TWENTY

THE REGAL MOTEL, SEATTLE. 22 JUNE 2011. 10 P.M.

It had gone dark. Outside his room the distant traffic sounds were relentless. One more thing to keep him awake.

Kyle sat in silence, propped up by pillows on top of his bed. In both shock and a half-suspended disbelief that he was in possession of such strange material, and that they had been privy to so much tragedy second hand, he’d spent the afternoon and early evening methodically working his way through a rough cut of Martha’s testimony, before going back over the Sweeney and Aguilar interviews to check on corroborating details. Keeping his hands and mind focused was the only thing that prevented what felt like a total mental breakdown within a maelstrom of terror.

Dan had obsessively cleaned the lenses, checked the camera functions, and recharged batteries while Kyle worked on the edit. ‘There’s shit all over these lenses ,’ he’d said when Kyle asked him to take it easy and go into Seattle and relax while he worked on the rough cut and hardcopy shot log. It was the most they’d said to each other since checking into the motel. Early the next morning they would fly back to London. The last interview was a wrap and they should have been out celebrating with a steak and a few beers. Both of them knew it, but didn’t raise it. They’d huddled together within a silent, uncomfortable anticipation. An anxiety about what happened next. Because nothing felt finished. It was as if they had learned just enough to become implicated in a thing with terrible repercussions they didn’t understand.

Earlier that day, his fascination with the cult had finally turned the corner into a profound disgust and his irritation with Max had evolved into a rage that left him dizzy. Now the shoot was over it was as if his fear and confusion and dread had waited to really kick off. Organizing the shoots, travelling, filming, making rough cuts, half absorbing the madness, and pipe-dreaming the film’s potential, the effects of his exposure to such dysfunction had built without being fully confronted. He only acknowledged it now. And it felt too late to rewind to a place of safety and familiarity. Typical. He had been committed, absorbed and unthinking. Intentionally, because the story was so good. So good he felt like he’d been damaged by it, permanently.

Every bit of secondary reading and research he’d fast-tracked into his mind since taking the assignment had coalesced into a size and weight sufficient to pull him down. In planes and hotel rooms and inside his flat, he’d read and watched anything he could acquire connected to sixties and seventies cults to try and gain perspective on Sister Katherine and her merry band. And he’d found little he liked. In a fortnight he’d saturated himself with manipulative sociopaths, malignant narcissists, murderers, sadists, rapists, violent criminals, ludicrous messiahs and absurd prophets. Let it spin round with nervous energy, tobacco, lack of sleep, takeout food, and hard liquor. Terminal harm. The nightmares. Hallucinations. The things on the walls. It all had to come back out sometime.

Through the coming night, he expected to endure the same restless and haunted dreams plaguing him since Normandy. And when he was back in his own bed, what then? Would normal sleep be possible again? If so, when? Sleeping pills and a psychotherapist: maybe it was time for that. He now wondered if the Last Days had somehow become entangled with all of the unresolved ambition and angst and disenchantment inside him. He didn’t know, but what he had learned the hard way was that he no longer knew when to apply the brakes. Was there anything he wouldn’t film with the same fastidious compulsion?

At ten, he closed his laptop and peered around plain white walls lit by Max’s dawn-light visor. It had become a habit.

Dan stowed the equipment in his room next door, walked back into Kyle’s and slumped in the chair in front of the television. Slowly, he worked his way through a bag of fries and the fried chicken pieces inside the cardboard box on his lap. Kyle hadn’t touched his own food. He stared at the mirror on the wall at the foot of the bed, and uncapped a bottle of Wild Turkey. Two crumpled beer cans lay on the bedside table. Red-rimmed eyes in a pale face emphasized the dark rings under his eyes. They looked bruised. The face familiar to him since he met Max. A coincidence? Not likely .

A big reckless swig drained the whisky from his glass. Without looking at Dan, in a room as bright as a solarium, he began to speak as much to himself as anybody else. ‘You know, Sharon Tate was eight months pregnant when she was stabbed sixteen times by a twenty-one-year-old girl. A member of Charles Manson’s Family called Susan Atkins.’

Dan watched Kyle with the same uncertainty with which he had considered his friend since leaving Martha Lake’s house. Dan had seen him look this way before; when his idea for a Ufology documentary was stolen by Unreal Pictures, when his last two girlfriends dumped him for ‘wankers higher up the food chain’, and after his last three funding applications were rejected. Falling down in front of Dan was becoming another bad habit.

‘Three of his group, known as the Family, also killed Tate’s house guests. Shot, strangled and stabbed three people, as well as a fourth victim who just happened to be leaving the house that night when the killers showed up. That guy really lucked out. He’d only been visiting the caretaker.

‘The killers wrote graffiti on the walls in the victims’ blood. They wrote “Pig” on the front door. Manson had sent his young followers on a “creepy crawly” to kill a record producer. A guy who used to live at the address, who’d rejected Manson’s music. But the guy had moved out and rented the house to Sharon Tate and Roman Polanksi.

‘The next night, Manson’s assassins drove to another house in LA. Could have been selected randomly, or it was somewhere the cult had hung out before. Didn’t matter. The married couple they murdered were strangers. They wrote “Death to Pigs” and “Rise” on the walls. They used the victims’ blood again. Daubed “Healter Skelter” on the refrigerator door. It was supposed to read “Helter Skelter”, to kick-start Manson’s race war as foretold in the lyrics of the Beatles’ White Album, but they couldn’t even bloody spell it.’

‘Kyle. It’s over, yeah?’

Kyle ignored him. ‘Manson’s Family also killed or tried to murder anyone that turned witness or stood up to Charlie. They once tried to kill a girl using a hamburger laced with LSD. Manson even had his own defence lawyer murdered during the trial.’

‘Kyle.’

‘The youngest of the killers in the Family was seventeen. The oldest was twenty-six. Most of them were about twenty. And when Manson was in prison, his followers carried out armed robberies, kept up the murder count, planned to hijack a 747, and to kill a president. They came close with President Ford. Manson’s number one, Squeaky, got two feet from the President in his motorcade. She was dressed in a nun’s habit, but the gun didn’t go off. She hadn’t chambered a round. She still lives close to San Quentin prison to be near Charlie. She thinks he’s Jesus.’

‘Mate. Please.’

Kyle poured another shot of whisky. Gulped at it. ‘The Reverend Jim Jones had nine hundred of his followers poisoned or shot during his White Night in Guyana in 1978. A mass ‘suicide’. The first to die were a woman and her one-month-old baby. Many of his people took the poisoned grape squash willingly. They queued up to drink strychnine from paper cups, or to be injected with it. A doctor prepared the poison in a vat. But about sixty people refused to go and were murdered. They were shot by the security guards, or forcibly injected with strychnine. The children that resisted had strychnine fired down their throats with syringes. The killers aimed for the swallow reflex to make sure the poison went down. They died in agony. Contorted. Bleeding. Vomiting. And all the while Jones droned and screamed through his PA system—’

Dan stood up. ‘OK! OK! I get the picture. Fuck’s sake, Kyle! Enough already. Jesus Christ.’ Dan’s face was not only fixed with disapproval but distaste. ‘You’re getting way too far into all this. Now is not the time. I came out here for you. I didn’t bloody want to.’

Kyle surged with fury. Dan had not read any of the research notes, and still hadn’t even opened Levine’s Last Days; he doubted Dan had even pursued a single Google search into what they were filming, what they had investigated, dug up, and maybe even brought back. Because Dan didn’t need to. He just messed around with the camera and the equipment, snarfed junk food, guzzled beer, snored like an oaf and kept him awake after he did all of the driving, the thinking, the planning. How could this still only be a job to Dan? A favour? How could he maintain the indifference? ‘Into it? Did you say into it?’

Dan read Kyle’s expression and looked away. Then peered back at him, warily. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘No, I don’t know.’

‘It’s messing with your head, mate. You’re starting to freak me out, if the truth be told. I knew this would happen. Knew it. Thought it was going to be me.’

‘Is it any bloody surprise?’

Dan sat down and took a sip from the beer can that looked tiny in his huge paw, and then stared at his feet again. ‘Didn’t have to be this way. We could have blown this off. I bloody told you. But no one can tell you anything can they?’

Kyle stopped listening to Dan; he listened to his own thoughts instead. ‘You saw those things in her attic. France, London, the same thing. And on my bloody kitchen wall. You’re OK. It’s me. Me! I’m fucked. I fucked myself.’

Dan looked at Kyle ruefully, critically, like Kyle was embarrassing himself in public after too many drinks.

Kyle stood up and seized the sides of his head. ‘What am I doing?’ he asked himself. ‘What the hell am I doing here?’

‘Mate, chill yeah. Take it easy. Don’t start with that shit now. You talked me into this. Yeah? Remember that. And I need you to keep it together till we get home.’

Kyle turned on Dan. ‘It’s different now. Out here. A whole new level. I can’t take it easy. Christ!’ He moved closer to Dan, stared into his friend’s big florid face. ‘We’re being tricked. Lied to. This could be some serious shit we’re in now. That’s what Martha said.’ These people, he wanted to add, these people we are trying to understand would have killed us without remorse. They were people who learned to live without a conscience. Could such sadistic fury be erased even after they had gone? That’s what he wanted to know. Could such a pathological desire for power and control fade like the ink on a police report in some locker, or the pages of an out-of-print true-crime book?

‘But cool it, yeah.’ Dan now looked like he was trying not to smile, which made Kyle’s inarticulate frustration ratchet higher to a place where all control of what he said and did could be lost. ‘Shit! Shit!’ He stomped across the room, took a swing and punched the wall. Imagined it was Max’s little orange head with the Barbie Doll hair. He stepped back, held his hand, bit back on the emotional incoherence engulfing him; a tiny rational part of him warned he might destroy something of value, again. He thought of the mobile phone he’d once smashed against the wall of his flat, and of the splintered laptop thrust deep within the dustbin. ‘Shit.’

He felt sick, lightheaded, his vision swooped. He’d drunk on an empty stomach. Was drunk. Hadn’t slept in . . . how long? Not for more than an hour or two in America. Not a wink on the flight over. Barely got his head down since they returned from Normandy. How long ago was that? A matter of days. It felt like years. He was coming down too fast.

He kneeled on the floor and bent over, every muscle in his body taut, the exhaustion desperate to come out one way or another and hardly in the way of his choosing. Slapping the carpet tiles with the palms of both hands he shouted, ‘Shit!’ Then looked up at Dan. ‘It’s too much.’ He could not stop himself and began sobbing. He growled back at the tears, but they wouldn’t cease. ‘Too much. I can’t . . .’

‘Mate. Mate.’ Dan kneeled on the floor beside him, but kept his distance.

‘These people. What’s wrong with them? Is this what it comes to? Power. This what it does to us? She bullied them. Raped them. Robbed and murdered her own people who gave her everything. She slit their throats. Buried them alive for all we know. Why? They were damned as soon as they met her. It’s like Martha said, they were damned.’

Kyle rolled onto his back, kicked his legs straight, wiped his eyes. ‘Is it any different now? People, Dan, they’ll do anything . . . anything for status. Money. The psychopaths we’ve worked for. The stolen ideas. Everyone stabbing everyone else in the back. For what? For some lousy shit that goes on the telly once? Who needs it, or wants it? Whoever asked for it? And why give these evil shits any more attention, eh? Manson, Jones, Sister-fat-fuck-Katherine? What am I doing in America messing around with their bullshit? Oh, Katherine had her needs. Needs! Had to be adored. Worshipped. It’s no different now, mate. Big Brother. Same thing. I’m a twattish Celebrity. Strictly Come dumb-fuck Dancing. On ice!’

Dan started to grin, then laugh, then wheeze. ‘Can I film this? For the DVD extras?’

‘Eh? Is this it, mate? Is this the best we can do? After millions of years of evolution, we start stupid cults of celebrity and feed the egos of maniacs until they take our money, fuck us in the arse, and then cut our throats. We should be cutting their throats!’ Kyle felt his rage deflate. He closed his eyes and let the warmth inside his blood take him over. His head spun; he felt sick and opened his eyes. ‘I just think I’m done, mate. With it all. Life. Work. People. The will of people. The will of them. Christ Almighty.’ He briefly visualized himself living alone, growing his own food, drinking water from a well. He imagined the silence. ‘Maybe I should quit now. Get the fee. Pay off my debts. And just go.’

‘You’re too sensitive for this work. Always have been.’

Kyle didn’t acknowledge Dan’s remark; he’d heard it, suspected it of himself, and denied it many times before. ‘You know, in the airport, coming over, I watched the people around us.’ Kyle shook his head where he lay on the floor, staring at the polystyrene ceiling tiles. ‘So many of them thought they had an audience. They were performing. Because everyone thinks they’re on stage these days. The Show Of Me, mate. Facebook. Twitter. Twitter my arse. Mobile phones? Eh? They’re not for communicating, they’re for broadcasting. Broadcasting The Show Of Me. We are an audience to every shithead with an iPhone. I can’t turn on the telly without some silly bitch with big teeth showing off.’

It was the thrust, the constant thrust of other personalities, the desperate need for attention, for their own reality drama, for their own public relations rituals to be seen, heard, remembered. A white noise of self-interest. Sister Katherine was just one endgame in an age of pathology.

Dan’s laughter filled the room. Reaching over, he shoved Kyle’s shoulder. Kyle tried not to smile. ‘But this out here. It’s like the distillation of it all. Where it really took hold. In the sixties. I can see that. Manipulative shysters. Naïve people desperate to believe in something, in someone, to be someone. Any different now? Who wants to be ordinary? Eh? No one, that’s who. Everybody’s got to be singing or dancing or drawing attention to themselves. For what? Is there really any talent involved in any of it? Anything meaningful? Is anything really thought through? Anything permanent any more? Does any of it matter? They can all self-actualize my middle finger. All of them. They can blog my arse.’

Dan chuckled. ‘That’s it. Right there. Your final narration before the credits. You need a drink.’

‘I don’t.’ Kyle wiped at his eyes, sat up. He looked at Dan. ‘I’m done, mate. Just done in. I need to sleep. I haven’t slept in . . . I can’t even remember. I close my eyes and I can see the road going through the desert, I can see airport queues, and I’m watching rushes while the satnav is telling me to turn right, all night. Jesus, I’m even scared to go to sleep. It’s like it’s all got inside me. Like I’m involved in them now. The way Martha looked at me . . .’ Kyle rolled on to his knees. Stood up, grabbed the cigarette packet off the nightstand. ‘Her roof, Dan.’ He shook his head. Lit up. ‘The bloody roof.’

Dan shrugged. ‘I’m trying not to think about it. Keeping my distance.’ His eyes were doleful, yet serious. ‘I can’t explain it. Unless someone is messing around with us. And with Max. Drawing those things on the walls before we get there. Hiding in the cult’s buildings to freak us out while we’re filming.’ Dan held up his hands. ‘It could be someone trying to scare us off. Using some kind of ink that fades under UV light.’

‘My flat? The hotel in Caen?’

‘It’s more believable than what Martha is suggesting. Because I won’t accept that it’s anything else. I just won’t, mate. It’s the only way I managed to get my arse over here to finish this. And by telling myself that even if hauntings are real . . . I dunno, ghosts, residues, whatever . . . they can’t hurt you. Remember that.’

‘Not even after what you’ve heard from the cops? Emilio? Don’t you believe that they . . . I dunno, called something out in that mine? In France? Summoned something? I feel silly even using that word, but come on, it has to be something else. Something we don’t have a rational explanation for.’

Dan shook his head. ‘I see it and I kind of accept it. For a while. I know I’ve had a few wobbles. But then I’m back here, or in some bar, and my reason kicks in. Denies it all. My instincts are telling me to run a mile, but I’ve been getting past that with a bit of logic, mate. Only way I can deal with it. And thank God it’s over.’

‘The shoe? That horrible little thing on her table. Same things were showing up in the desert. The heavenly letters. What Katherine called them. They must have arrived in the second year in France, the missing year. After Gabriel left. She brought those things over to America with her. Martha said she had a collection of them. They must have started to show up first in Normandy.’

‘Could have been planted. And you’re taking Martha’s word for it that it just appeared. She’s unhinged. They all are.’

‘My dreams. You think I’m making them up?’

‘No. But, like I said, you’re into this balls-deep. And I’m not.’

‘Martha has the same dreams. The weird limbs. Being in another body. Seeing things. Why? I’m supposed to be recording this, but it’s like . . . it’s invading me. Getting inside. Hunting me.’ Kyle crouched down in front of Dan, his eyes wild again. ‘How is that possible? They had visions. In the temples. Now I’m having visions. How does that work? And them all dying. Think about it. Susan White. Bridgette Clover. Eh? Why can’t Max find anyone else for us to talk to? He’s looked, you can count on that. I’ll wager they’re all dead.’

Dan swigged from his beer can. ‘I wanted to walk away from this. And you had your chance. So now is not the time for all this when it’s too late. Try and see it my way. Deal with it or you’ll go nuts. And you’ll start believing anything.’

Kyle grimaced. ‘I can’t.’

After a long silence, Dan smiled. ‘Because it’s brilliant.’

Kyle grinned. ‘It is. The best bloody thing we’ve ever done. Will ever do. You couldn’t make this up. But . . .’

Dan watched him intently again.

Kyle exhaled a long plume of smoke. ‘But there has to be a line that you don’t cross.’ Kyle put a hand on Dan’s shoulder. ‘It’s what you were trying to tell me. Before. I know. And I’m sorry. I mean that. Sorry that I didn’t listen. And you’re right, I never do.’

Dan looked down and swallowed. ‘It was Gabriel. You weren’t there. I keep thinking of Gabriel. Crying. His leg in that trap. He might not even pull through. What kind of life is he going to have if he does? And Martha sobbing in that shitty kitchen. Conway’s face. The way he looked at the dead trees at the mine. The way he was getting himself together to go through that night again, for us. Just for us. Susan White is dead. She actually died while we were making this film, mate. Jesus Christ.’

‘A stroke. You believe that? Bridgette Clover killed herself this year. Recently. Too real. Like it’s happening as the camera is rolling. Like this is live news footage of some atrocity. Not history. It’s supposed to be history. Interviews, locations, narration, speculation, all after the fact. Just like the other films. But it’s not. So why am I still doing it? So I can win acclaim, get paid, get laid? Like every other tosser with a project out there? Am I exploiting these poor old fools for my own gain? Am I too reckless and desperate to make this film instead of just acknowledging that we were in danger and should have quit?’

Dan shrugged. ‘I guess we’re telling the story, mate. The one that hasn’t been told, like Max said. And if we don’t do it someone else will.’

Kyle wasn’t sure if Dan was just trying to make him feel better. He didn’t know what he thought about any of it any more, or himself. But he had a horrible suspicion he might have become what he hated. Staring at the end of his cigarette, he said, ‘But who’ll be left to interview?’

Dan raised his bushy eyebrows and shrugged. ‘Martha gave me the business card our predecessor left with her. When he was out here.’ He handed the card over, pinched between two fingers. ‘Old Malcolm Gonal. His number is on there. Maybe talk to him. About what he found out.’

‘Even he bailed on this.’

‘Not heard his name for years. He had that hit with Spirit. Did that series called Voices from Beyond for Sketchboard in the nineties. Then not much else besides that football hooligan stuff.’

‘It was all shit.’

‘It was. Sacks of it. All the paranormal stuff was faked. Typical ITV bollocks.’

‘He’s everything I’m against.’

‘He hasn’t had a sniff in years. Must have been skint. This was his comeback.’

‘The money Max is throwing around, Gonal would have killed to get on board.’

‘Finger Mouse worked with him once, few years ago. On some video about a gangster. Said he was a twat.’

‘So why would Gonal walk away from this?’

‘Give him a call, ask him.’

Kyle stared at the business card. ‘I intend to. Better than that, tomorrow afternoon, when we get back, I’m going round to his place. Right before I go and rip Max a new one, and demand some answers about what the hell is going down.’ Kyle took out his wallet, slipped the business card inside.

‘There’s no production offices in New Cross. Must work from home.’

‘Precisely. Max is scratching around the cult TV has-beens. Me included. Motive unclear, but I don’t believe he’s thinking of Sundance or Cannes.’

‘Before you do any of that, will you do me a big favour?’

Kyle looked at Dan. ‘What?’

‘Will you get some bloody sleep.’

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