1 Chapter 1: The Assignment...

Spooky as it was, the full moon and the stillness of the night wasn't the scary part. It wasn't the cemetery just on the other side of the hedge, either. No, it was walking through the pools of direct light under the street lamps that freaked Alex out the most.

By the second or third such spot, he realized that maybe he should've worn something other than all black to walk down the street in the middle of the night. After all, some cop might roll by and think, "Hey, I wonder if that dude in all black with the black backpack and black gloves is up to something shady?"

When he got to the far end of the cemetery and turned into the thin alley between it and the storage rental complex, though, he felt better. He lingered in the darkness for a few deep breaths, reminding himself that no, really, people don't do crazy cult stuff in graveyards under the full moon. That was all just movie bullshit.

The climb up the vine-covered iron fence was not too hard. Alex was not a serious athlete, but at least he was thin and close to being in shape. He was feeling good about the climb until it came to the three strings of barbed wire at the top that had been concealed by all the leaves.

Okay, he thought, no problem. I'm not impaled, just scratched. I can afford another black sweatshirt. Just go slow, haul it up, over and okay not there, that's another barb, grab that overhanging branch, haul it up, ow ow ow my leg ow fuck!

It was awkward. Had any of his friends been there, they'd have made fun of him and called him a slowpoke, a klutz, a total pussy and a thousand other shitty things, but he made it over. His landing was surely less noisy than a car crash.

"Okay, that's just nerves," he thought. "I'm doing fine. Just a rustle and a thump. No big deal. Alley cats are noisier. Nobody's here. I'm fine. I'm fine. Total ninja."

Then his cell phone went off.

"Fuck!" he hissed, and clutched at his back pocket. The sounds of his Tool ringtone reminded him that yes, he was in fact a complete tool for forgetting to put the phone on vibrate before he went sneaking into a graveyard.

He silenced it, then looked at the display while trying to cover up the light from the screen with one hand. It was Jason, who would probably keep calling until he got an answer. Alex cursed his friends for being nineteen and stupid... mindfully including himself in that on both counts.

"What?" he grumbled quietly by way of greeting. At least the cemetery still seemed dead despite the disturbance. No sirens, no floodlights or groundskeeper's flashlights, no ghosts or zombies. Yet.

"Yo, nigga, where you at?"

"Jason, when you get your ass beat by some black guy who doesn't like hearing white people call each other that, I'm seriously gonna point at you and laugh."

"Yeah, if you ain't runnin'. Seriously, where are you?"

"Doing my photography homework."

"At ten thirty on a Monday?"

"I need night shots," Alex said tersely.

"I thought you only took that class 'cause it was full of hotties?"

"Yeah, well, the cute ones are all taking the class real seriously, so I guess I'd better, too. College is weird like that. Jason, I can't talk right now, what do you want?"

"Jus' callin' to say we're playin' pool if you wanna come."

Alex sighed and rolled his eyes. The lesson here was to come up with his good photo concepts before his friends decided on something fun to do. "No," he said, "not tonight. I'm good, thanks."

"Okay. What're you doing, anyway?"

JESUS! What part of "I can't talk" is so unintelligible? "I'll show you later," Alex said. "I gotta go. Later, man." He flipped the phone shut, made absolutely sure to put it on silent, and slipped it back into his pocket.

A minute of stillness later, Alex had his nerves good and settled. Nobody came out looking for him after all that noise, so whatever night watchman this place had was doubtlessly not really watching.

Sacred Heart cemetery was fairly large, with ground that gently rose and fell and a few bushes and low hedgerows here and there. It was creepy and quiet at this hour. The only lights shining within the grounds were a couple of external floodlights at the large chapel at the center of the cemetery and a few more at the closed-up main gate.

Alex kept low and moved slowly, still mindful of using whatever trees and bushes he could for concealment from the chapel and main gate, just in case.

Alex's assignment was for night photography of still subjects. He could have picked a considerably easier site... but there were a couple of drop-dead hot goth girls in his photography class. They seemed to like creepy stuff, so he figured --- naively, he had to admit -- some shots of the cemetery at night would at least be conversation starters.

The cemetery groundskeeper hadn't bought into it when Alex called and asked during the day if he could do this with permission. The guy was uninterested in Alex's assignment and probably hadn't even listened.

Alex wasn't normally one for doing crazy things like this, but lately, that very factor seemed to chafe at him. He didn't take enough risks. He tended to play by the rules. Just boring, nice guy Alex, never with anything crazy to share at parties.

Even now, his hopes that this little stunt could turn his life around were not high. A single act of trespassing doesn't change life forever. He was just out for a couple shots as icebreakers with 'Molly' and 'Onyx' nothing more.

Yeah, those are from Sacred Heart cemetery. No, they don't allow you to get in there at night. But if you climb the fence and stumble around in the dark anyway, you can get this really cool shot of this statue here. And you can sneak up on the chapel and get a pic of the steeple with the moon overhead, and it feels totally creepy and there's this mist and stuff,and you almost feel like you can hear wailing...

Alex stopped taking pictures and listened. Was that really wailing? It sounded like a scream coming from the chapel. A woman's scream, in fear or pain or both. Alex stopped, and listened, and heard another one, sounding like someone yelling "no."

His imagination ran away with him for a moment, but he quickly stopped himself with a deep breath. For all he knew the groundskeeper was inside watching a movie with the volume on full blast or something. Still, Alex wanted to know what was up. He was more concerned than curious. If a woman really was screaming about something bad, the last thing he wanted to do was walk away because he was afraid of being yelled at or maybe hit with a fine for a little after-hours photography.

Slipping closer to the chapel -- quickly now, as he was pretty sure whatever was going on inside would give him some cover -- he thought he heard men chanting something unintelligible, muffled by windows blocked by curtains. A dim orange glow flickered behind those curtains.

Up close to the walls and windows now, he heard a sharp shriek of pain, almost certainly a woman, while another woman distinctly yelled, "Stop this, please! You don't know what you're doing!"

"Silence her!" bellowed a man's voice, breaking the chant only momentarily. There was a sharp crack, a grunt, and then the cries of agony from the first woman's voice continued. Alex's heart raced and he suddenly felt out of breath, but did his best to stay calm. He still couldn't be sure this was really what it sounded like, though he was completely sure this wasn't someone's television.

Alex stayed low and alert as he moved around to the back door. It was locked, naturally, and the windows were shut. Crazy as it was, he thought about checking the front door. There were lights there, but this place was truly dead outside the chapel itself. The noise wasn't going to carry beyond the cemetery and the odds of someone looking right when he ran up were pretty slim.

The first woman's yelling stopped, leaving only the male chanting to be heard. It was quieter here closer to the front of the building, away from the action. He heard the sharp "crack," though, which elicited a yelp of pain, followed by another, and then another. It sounded like the women were being whipped.

He decided to go for it. Alex slipped up onto the porch quickly, slowed himself as he grabbed the doorknob... and found it opening. He had no more time to think now that he was exposed in that light. Alex pushed the door open all the way and then slipped inside.

The foyer, thankfully, was empty and dark, lit mainly by the intense glow of candlelight from down hallways on opposite sides of the room, leading to a central chamber. It had comfortable chairs and random pictures on the walls and a shelf of books that probably nobody ever read.

From down the hallways off to his right Alex heard the sharp crack of the whip and the cries it forced out of its victims, along with the chanting of those male voices. It sounded like there were only a couple of them. The air was thick and warm with a distinctly smoky, sulfur smell that overrode other stenches.

"Why are you doing this?" a woman asked in a fearful, almost sobbing voice. "This is insanity! It's evil! You're going to -- aaaaaarrrrhhhhh!" Her inquiry ended in another scream.

"You don't know--!" The whip cracked. "Agh! -- what you're—" Crack. "Gngh! -- playing with, old fool!" It was a different voice -- still feminine, but lower and angrier.

"I know precisely what I am doing, whore daughter of Satan," said the deeper, clearly male voice. The others, Alex figured two, were still chanting. "How else did you come to this? Why are you trapped? Why do you bleed?"

Alex crept up to the hallway. This is totally crazy, he thought, but he didn't want to go calling the cops on just what he was hearing. What if it was... he scowled fearfully. He didn't know what it could possibly be. He had to see.

The memorial service chamber was cleared of furniture. It seemed like a lit candle occupied every possible space along the walls, enough of them to kick out some serious heat. Crazy runes were strewn about the floor in some powder, some of them in circular shapes, with the bloody bodies of dead dogs, cats and birds in the center. Alex could even make out a human hand in the mess. A smoldering pile of ashes occupied another large circular outline near the hallway.

Two bloodied, mostly-naked women stood at about the center of the room, or more accurately hung from chains attached to the ceiling. They were spaced several feet apart facing away from Alex. Bloody pentagrams had been drawn on the floor around the feet of each. A trio of men lurked around them, one with a whip and one with a goblet and a bloody, wavy-looking dagger. Both women were bleeding from nearly identical wounds on their backs: two deep vertical gashes parallel to the spine, below the shoulders.

The woman on the right was blonde, and an odd scattering of long, white feathers lay around her bare feet. A few more of them stuck to her body by stains of blood. A white cloth of some sort hung around her waist, torn and sagging off of her hips.

The one on the left had no feathers around her, but had apparently shed more blood. She bore an additional deep and wide gash just above the crack of her ass, which was itself bare. Her dark-haired head slumped forward as more blood dripped from it. Alex couldn't see either one's face. Both had shapely, young bodies, but at the moment Alex certainly wasn't thinking about their measurements.

Watching from the shadow of the hallway, Alex got a good look at the three men. The apparent leader was dressed in a priest's cassock and looked fairly old, but hardened. The others wore ordinary street clothes.

The first goon, wielding the whip, was a scruffy fortysomething; he grinned as he let loose another lash, looking more than a little crazy. The other, with the goblet and dagger, was probably in his forties, noticeably bigger and looked marginally more kempt. Scary as the scene was, none of them looked super-imposing, and beyond the funky dagger and whip they weren't really armed with anything.

The whipping paused and the chanting picked up. It made the air tenser. Alex watched as the priest took the goblet and held it between the two women, chanting something new, loudly and forcefully.

"No!" the blonde shrieked. "Don't do this!"

The other woman yelled nothing, but raised her head enough to spit a bloody mess onto the priest's face. His eyes flared, and he faltered in his incantation, but began again and this time finished it. He held the goblet under the dark-haired woman's bleeding head, which he had to hold in place to prevent her from resisting, and then turned to catch blood running from the wounds at the blonde woman's back. "With this cup, I gather your essences," the priest said. "The purest of your good. The foulest of your evil. You will bend to my will, and you will serve loyally and faithfully forever."

The other two men paused and looked at each other. "And us, too," the whip-wielder reminded.

"Shut up," the priest growled.

The men glanced at one another again. "Just sayin' is all," muttered the first, mostly to his feet.

"Don't do this! You can't!" yelled the blonde. "You're damning your own souls!"

"It is already done," said the priest. "You can feel it."

"You'll burn in Hell for this," hissed the other woman.

"Perhaps, whore daughter of Satan... but I have no intention of ever dying. I'll have you both to protect me from that. And with all this defiance you're showing," the priest said, glancing between the two women, "I think I'll start with you first.

"Harold. Troy. Spread her out on the altar." He waited a moment, and then rolled his eyes as the other two men hesitated. He sighed. "You'll have her when I'm done with her, of course, but it's necessary for the spell!"

"Ooohhh," the two men nodded, and quickly set to undoing her chains.

"You're going to rape her?!" the blonde gasped.

"Both of you, before I'm through," the priest replied grinning.

Oh, fuck that noise, Alex thought from his hiding spot. He retreated back a bit, frantically trying to figure out what to do. Call the cops, definitely, but by the time they get here... Alex frowned. He couldn't waste time talking to them right now anyway. Quickly he found a phone in the foyer, picked it up off the receiver, dialed 911 and then left it off the hook. The cops would get there when they got there... hopefully in time to rescue my own stupid ass, he frowned.

Dropping the backpack, Alex fished around in his pockets and found the pepper spray he'd brought along just in case there really were freaks in the cemetery. It wasn't enough, though. He had heard that crazy people weren't always put down by pepper spray. What if he missed? What if the canister jammed?

He looked into the side rooms. Like most funeral chapels, this one had extra small rooms for private conversations and grieving and such, but comfortable chairs and boxes of tissues weren't going to be of much use. The first room had nothing useful, but in the second was a fireplace, complete with a set of fireplace tools. Alex rushed in and grabbed the long, heavy iron poker. It would have to do.

This is fucking nuts, he thought to himself. I'm going to get caught. I'm going to die. If I hadn't pulled this stupid stunt I wouldn't know this was even going on...

"Nooo!" one of the women yelled.

I'll never forgive myself if I don't do something.