“Hi.” Buffy lovingly ran her hand over cool granite.
“Sorry I haven’t been here in a long time. There’s no excuse but know I thought of you, both of you, every day.” She toyed with the purple cellophane wrapped pot of white lilies, untying and retying the yellow ribbon. “I hope you guys like the flowers. The grounds keeper said there’re different every week. You know, to keep it interesting. It’s not much—
“I’m so confused, there’s just so much going on right now. I wish you both were here to tell me what to do.” Sitting down, Buffy ignored the dead grass biting into her.
“I don’t know what’s real anymore. I saw things. Horrible things. Things that shouldn’t even exist. And the only person who might help is crazy. Like crazy, crazy.” Buffy reached up and snatched a slender leaf, then started pulling it apart. “I’m trying to fight something I have no clue how to fight. What’s worse, I almost lost myself. It was bad, really bad for a while. I acted in ways, ways that…I don’t know why and I didn’t even care how wrong it was.” Mindlessly she plucked and shredded another leaf.
“Don’t worry. I’m not acting that way. Not anymore. My head’s clear. Well, clearer.” Her finger traced and retraced her mother and sister’s names. “I know. I know you both love me and that I’m strong. I just don’t feel very strong right now.” Buffy sat quietly, letting the rest of the pseudo conversation play out in her mind.
“You’re both right. I know what to do. I just have to do it. Thank you.” Buffy stood up, brushing the leaves away. Kissing two finger tips, she pressed them to their gravestone.
“I love you both so very much. Good bye.” Buffy made her way back to the car, and with a parting glance, left.
~*~
Buffy was fading fast. The adrenaline she’d been running on for the past forty-eight hours nearly drained. Her body screamed for sleep. Yet her mind still raced, playing over and over her glimpse into the mind of a mad man.
His drawings. His words. Intricate riddles saying so much but telling her so little. It was all there. She just had to follow the scattering of bread crumbs. Wherever they might lead.
Now, strapped in at thirty thousand feet, she needed something to pass the time. She pulled Gil’s book from her carry-on.
Flipping through the pages, a dozen or so photos titled: Gateways to Hell caught her eye. Gil had a cameo in each one: wrapped in a parka standing in front Hekla, a snow covered volcano in Iceland; Zen-posed in the center of a rocky landscape littered with statues and dozens of pinwheels at Mount Osore, Japan; decked out in full tourist-wear of black socks and sandals, floppy sunhat, and a smear of zinc oxide down the bridge of his nose, at the mouth of the Cave of the Sibyl in Naples, Italy. It was the last picture that stopped Buffy dead in her tracks. A massive doorway, far grandeur than his lunatic rendition drawn on a bedroom door: Rodin’s The Gates of Hell.
Regardless of religion or culture, all over the world man had shared the same belief: the Gates of Hell was where one could literally go to hell or, even worse, demons could get out. Of all the places, LA wasn’t one of them. Yet something happened there. Something that drove Gil insane. Something possibly involving William.
Gil knew William that was clear. It was how, that wasn’t. There were hundreds of possibilities and what ifs. She could spend all her time trying to figuring this out or take it at face value. There was a far bigger question that needed answering: whether William was involved with the murders. This was something else entirely. Either way, William knew far more than he was letting on and she was getting to the bottom of this. That was for damn sure.
With a final look at a smiling, sane Gil, Buffy started reading. All too soon, she was battling off sleep, losing terribly. Exhaustion finally won. She fell asleep to the little girl next to her excitedly talking to her mother about egg hunts, baskets full of candy, and chocolate bunnies.
~*~
Following much needed rest and refueling, Buffy returned to the library. Surfing the Internet, she found nothing more of note on the Gates of Hell, and unsure how the lion, leopard, and wolf fit into all of this, she typed in “Inviticus”. Meaning unconquered, each line of William Ernest Henley’s poem touched her deeply:
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.”
The last two lines was Gil’s mantra. He claimed when the police found him in LA that demons were trying to take his soul. Did Gil see actual demons in LA? Was this an undiscovered gate to hell? More importantly, did LA have anything to do with the murders in Boston, and what’s William’s part in all of this?
Buffy decided the answers to these questions and the dozen or so she’d yet to ask were not going to be found in the library. It was decided. There was only one place to go. After a quick call to Mulcahy about LA, she was heading to Concentrico to see William. To end this once and for all.