by Rex Burns
I could see her start to scan through a Rolodex or, more likely, the subject files on a computer. “Whoa—I’m not serious about a speaker. But I do need some information if you have it.” I explained why and she said she might be able to tell me a little about it. We agreed to meet at the Mexican Village on the lower end of Orange Avenue.
A lot of things had changed at this end of Coronado, too. The old ferry slip was now a small park surrounded by condos. The busy street traffic that used to jam into lines to wait for the boat ride across the harbor was no more. A few lost tourists wandered up from the new cluster of shops at the passenger ferry dock; a car or two hissed past in the soft evening light. Even the curbs were empty so parking was free.
Still, not all was changed. For generations the Village had been the closest and loudest watering hole for navy pilots on liberty from North Island. The girls who sought to marry them still made fragrant weekend crowds in the dark and low-ceilinged bar that sprawled away into dim corners. I was grateful that it was a weeknight and free of the hustle of liberty hounds. Megan looked around with a wry smile at the shadowy booths and tables of black wood. “Larry brought me here once—he thought I ought to see the top guns at work.”
“Flyers from his squadron?”
“The women shooting them down.”
She told me a bit about her husband—factual, brief, and unsentimental. She had loved the uniform and liked the man. But even as the navy chaplain finished the ceremony and they’d rushed out under the uplifted swords of Larry’s fellow pilots, she’d had reservations about marrying. Not that it made any difference. They hadn’t had enough time together to really know if it had been the right thing to do. In the two years of their marriage, the squadron was always flying to different bases for two- and three-week training sessions; then they went on sea duty, and about halfway through that tour Larry, practicing night landings, had crashed into the end of the bobbing flight deck. Megan came to terms with her guilt on the grounds that they might have had a good marriage after all. And that at least Larry never knew they might not have.
I told her about Eleanor, showed her pictures of Karen and Rebecca when she asked to see them, and sprinted through the thoughtful, if not awkward, silence that followed show-and-tell. “Did you ever run across any cult or satanic problems as a counselor?”
“Not directly, no. But the district provided a workshop for counselors on cults and what we should look for. And we did hear stories of grave robberies in Chula Vista. But none of it ever came to light as Satanism.”
“And nothing at La Jolla High School?”
She shook her head. “I worked in the Encinas district. We wouldn’t have known about La Jolla.” Behind her, in an icy light that gleamed up the rows of bottles and glasses, the bartender was busy with an order of margaritas for diners in one of the back rooms. “The workshop was on cults and devil worship. It was in the newspapers at the time, and parents were worried. As I remember, girls were supposed to be more attracted to witchcraft or white magic than to Satanism. But I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Dori dabbled in it.”
“Why’s that?”
“She always has been a very lonely girl. And neither Henry nor Margaret is the most communicative parent in the world.” A swirl of Megan’s glass. “She fits the profile they gave us of likely joiners.”
“But neither Henry nor Margaret expressed any worry about her?”
“Not to me.”
“Even with the Gates death?”
“No.” Megan sipped at her margarita. “The things parents might notice—changes in eating and sleeping patterns, heavy alcohol or drug use, erratic grades—these can have other causes, too. Causes that come to mind more readily than Satanism.”
“What about symbols and videos and music—the worship of violence?”
“I suppose it would depend on how much fascination the child showed with violence. I’m not an expert at this, Jack, but I think a lot of that is natural curiosity and even bravado. Moreover, a lot of parents—and I think Margaret and Henry fit this—don’t really want to know if something’s wrong. They think if they ignore it, junior will grow out of it by himself.”
She searched her memory for the checklist of things that might indicate Satanist or cult activity. Nothing she could recall indicated Dorcas’s involvement. Still, the images that had haunted Margaret all these years had, Megan said, a ring of truth. She also gave me a sheet that she’d printed from one of her files before leaving work. It listed mailing addresses that offered more information on cults and the agencies that combated them. She explained, “Something starts making headlines, and someone will call up wanting a program on it.”
In the chill air outside the restaurant, there came another of those slightly awkward moments. “I’d like to thank you with a dinner when this is cleared up,” I said.
She smiled and held out a hand. “That’s not necessary.”
“I wasn’t thinking necessity, Megan—I was thinking pleasure.”
She gave that a long moment’s thought and finally said, “I’ll look forward to it, then.”
Like Megan, Sergeant Shaughnessy had given me the names of a few books on Satanism, some of which were in the small Coronado library. A few others I found in the New Age section of the bookstore at the other end of Orange Avenue. The clerk, a girl with thick glasses, smiled a bit too brightly as she wrapped up copies of the Necronomicon and LaVey’s The Satanic Bible. I felt her relief as I went out into the light traffic of early evening. I could have said “research” or “for a friend,” but I didn’t. She wouldn’t have believed me anyway, and besides, it was kind of funny. But it also gave me a hint of the ego gratification that could be found in a public admission of one’s dalliance with the occult. The girl had not been afraid of me, but she was certainly wary. That kind of effect on others was, in a way, an exertion of power. It commanded their attention—it made them behave in a way I dictated. Perhaps people caught in a world blindly careless of their feelings found in even that small taste of power a promise of far greater sweets to come.
My evening was spent reading. The appeal for immature readers of The Satanic Bible and the Necronomicon was evident in prose styles that were juvenile in inflated self-importance. LaVey’s strident voice reminded me of bull sessions I had with teenage friends: the challenges to established churches, the heavy sarcasm caused by hypocrisies among famous adults, the mixture of nervous laughter and bravado in discovering that “dog” is “god” spelled backwards. In another light, LaVey’s appeal was the same heavy-handed irreverence of Mad Magazine. The Necronomicon, also, insisted too loudly on its power and ancient mystery. Symbols, rituals, chants—all attributed on its own authority to pre-Christian cults of the Middle East—were presented in a language that, even with my limited linguistics background, was amateurishly artificial.
But it, too, played on the appeal of the forbidden and the mysterious. It threatened danger to all but the most careful practitioner—that is, to everyone but you, dear reader. And it promised power.
Yawning, I finally closed the last book and lay in bed to stare at the dimness of the ceiling. The truly wondrous thing was that people actually believed. They hungered for some kind of certainty. They hurt so much from fear and the vision of nothingness that they gave themselves in belief to nonsense like this. Hard to accept, perhaps, but I could think of at least one religion, strong and growing, whose documentary basis was equally immature and questionable. And Hitler’s appeal had been hard for outsiders to accept, too. In the jerky black-and-white newsreels, Der Fuehrer seemed a comic madman with his absurd mustache and high-pitched ranting. But millions of people supported him with their faith and with their lives.
“Hitler could not have caused such a magnitude of evil without the action of the Devil.” I tried to remember the name of the Jesuit priest who had argued that idea. For him, the Devil had been an active fact: the spirit world existed, and the Bible was revealed truth; the Devil was of that spiritu
al world, and the Bible said God created the Devil for His own inscrutable purposes. The priest had pointed out that worship of Satan did go back almost as far as the Catholic Church itself: Knights Templar, Black Masses, Madame La Voison. And he had cited an Italian priest who was currently writing on the role of exorcism and its even greater need in contemporary society.
From the library texts, names and dates floated through my sleepy mind as I stared at the ceiling. On the other side of the fragile neck of the Strand, the incoming Pacific beat with a steady pulse. I didn’t believe then and I still doubted the priest’s argument. To assert Satan’s biblical genealogy wasn’t the same as establishing his presence. And using the logic that God exists and therefore Satan exists seemed fallacious on at least two counts: an unwarranted expansion of human reason to govern God, or the restriction of God’s powers to humanity’s comprehension of them. Miracles may exist, and I wasn’t prepared to deny the possibility of a spiritual world. But I wouldn’t presume to define it, either. If there were any physical evidence for a Demon, it might be found only in Satanism’s practitioners and in the results for humanity of those practices. At any rate, there is where a Satan would be combated, and that made the question of his independent existence irrelevant. Long ago my work had carried me into the ethical swamps of conflicting political ideologies and recurrent questions of ends justifying means. I’d managed to find the firm ground of a pragmatic belief that life was more valuable than death, and that which made human existence better was more valuable than that which made it worse. I’d seen problems come when people—on our side or theirs—substituted for “life” a political code or an individual man: communism, Mao, capitalism, Stalin … even, with the self-defined patriots, the President. And now it looked like I’d run across a new combination of politics and personality cult—Satanism.
Once more, it was the surrender of reason to the romantic appeal of the irrational. But, ironically, that was an empirical truth I also believed in—the irrational, the Dionysian escape into ecstatic states, religious or secular. It did provide a source of knowledge that wasn’t encompassed by the realm of reason, or Nietzsche’s Apollo. The irrational is both those things, isn’t it? An escape from the pressures of life as well as an avenue to some different kinds of knowledge. As an artist, Eleanor had helped me tap that side of the psyche. It was chaotic and formless, but it was also unbounded possibility. Freedom from the restrictions of society, of family, even of reason. But not freedom from the self and those basic responsibilities that always devolve on the self. The irrational doesn’t have program or structure, and that’s the source of its illuminations. To channel its energies into a structure would not be to follow its illuminations but to supplant it with an exercise of reason—perverted, perhaps, or based on a fallacy, but a form of reason, nevertheless. Thus the cults’ insistence on highly structured priesthoods, their reliance on elaborate ritual, their own repeated logic of punishment and reward, of concordance of magic act and resultant effect. Their psychic energy may be drawn from the power of the irrational, but their form and purpose are a kind of perverted rationality. The force and power of the irrational was used to support a twisted reason based on the worship of death.
And that is what I was faced with: not only the sleep of reason, but more importantly its perversion.
So what weapons would be effective? What kind of defenses would I need? How to take arms against the ghosts in other minds while recognizing their existence in my own?
CHAPTER 16
IN THE BRIGHT overcast of morning, I vaguely recalled my final thoughts as I had fallen asleep the night before. I had been trying to clarify a transcendental dimension to the hunt for Dorcas. But this morning, those thoughts and ideas had lost any clarity or outline. There was only the fact of the missing pregnant girl, the thoroughly nontranscendent demand that something be done quickly, and the lingering odor of a spreading malignancy.
By the time I finished my run and a light breakfast, the hour wasn’t too early to call Jerry Hawley’s father again.
“A cult? You’re telling me Jerry was involved in some kind of cult?”
“I’m asking if that might have been the case, Mr. Hawley. You said earlier that he became moody and stopped playing soccer for no apparent reason. At about the same time, did he seem more secretive? Did he start ignoring old friends or stay away from home for longer periods?”
“He was at college. We wouldn’t see much of him at all except on vacations.” The voice paused. “He did stop coming home so much on weekends, but he said he was studying … we didn’t think anything of it.”
“How were his grades?”
“Not very good the fall quarter. That’s why we thought he was studying so hard that winter.”
“Was your son interested in religion?”
“You mean like the Moonies or something?”
“Religion in general. Did he read a lot about other religions or did he seem to be searching for a faith?”
“I don’t know. It’s not the kind of thing we’d talk about. I mean we sent him to Sunday school as a kid, but I guess from junior high on, it was pretty much up to him whether he went to church or not.” Hawley added somewhat apologetically, “Neither his mother nor I were regulars at church. We just didn’t make time to go. But it’s helped a lot since … well, it’s given us some strength.”
“How much did he tell you about Dwayne Vengley?”
“Very little. I met him one time when Jerry brought him home. It wasn’t too long after they met, I believe. I wasn’t too impressed with him, but I made it a point not to say anything bad to Jerry about his friends.”
“There were others you didn’t approve of?”
“Not then, no. But all his life Jerry would pick the damnedest people to be friends with. In grade school he just about worshiped this one kid who was one of the toughest little imps imaginable. And in junior high he got into a little trouble following the lead of a kid who later ended up in jail. Not serious trouble, thank God; just some vandalism—a broken store window, some spray painting. But he was thoroughly remorseful; he earned his own money to pay his share of the damages. Still, even in high school, he was always bringing home people with safety pins in their noses.” A sigh. “We even talked to a psychiatrist about it; he said Jerry was apologizing for his affluent background. But he didn’t have one thing to apologize for—I by God got where I am fair and square, and I never once pressured Jerry into doing anything he didn’t want to do.”
“And you saw his friendship with Vengley to be of this sort?”
He thought about that. “No. Vengley had plenty of money, for one thing. Occidental isn’t cheap, and his father’s a well-known attorney down in San Diego. I really don’t know what it was about him that attracted Jerry … maybe his attitude— he had this superior attitude. Not that he’d say anything snotty, but you could just tell he was looking down his nose at you.” His voice implied that he should have thought of it sooner. “It really was the same attitude some of his punk rocker friends had—as if they were sneering at you, your house, your beliefs. But you knew damned well they’d take every penny you gave them.”
“Do you think he supplied your son with drugs?”
He didn’t answer immediately. “I don’t know—you can get that stuff almost anywhere. So I suppose they could have done drugs together. Whether he was a pusher or not, I don’t know.” The voice shifted, bringing in a certain weariness. “Mr. Steele, I know I said I didn’t like Vengley. I still have very serious reservations about that young man. But it’s a pretty subjective feeling, and I certainly don’t think he led Jerry into any kind of cult. My son had a good head on his shoulders; he wouldn’t have let himself be manipulated by some charlatan. I’ve seen those people, Mr. Steele—running around with their robes and sandals and banging drums. Jerry wasn’t that type.”
I hadn’t been thinking of that kind of cult, but it would do the boy’s father no good to explain. Besides, the man had told me wh
at I wanted to know. “Thank you, Mr. Hawley. I don’t think I’ll need to bother you anymore.”
I watched the girl look up, puzzled. The supervisor bent across her desk to say something. Then she looked my way and her eyes widened. At first I thought she would not leave her desk, but she did. Nodding absently at something the supervisor said, she walked numbly toward me. I was someone she hadn’t expected, and someone she didn’t want to see again.
“I hope you don’t mind giving me a few more minutes of your time, Shelley.”
She did, it was obvious. But all she said was something about the supervisor who wanted people to take care of personal business on their own time.
“I talked to him already and explained why I’m here.” I smiled. “He said you could take an early lunch break with me.”
She looked around as if she wanted to call for help. None of the figures bending here and there over drafting tables or staring intently at computer screens looked our way. I put a hand under a bony elbow and guided her toward the door.
“Why?”
“We need to talk, Shelley. About Dori, about Dwayne.”
That was her only question. I led her to the car in the visitor’s slot. We pulled into the pulse of traffic that marked the coming noon hour.
This time Steven hadn’t called to warn her that I was coming. As the car weaved among others filling the lanes, I sensed her struggle to organize her thoughts, to anticipate my questions. “Why are you so tense, Shelley? You seem almost afraid of me.”
“No! … I mean I don’t know. I mean I wasn’t expecting to see you. …”
“I hope it’s not an unpleasant surprise. Is it unpleasant?”
“No. I just … I already told you everything, that’s all.”
“You like Chinese food?” I guided the car toward a restaurant with rearing dragons at the eaves and a sign for kosher Chinese tacos.
“It’s okay, I guess.”
