This Present Darkness (41 page)

MARSHALL HAD PERUSED
the materials on the Omni Corporation. He still hadn’t read about one thing.

“What about any kind of religious affiliation?”

“Yeah,” said Al, reaching for another folder. “You were right on that. Omni is just one of several underwriters for the Universal Consciousness Society, and that’s a whole other ball of financial and political wax, and perhaps the main motivation behind the company, even more than money. Omni owns or backs—oh brother, there must be hundreds of them—Society-owned businesses, from cottage-level enterprises clear up to banks, retail stores, schools, colleges—”

“Colleges?”

“Yeah, and law firms too, according to this news clipping. They have a major lobbying task force in Washington, they’ve been regularly pushing their own special interest legislation … it’s usually anti-Jewish and anti-Christian, if that’s of any interest to you.”

“How about towns? Does this Society like to buy towns?”

“I know Kaseph’s done it, or other things similar to that. Listen, I got in touch with Chuck Anderson, one of our foreign correspondents, and he’s heard all kinds of interesting things besides seeing a lot of it himself. It seems these Universal Consciousness people are a worldwide club. We’ve located Society chapters in ninety-three different countries. They just seem to pop up everywhere, no matter what part of the world, and yes, they have acquired full control of towns, villages, hospitals, some ships, some corporations. Sometimes they buy their way in, sometimes they vote their way in, sometimes they just crowd their way in.”

“Like an invasion without guns.”

“Yes, usually quite legally, but that’s probably out of sheer cleverness, not any integrity, and remember you’re also looking at a lot of power and pull here. You’re standing right in the path of Big Daddy himself, and from what I gather, he doesn’t slow, stop, or even go around.”

“Nuts …”

“I’d … well, I’d cool it, buddy. Call the feds, let somebody bigger handle it if they want. You still have a job back at the
Times
if you ever want it. At least cover the story from a distance. You’re a class-A reporter, but you’re too close, you have too much to lose.”

All Marshall could think was, Why me?

BERNICE HAD STUMBLED
too far into a touchy situation. The Carluccis were getting more unsettled and terrified the more she questioned them.

“Maybe this wasn’t a good idea,” Joe finally said. “If they ever find out we talked to you …”

Bernice was about to scream if she heard that word again. “Joe, who do you mean by ‘they’? You keep saying
they
and
them
, but you never say who.”

“I—I can’t tell you,” he said with great difficulty.

“Well, let me at least clear this much up: Are they people, I mean real people?”

He and Angelina thought for a moment, then he answered, “Yes, they are real people.”

“So they are real, flesh-and-blood people?”

“And maybe spirits too.”

“I’m talking about the real people now,” Bernice insisted. “Was it real people who audited your taxes?”

Reluctantly, they nodded.

“And it was a real, flesh-and-blood man who posted the auction notice on your door?”

“We didn’t see him,” Angelina said.

“But it was a real piece of paper, right?”

“But nobody told us it would happen!” Joe protested. “We always paid our taxes, I have the canceled checks to prove it! The people at the County Office wouldn’t listen to us!”

Angelina was angry now. “We had no money to pay the taxes they wanted. We already paid them, we couldn’t pay them again.”

“They said they would take our store, take all our inventory, and business was bad, very bad. Half our customers left and wouldn’t come
in anymore.”

“And I know what kept them away!” said Angelina defiantly. “We could all feel it. I tell you, windows don’t break by themselves, and groceries don’t fly off the shelves by themselves. It was the Devil himself in our store!”

Bernice had to reassure them. “All right, I’m not arguing with that. You saw what you saw, I don’t doubt you—”

“But don’t you see, Miss Krueger?” Joe asked with tears in his eyes. “We knew we could not stay. What would they do next? Our store was failing, our home was sold out from under us, our children were being tormented by evil people, spirits, whatever. We knew it would be best not to fight. It was God’s will. We sold the store. They gave us a good price …”

Bernice knew that wasn’t so. “You didn’t get half of what that store was worth.”

Joe broke down and cried as he said, “But we are free … We are free!”

Bernice had to wonder.

THEN CAME THE
blitz, a die-all-die-merrily push for information accompanied by mixed feelings of determination and foreboding, by conflicts between initial impulses and second thoughts. Every Tuesday and Friday for two weeks the
Ashton Clarion
still appeared on the newsstands and in all the mailboxes of subscribers, but its editor and chief reporter were very hard to contact or even catch a glimpse of. Marshall’s phone messages stacked up unreturned, Bernice was simply never home; there were several nights when Marshall never went home at all, but slept here and there, now and then in the office, waiting for special calls, making other calls, working at keeping the paper afloat with one hand while going over lists of contacts, tax records, business reports, interviews, and leads with the other.

The people who had left their positions, and usually Ashton, and the people who replaced them were definitely two separate groups of widely different persuasions; after a while, Marshall and Bernice could just about predict what their responses were going to be.

Bernice called Adam Jarred, the college regent whose daughter
was allegedly molested by Ted Harmel.

“No,” said Jarred, “I really don’t know anything about any special … what did you call it?”

“A society. The Universal Consciousness Society.”

“No, afraid not.”

Marshall spoke with Eugene Baylor.

“No,” Baylor replied somewhat impatiently, “I’ve never even heard the name Kaseph, and I really don’t understand what you’re driving at.”

“I’m trying to chase down some claims that the college might be negotiating a sale of its property with Alexander Kaseph of the Omni Corporation.”

Baylor laughed and said, “You must have heard about another college. There’s nothing like that happening here.”

“And what about the information we’ve received that the college is in heavy financial trouble?”

Baylor didn’t like that question at all. “Listen, the last editor of the
Clarion
tried that one too, and it was the dumbest move he ever made. Why don’t you just run your paper and leave the running of the college to us?”

The former regents had a different tune.

Morris James, now a business consultant in Chicago, had nothing but bad memories of his last year with the college.

“They really taught me what it must be like to be a leper,” he told Bernice. “I felt I could be a good voice on the board, you know, a stabilizing factor, but they simply would tolerate no dissent. I thought it was highly unprofessional.”

Bernice asked him, “And what about Eugene Baylor’s handling of the college finances?”

“Well, I left before any of this really serious trouble arose, this trouble you’ve described to me, but I could foresee it. I did try to block some decisions the board made regarding the granting of special powers and privileges to Baylor. I thought it was giving too much unauthorized control to one man without the oversight of the other regents. Needless to say, my opinion was very unpopular.”

Bernice asked a very pointed question. “Mr. James, what finally precipitated your resigning from the board and leaving Ashton?”

“Well … that’s a tough one to answer,” he began reluctantly. His
answer took about fifteen minutes, but the bottom line came down to, “My wholesale business was so harassed and so sabotaged by … unseen mobsters, I guess I would call it … that I became too great an insurance risk. I couldn’t fill my orders, clientele dropped way off, and I just couldn’t stay above water anymore. The business folded, I took the hint, and I got out of there. I’ve been doing fine ever since. You can’t keep a good man down, you know.”

Marshall managed to track down Rita Jacobson, now living in New Orleans. She was not happy to hear from someone in Ashton.

“Let the Devil have that town!” she said bitterly. “If he wants it so bad, let him have it.”

Marshall asked her about Juleen Langstrat.

“She’s a witch. I mean a real, live witch!”

He asked her about Alexander Kaseph.

“A warlock and a gangster rolled into one. Stay out of his way. He’ll bury you before you even feel it.”

He tried to ask her some other questions, but she finally said, “Please don’t ever call this number again,” and hung up.

Marshall tracked down as many former members of the city council as he could by telephone and found out that one had simply retired, but all the others stepped down because of some form of hardship: Allan Bates fell ill of cancer, Shirley Davidson went through a divorce and ran off with a new lover, Carl Frohm was “set up,” as he called it, with a phony tax scam, Jules Bennington’s business was “strong-armed” out of town by a bunch of mobsters whom he knew better than to identify. By cross-checking Marshall found that, in every case, the deposed city councilman or councilwoman was replaced by a new person connected in some way with either the Universal Consciousness Society or Omni Corporation or both; and in every case the deposed person thought that he or she was the only one who had left. Now, out of fear, out of self-interest, out of that typical reluctance to get involved, all of them remained far away, out of touch, out of the picture, saying nothing. Some were cooperative in answering Marshall’s questions, and some felt very threatened. All in all, though, Marshall got what he was after.

As for those who used to own businesses now run by this mysterious incognito corporation, very few of them had planned on selling out,
moving out, or giving up their peaceful lives in Ashton or their successful businesses. But the reasons for leaving were consistently along the same lines: tax bunglings, harassments, boycotts, personal problems, marriage dissolutions, perhaps a disease or a nervous breakdown here and there, with an occasional macabre tale of strange, maybe-supernatural occurrences.

Former Ashton District Judge Anthony C. Jefferson’s story was ominously typical. “Word started circulating around the courthouse and the legal community that I was on the take, receiving bribes for fixing sentences and letting people off. Some false witnesses even confronted me and made accusations, but it never happened—I swear it with all that I have in me!”

“Then can you tell me the truth about why you left Ashton?” Marshall asked, almost knowing what kind of answer to expect.

“Personal reasons as well as professional. Some of these reasons remain with me even now and are still viable enough to restrict what I can share with you. I can say, however, that my wife and I were needing a change. We were both feeling the pressure, she more than I. My health was failing. We at length thought it best to get out of Ashton altogether.”

“May I ask, sir, if there were any … unfavorable outside influences … that brought about your decision to step down from the bench?”

He thought for a moment, and then, with some bitterness in his voice, said, “I cannot tell you who they were—I have my reasons—but I can say yes, some very highly unfavorable influences.”

Marshall’s last question was, “And you really can’t tell me anything about who they might be?”

Jefferson gave a sardonic chuckle and said, “Just keep going the way you are, and you’ll find out soon enough yourself.”

Jefferson’s words were beginning to haunt both Marshall and Bernice; they had heard many similar warnings as they went along, and both of them were growing more aware of something out there around them, building, coming closer, growing more and more malevolent. Bernice tried to shrug it off, Marshall found himself resorting more and more to quickly blurted prayers; but the feeling was still there, that disturbing sense that you are nothing but a sand castle on the beach
and a twenty-foot wave is about to crash down on you.