J. Gonzalez - They

Vince was shaking his head. “This sounds so unreal .”

“I know,” Frank said. “How do you think I felt when we started uncovering it? I’m starting to feel like Whitley Strieber.”

“Who?”

“Whitley Strieber… the guy who wrote Communion . He’s a very high profile horror and science fiction writer. Wrote a couple of great novels: Wolfen , The Hunger . In his book Communion , he claims he was actually abducted by aliens and was used as a guinea pig in their experiments. He claims they’re still doing this to him, tracking him down. All this from a guy who makes a great living making this kind of shit up.” Frank patted his chest. “ That’s how I feel.”

So he feels funny believing in it, too , Vince thought. Still, he found it even hard to consider what Frank was telling him. It was just too crazy . But he couldn’t voice that to Frank. He had to deal with whatever doubts he had himself. Maybe tonight he would do some research on what Frank was insinuating.

Vince let out a careful sigh. “This stuff sounds pretty heavy.”

“It is,” Frank said. He finished his Dr. Pepper and set the empty in the cup holder. “You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff Mike and I have discovered. Did you know the Son of Sam killings in the late 1970s are vaguely connected to an offshoot of this group?”

“No.”

“There’s evidence that suggests that David Berkowitz didn’t act alone when he gunned down those people in ’76 and ’77. In fact, witness descriptions place three or four other gunmen at the scene of the crimes. One theory is that the shootings were committed by order of the cult to enact something—exactly what, I have no idea. The attacks were all committed on a day that corresponds with a holiday or festival on the occult calendar. Berkowitz, on the other hand, was most likely fingered to take the fall before he even knew it. He initially clammed up and claimed to have acted on the order of his neighbor’s dog, which he said was possessed by a demon. Psychiatrists dismissed that as a ploy, but a few years later when he began talking to an investigative reporter about the murders and hinting he was involved in a large nationwide satanic cult, he was attacked in prison. His throat was slashed and he almost died.” Frank looked at Vince. “As you can imagine, he kept quiet about the cult after that.”

Vince was silent, taking this all in.

“There’s more. I can go on and on about what we’ve found out. The Manson family, the Metamoros thing down in Mexico, the Edwin Groose serial killing case, all that stuff had some trail leading back to The Children of the Night. Did you know that they even own a major Christian Broadcasting system?”

Vince shook his head. This was all sounding like the paranoid delusions of a bad dream. The events of the past week raced through his mind: his mother’s sudden death, rushing to Pennsylvania, Lillian’s sudden death, talking to the detectives and his mother’s friends in Lititz, the visit from the attorney, the crazy guy at the airport that tried to kill him and Tracy. And now this .

“Why is all this happening?” Vince said, more to himself than to Frank.

“I have my suspicions, trust me.”

“No, I mean…” Vince turned in his seat so he was facing Frank. “Why me? Why is all this shit crumbling down around me ? Even considering the possibility my mother might have belonged to such a group and that they exist even now and are involved in everything you claim they are, why would they be after me? Why would they want to kill me? I have a fairly good life, I have a career I love, I have friends that I love and care for and who care for me. I have a good life. I had nothing to do with what my mother did in the sixties. I’m not in the least bit interested in the occult. So why should I care if my mother—our parents—were involved in a satanic cult? Why would a bunch of religious nuts want to kill me?”

Frank was silent for a moment. He regarded Vince sternly, his dark eyes resting heavily on him. “I could just go on and say that I came here to help you. If you remember, I told you that you were in danger. That part is certainly true as evidenced by what happened to you and Tracy.”

“But why am I in danger?” Vince asked. “Why would they want me dead? I’ve never done anything to them! And why did you go through all this trouble to find me? What business is it of yours?”

“It’s my business just as it is yours. You see, Vince, my reasons for tracking you down are not entirely for your concerns. I have my own self-interest at heart as well. I came here today in the hopes of helping both of us out because this is my problem, too.”

“How so?”

Frank reached in the rear of the Saturn and pulled out a black leather satchel of the sort carried by business executives. He rifled through it and pulled out a sheaf of papers. He handed them to Vince, who took them curiously and began to glance through them. “These are transcriptions of Internet communications,” Frank explained. “They were copied and pasted into an e-mail I got two months ago. I’ve been unable to track the sender of the e-mail. See there?” he pointed to a portion of the communication. “Where it refers to ‘plateau’?”

Vince saw it and nodded. “Yeah.”

“Read it.”

Vince read it. It only took a few lines to realize the implications of the communiqué. He looked at Frank, astonished. “There’s a reference here from this one guy about snuffing out ‘plateau’.”

“Exactly.”

“Plateau is you?”

Frank nodded. He looked grim. “That’s my screen name.”

“How did they get your screen name?”

“I don’t know,” Frank answered softly. “I’ve never tapped into any kind of occult bulletin board before in my life. All of my research on this was done at libraries and bookstores. My electronic correspondence is largely confined to people in publishing. I’ve tried to trace who I know in publishing who could know people that belong to The Children of the Night, but I’ve been unable to come up with anything. Everything runs into a dead end. I started thinking maybe none of this was real, that I was chasing something that doesn’t exist.” He held up the sheaf of papers. “But this group exists. They’re real . Whether there really is a literal devil is irrelevant in this case. These people believe there is a devil, much like Pat Robertson and Oral Roberts believe there is a literal God, and they will do anything to advance their agenda.” He paused for a moment, staring down at the floor of the Saturn.

“What’s their agenda?”

Frank appeared to think about this. “All I know is they seem to be working on something really big. They’re devil worshippers all the way; they not only hold allegiance to the Christian devil, they honor his father in even higher regard. The ancient Sumerian god Hanbi.”

“That name was written on the wall in my mother’s bedroom,” Vince said.

Frank looked at him. “You sure?”

Vince nodded. “Yeah.”

Frank turned away. Vince thought he muttered, “They’re moving fast,” but he wasn’t sure. He quickly regained his composure. “Anyway… they know who I am now. To conduct the kind of background check that revealed my e-mail address would require what O.J. Simpson paid for his defense team.”

“But somebody found out anyway?”

“Yes,” Frank answered, looking more grim. “The day I got that transcript I was away from the house. My wife was at work, and the kids were at her mother’s. Somebody broke into our place and ransacked it. Tore it apart. Nothing was taken, but they destroyed my computer and my office. They started a small fire there—that’s how we found out about it. A neighbor saw smoke pouring out of my office window and called the fire department and managed to track my wife down, who called me out of the meeting I was at.” He paused, as if struggling with that tragedy. “My office was a shambles. I lost everything except a backup tape that I keep in a safe deposit box, and my laptop computer, which I had with me. All the information about the cult, with the exception of the stuff I managed to save on tape, was destroyed.”