Devil House(3)
“Chandler,” he said. “This isn’t the city. There’s not even fifty thousand people there. You’ve got to have a decent enough credit history after your last few years. Besides, we get a cut of your movie rights. I know you’re not exactly starving out there.”
There was quiet for a few seconds.
“Even if you prorate for the down payment you’ll be paying less on the mortgage than you pay now on rent in the big city,” he said. “Come on. This has your name all over it.”
That call was five years ago, all the way back in December of 2001. This was a different place then; the cracks in the tech bubble were still fresh and raw, though property values would start to climb again soon enough. I’ve been hard at work ever since, but I haven’t turned the book in yet, in part because, while this is that book, it’s not the one that my contract obligates me to eventually write: DEVIL HOUSE, a work of nonfiction, between 80,000–120,000 words, about the multiple murders committed in the ADDRESS TK block of Main Street in Milpitas, California, on or about the night of November 1, 1986.
It is instead a book about restoring ancient temples to their proper estates. I got the idea from my grandfather, I like to say. I tried counting up the great-greats it would take to really get all the way back, but after a while you lose track and get lost. It happens every time. My grandfather, anyway. He lived in a castle but never forgot the grassy glades and wooded byways of his youth.
2.
THE OLD-FASHIONED GENERIC ANSWERING MACHINE was still holding its own against voice mail back in spring of 2002, even in burgeoning tech enclaves. I listened, with real pleasure, to the sound of moving parts forced into labor far beyond their intended life spans. On the outgoing message, a voice burbled through the warp and wobble of aging tape, managing to sound both bubbly and professional, a hard combination to hit: “Thank you for calling New Visions Properties. This is Whitney Burnett. None of our associates can take your call at this time.”
It was a woman’s voice, maybe someone in her twenties. I start categorizing people from the moment I first meet them; it’s a good habit to pick up if you’re going to try to put stories together from the messy loose ends of people’s actual lives. I imagined a young woman who, at some unfixed point down the line, intended to own her own business; a person whose ambitions were modest, and who had more drive than she really needed to meet them. “Please leave us a brief message telling us how we may be of assistance to you, and we will return your call. If you require immediate assistance, you may reach me on my mobile phone”—here she sounded out the number twice, area code included, in a cool, forceful voice that made me feel obligated to follow through.
“Thank you, and have a pleasant day.”
I left a clumsy message, talking for longer than I needed to and interrupting myself frequently, but when Whitney called back an hour later she cut directly to the chase.
“I would love to show you the property,” she said. “It’s actually a really nice old building. I should warn you, it’s kind of a mess right now, though. But it’s nice, you’ll see it. It’s had a lot of lives. In the fifties it was even a soda shop for a while.”
About the soda shop I already knew. I hadn’t been able to find many stories about it online, but small scraps I’d managed to dig up—postings in local listservs, scanned pictures on people’s still-standing Angelfire sites—all mentioned what a nice place it had been, once upon a time. It was called the Sunliner Grill back then. The building itself had origins dating a full century back, but there are no records of its function prior to the Ford Motor Company’s announcement, in 1954, of intentions to open their Central California plant in Milpitas the following year. Few locals remember the soda shop now; the population wasn’t yet young enough to support one, and there were two well-liked restaurants just down the road on Main Street, one of which had a license to serve alcohol. The Sunliner Grill did not survive the decade.
The building’s timeline gets murky after that. I’ve been told once or twice that someone ran a hardware store out of it, but I haven’t found any proof. Briefly, in the early seventies, someone seems to have had the bright idea to turn it into some kind of theater: a clipping from The Mercury News about regional growth makes note of an anomalous little cinder-block building near the freeway, referring to “the short-lived, unlamented Nite People Cinema,” but the article offers no further details. A single-screen movie house in a building so small in the shadow of the freeway feels almost unfathomably optimistic.
Sometime after 1974, when completion of Interstate 680 seemed to guarantee future traffic through town, somebody took out a lease on the building and began operating a newsstand out of it. The newsstand became a porn store, and then a sort of house in which a crime took place, about which I knew mainly what Ashton had told me over the phone—some teenagers holed up in a dark porn store, the specter of devil worship and arcane private ceremonies culminating in at least two deaths. Few details, plenty of innuendo: this was how I had come to be talking to Whitney Burnett about making the drive south despite a nagging hunch that, if there were really more to know, I was a person who’d already know about it.
“I’d love to see it,” I said. I felt a little weird putting on the mask of the reluctant client, since I meant to buy it no matter what condition it was in. If it looked uninhabitable, I would still make a way. There was even a sort of grim appeal in the possibility of finding the place a total wreck. “I’m in San Francisco, but I can be there next week, or even earlier, if you think there’s any hurry.”