My journey had so far taken almost twenty-two years, but it had become a far more profound voyage nineteen months ago than it had been previously. I have often said that in a quest for the purpose of my life, I learn by going where I have to go. And I do learn. But I realized here, only now, that learning had not been my primary motivation, that since the mall shootings in Pico Mundo, I had been on a pilgrimage to seek the sacrament of penance, in search of forgiveness for a failure that I refused to believe could ever be mitigated by ordinary confession and contrition. And I had come now full circle to the same adversary that I had not entirely defeated back then, the same implacable adversary from which I had perhaps saved many people, but not all, not nineteen who died, including she whose heart was one with mine.
The killers at the Green Moon Mall had been members of a satanic cult. And so were the cowboy trucker and the people gathered in this place, this night. Different people, different cult, same enemy. I’d known the truth hours earlier but had striven to repress it.
Denial couldn’t be maintained. The skulls of fourteen bighorn rams were positioned, mockingly, where in a Catholic church the fourteen stations of the cross would be. The red beads and the five human skulls insulted the rosary and its five joyful, five sorrowful, and five glorious mysteries.
The enemy was the same, but I was in a darker and far more desperate place now than I had been on that day in Pico Mundo.
The men in that cult nineteen months earlier had made a game of evil, committing murder primarily for the excitement of it, playing at satanic faith the way that boys might play at being vampires, with wax fangs and with capes made from blankets. The cultists in Pico Mundo never committed entirely to their faith, not intellectually or emotionally. When the confrontation came between me and them, they had their boldness and their viciousness, but they did not have any genuine power beyond that of other sociopaths. In the end, though deadly, they had been nothing more than thrill killers.
But the pilot of the ProStar+ and the congregation to which he belonged were true believers, so diligent and so passionate in the practice of their faith that they were rewarded with the ability to open doors to Elsewhere. They enjoyed the capacity to blind others to their actions, as the cowboy blinded the people in the supermarket to the fact that he had fired a pistol and threatened to kill innocent shoppers if I didn’t come with him quietly.
In this new and pending confrontation, these darksiders greatly outnumbered me. And although my paranormal gifts usually gave me an advantage, their gifts made them at least my equals.
My eyes had adjusted to the lighting, and now I saw that on the black-granite table at the front of the room lay what might have been a thick black book. I was loath to approach that altar, but I knew that I must do so.
Bound in black leather, the volume contained a thousand numbered pages, which must have been blank when it was bound. On the top of the first page someone had printed these words: This coven of the demon Meridian, founded to glorify his name, on the 7th day of October, in the year 1580, in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England.
Each of the next 433 pages was dedicated to one year in the coven’s existence. The heading of the page featured the year, a name followed by the words high priest, and the location. Each page also contained a handwritten meditation on the beauty and the necessity of evil, apparently composed by the priest. As I paged through, I saw that some priests served decades, others a few years. I didn’t have time to examine the book carefully enough to determine when they had moved their little cult to America. On page 433 was the current year and the name of the high priest, Lyle Hetland; otherwise that page was blank, for he had not yet written his meditation.
Over four hundred years and numerous generations of madness and murder. They were not the first of their kind and would not be the last. Accounts of such groups dated back to the earliest fragments of written history. If the world survived long enough, accounts of the activities of their latest iterations would be reported on the Internet or by whatever medium might one day replace it. The human heart may choose truth or lies, light or darkness, and even if the world were to become a universally prosperous, totally materialist sphere where everyone claimed to be scientific rationalists, some would secretly worship evil—and commit it—even if none were left who believed in the existence of absolute good. Good people are from time to time exhausted by the relentless nature of the enemy and need some period of peace, but those who worship darkness thrive on the battle, on violence and hatred, and have no taste for peace.
I’d gone where I had to go, and I’d learned what I resisted learning. And now there was only one place left for me: the house, where the children were being held, where the killing would soon begin.