Last Days (32 page)

They were the new family she had been looking for. An inclusion with significance. She shared the common belief of the disaffected in a prophesied Armageddon, and the belief in having been chosen to survive it. The therapeutic power of self-examination and self-interpretation in a poor backward life, that had known none until that point, twinned 283

ADAM NEVILL

with the powerful mind-bending experiences of hallucino-genic drugs, gobbled down like M&Ms, had a transforming impact upon her. And it all groomed her for the adventure of the desert retreat . . . and then it was too late to get out because there was nothing to go back to, not even a planet she recognized through eyes that were too old and too warped by 1975. The worst thing that could have happened to her then was celebrity.

‘Martha, many of the people who joined The Temple of the Last Days from 1974 to 1975 never actually saw Sister Katherine, let alone met her. But in the early stages of the Last Days in LA in 1972, and in the first year you were all based at the copper mine in 1973, when Sister Katherine made the occasional appearance, you did meet her.’

‘Got that right.’

‘I’ve read your interviews with Irvine Levine, but I wonder if time has given you any more insights into her.’

Martha pointed her cigarette at Kyle. ‘Let me tell you something. People think Irvine’s book is bullshit. That he made it up.’ She shook her head, sucked hard on the filter, and spoke through the smoke with force. ‘He didn’t. Most things I told him, and Bridgette told him, he put down just like we told it. But it reads as so crazy, people can’t accept it. And a lot of what I told him, he never used. ’Cus it was even crazier.’

‘Can you give us some examples?’

Martha gave Kyle a sly smile. ‘We’ll get there. But like I told Max, you got to have context. Or it don’t make any sense.’

‘Of course.’

‘All you movie people are the same.’ She smiled again. ‘Like 284

LAST DAYS

I was saying, Irvine was a crime man. Reporter, you know?

Courts. Police stuff. He was after the juice on the murders.

Drugs. Imprisonment. Rape. Shit like that. The stuff that would end up in court. He wanted everyone to read his book, like that one on Charlie Manson that was so big. So some of what I told him, Irvine never used. Didn’t believe it is why.

Thought it was stuff we imagined because we were hopped-up on drugs the whole time. Strange how that’s the stuff people want to hear about now.’

‘People?’

Martha grinned her yellow grin. ‘It’s why you want to cut to the chase, ain’t it? Max already told me that’s all he’s after anyways. Them
other
things.’

Kyle bit down on the gush of anger that came up from his stomach like reflux. Not for the first time he wondered who was really directing the film. He cleared his throat. ‘So the two things are inseparable: Katherine’s pathology and the stranger aspects of the Last Days story?’

Martha smiled. ‘Smart boy.’ She chuckled, a moist rattle in her throat. ‘Max been steppin’ on your toes, I can see that.

He seems the type that would. More money than sense, you ask me. But that’s what I said to Max, that you can’t have one without the other. Katherine was behind it all. Even when she wasn’t there, she was
there
, if you know what I mean.

She knew everything because we told her everything, one way or another. We were all her spies at one time. An’ every damn thing we said when she weren’t around, The Seven would whisper back to her.’

Martha raised an eyebrow, started to play with her lighter.

‘What time has told me, is that we were all part of some setup from the get-go, back in LA. Oh yeah. She had plans 285

ADAM NEVILL

way back then. Before maybe. Wouldn’t surprise me none.

Got all us fools out there in that desert and she trained us like dogs. But for what? It was a need-to-know thing. I don’t think she ever showed her real hand until right at the end.

Which, thank the Lord, I wasn’t around to see. But we were always being kept for something else. No doubt in my mind.

The same thing Max is so keen on.’

Kyle nodded with relief as much as an acknowledgement of her ideas, because she wouldn’t need coaxing. Maybe the interview was a nostalgic reminder of those dizzy days of magazine features and interviews on
60 Minutes
. ‘Other commentators on the cult emphasized Sister Katherine’s amassing of material wealth, of exploiting her followers like slaves –’

‘She got millions from Sister Urania, the English lady. But having what we owned was another way of owning us. Of cutting us off. She just used it to separate us from everything that we were. Who we had been. She took our freedom next.

Anything we had of value, she took it. Kinda stripped us clean. Took our dignity too. Till the only thing left to take from us was our children and our lives.’ Martha stopped herself and withdrew for a moment; the last comment a painful reminder of something Kyle wanted to hear.

‘Do you think there was any value in Katherine’s ideo -

logy?’

‘Not a single damn thing. All that freeing of our souls from the yoke of guilt and repression was horseshit. Oh, everything was wild to start with. It was pretty cool in LA. And when we got to the desert for a while. I never felt so free.

Never had so many friends. Good friends.’ Martha shook her head, removed another cigarette from the packet of Salem Lights on the table. Lit up, squinted as she drew hard 286

LAST DAYS

on the cigarette. ‘But
she
had her needs. Was just biding her time.’

‘Needs? What kind of needs?’

Martha stared at the table in silence again, bit her bottom lip. When she looked up at Kyle, the tough-talking broad had retreated. She showed him a face that had been swiftly transformed by pain. Her hard voice softened, lowered. ‘Everyone has needs. Love. Sex. Approval. Whatever. We all got ’em.’

But her needs were different. I don’t think she could stop herself. She was like a shark. She wanted blood in the water. All the time. She liked to wound. She liked to cause pain any way she could. Humiliation, guilt, exclusion, whatever she could use on a person. Or from a fear of those things. But not even that was enough. The head games. It was just prac-tice, you know. Preparation. I read one book on psychos that said she was
evolving
at that time, when we was in LA and at the mine in the early days. When she used to chair them sessions. She was becoming something else the whole time.

And I truly believe she was. Before it got physical.’ Martha played with her lighter, pawed at a packet of medication, swivelled the ashtray.

‘Physical?’

Martha stared hard at Kyle. ‘Rape. Sodomy.’ She shrugged.

‘Sure. Bitch had us beaten too.’ There was another long pause; Martha looked at the window, like it was an escape route that had been missed. ‘Oh, she liked that all right. Liked us to beg. For forgiveness. I think it was the begging that got her off when she was around, and whenever The Seven reported to her. What we were supposed to have done wrong was irrelevant. The stuff we said in the sessions we made up, just to have something to say. But it was the . . . submission 287

ADAM NEVILL

that excited her. Us all scared of her and telling her everything in that shitty old shack she called the temple. I seen it in her eyes. Hard green eyes. That fuckin’ bitch.’

Martha stopped talking; her hands were shaking. A cigar -

ette was clumsily stubbed out. Another was lit. The bourbon was fish-eyed. ‘They burned more brightly for sure when someone was crying, or screaming, or just lying down all broken and silent on their own. Everything was a weapon to her. Sex. The sun she would put you out under. The cold at night she would leave you in. The chain of fucking command.

Our children. Whatever she could use.’

Martha pulled hard on the cigarette. The end of it burned so fiercely it seemed to light up the dismal kitchen for one incandescent moment. ‘Everyone was afraid. That’s how we was controlled. Fear. No one stayed her favourite for long.

Yet, when she smiled at you, or when whoever was her favourite among The Seven gave you a kind word, you would do anything, anything at all to stay
chosen
.’

‘What made her change, Martha? Can you identify anything specifically that made her behave so badly? Made her treat you so terribly?’

Martha nodded, smiled knowingly. ‘Sure can. She turned when people started leaving. She couldn’t take that. Like it was some kind of personal rejection. In seventy-three people was coming and going all the time. By seventy-four people was mostly going. When she and The Seven were getting tougher. When the paranoia got real bad. And us all wasting our time trying to sell that friggin’ book in Yuma. It was like the party was over and no one wanted to hang around and clear up the mess. But she was clever. She’d hooked enough of us by then.’

288

LAST DAYS

‘It’s hard for people to accept that you never left, while you still had free will. Particularly when the situation was so distressing.’

Martha snorted. ‘Once you’d given up everything, you had to make it work, because there was nothing else for you, nowhere to go. And you were scared of her, but you were kinda scared of losing her too. Shit-scared. All the time.’

‘Did you also do things out there that you regret?’

Martha nodded her head. ‘Plenty.’

‘Can you tell us about what you were complicit in?’

Martha smiled. ‘I can tell you things we done that no one else admitted.’ She shrugged. ‘Can tell you how we all accused each other of things. Pretended we had these secret thoughts.

Telepathy. Ha! We denounced each other. Could happen to you at any time. You had to go along with it. We all did. It’s how we got each other beaten. I even told lies on Prissie and Bridgette, watched Belial whip the shit out of them. They squealed on me and watched me git beat too.’ She placed her hands on the table, pushed her chair back with a loud squeal that made Dan flinch behind the camera. She stood up, turned around and raised her cardigan and T-shirt as if she were about to suddenly go topless. But never raised her clothing above the level of her prominent scapula. ‘You want that in your film?’

Kyle heard himself swallow. He nodded at Dan.

‘Mark of Brother Belial. Son of a bitch.’

Dan filmed the ghostly white scar tissue that criss-crossed her back.

‘I was pregnant with my boy when he done that.’

Kyle’s head emptied. He felt dizzy and horribly vulnerable.

And acutely afraid, though he wasn’t sure of what. It was 289

ADAM NEVILL

like one of those situations when his overconfidence was punished with a salutary reminder of what he was really up against.

Martha lowered her clothes, reordered them. Sat down and uncapped the bottle of bourbon, glugged it into a tooth glass.

Took another cigarette from the packet. ‘We all took our part in folks getting whupped. Or getting them excluded for shit I can’t even recall now. Forced other girls to give up their babies to the Temple, like they forced me to. Didn’t interfere when someone got raped, like when them poor boys Brother Ariel and Brother Adonis was raped by The Seven, to teach them a lesson for pride.’

Kyle winced. Levine had written about the male rape out at the mine, which had become a favourite method for control that Belial and Moloch inflicted on two younger men who were still members of the Last Days in 1975; Brothers Ariel and Adonis. And on the journey over to America, Kyle had finished reading Tim Reiterman’s
Raven
; the definitive biography of Reverend Jim Jones and his People’s Temple. In Guyana, Jones had also sodomized his most devoted, trusted and respected male followers. He’d indulged his emotional need to inflict pain and humiliation on those heterosexual men closest to him. To reduce any man he perceived as competition to his authority. According to Susan White, aka Sister Isis, Katherine had begun a similar sexual manipulation in London, with enforced celibacy, then enforced unions. Way back then she must have been encouraged by the divisive and disarming effects of such methods upon her followers.

‘And we never spoke up when they went out with the guns. When they went after Ariel and Adonis. Oh, we heard talk later. We heard Belial joking that Adonis pissed hisself 290

LAST DAYS

at the end. How they chopped that boy up and buried him deep.’

‘You said “when they went out with guns”. Who were
they
?’

‘The Seven. Who else? Belial was appointed chastiser. And we were all threatened with being buried alive if we ran or talked to the FBI. That was the punishment for apostates.

Being buried alive. Maybe the boys was killed that way. I don’t think so. Belial liked knives, and them rifles. But those boys got buried one way or another, live or dead, when he was through with his
chastising
.’

‘Why were Ariel and Adonis murdered? You mentioned pride.’

Martha shrugged. ‘That’s what they said those two was always guilty of. But it weren’t that. Them boys were smart.

College-educated both of them. They did their best to put up with the discipline, but they started to question things. Ariel could talk the hind legs off Belial and he hated it. Things got bad for Ariel, and then Adonis too when he stuck up for his friend. When they ran, they were the first to get
done
as apostates. When Ariel and Adonis ran, while we was still building that fence, I heard Belial tell Brother Moloch and Baal to kill them. He said, “You kill those fuckin’ crudes.”

Baal and Moloch tracked them with the dogs. Came back grinning from ear to ear. Belial threw a party afterwards.’

Martha stretched her sinewy neck up and out of her collar to smile, though not pleasantly. ‘I’m in purgatory. Not in hell yet. But I will be soon. For the part I played. You can take that to the bank.’ She knocked back the entire two inches of fresh whisky in her glass.

Kyle couldn’t think of anything to say. He looked at the 291

ADAM NEVILL

pages of the script on his side of the table, but his flicking eyes couldn’t read the type. Unexplained phenomena, hauntings; they were his thing, not murder.
Murder! Jesus Christ!