by James Newman
Guice looked down at the ground. He suddenly felt awkward as hell and wished he had not come here at all. Let the frigging church rot, for all he cared. Same for Darryl Rhodes.
“There are a lot of people in town, members of your church who haven’t seen you in weeks. They’re concerned. It’s not every day a church closes its doors with no explanation. I just wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
“Well,” Rhodes said, “as you can see, everything is...okay. I am fine, and it is no one’s business but my own that I have chosen to close up this ‘House of God.’”
The sheriff frowned. Damned if that last bit hadn’t sounded...sarcastic. As if the reverend would rather spit the words from his mouth than speak them in that cold, calm way of his. As if those very words—House of God—were profane.
“I don’t expect you to understand,” Rhodes said.
The two men stared at one another for a moment, not speaking. A few feet to Sheriff Guice’s left something slithered through the high weeds. Something alive. Guice flinched, took several steps back, in the direction of his patrol car.
“Is there anything else that I can do for you, Sheriff?”
“N-no,” Guice stammered. “I don’t suppose there is.”
“Well then, I have much to do. I must bid you good day.”
“Yeah. Okay. You take care, Reverend.” Guice took several more steps backward, turned and started to walk back toward his car. He could feel the pastor’s creepy eyes burning into the back of his head, knew that the man was watching his every step.
What the hell was wrong with him? Why did that man in the Coke-bottle glasses, with the bushy gray eyebrows, a meek little man whom Sheriff Guice would otherwise find anything but intimidating any other day...why in the hell did he make Guice feel as if he were some disobedient child being scolded by an angry schoolmarm?
He didn’t know. But he felt it all the same. The guy gave him the fucking creeps. Though the day was warm, Sheriff Guice could not deny the ice finger that had trailed down his back each time the supposed man of God had spoken.
Guice shook his head, cursed himself.
He stopped in his tracks and turned back toward the church one last time.
Reverend Rhodes was still standing in the doorway of the parsonage, watching him. The breeze lapped at his greasy hair, forcing it to sway and bob like the living weeds at his feet.
“Actually,” Guice said, “there is one more thing you can do for me, Reverend.”
Rhodes’s eyebrows rose, but he said nothing.
“I don’t suppose you’ve seen my deputy around here, have you?” Guice asked, finding it very hard to meet the preacher’s bloodshot gaze. He forced himself to stare into Rhodes’s eyes, however, as uncomfortable as such a thing made him, because usually this was the most surefire way to recognize a lie. “Hank Keenan? I’ve been looking for him.”
“No,” Reverend Rhodes said. He blinked behind his dusty lenses, and Guice was quite sure this was the first time he had done so the entire time they had spoken. “I haven’t.”
“He’s wanted for questioning,” Guice said.
“Is that so?”
“Yeah. I, uh, guess you heard what happened.”
“No,” Rhodes said, “I didn’t.”
The pastor brought one hand up then—a hand that trembled slightly, Guice couldn’t help but notice—and picked something out from between his thinning strands of dark gray hair. He broke eye-contact with Sheriff Guice only long enough to look at it, whatever he had pulled from his scalp, before popping the wriggling object into his mouth. He swallowed it.
Guice turned and headed quickly back to his patrol car, practically leaping into it, beads of cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. He started it up, and pulled away from the curb. He continued to feel the preacher’s blank stare burning into the back of his head as he sped down Shorewood Avenue.
Dammit, he could feel it. Beyond a doubt.
As surely as he knew his own name, Sheriff Sam Guice knew that Reverend Rhodes had lied to him.
Rhodes was aware of what had happened, of Hank Keenan’s horrible crime against his family.
He knew, too, where Hank was hiding. He just wasn’t telling.
“Any word yet, Mavis?” Guice asked as he came through the door of the station.
“Sorry, Sam. Nothing.”
“Shit.”
“Where do you think he is?” Mavis asked. “Do you think Hank’s even alive?”
“I don’t know about that,” Guice said. “But tell me something, Mavis, how in the hell can a man everyone knows, a man who is such a recognizable face in this community, just disappear and no one has a clue where he is?”
“Good question,” Mavis said, but she offered no answer for now.
Guice shook his head, went to the coffee machine in the corner of the station house and poured himself a cup.
“I wouldn’t—” Mavis began.
He took a sip.
Spat it back out, into the cup.
“This tastes like shit.”
“Doesn’t it always?” Mavis laughed.
“I’ll never learn.”
Guice tossed the cup in the wastebasket beside Mavis’ desk. “What are you drinking?”
She showed him the contents of her cup. “Mello-Yello. Want some?” She reached into her desk drawer, pulled out the half-empty bottle.
“No.” Guice sounded ill and tired of the small talk, as he sat on a corner of her desk that was free of clutter. He slid aside her TAKE A NUMBER gag (the novelty thing with the hand grenade and the numbers attached to its ring), asked, “You got anything for me this morning?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.” Mavis glanced down at one of the many loose scraps of paper and various Post-It notes scattered about her desk in a rainbow-colored blizzard and immediately found what she was looking for. “Here. You got a call about an hour ago. Simon Short, from the paper.”
“What’d Short want?”
“He was up at the sanitarium, in Fleetwood. Said he’d just finished talking to a...Dr. Corriher, I believe it was.”
“And why does this concern me, Mavis?”
“He said to leave you a message, thought you might like to know...”
Mavis paused for a second, as if to build suspense. Took a deep breath. She always did shit like that. Guice made an impatient circular motion with one hand, urging her to continue.
“Bobby Briggs is dead, Sheriff. He killed himself this morning.”
If he hadn’t known better, Guice would have thought it was all one big, sick joke. He pressed Mavis for details, deciding there was no pertinent reason he should call Short back for now, and she gladly filled him on the sordid details. Guice blanched as she did so, as he discovered how Bobby Briggs had taken his own life.
Evidently, the doctors had started allowing Briggs to venture outside once a day, to wander about the grounds as a reward for his general good behavior and cooperation the first few months of his stay at the sanitarium. All had been fine until this morning. Shortly after breakfast, Briggs had sneaked into an old groundskeeper’s shed, a small building on the edge of the property that someone had neglected to padlock.
Inside the shed, Bobby Briggs found a full jug of gasoline sitting atop the asylum’s new John Deere mower.
He doused himself with its contents and wandered back outside.
“My gift to thee, my gift to thee,” he kept saying over and over, according to eyewitnesses at the scene.
“For Moloch!” the boy supposedly screamed, right before he did it.
Somewhere, earlier, he had found a lighter. Probably from some absentminded intern who had left the thing lying around after his or her smoke break.
There, in the sun-dappled courtyard of the Fleetwood sanitarium, as birds chirped merrily and patients laughed and sang and cried and did what patients at insane asylums do, Bobby Briggs lit himself on fire.
And burned.
And burned.
H
e laughed as he died, or so the witnesses said, laughed as if his agony was nothing short of ecstasy, as if his act of self-immolation was the greatest thing he had ever done in his short life.
Guice sat before his desk and rubbed at his temples. For the past several days, he seemed plagued with a permanent headache. And not your everyday headache, either—this thing felt like knives jabbing into his skull. Even the Excedrin Migraine pills he’d been taking weren’t doing a damn thing for his headaches, and those usually worked like gangbusters.
Guice hit his phone’s speakerphone button, followed by Mavis’s extension. “Mavis.”
“Yeah? Whatcha need, Sheriff?”
“Hold my calls, will you? I’ve got some things I need to catch up on.”
“Will do.”
“Thanks.”
Sam hung up, swiveled around in his chair to look out his window. A panorama of small-town life stretched out before him—across Lincoln Street was the new AutoZone, beside that Lauren’s Bicycle Shop and old Dean Schweitzer’s bookstore. In the distance Sam could see Frank’s Grocery, the store’s vast parking lot already filling up with early shoppers. Beside that sat the new Arby’s, its big orange cowboy hat like a beacon for the hungry.
There had been a time when Sam Guice could look out this window and feel as if his job as Sheriff of Morgan County meant something. A sworn protector, he had sometimes looked at himself as a proud marshall of the old West; with his shiny badge he viewed Morganville as his town, and woe unto those varmints who chose to muddy the place up. But it no longer felt as innocent as all that. Not these days. Sam couldn’t remember the last time Morganville seemed innocent at all.
Guice stood, went to his file cabinet in the corner and opened it. He thumbed through the various files, found a thick brown folder marked BRIGGS. He pulled it out and returned to his desk.
He spread the file out before him. Inside this particular folder lay everything relating to the Bobby Briggs case that the State Bureau of Investigation had allowed him to keep after it stuck its nose into the investigation. Which wasn’t much at all, really. Several sheets of paper, a couple books, some photographs.
Here was a copy of something called The Anarchist’s Cookbook, which—as far as Guice could tell—had been written for the sole purpose of serving as a sort of training manual for aspiring terrorists. Guice had thumbed through the thin black book several times after he arrested Bobby Briggs, but had never read any of it thoroughly. It seemed to offer little more than recipes for making homemade LSD and marijuana brownies, how to hack into other folks’ bank accounts, a couple illustrations on how to make pipe bombs, that sort of thing. Exactly the type of book that should never fall into the public’s hands, Guice believed, especially the hands of a minor. Sheriff Guice was all for free speech, but you had to draw the line somewhere.
Also in the folder was a picture of Bobby Briggs. Not a bad-looking kid by any stretch of the imagination, though you could see that look in his eyes. The kid had thin brown hair cut just shy of his shoulders, a grin exposing clean but crooked teeth. In the picture, he wore all black, what looked like a rock ‘n’ roll T-shirt with a bunch of skulls on it. The kid sported the peach-fuzz beginnings of a goatee. Small gold hoop in his left ear.
Guice shook his head, wondered where things went wrong. Was it the parenting? Should the parents be held accountable when their offspring commit a violent crime? Where was the leadership, the induction of morals into children from a young age?
Was there even a definite answer to that question?
Guice wasn’t sure.
Also in Briggs’ file lay another, smaller book than the first. Something called—Sam could barely pronounce it—the Necronomicon. Looked like some kind of devil shit, though he couldn’t be sure. It too had been confiscated at the time of Bobby’s arrest, one of many such books found in the arsonist’s bedroom. It may have been nothing more than a trashy horror novel, for all Guice knew. The thing’s pages were yellowed and dog-eared, as if it had been read many times over.
Inside the first page of that book was a photograph Guice had taken on the day of Bobby Briggs’ arrest, in the teenager’s bedroom. A close-up snapshot of the stack of books that had lain on the punk’s desk, lined up so their black and purple and blood red spines were visible to those gathering evidence on the scene. Briggs’ bizarre library had consisted of books with names like Ritual Magick, Magick in Theory and Practice, and Ceremonial Magic. Something called 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley. All of their titles were illustrated in swirling, archaic fonts, as if to insinuate that the knowledge within originated from sources esoteric and arcane.
Guice laid the photograph aside and reached for the loose pieces of spiral notebook paper within the folder. There had been rumors, during the investigation and subsequent trial, that Briggs had dabbled in devil worship, black magic stuff, but Guice had never placed much stock in that despite the evidence at hand. To Sheriff Sam Guice, Bobby Briggs had always seemed like nothing more than a very troubled young man who needed not only parental guidance, but a couple drug tests as well. Perhaps a good hard spanking to boot. Sam thought briefly of his own son, Nathaniel, and how he would not hesitate to bend the boy over his knee when Nathan got out of line. That would have solved Bobby Briggs’ problems a long time ago.
Guice pulled one page from the stack. His lips moved as he read to himself the words that took up the entire sheet of paper. Briggs had obviously been whacked out of his mind when he wrote this junk:
people think they got it all figired out.
they think its all about good and EVIL, god and the devil.
but 1 day there gonna realise its all so much bigger than that.
Theres something comin down, man.
And one day this whole fuckin world’s gonna go up in flames.
I want to be by HIS side to see that.
Blessed be
MOLOCH
cheif of Hells army, prince of the land of tears
Guice shook his head again. Lunatic ramblings, all of it. Still, he could not deny the chill that ran down his spine as he skimmed the page, as he stared at the scrawlings at the bottom of that page and on the papers following. Strange drawings, undoubtedly designed to portray ancient runes and religious markings.
He removed his hat, ran his hands through his hair, and wondered just who the hell this “Moloch” was, why that name kept popping up.
Some kind of rock star or something?
Guice doubted it. Though he wouldn’t have been too surprised. Kids sure did listen to some weird shit these days. He thought he might check that out, do some research a little later at Play It Again Records out on Worthington Boulevard. Maybe he could get some answers there.
Or maybe not. Probably not. He knew he was grasping at straws.
Guice sighed for what must have been the millionth time today, and called Mavis again on the speakerphone.
“Yeah, Sheriff?”
“How about throwing that pond water out, fix a new pot of coffee. Would you do that for me?”
“I suppose I could. Everything okay?”
“I don’t know anymore, Mavis.” He paused, then asked on a whim, “You know anything about this ‘Moloch’?”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know. I was asking you.”
“Sorry,” Mavis said. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Great.”
“Anything else?”
“Just get me that coffee, would ya? And put a rush on it, Mavis. I need it.”
He hung up, and though their connection was severed, he could hear the old woman in the other room, through his closed door: “Mr. Grumpy.”
Normally he would have laughed at that. But not today.
Not today.
CHAPTER 52
Joel called while Kate was fixing breakfast.
“Kate,” David shouted from the living room. “It’s for you.”
Kate reached atop the refrigerator and tur
ned down the radio. Her gospel music faded to a dull murmur, and the volume knob was now covered with a white blotch of pancake batter.
“Could you bring me the phone, please?” Kate said. “I’m making the pancakes.”
She waited. “David?”
Finally, when he hadn’t brought her the cordless phone after a minute or so, she walked into the den.
David was kicked back in his favorite armchair, watching some PBS Special on the mating habits of the duckbilled platypus. Becca sat nearby, reading a Blue’s Clues book.
“Nevermind,” she said with a scowl. “I’ll get it. I’m not doing anything at the moment.”
David didn’t look up at her, just handed her the phone. “It’s Joel.”
Kate exhaled loudly, wiped her sticky hands on her apron before taking the phone back into the kitchen with her. Christopher stared up at her from his bassinet on the table and Kate smiled at him.
“Hi, Joel.”
“Hey, sis.”
“It’s about time you called, little brother,” Kate said. “I’ve been worried sick about you.”
“Sorry. I’ve been busy.”
“I tried to call several times,” Kate said, “But you’re never home.”
“I’ve tried to throw myself into my work,” Joel said. “I can’t stand being in that house anymore. It’s so...empty, ya know? So many memories.”
Kate realized that her brother sounded like he’d been crying.
“That’s probably a good idea. Staying busy, I mean.” She placed the phone between her neck and shoulder, held it there as she went back to making breakfast. “You need to do that, so you can try and move on.”
“It’s been tough, sis. I miss him so bad.”
“I can imagine. But you know if there’s anything you need, Joel, do not hesitate to ask—”
“Sis,” Joel said. “Would you do me a favor?”
“Anything.”
“Well, I know you have a lot going on right now,” Joel said. “With the baby and all. But...is there any way I could talk you into going out to Heller Home with me?”
