Long Hard Road Out of Hell by Neil Strauss, Marilyn Manson Read Free Book Online

occasional automobile passing by on its way to civilization. We had fallen into a tipsy, self-satisfied daze when suddenly there was an explosion of gravel.
    Engulfed in a cloud of dust, a green GTO veered recklessly into the driveway and skidded to a halt. The door slowly opened, and a black-booted foot struck the ground. A big head appeared above the door, with an enormous skull stretching the skin taut. His hair was curly and disheveled. The eyes sunken deep into his head blazed like pinpoints in the center of two dark circles. As he stepped away, I noticed that, like Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, his hands, feet and torso were oversized and elongated. He wore a denim jacket emblazoned on the back with the universal symbol of rebellion: a pot leaf.
    With his right hand, he pulled a gun out of the waistband of his pants. He raised his arm wildly into the air and squeezed out shot after shot, each kickback jerking his arm further in our direction. When the chamber was empty, he strode toward us. As I stood there stunned, he shoved me backward onto the ground, pushed John and grabbed the bottle of Mad Dog, draining it in seconds and throwing it into the grass. Wiping his mouth on a denim sleeve, he muttered something that sounded like lyrics from Ozzy Osbourne’s “Suicide Solution” and strode into the house.
    “That’s my brother, dude,” John said, his face, pale with fear moments ago, now glowing proudly.
    We followed his brother upstairs and watched as he slammed shut his bedroom door and locked it. John wasn’t allowed to set foot in his brother’s room under penalty of serious pain. But he knew what went on in there: black magic, heavy metal, self-mutilation and conspicuous drug consumption. Like my grandfather’s basement, the room represented both my fears and my desires. And though I was frightened, I wanted nothing more than to see what was inside.
    In hopes that his brother would leave the house later that night, John and I walked outside to his barn—or at least the wooden skeleton of what had once been a barn—where we had stashed a bottle of Southern Comfort.
    “You wanna see something really cool?” John asked.
    “Sure,” I nodded. I was always up for anything cool, especially if John deemed it so.
    “But you gotta fucking promise not to say a word to fucking anyone.”
    “I promise.”
    “Promises aren’t good enough,” John snapped. “I want you to swear on your fucking mother’s… No. I want you to swear that if you ever tell, may your dick shrivel and grow putrid and wither away.”
    “I swear that if I tell anyone may my dick wither and die,” I said solemnly, knowing full well that I would need it in years to come.
    “Wieners take all,” John sneered, punching me painfully in the muscle beneath my shoulder. “So let’s go, wiener.”
    He led me to the back of the barn, and we climbed a ladder to a hay loft. The straw was splattered with dried blood. Strewn around it were bird carcasses; snakes and lizards with half their bodies missing, and partially decomposed rabbits with maggots and beetles eating away at the flesh still left on their bones.
    “This,” announced John, gesturing to the giant pentagram drawn in dripping red on the floor, “is where my brother holds his black masses.”
    It was like something out of a bad horror movie, where a troubled teen dabbling in the black arts takes things too far. There were even blood-caked pictures of various teachers and ex-girlfriends nailed to the walls and covered with obscenities written in thick, jagged strokes. As if he was taking on a starring role in the movie, John turned to me and said, “Do you want to see something even scarier?”
    I was torn. Maybe I’d seen enough for one day. But I was also curious, and I nodded my assent. John picked up off the floor a stained and tattered copy of The Necronomicon , a book of spells which he claimed contained black magic incantations from the Dark Ages. We walked back to