The other shots were all interiors. From them, it’s clear that the Devil House of legend was really only a store into which some people moved their belongings for a short space of time. They’d made it their own, but most of the wares and fixtures remained. There was the old countertop, still boasting a cash register that must have been too heavy for kids to move it; several mattresses on the floor elude the eye, drawn instead to the magazine and video racks amid which they rest. In tighter shots, the squalor of the mattresses is clearer, and the magazines’ titles are legible: DIAMOND COLLECTION. EIGHTEEN AND SHAVED. GIRLS WHO EAT CUM.
This was Anthony Hawley’s store. Hawley is gone by the time this picture gets taken, and Derrick and his friends have been busy redecorating. Their rough work has brought a note of chaos to the already lurid feel of the scene: In the racks, on the tier nearest to the floor, you can see a few copies of Daredevil, the comic book about the blind-lawyer-turned-superhero, and also an issue of Epic, a science fiction magazine from the seventies. On the back wall, in spray paint, you can see all the blind-alley symbols and slogans that would successfully drive the investigation for months: A GENERATION OF VAMPIRES; SORCERER CULT; SET 4 SACRIFICE.
But it’s the shot of the ceiling that got me. A silver pentagram in spray paint, familiar to me from the issue of the Fremont Argus in which a nearly identical shot ran after the press got access to the premises. The accompanying story, reported on by others and amended for their own purposes, fixed the narrative for the outside world. Different symbols occupied each recessed angle in the star, five in all; these were said to be letters from a Satanic alphabet, each corresponding to an occupant of the house, the stylized H at the center of Derrick’s own sigil, a sixth hidden in plain sight.
I could see how the detectives had been unable to resist the bait. They took the back booths as a clear sign that there’d been six people living in the building. Their theory of the crime assigned a lot of weight to this number six; ideas about numerology in occult thinking, and the specific weights of given numbers, were the crumb trail they’d chosen to follow. These ideas were malleable, even plastic: there was no working code that stayed in play longer than a day or two. All of it was rooted in superstition, and all of it allowed almost total authority to the gut reaction, assigning, to the hard case of the creeps an onlooker might get if confronted with the scene, a primary role.
But the full-timers and the weekend wraiths envisioned by the investigators were phantoms of the imagination, fuel for the always-hungry furnaces of public outrage. Any collective names later assigned to people said to have lived in Devil House came from captions under pictures like this one: captions placed by people who hadn’t actually known what they were talking about, but who, in their haste to avoid getting scooped, weren’t afraid of a little conjecture. And the nicknames assigned to imagined residents after somebody noticed that some of the spray-painted symbols looked like astrological signs: these, too, were inventions, dots connected for the sake of the story.
In truth, Derrick had painted the symbols in the star because they looked cool. The star was supposed to suggest exactly what people took from it—but its detailing had been strictly an aesthetic exercise for him. That the number of symbols corresponded exactly to the numbers of people involved in their creation was a function of expectations.
People do all kinds of things with their expectations. I would be reminded of this much later, having spent my own long season in the valley of early assumptions.
5.
IT TOOK ME UNTIL SUMMER to get an outline together I could actually rely on: it’s easy to draw up a plan with a bunch of Roman numerals and subheaders, but plans aren’t outlines. An outline shows you the shape of something. Once the shape comes into view, you can follow it wherever it goes. It’s magic.
I’d spent a week letting the Polaroids soak in. I wanted to see if I could correlate the terrain delineated by each one with the house as it lay now—this was rough going; the remodeling crew had been given license to rebuild from the ground up. But they’d left the basics intact. There’s no point building a wall where a window used to be if you’re only going to put a new window in a few feet over. So I made grease pencil marks on the floor, old Polaroids in hand, reckoning the proximity of objects in the frame to walls and doorways. Seeing how the light fell, imagining the place in the absence of the front porch and the windows that now let so much sunlight in: in Anthony Hawley’s day, this place had been much darker by design. These were only initial explorations, I knew: they’d have to be recalculated several times during the next year or two. But they were a beginning.
Once I’d marked up the floor I began walking in circles around the room, tracing ghost objects whose shapes were suggested by the hash marks on the floor. It’s a childish exercise, which is its value: kids have no problem believing absolutely anything. Tell a two-year-old you’re going to feed a make-believe candy bar to his teddy bear. Half an hour later you’ll still both be there, feeding a bear whose appetite never diminishes, and who demands, over and above his candy rations, ever-increasing supplies: of apples from imaginary orchards, of oats from bottomless feed bags, of carrots pulled fresh from the living room carpet. Spend an afternoon at this kind of play and you’ll remember the carrots at the day’s end. You may even smell them when you close your eyes. There is ample space in the brain for several worlds to occupy at once.
I walked up to the rim of one of my fresh greasepaint x-rings and I looked down into its center. Then I looked back at the dry Polaroid in my hand, its once-white frame aged nicotine-yellow. In it, I could see a pile of clothing on a floor, a rumpled denim jacket atop it obscuring any clear details of what lay beneath. T-shirts, right? It had to be mainly T-shirts. Socks, some puffy shirts, maybe. I thought I could see some loose ends poking out, possibly. But Polaroids fade as they age; I could only be sure about the jacket.
I closed my eyes and bent down, and I began to inhale deeply through my nose. Any reasonable person, looking through the window at that moment, would have come away thinking they’d seen an idiot. I felt like one, standing there bent at the waist, sniffing at the bare floor of my own house, trying to see if I could pick up the ancient scent of some teenagers’ unwashed clothes: to regenerate, in my mind’s eye, a place whose subsequent buyers had spared little expense erasing all traces of who had lived there and what had happened to them. But I’m a professional. I don’t care if I feel like an idiot. It’s kind of an item of faith with me that my feelings aren’t important when I’m working.
And so, venturing down interior pathways that have grown familiar to me, I smelled stale sweat, and cigarette smoke. I smelled cheap used paperback books and the baked-earth smell marijuana had before it became big business. I smelled bleach: they’d never wash that scent out of this place. And then something new and unwelcome got in the way. Berries. There was another air freshener in here, one I hadn’t noticed, something New Visions had hidden in a closet someplace.
I opened my eyes. Between the smell I’d been trying to conjure from the ghost of some clothes on the floor and the air freshener making itself inconspicuous somewhere, I had the beginnings of something, a way in.
I begin with rituals like this in part because the more distant a crime is historically, the harder it becomes to know just where to start. Some people focus on what makes their killer tick; others like to render the historical scene as vividly as possible. You see this latter a lot with people who cover the Son of Sam: they want the reader to feel the heat of New York City in the summer, to see the lakes of riotous color dripping down the sides of subway cars and taste the parched pavement on the air during a four-week stretch when it never rains once.
I always end up at the actual scene of the crime, no matter where I begin: that’s my method. A feeling for the coordinates. A sense of place. To arrive on the premises, facts in hand. It helps, when it’s possible, to begin in the same spot where you’ll end up: you get both views this way, the bird’s-eye and the worm’s. But no matter what, I have to get my hands dirty. It matters whose air I’m breathing.
* * *