Authors: Andrew Mayne
W
HEN
I
WAS
little, Dad worked as a technical consultant on movie sets when magic was involved. Most of the jobs came about through Grandfather's connections. Seeing my father as more of a technician than an artist, he had no qualms about lending his son and the family name to teach some Hollywood actor to palm a card or saw a woman in half convincingly enough. Because of this, I got to spend some time roaming studio back lots.
While the Wild West towns and New York backdrops were fascinating in their way, it was the small-town-USA neighborhoods that held my interest. I'd sneak away to play on the suburban sidewalks in front of the perfectly manicured houses. Even though they were little more than empty shells, they were a strange source of comfort to me.
Our own house deep in the Hollywood hills was in a perpetual state of disrepair. It was filled with its own mysteries, which I liked to explore, but it never felt like how I thought a home
should
feel. Those back-lot houses, a glorified ideal of the perfect family life, did.
Reverend Groom's house resembles one of those empty shells. Located in a nice suburb, set back on a small rise behind a picket fence, it looks picture-perfect. There's the feel of a facade beyond the flower gardens and landscaping. It's meant to be looked at, not looked out from. It's a mask.
Mrs. Groom greets me with a polite smile as she lets me into the home. She's clearly distraught about her husband, but appears to be holding it together. Attractive, and too well dressed for the dish gloves she's wearing, her reserve hides her shock.
“Thank you for letting me speak with you.” Going into this kind of job, they don't tell you how much of your time will be spent talking to people who have lost someone, or the people who caused that loss. It gets easier, but you can never be callous about it.
“Of course. Alec never spoke about his time in Hawkton. I met him after he moved to Atlanta.” She offers this right off the top, then shakes her head. “I didn't know how deeply he felt.” There's suddenly a distant look in her eyes.
“If you don't mind my asking, are you aware of what he said before he died?” I follow her into the kitchen.
“I haven't watched the video. But I know he was talking about sin. I know some people think he was under some kind of influence.” She's obviously still trying to understand. Now she's alone in this house, her quiet moments must be filled with thousands of questions.
“How do you feel about that?”
“Do I believe my husband was possessed?” she snaps, not too shocked to be insulted.
“My apologies.” I take a breath and speak more carefully. “I meant to ask if you thought there was some motivation behind that.”
“Ms. Blackwood, I'm a religious woman, but I'm not as . . . naive as some of the people Alec worked with. Neither was Alec, for that matter.”
“Didn't your husband sometimes speak as if God was talking through him and do faith healing?”
She waves away the question with a dish-gloved hand. “He had a flair for drama. Some people like rock bands in their church. Others want the old-time preacher.”
And some people want to live in million-dollar houses, not caring where the money came from.
“May I have a look in his office?”
She hesitates for a moment and then peels off the gloves. “Sure, I'll be upstairs if you need me.”
She leads me to his study, opens the door and departs. Bookcases line two walls. One section is filled with religious texts while the remainder holds military thrillers and popular fiction.
One wall is covered with photographs of Groom and his wife with smiling children from around the worldâproof of his outreach ministry. I've heard of more than one preacher who raises funds to help the impoverished in far-flung places, only to spend the majority of the money on underage prostitutes and expensive hotel accommodations. Just a few hundred dollars donated to a local orphanage gets you your photo-op that proves to your donors what great work you're doing.
I'm sure most aren't like that. I suspect that Groom's intentions were to a degree sincere, although the photos and the other items in his office look like props for someone playing a part.
In the top drawer of his desk I find a stack of letters, fawning testimonials from people thanking him for his prayers and telling him what a wonderful person he is. The top drawer is an interesting location. While the photos are for visitors, he kept these affirmations within his own arm's reach.
In the next drawer down I find a copy of a men's magazine filled with women in swimsuits. It wouldn't be a dark secret in any other man's office, but in a minister's study, it's understandably out of sight.
Below the magazine I see something familiar, and more career damning than the girlie magazine. This is the reading material he
really
doesn't want people to know about.
It's a book of magician's techniques for reading minds. We call these acts mentalism, a mixture of sleight-of-hand and
psychological principles that makes it look like you have ESP, or must be getting information from a supernatural source.
Groom was making sure he kept up on the latest methods. He'd bookmarked a section on getting people to fill out forms with personal information, under the guise of a contest, in order to use it later. I suddenly feel less sympathetic toward him.
I set the book back and look elsewhere.
His trashcan is empty, except for a discarded package that once held AA batteries. No crumpled suicide note. No threatening letter made from cut-up newspaper print.
I walk up the stairs to find Mrs. Groom. Along the hallway a slightly open door leads to a boy's bedroom, and I take a peek. A Spider-Man poster adorns the wall. An antique computer sits on a desk next to a television and a Nintendo game console. On a table by the bed, a Walkman sits on top of a stack of comics.
“This was Cedric's room,” says Mrs. Groom from behind me.
The posters, the computerâIt's all almost a decade old.
I don't get it. Then it hits me.
This is a shrine to a dead child.
I notice the sheets are ruffled slightly. “Did your husband come in here?”
“This is where he prayed. I haven't cleaned it since he . . . he passed.”
I pity her. Despite the fact her good fortune was based on defrauding the innocent, she's been dealt so much tragedy. First her son, and now her husband. There's never going to be a normal day for her.
“I'm so sorry,” I tell her, knowing she's heard this a thousand times.
“It's His will,” she says, as if trying to convince herself this is all part of a greater plan. “I'll be in the other room if you need anything else. I hope you can see that Alec was a good man now.” Her words trail off as she tries to hide her tears.
“I'm sure he had a good heart.”
Cedric had to have been ten or so when he passed away. After Mrs. Groom vanishes down the hallway, I take a step into the room, morbid curiosity getting the better of me. It feels like I've just traveled back in timeâlike the clock froze on the day he died.
It reminds me of my old bedroom, down to the Walkman. Mine was a hand-me-down from my father, complete with his cassette collection of music soundtracks.
Wait a second . . .
I'm older than Cedric would be now.
The Walkman seems out of place here. It was already on its way out when I was a teenager, replaced by compact discs and soon after that, MP3 players.
I'm about to dismiss itâafter all, I had kept mine long after it was out of fashionâwhen I remember the empty battery package in the trash downstairs . . .
Making sure Mrs. Groom isn't around, I violate the sacrosanct atmosphere by taking the Walkman from the nightstand. I place the headphones over my ears and press play.
L
OW AND GUTTURAL
yells are followed by swearing. Male and female voices repeatedly cry “hold him.” Things are knocked over. There are footsteps and the sounds of exertion. Someone reacts in pain, and the screams start again, high-pitched this time and then lower. Unintelligible shouting.
Abruptly, the screaming comes to a stop. Then, chilling and deep, “I am the one who walks in the dark path. I am the one who lives in the shadows. I am Azazel. I am the devourer.”
I have to pause the playback for a moment. This doesn't sound like a Hollywood movie. This sounds real.
Barely audible whispering. A man begins to recite the Lord's Prayer. The screaming and thrashing starts again.
“I said
hold him
!” a man shouts.
The hysterical screams are muffled, there is scuffling, and then they come to an end. There's a long silence in the room. The last voice to speak says, “Oh God.” Then the tape ends.
Lost in what I just heard, I sit on the bed staring into space, trying to make sense of it. Mrs. Groom finally knocks on the door to get my attention. “Everything okay?” She gives me an odd look, but says nothing about me sitting on her dead son's bed.
“I'd like to take this.” I hold up the Walkman. “I'll make sure you get it back.”
“Okay . . .” She seems more confused by the expression on my face than the presence of the tape player.
Ailes looks up from the cassette player resting on the conference room table. “Did his wife know where the tape came from?”
“No. She said she'd never heard it before. One of the voices I think is Groom's.”
“Yes, I recognized that too.”
“I counted at least five other people, maybe more.”
He knows where I'm going with this. “You want to match them to our victims?” he asks.
“Yes. I'd also like to go to Hawkton.”
“You don't need to go there to do that.”
“Maybe not. But the other voice, the screamer, I think it's a child, a boy. I'd like to know who that was.”
“Groom's son?”
“No connection that I've found. The tape is at least twenty years old. Groom's son died of leukemia ten years ago, when he was ten. I don't think there's a connection there. This is separate.” My eyes widen. “I think this even may be what binds everyone together.”
“And the boy on the tape is the subject of this . . . exorcism?”
There it is. I wanted him to say it first. Exorcism.
It's a loaded word, conjuring up images of horror movies and scary novels. For believers, it's proof that supernatural evil is real. For nonbelievers it's a stark reminder that in some ways we still live in the Middle Ages, a time in which someone with psychological problems can be ill-treated and abused instead of getting the care they need.
“Whoever this boy is, he may be the key. If this tape was made in Hawkton, then he has a connection to everything. He could be at the center of it all.”
“How?”
“It's the first time we hear âAzazel' in connection with them.”
“Is the boy on the tape our sixth man? Do you think this disturbed child turned into a killer?” he asks.
“I don't know. Maybe this goes deeper. But everything ties in here, I think. If the other voices are those of our church victims.”
Ailes taps the table. “You know what this would look like if we were religiously inclined . . .”
I've thought this through over and over. “Yes. A demon returning to kill the people that exorcised him.”
He contemplates this for a moment, staring at the ceiling. “Why do you and I see that as absurd, when others would accept it?”
“We're rational.”
“Are we? What does rational mean to you?”
“Never closing the door on questions.”
“We all shut the door at some time. We just choose to pursue some things and not others.” His talk of doors reminds me of Dr. Moya.
“I know. There's something else that bothers me. It's the way the tape ended.”
He nods. “I've got some signal processing people I know in Silicon Valley I can have take a look. There's a lot of information in there. We'll also have audio forensics see what they can pull from it. From an audiotape we can tell approximately how far away someone is from the microphone. We can probably identify what was used to record the audio. Which can give us some idea of where everyone was in relation to the recorder. Echo will give us an idea about the size of the room and even furniture. Not in great detail, but it will tell us if there's a mattress in there, a hard floor. The more audio to work with, the better. A lot of it is trial and error. The program will anticipate models and then reconfigure until it creates a virtual match, but we should be able to get a 3-D reconstruction of the room and an idea of how many people are in there.”
I pretend to know what all that means. “I'm worried about how it all finished. Something frightened them even more than what had been going on.”
“Me too. And Blackwood?”
“Yes?”
“Between us skeptics, it's okay to be a little disturbed by the tape. It creeps me out too.”
Ailes seems as resilient as a rock, yet it's a relief to have him tell me he's vulnerable too.
The screams haunt me. “I know it's just a child pretending. But I'm not sure what bothers me more: the idea of why, or the fact that those people took it seriously.”
“Find this boy for us. Maybe he can explain what's going on.”
C
LASS PHOTOS GOING
back over forty years stare back at me from behind Principal Kitson's desk. He was a fifth-grade teacher at Hawkton Elementary School around the time the tape was recorded. Now, in his late fifties, he seems more at ease in an office than a classroom.
I play a sound file on my phone for him. It's just a selection culled from the full-length audio, but it's still disturbing. Kitson looks up at me. “Is this a joke?”
“No joke. I just need to know if the boy sounds familiar.”
“I don't think it's even his real voice,” he replies, well familiar with childish pranks.
“I know. It's a long shot. The kid may have been a class clown, or he may have been the shy type who never said anything.”
Kitson looks to the side for a moment, then shakes his head. “We've had lots of those. But I can't think of anyone specific who sounded like that.”
“What about the Alsops or Jessup? Any of them have any kids around that might have done that?”
“No. None that I recall. I was just a math teacher back then. I didn't see all the students.”
“How many teachers are still around that might know? Maybe the principal?”
“She's in a nursing home. Alzheimers. But I can give you some names.”
He makes me a list and I spend the next several hours making calls and knocking on doors. There are a few vaguely suggested names, of boys that may have been troublemakers back then, but nobody says anyone stands out.
Those names turn out to be dead ends, but Mitchum's investigators circulate samples of the audio and manage to positively identify Adam Alsop, Curtis, and McKnight, confirming what I already suspected. Of the other voices in the room, none of them can be definitively identified as belonging to Natalie Alsop.
The remaining unnamed voices are troubling. Everyone on the tape we
can
identify is now dead. Are there others marked for death?
More direct questions about the exorcism are met with blank stares and shrugs, even from people who knew the victims. This town has seen so much. The last thing they want to talk about is how far back these troubles began.
Driving down the street or walking past stores in the small downtown, I get strange looks everywhere I go. The sheriff still hasn't been found. The mysterious events at Black Nick's cabin have only added to the overall sense of unease.
Nobody knows whom to trust. Even though I'm supposed to be one of the good guys, they're still in shock over the implications surrounding Sheriff Jessup. He was their good guy.
The local radio stations are going nuts. Information about the blast having a still-secret, mysterious explosive has fuelled the hysteria of a zombie on the loose. Footage of Reverend Groom's suicide plays endlessly on national news, anchor invectives about its graphic content only hyping interest in the clip. YouTube videos of Groom speaking in tongues and faith healing have begun popping up.
The sheriff comes across as the Boogeyman, but oily televangelist
Groom, who conned people in television broadcasts, is also a complicated victim. Many see his suicide as divine intervention.
Theologians fill the airwaves discussing every aspect of the case. The notion of avenging angels has been brought up. Fortunately, our video frame of the demonic shadow chasing Groom hasn't gone public. I can only imagine how that might go over.
When I check in with Mitchum's task force at their office, I notice more crucifixes around necks than is normal for the FBI. Several Bibles are scattered around, open to passages describing possession.
The armed search teams still looking for Sheriff Jessup are reporting strange stories about “lights in the woods” and the feeling of a “presence.” I chalk that up to paranoia, although they won't change their minds.
What presently frustrates me the most is not being able to identify the boy on the tape. Our victims are all dead ends. The Alsops didn't have any children. Curtis and McKnight had none the right age. After the teacher interviews went nowhere, Kitson had given me a list of students from that time who still live around Hawkton. My cold calls are repeatedly met with “no comment.” I don't get the impression anyone is hiding anything from me on purpose, but I think the past is just so distant, and the present so stressful, that they are reluctant to think back.
Ailes calls me when I get back to the motel after spending the day in the City Hall records wing going through the births. “Any luck?”
“No,” I reply as I take off my flats and lean back on my motel bed.
“Mitchum is raising a fuss,” he sighs.
“Over what?”
“You.”
“I didn't do anything.” I feel my back spasm. “I stopped by the task force for maybe forty minutes to drop off some interviews.”
“That was enough, apparently.”
“Christ. I'm not even technically on her case. I did that as a courtesy to the team doing backgrounds. Groom's suicide isn't even an FBI investigation. It's not even a local one.”
“I know. But once we ID'd Curtis and the others on the tape, it became part of Mitchum's investigation. She wants to call the shots on this too.”
“You're kidding me, right?”
“It's bullshit. I know. She's frustrated because they haven't found the sheriff. The manhunt isn't hers, but people want closure on this thing.”
“Closure? Or a whitewash?” I snap.
Ailes ignores my comment. “And there's the other problem with the tape . . .”
“What?”
Ailes pauses. “It got leaked,” he replies.
“Christ.”
“Some blog has the full audio. It's on SoundCloud now, and YouTube.”
“Terrific.” This could make things that much more difficult.
“Mitchum is saying you leaked it.”
“
What?
” I shoot off the bed. Jesus. Christ.
“I know you didn't.” He doesn't say anything about my other superiors. “She was cornered by a journalist. She made a comment about âpublicity seeking' people attached to the case.”
“I didn't do that.” My fingers clench the phone so hard I'm afraid I'll break the screen.
“I know. But the director is in a tough spot. Your Mexican adventure and now Mitchum raising a fuss. We can't have you two fighting.”
“I'm not fighting! I'm just doing my job,” I protest.
“I know. I know.”
“All I'm doing is chasing down the leads she's ignoring. I'm just filling the gaps.”
“No one is pulling you in yet, although that may change in the next day or so. It depends on how much of a fuss Mitchum raises.”
“Do I just drop it?” I ask, knowing there's no way in hell I would now.
“No. Keep going, stay clear of Mitchum.”
“What can I do?”
“Find the boy. Get someone still alive who is on that tape.”
“I'm trying. Mitchum has to realize she'd never even know about him if I hadn't stuck my nose in things.”
“I know she knows. But here's the difference between you two: You just want to find out what happened and get the guilty party. She sees this as a competition. In her mind, any success you have comes at her expense. Time isn't important to her. If she has to elbow someone to win, that's okay by her.”
“That's horrible.”
“That's politics. It's why you're a great field agent and would make a horrible manager.”
“I take that as a compliment.”
“It is.”
We hang up and I lay back down on the bed, trying not to think about what gross acts have taken place on the comforter. I'm at a dead end with the boy on the tape. My next step is to start knocking on random doors and barging into houses. I'm sure Mitchum will love that.
She's incomprehensible to me. I can't even bring myself to hate her. I just don't get it.
My phone rings again. I answer without looking at the display, expecting Ailes. “Now what?” I blurt.
“Something naughty, I hope,” replies a voice that's definitely not my boss's.