Patrick was confused, and he knew it showed on his face. Izzie could clearly see it, too, and sighed before she tried to explain.
“This morning I got to thinking about what we’re going to do the next time we run up against the Ridden,” she said. “We survived last night by a combination of quick thinking and dumb luck, and we can’t expect our luck to always hold out. But it occurred to me that we’re not the first people to go up against these things, and maybe we can learn from their example. Or, worst case scenario, from their mistakes.”
“Like old man Aguilar, you mean?” Patrick gestured to Roberto Aguilar’s personal journals on the stack at Izzie’s elbow.
“In part, but the old guy doesn’t really go into much detail in these,” Izzie answered. “These were for his own benefit, after all, and he didn’t need to explain things to himself that he already knew. But he wasn’t the only person we know of in Recondito who survived an encounter with the Ridden or the loa.”
Patrick arched an eyebrow, and Izzie held up a finger, begging a moment’s patience. Then she opened the lid of her laptop, waited while it woke back up, and turned it around so that Patrick could see the screen. The banner at the top of the browser window indicated that Izzie had loaded the website of the Recondito Clarion, and the headline of the article on the screen read KILLER CULT HIDES DEEP SECRET.
“That’s the article you sent me the other day.” Patrick looked up from the screen to meet Izzie’s gaze. That had been the source of Izzie’s discovery that the subterranean levels of the Eschaton Center had been connected to the disused mine that was connected to the Undersight project and so many other elements of their investigation.
“Right.” Izzie nodded as she turned the laptop back around to face her. “And whatever it was that went down the night of the Eschaton Center mass suicide, it involved the loa somehow. Maybe Jeremiah Standfast Parrish was one of the Ridden himself, like Zotovic. Maybe not. But either way, it would be useful to talk with someone who was there, right?”
After a moment it occurred to Patrick that the question wasn’t rhetorical and that she was waiting for an answer. He glanced over at Daphne and Joyce and saw that they were still glaring at one another, and so he turned back to Izzie and quickly bobbed his head in agreement
“According to the news reports at the time,” she went on, “there were three people who were at the Eschaton Center that last night who lived long enough to see the next day. Two young people who had been indoctrinated into the cult—a young man and a young woman—and the man who rescued them.”
“What was his name . . . ?” Patrick snapped his fingers, trying to find the memory in his cluttered recollections of the past week. “Jet something?”
“George Washington Jett,” Izzie read aloud from the screen. “Though most of the news reports at the time referred to him as ‘G.W.’ Jett, and a couple of times as ‘Harrier’ Jett.”
“Harrier?” Patrick raised an eyebrow.
“Nickname, I guess,” Izzie answered with a shrug. “Anyway, the young woman, Muriel Tomlinson, and the young man, Eric Fulton, had both been living at the Eschaton Center for about a year when their families hired Jett to pull them out. At the time he was a Recondito-based private investigator who specialized in ‘deprogramming’ young people who had been indoctrinated into cults. Several other families had approached him about getting their loved ones out of Eschaton, too, but unfortunately Tomlinson and Fulton were the only ones who made it out alive.”
“One of them wrote a book about it, right?” Patrick recalled.
Izzie nodded. “Yeah, Fulton was credited as the author of . . .” She broke off, checking her notes to confirm the title. “Escaping Shadows: My Months In The Eschaton Center. But it was probably the work of a ghost writer, because most of the details don’t line up with the statements that either Fulton or Tomlinson gave to authorities at the time. More than likely somebody just paid Fulton for the right to tell his story, and then jazzed it up with details borrowed from stories told by survivors of other cults, or b-movie plots, or whatever.”
Patrick could remember seeing battered old paperback copies of that book everywhere when he was a kid. The Eschaton Center massacre had left such an indelible mark on the psyche of the city, and even if most people might have preferred to forget all about it, it was impossible to completely erase. It was like being unable to resist probing a sore tooth with your tongue.
“But Tomlinson gave a few lengthy interviews,” Izzie went on, “including the one I found from the Recondito Clarion, and one of those ended up being the basis of the made-for-TV movie that aired a couple of years later.”
“I watched that in my ninth-grade history class in school, actually,” Patrick said. “I think the teacher just needed the break, to be honest—we watched a lot of videos that year—but that one really stood out because it took place so close to where we lived.”
“Well, from what I’ve read it was reasonably faithful to the version of events that Tomlinson gave in her interview, though the people who made it glossed over a lot of details and went to some lengths to keep it family-friendly enough for broadcast standards.” Izzie took a sip of coffee, thoughtfully. “But obviously, there was a lot more to the story than either Tomlinson or Fulton let on.”
“Maybe they’d be willing to open up a bit more, now that so much time has passed?” Patrick said around a bite of donut.
“Too late for that, I’m afraid,” Izzie answered. “Fulton died of a drug
