The Children of Red Peak Read online

  “Jeremiah was the first to die,” David said. “They crucified him. At dusk, they nailed him to a cross some long-lost religious sect planted on the peak. I didn’t see it from the bottom of the mountain, but I heard him screaming. The nails didn’t kill him, though. The cross was set afire. He was burned alive.”

  The faces around him morphed into something deeper than doubt. Horror.

  “Don’t go,” David begged them. “Please. There is something about that place that creeps into your head and changes you. Something terrible. Something alive.”

  David opened his hotel room’s door with trembling hands and lurched inside, manually locking it behind him. He flicked on every light until certain he was alone. His suitcase rested on one of the double beds, untouched. He sat on the other to think.

  “Stupid,” he growled, though he wasn’t sure at whom he was angrier right now. A bunch of lonely online wannabes hoping to take their obsession to the next level, or himself for failing to break through to them?

  They’d talked all day and into the night. Caught off guard, David had argued with them instead of using his trained techniques to guide them away from harm and back to reality. When Kyle started praising Emily’s suicide and lecturing him about what he owed the Family, David had shut down for good.

  They’d convinced themselves he had unfinished business with Red Peak and needed only a little prodding to fulfill the covenant. While they followed Kyle’s lead, they’d wanted him to be their leader. If he needed any proof of their madness, he had to look no further. They had no idea what they were playing with.

  For some doomsday cults, the end became a self-fulfilling prophecy. And ideas, it turned out, were like viruses that infected human beings.

  Inspired by this thought, he pulled out his phone, which he’d set to mute all day. Claire had called several times but left no messages. Her single text read, Call me when you get this. If it was related to the kids, she would have been more communicative. He decided it could wait.

  He dialed Beth’s number.

  “David?” she said.

  “Hi, I’m sorry to be calling so late.”

  “No, it’s fine. I’m glad to hear from you. How are you?”

  “Tell me about mass hysteria,” David said.

  “It’s a big topic. What can I tell you?”

  “Topline it for me.”

  “It’s called mass psychogenic illness,” Beth told him. “The illness starts in the mind but has very real symptoms. It passes into the mind through the eyes.”

  He rose from the bed and began to pace the room. “What does it do?”

  “Often, it develops similarly to a severe stress reaction, but not always. In one famous case, a student marching band stopped in the middle of the field where they played, and three hundred collapsed. In another, a bunch of kids saw a TV show and reported the same symptoms as characters in the show.” She paused to drink something, which David guessed was the red wine she favored. “In Tanzania, several schools suffered outbreaks of uncontrollable laughing. In the Middle Ages, there was a plague of dancing where they couldn’t stop. There are tons of other documented cases.”

  David thought about it. It didn’t quite fit.

  “What about group hallucinations?”

  “I guess we should know.”

  The fire writhing up to the heavens, the deafening horn blast.

  David shook a cigarette out of its box and lit it, willing to pay the hotel’s fine if he had to. “It’s a common thing?”

  “It’s a verified phenomenon, and there are many cases of it. One famous case is the Miracle of the Sun in Fátima in Portugal in 1917. Three kids made a prophecy that the Virgin Mary would show up in the sky and perform miracles. Thousands came to see it. For about ten minutes, they saw the sun zigzag around, shooting colors.”

  “They stared at it for too long,” he guessed.

  “The point is thousands of people said they saw the same thing.” She took another drink. “Is that enough? What else do you want to know?”

  He found himself on his third circuit walking around the room, puffing away on his cigarette, nowhere to go except back where he started. “I’m not sure.”

  “Where are you going with this? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. Did you get a package from Emily? Old articles?”

  Beth’s usual professional cool faltered. “I—yes, I did.”

  “It got to you, didn’t it?”

  “It’s unsettling. Remember those old cabins we found? I’m still not sure yet what to make of it, to be honest.”

  David quit pacing in front of the window. He looked out across the glittering downtown. “I think Peale knew about the Wardites.”

  Beth gasped. “Oh my God.”

  The Reverend knew about the Wardites and had become obsessed with a religious mystery. The Family had followed in their footsteps, just as The Restoration wanted to follow in the Family’s.

  Jeremiah had heard the voice because he’d expected to hear it. He’d wanted to hear it so much that he’d denied his own senses. He’d burned toast and seen the face of Christ, only on a much bigger scale.

  “For a long time,” Beth said, “I wondered if Peale was a schizophrenic, bipolar, or a borderline personality, but I couldn’t make it work. Now that I know the spark, I can. The voice, David. It was a projection of some suppressed narcissism. We might even be talking about multiple personality disorder.”

  Born from guilt and hardship, the voice had taken on a life of its own over time, demanding purity, blind obedience, and unconditional love. The Old Testament God. God as cult leader, or rather, a cult leader’s projection of God.

  “They all died because one man wanted to meet his maker,” David said.

  And failing to meet him, he’d created him.

  “It still doesn’t explain the bodies.”

  He thought of Angela. “I know exactly who can figure that out for us. I think we’ll find Peale worked out a deal with some people in Medford.”

  If Beth was right about multiple personality disorder, it was possible the Reverend had set it up without any real awareness he was doing it.

  If anyone could crack the final puzzle, his bulldog sister could. She’d find out where the bodies were buried. Fifteen years after the Medford Mystery, the survivors could lay the Family of the Living Spirit to final rest.

  After a pause, Beth said, “I don’t feel any better. Why don’t I feel any better?”

  He went to the bathroom and dropped his cigarette into the toilet. “Because there’s nothing to feel happy about.”

  She sighed. “I wish Emily had sent us this stuff before she’d decided to exit.”

  David wasn’t sure it would have made any difference. People believed what they wanted to believe. Emily had believed more than most.

  He thought of The Restoration packing up for the long trip into the desert, and realized he’d made a colossal mistake. The articles had gotten into his head, and he’d argued with Kyle and his followers about avoiding Red Peak, as if the place had real power. As if something slumbered there, waiting.

  There is something about that place that creeps into your head. Something terrible.

  The exact wrong thing to say, he realized now.

  At Red Peak, a voice would not call out to them, because that voice had been in Jeremiah’s head. One of them would hear it anyway, maybe some or even all of them, because they wanted to hear it. Because not hearing it meant they’d have to go home, where life was hard and lacked meaning.

  At Red Peak, they’d end up hurting themselves and their friends who didn’t play along.

  “I have to go,” David said. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

  “I hope so—”

  He hung up and stared at his cell. His first thought was to get in touch with Angela, but he didn’t want to see his sister mixed up in this, no matter how tough she was. He was on the right track, though. He’d contact the police in Medford and tell them what was comi
ng their way.

  His phone rang. Claire.

  “Hi, hon,” he said. “I was going to call you.”

  “David,” she said, her voice cracking with stress.

  “What’s wrong? Are the kids okay?”

  “That producer called back. He talked to me about you.”

  The temperature in the room plummeted.

  “What did he say?”

  “He told me about you and the Family of the Living Spirit cult.”

  13

  CONFESS

  With the windows closed and the fan kept off to minimize ambient sound, Laurie’s room was sweltering and smelled like sex. Sitting cross-legged in boxers on her rumpled mattress, Deacon tinkered on a laptop. His bandmate lay on her stomach, glaring at her own computer and wearing nothing but a black T-shirt.

  A chord progression trilled from her laptop. “Goddamn it.”

  “Let me hear it again.”

  “No. Focus on your own shit.”

  They hadn’t left her apartment in three days. Between marathon stretches of work, Laurie pulled him onto her for some rough sex with plenty of biting. Deacon was starting to doubt she was human but rather some form of musical succubus.

  Right now, she was obsessed with finding a perfect chord progression on her software. She said it would serve as a motif for the album to help tie the tracks together. Minor scale for a dark flavor. No power chords, Jesus chords, or the “epic” chord progression. She worked up a diminished chord, a dissonant sound that added tension and narrative drama.

  When she dropped it into her progression, the whole thing leaned and fell over.

  “Maybe not a dim chord,” she muttered. “I could augment it. Resurrection instead of tragedy.”

  Deacon shrugged and went back to chasing his own white whale, the shofar of Exodus. He blinked at his screen trying to come up with a new direction, and ended up studying the perfect curvature of Laurie’s ass and wondering what tone it would produce if he modeled it as a sound wave.

  Time for a break. He pulled on his T-shirt and padded into the living room.

  “Ugh,” Charlotte said from the sofa. “When are you leaving?”

  Laurie’s roommate thumbed a text into her phone while a swiveling floor fan blasted air at her. Deacon stood behind the couch to enjoy the soothing wind.

  “When my mistress releases me and gives me a ride,” he said.

  “What are you even doing in there?” Still staring at her phone, she extended her palm toward him. “Don’t answer that.”

  “We’re making a baby,” Deacon said anyway.

  She wrenched her eyes from her screen. “What?”

  “We’re working on an album together.” He walked into the kitchen and filled a bowl with milk. “Can I eat some of this cereal?”

  A loud, labored sigh. “Fine.”

  “Thanks.” He sat and poured Cap’n Crunch. The fan droned as it ponderously wagged its head. With each turn, the sound refracted.

  As a general rule, musicians hated unwanted ambient noise. They might dirty their sound until it was good and wrecked, or shoot for a live performance atmosphere, but by design. They otherwise spent a great deal of effort filtering out anything that wasn’t precisely engineered as part of the song.

  God didn’t live in recording studios. He lived on desolate peaks. His music was the never-ending song of entropy.

  Inspired, Deacon wolfed down the rest of his cereal and hurried back to Laurie’s bedroom, ignoring her roommate yelling at him to clean up his dishes.

  On his laptop, he pulled a sample of a cimbasso, a brass mutant cross between a tuba and a trombone. He dropped the pitch a couple octaves, wet the signal, and then dirtied it up with a ten-second reverb until it was nice and meaty.

  Next, he sifted through wind sound effects and found a lonely moan with the right pitch. He layered that into the background and played it back.

  Laurie’s head jerked like a cat sensing prey. “I like that.”

  “It’s closer to what I remember. Not quite there, though.”

  She turned back to her screen. “Definitely a dim chord. We need conflict.”

  Deacon plugged in headphones and closed his eyes to let the horn rumble between his ears again.

  A handful of bodies littered the dark slope around the cabins at the base of the mountain, the ones who’d tried to escape. The camp lay still. As far as he knew, everyone he loved was dead. From the summit, pulsing red fire boiled straight up into the sky, filling the night air with a ghostly murmur.

  Then the horn boomed. Its vibrations drummed the boulder behind which Deacon crouched shuddering in fear and shock. The roar built in volume until he couldn’t hear his own breathless scream.

  The bodies began to shift and stir on the ground—

  “Deacon,” Laurie yelled. “Answer your goddamn phone.”

  He came out of it with a gasp and wrenched off the headphones. His cell sang to him, wanting to be answered. He picked it up. “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Hey, it’s me.” Joy’s voice. “We have a problem.”

  Deacon braced himself for being told that Honey had been towed from the Wild Moon parking lot, where the car had sat for the past three days.

  “Okay.”

  “Apparently, we made a big impression on a teen who caught our show,” Joy said. “She went home and killed herself.”

  “Oh, shit.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Her suicide note was the lyrics to ‘Shadow Boxer.’ ”

  Laurie drove them to a Greek diner on Martin Luther King, where Frank had called an emergency meeting of the band.

  “We can work with this.” She leaned against the wheel like she always did, as if being a foot closer to the windshield helped her see the road better. “We could play up an angle about how some fans are like cultists themselves. Dedicate the album to this poor girl.”

  Deacon smoked in silence, still haunted by the vision of bodies bouncing around the ground until they’d started to tumble up the slope. As creepy as it was, nonetheless it served to distract him from the idea of a teenaged girl overdosing on sleeping pills because of a song he wrote.

  “I’m not saying we exploit it,” Laurie said. “I’m saying we let it inspire us.”

  She talked about the new album as if she’d poison herself too if that’s what it took to create it.

  Deacon watched Crenshaw’s grimy gas stations and fast food joints rush past as he flicked ash out the window.

  Laurie seemed to want him to say something, so he nodded. Inspire us. Yes.

  “All right.” She let go of the wheel to punch his thigh. “I feel like everything we’ve done so far has been playing at being a rock band so we can make money. I’ve got this impostor syndrome aftertaste in my mouth. Not with this album, though. This is real. It’s fucking art. This album is going to be a statement.”

  “Yes,” he said, though he didn’t believe there was going to be an album.

  The possibility seemed more remote than ever right now. He and Laurie had hoped that if they did the groundwork and shared the results with the group, their bandmates would get turned on and tune in.

  A fan committing suicide was likely to make them lean even harder against Cats Are Sad’s darker material. Hell, this was the kind of thing that could break up a band, produce a custodial fight over its soul.

  They walked into the diner and found their bandmates waiting at a table.

  Frank glared at them. “It’s about time. What have you two been doing?”

  “Working on a project,” Laurie said.

  Steve frowned at their hair, still wet from the shower they’d taken together. His shoulders sagged a little. He liked Laurie a lot, but he knew what she was like. She belonged to the music, not any man.

  “We can talk about that later,” the manager said. “Right now, we need to discuss how we’re going to respond to this suicide and the unwanted attention it’s bringing us.”

  “We’re not the firs
t band with a fan who offed herself,” Laurie said.

  “Right. We can learn from what they did right and wrong. The first step is to post condolences to the family on social media, explain how our music is there to give hope and courage to people who don’t fit into mainstream society, and offer an anti-suicide message. All of which I already took care of.”

  The server arrived to pour coffee for them. Joy ordered hot tea.

  “That works,” Bart said. “What else can we do?”

  “Well, I also think you need to lay low for a while,” Frank said. “Take a break and work on some new material, stuff that’s a little less emo.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  Laurie frowned at Deacon, but he kept staring into the blackness in his mug.

  “If you’re going to be on social media, stay on message,” Frank added. “If you say something stupid, you’ll put you and your band on the wrong side of an internet mob. Optics are everything.”

  Deacon’s phone rang. He turned away from the table to answer it. “Yeah?”

  “Hi, this is Doug Winder with the Intelligencer,” the voice said. “Is this Deacon Price with the band Cats Are Sad?”

  He stuck his finger in his ear to mute the diner’s noise. “Yup.”

  “I’m doing a piece on Alexandra Martinez. You’re aware she took her own life after your last show at the, uh, Wild Moon?”

  “We were just talking about that.”

  “What do you say to people who think your music caused her death?”

  “I’d tell them they’re stupid,” Deacon said.

  After a long pause, the reporter asked, “Why would you say that?”

  “Music doesn’t make you do anything. It’s grease, not a wheel.”

  “What’s the song about?”

  Bart’s eyes bugged. “Who’s he talking to?”

  Frank held out his hand. “Give me the goddamn phone.”

  Deacon stared at his manager as he said, “It’s about religious frustration, Mr. Winder of the Intelligencer. Most of us are programmed to be spiritual, but there’s nothing to connect with. I’m surprised we haven’t all killed ourselves, but we’re also programmed to survive. This conflict is driving the whole human race insane.”