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  There was a knock at the classroom door, and the assistant principal entered. She strolled over to Mrs. Mitten, and the two spoke briefly. Mrs. Mitten glanced at Cassie several times while they spoke and finally motioned her over.

  “Cassie, can you come here. Bring your books with you.”

  Cassie loaded her books in her backpack and approached the teacher. She couldn’t think of anything she’d done wrong, so whatever this was, it had to be a mistake.

  “Cassie. Your mom’s here,” Mrs. Mitten said quietly so the other students couldn’t hear. “Vicky will take you to see her.”

  Cassie followed Vicky to the school’s office, where her mom sat waiting outside the door. She didn’t look mad, but she did look worried. Or was it scared?

  “Mom?”

  Vicky gave Alison a reassuring nod. “Everything’s going to be okay, Alison.” She then gave Cassie’s shoulder a squeeze before heading inside the office.

  Cassie looked at her mom. “What’s going on?”

  “Your father had a heart attack,” Alison said as they pulled out of the school’s parking lot.

  For the longest moment, Cassie could only stare. She had heard the words, and knew their meaning, but her brain refused to connect them together.

  Heart attack. Dad.

  “He’s going to be okay, right?” she finally asked, once her brain was again able to process thoughts.

  “I hope so, sweetie,” Alison said and gave Cassie’s hand a comforting squeeze. “I hope so.”

  She’s scared, Cassie thought. She could see it in her eyes. Cassie choked down a lump in her throat. Her mom didn’t believe there was any hope. And a sudden numbness swallowed her up.

  Her dad was going to die.

  ****

  Rick Stevens never awoke from his coma. Cassie and her mom were at his bedside when he passed, and no gentle words could assuage Cassie’s heartache as she held his hand in a final goodbye. If there was a level of anguish beyond devastated, that’s where Cassie’s heart was. There would be no more weekends at the park watching him coach baseball, or summer vacations, or trips to see Grandma, or picnics at the bluff. Even those evenings they had spent doing her homework — when she had grumbled, and complained, and thrown so many tantrums — she found herself longing for just one more.

  But it would never happen. Death had seen to that. Death had taken him from her.

  It was Cassie’s first experience with death, and she hated it. She wanted to spit in its ugly face and tell it to fuck off. How could anything have so much power? In the blink of its cold, uncaring eye, it had wiped away a life.

  It had wiped away her dad’s life.

  Rick was laid to rest a week later at the Faulkner Cemetery. Faulkner was the county’s oldest cemetery, named after an early family of settlers in the region. It was built on the southern slope of Pioneer Hill, a lush forested hill overlooking the town and peninsula. A single narrow road, in desperate need of repair, ran along its southern border before winding down to the town. From there, on a clear day, you could see across the treetops to the lighthouse on the far side of town.

  It was quiet, and peaceful, and gave her dad a nice view.

  Over the coming months, Cassie spent many afternoons and evenings at her father’s grave, drawing inspiration for her poems from the haunting surroundings. A deep melancholy had fallen over her, and this was increasingly reflected in the often morose and brooding tone of her poetry. Where they had once sang the happy themes of springtime, they now mourned the dark winter nights of pain and loss.

  It was on one such night, as Cassie sat alone staring into the starlit sky, that she met the trio of goth teens who would shape the next stage of her life.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Ye Shall Be as Gods

  “...in the day ye eat thereof,

  then your eyes shall be opened,

  and ye shall be as gods...”

  — Genesis 3:16

  ****

  Cassie sat at her dad’s grave that night, as she had on so many nights since his death, staring off into the infinity of space. She had thought she was alone, but she soon heard voices approaching. She ducked behind his gravestone and watched as three teens walked past on their way to a nearby grave.

  There were two girls and one boy, all about Cassie’s age, and even from this distance, she could see the dark theme in their appearance. The boy wore a concert shirt, dark jeans, and a long black jacket. The girls wore black skirts, and all three had black dyed hair.

  But it wasn’t only their appearances that were dark; it was the way in which they blended with these haunted surroundings. They were as at home among the dead, as athletes were on a game field. This was their sanctum.

  Soon, the sweet smell of pot drifted to Cassie. She had never tried it but knew the smell from beneath the school bleachers where the stoners hung out.

  As they passed around the joint, Cassie saw the taller girl arranging sticks on the ground between them. She then placed candles in a circle around the sticks and lit the candles.

  “You know, if you’re gonna sit there and watch us, you might as well come out.” It was the boy who said this, and Cassie’s stomach dropped. She’d been spotted.

  All three goths looked her way.

  “You’re not fooling anyone,” said the tall girl, clearly annoyed at the intrusion. “You just look like an idiot.”

  Cassie rose and stepped out from behind the gravestone. She considered running for a moment, but then the shorter girl spoke.

  “It’s okay. We won’t bite,” she said, “unless you’re into that kind of thing.” She shot Cassie a grin.

  “So you coming, or going?” the boy asked.

  Cassie decided to come, trying her best not to appear as nervous as she felt.

  “What’s your name?” the shorter girl asked as Cassie walked up.

  “Cassie.”

  “Here. Sit by me,” she said, patting the grass beside her. “I’m Silvia. That’s Trish, and that’s Seth.”

  Cassie sat down and nodded shyly to each of them. “Hey.”

  “So I’m guessing that grave over there belongs to someone close,” Seth said with a nod toward the grave she had just come from. “Was it daddy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I’ll bet that’s got you all bitter and pissed off. Like, ‘How could death take him from me? Blah, blah, blah.’ Am I right?”

  Cassie hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. Pretty much.”

  It was then that his eyes locked onto hers and they held on like a vice. Something dark and knowing lived behind those eyes — something that terrified and yet intrigued with a strange thrall. He had answers to the questions that plagued her.

  “How would you like to find out,” he said.

  ****

  From the moment she first met the goths, Cassie felt a strange unease stir within her like a warning. She could see they were dark, and that alone wouldn’t have raised concerns, but it was their degree of darkness and fixation with death that roused those initial fears. Yet it was their knowledge of death that also lured her to them. She could tell they had answers to the questions that plagued her: What was death, and what came after it? What happened at the moment of death? What had her dad seen as death tore him into its terrible clutch?

  Was death something to fear?

  Cassie sensed she was stepping down a dangerous path, but she convinced herself that she was only going to peek into their mysterious new world and could always escape unscathed back into the safety of her old world at any time.

  It was a lie.

  At her deepest core, she always knew she was closing a door behind her and saying goodbye to her world of bright sunshine and colors, and entering a cold world of mist and night. But the sunshine held no answers for her, and the night did. And so she went.

  Cassie’s induction into this new world was slow, but progressive. One by one, new canons were learned, and old moral tenets excised. And the whole time, Cassie co
ntinued to reassure herself that there was nothing to fear; she was simply gaining knowledge. And knowledge had to be good.

  Over the coming months, the changes came in incremental steps, with each step built upon the previous one so seamlessly and effortlessly that Cassie barely noticed the changes as they occurred. But those around her noticed.

  By this time Cassie was a sophomore and had distanced herself from most of her old friends. Seth, Trish, and Silvia attended a public school across town (when they felt like attending), so Cassie spent most of her time at school alone or in the library reading a list of books Seth had suggested. She had dyed her hair black, despite her mom’s protests, and her clothing had taken a darker tone as well.

  Alison blamed herself for the problems Cassie seemed to be having. Without Rick’s income, Alison was forced to take a job bartending at a pub down by the wharf. She worked long hours till late in the night, so she had almost no time to spend with Cassie. But by that point it wouldn’t have made a difference. The changes had already burrowed deep roots within Cassie.

  What Alison and Cassie’s classmates saw were only the exterior surface-level changes. The dark hair and clothing, the truancy and drugs. What they had no way of knowing were the profound interior changes that had occurred. In the year since Rick’s death, Cassie’s life had become a danse macabre with darkness. And Death.

  Death came to have a peculiar allure to Cassie that she was only now discovering. It wasn’t something to fear, but rather to be explored. It promised answers to timeless secrets, and paths to reach beyond its walls. I am only secret, she once felt it whisper to her on a dark moonless night as they lay amongst the ancient graves in the older portion of the cemetery. Fear me not, for I am not threat.

  The goths also introduced Cassie to drugs at their gatherings, as a way to expand her mind, “to see the world unfiltered,” as they described it. There was so much to explore beyond the physical world and its limitations. Theirs would be the secrets of eternity.

  Over the remainder of her sophomore year, Cassie and the goths would gather together at the cemetery late at night and recite chants from ancient occult texts Seth had found. Afterward, as dawn approached, Cassie would stagger home in a drunken daze, barely slipping inside before her mom awakened. Her grades and attendance had taken a sharp downturn, but that no longer mattered to Cassie — what she was learning out there amongst the graves was so much more important. It was eternal.

  Cassie, Trish, and Silvia gravitated toward Seth as the unofficial leader of their little clan. Despite being an asshole at times, he possessed the easy charisma of a cult leader, and there was a magnetism to him that Cassie couldn’t deny. And while Silvia and Trish were steeped in occult lore, their knowledge paled in comparison to Seth’s. Seth was not only versed in modern occult practices, but he also knew the dark rites that had been practiced by the ancients who had once gathered on moonless nights when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead was at its thinnest, to offer dark sacrifices to their grim gods. It was on nights such as these that Cassie and her friends gathered at the cemetery to conduct séances to reach beyond that veil.

  Death was merely another doorway to be explored in Cassie’s new world.

  And on several nights during the summer preceding her junior year, Cassie sensed that doorway opening. But it would be on the night of the Harvest Moon that Cassie’s final baptism into darkness would occur.

  That was the night of the Black Mass.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Black Mass

  The full Harvest Moon hung like an enormous orange light in the night sky, casting its eerie pall over the fields that sped past the car window.

  Cassie and her goth friends had been driving for an hour, and according to the GPS on Trish’s cell phone, they had another twenty minutes to go.

  Seth had been secretive about their destination all night and didn’t reveal it till they were well outside of Capetown. They would be attending a Black Mass being celebrated by a satanic coven in Oakwood County. And Seth was on a high.

  Seth had heard rumors of it a month earlier and had traced every lead he knew to score them invites. He finally got them from a friend who played bass for a black metal band. This Black Mass would be the real deal, his friend assured him. It was the seventeenth century French version that had been a coveted secret among the French elite before its ban in the latter half of that century. And it certainly wasn’t like the pussy bullshit that had sprung up in this country after the millennium — no, this shit was real, and not simply an homage to some metaphoric symbol of rebellion.

  His friend also warned him that it was invite only, at a secret remote location, and anyone disclosing it might not live long enough to regret it.

  These people had ways of finding out.

  “Prepare to be freaked the fuck out,” was how Seth had teased the night ahead to the girls as they drove off. And when the reveal came, they were. Cassie in particular.

  Her first reaction was unease, as a small alarm prickled in her mind. But she shook it off. This night was to be about knowledge and expanding her mind to these hidden secrets. How could that be dangerous? And if things got too scary, she could always bail.

  It was the same lie she had repeated to herself more times than she could remember.

  Only secret. Not threat.

  Silvia and Trish were down for it and didn’t experience the unease Cassie felt. For Trish, it was a chance to expand her own mystic skills on a foundation of wisdom passed down over the centuries. For Silvia, it was more out of curiosity. She had heard talk of the Black Mass among her friends in the goth community, and it had piqued her interest.

  Seth’s motive was twofold — first was the purity of the rite itself. This was the real deal, unfiltered and uncensored. But a close second was the rush. He got off on shock and rebellion, and what better way to tell the world to fuck off than paying homage to Satan.

  And so they went, into the night, and into the tragic chain of events that eventually led to Cassie’s death.

  “Turn left up here,” Trish said, reading from the GPS on her cell phone. They were so far away from any cities or houses that all they saw were rolling hills and trees.

  Seth turned off the gravel road they had been on for the past twenty minutes and onto a paved drive. They drove a short ways before they ran into a gate. Two large men in suits stood there. One of them approached the car, and Seth rolled down his window.

  “This is private property,” the man said, looking in the window at the four kids. “You’re going to need to leave.”

  “In nomine dei nostri,” Seth gave as the password his buddy had told him to say.

  “Let me see your invitations,” said the man, and the hard look in his expression never changed.

  Seth handed him the four engraved invitations and watched as he examined them. He handed them back and nodded to the other man to open the gate. “Stay on the drive, and follow it to the end,” he instructed them.

  The drive wound through an orchard of citrus trees and crossed a narrow bridge before opening into a clearing surrounding the main house. The road ended there.

  The house was a large Tudor, built of gray stone with ivy curling up its sides, and in the orange glow of moonlight, it couldn’t have looked more menacing.

  Next to it was a large barn built of dark oak wood with a gravel lot out front. It was here that everyone was parking.

  They parked the car and walked over to the barn. Two more men stood outside the door checking everyone’s invitation and ID before they were allowed to enter.

  Once inside, the barn was dark and lit only by black candles along the walls. They were handed dark, hooded robes and told to wear them over their clothes. They quickly slipped into the robes, then joined the other congregants toward the back of the barn. They were gathered in a half circle around a marble altar. The altar was about three feet tall, and draped in a burgundy-colored cloth with an inverted cross embroidered into it. Bl
ack candles stood at either end. And barely visible in the flickering candlelight was a goat’s head mounted to the back wall behind the altar.

  The room was mostly silent while everyone waited for the ceremony to begin. Cassie snuck glances at the other congregants. There were about forty of them, all in their hooded robes with their heads bowed in silent reverence.

  The ceremony began promptly at the stroke of midnight. A door in the back opened, and a tall man with long black hair and priestly vestments strode over to the altar. He genuflected before the altar, kissed it, then positioned himself behind it to face the congregants.

  A girl in a dark robe approached the altar. She removed her robe and let it slide to the floor from her naked body. The priest took her hand and helped her onto the altar, where she lay down on her back. He placed a silver chalice on her bare stomach and then, turning to the congregants, used his left hand to make a reversed sign of the cross, touching first his abdomen, then his forehead, then his right shoulder, and finally his left, all the while reciting the Latin invocation:

  "In nomine magni dei nostri Satanas, introibo ad altare Domini Inferi."

  “Ave, Satanas,” came the response from the congregants, and Cassie made an effort to follow their lead. As she did, she felt that small alarm stir in her mind. She dismissed it again, but this time it left her feeling queasy.

  With the invocation finished, the ceremony commenced. A small lamb was led over to the altar on a leash. Taking a serrated knife, the priest sliced across the lamb’s throat. Cassie gasped in horror but somehow managed to keep it quiet. Nobody had warned her that animals would be killed, and nothing could have prepared her for that sight.

  Silvia stood beside Cassie on her right. She sensed Cassie’s revulsion and gave her hand a gentle squeeze to calm her. The lamb’s sacrifice was to serve a higher purpose.

  Turning back to the altar, Cassie saw the priest was now filling his chalice with blood that gushed from the lamb’s throat. When he was finished, he resumed his place behind the altar, while the lamb was left to die off to the side.