If I had a time machine that would take me back through Jinx’s life, so that I could find who twisted her mind with an ideology or sick philosophy … Well, no, I wouldn’t kill them to spare her from what she became. That way lies madness.
The wisdom of the most sagacious ancient Greeks, the wisdom of the most perceptive rabbis of ancient Canaan, and all the parables of Christ teach us to believe not in justice, but in truth. In a world of rampant lying, where so many lies are used to inflame passions and justify false grievances, the indiscriminate pursuit of justice leads sooner or later to insanity, mass murder, and the ruin of entire civilizations. Therefore, those who wish to punish the current and future generations for the inequities of a generation long gone, and who equate justice with revenge, are the most dangerous people in the world.
I got to my feet, crossed the room, and turned off the lights. In the hallway, I holstered the pistol and pulled shut the door.
There were now ten rounds in one Glock, fifteen in the other. I hoped I would need none of them, but I knew otherwise.
Returning to the back stairs, I started to climb the six flights of steps to the third floor.
Jessie, Jasmine, Jordan …
Thirty
PASSING THE SECOND FLOOR, I HEARD THE EXCITED voices of partiers beyond the stairwell door. The action seemed to be centered now on that level, and I sensed an acceleration of the crowd’s mood toward some much-desired condition of dark ecstasy.
My impression that this building had once been a lodge or perhaps a corporate retreat seemed to be confirmed when I stepped into the third-floor hallway. Numbered doors, as in a hotel, served evenly spaced rooms on both sides.
Although deserted, the third-floor hall wasn’t quiet. Laughter and the muffled roar of fevered conversation rose from below.
Jessie, Jasmine, Jordan brought me to Room 4 on the left, where I stood for a long moment with my hand on the doorknob.
I knew beyond doubt that the children were being kept in there, but intuition told me that I still lacked some information essential to ensure their rescue. As the energy of the crowd grew and as the party noise seemed increasingly to come from the lake side of the house, I needed to see what might be happening out there in the torchlit night.
Although Mr. Hitchcock had said that the clock was ticking, and although no one would know more about ticking clocks than the Master of Suspense, I went to the next door on the left, Room 6. It wasn’t locked.
They tortured people for pleasure and to win the favor of their malevolent god, and they made a sacrament of murder, but they trusted one another not to steal. Maybe that was because they also brutally executed their own—like the two men in the basement of the former Black & Buckle Manufacturing building in Barstow—for any behavior that might put the cult at risk or harm any of its members. I suppose the prospect of having your fingers amputated one by one with a bolt cutter and being set afire would make you think twice about sneaking into someone’s room and stealing his iPad.
The wall switch just inside the door brought light to the pair of bedside lamps in Room 6. The bedding had not been disturbed. On the dresser, someone had left a newspaper, a set of keys, and pocket change. A few paperback books were stacked on one of the nightstands.
At the wide window, the draperies were open. The flames of the propane torches, below my line of sight on the ground-floor terrace, made this higher night quiver with sinuous light.
To be sure I was alone, I checked the bathroom. Separate sets of personal-care products beside the two sinks indicated that a couple occupied this unit, a man and a woman. They were on a late-winter getaway: fresh mountain air, an entertaining novel or two, perhaps a little boating on the lake, the ritualistic murder of seventeen children to unwind taut nerves and ensure a good night’s sleep… .
Satisfied that for the moment I had the room to myself, I went to the window.
Immediately below, at the second floor, on the twenty-foot-wide cantilevered deck that extended the length of the building, more than twenty people were gathered, enjoying cocktails and wine, men and women in about equal numbers. They all wore sweaters, though not only or even primarily for comfort in the cool night air. Perhaps as an act of mockery, every sweater had a Christmas motif featuring Santa Claus or reindeer, snowmen or elves, holiday trees or snowflakes, and some featured words of the holiday like NOEL, FELIZ NAVIDAD, HO HO HO, and JOY TO THE WORLD. They were colorful, festive, and—out of season, under these circumstances—deeply sinister.
I didn’t know what the county sheriff looked like, but I saw a well-known film actor, a United States senator, and a couple of other faces that were familiar but that I couldn’t identify. The rhinestone cowboy wasn’t among them.
In this age of smartphones that can be used surreptitiously as cameras and recorders, for such prominent and recognizable people to attend this abomination seemed reckless in the extreme. But Mr. Hitchcock had said they were protected by their master, the rebel angel who was the prince of this world, to whom they had pledged everything. He said that they were untouchable. And perhaps they trusted one another not to steal and not to betray them with video on the Internet because when they had joined the darksiders, they had surrendered their free will and no longer had the capacity to change their minds and betray the cult. A satanic society, after all, would operate as the ultimate totalitarianism.
Beyond the deck, on the terrace below, in the center of a space defined by four of the tall propane torches, the round steel stage waited for the night’s performances. I had seen this same platform when I touched the cowboy in the supermarket parking lot. The three children had been seated on it when he set them afire.
Just past the farther end of the terrace, on the shore, between two torches stood a man with spiky white hair. He wore a blood-red suit, black shirt, and harlequin mask. The cowboy. He held a censer that was suspended by three chains from a handle, and as he turned, swinging it toward all four points of the compass, I could see the pale fumes of incense escaping from the holes in the filigreed lid of the gold thurible.
Only as I looked past the people in their Christmas sweaters and the stage below them, past the cowboy, did I realize that the night had undergone a frightening change. Directly overhead, stars winked between the tattered clouds, the edges of which were aglow with a reflection of an otherwise still-shrouded moon. But beyond the evenly spaced line of tall propane torches that defined the curving shoreline, the lake had been transformed.
Previously, the placid surface had been inky, and only the torches, reflected in the water, had revealed the presence of a lake. Now the pale soil of the shore seemed to flutter in firelight, as if it were alive and trembling with expectation, but the water did not mirror the flames, as though it had drained away. Earlier, across the portion of the sky above the lake, the clouds had been faintly luminous with the refracted lights of distant Las Vegas, providing just enough contrast to see the rising land along the farther shores. Unlike the heavens directly above this property, those looming over the lake were now so perfectly black that looking at them strained the eyes. The farther land and the lake that it had defined were now invisible.
The line of torches no longer marked the edge of the lake but defined the boundary between this reality and that wasteland I had seen through the windows—and from the roof—of the old industrial building in Elsewhere. Here, that vast cold hateful darkness met our world without the bridge of Elsewhere.
On the second-floor deck, more people were gathering, at least forty now, more colorful Christmas sweaters, and their conversation grew increasingly excited but at the same time quieter, as though they were anticipating the arrival of some special guest immeasurably more prestigious than the senator with the leonine mane of salt-and-pepper hair, far more glamorous than the movie star. Their attention focused now less on one another than on the absolute blackness where the lake had been.
A chill traveled through me, and it seemed that my blood had turned cold and thick. My
heart pumped not just faster but also with much greater force, as though higher pressure was required to drive the syrup of life through the arteries to every extremity. I could feel the hard strokes of my heart not merely in my chest and throbbing temples, but as well in my eyes, my vision pulsing, and in the thyroid cartilage of my Adam’s apple, my larynx vibrating with each beat, and in the deep pit of my stomach, which might have been my aorta swelling with each surge of blood. The fear that rose in me was unlike any that I’d known before, raw, primal, like a hibernating lodger that all my life had slept in my bones, that I had not known was part of me, until now it came awake.
Within that oppressive gloom where the lake had been, a presence slightly less black moved, and then more than one. I could discern no shapes, no features. I became aware of things roiling, writhing, creatures that, in their biological convolutions, by far exceeded in strangeness the strangest living things upon the earth. It seemed to me the darkness through which they moved, out of which they came, was without end, that they were many and yet somehow one, that rising toward the shore was something vast beyond measuring and grotesque beyond human comprehension.
The cowboy turned his back upon the blackness. Slowly and without apparent fear, carrying the censer, he started toward the house.
I turned away from the window.
The nightstand lamps brightened and dimmed rhythmically, and because they were not in time with my racing heart, I thought their throbbing must be real, not merely the consequence of my pulsating vision.
I drew both pistols but then holstered them. Such fear as this could inspire irrational action, which might lead me to fail not just one or two of the children, but all of them.
Whatever gate had been opened to whatever realm, whatever presence or legion had come out of the wasteland to the shore behind the house, it was not here to find me and carry me away. It was here to witness the extreme atrocities that these people intended to offer in gratitude for the power and the wealth that they had been given, for the success in their careers that came from the dark grace of their patron. They were the real threat to me.
My palms were damp with sweat.
I blotted them on my jeans.
I held my hands before my face, watching them tremble—until they didn’t.