By Al Bruno III
April 2nd: Or at least close to it.
Sara, Cousin Roy, and I were crouched in the woods on a hill near the Bayard Estates manufactured home community. Technically, we were trespassing on someone’s farm to do this, but Cousin Roy assured me this hill was rarely used for anything and had a reputation as a great spot for stargazing.
The stars? I had barely noticed them, but there was no moon tonight, and I was fine with that.
We were passing Cousin Roy’s binoculars back and forth, and I was really annoyed about it because in my satchel there was a police-surplus flashlight, a collapsible shovel, a first-aid kit, baby wipes, notebooks and pens, a bottle of water, a bottle of holy water, Ziplock baggies, an EMF meter, a thermal scanner, and a package of Beef Whips salted snack meat.
But not a pair of binoculars.
Some nights I think I should change the title of my page to ‘The Night Blunderer’.
From our vantage point, we could see Bayard Estates almost perfectly. A single road led in from the main entrance, then split into two branches that curved outward before eventually joining together again at the far end. From above, the whole thing would have looked something like a lightbulb.
There were about fifty mobile homes, with the largest and most impressive building sitting right by the main entrance. And what was next to that building? A 1965 Shelby GT350, of course. Hello, Stan. We see you.
“Let me have it,” Sara whispered.
I passed her the binoculars.
“No need to whisper; they’re not gonna hear us,” Cousin Roy said.
“Until they do,” I hissed. “Keep it down.”
Even in the half-light, I could see Sara’s expression. After all, I’d been staring at her face in the dark for a long time by now, in various circumstances. She had this expression that was worry and glee all at once. I watched it for a moment longer, then turned my attention back to Bayard Estates.
There were only five automobiles in the entire park: Stan’s Shelby, two minivans, a truck, and a Tesla.
Oddly enough, that was the thing that bothered Cousin Roy the most.
“Those things are gonna be the death of us,” he’d said.
Now as for those single- and double-wide trailers themselves? Completely dark. Not a single light went on.
At first, I thought they might be empty. But once again, Cousin Roy came through. He pointed out that all the windows had window-tint film. Layers of it, apparently.
How did Cousin Roy know?
As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, he works under the table for local mobster and Brylcreem enthusiast Peter “Bootsie” Werdegast. One of his many duties at Bootsie’s gentleman’s club, aside from working as a substitute DJ and cleaning up bodily fluids, is making sure the club’s windows have enough tint to keep passersby from seeing what’s going on inside.
Bayard Estates did have the legally required lampposts spaced at regular intervals along its roads, but most of them weren’t working, leaving everything in shadow except for the occasional slivers of light seeping out from under the mobile homes.
For those of you enjoying an existence closer to the 1%, I should inform you that mobile homes do not have basements. So what were we looking at here?
“The lights are green,” Sara said. “Why are they green?”
“Not sure.” Cousin Roy gently snatched the binoculars from her. “But whatever it is, it’s probably not for holiday cheer.”
“What are they doing down there?” I asked.
“No idea, not enough traffic coming in and out of the place for it to be something illegal and profitable,” he said. “Illegal stuff equals traffic. I gotta tell you, aside from Stan and the Porcelain twins, I have maybe seen four people poke their heads out of their trailers.”
“What for?”
“They walk into the woods for a while and come back.”
Sara said quizzically, “Maybe they don’t have bathrooms.”
Cousin Roy snorted and started singing the Mamas and the Papas, “All the leaves are brown…”
I shushed him again, rolled onto my back, and still barely noticed the stars. I had too much on my mind. What did all this mean? My original plan was just to wait for our target to go out for a few hours, sneak in, commit the appropriate felony, and sneak back out again. But now… now I was at a loss, and Sara and I were running out of time.
Was there someone I could reach out to? One of my many contacts? There was a time when Tegan Blue would have dropped everything to help me, but that was before she realized I was just using her for her spirit board. Was there something Atwater hadn’t told me about all this? No, probably not. That man loves to lecture, and the longer the lecture, the better. Maybe Ashley Fowler? Probably not, considering the last time she helped, I was tripping balls in a five-star restaurant. I put my hand over my eyes, blotting out the uninspiring stars. Did I really think I was going to win this time? Did I really think I was ever going to live happily ever after? Did I… Did I…
Did I hear music?
“Does anyone else hear that?” I said, forgetting to whisper.
“Hear what?” Sara asked.
I said, “It’s like music but not.”
Cousin Roy cocked his head. “I don’t hear Nickelback.”
“I, for one…” Sara took the binoculars back. “…enjoy Nickelback.”
“Yeah, well, you enjoy my cousin’s version of the Mattress Mambo, so I don’t think—” He paused. “Wait. What the hell is that?”
“It sounds like wind chimes,” Sara said, “but not random.”
“Organ grinder music,” Cousin Roy said.
“Are those voices?”
Sara said, “It sounds like the Residents.”
“The Residents,” Cousin Roy snorted. “A student project that got out of control.”
“But it does… but it’s like someone is trying to duplicate the sound with Ren Faire instruments. Out-of-tune ones, too,” Sara added, then she realized, “Brian? Why are you so quiet?”
I said, “I know that song…”
###
…it was early April 2009, a spring of grief and monsters that never seemed to end. Tom Wynne, my mother’s oldest, dearest friend, dead of an aneurysm, or at least that’s what they were calling it. I learned the week of Tom’s funeral that a lot of things that were one thing could be another; a weekend off from college could become an extended absence, a rally could be a possession, and an old dear friend could be something so much more. Mom and I had been turned away from Tom’s wake by a literal wall of members of the Wynne clan— aunts, cousins, and in-laws, no one my mother or I had ever met. The whole confrontation ended with my mother receiving a “You’ve got a lot of nerve showing up here” kind of speech, and as we made our way back to our car, someone called me a bastard.
I’m used to that kind of thing now, but then? Not so much.
A little over a week before, I had nearly been killed by a wisp of demonic smoke, but on the drive back from Gale Brothers Funeral Home, I was just as afraid for my life. Mom had never driven like this before—not when she was late to work, or I was running late for school, not for anything. She had always been an “I’ll get there when I get there” kind of girl. But not tonight.
Finally, the family car squealed to a halt in front of a house on the back end of Stirrup Drive I had never seen before. It was a pretty big house, and that made sense. This was the part of town where the wealthy and the wealthy-adjacent lived. I always assumed they called the street Stirrup Drive because most of the people there could afford a racehorse or two.
“Wait here,” Mom said, her voice shaking, her face crimson. It was a combination of shame and rage that made me want to hold her until she calmed down. But she was already out the door, and my cell phone was ringing. I recognized the number.
It was the call I had been waiting for.
Timing.
I watched as my Mom approached the house. It was a contemporary A-frame, for those of you readers with a real estate or architectural bent. The windows were dark; the front porch was lit. Mom was walking fast but trying to act like she had every right to be there. I wondered if I should try to stop her, but I knew that would just complicate matters. All I could do was watch and hope I wouldn’t be trying to talk her out of an arrest.
So I answered my call. “Osrick?”
The voice at the other end was craggy as always. “Brian, I expected you some time ago.”
Now Mom was walking around the front of the house, her head down. Sometimes she would bend down, shake her head, and move on.
“I know. I know. And I’m really sorry,” I said with a little bit of a cringe. “I am still with my Mom.”
There was no hiding the annoyance. “I hope you are not trying to make a fool of me.”
“No. Never, but you’ve got to understand,” I explained as I watched my Mom find the rock with the false bottom and retrieve the key. She ran up to the front door of the house and, after a bit of fumbling, let herself inside. “She’s grieving.”
“Time is not our friend, Brian,” Osrick explained. “If what you tell me is true, your mother may be grieving now, but you might be grieving her.”
“I don’t even know what to say to that.”
Actually, I did; it began with ‘Fuck’ and ended with ‘You,’ but I didn’t want to risk offending my new allies.
Mom was in there for an eternity. I kept looking up and down the street and back to the door. Meanwhile, Osrick was lecturing me about convergences and the Great Machine. And then, just to make me even more dizzy, I finally noticed the name on the house’s mailbox:
Wynne.
“I will wait,” Osrick said.
“Thank you,” I agreed. “I’ll hurry.”
The call ended. And I sat there, and sat there. Each time a car passed by, I jumped. I mean, sure, the timing of the wake was on our side, but what if someone in the Wynne family came back to get something they forgot? What if they had an alarm system? What if my Mom had well and truly flipped and she was setting the place on fire?
Finally, I saw my Mom again. She slammed the door closed and whipped the spare key into the neighbor’s yard. She had a small box under her arm, and as she ran back to the car, I wondered if this was how getaway drivers felt.
Except she was her own getaway driver.
She threw the box on my lap and sped away, leaving the Wynne house in her rearview mirror.
“What the fuuu-” I began, then remembered who I was talking to. “What on Earth is going on here?”
Mom took a hard turn, a right on red, and she didn’t check. She didn’t even slow down. Someone beeped. We were heading home, but I wondered for a moment if we would get there.
“He would have wanted us to have it,” was all she would say.
She didn’t speak again to me until we got back home, and even then it was just to apologize for everything. She was speed-walking into the house, the box under one arm and her keys in the other.
I could hear music playing in the house. Grandma Gail had suddenly taken to listening to music again, mostly gospel. In her teenage years, she had been twice as saved as Aunt Peg could ever hope to be. Of course, that was before she decided she had a different life to live, consequences be damned.
She had the music up way too loud:
“Well, I look way down the river
What do you think I see?
I see a band of angels
And they’re coming after me…”
It was so loud that Mom didn’t hear me when I asked her again what was wrong.
She swung the door open and spun around to face me so fast it knocked the welcome mat sideways.
“Your mother is a whore and a fool, that’s what’s wrong!”
Then she stormed inside and went straight to her bedroom, leaving me standing on the front step, realizing the Mike and the Mechanics story was becoming less plausible every second. I stood there watching her, wanting to run to comfort her as she had for me so many, many times. Then I thought of Osrick’s words and knew I had to go.
Fast-forward ninety minutes, and I was at the home of Osrick Langhorne.
Who the Hell is Osrick Langhorne, you ask?
Okay, let’s backtrack a little.
After my near-death experience, I doubled down on my research. In the week between Tom Wynne’s death and his wake, I went to libraries large and small, searched online, joined message boards, and paid good money to self-proclaimed mystics who called me a “Seeker.”
But the only thing I learned was that there’s a Seeker born every minute.
That changed when I found a paper written by a local, disgraced theology professor named Osrick Langhorne. He had written a treatise on a Coptic manuscript commonly referred to as the Constantinople Document. The writers of the 1939 repressed edition of the Golden Bough referred to the document when they shared this:
“This wicked vorvolaka pours out, as a most impure flood, the venom of its malice on men of depraved mind and corrupt heart, the spirit of lying, of impiety, of blasphemy and the pestilent breath of impurity, and of every vice and iniquity…”
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Professor Langhorne was a local boy, born and bred, who had eventually been academically exiled right back to his hometown of Poughkeepsie. It took a little snooping and wheedling, but I managed to get his contact information. He didn’t answer my phone call, but then again, who does these days? But he did answer my email asking about his much-maligned monograph almost instantly. After so many setbacks and dead ends, it was a pleasant surprise. And when I told him my story, he actually believed me, an even more pleasant surprise.
He offered to speak to me right then and there, and with the naivete of a man who still thought boogeymen were few and far between, I took the nearly two-hour drive to his house and got there slightly after midnight. The man who answered the door made me think I had to be in the wrong place. Surely this was not some disgraced theologian, but instead I had accidentally knocked on the door of a Mark Twain impersonator in the middle of a late-night rehearsal.
Yes, I’m serious. The man looked just like Mark Twain: unruly white hair, thick handlebar mustache, and the kind of smile you can only find on the face of a disillusioned visionary. He welcomed me in and made me tell him the details of what I had experienced. Pertinent questions were asked, notes were taken, and he frequently nodded sagely at something I said. As someone who still thought monsters belonged in the rubbish bin with holiday mascots and organized religion, the whole thing was surreal. Even sitting there in the middle of the night, I still didn’t believe it.
And it was all the more surreal because I expected my host at any moment to begin pontificating about The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.
When I had finished speaking, he got up and began shuffling through one of his filing cabinets. I must admit that I had been so spellbound by my host’s appearance that I hadn’t even bothered to notice my surroundings, which should be the first thing you do when you are an amateur sleuth and stalker of the night. Osrick Langhorne’s home was a small, single-floor affair: a living room, a bath, a bedroom, and a kitchen. We were sitting in the living room in soft, worn-out chairs beside a long, bricked-over fireplace. There were file cabinets and bookshelves everywhere. Books and stacks of papers were piled everywhere. His beautiful antique desk had long ago lost the battle against clutter, and now it seemed that Osrick’s workspace was a card table pushed up against it. It made me wonder if the line between eccentric genius and addled hoarder was marked by a tax bracket.
He handed me a sheaf of papers, photocopies and mimeographs, all of them with obscure and archaeologically-important-sounding titles and all of them highlighted sections of text:
“Vorvolaka! Vorvolaka! I have twisted rose briar before your door. Vorvolaka! Vorvolaka! The thorns that pierced His brow will tear your flesh. Vorvolaka! Vorvolaka! I have put salt in the fire and a cross of ashes on the door. Vorvolaka! Vorvolaka! Born of evil. Sinful and corrupt. Vorvolaka! Vorvolaka! Your mouth is bitter with the taste of blood and violence. Vorvolaka! Vorvolaka! You are guilty and abhorred.” A Peasant’s Chant — Ardel Wray
“The red smoke enters the houses unseen through doors and entrances, seeking the mothers who carry life within them and the fathers who beget and the children who weep. No hearth can remain, no bed warm.” - Babylonian fragment.
“Langhorne’s methodology is essentially syncretic: he combines Jungian theories of inherited archetypal imagery with material drawn from the marginal traditions of theology and archaeology, then overlays this already unstable synthesis with the assumptions of popular spiritualism. The resulting system of invented correspondences gives rise to such alleged archetypes as the Candle Barons, the Magna Machina, and the Vorvolaka. In methodology and ambition, Langhorne’s work recalls the speculative constructions of William Sharp Shaver, Erich von Däniken, and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. It is difficult to regard such material as scholarship, and its continued circulation within academic institutions is deeply regrettable.” - The International Society of Biblical Literature Journal #148 ‘The Case Against Osrick Langhorne’
I made a show of shuffling through them. “I have no idea what any of this means.”
“It means that where you once saw shadows, you now see light, and to see the world by the light of the truth is a terrifying thing.” He sat down in his chair and leaned toward me. “You can walk away, Brian. Leave your family behind and start over. Many who suffer such a revelation do.”
“Look, I don’t have a choice, the people I care about are in danger.” Then I laughed, briefly and hysterically, “I don’t even know if any of this is true! I could have been dreaming! I could just be crazy! You could just be five seconds from asking for my banking information!”
“Hold out your hand, Brian,” he said. “Your left one, please.”
Remember how I said there are moments when your understanding of the world simply ceases to function? There are also moments when you start to understand what you’ve been missing. Normally that can be a great thing—like realizing you love the taste of pistachio or meeting the love of your life. But it can also be terrifying. The only thing scarier than the man in the mask is the face beneath it.
I knew this was one of those moments, and part of me, a large part of me, did not want to hold out my hand. But I had to see. I had to know.
I held out my hand and Osrick Langhorne dropped a tiny stone that had been carved into an eleven-sided shape. It was the color of old blood. I looked at him questioningly. “If you think I’m going to—”
At first I thought it was just the living room lights reflecting off the polished edges of the stone, but that flickering refraction became a glow. The glow became green, and it was not a healthy springtime green; it was as though light from an alien sun filtered down through the atmosphere of a dying world.
And for a moment, just for a moment, I thought I could perceive that world.
“What…” Most people, sane people, would have been terrified. They would have dropped the stone, decided to walk away and start over. But not me. Once again I surprised myself. “What is it?”
Osrick nodded sagely. “That is a Ninazu stone.”
The glow didn’t brighten. It deepened. I frowned. “That is the least helpful thing you’ve said all night.”
“Oral legends say that there was a great sigil carved upon the side of a cliff on the Sinai Peninsula. It was as tall as five men and consisted of a series of lines, a cross, and a curve. No god or monster could stand against it,” Osrick explained. “They say the man who carved it was a refugee from a war in the city of Irem. He only escaped the carnage by finding his way into a dark passage to another world.”
“You realize how crazy this sounds, right?” I said as I stared, fascinated, at the stone.
Osrick continued, “It came to pass that the Pharaoh Netjerikhet ordered it to be destroyed and an army of laborers and soldiers brought it down, but some of those people took the ruined bits of stone and made talismans of them.”
I had so many questions; there was no way I could form a coherent train of thought. Before I could speak, everything changed again. I cocked my head. The change in my expression made Osrick lean in even closer. “What’s wrong, Brian?”
“Do you…” I struggled to speak. “Do you hear music?”
###
“…what you are telling me,” Cousin Roy said as we crept back to where my car was parked. It was two AM, and all we had to show for our stakeout was a list of things that didn’t help our situation at all. “Is that the ‘music’ we heard was the same thing you heard when you held that magic rock?”
Sara said, “Ninazu stone, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “It had eleven sides, a symbol of awareness and the parting of veils.”
She nodded. “And you held it in your left hand because that symbolizes hidden paths.”
“Nice.” I took a moment to admire the way her smile looked in the starlight. Not an appropriate thing to do while mid-skulk, but it happened.
She said, “You think you’re the only one who does research?”
“Cream-colored Christ,” Roy said before scooting up ahead of us.
“Was it really the same music?” Sara asked.
“I think so,” I replied. “It’s weird. It’s like trying to remember a dream. There are bits and pieces of melody.”
“I dunno, man.” Cousin Roy paused and lifted a branch so Sara and I could duck under it. As we did, we passed from the woods into the forest, and the canopy of trees closed in overhead, blocking the light from those useless stars and leaving us in shadow. Sara grabbed my hand. “Watch your step,” Cousin Roy cautioned.
“Don’t know what?” I asked.
“I told you.” He was just a shadow now, a shadow beckoning us to follow him. “I’m not one for blaming ghosties and goblins. This is all just true crime culty stuff.”
“How can you say that?”
“Come on, man. The guy killing hookers was a serial killer with a goofy light show, in rehab, Ashley was always doing hypnosis tricks for fun, those clown guys are just like some kind of Clockwork Orange gang, and you said it yourself that the lady with the zombies was just mindfucking people with drugs. It is all crazy people doing crazy shit.”
Sara’s voice became sharp. “What about me?”
Cousin Roy made a pained sound, the kind reserved for moments when unintended consequences hit you square in the face. “No offense, but… you’ve got issues… we all do.”
“Roy…” I said. I could feel her hand tightening around mine. It was this old argument again, but we were having it in the middle of the forest instead of at a Denny’s at 3 AM.
“For fuck’s sake!” Cousin Roy moved closer to us. “You go and on and on about how what went down in 2009 was the work of some kind of demon. Sometimes… maybe not always… angels and demons are stories we tell ourselves to deal with shit.”
“If we’re crazy,” Sara asked, “then why are you getting mixed up in all this? You might be going to jail.”
Before he spoke, he took his phone and fumbled with the flashlight app until it illuminated his face. The sincerity of his expression was just enough to offset the creepy underlighting. “I don’t believe in a lot of things, but I do believe in the people I care about, so if you want to spy on the Trailer Park of Dracula, then goddamnit I’m in.”
Sara let go of my hand and hugged him. “I thought I was gonna end the night by punching your lights out.”
He patted her shoulder as he switched off his flashlight app. “Night ain’t over yet.”
“In two or three hours it will be,” I said and started walking. “Let’s go.”
Cousin Roy called me, “It’s this way dumbass.”
The conversation dwindled as we walked on, occasionally pausing to reorient ourselves or check on one another when we stumbled over a root or stone protruding from the ground. It’s funny how making our way back from a place always seems to take longer than the initial journey to the place. I thought about everything we knew, about that music and about what I was going to do with the Eternal Codex of Tovit when I finally got my hands on it. And thinking about these things made me suddenly aware of time, and how little we might have. I had no idea what kind of a timetable Gorgo, Mormo, and Luna were operating on, but was I taking too long? Was I allowing myself to be distracted by love and sidequests?
Love and Sidequests. There was a blog entry title if I ever heard one.
My original plan had been to have Cousin Roy show up at Bayard Estates pretending to be some yokel looking to move in, make a nuisance of himself, while Sara and I did a little breaking and entering. Get in, get out, get away. But that plan assumed we’d figured out which manufactured home was playing host to an aficionado of forbidden lore, and right now I had no idea what the Hell was going on.
It took us about forty minutes to get from where we had been doing our surveillance to where I had parked. When we reached the edge of the forest, Cousin Roy again held some branches aside for us. I went first and was the first to see my Ford Escort parked off to the side of the road. I was also the first to see the police car parked in front of it, its lights off and the tall, athletic frame of Deputy Regina P. Bannister leaning against the hood. The stars were bright overhead, but they weren’t bright enough to reveal her expression.
“Evening, officer,” Cousin Roy said.
“Oh shit,” Sara whispered.
“We…” The Deputy walked over to her car and opened the back door. “Need to talk.”
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