Conspiracies

Then she's dragged to a table—a rough wooden bench, really—and watches as one of the hooded figures slices flesh from the monkey turning on the spit ... a chubby little thing with an unusually large head for a monkey. The flesh is laid before Olive. They don't even give her a chance to refuse it. The greasy meat is thrust into her mouth, then her jaws are forced shut and her nostrils pinched.

Again—swallow or suffocate.

She swallows.

Still gagging, she is carried to another corner of the room where a huge sow lies spread-eagled on a stone block. Its throat has been slit; its many-nippled abdomen has been opened and all the organs removed. Olive is folded into the red stinking cavity, her head in the pelvis, her feet against the diaphragm. She kicks and screams and twists as they sew the skin flaps closed, but to no avail. Soon she is entombed in the wet, suffocating darkness.

Never in her life, before or since, has Olive been so terrified, so mortally sick with fear and loathing. She is sure she is going to die. Past her sobs and whimpers she hears muffled chanting around her. The rotten air clogs in her throat. She can't breathe.

As a roaring grows in her ears and bright spots flare before her eyes, she feels a pair of hands gripping her head, the fingers curving under her jaw and pulling. Darkness still engulfs her. Where did the hands come from?

The hands pull, harder and harder, until she is sure her head will come off. She kicks toward the pressure and suddenly she's moving, squeezing through a tight, tight passage, and then there's air! Who'd have thought this dank subterranean air could smell so sweet? She sucks deep drafts as the rest of her body is pulled free of the sow through the space between its legs.

The chanters cheer and tear off their robes. They are naked beneath, and now they dance and drink and go into a rutting frenzy—men with women, women with women, men with men.

Child Olive squeezes her eyes shut while adult Olive thinks about all that followed after she regained these memories. She remembers confronting her father as he lay dying of cirrhosis—despite his toxic state, he gave a great performance of wounded incredulity. And even his mother, who hated the man and never had a good word to say about him, declared that he never could have been a part of such horrendous doings.

Lies, all lies.

Olive went to the local police. They investigated but could find no evidence of such a cult. Of course not. How could they? The evidence was three decades old.

Then she heard that the FBI was investigating the wave of reports of Satanic ritual abuse sweeping the country. Olive told them her story. The agents were properly sympathetic, and dutifully took down her information, but their investigation also yielded nothing.

How could that be? she wondered in all her naivete. How could one of the finest crime fighting organizations in the world find no evidence of such a widespread cult?

When she went back to the federal office and insisted that they keep looking, one of the investigators took her aside. He told her that they'd investigated hundreds of these claims and had yet to find any corroborating evidence. They'd combed through houses where others with recovered memories claimed that dozens of children had been ritually abused and sacrificed, and had found not a trace of blood. He even went so far as to suggest to Olive that what she remembered most likely never happened, that it was something called false memory syndrome, instilled by suggestions from her memory recovery therapist.

Olive thanked him very much ... and fled the building.

Because then she knew ... the very people she was turning to for help were part of the problem. This was bigger than she ever had imagined. Higher-ups in the government were linked to a powerful worldwide network of murderous satanic pedophiles and pornographers who destroyed all evidence when they could, and planted disinformation when they could not. And when that didn't work, the Lord of Evil protected them—Satan himself implanted distortions in the brains of survivors, to make them seem like poor delusional fools.

A filigree of deceit encasing the world, concealing the truth ...

Abruptly Olive is no longer lying on the floor. She feels sheets around her, a mattress against her back. And she is no longer a child.

She opens her eyes. She is back in her hotel room, and the Satanists are gathered again around her bed.

"So you plainly see, Olive," says her father's mocking voice, "why you can never be saved. You have drunk human blood and eaten human flesh. In God's eyes you are a blight on His creation, you are anathema. You will be cast into hell where we can all be together—for eternity!"

"No!" she cries. "I'm saved! I've been born again!"

Vicious laughter all around as her father says, "Born again? Olive, dear, you cannot be born again into the Spirit, because you have already been born again—of a sow!" The laughter grows louder. "And when did you last hear of a pig entering heaven?"

Olive sobs. She squeezes her eyes shut and claps her hands over her ears—for some reason, her hands are free now—to shut out the laughter. Soon the laughter fades. Hesitantly, she opens her eyes ...

She was alone.

Olive sat up in her bed and rubbed her eyes. She looked around in the darkness. Across the room, next to the square shadow of the TV, the red glowing numerals on the alarm clock read 4:28.

Relief flooded through her. A dream ... an appalling, horrifying dream, but only a dream. Her father was dead. He couldn't hurt her anymore. He—

Olive froze. The glowing numerals had disappeared ... as if someone had stepped between her and the clock. She sensed movement on both sides of her.

Oh, no! Please, God, NO!

She couldn't bear to relive that again. She opened her mouth to scream but a leather-clad hand slithered across her face and sealed her lips ...

Jack ...

... awakens to a sound ... a scratching noise ...

He sits up and focuses on it. Coming from the door. He reaches under the pillow and finds the Glock; he works the slide to chamber a round, then pads to the door.

As he reaches it, he notices the odor.

Rakoshi stink.

Not again. But that was a dream. This is real.

He puts his eye to the peephole and peers into the hall. Something wrong out there. All the lights are out. It's like peeking into a coffin ... but it smells worse.

Then he sees the eyes, pairs of glowing yellow almond-shaped slits floating in the darkness, and he knows.

Rakoshi!

No time to wonder how as a huge weight slams against the other side of the door. Jack jumps back. The weight hits the door again, and again, until the wood shatters, sending splinter missiles hurtling toward him.

Jack backpedals across the room, firing all the way. He jumps onto the bed. With his back to the wall he blasts wildly, down and around, everywhere he sees the eyes.

When the clip is empty, he stands there panting, sweating. The eyes are gone and he can't hear anything past the ringing in his ears. Slowly, cautiously, he bends, gropes, finds the switch on the bedside lamp, and turns it.

Blinking in the sudden glare, he gasps at the sight of a dozen or more hulking, cobalt-skinned creatures milling about the room, unharmed by the fusillade he's just loosed at them. They turn their shark-snouted heads his way, bare their teeth, and rake the air with their talons, but they do not approach. They merely watch him with their yellow basilisk eyes, as if waiting for him to fall over dead. No hurry. He's not going anywhere.

How? How did they get to his room without causing a panic and leaving a trail of bloody carnage in their wake?

And what the hell are they waiting for?

He should be glad they're waiting. His extra clips are in his gym bag over by the door. Not that they would do much good—bullets never seemed to have much effect on these things. But fire ... yeah, fire works.