Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,3

dress. He left his socks, inside out, on the floor. On his way to the door he stopped in front of Darla and tried to touch her on the shoulder. She slapped him across the cheek. He recoiled in shock. More anger, then weary resignation. He left the bedroom.

“Hey, thanks,” the blonde said, taking her dress. “And sorry about this—”

“Not now,” Mark snapped.

Darla remained where she was, arms folded across her chest, beginning to shake. The front door opened and closed. A car start started. Then another. Moments later the sound of the engines faded, and she was alone.

The high priest removed the black veil that covered the chalice and paten. He lifted the latter in both hands, on which rested a wafer of turnip, and said, “Blessed be the bread and wine of death. Blessed a thousand times more than the flesh and blood of life, for you have not been harvested by human hands nor did any human creature mill and grind you. It was our Lord Satan who took you to the mill of the grave, so that you should thus become the bread and blood of revelation and revulsion.” His voice became harsher, more guttural. “I spit upon you, I cast you down, because you preach punishment and shame to those who would emancipate themselves and repudiate the slavery of the church!” He inserted the host into the woman’s labia, removed it, and raised it to the Baphomet. “Vanish into nothingness, thou fool of fools, thou vile and abhorred pretender to the majesty of Satan, the true god of gods! Vanish into the void of thy empty Heaven, for thou wert never, nor shalt thou ever be!” He dropped the host into a small bowl and pulverized it with a pestle. He mixed what remained with charcoal and incense and set it aflame with a white candle. While it burned he picked up the Chalice of Ecstasy, which was filled not with blood or semen but his drink of choice, Kentucky bourbon. He raised it to the Baphomet and drank deeply. He replaced the chalice on the altar, covered it and the paten with the veil, then bowed and gave the blessing of Satan, extending his left hand in the Sign of the Horns: the two outermost fingers, representing the goat, pointing upward in defiance of Heaven, the two innermost pointing down in denial of the Holy Trinity. “Shemhamforash!”

“Hail, Satan!”

Darla returned to the Golf with her unpacked suitcase and drove. She couldn’t stand to be in the house any longer. Every room reminded her of Mark. The kitchen where they’d spent so many mornings in their housecoats making each other breakfast, the den where they’d snuggled up on the sofa together in the evenings to watch TV. Certainly not the bedroom. God, the tramp had been in her bed. How could Mark have allowed that? How could he violate the sanctity of the place where they’d conceived the baby that was growing inside her?

With this acid in her head, Darla tooled aimlessly around Boston Mills. She felt lost, confused, as if half her identity had been torn away from her—and in a sense she suppose it had. She’d been with Mark for ten years, ever since he’d asked her to their high school prom. He’d been the only stable fixture in her adult life.

Despair filled her. The house was Mark’s. He’d paid the down-deposit with his savings, and the bank loan was in his name. So she couldn’t stay there. She was homeless. Not only that, she had less than a hundred dollars in her bank account, no job, and a baby on the way. There had been a couple of jobs at the career fair she’d thought she might do okay at, but even if she was hired for one tomorrow, she likely wouldn’t start for a few weeks, and she wouldn’t be paid for another few weeks after that.

Family, she thought. She still had family. Her parents had moved to Florida several years before, and her older brother was teaching English in Japan or South Korea or China—somewhere too distant to think about. But her sister, Leanne, was only forty minutes away in Cleveland. Darla could crash there for a bit, maybe even look for work in Cleveland.

Then again, that meant Darla would have to deal with Leanne’s husband, Ray. He was a smug white-collar bank manager who’d always thought of Darla and Mark as uneducated country bumpkins. No, she couldn’t show up on