Those to be Forgiven

Published: 8 Feb 2018

How long did you stay with Mike in Pickman’s apartment?

I gave it about twenty minutes after I was sure that he had fallen asleep and then headed home.

He’d grown quite attached to you.

Yeah.

But I guess that that is to be expected considering what you both had been through.

I think so.

Before you went to Pickman’s you said that you had watched the haul of evidence that you had taken from Johnny Ives’s trailer…

I wouldn’t say watched. I skipped through the vast majority of it.

But you did watch the films that contained the loops featuring Donny Baldwin?

I had to.

I understand that.

(…)

How were you reconciling the fact that Donny didn’t appear to have aged in those films?

I wasn’t.

You still didn’t believe it?

You said it before… this kind of shit was ‘beyond my ken’. But the evidence was in front of me, there was no denying it.

Did you perhaps believe that some sort of camera trickery or special effects were in use?

That didn’t even cross my mind.

Why not?

The footage was too good. Too clean. From the 8mm film loops through to the VHS tapes… I mean yeah, there could have been some sort of Hollywood style special effects at work but not by Johnny Ives. If he’d have been able to create that sort of thing he wouldn’t have been living how he had.

So you were coming around to accepting that some sort of “magic” was involved?

I wouldn’t have said that either. I couldn’t deny what I could see with my own eyes. Even if what I could see was unbelievable. If I hadn’t seen Johnny, seemingly in his twenties but actually aged north of fifty… If I hadn’t seen Donny in those films… time passed… there was no doubting that… the kid just hadn’t grown with it.

Did you mention this to the owner of the Occult bookstore that you visited the following day?

No. It was bad enough that I was turning up on her doorstep with the journal of a madman in the hope that she might be able to make some sense of it for me. I didn’t need to throw in the appearance of the Lost Boys too…

When I got back to my apartment It was a little after one in the morning. I kept the lights off but like I had done at various intervals over the course of the day I took a few more photos of the street below.

Snatching a beer from the fridge I switched the television on and slumped down on the sofa, still wearing my coat, and started looking through the collection of pictures on my phone. There’s on street parking so the intention was that I might be able to spot which car contained Keena’s eyes. Three had stayed in position throughout the day; A white van that I knew belonged to someone across the road – it had been there on and off for the past couple of months, a silver Volkswagen Jetta with dirty wheels – but again, I had seen that on the street before with a young couple and their toddler using it mostly at weekends. The new car, the one that I hadn’t seen before, was the dark blue Toyota Corolla with the tinted windows. While I couldn’t necessarily prove it, I had figured it for Kenna’s eyes, even if I had little intention of doing anything about it. Just knowing which one to look out for would be enough.

The next morning, after showering and checking out the Corolla I headed back to the office. Still no call from Christian’s man about The Dutchman. I hoped that Pickman would be able to start us moving on it with whatever he could turn up that day… but I wasn’t holding out hope.

I was about to start in on Johnny Ives’s laptop but he’d password protected entry. I mean of course he had. If I had been Ives then there would be no way that I’d have allowed access to that thing by anyone who might have found it. Not that he had seemed like the tapping away at Starbucks kind. I fired a quick text to Pickman and asked him to check with Mike incase he knew what it would be. The response was immediate: ‘Kid says he was never allowed near it.’

Not wanting to waste the morning completely; I spent the rest of it online with a slowly growing cold coffee on my desk – tracking through the histories of Stephen Crops and Stephen Sisk.

While a basic search through the surface web turned up little, a delve into the deep web was great deal more productive:

In the summer of nineteen seventy-two Crops registered his company: Spring Harvest. Just as Roland had told me it primarily traded in naturist films. Boys in their early to mid teens hiking, playing volleyball on the beach or hanging out at the pool in his backyard; the one with the mosaic patterned wall. The boys all lived with him… you see they had been fostered through the state and any time child protective services visited he always received a glowing report – he was homeschooling the kids. From some of the reports that I had managed to dig through I’d dare say that he was in fact doing a better job than most public schools in the area were capable of at that time.

You look doubtful? I know, I know… he was clearly a boy lover – even back then. Anything between six to ten boys aged between twelve and seventeen were living at his villa near Englewood Beach at any one time. And if those films that were released and the photos that were sold to physique magazines were representative of life in that house on a daily basis – I can’t imagine that any of them wore a stitch of clothing from day to day. He must have been making good money from what he was selling to those Magazines; the ones that operated out of New York and San Francisco. I say that because in May of nineteen seventy-four he began publishing his own. The aforementioned nine issues of “American Boy Pictorial.’ He kept it as part of the Spring Harvest label and used it to shift even more 8mm’s of his naturist films.

From what I can make out Stephen Crops never posed a threat to any of the boys in his care… nothing beyond the lingering lens of his camera anyway.

The problem came in the Fall of nineteen seventy-five. He’d taken much of the money that he had made from his films and the magazines and had invested heavily in a chain of laundromats throughout the state. The laundromats however were little more than a money laundering outfit for the local mob. Literal money laundering. Funny isn’t it? Maybe that’s where that shit comes from. I can’t confirm whether or not he knew who he was funding but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did.

An FBI raid in early October forced the closure of the laundromats and lost him a steady stream of income. Two mid level mobsters ran to Cuba with what would have been Crops investment money and suddenly our man has only the little cash in his bank account and what amounted to his assets: His house and the boys.

The boys weren’t prostituting themselves as far as I could make out, not at that time. But they were… how to phrase it? ‘Financed Boys’. They seemed to know that they were onto a good thing with Crops… I mean, think about it: You’re probably a runaway… some lithe tanned mid-teen boy and you find yourself in the lap of luxury in a beautiful beach villa in Florida; you’re showered with gifts and given money and certainly more freedom than you would find in most homes… and the most you have to do for that is walk around naked and pose for a few pictures… Maybe let uncle Stephen put his arm around your shoulder and hold you close enough that he can smell your adolescent hormones; giving him just enough so that he can jerk himself off in his room once you’re out of sight… It’s not a perfect life but for a lot of the boys who would have stayed at that Villa it could have been a hell of a lot worse… And for Sisk it must have been heaven on earth…

Now, do you really think the boys would have stayed with him had he gone completely broke? Of course not. And he knew that too…

That’s where Stephen Sisk joins the story. A wealthy man who had made a name for himself out of the rapidly growing gay porn boom that came out of ‘Frisco in the seventies, Sisk had a reputation for the grimey unvarnished looking stuff that will still pop up on various porn sites from time to time. Bears and leather daddies fucking twinks and poorly paid runaways in various boarding houses throughout the city.

Apparently Sisk was a big fan of Crops output but taking his cue from Denmark’s overly relaxed pornography laws, he believed that there was a market that was missing in America. So Crops, now out of any real money and frightened that he would lose his boys if he could no longer finance them, officially closed Spring Harvest and opened Genesis Films with Stephen Sisk as his business partner.

They began producing the Cine Boys films in early nineteen seventy-five. By claiming that the films were made in Denmark they managed to circumnavigate the pornography laws. Because you see, while it was legal to own and show kiddie flicks it was illegal make them. Using the Danish as cover allowed them to film their own productions… they muddied the waters with Sisk’s trips to Copenhagen where he bought locally produced films from a company called Gul Læder. “Yellow Leather” in English. They would then re-cut scenes from the Yellow Leather productions into their own and repackage them in to the Cine Boys Loops.

Things go quiet after that for a few years. Crops invests in a few businesses although all looked to be legitimate unlike his previous endeavour and Sisk continues to make the kind of films that he was making in San Francisco, if fewer than he had been producing in the past.

On August seventeenth, nineteen eighty-two Stephen Crops is found dead in a hotel room in Weymouth Massachusetts by one of the maids. Multiple stab wounds to his chest and abdomen.

The local cops had figured Sisk for Crops murder as he was staying in the next room but had vanished without checking out. Investigations lead them to an apartment that Sisk owned in Florida but not Crops’s villa near Englewood beach. My guess, at the time, was that the house must have been registered under another name.

The Cine Boys loops had stopped being produced after Crops murder and Sisks disappearance. From what I had seen on the VHS cassettes the previous day however it looked like someone was using the locations (including Crops Villa) and a few of the same boys in order to continue to produce the films for the private collectors. The ones where Donny Baldwin still appeared along Johnny Ives.

Sisk wouldn’t resurface again until his body did on the twenty-third of March nineteen ninety-one. Stuffed into the trunk of a car outside the Boston Methodist Church in Tulsa Oklahoma. Also with multiple stab wounds to his chest and abdomen. The police never found who killed him.

My hunch as I read through the accounts and reports of the two Stephens was that Sisk didn’t kill Crops. Perhaps a third, unnamed, party that had somehow been involved with the productions of the films went after the two of them and Sisk managed to escape. If he spent nine years on the run he’d have used aliases and trying to track what he was doing in that time would be near impossible.

I needed to follow the lead that Ives had given me. Search out Crops Villa in Manasota Key and dig around.

It was nearing three in the afternoon when I saw the text message on my phone: “Tomorrow. 1400 hrs. My office at the club. M.K.”

This was it. Marko Keena had set the time and place. I called Pickman straight away:

“We’ve got a meet.” I said in lieu of a ‘Hello’.

“When and where?”

“I’ll see you tonight. Tell you then. You had any luck today?”

“With the Eurotrash or the gardening?” I was glad he was staying cagey.

“Either.”

“Nothing on one a lot on the other.”

“Good. How’s the kid?”

“He’s fine. Tonight then?”

“Tonight.” And I hung up. I knew no one was tapping my phone but there’s no such thing as being too careful. Particularly given who we were dealing with.

After sitting in silence for a moment I looked at Johnny Ives’s laptop sitting lifeless on my desk. I might not be able to get past his password but I knew someone who could: so I called Darnell Cooper and asked him to look at it for me. As always he was happy to help yet again and I quietly thanked the universe for giving me such a good and helpful friend.

Dropping the laptop at his apartment I warned him not to dig around too much. Just to see if he could crack it open for me.

“You know that you should probably take this thing to the police given what’s very probably on it right?” Darnell warned me after I had made my move to leave.

“I know, I know… but I’m getting close here. I can feel it.”

He shook his head at me with that look like I didn’t really know what I was doing. He wasn’t exactly wrong. “Just promise me you’re going to stay safe Ramsay. Protect yourself yeah. From all sides.”

I promised that I would; even if I didn’t exactly how I was going to do that.

It had hit seven o’clock by the time I reached ‘The Witches Brew’ in Lower Manhattan. The evening had cooled but clouds were gathering above The City I called home like vultures in the skies above a dying calf.

The shop hadn’t changed in the year and a half since I had visited last and still looked liked every cliche for an Occult bookstore you can imagine. Mounds of dusty secondhand books stacked on floor to ceiling shelves that overflowed to seemingly growing piles on the carpet; tables pyramided with paperback titles that I had never heard of; trinkets and charms scattered over a desk littered with paperwork and the old woman sitting in a wingback chair by the cash register, book in hand.

Alka Wrona had moved to the US from Poland sometime in the mid eighties when she was a middle aged woman. That was a fairly big deal then. She had no family left in her native land and none in the country that she was seeking to call her home. What she did have was a small but not insignificant book of savings that she used to buy the shop that she now calls home from it’s former owners; and I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if she hasn’t left it since signing the papers.

Around eighteen months ago the law firm: Burroughs, Cooper and Mishima had set me on the trail of tracking down a stolen book for a client. Some old Russian Orthodox family bible that had been lifted in a burglary. While I never saw the book myself I had found that Alka Wrona had purchased it – only to sell it on to another dealer for a few thousand dollars. As I chased the book across four states it never seemed to sit in one dealers hands long enough before it was sold to another, always with a small profit being made. I gave the name of the last buyer to the law firm once the book had left the country, leaving them to follow up from there. I couldn’t tell you if the client ever got her book back.

“Mister Quaid!” She called out from her position in her chair, lifting her gray eyes from the book in her lap as the bell above the door rang with a light tinkle.

“I’m surprised you remember me Ms. Wrona.”

“Ah young man! I never forget a face. Even one that looks like it has been through the wars recently as yours has… It is both great gift and terrible curse.” She smiled. Her accent was thick but her English was exceptional – only occasionally dropping the odd word. Far better than my Polish. By ‘My Polish’ I mean to say that I can just about remember to say “Dwa piwa proszę?” after David and I visited Warsaw during a European vacation a few years ago. “What I can help you with Mr Quaid?” She stood from her chair slowly, her hands planted on the wingback’s arms to support her. “You are looking for more złodzieje? More thieves?”

I smiled at her: “Not this time… I’m actually looking for a little advice if you have a few minutes to spare?”

“Time is something that I have precious little of these days. Too much with the sitting and the growing old huh?” she had a little chuckle to herself. “But I am always happy to help where possible. What do you need from an old lady?”

Moving across the shop to the desk I withdrew Johnny Ives’s notebook from my jacket pocket: “I remembered from our last meeting that you had a pretty extensive knowledge of…” I didn’t know how to phrase it.

“Books? Superstitions? Magic?” She chuckled a little more as she moved to lean on the desk across from me. “Old woman knowledge!” Big broad grin stretching her wrinkled face.

“Well yes. That.”

“You are looking for something? Maybe you seek to find a book that gives you answers to some secret that vexes you?”

“Perhaps…” I put Ives’s notebook on the desk between us. “I’m investigating a case Ms. Wrona and I think that this notebook might have some clues for me. I was wondering if its contents meant anything to you…”

Alka Wrona lifted the book from the desk and snapped back the elastic closure before opening it infront of her.

“I’ve been led to believe that the writings have been copied from various other books…”

The old woman’s eyes widened as she flicked through the pages, shaking her head. “This writing… How do you come to this book Mr Quaid?”

“It belonged to a very bad man.”

She nodded and grunted like it was enough of an answer to her question. “You should not be in possession of such a thing.”

“What can you tell me about the language?”

She shifted uncomfortably: “It is old. So very old Mr Quaid. Phonetic Aklo.” She cleared her throat. “R’lyehian to give it it’s proper name. The way that this language is constructed… these syllables are not meant for human tongues to speak.”

“I heard someone speak it.”

“What?” She looked up at me, dead straight into my eyes. “Who speaks this?”

“The man whose book it was… he passed away a few days ago.”

“This… These words… No good ever comes from these words.” She continued flicking through the pages of Ives’s notebook transfixed. “The men who would use such words are not to be trifled with.” muttered under her breath.

“How do you mean? I thought it was just some cultist bullshit.”

“HA! The Bible, The Quran, the Torah… this gówno of love spells that I sell to middle-aged divorcees looking to find second chances… That is all cultist bullshit.” I watched her run her bony fingers along the lines of writing, mouthing silently the words her eyes followed.

“Can you read it?”

“Words… Not really… but some words I know.”

“I believe that it was used to perform certain rituals. That the man who it belonged to maybe used it as a guide.”

“A guide to damnation and madness only!” She turned the page and scoffed at something. I figured then that she knew more than she was initially letting on. “What do you believe in Mr Quaid?”

“Sorry?”

Alka Wrona looked up from the book with nothing but stone in her eyes: “You have a faith of some sort?”

“Not really. I pretty much think that we’re alone out here.”

“It often feels like it does it not? But no. Not alone.”

“You believe in the things that are in this book?” I pointed to one of Ives impossible drawings with my left hand in it’s cast: some gelatinous multi-mouthed mollusc with empty feathered eyes and sharp liquid teeth on the ends of short stubby penile tentacles.

“It is what those who use these things believe,” she tapped her index finger on the book. “It does not matter what I believe… The men and women who worship and pray to the things that are described and drawn here are capable of real evil.”

I thought about Ives. What he had done throughout the course of his life. “So they’re evil. The creatures I mean. Like Demons? Like Devil worship?”

“No. You prescribe Judeo-Christian motifs to this book because you fail to understand. That fault is not with you… it is with civilization. What is written here… The creatures that have been drawn… They are beyond good and evil. They think of us, if they think of us at all, same way we think of amoeba maybe, It is the men who follow ancient religions who are evil.”

“How do you know this? If you can’t read the text?”

“I know Aklo well enough to recognise it written. I know the people who follow such beliefs well enough to know that you are perhaps… out of your league in dealing with them.”

She stopped on the image of the puss dripping, mouth covered phallic maggot that was drawn across two pages of Ives book and shook her head with disgust – clicking her tongue against the back of her front teeth. “This… this is not good.”

I pointed at it with my right: “This is the thing that they apparently worship.”

Alka Wrona’s hand reached to my own from the book, lifting it close to her face.

“You have become a wolf Mr Quaid?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Your ring.” She examined the ring on my finger. The one that Christian Christiansands had given me to wear as identification for his man tracking The Dutchman. The silver signet with the wolf headed turtle.

“It was given to me for a case.”

“You think it coincidence?”

“How do you mean?”

“Who gave you this ring?”

I tried to remain vague: “A man who wants me to find another man for him.”

“You know what this means?” She tapped at the ring.

“I didn’t think it meant anything.”

“Everything is connected Mr Quaid. Perhaps it is a coincidence, perhaps it is fate… Are the book and the ring connected in your thinking?”

“No. Two separate cases.”

She let go of my hand with a knowing smile and looked back to the drawing on the pages of the book. “This here is a being called J’ngc’ubbuc.” Alka pointed to the a small passage of writing in the bottom left hand corner of the page.

“Is this like… a bible?”

“No.” She squinted as she tried to read the text. “I do not know enough of the language to translate… A book called The Mjel’nc Grimoire seems to be what would pass as it’s bible… Beyond that I only know a few more words; This is: perversion… this is: statue…”

“How do you know the language?”

“I learn. Never too old to learn Mr Quaid. Men and women come to me and they buy and trade books. A good bookseller knows a little about all their stock.”

“Cultists? Like the man who wrote this?”

“Others.”

“What others?”

“Lions and Wolves.”

“Lions and Wolves? Like the ring?”

A flash of an image behind my eyes: Johnny Ives tied to the chair in his trailer, down on the floor. His voice spitting venom: “Fuckin’ Lions and Wolves! Which are you little broken man? …Lions and fuckin’ Wolves… I was warned… I was told one would come eventually…”

She let slip a wry smile: “Men and women who also believe in such things but are on perhaps the other side.”

“So in the context of what you’re telling me they believe, they’re the good guys. They fight these things?”

“When they are not fighting each other… but they do not fight ‘these things’ Mr Quaid. There is no fighting ‘these things’.” She tapped her finger on the drawing. “When creatures like this one here come, it is how the kids put it? Game Over! The men and women who trade with me fight the men and women who would see such monstrosities visited upon us.”

I’d opened up a whole new world of batshit crazy. I had seen with my own eyes that something of what these cultist pricks were doing was working: Johnny Ives and Donny Baldwin… Mike had given account of the rituals that he had seen performed and believed it himself… The idea that Christiansands might be involved in some way… even if indirectly… Did Christian Christiansands believe in this stuff too? Was he one of these people who had tasked himself with defending the world from these monsters?

“Do you know what they want? The Cultists? What they are trying to achieve?”

“Do you dream Mr Quaid?”

“Everybody dreams.”

“Do you remember them?”

Since the night that Thomas Baldwin had walked into my office my dreams had been more vivid and memorable than at any other point in my life. “More so lately.”

“These people… They believe that the Dreamlands: the realm of dreams… That what exists in their minds can be made reality. They believe that the things that they prey to, these things that they call Great Old Ones, speak with them through their dreams… These Great Old Ones are themselves all asleep; beneath oceans, in crevices deep under mountains, floating aimlessly between the stars. The goal… what they want to achieve… is to wake these beings and to trade the worlds of dreams and reality.”

“You mean bring their dreams to life?”

“Not quite.”

“I don’t think that I’m fully following you here.”

“There is more than one cult Mr Quaid. More than one Great Old One and more than one variation or impression of The Dreamlands. Each cult will perform rites and pray as they deem their God desires. The goal for each cult remains the same.”

“To make dreams reality?”

“Some maintain that they can already perform some brief version of this without waking their God… That they can visit the Dreamlands, if only for a short time, while awake.”

“Like hallucinations?”

“Not really. They understand dreams differently to how you and I perceive them you see. Through the performing of their rituals they believe that they are temporarily capable of actually entering the dream world while conscious. Have you read any Jung Mr Quaid?”

“Some sort of collective unconscious?”

“The ideas are similar but more… physical.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“Then you are in a better place perhaps than you should be given your recent adventures.” She turned the pages of the book – keeping her eyes down as she spoke. “Their goal is not Jungian in the sense that they desire to unleash some collective unconscious but instead to bind us all and free us from their impression of individuation. To achieve wholeness with The Dreamlands… What they seek is what they call the ‘absolute reality’ that lies in dreams. Something that, if you believe what they believe, yet have still have some scruples, is beyond anything that our minds are capable of imagining.”

I couldn’t help but keep thinking of what she was telling me in more metaphorical metaphysical terms: “So a state of awareness?”

“An awareness that our minds are too fragile to conceive.”

Yeah… I was struggling.

“In the simplest form. They believe that our dreams are all connected. Similar to the idea of the Jungian Collective Unconscious yes, like some psychic soup, but unlike Jung they think it as an actual physical plain. They believe it to be something real, something that you can touch taste and smell. They believe that this ‘soup’ is the true reality. That everything else, you, me, this desk the store, everything around it is instead only the thinnest of layers, an illusion; all that our fragile minds are capable of perceiving. Once one of these cults awakens their particular Great Old One they believe that it will bring about a new age. And that we will all be swimming in this ‘soup’ together. Metaphorically. These different factions that worship different beings all wish to achieve some version of this. What version that is depends on which deity that they worship, that they perform rituals for.”

“So… and you’ll have to excuse me for using the Judean-Christian terms here… but what you’re describing doesn’t sound too different to our common idea of what Heaven would be.”

“If it makes it easier for you to understand. But it is still wrong. What they would bring would not be Heaven. Not even for them. And their failure to understand what they are trying to usher in will ultimately be their undoing.”

“Forbidden knowledge?”

“It is not knowledge that is forbidden to us. It is knowledge that is beyond our understanding. There are things in this universe that we are not meant to know Mr Quaid. Things that we couldn’t possibly comprehend, that we are not built to comprehend. And trying to do so would only lead to mental exhaustion and madness. But still they perform their rituals because they see evidence of their beliefs writ physical.”

The slowing or stopping of the physical aging process. “Do you know anything about the rituals?”

“Very little. They differ from cult to cult of course. Most will involve some form of sacrifice, some incantation using the texts like in this book. Most take on a perverse sexual aspect… I believe that most require oils and lotions…”

Mike had mentioned the ‘funny smelling oil’ used by Ives’s group of hooded men and the Hurdy Gurdy Man on the bodies of the boys in the woods behind the trailer park.

“…derived from the seeds of rare plants grown in volcanic soil.”

A loud thunk in my head like an apple dropping, “Oil from the seeds of rare plants?”

“It is usual yes.”

I thought it was ridiculous to consider. Pickman’s problem with The Dutchman and Christian Christiansands sharing some tenuous link with Donny Baldwin? But the ring that Christian had given me? The oil from rare seeds grown in volcanic soil? While perhaps not directly connected… was it possible that there was some shared thread, no matter how thin, that tied the two?

Alka Wrona closed the book and snapped the elastic clasp back over. “Speak to your Wolf, Mr Quaid. If he is willing he will be able to help you more than I can.”

To Be Continued…

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