Finally, there was a dog who’d just happened to be walking past when the picture was taken. It was of no particular breed: just a dog with dirty golden fur, its mouth open and its tongue hanging out. I was happy to see this dog. A dog brings something cheery to even the grisliest of scenes, or so it’s always seemed to me, and the presence of a second tongue mirroring the painted one on the sign overhead seemed almost like an artist’s choice, an Easter egg for the keen onlooker.
The other shots were all interiors. From them, it’s clear that the Devil House of legend was really only a store into which some people moved their belongings for a short space of time. They’d made it their own, but most of the wares and fixtures remained. There was the old countertop, still boasting a cash register that must have been too heavy for kids to move it; several mattresses on the floor elude the eye, drawn instead to the magazine and video racks amid which they rest. In tighter shots, the squalor of the mattresses is clearer, and the magazines’ titles are legible: DIAMOND COLLECTION. EIGHTEEN AND SHAVED. GIRLS WHO EAT CUM.
This was Anthony Hawley’s store. Hawley is gone by the time this picture gets taken, and Derrick and his friends have been busy redecorating. Their rough work has brought a note of chaos to the already lurid feel of the scene: In the racks, on the tier nearest to the floor, you can see a few copies of Daredevil, the comic book about the blind-lawyer-turned-superhero, and also an issue of Epic, a science fiction magazine from the seventies. On the back wall, in spray paint, you can see all the blind-alley symbols and slogans that would successfully drive the investigation for months: A GENERATION OF VAMPIRES; SORCERER CULT; SET 4 SACRIFICE.
But it’s the shot of the ceiling that got me. A silver pentagram in spray paint, familiar to me from the issue of the Fremont Argus in which a nearly identical shot ran after the press got access to the premises. The accompanying story, reported on by others and amended for their own purposes, fixed the narrative for the outside world. Different symbols occupied each recessed angle in the star, five in all; these were said to be letters from a Satanic alphabet, each corresponding to an occupant of the house, the stylized H at the center of Derrick’s own sigil, a sixth hidden in plain sight.
I could see how the detectives had been unable to resist the bait. They took the back booths as a clear sign that there’d been six people living in the building. Their theory of the crime assigned a lot of weight to this number six; ideas about numerology in occult thinking, and the specific weights of given numbers, were the crumb trail they’d chosen to follow. These ideas were malleable, even plastic: there was no working code that stayed in play longer than a day or two. All of it was rooted in superstition, and all of it allowed almost total authority to the gut reaction, assigning, to the hard case of the creeps an onlooker might get if confronted with the scene, a primary role.
But the full-timers and the weekend wraiths envisioned by the investigators were phantoms of the imagination, fuel for the always-hungry furnaces of public outrage. Any collective names later assigned to people said to have lived in Devil House came from captions under pictures like this one: captions placed by people who hadn’t actually known what they were talking about, but who, in their haste to avoid getting scooped, weren’t afraid of a little conjecture. And the nicknames assigned to imagined residents after somebody noticed that some of the spray-painted symbols looked like astrological signs: these, too, were inventions, dots connected for the sake of the story.
In truth, Derrick had painted the symbols in the star because they looked cool. The star was supposed to suggest exactly what people took from it—but its detailing had been strictly an aesthetic exercise for him. That the number of symbols corresponded exactly to the numbers of people involved in their creation was a function of expectations.
People do all kinds of things with their expectations. I would be reminded of this much later, having spent my own long season in the valley of early assumptions.
5.
IT TOOK ME UNTIL SUMMER to get an outline together I could actually rely on: it’s easy to draw up a plan with a bunch of Roman numerals and subheaders, but plans aren’t outlines. An outline shows you the shape of something. Once the shape comes into view, you can follow it wherever it goes. It’s magic.
I’d spent a week letting the Polaroids soak in. I wanted to see if I could correlate the terrain delineated by each one with the house as it lay now—this was rough going; the remodeling crew had been given license to rebuild from the ground up. But they’d left the basics intact. There’s no point building a wall where a window used to be if you’re only going to put a new window in a few feet over. So I made grease pencil marks on the floor, old Polaroids in hand, reckoning the proximity of objects in the frame to walls and doorways. Seeing how the light fell, imagining the place in the absence of the front porch and the windows that now let so much sunlight in: in Anthony Hawley’s day, this place had been much darker by design. These were only initial explorations, I knew: they’d have to be recalculated several times during the next year or two. But they were a beginning.