The Plant

interoffice memo
TO: Roger FROM: John RE: True Tales of Demon Infestations, by Carlos Detweiller

Detweiller's manuscript came this morning, wrapped in shopping bags, secured with twine (much of it broken), and apparently typed by someone with terrible motor control problems. It is every bit as bad as I feared-abysmal, beyond hope.

That could and should be the end, but some of the photos he enclosed are intensely disturbing, Roger-and this is no joke, so please don't treat it as one. They are a weird conglomeration of black-and-white glossies (made with a Nikon, I would guess), color slides (ditto Nikon), and Polaroid SX-70 shots. Most of them are ridiculous-middle-aged men and women either got up in black bathrobes with cabalistic designs sewn on them or middle-aged men and women in nothing at all, displaying skinny shanks, dangling breasts, and pot bellies. They look exactly like what you'd guess the folks of Central Falls would imagine a Black Mass should look like (in some of them there is a much younger man who is probably Detweiller himself-this young man is always shot from the rear or with his face in deep shadow), and the locale appears, in most cases, to be a greenhouse-associated with the florist's where Detweiller told me he works, I imagine.

There's one packet of six photos labelled “The Sakred Seance” which show plasmic manifestations so obviously faked it's pitiful (what appears to be a balloon frosted with Day-Glo paint is floating from the medium's fingertips). A third packet of photos (all SX-70 shots) are textbook-style “exhibit” shots of various plants which purport to be deadly nightshade, belladonna, virgin's hair, etc. (impossible for me to tell if the labels are accurate-I can't tell a maple tree from a ponderosa pine without help; Ruth would probably know).

Okay, the disturbing part. Some of the photos (four, to be completely accurate) in the “Black Mass” scenes purport to show a human sacrifice-and it looks to me as if maybe they really did kill someone. The first photo shows an old man with an extremely realistic expression of terror on his face lying spread-eagled on a table in the greenhouse I mentioned. Several people in hokey robes are holding him down. The young man I presume to be Carlos Detweiller is standing on the left, naked, with what looks like a Bowie knife. The second shows the knife plunging into the old fellow's chest; in the third, the man I presume to be Detweiller is reaching into the chest cavity; in the last he is holding up a dripping thing for the others to look at. The dripping thing looks very much like a human heart.

The pictures could be complete hokum, and I'd be the first to admit it-a half-decent special effects man could cobble up something like this, I suppose, especially in stills... but the efforts to mislead in the other photos are so painfully obvious that I wonder if that can be.

Just glancing at them is enough to make me want to whoops my cookies, Roger-what if we've stumbled onto a bunch of people who are really practicing human sacrifice? Mass murder, perhaps? I'm nauseated, but right now I'm more scared than anything else. I could have told you all of this in person, of course, but it seemed important to get this down in writing, just in case it does turn out to be a legal matter. Christ, I wish I'd never even heard of Carlos Fucking Detweiller.

Come down and take a look at these as soon as you possibly can, okay? I just don't know if I should pick up the phone and call the police in Central Falls or not.

John