SIXTEEN

8 BALL MOTEL, YUMA. 20 JUNE 2011. MIDNIGHT

Kyle’s head dropped, again, over the open laptop on the little table under the television. He yanked his head upright, wiped at his mouth. Fox News flickered above him.

Emilio Aguilar’s small round face appeared on Kyle’s laptop screen and his soft voice, lilting with a slight Mexican accent, filled his earphones. Kyle sat back in the chair and gulped his coffee.

At first light, they’d headed into the Fortuna Foothills, back towards the mine to get the interview at the neighbouring ranch. Kyle still had half of Aguilar’s testimony to rough cut and there were only seven hours until the alarm began to shriek before the long drive to Phoenix. But since he started work his consciousness repeatedly slid towards a coma of sleep. He hadn’t slept on the plane from London to Arizona either; had been engrossed in redrafting the script for the US shoots, cross-referencing it with Max’s schedule and notes, and Levine’s Last Days. The heat of two days in the desert sucked out the last of his energy and two beers in the bar earlier functioned like intravenous sedatives. After the interview at the ranch, Dan even fell asleep at a table in a diner. Even through the wall of his motel room, he could hear Dan snoring on the other side; he sounded like something that needed oil.

But Kyle was in no hurry to sleep. Not after what Conway had told them the day before, which Emilio Aguilar only made worse that morning. And closing his eyes was the last thing on his mind after the previous night’s broken sleep. The actual dreams he couldn’t remember in any detail, but he’d woken three times in darkness, with either a shriek or a gasp, when convinced that small cold hands were placed in his own. Hands that tried to pull him off the bed. After the third episode at 4 a.m., he’d hit the shower.

‘Shit. Enough.’ Kyle dragged his fingers down his face, held his eyes open. Stood up and stretched. Went and poured more coffee from the little jug into his mug. Dribbled some Wild Turkey into it. Then sat down before the laptop and rewound the Aguilar interview to the part before he fell asleep.

Max’s production notes highlighted the significance of the Criollo Ranch, neighbouring the mine, on the Night of Ascent in 1975. Before Sergeant Conway and his partner, Patrolman Jiminez, rolled up to find the bodies, the now deceased owner of the ranch, Ramirez Aguilar, had been the closest thing to an eyewitness of the night’s events.

Irvine Levine had interviewed Ramirez Aguilar in 1975, but his testimony rang like the ravings of a crank in Last Days. Something that had pretty much discredited Aguilar senior as a credible witness to any serious investigation. Ramirez Aguilar had appeared in one of the seventies documentaries too, and then refused to speak about the cult again, to anyone.

The ranch was located two miles west of the Blue Oak Copper Mine. Emilio Aguilar, Ramirez Aguilar’s son, had been waiting there to give them the interview Max had set up. He only agreed to the film because he wanted to speak in defence of his father’s bizarre testimony about events at the mine preceding the murders. And like Conway, Kyle soon learned that he’d refused a fee from Max. For some, it wasn’t about money.

The sound was good because Dan had set it up; it filled his cans.

‘My father often talked to us about the mine. The Temple of the Last Days was probably the only interesting thing that ever happened in all the years he lived out here. And for the first year he even had a good relationship with them. I don’t remember much at all. I was maybe two years old when they came here and lived at the mine. So I must have been around five when the police raided it. But at home, my father talked about the people from the Temple often. Sometimes, he said, they would come by here and talk to him. Sometimes they did work at the ranch. Cleaned the stables. Fed the horses. Groomed them. Stuff like that. The young people. They liked hanging around the horses and my father. My dad liked most of them also. Some of the younger girls he felt sorry for. He used to say, they are only children. He worried about them. He used to tell me and my brother how lucky we were, that we had a happy home, and didn’t have to run away and join some hippy cult.

‘And people would come through asking for directions. Because they had heard about the mine and the community down there. They came in cars and buses for a while. Back then my dad said they were all looking for something. You know, something new and exciting. Others were running away. You know, from bad homes. Things like that.

‘He told us that he would come across the Temple people in the desert too. He took people from the city on trail rides through the foothills and into the Laguna mountains. It was the only work here for him then, and there were still some horses for people to ride. And they would come across the Temple people wearing their robes. Sometimes they would be naked. You know, the girls too. They always had a pack of dogs with them, like wolves. Alsatians, Huskies, some strays.

‘My father found the Temple people to be very strange. They were always polite. Friendly, you know. But sometimes they would preach too much.’

‘Did he ever tell you what they said to him?’

Emilio laughed. ‘My father called it hippy bullshit. They used to say to him they had left the world behind. That the world was coming to an end anyway. Things like that. It was all ego out in the world. You know, war and poverty and racism and violence. They said the last days were coming down. All the signs were there to see. Vietnam. Riots. The bomb. And that they were here to unlearn everything. To get rid of their education and family and personalities and responsibility. To free themselves of society. Everything it had taught them. They said they had a new family, a new society, which provided everything you needed once you let go of everything you didn’t need. Every man was a god. Even my father. Who wasn’t very religious. What they said made him laugh. They were looking for God in themselves so they could be God too. They were all called Brother or Sister something. They said they were children. They said they were animals. They said they were becoming angels. Pretty crazy. They were always on drugs. My father thought they were drunk. He could tell they were high on something because of their strange eyes. Intense, you know. And their crazy talk. But it was drugs. We know that now. Learned that from the police and the papers.

‘But there were times when I was growing up when I thought it all sounded pretty cool, you know. My father’s stories. Even after what happened. There was a time when the Temple people would camp in the hills, and sing and talk around big fires. Lots of pretty girls, my father used to say. Or they would just sit around and stare into space, out in the hills. Meditating. But that was in the beginning. Before the murders, it all changed.’

‘How did it change? Did your father mention anything specific?’

‘It was several things. For one, the young people stopped coming here to see the horses and to help out. And when he went to town, he no longer saw them selling the magazines and the books. In all the cities and towns around here, many people remember the Temple people in their robes from that time. People of my father’s generation.

‘People used to feed the hippies too. Because the Temple people ate garbage. They raided the garbage bins at the back of the markets and stores and took it back to the mine in their school bus and their VW van. And some people felt sorry for the young girls. Some of the hippy girls had babies and they were eating garbage. Even though Sister Katherine had all that money, her followers ate garbage.

‘But after two years, the cult started to wind down. So the change happened in seventy-four. Or maybe even as late as seventy-five. My father couldn’t write much, so he never wrote anything down. Sometimes my father would still meet them in the desert when he was riding the trails, but the Temple people would avoid him. They started to carry guns. Rifles. Said they were hunting. But the guns made my father nervous. His customers didn’t like it either. Some of the Temple people he recognized from the beginning. And he thought they were friends, but they avoided him. Like they were frightened. Some of the people he had never seen before. He never knew how many were out at the old mine. People came and went all the time.

‘Then one day, a young girl appeared at our place and asked for protection. She said they were keeping her prisoner at the mine. This girl had left her baby behind and wanted to go into town and get the police to get her baby back. She said she had been chosen to give the Temple a child. But the man who was the father of her child, she didn’t like. And she wasn’t allowed to spend time with her own baby. The girls, she said, had no choice who they had a baby with. She said many of them were forced. You know, raped. This girl told my dad it was a real bad scene out there. People were scared for their lives. Some kind of fence was being built to keep them all in. Only a few of the Temple people were still allowed to go to town and fetch things in the school bus and van. No one else was trusted to leave the mine. Most of them were prisoners. Children got sick too. But no one was allowed to fetch doctors.

‘That mine had a well, but no electricity. No phone. It was just a bunch of old cabins in the dirt, but they always called it paradise. Loco. The runaway girl said the Temple had been infiltrated. That they had informers in the community. Everyone was under suspicion. She said the brothers and sisters who objected to the way things were going had disappeared. But they were all told that these people had left and had started telling lies to the government, and now the police and the FBI and the CIA were out to get Sister Katherine. They were troublemakers trying to break up paradise. There was a lot of paranoia out there, she said. The girl didn’t really know what happened to her friends, but she worried they had been killed and buried in the desert. She’d heard talk. So when the troublemakers started disappearing, she decided to run away. And she came here because this was the closest place to the mine. She had heard from someone at the mine that my father was a good man.

‘But some of the other people from the Temple came by our place a few hours after the girl arrived. Four of them, in their red robes. They drove here in the Volkswagen van they had. And they asked my dad about the girl. Sister something. Priscilla, I think. Who was hiding in the house with my mother. My father could see the rifles in the van and my father was pretty nervous. He told them he hadn’t seen the girl, and that their dogs were frightening the horses, so they had to leave. They were real polite, but my father could tell they didn’t believe him about the girl. Two of the men went and looked around the back of the house and inside the stables, like they owned the place. Two of them kept my father talking out in the front yard, but he knew the others were searching the place behind his back.

‘And then this girl. This stupid girl just walks out of the house in tears and gets into the van, and all the Temple people just take off. And they never spoke to my father again. He said that was about half a year before the time of the murders.

‘There were some others who came here too. Later. Runaways from the mine. Two girls with babies came in the middle of the night and my father drove them straight into town. He tried to take them to the police, but they said they would be in trouble with the law. The whole Temple was on some government list. They would go to jail if he took them to the police.’

‘This was Martha Lake and Bridgette Clover.’

‘That’s right. But he only learned what their real names were in the papers, later. They were called Sister something and something then.’

‘Sister Hestia and Sister Everild.’

‘That’s right. I don’t know how many escaped before the murders though. The Temple never kept any records. They didn’t need to, the girls told my father, because Sister Katherine could read their minds. She knew everything all of the time. Crazy. But whenever my father had seen Temple people walking away from the mine in the valley, or through our land, or on the roads towards Yuma or Ajo, he used to pick them up and take them into town in his car. He said they had nothing. Just their robes and sandals. No money. No water. No food. Nothing. But those two girls with the babies were the last people he ever saw from the Temple.

‘When the police told him about the killings, my mother said that my father cried for a long time. He was very sad. For the children and the young girl they never found. Priscilla, who had been hiding in our house that time. He said to my mother that he had put his family in danger too. That all of us could have been killed by the Temple.’

‘Did your father ever report the Temple to the police?’

‘Many times, yes. He told the police about the guns and the runaways. The Temple people shooting in the desert at night. There was a time when he heard plenty of gunshots. In the last year. That’s when he started calling the police. The police even told him to stop making reports. They had bigger things to take care of besides some bunch of hippies. They did nothing until it was too late. It is a long drive out here, and they only went out to the mine once before the murders. And they told my father the hippies were crazy, but harmless. Can you believe that? Harmless.’

‘The night of the police raid and the murders, what did your father say about that night?’

‘He was frightened. He had been saying that things were going bad out there. For a long time. He used to say to my mother, “I knew it would end badly.” And he was right.’

‘Did he tell you how it started?’

‘Oh, he would always say it started with the dogs out at the mine. And the horses here. All terrified like they get in a lightning storm. We had two dogs here and they would not come out from under the table in the kitchen. My mother said the dogs were crying. They were crying at the ceiling.

‘A few months before the night of the murders this all started with our animals. The Temple dogs would bark and howl for hours out at the mine in the night. And our horses and dogs would freak out here. Two miles away. Once, my father told us that he took his truck and went down there and looked at the mine from the road to see what was happening. They had built a fence like the girls who escaped said, with razor wire on the top. It was like a prison, you know. And all the Temple dogs were freaking out inside the fence. But my father couldn’t see any people from the Temple. Just the dogs barking at the sky. Running around the edge of the fence, like they were trying to get out.

‘And he said the strangest thing was the mist. It had been raining and there was a little moonlight, and he said the mine was covered in this dirty mist. He had seen it from the road about a mile out. Kinda yellow and thick, like smoke in the distance. And above the roofs of the cabins he said the air was moving. Like it was shimmering in the heat. You know, moving in waves. But he couldn’t see where the mist started and where it ended. There were no lights in the buildings. No fires on the ground. Nothing. He could only see the outlines of the cabins and the fence and the dogs through the mist that was coming down. Not going up like smoke from a fire on the ground. It was coming down, he used to say. Like a kind of crack or hole in the sky. Like the mist was inside something that opened above the mine.

‘Police told my dad the mist was smoke from a fire pit they used, but there was no fire. My father was out there and saw it for himself. The police never saw it, so how did they know it was smoke from a fire? But my father never went any closer to the mine because of the mist and the way the air was all wavy. He stayed up on the road.

‘Same thing happened the night of the murders. This was like the fourth time he and my mother heard the dogs going wild out at the mine. And the horses were going crazy here again. And my father walked up to the hills behind our place and he said he could see the mist again in the distance. Down in the desert where the mine was. And while he was watching from the hill he heard the guns. Dogs barking and people shooting. Just crazy. So he came down here and he called the police in Yuma. And he told them they better get up here quick, because the Temple was all going to hell. It was like eleven at night, and they were shooting guns out at the mine, and he said he thought the place was on fire and that there were children out there. He said everything he could think of to make the police come. He didn’t know what was happening, but he knew it wasn’t right.

‘My father went back up to the hill and waited until he saw the police lights moving down to the mine. He said that the yellow mist had faded by the time the police came out. About an hour after he made the call. And he said there was no more shooting then. But . . . but he could still hear the dogs. They were squealing. You know, like they were real scared. And my father said the dogs were in the sky. Moving away from the mine. That’s what he said.

‘When the papers came and spoke to my father later, they wrote that he had seen a UFO. He didn’t say that. But that’s how the UFO stories started. And the police blamed my dad. They said he was making their work even harder by telling stories to the press. Same thing with the Last Days book, and the movie they made. They made out that my father saw a UFO. So he never spoke to anyone else about the Temple, outside of our family, until he died. If he was alive today, he would not speak to you about that night either. No way. My father was very hurt that they all lied and made him into a fool. Which is why I am speaking to you about this. Because I want to set the record straight. For my father. He was a good man.’

Kyle drifted to the bed. Lay back, his feet still planted upon the floor. Rubbed his eyes. He had to sleep. The main lights were on. Bathroom lights too. Max’s visor burned like a nuclear reactor on the bedside cabinet. The television flashed and glowed. He was lit up for safety, like a scared child. He only felt foolish until he recalled his dreams.

No matter his exhaustion, he didn’t want to sleep. Just a micro nap then? He’d be OK for the next day’s shoot after one of those, with the lights on . . . Dan was next door . . . they had only been . . . dreams . . . nothing to worry . . .

Shacks broken into the dust. The mine. A far-off perimeter of wire and fence posts upon a bleached plain where the mist moved. Birds cried out from where they twitched in the dust. Lost and forlorn, their tiny screams cluttered the air.

He turned about and ran towards the dogs who barked at him. He never found the dogs, but the muffled cries of the children who answered the calls from the birds compelled him to trip and stagger at the big wooden barn where the children were kept in little cribs. He never reached them. Could not move far enough on numb feet amongst the buildings of wood and rust; the mine and the farm, all here together, the same thing. Wasteland.

The terrible and sudden scream of a pig made him drop and cower upon the cold ground. A frantic bang of its feet on the wooden floor of the little stone house with the four windows that glowed reddish. The building shook with its fury.

He wept and begged not to be shown inside the little house, but found himself to be already peering through a small casement window. Inside were black-and-white photographs of Martha Lake and Bridgette Clover amongst photos of other young faces with their beards and long hair and freckled cheeks whom he had never seen before. The pictures were thrown over a big bed hung with a velvet canopy the colour of plump grapes. There was a figure inside the bed. Its small hairless head was turned away from him. Against the far dark wall he saw the others who kneeled and faced the wall with their heads bowed. They sheltered inside from the black rain that blew across the baked ground of this land, rain that swirled with ash and smoke from the distant crimson fires. Wavy smoke drifted into the greasy sky he dare not look up at.

He went looking for the gate so he could escape. ‘I’m only making a film,’ he said, smiling, and trying not to cry like the naked grubby child with dirty feet that he was. But the figure in the black robe before the closed gate stayed silent and he could not see her face inside the cowl. Two dogs on her leads were actually men on all fours with faces painted the scarlet of her fingernails. The dog-men barked and wanted to climb up him.

The rain was hot and bright red when it broke against his skin. Before the gate, the birds littered around his feet in the dust had their black feathers ruffled by the sooty wind. Their heads were skulls. Their beaks were open. The woman in the hood made pig sounds.

Something tried to break through the gate. He could hear the scratch, the insistent claws on the wood. Something wanted to be inside with him. So he screamed . . .

. . . And came awake looking at a white ceiling. At the light in a round shade of opaque glass. He sat up. Saw evacuation instructions on the back of the door; the television flickering; the desk and laptop; his rucksack; the sound equipment. Motel room. He was on the bed. Kyle rolled over and checked his watch: 4 a.m.

He pulled his sweat-clouded T-shirt off and threw it on the floor. Removed his socks and jeans. Hit the shower at a stagger. Sleep like that he could do without. Two more shoots and it was over. Over.

He checked the plaster walls of the bathroom: all clear. Got the shower running hard and hot, and decided to keep his dreams to himself from now on. Dan had enough on his plate.

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