Deity Read online

  When pop megastar Zach Crystal dies in a fire at his remote mansion, his mysterious demise rips open the bitter divide between those who adored his music and his endless charity work, and those who viewed him as a despicable predator, who manipulated and abused young and vulnerable girls.

  Online journalist, Scott King, whose Six Stories podcasts have become an internet sensation, investigates the accusations of sexual abuse and murder that were levelled at Crystal before he died. But as Scott begins to ask questions and rake over old graves, some startling inconsistencies emerge: Was the fire at Crystal’s remote home really an accident? Are reports of a haunting really true? Why was he never officially charged?

  Dark, chillingly topical and deeply thought-provoking, Deity is both an explosive thriller and a startling look at how heroes can fall from grace and why we turn a blind eye to even the most heinous of crimes…

  Deity

  MATT WESOLOWSKI

  ‘Frontmen embody a kind of divine charisma, strutting across the stage and mesmerising the crowd with their god-like powers, like preachers who can open up the kingdom of heaven for you. They are the ones front and centre, their hearts on their sleeve, spreading their arms up and out and singing the lines that will lift everyone into the sky.’

  —Johanna Hedva, They’re Really Close To My Body: A Hagiography of Nine Inch Nails and Their Resident Mystic, Robin Finck

  ‘Occasionally, something will happen that will change your opinion of someone irrevocably, that will shatter the ideal you’ve built up around a person and force you to see them for the fallible and human creature they really are.’

  —Marilyn Manson, The Long Hard Road out of Hell

  Where were you when Zach Crystal died?

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  Episode 1: Monster-Busters

  Episode 2: Zach Crystal Stan

  Episode 3: Secrets of the Whispering Wood

  Episode 4: The Special Girls

  Episode 5: You Get to Go Home.

  Episode 6: Being Nobody

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  DEPRAV

  Delving into the coldest, ungodly realms of the internet

  DEPRAVblog

  HEALTH:

  Why Gen Z are calling bullshit on gluten-free

  ‘You’re either a coeliac or an attention seeker and I don‘t see many coeliacs around here…’ says Gemma J

  Read more…

  MUSIC:

  How WORM made bus-rap a thing

  ‘Freestyle at the back of the number 49 is a cornucopia of unfettered talent’ – Shaun Z discovers a brand new genre and loves it.

  Read more…

  WTF:

  Why is no one talking about the 2007 Crystal Forest video?

  L00na wonders what terrible secrets the late Zach Crystal was really hiding from the public?

  Read more…

  DEPRAVblog WTF

  TAGS: #WEIRD #SPOOKY #ZACHCRYSTAL #CANNIBALISM

  Why is no one talking about that Crystal Forest video?

  By L00na

  It’s dark, almost pitch-black save for a single light. That light is bouncing all over the place; being swallowed occasionally then spat back out again by the dark. It drifts in and out of focus, pixelating and leaving yellowy trails, like some kind of modern Monet or a terrible acid trip.

  This goes on for the first ten seconds or so. Bouncing light, heavy breathing and darkness. There’s sound too; it might be rain. There’s crashing footsteps, inaudible voices, and behind it all, a buzzing cloud of interference and static. Eventually, the picture starts coming into focus, like eyes getting used to the night, greens and greys all blurring into a kaleidoscopic sludge.

  About thirty seconds in, the yellow light becomes still and the rain sound quietens. All that is left is ragged breathing. Sobbing. With the phone not moving anymore, it starts to become clear where we are.

  It’s dark; a more consistent darkness than before. That yellow light now illuminates what looks like stone, a ragged wall; dark slate perhaps? The light is coming from a torch. The torch sits between the knees of a figure; a girl, slumped at the base of the stone wall. Sodden hair hangs over her face, her trousers are torn, blackened with mud all the way to the knees. She shifts in and out of focus like a ghost.

  There’s silence for a moment. As if the slumped figure and the person filming are holding their breaths.

  Then the noise comes, the sound that however many times I see this video, brings me to my knees. The sound that makes me wake in the night and tell myself it’s just someone outside, my mind distorting the wind that creeps through the cracks in the walls of my flat, a bottle against a pavement, someone putting out their bins, or foxes screaming out their terrible mating cries.

  The noise on the video is an inhuman screech, a truncated howl that distorts then falls into sudden silence. A blast of pure, savage hate.

  The girl on the floor folds into herself and the camera shakes, either with cold, or fear or both.

  Then the crying starts. Both the girl and whoever is holding the phone – another girl, it sounds like – begin to sob, like children; like children waking from a nightmare to find that nobody is coming to save them.

  Maybe that sound is worse than the scream?

  I was initially asked by DEPRAV to write a blog post about being a former Zach Crystal fan.

  Remember when Zach Crystal was your idol too? Remember when you had his posters on your wall? We all did. We all had that MySpace background too – don’t pretend you didn’t, because I’m big enough to admit it and so should you be. Imagine going to your friend’s house after school today, going up to their bedroom and seeing posters of Zach Crystal. How would you feel about that friend?

  We all know what Zach Crystal was. At least we think we do. We all know his songs; they’re all still there on Spotify, aren’t they? But who is listening anymore? Who would dare to say they’re still a fan. Even those ‘I can separate the music from the man’ types are mostly silent now.

  What else can you say about him? What angle are you supposed to take?

  I was looking for just that angle when I fell down a Zach Crystal wormhole and found the video I’ve just described.

  ‘Lulu Copeland Jessica Morton Crystal Forest video.’

  I never want to see it again.

  The sobbing continues for ten more agonising seconds. The camera shakes and we see a glimpse of feet. Wrecked trainers, mud. What no one wants is to hear that scream again, that terrible sound. Slowly, the girl with the phone composes herself. She takes a few shuddering breaths and begins to move – past the crying girl on the floor, towards a black maw, an opening at the end of the cave. Is it the cave where they were found, those two girls? Just fans – just fans desperate for a chance to meet their idol. Like you might have been. Like me?

  Outside the cave, that blackness turns to streaks of blue and green; an endless, sodden forest.

  ‘…It’s for my mum … it’s for my mum…’ the girl – Lulu or Jessica, it’s not clear – keeps repeating through ragged breaths. ‘Mum, this is for you … if you’re out there…’

  What does she mean? Has she some hope her mother will emerge from somewhere in the five hundred acres of tangled and treacherous woodland where Zach Crystal built a hideaway, guarded by electric fences, dogs and cameras?

  There’s a scraping noise. A gasp. The girl with the phone turns around for a moment, a sickening lurch of perspective. For a second we see sodden clothes, lank hair and breath condensing in freezing clouds. Lulu or Jessica, hair plastered over her face, clothes torn and wet, walks towards the phone, knees at funny angles, her movements stiff, like a marionette. It’s
awful – like something out of one of those old, found-footage horror movies. Both girls are breathing hard and you can hear their teeth chattering.

  ‘Is it still out there?’ Lulu or Jessica says, and the light from the torch bounces all over the cave walls.

  You want to tell them both to stop, to stay still. If they have a phone, why haven’t they called the police?

  Nevertheless, you can’t stop watching as they reach the mouth of the cave and point the phone into the darkness. All you can see is that brutal Monet mess of black and brown and green. Uneven rows of trees. Through the distorted picture, you see snippets: ferns that stand almost shoulder height; a sodden, broken branch; a coil of brambles. There’s no path, no light, no signposts. Just the steady hiss of rain.

  There’s breathing too – hard, heavy, terrified breathing, which breaks into another sob. The camera points downwards and it’s unclear who is crying, but one of the girls calls out something that has troubled me ever since I saw it.

  ‘Just leave us alone, you hear me? We just want to go home!’

  The call is long and loud and scared. It dissolves into more hysterical sobbing. I found it so difficult to watch, when I viewed the video again I had to turn down the volume.

  The other girl then blurts something out too. It sounds like something along the lines of ‘Just leave us alone!’ but I’m not altogether sure that’s it, her voice is close to the phone and distorted.

  They both breathe – short gasps.

  ‘Keep filming, keep filming and then if it comes again…’

  There’s a noise and both girls scream. It’s not that terrible, inhuman howl, but the sound of crashing, of something moving through the forest. It sounds horribly close.

  The phone moves about a little, down to the floor and with a trembling hand, back up to face the forest. The girls are moaning, little involuntary noises that burn all the way to the bottom of the heart. There’s something else too. At first it sounds like breathing; stabby little breaths, panting, like a dog.

  ‘Eat,’ it seems to say. ‘Eat … Eat … Eat.’

  ‘We’re not scared of you…’ one of them whispers back through chattering teeth. She sounds six years old, a terrified little girl. There’s nothing convincing in those words though, and they’re swallowed up by the sodden blackness up ahead.

  Stillness, for a beat. Even the rain appears to hold off.

  Then there’s movement: a terrible shadow that could be wind, a branch, a bush, a twisted and pixelated bit of interference on an old camera phone wielded by a terrified teenage girl.

  To me it looks big; to me it looks animal rather than human. Whatever it is, be it an effect of the wind, the weather, or something else, the last words of that video are spoken in a terrified whisper.

  ‘Turn the fucking torch off … Turn it off!’

  That’s where the video ends.

  COMMENTS:

  Mayfly776: Ew creepy

  ForzaRadish: Zach Crystal fans are fuckin psychos.

  TLDR: Stanning Zach Crystal = BAD DEATH

  Butwhytho: Surely someone has to have looked into this? I mean rly?

  B0NN13: Has anyone asked Scott King yet lol?

  RUBY

  Episode 246: Zach Crystal

  Legendary presenter Ruby Rendall’s exclusive interview with pop megastar Zach Crystal. More >

  1 hr 45 • 9.00pm 20th July 2019 • Available for 28 days

  RUBY RENDALL: This. Is. It. This is the moment you’ve all been waiting for. It’s finally here. It’s finally happening.

  Good evening, I’m Ruby Rendall. This is live.

  Tonight, my guest is an extraordinary man.

  I can’t quite believe it.

  As you can see, we’ve dimmed the studio lights, given everything a bit of a spring clean in preparation for tonight’s guest. His fans have been lining up around the studio all day. In fact, can we cut to have a look? There we go. Look at that. I’ve never seen anything like it before in my life. Can we get some audio? Yes. Listen, you can hear them chanting his name. This has been going on since six this morning…

  Can we get some footage from earlier today? Yes? Let’s just have a look shall we? Audio too? Wow, look at that. Look at the crowds. Can you hear the chanting too? I’ve not seen anything like it since The Beatles!

  [Cut to footage of a vast crowd outside the BBC studios, holding banners and cheering.]

  Security is tighter than it has ever been on the show. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a truly momentous occasion. You see, my next guest famously does very, very few interviews. For this to happen is incredibly rare. We have so much to discuss: his music, his disappearance, his reappearance, his amazing house up in the Scottish wilderness. Everything.

  My guest informs me that tonight nothing is off limits. He’s here to spill it all.

  Yes. We are live and we are about to welcome onstage to sit opposite me, the most fascinating, the most spellbinding guest we’ve ever had on the show. I have to say, growing up with this guy’s music makes me a rather biased fan, but why on earth did I get a job on TV if not to interview the best?

  Because, ladies and gentlemen, he is the best. Unequivocally. The king. The sultan of song-writing himself. His first album spent twenty weeks on the Billboard 200 in the States and went triple platinum within a few weeks of release. He was twenty-one years old.

  Sold-out arena tours across the world followed. His second album sold twenty million copies worldwide in its first month … I could go on…

  This man represents so much more than music though. To some he represents the dream of every child who wants to grow up and be someone. To others, his is a classic rags-to-riches story, a fairy tale – a man whose voice, whose talent, fuelled his meteoric rise to the very top.

  Here he is, in all his glory, the man, the legend … Zach Crystal.

  [Applause as Zach Crystal walks onto the set. He is dressed in black leather trousers and knee-high boots. His long, blond hair is coiffed and hangs over his shoulders. He wears an elaborate crown made from deer antlers, and his face is heavily made up. Medallions made from sticks and bone hang around his neck. Crystal stands before his chair and bows to the studio audience.]

  RR: Welcome … welcome…

  [The applause becomes screams.]

  RR: Wow. Wow. Here he is. Zach Crystal, everyone. Thank you so much for coming. Please, sit down.

  ZACH CRYSTAL: Thank you, Ruby. Thank you, everyone.

  [The screams from the audience get higher, longer. Ruby winces. Crystal eventually sits down, crossing his legs.]

  RR: Please … please … I know, I know, Zach Crystal … I know…

  [A shot of the audience. They’re mostly women in their late twenties. They are all sat still in their seats, but their eyes are wild and their mouths are open, screaming.]

  RR: Are you nervous at all, right now? I certainly am, I’ll level with you!

  ZC: [laughs] No … I’m OK, Ruby. I’m OK. And you should be OK too. Please?

  [Zach Crystal raises his hand to the audience and the screaming halts abruptly.]

  RR: I am, thank you. I won’t lie, this is a little overwhelming. I just can’t believe … Is that even really you?

  [Laughter]

  ZC: [laughs] No! I’m an imposter!

  RR: I mean, it’s so rare for you to do interviews. This is your first full-length one is it not? On television and we’re live. I don’t think I even know what your speaking voice sounds like.

  ZC: [laughs] I don’t do things by halves, Ruby.

  [Cheering]

  RR: Zach, where do I start? I was watching some of your very early performances on YouTube earlier today. When you were still performing with your twin sister in bars around the UK.

  ZC: When we were The Crystal Twins. They are some very happy memories. Very happy ones indeed. We were so young.

  RR: Twelve years old when you began. You’re now…

  ZC: Forty-five, Ruby [laughs]. But I still feel it, you know? In
my heart, I’m still that nervous little boy.

  RR: The two of you looked so … It just looked like you were born to be on stage.

  ZC: You know, I think we were. I certainly always felt at home on stage. I’m a very shy person, you see. I always have been. It was Naomi who was the extrovert, not me.

  RR: We’ve hardly ever got to see your face until now, Zach. You’ve always worn a veil or a mask when you’ve spoken on camera, haven’t you?

  ZC: It was shyness, always shyness. I feel so exposed now, Ruby.

  [Cheering]

  RR: Zach, I think you look wonderful and so does everyone here.

  [Cheering]

  ZC: Thank you Ruby, thank you. That means a lot.

  RR: You and Naomi grew up without much money, on the Hopesprings Estate in Barlheath. That’s up in the Midlands, isn’t it?

  ZC: Life on the Hopesprings Estate wasn’t easy. Our parents didn’t have much money and we were always scraping around. We shared everything. All the toys, books and clothes were all second-hand; all of them worn and dented, dog-eared and used, but I didn’t mind. That’s just how it was for a family as poor as us. The only thing I was ever bought new was my underwear.

  [Laughter]

  RR: Your parents both worked, didn’t they?

  ZC: That’s where my work ethic comes from, I think. To this day, I’m always busy. I never stop working, because I remember where I’m from. I still have the attitude that was instilled in me by my parents. I had a paper round from the age of seven and I had to get up at 5.30 every morning and work until 4.30 after school, a little ghost with a giant, fluorescent-orange sack of newspapers around his neck, walking the streets of that estate. ‘The devil makes hands for idle work,’ my mother used to tell us, and we believed her.