Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (76 page)

“I don’t know. You tell us…” Gordon says, certain that Lloyd is about to do just that, anyway.

Lloyd slows the Bentley to take them through a hairpin turn. “There’s an ancient Chinese belief,” he says, “that an invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. It’s believed that the thread may stretch or tangle, but it never breaks.” Lloyd pauses as they all lean to the left, pushing against centrifugal force. As the road straightens out again he says, “I believe the red threads become especially vivid for those connected by murder. And in your tangled skein of coincidences surrounding Charles Manson, the Beatles, and
Rosemary’s Baby
, there’s at least one significant thread I think you’ve overlooked. You haven’t yet considered the role of that master magus and summoner of demons, Aleister Crowley.”

“But Crowley wasn’t even alive in the sixties,” Gordon protests.

“True, but his book,
Moonchild
, foreshadowed the plot of
Rosemary’s Baby
. And Charles Manson was certainly exposed to Crowley’s influence through Scientology and its splinter groups like the Process Church, if not through more direct routes. And don’t forget, there’s a picture of Aleister Crowley included in the Beatles’ ‘People We Like’ group assemblage on the cover of
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,
which was released in June of 1967, just a few months after Manson’s release from prison. How does the song go? ‘
It was twenty years today… Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play….
’ Twenty years takes us back to 1947–Crowley’s last year on Earth. It was also the time of the
Babalon Working
and many other strange events that we’ve already discussed.”

“Like the opening of that interdimensional energy portal over Disneyland that lets in all the aliens,” says Gordon.

“Actually, most of the
Babalon Working
took place out in the Mojave Desert, closer to where the Manson Family camped out.”

“Oh,
that
figures….”

“It’s my belief that the Manson Family murders, and many of the other famous serial killings in California and elsewhere, weren’t just random acts of violence–they were the Flower Power heyday equivalent of contract hits by a satanic Murder, Incorporated.”

“Whoa!” says Skip. “Hold on there, Big Guy... you lost me.”

“The myth of the Lone Nut serial killer is just as patently bogus as the myth of the Lone Gunman,” Lloyd says, trying his best to explain. “Charles Manson, Son of Sam, the Zodiac Killer… those sickos weren’t just making up their own rules as they went along, acting on sexual compulsions, or playing cat-and-mouse with law enforcement agencies for the hubristic kick they got out of it. On the contrary, they were all part of a bigger scheme, a grander design. They were carrying out their roles as mind-controlled foot soldiers in an interrelated network of satanic cults.”

“Do you have any idea how fucking
craaazy
that sounds?” Twinker asks him.

“It gets crazier,” Lloyd promises her.

“I am, like, so
not
surprised….”

“Haven’t you ever wondered why California became such a magnet for serial killers in the late-sixties and early-seventies?” Lloyd asks them.

“I know I have,” Gordon says, raising his hand.

“Me too!” chimes in D.H. and Skip.

“I always thought it was because they wanted to kill all the hippies,” Jimmy says, “sort of like sharks feeding on baby seals.”

“You’re not far off,” Lloyd says. He glances admiringly over his shoulder at his nephew –

– and almost drives them straight over one of Big Sur’s picturesque cliffs.

“Jesus, look out!” Gordon shouts. He grabs the steering wheel and swerves the Bentley back into its own lane.

Lloyd retakes the wheel with barely flustered aplomb, saying, “The view is rather spectacular, don’t you think?” Out beyond the guardrail they almost crashed through and some 300 feet below them, the jade green, foam-laced waves of the Pacific churn against mussel-covered outcroppings with a timeless, Zen-like grandeur.

“Yeah, it’s a great view,” Gordon admits, “but I don’t want to smash my face through your windshield to get a closer look at it.”

“Nice save, Crash,” D.H. compliments him.

“Yeah, good one…” Skip says, reaching over the front seat to clap Gordon on the shoulder.

“Who needs serial killers when you’ve got Lloyd driving the car?” says Twinker, who’s so used to amphetamine rushes that the adrenaline surge has only made her a tiny bit snarky.

“Oh, hush…” Lloyd demurs, “it wasn’t even that close.”

“Yeah, we had at least another six inches of road in front of us before we found out if this Bentley could sprout wings and fly,” Jimmy says sarcastically. His knee-jerk admiration for his uncle apparently doesn’t extend to situations involving his own death.

“Do you kids plan on razzing me until the end of my days, or do you want to know why California’s hippie dreams of a utopian paradise now lie in smoking ruins?” Lloyd asks them.

“We just wanna razz you,” says Twinker, speaking for all of them.

“Then razz away,” Lloyd says with a dismissive wave of his hand.

“It’s no fun if you don’t get all huffy about it,” Twinker says. “So go on: tell us about your precious satanic serial killer cults,” she coaxes him. “Does the Zodiac Killer belong to the Freemasons?”

Lloyd gives her a gimlet-eyed stare in the rear-view mirror. “It’s strange you should mention that, even in jest,” he says. “The codes and symbols in the Zodiac’s letters suggested he was familiar with naval intelligence. And at least one witness to the Zodiac’s murder spree claims to have seen him wearing a hood, like a Klansman, and a ceremonial apron, like a Mason.”

“Freaky,” says Skip.

“I heard the Son of Sam went around shooting people while he was wearing a fez, like a Shriner,” D.H. jokes. “And his getaway car was, like, a go-kart.”

“The Son of Sam was what drew my attention to the satanic cult angle in the first place,” Lloyd says grimly. “Back in 1979, the Queens District Attorney, John Santucci, decided to reopen the Son of Sam case after concluding that David Berkowitz didn’t act alone. Too many police sketches from eyewitness descriptions at the various crime scenes were obviously
not
depictions of Berkowitz. Also, a disturbingly high number of the people who were complicit in the murders, according to Berkowitz, later ending up dying in spectacularly violent ways.”

“Like we almost did,” Twinker kids him.

Lloyd pretends he didn’t hear her. “By way of a convoluted example, there was a man named John Carr living in the house behind Berkowitz’s place. He was the owner of the barking black dog named Harvey that Berkowitz claimed was a high demon who’d told him to go out and shoot people.”

“I always thought Harvey was supposed to be a giant rabbit,” D.H. interrupts, “or a
Pooka.
At least that’s what he was in that old Jimmy Stewart movie.”

“I need to see that movie…” says Gordon, thinking about his own encounters with a giant bunny. “What’s it called?”

“Harvey.”

“Harvey, in this case, was a demon-haunted Labrador retriever,” Lloyd continues drolly. “Take that however you may…. John Carr’s father, more interestingly, was named Sam Carr, which made John Carr the true ‘Son of Sam.’ Additionally implicating Carr was a line from one of the Son of Sam’s letters to the press that accused a certain ‘John Wheaties’ of being a ‘rapist and suffocator of young girls.’ John Carr happened to have a sister named Wheat and he himself went by the nickname ‘Wheaties,’ for some inane reason. According to Berkowitz, John Carr had planned and executed the bulk of the Son of Sam murders, along with his brother, Michael, and a third person whom Berkowitz–fearing for his family–would only name as Manson II. Berkowitz admitted that he’d shot a few people on his own, but he claimed that, for the most part, he was just a lookout who took the fall for the rest of the group. He also claimed the Carr brothers had initiated him into a satanic cult that ritually sacrificed animals and profited from child pornography. Of course, how much can you believe from a man who claims he was programmed to kill by a talking dog, right?”

“Right,” says Gordon, choosing to make no mention of the fact that he’d once wanted to marry his basset hound.

“But here’s the interesting thing…” Lloyd says. “In 1978, John Carr died from a shotgun blast to the head while he was visiting an Air Force base in North Dakota. His death was ruled a suicide, even though someone had scratched the number of the beast,
666
, in the dried blood on his hand and then smeared something curious on the wall next where his body was found: ‘
NYSS
’ was written there in John Carr’s own blood. ‘New York Son of Sam’ would be the obvious interpretation, don’t you think?”

“Or it could be
‘Nazi Youth Schutzstaffel
,’” says Gordon, showing off. “Either way, I can’t believe the Air Force got that written off as a suicide. Do you think they had one of those secret remote viewing centers there?”

“Perhaps that, or a satanic day care center,” says Lloyd. It’s hard to tell if he’s joking. “John Carr’s brother, Michael, also died violently about a year later, in a car crash on Manhattan’s West Side Highway near 72nd Street–in relatively close proximity to the interdimensional energy portal created above the Dakota building by Aleister Crowley in 1918, which, as I mentioned, may have suffered a breach during Ingo Swann’s remote viewing experiments at the nearby American Society for Psychical Research in 1972.”

“Man, I wonder what Yoko thinks, living there now…” D.H. muses out loud. “She must be getting bad vibes up her Japanese yin-yang.”

“Whatever happens to Yoko’s yin-yang is her business,” Lloyd says chivalrously. “But what happened to Arlis Perry, after Ingo Swann moved west and took up his remote viewing experiments again at the Stanford Research Institute… well, that’s another matter entirely.”

“Who’s Arlis Perry?” Gordon asks, since somebody has to do it.

“Arlis Perry was a young woman who was savagely murdered inside the Stanford Memorial Church–not far from the Stanford Research Institute–on October 12th, 1974. That date just happens to coincide with Aleister Crowley’s birthday. He would have been ninety-nine. The unfortunate Ms. Perry was only nineteen. She’d been beaten, strangled, and stabbed with an ice pick through her brain–then she was stripped nude from the waist down. She was found positioned with her head toward the altar and her legs spread wide. Her jeans had been carefully flattened and arranged across her splayed legs in an inverted V-shaped pattern that seemed to echo the Masonic Square and Compass symbol. A 24-inch altar candle was wedged between her exposed breasts and another such candle protruded from her vagina. Semen had been dribbled on a nearby kneeling pillow–but despite that evidence, her killer was never found.”

“It’s good to know you can still jack-off in church and sacrifice a young girl to Satan without getting arrested in this country,” D.H. says with unmistakable irony.

“Freedom to worship as we choose! Whoo-hoo!”
Jimmy hoots.

“As this case illustrates, even worshipping in a house of the Lord has its perils’” Lloyd says. “Arlis Perry never harmed anyone. She was a decent, God-fearing Christian girl from Bismarck, North Dakota.”

“Oh shit… I can already see where you’re going with this,” says Gordon. “This has something to do with that Air Force base in North Dakota where Berkowitz’s buddy got shot, right?”

“In a roundabout way, yes,” Lloyd says with a nod of his double chin. “My first thought when I heard of that poor girl’s death was that Ingo Swann’s astrally-attention-grabbing remote viewing activities had drawn some particularly nasty interdimensional entity to Stanford, which had then assumed human form. But for that to occur, an interdimensional energy portal would have had to have already been in place from some prior magickal ritual. And Ingo, as I well knew, was no practitioner of the dark arts. So I was perplexed by the whole business… but then I realized that Arlis Perry’s murder
was
the ritual. Her orchestrated death had been the climax to an elaborate demonic summoning that created a
new
interdimensional portal that’s been open above the Stanford University campus ever since.”

“Man, with all these serial killings, California must be looking like astral Swiss cheese by now,” says Gordon.

“Not every murder creates a portal,” Lloyd corrects him. “But murder done within the context of certain magickal rituals can increase the porosity of the interdimensional borders, leading to a ‘thinning of the veil’–or dilating of a portal–that makes it easier for predatory entities to cross over.”

“Great…” says Twinker, wafting sarcasm. “Why don’t I just kill myself now and save the predatory entities the trouble?”

“Suicide can have the same effect as ritual murder, because it focuses and releases such intense, despairing, negative energy,” Lloyd explains to her. “Which is one of the reasons why–among many–that you should never,
ever,
kill yourself. Besides, it’s just bad form, like walking out in a huff in the middle of a great symphony performance.”

“Yeah, but what if your life is more like a really shitty movie?”

“Every life is a symphony–a grand, ever-shifting, vibrational pattern made up of countless interacting and resonating frequencies. If you think otherwise, then clearly you haven’t been paying attention.”

“Sometimes I feel like I need an intermission,” says Twinker, grudgingly.

“Just be glad you’re not Arlis Perry,” Skip says in a pathetic attempt to lift her spirits. Cheerleaders used to carry Skip in their arms (before he dropped acid and subsequently dropped off the football team); he seems baffled that Twinker isn’t happier to be sitting on his lap now.

“So who killed Arlis Perry, anyway?” Gordon asks Lloyd. “Did you ever find out?”

“Oddly enough, it was David Berkowitz who helped me figure that out,” says Lloyd. “In 1979, Berkowitz, in his prison cell, somehow managed to obtain a book about witchcraft. He later sent that same book to the North Dakota police, after underlining certain passages in it about Charles Manson and the Four Pi Movement. He also included a cryptic note in his own handwriting that read:
‘Arlis Perry. Hunted, stalked, and slain. Followed to California.’”