FOUR BLACK-AND-WHITES PULL UP in front of the building at exactly 4:30 a.m. It’s November 2, 1986: in bigger towns, Halloween parties probably are still going strong, but here it’s quiet. An onlooker, in the dark, might take the garish graffiti all down the door that faces the street as seasonal decoration, an invitation to trick-or-treaters who might otherwise skip the house by the freeway. But as the arriving officers begin to ascend the porch steps, they take note of the devastation around them, which is general.
Broken bottles are planted out front, jagged sides up. It’s like something out of an old cartoon but for the stench, which you can’t miss: these are Thunderbird and Ripple empties, their cheery upside-down labels like distress flags, raised foil highlights glistening in the dark. Mingling with their winey sweetness is a smell of fresh soot: vaguely runic shapes have been burned onto the concrete walkway. Off to one corner, atop a broomstick jutting up from a patch of grass at an angle, there’s a mannequin’s head, its hair scorched to the roots, its eyes painted matte-purple. If this particular detail is meant to scare people away, it’s strangely positioned: only one officer sees it going in, but the later inventory confirms his impression.
Across the steps that lead to the front door, someone’s scattered dozens of small animal bones—chicken, fish—and these, as boots advance across them, break the carefully observed quiet with a chorus of loud snaps. Everyone freezes, on the lookout for traps; but no lights go on inside the building, and no sounds come from within. The team leader waves two officers around to the back of the house, where there’s a door that used to be an employee entrance; it’s padlocked, but the wood is warped and splintered. Anybody could easily kick it open from either side.
The remaining two officers stand guard near the patrol car—it’s only paces from the scene; the lot is small—their guns drawn in case anyone tries to run. From their position, these two have the best view of the proceedings. They get only seconds to take it all in: the element of surprise is indispensable in a raid. In the glint of the streetlight, they note that the planks of the porch have been painted in alternating colors—red, black, two reds, another black, recurring voids in a crimson field. On the front door, silver paint: a pentagram inside a circle that heralds a riot of words in red that bleed over into the doorframe and onto the outer siding both right and left:
SICK SATAN SENTRAL FAITHFUL 4EVER! BY THIS
SIGHN CONQUER BY THESE LIGHTS COME TO
SEE
Beneath the door, where a welcome mat might be, two great bloodshot lidded eyes, painted by a hurried hand, pupils misty purple: two coats of paint, color over primer, to make them pop. The eyes look to their right, toward the vacant lot below the freeway, away from the overgrown side yard.
When, seconds from now, the battering ram breaks down the front door and floodlight fills the room, the scene that greets the team claims its intended effect: believers and nonbelievers alike are temporarily frozen in their tracks. Half-melted action figures, hulking blobs of plastic or rubber, hang from light fixtures, their heads shapeless or snapped off at the neck. Mirrors and jagged pieces of mirror, some painted with slogans like the ones from the front door, dot racks that once held only porn: many of the old VHS housings and magazines are still there, defaced, and joined now by comic books or scarecrow-like figures hand-twisted from old newspaper, their feet jammed between spindles to hold them steady.
Where the racks give way to a clearing, in the middle of the room, yellow DO NOT CROSS tape has been affixed to the floor around what seems at first to be the outline of a body. Trained eyes catch as much as they can from the information overload confronting them. Through their protective visors, each member of the team begins screaming, in his own rhythm and pitch: POLICE! GET ON THE GROUND!
Someone thinks they see something move; shots, a riot of fireworks, sound out loud enough to cause immediate ringing in the whole team’s ears. Later, having recovered evidence, detectives will claim in their report that several officers saw a figure in the shadows hoisting a sword with both hands.
I see this figure clearly in my mind’s eye, but, in truth, none of the bullets fired that night find purchase: they ricochet off the walls and blow through cardboard VHS cases, but they don’t hurt anybody who wasn’t already past hurt.
* * *
MY NAME IS GAGE CHANDLER. I’ve been here for almost a year. I moved into this house to tell a story: to employ my usual and usually successful methods to the task. To inhabit the carapace of the crime scene, to retrace the steps of the killer in order to better know his path. I have spoken with my neighbors, and with police, and with any surviving relatives willing to speak with me. I went to the high school and talked with the teachers; I talked with a caseworker, Marsha Gaines, who worked with Seth. Anyone who knew Derrick and could still be located, I have found, making contact and never once taking no for an answer: I’ve charmed people when I could, playing up Hollywood friends when I had to, always finding a way to get them to talk. I did this with everybody. I gained access to police files and court records. I reenacted scenes I wasn’t present for. I’ve unrolled butcher-block for days, drawing maps and diagrams and flowcharts to show me how things looked before I came here, and to light a path toward my rebuilding of the fortress that stood here for a brief time before it was made new, and then made new again, cloaked in fresh paint by people who’d like to erase 1986 from this neighborhood’s memory. I have surrounded myself with artifacts to keep the earlier days of this place vivid before me, to push back against the advancing crust of renovation. I have conjured the past in order to know more of the present. I know what happened here, and how what happened here differs in several important ways from the fragment Ashton unearthed for me, and what will happen if those differences are brought back out into the light. What I’ve learned contradicts the account I first read, which I understand to have sprung from the need for a certain sort of telling, a hunger for known quantities. I have combed every inch of the ground where something dreadful happened some years back, and it is time now for me to tell the story I was sent here to tell.
I don’t want to do this, and I’m not going to do this.
2
The White Witch
1.
YOU BUY EVERYDAY WITCHCRAFT at Jordano’s on impulse one day: a Sunday, your shopping day. You plan to cook for yourself tonight and every night this week until Friday, when you’ll treat yourself to some restaurant with a view of the bay—maybe you’ll invite a friend out, unwinding at the end of a long week, or maybe not. From here, Friday is a world away.
Idling happily through the busy supermarket, you pick out small yellow potatoes and bagged carrots from the produce section, then find some canned tuna you’ll fix with noodles and sauce during the week. You get a loaf of bread, and some plum jam; at the deli counter, you ask the high school student in the smudged white smock to slice you a quarter pound of pastrami. He does a slapstick pantomime routine with the slicer as he works, pretending it’s harder to operate than it really is, grimacing once as though hurt, watching your face over his shoulder to see how you’ll react. You play along, opening your eyes wide and raising a free hand in mock-panic. He cracks up. When students see their teachers walking around in the real world, it always seems funny to them.