Chapter 11
Ron Green slowed his car almost automatically. He had no intention of stopping and trying to pick the girl up. He had neither the time nor the inclination to complicate his life that way. But she did have a nice ass, and he wanted to get a better look at her.
She turned her head as he drew close, her eyes flicking over the approaching car, dismissing it from her attention. The glimpse he got of her face made him almost ashamed of himself. She was pretty, yes, but she was young enough to be his daughter.
He wondered why she was walking her dog at this hour, in this Godforsaken place. Maybe he ought to stop and pick her up before some unscrupulous character did. If she were running away from home, he might persuade her to go back where she belonged.
His mind made a connection it should have made earlier. Of course she was running away from home. More correctly, she had already done so. She was one of the hippies he was investigating. That explained her presence here.
He stopped the car and looked back. A lonely little light burned on the utility pole at the crossroads several hundred yards behind him. Anyone walking in the road would have been outlined against the light, but now he couldn't see the girl or her dog. She must have turned to cut across the fields just after he'd passed her, or else she was lying low, fearing contact with strangers.
He fit a cigarette and continued to scan the shadowy road. Why was he concerned about her? He grew suspicious of his motives. She had certainly been pretty, and maybe his impulse to pick her up and give her a fatherly talking-to wasn't altruistic.
Whatever his motive might have been, he was merely wasting time now. He turned back to the wheel, making an effort to dismiss the girl from his mind, and put his old Mustang in motion again. Soon, boring his way through the cricket-loud darkness, he had forgotten her.
He thought about Marcia Creighton instead, and his hands tightened on the wheel as a complicated mixture of violent emotions washed over him. Thinking of her lately never failed to produce that effect. Tonight it was worse than ever.
Long ago, he had made a resolution never to get emotionally involved with his co-workers. It was a good, sensible resolution. You couldn't do your job well if you were having an affair with someone you met in the line of duty every day.
It was an excellent resolution, and Ron had never lost faith in its excellence, but he had never kept it, either. For one thing, he seldom had the opportunity to meet girls outside his work. For another, he liked newspaperwomen: as a class, they were reasonably intelligent, they shared his interests, they sympathized with his irreverence for authority and institutions. Nearly all the girls he'd slept with since Linda his ex-wife had walked out on him, had been co-workers.
Marcia couldn't be fitted comfortably into that category. Regardless of what she thought about it, she was no newspaperwoman. He didn't think of her as someone he might want for a one-night stand or even for an affair of a few weeks duration, either. Whenever he thought of her-which was often-he imagined her sharing his life, waiting for him at the airport when he jetted in from some foreign assignment. With the incentive and encouragement a woman like Marcia could give him, that kind of job wouldn't be out of his reach.
Nor did he believe that Marcia was out of his reach. He knew she was dissatisfied with her home life. She always looked a little distressed when it came time for her to go home. She always managed to find some excuse to hang around the city room and postpone her return.
Most important of all, he knew that she was interested in him. Just talking, exchanging a casual word about some trivial incident, they generated electricity between them. Only her innate decency, her respect for the marriage contract, kept her chained to her clod of a husband-whom Ron had met, and characterized as a clod, long before he'd met Marcia. He wouldn't have loved her-yes, loved her, he was forced to acknowledge it-if she hadn't been so decent and loyal.
It was trying, though. She always rejected his offers to meet him for a drink after work. She maintained a firmly aloof manner when they were on an assignment together. Still, there was no denying that electricity. He could feel it, and he couldn't remember when he'd ever been wrong about it.
But now, more forcefully than ever, his resolution was being proved correct. He was in love with Marcia, and she was actively screwing up his job.
Of course, she didn't realize it. A person as sweet and guileless as Marcia couldn't realize what a bastard Jack Higgins really was. Higgins resented the fact that Ron was too talented, too experienced, to be working on a small-time rag like the Banner. They'd had a few run-ins already, and now Higgins was looking for an excuse to fire him.
Just last week, the managing editor had accused him of not generating enough ideas for human interest features. That was true enough. Ron wasn't the kind of reporter who could waste his time on hundred-year-old ladies, cute animals, or screwball hobbyists. But if Higgins wanted feature stories, that's what Higgins would get, and Ron had promptly come up with an idea that would fit the editor's requirements without compromising his own professional standards: a story about the sudden influx of hippies into Riveredge Township would have plenty of human interest, but it would also be timely, it would say something meaningful about society-it would be, in the best sense, a news story.
Higgins, of course, hadn't seen it that way. "Jesus Christ, Ron," he'd fumed, "this isn't 1965. Who the fuck wants to read about hippies anymore?"
But Higgins had given his grudging consent to the assignment, and Ron had vowed to give him the kind of story that would make him eat his words-or failing that, the kind of story that would look good among his clippings when he sought another job.
Higgins hadn't been content merely to sneer at his idea, though; he'd actively tried to sabotage it by sending along an inept cub who would cramp his style and get tangled in his footwork.
The strategy was working brilliantly. Marcia couldn't have done a better job of screwing him up today if she'd been trying. Clicking her damned camera at the wrong moment-asking dumb questions-making a fool out of herself and flustering him with her clumsy inexperience-most of all, inhibiting him from talking to that wise-ass faggot who called himself Alexander Hamilton in a straight-from-the-shoulder way that would have elicited some information, if only by rattling him and making him lose his cool control.
The interview hadn't been a total loss, however. Hamilton had revealed a lot more than he'd intended. Principally, he'd revealed that he had something to cover up; and Ron strongly suspected what it was. Hamilton's jewelry wasn't intended for women. It was the paraphernalia of sado-masochistic homosexuals. Ron was familiar with their activities from some of the more sensational journals that came his way. After all, no woman in her right mind was going to wear a bull's prick around her neck. But it would be just the right touch on some freak in a nail-studded leather jacket and stamper boots, bellying up to one of the weird bars that catered to his sort.
Whether the newly arrived hippies contained a large contingent of such people or not, Ron didn't know. They well might, because he believed they were capable of any perversion. The tip-off had been the goat. He had watched enough old-time horror movies to know a pentagram when he saw one, and that's what the goat had been wearing around its neck.
It all fitted neatly together. The hippies were members of a Satanist cult, no doubt the followers of some charismatic leader who wasn't playing with a full deck. On his orders, they were gathering here for some big event of their liturgical year. Ron had spent the evening in the library, reading up on witchcraft and Satanism, and he believed he could name the night of their big bash: April 30, known as May Eve or Walpurgis Night, one of the four or five such nights of the year when self-styled witches assemble to worship the Devil at an obscene convocation known as the Sabbat.
Such people would routinely practice all forms of degeneracy with the fervor of religious acts. The S-and-M paraphernalia that Hamilton made was to be expected. So were the cattle mutilations that had been reported in the neighborhood. So was the murder-as Marcia had astutely recognized it to be-of the old hermit.
She hadn't followed up her hunch about that story, though, which only served to prove his contention that she was no newspaperwoman. Ron had followed it up by talking to the Medical Examiner. When the M.E. had autopsied the corpse, he'd discovered that Peach-tree's heart was missing. The cops weren't officially calling it murder yet, but none of them seriously believed that a pack of starving dogs would be so selective. The heart had been taken, Ron believed, for use in some blasphemous ritual. Before the old man's death, the Satanists had terrorized him to give rise to the rumor that some supernatural creature was responsible.
But the goat had been the tip-off. During the Sabbat, the Devil himself was supposed to appear: sometimes as a man, sometimes as an animal, sometimes as a combination of the two. The goat, so carefully curried and groomed, would no doubt play a part in that scene. The pentagram, the five-pointed star Ron had identified on the goat's necklace, was the symbol traditionally used by witches to control demons they had summoned.
Of course it was all nonsense, but these people believed it, and that belief made it dangerous nonsense. One man had died already. Animals had been tortured. Ron couldn't even imagine what kind of perversions and obscenities some of the young, starry-eyed followers of the crazy cult were being subjected to-like that pretty young girl he'd passed on the road a few minutes ago-but he planned to find out.
Unexpectedly, this "human interest feature" for Higgins might turn out to be the biggest story of his life, the springboard that would catapult him into the belated beginning of a real career. The story had everything-murder, sex, a kinky religious angle-and Ron planned to hold onto it and milk it for all it was worth. It was going to be his story, his alone.
That was why he was driving down this lonely country road tonight, dressed in old clothes, armed with a flashlight, a hunting knife, and-quite illegally-a .357 Magnum Colt Python. He'd bought it in a state with liberal gun laws, back in the days when the ghetto riots were making news. He'd never before carried it on a story. No one had ever assigned him to cover a riot.
He slowed at Blackwood's Corners and made the turn into Falls Road, where he and Marcia had interviewed Hamilton that afternoon. He soon found a boarded-up produce stand that looked like a good place to pull the car out of sight. He drove behind the stand, cut the lights and the engine, and sat listening for a moment. He heard nothing but crickets and frogs, and the bark of a dog in the distance. He could dimly discern the bulk of a farmhouse at the end of a long drive leading from the stand, but it was dark.
He got out of the car, shaking himself to unglue his sweaty clothes from his body. He was embarrassed by the theatricality of the gesture, even though he was alone, but he took out his pistol and checked the cylinder to make sure it was fully loaded. Then he slipped it into his belt beneath his shirt and started off down the road on foot.
Once his eyes had adapted to the starlight, he could make out the road and the shoulder clearly enough. He was sure he could fade into the bushes if a car should approach.
He caught himself humming aloud, and he put a stop to it. He smiled ruefully as he realized how buoyant, how exhilarated he felt. He had been a stranger to such feelings for a long time, ever since Linda had left him. He had just lost a job then. He'd been drinking too much. She'd found someone she liked better. Things had never gone right for him since then.
Now they were going right again at last. This was one big story that nobody would ignore. Even Jack Higgins wouldn't be able to play it down or steal the credit from him. What if some enterprising reporter had nipped Charles Manson in the bud by exposing his crazy philosophy and his plan for mass murder? Ron began toying with the idea of a Pulitzer Prize. Marcia would certainly rethink her attitude toward him if he got one.
He glimpsed lights through the trees. They had to be coming from Hamilton's place. He slowed his pace slightly. He was right: lights blazed in every window of the ramshackle farmhouse.
He stopped, cupping his hands to hide the flame as he lit a cigarette. He had worked out no plan for approaching the house, and he realized now that he should have done so. He should have driven past a couple of times in daylight to familiarize himself with the terrain. But it was too late to worry about that now.
He started forward again. He might be able to approach the house from the road, taking cover behind what he found, like say, the parked bus and the miscellaneous junk that littered the front yard.
Just as he got within sight of the house, the screen door opened and some people started coming out. He fell flat instantly, stifling a grunt, and slid down into the ditch by the roadside. A strong odor of mint assailed him from plants he crushed on his way down.
He lay still for a moment, breathing heavily, then slowly raised his head above the rim of the ditch. Eight or ten people had left the house and were now walking toward the road in an orderly file that resembled some kind of religious procession. They all wore long, white garments. The sight unnerved him, even though his suspicion should have prepared him for something like this.
They passed close by his hiding place, turning away from him as they reached the road. It was too dark to make out their faces. That encouraged him to believe that his own presence had gone undetected. They passed in perfect silence, except for the occasional whisper of a robe brushing the grass. Ron believed they must be barefoot
He rose from the ditch and waited until the last figure in the file was only a pale blur in his sight. He cast a quick glance at the farmhouse. Seeing no one, he climbed back onto the road and passed the lighted house, following them.
He couldn't imagine what they were up to. Perhaps they planned to hold a small service in preparation for the big event. His readings had told him that such gatherings were frequent. Perhaps they were going in search of another victim, or to mutilate some more of their neighbors cattle. Whatever they did, he planned to have a ringside seat.
He hadn't gone far before it occurred to him that the lights of the farmhouse were now at his back. If anyone in the file looked over his shoulder, he would be clearly visible. Cursing his thoughtlessness, he moved off the road. He tripped and fell into the ditch he'd just left.
He twisted his ankle beneath him as he fell. He was sure it wasn't broken, but it hurt when he put all his weight on it. He'd landed in a puddle, and the wetness of his clothes was even more annoying than the pain in his ankle.
He waited a moment, making an effort to calm his jangled nerves. He was off to a rotten start. It was obvious that he should have prepared himself more carefully. This was no ordinary job, either, and the next mistake he made might cost him his life.
It was hard for him to make an emotional connection with that fact. He had been a reporter for fifteen years, and he'd seen the results of violence in all its ugly forms, but always as a disinterested observer. Tonight for the first time, he was risking his life in the line of duty.
Perversely, the thought cheered him up. Once again he rejected the idea of turning back and making more careful preparations for another night. The hippies were up to something now, that was certain, and they might be inactive tomorrow or the next night.
He scrambled up the far bank of the ditch and limped hastily forward through the underbrush. Branches snatched at his clothes and scratched his face, but he didn't slow down. He was out of breath, his vision blurred by trickles of sweat, when he caught sight of the column again. It was proceeding sedately, in perfect order. He slowed, dragging air into his burning lungs as quietly as he could. He began to pick his way more carefully, trying to move without a sound.
A dog barked nearby. He hesitated. His recollection of the road was hazy, but he was almost certain that no other houses stood for several miles beyond Hamilton's. The dog was running loose. What if the police had been right in their first guess, and Peachtree had been killed by dogs? He refused to take that line of thought any further.
He saw that he was gaining on the white-robed hippies, and it took him a moment to realize that the file had halted. He saw a glimmer of dim garments as they rearranged their formation into a circle.
The bank he was following had risen considerably above the level of the road. When he inched closer, he had as good a view as the darkness would permit. The hippies had stopped and formed a circle where a graveled road crossed the blacktop. He knew that he had read something this evening about the significance that a crossroads had for witches, but he couldn't recall now what it was. It didn't matter really, because their crazy beliefs had no objective reality. Whatever it was, he could go back to the library tomorrow and look it up.
The hippies were chanting now. He had studied Latin and French in high school, and he believed he could identify five or six other languages, but the tongue they used was unfamiliar. Perhaps it was some kind of gibberish made up to confuse unbelievers. A word that sounded like "yog-zoth" was repeated many times, and more than once he heard the name "Hecate." He was on more familiar ground there. Hecate was the goddess of witches, going back to ancient Greece. That seemed to prove he was on the right track, that he had indeed stumbled upon practitioners of witchcraft and Devil-worship.
The chant had begun as a whispery sigh, but now it was warming up. It had developed a driving, rhythmic beat as it rose in volume. The lead was taken by a woman, slim and small and fair-haired, who virtually screamed her part as the others grunted and bellowed in unison.
As if in response to the chant, a piece of noisy machinery, perhaps an irrigation pump, started up in the near distance. Ron smiled wryly as he recalled a snatch of an old song about the peace and quiet to be found in the country. Between these screaming lunatics and the chugging pump, or whatever it was, the lonely crossroads sounded like a rock concert in a boiler factory.
The small woman, the leader of the chant, was moving around inside the circle, holding out something in her hands to each of the others. They each took something-no, that wasn't it-each of them added something to whatever it was she held. They kept up the chant all the while, the responses overlapping her screams as the volume and the frenzy still escalated. Even the noise of the machinery seemed to be getting louder, through some quirk of the night's acoustics.
The woman placed the object in the center of the crossroads and withdrew to a position in the circle. The emotional intensity of the chanting diminished. The volume died. Soon it faded and stopped, leaving the night to the insects, the frogs, and the whippoorwills, all of them sounding so homey and prosaic that Ron could almost believe he'd imagined the hellish cacophony. Even the pump, probably controlled by an automatic timer, had stopped as if on cue.
The hippies now moved off, no longer in orderly file, but straggling in clusters, talking in subdued tones. Despite the melodramatic timing and setting of their ceremony, they now seemed like a group of churchgoers heading home on a Sunday morning.
He breathed more easily when they'd left. He waited for a full five minutes by his watch before he dared to stir, and even then he made his way down to the crossroads with extreme caution. He looked back the way the hippies had gone. He could see nothing, not a hint of a white robe. The night seemed to have grown unaccountably darker. The sky had been filled with stars only a half hour before, but now he couldn't make out one.
He was momentarily distracted by the random glimmer of fireflies. It was a sight he hadn't noticed since he was a child, and he permitted himself a moment to savor the nostalgia the silent show evoked. He smiled indulgently at his foolishness.
He stepped confidently onto the road, drawing out his flashlight. Whatever the woman had set down in the crossroads still lay there, a gray blob in the darkness. He drew closer and flicked on his light. The light was surprisingly dim, even though he had made a point of checking it before setting out. He shook it, but that had no effect. It was bright enough to reveal the object before him as an earthenware pot.
The machinery wheezed back to life again. He straightened up and listened. The noise seemed much louder now. The chanting must have partially shrouded it before, and now it had no competition. He tried to pinpoint its source, but it seemed to come from all directions at once.
He ignored the sound and returned his attention to the bowl. He flashed his exasperatingly feeble light on it directly. It was quite large, perhaps two feet in diameter. It was filled to overflowing with raw, bloody meat.
He flicked off the light, remembering what he'd read about the significance of a crossroads in witchcraft legends. It went back to the earliest times. Offerings to Hecate, goddess of night, who roamed the darkness with a troop of beasts, were placed at a crossroads. He laughed. This "offering" would be consumed by raccoons and stray cats and dogs by morning, and the leader of the "witches" would point to its disappearance as proof of his ravings. Or her ravings. He wondered if the slim, fair-haired woman was responsible for this resurgence of ancient superstition.
In a field beyond the crossroads, something at the edge of Ron's vision moved with alarming speed. He turned and looked, but it was no longer there. It may have been a gust of wind flattening the tall grass, except that there was no wind. It had undoubtedly been an optical illusion, an aberration caused by overwrought nerves and unaccustomed exertion.
He could do no more here. The show was over. He wished he had brought a camera instead of a gun. A picture of the bowl, taken with a flash attachment, would have been desirable, but that was just another instance of his imperfect preparation. He would plan more carefully, next time.
He started back the way he had come, but then he was struck by sudden inspiration. Why bother with a picture? He returned to the bowl and dumped its messy contents in the road, then took it along with him. An expert on such matters might be able to interpret the curious designs he had seen on it. The cultists would assume that some random passer-by had taken it, or perhaps they would even believe that their night-roaming goddess had taken it to enjoy her snack elsewhere.
He started to hum again, but he checked himself. He wasn't out of danger yet. He still had to pass by Hamilton's house unseen.
Unquestionably, the noise of the pump was getting louder as he walked. He could remember seeing no cultivated fields in this direction, nothing that would require irrigation. The only other possible interpretation was that the source of the sound was approaching him.
He stopped. In calling it a pump, he'd been making an offhanded guess. The sound had that sort of rhythmic regularity to it, but now it seemed much too loud for any irrigation pump. The noise had a wheezing, chugging quality, like air or steam escaping from a high-pressure container. Now the sound suggested nothing so much as a steam locomotive.
He laughed uneasily. The hippies were responsible. They were producing the sound with electronic equipment, perhaps to frighten or impress the neophytes in their group. It was supposed to represent ... what? An animal, perhaps. Yes, that was it, an animal of prehistoric dimensions, a predatory beast sniffing out its prey.
"Crazy assholes," he muttered, thinking of the expense and ingenuity required to produce the silly effect.
He quickened his pace. If the loudspeakers were hidden nearby, perhaps one of the cultists was also nearby, tending them. Perhaps he had already been observed. But it made more sense to get out quickly, by way of the road, than to blunder into the woods. He touched the butt of the gun in his belt for reassurance.
He recalled now what Marcia had told him: that Peachtree had heard something "snuffling" around his house, something that sounded like a steam engine. This was the wrong time and place to remember such details. He walked a little faster, even while telling himself that this effect wasn't being created for his benefit. The hippies didn't know he was here.
He stopped cold. A white figure barred the road.
"God-no!" he screamed.
He switched on the flashlight in his hand. It was the girl he had seen earlier. Now she was stark naked, and her dog was no longer with her. Her eyes were glassy, unfeeling, perhaps even unseeing. She was drugged-that was it-and the weird sound-show was being put on for her benefit, to assist in her conversion.
"You scared the shit out of me, kid," he laughed.
He moved closer, not turning off the flashlight, trying to think of a way to talk himself out of this situation. He might not need to. She might be alone. His fright over, he became aware that she had one hell of a body. Again he cursed the inefficiency of the flashlight as he slid it lower.
He stopped again as she raised one arm slowly, theatrically, to point at him. Her eyes were glacial.
"You could catch cold-" he began, but he got no chance to complete his thought. The noise around him rose suddenly to a roar as something gripped him around the middle, pressing him until his ribs cracked and he felt lances of intolerable pain. A hot blast of air surrounded him, stifled him, made him retch with its odor of corruption. When he tried to draw in his breath to scream, he found that he couldn't.