Ed McBain: Vespers

There were wrought-iron grilles on the ground-floor and first-floor windows, and razor wire on the roof overhanging the third floor. There were now two names in the directory set beside the bell button: M. Hollis and H. Willis.

Willis paid the driver and tipped him extravagantly; it was that kind of night. Marilyn was unlocking the front door as the taxi pulled away from the curb. It turned the corner and vanished from sight, the sound of its engine fading, fading, and then disappearing entirely. For an instant, the street, the small park across the way, were utterly still. Willis took a deep breath and looked up at the sky. Stars blinked overhead. A Pinocchio night. He expected Jiminy Cricket to come hopping up the sidewalk.

"Hal?”

He turned.

"Aren't you coming in?”

"It's so beautiful," he said.

He would later remember that these were the last words he'd said before the telephone rang. The last words before the terror started.

He went into the house and closed and locked the door behind him. The entry foyer and the living room beyond were paneled in mahogany. Old thick wooden beams crossed the ceiling. Marilyn began unbuttoning her blouse as she climbed the walnut-banistered staircase to the second story.

Willis was crossing the living room, yanking down his tie and unbuttoning the top button of his shirt, when the telephone rang.

He looked automatically at his watch, walked to the phone on the dropleaf desk, and picked up the receiver.

"Hello?" he said.

There was a slight hesitation.

Then a man's voice said, "Perd6neme, senor.”

And then there was an empty click.

The altar was naked.

The altar was a twenty-seven-year-old woman who lay on her back on an elevated platform shaped as a trapezoid and covered with black velvet.

Her head was at the narrow end of the trapezoid, her long blonde hair cushioned on a pillow covered with black silk. White against black, she lay with her legs widespread and dangling over the wide end of the platform, her arms at her sides, her eyes closed.

Lying between her naked breasts was a thick silver disc on a heavy silver chain, sculpted in relief with the Sacred Sign of Baphomet, the Black Goat, whose image hung on the wall behind her as well, its horns, ears, face and beard contained within the center and five points of an inverted pentagram: Smoke from the torches illuminating this symbol swirled upward toward the arched ceiling the abandoned church. Smoke from the candle clutched in the hands of the woman who was altar drifted up toward old wooden beams that Ion ago had crossed over an altar made not of flesh of marble.

The mass had started at the stroke of midnight.

Now, at a little past one A.M., the priest between the spread legs of the altar, facing celebrants, his back to the woman. He was wearing black cotton robe embroidered in richer black with pine cones that formed a phallic pattern. robe was slit to the waist on either side, revealing priest's muscular legs and thighs.

The celebrants were here to mark the day of Expulsion. Some twenty minutes earlier, during Canon segment, they had each and separatel partaken of the contents of a silver chalice offered the priest. The chalice had tonight contained not k red wine symbolic of the blood of Christ, but something called Ecstasy, a hallucinogenic drug that was a potent mix of mescaline and speed, A capsule of Ecstasy sold for twenty dollars. There were at least two hundred people here tonight, most of them young, and each and every one of them had swallowed a cap of X immediately after the conclusion of the third segment of the mass.

Kissing the altar/woman full on her genitals, the priest had recited the timeless words, "Stan is Lord of the Temple, Lord of the World, he bringeth to me joyous youth, all praise Satan, all hail Satan!" and the celebrants had responded "All hail Satan!" and the girl acolyte had come to the altar and raised her garments to the priest, revealing herself naked beneath them. The boy acolyte had held a silver container to catch her urine, and the priest had dipped a phallus-shaped aspergill into the container arid sprinkled the celebrants with the little girl's urine, If thou hast thirst, then let thee come to the Lord Satan. If thou wouldst partake of the water of life, the Infernal Lord doth offer it. And then he had passed among them with the chalice containing the Ecstasy capsules, and they had washed the caps down with thick red wine offered by the deacon and one of the sub-deacons, sixty-one people times twenty bucks a pop came to twelve hundred and change, The girl acolyte stood to the right of the altar now.

She was a darling little blonde girl, all of eight years old, whose mother was tonight serving as. the altar. She was dressed entirely in black, as was her father who was sitting among the other stoned celebrants and feeling enormously proud of the separate important roles his wife and daughter were playing in tonight's ritual.

The boy acolyte was only seven. He was standing to the left of the altar/ woman, staring a bit wide-eyed at the tufted blonde patch above the joining of her legs. The priest was about to embark upon the fifth and final segment of the mass, called the Repudiation, est significant tonight in that this twenty-fourth day May was what the Christians had named th, Ascension, upon which day the body of Jesus was supposed to have risen to Heaven, but here within these walls was being celebrated as expulsion of Jesus from Hell.

The priest had been supplied with a consecrated at a church in another part of the city, stolen this morning at mass by a woman whose mouth had first been coated with alum protect the wafer from her own saliva. He held wafer between the thumb and forefinger of his hand now, made a deep, mocking bow over it, said, "I show you the body of Jesus Christ, Forgotten One, pretender to the throne of monarch to slaves, confounder of minions to perdition.”

He turned to face the altar/woman, his back to celebrants now, his right hand raised in the sign , his left hand holding the wafer aloft to the goat symbol on the wall.

"All hail Satan!" he said.

"Hail, Satan!" the celebrants responded.

"All praise these splendid breasts that gave suck to the body of Jesus,” he said mockingly, and touched the wafer first to the woman's right nipple and then to her left nipple. Kneeling between her legs, he rested the hand with the wafer on her mons veneris, and said, again mockingly, "Blessed be the generous womb that begat the body of Jesus," and passed the host over the lips of her vagina.

Now began the Repudiation in earnest.

Lifting the hems of his robe, fastening them into the black silken cord at his waist, he wet the fingers of his right hand and then touched them to the head of his now-erect penis. "Jesus Christ, messenger of doom, I offer you to worm and maggot..." he said, touching the wafer to the moistened head of his penis where it clung in desecration, moving closer to the widespread legs of the altar, the boy acolyte watching excited and amazed, "thrust you down with scorpion and snake..." approaching the altar where she waited open and spread for him, "show you storm and savage strife, curse you with famine and filth, bum you in eternal fire, cause you everlasting death to the end of time unending, and reward you With the enduring fury of our Lord, Satan!”

"Hail, Satan!" the celebrants chanted. "All hail Hurling himself omo the altar, thrusting himself! into the woman, wafer and penis entering her, the priest said, "I descend anew, and ascend forever, saith the Infernal Lord. My flesh is your flesh...”

"My flesh is thy flesh," the woman murmured.

"My flesh is our flesh...”

"Thy flesh is our flesh," the celebrants intoned.

"In flesh, let us find the glory of Satan!”

"In flesh, find the glory of Satan!”