“I could kill you right now,” he said. “Be across that table before anybody could do shit.”
“Take your shot,” I said. “I can drop your nasty, decrepit ass before you haul yourself over that table.” Manson glared at me and then broke into laughter.
“Shit, man, you’re all right,” Charlie said. “I kill you, I don’t get Pop-Tarts. I like Pop-Tarts more’n pussy these days. Why you here? What’s your handle?” I pointed to my name badge. Charlie squinted and then made a face. “Melvin Blanke? Shit, that’s the Bugs Bunny guy. What’s your real name, the one you call yourself in the dark? That’s the only one that matters.”
“Laytham Ballard,” I said. “Mel Blanke sounded like as good a name as any to deal with Looney Tunes Charlie.”
Manson leaned back, a smug expression crossing his weathered face. “Ballard, yeah. They said you might come visit, said I shouldn’t say shit to you. They think you’re dangerous.” Charlie gave me the once-over, nodded. “You are. You got it in the eyes all right, just like me.”
“Who’s ‘they,’ Charlie? Who said not to tell me?” Manson seemed to be doing the calculus of betrayal in his head. I sweetened the pot by holding up a pack of American Spirits. He grinned. His teeth were small and yellow, like a rat’s. He reached out for the smokes, and I withdrew them. He became irritated. “Spill,” I said.
“Shit, why the hell not, man,” he said. “Not like they can dream up something to get me in here, as long as I got my guardian angels. No one can touch me in here. I’m a god, and this is my temple.”
“Who?” I asked again, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice. I was painfully aware of how sober I was. Manson’s energies were frantic, constant, like a dog scratching at the door. He could tell he was getting to me. It was remarkable. Charles Mansion was no wizard, nothing special, but he was a charisma savant. He had raw presence that gave him power over the weak, the young, the scared, the gullible, and the damaged. For all my training, all my godlike ability, at my core, I was a broken human being, and Manson was masterful at worming his way in, spotting your flaws, and crawling inside you. I centered myself and waited, cigarettes in hand.
“The Process,” he said, clutching the air with his manacled hands and nodding toward the smokes. I handed him the pack. He fumbled to open it.
“The Process … the Process Church of the Final Judgment, the cult?”
Charlie bobbed his head and popped a cigarette between his lips. He murmured in the affirmative.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s one of their names. It’s what they called themselves when I met them.”
“I thought they folded up shop in the seventies,” I said.
“Changed their name,” he said. “Changed their face, put the old one in a jar by the door. They been around a long, long time. They call themselves different now. They still own this city, just like they did back then, pretty much have for a long time. They like it here. L.A. matches their, y’know, vibe.”
I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my face. This could all be the famous Manson rambling bullshit, but there were still rumors in the Life that the idea for Manson’s race-war apocalypse, Helter Skelter, was borrowed in part from the doctrine of the Process Church.
“You mean to say that people from the Process came to you recently to warn you about me, specifically, Charlie? Are you jerking me around?”
“You’ll see,” Manson said. “You got a light?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I do.” I didn’t move or make any attempt to give the little dirtbag anything. “Charlie, what would the Process want from you, after all this time? It have anything to do with the tulpa?”
“My head-babies,” Manson said. “Yeah, that’s why you’re here, ain’t it?”
“A thing that may have been one of yours tore a very nice lady and her asshole boyfriend to shreds last night. How is that even possible, Charlie? I thought all those things were destroyed by the Acidmancers.”
“You mean Timmy’s little helpers?” Manson sneered. “Hell, man, they tried, but I had lots of time in here to figure out a go-around. They don’t exist in the fancy, snobby, think-you’re-better-than-me collective unconscious anymore, yeah, but I made my own one a’ those in here. And then I put them back together in my mind and birthed them right in the jailhouse, just like the jailhouse was my mother.”
I tried hard to not show this lunatic how impressed I was by what he was telling me. When Wayne and the other Acidmancers sealed Manson nightmare creations off from the collective thought-stream of mankind, Charlie had created his own new collective thought gestalt, using the isolated, emotional minds of all those locked away in the prisons of the world. His own private mass-mind of fear, anger, and brutal awareness. An untapped Jungian jungle. It would take decades of isolated meditation to build such an occult construct and then populate it with the worst nightmares and most horrific fantasies of those on the inside. Charlie had the deranged focus to do it, and we had given him the quiet, the silence, and the time.
“Yeah,” Manson said, “you got it. It’s beautiful, isn’t it, man? Something you wished you’d thought up yourself. Something you could’ve. You’re jealous you didn’t, I can see that in those shitty marbles your soul peeks out of.”
“It’s impressive,” I said.
“Then give me a fucking light for my cancer-stick,” Charlie said, gesturing with the cigarette as best he could with the manacles. I remained still.
“You’re no miracle man, Charlie,” I said. “If you were, you wouldn’t be locked up in here still.” Manson laughed again.
“Look at who’s so enlightened, so blind. These walls, they’re glass, they’re mirrors. What’s in here is all of you on the outside. We’re just not as good at faking we’re good people, that we’re civilized like you pretend. You’re the prisoners, not me. I dreamed all of your world up. In here, in my world, that’s the only thing that’s real. You’re all ghosts, living in a god’s dream, my dream.” I tried to let his words move through me without tainting my insides. Told myself it was the rantings of a narcissistic psychopath. Manson nodded, looking almost grim. “Ask what you came to ask, ghost man, then go back to your haunted world.”
“Why did you call up the tulpa to kill Elextra and George? Who told you to?”
“I don’t know who the fuck you’re talking about. I didn’t wake any of my children up…” An awareness crossed Manson’s face, like he just got the punch line of a joke. He looked surprised and a bit smug. “Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, right on! He did it!”
“Who did it?” I leaned closer. “Who did it Charlie, if it wasn’t you?”
“My boy,” he said, “my son. They said they were gonna teach him the way they taught me.”
“The Process,” I said. “They’re gone, Charlie, scorched earth. I need to know who really killed Elextra, and why?”
“People always got to go and try to put labels on things,” Manson said. “Things don’t change what they’re made of ’cause their form changes. You call a glass of water a river, tell me it isn’t really. You call death a cigarette. What they are stays the same, regardless if you call them the Process or something else. They’re not hung up on names. Blinders to what’s real.”
“And what are they, Charlie? What’s real?”
Manson showed me the cigarette and smiled. “They looking to move on, to move up, get that enlightenment jones a-goin’. ’Cept they got it right, not like all those bible-thumpers and prissy-ass Satanists. They get you can’t know light unless you know the dark, and after a while spent in either, you go blind, and the dark wins out anyway.”
It was my turn to get it.
“They’re seeking out enlightenment by courting the dark, embracing it,” I said. Charlie nodded.
“Yeah, it’s beautiful, baby.” His eyes were looking into places I couldn’t see. “They put my feet on the path a looooong time ago. I was walking it and didn’t even know it, ’til they showed me. They taught me the real meaning of family
. Children, man, they are the harbingers of our own end and the gateway to immortality. I’m gonna live forever. My seed is in all the blood of mankind now, just like theirs. Everything I foretold is coming to pass right now—the race riots, the hate and anger, the end of the of wagging tongues, the dawn of the raising of fists, the whites and the blacks going to war. I’m a prophet and that will be borne out by history. They sent me out as their prophet, showed me all of it.” Manson cocked his head and gave me an almost pitying look. “They’ll show you too. They like you, Ballard, that’s why they haven’t killed you yet.”
“Okay, Charlie,” I said, leaning closer. “This one is for a light for that cigarette and a carton of smokes. I want you to explain something to me, and I want every detail.” And he did.
* * *
“It’s a cult,” I said to Grinner, Anna, and Vigil, “a cult of Buddhist mystics. The murder of Jane, of all the girls, they’re ritual sacrifices for them, designed to provide empowerment and further their messed-up take on enlightenment. It all makes sense now.” We were in the office at the Hard Limit, and daylight was burning. I had spent the morning with Manson, and I now had much less than twenty-four hours to get out of Dodge.
Gida had ordered Dragon out of town on an assignment shortly after we had our little chat. Dragon was to go back to Bombay Beach, where Jane’s body had been dumped in 1984, to follow up on local interviews. Dragon and I both knew it was bullshit, a way to keep her from helping me and compromising herself to the Nightwise. I had urged her to go. I didn’t want to cause her any more grief than I already had. Gida was making her take Luke along, supposedly as a partner, but really to keep an eye on her, make sure she was nowhere near me.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold the phone,” Grinner said. “We’re talking freakin’ Buddhists here. No attachment, right? Y’know, letting go of aggression and resentment. The Mr. Rogers of religions, right? This sounds nuts, Ballard. I think you and Manson shared too many magic toadstools, man.”
“Not a lot of people in the West realize it, but there are different sects and opposing philosophies and traditions in Buddhism,” Anna said, sipping her mint tea. “It’s not monolithic, any more than any other faith. They’ve had their internal struggles over doctrine and their versions of reformations and heresies.”
I nodded in agreement.
“Exactly,” I said. “I remember hearing about this particular heresy at the night schools of Shambhala, when I was studying in the Tian Shan mountains. They’re called the Dugpa, or Dögpa, but that’s a really loose and inaccurate translation. ‘Dugpa’ is kind of like calling all Southerners ‘klan’ or all Muslims ‘terrorists.’ The West doesn’t have an accurate word to describe what they are. None of my teachers wanted to discuss them very much, it was forbidden, so, of course, I was all over it.”
“Natch,” Grinner said, tipping his coffee mug in my direction.
“They’re practitioners of Black Tantra,” I continued. “Selfish, greedy, ruthless sorcerers. Their view of Buddhism is ass-backwards from everyone else’s. They believe that cultivating negative emotions and thoughts leads to enlightenment. Attachment, possession, in all its extreme tangible and metaphysical forms is to be embraced.”
“Okay.” Grinner nodded. “So, Sith Buddhists, got it.”
“Nothing is considered sacred to them,” I continued. “The very notion of sacredness is a joke. They embrace experience in all its permutations and perversions, and they gain mystical power through self-destruction and the corruption of others.” Anna, Vigil, and Grinner all looked at each other, and I felt an uncomfortable understanding pass between them. “What?” I asked.
“It’s nothing, Laytham,” Anna said. “Go on.”
“The Dugpa were briefly associated with the Kagyu sects, but not for long. Many of the oldest and most prominent Buddhist sects, like the Kagyu, got painted with the same racist broad-brush by Madame Blavatsky and some other western occultists because of the Dugpa. She lumped these assholes in with all the different Kagyu and two other very old and reputable branches of Buddhism. It’s something the Red Hat sects have been trying to clear up ever since with westerners.”
“Wait a second,” Vigil said, “Brett Glide’s production company is called ‘Red Hat.’”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s one of the western names for the Dugpa. I should have picked that up when we were out in the desert, but I was too hungover, I guess, just not thinking straight. Glide’s in this somehow. He registered to me and Dragon like someone with some magical training. I should have known.”
“I ran his prints off the water bottle like you asked, and they completely fucked up the Fed’s NGI identification system I ran them through,” Grinner said.
“Just like mine would do,” I said. “He’s got some serious magic working.”
“No shit,” Grinner said. “So I’ve put him under a microscope, and you’re right, Mr. Crunchy Granola is up to his tits in your and Dragon’s cold case. I was able to use facial recognition software matched up to a massive porn image search program to determine that every woman murdered had been active in the adult film industry here in L.A., either online or in films, clubs, chat rooms, or all of the above. They were all working in adult entertainment and I just found another major correlation between them in the wee hours of last night while you were out playing footsie with your old girlfriend. Every woman killed, all the way back to the first you found in 1984. They had one thing in common: they had all worked for Red Hat Productions at some point in their careers.”
“It’s a small community, relatively speaking,” Anna said. “Could just be a coincidence.”
“If we didn’t know that Glide was connected to the life,” Vigil said, “and that his company is named after these Dugpa. It stretches coincidence pretty far.”
“Crystal Myth worked for Red Hat too, didn’t she?” I said, already knowing the answer.
“Yeah,” Grinner said.
“And that breaks coincidence,” Anna nodded.
“How did you know?” Vigil asked me. “That she was connected to your old case?” I took out the crumpled still from one of Crystal’s movies I had found at Elextra’s murder scene. I laid the blood-flecked, wrinkled print out on the desk between us. I pointed to a scar on her hip, an ornate brand made up of lines and whorls with sharp, pointed swoops on the ends of the pattern.
“Is that what I think it is?” Dragon asked. I nodded.
“That,” I said. “All the victims had it somewhere on their bodies. Sometimes it was fresh, a few weeks old, other times it had been there for a while, probably years, but always the same symbol. No one in the Nightwise, LAPD, FBI, even Langley’s code-breakers, could ever figure out what it meant, until this morning, until I found out we’re dealing with Dugpa.”
“What is it?” Anna asked.
“Looks like fucking Klingon,” Grinner offered.
“It’s from the Tibetan alphabet,” I said. “The symbols have been packed together and then reversed like a mirror image. It says, ‘mchod pa.’ It means ‘offering.’”
“Of course it does,” Grinner muttered, looking at the old photo. “Shit. You think your lost girl, this Caern, Crystal Myth, you’re looking for is dead?” Vigil searched my face. His jaw was tight.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Not yet, anyway. Every victim’s body was dropped someplace they would be discovered pretty quickly, like the killers were showing off what they did. The Dugpa corrupt by weakening the resolve, challenging belief. Nothing like a brutal, senseless torture-murder to shake up your faith in a just and ordered universe, right? Each one of these nine murders gave them mystical fuel. That’s why the heads were left pristine on each woman, to allow them to feed off the suffering and death pouring through their perfect Ajna and their Sahasrara chakras, the seats of awareness and enlightenment. It’s sick as hell, but it makes perfect sense.”
“So they degraded these women, over years,” Anna said, “wore them down, ruined their lives, destroye
d their hope, and then, when they had nothing left to lose, tortured them, killed them and…”
“Ate their souls,” I said, “like it was caviar. By that point the women were probably thankful for the utter negation of their life force. They wouldn’t just want to die, they’d wish they had never been born, and never be reborn. They’d beg the Dugpa for annihilation. It’s … bad … it’s fucked up on a different level, even for me.”
“We have got to stop these evil things,” Anna said. I nodded.
“They’re not monsters, darlin’, just human beings, that’s all they need to be. I’ve got ten hours to find them and punch their ticket.”
“And find the Lady Ankou,” Vigil said. “If she’s not dead, she is in danger from this cult.”
“Agreed,” I said, “but we’ve very little time before I have the fucking mojo po-po up my ass.”
“We can’t deal with the assembled might of the Nightwise,” Vigil said.
“Yeah,” I said, “that would suck, especially since that would include Dragon too.”
“Damn it, Laytham, you can’t put her in that position,” Anna said. “All she has is the Nightwise. She believes in what the order is about, even if you don’t anymore.”
“I know,” I said, rubbing my face. I felt so tired, and I was painfully aware of every hour, every minute, every second it had been since I’d had a drink. “I’ll figure something out, Anna. I won’t hurt her, I won’t make her choose. I promise.”
“Don’t promise,” Anna said, “I know what that’s worth. Just do it, okay? Please.”
“I poked a little deeper into Red Hat,” Grinner said, coming to the rescue. “It’s weird. That company is older than Brett Glide. It’s been creeping around under different names but same holding companies since at least the 1970s, probably further back than that. The electron trail gets cold past a certain date.”
The Night Dahlia Page 25
