Dag surged to his feet and shredded the distance between them in one long stride. “Show me,” he rumbled.
“This document?” She pointed at the screen. “It’s like a diary almost. Entries aren’t dated, but they’re all written in the first person and appear to discuss both events in someone’s life and that person’s thoughts and reactions to those events. Some are only a few sentences, some several pages long. I started at the most recent and scrolled backward, but this name caught my eye.” She highlighted “Annie Mulhollow” in a streak of yellow. “I recognized it. It’s one of the three full names on the spreadsheet.”
Dag pressed one palm against the desktop and leaned in to read the text that filled the screen. “But wouldn’t that make the girl a member of the Order?”
“Here.” Kylie scrolled forward. “Keep reading.”
She followed the text right along with him, but she had already scanned ahead. Those speed-reading classes in grade school had certainly come in handy tonight.
The journal entry read like a cross between a memoir and a manifesto. It began with the story of two young college students, plagued by curiosity and a deep dissatisfaction with the average middle-class lives they had been born to. Although they had every advantage—loving families, places in a respected university, friends, and each other—they still felt as if they should have something more. That inner restless greed had made them the perfect targets for a charismatic upperclassman who promised them not only excitement, but the chance for power and achievement beyond their wildest dreams.
The young man, referred to only as Alistair, had introduced the couple to a secretive and exclusive world that operated in shadows, and whispered seductive tales of wealth, power, and influence that could all be theirs for the taking. All they had to do was join. All that was required was to do as they were told.
When it started, Dennis wrote, it had seemed like a joke, like something out of a movie, all Skull and Bones meets the Hellfire Club. Sure, there were weird, elaborate ceremonies where the established members chanted the names of “demons” and called on the dark ones to grant them power, but no one really believed in any of that stuff, and the benefits rocked.
The “club” provided more than illicit thrills, it chipped in to cover the shortfall when the university raised tuition for the spring semester and Dennis didn’t quite have the money to cover the bill. When Annie’s car got stolen and wrecked, the club bought her a new one, one ten times better than the one she lost. Plus, the booze and drugs flowed like water, and it was really good shit. Sometimes, after Dennis drank from the ritual chalice, he almost swore he could see the faces of the “demons” his new friends liked to talk about so much.
Everything seemed great, fun, awesome, until the night he and Annie were offered their initiations into the inner circle.
The description of what happened that night provided almost no detail. Indeed, the vagueness of it initially made her frown. Kylie’s first question was whether he chose not to describe the event, or whether he could not, because he’d never actually been there. Within a few more sentences, though, she came to an entirely separate conclusion—Ott could not describe the event because what had happened scarred his psyche so deeply, his mind fractured and sealed off the truth in order to preserve the man’s sanity.
During his initiation, the secret ceremonies he had previously watched with a cynic’s amusement took on a new and terrifying seriousness. The demonic faces Dennis Ott thought of as products of a drug-induced hallucination became frighteningly real as the cult’s inner circle summoned a being they called Master to emerge from the depths and feed upon their offerings.
To the young man this now seemed less an initiation and more a human sacrifice, and he realized that tonight’s ritual chalice—the one he and Annie alone had shared—contained a paralytic agent, rendering him unable to move as a creature from a psychopath’s nightmares had appeared in a swirling mist above their heads. Its form had not been the scary part. It manifested as a humanoid shape on top, thick mist below, like a cartoon genie. Of course, Disney rarely made the smoke below one of their characters writhe like tentacles or doomed, tortured souls.