CHAPTER FOUR
A GENTILE PROBLEM
“WITCHCRAFT IS BASICALLY A GENTILE PROBLEM; Jews stopped believing in the devil a long time ago. Freud put the nail in the devil’s coffin by saying the devil was just your cock telling you what you wanted to hear. ‘I am the magic wand. I make fantasy into reality. I am the seed of life.’”
I was having coffee with Mank at his house off Beverly Boulevard. Mank was from an old Hollywood family; his people had practically invented movies. Mank, himself, was a gossip columnist for the L.A. Times. He was still in his early twenties and somewhat of a black sheep. It was taken for granted that by the time he was in his early thirties he’d have a nice Jewish wife and a couple of T.V. shows to produce before going on to make a name for himself in the movies like the rest of his family.
His apartment was a study in chaos financed by a grant from his parents to the University of Soft Knocks in an attempt to discover which would run out first, his trust fund or his parents’ patience. Piles of clothes, newspapers, records and bedding were scattered around the apartment with an intentional, almost comic, disregard for order. A lot of small change and even a few low-denomination bills were sprinkled on the floor, adding to that touch of disdain for money only the truly wealthy can afford. Mank was a study in casual. He had the face of a child and the body of a fifty-year-old card shark. He dressed in wrinkled chic, a style he originated by wearing his expensive, unearned clothes un-ironed. However, there was a royalty about him, something in his being, that if he told you he was a Gypsy Prince you’d look at those dark eyes piercing through that shock of black hair hanging in his face and think, Yeah.
“Most witches, historically speaking, started out as Catholics, although in this country, with its great religious freedom, you had Puritan witches, Church of England, Baptists, the whole smear. Like everything else, people get into it for the money. And show business, Gentiles definitely do not understand show business. They have always believed it was the devil’s work. The major Gentile contribution to the field of entertainment is the rodeo. That’s it.”
“Mank, you’re not helping me.”
He smiled then looked down at his coffee cup.
“Sure I am. You have to understand the essence of your problem then you can deal with the particulars.”
“Mank, I do not need a beginner’s course in this, I have been researching the occult for the past five years here. I need definite information about definite covens and the people that belong to them.”
“Okay, I’ll quit doing George Burns. What do you want to know?”
“Is there a coven that specializes in initiating children into the black arts?”
“Well, not exactly. There’s the Molochians, who do things to their own kids, but for them it’s like they didn’t get enough money or power by selling their own souls so they sell the souls of their children. They’re more likely the ones you’re after. In the movie community, these guys usually produce splatter flicks aimed at giving teenage boys fear erections to enforce the equation of sex with violence. Violence then becomes a socially acceptable form of sex and that gives these guys the feeling that they’ve harvested a few more souls for Satan.”
“Like I say they use their own kids but it’s not like a concert violinist teaching his three-year-old to play Bach. Basically the kids don’t know what’s going on and their parents really don’t want them to. Is any of this helping you?”
“Maybe – I’ve been told about human sacrifices….”
“Murder is the ultimate status symbol. It goes all the way back to prehistory. Scalps on a belt, notches on a gun, stars on a general’s collar, they all mean the same thing: this man got away with murder more times than you did. But it took religion to elevate murder to the highest status, that of a holy act. Now you’re generally dealing with bourgeois, social-climbing, status-seeking assholes when you talk about your modern-day witches and warlocks. So, to answer your question, I would say there is a good chance the stories you heard about that stuff are true. But really, killing any helpless creature gives them a similar rush, a dog, a cat…”
“A kitten?”
“A kitten, a goldfish, a cockroach—none of us are immune to this sensation, but these people get addicted to it. They turn their back on any real talent they might have and, like a junkie, spend all their time looking for a bigger rush. They become dangerous and the rich ones become real dangerous.”
“And the poor ones become sad headlines.”
“So, what else you want to know?”
“What have you heard about Chris Boone and Burns Sawyer?”
Mank didn’t know much about my friends but he said he’d look into it for me. It was good to talk to Mank. What he had told me was like a ray of sunlight hitting last night’s dragon and turning it into a tree stump. It made the drive down to the beach spellbinding. The orange autumn afternoon light played through the palm trees like a senorita’s smile through a lace fan. I drove my battered M.G. with the top down; the air felt silky. I parked by the pier in Santa Monica and walked out on the sand as the red sun kissed its reflection on the darkening sea. They were turning on the lights that outlined the roofs of the arcades on the pier above me. Night was coming back again with its fog dragons, looking for me, waiting for me to close my eyes.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE NIGHTMARE BEGINS
HIS CORPSE WAS COLD, gray, split open down the middle from the sternum to the pelvis. Jimmy didn’t like the way he looked. He examined the empty flaps of skin left by the coroner’s incision, the hollow cave where his intestines, heart, lungs, stomach, liver, kidneys – in short, his guts, had been. Jimmy’s spirit hand touched the lifeless hand of Jimmy’s corpse. Spirit tears, like tiny jewels, fell from his spirit cheeks onto the tattered flesh. The corpse was covered with wounds. He had been shot twice, stabbed over one hundred and fifty times but he still would not die. At last, they held his fighting body to the ground and drove a rat-tail file through his skull. The sound of that terrible hammer and the pain of that ugly file, creeping blow by blow through his sputtering brain, began ringing in his spirit ears. He touched the hole in the center of his body’s forehead and screamed a silent spirit scream until the corpse rattled and shook the metal table it lay upon. It sat blot upright, jaw open, all its wounds spitting cold, black blood. It was time for the spirit to move on, to leave its shaking corpse to the elements of corruption and spin howling into the night in search of revenge.
Chris Boone would wake up, perhaps in a few moments. He would be clammy wet with sweat and fear. Jimmy’s ghost would sit beside his bed and send cold chills up his barely conscious spine.
I had just come back from a Halloween party up in the Hollywood Hills, all done up in my special wolfman make-up. Steaks, in her Betty Boop outfit, had actually dumped her chic date at the party and was sprawled out on my couch chugging down the last of my tequila. It looked like I was finally gonna’ find out if New York stayed open all night. We had just decided to leave our costumes on when the phone rang. It had to be bad news. It was. Chris Boone had just seen a ghost.
“You’ve just seen a what?”
“I’ve just seen the Rabbit.”
“You mean Jimmy, from Texas—He’s been dead over five years.”
“Can you come over? I can still feel his presence. The cats are going crazy.”
Steaks