, trying to sound as serious as possible. “You can pick it up if you recognize the voice coming through. That way if the Beast does call you, he won’t actually be talking to you. He won’t be able to get you.”

Surprisingly, Maggie had fallen for it and it was then that Lillian began to fear for her friend’s sanity. Maggie had always been strong-willed and God fearing, but her fear of the approaching of Armageddon and her insistence that it was coming sooner than they thought had really gotten to her the last few years. Lillian even talked to Reverend Powell about it in an effort to lay her fears to rest and the Reverend hadn’t shown the least bit of worry. “Maggie is simply preparing for what the Lord has told us is bound to come,” he’d said. “She may be a little more… impassioned about it than most of us would be, but then she’s a very passionate woman. Her walk with the Lord is the strongest I’ve ever seen in a Christian.”

Lillian had agreed. Maggie’s walk with the Lord was certainly one to try to emulate. But Maggie’s behavior still nagged her.

The tip of the iceberg had been when Vincent asked about Maggie’s past.

Lillian sighed and put the Bible on the coffee table. She felt bad about lying to Vince, but she had to. It was the only thing she could think of until she thought about what to do.

Now she had the time to think about it.

The box…

She didn’t know how long ago it was now, but it had to have been in 1987 or 1988. Well over ten years ago. She’d been over at Maggie’s house helping to arrange the knick-knacks on the new shelves she’d installed in the living room. It was spring and the two women had been talking about the latest lesson from church services the week before. Lillian was embroiled in the subject, which concerned Mark’s account of how Jesus chased the money-changers out of the temple, when she noticed Maggie was gone. Lillian stopped what she was doing, turning to try to find her, when Maggie called out. “Lillian?”

Lillian had turned toward the hallway and saw Maggie near the doorway to her bedroom. Maggie beckoned to her and Lillian had gone into the bedroom, wondering what her friend wanted. And that’s when Maggie showed her the box with the padlock.

“I want you to promise me something, Lillian,” Maggie had said. Her breath was bated, as if she was asking Lillian to contemplate something that was on a grandiose scale. Robbing a bank. Or stealing secret documents. Maggie kept looking around the room, as if to keep reassuring herself that they were the only two people in the room.

“What is it?” she’d asked.

Maggie lifted the box up and jiggled the lock. “I’m going to bury this box in my garden. It will be approximately ten feet from where the concrete of my back porch ends, dead center from my back door. It will be buried two feet down. I want you to promise me that if I should die—”

“What? Maggie what are you talking about?”

“If I die,” Maggie continued, ignoring her protests, “I want you to promise me you’ll dig this box up. I’ll give you the only key. You will keep the key in a safe place. If something happens to me, you will dig up the box. You will take it to a safe place and open it. Read the documents I have placed inside it.”

“Maggie—”

“Then take them to Reverend Powell. Do not take them to anybody else. Especially my son if he shows up.”

“Maggie, this is ridiculous! I don’t understand—”

“You will when you open the box. Now do you promise?”

They’d gone back and forth like that for a good ten minutes before Lillian had given in. She promised Maggie she would unearth the box, and that she and Reverend Powell would read what was inside. Maggie had given her the key, and without another word she put the box back in her room. When she returned to the living room she wouldn’t speak of her request. She’d never spoken of it in the years that passed. When Lillian asked, all Maggie would say was that she couldn’t say anything about it now. She was afraid to. But when the time came, Lillian could find out for herself and then God help her.

She’d talked to Reverend Powell about it in the privacy of his home office and he’d listened to her carefully, twirling the corncob pipe he always carried with him but never smoked. He’d been a smoker back when he lived a life of sin, and even though he no longer touched tobacco, the habit of putting a pipe to his lips was an old vice. Lillian saw it as a familiar reminder of his older, dirtier habit, and if the Lord chose to help Reverend Powell rid himself of that habit by making it impossible to give up fiddling with the pipe itself, so be it. When she finished, Reverend Powell put the pipe on his walnut desk and kicked his feet up, lacing his hands behind his head as he leaned back in his chair. He was staring up at the ceiling in contemplation. “Perhaps the items she has in that box are the holdovers from her past life. Her life before she was saved.”

Lillian thought that was the case, but the way Maggie had been so feverishly incensed when she’d asked her to do this bothered her. “You should have seen her,” she’d told Reverend Powell. “It was like she was asking me not to tell anybody that she’d gotten drunk at the local bar and hit on a CIA agent who was in town, and that her brief affair with him resulted in her finding out who really shot JFK.” Reverend Powell chuckled at that scenario and Lillian cracked a grin herself. “I guess that’s a crazy way of putting it, but that’s how it seemed. She acted like she had the world’s… wickedest secret in that box.”

“To her it probably is the world’s wickedest secret,” Reverend Powell said. “The sins of one’s past life can put a tremendous burden on our walks with Christ if we do not shed them. I’ve no doubt that Maggie has shed her sins through Christ, but why she would keep the mementos of those sins, I can’t say.”

“So you really think that’s what they are?” Lillian had asked. “Newspaper clippings maybe, or old photographs of the person she used to be?”

“Of course,” Reverend Powell said. He’d pulled his feet off the desk and sat forward. He was a big man, but gentle. His voice, which was a deep booming baritone, could be surprisingly mellow and soothing. “We won’t know what she has in that box until the day has come when what she has asked us to do comes to pass. But if it puts your mind at ease, it’s my sincere belief that all it carries is probably pictures of her past life, maybe an old scrapbook or phone book. Maybe there’s information on her family in it.”

“She’s never talked about her family at all,” Lillian said.

“Maybe she has a reason not to. Maybe they… treated her badly at some point in her past. Neglected her, abused her. Maybe they were heathens. And the reason she’s keeping this material is because the blood tie is strong. Only the Lord knows. And I think we should respect her wish.”

That had been the end of it. She’d never asked Maggie about the contents of the box, and she never brought the subject up with Reverend Powell again. On the morning they learned Maggie had been murdered, her mind went back to that afternoon over a decade ago when Maggie made her promise to dig up the box and she’d cast her eyes over at Reverend Powell, who was consoling Mary Rossington in her grief. Reverend Powell’s eyes met hers over Mary’s curly-topped head and held them. They were both thinking the same thing. The time had come for that box to be unearthed.

Lillian rose from her chair and went to the kitchen. She went to the closet where she kept her garbage can and fished around. Her fingers grasped the handle of a shovel and she pulled it out, hefting it in her hand. It was almost eleven o’clock, but she didn’t feel the least bit tired. The key was taped to the pages of a Bible that Maggie had given to her as a gift a year before, but there was no need to retrieve it yet. Nor did she feel like waiting until tomorrow to fulfill her end of the promise she’d made. She pulled open one of the drawers of the countertop and pulled out a heavy flashlight. She turned it on. The beam was strong. She turned the flashlight off and carried both tools to the living room. She set the shovel down, leaning its handle against the wall, and put the flashlight on a small end table. Then she grabbed her tennis shoes and put them on. When her shoes were on, she grabbed the flashlight and shovel and was just about to exit the house by the back door when a hand clamped over her mouth and strong arms yanked her back in the house.

Her heart leaped in her throat as she was spun around. A man she didn’t recognize stood in front of her and she could sense another man behind her, his hand still clamped over her mouth. The man in front of her was holding a piece of duct tape. “We need to talk,” he said, as he stepped forward and deftly covered Lillian’s mouth with the tape.

Oh my God, it’s the same men that killed Maggie! Lillian’s mind shrieked. She knew this was the case even as the man behind her guided her into the living room. Her eyes grew wide as she entered the living room as her gaze lit across a third person in the house. A young woman with blond hair, her features pleasant, wholesome, all-American. The woman looked up with anticipation.

“Sit.” The man behind her barked, and strong hands pushed her into a chair. She looked up at the two men, her adrenaline pumping through her veins. She felt suddenly hot in the claustrophobic closeness of her little home.

The man that had grabbed her stepped in front of her, and now she got a good look at him. He was young, with short dark hair, wearing dark slacks and a dark coat over a white shirt. His accomplice was blond, his features gaunt, his skinny frame bearing loose fitting jeans and a billowy shirt. They looked indifferent as they gazed down at her. What do they want from me, oh my God, what do they want—

“We can make this easy, or we can make this very hard,” the first man said in slow, measured tones. “It doesn’t matter to us, but it will to you. You can either go through the same torture your friend went through, or you can tell us what we need to know right now. And if you think your death will be connected to your friend’s, you can forget it. If you decide not to cooperate, we will torture you, but the authorities will think you’ve succumbed to heart failure. It’s really quite simple to do, especially once you’ve given yourself over to the Dark Lord.”

Oh sweet Jesus, help me Lord, give me strength, get thee behind me Satan—

“So what will it be, Lillian?” The man leaned forward as the young woman stood up and pointed at her. The young woman began chanting in a fluting, musical voice. An homine en guterish en domine en deamon ia, shggth nggslamna hanbi.

“So what will it be, Lillian?” the man said and suddenly, as if by magic, hundreds of large spiders were crawling on her, covering the floor, crawling up her legs and body, some already crawling up her neck. She instinctively tried to bolt out of the chair but something was holding her back as if she was tied down. “Will you tell us everything Maggie Walters told you? We know she told you about her son and us. Please, indulge us.”

Lillian looked up at the man, her eyes open wide in fear as she felt the first spider sink its fangs into the soft flesh of her belly. A minute later another spider bit into her neck and Lillian screamed through the tape.

“We can make this all go away now if you wish. You know what to do.”

Maggie’s words went through Lillian’s brain. You are not to tell anybody about this. You are to dig up the box, then take it and the contents to Reverend Powell. Read them together. She thought about what Maggie had died for, thought about the way she’d died, about the symbols written in blood on the wall of her bedroom. There was no way she was going to betray her friend. There was no way she was going to give in to these denizens of Satan.

And Lillian, her fear rising, casting a quick prayer up to her Lord to give her strength, shook her head slowly. No.

In the end, the torture was to be a thousand times worse than Maggie’s.

June 24, 1999, 10:30 PM, Pacific Standard Time.

Hollywood, California.

FRANK BLACK SAT at the bar inside Harry’s Pub on the Strip, surprised that the glass sitting in front of him didn’t contain an alcoholic beverage.

He took a sip of his Coca-Cola and surveyed the bar from his position. Man, how the place had changed. Originally an Italian restaurant, Harry’s quickly became a haven for movie stars and producers in the forties and fifties. Due to its proximity to the Rainbow Bar and Grill across the street, the spot became a hangout for rock stars in the 1980s. With Gazarri’s (now called the Key Club), the Roxy and the Whiskey A Go-Go across the street as well, Harry’s quickly became the watering hole for members of Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Aerosmith, and every rock star that came to Los Angeles. In the 1980s it became the hangout spot for the scores of aspiring musicians that played the clubs and littered the sunset strip with flyers for their bands. The LAPD made nightly arrests for everything from fights to public drunkenness to drug dealing. Sometimes they busted people for no reason other than to provide amusement for themselves, thus proving militant blacks wrong that the LAPD was down on African Americans. Frank had seen them beat the crap out of people of all races just because they felt like it. Once he’d been arrested while walking to Harry’s. He hadn’t taken a drink all day, he hadn’t been carrying, and he was cold sober. The pigs had just wanted to hassle him because he was wearing a leather jacket and had long hair.

But all that had changed. Now fourteen years later, Frank was not only sober and loving it, he was married to a loving woman named Brandy and he had a three-year old son named Mark and a two-month old daughter named Melody. He was recently experiencing an upswing in his writing career—he’d almost destroyed it eight years ago when he was deep in his heroin addiction—and he was producing the best work in his life. His income was good, better than it had ever been, and the gigs kept coming in. Most of what they used to pay the mortgage on the condo and the bills came from the CD-ROM games he was writing and Brandy’s partnership in the modeling agency she co-owned with her mother. Now that his fiction-writing career was taking off again, he was selling novels. It was only a matter of time before he gained a solid readership. And then…

And now here he was, sitting in Harry’s Bar and Grill wondering why he would risk losing it all again.

Frank took another sip of coke. Neil Young came on the bar’s sound system, screeching that we had to keep on rocking in a free world. Brandy had taken the kids to her mother’s for dinner after Frank told her he had a meeting in West Hollywood with the CD ROM people to discuss next year’s projects. The CD ROM gigs had become so lucrative that she’d bought the lie. It was the first time he’d ever lied to her in the five years they’d been together. Amazing, he thought, drumming his fingers on the bar. To think that all that I have overcome: inadequate feelings about myself, alcoholism, heroin addiction, destroying my career in publishing, using women for my own sexual needs, allowing women to use me for their sexual needs, lying to people to score the next gig, the next fix, the next fuck. I overcome all that, I redeem myself before God Himself, and now I’m sitting in Harry’s Bar and Grill, the most tempting bar in Los Angeles where one can score the drug or woman of their choice without even trying, after having just lied to my wife about what I am doing tonight.

Jesus.

He set the empty glass on the bar. The bartender approached and Frank signaled for another. The bartender refilled his glass with Coca-Cola and placed it in front of him on a napkin. The bartender, who was large and hulking with a bald head and large hoop earrings, motioned at him. “Nice tats,” he said. “Where do you get your work done?”

Frank moved his arms out. He was wearing a black T-shirt with a Harley Davidson insignia on the front. His tattoos were very well displayed. “Rick Bennett over at Good Time Charlie’s does my work now,” he said.

“They’re gorgeous,” the bartender said, wiping down glasses. His arms were tastefully decorated as well, although not as intricately as Frank’s. Both of Frank’s arms were heavily tattooed from the wrist all the way to the shoulder, blending into the pectorals in the front and snaking down his back to his waist. When Frank went shirtless he got quite a few stares, most of them admiring. The tattoos were Japanese in style, artfully rendered, the bottom designs black tribal, the flourishes a vast array of blending images that melted into one another. To Frank, the designs were reflections of who he was, his experiences, his moods. He had been getting tattooed since he was twenty-one, but had not gotten seriously into it until after he became sober. He found that he enjoyed the sting of the tattoo needle better than the syringe.

In time, the tattooing filled that void left from his addiction.

“Rose Tattoos does mine,” the bartender said. He turned his arms toward Frank, showing off a large portrait of a woman, an evil looking alien, and a mythical figure slumped against a tree. They were striking. “They just did a skull on the back of my left shoulder.”

“Hurts like a bitch, don’t it?” Frank asked, grinning.

“You bet!” The bartender said. “You ever had your back done?”

“I’m having a back piece done now.”

“Your whole back?”

“My whole back.”

“Wow!” The bartender raised his eyebrows in amazement.

A young couple dressed in flannel shirts and blue jeans took a pair of seats at the opposite end of the bar. The bartender turned his attention to them and Frank took another sip of his coke.

He’d started out the evening aimlessly, driving the Saturn around the city, letting his mind wander with whatever thoughts he might have and come home. But he found himself driving down the strip, and when he passed Larabee he thought about Harry’s. He pulled into the parking lot down the street and entered without a moment’s hesitation. And he’d been sitting at the bar drinking cokes and thinking ever since.

He supposed the whole thing had started two years ago with the dreams.

In the beginning they’d been mere haunting images that remained in his mind long after work. He used several of the images in short stories that he sold to magazines. But then they began getting worse. He began having dreams about normal looking people hanging out with him, treating him very friendly, almost as if he were family. And then just as he would begin to ease into the relationships they would change suddenly into hideous monsters. They would become beast-like, resembling various creatures; sometimes bearing the large bulbous eyes of a fly; other times the trunk and tusks of an elephant; other times the flat snout and tusks of a wild boar. Sometimes they would turn into combinations of all three, their various identities meshing together, merging from one to the other, then swimming back to human form, all the while voices rose in his mind, singing, droning voices intermingling with the harsh chants of what sounded like praying.

He woke up screaming the first time the dreams became so vivid. Brandy had to wake him up before he realized he was screaming in his sleep, clawing the air in front of him. He’d collapsed in her arms, out of breath, his heart racing with fright. At first he thought it was an LSD flashback. It was much easier to blame such a horrifying nightmare on the indulgences of his youth.

Without realizing he was doing it, he wrote a novel about the dream, using the images as a metaphor for the monsters that are inside some people. His agent sold it first trip out. It had been his first horror novel in seven years. It was called Those Inside.

It became the best received of all of his works, with the exception of the first book of the science fiction trilogy that had come out the year before. Frank Black had carved a reputation for himself in the world of science fiction, and despite the two horror novels he had published during that time—Conversion, which was a vampire novel, and In the Cellar—he was still typecast as a science fiction author. Even when he got back into publishing again, his first sale was a science fiction novel. He’d always liked horror stories, but had never been inspired to write them. His science fiction stories were weird enough.

But writing Those Inside seemed to trigger an untapped well. The week after it sold, he got an idea for a batch of short horror fiction. He was knee deep in writing the third novel for his trilogy, he’d just landed the CD ROM gigs, and life was on the upswing. He’d plugged on, fighting the good fight.

Those Inside had not only triggered an untapped well, it also drained him. The dreams came more regularly, which puzzled him. Writing about the things that bothered him usually purged those demons, but instead the dreams were coming more and more frequently. He began attending his AA meetings more regularly, actually volunteering for things at his local AA chapter, something he’d never done. The dreams kept coming, growing worse in their repulsiveness, and it was then that he began to slip.

He began smoking pot again.

Hemp had always served as a good escape vehicle in the past and it proved to be more so now. And with California’s new medicinal marijuana law on the books, he liked to tell himself that he had a legitimate claim for his use of it. He tried to get to the bottom of the dreams through therapy, but he was making no headway there. He’d started smoking pot again one night after dropping some work off at the home of the man that owned the CD ROM company. “You look beat,” Jeff Townsend had said that night. “Something wrong?”

“Haven’t been getting any sleep,” Frank had said. The dreams had been keeping him up and Mark was hitting his terrible two’s, which made it worse. “I’m really stressed out.”

Jeff had already fired up a joint and handed it to him. “Have a hit. Sit down. Relax a little bit.”

And he did. He didn’t even think about the consequences of what falling off the wagon would do to him. He took two hits off the joint and it hit him immediately. He felt relaxed and at ease; more relaxed than he felt in a long time.

He’d bought a dime bag of pot from Jeff that night and took it up again. He did not slip further down the ladder of Schedule 1 drugs like he feared he would. Pot was all he did. As a medicinal tool, it worked wonders. It relaxed him, made him calm, more at ease.

Naturally, Brandy was worried about his descent back into drug use, but when he displayed no signs of going back to the harder stuff, or alcohol, she relaxed a little but kept a wary eye on him. What she was worried about were the memories being unearthed in his therapy sessions, which he resumed late last summer.

The first time he told her about the memories he’d buried so long ago, memories he never even knew he had, he’d wept in her arms in utter fear.

The therapy sessions had continued, unearthing long buried horrors of his past.

He’d found out his mother had been involved.

In early fall he realized he wanted to find out exactly what had happened to him. But most importantly, he wanted to find out what had happened to his father.

Two years before, a man named Mike Peterson had called Frank out of the blue. Mike claimed to be a friend of his father’s. At the time, the only thing Frank knew about his father was that he’d left his mother when he was three. He’d barely remembered the man. He’d talked to Mike on the phone and told him that he had no idea where his father was and had no desire to know, thank you very much, and he was doing just fine without daddy-o around. Mike had been pleasant enough and had told Frank that if he ever wanted to talk about his father, if he ever wanted to talk about anything, to call him. He’d left Frank his phone number and that was it.

When the long buried memories of his past life came bubbling forth in his therapy sessions, his past life before he’d tried to deaden it with massive quantities of drugs, he’d called Mike Peterson.

He’d met with Mike that weekend at a restaurant in Orange County. Mike confirmed that the memories that were flooding back weren’t simply planted or suggested by his therapist. After Mike filled in the gaps to what Frank was already realizing, he agreed to help him.

And now, eight months later, they were closing in.

Half a dozen more people had crowded into the bar and the music begun to blare loud. Party time. For the first time in seven years, Frank wished for a cigarette. He checked his watch: it was already closing in on eleven PM. Time to leave now if he wanted to make it home by midnight.

He pushed his empty Coke glass back along with the assorted dollar bills in change for the bartender’s tip. Then he rose from the bar and headed out.

When he got outside he paused for a moment to breathe in the summer air. The action on the strip was already starting. The music from the Roxy was loud and foot traffic along the strip was beginning its midnight shuffle. He headed to the parking lot where he’d left his car.

As he drove home he rehearsed in his mind what he was going to tell Brandy. He hadn’t lied to her yet about his work with Mike. She knew it was important for him to find out about his childhood, to dig up those demons and confront them. He’d told her everything his long buried memories had unearthed and she’d supported him every step of the way. That had made their marriage more rock solid, their relationship closer. Baring his soul to Brandy in all this had not only made him more vulnerable to her, but had also created a strong bond of trust. He felt she was part of his team, working with him to get to the bottom of what he knew he had to do even if she wasn’t on the front lines with him and Mike. Her support of him in this was one hundred percent.

He mulled this over as he drove home along Sunset Boulevard, headed toward Pacific Coast Highway. He hoped that what he and Mike had in store wouldn’t place Brandy and the kids in too much danger. Still, he had to be prepared. Earlier that afternoon he’d picked up plane tickets for them and Mike had reserved the cabin in Vermont under one of his aliases. When it came to the lives of his wife and children, he wasn’t taking any chances.

The plan was simple. Ship Brandy and the kids back east. Tell her it was for her safety; she knew that some of the information they’d dug up was dangerous; hell it was scary, but he had to do this. He had to put a stop to these people, had to make sure they were caught and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

But most of all, he had to contact Andy. Mike had just located him.

Andy was the reason for the insanity. The murders.

The rituals.

With a heaviness in his heart, Frank drove home through the dark night.