“I know it was seven booths because of the whole thing with Derrick’s friends later,” he said. “I remember that. And I remember the couples booth because the couples cleaned up after themselves, unlike the guys in the solo booths, who…”
He pursed his lips. “You wouldn’t believe what some of these guys get up to in there. It would make you sick. And they write on the walls, or carve designs in there. Who does that? Gets out their pocketknife while they’re watching the porno movie and just carves something in the wall.”
But these carvings, occasionally, either by virtue of their sheer crudeness or because of some detail that grabbed the imagination and wouldn’t let go, made cleanup—the worst part of the job, and also its most recurring, reliable function— a little less degrading, and a little more interesting. Derrick judged them like entries in a competition. The first solo booth, just to the right of the arcade entrance, had had two carvings, both predating Devil House; neither would have made his honorable mentions list. One looked like an eyeball but was probably supposed to be a breast. The other was unmistakably a penis drawn by a person whose feeling for the organ was one part wonder to two parts revulsion; none of the later work done to improve it could wholly mask the veins that had once popped out from under its skin, or the sinewy detail of the frenulum.
Still, one evidentiary photograph shows how a later-arriving artist had tried to improve upon it, doing his level best to transform the glans into the head of a sea serpent that looked like one of the Godzilla knockoffs who used to show up on late-night TV. The batwing-like ears jutting out from it are stark, and striking; the urethral meatus is now only one pupil among three gazing out from carefully rounded, menacing eyes.
No one familiar with Derrick’s hand—his gently wavering lines, the slumping biomorphic shapes—could mistake this work for his. Derrick’s work awaited the onlooker’s attention; it repaid the eye wise enough to dwell on it with detail and nuance. Even his most garish pieces had a softness, and doted on line and curve that seemed to soften their content. The penis-monster in Solo Booth I is also quite detailed—its scales are meticulous, the claws at the ends of its bulbous feet are of uniform length. But the hand that drew it feels driven: the point of the piece seems not decorative but communicative.
It has to be Seth. Seth wanted to say something to the outside world when he drew, even if the chances anyone would see it, or care when they did, were infinitesimally small.
FOR MATTHEW PARIS
Often, if you have an exact enough description of the primary source you’re looking for, you can follow its movements—you can find out when it changed hands, and for how much, and how heated or tepid the bidding was during the auction. Once in a while, when buyers or sellers get sloppy, you can even find out their names and cull their contact information. All it takes is someone whose hurry was too great to check the “keep this information private” box on a single click-through screen, and many auctions end in a short flurry of click-throughs: people get impatient. Archaeologists have determined that the earliest written records in existence were sales records; if you can get your hands on a bill of sale, or, even better, a ledger, the data you harvest tell a vivid story provided you know how to connect the dots.
In the case of Derrick’s notebooks, however, the buyers have been on their game, and cannot be tracked. I’ve got alerts set in case either book should come up for sale again, but I’m not hopeful. The people who raid the Internet for relics like these aren’t investors. They’re collectors, and if this were Derrick’s notebook, it would be in their hands, not mine. It’s Seth’s. When it came up for auction, only dumb luck and decent search terms brought it to my attention. The blind-lot grab-bag the seller had found left him grasping for straws:
￡ΩΩK! RARE ∞MURDER SCENE∞ ARTICLE NOT RECOVERED BY POLICE. NOTEBOOK FROM FAMOUS DEVIL HOUSE CASE IN THE 80s, VERY FEW EVER TURN UP … SAFE SHIPPING GUARANTEED OR ADD INSURANCE. CHECK MY REVIEWS FOR OTHER CRIME FINDS AND BID WITH CONFIDENCE
Technically, it’s not really a notebook at all. It’s a loose-leaf binder with three sturdy spiral rings holding forty-seven pages total, the last sixteen of which are blank except for a few stray marks: somebody testing a ballpoint to see if it still has ink. It’s a sketchbook, for the most part, though the detailed, murky monsters of its pages are occasionally interrupted by sloppy paragraphs in a crimped hand, lines sometimes running past the red margin and sometimes stopping well short of it.
Save up bus fare to (SF or even Seattle???) bcz this won’t last, the first of these interrupting pages begins. Is there a safe behind the counter?? Otherwise keep in r____ n___. I spent an hour working out possibilities for the blank spaces here, but couldn’t come up with anything conclusive—“broken [something]”? “Trick [something]”? “Green knapsack”? Probably not “knapsack.” You can really spend a lot of time with things you’re not ever going to nail down.
I think they Know, the next one starts. There’s a picture of an eyeball underneath these words. It’s not identical to any of the eyes on the penis-monster in the first solo booth, but the harshness of its line—the way the rounded curves darken as they progress toward their meeting point; the reinforced thickness—seems sufficient. Ang saw people snooping around and warned me. Everybody worried now. Feel like shit. Ang says I shouldn’t feel bad it’s nobody’s fault. Knew this couldn’t last forever but oh well.
“Knew this couldn’t last forever but oh well.” If the true crime goblins cruising the web for rare finds had actually known what this unassuming-looking binder actually was, I’d never have even learned it existed. But I did, and its contents awakened my first suspicions that Devil House, and in particular the story of Derrick Hall, was something wholly apart from any old news stories Ashton might have run across on his lunch hour: the reality of it was something different from the story told by the local press and, eventually, by the national news media. It would be a disservice to the living and the dead alike to rehash these stories; it would be beneath me, I thought, which was saying something. I haunt dreadful places and try to coax ghosts from the walls, and then I sell pictures of the ghosts for money. I’m not ashamed of my work—I think it’s good, when it’s good. I won’t apologize for that. But I also can’t argue too strenuously against several cases that might be made against it; and this notebook made me pause, in the stillness of a summer evening in this ridiculous house, where nothing much ever happened save occasional knocks on the door from speculative realtors. I wondered how much of the story I’d come to tell was something I’d brought with me, more outline awaiting shades than a blank page seeking figures who lived in three dimensions.
It was a moment. I made note of it. Then I reflected that I’d already claimed half my advance against royalties, and returned to my work.
2.
YELLOW MOLD
It took ten minutes from his doorstep to school if he rode his bike: he’d timed it. Most days it took a little longer, but the direct route—north, then west, then north again—could be done in ten flat if he set out at a clip and didn’t let up.