THE VAT – PART II

Oct 18, 2015 News

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By Harold A. Bascom

(When we left Port Kaituma last week, psychologist Yvonne Holder and her brother, Brent, were investigating the baffling suicides of four young men. The Regional Chairwoman had related how an elderly resident, Phillip Pires, had spoken about an omen that had ties to Jonestown…)

“Is it true that each of those boys that committed suicide were in Jonestown before they died?”

“Seems so…” She took a deep breath then: “Okay—lemme tell you something that only people here in Port Kaituma know about, but many don’t talk about it.”

“This promises to be interesting.”

“It is more than interesting, Yvonne—is downright spooky—anyway… Mr. Pires had a brother very much into spiritism also; the only difference between this brother and Pires, was that this brother was money-hungry, and thought he could use spiritual things to make money. His name was Rudy—we used to call he ‘Brother Rudy’. Somehow he come up with a theory—I don’t know through what kind of divination, but he believed that Jim Jones buried money in Jonestown just before Congressman Leo Ryan flew in. So, Brother Rudy decided that he was going to go to Jonestown and invoke the earth-bound spirit of Jim Jones…”

“But Jim Jones isn’t buried there—they took the body back to California…”

“But his spirit is bound to Jonestown! —Anyway, back to his brother, Rudy: He went to Jonestown one night—”

Yvonne Holder shook her head. “At night.”

“Yes, and did some kinda ritual to invoke the demon of Jim Jones. The next morning, they found Brother Rudy body in the grass, on the perimeter of the airstrip, with his neck broken. The strange thing, however, was that when they examine the body, he was sexually molested—brutally so! … As for what happened that night?” She shook her head. “Up to now nobody knows. But a farmer, living nearby the airstrip, recalled hearing the sound of somebody breaking bushes and screaming at the top of they lungs—and that just like that it stop.” She took a deep breath. “It was the very farmer who find Brother Rudy body and call the Port Kaituma police.”

Unmoved, Yvonne looked levelly at the Regional chairwoman. “This stuff you telling me, is for real, Shelley?”

“Real as ever!—I was one who saw Brother Rudy’s body at the hospital!”

“Okay.”

“Many people thought that Brother Rudy should have known better—since he knew Mother Monica—”

“And who is Mother Monica?”

“She was the woman who tied down the ghosts at Jonestown, to protect the people here from being haunted—yeah, Mother Monica performed a ‘tie-down’ ritual.”

“Tie-down ritual’—I’m out of my depth here.”

“After the GDF flew in and found all the swollen dead bodies at Jonestown, the whole of Port Kaituma was worried that spirits from the commune would haunt the village. So Mother Monica’, went in there, and performed a ritual to tie them to Jonestown. In reality though, they say that she only had to tie down one spirit—the lead spirit to tie down the rest…”

Chuckling, the psychologist said: “So the spirit she tied down was Jim Jones.”

“Yes. So it seemed that whatever Brother Rudy did that night, released the Jim Jones demon—”

And the psychologist ended what the Regional Chairman intended to say: “And it chased after him through the night, sodomised him, and then broke his neck by the airstrip.”

“Yvonne!” the Regional Chairwoman said chuckling. “By the look on your face, you’re thinking that I’m talking a load of superstitious nonsense, eh?”

“Well,” Yvonne Holder, “You’re just selling it as you bought it.” She shrugged. “But what all that has to do with the guy Phillip Pires and his dreams—How do all this tie in to those four young men who took their own lives?”

“After Rudy Pires death, people say that Phillip Pires recaptured the demon of Jim Jones in a bottle, took it back to Jonestown and tied it down again…”

“And the whispered theory is, that Sean La Cruz and his three friends went in there, started probing, and inadvertently released Jim Jones’ lascivious demon again. I saw that one coming.”

“Now you have me laughing, Yvonne,” said the Regional Chairwoman. “Anyway, I’m finished with the story-telling for the night. … But, Miss Holder!—Please don’t quote me on anything that I just told you! I have a respectable position in this village!”

*

Something hooted. Yvonne Holder looked away and down past a dishevelment of wooden shops. A trawler was creeping into the garbage-infested port. Another sound made her turn back to the roadway that disappeared around a bend. She saw a Land Rover nose into view. Her brother, Brent, was here.

After he settled in at the guest house and had something to eat, she filled him in on everything she heard from the Regional Chairman. They spoke as they sat snacking on the verandah overlooking the main street, a quagmire now. Brent peered through the balustrade at the mix of the men—the women…the girls. There was a predominant mix of half Amerindian, half black girls with a sexual allure that was raw. “This place has a certain, je ne sais quoi…” He turned to his sister. “I won’t mind, at all, if you introduce me to the Regional Chairwoman. With her by my side—who knows, I might be able to talk to a few people and try to understand what’s going on here. Four suicides in five months?” He nodded. “Yep. I’m looking forward to talking to a few of the residents here.”

“As I told you, it may not be a cakewalk getting much out of people here, Brent.”

“Don’t worry, Sis, I’m a communicator. Together, we’ll get to the bottom of this.” He shifted his full attention to her now: “So, the theory is that the demon of Jim Jones killed those guys.” He shook his head. “Even I who write stories of supernatural happenings, separate village lore from the downright fictional! —But you must introduce me to the Regional Chairwoman, chick. This place can turn out to be a goldmine of supernatural articles for me.”

Yvonne Holder said, reaching for her cell phone. “I’ll call her now—I might even get her to bring a few people here for us to talk to…”

“No bringing… better if we speak to people in their own space. That would be more comfortable for them—and we get more.”

And that was how he and his sister came to be taken to the home of Sean La Cruz’s girlfriend: Irene Da Silva.

*

The darkness under her eyes told Yvonne about the girl’s grief over her man’s passing. She lived in her parents’ house on the top of a hill that overlooked the Government school nestled in a vast clearing. As they spoke, there were noisy young men playing soccer down in the distance. Their shouts came up to the house on the hill, but Irene didn’t seem to be aware of them.

“Did Sean know the other three young men, Irene?”

She took a deep breath. “Yes. … They hung together.”

“People are saying that Sean started acting strange before he died. … You remember anything like that, Irene?”

“Before Sean died…I hadn’t seen him like a full week and a half—but friends of mine saw him, and they think he wasn’t himself; that he was hardly talking to anybody, and was walking with his head down.” She shook her head. “That, to me was strange…”

“What was strange?” said Yvonne. “Sean’s walking with his head down?”

“Yes—Sean was never like that—never! He was always very proud of being who he was…his head was always up… always laughing.”

“Okay…”

“When I heard how he was…the first thing that came to me was, was that maybe what make all of them kill themselves—was because they been in to Jonestown.” She shook her head. “I was against it—and that was why he got angry with me and went home the last time I saw him.”

“What did he say he was going to do in Jonestown, Irene?” Brent said, gently.

“He told me he was going there to look for artifacts…”

“Artifacts…” echoed, Yvonne Holder.

“Yes, he read somewhere—heard somewhere, that part of the tin tub—this bakey that Jim Jones mixed the poison in, was still there. He wanted to bring it back—he-he said he just didn’t understand why the remnants of it weren’t in a museum or something!”

She was weeping now: “I told Sean that he was stupid to even think to be messing with something like that—I called him a big fool! I-I was just afraid—afraid for him. But it was when I told him that Uncle Pires said that Jonestown was not a place to be digging around—Sean got mad and said that I was speaking like a real ignorant ‘local’—like old, stupid Uncle Phillip!—and then he just got up and left…”

*

“Well…” said Yvonne Holder as she and Brent waited for the Regional Chairwoman to pick them up at the cross road at the bottom of the hill down from Irene’s home. “What do you think, Brent?”

“What do I think?” Brent Holder echoed. “Well I think that even cynical you would have to agree that there’s something funny as hell forming up here—strange as hell—”

“Supernatural as hell—com’on—out with it, my brother.”

He chuckled. “Supernatural as hell. Sean La Cruz and the other three probably went in to Jonestown to look for what’s left of that suicide cauldron after so many years—”

“And what?—something follow them out and killed them one by one?”

He looked at her, emptily.

“They weren’t murdered, Brent—they killed themselves!” She heard the sound of the Land Rover, and looked to see it nose into view.

“We’ll ask her to take us to the homes of the others that died,” Brent said.

“Okay,” said Shelly as they started forward for the hardy vehicle.

*

After speaking to the family of the dead young men for most of the day, Brent found quite a few things unsettling.

“Check this out, Vonny,” he said to his

sister, who was reclining in a nibbi sofa in her guest room. She looked over to her brother with his laptop on his thighs.

“Check this: Each one of the young men that killed himself exhibited new and common idiosyncrasies: Loss of confidence in the way each walked—as though each had no right to use the public road; subservient body language, and not speaking. … And then there were the nightmares that each, reportedly, had continually.”

Yvonne remembered. Bereaved parents spoke of their sons crying out like someone was about to do ‘bad things’—or was doing something very bad to them.

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