The Horror Megapack_ 25 Classic and Modern Horror Stories ( PDFDrive )

the ritual from which she had escaped. Her body was to serve as an altar,
perhaps to feel the thrust of a sacrificial knife. Black candles burned about her,
diffusing acrid fumes which half obscured her; but Crane saw that she breathed.
The tourniquet with his initials, however, had been removed.
Since Diane was alive; he need not find that damning handkerchief, provided
that he could extricate her. But though he was armed with the sentry’s pistol, the
odds were far too great for open attack.
Then he saw that the figure on the two foot, brazen crucifix behind that altar of
bare, lacerated flesh was inverted. That final detail sent frost racing through his
blood. Those hooded figures had gathered for the Black Mass, the evil ritual of
modern satanism, utterly different from the oriental devil-worship. Crane
wondered how that silver peacock fitted into the tangle.
From one of the passages at the left came bestial snarls and half human
mutterings: some monster held in reserve for the ultimate horror of that mad
gathering.
The lordly figure in black clapped his hands. The devotees shifted into crescent
formation. Crane joined them as they moved toward the altar.
The Black Monster was donning a priest’s stole and cope. Six red-robed
acolytes filed from a passageway. Three carried thuribles from which poured
blue-black, pungent fumes; the others had trays of hammered copper, all heaped
with diamond shaped lozenges. They passed among the gathering, swinging their
thuribles and offering wafers to the devotees.
Crane tasted one of the confections; but instead of swallowing, he palmed it. It
reeked with hasheesh and datura, blended with other oriental drugs he could not
identify; but the two he recognized warned him. Both were brain-searing
aphrodisiacs. Those wafers of illusion would make the partaker a crazed beast
gnawed by outrageous fancies and delusions. That would give Crane his chance
to act.
And all the while that bestial mumbling and groaning and the vibration of
pounded iron echoed from the further crypt.
Crane watched the high priest of Satan make a foul mockery of the genuflections
of the Mass, saw him spit upon the reversed crucifix, heard him chanting
in a high, malignant voice.
Crane could scarcely understand the ritual, but some phrases of ultimate
blasphemy were all too clearly burned into his reeling brain.
“Satan, Lord of the World, defend us against an unjust god who created only to
damn…defend us against hypocrisy that mocks with the lure of redemption…