Chapter Text
September, 1992
“Since when does the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime dedicate an entire task force to looking into child abuse?”
“This is part of a wider investigation into an influx of claims regarding satanic ritual abuse across the country.” Detective Rock says, stony. As if that doesn’t sound deluded and straight out of some terrible made for television movie.
“Wait, sorry—” Dave settles his elbows on the table, leans until he taps on the laminate with the tip of his pointer finger. “You’re serious?”
Rock’s got a damn good poker face. “Yes.”
“Devil worshiping?” Dave laughs. The unflattering lightning, the stiff seat under his ass, the bland coffee: it’s all getting to him. “At a bible camp?”
Rock takes a beat, gives him an unimpressed tilt of his mouth, before presenting him with another set of photos. Some are shot on color film, some black and white. He squints at them, tries to make sense of what he’s seeing: pentagrams, black candles, and upside down crosses that look fresh off some Hollywood back lot. “Any of this look familiar?”
“No, no.” Dave grimaces and dismisses the photos with the shake of his head. “Never saw anything like that at Trinity.”
“Alright. I’d like to know more about that roommate you mentioned.” Rock shuffles his papers around. “James Hetfield.”
“What about him?” Dave shrugs.
“Did he ever do anything to suggest a violent past?” The woman next to Rock asks. She seems to have a bone to pick with Dave, like this whole thing is a waste of her time. Dave tends to agree with that sentiment. “Were you scared of him?”
“Scared of him? No.” He won’t dare tell them he sometimes, still, closes his eyes and pretends. The furrows and whorls of James’ fingerprints bruise him yet, but the sillage of his touch is all that’s left. No, he wasn’t scared.
June, 1983
Dave sweats in the early morning light where he’s tangled in his sheet, the weight of James zippered along his spine only adding to the stifling heat. He wrestles his legs free, sighs when the fresh air washes over him. The motion jostles the entire bed and the arms around his naked waist tightens.
“James?” He whispers, voice sleep soft. “You awake?”
“No.”
Dave laughs a little, struggles to turn over in the stockade around his body but manages anyway. He dusts a fingertip along James’ eyebrow, down his nose, just to watch it scrunch at the tickle. James nudges his hand away and hides his face against Dave’s throat.
Dave crawls that touch down his flank still tender and pink from the day he swam beneath the blazing noon sun. He murmurs against the flecked skin of his shoulder as he finds the front of those dorky white briefs James is wearing, lets his hand dip underneath the elastic. “Really? Still asleep?”
“Alright, alright.” James grumbles before kissing where his mouth rests. “I’m awake.”
Dave scratches his hand through the hair under James’ navel just to feel the muscles jump, just to hear the little gasp for air. “What happened last night?”
“Huh?”
“Do you remember anything?” He pulls back from where James pecks at him, a rabbit under his buzzard kiss. Still eager, still hungry, even as he shakes off a drowsy delirium. “It's kinda fuzzy for me.”
“Yeah, you were out of it.” James mumbles, landing on his back, the crown of half-baked curls splaying beneath him. He grabs at Dave’s wrist, urges his hand lower, molding against his palm with a hitch and a smirk. “You shouldn’t take drugs from Kirk anymore.”
“I didn’t.” Dave’s brows pinch together on their own accord. He turned down Kirk’s offers. He knows that, he knows that happened. He’s sure of it. “I didn’t take any—”
“Come on, keep going.” James interrupts, insisting and wet against his fingers. Dave can’t help biting at the satin pink of his panting mouth, swiping his tongue across the dewing pearl cradled in aragonite nacre. James grips his neck, pulls him closer still. “You can fuck me if you want.”
Dave’s touch stops. “What?”
“Or I could fuck you if you like that.” James whispers against his mouth, bats his spider leg lashes, pale in the sun. His heart skips a beat or two and he doesn’t hide it well. Dave just stares at him, the way he looks hopelessly young and shy right there in that moment. “Nevermind. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s—” Dave pulls down his own underwear, presses the stiffness of them both together like flowers between pages of books. He eats the moan that escapes James before it can reach the rest of the room, gnashes it between his canines and molars. “Like this is good.”
James nods, agreeing. And Dave wants to tell him he’s never met anyone quite like James; that before, he’d never seen spoiled food on a plate, crumbling and rotten, that he wanted to take a bite of. That he wanted to gorge himself on until he was full, until he was sick.
And he does just that, ruts against the warmth under the blanket with James’ nails digging into his back, his nose smashed against his cheek. Until he’s whining with his arms tight around Dave’s neck, his shoulders, in a crushing hug, like he can’t get his fill. Like he’d crack him open and climb inside, make a coffin of his body, if that were at all possible.
“Don’t stop.” James pleads, hot and quiet in his ear. Dave cums first hearing those hiccuping little breaths, shimmies down to finish James off with a vise grip and a nip of teeth on the fat of his stomach. He curls in on himself, follows suit with next to no warning and the majority of his load lands in Dave’s hair. “Shit, sorry—”
“It’s fine.” Dave chuckles, attempting to scrape some out, to no avail. He wipes his hands on his briefs around his thighs and pulls them back up over his ass. “I needed a shower anyway.”
James doesn't laugh, just lies there for a second, sated and heaving for air. Then he grabs Dave’s face with both hands, pulls so suddenly they nearly clack front teeth, and smashes their mouths together in a hays code kiss, too long and awkward to be at all romantic. They break apart with a smack. “What happens when summer is over?”
“I don’t really know.” Dave answers honestly. “But I hope I see you again.”
The corner of James’ frown twitches almost invisibly. “Last night, you were talking about eyes.”
“What’s that mean?” Dave pulls back, rubs at the ultramarine veins in the wrist under his thumb. He scrambles to search his memory, sifting all the jumbled moments like sand through a sieve. He comes up with nothing.
“You weren't making sense.” James shrugs, wipes Dave’s spunk off his stomach with the sheet and sits on the edge of the bed. Dave glimpses something, fresh and red and angry, so he makes a barrette of his hand to get a second look. Three scratches—equal in length, right there on the curve of Jame’s shoulder blade—that he knows aren’t from him. “Just kept saying the eyes were scary.”
-
The search of his backpack for a single spare cigarette is fruitless. The carton lies crumpled on his bed, the rest of his belongings upturned right alongside it. Dave huffs. He definitely should’ve purchased a pack just for himself on his last supply run with Cliff.
He knows there are more than likely some cigs in the Woodshed, but that would require him to tie his sneakers, get a flashlight, and haul ass all by his lonesome. That's too much work for a quick fix. Poking his head out of his cabin, he sees the lights are on at Kirk’s.
Dave taps twice on the door. No dice, the place is empty. He almost gives up but then he remembers Lars and the secret stash, the box under the bed, he became privy to all those nights ago. Reinvigorated, he jogs to the single cabin and knocks but finds it empty too. He hesitates, hovers in the doorway for a moment.
Lars probably wouldn’t mind if he just took a peek, if he bummed one. He did say they were friends. And even if he does mind, it's usually easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission. In Dave’s experience, anyway. So he allows the door to swing close on the spring loaded hinge, drops to the floor and reaches for the box pushed up against the wall beneath the bed frame.
Sitting back on his heels, Dave pops the latch. He sets the skin mags aside, shuffles through the weed and the cassettes. There’s a loosey rolling around in the deepest corner and he reaches for it—victorious, gluttonous. His nails collide hollowly against the flimsiness there and he tucks the cig behind his ear, purposely pokes the bottom of the box with more force.
It rattles. He pokes it again and it jostles the contents in the opposite corner. So he clears out all the junk until he’s met with a false bottom, demarcated with a carving of an upside down triangle. Tracing it, he remembers the Woodshed, the chapel. Up, over, down. Up, over, down. He takes the panel out.
In the hidden compartment he sees a paper. It’s dirty on all its folds, soft and weak from how many times it’s been open and closed. The paper is blank save for a design that Dave can’t make sense of. He doesn’t know what to call it, all bizarre swirls and hooks, only knows he’s never seen it before.
There’s a little notebook, those spiral pocket sized journals with the lined paper. It’s virtually empty beside the first few pages, and even then, writing is scarce and not in English. And then, oddly, there are rocks. An earth stained spread of irregular oatmeal colored rocks and then one in the center—flat, curvilinear edged and prominent. Dave picks it up.
He turns it over in his hand, slightly pitted and almost porous in spots. His thumb hovers over the flat of it, familiar. He sets it back down carefully and touches the others that cradle it. The same distinct weightlessness greets him as expected. These are not rocks.
Quickly, with a detached terror trickling along the length of his back, Dave returns the notebook and the paper. Deposits the false bottom in place, hides what he found, buries it back in its shallow grave. Blinks against the burning in his eyes, lets that upside down triangle blur in and out of clarity a few final times before dumping the tapes and porn back on top.
He desperately wants to forget what he saw here so he closes the lid and flicks the latch and shoves the box back from where it came, so fast it audibly skids against the floor. It takes a second to realize that panting breath is coming from his own lungs. When he glances down he partly expects his own hands to be stained red in some bluebeardian punishment, too acquainted with a bloody key and a dead body, a secret.
He stands, drenched in cold, and marches to the door—out, down the steps, past Kirk’s cabin, and back to his own. This cannot be happening, he can’t let it. So he climbs into bed, shoes on, pulls the blanket up and over his head in a panic he hasn’t felt in years. No, no. They aren’t rocks.
They’re bones.
-
Dave feigned illness the next day, spent each hour huddled under his blanket in sleeplessness. James asked him if he should get the nurse but he didn’t answer, couldn’t find his voice, and brushed the concern off with the shake of his head.
But he couldn't hide forever, and he had to work with Kirk and Cliff all Monday, checking over his shoulder and flinching at every sound. Every touch. The guys ribbed him, asked him why he was in such a bad mood. He wasn’t trying to be rude, he was merely worried that if he opened his mouth he’d spew.
He needs to tell someone, needs to do something. He thinks for a second that he should tell Phil what he saw, but then he remembers that calculated indifference he had that night in the office. No, he needs to go bigger. He needs the police.
But first, he needs to warn James. He needs to get him out, to help him. Maybe they can go together. He gets his notebook and hastily flips to a fresh page. As he turns page after page, Dave sees his own writing, words he doesn’t understand or remember writing. His hand trembles as he scribbles on one of the only blank spaces left and rips it off.
WOODSHED AT MIDNITE. COME ALONE.
He folds it once and leaves it poking out from under James’ pillow. He just hopes he gets the message in time. Dave hasn’t seen him all day, can’t possibly imagine where he’s run off to. Maybe he feels burned by Dave’s coldness and is now giving him a taste of his own medicine. But tonight, he’ll fix everything. Tonight.
On his way to the mess hall the bell for dinner rings out, loud and echoing. A few stragglers, Dave included, appear to be in no hurry to get there. When he steps through the doorway, his eyes search for an open seat, but before he can find it he sees James and Kirk on the line serving dinner, their hair plopped goofily in nets.
James waves at him from across the line with the ladle, a smile lighting up his face. Okay, so he’s not in the doghouse. Good. He waves back, heads toward the queue, but stops short as Lars steps into his field of vision.
“No smile for me? Ouch.” He clasps his own chest at the injustice. He wheels Dave around, directs him toward a table, and that hold feels not entirely dissimilar to a hanging tree and a noose around his neck. “I already got you a plate.”
“Oh.” Dave blinks at the plate. He sits, clears his throat. Takes hold of his fork as if it’s his first day with opposable thumbs, all out of sorts. “Thanks. You didn’t have to do that.”
“Heart of a servant.” Lars rolls his eyes. He shakes his perfectly coiffed hair away from his face, bubblegum lips pursed demurely. Dave wonders if he tastes as sickly sweet as he looks. “What’s new? I feel like it's been ages.”
“Wasn’t feeling well.” Dave grunts through his bite of spaghetti. He pokes at a meatball with the prongs and glances around before continuing. “You said something the other night. Y’know, I could have anything I want if I ask?”
“Well, there's one caveat.” Lars settles his elbows on the table and leans in, interested. His voice is low enough that nobody else can hear them. Dave, stupefied by that chrysocolla stare, hangs on his every word. “You have to give something to get something. It’s sort of like an exchange, a transaction.”
“A sacrifice?” Dave clarifies. Lars quirks an eyebrow, neither confirms nor denies. And he feels the compulsion to confess so he discloses the very thing he was trying so hard to hide. “I looked in the box under your bed. Is it—I mean, is that—Lars, what did you do?”
Lars’ lips twitch, slowly, letting them molt from a smirk to a grin. There’s a sort of perverse duality in someone being so beautiful, so ugly. He starts to laugh. Dave looks around the room, frantic, and his eyes land on Phil and the other camp staff in charge of actually running Trinity. Lars notices, follows his gaze, and shrugs.
“Go ahead, tell them. You couldn’t pass a piss test if you wanted to.” Lars says around a giggle, feather light. He looks pointedly at Dave’s tray and then—slowly, slowly—to his mouth. Dave pushes the food away. “Now, who would believe you?”
-
Sixty minutes out in the cold and Dave can no longer feel the chill in the air. He forgot his jacket, adrenaline bolstering him up to brave the weather and the dark with a newfound fearlessness in only his ringer tee. He passes the minutes and the seconds by chain smoking with the pack he found under the floorboard in the Woodshed.
James should be arriving soon now that midnight creeps up on him, and he stares sightlessly into the trees, until footfall disturbs the eerie silence blanketing the clearing. The beam of the flashlight he’s carrying sweeps the dirt and flickers off when Dave is found. James bounds up to him, almost a jog, and meets him halfway in a collision of limbs resembling a hug.
“You’re fuckin’ freezing.” James laughs, hands rubbing up and down Dave’s arms. He pecks him in greeting, short and sweet. “Want my jacket?”
He shrugs him off. “No, I don't need it.”
“Alright. Let’s go.” James concedes, kisses him hungrily before holding his hand between his own and heading to the Woodshed. Dave doesn’t budge, stays rooted in place, even goes as far as yanking his hand out of his grip. He shakes his head no, and James sizes him up, befuddled. “What’s going on?”
“There’s something wrong with Lars.”
“Is he okay?” James asks, worry imbued in his words. “What happened?”
Dave shakes his head again, misunderstood. He’s frustrated with himself for how he can’t just come out and say it. But he doesn’t want to scare James, doesn’t want to freak him out with what he thinks is true. “No, I mean he’s been doing something to me. Like messing with me.”
“How?”
“It sounds stupid but—” Dave takes a breath and holds James’ shoulders over the worn denim of his jacket. “I was in his room and I found this box and—and in the box it’s all this stuff. Like weird stuff.”
“Weird stuff?” His face screws up in obvious confusion. “I don’t understand.”
“James please, just come with me and I’ll explain it better later.” Dave urges and now it’s his turn to attempt leading James back to camp before he gets batted away. “Come with me.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“We need to go to the police.” Dave insists, frames James’ skull tenderly.
James' face drops almost imperceptibly, his voice goes cold and flat. “I can’t do that.”
“We have to get out of here, it’s not safe. Lars is fuckin’ dangerous. I think he did something to Ron. He killed Ron and I think—” He hears it before he feels it, the separation of flesh from flesh. There, in the left side of his body, a knife, and the hand that drives it in belongs to James. “What are you doing? What are—”
James stabs him again, in the same raw incision, with an almost surgical accuracy. Dave, unbelieving, pulls the knife out with his own hands on James’ wrist. It’s the knife that cut his palm all those nights ago in this very spot. He hunches over to conceal the brutality but he spills from his own body all the same.
“Why’d you have to ruin everything?” James questions, tears his wrist away from its feeble restraint and swings again. Dave knocks the knife from his grip, pushes him away like a bad dog with a sanguine muzzle of a grip on James’ jaw.
But he overpowers Dave, sends him tumbling down easily. Turns over onto his stomach, attempts to claw his way out from the weight of James’ body as he scrambles for the knife. Dave gets nowhere. James flips him back over, stares down at him with heaving breath, wild hair. Traps him.
“Stop, stop!” He begs, James’ fingers worming lewdly into the cut on his stomach. Dave moans in agony, the sound kneaded out of him. He squirms under the touch, under the vulgarity. “Don't, please don’t—stop, James stop.”
“I told you to leave and you didn’t listen.” James seethes, on top of him in writhing breathlessness. He plunges the blade in again with a filthy gasp. “I have to do this.”
“Please, please. James, I—” Dave looks down, sees James excoriate that gash too; he looks mesmerized by the violence, his ability to displace flesh. Dave thinks if he lets him, he’d wear the garland of his organs around his neck. He wails, helpless to the carnal grope of vessels and tissue he’s subjected to. “God, oh my God.”
James’ face eclipses wholly, devastating and baleful. “God’s not here.”
Dave believes it, right then, marked for death and at the mercy of an executioner’s half moon axe. So he knots his sticky fingers in his James’ hair and pulls as hard as he can, the muscles in his neck straining against the hold. He slashes at Dave’s throat, the skin burns with the slice—shallow and desperate and flailing.
He refuses to die here, on a bed of dirt and bugs, pathetic and sniveling. Dave searches blindly for anything, anything. He lands on cool metal. The flashlight. He swings it imprecisely, cracks it right against James skull with a whimper of his own. James hisses, falls to the side and Dave scurries up, stumbling on wobbly legs into the trees.
James shouts after him, calling his name in between garbled curses, so he raises a forearm against the low hanging branches and runs wildly into the woods. He’s chased, now, not by some hidden horror that stalks the night where shadow feasts on light, but by a boy; it is not possible to stare into the abyss of him and not be destroyed.
He runs until he becomes dizzy, fueled by the primordial instinct to flee, and he meets the ground in a crunch of bones when he catches a rock with the sole of his sneaker. He can’t scream, not with his voice paralyzed in his cut throat. It’s nothing more than a choked, sopping gurgle when he slams onto the silt.
He lies there for a moment, the damp green sweetness of the earth mixing with the putrid tanginess of death, of him. But he has to keep going, he has to keep moving. He inches along the cold grit of soil on his elbows, his stomach smarting with every move, a fresh wave of blood spurting with each clench of muscle.
Dave crawls through the burr, the bramble, and sees it. The chapel. The door is open, it always has been, and as he slithers forward the decay is nearly comforting. He pulls himself up, drags his own feet underneath him one step at a time to the leaning structure. He bundles up his shirt and holds it to his neck, uselessly soaking the cotton. It won’t save him.
He stumbles down the aisle with a moan, trawling those heavy chains behind him, the terror that haunts this place. He lands ceremoniously at the altar, an unholy union. He knows what he has to do. There, where he left it: the bottle, the bandana. He digs in his pocket for his lighter. His blood wet fingers slip on the spark wheel one, two, three times and then it catches and lights the fabric.
He throws it toward the pile of ripped paper and destroyed bibles, watches it explode into a burst of agrestal orange flame. He feels nothing, numbed by the gift of catatonia only true pain brings. His vision, fuzzy on the edges, tells him he needs to lie down. So he does, languishes right there on the floor of the church.
The echoing of hooves, that swarming warhorse stampede and the hellacious trumpeting: it’s all back and louder than ever. This ancient emptiness, cloaked in obsidian. He blinks at the spindly pale fingers reaching out to him, his body ripe for culling. He knows he shouldn’t. But that darkness, the inky nowhere and nothing—he touches it.
-
Iodic and sterile, the room is a wash of various shades of beige, beige, and beige. A lone pink plastic water pitcher sits on the side table the nurse wheeled away when she reached for the clothes stored under his hospital bed. The jeans, shirt, and underwear they cut from his body on the operating table, the grime and the gore.
They’re pumping him full of the good stuff, he can tell, and a little button next to his line allows him to dole out more drugs every time he presses it. Stitched up, he lies in a flimsy green gown. There’s a slice in the breast pocket and for some reason, he feels humiliated that his nipple is visible when he slouches just right.
The attending physician explains everything they did to save his life and clears the police to come in for an interview. His clothes, turned over by the nurse to two shaken beat cops, get bagged up for evidence. It’s only when he poses for pictures to document his injuries that he realizes he’s still unwashed.
His hair, a matted mess, now that it's free from the surgical cap. He stinks like fire, like smoke. There’s dirt caked under his nails, blood dried in every crevice of his hands. There are little nicks and bruises dotting his skin he doesn’t remember sustaining, undeniable traces of James.
“I couldn’t see much, really. It was dark and I wasn’t wearing my glasses. I guess he was about my height.” Dave presses the button on his pump again for another dose of morphine. “He was wearing a hood.”
“Like a jacket?” The fatter cop asks, pallid faced and unprepared.
“No.” Dave thinks for a moment about how much of the truth he’s going to obscure between omission and outright lies. “I mean he was wearing a mask.”
The cop writes that down in his notepad. The other one, sharp with bird features, leans against the wall. Dave thinks that’s weird and unprofessional. “Why were you out of your cabin after curfew?”
“Couldn’t sleep, went for a walk. Got lost in the woods.” His mouth is insanely dry and he attempts to swallow against it with no luck. “I don’t know my way around too well.”
“So, after you were attacked you set the fire at the chapel, correct?”
“Yes.” Dave clears his throat, voice hoarse. “I was trying to get help.”
“Quick thinking, kid.” The fat one exhales, rests his hands on his belt that’s struggling to hold up his pants. “Doctor said if you’d lost any more blood, we wouldn’t be talking right now.”
He thinks about that. Tosses the thought of mortality back and forth between his two hands, weighs death against life. He wonders if James has had enough time to wash off Dave’s blood. Has he discarded the knife? Did he remember the flashlight? Did he burn his clothes? He hopes he did.
“You get some rest. We’ll be in touch.” The cops grab the evidence bag, nod curtly one more time in his direction with flat grimaces. “If you think of anything, let us know.”
“Wait, officer.” Dave’s fingers float up to the dressing on his neck. The box, the bones, the sigils in the spruce: if they search the camp, what will be left and who will find it? He strokes the tegaderm, the gauze. “Can you call my mom?”
October, 1994
On his way home from work on Monday, Dave sees the newest edition of the New York Times with a headline that makes him glance twice. He slots a coin into the news rack, carefully dispenses one single copy, thick and richly printed.
He leaves it rolled up on the passenger seat the entire time he drives home, stares at it out the corner of his eye like it might pick a fight. Goes exactly the speed limit, stops at every light and traffic sign with at least one car length following distance. He pulls into his driveway, tucks the paper under his arm as he checks the mailbox at the end of the pavement.
“I’m home.” He tosses the mail on the coffee table, drops to the couch cushions with a sigh and a beer. “Babe? Where are you?”
“Getting ready!” Pamela yells from somewhere deep within the house. Oh, that’s right. They agreed to go to that Halloween party tonight, the one his wife’s coworkers badgered him into. At least he can use his son as an excuse to leave early if he can’t hack it.
He unfolds the paper gingerly, sees the words he’s looking for. There, in stark black ink: Proof Lacking for Ritual Abuse by Satanists. He rescues his glasses out of the pocket on his button down and slips them on. Takes a steady breath through his nose.
He scans each column quickly first, gives it all a once over before starting back at the beginning. A pull out quote from the article states proudly that cases of truly extreme occultism are incredibly rare, according to an in depth study.
The study conducted by the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, the study he participated in. The study in which he lied through his teeth, endlessly, as he has for over a decade now. The country can rest assured, true evil has been deemed nothing but a hoax.
“Well, what do you think?” Pamela grins, comes around the corner in a white silk dress that looks remarkably close to lingerie and a fuzzy little halo pinned in her hair. She turns around and shows him matching wings. He sets the paper down on the cushion next to him. “I’m an angel.”
But Dave knows the shadow in the corner of his vision, blurred. The breath on the other end of the line when the phone rings at three in the morning. The breeze that carries the scent of leaves, of iron. He’s still here.
“You look sexy.” He kisses her when she bends over, only briefly so he doesn’t mess up her lipstick. She hates when he does that. He flicks the bottom of the skirt with two fingers and tuts at how much skin it reveals. “Thought this was an office party?”
He’s familiar with the nails scratching along the floorboard, the eyes in the dark. The hand on the door frame that disappears with the squint of his eyes. The voice whispering his name. The triangulation he traces into everything he touches, the endless loop of line after line after line. He invited him in.
“It is.” Pamela insists, with a roll of her eyes. “Come on baby, show daddy your costume.”
His son, with his blonde hair and chubby cheeks, waddles out in a red sateen romper and a matching bonnet tied under his chin. His wife adjusts it, making sure the plastic horns are on straight. He gives Dave a delighted giggle, finger in his mouth.
“Damn it, almost forgot the best part.” Pamela disappears around the corner before emerging with a plastic pitchfork. His son clutches it in his dimpled fist, scooped up by the manicured hands of his mother and delivered for inspection. “Here he is. Our little devil.”
Dave smiles. He never left.