Devil House(68)

NORTHUMBRIAN WHISPERS

The initial reports went out over the airwaves; cases like these are godsends to local radio. Something lurid to make drive time pass more quickly between work and home, something so juicy it makes Dad turn on the TV news as soon as he gets in through the front door. Bill, what? Shh, listen. Some kind of satanic thing. That stuff in New Jersey? No, down near the freeway. The freeway here? What other freeway is there? Shh. Well, you said it last year, whole lot of new people lately. Too many, last time I checked, this is just, wait, shh, here it is.

Rumors began to spread as soon as the news hit the wires: on the campuses of the middle and high schools first, filtering down a day or two later to the elementaries. These would grow distorted and bizarre as they traveled, the inevitable process of myth-building in an age of print and video: seven kids in a pact with Satan to kill, unrepeatable atrocities visited upon the bodies, old corpses dug up from the lawn. Signs and symbols to describe with fear and wonder. Nocturnal rites inside the dirty bookstore. Younger kids, hearing, genuinely frightened but too proud to show it, would, when they passed the stories along, embellish new details from the reservoirs of their dreams: I heard they lit the bodies on fire. I heard one guy was covered in oil but he didn’t burn. My friend lives near there, he saw the burning bodies. For real? For real. My brother said there was a lady inside whose right leg was twice as long as her left one, she had to drag herself around by her hands. How did she kill anybody if she couldn’t run after them? Somebody held them down for her right there on the floor.

The detail of the lady with one leg twice as long as the other is one I found in an openly skeptical news report, one of the few pieces about the killings to be broadcast beyond the confines of California during the week that followed. A teenager, whose name the paper, citing general policy, had declined to publish, said he’d heard it from at least three people, including somebody who claimed to have known Siraj personally. Siraj? Siraj, yes, with a j, new kid, everybody at the whole school knows he was involved, he’s crazy, he can’t shut up about all the shit he gets up to, excuse me, all the things he does—this as fellow students nearby, also unnamed, erupt with laughter and then try to compose themselves. Find him, though, for real, he knows all about it, swear to God.

Dana Reid, the reporter of this story, seems to have requested and been given access to the enrollment records; I was unable to locate a court order granting her access, but these were looser times. Finding nobody named Siraj, she remarked, parenthetically: “Action News found no student by this name on the rolls for the 1986–87 school year.” She touched then on competing theories of the case—former tenants with an ax to grind; criminals occupying an abandoned property; crack is mentioned several times: in the eighties you could get away with blaming almost anything on crack—before returning the broadcast to its anchors.

There’s a lot I’d like to ask this student whose name Action News couldn’t find, but he’s lost to us. It’s almost impossible to get clarity on early details like these, especially when the facts have been so successfully obscured by Siraj’s later life within the febrile imagination of the public—or within, I should say, that small slice of the public that still follows stories like these after they’ve dropped off the front page, the people who can’t help but be curious about details left out of the news reports; and who, denied such details by miserly detectives and cowardly reporters, fill in the blanks themselves as best they can.





4

Song of Gorbonian





the life and works of

Gorboniaw map Morydd,

known more generally as Gorbonianus, but called, by Geoffrey, in his History of the Kings of Britain,

Gorbonian:

that good king who, in his time, defended the husbandmen against the oppressions of their land-lords; who ruled his kingdom with right justice, and did show mercy to the poor of this land; who shunned adventuring over-seas, preferring, to such sojourns, the happy haunts of his youth, those green boughs and pleasant meadows deemed greater by him than all the exalted halls which house the kings and lords of this world; and who, in the strength of his days, did, of his own enterprise and will, restore an ancient temple, in those groves of mystery which he had loved since boyhood with honor and reverence, a spirit he honored until the end of his days.





1.


Now the birth of Gorbonian was as follows. His father the King, having defended his counties against the Flemish invaders, brought upon the land a time of feasting and plenty; and tribute did issue from the land all round, in gratitude to King Morvidus, who, though his mother had come from some far country, none knew which, did now guard his kingdom from marauders. And the people did say, that there was none so worthy as King Morvidus; and in the richness of his reign, commerce prospered, the town around the castle growing great, and newe fangled habits did arise among the young and old.

But after a time the people did say, that the old customs were gone out from the land; and that, with the coming of the new, the old had been washed away. Greatly did folk rue the passing of their customs, saying, that a kingdom ruled by thankless men, would, in short measure, become a kingdom unremembered; and men did complain, when they gathered, at how few remained who yet could call to mind the noble names of the gods. Those gods, they said, had once sustained this land; but they might forget as well as be forgotten, as would be seen.