“A lot. From all accounts, Eric Townsend was a very upstanding businessman, one of his company’s best. That’s before he disappeared six months ago.”
“Any idea what he’s been doing for all that time?”
Brake lights flash like fireflies up ahead.
“Listen to this,” says Julie. “That tattoo he had lasered off? It’s the same emblem that was on the shirts of the three men you and Candy saw on Wonderland Avenue.”
“What does it mean?”
“It’s the insignia of the White Light Legion. Ever heard of them?”
“Aren’t they some freaky skinhead group? Like religious Nazi assholes?”
“You’re partly right, but they’re much stranger than that. The Vigil has a whole library on the White Lights and the Silver Shirts.”
“Now, the Silver Legion I’ve heard of. Local Hitler groupies back in the thirties. They were kind of a big deal at one point.”
“Their leader was a disgruntled screenwriter named William Dudley Pelley.”
“Leave it to a writer to go nuts and think he can take over the world with his Dungeons and Dragons crew.”
“It goes much deeper than that. Pelley didn’t want to take over the country. He wanted to pave the way for the Führer in the U.S. when he won the war in Europe. Pelley started the Silver Shirts on January first, 1933, the day Hitler became chancellor of Germany. But he wasn’t a run-of-the-mill fascist. Yes, his group attracted the usual bullies and thugs you find in those groups, but Pelley saw himself as a spiritual leader. Call it New Age fascism.”
“What does that mean?”
A Caddy cuts off a plumbing truck to move farther left, so I cut off a Prius to do the same.
“In 1928, Pelley had a
‘clairaudient’ event. A kind of out-of-body experience that later, in an article, he called ‘My Seven Minutes in Eternity.’ He said he was hit by a shaft of bright white light that took him to another plane of existence where he heard voices. He talked with the souls of the dead, even God and Jesus. Along the way, he gained special psychic powers.”
“This guy is starting to sound like every snake-oil salesman I’ve ever heard of.”
“Not quite. Pelley was special. The Silver Legion had fifteen thousand members at one point, three thousand in California alone. But Pelley didn’t want to just be a fascist. He saw himself as a great religious leader and that the beings he met on his out-of-body journeys had picked him to bring about a spiritual revolution in America.”
“What kind?”
“Pelley had psychic experiences for four years after the first one in ’28. According to him, they unlocked his mental powers. Some accounts say he claimed he could levitate. He could speak to ‘secret masters’ that lived on other planes, and it was his job to teach others what they taught him. He even had his own metaphysical magazine, the New Liberator, where he published general spiritualist articles and his own teachings.”
We come to a complete stop again. A pickup truck and a Maserati almost sideswipe each other as they wrestle for an exit ramp.
“What does any of this have to do with Townsend? He wasn’t a Silver Shirt. You said he was in another group.”
“Yes, the White Light Legion. They were split off from the Silver Legion in the late thirties over some kind of metaphysical dispute. They didn’t think Pelley’s teachings went far enough. They weren’t practical enough. If Pelley could levitate and communicate with dead souls, they wanted to do the same. Their leader, Edison Elijah McCarthy, thought Pelley was holding out on them.”
“A Nazi must have loved having a name like Elijah.”
“By the time he legally changed his middle name to Monroe, it was too late. Enough people knew his real name. He spent years trying to cover it up.”
“What are you saying? Those White Lights guys slaughtered a whole houseful of people on Wonderland because someone knew their leader’s real name?”
“I doubt it, but it’s hard to say exactly what the White Lights want. We know they demanded access to Pelley’s most esoteric teachings, but there’s no way of knowing if they got it. They had their own publications, but they destroyed them all in the early sixties when an FBI agent briefly infiltrated the group. Since then, all their teachings have been by word of mouth and no other plants have gotten close enough to the inner circle to learn their most important beliefs.”
Julie is on a roll. I don’t want to stop her, but I’m going crazy sitting here. I dig the Maledictions out of my pocket and light one up. It’s a small victory.
She says, “We know that Edison kept in touch with some of Pelley’s contacts in German fascist and metaphysical organizations. But we don’t have much information about that either. What reports we have say he did have dealings with the Thule Society.”
“I’ve heard of them. Dark-magic dilettantes and trying to prove Aryans were the master race, tracing them back to earlier made-up civilizations. Atlantis and other cheap fantasies.”