Page 29 of Going Home in the Dark

“Yes,” Bobby said, and Ernie said, “Yeah, sure,” and Spencer said, “Of course.”

She surveyed them with a gimlet eye—actually, two gimlet eyes. “We need to get one thing settled. You’re not going to treat me like a girl or think of me as a girl. I’m one of the guys. Even if I show up in your dreams, even then, I’ll just be one of the guys. I won’t be an amiga. I’ll be just another amigo. You got that?”

Bobby said, “Naturally, yeah, all right,” and Ernie nodded as he intoned, “One of the guys,” and Spencer confirmed, “I got it, you got it, we all got it.”

Bobby was confident that, considering her appearance, it would be easy enough to think of her as a guy. Months later, when they discovered how she really looked, she had become a brother to them, and not much adjustment was required to think of her as a tomboy sister, though that is for a later chapter, as this one will soon become longer than a modern reader will tolerate.

Now she leaned back in the booth and smiled at her amigos. “So if we’re not a club, what are we—a gang?”

Ernie said, “Gee, I don’t know. ‘Gang’ sounds kind of rough.”

However, Spencer sat up straight, electrified by the idea. “People don’t mess with gangsters.”

Half an hour of vigorous discussion ensued, most of it too juvenile to burden you with here. Eventually they decided to think of themselves as a gang though not to say so publicly.

Now on her second Coke and feeling no pain, Rebecca said, “You are not going to regret this. I’ll be loyal and pull my own weight in whatever we do. Hey, you know what?”

“What?” the boys asked simultaneously.

“Now that we’re a gang, we should knock over a liquor store and find some old man crossing the street so we can beat him up just for the hell of it.”

The boys laughed, though a bit uneasily, still not quite sure what to make of her in her combat boots, camouflage pants, black sweatshirt, and death-white makeup.

18Under the Church

As it pricked the eye of the moon, the steeple of Saint Mark’s appeared as sharp as a thorn. Clad in native limestone, the church had been constructed in a time when people felt the architecture of churches should encourage consideration of the mightiness of God rather than bring to mind automobile showrooms and discount outlets.

The courthouse stood on the northeast corner of the block, Liberty Park with its bandstand on the northwest corner, the library on the southwest corner, and Saint Mark’s at the southeast position. Dating back to the electrification of the town, fluted iron streetlamps, painted dark green and each topped with a frosted glass fixture shaped like a flame, cast a pale light that imbrued the scene with loneliness, reminding Rebecca of paintings by Edward Hopper. There was also a quiet menace about the place that brought to mind certain late-night street shots inThe Exorcist.

Even at just 9:40, little traffic navigated the intersection of Cunningham Avenue and Winkler Street. Maple Grove was surrounded by miles of fertile farmland, and in spite of the Keppelwhite Institute and the army of scientists who lived in that company neighborhood, this was still something of a farm town,where early-to-bed-and-early-to-rise was a guiding principle with many of its citizens.

The amigos had left two cars at the motel and had come here in Spencer’s Genesis SUV. He parked east of Saint Mark’s, in front of the cemetery that lay between the church and rectory. At the far end of the long block, the reverend’s handsome brick residence was dark. Pastor Larry Turnbuckle was asleep—or perhaps engaged in some freaky activity that explained his perpetual dreamy half smile.

Having shed her wig and eyeglasses now that night had fallen and they did not intend to return to any busy public place, Rebecca followed Bobby into the moonlit cemetery. Spencer trailed close behind.

This burial ground was a major feature of the town, extending two blocks from north to south, a maze of headstones and memorial plaques set flush in the earth, with here and there a massive old oak. When Maple Grove was a young town, before Saint Mark’s was built, when the graveyard had been less populated than it was now, those trees had already been mighty works of Nature. In the days of horse-drawn wagon trains, during the great migration westward, settlers on the way to a promised land of milk and honey stopped in Maple Grove to stock their covered wagons with supplies. They were stalwart and optimistic folks, blithely unaware that some would be stranded for months in the blizzard-ripped Rocky Mountains and cannibalize one another in desperation, which is the kind of thing that happens to stalwart and optimistic folks more often than they ever anticipate. In addition to the migrants, there were outlaws of all kinds in those days—bank robbers, wagon-train raiders, men who kidnapped schoolmarms for unspeakable purposes, horse thieves, schoolmarms who wentbad and became horse thieves, vicious gunslingers in the hire of cattle barons who paid them to kill sheep ranchers, gunslingers in the hire of sheep ranchers who paid them to kill corn farmers, gunslingers in the hire of corn farmers who paid them to kill those who were foolish enough to grow beets. Really, there was no end to it. Back then, only a few brave individuals took up careers in law enforcement. Nevertheless, a great many desperadoes and miscreants were brought to trial before a judge, under the cemetery oaks, where they were found guilty with satisfying speed and hanged from the stout limbs. These enemies of civilization were left depending from the oaks for at least three days, during which they began to rot, were pecked apart by carrion-eating birds, and served as a lesson to others who might be thinking that the criminal life looked pretty sweet.

In a long-ago December, following the worst crime epidemic in state history, a reporter named William Hawkshaw, working for theMaple Grove Gazette, toured this cemetery at dusk with carolers and a crowd of holiday revelers, each of whom bore a candle. Hawkshaw wrote a moving, inspiring piece in which he described the numerous frozen corpses suspended from the winter-stripped oaks as “ornaments of true justice decorating the trees of righteousness, waiting for the ground to thaw, graves to be dug, and Hell to welcome them. Snow began to fall, the delicate flakes like merry angels capering in the candlelight.” He didn’t win a Pulitzer, as surely he would have in our time, but only because the Pulitzer didn’t yet exist. However, Hawkshaw was honored by the Maple County Corn Growers Association, half of whose members had recently been gunned down but who refused to be defeated by a bunch of sheepherders.

Now, as the three amigos made their way through the cemetery, where no one had been hanged in nearly a hundred and fifty years, Rebecca was not overcome by a sense of the town’s glorious history, as you might expect. She was instead awash in nostalgia for her teen years, when she and her amigos frequently went on night adventures. Although most of those escapades had been erased from her memory, she still vaguely recalled that they had occurred, which was enough to make her heart swell with longing. Like Rebecca, most actors are sentimental, yearning for the golden days of youth, when they were convinced that they were going to be bigger stars than they became.

When they had passed the east side of Saint Mark’s, they turned west, departed the graveyard, and gathered behind the church. Three doors were set in that south wall. From experience, they knew that the one to the left opened into the sacristy. The one on the right was an emergency exit from the nave. The door in the middle provided access to a small holding room from which stairs led to the basement.

During the drive from the restaurant, Bobby had explained the function of a police lock-release gun. It isn’t as big as a real pistol, and it doesn’t blow out a lock with bullets. Instead of a barrel and muzzle, it presents a pick that has to be inserted in the keyway of the deadbolt. The trigger is then squeezed, usually three to five times, until all the pins in the lock are thrown to the sheer line, disengaging the bolt. Because some novels that Bobby had written dealt with crime and police procedure, his diligent research informed him of this device, which he had then illegally acquired. He carried this instrument with him in his travels, secured to his left ankle with a Velcro strap just in case he fell into the hands of bad people who locked him in a windowless room to be torturedand interrogated later. Growing up in Maple Grove, he’d become somewhat paranoid.

He also had a penlight, which Rebecca held, directing the beam on the deadbolt. Spencer merely stood watching, which was what most visual artists did when confronted with a situation that required dexterity with a mechanical device.

They were taking a chance that Saint Mark’s did not have an alarm system. These days, churches were locked at night and often even in daylight if services were not underway, but they were rarely wired with alarm systems. Although bigots prowled in record numbers, those whose intentions were to desecrate altars were lazy cretins who, on finding the premises locked, slaked their hatred by throwing a brick through a stained-glass window or urinating on the front door.

The lock relented. They moved inside and closed the door behind them, and Rebecca shone the narrow beam down the concrete stairs. Like the holding room, the basement had no windows, so Bobby flipped up the wall switch. The light in the realm below was murky yellow and unwelcoming, remarkably reminiscent of the eerie light at the bottom of the hidden staircase that led to the secret room under the barn inShriek and Shriek Again. Spencer must have recognized this resemblance, too, because he said, “This isn’t a movie. There is no such person as Judyface.”

Rebecca wasn’t so sure. Life often imitates movies, unless the movies are about superheroes or humongous reptiles like Godzilla. Maybe there was a Judyface; maybe there wasn’t. She had escaped from him once, set the bastard on fire in the sequel, and finally killed him in film three. So now she gathered courage and got in character, became spunky Heather Ashmont, the toughest and most indomitable young nurse in America, summoned to mindthe inspiring music from the end credits ofShriek Hard, Shriek Harder, and led the way down the stairs.

The first room contained furnaces and electrical panels and fantastic snarls of plumbing that had no comprehensible purpose. A hallway led out of that space, with a large room on each side.

The chamber on the right provided storage for church records going back more than a hundred and twenty years. Included was a trove of information about generations of parishioners in which the amigos had no more interest than cows have an interest in the works of Dostoevsky.

The room to the left was about forty feet wide and fifty feet long. It was in this place that they had found ten comatose people lying face up and side by side, the recovered memory of which had drawn them here tonight.

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