Ghost Girl (24 page)

Then, as always, the suspicions began to creep back. Despite Jadie’s graphic account, I had no facts. I didn’t know who was involved. I didn’t know where it was happening. I didn’t even know for certain what was happening, other than the specific abuse. Why was Jadie always so hazy on the details? Where on earth were her parents? Just who, precisely, were all these people she referred to? Where did they come from? Where did they disappear to when their sessions with Jadie and Amber were over? I had reported other cases of suspected abuse in my career, and I knew the kinds of details the police would require. I didn’t have them in this case. I could tell the police, but what, realistically, could they do, if I didn’t know who was committing the crime?

Worse, I worried about what effects my reporting would have on Jadie. In all likelihood, it would destroy our relationship, if for no other reason than that I had so blatantly betrayed her trust in me. Would she stop talking to me about what was going on? Would she talk to the police or to social workers about what was happening?

Then came the old worry. Could a disturbed child create all this? Might it be an unconscious cobbling together of TV shows and pornographic videos? Might the abuse itself be very different, committed perhaps at a completely different time, perhaps by a bunch of neighborhood boys, and transformed in Jadie’s mind?

I went home in a state of complete emotional devastation. What could I do? How did I cope with this? Should I keep it private between the two of us until I knew more? Should I seek advice from professional colleagues? Should I tell someone in authority? It was this unspeakably difficult state of
not knowing
that was crucifying me, and the extent of what I did not know seemed limitless.

All evening I agonized, unable to distract myself with anything. When bedtime came, I knew there was no hope for sleep, not until I was too tired to think, so I went out into the living room and turned on the TV. Johnny Carson was on, and I watched the usual line-up of half-witted comedians, fading stars, and authors flogging their books. Among this last group was a woman who claimed telepathy with animals. After giving several mind-boggling examples from her book, she asked for a live animal on stage. A Pekingese was duly supplied and she quickly rattled off its complaints, to which the amazed owner concurred. At this point, I got fed up and turned the program off.

I still couldn’t sleep. I lay in the darkness, listening to the silence, and Jadie quickly overwhelmed me. Always able to create bright, precise mental pictures, I could all too easily follow Jadie and her sisters into the shadowy world she had described for me. The characters of “Dallas” sprang to life in lurid, menacing fashion, clutching Sapphire and Tashee’s broken doll.

No
. I made a strong effort to pull my thoughts away.
No. No. Think of something else
. The woman with the Pekingese on Johnny Carson. I forced pictures of the reluctant dog into my mind. I pondered what the woman might have been doing when she claimed to be able to communicate telepathically with the dog. Was the dog picking up minute behavioral clues? Was she? Had she trained him ahead of time, making it no more than a fancy parlor trick? Or was she really reading the dog’s mind? I considered the likelihood of anyone’s being able to do this. My thoughts broadened from the specific to the general and then went laterally. Telepathy with dogs to telepathy in general. Could people really do it? Telepathy to psychic powers. I recalled a book I’d read once. Psychic powers to occultism. Occultism to satanism. Satanism to Jadie. I’d come full circle.

Satanism
. The thought assailed me with the same force it had that afternoon of the Halloween party. Halloween.
Halloween
. Abruptly, it occurred to me that Jadie had said “last week” in terms of Sapphire’s molestation. Had it been on Halloween? Six. Miss Ellie had said six was an important number. Having read the Book of Revelations, I knew 666 was the number of the beast, often assumed to be Satan. Was there a connection?

Electric with this insight, I realized the time had come to learn more about satanism. Without knowledge, I could do nothing. But where? How? I knew there was nowhere in Pecking to find the kind of in-depth information I was going to want on satanism. Moreover, I wasn’t sure I wanted to call attention to myself by asking for such material locally. The only place I could think to start was with the bookstore Hugh had mentioned up in the city. So I resolved to get up early and make the four-hour journey northward in the morning. Assuaged by having found a course of action, I was at last able to fall asleep.

Hugh came with me to the bookstore, and I was grateful for his company. A good deal of my bravado had left me by then. What had seemed an impeccably sound theory in the middle of the night seemed a bit silly in daylight, and I was feeling decidedly sheepish about going into the bookstore. I would have been quite comfortable inquiring about a book on astrology or even something a bit kookier, like channeling, but satanism went right off my kook scale.

I didn’t need to worry much, however, being with someone like Hugh, who seemed able to discuss anything with anyone, often in loud, ringing tones. “Hey, Brenda!” he called out when we entered the store. “Remember me? Yeah, Hugh! Remember?”

The girl behind the counter looked up. It wasn’t clear if she did remember, but she smiled in a friendly fashion.

“This is the one I was telling you about,” Hugh said to me. “Brenda’s the witch.”

This wasn’t too hard to imagine. Brenda had waist-long, black hair and pale, unmade-up skin. Although she was young—probably no more than in her early twenties—she wore relics of sixties hippy fashions. I eyed her; she eyed me. We both smiled cautiously.

“This is my girlfriend, Torey. She’s looking for stuff on the occult. You know, satanism and all that. I said this was the best place to come.”

Brenda brightened at this, clearly taking it as a compliment. “Yeah, okay. Over here. I’ll show you the section where we keep all those books. You been into this sort of thing long? Or are you just getting started? I could recommend you some good books. You ever read Crowley’s stuff?”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t really know much about it.”

“Well, Hugh’s right, you know. You have come to the right place. We’ve got this shelf and this shelf and over here.” She was a pretty girl in a wan sort of way. As I watched her wend her way among the bookshelves, I wondered what being a witch meant to her.

“If I …” I paused a moment. “Well, say if I wanted to meet someone who’s into this kind of thing … Would I be able to find someone in the city?”

She searched my face, then gave a faint lift of her shoulders. “Yeah, probably.” There was an undercurrent to her words, on the nature of a challenge, and I knew I’d have to prove my interest in some way, if I wanted to pursue that direction. I didn’t really. I was only curious about how plentiful and easy to find these groups might be.

“Basically, I just want something that can give me the facts. I don’t know anything about it, other than what I’ve gotten from the press, and I thought I’d like to be better informed.”

“That’s a good idea,” Brenda replied. “It’s not the way everyone says. Most of what people read is made up by the newspapers. Like, it sells newspapers, you know? But satanism’s not anything bad. It’s a kind of religion, like, and people ought to have the freedom to believe whatever their hearts say is right for them.”

We browsed for more than an hour in the store. Never having been inside such a place, I found it very interesting, and the scope of the books took me by surprise. In the end, I settled on what looked like a type of primer on satanism and on a lengthy account with several pictures that told of a series of murders thought to be carried out by a network of satanists on the West Coast.

Afterward, Hugh and I retired to a nearby bistro for lunch. He knew why I had been looking and had taken a lively interest in browsing through the occult bookstore. Now, however, he paused pensively over his sandwich.

“Do you really believe in the devil?” he asked.

“I don’t think that actually matters much. It’s whether the people surrounding Jadie believe he exists.”

“But do you?”

I shrugged. “I believe in evil. I don’t really think there’s an external entity, I suppose, but I don’t know. It’s the kind of thing I keep an open mind on.”

Hugh turned his attention to his french fries, eating them one by one.

“Why do you ask?” I inquired.

“There’re a lot of people for whom the devil’s a very real thing. You get into this too much, and you’re not going to have any trouble finding support, especially in a small place like Pecking. You get in some of these more conservative churches, the ones with the fundamentalist views. and they’re already seeing occultists behind every rock. And you go into one of these little backwoods police stations making the kinds of allegations you’re coming up with and they’re going to go wild. Sitting a hundred years coping with parking tickets and drunks and something like this comes along, they’re going to leap into your arms. Man, this is
interesting.
”

“Good gracious, Hugh, the last thing I’d want would be to make some kind of media circus out of this. It’s not a moral crusade. I’ve gotten caught up in something I don’t even believe in, and I’m still not sure I do. But it’s Jadie …”

Hugh nodded his head thoughtfully. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “But be sure and listen to what you’re saying, Tor. It’s all right to go making jokes with Brenda down at the bookstore. She’s sweet, but she hasn’t got the brains God gave a goose, and so you expect it out of someone like that, but … not out of someone like you. I mean, listen to what you’ve cooked up, for Pete’s sake. It sounds like the plot to a bad novel.”

I stayed over with Hugh, planning to drive back on Sunday. On impulse, we decided to go ice skating early Saturday evening. Afterward, still in our jeans, we risked going into a fancy Mexican restaurant for chimichangas and then took in a movie. Thriving on the change, I enjoyed myself tremendously and Jadie was eclipsed.

Once back in Hugh’s apartment, however, I was unable to keep away from the books I’d bought. Just a few chapters, I pleaded, and then I’d turn the light out. Exhausted from our activities, all Hugh wanted was sleep, so I picked the thicker of the two books up and went out into the living room to read. Stoking the embers in the fireplace back into flames, I added another couple of logs and settled into the armchair.

The premise of the book was that a series of murders committed in various locations around the West were not isolated incidents but the work of a large, loose network of Satan worshippers. The first section dealt in appallingly graphic detail with the murder of a young woman, whose body was found in a church. Revulsion is not an adequate word for the feeling that came over me while reading. The violence, alone, would have been enough to put me off in normal circumstances, but this went far beyond that. I felt dirty having the book in my hands. Closing it, I set it on the table beside me, but found I still felt tainted by it. A need to destroy the book overpowered me.

Rising from the chair, I pulled the fireguard back and grabbed the book with the full intention of throwing it in. I paused. Hey ho. Was this me? The rational, more down-to-earth side of myself struggled forward to remind me that I’d paid almost five dollars for this thing just that afternoon and had read less than a hundred pages. Intellect, however, didn’t stand much of a chance. Burn it I did. It was the only way of relieving that need to get it away from me.

By Monday I’d come back to my senses. Pulling aside the kitchen curtains while I was eating my breakfast, I gazed out over the Pecking rooftops. It was a dull, mid-November morning, heavily overcast and absolutely still. From the height of my attic window, I could see past the bare trees, past the houses to the plains beyond. They stretched away, yellow-brown, until they met the sky. Devils and devil worship, murder and mayhem all seemed a long way removed from Pecking, bathed in pale gray morning light.

Now, in daylight, I was having difficulties giving credence to the idea of something as outlandish as occultism being involved in Jadie’s problems. I hadn’t needed Hugh’s reminder of the willingness of certain groups to jump at proof of the supernatural. As I sat eating my breakfast and studying the view from the window, my thoughts were drawn back to another time, another place, and another Devil’s child. He was twelve, his name was David, and he suffered from a chronic and very debilitating form of childhood schizophrenia. I was in a small town then, too, in an area of strong, fundamental religious views, which were shared by many of my colleagues on the staff; and I remembered encountering David’s physical education teacher on one occasion outside the school. “There’s no point in doing therapy,” he’d said. “There’s not much any of us can do for David until he accepts Jesus. But our whole church is praying that the Lord will take pity on him and cast his demons out.” And I remembered going back to class the next day, to David, who often fell writhing to the floor when in the grip of his hallucinations, and it was easy to believe demons possessed him. It was easier still to want the Lord to take over the back-breaking, heart-wrenching job of helping David. Was that the case with Jadie, too? Was I looking to shift the responsibility elsewhere, to free myself from the hopelessness of working with a psychotic child?

On playground duty, we worked in threes, one teacher at the back of the school where the playing field was, one on the side where the long span of asphalt ran alongside the building, and one in front where the swings, monkey bars, and sandbox were. I usually supervised this last area when it was my turn at duty. There weren’t any regulations as to where the children could play, but they tended to divide themselves roughly by age, so that I usually had the youngest on my patch. Even by seven or eight, most usually gravitated around to the side of the building to play ball games or hopscotch.