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

the house and John filled a backpack with flashlights, hunting knives, snack food and a few trinkets he said had magical powers. Our destination, John said, was the place where his brother sold his soul to the devil.
    To get there, we had to climb through a sewer pipe that started near John’s house and ran underneath a cemetery. We walked crouched over in the sludgy, rat-infested water, with no entrance or exit in sight, constantly conscious of the fact that in the mud on all sides of the pipe were dead bodies. I don’t think I’ve ever been more terrified of the supernatural in my life. On that half-mile odyssey, every small noise produced a large, ominous echo, and I kept thinking I was hearing skeletons knocking on the outside of the pipe and undead creatures ripping through the metal, ready to grab me and bury me alive.
    When we finally reached the other side, we were covered from head to foot with a thin film of sewage, spiderwebs and mud. We were in the middle of nowhere in a dark forest. After a half-mile of hacking through the overgrowth, a huge house loomed over us. Weeds had grown all around it, as if the forest was trying to reclaim the space, and every exposed patch of concrete was covered with pentagrams, upside-down crosses, renderings of Satan, heavy metal band logos and words and phrases like “cocksucker” and “fuck your mother.”
    We cleared away the vines and dead leaves covering an open window, climbed inside and searched the room with the beams of our flashlights. There were rats, cobwebs, broken glass and old beer cans. In a corner the embers of a dying fire let us know that someone had recently been here. I turned around, and John was gone.
    I called his name nervously.
    “Up here,” he yelled from the top of the stairs. “Check this out.” Though I was starting to panic, I followed him upstairs and through a cluttered doorway. The room looked inhabited. There was a putrid yellow mattress on the floor, which was littered with hypodermic needles, a bent spoon and other drug paraphernalia. Lying around the mattress, like dried-out snake skins, were half a dozen used condoms alongside disintegrating pages from gay porno magazines that had been smashed into the floor.
    We walked into the next room, which was completely empty except for a pentagram drawn on the south wall and surrounded by indecipherable runes. John pulled out his copy of The Necronomicon .
    “What the fuck are you doing?” I asked.
    “Opening the gates of hell to summon the spirits that once lived in this house,” he said in as ominous a voice as he could muster. He traced a circle in the dust on the floor with his finger. As he completed it, a sharp sound came from downstairs. We stood completely still, barely even breathing, and listened to the darkness. Nothing, except for the sound of my pulse beating like a triphammer in my neck.
    John stepped into the middle of the circle, and paged through the book to find the right incantation.
    A metallic crash, much louder than the previous sound, echoed from downstairs. If whatever we had begun to do had any powers, we weren’t ready for them. The alcohol in our blood turned to adrenaline and we ran—down the stairs, out the window and into the forest until we were breathless, sweaty and dry-mouthed. Dusk had fallen, and a few raindrops splattered around us. We avoided the sewer pipe, stumbling the rest of the way home through the woods as quickly as possible in complete silence.
    By the time we were safely back in John’s house, his brother was hopelessly stoned, roaming the house dazed and red-eyed. The drugs had worn down his aggressive edge, and he seemed almost sedate, which wasn’t any less frightening than when he was manic. A snow-white cat was cradled in his arms, and he kept stroking it.
    “That cat’s his familiar,” John whispered to me.
    “His familiar?”
    “Yeah, it’s like a demon that’s taken on animal form to help my brother with his magic.”
    This