They

Chapter Ten

VINCE WALTERS DIDN’T get back to the office until 1:30 that afternoon. When he returned he went immediately to his office, shut his computer down, and checked his messages. There was a call from detective Staley. Vince returned the call, on nervous edge as he was put through to the detective.

“So what’s the news?” he asked detective Staley.

“We don’t think he’s the guy,” Detective Staley said, clearly irritated at this turn-of-event. “Insufficient evidence. The guy has a clear alibi, but we’re holding him on weapons charges.”

“What turned you on to him anyway and who is he?”

“He was fingered by a witness at the airport,” Detective Staley said. “I won’t name the witness, but he related that the guy resembled somebody he knew that had been making terrorist threats at his place of employment. We followed up on it and visited the suspect at his home in Huntington Beach. Turns out the guy is a neo-Nazi and had a pretty good arsenal, most of it illegal firearms. We’re holding him on that charge now without bail until we can build a case against him. But I don’t think he’s the guy that shot at you.”

“Why’s that?”

“This guy claims he was attending a White-Power rally in San Diego,” Detective Staley said, his voice tinged with disgust. “We checked that angle out and found video-tape that supports his alibi. He certainly appears to have been elsewhere.”

“So what happens now?”

“That’s up to you. Have you been to your home yet?”

“I’m planning on going now.”

“I’d be careful. I can’t spare any more resources, so I suggest you lay low and alter your driving routes and habits. We’re doing all we can on this end.”

“Thanks.” Vince hung up. He wanted to call Tracy right away and he glanced at the digital clock on his desk. He had to get going if he wanted to meet Frank at the house. He would call Tracy later.

He quickly packed up his briefcase and headed out. He told his secretary he wasn’t feeling well and was going home. Then he left for the day.

Frank met him at his house. He’d given Frank directions before being dropped off at the mall to pick up his car. Frank told him that he still wasn’t sure if the group was on to him; if they’d wanted him dead, they would have made it look like an accident, not a full-blown assassination attempt. He was going to call Mike from his cell phone and give him the latest news, then he would meet him at Vince’s home. Whoever it was that tried to have him and Tracy killed was probably lying low after Sunday’s aborted attempt. While Vince was fairly confident The Children of the Night hadn’t been making inquiries into him, Frank’s story spooked him. Luckily most of the staff was out at late lunches or still in meetings and he was able to escape the office relatively undetected. If anybody inquired as to his whereabouts, Glenda would simply tell them he’d gone home sick. No problem.

When he arrived home he opened the garage door and pulled the car in, parking as far to the left as possible so Frank could ease his vehicle in. That had been Vince’s idea. If they were on to Frank he didn’t want them to find out where he was living. He made sure he wasn’t followed on the drive home, and he knew Frank would be even more wary. Therefore, when he closed the garage door behind them he felt a great sense of relief as it rattled down. Frank stepped out of his car, a tall silhouette in the darkened garage, long hair flowing down to his shoulders. He was brandishing a handgun. “Turn on the light.”

“Jesus Christ, man!” Vince felt instantly nervous at the sight of the gun.

“Just turn on the fucking lights!”

Vince reached over and turned on the garage lights.

Frank stood still for a moment, weapon ready. It was a two-car garage with no storage space above, but there was a small makeshift closet against the wall. He motioned to Vince with the gun. “Move out of the way,” he said, as he stepped forward and swung the door open.

Vince almost jumped, as if expecting something to leap out at them. Frank inspected the closet quickly. The storage space was empty.

“Okay,” Frank said, motioning for Vince to follow him. “Stay behind me and be quiet.”

He followed Frank into his house, heart racing madly as the formidable figure crept silently through the house, opening closets stealthily, checking out available hiding places. They covered the kitchen, the downstairs bathrooms, the living room, den, and dining room. Then they headed upstairs, Frank looking more like an undercover narcotics agent than a science-fiction writer paranoid that some shadowy organization was about to kill him. He moved with precision and stealth, his body flattened against the wall as he swung open doors to bedrooms, checked under beds, looked in closets. Finally, when all the rooms had been checked and cleared, Frank relaxed. They were in the second floor hallway. He flipped the safety on and stuck the handgun in his jacket. “We’re cool. Now I gotta pee.”

“Me too,” Vince said. He pointed downstairs. “There’s a bathroom downstairs. I’m going to get out of these clothes. Feel free to make yourself at home.”

“Thanks,” Frank said, heading downstairs.

Vince went into his bedroom, relieved himself in the master bathroom, and then shed his work clothes quickly. He left his clothes on the bed and rummaged around in a dresser for a pair of shorts and a tank top. He found a pair, donned them, and gave his appearance a quick glance in the mirror. His face looked flushed, his eyes slightly wild looking, but that was to be expected under the circumstances. He’d just learned some pretty hideous things today. Whether they were one hundred percent true still remained to be seen, but the adrenaline running through his body was a sure sign that Frank’s story had affected him physically. It felt like his nerves were alive, squirming under his skin.

When he went downstairs he found Frank sitting on the cream colored sofa in the living room. Vince headed toward the kitchen. “Anything to drink?”

“Water would do,” Frank said.

“Evian okay?”

“Perfect.”

Vince got two bottles of Evian out of the refrigerator and carried them into the living room. He handed one to Frank, who twisted the cap off and drank deeply. Vince sank into a plush seat by the sofa and twisted the cap off his bottle. They relaxed for a moment, lost in the sounds of peaceful silence. There was a light summer breeze blowing through the living room window, and it felt nice to just chill out for a little bit. If it had been any other day Vince would have just been content to lay here and let his mind drift, letting his body relax limb by limb, muscle by muscle, until he could feel his mind detaching itself from his body. But that wasn’t going to be the case today. His mind was so cluttered with what he’d learned that he didn’t know if he’d be able to sleep.

“So what do we do now?” Vince asked.

Frank didn’t look at him as he answered. “I’ve sent my wife and kids away. I made the arrangements two days ago.”

Vince looked at him, astonished that he’d taken such steps.

“Brandy knew something was getting heavy. She knew it had something to do with my mother, with what Mike and I were investigating. And up until two days ago she was good about giving me my space. She’s what any man who makes his living as a writer can ask for.” Frank smiled. “She’s a good woman.”

Vince sat calmly, waiting for him to go on.

“Two days ago when I knew we were going to contact you, I told her everything I found out. Naturally, she was horrified. Then I called her mother and told her everything. Her reaction was naturally the same as her daughter’s. The three of us talked, and I told them that the best thing for them until this was over was for me to send Brandy and the kids to her mother’s and have Wendy make arrangements to get them out of California. So that’s what we did. We packed up, and I drove them to Wendy’s that night and saw them off. And believe me, it was hard.”

Vince could only imagine. For a moment Laura’s features swam to the surface of his mind again and he saw himself in Frank’s situation. Up against a secret organization that knows you exist, that knows you’re aware of their secrets and can kill you at the push of a button. If he were in Frank’s shoes he wouldn’t be that concerned for himself; he’d be more concerned for his wife.

“I have no idea where they are now,” Frank said. He took another hearty drink of water, set the bottle down on the end table by the sofa and sighed. He leaned back into the comfort of the sofa and crossed his legs. “I know they’re safe. Wendy is keeping my literary agent informed as to what’s happening and I’m getting the news from Peter, who’s sort of acting as a message hub for the whole thing. Peter has no idea what’s going on. He thinks Brandy and I split up.”

“So what do we do tonight?” Vince asked.

Frank looked at him. “We make a plan of action.”

THEY MET MIKE Peterson in the back booth of a Round Table Pizza Parlor, located in the Mission Viejo Mall.

Frank called him from Vince’s living room around four that afternoon and they spoke briefly. Vince busied himself in the kitchen, running last evening’s dishes through the dishwasher and tidying up. When Frank was finished he walked over to the breakfast bar. “Mike wants to meet you. Tonight.”

“Fine.” He wanted to meet Mike Peterson as well.

“He’ll back up everything I’ve told you. And if you’re up to it, we’d all like to fly out to Pennsylvania as soon as possible.”

“What for?”

“To do more checking.”

“On whether my mother was involved with The Children of the Night?”

“No,” Frank said, downing the rest of his Evian. “To find out why they’re trying to get back in touch with you. Mike wants you to tell him what happened at the airport, too.”

“Did you tell him what happened?”

“Yeah, I did. He was just as surprised as I was. He didn’t think they would take such drastic measures. He says what happened to you at the airport isn’t part of their M.O.”

A chill went through Vince’s spine but he tried not to show it as he put the remainder of last week’s dishes in the dishwasher. He closed the dishwasher, flipped the switch, and started the load. “Do you think… that whoever it was that tried to kill me and Tracy wasn’t… that they weren’t part of The Children of the Night?”

“I don’t know.” Frank leaned his tattooed arms on the breakfast bar. “But they’re involved somehow. You’re having these dreams for a reason. And you’re remembering your past for reasons that go beyond the traditional Satanic Ritual Abuse syndrome.”

“You mean there’s a technical term for people like us?”

Frank grinned. “Surprising, isn’t it? Fortunately, ninety percent of those cases are outright frauds. Therapists planting false memories in the fragile minds of their patients to make a quick buck. The sad thing is these people seriously undermine the real threat that’s out there.”

“That groups like The Children of the Night are really involved in stuff like this?”

Frank nodded.

Vince leaned on the opposite side of the breakfast bar, facing Frank. He was beginning to get hungry, and their rendezvous with Mike was only forty minutes away. “You know, I’m glad you said that because for a moment I thought I was caught in a bad dream.”

“What do you mean?” Frank asked.

“Well, I’ve heard stories about Satanic Ritual Abuse before,” Vince began. “And to tell you the truth, I just dismissed it as something unsubstantiated. There was a case here in Mission Viejo in the late eighties when a pair of sisters sued their parents for abuse they claimed to have suffered at their hands when they were forced to participate in satanic rituals. One of the sisters claimed she was a breeder for Satan. She said she bore three children, all of who were killed a few days after they were born in ritual sacrifices. She claimed to have vivid memories of this; both of them did.”

“The case was thrown out of court,” Frank said, with the all-knowing sense of one who has done his homework.

“Right,” Vince said. “At the request of the defense, both women were examined by psychiatrists and other medical experts. The sister who claimed that she’d been a breeder was examined by a gynecologist who testified there were no signs that she’d ever given birth.” He shook his head. “So when you showed up today and started on this thing, I was prepared to chalk your story up to something for the tabloids. But the thing that kept me from dismissing it is that—”

“You remember.”

“That’s right,” The memories flashed through his mind. “I remember. And I know for a fact that nobody planted any memories in my mind. These things started before Laura was killed. Hell, they started intensifying in their imagery before I even started therapy.”

“The question that now remains is the one I posed before,” Frank said. “Why are we having these dreams now, and why does it seem that these people—whoever the hell they are—seem to be coming back for us?”

They looked at each other across the breakfast bar. Finally Vince answered that question with the best answer he could summon up. “I don’t know.”

They left the house five minutes later for their meeting with Mike.

Mike Peterson was already seated in a back booth when they arrived. There were two families seated at tables in the front of the restaurant; aside from that, the place was empty. Mike had already ordered a pitcher of Iced Tea, and as Frank and Vince stepped into the corner booth, obscured by shadows and lit by shaded lamps that hung from the wall, he saw Mike Peterson was a middle-aged man who appeared to be in reasonably good health. He was dressed in blue jeans, a white T-shirt with the words Palm Springs stitched across the chest, and white sneakers. His graying blond hair was swept back over his head, making no effort to conceal the bald spot that had taken root at the cap of his forehead. His eyes were blue and sparkled with a sense of wariness as he regarded Vince.

After introductions were made, the men sat down at the table. Mike got down to business immediately. “How do you feel about all this, Vince?”

Vince shrugged. “Overwhelmed is the best way to describe it.”

Mike nodded. “Frank felt that way, too. So did I. The important thing to remember is that it’s okay to feel overwhelmed. It’s okay to think what Frank has told you is something paranoid, something that couldn’t happen. It’s a normal reaction. You wouldn’t be human if you felt otherwise.”

Vince thought that was a strange thing to say. You wouldn’t be human otherwise. But he kept quiet about it and let Mike continue.

“Before we go on,” Mike said, trading glances between Frank and Vince. “Does anybody want anything to eat?”

“Yeah,” Frank said. He rose to his feet and clapped Vince on the back. “How ’bout we order some chow?”

“Great.” Vince got up and followed the two men to the front counter of the pizza parlor. His stomach was rumbling; he hadn’t eaten all day.

They put in their order—a large deep-dish pizza with pepperoni and olives—and returned to their corner booth. Mike introduced himself to Vince more formally and gave him his background.

He explained that he was a retired high school history teacher. The reason he’d become involved in this was simple: Jesse Black, Frank’s natural father, had been his best friend. They’d grown up together in El Paso, Texas, had even gone to college together, served in the military. Then Jesse had moved to California where the job prospects in computer engineering were in their infancy stages. Jesse had earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics, and the most he could have gotten on the employment ladder in Texas would have been teaching high school math. “Jesse was more ambitious than that,” Mike explained as they waited for their order. “So he moved to California in 1960, landed a job as a Computer Operator at an insurance company. He met Gladys Silva in 1962, they were married the following year, and Frank was born the year after that.” Frank remained unemotional as Mike gave Vince the brief history lesson. “For the first three years of their marriage, all appeared normal. At least on the surface.”

Mike turned to Frank. “Are you sure you can hear all this?”

“You’re talking to a guy who once wrote a scene in a horror novel about a man who was pulled through a quarter-inch drainpipe,” Frank said, waving for Mike to go on. “I’m fine with it. Really.”

The trouble was, Vince didn’t feel one hundred percent fine with it. It was already gearing up to be grim. Mike Peterson continued: “By this time I was living out here as well, in Anaheim. I was married, and my son was born two months after Frank. In fact, I was in Jesse’s wedding, along with another old buddy of ours who’d also moved out to the West Coast. A guy by the name of John Llama. Anyway, the three of us were so busy back then with raising our families and getting started on our careers; John was a lawyer and had just gotten a job at a pretty prestigious firm downtown; I was teaching; Jesse was working his way up the corporate ladder. Our wives were able to stay home and raise the kids, be housewives. Back then it was financially possible for young wives to stay at home and raise kids while the husbands worked.” He paused, as if coming across the first rocky bump of the narrative that would take him down to hell. “Jesse didn’t tell me anything about what happened between him and Gladys, what caused her to… do what she later did. He didn’t tell me anything until years later. In fact, what I’m going to tell you is what John and I have been able to piece together throughout the years, with the help of Frank’s aunt Diane, Jesse’s sister.” He paused again, choosing his words carefully. “It seems that at some time when Frank was between the ages of one and two, Gladys met a group of people that we can simply call ‘hippies’.”

Vince was nodding slowly through all this, listening carefully. Mike continued: “Gladys had some emotional problems before she and Jesse were married. That was all Jesse confided in me. Her mother had been an alcoholic, her father wasn’t much better; buried himself in his work to escape the mother’s drinking. Needless to say, there’s probably more that went on in that household that Jesse didn’t let on. With what we know about dysfunctional households, there was probably a great deal of abuse that went on. I’m sure Gladys suffered quite a bit of it. How much, we’ll never know. But Jesse loved her, and he was determined to do everything he could to make her life better for her and Frank. He started working longer hours so he could afford to move his growing family to a small house in Hawthorne. It was at this point that John and I assumed that Gladys met the hippies—and I’m sorry to use that term, because that’s the only word I can think of to describe them.”

“They were hippies,” Frank said, taking a sip of iced tea. “It was the sixties. They were fucking hippies.”

Mike nodded, a slight smile on his features creasing his face at Frank’s outburst. “Okay, they were hippies. Maybe they weren’t normal hippies—the kind that were largely benevolent, into the peace and love movement and all that pacifist bullshit. But they surely dressed like them. John and I think they might have lived next door to Jesse and Gladys and were nothing more than college kids. Gladys would have had a lot of time on her hands during the day and through most early evenings.” He glanced at Frank. “Frank himself doesn’t remember any of this period, but from what we’ve been able to gather, the hippies turned Gladys on to LSD and pot. They also introduced her to some weird spiritual stuff that probably didn’t amount to much at the time, but which soon got worse. Did Frank tell you about The Children of the Night?”

Vince nodded.

“We think they may have been early members. Of course, everything they involved her in was drug related and mixed with some of their teachings. Whatever it was, it was attractive to Gladys. She began neglecting Frank, and Jesse noticed quickly. This led to fights between them. Jesse’s mother, who used to fly out from El Paso frequently to visit, tried to help out. She was very troubled by it. At one point, Jesse took Frank to his in-laws during a brief separation.” A slight grin cracked Mike Peterson’s features. “Jesse didn’t care much for Gladys’ folks, but he also didn’t think her mother was that bad. Maybe she wasn’t. He certainly seemed to trust them with Frank more then he trusted his own wife.”

Vince and Frank waited while Mike drank some iced tea. “To make a long story short they reconciled, moved out of the house and bought a place. I remember that house. It was in Gardena, right off Sepulveda and Vermont. It was a small two-bedroom place and the garage had been converted into a den. A nice place for a young couple to get a start. Jesse had been promoted to shift supervisor by then and was still working a lot. But he was doing it to build a nest egg for him and Gladys. He said they wanted another child.”

He stopped at this point, his eyes flicking to Frank as if dreading to go on. Frank nodded at him, encouraging him. Frank’s features were stony, almost cold, with a faint underlying of dread.

“Jesse tried to keep things going as normal as possible, but the influence of Gladys’ friends was strong. They kept showing up when Jesse was working, and it was then that she began having affairs.” He cleared his throat, looking down at the table. “Sometimes she would engage in sex in Frank’s presence.”

Vince looked at Frank, who didn’t meet his gaze. He turned back to Mike. “How could you know this if Jesse never told you anything?”

“It all came out during my therapy,” Frank said softly. He looked at Vince. “Trust me, I went through a lot of regression therapy. My earliest memory was when I was three, which corresponds to around the time Mike is telling you about now. Only my earliest memory is of San Francisco, after we moved there. Not Los Angeles. I had to be taken back through my memories to remember what… I saw my mom doing.”

A worm of unease began to gnaw at Vince’s belly. He took a sip of iced tea.

“Gladys didn’t move to the Bay Area until she left Jesse. I was the first person Jesse called when Gladys left. He was scared and angry; he didn’t tell me anything about Gladys having affairs, or anything else that had been going on. Just that they’d been having problems again and that she left. He tried to get Frank from her, but Gladys won a court order placing Frank in her custody. She was also pregnant.” Mike lapsed into silence for a moment and Vince felt his heart pounding. She was also pregnant.

He glanced at Frank, who didn’t return the look. Frank sat motionless, stony faced. He looked like he’d heard this story many times, but hearing it again was just as gruesome as hearing it for the first time. Vince swallowed a lump in his throat and tuned back in to Mike’s narrative.

“She moved to the Bay Area, taking Frank with her. He’d just turned three.” Mike spoke slowly, his voice lowered. “She went to San Francisco with a group of people she’d met in L.A. They settled into the Haight Ashbury scene quite easily, and it was there they met core members of The Children of the Night, who had infiltrated the hippie scene very successfully.” He paused. “They got Gladys into the group somehow and this was where she met your mother, Maggie Swanson.”

Vince didn’t feel anything as Frank took over briefly. “From what we’ve gathered, Maggie got involved with the group from a guy she met at UC Berkeley, a guy named Tom McDonald.”

The name clicked and Vince placed the name with a face. That smiling Dad Face of his youth in California. “My dad.”

Frank nodded. “We don’t know if he was your real father or not. There were a lot of orgies and love-ins going on at the time. Plus, about a year before you were born your mother and other members of the group went on a spiritual pilgrimage to the Middle East. They were there for almost a year. It’s possible you weren’t even born in this country; we haven’t been able to pinpoint your exact birthplace. If your mom became pregnant with you there, your father could have been one of the male members of the group. But anyway, that’s where our mothers met, at one of these gatherings that was, in reality, a Children of the Night meeting. They encouraged the orgiastic behavior, the drugs. It was hippie heaven.”

Mike picked up the narrative. “Gladys fell in hard for Maggie and Tom. They became lovers, and with her drug use so high she wanted to be a part of them. Maggie and Tom were already pretty ingrained in the cult and they brought Gladys in. They… I don’t know how to say it, but… they had some kind of spell over her. Made her believe that the coming of Armageddon was near and that they were on the winning side.”

Frank nodded. “She was also most likely brainwashed into believing that their dedication and worship of Satan was, in a way, a glorification of God as well. Because if God had this whole scenario planned out beforehand as prophesized in the Bible, then they figured that serving the Prince of Darkness wouldn’t be bad… they’d be essentially doing their part to fulfill Biblical prophecy.”

“But this group took things a step further,” Mike explained just as he was interrupted by a voice announcing over the intercom that their pizza was ready.

Frank rose to get it and after he came back and they’d served themselves and begun eating, Mike continued. “I’d like to focus on another group for a minute. The End Times Church believed that Jesus, God, and Satan should be equally recognized. One does not exist without the other. In time, members began to focus on certain aspects of the religion; some were devoted followers of Jesus, others concentrated on Satan. The hub that connected them was that they believed in the literal prophecy of Armageddon as prophesized in the Book of Revelations. They also saw themselves as playing key parts in it. It was around 1966 or so that the Satanist sect broke off from the original church in an effort to wholly worship evil and bring about the coming of the Anti-Christ. The Black Cross has been credited with being this splinter group that broke away from the End Times Church. There’s no real hard evidence the Black Cross exists now. Through the research Frank and I conducted, we’ve come to learn that the Black Cross was merely a front group for an older organization.”

“The Children of the Night,” Vince said.

“Yes,” Mike said. “The Children of the Night had infiltrated the End Times Church early on. By the time they initiated the break, their goals were more solid thanks to their leader, a middle-aged wealthy business tycoon named Samuel F. Garrison. They didn’t just see themselves as overthrowing Christianity, they now saw themselves as going into battle with God, who they perceived as being not only weak, but also a blind idiot god who was indifferent to his creations. Their goal was to play a key part in the Battle of Armageddon.”

“You mean as in, actually participating?” Vince asked between slices of pizza.

“Yes,” Mike was eating slowly too, and he chased a mouthful down with a swallow of iced tea. “Their goal became clear: the total destruction of the Christian Church and the return of Satan to his rightful domain: earth.”

There was silence for a moment as Vince digested this bit of information. He ate his pizza, mulling it over. Frank didn’t say anything, concentrating more on the food in front of him. After awhile, Vince voiced a question. “Where do Frank and I come in?”

Mike traded a glance with Frank, and Vince thought he caught a faint sign of wariness there. As if an unspoken message passed between them. Do we tell him everything? No, I don’t think so. Vince was about to open his mouth to say something but decided against it.

“We don’t know where you and Frank come in,” Mike said. “That’s what we’re trying to find out now.”

“What happened to Frank’s sibling?” Vince said, already having a feeling what the answer to that would be but wanting to hear it aloud.

Mike glanced at Frank again, who didn’t return his gaze. Frank kept eating, concentrating on his food. Mike leaned close to Vince and whispered: “This is still hard for Frank to deal with, so I’m going to whisper it in your ear. Okay?”

Vince nodded, the dread blossoming in his stomach.

Mike leaned closer to Vince.

Frank didn’t look up from his plate as he ate. His features were stony.

Mike began to tell him.

Vince stopped chewing. He listened to the atrocity. The initiation. The offering ending in sacrifice.

Three-year old Frank being present as his newborn sister was ritualistically murdered on a dragon-shaped altar in a large, dark room. Looking through the eyes of three-year-old Frank Black as the cultists swarmed over the body and tore it apart in an orgy of death.

Vince felt a black wall loom before him. He closed his eyes, squeezing out the pain he felt. When he opened them Mike was back at his spot at the table, pouring himself another glass of iced tea. Frank was still eating, head down, not looking up. Vince stole a quick glance and saw now why Frank had built up such a strong layer of armor around him. His shell was thickened by what he’d seen and experienced as a toddler. Not to mention what he’d went through after he got out of his family situation.

Vince turned to the slice of pizza sitting on his plate. He picked it up and bit into it, chewing slowly, savoring the taste. He felt like the inside of his skull and innards had been carved out.

They ate in silence for a while. As he ate all he could think about were the atrocities that had been described to him. Human sacrifices, satanic rituals, all in the form of black-cloaked adults grouped around an altar in a candle-lit room, chanting softly, their voices rising reverently. The fact that such people would believe such bullshit and follow it was one thing; Vince had always held a low opinion of religion in all its forms, probably because of his own strict religious upbringing. He’d become an atheist early in life, based on his own intellect and reasoning. He found the Christian God just as unbelievable as the Muslim God Allah, the Jewish Yahweh, the Hindu God of Life, and the various sects he’d heard about through word-of-mouth, the occasional television show or the printed word. His knowledge of the occult was minimal. He knew the Christian version of what the occult was supposed to stand for, and who Satan was supposed to be and what his purpose was. As far as educating himself from a layman’s point of view on the Devil, he hadn’t done a very good job of it. Why educate yourself on a segment of Christianity if you felt that Christianity, not to mention all religion, was non-existent, all created by man to fulfill some Jungian need for spiritual belief?

There was one thing that bothered Vince, and that was the extreme nature of the story Frank Black and Mike Peterson just told him. If such an underground organization existed, wouldn’t they have been exposed by now? Surely somebody would have run to the police. Vince wondered why nobody had spilled the beans yet; somebody always talked: mafia hit men, royal family members, mistresses to the stars and high ranking politicians, members of highly organized drug cartels. Somebody always talked and was eventually rewarded richly for their story.

Vince finished his last slice of pizza, reflecting on this. Frank had already finished, wiped his hands on a napkin, and risen to his feet. “Be right back.” He headed out of the booth toward the restrooms.

When he was out of earshot, Mike wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Hearing about what happened to his sister still affects him, even though he only remembers the ritual through his therapy sessions.”

“I can understand why,” Vince said.

“Things got worse later,” Mike said, slipping back into the narrative. “Gladys became deeply ingrained in the cult, and became especially devoted to Samuel Garrison. Frank’s told you about him already, I take it?”

“Yes,” Vince nodded. “The Head Devil.”

“Samuel Garrison comes from pure European stock,” Mike explained. “His father’s family can be traced back to medieval England, his mother’s from Spain, and some of her ancestors settled in Mexico during the Spanish Conquest of Mexico and parts of the Southwestern United States. We have reason to believe his grandmother became involved with a group of devil worshippers in the Yucatan valley as a teenager. When Sam took control and resurrected The Children of the Night in 1966, the nicknames just became attributed to him.” Mike took a sip of his iced tea. “Gladys became a sort of sex slave to Sam,” Mike continued, speaking slowly and softly. “Frank was very well taken care of during these years, I might add. Sam took care to make sure all the children were taken care of.” He eyed Vince. “I don’t know why Sam insisted the children be well taken care of, but one thing we’ve found out is that this wasn’t happening in Frank’s household.” He shot a questioning glance at Vince. “Do you remember your folks ever mistreating you?”

Vince shook his head. “No. Not at all. Except for my dad yelling at my mom and me in the last year we were in California and throwing things around… nothing out of the ordinary.” Vince shrugged. “I just always chalked that up to whatever stress he might have been going through. A young guy with a wife and a kid and a demanding career. You know?”

Mike nodded. “To make a long story short, Frank attended rituals between the ages of three and five, rituals he remembers you being in attendance at as well. Frank stayed with the group until Child Services Authorities took him out of the house in 1973. He spent the rest of his youth in various foster homes and his Aunt Diane’s until he left home at sixteen to move to Hollywood. You know the rest.”

“What’s the purpose of your investigation, though?” Vince asked. “You’re connecting all these dots, gathering information… for what? You plan on writing some kind of tell-all book or something?”

“I have a trusted friend,” Mike began. “A lawyer who used to work for my friend John’s law firm. His name is William Grecko. I’ll get to John’s story shortly, because what happened to him factors into everything we’re telling you. Needless to say, Bill knows I’m researching something that is big. I haven’t given him details for his own protection. He has a vast network of connections with law enforcement at various levels; state and federal, including FBI and CIA, as well as prosecutors across the country. We almost have enough to take to him now. Your mother’s murder has changed things.”

“How?”

“It’s added an element in our investigation that requires further work,” Mike answered. “Finding you was important. If we can gather enough circumstantial evidence based on your memories and whatever physical evidence your mother may have preserved, such as old diaries or photos from those years—”

Vince shook his head. “I don’t remember any old photos from our years in California.”

“She might have kept them hidden from you.”

Vince shrugged. “Maybe.” It was possible, but Vince didn’t believe his mother would have held on to mementoes from her so-called “life as a sinner.” “Do you think this friend of yours, this William Grecko, has the connections to launch a formal investigation?”

“He not only has the connections, he can pull the right strings and do it discreetly,” Mike said. “I have confidence that within hours of turning over everything we’ve uncovered to Billy, key members of The Children of the Night will be in federal custody and this case will be blown wide open in the media.”

“You have media connections too?”

“Frank does. We plan to turn the same information over to his contacts at the LA and New York Times, as well as CNN.”

“Before or after you turn it over to Billy?”

“Simultaneously.”

Vince took a sip of his iced tea, looking up as Frank walked back into the realm of conversation and slid back into his seat. He looked better; his face was less flushed, more alert.

Mike looked up at Frank. “Did you two have anything in mind for this evening?”

Vince didn’t know this evening was in the equation. He figured on going home and learning more about his forgotten past from Frank. Mike’s question suddenly put the older man into the equation, too. Vince shrugged. “Actually, I just thought Frank and I were going to hang out at my place. Are you interested in joining us?”

“If I may,” Mike said. “There’s still more you need to know, and I’d like to see for myself just how safe you and Frank are.”

“We’re safe,” Frank said softly.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Mike said.

FOR THE FIRST time in his life Vince Walters wished he owned a gun.

He lay in the king-sized bed he used to share with Laura, staring at the ceiling. Mike Peterson was sleeping in the guest-room down the hall in the sofa bed; Frank Black was parked downstairs on the sofa. Frank and Mike were armed. That made Vince feel a little better, but he felt naked without a gun himself, even though he’d never fired one in his life.

The three men had gone back to the house and over iced coffee and bagels they’d talked until one in the morning. Most of the talk revolved around the cult and some more personal history on the mysterious disappearance of Jesse Black.

Vince didn’t think Frank would be so privy to hearing about his father’s untimely demise, but the man had apparently heard it a dozen times. He’d also most likely been able to distance himself emotionally from his father, since he’d never known the man while growing up. It would be as if Vince were to ever hear his own natural father had died of cancer.

It had been a nice evening outside, with a breeze cooling down the heat of the day. Despite that, Mike and Frank insisted that all the windows and drapes be closed. Vince had complied and turned on the air conditioner. Then they retreated to the den, which was at the rear of the house. Vince brought the pitcher of iced coffee in the den and set it on the bar counter for refills where they’d spent the rest of the evening talking.

As it turned out there wasn’t much more to the story of Jesse Black. He’d turned up in San Francisco in early 1968 and managed to track Gladys down to a house on Haight and Ashbury where she was living with several cult members. He’d demanded to see his baby, not knowing the newborn girl’s fate. Gladys told him she’d given the child up for adoption and Jesse had flown into a rage. He’d been restrained by several cult members, who’d forced him into a car and driven him to an undisclosed location. Mike believed it was a location in the Santa Cruz Mountains where cult rituals were common, and where the cult maintained a compound. Whatever the destination the result was the same; while Jesse never told Mike what he’d witnessed, it was evident he was exposed to something terrible. He’d fled in a severe mental state, was picked up by the San Francisco police three days later for vagrancy and when he was released, he disappeared.

He’d severed all ties with his family, his friends back in Los Angeles, his job.

He became one of the anonymous space-cases that wandered Golden Gate Park, sleeping in cardboard boxes, muttering to themselves.

Mike and John Llama had grown concerned when they hadn’t heard from their friend in a few weeks, and tried to track Jesse down. His family in El Paso joined in the effort. Then, almost as suddenly as he disappeared, Jesse reappeared in his hometown.

He showed up suddenly at the home of his parents, on El Paso’s east side, disheveled, wearing a dirty pair of jeans, a tattered shirt, a pair of brown oxfords tied together with duct tape, and a tweed jacket. He hadn’t shaved. He hadn’t bathed. The only thing recognizable about him was his eyes, which his mother recognized immediately. Upon seeing the haunted eyes of her son the woman broke down sobbing and embraced the decrepit man standing on her front porch.

His mother’s sister, Mary, came to the house upon receiving a phone call from Vivian, Jesse’s mother. When she saw her nephew in such a despicable state seated at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of Albondigas soup, his mother clutching his arm and weeping, Mary called an ambulance. Jesse was taken to El Paso County General Hospital and placed under psychiatric observation at the request of his parents. He was transferred to a mental hospital in Las Cruces, New Mexico two weeks later where he spent the next four months. The official diagnosis was a complete nervous and mental breakdown.

Jesse’s family tried to find out what happened to Gladys and Frank, but the court system prevented them from doing much regarding gaining custody of the boy. Gladys contacted Vivian and assured her that she and the boy were fine. It was through Vivian that Mike and John first heard about the adoption of Jesse’s daughter. John was able to visit Jesse in El Paso at the hospital and came away concerned, confused and frightened. John later told Mike that looking at Jesse’s face, into those eyes, was like looking into the bottomless pit of a fear born of hell.

Released to the custody of his parents in the middle of 1969, Jesse took work with his brother-in-law, who owned a cleaning service. He wouldn’t talk of the incident that led to his breakdown, and on the advice of Jesse’s psychiatrist the family refrained from asking him. Jesse was supposed to have continued therapy sessions, but he stopped going after a few weeks, and no amount of persuasion could get him to return. While he appeared to improve upon his release from the hospital, enthusiastically smiling and hugging family members, engaging in conversation, he appeared troubled, as if something had been released inside him that held him back emotionally. Mike saw this on a visit to El Paso that summer with his wife and two children. He’d suggested the trip to his wife as an excuse for her to finally meet his extended family, but he really wanted to pay Jesse a visit. What he’d seen was shocking.

“He just wasn’t the same man,” he told Vince as the three men sat in the den that evening. “He appeared to be the same, he talked the same, we had the same conversations we always had. But there was something missing. Something… some part of his personality that was dead.”

If Jesse showed signs of improvement, those signs were dashed in December of 1969 with the arrest of Charles Manson and “The Family.” Diane later told Mike that Jesse was seated at her kitchen table when it happened. Her husband Carlos had passed the El Paso Times to him nonchalantly as he always did, and Jesse took one look at the front page, Manson’s long-haired, demonic figure grinning evilly at the camera, and he’d lost it right there. He began shaking, the newspaper crumpling in his hands as he gazed down at the story. Diane had asked, “What’s wrong? Are you okay?” Jesse hadn’t replied. He put the paper down and stared out the window into space. His eyes had gained that faraway look of catatonia again.

Carlos had noticed the sudden change and at the time didn’t pay much attention to what could have caused it. Diane rang Jesse’s psychiatrist. Before she could get him on the phone, Jesse rose from his chair and skirted out the side door. Leaving again.

This time for good.

John Llama and Mike Peterson did all they could to search for their friend, but to no avail. They put out missing-person bulletins, scanned newspapers, put out the word of Jesse Black’s disappearance with flyers with his picture on it. None of it helped. The years went by. In 1980 John Llama, who was now the senior partner in the law firm, started up the investigation again. With a wealth of investigators at his fingertips in his law office, he felt he had the resources to make this effort more professional and not the half-hearted attempt he and Mike had tried previously. In the decade that passed they’d kept in touch with Jesse’s family, hoping to gain some kind of insight to their friend’s disappearance and final years in Los Angeles. The closest they’d come was some of the investigations Diane and Carlos had launched in the years following Jesse’s final disappearance. “Gladys was involved with some dangerous people in California,” she told Mike at one time. “People who were involved in a huge underground crime cartel. I don’t know what kind of activities they were involved in, but it was huge. And dangerous. I think Jesse found out about it and they did something to him.”

Diane and Carlos did some minor poking around on their own, contracting the help of a business acquaintance of Carlos’s who was a private investigator. The investigator worked for them for about six months in 1976 and came back one night in December of that year breathless. “You have to take me off this case,” he’d said after they let him in their home upon his return from California.

Why? they’d asked, alarmed.

The investigator laid it all out. While he couldn’t gain solid proof for this theory, he was fairly confident that the people Gladys was involved with were members of a dangerous satanic cult. At least that’s what he learned from the people that would talk to him about it. He’d talked to police officers, detectives, people in the Haight Ashbury district, and while he hadn’t talked to anybody directly tied to Gladys herself, the people he interviewed told him the same thing. A large satanic cult was in operation, had spread nationwide and had members in various parts of the world. The private investigator showed Gladys’s photo to a few of the people he’d interviewed, and the ones that recognized her admitted that the company she kept was cult related. She might even be a member of the group herself. When the investigator tried to learn more about the cult, everybody clammed up. Nobody would talk to him about it. You don’t understand, they all said. These people are bad. They know all, they see all. They have heavily infiltrated modern society and they are everywhere. Especially here. If I tell you anything more about them they might find out and I don’t want to even think what might become of me.

The police hadn’t been much help either, neither denying rumors of a cult nor confirming one. Despite vague rumors of a cult compound in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the investigator wasn’t able to learn much else. He was just about to launch into phase two of his investigation when he woke up one morning to the sound of a knock on his hotel room door. Upon opening it, he’d found a gift-wrapped box in front of the door. Curious, he’d brought the box in and carefully opened it.

Carefully wrapped in tissue paper was a severed human finger. Along with a single note, written in a blocky script on a tattered piece of notebook paper. Cease your investigation, was all it said. The investigator heeded the warning and took the first flight out of Los Angeles back to Texas.

This troubled Diane and Carlos. They’d been in the process of trying to gain custody of Frank, who’d just been released to his parents after the criminal charges against them were mysteriously dropped. Now with the new information that Ray Allman—their private investigator friend—had learned, they were prepared to use it against the couple. But before they could get started, two things happened.

In early January of 1977, two men in ski masks forced their way into the house. Carlos was at work, the kids at school. Diane and the maid were at home, tending to chores when the gunmen broke in. They herded the cowering women into the bathroom and locked them in, telling them that if they didn’t shut the fuck up they would be shot in the fucking head. Diane had quickly quieted Maria down, and the two women sat in the bathroom clutching each other fearfully as the sound of footsteps traveled through the house. The men seemed to know exactly where they were going, for there were no sounds of ransacking as would have been prevalent in most home burglaries. Five minutes later they heard the front door open and close, and then the sound of receding footsteps. The women sat in the bathroom for another forty-five minutes before Diane tried opening the door, which was locked from the outside. It took the women another fifteen minutes to break the lock on the bathroom door and, once they were out, Diane headed for the phone in the master bedroom and called the police.

The only thing that was stolen was twenty-five thousand dollars in cash that Carlos had stashed in a metal box, stored on the upper shelf in the closet. The men had taken the box with them. Nothing else in the house was touched or stolen.

The police questioned them extensively. Were they certain that nobody but Carlos and Diane knew about the money? Had they mentioned the whereabouts of the cash to anybody outside of the family? The answers were no. The police checked out Carlos, thinking he might have hired one of his workers to steal the money for some illicit purpose, but could find nothing to support this theory. The night after the robbery, Diane had turned to her husband in the darkness of their bedroom. “This was a warning, Carlos.”

“A warning?”

“A warning from that… devil group of Gladys’ in California. I can feel it in my bones. Somehow they found out we hired Ray to do that investigating. Gladys must be angry at us for trying to get Frank out of that house.”

“But that’s ridiculous, honey,” Carlos had said in a whispered voice. “How would they know we even had this cash in our house? And how would they have known its location?”

Diane had shuddered. “They knew. The devil told them where it was. How else could those men have gone right to where we kept the money?” And then she’d crossed herself and mumbled a prayer of protection.

Two weeks later they got a call from California. It was Gladys. She told Diane that she and Tom had talked things over and that she was sending Frank to El Paso to live with her and Carlos. She felt it would be better for the boy to have a change of place. Diane didn’t mention the breakin to her former sister-in-law; she merely mumbled thank you and two days later they picked up Frank at the El Paso International Airport.

When John Llama started his investigation, he started where Diane and Carlos had left off. He obtained the files Ray Allman had left with them (securely locked in a safe deposit box at a bank), and started verifying what Ray found. For the first year John didn’t learn much, except that the group called itself The Children of the Night. He learned they were involved in a lot of criminal activity: child pornography and regular run-of-the-mill porn, drugs, white slavery, weapons smuggling, and prostitution. They also had several legitimate business interests, and it was this route that John chose to take. For the first year of investigating he grew frustrated at always hitting dead ends; the cult members went by so many aliases and code names it was hard to tell one from the other. Another thing that hindered his progress was, despite the evidence the group was nationwide, possibly worldwide, there was no evidence to support the theory. It appeared that the group went by different names in different parts of the U.S., with a group in New York meeting as “The Children” and a group in Alabama meeting as “The Children of the Night.” John pressed on, uncovering information about The Children of the Night, eventually making the connection that it was this name that the group was most commonly known by.

During the time John was conducting his investigation, Mike was only fleetingly aware of it. John would call him from time to time to discuss details. He told Mike he was being extremely careful; he’d lifted all of the preliminary duties from his assistants at the office, taking the case on himself. He didn’t trust anybody with any of it. He was also being careful to destroy whatever notes he had and stored other items in a safe deposit box. He gave Mike a key and made him memorize the box number and what bank it was at. Mike was concerned and wanted to help his friend, but he didn’t want to let his wife, Carol, in on it. She would be petrified and would forbid Mike to even lend a hand. So he sat idly by on the sidelines while John did all of the work.

In the end they got to John so swiftly that even Mike was surprised at their skill and deftness. To this day, he still didn’t know how they found out. Maybe the group found out who John was and brought him into the fold secretly, setting up people to meet him at business functions, passing themselves off as businessmen or lawyers John might have met at some meeting or party. Mike recalled John telling him about a few social mixers he’d attended in his off time; he’d surely been attending a lot of them since his divorce from Connie, and Mike was afraid John would start drinking again (he’d developed a drinking problem in college that lasted through the early years of his law career). But John seemed to be doing fine and Mike didn’t press it.

Mike remembered the day in the Spring of 1982—it must have been mid April, or so—when John called him at three a.m. Mike had picked up the phone by his side of the bed, irritated at being woken up at this hour, and at first John’s slurred voice was unrecognizable. “John?”

“It’s me, Mike,” John had said. Mike could tell right away that John had fallen off the wagon. It had been three months since they’d spoken, and John had been doing fine then. Suddenly concerned, he started to ask John if he was okay when John cut him off. “There’s no way we can find out anything else about Jesse, Mike. Better chalk him up as being dead. Dead and gone. No way.”

“John what are you talking about?” Rising fear wormed its way into Mike’s gut.

“They’re everywhere, Mike.” John paused and Mike could hear the tilt of a bottle on the other end of the line. “They’re fucking everywhere.”

Dread filled Mike. He had the sick feeling he knew what John was talking about.

“I don’t know how they found me. I went to a party with an associate of mine, guy who’s president of a big firm downtown. It was supposed to be at the home of an investment banker. I was interested in offshore investing. Paul really sold me on it and he promised me this guy knew what he was talking about.”

“Who’s Paul?” Mike had asked gently. He’d picked up the phone and moved out of the bedroom and into the hall where he wouldn’t disturb Carol, who moaned once and turned over in her sleep.

“Guy I met at a seminar a few months ago.” John seemed to struggle with the memory. “Nice guy… or at least I thought so until Tuesday.”

“What happened, John?”

Another hit off the bottle. “Guy’s one of them,” he slurred. “Fucking devil worshipper.”

Mike felt himself go numb with fright.

“Got to the house for the party,” John said, slurring his words bad now. “Everything was cool for awhile. It was a biiigg house. Fuckin’ mansion in Bel Air. Beautiful. There was this little babe that was so hot for me… ya shoulda seen her, Mikey… fucking tits to die for, a body that wouldn’t quit—”

“I’m listening, John,” Mike had said calmly, trying to quell the beating of his heart. “Tell me what happened.”

There was a pause for a moment, as if John was trying to muster the courage to tell him what happened. He started slowly. “I don’t remember her name. I think it was Susie. She offered me a drink. I thought ‘why not,’ and she went to the bar and brought me one. It tasted okay. But after awhile I started feeling funny. She started flirting with me… little cock teaser. Then I started getting dizzy. I reached out and grabbed her shoulder to support myself ’cause I felt the room spinning. I dropped the drink and then there was a hand on my shoulder helping me up. I remember being led out of the room and a voice… a real big voice, almost hollow sounding, saying something like ‘we’ll begin once it’s taken full effect.’ ” He paused again. “It was then that I realized I’d been drugged.”

Mike didn’t say anything. He listened with sinking dread as John continued.

“The next thing I know I woke up in a big room.” For a moment the slurriness of his speech was gone as John struggled with the memory. “I was naked, laid out in the middle of the room. It was lit by candles. Dozens of them. There were people in the room, still dressed in their suits and dresses. Paul was standing in front of me, looking down with a scary look. I swear to you, Mike, that man had murder in his eyes. And something more than murder. Evil. Corruption. They all did. I tried to sit up, but I felt the room spin. I tried to fight the dizziness and felt myself getting sick. Then I threw up all over the floor. And they laughed.”

The rest of it had been a blur for John. He didn’t remember much and still didn’t realize what had happened to him, or if any of it was simply a figment of his imagination. He thought he was tortured, that hot spikes were being burned into his flesh; he recalled figures standing above him and jabbing long sharp objects into his body as he writhed and screamed on the ground in excruciating pain. He thought at one time he awoke over a steaming pit of filth, his face held over a cauldron of human excretions. He felt a hand grip the back of his head firmly and push him into the steaming mess, feeling the texture of the warm wetness; lumpy, damp, mixing the stink of piss, vomit and shit. He felt it ooze into his nostrils and throat and he gagged. His stomach churned and he threw up again, the warm steaming mess joining the mixture in the bowl and he was forced to lap at it until he threw up again, he kept throwing up until his stomach muscles convulsed, wrenching his guts dry. He’d dropped to the floor in exhaustion, breathing heavily, and then he felt the searing pain as the red hot lances stabbed into his flesh again.

This continued for a long time. How long, John didn’t know. At one point, he woke up to see the group of people stripped naked, hovering over a lone nude figure on the floor. The figure was a female and very dead. Her chest had been cut open and the woman that had been flirting with him reached into the corpse’s chest and pulled out her heart. She took a bite out of it and then John felt strong hands grip his arms and herd him over to the body. He was pushed toward the corpse, a hand clutching a bloody hunk of meat was thrust in his face and before he passed out again he saw one of the men, his erection hard and sticking up stiffly, move the corpse’s buttocks up into position for penetration.

The next thing he remembered was being thrown out of a moving car. He hit the pavement hard and rolled toward the curb, covering his head with his arms. When he came to rest he scrambled to his feet. The car he was thrown from was already receding in the distance and he looked around. His clothes were on; his tie unknotted and hanging limply from his neck, shirt unbuttoned, his suit coat rumpled and dirty. He was in a ritzy neighborhood, probably somewhere near Bel Air where the party was held. For a moment he didn’t remember what he was doing there, but then suddenly the memory came screaming at him. He yelled and began running down the moonlit, quiet street.

The Beverly Hills police picked him up that night for disturbing the peace. But when he blurted his story out to them, they chuckled in disbelief. “There’s nothing wrong with you except you’re drunk as shit,” one of the cops told him. They’d put him in the drunk tank and he made bail the next day, called for a cab and came straight home. He tried calling the man he met at the social mixer, Paul.

It was answered on the third ring by a woman who spoke Spanish. John had hung up, redialed the number, and got the same woman. “Who is this?” she demanded, this time switching to English effortlessly.

With a shaking voice, John asked her: “Is this 965-3948?” He’d read the number carefully from the business card Paul had given him.

“Yes?” Deep suspicion in the woman’s voice.

John sighed. He’d dialed the right number. “I’d like to speak to Paul, please.”

“There’s nobody here named Paul.”

“But…” John had fumbled for the card again, verifying the number. “I called this number just yesterday and spoke to him. I’ve been calling this number for the past three months and have reached him here!”

“I’ve had this phone number for ten years,” the woman said, clearly in no mood for John. “You sound drunk.” She’d hung up on him.

John hadn’t been drunk, but getting there proved to be no problem. He’d driven to the liquor store and stocked up. He’d spent the next two days drinking. Then he called Mike.

Mike didn’t know what to make of John’s story. John swore by it, and when Mike stopped by John’s house the next morning he calmly asked him to take off his shirt. John glowered at Mike with red-rimmed eyes. “You don’t believe me.”

“I believe you,” Mike said. “I just want to see how badly hurt you are.”

John seemed to brood, as if he were ashamed of something. Then he muttered “oh hell,” and took off his shirt. “There’s nothing, see? I looked at myself the minute I got home. I don’t have any bruises, any wounds from what they did to me.”

He was right. John’s pudgy flesh was unmarked by bruises and didn’t bear the faintest hint of trauma except for a few scrapes that could have been caused from his tumbling from the car. In fact, the wounds that exhibited this were the only ones that matched John’s story.

“So there was nothing physical to support John’s story?” Vince asked mid-way through the narrative.

“None at all,” Mike said. He poured himself a second cup of iced coffee and took a sip. “I tried to take him back to the spot where he said the party was held, but he couldn’t even remember what house it was at. We ended up driving around in circles through Beverly Hills and Bel Air.”

“So what happened?” Vince asked.

What happened was John went downhill. He stopped his investigation. He told Mike that if he wanted to tackle it that he was more than welcome to. But as far as he was concerned, he was out of it. He gave Mike all his notes and the master key to the safe deposit box and turned his attention to drinking. He married again, meeting his second wife at a bar in Huntington Beach, and got divorced again two years later. By this time his business was gone, taken over by one of the lesser partners who took the reins when John began to devote more time to the bottle. John didn’t care. He took a job as a lawyer with another firm and tried to control his drinking. He sold his share in his former law office to his successor, not wanting to waste the time or drinking energy it would take to go to court. For the next ten years he made a meager living practicing law and drinking. He retired in 1994 and died in 1996 from liver failure.

“That’s when I decided to get into it,” Mike said. Frank remained sitting in the easy chair, sipping his iced coffee and listening to the story, not offering comments. “I made the decision at John’s funeral as a promise to him and Jesse. I told them I would find out who was behind this complete destruction of two beautiful lives.” He looked at Frank briefly, as if seeing his old friend Jesse in the younger man’s face, and then turned back to Vince. “I still keep in contact with Diane. In the years since her… warning, I guess you’d call it, she’s become increasingly religious. Jesse and Diane came from a Catholic Family, and Diane really got into her faith more and more. She’s pretty much a complete religious nut now. A real loony.”

Like my mother, Vince thought.

“Not too long after John had his little incident, Diane got word from the Miami Police Department that Jesse had been found dead. He’d drank himself to death and was found in an alley in a bad section of town. He was identified through fingerprints, which turned up the arrest in San Francisco, along with a host of others through the years, mostly for vagrancy and public drunkenness. The body was shipped back to El Paso, and Diane said that when she and her sister Arlene viewed it they barely recognized him. He…” Mike licked his lips. “He’d really let himself go, to say the least.”

Vince nodded, visualizing what over fifteen years of continuous drinking and living on the streets would do to a man’s physical appearance. Not to mention what the mental breakdown could do as well.

Mike started his own investigation a year after John’s death. He did it discreetly. Retired from teaching and living quietly with Carol in Huntington Beach, California, the kids all out of the house and starting families and careers of their own, Mike first indulged in the pleasures of retired life. Waking up leisurely, catching up on his reading, traveling with Carol, visiting the kids. After a few months he began reading books on the occult and true crime. Carol didn’t object to the reading material at all—she was an avid Stephen King and Dean Koontz fan herself. Mike didn’t tell her his reasons for delving into such subject matter. As much as he loved his wife, he didn’t want to scare her. If she knew the truth, she would be mortified with fear.

Carol already knew some of the details. She couldn’t help but hear some of it when Jesse originally disappeared. Mike shielded her from the grisly aspects of it and told her that Gladys had left Jesse and taken their son Frank up to San Francisco. Jesse had started drinking and… she bought it. Hook, line and sinker. From then on, Carol simply assumed Jesse had turned into a deadbeat dad.

The first thing Mike did was to set up another identity. He found a book in an odd little bookstore in Hollywood called How to Disappear Successfully. This book gave detailed tips on dropping completely out of sight and avoiding creditors, former employers, friends, families, lovers. It also gave detailed information on how to hide from the IRS and the government, which was what Mike was especially interested in. If The Children of the Night were as sophisticated as he thought, they most likely had an intelligence system that ranked with the FBI’s. Mike read the book, and over the next six months he began setting up a second identity.

It was fairly easy. He set up a mailbox at Mail Boxes Etc. Then he answered an ad in the back of a magazine that promised authentic-looking state issued identification cards. The book suggested going through one of these services rather than a street hustler. Mike sent the firm his information and a photograph he had taken at a photo booth along with the requested fee. A month later he received a very authentic looking California Driver’s License identifying himself as David J. Connelly. Using the Connelly name, he was able to get a Social Security number from the Social Security Office, being careful to bring another set of documents that he had another outfit prepare for him certifying that he was a victim of amnesia. With no recollection of his full name or previous life, he needed to start over. Social Security provided him with a new number and he was on his way.

The next thing he did was to rent a small office in Huntington Beach. He bought an old desk and chair from a goodwill store and installed a phone in the building. And it was from this little office that he conducted all of his investigations into the group known as The Children of the Night.

“I also picked up a pretty nice tracking device that attaches to your phone line,” he explained. This tracking device alerted you if your phone was being tapped, or if the line was being traced. He also bought a computer and had a second line hooked up for a modem. He began doing his research on-line and by making phone calls when necessary.

“I found out a lot that first year,” he said. “I found out where Gladys and Tom live. I scoped the placed out myself. I obtained background information on them, found out that they’re living very legitimate, respectable lives on the outside. Tom is CEO of Metropolitan Inc., a large offshore company. Gladys is an executive at Digitalis, a computer hardware firm in Newport Beach. They live in Newport Beach in a gated community, Tom drives a Mercedes, and she drives a BMW. The perfect picture of a nice life, right?”

Vince nodded.

Mike found out everything about the companies they worked at. How many employees worked there, how long the companies had been in existence, their ranking in their respective industry, who the stockholders were. From there, Mike began investigating the corporate angle, keeping an eye peeled out for anything about the respective companies in the trade journals. As far as the information John had found, it didn’t help him much. The most John had been able to get on that was that somebody in the organization was very high up with a firm called Corporate Financial. Using that information, Mike researched Corporate Financial.

Because Mike wanted to assume as normal a profile to his wife as possible, he was only able to devote a few hours a week to his research. When he left the house for his office, he told Carol he was going to the library or the mall. He paid the rent and utilities from a checking account he opened under the David Connelly name. All bills came to the mailbox he had set up for David Connelly.

“Diane called me at the end of ’97 out of the blue, told me about Frank and where he was living,” Mike said. “I made a note of it, but didn’t contact him immediately.” He glanced at Frank and grinned. “He’s still a little pissed about me for this.”

“He thought I was like my fucking psycho bitch mother,” Frank said.

Vince couldn’t help but chuckle. Another thing he had in common with Frank; not only did they grow up together, they both hated their mothers.

“I didn’t want to take chances, that’s for sure,” Mike said. He took a sip of iced coffee and launched into the rest of it. His investigation of Corporate Financial led to a man on the board of directors who also sat on the board of a major computer firm as well as several other firms. He got the man’s name, ran it through the computer, and the background that spit out was promising indeed. It seemed to link a billionaire businessman named Samuel F. Garrison with the shadowy figure said to be the leader of The Children of the Night. Their backgrounds were similar. A trip to the library and an afternoon rifling through business journals yielded a few photographs of Mr. Garrison. When Mike finally did contact Frank and showed him the picture of Sam Garrison, Frank’s face had turned white.

“I checked Frank out before I contacted him,” Mike finished the long narrative. “I made double sure he wasn’t involved and it turned out he was having the dreams we spoke of earlier. He’d already started his own investigation, and with my help we tracked you down at his suggestion.”

“It was also around this time that a woman claiming to be my father’s wife contacted my aunt Diane,” Frank said from his spot on the easy chair. He sat up from his slouched position, leaning forward. “She claims she was married to my father in Miami, that they were alcoholics who spent a lot of time on the streets. She’d sobered up, found God, and tracked my aunt down. She told Diane that my dad had witnessed something… pretty bad in California back in the sixties. Even she never learned what it was. The most he ever told her was that he’d seen the Devil himself do vile things to infants, to women and children. She was very vague, but apparently felt compelled by my father’s story to believe it. She contacted Diane because she wanted to… offer belated condolences of his death, I suppose.” He chortled. “She said that whatever it was my dad had experienced in California, that’s what drove him to drink, what drove him out of his mind. She wanted to know what it was.”

Vince paused. “Your aunt didn’t tell her?”

“No,” Frank said. “She gave the woman some excuse. Told her dad had a history of mental illness, that she should put whatever it was my father told her out of her mind. To forget it.” He sighed. “The problem is, how can anybody put something so terrible out of their mind?”

Which was something Vince was trying to do now as he lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. It was a warm night and even with the air conditioning on he still felt warm. Every time he closed his eyes, all he could think about was what Frank and Mike had told him. His mother involved in a satanic cult; human sacrifices, ritual murder, a secret organization with stealth, cunning, and predatory skill. Vince closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but those images kept pushing at the forefront of his mind, like waves breaking on the shore of a rocky beach.

Indeed, how do you wipe something so terrible out of your mind?

Somehow, Vince wound up doing just that. He wasn’t sure when, but at some point in the night, he fell asleep.