35

The first thing I did was search for Old Nathaniel. I was surprised when I got a few hits.

One was from a site that collected Appalachian folk tales. The site verified what Susan had said about the legend’s origins. There was no mention of using Old Nathaniel as a racist symbol, though.

The next hit was from a message board called White Strikes Back. A poster who went by the screen name rightpower33 asked if anyone had ever seen Old Nathaniel.

There were three replies. The first one was just a question mark and emoji of a face looking confused.

The second said, “I am Old Nathaniel.”

The third, from screen name nogeorgiaaoc, said, “Dude, you are an idiot. Only the n$ggers see Old Nathaniel, and that’s right before they die … hahahaha! Film on the dark web.”

I studied that response for a long time, trying to make sense of it. First, the screen name. Nogeorgiaaoc. North Georgia AOC. AOC was what had been written on the wall in the cave. I still had no idea what it stood for. And what did it mean that there was a “film on the dark web”?

I’d heard of the dark net—could this dark web be the same thing? It almost had to be. From what I understood, accessing the dark net was a secret thing, and I didn’t have the first idea how to do it.

I opened a separate tab and searched for AOC. Several businesses came up that used those initials, but none were located in or even near Georgia. I tried North Georgia AOC and found something called the Atlanta Outdoor Club that looked benign enough. I kept paging, looking deeper and deeper into the results until, seven pages in, something caught my eye.

AOC Productions.

I clicked the link and it took me to the homepage for a 1999 film called Angels of Depravity. I clicked on the trailer, but the link was broken. A brief summary of the film gave away little, just that it was set in rural Georgia and was a “visionary horror masterpiece” directed by “the cult auteur, Taggart.” A screenshot showed a man standing on the edge of a country road as headlights crested the hill and bore down on him. He wore overalls and big boots. In his hand was a large kitchen knife, streaked with blood.

Taggart.

Jackpot. I opened yet another tab and searched Taggart Monroe, Director. An IMDb page came up as the first result. I clicked on it and read the short bio.

Taggart Monroe directed his first feature film in 1979. Living to Die, a thriller about a man whose suicide attempts keep being thwarted by people of color brought him instant recognition as one of Hollywood’s top young filmmakers, despite the objections of many critics who praised the film as “beautifully shot” but found the script and overall theme of the film racist and xenophobic. Other critics—as well as the filmgoers who helped make Living to Die an underground hit—argued that it was a comment on racism, and that if the film had a flaw, it was an overabundance of subtlety, which served to obfuscate the commentary on the racist culture of the South at the time.

Monroe’s follow-up left little doubt as to his intentions. The 1985 film The Killer stands as one of the most controversial films ever made by a large studio. It was pulled from theaters only three days after its release because of protests and bad publicity, prompting Warner Brothers to release a statement disassociating themselves from Taggart Monroe and the film. The Killer was a critical and financial flop. Worse, it made it impossible for Monroe to work in Hollywood again.

Monroe’s film career appeared to be over, but then in 1999, he emerged with a straight-to-DVD release called Angels of Depravity. For this film, he dropped his last name, most likely in an effort to rebrand himself and reboot his career. But the reboot was short-lived. Taggart went on to make two more films, Rando and Ivory War, both of which lost money and are now out of circulation.

Monroe’s final film came in 2005. Utter Destiny was his first release from his own Georgia studio called Skull Productions. He is credited as the director under the name Tag Monroe.

When one surveys the whole of Monroe’s work, some curious themes arise. Besides rampant racism and misogyny, the director seems obsessed with numerology and moon phases. All Monroe films feature a climatic sequence that involves three scenes of increasing impact. In each film, Monroe seemed to focus on a different moon phase—new, first quarter, full, etc., and the climatic scenes are always washed in moonlight. Perhaps, if he hadn’t also washed his films in intolerant ideals and a vile worldview, critics might have spent more time delving into his other fascinating idiosyncrasies.

So, Lane’s alibi for the night Mary went missing was verified by a washed-up racist director. I wondered if Patterson even knew Monroe’s history. This guy checked all the boxes as being involved with Mary’s disappearance: racist, eccentric—hell, he even named his film company Skull Productions.

Not to mention his other company—AOC Productions. Old Nathaniel, AOC, skulls. Tag Monroe brought them all together in one neat little package. And he was Lane Jefferson’s alibi.

I decided to dig a little deeper and searched his other films. The first two returned the most hits. The third, Utter Destiny seemed to barely exist at all. The only mention of it I could find was a single landing page for a website that was apparently never finished. The page showed a white woman wearing a black dress, kneeling beside a pond. The tagline read, “There is one thing none of us can escape.”

Living to Die was far more interesting. According to some obscure fan forums, many film buffs still saw it as one of the most well-made films of all time. I found posts where fans spent paragraphs discussing how Tag (as they referred to him) had staged and filmed the shots. If someone did bring up the racist elements of the film, they were basically told to shut up because it was old news.

“We’re discussing technique,” one rabid fan commented in response to another one who’d said Living to Die sickened her. “Go somewhere else for your liberal snowflake rant.” Snowflake. I’d first encountered the term when someone had called Rufus a “snowflake,” which still made me laugh, thinking about it. Sure, I could see how Rufus could be considered a liberal, but I definitely couldn’t see how anyone might mistake Rufus for a snowflake. Serial killer with a streak of asshole, yeah, but snowflake, no. So, whenever I saw this term being used disparagingly, I immediately judged the person using the phrase as an idiot.

I clicked on the avatar of the fan who’d said this—his screen name was ifTHEsouthDONTrise. Clicking the avatar took me to his profile page, where he listed his presence on some other sites. He had a blog and something called Tumblr. I clicked on both only to find pages of racist and anti-Semitic screeds.

One of his posts was about Taggart Monroe’s films. I clicked and read a mind-numbing essay about the “underappreciated genius” of Monroe and the laughable assertion that “all great minds are by definition racist.” The reasoning behind the last statement was that most normal people or “normies,” according to the author, didn’t possess the intellectual abilities or honesty to see the world for what it was, one in which color did matter. Dark-skinned people were lower on the scale of humanity than lighter-skinned people.

I felt sick even reading this kind of thing, but I pushed on to the end of the essay anyway, simply because I owed it to Mary to exhaust every avenue. I was glad I did because the ending did not disappoint and made me understand exactly why Lane Jefferson might have targeted Mary.

The very worst thing a person of any race can do is try to break out of the natural order. This is why I hate white people who will not affirm their divine rights as the keepers and rulers of this earth. It’s why I hate colored people who try to take on positions of authority that should by right go to whites. Black women are the worst and most smug of all who commit these grievances. A black woman is God’s lowest creature—

I stopped. There was more, but I just couldn’t bring myself to read it. How could someone be so vile, so evil? Were people born like that, or had our world been so corrupted that they were altered as they grew older? Was it even possible that someone like this had once been a cute, innocent kid like Briscoe?

I knew it was, and that knowledge gutted me. I wanted to find the source of this evil. Find it and shut it off at the valve.

But no matter how badly I wanted that, I knew it was an impossibility. The best thing I could do for Briscoe and Virginia and all the kids like them was also the best thing I could do for myself, and that was finding Mary, a person whose light shone brighter than any I’d ever known in a world that always seemed to be getting darker.

When I looked up from the computer again, it was well after midnight, and the house was quiet. I glanced over at Shelia, still lying on the floor. She was so relaxed, so zoned out. Part of me envied her. Oh, to be in a place where I just didn’t give a damn about anything. Even for a little while.

Of course, that was the kind of thinking that had created some of the worst moments I’d ever known. It was the addict’s mentality, and I’d fought against it for most of my life.

Was I an addict?

Maybe. No, probably. But, for much of my life, I’d kept it right on the edge, able to alternate between long stretches of functionality and short, rapid-fire bursts of substance-induced forgetting.

Luckily, I’d managed to stay away from hard drugs, but I probably owed that more to my love affair with whiskey than to any kind of good decision-making on my part. Hell, right now, I wanted nothing more than some quick shots and a couple of beers. Then I’d be relaxed. Then I could let things go.

At least that was what I told myself. Sometimes the biggest lies we tell ourselves are when we think we are being brutally honest.

“You find anything?” Ronnie asked from the couch. I was surprised he was awake.

“I found enough to understand we’re dealing with real depravity.”

Martin, who was sitting beside Ronnie, with a glazed look in his eye, twitched suddenly.

“Sorry about your girlfriend,” he said, and then leaned his head back and began to snore.

“Yeah, me too,” I said, and left the kitchen to lie down on the floor beside Shelia and sleep.