Wildest Dreams

3

I had a lot of questions.

I needed some answers.

I didn’t know how quickly I could get them.

But I knew where to start looking.

I spotted the mailbox right off. The huge rubber tarantula spiked to the top was a dead giveaway. Given life by a steady stream of pelting raindrops, the tarantula’s rubber legs danced over dull gray metal as if the impaled bug were trying to scramble free and escape into the primeval forest beyond.

Spider Ripley’s place was set back from Surf Glenn Lane. A gravel road snaked into a stand of dying trees, but I didn’t turn off. I stuck to the main road, slowing the Toyota to a crawl, studying the house through a net of twisted branches bristling with rusty red needles as I passed by.

Spider Ripley certainly wasn’t an average man. There was nothing average about his house, either. Ripley lived in a pyramid. Oh, not the kind built by ancient Egyptians, whose gods he had worshipped in his younger days. Spider’s pyramid looked like it had been designed by a misguided granola-eating architect with a revolutionary selling point -your home now, your crypt later. That was the only explanation I could come up with, unless the guy had simply tired of building geodesic domes. Either way, whoever was responsible for the monstrosity that loomed before me definitely had more money than sense, which left him ahead of Spider Ripley in at least one department.

Like the House of Usher, the pyramid had definitely seen better days. I was willing to bet that it dated to the seventies, the golden age of neo-hippie architecture. Three stories high, it was covered with redwood shingles. Of the two walls I could see, one was going green with moss and the other looked like a sick tree that was ready to shed its bark. The few windows shone as black as Ray-Ban lenses, narrow horizontal slits that could easily accommodate the barrel of a sniper’s rifle.

No cars were parked out front. What was behind the pyramid, I didn’t know. A miniature sphinx wouldn’t have surprised me. But as long as there wasn’t a car parked back there, I’d be happy.

I followed the main road, and the pyramid disappeared behind me as the forest thickened. Under other circumstances Ripley’s place might have made me laugh. As it was, my appreciation of the ironic was running at a low ebb.

My thoughts returned to my fight with Ripley. Not just because my ribs ached. Actually, I didn’t remember much about the fight at all. What I remembered was the way Spider’s eyes shone with hatred and embarrassment when I saw the silver crucifix hanging around his neck.

It was a strange reaction. Funny. Pathetic. Revealing.

At least I hoped it was revealing. Just as I hoped Spider’s crucifix meant what I thought it did.

Otherwise, my coming here was a waste of time.

The windshield wipers beat a steady rhythm. Surf Glenn Lane curved toward the coastline. A quarter mile from Spider’s place, I spotted a weathered LOT FOR SALE sign and a dirt road that descended into the trees.

I turned off. The lot was hidden from the road. Overgrown with ferns, it didn’t exactly look like a real estate agent’s hot property. Even if it was, I doubted that a prospective buyer would be scouting undeveloped acreage in the rain. The odds were good that the truck would be safe.

I parked and armed myself, concealing one of the pistols and my K-bar just as I had earlier in Cliffside.

As I walked up the road, I wondered what secrets Spider Ripley’s pyramid held.

If I was lucky, I already knew.

There wasn’t any traffic on Surf Glenn Lane. Still, I stayed close to the treeline. The rain was steady but gentle, and the trees were thick enough to keep me from getting too wet.

I started down the gravel road that led to Spider’s pyramid. Closer in, the place seemed less amusing. I didn’t like those opaque windows. Anything could be inside. Or anyone.

There was only one way to find out. Two sides of the pyramid were visible from the main road-one of them being the main entrance, which faced the gravel driveway-so I went around the back.

No miniature sphinx. Just a little garden choked with weeds, several pink flamingos, and a pair of copulating ceramic gnomes.

I picked up the male, and I had to laugh. His equipment was way past elfin. The little guy was hung like a troll.

But copulating ceramic gnomes weren’t anything to get excited about. The good news was that no cars were parked in Spider’s garden, and that made me happy. It wasn’t incontrovertible evidence that no one was home, but I took it as a pretty solid indication of same.

I spotted another door-sliding glass and black as midnight. Completely opaque. The only thing I saw as I approached it was my own reflection waiting for me on the glass.

It was a stone cold fact that I’d seen better days, but I didn’t let my appearance slow me down.

I heaved the gnome through the glass and followed it inside.

Dark as a pit in there, and cool.

I took a deep breath.

Decay and death, with just a hint of pestilence. Exactly what I was looking for.

Four rooms on the first floor of the pyramid. Three of them were fairly narrow, one on each wall, with the fourth in the center.

The latter was Spider Ripley’s living room-if a pyramid could contain such a room-and considering what I knew about Ripley, the decor ran true to form.

Circe had told me that Spider was a member of an Egyptian revival cult before joining her father’s church. It was common knowledge that Whistler’s own brand of religion drew heavily on the Egyptian beliefs concerning death and rebirth, so it wasn’t surprising that Spider’s pyramid was decorated in a style that could only be described as very late Egyptian…or very early Diabolos Whistler.

In a series of papyrus friezes that hung on the walls, a pharaoh who looked very much like Diabolos Whistler traveled the cycle of death and rebirth. The furniture was simple, black, and spare. There were statues and small idols everywhere, intricate portrayals of Egyptian gods and Whistler’s own deities. Fortunately, most of the statuary bore small name-plates-a necessity for an unbeliever like myself.

There was Bes, the Egyptian god of a happy home, a strange bearded creature who reminded me of the gnome I’d tossed through the window, though Bes wasn’t quite as well-endowed. Bastet, the cat goddess, crouched at his side. Korthes’h-the hideous creature tattooed on Circe Whistler’s back-loomed on a low table, hovering over Sakhmet and Anubis, Manth’ss and Krake.

Many of the pieces were museum quality, elaborate statues inlaid with lapis lazuli, turquoise, and carnelian. Even so, the room reflected an almost childlike sense of completion and display, as if Ripley needed to reinforce his faith by surrounding himself with icons. I could almost imagine the freakish giant acting out Whistler’s modern mythology of new gods that slew the old like a kid with a set of very expensive action figures.

But I wasn’t here to play psychiatrist. I climbed a staircase to the second floor. Only two rooms there, and they held more of the same.

A bedroom and an expansive master bath. I guessed Spider spent most of his time in these two rooms. Both had televisions and telephones…and several boxes of Ramses condoms, birth control fit for a pharaoh.

Besides that, the bedroom contained a kingsize-plus bed with plenty of room for the seven-foot bodyguard, a female guest, and its current occupant-a realistic looking mummy that on closer examination turned out to be a doll. Staring at it, I couldn’t help remembering the all-too-real mummies stacked in Diabolos Whistler’s study. Maybe the things were de rigueur when it came to cultist decorating… Beyond that, I didn’t want to dwell on the implications of a mummy-be it authentic or ersatz-in a kingsize-plus bed.

I didn’t want to think about the sarcophagus-shaped tub in the bathroom, either. Or the Canopic jars with lids shaped like the heads of Whistler’s gods that stood on the toilet tank in the pissoir.

No way was I going to lift the lids of those jars and peek at the contents. I left them behind, along with a collection of pleasant-smelling incense burners and scented cones that stood on a shelf above them, and I followed a sharper, less appealing scent that led me to a trapdoor set in the ceiling above the kingsize-plus bed.

A man of Ripley’s height wouldn’t have had any trouble reaching that door. I had to climb on top of the bed to slide it open.

It clicked into place and disgorged a black ladder that I barely dodged. Nothing was going to slow me down now that I was on the proper scent. I climbed the ladder and entered a cramped chamber that filled the uppermost section of the pyramid.

Votive candles flickered here. Crucifixes gleamed. A wooden Christ spilled splintered blood, while a statue of Mary wept glass tears. The Christian symbols didn’t surprise me. After all, I’d seen the crucifix eclipsing the ankh branded on Spider Ripley’s chest.

It wasn’t hard to discover the cause of Spider’s latest conversion. The thing itself rested on the triangular black table in the center of the room.

An iron box covered with welded crucifixes, barred in the front, and padlocked.

The contents: Diabolos Whistler’s head.

Dull, hazel eyes stared through ropes of long white hair that hung across his face. Whistler’s left cheek had flattened against the bottom of the backpack during our trip, cementing his lips in a strange expression that could be a sneer or a smile depending upon the light.

He wasn’t pretty. That much was certain. But I didn’t much care how he looked. Diabolos and I were old friends. We’d traveled together. Talked through the long, empty night.

Or I talked and he listened. Diabolos was a good listener. Excellent company, as far as I was concerned. Hey, I’d duct-taped his head to the Toyota’s differential and he hadn’t complained one bit.

Oh, maybe he sneered a little if the light was wrong, his twisted lips curling cynically in that bristling white goatee. Maybe he was having his own private joke at my expense. But how far was a sneer from a smile? Really?

It was all a matter of perspective. Just like locking Whistler’s head in an iron box. Perspective driven by fear, resulting in action.

Spider Ripley had taken action. The iron box with its welded crucifixes was only the beginning of his preparations. He obviously felt the trappings of Christianity would restrain Diabolos Whistler. Short of the Shroud of Turin and the Holy Grail, Spider Ripley had done his best to create a divine prison that would hold the darkest of the dark ones at bay.

I wondered if Spider had gone down on his knees and prayed in his secret shrine. It wouldn’t have surprised me. Circe had said that her bodyguard was deathly afraid of her father’s powers. Obviously, he believed the things I’d read in those pamphlets handed out by Whistler’s followers-that Whistler’s death would indeed signal the arrival of a new satanic age, and Satan himself would be reborn from the ruin of Whistler’s corpse.

“That’s where you’ve got them fooled,” I whispered to Diabolos. “You’re a bright boy, all right. Getting them to focus on your head. I bet they forgot all about your body. You’re probably busting out of a Mexican morgue right now. You’ll snatch some other corpse’s head, slap it on, buy a Toyota from some surf bum, come north and claim your head like a fallen crown.”

Diabolos only sneered.

“That’s the plan. Isn’t it, buddy?”

I leaned in close. And that was when I discovered the final touch. A silver chain encircled Whistler’s neck, the fine links disappearing between his shriveled lips.

I tugged on the chain and drew another crucifix from Diabolos Whistler’s dead sneer, dislodging several communion wafers in the process.

Free of the crucifix, Diabolos didn’t say a word.

I laughed. He still looked awfully dead to me.

I grabbed the metal box and blew out the votive candles. Darkness closed in.

I might have been in an empty room. A room that was not shaped like a pyramid. A room that held nothing at all.

It was a place I might have lingered.

I couldn’t afford to do that. Not now.

I descended the ladder, leaving the darkness for the light.

I needed other answers, and I wasn’t prepared to leave Spider Ripley’s pyramid until I found them.

I didn’t expect to be disturbed. Spider and his merry band were no doubt busy enough, and I doubted that he’d be heading home anytime soon. With his fear of Whistler’s head, I was sure that Ripley didn’t want to be anywhere near it unless he absolutely had to.

There were two things I needed first and foremost, and both were in Spider Ripley’s bedroom.

A television and a remote. I picked up the latter and turned on the former. It was the top of the hour, so I was lucky. I found a news anchor who didn’t annoy me, and I stuck with him for nearly twelve minutes.

In that time, many of my questions were answered. Number one was the identity of the flayed corpse I’d mistaken for Circe Whistler. The murdered woman was Lethe, Circe’s sister. The network had dug up some footage of her-home video shot at some club in San Francisco, along with a music video she’d made with some abysmal goth band (she was the nun in fishnet stockings). Apart from a pair of blue eyes and several hauntingly familiar tattoos, she didn’t look much like Circe.

Who was said to be in seclusion in San Francisco. This factoid was seemingly verified by a clip of an old Victorian in the Haight. A limo pulled up, and a woman in a black crushed velvet cape got out. The cape had a hood, and the woman was wearing sunglasses, and she had enough bodyguards to handle a visiting head of state.

Circe’s doppelganger disappeared into the old house. A scab-colored door slammed closed behind her. Flash to a nightclub in the Mission District called the Make-Out Room, where a reporter was interviewing one of the owners. Sure he knew Circe Whistler. He knew her well. She’d spent the previous night at his place. They’d heard about Lethe’s murder over breakfast, while listening to the radio in a neighborhood cafe.

I remembered Circe’s comment about her father’s use of doubles back in the sixties. I wondered what the going rate was for a doppelganger these days, especially one that would have to spend a good amount of time under a tattoo artist’s needle.

Whatever the rate, it probably wasn’t as lucrative as the check Circe’s scriptwriter was pulling down. I figured she had to have one of those, too, because the scenario for Circe’s power play was brilliant. Not only had she found a way to eliminate her father and her sister, she was also creating sympathy for her church in the bargain.

She had fashioned a bogeyman-faceless, unseen, scary to anyone with a brain. The suspected killer was a member of the Christian right. Several media outlets had received communiques from a man who claimed responsibility for the executions of Diabolos Whistler and his youngest daughter. He proclaimed his membership in a group called Jehovah’s Hammer, and he said he wouldn’t stop killing until Circe Whistler and her followers were dead in the ground.

This revelation was followed by a background piece featuring old footage of a debate between Circe and Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition. That was yesterday’s news, so I started channel surfing. The story was everywhere. CNBC was deep into wall-to-wall coverage, concentrating on the murder-mystery game. The tabloid shows were getting up-close-and-personal, fighting over Lethe Whistler’s ex-lovers-several aspiring musicians, a writer of paperback horror novels, and a cross-dressing basketball player who had dated her during a brief stint with the Golden State Warriors. PBS was there, too, taking the high road. A bunch of talking heads were kicking around the New Hedonism on The News Hour.

That was a little much, so I switched over to Larry King.

He was interviewing an expert on serial murderers.

A man with a terminally pinched expression.

Right off, I recognized my old buddy Clifford Rakes. His voice was calm and considered. Anyone who hadn’t heard him whining to his editor about waterbeds and dust-jacket photos might have been convinced that Clifford possessed a shred of intelligence.

“To deconstruct a killer’s behavior, we must see things through his eyes,” Rakes began. “The how’s of a case like this are obvious-the killer has left ample evidence at each murder. It’s the why’s we need to concentrate on. Perspective is the key to motivation, and motivation is the key to capture.”

I laughed. If Clifford wanted motivation, he could have looked at my bank account. I should have switched channels, but for some reason I wanted to hear him out.

He launched into his profile. I tried to rein in my anger as Rakes pontificated on my probable childhood propensity for bed-wetting, animal mutilation, and arson. My chest tightened when he talked about the sexual implications of a male killer who uses a knife… and takes trophies, namely a male victim’s head.

I held my breath as Rakes made passing references to Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Ramirez. But then he zeroed in for the kill, the infobite he’d obviously been saving for last. “Our killer is a religious avenger, a prophet who sets himself above others. He’s part of a cult himself-Jehovah’s Hammer-perhaps even its leader. Who knows how many innocents have fallen under his sway. He believes more will come to him as a result of the Whistler slayings. In the history of serial murder, I can think of only one killer who bears the weight of comparison.”

Blood pounded in my head.

Rakes pursed his lips and continued: “The madman I’m speaking of also headed a cult and saw himself as a prophet. He was responsible for the destruction of a great many lives.”

I aimed the remote at Rakes’s head, wishing it were a gun.

“His name was Charles Manson.”

I pressed a button. The screen went helter-skelter. And Clifford Rakes was gone.

I threw the television against a wall, grabbed Whistler’s head, and left Spider Ripley’s bedroom.

I’d learned all I could from the one-eyed box. After all, network anchors don’t believe in ghosts. They weren’t about to run a bio piece on a dead little girl who lived by a bridge. They weren’t going to tell me who she was, or what had happened to her, or if it was likely that I’d ever see her again.

But I knew someone who might be able to give me that information, if I could get to her. There were a few things I needed if I was going to manage that.

I found a stack of bills in a little office downstairs. I filed through the envelopes until I found one from the phone company. Just as I’d hoped, Spider Ripley had a cell phone.

I picked up the phone on the desk and punched in the number.

An electronic chirping sounded in an adjoining room.

I was in luck. In a minute I found the cell phone. I needed a few other things, and I found them, too. I stashed the stuff in a bag and walked to the Toyota.

Then I drove back to Spider’s pyramid. There was one other thing I needed, but I didn’t want to be spotted carrying it down the road.

Diabolos Whistler’s head.

Diabolos was waiting for me. Still sneering, still in on the joke.

Some people claimed that Diabolos Whistler was the real power behind Charles Manson. The rumors had drifted around for years. That Whistler had fingered Sharon Tate for murder. That he’d funneled money to Manson, and pulled his strings, and made him do the things he did through supernatural means.

There was one other rumor worth noting. It went like this-when Whistler was reborn as Satan, demons would unlock the prison gates, and Charles Manson and his followers would reap their unholy rewards at Whistler’s side.

Thinking about it gave me a chill.

Not because I believed it.

But because others did.

Because their belief gave them hope.