Granted, I said.
Cool, he said. Now picture him on his throne, with his court, right, where does he live?
In the castle, I said.
In the castle, he said, which is a structure not imported into England until after the Norman conquest, which is, at the earliest, five hundred years after the death of the best candidate we have for the historical Arthur.
So, no castle, no king? I said.
No, no, that’s not the point of the lost age, he said. The point is that the king is still in his castle, but to you, he doesn’t look like what you mean by king, and his castle doesn’t look like a castle.
So what does it look like? I said.
It looks, he said, like a dirt mound somebody piled up in a real hurry overnight to protect a very small group of people from attack.
* * *
SO ANYWAY, THE MONSTER, HE SAID, I was going to tell you about the monster. The first thing was my editor, he’s got three names—here Gage shot me a conspiratorial look implying a shared Californian suspicion of old-money pretensions—he wrote and said he’d come across some news story. Multiple Murders in Milpitas.
Multiple Murders in Milpitas, I said.
Yeah, yeah, he said, fish in a barrel, right? and I remembered you, and that kind of fired my imagination a little, you know, the dreams of children or whatever, right? Lost age. So my editor sent me the story, and I read it, and he was absolutely right, it was directly up my alley, because it was tethered to a specific site, this shuttered porn store, and some kids had been in there, using it as a sort of clubhouse but also, like, as a house, some of them lived there, maybe. So it wasn’t just the place where something happened, it had its own history on top of that. Something about places, they speak to me.
They have an energy, I said.
That’s right, he said.
But this case, though, I said, this isn’t River’s Edge? I saw that movie.
No, no, he said, that’s actually part of what makes this one interesting, because it wasn’t all that long after the Conrad case, that was the River’s Edge vic, Marcy Renee Conrad, 1981. Also Milpitas, but different case.
Wow, yeah, I said, “vic,” that’s victim, right, I feel like I’m out of my depth.
Ah, everybody finds their depth eventually, he said. Our pizza arrived, steam rising from the bubbling cheese on top.
But this other one, he said, the one I’m presently in hot water about. It’s during the so-called Satanic Panic. What little coverage I could find was extremely lurid and sensational, the sort of thing you’d think everybody would have heard more about, especially the sort of thing I’d think I would have heard more about, being that whole field is my beat, right, but Ashton’s pitch was, “Move into the house,” so I—
You moved into the murder house? I said.
Yeah, that was the whole plan, he said, taking a huge bite, like a very hungry person, and so that’s what I did, and then I did the thing I do, you know, getting as many primary sources as possible, I’m like a bloodhound, I need the scent of blood on a swatch of a shirt before I can get my barking up to its proper volume. And I got my hands on some crime scene photos, unpublished stuff, and hotline tapes, and then I fixed up the house so it would look just like it had looked on the night the crime, or crimes, took place. And all the while I’m writing the book, right, there’s an element of mystery involved, because there are two dead bodies and no criminal charges as far as I can tell, and—
He pulled himself up short then. His face relaxed into a look of worry, or sadness, I wasn’t sure—both, probably—and he said: Look, when I get going about this, I go pretty far down the rabbit hole, I’ve been neck-deep in all this stuff for several years now, are you sure you want to do all this? We could just, you know, eat some pizza.
I took a long sip from the translucent red plastic cup full of generic cola over ice that I can never help ordering whenever I’m at a pizza place, and I said: No, I’m good, this is good, in for a penny, in for a pound, right, let’s hear it.
* * *
IT WAS A WEIRD PITCH in the first place, he said, because when you do what I do, people are always telling you what you should write about next, and half the time it’s the same thing, you know, some ancient story wakes up for whatever reason and everybody gets reminded about it at the same time, and then somebody who’s read one of my books will say to themselves, Hey, that one guy who wrote that other book might be into this, and they write me letters, or emails, now, it’s both ways, but they get in touch, and even when the idea’s cool, I usually feel like I don’t want to be running with something somebody else picked up, I do my own research. And then most of the time the idea doesn’t really actually feel like something I’d do: like, maybe it’ll be bloody enough, I do tend to lean in on the blood, but there won’t be the complications, the knots in the thread, the parts that make you feel like everything was sort of doomed to happen the way it happened, that’s kind of my zone.