dirty, moldy room to serve as an altar. Cleavon constructed a six-foot-tall crucifix with two pieces of scavenged timber, which he positioned upside down against the wall behind the altar. Earl placed Mary, who was still unconscious, in the middle of the pentagram. Spencer cut her pajamas from her body with the kitchen knife, to the muted delight of those gathered.
Then, when Spencer had everybody’s full attention, he crossed himself in a counter clockwise direction with his left hand and began the black mass. Channeling the intonation and charisma of Anton LeVay, he recited a collection of passages from the Satanic Bible from memory, moving from the Introit to the Offeratory to the Canon to the Consecration. Cleavon and the others watched him in an enraptured state, saying nothing, not even when he inserted the withered carrot/host into Mary’s labia—but he saw the lust in their eyes. It burned like black fire.
During the fifth and final segment of the mass, the Repudiation, Spencer passed around the beer stein/chalice filled with bourbon. When everyone had drunk from it he said in a commanding voice, “Brothers of the Left-Hand Path, the penitent has proved a worthy neophyte in our high order. It is now time to free her from the bonds of ignorance and superstition. Cleavon, come forth and partake in your desire.”
“Huh?” Cleavon said, as if coming out of a trance.
“Do you desire this woman?”
“I, well…I guess.”
“The Dark Lord Lucifer has granted you all that you desire. Now take her!”
“I don’t know—”
“Lonnie? Quick! We must conclude the mass. Take her!”
“Hell ya!” Lonnie Olsen said, coming forward, unbuckling his belt. He was fully aroused as soon as his pants hit his ankles. Then he was on his knees before Mary’s prone body, his pasty, pockmarked buttocks clenching in rhythm to the thrusting of his hips.
“Eva, Ave Satanas!” Spencer chanted. “Vade Lilith, vade retro Pan! Deus maledictus est! Gloria tibi! Domine Lucifere, per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen!”
Moments after Lonnie removed himself from Mary, Cleavon took his spot, then Jesse, then Weasel, then Earl, and finally Floyd. When they had all been sated, Spencer knelt next to Mary with the kitchen knife. Before anyone could protest, he sank the blade into her chest, into her heart. Her eyes popped open at this, and he watched as her life drained from them.
“And so it is done,” he said softly.
Afterward, in the guilty, bewildered silence that followed, Spencer held each man’s gaze in turn and said, “Thank you, gentlemen. It is as she wanted. She is at peace.” He hesitated before adding, “And you all must know, of course, that in the name of your self-preservation, what happened here this morning can never be spoken of to anyone, ever.”
Two months later Spencer read a story in the Boston Mills Tribune about a young couple who had disappeared while visiting “Helltown” in the hopes of spotting the mutants said to inhabit the national park (the Satanist rumors wouldn’t begin in earnest for another year or so). Nevertheless, Spencer didn’t think much about it. When he read a second story two months after the first about another missing couple, he had his suspicions. These were confirmed a week later when Sheriff Humperdinck discovered a number of makeshift crosses and Satantic graffiti at several different abandoned houses in the national park, which he attributed incorrectly to “troublesome out-of-town folks coming here and giving our town a bad name.”
Spencer thought long and hard about what to do before visiting Cleavon at the House in the Woods and telling his brother, “If you and your friends are going to keep this up, you may as well learn to do it right.”
Since that encounter Spencer had inducted the six of them—Cleavon, Earl, Floyd, Weasel, Jesse, and Lonnie—into his “club” and had led them in eight other black masses, all of which he had enjoyed tremendously, especially the psychodrama involved, which he’d never incorporated into his private killings but which was proving to be wonderfully erotic. As an added bonus he no longer had to leave Boston Mills to find his victims. Weasel took care of this in the ugly black hearse Cleavon had picked up from some junkyard.
Even so, Spencer had always understood this convenient arrangement wouldn’t last forever. There were too many people involved, too many chances for something to go wrong.
And that something had gone wrong tonight, very wrong.
Ever the cautious man, however, Spencer had prepared for this eventuality from day one, prepared and planned, and he knew exactly what