Crucifax

Read Crucifax for Free Online

Book: Read Crucifax for Free Online
Authors: Ray Garton
hands. His will be done."
    Furious, J.R. followed Sheila back out to the car. She tossed her last load into the back seat and started to get in.
    "Wait, Sheila, don't do this!" he pleaded. "You can come live with me if you want, I've just got that tiny apartment, but if it'll—"
    "Yeah, then how would I have to live, huh? Your way instead of theirs? Big difference." She slammed the door.
    "Sheila, please! Where are you going?"
    She opened the window a crack and said, "Someplace better than this."
    The window on the driver's side slid down smoothly, and a woman with bushy black hair, pale skin, and dark eye makeup smiled out at him.
    "You lose, big brother," she said as she drove away. J.R. was sure it was just reflected moonlight, but her eyes had shimmered in that last moment before she was out of sight.
    J.R. rushed into the house, angered by the woman's cockiness, and called the police, since his parents wouldn't.
    "Is she a minor, Mr. Haskell?" the officer asked.
    "She's seventeen."
    "And she just left tonight, huh? Well, apparently she wasn't taken against her will. You don't know where she went?"
    "No."
    "Well, if you haven't heard from her in twenty-four hours, give us a call. But as far as I can tell, there's not much we can do."
    Three days later, Sheila was found hanging in the closet of a cheap motel room just outside of El Cerrito. She had taken her own life and left a note that read simply, "I'm going to someplace better."
    Nine days after Sheila's death, a restaurant that had been abandoned for nearly five years, the Old Red Barn, had caught fire. The building had been in very poor condition, and no one was surprised by the news of the fire. All had been shocked, however, by what was found inside the building.
    The restaurant had been designed to look like an old barn with a high ceiling and rafters. Most of the rafters collapsed during the fire. Tied to the rafters were twenty-two ropes. Each rope ended in a noose, and each noose was wrapped around the neck of a dead teenager.
    It was later determined that the teenagers had been dead at least two hours before one of the ropes had snapped and the corpse of a sixteen-year-old boy from Richmond had fallen on lighted candles that had been burning in the building, starting the fire.
    The following week was filled with funerals, long processions of slow-moving cars with headlights shining, flags flown at half-mast, and a fruitless attempt to understand why twenty-two teenagers had ended their lives.
    J.R. recognized many of the dead as former friends of Sheila's, and when he heard that several teenagers claimed that their friends had been involved with a couple named John and Dara, he became suspicious. They claimed the couple had encouraged the students to take drugs and engage in promiscuous sex, and they had spoken of suicide as if it were some kind of elevation of the spirit to a higher plane. They believed John and Dara were responsible for the deaths. J.R. had considered speaking up, supporting them, telling of Sheila's association with John and Dara, but when he saw the reaction they got, he decided there was already enough misery in his life.
    While going through their dead children's belongings, some of the parents found rock lyrics written down in notebooks, letters, even on napkins—lyrics that made explicit references to sex, drugs, and violence. The parents organized and began fighting for the censorship of such rock records, claiming the lyrics had confused and desensitized their children, leading them to suicide. When the teenagers protested the group's ideas, the parents fought back with a very parental response: "It's for your own good."
    The suicides made national news, were analyzed and reanalyzed by television and radio psychologists, written about in magazines and psychology journals, and preached about in churches.
    All J.R. knew was that he'd lost his little sister. If she hadn't killed herself in that dingy motel room, she probably would have

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