I am alone now, and I am shivering, mangled beyond all recognition in the 
rear pew of St. Ann’s Catholic Church. It is late now, well past 4 am, and all that’s left along the strand is a pale and wanton cast of zombies, spilling out into the night as Holly Beach marquees go dark. This is what Scottish warlocks refer to as the Devil’s Pocket – a vacuum-black void that exists between pitch dark and dawn. The Devil’s Pocket is no time to go wandering dead-end streets alone, that is unless you happen to be carrying a gun, or a badge, or both, and you have absolutely no qualms about brandishing either one.
Down along the east end of Cresse, local authorities are just now beginning to investigate the sudden disappearance of a Canadian transvestite named Rene Ouellet. Rene was last seen wandering toward the beach with an unidentified male right around this hour of the night. Less than a week prior to Rene’s disappearance, a recent high school graduate by the name of Steven Freeman had been arrested and charged with the fatal stabbing of a classmate outside a North Wildwood hotel along the corner of 11th and Surf Avenue.
Two summers before that on Memorial Day weekend, the half-naked body of a 20-year old named Susan Negersmith had been found beaten and bloody behind a dumpster outside Schellenger’s Restaurant. Negersmith’s body had been discovered by two busboys, her T-shirt and bra had been pushed up around her neck, her jeans and underwear had been bunched up around one foot. There were 26 areas of trauma on Susan Negersmith’s body, including vaginal bruising and the presence of semen.
At the time, the Cape May County Coroner’s Office tried to pass off Susan’s death as nothing more than routine alcohol poisoning. That is until the state police, the FBI, and a forensic pathologist by the name of Michael Baden simultaneously descended on the area, declaring the entire investigation (or general lack thereof) an obscene miscarriage of justice. Those sources concluded, much like any other sane, uncompromising human being might, that Susan Negersmith had been raped, and then strangled, and then left to die upon a filthy piece of cardboard. “It would seem to me you could not rule it any other way,” State Police Superintendent Justin Dintino had been later quoted as saying.
In the blazing shitstorm that ensued, Mary Ann Clayton, a state medical examiner who had assisted in Susan Negersmith’s initial autopsy, admitted a “grievous error” had been made, and offered to amend the official cause of death. Clayton was overruled by her superiors, many of whom insisted upon sticking to their story. This despite the fact there was still an unrepentant rapist/murderer left wandering the streets.
All of this kept swimming around in my head as I ducked into the bowels of a catholic church at 4 o’clock in the morning. I was drunk, and severely stoned, and I was more than a little bit afraid. More to the point, I had no idea how I had gotten there. I mean, I knew where I was. And I knew that I had wandered in there, and that the door had been unlocked. I simply could not stitch together how I had gone from smoking hash in someone’s attic to staring at a row of votive candles during the middle of the night.
***
I was seeing the world through kaleidoscope eyes now, an array of dancing prisms set adrift in my periphery. The votive candles were fucking with my vision something wicked; I could see the stained-glass glow of blinking traffic signals along the altar. I could hear the rhythmic purr of dual exhaust and static pounding … a pair of ghetto dragsters battling hard along Atlantic. The screeching tires set me reeling, reeling forward past the altar, past the candles and the stained glass, past the streetlights and the shivering, past it all until I reappeared inside the bare-bones attic of some beach house, smoking pot out of a bong that may or may not be nicknamed Sue.
I hold that bong down at an angle, much like a mortar or an alpine horn. The skunk weed sets me spinning, the hashish sets my mind afloat … afloat and confused, like some cosmic whirling dervish. I am lost now, doggy-paddling, set adrift a thousand miles at sea. I will myself toward the shore, battling currents and black ripples, battling eddies and fierce winds, battling my way beneath the surface … battling deep, deep down into the nether until I find myself right back again, inside the vast and empty confines of a church past 4 am.
I slip out of the church through a side door. I wander down along East Maple. I take a seat upon the front steps of a house where I once lived. An unmarked cruiser stops in front of me, a plain-clothes officer asks, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m just on my way home,” I somehow manage to tell the officer.
“Home where?” the officer asks.
“Home here,” I say, without hesitation. “I live up on the second floor.”
The officer glances upward, considers whether to call me on my bullshit.
“In that case, get upstairs,” he says. “You don’t want to be out here by yourself this time of night.”
I stand up, and then nod. I climb upstairs toward the door. I disappear into the shadows, pulling curtains close behind me. I stand there, still and silent in the hallway of that beach house. I hold my breath and shut my eyes. I pray to god no tenant sees me.
I creep toward the window, making sure the coast is clear. Then I dart back down the steps and high-tail it to the beach. It is light now, nearly dawn, and the sun will soon be breaking coast. It’s time for me to get back home. It’s time for me to get some sleep.
Day 135