J. Gonzalez - They

Mike nodded and Frank stripped down to his underwear and began rummaging in his overnight bag. Vince turned to Mike. “So Mary Ann skipped town, too?”

Mike nodded, sipping his drink. “Jackie said Mary Ann called her this morning from a bus stop in North Carolina. She said that she was afraid of those guys coming back to Lititz to finish what they started.”

“What did she mean by that?” Vince was listening with bated breath.

“I don’t know,” Mike said. He sighed. “Fortunately, we were able to talk to Jackie at length. Her parents were at work, so we sat in the living room and talked. She was quite the chatter box.”

“I got the impression that she was standing on the sidelines when this shit happened,” Frank said, pulling a pair of black jeans over his legs. “She and Mary Ann were friends, but she didn’t hang out with this other gang of kids much.”

Mike chuckled. “Yeah. She said that she felt she was much better than Clint and his crowd. I caught a whiff of contempt.”

“More like an air of superiority,” Frank said, pulling a T-shirt over his lanky frame. His tattoos gleamed in the light.

“The basic story is that Jackie confirmed to us that Clint and his friends were dabblers in a devil worship group,” Mike said. He took a sip of his drink. “She admitted quite freely that they were into it for the shock value. She didn’t hang out with them, but Mary Ann did. She said Mary Ann usually went along for the ride whenever Clint and his friends were out on the town.”

“They were a bunch of your usual Marilyn Manson fan boy, pot smoking losers who thought it was cool to worship the devil,” Frank said, sitting down on the second bed. “Twenty years ago they would have been Black Sabbath fans.”

Vince nodded. He remembered the stoner scene very well from high school.

“Anyway,” Mike continued, “she said she never met Mark Lancaster and the other fellow, but Mary Ann did. And Mary Ann was scared of them the instant she met them. She told Jackie that Mark and Glenn were definitely serious about the occult. Jackie says she warned her friend to stay away from them, and luckily, Mary Ann heeded her advice. But she was still loyal to Clint; after all, they were dating. She loved him. So most of what happened comes directly from Clint telling Mary Ann, and Mary Ann later telling Jackie. It sounds like pretty reliable third-hand information, though. Jackie struck me as a very smart girl. She did some research of her own and found out some disturbing things.”

“What kind of disturbing things?” Vince asked.

“In a minute,” Mike said. He took another sip of his drink. Frank got himself a Coke from the refrigerator. He looked at Vince and resumed the narrative. “According to Jackie, Clint wanted to impress these guys. He was thrilled that a pair of older guys was into the same things he was. Clint and his friends felt they were respected when they were with them. So they started hanging out. When Mary Ann told Jackie the name of the cult these guys claimed they belonged to, Jackie grew even more concerned and scared. She’d already done a lot of reading on the occult, and some of the things Mary Ann said about them bothered her. So she did some more research. There was one bit of information that kept nagging at her—the group Mark and Glenn claimed they belonged to. Apparently they told Clint they belonged to an organization called The Children, and that they were based out of New York City.”

“Another name for The Children of the Night?” Vince asked.

Mike nodded. “Yes and no. I’ll get to that in a minute. What Jackie did, was she went on the Internet and did some intense research on the occult and Satanism for three days, asking people on various newsgroups about the Children. She got one response. The only thing the person said was that The Children was supposed to be a secret, sinister devil cult based in New York. That was all the correspondent would relate. The correspondent even went so far as to admit that the group itself was only rumored to exist. Jackie did some more checking and was able to confirm evidence of the rumor in a book linking the Son of Sam murders to a secret, underground satanic organization.”

“So what did she do?” Vince asked, entranced by the story.

“It scared the hell out of her,” Mike said. “And rightly so.” He traded a glance with Frank. “The Children are the New York State counterparts of The Children of the Night. There are factions in other parts of the country that go under other names as well. There’s a group in Alabama called ‘The Children of the Black Cross,’ for example. Another group in the Midwest calls itself ‘The Children of Darkness.’ They’re all connected with the main group in California.”

The bottle of Rolling Rock was weighing heavily on Vince’s mind, and he finally dashed over to the refrigerator and pulled it out, opened it, and took a drink.

“Jackie claims she told Mary Ann to stay away from Clint,” Mike continued. “She told her friend everything. She didn’t know if Mary Ann related all this to Clint. She claimed Mary Ann told her she would find a way to tell Clint without revealing the source. She seems to think that Clint already knew he was over his head and was staying away from Mark and Glenn out of his own fear. When the dead dogs turned up in that field she knew something big was going to happen, but she didn’t know what. She said Mary Ann avoided her in the next few months. Like she was ashamed that she was still seeing Clint, who by now was regarded as the Black Sheep of Warwick County. Then Maggie Walters was murdered, and at first the newspapers weren’t reporting the occult symbols found written on the walls at the murder site. But for some reason, Jackie had a feeling there was a connection. Then last week, the Intelligencer ran an in depth article on the case, and for the first time all of Lancaster County learned about the mutilation and the Satanic symbols found in Maggie’s house. And then Clint disappeared, followed closely by Mary Ann.”

“Does she have any idea what might have happened to them?” Vince asked.

“Not really, but get this. Jackie came to the same conclusion Frank and I have been coming to. Maggie may have been killed by these guys for some kind of revenge ritual. The killing of the dogs on April 30— Walpurgisnacht —is significant. It’s a day that is said to provide great power to the black magician for certain rituals. The murder of the dogs was done in conjunction with a preliminary ritual for something bigger in Lititz. That something bigger was probably the murder of Maggie Walters.”

“I don’t think I follow,” Vince said.

“The first ritual opened the gates,” Frank said. He was sitting on the couch, holding his can of Coke. “They probably invoked the names of whatever demons they have working with them. It was all done in preparation for the murder of your mother, which was designed to be both a revenge killing and to lead them to something bigger.”

“In other words, they’d already staked her out?” Vince asked. “They’d found her months before they actually killed her?”

Frank and Mike nodded. “Yes,” Mike said.

“Why didn’t they just bump her off then?”

“You still don’t understand these guys,” Frank said, looking grim. “The ritual they performed was also probably one of protection. They didn’t want to get caught. They wanted to throw confusion and chaos among the local population. And it worked.”

Vince was about to open his mouth again and blurt out another question, then stopped. He had to keep reminding himself that he was dealing with religious nuts. Religious nuts did all kinds of wacky things like perform suicide bomb missions for this or that jihad, or self flagellate themselves for whatever purification purposes. Or they killed abortion providers for God, or killed dogs to summon up demons from hell.