Children of Chaos Read online

“We’ve all grown so much older,” she said, motioning to a chair at the table. “The last time I saw you I think you were about eighteen.”

  “Yes,” I said, sliding into a free chair. “It’s been a long time.”

  “I understand you’re a writer these days.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure of reading any of your novels.”

  “That’s OK, not many people have.”

  She smiled, though it was guarded. “I remember when you and Martin were just boys. I can still see you two and Jamie Wheeler playing Cowboys and Indians in the yard at the old house.”

  “I remember too.”

  “You always wanted to write, didn’t you?”

  “I did, yes.”

  “For a time, when he was younger, Martin wanted to be an actor or a filmmaker. Do you remember?”

  “I do.”

  “So much has changed now.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I was sorry to hear about Mr. Doyle.”

  “All the money in the world can’t put things back the way they used to be.” She looked away, as if embarrassed. “I apologize for sending Janine to speak with you rather than coming myself. I know it was probably awkward and more than a little confusing for you. I’d have made the trip myself, but I’m not well.”

  I glanced at Janine, who was standing in the doorway; hands clasped and held down in front of her. “I was sorry to hear that too.”

  “Pancreatic cancer,” she said flatly. “There’s nothing they can do.”

  “I’m really very sorry,” I said again, this time with greater conviction.

  She nodded wearily in thanks. “I hope you didn’t take offense to the money. I just felt you should be compensated for your time and trouble.”

  “Why did you send for me, Mrs. Doyle?”

  “I need your help.”

  “What is it I can do for you?”

  “Have you heard from Martin?”

  “No ma’am, I haven’t seen or spoken to him in years.”

  Her expression struck me more as a confirmation of what she’d already known rather than a reaction to my response. I felt like she’d just tested me to see if I’d tell her the truth, and I’d passed. “What do you know about Martin’s past, his life?”

  “Virtually nothing.”

  “You knew he’d left the country for several years?”

  “Last I knew he’d gotten a job on a cargo ship that was headed to England. That was right after we graduated high school. He was planning to backpack around Europe or something, if I remember correctly.”

  Mrs. Doyle’s eyes shifted to Janine, who immediately came alive from her position in the doorway. “Martin spent a year tramping around Europe,” she said, moving to within a few feet of the table. “And over the next four years found brief positions of employment that allowed him to traverse the globe.”

  “I’d hear from him now and then,” Mrs. Doyle told me, “and came to understand that Martin was on something of a spiritual quest. He believed his traveling would lead him to greater…enlightenment…as he called it.”

  “He found his way to and spent time in Africa, Asia, Australia, and eventually wound up in Central and then South America,” Janine continued at Mrs. Doyle’s prompting, reciting the information from memory. “Martin spent time in several countries there before finally returning home. He’d been gone a total of six years, leaving at eighteen and returning at twenty-four.”

  I looked to Mrs. Doyle. “You didn’t see him in all that time?”

  “He wrote to me regularly and called quite a bit—whenever he was in an area that had phone service—but otherwise, no.” She drew a deep breath. Her chest wheezed and rattled. “When he did come home he stayed with us—my husband was still alive at the time—but he’d changed, Phillip. His travels and that whole way of life had changed him. He enrolled in college but dropped out after only two semesters.”

  “Despite having a perfect grade point average,” Janine added.

  “Martin was always very bright,” I said.

  Mrs. Doyle seemed pleased with my comment. “He just couldn’t seem to adapt to a traditional lifestyle. He’d have these horrible mood swings. In the blink of an eye he could go from being introspective, quiet and gentle to a screaming, rage-filled maniac, yelling and smashing things around the house, insisting we had no idea what he was going through in this attempt to, as he put it, find God. Martin became a very tortured young man.”

  I knew the feeling.

  “Eventually he moved out,” she continued. “And over the course of the next five years we only heard from him a handful of times. Each call was more troubling than the last, and the times between them became longer and longer. When he did call he’d say the most blasphemous and hateful things to us, and insist he’d found the truth and that our lives were lies. He’d ramble on and on nonsensically about religion, spirituality, death and life, and my husband and I began to think Martin was either addicted to drugs or was suffering from mental illness. But there was nothing we could do. As far as we knew he wasn’t a danger to himself or others, and he had every right to choose to live the life of a wandering bum.” She stopped a moment and took a series of breaths. “During this time he was doing the same thing to Thelma. You remember his sister.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Thelma moved to Chicago several years ago after she graduated college. She’s a CPA now. At any rate, Martin did the same to his sister. It disturbed her to the point that she wanted nothing more to do with him. She stopped taking his calls and eventually he no longer tried to contact her. They haven’t spoken in years.”

  “That’s a shame,” I said, hoping at some point she’d let me know what any of this had to do with me.

  “A few years after that, Mr. Doyle was killed. Martin never even came home for the funeral. He called about a year after his father died and I told him the news. He said he knew all about it. Of course there was no way for him to have known, but he insisted he had, and then went right on with one of his tirades, as if I’d told him something trivial and unimportant. That was fifteen years ago. For several years after that I’d hear from Martin maybe once or twice a year. And then about five years ago, all contact stopped. I was afraid he’d died, so I hired a private detective to find him.” Again, she looked to Janine.

  “The first detective hired found that Martin was moving around quite a bit,” she said, taking over for Mrs. Doyle. “From what he was able to ascertain, Martin hadn’t left the country again but he’d been on the move within it for several years. It made finding him difficult to say the least, because he didn’t stay in any one place for long. The last place this detective was able to say for sure Martin had been was in California. Apparently he’d taken up with a small group of homeless people and they all traveled together, moving from state to state by any means they could find. How they were able to support themselves wasn’t clear, but he obviously suspected Martin and these other people were involved in some sort of petty illegal activity.”

  “So basically that was a dead end,” I said.

  “Basically, yes.”

  “I began to think I’d never hear from or see my son again,” Mrs. Doyle sighed. “But then, two years ago, I began receiving messages from Martin, sporadic but deeply troubling messages.”

  Janine waited for her employer to give a nod of approval then said, “Mrs. Doyle began to receive things in the mail. Letters at first—crudely scribbled notes on three separate occasions—and then she received a videotaped message, which came about a year ago. Since then there’s been no contact. These messages led us to hire another detective to try to find Martin again. That was almost a year ago, right after the videotape arrived. In the end, we had to hire three private investigators before we got any solid answers as to Martin’s whereabouts.” She scooped up a manila folder from the table between us, opened it and showed me a photograph and business card of a bald, overweight middle-aged man with a bushy mustache
. “This is William Thompson, a private detective based out of Boston who went looking for Martin and…”

  For the first time since I’d met her, a nervous twitch broke through Janine Cummings cool exterior. “And what?” I asked.

  “He vanished. The last anyone knew he was in Arizona. Our final contact with him was when he phoned to tell us he believed Martin might be in Mexico, and that he’d become involved with some sort of religious cult. We never heard from Mr. Thompson again. In fact, no one has. Subsequent police investigations turned up nothing. It’s as if he simply vanished from the face of the earth.”

  “Do the police suspect foul play?” I asked.

  Janine closed the folder and returned it to the table. “Apparently Mr. Thompson had a severe gambling addiction. He owed substantial amounts of money to some rather unsavory characters and the police believe it may have had something to do with that. They think he slipped into Mexico and disappeared intentionally.”

  I turned to Mrs. Doyle. “And what do you believe?”

  “I don’t know,” she said softly. “But I hope that’s what it was.”

  Rain spattered against the glass walls.

  “We then hired a third investigator,” Janine said. “A woman named Connie Joseph, also out of Boston. She turned out to be far more reliable and was able to obtain some further information while also confirming some of Mr. Thompson’s initial reports. She found that Martin was in fact in Mexico—deep in Mexico—and that he was not only involved with a cult of some kind, but quite likely the head of it. Pursuing the case further would have involved going into Mexico to find Martin, and she decided against it. Mrs. Doyle offered to pay her handsomely but Ms. Joseph refused.”

  “She was frightened,” Martin’s mother said abruptly. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so frightened, so profoundly crippled with fear.”

  “That was four months ago.”

  My hands began to shake, so I hid them in my lap. I’d have killed for a drink, maimed for a cigarette. “What was she so frightened of?”

  “The video could hold the key,” Janine answered.

  “Didn’t this woman watch it before she took the case?”

  “She did, but when Ms. Joseph returned from the west coast she was not the same person she was when she left. She was distraught, confused, and as Mrs. Doyle said, horribly frightened. Apparently a few weeks after dropping the case she suffered a nervous breakdown. I’m not certain she’s even practicing as a private detective at this point. Far as we know, she had none of the issues her predecessor struggled with, so her problems are something of a mystery. She felt Martin had gotten in her head—her words—and she couldn’t get him out.”

  I exchanged confused and uneasy glances with both women. “Then before she came back and dropped it she actually came into contact with him?”

  “No. She was in Mexico briefly—Tijuana—but never actually found him.”

  “This is troubling,” I said, playing it cool but afraid to close my eyes for fear of what might be waiting there. “I just don’t see what it has to do with me.”

  “Before we discuss that,” Janine said, “we’d like you to see the videotape.”

  “Once you see it, I think you’ll understand.” Mrs. Doyle reached out and touched my shoulder. “You were his best friend, Phillip. Martin adored you.”

  “That was years ago. We were just kids. We probably wouldn’t know each other now if we passed on the street.”

  Undeterred, Mrs. Doyle pointed to the cart in the center of the room.

  With a quick nod, Janine strode over to the VCR and hit PLAY.

  FIVE

  The video began as static but then jumped to a shot of dirt road. Shaking and bouncing to the point where it was difficult to make out what I was looking at, the cameraman was evidently in the passenger seat of a pickup truck with the camcorder shooting through a windshield coated in a layer of dirt and dead bugs. The wipers had carved out two half moons through which the dirt road was visible. Things in the truck jingled and clanged as the vehicle bounded along the uneven terrain, from all indications moving along at a fairly quick speed. At one point the camera panned far enough to the left to reveal something dangling from the rearview mirror: the bloody severed leg of a chicken.

  Another abrupt cut led to a shot of what appeared to be desert-like floor. Now outside, the camera swung up and captured a building perhaps fifty yards in the distance. As the cameraman walked closer, I could see it was an old stone church, clearly abandoned and dilapidated, ravaged by years of neglect in the desert elements. I could hear footfalls and the breathing of not only the cameraman but someone walking alongside him. Neither person spoke.

  Static returned to the screen. I looked at Janine as if to say, “that’s it?”

  Remote in hand, she pointed at the television. “Keep watching.”

  Another series of quick cuts and edits, and a dark view of what I assumed was the inside of the old church came into focus. The video was grainy and a bit blurry, like it was a second or third generation copy, but I was still able to see an old altar in the background, and among the shadows, a man kneeling in a circle of burning black candles.

  Shadows, limited light and the filth inside the building made it virtually impossible to ascertain any specific details of the person other than the fact that it was clearly a man and that he was either nude or clad only in underwear. His kneeling position and the surrounding darkness left either as a possibility.

  The camera wavered erratically, zoomed in, went out of focus then came back in and pulled back out all in a matter of seconds.

  “Mother,” the man said in near whisper, “sitting in your silly, mindless castle, wasting away, slinking closer to death, back to your idea of your maker, each day borrowed time, a gift the liars call it. But the true gift is only in the other…the other…”

  I wanted to leave the room, to get away from this, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t yet sure this was Martin, as I couldn’t see anything but a shadowy figure and hadn’t heard his voice in years. But it did sound like him. Not exactly as I remembered him, but close.

  The shadow raised an arm, ran the back of his hand across his forehead and sighed as the camera moved slightly closer, again coming in and out of focus. “When you close your eyes and listen to the silence, can you hear it? Can you hear the other? Can you feel it on your throat, in your bones, moving through your organs and in your blood? There is no faith, no science, only knowledge accepted or denied. And both are fools.”

  I glanced quickly at Mrs. Doyle. Her head was bowed. She wasn’t watching and I didn’t blame her.

  “I dream of it,” the shadow went on, “the dark, the quiet, but I also dream of fire and the beautiful screams. Agonizing screams of those who suddenly see that their smug views and beliefs mean nothing because they know nothing. They’re empty and useless. Children, arrogant, know-it-all little children scurrying through the dark.”

  A wave of fear washed over me. In my nightmare, Martin had mentioned dreams of fire. I ran my hand through my hair and let out a slow breath. I was certain now this was him. His voice had changed and even in whisper it had taken on an eerie echo in the otherwise empty old church, but it was him.

  “I’m there with you. Can you feel me beside you? I’m your salvation. You, mother, are the giver of life, the sacred one. And now, I come to save you and all others. I come not to die for the sins of Man, but to kill for them, to slaughter for them, to avenge them for a god not of love but retribution and furious anger. I come to punish and destroy. I unleash chaos. Not against Heaven or Hell, but against their toys. We’ll be together again soon, mother, forever. Everything you know belongs to a past that never was, stories told in books of lies. But listen carefully, watch closely. There is no peace in the stillness, only chaos. God is not a lamb, but a razor.”

  The tape returned to static. Though there was a degree of passion in his tone, not once during his speech had Martin raised his voice above a whisper, which
made the madness he spewed all the more chilling somehow. I leaned back in my chair and tried to collect my thoughts. He’d clearly gone completely insane, but I shared the secret that had probably been most instrumental in bringing that destruction about, and I couldn’t simply dismiss it as the ramblings of some mentally defective lunatic.

  Janine switched off the VCR and TV then returned to the table and poured iced tea from the carafe into each of the glasses before us. Mrs. Doyle thanked her with a subtle nod, took the glass in her fragile hands and drank a bit.

  “As you can see, Martin’s condition is very upsetting,” Mrs. Doyle said. “He’s obviously quite ill.”

  “Yes.” I sipped my iced tea. “I think that’s a safe assumption.”

  Janine took three envelopes from the table and held them out for me. “These are the three letters Martin sent prior to the videotape.”

  Without bothering to take them from her I said, “More of the same?”

  “Essentially, yes, though not nearly as coherent.”

  “I’ve seen more than enough, thanks.”

  She conceded with one of her unflappable smiles, which were quickly becoming annoying, and placed the envelopes back on the table. “We know Martin and his followers—or whatever they may be—are in a secluded area of Mexico, located, we believe, at or nearby that old church shown in the video. As Mrs. Doyle said, Martin is quite clearly mentally ill.”

  “Yeah, I get it,” I said, trying not to sound too irritable. “Look, this is all very disturbing, and I’m sorry to see Martin in such a state, but…” I put my iced tea down and turned to Mrs. Doyle. “Ma’am, what do you think I can do about any of this?”

  Mrs. Doyle seemed far more drawn than when I’d first gotten there. Her face had become even paler, and she looked in desperate need of a nap. “Phillip, I understand you’re a parent?”

  “Yes, I have a daughter.”

  “That’s wonderful. Are you close?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll bet you’re a good father.”

  “I try my best.”