Claire had wondered why he didn’t just talk to them. For David, the answer was the same as to why you couldn’t reason a person out of a severe mental illness. Groups that practiced mind-control techniques rewired brains. They distorted reality. If a man thought he was Jesus, a simple solution seemed to be to quiz him on the Bible and then present his wrong answers to show him he was not in fact Jesus. But the man would simply answer, You have the wrong Bible. The same way the diehards in the doomsday cults doubled down on their belief every time their leader screwed up the date of the apocalypse.
No, one couldn’t simply reason with them.
Or perhaps one might, with the right approach. David began to seek out people calling themselves exit counselors to learn their methods. Several years later, he started his practice. After a few false starts and speed bumps, he achieved his first big successes, recommending deprogramming to his clients as a last resort if exit counseling failed. Everything in his life finally started to come together. Alyssa had already been born, followed by Dexter, and when he wasn’t working, David devoted time and energy to provide as loving and warm a home as he was able, a safe cocoon armored against the horrors of the world he knew too well.
Driving through a smoky haze, they agreed to skip the reception and pulled into a restaurant parking lot. Most people were staying home because of the fire and the unhealthy air, and David and his friends about had the place to themselves.
After ordering lunch, Beth removed her hat and said, “I guess that’s it. What are you boys doing after this? What’s next in life?”
“My band has a gig tomorrow night,” Deacon said. “Back in LA.”
“It’s wild you’re like this rock star now. Not at all surprising, though.”
“Rock, sure. Star, meh. Our fan base is devoted but small.” He trembled with restless leg syndrome, contrasting against Beth’s poised calm.
She gave him a practiced smile. “What about you, David?”
David worried the cloth napkin from his place setting, still a little anxious himself. “I’m going to return to my family and get ready for my next client.”
“You convince people to leave cults,” Beth said.
“Every single one of them, if I can. I practice exit counseling, though, not deprogramming.”
“I’m aware of the difference. It’s a perfect job for you.”
“Thanks.” David smiled and let go of the napkin. This was the conversation he’d imagined having with them, small talk and catching up and a little banter. “How about you? What’s next?”
“First, a long bath. After that, there are plenty of heads to shrink. Humanity is a spectrum disorder.”
Deacon chuckled. “I like that. What’s it mean?”
“It means very few of us are playing with a completely full deck, though there’s a huge variation in the number of cards each of us are dealt,” she explained. “That’s how you end up trusting the pilot flying the jumbo jet you’re on, while he thinks the moon landing was faked and plays lucky lottery numbers recalled from dreams. If delusions become destructive, that’s where I come in.”
The server returned with a glass of wine for Beth and coffee for the men. Deacon drank it black and bitter. David poured milk and sugar into his and stirred, already making mental notes of what he needed to do when he got home.
He’d mowed the lawn before he left, but the flower beds required weeding. He wanted to expand his backyard garden. A few unpaid bills waited on his desk. He had to practice the talk he was scheduled to give at the conference after the weekend and prepare for his next counseling session, a young man in a group called The Restoration, another lost soul needing salvation.
He sipped the hot coffee and longed to get back to these problems. The only thing better than leaving a routine was returning to it. Juggling the demands of work and children would snap him out of this anxious sense of hanging suspended between worlds. Having too much to do had always been a good way to avoid thinking about what had been done to him.
When he looked up, his friends stared at him. “What?”
“I asked you what you saw that last night,” Beth said.
Far away, a red glow outlined the crown of Red Peak.
Gaunt from hunger and hard labor and pain, the congregation shambled out of the darkness for their final act of worship…
David winced at this flashback, which appeared as sudden and real as if he’d physically transported to the past. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told you at the mental hospital. I didn’t see a damn thing. When everybody went to the Temple, I hid in the supply closet. I didn’t come out until the sheriff’s deputy found me.”
“I saw something,” Deacon said.
“Please.” Back when they were institutionalized, David had heard the horrifying story of what happened to Wyatt and had no wish to ever hear it again. “You don’t have to say it. I remember.”
“You didn’t hear everything, David. I never told Dr. Klein what I saw because I thought if I did, he’d never let me out of that place. I never told you either.”
“All right. What?”
“When the end came, when everybody was dead? I saw—” His face pale and taut, he hesitated. “I saw a pillar of fire on the mountain, shooting straight up into the sky.”
David recoiled. “What the hell?”
“That’s incredible,” Beth said.
“To put it mildly!”
“Incredible because Emily saw it too,” she clarified. “A fire that went all the way up into the air. She told me about it at the hospital but swore me to silence.”
“She never told me about it,” David said.
“You were already upset enough. She didn’t want to make it worse.”
Deacon nodded. “All the way up to the sky. Glowing red just like that forest fire out there. And that horn. It was so loud.”
She shivered. “The horn I remember. And…”
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just a fragment, like a dream. It’s crazy.”
“Crazier than a pillar of fire?”
David shook his head. “The light was playing tricks on you or something. The cross on the mountain was on fire, remember? Beth, I’m surprised at you. Surely, you know what Occam’s razor is and how it works.”
“Occam what?” said Deacon.
Beth filled him in. “Occam’s razor. Another way of saying the simplest explanation is almost always true.”
“You suffered a visual and auditory hallucination,” David went on. “Guys, I hate to break this to you, but whatever the Family was at one time, it turned into a cult at Red Peak. We were all brainwashed.”
“It doesn’t explain how me and Emily had the exact same hallucination,” Deacon said.
“Of course it does. On the last day, Reverend Peale said we weren’t waiting for paradise, it was waiting for us. And once everybody shed their mortal coil, as he put it so quaintly, we’d all beam up to paradise. The terrible things you saw, I can’t even imagine. These are extremely traumatic memories. The brain reacts in strange ways to trauma, especially a child’s mind.”
“He’s right about that,” Beth conceded. “But… I don’t know.”
“Okay, fine,” said Deacon. “Then where did the bodies go? How do you explain that?”
When the sheriff’s deputy took him by the hand and led him out of the shattered Temple, only bloodstains remained on the wrecked pews and mountain slopes. Not a single body was ever recovered, and what happened in the desert near a little nowhere town called Medford became forever infamous as the Medford Mystery, the subject of Unexplained Mysteries–style documentary shows.
“Somebody had to have taken them and buried them in the mountains,” David said.
Deacon laughed. “You actually think somebody found and moved over a hundred bodies in the dark and got them all out of there in just one night.” He snorted. “And I’m the one who’s hallucinating.”
“I agree that part is a mystery.
”
“Occam’s razor,” Beth said. “The simplest explanation is usually true.”
“I see you have a theory,” David said.
“More like playing devil’s advocate. Let’s say the Reverend was right.”
“A psychologist saying this.” David sputtered in disbelief. “You’ve completely lost it. You know that, right?”
“I’m not saying what I believe,” Beth said. “Though yes, one might, as you put it, lose it if one accepted it as truth.”
Deacon stiffened in his seat. “Oh, you think…”
“Emily was always a true believer. I think she couldn’t handle the contradiction of loving a God who would do this to his followers, even with paradise as the reward.”
“Or maybe she thought she was fulfilling the deal the Rev made,” Deacon said. “The covenant he always talked about. She wanted to cross the black sea.”
The black sea. David shuddered. A term Jeremiah Peale started using after the Family moved to Red Peak in 2005.
“Yes,” Beth said. “That works too.”
“Stop,” David said. “Just stop. Please. Let her go and rest in peace.”
The server approached with their lunches and delivered them with brisk efficiency, as the tension at the table was obvious. David stared bleakly at his grilled chicken salad and wondered if he was going to be attending two more funerals soon. His friends had taken a long dive off the deep end.
One thing bothered him, though. Safe in his hiding place, he hadn’t seen any light show on the mountain, but he remembered hearing the rumbling blast, which rent the air like the horn of a giant ram. The noise had been so powerful, he’d felt it vibrating through his chest and heard the windows shivering in the panes, followed by a loud series of bangs, the pews being thrown around. Later, he’d assumed it was an earthquake, this being California, but the timing was a bizarre coincidence.
A coincidence, yes. Nothing more.
Even if the impossible were true, it didn’t matter to him anyway, not anymore.
4
CREATE
In the funeral home parking lot, the three childhood friends hugged.
Deacon Price was glad it was over. Burying Emily had left his soul raw, as if a cheese grater had run over it. His friends didn’t understand that when he was flirty or insensitive or cracking jokes at inappropriate times, he was holding back a scream.
Now he couldn’t wait to turn that shriek into music.
He offered David a lopsided grin. “Stay in touch, okay?”
“I was thinking we should try to meet up at least once a year. I’ll drag Angela along next time.”
“Sure thing.” Deacon knew his friend was full of it.
Beth fished in her purse and handed David a card. “If you can’t see us socially, see me professionally. If you ever need to.”
David smiled as he got into his car. “I’ve gotten very good at taking care of myself. But thanks.”
Deacon waved him out of sight, something inside him breaking. They’d once been best friends. He was glad the reunion was over, but a part of him wanted it to never end.
“Are you okay?” Beth said.
He appraised her. God, she was beautiful. Still Beth, but now all grown up. The same large dark eyes a boy could fall into. So much stronger now. And smart as hell. Alone of the survivors, she’d been able to go on to college, all the way to a doctorate in clinical psychology.
“You’re pretty awesome,” Deacon said. “How is it you never got married?”
She pursed her lips. “That’s not a polite question, you know.”
“I’m just surprised.”
She gestured to the gray snow fluttering around them. “If you’d like to keep talking, can we get out of this?”
He pointed out his battered Honda Civic coated in ash as fine as powdered sugar. “We could hop in Honey for a bit.”
Beth scrutinized his car, no doubt imagining grimy floors and seats covered in rock band detritus, which wasn’t far from the truth.
“Mine’s closer,” she said.
Deacon climbed into the immaculate interior of her Mercedes. You could eat off her seats, he mused, while mine look half-eaten.
She gazed through the dusted windshield at the funeral home. “Do you think Emily is in a better place?”
“Sure. Why not.”
“That’s not very convincing.”
“You heard the pastor. We really have no idea what comes after, so yeah, it’d be great. You want me to believe anything else, forget it. That’s how you end up with people singing hymns one minute and drinking Kool-Aid the next.”
Or in the Family’s case, communion wine mixed with cyanide, but not far from the method the Peoples Temple had used to kill themselves in Guyana back in the ’70s. He glanced down at a Latin proverb tattooed on his arm: A diabolo, qui est simia dei. Rough translation: Where God has a church, the Devil has a chapel.
“I struggle with it myself,” she said. “Being raised a believer while seeing what taking belief to its limit did to the Family.”
“So.” He smiled.
“What?”
“Why didn’t you ever get married? I don’t see a ring.”
She sighed. “Because nothing lasts.”
His heart thudded now, pounding pure bass in his ears. Beautiful. “Some things do. Some things last a lifetime.”
He leaned in to kiss her, and she returned it in a surprising burst of eagerness, devouring him. She tasted like wine and peppermint. His restless mind zeroed out into the strange nothingness one finds at the dead center of a startling noise. They broke for air, and he dove into her slim, soft neck, sucking and biting.
Beth moaned and gave him a gentle push back toward his side of the car. “Not the time or place.” She reached into her purse and produced a business card, onto which she wrote something.
Deacon took it. “Social or professional?”
“That remains to be seen.” She smiled. “I checked out some of your songs on YouTube. They’re dark as hell. I could give you a couple months of therapy on ‘Shadow Boxer’ alone.”
He chuckled. “Music is my therapy.” He didn’t add that this was close to being the literal truth. His interest in songwriting had started a long time ago, an offshoot of Dr. Klein’s poetry therapy.
Then he checked the card, on which she’d scribbled an address. An invitation? The heartbreak of another separation didn’t have to last.
“Santa Barbara,” he said. “That isn’t too far. You should come down and catch one of my shows.”
“Actually, I was thinking of something else. An expedition.”
“This sounds intriguing.”
“We should go back. To Red Peak. It’s been fifteen years. I’d like to see the place again for myself. See if anything surfaces that I don’t remember, or don’t want to remember.”
“You want to see if we hear the same voice the Reverend did. Like Angela wanted us to do—remember that trip she was on for a while?”
She shook her head. “David was right about the hallucinations. He’s wrong, though, about suppressing his feelings. I’m thinking of the trip as therapeutic. For him, in particular. Confront the source of our trauma, clarify our memory in safety, and put it behind us forever. We should all go together.”
“You really do like to tear off the Band-Aid. Hell, lady, there’s only one answer I can give. Fucking yes.”
“I thought you might think it was stupid or weird. It’s been so long.”
“It’s pure genius. It may just be us, though. David wants to pretend the whole thing never happened. As for Angela, who knows. It’s been a long time since she wanted to go back. Knowing her, she’ll yell at us over the phone and hang up.”
“Use that card. Personal or professional, your choice.” Beth turned the ignition, and her Mercedes purred to life. “And give the trip some thought. I think it might be good for you.”
Deacon winced at the idea of them parting. He’d only just found her again.
He could stay in this car and talk all day and night. But he had a gig to get back to, and she had a life.
He swallowed hard. “It was really, really nice seeing you again.”
Beth leaned in to plant a soft kiss on his cheek. “Take care of yourself, Deek.”
She drove away, taking his breath with her as the heartbreak returned full force.
Sad, realizing the best years of your life happened before you turned fifteen, that everything after felt fake, one scene after another in a long dream.
So good too, like a long, excruciating tattoo on the soft flesh covering the jugular, where a single flinch could ruin the permanent mark.
Buzzing with ideas, Deacon raced to Honey and got in. The seat behind the wheel, its fabric ripped with bulging yellow foam, welcomed him with a sense of home, which made sense for a man who had none.
A long drive awaited him.
First, he had to write these feelings down.
He caught another Latin proverb on his arm: Abyssus abyssum invocat. Deep calls to deep. In the Bible, deep meant the Word. The Living Spirit.
Under that, NO PAIN NO GAIN.
“Amen, motherfucker,” Deacon said.
He reached under his seat, his hand brushing against empties and ancient McDonald’s wrappers, and gripped his songbook, a black faceless thing he poured his howling soul into when the muse struck. Next he thrust his hand in the glove compartment for a pen, which turned out to be dry. He flung it away and got another, a flowing black marker whose scrawl would bleed through the page.
Deacon wanted to write a song. No, make that an album. Actually a concept album, a rock opera in which he would reveal to the world the beauty and horror of the Family of the Living Spirit. The Gospel of Deacon. Better yet, The Gospel of the Sad Cat, an homage to Cats Are Sad, the name of his band.
In this opus, he’d finally share the thing that for fifteen years had lived under his skin. Share his pain in a way that weeviled into his listeners’ flesh, like an auditory tattoo or a new type of STD. By the time they finished listening to his story, they’d never forget it, and some might even join a cult themselves.
The Children of Red Peak Page 4
