Returning to the back stairs, I started to climb the six flights of steps to the third floor.
Jessie, Jasmine, Jordan …
Thirty
PASSING THE SECOND FLOOR, I HEARD THE EXCITED voices of partiers beyond the stairwell door. The action seemed to be centered now on that level, and I sensed an acceleration of the crowd’s mood toward some much-desired condition of dark ecstasy.
My impression that this building had once been a lodge or perhaps a corporate retreat seemed to be confirmed when I stepped into the third-floor hallway. Numbered doors, as in a hotel, served evenly spaced rooms on both sides.
Although deserted, the third-floor hall wasn’t quiet. Laughter and the muffled roar of fevered conversation rose from below.
Jessie, Jasmine, Jordan brought me to Room 4 on the left, where I stood for a long moment with my hand on the doorknob.
I knew beyond doubt that the children were being kept in there, but intuition told me that I still lacked some information essential to ensure their rescue. As the energy of the crowd grew and as the party noise seemed increasingly to come from the lake side of the house, I needed to see what might be happening out there in the torchlit night.
Although Mr. Hitchcock had said that the clock was ticking, and although no one would know more about ticking clocks than the Master of Suspense, I went to the next door on the left, Room 6. It wasn’t locked.
They tortured people for pleasure and to win the favor of their malevolent god, and they made a sacrament of murder, but they trusted one another not to steal. Maybe that was because they also brutally executed their own—like the two men in the basement of the former Black & Buckle Manufacturing building in Barstow—for any behavior that might put the cult at risk or harm any of its members. I suppose the prospect of having your fingers amputated one by one with a bolt cutter and being set afire would make you think twice about sneaking into someone’s room and stealing his iPad.
The wall switch just inside the door brought light to the pair of bedside lamps in Room 6. The bedding had not been disturbed. On the dresser, someone had left a newspaper, a set of keys, and pocket change. A few paperback books were stacked on one of the nightstands.
At the wide window, the draperies were open. The flames of the propane torches, below my line of sight on the ground-floor terrace, made this higher night quiver with sinuous light.
To be sure I was alone, I checked the bathroom. Separate sets of personal-care products beside the two sinks indicated that a couple occupied this unit, a man and a woman. They were on a late-winter getaway: fresh mountain air, an entertaining novel or two, perhaps a little boating on the lake, the ritualistic murder of seventeen children to unwind taut nerves and ensure a good night’s sleep… .
Satisfied that for the moment I had the room to myself, I went to the window.
Immediately below, at the second floor, on the twenty-foot-wide cantilevered deck that extended the length of the building, more than twenty people were gathered, enjoying cocktails and wine, men and women in about equal numbers. They all wore sweaters, though not only or even primarily for comfort in the cool night air. Perhaps as an act of mockery, every sweater had a Christmas motif featuring Santa Claus or reindeer, snowmen or elves, holiday trees or snowflakes, and some featured words of the holiday like NOEL, FELIZ NAVIDAD, HO HO HO, and JOY TO THE WORLD. They were colorful, festive, and—out of season, under these circumstances—deeply sinister.
I didn’t know what the county sheriff looked like, but I saw a well-known film actor, a United States senator, and a couple of other faces that were familiar but that I couldn’t identify. The rhinestone cowboy wasn’t among them.
In this age of smartphones that can be used surreptitiously as cameras and recorders, for such prominent and recognizable people to attend this abomination seemed reckless in the extreme. But Mr. Hitchcock had said they were protected by their master, the rebel angel who was the prince of this world, to whom they had pledged everything. He said that they were untouchable. And perhaps they trusted one another not to steal and not to betray them with video on the Internet because when they had joined the darksiders, they had surrendered their free will and no longer had the capacity to change their minds and betray the cult. A satanic society, after all, would operate as the ultimate totalitarianism.
Beyond the deck, on the terrace below, in the center of a space defined by four of the tall propane torches, the round steel stage waited for the night’s performances. I had seen this same platform when I touched the cowboy in the supermarket parking lot. The three children had been seated on it when he set them afire.
Just past the farther end of the terrace, on the shore, between two torches stood a man with spiky white hair. He wore a blood-red suit, black shirt, and harlequin mask. The cowboy. He held a censer that was suspended by three chains from a handle, and as he turned, swinging it toward all four points of the compass, I could see the pale fumes of incense escaping from the holes in the filigreed lid of the gold thurible.