Arcana Read online

  Copyright 2020 © by Jess Whitecroft

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover photography by Tony Marturano, licensed by Shutterstock.

  Arcana

  by

  Jess Whitecroft

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  Chapters

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Prologue

  Arturo had heard all the stories about this stretch of desert. There was something about no longer being under constant electronic surveillance (sinister enough in Arturo’s opinion) that made people revert to much older anxieties. Once you passed that point where the phone signals blinked out, and kept on driving into the darkness, the ghosts came pouring back in. People thought themselves very sophisticated these days, but they were only a handful of dinners and smart phones away from hairy, nervous huddled figures sitting around a fire in the dark. People made up stories about this blank space of California desert, some based in fact, others pure nonsense. While Arturo didn’t believe in the white draped women said to walk, weeping tears of blood, along the side of the highway, he knew in his bones that there were bodies dumped out here. Blank spaces were good news for monsters, and there were plenty of them drawn to this one. If you walked into any one of the handful of far flung diners around here, you could meet them over a cheeseburger. Sharp eyed men in expensive jeans, or monsters barely turned twenty, downy faced and bulging with government firepower and insignias. Little baby psychopaths who had found their bloodthirsty niche while young, like Manson girls, but with better weapons.

  And they were part of the local folklore, naturally. Somewhere in this blank space – before it ever was one in the twenty-first century sense of the word – Charlie had told his followers that here was the hole in the ground where they were going to see out the end of the world, sit out the race war, and screw around on dune buggies for the rest of time. Probably could have pulled it off, too, if they hadn’t gotten vicious and murdered Sharon Tate.

  “I heard those freaks were back,” one of the border cops had said, when Arturo said he was passing through. If they asked, you had to tell them exactly where you were going, because it wasn’t worth your while not to.

  “Which ones?” said the other cop, squinting into the space behind Arturo’s radiator, flashlight in hand. There was no point telling them that there was nothing but avocados in the truck, because they never believed you. If anything, telling the truth only made them more suspicious. “How could the Mansons be back, dumbass? Charlie Manson’s dead, and most of the chicks who hung out with him are still in prison. Hell, they’re probably old ladies now.”

  “No, I don’t mean them. I mean cults. There’s one out there now, not a million miles away from Manson’s old stomping grounds.”

  “What kind of cult?”

  “I don’t know. Are there kinds of cults? All I know is that I heard there are a bunch of people – mostly old ladies, by the way—”

  “—oh cool. A grandma cult? What are they gonna do? Bring about the apocalypse by knitting?”

  “Do not rule out old ladies,” the first cop had said. “Old ladies know shit. Spooky shit. My grandma always knew who was going to be the next to die in our family. It was fucking creepy.”

  “Have you considered the possibility that your grandma might have been a serial killer?” said the cop with the flashlight, now peering behind Arturo’s front bumper with the expression of someone who wanted to be a real pain in the ass and remove the bumper completely.

  “That’s what I’m saying, man. Old ladies. Nobody ever fucking suspects them, because they’re nice little old ladies. You got a whole bunch of them out there in the desert practicing witchcraft—”

  “—okay, they are not practicing witchcraft—”

  “—they are. They call themselves witches.” And the cop had turned to Arturo. “You know about all that, right? Brujas? Santeria and all that shit?”

  Arturo was about to say that he didn’t, and that Santeria was more of a Cuban thing, but at that moment a huge black something flapped loose from behind the bumper, making the crouching cop scream like a teenage girl. He landed on his butt on the concrete. The thing was almost as large as a bird or a bat, but then it settled on the windshield and Arturo saw that it was a witch moth, easily eight inches wide with its wings outstretched.

  “Jesus,” said the first cop, when he’d finished laughing. “Someone’s gonna die. Those things are a death omen. That much I do know.”

  “They’re just moths,” said Arturo. “Kind of a pest, actually.”

  This time he’d been glad of the moth, because it had bought him a break. Embarrassed by their reaction to the insect, the border cops had stopped their posturing and stopped trying to take his truck apart to see if it contained anything else besides avocados. Now he was back on the road again, driving in complete darkness, a rosary swinging from the rear view mirror. Arturo wasn’t superstitious. The last time he’d given the cab a thorough cleaning, he had taken down the rosary and left it in the glovebox, but then his wife had put it back on the mirror for no other reason than it belonged there. Jesus was just part of the furniture.

  So many long stretches of Arturo’s life lately had been spent in a sort of trance, akin to prayer. White lines and weather scarred road signs were his rosary beads. He followed them into the dark and thought of something and nothing. The roads were endless and featureless, and he could go fifty miles or more just zoned out, floating along in the parched desert night. He drifted along for a while, until his attention was broken by the sign that said the gas station was fifteen miles ahead. Good. He could refuel and grab a piece of pie. And some more water. Arturo had bought a big Thermos bottle that almost – a little loose, but never mind – fitted perfectly into the truck’s cup holder. He wasn’t afraid of ghosts or witches, but he was terrified of running out of water.

  Something brushed the back of his neck.

  His conscious, logical mind registered the touch for less than a second, and then the lizard brain took over. He screamed the way you only scream when you’re alone in the dark and something touches you. The brakes screamed along with him. It was a moth, another one of those fucking moths, panicking almost as hard as he was. Black wings beat dust into his face and he flailed, knocking it out of the air with his hand, because he had to stop. Time slowed in the wake of terror. The tires screeched on the ragged asphalt as he swerved. He felt a wheel go over the shallow concrete barrier and thought ‘this is it.’ This was how he died.

  The truck stopped, but he went on flying forward in slow motion, until the seatbelt snapped tight. He felt his ribs snap and then the airbag exploded, stealing his breath. He sat voiceless with pain and shock for a long while, his poor, shaken brain repeating the same words like a mantra. Didn’t die, didn’t die, didn’t die.

  Good. Didn’t die. Jesus swung slowly to a halt from the wing mirror. Arturo’s head thundered, and even breathing hurt, but he was okay. Arms. Legs. All where they should be. Didn’t feel great, but all in one piece.

 
The moth was fine. It was chilling on top of the airbag.

  “Asshole,” he said, and realized his foot was wet. And cold.

  He looked down, bracing himself for what he might see, but then saw something far worse than gore and smashed bone. The Thermos bottle had tipped over. And there was no more water.

  How much water was in an avocado? Should be a lot, surely. The damned things needed enough irrigation, and all that water had to go somewhere.

  He managed to deflate the airbag and pushed at the door of the truck. It stuck, confirming his fears that it had been dinged up pretty bad, but after a hard shove from his burning shoulder it gave, almost tipping him out into the desert. The moth flew out over his head and immediately melted away into the night.

  Holy shit, it was dark. The moon was somewhere behind a cloud, and everything beyond the lights of his truck was absolutely black. He assumed the highway was behind him somewhere. That was where he needed to get back to. Somehow. His knees felt like they’d turned to mayonnaise, and his legs hurt from toe to hip and beyond. Everything hurt. His teeth felt like they’d been rattled in their sockets, and even the roots of his hair seemed to throb. He reached for his phone. It was a long shot, but there was still a chance that he might have just passed that point where a signal could be reached.

  Nope. Nothing.

  Arturo wrangled the remains of the airbag, found the flashlight in the glovebox and tried to figure out which way to go. That was when he heard it.

  At first he couldn’t believe he was that lucky, or that his brain – probably more smashed and bruised than the avocados in the back of his truck – was playing some ugly, neurological trick on him before the inevitable fatal bleed. But as he strained his ears in the dark, the sound was unmistakable. Voices. Human voices.

  They were singing. He couldn’t make out the words, but the tune was one of those ones that could start in any number of places, overlapping and harmonizing. And they weren’t far away, either. Instinctively he switched off the truck lights and saw a dull glow emanating from somewhere above the lip of the hollow where he’d landed. The singing rose, and he vaguely recognized it as something like a litany, like one of those roll calls of the saints he had used to sing in school. Arturo took the flashlight and gingerly stepped out across the dark, rocky ground. Cult or not, he didn’t care. They could have been the actual reincarnated Manson family and he wouldn’t have given a shit at this point, just so long as they had water and directions back to the highway. The voices were high and sweet and feminine, sirens in the night. He almost tripped, steadied himself, and found himself staring over the edge of another rise at…something.

  Candles. Dozens, maybe hundreds, all moving in a slow circle of fire and song. They were carried in the hands of robed figures, and now he could make out some of the words that they were singing. Names, and none of them sounded like the names of any of the saints he’d learned from the lips of the Jesuit brothers. Diana. Isis. Hecate. Bast. He shut off the flashlight, but he didn’t think they’d seen him. They went on circling and singing, and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw that the circle enclosed a pentagram, a five pointed star, raked out in what looked like white sand against the darker surface of the desert.

  And in the very center was an altar.

  The circle spiraled, twisting closer and closer to the altar at the middle. When it loosened again it left one of the robed number behind, and the figure removed its robe.

  It was a woman, but this was no old lady. Arturo didn’t feel the first drops of rain fall, because of her. Beneath the robe she wore a thin, white shift made from a fabric that veiled rather than concealed her body. Her thick hair was blazing red and her face – high cheekbones, wide mouth, heavy eyelids – was a perfect mask of priesthood. He felt water trickle into his mouth and was parched and sated all at once as the raindrops began to dampen her single garment, plastering it to her small breasts and long thighs. She laughed and lifted her arms to the sky. The circle was silent now, and Arturo leaned forward, mesmerized, his eyes almost bursting from their sockets in their need to drink her in.

  As he leaned, he dislodged a rock. He watched – in something like the same appalled slow motion that had taken over when he lost control of the truck – as the stone rattled noisily downwards and came to rest at the feet of another robed figure.

  This one only threw back her hood, but her face was more than he ever wanted to see of her, now or ever again. She was older, blonde, and in that instant he could almost see who she used to be – some nice white lady who posted wine mom memes on Twitter, and hosted a book club where they never read anything too controversial.

  But that was before. Before she’d come out here to the desert and turned into this large eyed, feral thing that scared him in the way that only certain kinds of women could scare men. The kind of woman who could look so deep into a man that he’d panic and break out the scold’s bridle and the ducking stool, and pile high the pyre to eradicate all traces of her from the earth. Her eyes were too big, and made him feel like a mouse reflected in the huge eyes of a hunting hawk. The rain began to pound on the dry ground, intensifying his sudden panic. He switched the flashlight back on and stumbled – every nerve and bone on fire – back towards the truck.

  It wasn’t there. He couldn’t find it. He’d overshot it somewhere in the dark, or maybe she had made it disappear. Why hadn’t he had the sense to leave the lights on? Now he was going to die lost and thirsty out here in the desert, assuming the witches didn’t hunt him down and sacrifice him first. God, that woman’s face.

  Old ladies know shit.

  His breathing rasped in his own ears, so that when he first heard it he couldn’t be sure if it was real or just frantic wishful thinking. His heart hammered so loud that he wanted to scream at it to shut up, but there…just beyond the sound of the thud thud thud…

  Tires. An engine.

  His lungs felt like they were about to burst, but he kept running, lurching, turning his ankles in the direction of the sound. He saw the bottom of a road sign and drew in a gasping breath of pure relief.

  There was the road, and even better, there was a truck. Lights ablaze. Arturo yelled and threw himself almost directly in its path. Both hands in the air, screaming like a castaway. The truck stopped with a hiss of airbrakes, and the door opened, spilling light and the syrupy whine of country music onto the road. “Hey, man,” said the driver, a large guy with glasses and a plaid shirt. “You need a ride?”

  Arturo nodded convulsively. When he tried to explain what had happened to him it all came out in a mess – crashed, moth, witches, avocados, thank you, thank you, thank you so much.

  “Yeah, no problem. I can drop you off at the gas station.”

  “Thank you,” Arturo said, and couldn’t seem to stop saying it. “Thank you, thank you. I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “Well, you can start by drying off,” said the trucker, wrinkling his nose. “How’d you get all wet out here?”

  Arturo followed the direction of his gaze and saw that he was standing in a puddle. He couldn’t have walked more than half a mile from where the rain had fallen hard enough to soak him to the bone, but here the air was as arid as it always was in this part of the Death Valley. The puddle at his feet was rapidly evaporating into the cracked road. The rain had stopped. No, not stopped. Not here. Here the rain hadn’t happened at all.

  1

  On Tuesdays Gus was in the old anatomy theater, a wooden amphitheater whose staggered seats sloped down to a stage where human bodies had once been unveiled and opened like props in a macabre magic act. The students said it was haunted, although Gus had been there after dark many times, and had encountered nothing more unsettling than the way the wind whistled through the gaps in the long rectangular windows.

  “Okay – trigger warning,” he said, because they’d come here to be spooked, after all. “Before we go any further, I should tell you that we’re about to get into the gruesome stuff, including images
that you will find upsetting. We’re going to be discussing some of the worst aspects of human behavior, including mass murder and multiple infanticide. I assume – and I hope – you’ve done the reading ahead of time and that you know this, but just be warned.” He looked around the class. Nobody left. If anything, they looked a lot more attentive than he had when he dropped the warning. “We all good?”

  There was a murmur of assent.

  “November 18, 1978,” Gus began. “Does that date mean anything to you?”

  A boy in the back raised his hand. “Jonestown.”

  “Good. Yes. And what happened at Jonestown?”

  “They all killed themselves. The whole cult. Mass suicide.”

  Gus flicked up the image on the screen behind him. It was one of the least graphic, but it was still horrifying. Taken from the air, it showed the dead fallen like stalks of colorful wheat, many side by side. Some had died holding hands, some with their arms around each other. “It’s thought that over nine hundred people died in Jonestown,” Gus said. “The largest loss of American civilian life in peacetime until 9/11. We don’t have exact figures for the number of casualties. They were stacked on top of one another in many cases. What you’re looking at here is only the top layer. The heat and humidity of the Guyanese jungle led to extremely rapid decomposition, making identification difficult for investigators. Also most of the bodies on that bottom layer were those of children. The children of Jonestown died first, fed potassium cyanide by their parents and caregivers.”

  “Is this the one where they drank the Kool-Aid?” said a boy with ear gauges. So much for reading ahead, then.