“I wish I knew why you’re helping me,” I said, realizing I was still gripping the pistol. I put it on the floor beside my seat. “I mean, you’re putting yourself at risk.”
“Am I? You’ve been holding a gun on me since we left Sparta.”
“Good story. It’ll probably stick if you hold your nerve.” I looked at the line of her face. She was determined enough, I could see that. “This is some kind of thrill for you, isn’t it? Pretending we’re Bonnie and Clyde, lying to cops—a lot more exciting than being a small-town schoolteacher.”
Her cheeks reddened. “Screw you, Matt,” she said angrily. “You just don’t get it, do you?”
“Men are dumb,” I said, holding my gaze on her as she swerved past a truck and accelerated hard.
“Yeah, you got that right.”
I sensed that she needed to unburden herself. That could be tricky, especially if it created an intimacy between us, but I needed to find out more. I still had a suspicion that her presence was too good to be true. On the other hand, she’d already showed with the cop that she was a good liar. Would I be able to tell if she spouted a stream of bullshit?
I decided I’d give it a try. “Let me put it another way. Most men are dumb, but I’m not most men.”
“You sure aren’t, Matt Wells.” She smiled sadly and drew her sleeve across her eyes.
“What is it, Mary?” I asked, resisting the temptation to touch her. She suddenly looked inconsolable.
Shaking her head, she didn’t speak for some time. Her damp eyes were fixed on the road ahead.
“I’m sorry,” I said, after she seemed to have calmed down. “This is getting to you, Mary. Stop the car, go back to your mother.”
“No!” Her voice was shrill. “I’m not a child. I don’t need my mother. I don’t want my mother…” She hit the brake and turned without warning into a turnoff.
An eighteen-wheeler loaded with logs roared past from behind, the same logo with the open newspaper on the cab door as the one from yesterday. I started gathering up my gear. At least there was traffic on the road and hitching would be feasible.
“No!” she screamed again. “No, Matt. I don’t want you to go. I want…I want to help you.” She slumped forward, sobbing.
This time I did touch her, my arm going round her shoulders. “Listen, Mary, whatever’s troubling you, I’m just making it worse.”
“No…no, you’re not.” She tried to get her breathing under control. “You’re…you’re the best thing that’s happened to me for a long time.”
That was exactly what I didn’t want to hear. Now it seemed that Mary wasn’t helping me out of a sense of injustice. I’d engaged her emotions, which was flattering but dangerous. The blonde woman whose name still escaped memory rose up before me. I loved her and she loved me—of that much, I was certain. Which meant that by leading Mary on in any way, I was exploiting her. That made me feel slimier than a worm.
She sat up and turned her red eyes and damp face to me, but she was smiling. “It’s all right, Matt,” she said, looking in the mirror and putting the car back in gear. “I’m going to tell you something, but you have to promise never to tell anyone else, okay?”
I looked at her as we moved back onto the road and picked up speed. “Okay,” I said, wondering what I was getting myself into.
“I mean it, Matt,” she said, her voice even. “The last person who talked had his tongue cut out.”
My stomach did a somersault. Then I was taken on a walk through hell.
The Antichurch of Lucifer Triumphant was established in the town of Jasper, Maine, in 1846 by a logger named Jeremiah Dodds. Jasper was in the far north of the state, deep in the forest. Back then, there was no shortage of extreme religious sects, but the overwhelming majority were Christian. Jeremiah Dodds had no truck with Christianity, having been abused by a minister when he was a boy and savagely beaten by his father when he spoke about it. As a young man, he had consoled himself with the strong drink and the slack-jawed women ever present in logging camps. But, as he got older, those pleasures failed to divert him. One of the advantages of his enforced attendance at the church school was that he had learned to read and write. The only book that was readily available in the wilderness was the Bible and Jeremiah Dodds started to study it again in his thirties, but with a zeal possessed only by the true contrarian. The result was the antiGospel of Lucifer, a savage perversion of its New Testament prototype that set out a new faith based on violence and devotion to Satan. While Christians worshipped the blood of the Lamb that had been spilled for humanity, Luciferians saw holiness in terms of spilling human blood.
The Antichurch flourished in the great wilderness of the Maine forests, where the daily struggle to stay alive drained what little good there was in the loggers—they viewed themselves as nothing more than the timber barons’ slaves. That mentality made them easy converts to Jeremiah Dodds’s preaching. Anyone who objected was whipped from the settlements where he prevailed and hunted through the woods, ending up as a source of blood for the congregation’s monthly rites. Soon there was no opposition and Dodds reigned supreme in Jasper and its neighboring towns.
So supreme was the Antichurch that it ran out of victims. That was the beginning of what was called the Great Trouble. For Jeremiah Dodds wasn’t satisfied with the substitute blood of moose and bear. That, he proclaimed, would please Lucifer only for a short time. The congregations had to look for human victims in towns and camps where traditional Christian beliefs still held sway. So blinded were the faithful by the seductive power of the antiGospel and the subtle guile of Dodds that they covered huge distances, even in winter, to bring back living sacrifices. They preferred women and children because they were easier to carry—and because they provided the men with what were known as “virtues of the flesh” in the hours before they met the knife. The “virtues” were enjoyed in public and the lash was not spared, the only stipulation laid down by the antigospel being that the offerings to Lucifer were to remain conscious throughout. For it was said that the road to Hell was too splendid for even a second of the journey to be missed. However, their eyes were put out as soon as they were dead; to see the glories of the underworld was a privilege reserved for Luciferians.
The inhabitants of other places, those who retained some decency, resisted the unseen menace that haunted the pine forests as best they could. Initially, the disappearance of wives and offspring—the Luciferians never took whores, seeing them as fellow spirits—was put down to wild beasts. But finally the stories of the few Luciferians who broke free and survived could be ignored no longer. Parties of heavily armed men set out to confront the raiders in their base. For, rumor had spread that the town of Jasper was a sinkhole of corruption, a modern-day Sodom where the filthiest of unholy ceremonies were practiced, with victims being sacrificed on upturned crosses. With wholly justifiable rage and a less commendable desire for revenge, the true believers fell upon the abomination that Jeremiah Dodds had created. The Luciferians disappeared without trace. Jasper was burned to the ground and its name expunged from the maps. The arch blasphemer and murderer Dodds was hanged from the tallest tree, his face beaten to a pulp and his innards loosed upon the ground before his spirit went to its foul master below the earth. As a final, ironic affront, Dodds’s eyes were torn out so that he wouldn’t be able to see Lucifer’s realm. For decades, people were reluctant to go within a hundred miles of where Jasper had been, lest a fearsome creature, its blinded face twisted and its feet tangled in its own entrails, should come upon them and drag them screaming to hell.
Such was the end of the Antichurch of Lucifer Triumphant, at least as far as the civic and religious authorities were concerned—in any case, they only heard the stories months after Dodds and his congregation had been eradicated by the mob. But the truth was that there were still people who enthused over the antiGospel. Despite strict repression of the text, it had remained in existence, circulated by subsequent generations of Luciferians with extreme cau
tion—every copy accounted for, reproduction in any form forbidden on pain of death. Recently a Bangor man by the name of Regent, who had feigned devotion to the Antichurch, started to transcribe the text onto a Web site; he had never been seen again. He became the first human sacrifice in several years, his tongue and genitals sliced off while he was still conscious. His blood was drained and drunk by the faithful before the flesh and organs were stripped from his bones and burnt on the Antichurch’s altar, beneath the obligatory inverted cross.
The word of Jeremiah Dodds was still alive in the evergreen forests of northern Maine and it was spreading. There was even a small congregation in the town of Sparta, one attended by a recent recruit to the cause.
“What?” I gasped. “Your mother is one of them?”
Mary nodded, her face damp with sweat despite the cold in the pickup. “I found her diary.”
“But aren’t you in danger? Do these lunatics have any idea that you know about them?”
“I doubt it.” She glanced at me. “I’m not sure I’d be walking around in one piece if they did. I don’t think Mom knows, either.”
I thought back to the wrinkled old woman. She had alarmed me enough with her shotgun threats before I knew she was a member of the local satanist coven. Then I wondered about Mary. Was she more involved with the Antichurch than she’d admitted? Had she perhaps singled me out as a potential sacrifice? I twitched my head and tried to get a grip. She was driving me away from her mother. Then again, there might have been another altar in southern Maine. No, she would hardly have told me about the Antichurch if she were a member.
“Why are you telling me all this?” I asked.
She bit her lip. “Because I’m frightened, Matt. I needed to share the burden.”
I reckoned she was being straight with me. But there was something familiar about the story, something hovering on the margins of my memory….
“How many members of this Antichurch are there?” I asked.
“Around ten, I think.”
“Are there any other branches?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. They’re so paranoid about the antiGospel getting into the wrong hands that they prefer to limit their numbers.”
“And what about Jasper? Have you any idea where that was?”
Mary raised her shoulders. “The congregation doesn’t even know that. Mom wrote something about them asking their savior to direct them to what they call ‘the field of glory.’ I got the impression Lucifer hadn’t obliged.”
I thought about the camp I’d escaped from. Filming a man having his throat cut by a naked woman wasn’t much different from the rituals Mary had described, but I didn’t remember any devil worship per se.
I shook my head, wondering what I’d got myself into. Then I thought about the murders in Washington that I was supposed to have committed. Could they have some connection?
I was so caught up in my thoughts that I hardly noticed when we crossed the state line into New Hampshire. The minor road Mary had taken wasn’t even under scrutiny. We had evaded the state troopers, but I had a feeling that the reach of the people at the camp was a lot longer than that of the Maine authorities or the FBI.
Twenty-Six
Peter Sebastian, perfectly turned out in a dark blue suit and striped tie, eyed the detectives on the other side of the conference table.
“Well, gentlemen. Over eighteen hours have passed since the discovery of Abraham Singer’s body. What progress have you made?”
“We’d be making more if you hadn’t called this meeting,” Gerard Pinker said, shaking his head hopelessly.
“Nice,” Sebastian said, smiling icily. “Very nice. Perhaps I should call in Chief Owen.”
Clem Simmons gave his partner a long-suffering look and then caught Dana Maltravers’s eye. He reckoned she’d have smiled if she hadn’t been so in awe of her boss.
“That won’t be necessary,” Simmons said, flipping open his notebook. “As I’m sure you’re aware, Special Agent Maltravers attended the autopsy with me. The report’s not out yet, but the time of death isn’t going to be much different from Dr. Gilbert’s original estimate of between 9:00 and 11:00 p.m. Cause of death, major brain trauma caused by the skewers driven into each eye. There’s no evidence of any other trauma, so it’s likely the killer inserted them while the victim was still conscious.”
“Meaning he knows what he’s doing,” Sebastian said.
Pinker gave a wry smile. “Kinda the impression we’d got from the first two murders.”
“Quite,” said the FBI man, holding his gaze on Simmons. “What about the significance of the M.O.?”
“Skewers again,” Clem said.
“And two of them again,” Dana Maltravers said. “So there’s the same symbolism of the pair.”
“Whatever that means,” Pinker put in, smiling at her. “Maybe he just likes using both hands. Or maybe there are two murderers.”
“I suppose that’s possible,” Sebastian said. “That’s all we need. A pair of serial killers.”
“Maybe they’re twins,” Pinker suggested.
The FBI man raised an eyebrow. “Let’s not lose touch with reality completely.” He glanced at Simmons. “Go on with your report, Detective.”
“We’ve been canvassing the area. The problem is, the majority of buildings are university property, but offices rather than student accommodation, so there weren’t many people around in the evening.”
Peter Sebastian’s expression was grim. “What you’re saying, Detective, is that no one saw the killer.”
“If anyone did, we ain’t found ’em yet,” Pinker said. Not for the first time, he reverted to the way he talked back home in Georgia when addressing the Bureau man.
“CSIs?” Sebastian said, looking at his notes.
“They’re still comparing fingerprints with those we’ve taken from people who were in the professor’s room recently,” Clem Simmons said. “It’ll take some time. There are students, other professors, cleaners. Same goes for fibers.”
“Any suggestive background on the victim?” the FBI man asked.
“Suggestive?” Pinker repeated, smiling at Maltravers. “You mean, did he grope his students?”
Simmons frowned at his partner. “He was an expert in Jewish mysticism. That could be a connection with the other murders. He was studying a medieval book called De Occulta Philosophia. So—”
“So you think the killer has it in for people who dabble in the occult?” Sebastian said dubiously.
“That’s what the dailies are saying,” Pinker said.
“I pay no attention to trash like that,” the Bureau man said.
Clem Simmons raised his heavy shoulders. “We haven’t found anything else to explain the professor’s murder. He seems to have been happily married…” He gave Pinker a long-suffering look. “And he didn’t have a reputation as a groper. According to Professor Rudenstein, he wasn’t one of those academics who stir up controversy.”
“’Course, there is another possibility,” Pinker said, eyeing each of the others in turn.
“Enlighten us, Detective,” Sebastian said wearily.
“He was Jewish—could have been targeted by some far-right crazy.”
“It’s certainly a possibility.” Sebastian looked at his subordinate. “Have you alerted the Hate Crimes Unit?”
Dana Maltravers nodded. “They’re checking it. I’ve been through the victim’s recent e-mail correspondence. There are no obvious threats. Of course, he could have deleted them. I’ve also spoken to his wife. She wasn’t aware of anything like that.”
“All right,” Sebastian said. “Keep in touch with our people. What about the drawing?”
“The document-analysis experts are comparing it with the others,” Maltravers replied. “There isn’t much doubt that it was done by the same hand, and with the same pen and paper.”
“And the meaning?” Sebastian asked impatiently.
“Um…unclear, so far.”
“Anyone else have any ideas?”
“Could be building up to some sort of composite,” Clem said. “The shapes are in different places on each page.”
“True,” the FBI man said. “The problem is, if it’s not complete, then we can expect more murders.”
Silence greeted that remark.
“Have you gotten anywhere with background checks on Loki and Monsieur Hexie?” Dana Maltravers asked.
“Not really,” Simmons replied. “The band members are saying as little as they can. We’ve been looking at their activities. Loki got plenty of abuse on the band’s Web site about his lyrics, but that seems normal in the circles he moved in.”
“What about anti-Nazi and civil-rights groups?” Sebastian put in.
“Yeah, they thought he was a piece of shit,” Pinker said, “but we haven’t found any death threats. Same for Monsieur Hexie but Clem can tell you more about him.”
“Thanks, partner,” Simmons said. “The second vic actually seems to have been rather popular. People appreciated the stuff he sold. It made them happy.”
“Woo-hoo for voodoo,” Pinker said, with a sardonic smile.
Dana Maltravers looked up from her papers. “It seems he was still turning tricks, though, despite his age.”
Simmons nodded. “From time to time. We tracked down the recent johns—Monsieur Hexie kept a client list on his computer. They were pretty upset.”
“They had solid alibis, too,” Pinker said.
“Could the list have been tampered with?” Sebastian asked.
Clem Simmons shrugged. “I guess. The list was a standard Word file.”
There was another silence.
Gerard Pinker broke it. “What about your man Matt Wells? The CSIs haven’t found anything linking him to the latest scene.”
Sebastian gave a tight smile. “They’re unlikely to, given that he was in Maine last night.”
“So you failed to catch him,” Pinker said pointedly.
Maps of Hell Page 17
