“Who?” I asked again, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice. I was painfully aware of how sober I was. Manson’s energies were frantic, constant, like a dog scratching at the door. He could tell he was getting to me. It was remarkable. Charles Mansion was no wizard, nothing special, but he was a charisma savant. He had raw presence that gave him power over the weak, the young, the scared, the gullible, and the damaged. For all my training, all my godlike ability, at my core, I was a broken human being, and Manson was masterful at worming his way in, spotting your flaws, and crawling inside you. I centered myself and waited, cigarettes in hand.
“The Process,” he said, clutching the air with his manacled hands and nodding toward the smokes. I handed him the pack. He fumbled to open it.
“The Process … the Process Church of the Final Judgment, the cult?”
Charlie bobbed his head and popped a cigarette between his lips. He murmured in the affirmative.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s one of their names. It’s what they called themselves when I met them.”
“I thought they folded up shop in the seventies,” I said.
“Changed their name,” he said. “Changed their face, put the old one in a jar by the door. They been around a long, long time. They call themselves different now. They still own this city, just like they did back then, pretty much have for a long time. They like it here. L.A. matches their, y’know, vibe.”
I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my face. This could all be the famous Manson rambling bullshit, but there were still rumors in the Life that the idea for Manson’s race-war apocalypse, Helter Skelter, was borrowed in part from the doctrine of the Process Church.
“You mean to say that people from the Process came to you recently to warn you about me, specifically, Charlie? Are you jerking me around?”
“You’ll see,” Manson said. “You got a light?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I do.” I didn’t move or make any attempt to give the little dirtbag anything. “Charlie, what would the Process want from you, after all this time? It have anything to do with the tulpa?”
“My head-babies,” Manson said. “Yeah, that’s why you’re here, ain’t it?”
“A thing that may have been one of yours tore a very nice lady and her asshole boyfriend to shreds last night. How is that even possible, Charlie? I thought all those things were destroyed by the Acidmancers.”
“You mean Timmy’s little helpers?” Manson sneered. “Hell, man, they tried, but I had lots of time in here to figure out a go-around. They don’t exist in the fancy, snobby, think-you’re-better-than-me collective unconscious anymore, yeah, but I made my own one a’ those in here. And then I put them back together in my mind and birthed them right in the jailhouse, just like the jailhouse was my mother.”
I tried hard to not show this lunatic how impressed I was by what he was telling me. When Wayne and the other Acidmancers sealed Manson nightmare creations off from the collective thought-stream of mankind, Charlie had created his own new collective thought gestalt, using the isolated, emotional minds of all those locked away in the prisons of the world. His own private mass-mind of fear, anger, and brutal awareness. An untapped Jungian jungle. It would take decades of isolated meditation to build such an occult construct and then populate it with the worst nightmares and most horrific fantasies of those on the inside. Charlie had the deranged focus to do it, and we had given him the quiet, the silence, and the time.
“Yeah,” Manson said, “you got it. It’s beautiful, isn’t it, man? Something you wished you’d thought up yourself. Something you could’ve. You’re jealous you didn’t, I can see that in those shitty marbles your soul peeks out of.”
“It’s impressive,” I said.
“Then give me a fucking light for my cancer-stick,” Charlie said, gesturing with the cigarette as best he could with the manacles. I remained still.
“You’re no miracle man, Charlie,” I said. “If you were, you wouldn’t be locked up in here still.” Manson laughed again.
“Look at who’s so enlightened, so blind. These walls, they’re glass, they’re mirrors. What’s in here is all of you on the outside. We’re just not as good at faking we’re good people, that we’re civilized like you pretend. You’re the prisoners, not me. I dreamed all of your world up. In here, in my world, that’s the only thing that’s real. You’re all ghosts, living in a god’s dream, my dream.” I tried to let his words move through me without tainting my insides. Told myself it was the rantings of a narcissistic psychopath. Manson nodded, looking almost grim. “Ask what you came to ask, ghost man, then go back to your haunted world.”
“Why did you call up the tulpa to kill Elextra and George? Who told you to?”
“I don’t know who the fuck you’re talking about. I didn’t wake any of my children up…” An awareness crossed Manson’s face, like he just got the punch line of a joke. He looked surprised and a bit smug. “Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, right on! He did it!”
“Who did it?” I leaned closer. “Who did it Charlie, if it wasn’t you?”
“My boy,” he said, “my son. They said they were gonna teach him the way they taught me.”
“The Process,” I said. “They’re gone, Charlie, scorched earth. I need to know who really killed Elextra, and why?”
“People always got to go and try to put labels on things,” Manson said. “Things don’t change what they’re made of ’cause their form changes. You call a glass of water a river, tell me it isn’t really. You call death a cigarette. What they are stays the same, regardless if you call them the Process or something else. They’re not hung up on names. Blinders to what’s real.”
“And what are they,
