while the black stars burn (11 page)

“It seems your parents made some changes to their will that I was unaware of and would have advised against,” he said gravely. “But nonetheless the alterations are legitimate and legal.”

“What changes?” she asked. She’d had a hard time feeling anything but numb since the phone call. Her parents’ bodies were too badly damaged for an open casket funeral, and so their deaths still felt unreal.

“Your father and mother have both left 80% and 90%, respectively, of their money to the Messina Strait Foundation.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a religious organization, one that your mother was apparently involved with most of her adult life. According to the notarized letter she left behind, she apparently joined it either before or during her work on
Cthylla
, and your father became involved recently. It’s news to me, too,” he added, apparently reading the confusion on her face.

“What does the foundation do?”

“They offer spiritual retreats and workshops. Past that, I’m honestly not sure, except that now they have a great deal of money with which to do it.”

Kamerynne couldn’t help Nat or anyone else without money. And if she couldn’t help...what good was she?

“Am I broke?” She immediately hated how much her question made her sound like a little girl.

“Oh, no, don’t worry...you still have your parents’ house, and they left you a trust fund that should enable you to maintain the house and pay for your college and personal upkeep indefinitely. You should be able to live comfortably without having to work unless you want to.”

“I do want to work,” she said. “I want to be...worthwhile.”

*

She and Nat both started their freshman years at UCLA the next year. They left Olga to take care of her parents’ house and they split a dorm room on campus. Nat majored in art, of course, and Kamerynne tentatively settled on journalism; she wasn’t sure she wanted to try coding games, but writing about them for magazines seemed fun. And if she majored in English she knew she’d have to write a bunch of papers on a bunch of old books that had bored her half to death the first time her father made her read them.

The week before midterms, two events changed Kamerynne’s life forever.

The first was that she attended a guest lecture offered by a visiting investigative journalist from
The New York Times
.

“There’s
always
a paper trail,” the journalist told them. “Every thought that every person physically writes down or sends through an email is recorded somewhere. Every communication leaves a ghost behind. If you jot down a note on a piece of paper resting on a phone book, and then you tear up that paper, guess what? The imprint of your pen marks are on the cover of the phone book. A good investigator can find that and read that. If you send an email, even if you and your recipient delete it? That message has traveled through a dozen routers, and that email can be packet sniffed or recorded. There’s
always
a paper trail, even if it isn’t paper.”

Kamerynne sat up straighter in her seat. Bloody Mary didn’t have to be spoken aloud anymore to summon her spectre, it seemed.

She was still mulling over palimpsests and packet sniffers when she arrived back at their dorm room. “Paint it Black” was blasting on the stereo, and Nat was unconscious on the floor, barely breathing in a puddle of pill-spotted vomit.

*

Kamerynne spent five long hours by Nat’s side at the ER. Nat regained consciousness briefly and started wailing and trying to pull out her nasogastric tube and IV. The doctors had to sedate her and told Kamerynne it was best if she went home.

So she went back to the dorm room; the janitorial staff had cleaned up the vomit in her absence, but the air in the room had a sour chemical smell. Kamerynne sat on her narrow bed and wept out her frustration and worry. Nat had seemed to be doing so well; she’d seemed
happy
. And her art had gotten even better! A gallery in LA was interested in showing her work. But clearly she wasn’t actually happy...or something bad had happened.

Kamerynne booted up Nat’s computer, composed a short, polite letter to let Nat’s instructors know that she was in the hospital, and got into her email to start sending out messages.

In Nat’s inbox was a message from someone named Dr. Helene Arcanjo:

Natalya,

It’s very nice that the gallery is interested in your drawings, but remember that you must not focus on such trivial things. The Goddess has her plan for you, and you must dedicate yourself to her fully. Do not disappoint us after everything we’ve done for you.

-Helene

Who the hell was this Arcanjo woman? And what had she been doing for Nat? If Nat had confided in Arcanjo about her earlier suicide attempt, this email was as good as handing Nat a loaded pistol. A quick Web search revealed that Arcanjo had a PhD in divinity from the Innsmouth Theological Seminary in Rhode Island and she was the minister for the Temple of the Deep Mother in Oxnard. As far as Kamerynne knew, Nat had never been to the church...but she couldn’t be sure.

Not knowing made her sick to her stomach. What was going on in Nat’s life? Kamerynne dug through Nat’s email, looking for messages to or from Arcanjo. And there was nothing, no messages from other church members, not even any messages referring to the Goddess. If she was deleting the emails, Nat had to believe they contained something incriminating...and that there was a risk of someone looking for them.

Suddenly worried about leaving a search engine history on Nat’s computer, Kamerynne went to her own computer. Another query on Temple of the Deep Mother led to an older version of the church page in archive.org that contained a list of members. Searches on those names led her to a church member’s personal website, which contained a lot of poetry about the Goddess and links to several
Cthylla
fan pages, a couple of which mentioned Charybdis Studios. Whose representatives Kamerynne’s mother and father had been meeting with the night they died.

*

The next morning, Kamerynne made some phone calls to former associates of her father’s. When she told them what she wanted to know, most of them claimed ignorance or blew her off. Finally, she got in touch with a senior programmer who offered to call her back on another line. He gave her a name, and a campus address.

Kamerynne walked to Boelter Hall and found a small, windowless office on the third floor. The door was open a crack. Inside were two pale computer science students huddled around a Sun Microsystems computer. Their desks were piled high with diskettes, computer cables, and empty Mountain Dew cans.

She rapped on the door frame to get their attention. “Hi, is Chad Barnes in here?”

“Can we help you?” one of them asked, barely looking away from the code on the monitor.

“I hope so. My name’s Kamerynne Craigie, and—”

“Are you Cameron Craigie’s daughter?” His eyes focused on her like lasers.

Nat had the same star-struck expression when she found out she was standing in Grayce Aberdine’s house.

“I am, in fact.” She smiled at them, and suddenly they were both on their feet, talking over each other.

“Wow, it’s an honor—”

“I was so bummed to hear about your dad, it was terrible—”

“I was hoping one of you guys could help me with a project,” she said.

“Sure, what?” the first asked.

“I need everything you can tell me about keyloggers....”

*

Kamerynne disappeared into the computer science underworld at her college. She emerged long enough each day to visit Nat at the hospital, but beyond that she was in the computer lab learning what she could from Chad and his friends or at her own machine. She burrowed into cracking like a larvae in a juicy apple. The search for illicit knowledge and cryptic information excited her almost more than sex.

The day before Nat was released from the hospital, Kamerynne went to her computer to install a program to record keystrokes and copy her incoming email in a separate, hidden file on her hard drive. But as she dug into the computer’s core system to install the hypervisor...she discovered another keylogger already running. It didn’t look like any of the standard malware Chad had showed her. Kamerynne was able to decrypt enough of it to see that it was sending the data to a computer in the Ukraine. Nat’s native country.

Kamerynne looked up the IP of the receiving computer, not expecting to find anything...but the address was registered to the European branch of Charybdis Studios.

*

A week after she picked up Nat from the hospital, Kamerynne downloaded a torrent of
Cthylla: The Rising
, which was still three months away from opening in theatres. She’d figured they’d gotten another actress to play her mother’s role...but her mother’s character wasn’t in this film. She hadn’t been recast; as far as this movie’s script was concerned, her character had simply never existed. Had she been written out after her death? Or was she never supposed to be in the film in the first place?

Kamerynne took a screen capture of the list of supporters in the movie’s end credits and spent several hours looking up names. Ten attended the Temple of the Deep Mother at some point in their lives. And three seemed to have something to do with the Messina Strait Foundation, the group that had inherited her parents’ money.

*

“What do you know about Charybdis Studios?” Kamerynne asked when Nat stumbled into their dorm room at three in the morning.

Nat paused in the doorway, her face flushed with alcohol. “A little. Not much. They made the
Cthylla
movies.”

“Right.” Kamerynne paused, not sure if she should continue. “Why would someone from those studios be monitoring your computer?”

Nat laughed dismissively, but also turned pale. “That’s silly. That wouldn’t happen.”

“But it did.” Kamerynne nodded toward her computer. “They’re watching you. Why?”

Something seemed to crumple behind Nat’s eyes, and she got a faraway expression. “To make sure I’m doing as I’m told.”

Kamerynne’s heart beat faster. Was she going to get the truth, at last? “What are they telling you to do?”

Tears spilled down Nat’s cheeks. “Right now? Helene
wants
me help get rich people to donate to the Foundation. But I’m shit at it. Eventually I’m to go in the water, and the goddess will come out. She needs sacrifices to bring her into the world. It’s what I was made for.”

“Made for? What do you mean?”

Nat gave a shuddering little laugh. “It’s funny, you know? You and I were both conceived at parties. Only your parents didn’t mean to make you. Mine did. My mom had sex with every man at the temple so nobody would know who my father was. Thirteen guys, and she didn’t get pregnant the first time, so they had to do it again during the next new moon. Me and all the other temple babies, we’re goddess chum.”

Kamerynne tried to get her mind around what Nat was telling her. “You’re...you’re saying you’re supposed to be a human sacrifice?”

“Pretty much, yeah.” Nat’s face was a sickly grey.

“Why...why do they let you walk around? Go to college?”

“They don’t care how I live my life; they just care that I’m there when it needs to end. And who knows when that will be? It could be next week, it could be in twenty years. And if it’s in twenty years, I might as well be useful in the meantime, right?”

“Why don’t you run away? Look, I’ll give you money to run away.”

Nat laughed again. She looked like she was going to start weeping at any moment. “There’s no place to run. The Foundation is everywhere.”

“The Messina Strait Foundation?”

“Yeah.”

“How is the Foundation connected to the Temple of the Deep Mother and Charybdis Studios?”

“Isn’t it obvious? The Foundation runs the studios and the Temple runs the Foundation.”

Kamerynne stared at her for a moment, feeling herself dangling above that terrible, cold, unfathomable blackness she’d feared since she was a kid. “Did the Foundation kill my parents?”

“Probably, yeah. I mean, I don’t know anything specific, but yeah. Once a wealthy person changes their will for the Foundation, they don’t last long.”

“Jesus. Fucking. Christ.” Kamerynne wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. She wanted to push Nat’s face right through the wall. “How can you be so casual about that? They murdered my parents! Does that not mean
anything
to you?”

“It’s terrible! I agree! But...they do it every day.”

Part of Kamerynne’s mind was whispering
This can’t be real
over and over. The room seemed to be tilted, the air a suffocating blanket. She looked down at her hands; they felt like they belonged to someone else.

“Why are you telling me all this?” Kamerynne’s tongue felt like borrowed flesh, too, and was hard to move.

“Because it doesn’t matter if you know or not. They won’t kill me for telling, because they need me for the ritual. And they probably won’t kill you, not unless you go to the papers or the cops or something stupid...and you’re not stupid. They already have your money. And when the Goddess rises, everybody dies and none of this mattered. That’s just how it goes.”

*

A month later, Nat and a group of 100 other young women attended a beachside retreat near Bolinas, California. Helene Arcanjo led them into the water at high tide during a freak storm; all of them drowned. A pair of fishermen found Nat’s body washed up on a nearby beach three days later.

Just hours after that, Kamerynne’s BMW was found crashed and burned in a ravine; the body inside was so badly damaged it could not be conclusively identified.

Nat’s cremains were interred in the lovely Chapel of the Chimes, courtesy of an anonymous donor.

Bank accounts and mutual funds belonging to the Messina Strait Foundation and Charybdis Studios developed mysterious electronic leaks, and in the space of a few months their assets plummeted so far that they had to seek bankruptcy protection. And after that, high-ranking members of the Foundation started turning up dead: a few car accidents, an electrocution in a bathtub, a heart attack in a hot tub, a plane crash.