Part Three
(Part One is HERE)
(Part Two is HERE)
(Part Four is HERE)
I quickly learned that if Carissa had a strong point, it was marketing. She revamped my entire image, dubbing these new pieces my “Slasher Cycle.” In keeping with this, she changed the gallery website to credit me as ‘The Official Biographer of the Silver Lake Slasher.’ I had to admire her audacity, even as I grew to loathe her. But the approach garnered much interest, with each new painting selling first day of display, all for the nifty price of $6,066.00.
With all the money coming in, I didn’t have to try very hard to convince Carissa I was on board. Carissa wanted to believe I’d gotten over my compunctions and now embraced this new chapter in our lives. Little did she know that when I approached her about hosting a show, my motives had absolutely nothing to do with money. If Portlock had been filming me this whole time, she had to be in on it. And if Carissa was helping Portlock make his movie at my expense, that meant our entire relationship amounted to little more than an adventurous fiction; one long-con performance in a cut-throat filmmaker’s master plan: a two-act meta-movie designed to turn an ordinary person into a monster.
We inked the idea for the show by paying for a full-page ad in LA Weekly and another on Instagram. I smiled; everything was coming up Milhouse.
That’s when I discovered just how deep Carissa’s betrayal ran.
Three days after returning to the Walsh’s I woke to discover several new paintings and a nasty cut across my left palm. In the previous night’s fog, I could clearly remember a man’s face, tall and thin and at least seventy years old. He’d been murdered - a story in the paper later that night would confirm this - but blood found at the scene suggested that he’d managed to take a piece off his assailant with a kitchen knife during the struggle. Upon waking, the paintings I found in the studio confirmed this: images of blood and gore, with one a close-up of the palm of my hand, cut deep and leaking blood. Inside the gash, a bloodshot eye stared out from between the layers of lacerated meat. The thing inside me finally coming to the surface.
As I sat at the kitchen table shaking, I tried to drink my morning dose of Carissa’s tea. With the final mouthful, something caught in my teeth. Using my left pinky finger, I dislodged and recognized a tiny, purple flake. The lightbulb proved blinding: Carissa’s tea was made from Portlock’s drug. She’d been dosing me every day since the night of the first murder. Maybe before.
**
The next day was Thursday. I tried to play it cool. Not hard to do, considering how busy Carissa was with the move’s logistics. By the end of the weekend, we’d be in the new space, and I’d already convinced her that if I pitched in, we’d have the new Shock up and running by Wednesday. This meant a Thursday night show for my work was indeed a possibility.
**
There’s something I haven’t told you yet, but I very much need to now, before we continue. If you’re still reading this, maybe you believe me. I hope so; my experiences very much affect others, especially if you live in the Los Angeles area. As I proceed, you’ll see that the events that follow move the story out into a considerably larger scale. The thing is, though, from here things get weird. Well, weirder. I may lose some of you. Fine. Just remember, I tried to warn you.
Shortly after watching those videos of myself in the Walsh’s house, I had begun to experience a kind of tenacious lucidity during my blackouts. What’s more, when I did sleep, my dreams effectively became a conversation with the Lava. Yeah, I know, fungus as we think of it can’t talk. Only, that’s not exactly true. Guys like Terence and Dennis McKenna posited the idea of sentient fungus as far back as the 60s, but most people don’t listen to anyone who talks about stuff like that, and a lot of the ones that do tend to be burnt-outs. The first time I heard the ‘voice’ of the Lava in my dream, I woke up knowing I had 100% been listening to an actual living, thinking being. Because of this, I was finally able to learn a thing or two about it, given name Deschidere, or “opening” in its native Romania, where it grew wild among the Carpathian Mountains on the Southeast border of the historic region known colloquially as Transylvania.
No, I’m not fucking kidding.
Put what you know about this region aside because it’s probably all Hollywood bullshit. Deschidere is a rare, sentient fungus that, when ingested, joins with its host to create a macro-consciousness. What’s that mean? It means Lava is a living, intelligent entity - a parasite, if you will - and once introduced into a host body, it burrows deep into the unconscious mind and awakens certain primal personality traits in order to perpetuate itself. This is apparently known as “The First Process” due to a pre-existing relationship early tribal humans in that geographic area had with the fungus. You see, Lava makes its host kill because the blood is the soil that yields more Lava. So yeah, that weird mold I’d seen at the Walsh place? More Lava. And I was willing to bet if I went back there again, all traces of it would be gone, harvested by Portlock.
Now the second film’s title made sense; Its Soil Be Murder was a direct reference to Lava and how it grew from a combination of violence, blood and death. Not just death - wrongful death.
**
I’d imagine it must seem fairly ludicrous that, after everything I have related to bring this story up to speed, I have yet to mention the police in any substantial capacity. That’s not embellishment or lethargy on my part. Quite the contrary; looking back now, I can tell you that despite my confusion and terror, my increasing success as an artist had instilled a hubris that made me careless. I didn’t give more than a perfunctory fuck about the fact that I had publicly launched a series of paintings based on intimate knowledge of recent crime scenes. If you think you can imagine the egomania that compelled me to do this, you are mistaken. All I wanted by that point was Portlock, and I wasn’t thinking about anything else. This was another big mistake, thinking myself invisible to the police.
Turns out, the Walsh family had pervasive home security cameras. We’re talking every room. And based on a hunch, one of the detectives working the case had asked the monitoring company to keep them active. Once a day, Six Point Security would send the day’s feed from Casa Walsh to the LAPD. As time allowed, a cadet would toggle through every frame of that footage, eyes peeled for anything out of place. Seems this Detective - Arthur Gradanko - believed the old cop adage to be gospel:
The killer always returns to the scene of the crime.
There was no way for me to know then that I was living on borrowed time. The general pulse of the department must have been rather chaotic, the crimes having kicked up all manner of social unrest. Because of this, the police struggled to keep up with the surveillance. But little by little, someone watched every second of that footage until the afternoon before the show, when Detective Gradanko got what he was hoping for.
My face.
**
The day of the show, I had to keep myself from outright asking Carissa if she’d invited Portlock. I didn’t want to tip my hand in any way. If Justin didn’t show, it would be back to square one.
The doors opened at 9:00 PM, but we didn’t see anyone for over two hours.
“I told you,” Carissa said flirtatiously, hiking up her skirt and maneuvering me into the back room, where she fucked me on my new worktable. Might as well get some use out of the thing.
No sooner did we start going at it than the little bell on the door alerted us to our first visitor.
“Welcome, friend! Be right out,” Carissa called as she came, her voice quivering. I followed a minute or two later, and in less than five, we casually strolled into the gallery to meet our guest, beads of sweat still glistening on our foreheads.
“Wow. I love the new place.”
“Thank you, Detective.”
My head snapped around and I made eye contact with a tall man, grayish hair, mid-to-late fifties. Dick Tracey’s chin mixed with DiCaprio’s brow.
“Renn, this is Detective Gradanko. He’s the one I told you about.”
“Who?”
“You know, the Detective I told you who stopped by a few days ago? The one working the Silver Lake Slasher case.”
Carissa had not told me anything of the sort. My hackles went up; was she working for Portlock or the fucking cops?
**
Shortly after Detective Gradanko appeared, the gallery became mobbed. I cornered Carissa and argued with her about withholding his visit from me, but she insisted she had told me.
“How the fuck would you even remember, Renn? You’re always blasted on one drug or another.”
I had to bite my tongue, knowing what I did about her fucking tea, but I’d come too far and was so close to Portlock, I couldn’t blow it now. Amidst the crowd, I found it easy to avoid Gradanko. Flitting around the room, talking about my work, I played the role Carissa had created for me. What better way to avoid the shit storm amassing at my heels?
“Yes, well, the intense nature of these crimes leaves imprints on our reality. My gift - really a curse - is to be able to interact with these imprints.” I told a gangly, androgynous hipster named Sailor who had cornered me in front of one of my latest pieces, an overhead view of a room saturated with blood.
By 10:30, Gradanko had disappeared. I felt myself breathe a sigh of relief. But with relaxation came fatigue; my social mileage was way tapped out. I excused myself to dip into the back and do a couple lines to keep me going.
Since we’d only been in the space for less than a day, there was quite a bit of work we still needed to do. Chief among those tasks was building a proper barrier between the public and private areas. For the moment, a thin, black sheet hung over the double doorway that opened into the supply room, at the rear left of which sat the door to the office and the small living space we planned to create. It was here I found Gradanko smoking a cigarette and looking through a small bureau Carissa used for invoices.
“This is a private area, capiche?”
“Yeah, yeah. Let me guess, this where you keep the photo references you use for your work?”
“I don’t use photo references, Detective.”
“Oh, right. You paint from, ahem, visionary experiences.”
He said this in a way that told me he thought I was full of shit.
“The website calls you the ‘Official Biographer of the Silver Lake Slasher.’ To me, that implies you know him. Or, ah, maybe you are him. Eh?”
I tried to play it cool but felt like a stoned teenager coming home late to find my parents still awake. Everything I did or said seemed to telegraph my secret in ten-foot-high, neon letters. Because of this, I let the Detective do most of the talking.
Detective Gradanko took this opportunity to explain what he had on me and how he’d gotten it. His first visit might have been motivated by no more than the sheer audacity of my nom de plume, but with the advent of the Walsh’s security footage, he had me dead to rights.
His words.
Of course, when I asked why they hadn’t already arrested me, I realized that Gradanko harbored some pretty interesting ideas about the scene that had sprung up around my work.
“I started as a cop back in New York. Summer of 1977, to be exact.”
When I confessed this meant little to me, he went on to explain that he’d come on board at NYPD during the Son of Sam murders. He’d been assigned to the unit that discovered the connection to Untermeyer Park in Yonkers and, subsequently, something called The Church of the Final Process, a name I recognized immediately as a derivation of the early Romanian’s “First Process” relationship with the Deschidere. The recognition was unexpected, and Gradanko took it as a sign of involvement.
“Yeah. That’s what I thought. See, the city of New York may have served Berkowitz up a la carte, but some of us thought the connection to a larger Satanic Conspiracy was, you know, incontrovertible.”
“Fascinating. And I suppose your video proves that I am… what? The real Son of Sam?”
“I think there’s a lot more people involved in this shit than most cops realize, and I’d say your recent brush with success goes a long way toward corroborating that. Let me show you something.”
Gradanko unlocked his phone and studied it for a moment, his fingers swiping over the screen until he stopped and held it out so I could see.
Before me was a photograph of Carissa, there was no doubt about that. She stood surrounded by several others on the steps of what I took to be a church I knew right away was the same one in my painting. The same one in the painting on the wall during Primordial Return. On her left hand, clear as day, was a ring with the symbol I recognized from Benjamin the Producer’s sway bag.
“That’s your lady, right?”
I couldn’t hide my surprise at the image. The picture was black and white and grainy, no doubt a quick snap of a photo in an old file, mildewed and forgotten until this man’s obsession led him to find it.
“What year is this from?”
“That’s the rub, kid. 1981. Hasn’t aged a day, has she?”
I didn’t know what to say; looking back, I now know this was the point where part of me figured it all out. But it was a deep part and one I wasn’t used to listening to unless I had a brush in my hand.
Carissa emerged from the back room, eyed us suspiciously.
“Are you having a good time, Lieutenant?”
“Detective,” Gradanko corrected her as he took a defiant drag from his cigarette, then stubbed it out on the floor with his boot, “You can stop trying to butter me up. I know you’re in on your boyfriend’s little art project.”
Carissa fixed her icy stare on him. For a moment, she resembled a statue with a nearly perfect porcelain complexion. One that might turn you to stone if you met her gaze.
“Do tell? What makes you think Renn is my *ahem* boyfriend?”
“Save it, Morticia. You think I didn’t hear you too pounding away in the back room when I first came in? I can practically smell his cum running down the inside of your stockings.”
“Classy.”
“Way I figure it, you both set it up. Recon the victims, plan it out. He does the fun part; you take the photos.”
“So you have her on camera, too?” I asked.
“Maybe I do,” he lied. I wondered what else he’d said might be make-believe.
“Oh, well, Lieutenant, if you have us on camera, I guess you should just arrest us, no?”
I shot Carissa a what the fuck look, but she remained intent on our opponent. From the bureau behind me, I picked up the putty knife I’d used to cut up the canvas night before last. Fuck, this was escalating quickly.
“It would be my pleasure. You’re both under arrest for murder. Happy?”
“Very much,” Carissa said, holding out her arms to accept the cuffs; a smile spread across her face.
“Wipe that smug grin off your puss, bitch. What’d you have to be happy about?”
“Well, you said it yourself, Dee-tech-teev,” Carissa’s enunciation of Gradanko’s title sounded like a slap in the face, “look how well your little investigation into Sam went. You might have taken an arm, but The Process will always grow the limb back. Lot’s of limbs, ya know?”
Gradanko’s face betrayed the wave of his utter frustration as it broke and rolled back. He jerked forward, grabbed Carissa by the wrists, and slapped on the first cuff. Before he could get the second, I saw the androgynous Hipster dip beneath the black sheet divider. He moved fast and silent, was up on the Detective just as he clasped that second cuff.
“You have the right to remain silent-” he started but got no further as Sailor caught him by the hair with his left hand and dragged a straight razor across his throat with his right.
“What the fuck?” I screamed, a geyser of blood spraying me in the face, neck and chest.
“It’s time, Renn. Welcome to the Church of the First Process.”