by R.J. Ellory
The running gang behind us became crazy.
What had been a jog in our direction became a chase, and even as they chased us I felt stones whipping by my head, heard the sounds as they hit the sidewalk or the wooden front of a store.
Somewhere a window smashed.
I looked at Nathan. His eyes were wide with fear, the left side of his face covered with blood, and somewhere within me I found a reserve of passion and strength and stamina because I took off like a rocket and for a moment left Nathan behind.
How long we ran I can't remember, but suddenly there was someone ahead of us, and in a flash we were past them and I heard them shouting.
I slowed, came to a stop, Nathan alongside me, and when we turned we saw something that I would never forget.
Mrs. Chantry stood in the middle of the street, resolute, immovable.
Above her head she held a heavy-looking stick, and when she spoke it seemed like her voice came right up out of the earth and filled the street and every building along it.
'You stop right there!' she hollered.
I looked at Nathan.
Rock and a hard place, his eyes said.
The running gang behind us came to a staggered and surprised halt, bumping into one another, each jostling to see who was standing in their way.
'You boys stop right there! You see what you've done? You see what's happening here? Get back where you came from or I'll turn you into the lizards that you are!'
Mrs. Chantry's voice was commanding, like marshalling the forces in some Union-Confederate engagement.
And the gang of teenagers behind us was shocked.
Stunned.
Silent.
And then they went.
No question.
No hesitation.
One after the other they went, caterwauling down the street like a pack of whipped dogs.
Even at sixteen or seventeen you still remembered the stories well enough, the eating of the husband, the gateway to Hell that lay right behind her porch door.
I remember Larry James' face in that moment. He glanced back towards us before he turned at the end of the street. He didn't know whether to feel angry he'd been cheated of the kill, or sympathetic because we had encountered what appeared to be a far worse fate.
And then she turned.
I saw myself at eleven years old, saw myself standing right there on her path with a fish in my hands, wrapped in a piece of linen that once held a baked ham sandwich, a baked ham sandwich just like the one Nathan Verney and I had shared a million years before.
And that moment seemed like yesterday, like an hour ago, like the fleeting second that had just passed by.
Possibly the last second of my life.
And then she spoke, and all I recall now is the sense of warmth in her tone, the timbre, the depth.
'You know, boys,' she started. 'I really did eat the fish.'
We were there for nigh on two hours.
Mrs. Chantry cleaned Nathan's face, she dressed it, put some gauze over it and held it with some tape.
She had homemade lemonade, some kind of dry cookie that tasted of nutmeg and sweet cherry and something else indescribable that made you want two or three more.
Her house did not have walls daubed with blood. She did not have the skull of her husband on the mantel over the fire. She had all her teeth, they were white, not black, and she smelled faintly of violets and peppermint.
She even showed us a picture of her husband, and when we told her of the stories we'd heard as children she told us she had in fact started most of the rumors.
'Get to my age,' she said, 'and you require a little peace and quiet. It was never the intention to frighten a soul, least of all a child, but you know how people are. They take something and they embellish it, they twist it and exaggerate it, and when you hear that same tale come back it's twice as high and three times as wide, and you barely recognize it. That was all that happened, and now I'm kinda regretful folks took to such things in the first place.'
She smiled at Nathan.
'Like you,' she said. 'You saw something today that you were gonna have to deal with one time or other. You understand what I mean, right?'
'Dumb as milk white folks is what you mean,' Nathan said.
Mrs. Chantry smiled. 'Dumb-ass white folks, sure enough.'
'Trailer trash,' Nathan went on. 'All up and marryin' their sisters and eating three-day old leftovers out of a cooking pan.'
'Nathan,' I hissed, and he looked at me with this wide- eyed innocence.
Mrs. Chantry raised her hand. 'Ain't so far from the truth, Daniel.'
She turned and looked at Nathan. 'I know your daddy,' she went on. 'I know he knows all about what's happening in Alabama and Georgia. Never suspected it would do anything other than infect the whole country after a while. Figure there'll be a lot more shooting and rioting and marching and hollering before people come to their senses, you know?'
She looked at me and smiled. She turned once again to Nathan.
'You seem to have yourself a good friend here, Nathan Verney. Seems to me a white boy who'll stand up for a negro in this time is a man of spirit and backbone.'
She laughed, a tumbling infectious sound.
'But then you pair were always in a heap of trouble all by yourselves, weren't you?'
Nathan smiled, the first time since the street. 'Wouldn't have been a pair, and wouldn't have been anywhere near as much trouble on my own,' he said, and I laughed with him, and for just a little while what had happened didn't matter.
Seemed to me we were laughing at the world from the gateway to Hell, and that was the funniest thing of all.
Later, after we left, left with an open invitation to return, Nathan walked with me towards the Lake. We always went this way, side by side, step for step, and then where the path separated fifty yards from the water's edge we would go our respective ways.
'We'll see this thing through together, Nathan,' I said.
He didn't reply. He knew what I meant.
He paused at the end of the path and turned towards me.
He held out his hand.
I took his hand, and for an eternity we stood there without a word.
'Your choice, Danny Ford,' he eventually said.
'No choice, Nathan Verney,' I remember saying.
And then we went our different ways, back to our own homes, and later I sat at the window of my room and watched that slow Carolina blue skyline melt soundlessly into Lake Marion.
At sixteen years old it was not my job to understand why.
That's what I believed.
The reason I ran with Nathan was because I was scared, because I had been unable to defend myself, because he had stepped in to protect me and I owed him the same.
Eleven years since the day we'd shared a sandwich by the Lake.
A little more than half of that again and Nathan Verney would be dead.
But that was the future, an unknown, and just as JFK would fall within the year, we had no idea of what was coming.
We lived for the present, a little for the past, but most of all it seemed we lived for one another.
And that, out of everything that was to come, was possibly the hardest thing of all.
* * *
Chapter Four
Back in Sumter, the year or so I spent there before being transferred to Death Row, I met a man called Robert Schembri. It was August of 1972, and by the time our paths coincided Robert was nearly seventy, and he walked with a stoop and a limp and the air of someone beaten. Beaten, however, he was not, for Robert Schembri possessed a spirit of unparalleled indomitability. Apparently he served thirteen years straight in solitary, a narrow cell, eight feet by eight, a metal-framed bed, a hole in the ground, fifty minutes of daylight every seventy-two hours. He went down there because of his stories, and his stories were wild and impossible and strangely fascinating. Folks were upset by his stories, the claims he made, the theories he presented, and though anyone
in their right mind would have considered him far from the brightest light in the harbor, my experience of Robert Schembri remains lucid and clear. Schembri was a dangerously intelligent man.
I was the only person he ever told the reason for his imprisonment. Why I was chosen I never knew, for Schembri died of a heart attack, one of those special Federal Penitentiary kind of seizures, a month before I was transferred out of General Populace. And he was the one who gave me some kind of understanding of what had happened to me and, more importantly, why. It was he who'd warned me of a man called West, a man who walked the walk and talked the talk, and ran D-Block as if he was the last American God. I had not known at that time that Mr. West would figure so prominently in the latter years of my life, and had I known I would have paid a great deal more attention to what Robert Schembri told me of him. But I did not, and at the time it seemed unimportant, and Schembri had a way of making it clear what you should listen to and what you shouldn't.
What he did tell me took place over three days. We only ever met at meals, and after the first day I remember standing there in the line, craning my neck, looking at face after face after face, searching him out amidst the confusion of people. My trial and the subsequent months of legal and judicial wrangling were drawn out and complex. But that was another story, another story altogether. Until the case was concluded and the death sentence levied I was there with the rest of the innocents.
I found Robert Schembri in the corner of the hall, back and to the left. Apparently he always sat alone. People avoided him like a disease, a bio-hazard. Seems he'd sat alone for all the years he'd been there, and but for the few hours I shared with him he would sit alone for the rest of his life.
He possessed a strange manner. The way he would look at me I felt invisible, but that sensation did not disturb me, merely made me feel I was there to listen, to be a receipt point for whatever came tumbling from his lips. Schembri described himself as a channel from the gods. What that meant didn't matter.
'Tell ya something, kid,' he started. He said that each time he began. Tell ya something.
'It was a premeditated act, all of it. The Killing of the King. It was necessary as the second part of the trilogy. They had three goals to bring about the complete decay of matter, the total dissolution of society.'
Schembri smiled sardonically.
'Tell me you don't see society falling to pieces, going all to hell in a handbasket.'
'I see it,' I replied.
He nodded. 'What happened to you is a symptom of the disease.'
'A symptom? A symptom of what?' I leaned forward.
'All the shit and shenanigans you got yourself into down here.' He smiled wryly and winked. 'I know a little of this and a little of that, you see.'
I shook my head. 'You know about what happened to me?'
Schembri waved my question away. 'Got a question for you,' he said. 'You know why they killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy?'
He didn't wait for an answer; seemed he didn't really need to know that I was listening, only that I was there.
'The first part they called The Creation and Destruction of Primordial Matter. They had to make it sound complex so that people would take them seriously. They wanted the top people involved, all the Freemason Brotherhood, to bring about this mass-trauma, mind-control assault against the body politic of the U.S. They had a guy called Peter Kern, a Freemason himself, and they asked him to build a gate. The site of the gate was called The Trinity in Mexico, the thirty-third degree of the north parallel latitude. There's an old road down there called the Jornada del Muerto, The Journey of the Dead Man. So Kern built the gate, and they called it The Gate With A Thousand Doors, and once he'd completed it they ceremonially decapitated him. They did some other shit too, occult shit, all along that latitude through Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico.'
Schembri smiled and winked. He knew what he was talking about even if I didn't.
'I'll tell ya something else. These nuts believe in something called the Kundalini fire serpent. Say that it lives in the body of a man, and the serpent crosses the thirty-three segments of the human spine which they consider is the vehicle of fiery ascent. Thirty-three is also the highest degree in Freemasonry.'
He nodded and winked once more as if everything was now becoming clear.
'The second stage of the The Creation and Destruction of Primordial Matter also took place at The Trinity, the Place of Fire, with the detonation of the first atomic bomb.'
Schembri leaned back and smiled. He raised his spoon. 'They knew what they were doing, see? They knew exactly what they were doing.'
He lowered his spoon and used it to stir up the mess of food on his tray.
I wanted to ask him what he meant, what he knew of what had happened to me.
'The third stage was The Killing of the King,' he said, interrupting my thought. 'Ten miles south of the thirty- third degree of north parallel latitude between the Trinity River and the Triple Underpass in Dallas… and that was Dealey Plaza, the site of the first Masonic temple in Dallas. Used to be called Bloody Elm Street, and here they brought the King of Camelot, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and they sacrificed him.'
Schembri was looking out towards the mass of people that surrounded us. He nodded his head slowly.
'They killed the King, you see? Killed him right there in front of the world. And that was the greatest trick of all.'
Schembri looked back at me.
'They had this picture from that day in Dallas. You've seen this picture, three bums, three hobos in custody. Hobos with good haircuts and clean shoes. Those three guys were just released without identification, though folks interested in what really happened have always believed that there was some significance to the presence of those men. I'll tell you who they were. They were symbols, Masonic symbols, because every time the Freemasons kill someone they have three unworthy craftsmen present, Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum. They were there. They had to be there. They were as much a part of the thing as anything else.'
Schembri smiled again, that same wry expression that said more than could ever be expressed in words.
'Kennedy wasn't killed for political reasons. They didn't kill him because he was trying to stop the Vietnam War or close down Bell Helicopters. It wasn't even because he was trying to stop the segregation of the blacks. They killed him because they could. They wanted the world to know they could take the most powerful man in the world and blow his head off on TV… and that no-one could do anything about it. Who actually shot him will never be known. Those details will die with the people that pulled the triggers and the folks who organized it. I should imagine the gunmen themselves were dead within an hour of the incident. Oswald was no more responsible than you were. Kennedy got caught in a triangulation of fire, a classic CIA strategy. The entire flood of disinformation that followed, the CIA-Mafia-Anti-Castro-Castro-KGB-Texas Right Wing theories… all of it was planned a year before the assassination. The people that put Kennedy there took him away again.'
Schembri looked away, for a moment an expression of sadness in his eyes.
'You see everything changed after November '63. The whole world changed. America started down the tubes. Quality of life deteriorated. Music got louder, drugs got into the mainstream culture, even down to the clothes people wore. No longer cotton and natural fabrics, but artificial, garish-colored, ugly. America realized that whoever could kill their President in broad daylight could do anything they wished. No longer was there one man, the Chief Executive of the nation, but some unelected invisible fraternity. And that same fraternity gave us LSD and psychiatry, free love, pornography, violence on the TV, everything that made it okay to be nuts.'
Schembri nodded his head.
'They took away the King of Camelot and gave us the Wizard of Oz. We exist in a palace of unreality, we are manipulated by invisible hands, and always in the distance is the awareness that somewhere there are people who know who we are, what we are doing, what we will do next, and when neces
sary they push the buttons and pull the strings and it all slots into place as it was designed.'
I opened my mouth to speak but Schembri went on.
My food was already cold.
'Kennedy was a visual leader, a man who won the hearts and minds of a nation through the TV set. People often said that Kennedy was elected because of how he looked - the all-American boy, the stand-up guy, the clean-cut military man. He was the personification of all our mothers' sons, the boy our fathers wanted us to be, and we identified with him. They killed him, they killed us, one and the same thing, and with that single, simple action they took away our identity and our vision. They managed to do to an entire nation what they had been doing to individuals for years. It was their greatest coup, a moment of sheer brilliance, and it made them feel bold and brave and committed to continuing their plan to introduce the New World Order. They even advertise themselves on the back of a dollar bill. The Eye In The Pyramid, the symbol of enclosed awareness, and beneath it those same words in Latin, New World Order. Even George Washington knew these people existed, and when he was asked about them he said they held diabolical tenets, and that their objective was a separation of the people from their government. Well, they succeeded, succeeded beyond their own wildest dreams, and the government behind the government is healthier and more robust than it ever was.'
