Horror Haunting The Beauty…And Me

Early Morning…Saturday August 9, 1969

Crystalline, aquiline sky, omnipresent, penetrating heat, a suffocating kind of quiet in
Benedict Canyon.
No birds singing, the usually constant traffic melee down on Sunset Boulevard was mysteriously muffled to the point of non-existent, no voices even, no hint of living things...
The lodge-pole pines bent back and forth imperceptibly, the odd soft creak or groan could have been heard...if anyone with working ears were there...
Now - sheets, nicely laundered, freshly washed bed-sheets, so stark-white they were against the soft moss-green of the front lawn, blades of that grass grabbed by desperate fingers, those fingers now under those sheets in a rigid grip made some eight hours before.
Bed-sheets don't belong on front lawns, do they?
Finally - the hum-click of large professional photographic cameras, the odd hum-click of the pool filter, living beings there now but conversing in reverent tones and only to offer orders. Get this job sewn up as fast as possible, no hair on any man's neck was standing down until that goal was accomplished.
Heat, Los Angeles heat, was hitting 96 F at high noon in the shade, low 90s inside the home, the small panes of picture glass softly sound-cracking from the expansion...
Heating, roasting, burning blood, the odour made one wretch, now the smell of blood mixing with the rancid smell of vomit on that lovely lawn. What was once dead quiet and still, now, an ethereal bile attacking the senses.
Evil would have the final word that day, its speech other-worldly, of course, the vibration of wasted souls translated into the now low-frequency, incessant buzz of blue-bottle flies, the sound growing, the auditory menace over-taking. Even hardened officers haunted.
Body temperatures would not lower that day as those five wretched bodies lay baking in the California sun.
45 years later, if you listen really close, the buzzing of blue-bottles and the wrenching of souls in this dreamy place, once the home of very Beautiful People, can still be felt and heard.
Buzzing in my mind, since, and evermore.