Errol made his home in the boonies beyond the Creole Nature Trail. He kept his dead father — another lawless lawman and corrupt Tuttle, who with other Tuttles abused him and warped him and sewed his psyche with their perverse private religion — bound and lip-tied. He kept house with his half-sister. Made “flowers” on her, too. (Ewww.) He had stacks and stacks of books, magazines and DVDs in his trashed, fly-swarmed, fetid home. (Was The King In Yellow somewhere in those stacks?) He watched a lot of TV. (That was North by Northwest on the telly.) He was a man of many voices — Andy Griffith, Slingblade, James Mason — and seemingly no fixed identity.
But the intelligence behind those masks did fancy itself something monstrous. Errol lived to make his mark on the world by abducting and raping and killing children in ritualistic fashion with the help of his low-life cousins — his “acolytes” — the Ledoux brother, and littering the landscape with devil nets, occult graffiti, a Christian woman slain and transmogrified into an art object that mocked her faith. All were ironic reminders that evil roamed the land with impunity, and no one could — or would — stop him. Certainly not God. It bothered Errol, though, that no one had detected his handiwork: “Oh, if they had eyes to see,” he said. The implication: Errol wanted to be discovered. What’s more, he wanted to expose the family that had made him, that used him, that… worshipped him? And then there was the matter of Errol’s last great project: His “ascension.” He made a reference to tying off the endless loop of his life — his own circle of violence and degradation — and checking out — “I am near the final stage. Some mornings, I can see the infernal plane.”
I am taken by the notion that Errol wanted to end his life by producing a story — his last ritual — in which he would play the part of The Great Adversary. He just needed some worthy Hero-Christs to play their parts in the play. He finally got them — after years of waiting? — in the form of Cohle and Hart. In that moment in the field, when Cohle told Errol to freeze, and Errol said “No,” Errol wanted the detectives to follow him into his labyrinth. A grand battle ensued — Errol wasn’t going to make it easy; our boys had to earn it — and Errol got his death-wish made true by Cohle, no stranger to death-wishes. Cohle shot him in the head, and the image we got framed Errol’s exploding head within the hole in the roof of his chamber. Behold Errol’s violent enlightenment, his ascension, his storytelling mission accomplished.
Of the many details that defined Errol, I am thinking most at present about all that pop culture lying around his house. Errol’s story concluded one of True Detective’s themes/morals: Be careful what you put in your head. You spend your days filling your head with pictures of evil (Cohle, ep. 3), you spend your days filling your imagination with faces of evil and stories about evil (Errol, and his Carcosa-crazed family, Hitchcock flicks, and who knows what else Errol kept lying around), you spend your days fascinated with abomination, and chances are, they’re going to affect the way you see the world.
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