‘The horned god represents male power,’ said David. He had dropped his voice as if there might be ears in the forest, listening in. Perhaps the trees themselves. ‘He’s the lord of life.’
‘And death,’ said Connie. ‘The triple goddess represents the divine feminine. They were kind of crudely etched, but all the experts agreed that’s what they were meant to be.’
‘Here, hold on,’ said David. ‘I’ll show you.’
Show me what, for God’s sake, I wanted to ask, but he’d already disappeared into their cabin. A moment later, he came out with a blank sheet of paper and a Sharpie. He drew a large circle, then a crescent on top. It looked like a crudely drawn head with thick horns. ‘That’s the horned god. And this is the triple goddess.’ He drew another circle, then a crescent on either side, facing outwards.
‘Do these represent the moon?’ I asked.
‘You got it,’ he replied. ‘The goddess symbol represents the waxing and waning of the moon. The male one is more a literal representation of a dude with horns.’ He chuckled. ‘But yeah, the moon is important to pagans.’
‘And it was a new moon that night,’ said Connie.
‘So this was . . .’ I was loath to say it. ‘Some kind of offering? A sacrifice?’
‘That’s the theory,’ she replied.
Light was beginning to drain from the sky, the spaces between the trees darkening. I looked up, wondering where the moon was in its cycle, but it hadn’t yet appeared. I had an image of the bodies, pale and bloody in the moonlight, flies already gathering, drawn by the sweet, sticky blood . . . and just like that, I’d been transformed into a dark tourist. I couldn’t help but see, peeking through a gap in the trees, the yellow eyes of some creature, some god – and a shiver of nausea and horror went through me.
‘It only took the cops a few hours to figure out who did it,’ Connie said, bringing me back to the real world.
‘His name was Everett Miller,’ David said.
‘A local?’
‘Yep. He lived in Penance.’
Penance was the nearest town, several miles from Hollow Falls. I had looked it up before coming to the US, wanting to know what was nearby and if there were any places worth taking day trips to. Penance, which had a population of 2,068 at the last census, didn’t appear to have anything worth seeing. There wasn’t even a cinema; just a couple of bars, a Baptist church and a handful of shops.
‘Everett Miller was the local weirdo,’ David said. ‘The guy that everyone whispered about or laughed at when he went by.’
‘He had long hair and dressed all in black,’ Connie said. ‘He wore make-up and had piercings all over his face.’
‘And he was into black metal,’ said David. ‘All these crazy-ass bands out of Norway and Finland or wherever. Screaming about Satan and death and all this bizarre pagan shit. There was this one band he was into, Wolfspear – all their songs were about blood sacrifices and murder and burning churches. Their newest one at the time had a video where the lead guy dressed as the horned god and rampaged through the woods with all these naked women, and then murdered them and had sex with their bodies. Real X-rated horror-film stuff. It was banned but Everett had a videotape that he’d imported from Norway. He had the band’s symbol painted on the back of his leather jacket too.’
‘The police thought it probably wasn’t planned,’ Connie said. ‘Or not properly thought through, anyway. The theory was that he’d seen them having sex and been sent into some kind of frenzy. There was speculation he was on drugs. Out of his mind.’
‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘They blamed him because he watched a music video and had a pagan symbol on the back of his jacket? Isn’t that, like, circumstantial evidence?’
‘It is. But there was forensic evidence too. That’s the important part.’ Connie looked over my shoulder as she spoke, and I turned to see Frankie and Ryan coming back up the path towards us. They were laughing; clearly, they had hit it off.
‘Everett always used to wear this scarf,’ David said quickly. ‘A bandana? And guess what was used to daub the symbols on the rock? The cops found it on a path near the clearing, covered in Eric’s blood.’
I’d heard of criminals being caught because of their own stupidity before, but this was something else.
‘Did Everett confess?’
Frankie and Ryan reached us just then, a big smile on Frankie’s face, the sulkiness of earlier forgotten. ‘What are you talking about?’ she asked.