by John Russo
“Good place for a burning,” said Luke. “Nice and secluded. They couldn’t have picked it better for us.”
“Burn ’em and bury what’s left,” said Abraham. “Start diggin’ a hole big enough to hide the leftovers, Cyrus!”
Luke and Abraham dragged over the bodies of Tom and Hank, making a pile of corpses. They covered the pile with blankets, sleeping bags, and miscellaneous gear from the van. The deputies’ uniforms were thrown on the pile, too. At last Luke poured a can of gasoline over it all, then struck a match and started a bonfire, a funeral pyre. The faces of the three brothers—Luke, Cyrus, and Abraham—were highlighted weirdly by the roaring flames.
CHAPTER 8
Cynthia lay in bed reading from a book entitled The Appeal of Witchcraft, by Dr. Morgan Drey, a professor of anthropology at New York City College:
It is no accident that the devil is portrayed in medieval woodcuts as a cloven-hooved beast with his tongue in the shape of a triple penis. Sadism is a sexual perversion. And a belief in witchcraft is the horrid sickness of a sexually repressed society. The inquisitor and the witch are both perverted by the belief, by the insistence by church and state that witches do indeed exist as agents of the devil and need to be rooted out, punished, and destroyed.
The individual becomes either witch or witchhunter because it gives him an outlet for his perversions. In saying ‘I am a witch,’ one gives license to oneself to indulge in lascivious, erotic practices running to the obscenity of sadism; in saying ‘I will persecute witches,’ one gives oneself license to treat the witches sadistically. In either case, human beings torture, maim, and kill each other in an orgy of righteousness and unrighteousness, holiness and unholiness, till the two sides of the coin become one: both witch and inquisitor, operating within the witchcraft mystique, or matrix, give vent to impulses which are sadistic.
This duality of holiness transmuted to unholiness was personified by Gilles de Rais, the soldier-protector and rumored lover of Joan of Arc. In 1429, when their mystical triumphs on the battlefields had resulted in the coronation of Charles VII, Joan was revered as a saint and Gilles was made a Marshal of France. He was only twenty-five years of age, had inherited enormous wealth, possessed a love of books, music, and poetry, and was extremely handsome and famous. In the language of today, Gilles ‘had everything going for him.’ He went home from the wars with the intention of leading a life of genteel beauty, luxury, and good works.
But in 1431, through treachery, Joan of Arc was condemned as a witch and burned at the stake. This event, coupled with several other key disappointments in Gilles’ life, seems to have torn his brain loose from the moorings of sanity. He left his wife and renounced all future sexual intercourse with women. Withdrawing to his castle, he surrounded himself with an army of soldiers, sycophants, homosexuals and perverts, He began to squander his wealth by traveling around the countryside with a sumptuously armed and outfitted entourage and by sponsoring lavish public entertainments which rivaled some of those staged by the fabled Roman emperors.
Gilles, in fact, felt an admiration and kinship with the most depraved and corrupt of the Romans—Nero and Caligula. He pored over prized books in his vast library which were filled with woodcuts elaborately depicting the emperors’ excesses of lasciviousness, brutality and torture.
As Gilles’ coffers were being depleted by his profligate life-style, he hired a sorcerer and alchemist, Francesco Prelati, to aid him in transforming lead into gold. Many medieval alchemists used their “art” as a pretext for debauchery and perversion, and Prelati was no exception. He convinced Gilles, after a few futile experiments, that no real progress would be forthcoming without making a pact with the Devil.
Gilles lured a young boy to his castle, raped him, then tore out his eyes, mutilated his genitals, and ripped out his heart and lungs. Gilles used the boy to vent his sexual appetites, and Prelati used the blood and organs in alchemical experiments. Thus began a period of eight years in which Gilles, goaded by Prelati, raped, tortured, mutilated, and dismembered literally hundreds of children. When he was finally arrested and sentenced to be hanged and burned, and the prosecutor asked him the reason for his hideous crimes, he replied: “Truly I had none, but the gratification of my passions.” This was an amazingly candid admission by Gilles, who would be expected to rationalize his behavior by telling himself that the young boys had to be killed, anyway, for the all-important purpose of turning lead into gold.
Most of the time aberrant behavior needs an excuse, a justification. Religious fanaticism gives birth to witchcraft by encouraging a deep-rooted fear of a very real Devil who walks the earth and possesses living persons. It was once said that: Nothing is so healthy for religion as a strong, unshakable belief in Satan.
What priest today wouldn’t secretly love to meet Satan in person—to be confronted with incontrovertible proof that the Prince of Hell does exist and therefore the lifelong devotion to a priestly calling has not been a futile waste of energy?
Having come to the end of a chapter, Cynthia laid down the book and thought about the author, Dr. Morgan Drey, whom she had met at her store in Greenwich Village. He had come in to purchase books for research and artifacts he could photograph to illustrate The Appeal of Witchcraft. When the manuscript was published some months later, he had returned to present her with an autographed copy and ask her to let him take her to dinner. She surprised herself by saying yes.
She had not opened the store to get involved with non-believers. It had been her idea to go to New York and run a place of her own, specializing in the sale of witches’ paraphernalia, potions and herbs—much like Mama’s old store—so that she could meet other people with beliefs similar to her own. She did not care to meet skeptics like Morgan Drey. She wanted to use the store as a way of building her own congregation. Over a period of four years, she had been successful in developing a conclave of almost two hundred witches from various parts of the United States. Each year the services took place at midnight on Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday. Special rites, pulled off at considerable risk, were looked forward to by all. Some of the members of the congregation were gaining followers of their own and conducting services regularly in other states and cities. But the services in the chapel on the Barnes family estate were by far the grandest and most daring.
Morgan Drey had interviewed Cynthia for his book. She had been open with him, except where self-protection made discretion imperative, and had even told him, rather proudly, about her own congregation and the annual services conducted under her leadership. Over a sip of wine in the Italian restaurant where he had taken her, he chuckled good-naturedly. “Surely you don’t really believe in all this,” he told her. “I can realize that you have to maintain avidly that you do, for the benefit of your customers. But you can tell me the truth. What are your private feelings?”
Her eyes met his across the table. He was a goodlooking, if scholarly, man in his late twenties. His forehead was high, and Cynthia knew this was a mark of intelligence. He had light brown hair, deepset inquisitive blue eyes, and a scrupulously trimmed goatee and mustache.
“My private beliefs are as I have said,” Cynthia told him. “I believe in my powers.”
“What powers?” he challenged. “What proof do you have that you’ve ever worked any extraordinary magic?”
She clenched her teeth, her eyes flashing with annoyance. “I cannot tell you,” she said, haughtily angered.
“You mean there is nothing,” he persisted.
“I mean I can’t tell you,” she uttered coldly. “These matters are not to be discussed lightly with a nonbeliever. “
“You know, you’re very pretty when you get worked up,” he said, changing the subject and continuing to stare at her intently.
She knew intuitively that he liked her, and more—he wanted to get involved with her romantically; this was pleasing, but also frightening. He reached out and took her hand, but she drew it away as if it had been burned, and her cheeks flushed red from
embarrassment.
“What’s the matter?” he said, startled.
“Nothing. I—”
“Are you afraid of men?”
“No.”
“Do you have a boyfriend . . . a fiancé?”
“Certainly not.”
“What do you mean, certainly not? As if the mere idea were out of the realm of possibility?”
She did not answer. He had her unsettled.
“You had better be careful, Cynthia,” he warned. “Or else these beliefs of yours will become a horrid obsession. You’re much too young and pretty not to have a normal life—one free of anxiety and repression. You need to fall in love someday and have children.”
“Never,” she said fervently. “I have other things to do which are more important.”
“Let me see you again,” he pleaded. “I’m attracted to you. I’d like a chance to change your mind, to show you another way of thinking. That mother of yours—I know you love her, but she has given you some warped ideas. And 1 believe you have a hostility toward men because you were deserted by your father ten years ago and you’ve never gotten over it.”
His words shook small tremors of self-doubt in Cynthia, making her angry. How dare he! What gave him the nerve to be so impertinent? She would never allow him to undermine her confidence, her commitment. Her congregation was proof of her sanctity. They worshipped her because she had inherited tremendous spiritual gifts from her grandfather and great-grandfather. She had the power of the caul, the mark of Tetragrammaton, who had chosen her to be even greater than her ancestors, the Cunning Men.
“I would appreciate it if you would never come to my store again,” she told Morgan Drey.
He immediately looked hurt, baffled, his usual aura of self-assuredness gone. She had succeeded in wounding him, instead of the other way around. The triumph was hers. She smiled at him to make his pain worse. She had to get him out of her life so she could go on leading her congregation. He was a stupid and dangerous non-believer. She did not need him. There were others who cherished her for the proper reasons. When she needed a man, or men, she could choose from among those who had the truest, deepest, most violent ability to please her.
What did Morgan Drey know? His book was nonsense, full of theoretical babbling. What would he think if he saw the rituals in person? He would go starkraving mad, his pitiful imaginings dwarfed to ridiculous pettiness by the real thing.
An extraordinary idea occurred to Cynthia: What if she could convert him? The possibility was titillating. She knew he was attracted to her; maybe there were reasons he didn’t want to admit. Perhaps he wasn’t as skeptical as he seemed to be. His writings about Gilles de Rais, Jack the Ripper, and the Marquis de Sade might be an outlet for a side of himself he barely understood, a potential yearning to be set free. Skeptics made the most passionate converts once they were shown the way to the actual, rather than the vicarious, indulgence of their passions. Judging from his writing, Morgan Drey seemed particularly fascinated by Elisabeth Bathory, the sixteenth-century Hungarian countess who kept hundreds of young girls chained in the dungeons beneath her castle, so she could periodically renew her own vigor and beauty by slitting the young girls’ veins and bathing in their blood. What would Morgan think if he knew that some of the countess’ practices would form the basis for rituals of Cynthia’s devising which would commence in two days, on Good Friday, when the entire congregation had arrived?
She laid down his book and closed her eyes, shutting him out of her mind. She wondered about the girls downstairs, who were going to be unwilling contributors to her rituals. What sort of lives did they lead? Did they have boyfriends? Lovers? Were their sexual preferences normal, or bizzare?
From across the hall she could hear the muffled tones of Luke’s voice droning on, talking to Mama behind her closed bedroom door: “Mama . . . I hope you’ve gotten it out of your head that I’m to blame for doing wrong. We didn’t mean for that girl to die . . . but she went and hurt Cyrus pretty bad. And you always said he had a delicate temper. It was the girl’s fault. Me and Abraham . . . we’re gonna catch another girl tomorrow. We got us a van that don’t belong to us . . . nobody can trace it to us. Tomorrow morning we’ll take it out on the road, and we’ll find us another girl, I promise. Maybe it’ll be somebody young and pretty . . . maybe a virgin. Don’t you worry now. Me and Abraham . . . we ain’t goin’ to disappoint the congregation.”
Mama didn’t say anything. She just sat in her rocking chair, looking out the window. Luke didn’t know if she was angry at him or not. Hoping that he had his mother’s approval and understanding, even though she didn’t voice it, he backed sheepishly out of the bedroom and shut the door. Then he went down the hall to his own room and started getting undressed for bed.
Downstairs in their cages, Nancy and Gwen were talking, keeping their voices low.
Gwen tried to remain calm while explaining how she had been trapped. “My sister and I were driving by, exploring the back roads, and . . .”—she stifled a sob—“. . . and Sally . . . she liked to hunt for old cemeteries . . . the older the better . . . to take pictures and make tombstone rubbings. Right away she noticed the family graveyard out back, across the field, so she wanted to stop and look. But she wouldn’t dare go out there without asking permission. We got out of the car and went up on the porch to knock, and the door banged open all of a sudden and the three brothers jumped us. It was awful . . . awful! I didn’t do a good job of fighting back . . . I was in shock or something. Sally bit and scratched and they had a hard time with her. She kicked Cyrus, the big crazy one, between the legs—and he roared like a wounded bear . . . and then he stabbed her . . . again and again. I was half out of my mind, already in my cage. I—” Gwen buried her face in her hands and broke down crying.
Nancy trembled, not knowing how to comfort the older girl. She said, “I’m sorry, Gwen. Please . . . maybe you shouldn’t talk about it anymore.”
But Gwen went on, as if she had to get it all out of her system. She was thinking it out as she talked, trying to get it all straight in her mind, reciting details that refused to yield to reason or understanding. “The two deputies stopped here. I could hear them talking out on the front porch. They said they had been chasing a white van that had gone speeding away from a grocery store in town. But Luke must’ve been afraid and suspicious. The deputies said they had wrecked their car in the chase. Luke offered them some hot coffee, and he brought a fresh potful out onto the porch. I wanted to scream . . . but Abraham had a gun on me. The coffee must’ve been drugged, because in a little while the deputies were dragged in here, tied up with rope . . . unconscious. They were tortured and stabbed to death . . . and I had to watch. But most of the time I shut my eyes. I guess I babbled and raved and pounded my bare fists on the cage. . . .” Gwen held up her hands, which were bruised and swollen and scraped raw.
“Oh, God!” Nancy moaned. “Why? Why is all this happening?”
“There’s no reason for it,” Gwen said soberly. “I keep remembering my grandfather telling me to never forget man is capable of the worst imaginable acts of cruelty. He was in a Nazi concentration camp during World War Two. But at least that was wartime. What excuse is there for what’s happening to us now?”
Nancy was silent, coming face to face with a guilt she had just realized—she and Hank and Tom were partially to blame for the deputies’ deaths, because the chase never would have happened were it not for the theft of the groceries from the store. Oh, what a lark it had seemed to be! And getting away had been the best part. They had thought themselves so terribly clever, never suspecting that the deputies weren’t able to give pursuit anymore because they had wrecked their squad car. As these realizations struck home, silent, remorseful tears rolled down Nancy’s cheeks. “Damn my stepfather,” she said suddenly.
Gwen hunched forward, peering through the wire cages, her eyes bright with desperation. “We have to try to escape! We have to try to get out of here. They’ll kill us. The whole f
amily is crazy. They think they’re vampires or witches or something.”
“Shh!” Nancy whispered, afraid Gwen was talking so loudly that she’d be overheard.
But Gwen went on, barely lowering her volume. “I’ve been locked up in this cage for two days . . . I’ve heard them talking . . . planning . . . diabolical things that would send chills up your spine. Their mother is in charge of whatever they’re going to do . . . only I’ve never seen her. She lives upstairs. She’s a witch, or they think she is. They’re preparing for a Black Mass . . . an insane ritual of some sort. And you and I and some other poor girl are intended to be human sacrifices.”
Nancy didn’t want to hear what Gwen was saying. It didn’t make sense. It couldn’t be happening. It overwhelmed the senses, numbing a person’s intellect, a person’s physical and emotional resources, till the ability to struggle for survival was lost in a nightmarish vortex of futility and despair. Nancy had sunk back against the rear of her cage; the fight had gone, out of her; she was hopelessly disconsolate and almost ready to die. She even felt she probably deserved it, because of her guilt over the way the two deputies had died.
“May the Lord have mercy on them,” she mumbled under her breath. “And on Hank and Tom.”
Pressing her face against the wire mesh of her cage, Gwen whispered insistently, “I tell you, Nancy, we have got to try to get out of here. Don’t give up on me—please. If you and I lose hope, we’ll be done for. We’ve got to think our way out of this somehow.”
Nancy spoke through her tears. “But what can we do, Gwen? It’s useless . . . useless . . . in these cages. At least if we were locked up in a room—but this way we don’t have a chance of trying to escape.” She continued sobbing.
“Look, you’ve got to pull yourself together,” Gwen said. “It’s not as hopeless as you think. In the morning Luke and Abraham will unlock the cages to give us food and march us out into the field to go to the toilet. If I get a chance, I’m going to try something.”