Religious tomes cluttered the apartment in dusty heaps, filling the air with a musty newspaper smell. Candles of varying sizes and description flickered in almost every corner along with incense and herbs that, mixed with the dank mildewed stench of aging books and the funky animal smells of fur, excrement, blood, and organs, made the air almost unbreathable. A miasma of fragrant smoke and ash lingered in each room, a perpetual fog. Tikis, totems, statues and other icons, effigies, and symbols hung from the walls and sat atop every surface that would support them, representing over one thousand different religious sects.
Candles cast their flickering shadows across walls graffitied with prayers, spells, and other symbols of worship. The apartment was a shrine to mankind’s entire religious history.
Darkening pools of red stained the warped hardwood floors in every room and many of the prayers and symbols written on the walls were drawn in the same brown-red blood.
Dozens of animals raged, screeched, barked, and hissed in their cages. The smell of death was driving them mad. Each morning, a company that bred animals for experimentation brought him fresh shipments of creatures that he promptly slaughtered while praying without relent to one God after another. Cartons of rabbits, monkeys, snakes, and birds, cages of sheep and goats, hit his doorstep each morning and by the following morning those same cages and cartons would be empty. His trash can was full of their mutilated remains. His garbage stank like an abattoir.
Jamie stepped into the shower to wash the morning’s sacrifice from his hands, face, and hair. Blood spiraled down the drain as he scrubbed his skin and hair. He could feel the tension in his muscles relax slightly as he washed away his sins. As distasteful as they were, the sacrifices always made Jamie feel better. They quieted the demons within as well as those haunting the shadows around him. Jamie winced as he washed one of the numerous bleeding sores on his body and noticed with dismay that the melanoma was spreading. If the prayers were working, he couldn’t tell.
Jamie dressed quickly and walked past the cages of animals doomed to be executed that very evening into the room where he kept his “other” sacrifices, the ones plucked from street corners or stolen from emergency rooms. He paused briefly, staring at the locked door and listening to the muffled weeping within. He continued past.
Downstairs, below his apartment, was the occult shop he owned with his family. Jamie had worked there since he dropped out of college. He hurried around, tidying up and turning on lights, trying to eradicate every shadow in the room. But there were always places for shadows to hide.
He turned the sign around so that it showed “open,” unlocked the door, then plopped down behind the counter in front of his laptop to begin his research.
He punched in “Human Sacrifice and Religion” and his mind reeled as pages and pages of links sprang up on the screen, each one a different religion requiring its adherents to murder and mutilate in the name of its God, gods, Goddess, goddesses, saints, demons, angels, and/or devils.
“What do I do?” he gasped, staring at the screen in astonishment, overwhelmed by the enormity of his predicament.
He thought about limiting his religious mania to only modern religions or only the major ones, but he was smart enough to know that just because an idea or ideology had fallen out of popularity didn’t make it any less true. Truth was not a matter of popular opinion. Presidents, movie stars, and rock stars were the results of popular opinion, and he was seldom impressed with the tastes and wisdom of the masses. Most people, he knew, were idiots, terrified of truth, happier with pretty lies no matter who they had to hurt to maintain them.
“So, I am back where I started. Who is right?”
The bell on the door rang, announcing the arrival of a customer and startling Jamie out of his meditations.
The girl who shuffled in past the rows of love potions, power candles, and voodoo dolls had that look about her that told Jamie she was on the run from something or someone. Her eyes kept sweeping the floor, nervously shifting left to right and never once looking up at any of the spells, amulets, and potions lining the shelves. Her clothes were ill fitted, as if she had recently lost a lot of weight, yet she was far from emaciated. She was even plump in spots—all the right spots—thighs, hips, ass, breasts, the type of woman Jamie had always been attracted to before the disease robbed him of his desire. Even her shoes looked too big, slapping the tile floor as she shuffled up one aisle and down the other, looking at nothing. She was dressed inappropriately for the weather which wasn’t unusual. Most of the women in the neighborhood were strippers or whores who were accustomed to ignoring the frigid temperature in order to attract customers. She was not a shopper. She had come in to the store to hide.
Jamie slid out from behind the desk, leaving his computer in search mode, listing one religion after another and each demanded human blood to appease its Gods. He sidled up beside the young girl and smiled.
“Can I help you with something?”
“Do you have anything to ward off evil?”
“Lots of things. Evil spirits or evil people?”
“People. The worst kind of people.” The girl’s eyes glanced towards the store window as if she were expecting an attack from that direction.
“Who’s after you?”
The girl’s eyes rose to look up at Jamie. She stared at the rashes and lesions on his face and then back into his eyes.
“Are you sick or something?”
“AIDS. I’ll probably be dead by the end of the year. Now, you tell me your story. Drugs? Prostitution? Ran away from home?”
“All of the above. Except, I didn’t run away in the usual sense. I’m nineteen. My parents aren’t exactly going to be calling out the FBI, and yesterday was my first night as a prostitute and my last. Some guy tried to kill me. He threatened to cut my tits off if I didn’t let him fuck me in the ass. I ran and now my pimp is after me. I just met him, too.”
Jamie saw a quick, furtive movement out of the corner of his eye and turned in time to see something dark and ill-formed, the shadow of some grotesquely deformed thing, detach itself from the darkness behind one of the massive bookshelves lining the walls and dart across the room to join the other shadows behind the closet door. His pulse quickened. He didn’t know what these things were. Demons his rituals had summoned? Messengers of the many Gods he worshipped? Some of the lesser Gods themselves? He knew what they wanted, and he knew they were getting impatient.
“Well, I’ve got an apartment upstairs if you need a place to stay. You don’t have to worry about me trying to fuck you or anything. All the medications I’m on have left me with very little libido.”
His smile trembled as it spread across his face. He hoped she would attribute the bizarre expression to his disease and not the fear steadily increasing within him as more shadows flitted about the room on the edge of his peripheral vision.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It’s a blessing really. Could you really see me trying to get laid, looking the way I do? I don’t need that kind of frustration and I wouldn’t want to accidentally get someone else sick. Believe it or not, I used to be a really good-looking guy.”
The girl smiled at him. “I believe it.”
“So, what do you think? Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving. Nobody should be alone on Thanksgiving. Do you want a place to stay for a few days?”
She looked around the occult shop and back into Jamie’s eyes. She was obviously the type who thought she could see everything about people in their eyes. Of course, if that were true, she wouldn’t have picked up a sadistic trick and fallen in with a pimp.