The Follower

by Nicholas Bowling

  “Has anyone mentioned Nathan at all?” Minnie interrupted.

  “She’s getting to that,” said Jerome.

  “No,” said Vivian, looking at Minnie. “No one’s said anything about him.”

  But then, she’d hardly been asking after him at all. She wriggled uncomfortably under the nightie. She was getting a rash around her shoulders. A hair shirt, indeed – she’d earned it.

  “These two, Glenn and—what did you call him, Shiv? They brought you out here?”

  Vivian told them about the kidnapping, and the accident, and, eventually, what Glenn had said to her.

  “They’ve lost him?” said Jerome. “They don’t know where he is?”

  “Seems like that.”

  “But he thought you knew where he was?”

  “I don’t get that either.”

  “Didn’t you ask him?”

  “I didn’t get that far…”

  She told him what she’d done to Glenn. There was a pause. The Carters had a very loud carriage clock next to the photo of Nathan, whose ticking filled the silence.

  “You left him there?” he said.

  “Glenn? Yeah.”

  “Was he…” He interlaced his fingers. “Was he alive?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And that stick you’ve got. You used that to…”

  “Yeah,” said Vivian. The rod was still on the back seat of their car.

  The muscle in Jerome’s jaw twitched.

  “This is not good,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “If he’s alive and he walks out of there…”

  “I know.”

  “And if he’s dead…”

  “But she was defending herself, Jay!” said Minnie. “Won’t that hold up?”

  “Maybe, but it looks damn suspicious, not reporting it,” he said. “And this is Telos people we’re talking about. You know there’s something going on between them and the cops. That’s why we’re in the mess in the first place.”

  “What do you think they wanted with you?” asked Minnie.

  “I don’t know,” said Vivian. “When I was in the truck, the guy, Glenn, said he had some questions for me. About Jesse, I guess. Don’t know why he needed to ask me out in the desert. I think maybe he was angry with me, too.”

  “What for?”

  “For going up the mountain when I wasn’t supposed to.”

  “You went up?”

  “I’d already been up when you left me my note.”

  “And?”

  “I didn’t get far. I had a bit of an accident.” She pointed out the bruise on her head.

  “Oh you poor thing,” said Minnie, and squeezed her knee under the table.

  “Did you see anything?” said Jerome.

  John of Telos, Vivian thought. I saw John of Telos. Praise be!

  “No,” she said.

  Jerome’s fingers made a sandpapery noise as he rubbed his chin. He was thinking hard about something.

  “This man, Shiv,” he said. “What’s his story?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. Seems like he’s someone high ranking in the whole Telos setup. I think he calls the shots. He was the one who excommunicated Shelley—”

  “Excommunicated?”

  “Barred her from the franchise. And I think he was the one who wanted me removed from the picture. He seemed pissed-off that I was looking for Jesse. Then Glenn and Carl took me out in the truck, same night.”

  Jerome wordlessly left the table and went into the hallway while Vivian was finishing speaking. She watched him go.

  “And you don’t know anything about our Nathan?” said Minnie.

  “Not yet,” said Vivian. “Sorry.”

  Minnie folded her hands in her lap and sighed.

  “I can’t help thinking, did we do something wrong? I always thought me and Jerome brought him up as best we could. Nathan, I mean. I thought this was a happy home. But then it turns out he’s so unhappy he’s got to run off and join these crazy folks – excuse me for cursing.” Vivian wasn’t sure what was meant to be the curse-word. “Did we get it all wrong? Was his life really so bad? He had a good job, a lot of money. He had everything.”

  Maybe that was the problem, Vivian thought.

  “What about your mom and dad?” said Minnie.

  “Mine?”

  “You’re a nice young woman. They must have brought you up right. They must have loved you and your brother. What happened? Why do you think your brother ran out on them?”

  There were a few assumptions there that Vivian wasn’t sure she agreed with. She was excused from answering by the return of Jerome, who came back into the kitchen carrying two large box files. He set them down on the table next to each other.

  “What’s this?” asked Vivian.

  “This is everything I’ve dug up on Telos since Nathan went missing. It’s not a lot, but it would maybe make sense for us to have a look over it. See if there’s anything there that’s interesting. Something that might match up with what you’ve seen and heard. I don’t remember the name Shiv coming up in any of it.”

  Vivian opened the box file on the left. She hefted the contents in both hands. Most of it was screenshots of the website that Jerome had printed out, but there were also a few newspaper cuttings and promotional flyers and pamphlets for various schools of Telos.

  “I’ve got bits and pieces going back to the mid-1970s, when Telos first came here. A lot of hippies kind of gave up after the whole Summer of Love thing didn’t work out, but some of them doubled down, if you know what I mean. Like world peace was still achievable if they just got weirder.”

  Vivian thumbed through them.

  “There’s nothing about Shiv in here?” she said.

  “Not that I know of,” said Jerome. “And I’ve read that whole lot back to front.”

  She put the documents in front of her and straightened the pile and frowned.

  “Aren’t you going to look at it properly?” said Jerome.

  “What we really need to know,” said Vivian, “is where everyone goes when they’re up the mountain. What everyone means when they’re talking about Telos.”

  “Right.”

  “I mean… can’t we just look at a map? Isn’t there one online or something? Must be visible from a satellite.”

  “Well sure, that would be just dandy,” said Jerome, and gave a little laugh that suggested Vivian hadn’t been keeping up. “There’s nothing on any map, though. Either they’ve got it good and hidden, or they’ve found a way to keep it off the map. Or, it might not be up the mountain at all. Not literally. You know the kind of hokum they all talk. Could mean something totally different.”

  That was a desperate thought – that all the talk of “ascension” and “going up the mountain” was pure metaphor, and that Jesse was nowhere near Mount Hookey.

  “I don’t think Shiv would tell us anything, even if we found him again.”

  “He sounds like bad news,” Jerome agreed.

  “His wife might.”

  “His wife?”

  “She works as a receptionist in the motel. Or she did. She’ll know something.” Vivian thought of the posters of Jesse, covered in symbols. “Yeah,” she said, “we need to talk to her.”

  “Alright,” said Jerome. “Maybe we can do that, then.” He massaged his temples. “There’s still this business with the truck, though. If your guy Glenn doesn’t wake up, then…” He paused. “And if he does wake up… I think we’re going to have to try and straighten this out. Tomorrow. I’ll take you back there. Then we can figure out what’s what.”

  Vivian didn’t want to revisit the morning’s nightmare under any circumstances. She wondered if the horse was still there, grieving. But she supposed Jerome was right: she couldn’t just leave the crime scene as it was.

  “You sure you don’t want to look through that?” Jerome said, nodding to the pile of documents on the table.

  Vivian drew it towards her and flicked throu
gh the pages. There didn’t seem to be much of interest. A lot of promotional materials she’d already read, photocopied pages from The Violet Path, topographical sketches of the mountain that just showed hundreds of square miles of forests and scree and nothing else besides. At the very back of the pile was a yellowed newspaper from August 1976, the same local edition that Mr Blucas had thrust in her face. She turned the pages carefully.

  “Why’s this here?” she asked.

  “He stole it from Lewiston library,” said Minnie, shaking her head. “A police officer!”

  “That’s the first time Telos gets mentioned anywhere,” said Jerome. “Look in the classified bit.”

  She turned to the back and found, there, circled in pencil amid the lonely hearts and adverts for old cars and damaged coffee tables, a call to action:

  JOIN THE INTERNATIONAL CHURCH OF TELOS!

  Followed by questions:

  DO YOU FEEL UNFULFILLED?

  DO YOU SEEK GREATER CONNECTION?

  DO YOU WANT TO GET TO KNOW YOUR TRUE SPIRIT?

  And then an invitation to attend the Church of Telos’s first meeting at the veterans’ hall in the centre of Mount Hookey.

  “Who started it?” Vivian asked. Although everyone seemed so deferential to him, it couldn’t have been Shiv. He was grey-haired, yes, but was probably only in his fifties, and too young to have been starting cults in the 1970s.

  “Some guy,” said Jerome. He raised his eyebrows. “Usual, bearded, Charles Manson type. There’s a picture of him somewhere.”

  Vivian waited while he sifted through the other box file. He dug out an edition of the Lotus Guide, this one from the early 1980s. He opened it to the centrefold and spread it on the table. The article was called “A Message for the Arrival of the New Moon”. On one side there was a “sermon” from John of Telos, accompanied by a photograph of the man himself. There he was, surrounded by his flock.

  Vivian blurted something unintelligible. She recognised him instantly, despite the gulf of nearly forty years, as her recently deceased father.

  18

  VIVIAN’S MOTHER had occasionally made off-colour jokes about her husband visiting his “secret family”. Vivian wondered, now, if they had been jokes at all; or rather, the truth spoken in jest. She looked at him, spread-armed behind his followers, hair and beard darker than she remembered but otherwise unchanged. Of course, she’d recognised her father the first time she’d seen his picture in Shelley’s kitchen; recognised him over and over again in the Sanctuary’s garish portraits and murals. The image was stylised just to the point where her brain had refused to make an explicit connection. It was so deep in the uncanny valley she hadn’t even thought of John of Telos as a real person.

  “What is it?” said Jerome, when she hadn’t spoken for a while.

  “That’s my dad,” she said.

  “Your dad?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  Her father’s name was Graham, not John. Had John been his middle name? She honestly couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter a great deal – he would hardly have used his real name if he was in the business of founding a cult. Or perhaps his real name was John, and he’d taken on an alias just for the sake of marrying and having children without his initiates catching up with him.

  “Did you know?” asked Jerome.

  “Of course she didn’t know!” said Minnie.

  Vivian laughed flatly, picturing the circular economy their family had created. All that money getting pumped straight back into the Telos franchise, passed from father to son to father again. And, on top of that, an even sweeter layer of irony: would Jesse have even signed up for the course in the first place if his father had been around a little more, and if he hadn’t been just swimming in cash since the day he was born?

  “Vivian?” Jerome was saying. “Are you okay?”

  She didn’t answer and kept scrutinising the photo. There were two more faces she knew among the group of initiates, two faces that were practically identical to each other. The brothers Blucas.

  “Look,” she said. “I’ve met these two. At least one of them might give us some answers.”

  “Sure,” said Jerome, though he looked unconvinced. “But, I mean, Vivian… If it’s a family business, couldn’t you do some digging of your own?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Can’t you speak to your dad?”

  She’d forgotten the lies she’d peddled.

  “Oh. No. Dad’s dead.”

  But then she thought: the violet man. Everyone said that was what John of Telos looked like when he appeared. And she remembered Glenn’s words about finite energy and infinite space and the idea that, yes, her dad was still with them, though perhaps in a form she wouldn’t recognise. Surely not? She’d seen the ambulance, and she’d smelled the fumes, and she’d been to the funeral and seen the box disappear behind that horrible, inexorable, mechanical curtain. And Glenn, well, Glenn had wanted to kill her, or worse. She pictured him hissing and swearing.

  “I thought—” said Jerome, but Vivian cut him off.

  “I need some sleep,” she said, and pushed back her chair.

  “But—”

  “Leave the poor thing be,” said Minnie. “We don’t have to talk right now. I’ll make you up a bed.”

  Vivian stayed on a sofa in the “den” but didn’t sleep. The sofa creaked all night and every half hour or so the refrigerator made a sound like a hovercraft starting up, which startled her out of whatever doze she’d managed to fall into. The faces of her family were on heavy rotation behind her eyelids, her father’s in particular. In the morning, the squirrels and the birds were up at the same time as the sun and she lay listening to them cavorting on the roof, her eyes wide open, until Minnie came out of the Carters’ bedroom and tiptoed into the kitchen. Vivian rolled over so her face was pointing into the crack at the back of the sofa. The frame creaked again.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” called Minnie from the other room. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

  Vivian rolled back again.

  “It’s alright,” she said. “I was up.”

  Minnie was concealed by the refrigerator’s open door. A coffee machine gurgled somewhere. The smell of it made Vivian feel even more strung-out. The knowledge that the coffee was going to drag her through the day, no matter how tired she was.

  Minnie came over and handed her a mug.

  “You sleep good?” she asked.

  “Okay,” said Vivian.

  “Poor soul. A lot on your mind, I’ll bet.”

  Vivian nodded and hid behind the mug when she drank from it.

  When Jerome got up the three of them sat at the table again and ate dry, over-sweet muffins and drank more coffee. Jerome and his wife hardly spoke, and when they did it was about the weather or local news. The files containing all the Telos material had been removed to a side table next to the phone.

  They finished and sat in silence. Jerome sat back in his chair, warming his fingers on his mug but not drinking from it.

  “So,” he said. “What you want to do?”

  “I need to talk to my mum.”

  “Okay.” He paused and waited for her to continue, but that was as far as Vivian could get. “Anything else?”

  “I guess I need to go back to Mount Hookey. Talk to the receptionist. Have a proper look up the mountain. Find one of the Blucases maybe.”

  “The Blucases?”

  “The men from the picture. The twins. They might know something about what’s up the mountain. At least, one of them might.”

  “Okay.” He paused again. “But if Glenn and the others don’t know where he is, he might not even be on the mountain anymore.”

  “Then what do you suggest?” she said, and she was angrier than expected, and the words came out with a good helping of spit. Jerome looked contrite.

  “You’re right,” he said. “You’re right. Got to start somewhere. Maybe he told someone up there where he was going.”

  Vivian had to ad
mit that was clutching at straws. If he’d left Mount Hookey altogether, why hadn’t he rung home? In all likelihood they were looking for a body.

  “I’ll run you in,” said Jerome. He ran a finger around the handle of his coffee cup. “But we still need to think about what happened yesterday. The truck. Glenn. I don’t know… I think we should go back.”

  At this point Minnie got up from the table, as if she didn’t want to hear about it. Vivian didn’t want to hear about it either, not on top of everything else.

  “Do we have to? Maybe it’ll just look like an accident.”

  “You said you beat the guy half to death, Vivian.”

  “I hit him once. Maybe twice.”

  “You said you didn’t know if he was breathing or not.”

  “Maybe it’ll look like he injured himself when the truck crashed.”

  Jerome sighed.

  “Vivian, come on. No one’s that stupid. Even in the police force. And like I said, even if it did look like an accident, pretty damn strange you just walking away and not telling anyone.”

  She hung her head.

  “And you’ve got witnesses at the bar. You think about that?”

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t.”

  She imagined the man in the Stetson bringing her in like the outlaw she was, hog-tied on the back of a horse.

  “So,” said Jerome. “I think we’ve got to go back there on our way to Mount Hookey. See what’s what.”

  It took them half an hour to get ready. Minnie gave her a packed lunch of dry, yellow carbohydrates – cornbread, crisps, more breakfast muffins – and let her borrow the thermos for coffee. Jerome and Vivian got in the car and drove out the way they had come. Gazelle was a little more lively in the morning. Someone mowing a yard, someone washing a car. People just getting on with things.

  She called home on Jerome’s mobile while he drove. Same deal as before – just one ring before her mother snatched up the phone.

  “Hello?”

  Vivian hadn’t thought about how this conversation might go.

  “Jesse?” said her mother.