Rob Zombie - Lords of Salem

Morgan let out a great, cackling laugh. She struck the drum hard enough to shatter the tip of the bone she played with. “In the memory of Satan, I preach punishment and shame to those who would emancipate themselves and repudiate the slavery of the church!” she shouted. “Satan come to me! We are ready!”

All around her the air was black with smoke. The theater itself had changed as well, had begun at first to waver and shake and then to blur around the edges until it was no longer a room at all. The walls fell away or dissolved into black smoke and Heidi found herself feeling she was outside, in a clearing in a forest, the moon blazing overhead. Just behind her, close enough that she could feel its crackling heat, was a bonfire. Around her were the same women she had been standing with before. Many of them now wore animal skins and cloaks, though some of them had stripped these off and had let them fall in heaps on the ground to reveal their naked and grimy bodies painted with strange symbols and daubed in blood. Before her, the three women had lost any resemblance to Lacy or her sisters and had now become, fully and truly, the witches of Salem’s past.

“At last thou hast come!” Morgan said. “Hawthorne: I, Margaret Morgan, claim thee for my master the Lord Satan.”

Heidi tried to move but couldn’t, was barely being allowed to breathe. Margaret passed her hands back and forth, inscribing in the air a symbol that momentarily seemed to glow and flicker.

“Blessed be a thousand times more than the flesh and blood of life,” she intoned. “For you have not been harvested by human hands nor did any human creature mill and grind you. Take this noble disciple! Take her, my dark savior! Bring her home!”

Around her the other women, caressing one another and writhing, suddenly began to hiss. They began instead to attack one another, rending and tearing. Some of them groped on the ground for rocks or stones or bits of weapons and when they found them they set about trying to bash one another’s skulls in. They shrieked and yelled, and here and there Heidi caught a glimpse not of the hillock and the bonfire but of the inside of a dilapidated theater.

She watched the carnage go on around her. Still she did not—could not—move.

“It was our Lord Satan who took you to the mill of the grave,” said Morgan from the top of her hillock, “so that you should thus become the bread and blood of revelation and revulsion.”

The two women beside Morgan reached into their robes and removed glittering knives. These they pressed into the hands of two of the struggling women. The noises grew louder and more terrible, as the women became even more violent and the two chosen women began to gash and stab anyone coming close to them. For a moment the creature within her released her and she thought she had control again. She turned her head and tried to move away, but no, it had her again, and now she was watching Herman pushing and fighting his way through the carnage and mob scene, trying to get to her. No, it hadn’t released her, she realized, but it was letting her see Herman, letting her watch what was going to happen to him.

He darted closer to her and she saw a woman’s knife pass close to his neck, almost cut through it. His jacket had been torn and his face was bloody, but still he kept coming. Tough fucker. He took a knife through the hand, but didn’t stop. A moment later he was there, beside her, close enough that he could reach his arms out and grab her. No, Herman, she tried to say again. Save yourself. But he yanked her to him. Picking her up, shouting, he began to run for his life.

Goddamn, it was some weird shit, and then they’d set fires out in the house, too, likely to burn the place down. And then the whole place shook, and there was a pretty good chance the whole building was going to collapse. He was ready to get the fuck out of there. But he had to get Heidi. He hadn’t spent all these years trying to save Heidi to lose her now. He didn’t know how much she was in on it or what sort of deprogramming it was going to take, but hell no, he wasn’t going to abandon her now. That wasn’t how he was built.

So he started up the aisle, coughing and pushing through the smoke. He was going to grab her and pull her away, get her out of there and talk some sense into her. The show could go on for all he cared, as long as he wasn’t part of it anymore. All he had to do was grab her.

And then he started seeing what was going on. The women had gone crazy. First they’d been all caresses and lovey-dovey, but now they were bat-shit crazy, trying to scratch out each other’s eyes. Some weird shit was going on, he understood, but he didn’t realize how weird until he saw one of the women take a knife and plunge it deep into another woman’s chest. Holy shit , he thought.

The woman was dead, blood at first spurting from the wound and then, as she died, slowing, simply oozing. The woman with the knife had already gone on to someone else, had sliced open another woman’s cheek. But the weird thing was the woman being stabbed didn’t look upset about it. No, she looked ecstatic.

Fuck me , thought Herman. They’d drugged him. That was what it must be. This couldn’t be really happening. Something in the smoke was messing with him and making him see things that weren’t there. And indeed, as he continued to look, the old peeling walls of the theater seemed to grow transparent and thinner until he could see through them.

He closed his eyes and when he opened them he was no longer in the theater at all but outside, in a forest, in the open air. In front of him a huge bonfire crackled and on the other side of it raged the carnage: the women struggling with one another, killing one another. Beyond that were the three musicians, seemingly unperturbed. And Heidi: motionless, and so far untouched.

He made a run for it, skirting the edge of the fire and pushing his way through the women still standing, punching and knocking his way through when they tried to grab ahold of him. A knife struck at his side but was knocked away by his leather jacket, which it tore. Another jabbed right into his hand, and it hurt like hell, but he managed to kick the woman in the face and knock her down. And then he had reached Heidi. She was still standing motionless, unmoving. What was wrong with her? He wrapped his arms around her and took off running.

In a moment he was around the fire and had left the clearing. He threaded his way through the trees, fighting still with the dense black smoke that billowed off the bonfire, trying not to get lost, when suddenly one of the crazed women sprang out of the darkness and came at him, trying to claw his face away. He struck her hard in the face with his own forehead, cracking down, and she fell back. He kept running, but a moment later with a hiss she had sprung onto his back and by damn she had bit him, had torn a chunk out of his neck.

He screamed, stumbled. He let Heidi fall and reached behind to grab hold of the crazed, thrashing woman’s throat. She flailed ropily, almost like a snake in his hands, scratching and clawing wildly as Herman, blood pumping from his neck, squeezed harder and harder.

There was a snap and she jerked once and went limp. Herman let her fall from his hands. He stumbled forward, attempted to pick up Heidi, and then sank to his knees. He reached up and tried to staunch the wound in his neck but the woman had bitten into the jugular and the blood kept spurting through his fingers.

In front of him, Heidi calmly gathered herself, rose from the ground, and stood. She remained there, motionless, staring down at him.

Herman lifted his head. Her eyes, he saw, were white, without pupils, as if she were blind, or as if there was nobody home. She stared down with a beatific smile on her face. Then she reached slowly out and touched his face.