They

Chapter Nine

FRANK BLACK DROVE a car that didn’t fit his image: a dark, four door Saturn sedan. There was a baby seat in the back, positioned in the middle. Frank looked more like the type of guy that would drive something sleek and powerful; a Corvette, a TransAm, a Camaro, a Jaguar. Something sporty and powerful. A Saturn suggested he was a family man; it also eased the tension from Vince. A guy driving a Saturn with a baby-seat in the back wasn’t the kind of guy that was going to lure you somewhere so you could be murdered. Vince was about to ask Frank if he was married and had a kid, but decided not to. He wanted to hear about Laura more than anything.

They drove around Irvine for ten minutes, making small talk as Vince navigated Frank around the city, trying to find someplace they could pull over. Frank didn’t want to talk in a public place like a bar or restaurant, and he was reluctant to go to Vince’s home, and especially his office. Vince thought it was odd that a man that looked like he wouldn’t be afraid of anything could be so nervous and scared about talking to him about Laura and the mystery surrounding his mother’s death. But then his mother had been pretty paranoid in the end, hadn’t she?

For the first five minutes, Vince’s heart raced with nervousness. He still didn’t know what Frank was up to, what his motives were, and he was tense every time the big man moved or said anything. His stomach knotted itself as they drove; Vince had an insane thought that the man was going to drive him out to a remote section of Irvine or Laguna Hills and do something hideous: beat him up, torture and kill him. Why he thought this he hadn’t the slightest idea, but he supposed it had to do with the strange nature in which the man had suddenly stepped back into his life. Why would you track down a boyhood pal you hadn’t seen in over twenty-five years and then behave real paranoid around him? It didn’t make sense.

Frank checked the rearview mirrors constantly as they drove. Apparently his paranoia wasn’t limited to just Vince being followed.

Vince relaxed more as he realized Frank was following his street directions in finding a quiet spot to pull over. Vince remembered a small park that was near a library and the Town Hall. He directed Frank to it and they drove in silence as the Saturn purred down the suburban streets. It was a nice, warm day. The sky was blue with specks of white fluffy clouds scattered about, and there was a nice offshore breeze blowing from the west. It was probably close to eighty degrees and it was only twelve o’clock. Vince figured he could get away with being away from the office until at least two, so he hoped Frank would tell him what was on his mind so Vince could go about the task of asking his own questions.

They approached MacArthur Boulevard, and Vince directed Frank across the intersection. The park was just ahead of them, to the right. Frank pulled the Saturn into a parking slot away from other cars and killed the engine. Outside, a group of kids played scratch baseball in the open field of the park. To their right a group of women were seated at a picnic table scurrying about like busy bees, unloading baskets of food and talking as children played around them and on the playground. In short, it was a normal summer afternoon in the park.

Frank turned toward Vince, his mirror shades menacing in the closed space. “Okay, I think we’ll be cool here.”

“Nobody followed us?” Vince asked. He felt silly asking, but it seemed like a joke to him. He tried not to let his skepticism creep into his tone of voice.

“No,” Frank said. Then he jumped right into the subject at hand. “Do you remember any part of our childhood?”

“I thought you were going to tell me about my mother?” Vince asked, the cockiness of their earlier encounter at the restaurant creeping in. “And what do you know about Laura being—”

“First things first,” Frank said, holding up one leather clad hand to halt Vince’s flow of questions. “I’ll get to your questions as soon as I can. I promise. Please, just bear with me. How much of our childhood do you remember?”

Vince sighed and backed off from his confrontational stance, realizing it wasn’t going to get him anywhere. Might as well play Frank’s game his way. “I just remember snatches of it.”

“Like what?”

Vince shrugged. “Kindergarten through second grade basically. I remember playing with a bunch of other kids after school. I think you were one of them. There was a little girl with blond hair… our parents were friends with her parents—”

“Nellie,” Frank said. At the mention of that long lost childhood name of the little girl Vince had played with, he felt a sense of nostalgia.

“Yes,” Vince said.

“What else?”

“I remember…” Vince thought hard about this, dredging up long buried memories. “Just various people that used to come by. I don’t remember who they were.”

“Do you remember any names?”

“Just you and Nellie,” Vince said, trying hard to dredge his memory. “I remember a guy named Tom… I think he was your father.”

“He wasn’t my father,” Frank said, almost spitting the words out. “He had a hand in raising me, but he wasn’t my father.”

“I remember an older guy. An Uncle I think.” His searching mind unearthed the name. “Sammy, I think his name was? Uncle Sammy? That sounds weird, but—”

At the mention of Uncle Sammy, Frank turned away from Vince, his hands gripping the steering wheel. He appeared to be visibly affected, as if he’d just heard a set of fingernails being scratched against a chalkboard. “That’s Samuel Garrison,” he said, softly. “Yeah, you got that right. What else?”

Knowing that the mention of Samuel Garrison bothered Frank immensely and wondering why, he plunged on. “There were others, I don’t remember all their names. There was an older couple named Paul and Opal… that’s an old fashioned-sounding name, isn’t? Opal? I remember a black guy, real thin, friendly… a real cool dude. Sharp dresser. I think his name was Bobby. There were a couple of young guys that my dad used to hang out with. Maybe it was my mom’s boyfriend. I’m still not so sure who my dad was . They looked like hippies. A lot of the people that used to come around were kinda hippie like, but they were also respectable. You know, normal looking.”

Frank was nodding. “You remember more than I thought you would then. Much more.”

“I remember you and I used to play together,” Vince continued. “We used to play with Nellie and a couple other kids in my neighborhood. Sometimes there were kids whose parents our folks hung out with. I don’t remember their names.”

“I remember them, too,” Frank said. “I don’t remember names much myself. I had to dredge them up with the help of regression therapy.” He motioned to Vince. “What else?”

Vince shrugged. “Just… it all ended. We moved, and you weren’t around anymore for some reason. I don’t remember why. Or maybe it was you and your folks moved.” He concentrated, trying to remember. “Yeah, I think that’s right. My mother told me you and your folks moved.” He looked at Frank. “Is that right?”

“Pretty much,” Frank said, looking out the window idly, as if he didn’t want to answer Vince’s question. He turned to Vince. “Anything else?”

Vince tried to remember but he couldn’t. The images floated in his mind, intermingling with the dreams: the darkness dream, the dream in which the weird man tried to kill him. They all swirled in his head like a kaleidoscope. He felt weird telling Frank all of this, especially since he barely knew the man, but then it was Frank Black, his childhood friend. There’d been a bond between them twenty-five years ago, almost brotherly like, and despite the long gap of not seeing him he felt he could tell Frank everything. He told Frank a watered down version of his mother suddenly packing him up in the middle of the night and moving back east. He related what he remembered about the drive. “Now that I think back on it, I get the feeling that my mother was running from something out here,” he said. “What she was running from, I don’t know. But I remember how nervous she was during the drive. Her determination to put as many miles down every day, her insistence that we stay in out-of-the-way motels, our changing cars every few states.”

Frank nodded through the narrative as Vince continued. He summed up their arrival in New York, then their move to Toronto, and then the move to Pennsylvania. He left out the stuff about his mother becoming increasingly fanatical in her religious views. He didn’t want to taint Frank’s ears with his theory that he believed mother had skipped California so suddenly because she’d angered some cultish hippies. It was his own pet theory he’d developed in the last day or two and he wanted to see what Frank knew about his mother before he voiced this opinion.

“That’s it. What about you?”

Frank looked out at the park, noting the activity around them. He looked in the rear and side view mirrors, as if checking to see if they were being observed. It made Vince a little uneasy. Then he keyed the ignition to activate the battery and pressed the power window button; it slid down. He turned the ignition off and settled back in his seat, twiddling with the keys. “When you say that you thought I’d moved,” he began, “it isn’t really the whole truth. The truth was, I was taken out of my home and placed in foster care and my parents were jailed for abusing me.”

It didn’t surprise Vince. Maybe it was the air of dysfunction that seemed to permeate around the man. Now that he thought about it, he recalled that Frank’s mother, Gladys, and his stepfather had been pretty strict. He remembered thinking to himself once that he would have hated to live with them. While he never actually saw them physically strike Frank, the implication was always there. Mom used to always say Frank was “a bad kid,” and he certainly remembered the older boy as being sullen and troubled. This new revelation explained it.

Frank took off his shades. His eyes were dark brown and piercing. They were haunted, liquid pools of pain. “What I have to tell you is pretty heavy stuff. It’s… going to sound pretty crazy to you.”

“Nothing sounds too crazy,” Vince said, thinking back on the past week of hell he went through regarding his mother’s death and the attempt on his life.

Frank looked at Vince, then cast his eyes out at the circle of women around the picnic table, as if contemplating how to begin. “Before I was sent to the foster home something really weird happened that… I guess sort of precipitated the beating I received that eventually led to the arrest of my parents. A classmate of mine, a guy I remember quite well named Larry, was with me one day after school. I was in the third grade. We were playing together outside and my dad came home. He was furious that Larry was at the house. I wasn’t supposed to have guests over unless they were what he termed ‘pre-approved’; you and Nellie, kids that were the progeny of our parent’s friends. Kids from the neighborhood or from school were a no-no. He blew his top and began wailing on me. Larry got scared and ran into the house—my house. That neighborhood we lived in, if you remember, consisted of older homes.”

Vince nodded.

Frank continued. “Some of those houses had little basements. Ours was one of them. Larry made his way to the basement where I later found out he stumbled upon a woman’s corpse.”

A sharp intake of breath from Vince. “Jesus,” he said.

“He scrambled back up the stairs and out the back door just as my step-dad was dragging me into the house. He beat me up real bad, and when it was over the police were there. Larry’s folks had called them.” He looked up at Vince. “Guess what they didn’t find?”

“The body,” Vince said.

“You got it,” Frank said, almost deadpan. “They didn’t find a body. I had no idea until later that that’s why they came to the house. How my stepfather managed to get rid of it before the cops showed up, I still don’t know, but—”

“Wait,” Vince broke in. “How could you even be certain there was a body in the basement. Maybe this Larry kid was just… scared and out of his mind with what he saw happen to you.”

“That’s what I always used to think,” Frank said. “Until just lately.”

A slight shiver coursed down Vince’s spine.

Frank continued his narrative. “They didn’t find a body, but they did find evidence of physical abuse against me. They took me out of the house and placed my folks under arrest. I was in and out of foster homes for three or four years. When my folks got out of jail, they sent me to El Paso, Texas, to live with my paternal aunt and uncle and their kids. I didn’t know them very well at the time, since I rarely saw my dad’s side of the family. In fact, I barely remember my real dad. It’s only been recently that I’ve learned more about him.”

Vince’s heart was thudding. Could it be that their fathers were the same men? “What about your father?”

“Long story,” Frank said, dismissing it with a wave of one leather gloved hand. “I’ll get to that in due time. The basic story I got was that my father left my mom when I was three. That’s all I knew. It’s only been within the last year that I’ve discovered that my father didn’t leave so much as that he was… driven away. I’m… still doing some research on this, and don’t want to go too much into it now, if that’s okay.” He cocked a glance at Vince.

Vince shrugged. “Fine.”

“Okay.” Frank sighed and continued. “I went to live with my dad’s sister and her husband and my cousins, and I eventually left for Hollywood when I was sixteen. I wanted to be a musician, and I was in a band that came out here to try to make it in the music industry. To make a long story short, I lived on the streets for a while, sold drugs, became an alcoholic and a heroin addict, spent time in jail—the whole nine yards. I used people and people used me. I’m not proud of it.” He paused briefly, as if those memories of his past life were causing pain. “I lived in New York City for awhile and later moved to New Jersey. When I got clean, I came back out here. I’ve always had a knack for telling stories and writing, and I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, probably as a psychological method of escaping what I was going through. Makes sense, now that I think about it. Most of my stuff is fantasy and science fiction. Anyway, I started selling stories professionally when I was nineteen, and was already building a pretty reputable name for myself as a science fiction writer when I blew it with my addiction. I managed to get it all back, and now I’m doing pretty good. I’ve got a short story collection coming out this summer, and the third installment of a trilogy due out next winter. I’ve just started a new novel, and a screenplay I wrote has been optioned. I’m married to a beautiful successful woman who I adore above all of God’s creations. I have a three-year old son and a baby daughter. Things are going better for me now than I can ever ask for. And I wonder why I would want to jeopardize all that by… finding you and going through with all this.”

His voice became brittle, verging on that cracking edge of anger and despair. He turned away from Vince and rested his arms against the steering wheel. His breathing became heavier. “All this… stuff just started emerging during therapy over the past six months. I haven’t seen or spoken to my mother or stepfather in almost twenty years, and I remember the names and faces of my childhood with such clarity that it’s almost as if I can step back into that world and relive the horror I thought I’d escaped. It’s pretty surprising considering the amount of dope I shot up to deaden those images.” He paused, his face quivering as he looked out the windshield. “Goddamn,” he muttered, tears pooling in his eyes. He slammed his fist down on the dashboard. “Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn!”

Each “goddamn” was punctuated with a pounding of his fist on the dashboard. He lowered his head to the steering wheel, his long black hair draped over his heavily tattooed arms and shoulders, struggling to compose himself. Vince felt leaden, as if he was a spectator in a film he’d been cast in that he hadn’t rehearsed for. He felt awkward sitting in this car while the owner, who looked like he could snap the vehicle in two with his bare hands, struggled to keep from weeping. Vince sat still while Frank reined his tears in, trying to not seem so conspicuous.

When Frank was finished he wiped his eyes with the back of his gloved hands and smoothed his hair back. He turned to Vince. “I’m sorry. It’s just that… thinking about this… remembering the hell I went through… what it made me, just…” He let it drift into an incomplete sentence, as if he didn’t know how to finish.

Vince nodded, uncomfortable. “It’s all right. I’ve been going through my own personal hell as well. But I guess you already know about that.”

“Yeah,” Frank said, looking out at the park again, then back at Vince. “I do.” His deep brown eyes held secrets that wanted to spill forth.

Vince was going to try asking Frank what he knew about his mother and Laura’s death, what he knew about the attempt on his own life, when the bigger man began again. “Do you have dreams about being in a dark room and candles are burning all over the place? And there’s a strange humming sound and black hooded figures move closer to you? And they’re chanting?”

Vince’s stomach turned over in his stomach, as if dropped down an elevator. The chanting dream! “How do you know about that?” he breathed.

“I have them, too.”

Vince looked surprised. “You? Wh… why?”

“I was there with you, Vince. That’s why I remember a little bit more of it than you. We were both there. Along with Nellie, and some of the other kids we used to play with. They stopped bringing us to them when I was five or six, but they continued the ceremonies themselves.”

“Ceremonies? I don’t understand—”

“Our parents were involved, Vince. Mine. Yours. A group of twenty or more people. Samuel Garrison was their leader. I even remember the sacrifices.”

A bolt of memory flashed through his mind. “Sacrifices?”

“Yes. I know it’s hard to believe, but—”

“Your parents were devil worshippers?”

“Not just my parents, Vince. Yours, too.”

THIS SUDDEN REVELATION drained Vince. He needed a drink.

Frank suggested they get out and wander over to the recreation center. There would be soft drink vending machines there. They walked across the park to the recreation center, not speaking, both lost in their own thoughts. Vince bought a Coke, Frank a Dr. Pepper, and they walked back to the car, the summer sun beating down over them as they made their way back to the vehicle. The shouting laughs of playing took Vince back to the summer he remembered spending in California that was clearest in his memory. Seven years old and playing outside with the neighborhood kids, delighting in afternoon games of hide-and-seek, playing Dinosaurs, watching cartoons. Mom and Dad working, spending his days with Nellie and her folks, chasing after the ice cream man in his carnival-music-sounding truck as it drove slowly down the street as sprinklers showered summer lawns with cool water to run and play in. It was a magical time that seemed to last forever.

When they got back to the car, they climbed back in and sat in the stillness for a moment, savoring their soft drinks. Vince broke the silence. “It’s just so… hard to believe.”

“I know,” Frank said, sipping his Dr. Pepper. He turned to Vince. “And I’m sorry you had to find out about this. Especially after your mother died.”

“Are you sure my mother was involved?” Vince turned to Frank, imploring him to tell the truth. Don’t lie. He hadn’t had a lot of respect for his mother in the last ten years of her life, and he could accept anything about her regardless of how hideous. But this? Devil worship? It was beyond him. She’d been so… fundamentally Christian.

But then maybe that explained it.

Frank nodded. “I thought the memories were planted by the therapist I was seeing. I thought they were the result of my drug use. I didn’t know what to believe. But the more I thought about it, the more it began to make sense in a sick sort of way. I started thinking back on what I could remember that’d happened to me and place them with what I knew. It wasn’t until I started doing my own research into the occult that I found out a lot more. A whole lot more.”

“Like what?”

“So much that you can’t even imagine,” Frank began.

“My mother was killed by a devil cult I think,” Vince broke in, the words just tumbling out as everything began to come together. “The local detectives just think it’s some twisted kid or something, but… hearing all of this really ties it all in.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Frank said. “When I heard about your mother, I knew they’d tracked her down. And that’s why I had to get to you before they did.”

“But who are they?” Vince admonished. “I still don’t understand all that’s happening.”

“Okay, first things first.” Frank took a sip of Dr. Pepper, put the can in a holder between the bucket seats. “You need to know some background, how I came to find you and know about all this stuff. Okay?”

Vince nodded; he wanted to ask Frank why this cult would want him dead, but he remained silent. He took a sip of Coke, sat back and waited for Frank to begin.

“When I began my research into the occult, it was because of the repressed memories and dreams I was having that were coming out during therapy. At first I thought it was bullshit. The dreams actually first started coming sporadically about three years before I went into therapy. I wrote a novel loosely based on them called Darkness Inside. I thought I was purging the dreams when I wrote that novel. The dreams became a flood when the book was published, and that’s when I sought therapy. I thought I had another idea for a book—in fact, I’ve written several things based on these dreams, but we don’t need to go there. What you need to know is what I found in my research.”

He took another sip of Dr. Pepper and continued. “When I started doing my research I realized that there were many different kinds of satanic cults. There’s the usual group of stoned teenagers who have maybe listened to a little too much Danzig or Marilyn Manson, smoked too much dope and think Satan is cool and form an informal coven out of a sense of camaraderie. Most of the time these groups are harmless. Sometimes they cross the line into vandalism and other petty crimes. Sometimes they cross the line further and sacrifice neighborhood pets. Very rarely do they cross that line into killing people. Most often they’ll do blood ceremonies where they prick their fingers, squeeze blood into a chalice and drink it as their benediction. For the most part, these groups are very unorganized. Their theology is largely made up as they go along, but they usually find inspiration in black metal bands, horror movies, and a snippet from The Satanic Bible. In short, they’re usually formed out of rebellion.”

“The Satanic Bible?” Vince was amazed. “You mean one actually exists?”

“That’s where the second group of Satanists comes in,” Frank said. “That would be the ‘legitimate’ satanic groups.” He emphasized the word legitimate by moving his fingers in the air: Quote, unquote. “I call these groups legitimate because they have taken the pains to register their organizations as institutional religions, and have even gone so far as to advertise themselves in local phone books. Groups like the Church of Satan, the Temple of Set. Both of these groups revolve around the basic belief structure of The Satanic Bible, which was written in the late sixties by Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey. LaVey passed away almost two years ago and the reins have now been handed down to his companion, Blanche Barton and his oldest daughter, Karla. The group itself is basically atheist. They don’t even believe in the Devil, much less God. They use Satan as a symbol of man’s carnal, natural instincts and behavior, and encourage this through ritual designed to appeal to man’s basic Jungian need for religious ritual. To the LaVeyan Satanist, you,” he pointed at Vince, “are your highest God, thus if you are a LaVeyan Satanist you worship yourself.”

Vince was soaking this in. “Wow! I’ve never heard of this.”

Frank managed a small grin. “Satanism in this context is somewhat misleading. In actuality, it is a philosophy of Jungian ritual and social Darwinism that seeks to appeal to man’s basic’s instincts. LaVey was very heavily influenced by a German philosopher named Frederick Neitchze and utilized his concepts and philosophies when formulating his church’s beliefs. While LaVeyan Satanists use the traditional trappings of the occult like the Baphomet symbol and invoke Satan and various demons in their rituals, these are only used symbolically. Despite what born-again Christians may think, LaVeyan Satanists are harmless. They don’t believe in killing innocent people, or animals or children, nor do they engage in the type of behavior that your average born-again might like you to believe. In fact, they explicitly disapprove of such behavior. They’re very law-abiding people.”

He continued, holding up three fingers. “Then, there is the third kind of Satanist, the kind that most of our current myths of devil cults are based on. The more traditional form of Satanism, I guess you could say. Traditional in that unlike the legitimate Satanists, these groups, or group in this case, really believes in the Christian Devil and God, and they worship him the way Catholics pay homage to Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Unlike the LaVeyan Satanists, they whole-heartedly believe in blood sacrifice and they practice it. They are hold-overs from the old European devil cults of the Middle Ages and their sole purpose in life is the total destruction of not only Christianity, but man in general. It has been suggested by various groups that this group is largely imaginary, that it has been fostered for years by the Christian church and doesn’t exist, except in the minds of those who wish to believe in them.”

He paused for a moment, his eyes riveted on Vince. “To a certain extent, the skeptics are right. Fundamentalist Christians who specialize in writing about the occult from a Christian standpoint claim Satanists kill 50,000 people a year in ritual killings. That’s twice the number of the average homicide rate. They also claim they’re responsible for the majority of missing person’s cases and the list goes on. Most of what they say about Satanism is pure bullshit.” He leveled his gaze down, took a sip of Dr Pepper. “But unfortunately, a group like this does exist. They aren’t responsible for 50,000 murders a year. And they aren’t involved in the majority of kidnappings and child molestations that occur, either. They don’t run all the day care centers in America and rape our children. But they do exist, they can—and do—kill, and they are so powerful you wouldn’t believe it. It is this last group that our folks were involved with. A group that has been gaining strength since the late sixties and is now established all over the country and in many parts of the world. They worship not only Satan, but a god that is even older than Satan, a god that was worshipped when man was just a primitive ape with no language skills. This god is almost unknown to everybody but an elite sect of devil worshippers and these people are very secretive, very real, and very dangerous.”

All of this was coming at Vince so fast that it was hard to process, much less believe. He took another sip of Coke, his mind racing with a thousand questions. “I just have one question. If you found out my mother was killed and you feel she was killed by… one of them… how can you be so sure they don’t know about me yet?”

“I made extra sure of that, trust me,” Frank said, sipping his Dr. Pepper and looking out at the park beyond.

“Are you sure? Because… if you’re sure they don’t know about me, then who was the guy that tried to kill me yesterday at John Wayne Airport?”

“What’s that?” Frank raised his eyebrows, interested.

Vince told Frank a simplified version of what happened at John Wayne Airport. Frank reacted visibly; he actually went pale. “Fuck,” he said, one gloved hand rubbing his mouth. “You’ve got to be kidding. And the cops say they’ve got somebody in custody?”

Vince nodded. “Yeah. One of the detectives I’ve been working with is supposed to call me this afternoon with more info.”

“This changes everything, then.” Frank glanced in the mirrors, once again making Vince paranoid as well. “I’m gonna have to tell Mike about this.”

“Who’s Mike?”

“A friend of my father’s. He and I have been working on this for the past six months or so. He’s the one that did the extra surveillance on you and determined they hadn’t gotten to you yet. Obviously, they have. Shit!”

Frank’s mood had darkened considerably since this bit of news, and Vince sought to steer his mind back to the task at hand; he needed to know everything Frank knew. “Tell me about Mike.”

Frank continued looking out the windows and into his rear and side view mirrors. “He contacted me over a year ago. He’d been researching my father’s disappearance. You see, my mother originally left my father when I was about three years old. She just packed me up and moved to San Francisco and she took me with her. From what I’ve been able to gather, she wasn’t a member of the cult yet, but she was exposed to them in the Bay Area. My dad tracked us down and things get kind of fuzzy there.” He turned back to Vince. “He essentially disappeared for two years. He turned up later in El Paso. He was… all fucked up. Severe mental problems. My aunt Diane and Uncle Charlie tried to help him out, but he took off again a year or so later and nobody’s seen him since. Anyway, a few years ago, my dad’s best friend from when he was a kid, Mike Peterson, decides to do some of his own detective work. And he found out more than he cared to know. He was the one that initially found out the basic information on the cult. He tracked me down and asked if I wanted to help him. At first I didn’t, but by then I was having the dreams. So I agreed. It was through my memories that you and your mother came into the picture. I didn’t remember your names but therapy helped that, and even now I’m surprised I was still able to find you the way I did.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t remember you as Vince Walters,” Frank said. “I remember you as Andy and your mother as Margaret. Your name is… or was… Andrew Swanson.”

At the mention of the name Vince felt a weird sense of deja vu. Andrew Swanson. The name came to him so effortlessly, so easy. It was as if the long missing piece to a puzzle had been finally inserted in its place again. He felt whole and complete.

“Andy,” he let the name roll off his tongue.

“Trouble was, we couldn’t find you,” Frank said, turning back in his seat again and facing Vince. “We tried every method of skip tracing known to man. So do you know what we did?”

“What?”

“Several things.” He brought the old photograph of him and Vince out and held it up. “We scanned this into a computer and with the aid of a sketch artist I know, he aged your picture to make you appear as you might look now.” Frank grinned. “Scott was pretty damn accurate.”

Vince managed a small grin.

“Next, I remembered you were good in math and sports. I thought this would be a long shot, so I checked at the local universities and colleges first. Our plan was to search colleges and universities statewide, but I thought I would try California first, since it seemed the easiest thing to do. I had them compile a database of alumni from the years 1985 to 1992, years I figured you would be attending college if you enrolled, and I asked them to pay close attention to math majors, computer science majors, and accounting or business management majors. I also paid attention to those students that excelled in sports or maybe gained sports scholarships. The database spit out a list, and Mike and I narrowed it down to several hundred thousand candidates.” He laughed. “Quite a lot, I know, but it didn’t take us that long to go through it. We obtained school photos and began comparing, which helped whittle down the list. And we found a match right away. A University of California at Irvine alumni by the name of Vincent F. Walters, graduating class of 1988. From the small town of Lititz, Pennsylvania where he had previously lived with his mother, Maggie Walters.”

Vince sipped at his Coke, amazed that he’d not only been tracked down so deftly, but that the pieces were slowly coming in place. “The rest was simple,” Frank said, sipping his Dr. Pepper. “We found out where you lived, did some background work on you and your mom, and started doing some background work on your close friends and co-workers to make sure they hadn’t found you yet.”

“You did background checks on my friends?”

“We had to,” Frank said. “In order to make sure the group hadn’t found you. We found out about your wife’s death and checked it out as much as we could. There’s no physical evidence they had anything to do with it, but if you know their history you could see that they might have had a hand in it. They’re experts at making deaths seem like accidents. Defectors from the group always wind up dying from them. One such accident was very similar to Laura’s—his car just suddenly veered off a highway at fifty-five miles an hour and he died in the crash. By all accounts, the guy was a good driver, the car was in top shape, and he had no health problems. And there were no other cars involved—plenty of witnesses testified to that. They just…”

Vince finished for him. “It’s like they maybe used some kind of supernatural power to make the car lose control. Right?”

Frank nodded. “Yeah. Sounds crazy, huh?”

“And you think they got to Laura this way? Why?”

“It’s just a theory,” Frank explained quickly. “From what we were able to gather, they seemed to have no knowledge of your new identity. So it seems unlikely they had anything to do with Laura. What happened to Laura was tragic and unfortunate and probably not their doing. And… I know this is gonna fuck with your head, but it just seems so unlikely they had anything to do with this incident at the airport. That just isn’t their style, but then I could be wrong. If they were going to get to you, they would have done so through your friends. That’s why we had them checked out. Yeah, your wife’s death was probably an accident, but we couldn’t be sure of that, know what I mean?”

Vince shook his head. The whole thing sounded like an Ian Fleming novel. “You checked out my friends!”

“Brian Saunders and Tracy Harris seem okay,” Frank said. “At least on the surface, but then so does everybody else in your life. So does your shrink, Dr. Cartwright. Likewise, Laura’s parents in Kansas checked out okay too—”

“You did background checks on my in-laws?” Vince snapped. A hot flush crept up the back of his neck. Now he was getting irritated and more than a little angry.

Frank held up his gloved hands. “I’m sorry. We had to. You have no idea how good these people are at blending in with society, leading double lives that are all but unknown to those they’re close to when they parade around wearing their masks of normalcy. We had to make sure that—”

“This is starting to sound like a bunch of private eye bullshit!” Vince spat. “What the hell do you think you can accomplish by telling me this? Who the hell do you think you are to butt into my life, invade my privacy?”

Strong hands grabbed Vince’s shirt and pulled him toward Frank. The bigger man scowled as he held Vince firmly in his grip, rumpling his clothes. “You listen to me, goddamnit! I’ve got more than our lives at stake here on this. I’ve got my wife and kids to think about, too. If they were already onto you and I come poking around, they’d find out, find out who I am, then go after my wife and kids and kill them. So don’t you come to me with your whiney bullshit about your pathetic loss of your privacy!”

Frank let go of Vince and turned back to the front of the car. Vince slumped in his seat breathing heavy, his heart beating fast. He’d been taken aback by Frank’s sudden outburst and it scared him. He looked at Frank and realized he was dealing with the real thing here. The man was serious and it might be beneficial if he just kept his feelings in check and listened to what he had to say.

“I’m sorry,” Vince began, softly at first, then more assertive. “Look, I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to be so… pissy about what you said. I just freaked out. I’ve… never had anybody poke into my life like that and I guess I just felt… I don’t know… violated.”

Frank regarded him from his seat, his eyes dark and piercing. Vince noticed for the first time that Frank’s sudden assault had spilled some of his soft drink on his slacks. He wiped at the dampness with his hand as he put his can in the cup holder on his side of the seat.

“I am not trying to fuck with you, Vince,” Frank breathed through gritted teeth. “If you don’t want to know anymore about your mother or why she was killed, just tell me and I’ll take you back to the mall and we can forget this whole thing.”

“No,” Vince exclaimed, forgetting the stain on his pants. “Don’t do that. I’m sorry. Really. I won’t do it again.”

There was silence for a moment as the tension eased. Frank remained hunched over the steering wheel, head bowed, eyes closed. Finally he let out a big sigh and lifted his head. He looked at Vince through haunted, bloodshot eyes. “Okay.”

Vince sighed, relaxing. He felt better now that the tension had died down. “You were saying that I checked out.”

Frank nodded. “Yes, you did. From what we’ve been able to gather, they haven’t come in contact with you yet. That still doesn’t mean they don’t know who you are. They very well could, which is why I’m being such a paranoid bastard. What happened to you and Tracy is just totally unexpected.”

Frank continued with his narrative. “Before we even started looking for you, we did some checking on Samuel Garrison. That was easy. I remembered he was involved in big business, that he owned some big corporation, but I didn’t remember exactly what kind. Who remembers that kind of shit when they’re nine years old? Mike and I sifted through back issues of the Wall Street Journal and various business magazines at the library until we found what we were looking for.” He leaned forward, fixing Vince with an intense eye. “Samuel F. Garrison is the leader of this group. He’s known as the Head Devil, or the Grand Chingon. He currently sits on the board of Directors of Cyberlink Systems, Corporate Financial Consulting Group—”

At the sound of Corporate Financial Consulting Group, Vince flinched. He felt his stomach turn into a knot. Frank noticed. “Don’t think we didn’t notice that you work for them. That’s why we really went to town on your background check. We thought maybe they’d found out about you long before you applied for that position. From what we can tell, everybody at Corporate Financial is clean, from top to bottom.”

The coincidence was striking, though. And disturbing. “Go on,” Vince said. “He sits on the board for my employer. What other companies is he on the board for?

“He also sits on the board for Al Azif Oil and Commodities and he is also the CEO and Chairman of the Board of Garrison Enterprises and Real Estate. You may have heard of them.”

Vince’s mind was racing. He’d heard of Cyberlink and Al Azif; Corporate Financial was their top client. “Garrison owns most of the shopping malls in Orange County, don’t they?”

Frank was nodding. “And the land that several buildings in Costa Mesa are on, most of them insurance and financial firms. They also own the Orange Coast Theater and a string of hotels. They’re very big. But here’s the thing that worried Mike and me. Garrison once served as CEO of Corporate Financial.”

Vince blinked in surprise. A flutter rose in him. “What?”

“Yeah, no shit. You don’t know that?”

Vince shook his head. “No. I don’t. My knowledge of what happens where I work is confined to my division and the executive branch. I get the quarterly reports and stuff, and I know there’s a list of the current board of directors somewhere in my office, but I’ve never paid attention to it.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Frank said. “As you can imagine, when we learned this we freaked. It certainly made our mission more critical.”

“I can see why,” Vince said, the flutter in his belly growing colder. He turned to Frank. “Should I be worried? I mean, are you sure they don’t know about me?”

Frank nodded. “The headhunter that recruited you has no ties to any of Garrison’s companies. Their current executives have spotless records when it comes to dealing with Garrison’s former and current companies. It’s just a coincidence—a pretty fucking weird coincidence, I gotta admit, but it was too close for comfort.”

“So what about this Samuel Garrison?”

“He’s a killer,” Frank said, his face dark, unbroken by the comment. “He’s in charge of an international organization of killers, drug cartels, pornographers, white slave leaders. You name it, he has his hand in it some way.”

Vince took another sip of his Coke. “This is all so crazy. It’s like something out of Geraldo Rivera or something.”

“That’s why they’re so successful at hiding it,” Frank continued. “It sounds crazy to most people, therefore, they refuse to believe it. That enables them to carry on with their activities. They’ve also got people planted in various law enforcement and government organizations that make sure all their tracks are covered.”

It sounded like something out of the mind of a paranoid End-of-the-World wacko. Vince held his tongue.

“Once Mike and I identified the group we stepped back and started doing research at the library, looking through microfilm of old newspapers. We couldn’t find any proof or evidence this group exists. Not a bit.”

Vince shrugged. “They sound pretty secretive.”

“They are,” Frank said, taking a sip of Dr. Pepper. “I contacted the LAPD under the guise of an investigative reporter. I told him I was doing a book on unsolved crimes to connect some of the murders I’d witnessed—”

“You witnessed murders?”

“Oh yeah,” Frank said, matter-of-factly. He took another sip of Dr. Pepper. “I did.”

Vince leaned back in his seat, staring out at the park. His stomach was queasy. The more he listened, the more this was making him sick with dread.

“I got a chance to go through their files and do some poking around,” Frank went on. “I didn’t find anything. I spent a few weeks after that driving around in the Topanga Canyon area, Malibu, Mission Hills, Calabasas, Canyon Country. Beverly Hills and Bel Air. Just trying to jolt my mind. I remember spending time in a lot of those places when I was younger—Sam had a mansion in Bel Air, and I remember being there at a very young age. Anyway, I finally found something two weeks later: the house I’d lived in as a child, shortly after we moved back to Southern California.”

“Fountain Valley?” Vince asked, breathless.

“No, Tustin,” Frank said, taking another sip of Dr. Pepper. “Close enough, though. I spent a lot of time driving all over southern California trying to remember things, place locations with my memory. It wasn’t until I was driving in the Santa Ana Mountains that things started coming back. It was almost like I was being guided to the exact spot by some force. I remember driving past the cul-de-sac and something just popped into my mind and said that’s it! I made a U-turn and drove through the neighborhood and saw it immediately. My house.”

He breathed heavily and at first Vince thought Frank was going to collapse emotionally again. But he regained his composure and continued. “I ended up obtaining copies of the mortgage records and deed to the property of the current owners. I did a background check on them. They turned out to be normal. I decided against going to the house and knocking on the door, introducing myself, telling them I grew up there and that I was just passing through the neighborhood. But God, did I want to see the inside of that place. Despite the fact that I lived nightmares in that house, I just had to go in there.

“I spent the next two weeks shadowing the owners,” Frank continued, leaning back in his seat casually, looking out at the park. “I learned their habits, their whereabouts. Then one day when they weren’t home, I broke in.”

“You broke in?”

“Yeah. Holdover from my days as an addict when I used to break into houses and steal shit I could sell for dope. I managed to slip through the back. I must’ve sat in the living room for thirty minutes, letting old memories wash over me the way waves lap on the sand of a beach. Then I hit all the rooms. I didn’t take anything. Didn’t touch anything. Just walked around, letting the memories come to me as I entered each room.” He paused, struggling with the next bit of memory that was coming to the surface. “And then when I got to a room that was an addition to the house—it was set in the back and was sunk down into the foundation by a few feet—the last memory hit me hard.” His voice lowered, his face grew stony as he remembered that long ago incident. “I saw my parents. Your parents. Opal and Paul—you remember them?”

Vince nodded. Opal and Paul had been a sweet older couple, very grandparent-like in appearance. Vince used to like being with them.

“There were others you’d probably remember as well. You remember the people our folks used to get together with?”

Vince nodded, his own memories now flooding to the surface. The people that used to come to the house—friends of his mom and dad, co-workers, people he referred to as “Aunts” and “Uncles,” people he thought until recently had been blood family—memories of their faces swam to the surface of his mind.

“Your folks were there, too,” Frank continued. He was gripping the steering wheel hard. “I don’t remember what I was doing at the time. Maybe I woke up in the middle of the night and heard a noise. I think my folks used to drug me on nights they had ceremonies. I remember my mother used to give me a pill with a glass of water before I went to bed on certain nights. I’d sleep all the way through. But one night I must have woken up and heard something and stumbled onto what they were doing in the den and later blacked it out of my mind.”

“What was it?” Vince asked, breathless with dread.

“They were in the middle of a ceremony,” Frank said. “They were dressed in black robes and cowls. The room was dark, illuminated by several burning candles. They were grouped around something lying on the floor. When I got there I remembered a frenzied chanting, and then I heard a wet thud and a cry, almost like a cry of passion. The group was huddled around whatever was on the floor and they parted briefly, allowing me a brief glimpse.” Frank gulped once, turned to Vince. His eyes were wide liquid pools of fear. “It was a body. A young man, kinda hippie looking. He was naked and they’d just killed him, stabbed him in the chest. One of them was cutting into his chest with a knife, and as I watched I saw somebody pull out his heart and hold it up. The heart was still beating, blood was running down the man’s hands. And they were all chanting something weird, like one long continuous voice.” He paused briefly, his voice deadpan. “And then the guy brought the heart to his mouth and bit into it.”

Vince winced.

“And it was passed around and everybody bit into it, everybody ate a piece of it. And then they all fell on him, tearing into him, rolling in his body like some insane orgy.” Frank paused for breath. “I don’t remember how I got back to my room, but the next thing I remember I was sitting up in bed. I was sweaty all over. I thought I’d dreamed the whole thing and then I heard a sound and realized what it was. It was them. Making sounds. Grunting, horrible sounds.”

Vince watched Frank grapple with the memories he’d witnessed. Vince still had a hard time believing that what Frank just related was true. How could it not be, he thought, if his conviction of the events seems so real? The only thing that kept him from believing in Frank’s story wholeheartedly was the absurdity of it. To think that the supposed satanic group was as powerful as Frank said they were, and had avoided detection by law enforcement agencies thus far, suggested they boasted an intelligence system that exceeded the CIA’s.

But if you consider the spiritual nature of the story—which Vince had a hard time doing since he didn’t even believe in God or the Devil—perhaps there was some sort of infernal doings here.

Frank regained his composure and continued. “When this memory hit me it was like being sucker punched between the eyes. It literally knocked me down. I sat on the steps that led down to the den and just reeled with the intensity of it. And then I guess I lost it there for a minute. I was bawling like a baby, but more out of fear. I was so utterly petrified, so scared for my life you wouldn’t believe it. Until then I had sort of been coasting through this whole ordeal, accepting the fact that I had been physically and psychologically abused as a child, but still not accepting the whole Satanic thing. I guess you’re feeling the same way.”

Vince nodded. It was hard to grasp.

“But when this memory came back, I was floored. I’d never told my therapist about any suspicions I had about my parents being in a Satanic cult. The memories that always came up before were those of basic dysfunction; my dad striking me, the neglect I used to suffer. Nothing like this. And I realized then that the room I was standing in when this flashback occurred was the same room it happened in. That’s what triggered it. So I got out of the house as quickly as I could and drove to Mike’s place. Told him everything.”

They were silent for a moment, Vince digesting everything Frank had just told him. He finished his Coke and set the empty down in the cup holder. Frank sat forward in his seat, looking out at the park, sipping his Dr. Pepper. The afternoon sun was burning high overhead, and a scratch baseball game had started in the diamond to their left.

“Okay,” Vince said, breaking the silence. He turned to Frank. “So you put two and two together and came after me. And you have no hard, physical proof that any of this happened.”

Frank nodded. “Just my memories.”

Vince thought this over. “How much do you know about this group?”

“Too much and not enough.” Frank shifted around in his seat. He turned to Vince again. “The present lineage has been in existence since the 1960s. They’re called The Children of the Night. The earliest mention of the cult comes from the early part of this century, but it’s believed their links go back much further. I don’t have the time to get into ancient Sumerian and Babylonian occult teachings, but elements of their belief system and rituals go back to them, especially in regards to the Sumerian devil Hanbi.”

“Hanbi?” Vince asked. “What’s that?” His mind flashed back on that jumble of words written in his mother’s blood. That word had been one of them.

“My research on that isn’t complete yet,” Frank said. “In fact, it’s pretty fucking hard unless you can read ancient Sumerian. Hanbi is said to be the father of a more well known Sumerian God named Pazuzu, who was the devil-god of the southeastern wind and brought drought and pestilence. Ever see The Exorcist?”

Vince nodded.

“The little girl in that movie, Regan, was possessed by Pazuzu.”

“So… Pazuzu is just another name for the Devil?”

“That’s what it all boils down to.” Frank took a sip of his drink. “The devil has gone by numerous names throughout history. Azazel, Beelzebub, Shaitan, Behemoth, Satanael, Melek Taus. With each name he goes by a different appearance but he’s pretty much more or less the same.”

“A fallen angel,” Vince said, the Bible lessons his mother forced him to partake in coming to mind.

“So they say, but there’s a lot more to it than that. I’m still trying to chase that end down too. Needless to say, he’s been worshipped since the dawn of time. In fact, my evidence suggests he was worshipped well before our concept of God even developed.”

“Oh yeah?” Vince looked at Frank curiously.

“I’ll tell you more about that later. Let’s stick with what we’re going on now, which is the group our parents were involved with. The first tangible evidence of our group is from Europe around 1914. It’s alleged that Aleister Crowley associated with them and later left, some say, out of fear, which was out of character for Crowley. There’s evidence of cult activity in the U.S. in the 1920s, especially regarding the Archibald Lasher serial killing case in Los Angeles. By the 1940s, the cult was very active and it’s alleged that Adolf Hitler and several key SS personnel were members. The cult was largely inactive after World War II until the late 1960s. That’s when you had the End Times Church, who worshipped Jesus, God, and Satan simultaneously, their reason being that you can’t have one without the other, that all of them worked together in some sort of tandem. A group called the Four P Movement broke away from yet another cult, one called the Process Church of the Final Judgment and was largely blamed for the rise of cult killings in the US in the late sixties and early seventies. I studied both groups and that’s when I saw that The Children of the Night had re-emerged within this period. By then they’d seamlessly blended into the background of mainstream society. Folks like Charles Manson and his cult were popularly attributed to belonging to one or the other.”

“Oh yeah?” Victor had watched a documentary on Charles Manson a year or two before Laura’s murder.

“Yeah,” Frank said. “There’s no hard proof, of course, but the evidence is pretty strong. There’s even stronger evidence The Children of the Night rubbed shoulders with members of the Japanese Yakuza, various Islamic splinter groups from the Middle East, Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the Army of God, Jim Jones, and serial killers like Henry Lee Lucas and Son of Sam. Their leader was—and still is—Samuel F. Garrison, the “Grand Chingon,” or “Head Devil.” You wouldn’t know he was involved in this stuff from looking at him.” Frank leaned back in his leather bucket seat. “Very suave looking man, early seventies, in great shape for a man of his age. Sharp minded. Very cultured, polite, respectful. A man who has contributed immensely to the business world and the community. A man who is an icon of respectability. But beneath that the guy is the fucking devil.”

Vince was silent for a moment. He was just about to ask a question when Frank continued.

“They’re also connected to similar sects around the world, all involved in the same thing. Are they responsible for all the child abductions and murders you hear about from Christian fundamentalists? No. But they do prey on runaways for their rituals. They’re the easiest targets. Do they keep women in compounds as ‘breeders’ for infants that are later sacrificed to the devil? No fucking way. They probably had a hand in spreading such a rumor because doing so takes all suspicion off of them. But they have used infants in sacrifices.” He stopped himself and for a minute Vince thought he was going to collapse again, but he managed to get under control again. “They are in our government and military. They are experts in mind control, Physiological experimentation on humans and controlling via biochips. They are deceptive and infiltrate the government, modern society, and the Christian church intentionally to pervert it and cause divisions. And the reason they’ve been able to survive for so long is because they are incredibly organized and by outward appearances are outstanding citizens: doctors, lawyers, CEO’s, Law Enforcement Agents, Government Officials, members of the clergy.”

Vince was shaking his head. “This sounds so unreal.”

“I know,” Frank said. “How do you think I felt when we started uncovering it? I’m starting to feel like Whitley Strieber.”

“Who?”

“Whitley Strieber… the guy who wrote Communion. He’s a very high profile horror and science fiction writer. Wrote a couple of great novels: Wolfen, The Hunger. In his book Communion, he claims he was actually abducted by aliens and was used as a guinea pig in their experiments. He claims they’re still doing this to him, tracking him down. All this from a guy who makes a great living making this kind of shit up.” Frank patted his chest. “That’s how I feel.”

So he feels funny believing in it, too, Vince thought. Still, he found it even hard to consider what Frank was telling him. It was just too crazy. But he couldn’t voice that to Frank. He had to deal with whatever doubts he had himself. Maybe tonight he would do some research on what Frank was insinuating.

Vince let out a careful sigh. “This stuff sounds pretty heavy.”

“It is,” Frank said. He finished his Dr. Pepper and set the empty in the cup holder. “You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff Mike and I have discovered. Did you know the Son of Sam killings in the late 1970s are vaguely connected to an offshoot of this group?”

“No.”

“There’s evidence that suggests that David Berkowitz didn’t act alone when he gunned down those people in ’76 and ’77. In fact, witness descriptions place three or four other gunmen at the scene of the crimes. One theory is that the shootings were committed by order of the cult to enact something—exactly what, I have no idea. The attacks were all committed on a day that corresponds with a holiday or festival on the occult calendar. Berkowitz, on the other hand, was most likely fingered to take the fall before he even knew it. He initially clammed up and claimed to have acted on the order of his neighbor’s dog, which he said was possessed by a demon. Psychiatrists dismissed that as a ploy, but a few years later when he began talking to an investigative reporter about the murders and hinting he was involved in a large nationwide satanic cult, he was attacked in prison. His throat was slashed and he almost died.” Frank looked at Vince. “As you can imagine, he kept quiet about the cult after that.”

Vince was silent, taking this all in.

“There’s more. I can go on and on about what we’ve found out. The Manson family, the Metamoros thing down in Mexico, the Edwin Groose serial killing case, all that stuff had some trail leading back to The Children of the Night. Did you know that they even own a major Christian Broadcasting system?”

Vince shook his head. This was all sounding like the paranoid delusions of a bad dream. The events of the past week raced through his mind: his mother’s sudden death, rushing to Pennsylvania, Lillian’s sudden death, talking to the detectives and his mother’s friends in Lititz, the visit from the attorney, the crazy guy at the airport that tried to kill him and Tracy. And now this.

“Why is all this happening?” Vince said, more to himself than to Frank.

“I have my suspicions, trust me.”

“No, I mean…” Vince turned in his seat so he was facing Frank. “Why me? Why is all this shit crumbling down around me? Even considering the possibility my mother might have belonged to such a group and that they exist even now and are involved in everything you claim they are, why would they be after me? Why would they want to kill me? I have a fairly good life, I have a career I love, I have friends that I love and care for and who care for me. I have a good life. I had nothing to do with what my mother did in the sixties. I’m not in the least bit interested in the occult. So why should I care if my mother—our parents—were involved in a satanic cult? Why would a bunch of religious nuts want to kill me?”

Frank was silent for a moment. He regarded Vince sternly, his dark eyes resting heavily on him. “I could just go on and say that I came here to help you. If you remember, I told you that you were in danger. That part is certainly true as evidenced by what happened to you and Tracy.”

“But why am I in danger?” Vince asked. “Why would they want me dead? I’ve never done anything to them! And why did you go through all this trouble to find me? What business is it of yours?”

“It’s my business just as it is yours. You see, Vince, my reasons for tracking you down are not entirely for your concerns. I have my own self-interest at heart as well. I came here today in the hopes of helping both of us out because this is my problem, too.”

“How so?”

Frank reached in the rear of the Saturn and pulled out a black leather satchel of the sort carried by business executives. He rifled through it and pulled out a sheaf of papers. He handed them to Vince, who took them curiously and began to glance through them. “These are transcriptions of Internet communications,” Frank explained. “They were copied and pasted into an e-mail I got two months ago. I’ve been unable to track the sender of the e-mail. See there?” he pointed to a portion of the communication. “Where it refers to ‘plateau’?”

Vince saw it and nodded. “Yeah.”

“Read it.”

Vince read it. It only took a few lines to realize the implications of the communiqué. He looked at Frank, astonished. “There’s a reference here from this one guy about snuffing out ‘plateau’.”

“Exactly.”

“Plateau is you?”

Frank nodded. He looked grim. “That’s my screen name.”

“How did they get your screen name?”

“I don’t know,” Frank answered softly. “I’ve never tapped into any kind of occult bulletin board before in my life. All of my research on this was done at libraries and bookstores. My electronic correspondence is largely confined to people in publishing. I’ve tried to trace who I know in publishing who could know people that belong to The Children of the Night, but I’ve been unable to come up with anything. Everything runs into a dead end. I started thinking maybe none of this was real, that I was chasing something that doesn’t exist.” He held up the sheaf of papers. “But this group exists. They’re real. Whether there really is a literal devil is irrelevant in this case. These people believe there is a devil, much like Pat Robertson and Oral Roberts believe there is a literal God, and they will do anything to advance their agenda.” He paused for a moment, staring down at the floor of the Saturn.

“What’s their agenda?”

Frank appeared to think about this. “All I know is they seem to be working on something really big. They’re devil worshippers all the way; they not only hold allegiance to the Christian devil, they honor his father in even higher regard. The ancient Sumerian god Hanbi.”

“That name was written on the wall in my mother’s bedroom,” Vince said.

Frank looked at him. “You sure?”

Vince nodded. “Yeah.”

Frank turned away. Vince thought he muttered, “They’re moving fast,” but he wasn’t sure. He quickly regained his composure. “Anyway… they know who I am now. To conduct the kind of background check that revealed my e-mail address would require what O.J. Simpson paid for his defense team.”

“But somebody found out anyway?”

“Yes,” Frank answered, looking more grim. “The day I got that transcript I was away from the house. My wife was at work, and the kids were at her mother’s. Somebody broke into our place and ransacked it. Tore it apart. Nothing was taken, but they destroyed my computer and my office. They started a small fire there—that’s how we found out about it. A neighbor saw smoke pouring out of my office window and called the fire department and managed to track my wife down, who called me out of the meeting I was at.” He paused, as if struggling with that tragedy. “My office was a shambles. I lost everything except a backup tape that I keep in a safe deposit box, and my laptop computer, which I had with me. All the information about the cult, with the exception of the stuff I managed to save on tape, was destroyed.”

He regarded Vince with those deep brown eyes again. “And here I am.”