Shadows Out of Time

In those days, only Maggie stood by me when my family refused any support. Strict and conservative, the entire Hendricks clan had disowned Dennis for his drug abuse and involvement in a counterculture movement called Wicca, advocated in New York City back then by a modern witch named Raymond Buckland. Dennis, being Dennis, climbed those Neopagan ranks until he met Redcap, a man who ran a Greenwich Village coven inspired by the work of Keziah Mason, a 17th-century witch now acknowledged in rarified circles as an early, misunderstood mathematical genius. Redcap almost certainly caused my brother’s death, though neither I nor the police could prove it. My parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, however, all so ashamed of Dennis, didn’t care to know either way and remained content to see him buried and move on with their lives. Only Maggie and I cared to do otherwise.

We had grown up thick as thieves next door to each other in the Long Island Bay town of Knicksport, fifty miles outside the city. At age five, we promised to marry in that way little kids innocently do, but as adults, we remained platonic, the bond of brother and sister, which made losing Maggie in 1973 all the more difficult. The one warm, ever-present constant in my life, a caring woman who dreamed of becoming a doctor — gone. And when we had come so close to grasping the hidden facts of Dennis’s death.

Based on statements to police from neighbors who witnessed his panicked dash from his second-floor apartment to the rooftop from which he plummeted, we knew Dennis had raved about the cockroach creature as he ran, that he had talked about it stalking him for days. The cops chalked it off to hallucinations instigated by drug use, an easy enough explanation. Except that the story resonated for me. Five years younger than my twentytwo-year-old brother and my head filled with the strange things he’d told me, I wondered what if there were more to his fatal mania than psychedelic derangement. I couldn’t shake myself loose from that question.

In the aftermath of Maggie’s visit tonight, I’ve retrieved an old shoebox from the back of my closet. In it lie all my notes and photos from that time, materials I never mustered the courage to revisit or discard. And with them my 1968 Carry-Corder 150, which, astonishingly, still works with fresh batteries despite storage for all the intervening years.

The cassettes still play. The voices still speak.

Maggie’s. That dirtbag pusher, Squirrel’s. Mine, younger and deeper.

My brother’s.

The city street noise hums like a background theme. The morning of August 8, 1973, outside a brownstone apartment on East 4th Street, a moment kept alive magnetically.

The last day I sought the truth.

August 8, 1973, recording. The rush of passing cars. Chattering passersby. A call for a taxi.

Maggie: You recording?

Me: Yeah, pretty cool, right? Easier than taking notes.

Maggie: Unless you run out of batteries or tape.

Me: Got extras right here.

The slap of my hand patting my satchel.

Maggie: You sure this is the right place?

Me: The papers reported this address back in ’71. The superintendent found a child’s corpse hidden in the basement walls. The police suspected Redcap and his coven of killing him.

Maggie: Whoa, Richie-Rich, you didn’t tell me we’re checking out a murder scene.

Me: It’s not related. Redcap’s people had a solid alibi.

Squirrel: Yeah, alibis don’t mean shit, man.

Me: The body was found behind a wall that hadn’t been touched for fifteen years.

Squirrel: Right, man, but it was the body of a kid only a week dead.

Maggie: What? Are you joking? You’re joking.

Squirrel: I ain’t joking. You guys paid me for information. I’m giving you information.

Maggie: It’s not like there’s a dead body in there now, right?

Me: No, of course not.

Squirrel: Not that you know of.

Maggie: Guess there’s only one way to find out, huh, boys?

Maggie hustled up the stoop and then unlocked the door with the key the superintendent had rented us for fifty dollars cash. The sight of her waiting in the open doorway filled me with hope and confidence that answers awaited us on the other side of the threshold. I walked into the foyer and Squirrel followed me. I had paid him to help us because he’d sold drugs to Redcap’s Coven of the Right Stars, which seemingly dissolved sometime in the winter of 1973, and though he hadn’t taken part in their rituals, he knew more about them than anyone else I’d found.

We entered Redcap’s old apartment. Never occupied for long since he left it, the place carried a bad reputation. The super complained he couldn’t clean it up right no matter what he did, and its tenants all “wigged out and broke their lease or ran off in the middle of the night.”