Death Falls (26 page)

She had discovered Professor Reid through a process possible only in the age of Google. Curious about the religion that had so moved Glenn Stewart during his time in Vietnam, she turned to the Internet. Her first step was to do a search of the words Vietnam and religion. That yielded several thousand results, most of them regarding things like Tft or Wandering Souls Day. After clicking on a few and seeing nothing about moon worship, she narrowed her search.

Thus,
moon
was added to the previous two words, fetching only a few hundred results. None of them looked very promising. She next tried
glorious moon
, which led her to a book called
Religions of Southeast Asia.
Its author was Professor Reid, who had his own Web site. That led to her calling directory assistance at Princeton, where she was hopscotched from department to department, finally reaching the esteemed professor himself.

“I’ll admit, I’m surprised by your call,” he said. “Many people don’t even know mooncentric religions exist.”

“I didn’t until today.”

“Most people are more familiar with sun worship, Earth worship, plus the big ones like Christianity and Judaism. But there are a handful that pay the same respect to the moon.”

Kat, who wasn’t much for religion in the first place, could at least understand someone putting their faith in something as powerful and vital as the sun. The moon, not so much.

“Why the moon?”

“There are different reasons,” the professor said. “Lunar cycles play a big part of it. Unlike the sun, the moon is constantly changing, suggesting the work of a higher power. Then there’s the basic symbolism of it being a literal light in the darkness.”

“Does such a religion exist in Vietnam?”

“Yes, but barely.” Professor Reid paused a moment, filling the silence with frantic typing on a keyboard. “It doesn’t have an official name, although it’s generally referred to as
m
ặ
t tr
ă
ng vinh quang
. That loosely translates to ‘glorious moon.’”

Which was very similar to the glorious enlightenment Glenn Stewart mentioned to both Kat and Norm Harper. She had a feeling Professor Reid was leading her in the right direction.

“Do a lot of people follow it?”

“Hardly any. Maybe a hundred people or so. Probably less. It’s an ancient, agrarian religion that’s practiced mainly in small, isolated villages.”

“And what exactly is this practice?”

Professor Reid stopped typing and Kat heard one last click from his end of the line. A few seconds later, a similar click sounded on her computer.

“You’ve got mail,” the professor said.

Kat opened the e-mail. It contained no text, just three photographs. She scrolled through them as Professor Reid spoke. The first showed a full moon rising over a steaming tangle of jungle plants.

“
M
ặ
t tr
ă
ng vinh quang
is based on the idea of the full moon, which is perceived to be the moon in its purest form. A child born during a full moon is considered blessed, so much so that some followers have been known to try to slow down or speed up labor in order to make this happen.”

The next photograph showed an open hand holding a clay disk that had been painted white.

“What’s that in the second picture?” Kat asked.

“It’s basically a good luck charm,” the professor said. “It’s left with the dead to ensure a blessed afterlife. Those buried with a clay moon are thought to be guaranteed a place in heaven. Those buried without it are doomed to roam the earth in ghostly form.”

“We’re not talking about the same heaven Christians believe in, right?” Kat asked.

“Correct,” the professor said. “Believers of
m
ặ
t tr
ă
ng vinh quang
go somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“Do you still have the e-mail up?”

“Yes,” Kat said.

“Look again at the first photo.”

Kat scrolled up a bit, landing on the photograph of the full moon hovering over the jungle. There were no stars in the picture, only a pregnant orb dominating the darkness. Kat stared at it, letting the professor’s words settle over her thoughts like dusk.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “When they die, they think that they go to the moon?”

“Yes. Their spirits are supposedly carried to the moon, where they spend eternity bathed in warm, white light.”

Glenn Stewart had called the moon landings a violation. Although Kat was baffled at the time, it now made sense. If he was a follower of
m
ặ
t tr
ă
ng vinh quang,
then he had good reason to think poorly of NASA’s lunar missions. They were basically landing rockets on his version of heaven. Adding insult to injury, another landing was scheduled to take place that very afternoon.

“Since you’re the expert,” Kat said, “do you really consider this to be a legitimate religion?”

“As a scholar, it’s not really my place to classify or pass judgment on the beliefs of others. But in this case, I can safely say
m
ặ
t tr
ă
ng vinh quang
basically amounts to a moon cult.”

Those two words—one innocent, one not—gave Kat a chill when she heard them pushed together. Knowing Eric’s neighbor could very well be a member created a second chill. What the professor said next created an outright shiver that Kat felt from the tips of her toes to the top of her head.

“The fact that you’re inquiring about it concerns me. While most followers are nothing but peaceful, a few have been known to be very dangerous.”

“Dangerous how?”

“Please look at the last picture.”

Kat scrolled through the e-mail until she came to the third and final photo Professor Reid had attached. A black-and-white shot, it showed a young boy sleeping on a bed constructed of stone, leaves, and tree branches.

“That was taken in May 1940 in a tiny village near My Lai,” the professor said. “There were two full moons that month.”

“A blue moon?”

“That’s right,” Professor Reid replied. “The second full moon is called a blue moon in most parts of the world. Followers of
m
ặ
t tr
ă
ng vinh quang
think differently. They refer to it as
x
ấ
u m
ặ
t tr
ă
ng
—the bad moon. They consider that second full moon to be an imposter not containing the spirits of their loved ones.”

“What does it contain?”

“Evil entities that can only be chased away with one thing.”

Kat examined the photograph again, spotting details she had missed the first time. There were white flowers affixed to the platform. The boy, ten if he was a day, lay flat on his back with his hands folded over his chest. Tucked under his fingers was what looked to be a flat circle of clay—a moon charm made for the dead.

“Please tell me I’m not looking at a human sacrifice.”

“I wish I could,” the professor said. “But I can’t. It was believed that only the death of someone young and without sin could appease the bad moon.”

Kat closed the e-mail with a sharp tap of the mouse. She couldn’t look at the picture anymore. Just thinking about it both frightened and saddened her in equal measure.

The fear rose to the forefront, however, when Professor Reid said, “If you know a follower, and I suspect you do, I urge you to use caution. As I told you, most of them are nonviolent. But on a day like today, a hard-core believer might not be so peaceful. In fact, he could be more dangerous than you or I can fathom.”

A minute after she got off the phone with Professor Reid, Kat received another phone call, this time from Eric Olmstead. She didn’t want to talk to him. Honestly, she didn’t have the time. She needed to talk to Glenn Stewart, face-to-face, and find out exactly what he had come to believe while recuperating in Vietnam. But when she answered the phone, the seriousness of Eric’s voice stopped her cold.

“You need to come over,” he said. “Now.”

When Kat reached Eric’s house, she found a rig in the street and a film projector in the living room. Both of them looked out of place. The truck, Eric told her, belonged to his father, who was sleeping off a bender upstairs. The projector apparently had been his mother’s because he found it in the basement.

“The film,” he said, “belongs to Lee and Becky Santangelo.”

Kat eyed the projector. It was square and bulky, like most things built in the middle part of the twentieth century. Eric had wiped away most of the dust, but some remained—streaks of gray on the projector’s brown surface. The reel of film had been spooled through it and was ready for viewing.

“Have you watched it yet?”

Eric shook his head. “I waited for you.”

He had turned the projector to face a bare patch of wall near the television. While he started it up, Kat closed the curtains and drew the blinds until the living room was dark enough to see the square of light projected on the wall. Eric flicked a switch and the movie began.

The first image to appear was of a hallway, the walls and floor tilting sharply to the right. After a slight bump, they righted themselves briefly before slipping to the left. Soon they became blurs of saturated color as the camera was carried through the hall and down a staircase.

The movement resembled the point of view of someone who was either very drunk or very seasick. It made Kat feel the same way, especially when the camera apparently slipped, the lens lurching downward toward the floor in one quick, stomach-churning move.

Whoever was holding the camera righted it at the bottom of the stairs. The view was of the entrance hall to Lee and Becky Santangelo’s house. Kat recognized the location but not the décor, which was done up in late-sixties chic—shag carpeting, wild colors, geometric patterns on the wallpaper. The only sign of good taste was a vase of white lilies sitting on a side table near the door. It was also where the camera was headed. There was one last blur, this time in the form of a lily slapping the lens, before the camera came to a rest on the table.

The perch provided a waist-high view of the front door and about a third of the entrance hall. It also finally allowed Eric and Kat to see who had been manning the camera. That would be Lee Santangelo, who entered the frame from the left and moved quickly to the door. Dressed in only boxer shorts and an unbuttoned white shirt, he looked to be partially hiding behind the door even as he opened it.

At first, Kat couldn’t see the person standing on the other side. It was dark there, for one thing, and Lee had really only opened the door a crack. But when the visitor took a step forward, Kat recognized her wide, searching eyes and face drawn tight with worry.

Maggie Olmstead.

Eric gasped his surprise. Standing next to the projector, he wordlessly reached out his hand. Kat took it and gripped it tight as they watched his dead mother converse with Lee Santangelo. There was no sound with the film, just flickering images from long ago. Yet Kat knew what Maggie and Lee were talking about.

Mrs. Olmstead was looking for Charlie.

Onscreen, Maggie tilted her head, trying to get a better view inside the house. Lee stepped in front of her, blocking her view of the camera and, incidentally, the camera’s view of Maggie. Eventually, Lee tried to shut the door but was stopped, most likely by Maggie. After a few seconds more, the door closed for real and Eric’s mother was gone once again.

Just as in life, the film carried on without her. Lee picked up the camera on his way back from the door. What followed were more streaks of off-kilter hallways, more sudden lurches from one focal point to another. During one particularly dizzying moment, Kat saw nothing but the blurs of Lee’s bare feet as he ascended the stairs. Then it was into a bedroom—the same room Lee Santangelo still occupied, although in a far different state.

When the camera settled down again, it was to give the viewer a glimpse of a television. Unlike the widescreen, high-definition set currently filling that room, this television was a tidy square of black-and-white images. Pointed at the TV, the camera remained steady, as if in awe of what was happening onscreen.

On the television, two astronauts were bouncing impossibly high on what could only be the surface of the moon. The footage was grainy, made even worse by the age of the film itself, but it was still an amazing sight. No wonder Lee had stopped whatever he was doing to capture the moment. Kat would have done the same thing.

After a few seconds, the camera jerked to the right, away from the television and toward the window. Someone stood naked before it, peering outside—no doubt the woman Eric’s mother had seen from the yard. Only it wasn’t a woman. Even with their back to the camera, Kat could tell it was a young man. The shoulders were broader than a woman’s. The hips not as rounded. The person at the window was all bone and sinewy muscle. The only thing remotely feminine about him was his hair, which brushed his shoulders.

“My God,” Eric said. “All this time the mystery woman was a mystery man.”

“Yep,” Kat replied. “No wonder Becky Santangelo didn’t want to talk about it.”

The man turned around when he noticed the camera. He approached Lee quickly, head bobbing out of frame, hand thrust forward to block the lens. There was another blur as the camera changed hands, with Lee now the focus of its gaze. He yanked off his shirt and fell back on the bed, giving the camera a lustful grin as he caressed his crotch. He reached for the camera with his free hand, causing yet another dizzying spin as the young man once again came into view.

He stood still a moment, letting the camera get a good look at him. His unruly hair draped over his eyes. His skin, especially his face, was deeply tanned, signaling that he had spent most of that summer out in the sun. But the tan wasn’t dark enough to cover one notable feature—a dime-sized mole on his chin.

The scene abruptly ended, the square of light replacing it on the living-room wall. A whirring sound emanated from the projector, which had run out of film. Eric switched it off while Kat continued to stare at the wall, stunned.