Summer Solstice 2003

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FICTION

I.

EGARDLESS OF WHAT YOU may have heard, I am a kindly man given to scholarship and prayer. On cold, drizzly weekends in late fall or early winter, I retreat to my study in the back of our old Victorian-style house and read something about Biblical archeology or work on my book, Puritanism in Contemporary America. Of course, I am retired, and so often when I pray or write, I look out my second-story window toward the small, four-year college where I taught for many years. Unless there's fog, I can always see the white tip of the Baptist cross and the third floor of the Hines building, a century-old red brick affair where I had my office. Several months back, as you may know, the college shut it doors for the final time.

The demise of the college fills me with sorrow. Yes, good memories from those days abound: weekend parties, trips with students, packed lecture halls. But bad memories linger and overshadow the good. One so haunts my dreams that, at times, I question ever leaving Southern California in the late 60s for what Barb and I thought would be an idyllic college paradise in the Pacific Northwest.

That memory, of course, involves David Harris, a man who has achieved the regional status of a Charles Manson.

II.

IGNORANT OF THE MAN'S potential for evil, I brought Harris aboard the college years ago. As department head and chair of his hiring committee, I was impressed by Harris' scholarship, particularly in the field of the horror novel: he had published several essays in prestigious journals--The Bangkok Review, Twisted Vine, and Serpent among them--and just completed his first book, Blood Cults in Paradise, published four years later by Druid Press.

However, he had certain annoying peculiarities. When I first met him at Portland International, he walked with a limp, muttering to himself, slightly dragging his left leg as he moved forward. Limp or not, he was a striking man: tall, thin with piercing blue eyes and a full head of black, wavy hair. On the way from baggage claim to my car, he somewhat arrogantly refused my kind offer to carry his bag. By the time we made the freeway on that overcast day in December, he was talking a mile a minute about the pagan and occult influences that had helped shaped gothic architecture in Europe. When he saw the highway billboard ad for the Jaguar, a topless restaurant that claimed to serve free lunches, he demanded that we stop and I didn't refuse. And so over lunch at the topless place, between mouthfuls of hamburger and occasional eyefuls of the dancers, he exhibited bizarre mannerisms, which I only recently learned had something to do with a congenital disease: often, when he turned toward me, he rolled his eyes back in his head, as if listening to a silent voice. As we ate, talked, and watched the dancers, he picked a scab on his left cheek until it bled (I admit to losing my appetite); he avoided eye-contact with me, concentrating on a point just over my head; and he hissed when he drew in a breath. With mockery in his voice, he insisted that we pray when he had finished eating.

That afternoon and into the next day, he waltzed through the interviews and was hired to begin teaching at the end of January '82.

For his first ten years, while he attended faculty meetings and served on countless committees, David kept very much to himself. He rarely returned telephone calls--but, then again, I wonder how many of his colleagues telephoned the young, darkly brooding professor who, sometimes chanting to himself, walked about the often gray and drizzly campus in an ankle-length trenchcoat. And when I asked him over coffee in the faculty lounge one Monday morning, perhaps a year or two after he was hired, why he never attended our weekend faculty get-togethers, he gave me that smile that students eventually found so charming and commented that he and his wife were always busy with their four children over the weekend. At the same time, he told me, with an emphatic stare that made my blood run cold, never to ask that question again. I later discovered that David was never invited. His colleagues didn't like him.

While the college shunned David and his family, he seemed almost content with his isolation. Certainly, in his solitude, he continued to publish scholarly articles at an unbelievable rate, a fact that did not earn him the merit pay increases that he so richly deserved. Indeed, David may have wanted little to do with us. Perhaps the most peculiar and revealing thing about David and his family was that in his seventeen years at the college, no one ever saw David's wife Abigail. Until her untimely death, some of my colleagues even wondered if David did indeed have the wife he claimed to have married in Cleveland months before he was hired; others speculated that Abby--David talked of her around the few colleagues he associated with--was a member of a local witches' coven.

In the early 90s, shortly after I had been appointed Dean of Arts and Sciences, things seemed to break for David. He became friends with the students, a phenomenon that relieved some of the guilt I felt over his being ostracized. In response to their invitation, he agreed to become faculty advisor for a student club professing an interest in religious studies.

However, after some two years of David's involvement with the club, rumors began circulating. According to one, once a month, without receiving the college's permission to do so, David traveled with the group to an old cabin hidden back in the mountains. The story was that he and the students always left on Friday, spent the weekend screwing each other and denouncing the Savior, and returned on Sunday evening too haggard and exhausted to attend class the next day. This rumor I dismissed as implausible, an attempt to fabricate yet another urban legend in a community whose "mythic" history included a number of devil cults whose origin could be traced to the late nineteenth century.

But then some particularly disturbing tales filtered through, oddly corresponding to another occurrence that had had everyone in and around our community on edge for several years: the regular disappearance of young, beautiful high school or college girls. Indeed, the disappearances seemed to occur several days preceding the monthly weekend trips that David Harris was reportedly taking with his club. Refusing to acknowledge a correlation, I struggled to bury myself in administrative work, class preparation and research. But tuning out the stories became impossible when tales of "bloodletting" came my way: the most popular versions focused on female students who consented to sex with several males and then were brutally sacrificed in front of the entire group while strapped to some contraption called "the Devil's chair."

Lending credence to the tales, one of my students at the time--Cindy Banks, now a banker in Portland--showed me a photo, taken during one of the retreats. The picture showed a topless blonde female, face and breasts bloodied; during the retreat, the blonde and another girl had removed their sweaters and engaged in a "cat fight" in front of all the other howling members, Dr. Harris included. The story made me ill.

Then, at a restaurant where we had agreed to meet on the week following Easter of '93 or '94, Cindy told me of another chilling event that went against everything I professed to believe in. The story was of a mock crucifixion, in this case involving a young woman from Idaho who had been stripped of her clothing, dabbed in pig's blood, and raised on a pole inserted inside her between her legs. Supposedly, the pole had been fitted with a halter that was to secure the participant's waist and ensure her safety while perpetuating the illusion that the she was being sexually impaled. However, the girl from Idaho had neglected to fasten the halter and, raised for all to see in the final scene of a play the students performed, had allowed herself to be impaled in a bloody climax to a life marked by suicidal depressions. "At first, we didn't think anything was wrong. Jenny just hung there, screaming, her face riddled with pain. We thought she was joking. She could be so funny at times, and you never knew when she was putting you on. Then we saw blood trickling down the pole and down the side of her mouth," Cindy stated.

It was becoming more and more difficult not to allow such stories to occupy my every thought. Faced with irate colleagues who demanded I look into the matter, I asserted that were I going to be disturbed over anything, it was not going to be over the unsubstantiated claims that David and his club went on trips that spawned horror stories of Satanic dimension but over the fact that the trips occurred so frequently, were done without the college's approval, cost the college outrageous amounts of money, and always left all participants hung-over and exhausted.

III.

IT SICKENS ME TO think that if I had bothered to talk to David, if I had insisted upon some kind of investigation, or if I had argued that the administration should no longer support this club, then things may have turned out differently. But I failed to act, and in so doing helped perpetuate an enormous evil.

The first bit of substantial evidence came from a high school English teacher in a town some one hundred miles north of the college, who sent me a small article from his local paper. According to a journalist, who admitted his speculation was based upon undocumented "confessions," students from small colleges throughout the Pacific Northwest had for years been gathering once a month in a cabin in these mountains and participating in "activities of a diabolical nature." The article froze me to the core.

For months after I read the article, whisperings concerning the "diabolical activities" burnt through the region like the slow fires of Hell. Possibly to its credit, our student newspaper carried a couple of articles, pointing out that while the stories concerning Dr. Harris' club were fascinating, even entertaining, no basis had been offered to substantiate that Dr. Harris was involved in a group interested in cultivating a friendship with Satan. It is worth noting, by the way, that the student newspaper was run by two of Harris' students.

Finally, evil took form. I remember the night: December 2nd, when Barb and I were relaxing in our family room to watch the evening news, a nightly ritual for us. We'd heard that a huge storm, combining Arctic and Pacific air masses, was headed for our area in what could be the worst storm in a hundred years, so we nervously awaited the weather report. Then, I saw David's picture on the screen, the words "Blood Cult Massacre" inscribed above and behind him, and I sat up in my chair, heart racing, and woke Barbara, who was asleep on the couch. Spellbound, Barb and I listened as Glen James, a former student and local newsman, reported that a local professor had been named as a key participant in monthly "blood rituals" that involved students from several colleges located in the surrounding area and that likely explained the disappearance over the past decade of numerous high school and college girls from the region. James' voice shook as he conveyed the news.

The screen flashed a photo of the young woman whose confession had revealed Harris' participation in something that shook the college and caught the nation's attention; blonde hair disheveled, wearing a blood-streaked T-shirt and torn blue shorts, the confessor was a student I recognized.

Stephanie Reynolds had been found several mornings before wandering dazed along a one-lane mountain road twenty miles from the cabin where the activities took place. Her face, arms, and legs were deeply lacerated. She was picked up by an older couple from Seattle, who dressed and fed her and then drove Stephanie to the nearest small town, where she was taken into custody by local law enforcement authorities. It was at the police station, I think, that she paused for the photo that appeared on the news. Three days later, from her bed in the hospital, Stephanie told police the entire story, emphasizing that in revealing the cult, she was putting the lives of herself and her family in extreme danger. On the evening following the campus arrest the next day of Dr. Harris and several of his students, a national broadcast featured Stephanie's full confession. Her story, eventually covered by Time magazine, also appeared in every newspaper in the country.

A former student, Stephanie was an intelligent, literate woman whose proclivity towards decadence nearly cost her life and her soul. Now a rising star in the adult film industry, she has given me permission to use her story, parts of which I shall retell in my own words.

IV.

ACCORDING TO STEPHANIE, IT was a cold mid-November night, the full moon overhead bathing the entire area in an unearthly, sickening glow. The old twisted, two-story cabin sat in the middle of a small meadow, which was surrounded by a thick wall of tall, dark, pine trees. Lights blazed and shadows danced from the windows of the cabin, and as Stephanie walked from the car to the door, she could hear laughter and shouting that did nothing to dispel the impression that something wicked was coming her way.

I say "impression;" let me explain my use of that term. Stephanie had been raised Pentecostal in a small town in northern Idaho, and while several years before she had broken from the Stream of Living Water Church where she was raised, there yet remained in her an immediate apprehension of evil that her parents considered a gift from God, a manifestation of the presence of the Holy Spirit. As Stephanie later told me, the night, the area, the cabin for the weekend retreat exuded evil as tangible as hot oil.

What she found inside at first struck her as a typical college frat party: drinking, drugs, and sex. "Everything was cool," as she put it. The air was thick with smoke and smelled of alcohol. But the longer she stood in a corner, drinking from a wine bottle, the more she saw that fascinated and frightened her. Stephanie felt drawn to many of the things in that room that the elders of the church of her youth would find abominable: the picture of the goat's head over the door, wall paintings and photos of naked and bloodied women hanging from crosses, an upside-down cross dangling from the ceiling. She told me that a number of students--male and female--were either partially or totally undressed, many dabbed or streaked in what looked like blood but which Stephanie assumed must be washable paint. A few, she observed, were openly engaging in sex, and while she admitted to me that she had seen a few adult movies at the time in her young life, Stephanie had never actually watched another couple copulating like beasts, from the moment of penetration to the moaning height of climax.

"It was wonderful yet horrible," she confided in me. Stephanie said that she couldn't take her eye off one threesome in the corner: naked, the skinny and plain red-haired girl she knew as Tiffany leaned forward, hands braced against the wall, legs spread, while two males from the college football team took turns entering her. Stephanie's description reveals a young lady giving in to temptation. "Their cocks were huge," she said. "I wanted something that large in me. Fucking went on for half an hour, maybe an hour. I wanted to do that, so saying goodbye to old-time religion, I took off my clothes, walked up to one of the men and took his cock in my hand. I knelt slightly and kissed the head of his dick. He smiled. Panting yet apprehensive, I braced myself against the wall, opened my legs and told the boys to fuck me. They did. Soon, I found myself on a mattress on the floor, one male under me and inside me, one behind me and inside me, and one in my mouth. At the time, I thought it was bliss. What the hell have I been missing? I wondered. Maybe it was the low point in my life, but who hasn't given in to gooey darkness once in awhile?"

Devilish debauchery prevailed that night and into the early hours of the morning when the tenor of the retreat changed. According to Stephanie, by three or four, sexual activities had pretty much ceased. Partially dressed males and females sat around in small groups, drinking, smoking weed, talking in low tones when Dr. Harris stepped to the front of the room. Feeling a cutting chill enter the room, Stephanie noticed that David was clothed in a long black and red cloak, open at the middle to expose his erect manhood, and he was accompanied by two large men, neither one students, each one wearing the same kind of cloak. Stephanie was not clear about what he said, but I doubt very much his words will every find a welcome in the liturgy of the church. What was remarkable, according to Stephanie, is the effect his presence and words had upon everyone else there; the students worshiped and adored this man who, at the end of his prayer or chant, beckoned some students in the back to "bring forth the offering."

"The Spirit within me leaped; I couldn't fucking help it, " Stephanie told me, and she felt her bones freeze as she saw one of her friends--a girl named Amy Ewing from Twin Falls, Idaho--being led toward David. A beautiful, tall woman with long raven hair, Amy was dressed in a sheer white robe through which her body looked almost ethereal, somewhat divine.

Crouched naked in a far corner, clutching her bag and beginning to shiver in spite of the warmth provided by the huge fire in the fireplace, Stephanie had to fight the sudden urge to flee into the night. From where she sat, she was two feet from the door. Images of exorcisms she had heard about as a youth filling her mind, Stephanie intuited the presence of something so evil in Dr. Harris' tone and his bearing that she knew she would likely be butchered if she protested.

Spellbound, her soul coursing with yet fighting the dark, sickening energy which fueled Harris and his followers, Stephanie held her breath, prayed for forgiveness and strength, and watched and waited.

"As I watched," Stephanie told me, "I realized Amy was in a trance. She'd been so drugged, felt no emotion and no pain. I could tell that by looking at her. Unable to break away, I watched from the back. It was like one of those hideous "B" horror movies where blood runs freely as water from a hose and everyone stands to die. A twisted, Satanic drama, everything was played out in a darkness that oozed like candle wax dripping from the walls and ceiling and sticking to everyone. I went numb, stopped thinking, my mind a blank slate. All eyes were on beautiful, raven-haired Amy. Standing erect, expressionless, she let Dr. Harris and his assistants undress her. For several moments, she stood in front of us all, naked, surrounded by a glow. Then I watched her turn and climb onto a wooden X-shaped structure in the middle of the room--the Devil's Chair, they called it--and stretch out her arms and legs, which were then bound with rope. The structure was raised at a 45 degree angle to the floor, and I watched Harris and his assistants taking turns with her. I actually enjoyed this. Almost wishing I were Amy, I watched their cocks shove inside her moist pussy again and again. Though watched by over a hundred, Amy cried out with pleasure each time she was penetrated. Finished, Dr. Harris sang a chant in a language I did not recognize. Some around me muttered along with him. At that moment, suddenly, actually enjoying the spectacle, I felt cold winds of hell.

"From that point, things didn't go the way I thought they should. I watched, puzzled, as one of the assistants produced a huge serrated knife, the kind you use deer hunting, and handed it to Harris. This wasn't going to occur, I told myself. Drawn like a fly to honey, I came forward from my corner--several did, in fact--and walked as close to the front as I could and, looking down upon her, was first struck by her perfect body, large breasts whose stark whiteness contrasted with her tan, nipples pierced in gold, a shaved pubic area that bore the tattoo of a black snake, and perfectly shaped, blood-red lips. Like everyone else, I was stunned by her beauty. Then she looked me in the eyes, and behind the film of glossy gray, I sensed a cry for help, plain as day. Locked inside her numbed mind and body, Amy's soul was screaming for release. Wondering if I was going crazy, averting my eyes from hers, I turned to Dr. Harris, who had been watching me with that steady, unfathomable calm. I experienced an odd sensation then: I felt that I loved the man at the moment and would have done anything to please him. Smiling, turning from me and back to Amy, he placed the tip of the blade just below her sternum and slowly, neatly inserted the knife through taut, tanned flesh. Blood spurted from the wound in tiny geysers, showering some of those watching. I still have dreams about this, and in the dream watch Dr. Harris lean forward as Amy bleeds, stroke her hair, kiss her on the mouth, and then draw back and cut slowly, neatly down to her pubic area. It was a straight, even professional incision. Through all this, Amy's eyes stayed open and fixed on me. He removed the knife slowly and, as he did, blood poured out of Amy, who moaned slightly now. I felt torn. Inside the bleeding body was a frightened soul crying to me. Maybe I should have stopped it.

"Next, Dr. Harris made a deep horizontal slit through the cut and just above the navel and, reaching down, pulled back the flaps of skin. You could see her insides as blood flowed like a waterfall into a basin built around the base of the chair. I'm sure they drank the blood.

"Then, it hit me: I was watching someone being disemboweled. It was as if I were standing inside Hell, and, closing my eyes, freezing, I told myself to get out. My soul was dangerously perched, as Daddy used to say. Opening my eyes, I turned and glanced behind me at other faces. Most stood, mute, stupid, watching Dr. Harris carry through the grisly procedure; no one seemed aware of me.

"Legs trembling, feeling like my soul was melting, I shuffled to the back of the room--I couldn't walk normally then--unable at the time to move my arms from my sides, moving between the icy bodies of the observers.

"When I got to the back of the room, I forced myself to kneel, reached into my bag, pulled out a T-shirt and shorts, and with effort born from fighting madness, put them on. Then feeling like one possessed, I shuffled to the door, quietly--trying to will myself to pray for invisibility but realizing I could not pray-- and out onto the porch and into the freezing night air. Just over the trees, looking at me, the moon was blood red. As soon as the wind bit into my flesh, my mind cleared some, and realizing that I had nearly joined hands with Satan, I broke into a frightened sprint and headed for the thick black forest.

"When I was running, after only a few seconds, I heard voices behind me; two or three had realized I was escaping, and as Dr. Harris had told us all before the weekend trip (jokingly, I thought at the time), 'No one who wants to live was to leave the cabin.' With ability developed over three years as a sprinter in high school, I moved like the wind, my feet finding a path on the frozen ground. Running with all my strength, I heard heavy footfalls behind me, unbelievably gaining on me. Panic began choking me, and I was tempted to stop and give up. I wouldn't be fast enough--I knew that--and I would be dragged back and hacked into a million bloody bits, the punishment for betrayers.

"I ran. Freezing night air burned my lungs. I was between 4000 and 6000 feet and knew I was going to die. But just as the footsteps were on me, just as I felt hot breath burning my back and neck, I heard my pursuer stumble and yell, then felt him fall against me. The force of his weight cracked my back and threw me forward, and I fell to the cold hard ground, rocks and dead wood cutting face, hands, arms, and legs. Bleeding, my nose surely broken, I forced myself up, and looked back, expecting to be taken captive. The pain in my face was incredible. Then, I saw him--a large young man popular on campus--crouching and glaring at me ten feet away. I knew then the devil was in him. His eyes gleamed hatefully, but with a twisted an ankle or broken leg, he could only drag himself toward me with a sickening snarl. With a sharp pain in my right side, I turned. I screamed a command at myself: 'Get out of here, Stephanie!' I pushed myself far into the night, through the seeming unending forest, running and running until, from pain and exhaustion, I must have lost consciousness.

"You know the rest: the old couple finding me wandering like a bloodied, wounded animal on the side of the road, picking me up, washing me off with their own water, then wrapping me in a blanket and driving me to the police station in the next town. Regular fucking saints, these people. I can't remember what I talked about with them. I don't even remember what they looked like. They never gave me their names. Maybe they were angels sent by God. Daddy always said angels walked among us unawares."

V.

MAYBE THEY WERE ANGELS, as Stephanie claims. No one will know because the old couple disappeared as soon as they had dropped Stephanie off with the authorities.

Of course, even several years later, Stephanie will likely never completely recover from the trauma. After a brief hospitalization, she moved with her parents to live with relatives in Pennsylvania. She left them after several months. As far as I know, at least according to the letter she sent some time ago, she's now dancing in some seedy nightclub in Las Vegas. She claims she is still on the antidepressants the doctors gave her to help her clear her mind so she could give testimony against Dr. Harris and his cult. Harris and the leaders were sentenced to life terms in the state's maximum-security prison with no chance for parole.

During the trial, a number of students who had participated in the rituals got reduced sentences for testifying against Dr. Harris and his faithful adherents, their stories revealing that the bodies of the sacrificial victims--the missing girls that I previously referred to--had been buried in a small field fifty or so miles somewhere to the east of the cabin. Even with that information, it took local authorities and the FBI several months to find the place, a long ridge that had once constituted part of a farm, whose two-story house had burned to the ground half a century before. Over two hundred corpses were found buried along that ridge, some dating back forty years, long before Harris became the leader of the cult. Police investigators are still working on identifying the bodies, most so badly decomposed that they are beyond recognition. It was easily determined, however, that these were the remains of people who had been violated numerous times and then disemboweled. "The face of Satan was everywhere," as one of the detectives told me. Faces of the most recent corpses, all females in their late teens or early twenties, had been so mutilated that any sort of positive ID was impossible. Investigators and forensics experts are working on matching the dental records of the missing girls to the corpses. So far, only three have been positively matched, all from small mountain communities in Oregon.

As far as Harris' wife and children ... Immediately following Stephanie's confession, local police contacted me and asked if I would take them to Harris' house. I'm not sure why they didn't go themselves. Maybe it was because I knew that the Harris house was the only residence at the end of a windy dirt road that took off from the main highway two miles north of town. In two squad cars, the sheriff, the chief of local detectives, and several patrolmen followed me. I was the first to pull into the large dirt driveway, and when I got out of my car, the stench from the old two-story farmhouse told me what we would likely find. Inside, in three of the upstairs bedrooms, we found Harris' wife and three children undressed and uncovered. All were in separate beds, all had had their throats slit, all bore several stab wounds to the upper and lower body. Apparently, some time after his return from his final retreat and before his arrest on campus, Harris had sacrificed wife and children.

The David Harris affair shook me. Evil, I am forced to conclude, can dwell in the human heart and is not innate to the human species. No place is safe anymore; that much I have learned. While I still profess that I am in my heart a good, kind and caring man, I must admit that I hired David Harris and, through inaction, contributed to his involvement in activities that destroyed students and the college.

Approaching seventy, I am not sure where I want to go. Certainly, I want to go somewhere. Barb and I will not stay in the Northwest, at least not in this area where everyone knows us and continues to associate us with Harris. We have thought of moving back to southern California, where Barb and I can erase the memory of Dr. Harris' blood cult and, putting that behind us, begin life anew. Or maybe we'll use my retirement to go to Europe and live with our children, who thankfully still write and speak to us. We need something….