NINETEEN

SEATTLE. 22 JUNE 2011. 10 A.M.

The woman who answered the door to Kyle and Dan was barely recognizable as the Martha Lake circa seventy-five, or even eighty-one.

Within a wooden door frame that looked like it suffered from seborrhoeic dermatitis, Martha Lake was famine-thin under a shapeless cardigan and sweat pants. A stringy neck stretched to a face collapsed with so much regret, disappointment, sorrow, and hopelessness, it carried a misery sentence of another decade more than any woman of fifty-eight years would wish to serve. The broad bone structure was still in evidence, beneath the deeply lined skin that hung from it. Down-turned and haggard, her mouth hadn’t released much laughter since 1977 when she was flown from one top-of-the-town party to another. The big passionate lips had vanished into the grooves around her mouth and scoring her chin. That proud and secret smile from the news footage of seventy-five was now a muzzle. Pulled tight into a ponytail, her hair was white strung with gunmetal grey.

But the eyes were classic Martha Lake: handsome, intelligent, alert. Timeless. Kyle had stared into them for a long time while he researched her online, but now they were staring back at him he found himself diffident and nervous, as if overwhelmed by an authority he’d hitherto underestimated, or as if suddenly confronted by a girl he hadn’t realized he’d been stalking.

She caught his reaction. Seemed to like it. Smiled without moving her mouth. Behind her a malodour of cheap cigarettes and unkempt living spaces issued from the murk of her home. ‘Nice to see I can still turn heads.’ Her laugh was a wet catarrh grumble; her teeth were mostly brown. ‘Come on in, kids.’ She peered over their heads, up and down the street quickly, then stood aside on grubby slippered feet.

The world inside Martha Lake’s rented Folk-Victorian house, with its pointed gables, weathered spindles and gingerbread details over the peeling porch sunk into an overgrown yard, was missing some essential colours. Silver had gone from the places where the thin light seeped. Warmer tones of the reds had been drained from the hardwood floor and banisters. Anything once white only emitted a grey or a dull-brown spectrum. Door frames and skirting boards were chipped and scuffed. Ancient wallpaper of a wintry green stifled visibility to eye level, before plaster painted the tone of artificial limbs took over and grew sickly to the murky ceiling and its cracked plaster mouldings.

The building that opened around Kyle was vast and gave the impression not so much of vacancy but of its abandonment in another time. The silence and stillness slowed Kyle’s mind, but never put it at ease; in fact, the atmosphere immediately turned his spirits downwards.

Sunlight failed to move much further than the glass it came in through, and left vague blue stripes across the ceiling in the hallway Martha led them along, to the kitchen. ‘Spend my time in here.’

In the kitchen, pale blinds were half drawn behind grubby net curtains, about which a dwindling brown light hovered. The swept but scratched lino on the floor of the kitchen was patterned with daisies, but their two-dimensional floral beaming did nothing to enliven the room. Wooden wall cabinets painted yellow were now faded to a soiled vanilla. Clear plastic door handles were cut like jewels. Kyle’s nan had similar; same for the big enamel sink, the wooden table with four simple chairs, the blue and white check tablecloth. Beside an ancient-looking metal stove, Martha’s glasses and mugs and plates were stacked neatly, but tidiness would never make the kitchen look homely. One of those rooms in one of those houses that made him feel like an intruder within, and a witness to, the meagreness and poverty of the aged.

He came to this dreadful place exhausted, but the room made him feel so forlorn his movements diminished to a shuffle. But it was a damn good location for the interview; a Hollywood art director couldn’t have designed better. It was a further representation of Martha’s decline, of what became of the survivors; another of those places where the bloody memories of the cult’s vertical ascent into chaos were stored.

In the dim room Martha’s face glowed faintly like unsalted butter. The table before her chair was covered in an assortment of medication in blister packs, beside a bottle of Four Roses bourbon. ‘You want?’ she said, when she saw Kyle spy the whisky before looking away.

Kyle nearly said not this early, but shook his head instead. ‘No, thanks.’

‘Coffee in the pot. Fresh made.’

‘Dan?’

‘No, ta.’ Dan began setting up the lights, and unpacking the sound equipment; content to be the silent member of the crew, not so much indifferent as happily irrelevant to the ‘talent’.

Kyle poured himself a cup, and one for Martha. He was too on edge to ask her where the sugar was. He’d wince it down black and bitter.

Kyle also knew from Max’s notes that Martha had three children by three different men, and the only father that remained a mystery was the father of her eldest son, who was conceived at the copper mine in 1973. The other fathers and all of the children appeared long gone. He wondered whether one of the dim rooms outside the kitchen held their images inside frames.

‘Big place for one person.’

Martha gave Kyle a knowing smile. ‘Takes longer to fill.’

He wasn’t sure what she meant. Dan did a light-meter reading behind Martha’s head. And he looked really uneasy as he did so. One more shoot, mate. Last one. The last one of the Last Days.

Martha took a deep draw on her cigarette. ‘It’s the third place I rented this year. Gotta keep moving. Past keeps catchin’ up.’

‘The press?’

Martha smiled her brown smile and stubbed out the cigarette. Took another from the packet on the table. Lit up. ‘You don’t know nothin’, do you?’ She shook her head and pulled a long draught of thick smoke into her lungs; its passage downwards sounded like it rasped through a series of small holes inside her chest.

Kyle smiled and hoped to disarm what he intuited as mockery. ‘I’m hoping you might change that,’ he said. ‘We’ve interviewed the police who worked the case, and the son of the man who once owned the ranch nearby—’

‘He dead? Mr Aguilar?’

‘Er, yes.’

Through a veil of cigarette smoke, Martha’s eyes narrowed. ‘How’d he go?’

‘Umm, not sure. His son never said.’

‘God rest his soul. He’s the only reason I’m sittin’ here now.’

Kyle nodded. ‘His son spoke highly of him.’

‘Back then police didn’t bother groups like we had, lest you gave them pretty good cause. Different now. But out at the mine there was no one to help us right till the end we knew was comin’. ’Cept for Mr Aguilar. He tried to help Prissie too.’ Martha stopped talking and shook her head.

‘Sister Priscilla?’

Martha snorted. ‘What you know about Prissie?’

‘Not much. Just that Mr Aguilar sheltered her after she ran. But then she just gave herself up to the Temple.’

Martha nodded. ‘Damn fool. But I can’t blame her.’

Kyle looked at Dan to see how close he was to readiness. ‘Why?’

‘She went back for her baby boy. Couldn’t get no further than that ranch. Broken heart brought her back to the mine. But she shoulda kept goin’ and gone straight to the police.’ She suddenly clapped her hands, startling Kyle and Dan. ‘Ha! Shoulda, coulda. Story of my life!’ She threw her head back and cackled until a wet cough wracked her entire body. Dan’s eyes went wide; Kyle went for water.

Martha wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her cardigan, and wheezed like she was sucking air into her lungs through a wet cheesecloth. She nodded her appreciation for Kyle’s assistance with the water, for the hand on her shoulder. When her breathing returned to a semblance of normality, Dan said, ‘Ready when you are, boss,’ from behind the tripod-mounted camera.

They’d shoot this naturally because Kyle wanted it to be what it was: an anxious woman with lined skin, smoking in a dismal kitchen and talking about the imprisonment and murder of her friends. A time in her life she’d never escaped. This was her last chance to do something and she wanted to take it. Like it was a statement, if not a will. That’s how she made it feel.

‘Martha, you are the only living survivor of The Temple of the Last Days who was an adult member in its . . . well its final days in the Sonoran desert. The spring and summer of 1975. We’ll never know, but the children who survived the Last Days were probably too young at the time of their rescue to remember much about the cult. And the death by suicide of Bridgette Clover, earlier this year, makes you the only known living memory of the Temple in its final incarnation.’

Martha nodded her head and raised her jaw with what looked like stubborn pride. ‘Got that right.’ Besides the cigarettes and whisky, Kyle wondered if anything else could give her satisfaction at this point in her life.

‘So would you begin by telling us a little about how you came to be a member of the Temple?’

She told them a lot more than a little. Like Brother Gabriel and Sister Isis before her, Kyle assumed from Martha Lake’s narration that she didn’t get out much. She also displayed the same unnerving eccentricity that incubates in a lengthy isolation. He wondered if they had all been fundamentally damaged before their time in the cult, or whether the association made each of them irretrievably alien in the ordinary worlds they later tried to inhabit. Susan and Gabriel had become gregarious enough in the company of him and Dan, but both exhibited the signs of a consistent failure to make a lasting contact with others in any way meaningful enough to renew a membership in society. They were all misfits and outcasts. And they made him feel his time with them had to be kept short, as if they were contagious. Only Max appeared to have flourished post-Katherine, but then, he was hardly normal either.

Martha’s story of the early days would have to be cut tight to a voice-over. If anything, it was typical enough to be a cliché: a girl from a poor home with a violent and mostly absent father and an alcoholic mother. A girl who dropped out of high school and ran away to San Francisco. Followed that up by experimenting with drugs and communal living in the euphoria of the sixties youth revolution. Drifted down to LA with some biker drug-dealers and hooked up with enigmatic Last Temple types wearing their robes on Santa Monica Boulevard, with their intense eyes and their talk of the God in you and salvation and paradise.

They were the new family she had been looking for. An inclusion with significance. She shared the common belief of the disaffected in a prophesied Armageddon, and the belief in having been chosen to survive it. The therapeutic power of self-examination and self-interpretation in a poor backward life, that had known none until that point, twinned with the powerful mind-bending experiences of hallucinogenic drugs, gobbled down like M&Ms, had a transforming impact upon her. And it all groomed her for the adventure of the desert retreat . . . and then it was too late to get out because there was nothing to go back to, not even a planet she recognized through eyes that were too old and too warped by 1975. The worst thing that could have happened to her then was celebrity.

‘Martha, many of the people who joined The Temple of the Last Days from 1974 to 1975 never actually saw Sister Katherine, let alone met her. But in the early stages of the Last Days in LA in 1972, and in the first year you were all based at the copper mine in 1973, when Sister Katherine made the occasional appearance, you did meet her.’

‘Got that right.’

‘I’ve read your interviews with Irvine Levine, but I wonder if time has given you any more insights into her.’

Martha pointed her cigarette at Kyle. ‘Let me tell you something. People think Irvine’s book is bullshit. That he made it up.’ She shook her head, sucked hard on the filter, and spoke through the smoke with force. ‘He didn’t. Most things I told him, and Bridgette told him, he put down just like we told it. But it reads as so crazy, people can’t accept it. And a lot of what I told him, he never used. ’Cus it was even crazier.’

‘Can you give us some examples?’

Martha gave Kyle a sly smile. ‘We’ll get there. But like I told Max, you got to have context. Or it don’t make any sense.’

‘Of course.’

‘All you movie people are the same.’ She smiled again. ‘Like I was saying, Irvine was a crime man. Reporter, you know? Courts. Police stuff. He was after the juice on the murders. Drugs. Imprisonment. Rape. Shit like that. The stuff that would end up in court. He wanted everyone to read his book, like that one on Charlie Manson that was so big. So some of what I told him, Irvine never used. Didn’t believe it is why. Thought it was stuff we imagined because we were hopped-up on drugs the whole time. Strange how that’s the stuff people want to hear about now.’

‘People?’

Martha grinned her yellow grin. ‘It’s why you want to cut to the chase, ain’t it? Max already told me that’s all he’s after anyways. Them other things.’

Kyle bit down on the gush of anger that came up from his stomach like reflux. Not for the first time he wondered who was really directing the film. He cleared his throat. ‘So the two things are inseparable: Katherine’s pathology and the stranger aspects of the Last Days story?’

Martha smiled. ‘Smart boy.’ She chuckled, a moist rattle in her throat. ‘Max been steppin’ on your toes, I can see that. He seems the type that would. More money than sense, you ask me. But that’s what I said to Max, that you can’t have one without the other. Katherine was behind it all. Even when she wasn’t there, she was there, if you know what I mean. She knew everything because we told her everything, one way or another. We were all her spies at one time. An’ every damn thing we said when she weren’t around, The Seven would whisper back to her.’

Martha raised an eyebrow, started to play with her lighter. ‘What time has told me, is that we were all part of some setup from the get-go, back in LA. Oh yeah. She had plans way back then. Before maybe. Wouldn’t surprise me none. Got all us fools out there in that desert and she trained us like dogs. But for what? It was a need-to-know thing. I don’t think she ever showed her real hand until right at the end. Which, thank the Lord, I wasn ’t around to see. But we were always being kept for something else. No doubt in my mind. The same thing Max is so keen on.’

Kyle nodded with relief as much as an acknowledgement of her ideas, because she wouldn’t need coaxing. Maybe the interview was a nostalgic reminder of those dizzy days of magazine features and interviews on 60 Minutes. ‘Other commentators on the cult emphasized Sister Katherine’s amassing of material wealth, of exploiting her followers like slaves –’

‘She got millions from Sister Urania, the English lady. But having what we owned was another way of owning us. Of cutting us off. She just used it to separate us from everything that we were. Who we had been. She took our freedom next. Anything we had of value, she took it. Kinda stripped us clean. Took our dignity too. Till the only thing left to take from us was our children and our lives.’ Martha stopped herself and withdrew for a moment; the last comment a painful reminder of something Kyle wanted to hear.

‘Do you think there was any value in Katherine’s ideology?’

‘Not a single damn thing. All that freeing of our souls from the yoke of guilt and repression was horseshit. Oh, everything was wild to start with. It was pretty cool in LA. And when we got to the desert for a while. I never felt so free. Never had so many friends. Good friends.’ Martha shook her head, removed another cigarette from the packet of Salem Lights on the table. Lit up, squinted as she drew hard on the cigarette. ‘But she had her needs. Was just biding her time.’

‘Needs? What kind of needs?’

Martha stared at the table in silence again, bit her bottom lip. When she looked up at Kyle, the tough-talking broad had retreated. She showed him a face that had been swiftly transformed by pain. Her hard voice softened, lowered. ‘Everyone has needs. Love. Sex. Approval. Whatever. We all got ’em.’ But her needs were different. I don’t think she could stop herself. She was like a shark. She wanted blood in the water. All the time. She liked to wound. She liked to cause pain any way she could. Humiliation, guilt, exclusion, whatever she could use on a person. Or from a fear of those things. But not even that was enough. The head games. It was just practice, you know. Preparation. I read one book on psychos that said she was evolving at that time, when we was in LA and at the mine in the early days. When she used to chair them sessions. She was becoming something else the whole time. And I truly believe she was. Before it got physical.’ Martha played with her lighter, pawed at a packet of medication, swivelled the ashtray.

‘Physical?’

Martha stared hard at Kyle. ‘Rape. Sodomy.’ She shrugged. ‘Sure. Bitch had us beaten too.’ There was another long pause; Martha looked at the window, like it was an escape route that had been missed. ‘Oh, she liked that all right. Liked us to beg. For forgiveness. I think it was the begging that got her off when she was around, and whenever The Seven reported to her. What we were supposed to have done wrong was irrelevant. The stuff we said in the sessions we made up, just to have something to say. But it was the . . . submission that excited her. Us all scared of her and telling her everything in that shitty old shack she called the temple. I seen it in her eyes. Hard green eyes. That fuckin’ bitch.’

Martha stopped talking; her hands were shaking. A cigarette was clumsily stubbed out. Another was lit. The bourbon was fish-eyed. ‘They burned more brightly for sure when someone was crying, or screaming, or just lying down all broken and silent on their own. Everything was a weapon to her. Sex. The sun she would put you out under. The cold at night she would leave you in. The chain of fucking command. Our children. Whatever she could use.’

Martha pulled hard on the cigarette. The end of it burned so fiercely it seemed to light up the dismal kitchen for one incandescent moment. ‘Everyone was afraid. That’s how we was controlled. Fear. No one stayed her favourite for long. Yet, when she smiled at you, or when whoever was her favourite among The Seven gave you a kind word, you would do anything, anything at all to stay chosen.’

‘What made her change, Martha? Can you identify anything specifically that made her behave so badly? Made her treat you so terribly?’

Martha nodded, smiled knowingly. ‘Sure can. She turned when people started leaving. She couldn’t take that. Like it was some kind of personal rejection. In seventy-three people was coming and going all the time. By seventy-four people was mostly going. When she and The Seven were getting tougher. When the paranoia got real bad. And us all wasting our time trying to sell that friggin’ book in Yuma. It was like the party was over and no one wanted to hang around and clear up the mess. But she was clever. She’d hooked enough of us by then.’

‘It’s hard for people to accept that you never left, while you still had free will. Particularly when the situation was so distressing.’

Martha snorted. ‘Once you’d given up everything, you had to make it work, because there was nothing else for you, nowhere to go. And you were scared of her, but you were kinda scared of losing her too. Shit-scared. All the time.’

‘Did you also do things out there that you regret?’

Martha nodded her head. ‘Plenty.’

‘Can you tell us about what you were complicit in?’

Martha smiled. ‘I can tell you things we done that no one else admitted.’ She shrugged. ‘Can tell you how we all accused each other of things. Pretended we had these secret thoughts. Telepathy. Ha! We denounced each other. Could happen to you at any time. You had to go along with it. We all did. It’s how we got each other beaten. I even told lies on Prissie and Bridgette, watched Belial whip the shit out of them. They squealed on me and watched me git beat too.’ She placed her hands on the table, pushed her chair back with a loud squeal that made Dan flinch behind the camera. She stood up, turned around and raised her cardigan and T-shirt as if she were about to suddenly go topless. But never raised her clothing above the level of her prominent scapula. ‘You want that in your film?’

Kyle heard himself swallow. He nodded at Dan.

‘Mark of Brother Belial. Son of a bitch.’

Dan filmed the ghostly white scar tissue that criss-crossed her back.

‘I was pregnant with my boy when he done that.’

Kyle’s head emptied. He felt dizzy and horribly vulnerable. And acutely afraid, though he wasn’t sure of what. It was like one of those situations when his overconfidence was punished with a salutary reminder of what he was really up against.

Martha lowered her clothes, reordered them. Sat down and uncapped the bottle of bourbon, glugged it into a tooth glass. Took another cigarette from the packet. ‘We all took our part in folks getting whupped. Or getting them excluded for shit I can’t even recall now. Forced other girls to give up their babies to the Temple, like they forced me to. Didn’t interfere when someone got raped, like when them poor boys Brother Ariel and Brother Adonis was raped by The Seven, to teach them a lesson for pride.’

Kyle winced. Levine had written about the male rape out at the mine, which had become a favourite method for control that Belial and Moloch inflicted on two younger men who were still members of the Last Days in 1975; Brothers Ariel and Adonis. And on the journey over to America, Kyle had finished reading Tim Reiterman’s Raven; the definitive biography of Reverend Jim Jones and his People’s Temple. In Guyana, Jones had also sodomized his most devoted, trusted and respected male followers. He’d indulged his emotional need to inflict pain and humiliation on those heterosexual men closest to him. To reduce any man he perceived as competition to his authority. According to Susan White, aka Sister Isis, Katherine had begun a similar sexual manipulation in London, with enforced celibacy, then enforced unions. Way back then she must have been encouraged by the divisive and disarming effects of such methods upon her followers.

‘And we never spoke up when they went out with the guns. When they went after Ariel and Adonis. Oh, we heard talk later. We heard Belial joking that Adonis pissed hisself at the end. How they chopped that boy up and buried him deep.’

‘You said “when they went out with guns”. Who were they?’

‘The Seven. Who else? Belial was appointed chastiser. And we were all threatened with being buried alive if we ran or talked to the FBI. That was the punishment for apostates. Being buried alive. Maybe the boys was killed that way. I don’t think so. Belial liked knives, and them rifles. But those boys got buried one way or another, live or dead, when he was through with his chastising.’

‘Why were Ariel and Adonis murdered? You mentioned pride.’

Martha shrugged. ‘That’s what they said those two was always guilty of. But it weren’t that. Them boys were smart. College-educated both of them. They did their best to put up with the discipline, but they started to question things. Ariel could talk the hind legs off Belial and he hated it. Things got bad for Ariel, and then Adonis too when he stuck up for his friend. When they ran, they were the first to get done as apostates. When Ariel and Adonis ran, while we was still building that fence, I heard Belial tell Brother Moloch and Baal to kill them. He said, “You kill those fuckin’ crudes.” Baal and Moloch tracked them with the dogs. Came back grinning from ear to ear. Belial threw a party afterwards.’

Martha stretched her sinewy neck up and out of her collar to smile, though not pleasantly. ‘I’m in purgatory. Not in hell yet. But I will be soon. For the part I played. You can take that to the bank.’ She knocked back the entire two inches of fresh whisky in her glass.

Kyle couldn’t think of anything to say. He looked at the pages of the script on his side of the table, but his flicking eyes couldn’t read the type. Unexplained phenomena, hauntings; they were his thing, not murder. Murder! Jesus Christ!

Martha gasped and successfully suppressed a coughing fit, wiped at her eyes. ‘You know what they always told us? Huh? They told us that we were forgiven, that our actions were blessed. Katherine told us we were perfect. We had transcended. We believed her. Had to. What we was doing was too awful to think about. All we needed on this earth were her blessings. That power was given to her by others. By friends. Old friends. That’s what she and The Seven always said.’ Martha broke off and looked up at the ceiling; she smiled her sinister smile again. ‘Friends none of us needed, that’s for sure.’

Kyle recalled what Detective Sweeney had said about Belial looking at the ceiling of the interview room when he mentioned ‘old friends’. His thoughts tripped over one another. His skin chilled, his neck prickled. He looked across at Dan, who hadn’t broken his gaze from the viewfinder, but his face was pallid, twitchy.

Martha returned her attention to the table, poured herself another generous measure of whisky. ‘And you know what? We was punished if we showed any guilt for what we did to each other. So you learned to not show it. Ha! But if she was so clever, if she could see inside us, how come she never knew me and Bridgette were going to run that night? How about that, bitch?’

Kyle cleared his throat, not sure who the ‘bitch’ was that Martha referred to. ‘You’re absolutely certain, Sister Katherine ordered the killings?’

‘Sure. The Seven never done a thing without her say so first. And in seventy-five it all went to hell. The Seven was doing things with people they took away from the group. We didn’t know what, but it was something to do with the “friends”. Some people came back from the desert crazy. Couldn’t speak or tell us what went down out there. Like Brother Ariel and Brother Adonis. Just before they ran they also seen something out there in the desert. Was showed something real bad by The Seven. They’d been raped sure enough, but it was something else that finally sent them boys running for their lives. Then a couple of girls who went out with The Seven never come back at all. It’s like we was all being tried out for something.’

‘Something? Can you elaborate on what Sister Katherine’s aims were?’

Martha shrugged, but looked frightened. ‘Hard to know. She broke us all, and them kids. Made us weak. So she could mess with our heads. We was prisoners. Isolated. And people was sayin’ some real crazy things in seventy-five. They was losin’ their minds. Hard to say what was what. Some was sayin’ they was gettin’ taken out of theirselves when they was sleepin’, and findin’ it hard to get back. We didn’t know what was friggin’ real and what was a bad trip. But it was all for somethin’ Katherine was plottin’. Somethin’ we had no say in, and woulda said no to, so she kept exactly what it was to herself. I ain’t sure even The Seven really knew what it was all for, whatever the fuck she had in mind out there in the desert. But when they started takin’ folks out at night, it felt like the end for us all was pretty close. Guess I was right about that.’

Kyle swallowed and took a deep breath. ‘Getting taken out of themselves. At night. Asleep. Did you . . .’

Martha looked at Kyle intensely and in silence, as if suddenly wary or even suspicious of him. When she lowered her eyes to the table she nodded. ‘Few times I told myself it was the LSD that made me . . . made me feel like I was inside something else. Some other thing that weren’t right. Like I had been pulled outta my own skin.’

Kyle forced himself to focus on the script. Looked down at his papers and tried to stop his jaw from trembling. Saw the slides of the missing Temple followers’ faces. The individuals the police looked for after Martha and Bridgette gave their statements back in 1975. It would be more poignant if Martha could name them for the film. He cleared his throat. ‘You always claimed some of your friends were murdered. Who else besides Adonis and Ariel? Who never came back?’

‘Sister Urania, who wouldn’t hear a damn bad word said against Katherine, not ever. She come over from France. Same as Sister Hannah. They was older. Nice girls. English. Urania was the one I told you gave up a big inheritance to the Temple. Millions. Every penny. Used to think on that when I saw her knee-deep in a dumpster in Yuma, fetching garbage out to feed her child. But same as Hannah, she would never have run. She was in it to the last drop of her blood, an’ I reckon she gave that up too. Once Ariel and Adonis was both taken care of, it got easier for Belial, Moloch, and Baal. Killin’ was easy once they lost their cherry. And them orders came down from Katherine’s place, no lie. That’s why she was holed up out of state, so she couldn’t get blamed for nothing. But Sister Urania and Sister Hannah, they never ran. They got picked out as favourites for something special that they called Ascent. Part of Katherine’s plan. It was foreseen. They told us that much.’

‘Was that the first time you heard “Ascent” mentioned at the mine?’

‘Guess so.’

‘Is this the reason you finally ran? You and Bridgette? Because you were afraid for your own lives, and those of your children?’

‘Main reason I left was ’cus she stole a baby. Katherine. Oh yeah. Prissie’s baby was gone one day from the shack we called the nursery. Brothers Moloch and Baal musta took the boy to Katherine. We heard them leave in the VW van early one morning. Prissie snuck out like she always did to check on her little one in the nursery and saw he was gone. Moloch and Baal came back to the mine late the next night without the baby. Never saw that child again till he was in them police photos. Little boy. The clean boy the police called him. He was one of the kids they found in the mine at the end. I was shown photos by the police, to identify the children they pulled out of there.’

‘What was Prissie’s reaction to this?’

‘Prissie tried to stay her grief. But she couldn’t. We all tried to talk her round, told her all that bullshit again about the children belonging to the Temple, not their parents. The Seven who was still around got real nervous after they took the boy though. More than when they killed Ariel and Adonis, or Urania and Hannah. It was like murder was one thing, but snatching babies was on a whole new level. Kinda fucked-up, you ask me.

‘But then Prissie was gone too, no more than a week after her baby went missing. We were told she ran. Told she was an apostate. That her name was never to be spoken again in paradise. Paradise, ha! But they killed her. Sure enough. So Katherine could keep her baby over in the big house in California. She couldn’t have kids herself, but she made us girls have them and hated us for being able to.’

‘Did you hear members of The Seven admit to murdering Sister Priscilla?’

‘No. But they did her, for sure. I know ’cus we were all sent out to work the fence without Prissie, who wouldn’t speak, or get up from the floor of the temple since they took her baby boy. When we came back in for lunch, Prissie was gone, and so was Brother Belial and Brother Moloch.

‘Prissie’s still out there, somewhere. Buried in that desert. Cops never found her. Same as the others. They all dead and buried in the desert. Police never looked too hard for the bodies neither. What was the point once Belial was dead? There was no one left to put in the electric chair.’

‘You and Bridgette took your babies with you when you ran. But what about the other children?’

‘There was five kids found at the end. Two older kids that came over from France in seventy-two. Sister Urania’s girl and Sister Hannah’s son. Other two boys belonged to Rhea and Lelia, who was shot dead trying to run on the Night of Ascent. And Prissie’s little boy was the fifth child they pulled out of there. But when me and Bridgette ran, them five kids was the only children still out there. Loads of kids had come and gone with their mothers since the beginning at the mine, but they all left with their mothers. Only kid who died there was the little ’un in seventy-three who didn’t last a week. Was no doctors out there. His mother, Sister Eleos, she died of a drug overdose in San Francisco in seventy-seven. She was livin’ with Sisters Gehenna and Bellona, who was two of The Seven that Katherine sent up to San Francisco to start a new branch in seventy-four. After all she’d been through, Eleos still went and lived with them wackos once it was all over and done with at the mine. Beats me why.’

Martha shook her head, then looked at Kyle and pointed her cigarette at him. ‘But no way Katherine was taking my baby. What she want a baby for? She didn’t even like kids. Locked ’em away. Restricted access to them. So now we gotta just let her take ’em away from us at the mine like they was her own? No way. Not my boy. Or Bridgette’s. So we ran in the middle of the night. Cut a hole in the fence just before we broke from working on the last stretch of wire that final day, and we took off. Made it to Mr Aguilar’s ranch, and he drove us into town. That man saved us. Belial knew it too. They was going to go and kill him anyway for helping Sister Prissie that first time she run. There was a lot of fighting talk when they came back with Prissie in the van that day. Belial was bragging about how he would “snuff that apostate wetback”.’

It was no wonder Irvine Levine concentrated on the criminal aspects of the cult strewn all the way from London to Arizona; did he need anything else?

A long silence followed Martha’s disclosure about the children. Kyle eventually broke it. His desire to know about the Night of Ascent was making him breathless. ‘Martha, less than three months after you and Bridgette escaped from the mine, the Night of Ascent was called by Sister Katherine, and nine people were murdered at the mine in one hour, including Katherine. The police evidence suggests that four of the victims tried to escape from something . . . some kind of final ritual. A ritual that involved the willing execution of four members of The Seven and Katherine herself. Did you have any idea this kind of mass suicide was coming? Or can you give us any clues as to what happened that night?’

She shook her head, sighed. ‘Something was coming, sure enough. A whole lot of killing. We were all on a one-way ticket. Like I said before, everything was leading to something that only Katherine knew about. That bitch had plans she weren’t wholly sharing. But what happened out there that night . . . I can’t say. There was a lot of paranoia, right through seventy-five. Katherine lost that trial against Levine. An’ we were told that apostates were building a case against us with the police, the CIA, the FBI, the government . . . Everybody was out to get us. I believed it. Brother Moloch told us that if the government came for us before the Night of Ascent, we would fight to the last man to defend paradise. If we were too weak to fight, we were to kill each other, then ourselves. They never said what the Night of Ascent was, but me and Bridgette didn’t like the sound of it. You know, it just had that tone.

‘I always reckoned the killings that night was because The Seven got spooked after me and Bridgette ran, considering what we knew about the murders of Urania, Hannah, Prissie and the boys. Katherine was crazy anyway by then. And all them drugs she’d been taking in California musta ratcheted up her paranoia to the next level when me and Bridgette lit out. Police said the murders happened in some kind of leadership battle. That’s bullshit. No one ever opposed Katherine beside Ariel and Adonis, and look where that got them. Other people said it was some kind of sacrifice, to the devil.’ Martha shook her head. ‘It weren’t the devil. Don’t you believe it.’

‘It’s been said that Katherine claimed she was immortal. An eternal saint. That all of those she blessed could be too. But if she were immortal, do you ever wonder why she had herself killed?’

Martha shrugged, then drew further down inside her cardigan. She began playing with the cigarette lighter again. ‘Lately, I’ve been considering other things. You know, other possibilities. Right around the same time Max got in touch, which was kinda weird. ’Cus I could tell from his voice that he was spooked by something too. Not long after he called, Bridgette gave up.’

‘Gave up?’

Martha looked at Kyle with her watery eyes, and swallowed. She was frightened. ‘You got to understand. There was some things we experienced . . . that we saw . . . that was just about as bad as knowing people were getting killed. Police always said it was the drugs that made us see stuff. Been telling myself my whole life after I ran from that temple that the police were right about that. That we were hallucinating. Now I know different. So did Bridgette. We never got away. No, sir. Not really. No one did. Whatever it was Katherine brought over with her from France came back. Old friends. Belial was right. What he said in prison to the cops about them coming down. You know, being around us. I don’t think not one of us ever got free.’

‘Old friends. Blood Friends. I keep hearing these names. Were they part of the Night of Ascent?’

Martha nodded. She stared at her hands. ‘That’s what I been thinking.’

‘Who were they?’

‘What are they, is the question you should be askin’.’ Another cigarette was sparked up, her voice trembled with emotion. ‘We’d been calling down what we had become. That’s the best way I can say it. For over a year. Late in seventy-four, an’ seventy-five. We weren’t the blessed, we was the opposite. We were damned. Like they is. The friends. There was nothing holy or right about any of us. Not by that time. We’d all lost our way. Maybe some of us before we even got to that mine. But that was the point. We were ready by the end. Crossed every damn line and was all broke down inside, in spirit you know? Ready. Ready for something. For them. All we had was the Last Days. And them was the last days, in that summer. Only thing I had to get me to step off that crazy train was my boy. We were young and stupid. Me and Bridgette. But we were mothers. It’s like we knew, you know? Inside. Knew we had to get out right then. It was now or never. Sink or swim.’

Martha reared up in her chair, her face terribly pale, and unleashed a long mournful sigh that ended as a moan of profound distress. Dan and Kyle flinched.

‘Jesus. Sweet Jesus.’ Her voice swelled with anguish, her eyes shone wet. ‘We were killers. Turned the other cheek when someone got raped. Murdered. When some girl’s baby got . . .’ Martha covered her eyes with her forearm, sank to the table and sobbed into her sleeve.

Kyle and Dan exchanged looks. Dan’s face jumped with nerves, was pale, tight-lipped. Kyle nodded at him, mouthed keep rolling. Dan returned to the viewfinder of the camera.

Martha sobbed for over five minutes, head down between her arms. Kyle didn’t want to walk into shot and comfort her. It would have been wrong; wrong for the moment, for the scene, for the film. Let it play, he said to himself. Let it play. He’d put the whole thing in the damn film; make people sit through it. This wretched woman’s grief, her misery, her mourning, her guilt and her regret. Hear every sob, see every tear, witness every heave that wracked that thin, broken body. Susan White’s astonishment, Gabriel’s terror, Martha’s grief: let it play.

As her sobs subsided into sniffs, Martha spoke in a broken voice. ‘We dreamed of the burning. Of the bodies on stakes. We saw the bodies eaten by birds and dogs. We all saw the flames and the ash in the rain . . . That’s how it started. In them sessions. That’s when they come.’

Kyle felt as if he’d stuck a wet finger into a light socket. Something jolted out of his memory. A series of murky, vague images. Jump-cuts through a nightmare featuring some kind of slaughter in progress, in the rain and smoke and ash. He’d dreamed of it when he came back from France.

‘The sessions . . .’ His voice was a rasp. Dan looked across at him, but Kyle never removed his eyes from Martha. Who sat back in her chair. Shook her head with her hands over her face. ‘The world stops turning. Goes quiet. Still. But it ain’t natural. Then you get the smell. The scent. Ain’t nothing changed ’bout that. Still the same.’

‘When does . . . did this happen, Martha?’

‘In them sessions. We all saw it. Every one of us. We seen the same thing. Them dead people all cut up and burned. In the sessions we all started seeing it. When we was tired. From all the confessions. We all saw it.’

‘A vision?’

Martha nodded. Wiped at her red eyes. ‘Why am I seein’ it again if it was the drugs? Only drugs I take now I get from the doc.’

Kyle swallowed the lump in his throat. ‘You all saw the same vision, in the temple at the mine, of people being . . . tortured in the rain?’

‘Weren’t just that. Before me and Bridgette ran, she seen something else. Outside the temple. One of the last sessions we ever did. She got spooked inside that room. We all did. But she got sick with the smell. And when . . . when they came in and they touched against us . . . in the air . . . Bridgette left the temple. Ran outside to puke. And she told me later the sky was changed. Different. She said she could smell what we had been dreamin’ of. And the sky was full of fog . . . yellow, dirty. Kind of a long way off, but coming down fast. She said there was voices too. In the distance, above her head. Saw two dogs go running at the fog or smoke, raising hell. And they never come back out . . . right before her eyes. They just disappeared. Then she said the dogs was over her head, up in the sky. And the air, she said it was kinda wavy. Like in the heat, if you looked out across the sand when it was real hot. But coming down. Waves coming down from where them dogs were screamin’, in with all them people she couldn’t see. Up there. She weren’t no liar. She seen it.’

Aguilar’s son had said the same thing about a mist; Conway had seen the tail end of some similar atmospheric effect. And had Kyle not suffered some kind of vision, a hallucination in the fermette in Normandy . . . after he had been touched in that lightless barn . . . Oh Christ! . . . and what of his dreams?

Martha wiped at her eyes again, swore to herself under her breath, and reached for the whisky bottle. Dan looked at Kyle, who could not break his own stare from the tabletop, which he was unable to focus on.

‘Looks like you seen your own ghost and could use a shot a this.’

Kyle looked at Martha, nodded. Dan fetched two glasses from the shelves beside the cooker. ‘You too, huh, big guy?’ Kyle heard Martha say from outside the swarm of thoughts and white noise that filled his head. ‘You said . . . Martha, you said, that it’s still the same. What did you mean?’

Dan lumbered back behind the camera. Martha pushed a glass of whisky across the table at Kyle. She smiled bitterly. ‘I guess I’m sayin’ that no one ever leaves the Last Days. Once you is in, you is in for life. And maybe after that too.’

Kyle wanted to scream, but I was never in it!

‘There’s things happened out there.’ She looked at the ceiling. ‘Things that no one would believe less they seen it theirselves. Weren’t natural. Things I put down to the LSD were real. Was a time I saw Katherine walk a yard clear of the ground in that temple. She just came out of her chair, calling out that they were here. “Among us. Among us!” she was calling out like a crazy woman. ’Nother time she showed us her sin coming out. And I ask you: you ever seen a woman, or a man, spit out frogs? An’ these itty-bitty snakes? Outta their friggin’ mouths?’

‘You saw that?’ Kyle barely heard his own voice. He cleared his throat. ‘We saw . . . I saw the same thing. In Normandy. In her room . . . bed. They were in her bed.’ He wasn’t sure who he spoke to. Perhaps only himself.

Martha looked at him with what seemed to be distaste, or pity, or fear. Maybe all three of these things. But in her bloodshot eyes and in the way she pulled her lips back from her discoloured teeth, he also saw what could only be described as recognition. ‘Like I was saying. We were all contaminated. Marked. Whatever you want to call it. And it’s come back again.’

‘What? What has?’

‘The dreams. And the changes that come with the dreams. When your own hands and feet, arms, legs ain’t your own. Last two places I had, I started waking up in another room. Not one I even recognized. That’s why I moved. But it did no good.’ She shook her head, and sighed, resigned. ‘At the mine . . . like I said, somethin’ would git me outta myself. At the mine I used to dream that I was above the desert. Just up there, over it, looking down. Back then I told myself it was drugs. Fuck knows we took a few. But these past few months when it all started up again, I been thinking that it was not enough for Katherine to take our money, our freedom. Not enough. It was like she wanted our bodies too. Who we were. Our minds. Us, as people, she hated it. Did everything to get rid of us, inside. It’s why she took the kids. She didn’t want us inside our own children. She wanted them empty.’

‘Martha, where is your son?’

‘Safe. Courts took him because of the way I was living. Then I got him back in eighty-three. Never got my shit together that time neither. But I got it together enough to put him somewhere safe. ’Cus it was never over. Not in seventy-five, not today. Bridgette knew that.’ Martha teared up again, looked away from them, at the window. ‘I’m the last. Katherine came back for the rest of them.’ She nodded to herself. ‘And I can’t run no more. It stops here.’

She turned her head quickly to face Kyle, at where he gaped at her, ashen-faced, across the table. ‘Something you should see. Max wants you to film it.’

She stood up. ‘You want to see the Blood Friends, you need to come with me.’ She looked at Dan. ‘You better bring the camera before they fade. Wood doesn’t hold them for long. Or plaster. But the bricks keep their shadows best.’

They passed rooms more sombre than empty churches. Feet thudding on the hollow, uncarpeted stairs, they became featureless silhouettes themselves, moving up and deeper into the dim house. At each of the two windows they passed, Kyle felt the urge to pause and peer longingly through the glass. But his stomach defined itself with sparks of nervous electricity because he was both reluctant and morbidly excited about bearing witness to what had followed Martha here.

Down a hallway, barely lit by an unshaded yellow bulb, and between closed bedroom doors, Martha led them to a short staircase at the end of the hall on the first floor. Four steps up and Martha raised a hatch to allow access to the attic. She looked over her shoulder at Kyle and Dan. ‘They come in through here.’

Kyle and Dan exchanged looks. Dan started to grin anxiously over the viewfinder, but when he saw Kyle’s face, his fragile need for levity vanished from his eyes. Perhaps he too recalled the fragments of things glimpsed on the walls of places they had been to, and captured in jerky footage while they struggled to breathe through their panic.

Carrying the lights, audio equipment, camera and tripod between them, Kyle and Dan struggled through the narrow hatch and followed Martha into the thick, dusty air beneath the steep-sided cross-gables of the roof. Kyle found some empty floor space and settled the sound equipment and the camera’s tripod upon bare wooden boards.

Light from an arched window cut long, thin stripes across the dirty wooden floor, but left the sloping inside of the roof in deep shadow. They were surrounded by splintered tea chests, bordered with rusty iron; a pushchair furred with dust; two large suitcases on wheels; Christmas decorations in a box marked Rinso.

‘You gonna need them lights to see it. Power’s out up here.’

Dan ran the extension lead back down to the first floor to find a power socket. Kyle set up the tripod and saw to the sound. When Dan returned, he extended the lampstands. He pointed the lights underneath one side of the ceiling that Martha nodded at, a cigarette burning between her yellow fingertips. She stood between bales of old sheets under a wooden stepladder and an office desk made from grey steel.

The lights hummed, then clicked into a sudden warm and welcome explosion of white light that filled the main gable, but threw the corners of the cross section into shadow. And at first, as they all stared at the underside of the roof, Kyle could only see broad wooden boards stained with watermarks. He nearly asked what it was he was looking at. Dan stared into his viewfinder, zoomed in, zoomed out, searching. And then comprehension seemed to come into them both suddenly and simultaneously.

‘Jesus.’

‘Shit.’

‘Is that . . .’

Martha looked satisfied, though also uncomfortable at the evidence of what appeared before them: some kind of hideous expressionist art that used the gable rafters and vertical boards of her attic as a canvas.

Much of what was visible was striated, formed into moist-looking seams; the rest had seemingly soaked into the surrounding roof timbers, and faded or disintegrated into a murk of scraps; either greasy opaque sections that lacked detail, or half-completed portions of dark limbs and torsos.

It appeared to Kyle, instinctively, as if a motley and desiccated crowd of figures had all tried to force their way into the attic space, but become stuck on their way through, and then merely faded away to leave ghastly imprints of their emaciated forms behind.

He stared at the most complete shape. Tiny steps of a spectral ribcage led up to the profile of a face, caught in the act of a scream. Impressions of a full set of unnaturally long teeth were intricately detailed. Across an empty eye socket and a nose incompletely formed from what appeared to be cartilage, but not entirely obscuring these features, long fingers had been clasped. A smattering of carpals and forearm bones appeared to protrude from the plain wood. It was like the small figure had been suddenly horrified at the sight of something awaiting it inside the attic, which had also stopped its progress. It was small, unappealingly infantile.

‘Here. Look,’ Dan whispered, his voice tight with fascination, but also shock. Kyle looked at the end of the camera lens and followed a straight trajectory to what Dan filmed near the apex of the roof, beneath the main beam. ‘You seeing that?’

Kyle was, though wished he were not. And longed to be back outside and not staring up, unable to breathe or blink, at the figure with a complete pelvis that clutched at its throat with indistinct hands. Smooth arms crossed its chest. A suggestion of hair fanned about the bony face, the figure caught in some strong headwind as it birthed inside the attic space. Bulbous ball joints and long femurs defined its legs, but the lower limbs were tangled behind it from the knees down.

Kyle swallowed. ‘What . . . When . . .’

‘Heard ’em three weeks back for the first time. I was in bed. Heard ’em through the ceiling. Up here. Knockin’. Bumpin’. Tryin’ to get in. Man across the street knocked on my door. Was the only thing that give me the strength to come downstairs. He was worried that I had a fire. Said he could see smoke.’ Martha sighed. ‘Weren’t that kind of smoke, I wanted to tell him.’ She shrugged, hopelessly.

‘You’ve seen this before?’

Martha nodded. ‘It’s why I moved on so much. Same thing. Last two places.’

‘What are they?’

Martha looked into Kyle’s eyes so fiercely, he withered inside. ‘Old friends.’ She turned her head away and looked at the mottled roof. ‘What Katherine brought down.’

Kyle couldn’t slow his heart; it beat, paused, gurgled unhealthily. He kneeled down on the floor. Dan asked him if he was all right. He couldn’t answer.

Martha remained preoccupied with her recollections. ‘These come two nights back. Nearly made it all the way through. But I switched the lights on that Max sent me, and—’

‘Lights? What lights? Max?’ Dan said.

Martha nodded without looking at him. ‘It don’t matter none. They juss keep coming. Last night they chewed through the wires in here like rats, with what they’s got left for teeth.’

Kyle put his hand on Dan’s thigh and pulled himself to his feet.

‘Thought they was birds the first time. When I went into the spare room I had in my old place it sure smelled like a whole flock of dead ones that could still sing. Thought a pipe had burst too. But it weren’t. It was them. Coming for me. Same as they come for Bridgette.’

‘She told you that? Bridgette?’

Martha nodded. ‘Out in her place in Denver. We spoke every day on the phone since it started up again. They came for her first. She said . . .’ Martha’s voice trailed off, and she touched at the corner of an eye, sniffed. ‘She said they was going to take her into the sky, like they did with them dogs at the mine. “But not . . . not if I ain’t here for them to get a hold of.” That was the last thing she told me.’

Martha turned away from the roof and walked to the hatch. ‘I’m beat. Can’t do no more. There’s nothing else to tell. Just one more thing I got to show you.’ She paused and looked back at Kyle with her red and shining eyes. ‘Sometimes they leave things behind.’

It was a shoe, and probably the most horrible thing of all, amongst all of the horrid things she had recounted and then shown them.

Kyle couldn’t touch it. Dan filmed it closely, at where it sat on a sheet of newspaper in the middle of Martha’s kitchen table. ‘Found it in the attic. Left behind. Means they’s real close.’

It was small enough to fit a child. Hard as wood and black as coal. Charred perhaps, or petrified, but once leather. The little pointy toes curled at the tips. Small holes were visible on the uppers, and fragments of stitches where the worn sole met the heel and toe of the shoe.

‘You seen anything like this before?’ Kyle asked Martha, who stood by the big sink, smoking and staring out into the overcast sky.

She nodded. ‘Katherine and The Seven called them “heavenly letters”. Said it was “mana”. A sign, you know. For the time of ascent. They kept bits of clothes in this chest. Collected them. They looked real old and burned. Scraps they found in the desert to start with. Belial would bring them back to the mine. Then they was appearing on the floor of the temple after the sessions. First I thought it was a trick, because Katherine had plenty of stuff like that she brought from France. Her holy relics. She showed us. But like I said, we brought things down. Inside that place, to be with us. Never saw who left them, but we smelled whoever they belonged to sure enough. Just like there was dead men standing right next to us in the dark.’

‘What is it? What did she say to you? Back there?’ Kyle asked when Dan slumped into the passenger seat and expelled a deep, weary sigh.

Because he had the keys and because he was desperate to leave the house, Kyle was first back to the car, and he’d remained speechless with shock until he’d loaded the back seat and trunk like an automaton. But he’d seen an intense exchange between Dan and Martha on the porch before they said goodbye.

Dan turned to Kyle. Though his unshaven face betrayed some relief that the shoot was over, it remained tense. ‘She said that we’re not the first.’

Kyle’s teeth were clenched in a grimace. He eased his jaw apart. ‘Eh?’

‘Not the first “movie people” that Max sent out here to interview her. Someone else was here. Last month.’ Dan looked puzzled. ‘Maybe it was too freaky even for him. I could excuse that.’

‘Who?’

‘Malcolm Gonal.’

‘Gonal!’ Kyle raised his hands and then slapped them onto the steering wheel. ‘Fucking Gonal! Why didn’t Max tell me? He builds the whole thing up to me as some kind of exclusive project that only I could make happen because he was let down by his team. It was bullshit. It’s all bullshit. Gonal was his fucking team! That fucking fraud.’

‘Max told Martha not to tell you. Said that if she did, she wouldn’t get paid. She wants to give the fee to her kids, so she agreed. But . . .’

‘What?’

‘But she could see . . . she could see that we’re involved. She guessed we’ve seen things. Said she knew “pretty quick”. And she warned me, mate. Warned me to stay away. To not make the film. Because we are in danger. Serious danger.’ Dan looked through the windscreen at nothing in particular. ‘Bit late for that, I told her.’

Kyle thrust his face into his hands. He dragged his fingers down his cheeks, opened his eyes wide to cleanse them with sunlight, to rinse them of the appalling darkness of that house.

Dan nodded. ‘Max is using us.’

‘But I don’t know why.’

‘What do we do?’

Kyle rested his forehead on the centre of the steering wheel, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m tired. I’m just so bloody tired.’

‘I need a drink.’

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