Helltown (27 page)

For a while LaVey’s Friday night lectures and rituals continued as cathartic blasphemies against Christianity. But then LaVey, drawing upon Spencer’s expertise in psychiatry, began to focus more on self-transformational techniques such as psychodrama, encouraging his followers to enforce their own meaning on life. This proved hugely popular with the masses, and within two years LeVay was getting coverage in major magazines such as
Cosmopolitan
,
Time
, and
Newsweek
. By the time he published
The Satanic Bible
in 1968, the Church of Satan had ten thousand members and he had become an internationally-recognized Satanist labeled the Black Pope by the
media.

Over the next couple years, however, LaVey allowed himself to become charmed by his own hype and grandiosity, causing Spencer to lash out at him one evening in September of 1971, accusing him of turning the church into a cult of personality. The following day Spencer discovered just how much he had overestimated his position and influence within the Magic Circle—or underestimated how crypto-fascist LaVey had become—because LaVey kicked him out of the church, what had become his family.

Disillusioned, lost, Spencer returned to Cleveland and did his best to get on with his life. He often consoled himself with the knowledge that LeVay was a lie and a phony. The man wrote and preached that Satanism was about becoming one’s own god and living as one’s carnal nature dictated, but he never had the balls to move beyond the conformities of the masses and follow this teaching through fully. He never raped or killed or indulged in any other of the most basic of human desires—desires repressed inside everyone—which made him as hypocritical as the hypocrites he professed to hate.

Spencer, on the other hand, indulged more than anybody ever knew. During his time in LA he killed seven women, while over the next sixteen years he killed dozens more, experimenting with everything from necrophilia to cannibalism to human sacrifice. What kept him from getting caught, he believed, were two simple rules: he never killed anyone he knew, and he never killed anyone in or around Summit County.

He broke both those rules in the winter of 1985.

Her name was Mary Atwater. She was committed to Boston Mills Psychiatric Hospital during a blizzard three days before Christmas day. As Psychiatrist-in-Chief it was one of Spencer’s responsibilities to interview each incoming patient. Based on the photo in her files he knew Mary was attractive, but he wasn’t prepared for her extravagant beauty. Armenian-American, she had glossy jet-black hair and piercing chestnut-brown eyes and a wide, handsome mouth. She wore a blue silk kaftan with a silver-and-turquoise necklace and an armload of silver bracelets. She had been born in Chicago where she enjoyed a normal, stable childhood. She became a cello prodigy in her teenage years and married her former college professor. They relocated to Cleveland when she was twenty-five, where, quite out of the blue, a combination of heritability and her daughter’s birth precipitated a catastrophic mental breakdown from which she never recovered. It’s what landed her in Ward 16 of Boston Mills Psychiatric Hospital, an “acute admissions” ward meant for patients in highly disturbed states who needed around-the-clock care and medication. They were all sectioned, a euphemism for legally detained (hence the hospital’s barred windows and locked doors), and most were never discharged, instead withering away in the long-stay wards until they died and were no longer burdens on the system.

Mary was deeply and irremediably psychotic with the most extreme form of what used to be called manic depression and is now known as bipolar disorder. On the day Spencer first met and interviewed her, she was in relatively good spirit and mind. She spoke with an educated accent and, had you not known better, you would have thought she was a perfectly healthy young woman.

But Spencer had treated enough patients with bipolar disorder to know this was a deceptive calm in what would be a stormy, unforgiving life. Indeed, the very next day Mary sank into her depressed state and refused to get out of bed. She simply lay there unmoving, unspeaking, barely eating or drinking. She would be torturing herself inside her head, Spencer knew, rehearsing every bad thing she had every done, every bad thought she’d ever had, telling herself she was trash, filth, perhaps contemplating killing herself. This terrible low continued for several days until her manic state took over and she became wild, uncontrollable, ripping off her clothes, screaming obscenities at the orderlies and other patients, and once attacking the charge nurse, taking a bite out of her arm.

Seven weeks after she was committed she escaped from the hospital while under the influence of one of her manic phases. The Ward 16 nursing station sat between both the male and female dormitories, with a twenty-four-hour lookout spot. After ten o’clock only one nurse remained on duty. That night it was Ron (the night nurses were always male), who admitted to falling asleep for what he called in his statement to the police a “brief spell.” Spencer, who had been working late at the hospital as usual, alerted Alan Humperdinck, the Summit County sheriff, to Mary’s disappearance, and an impromptu, sleepy search of the hospital grounds commenced. When Mary wasn’t found, the search was called off until first light. Spencer left the hospital at 3 a.m. that morning—and discovered Mary when he pulled out of his parking spot. She had been hiding beneath his Volvo, presumably to get out of the wind and snow, and had fallen asleep.

Instead of installing her back in her room, Spencer set her in the backseat of his car. The situation was too serendipitous to pass up. The police knew she was missing; Ron had already copped blame. The weather being how it was, everyone would assume she’d died from exposure to the elements and was buried by the snow.

While Spencer drove her to one of the abandoned houses that littered the national park—now wide awake and buzzing with the adrenaline and excitement that always preceded a kill—Mary woke and went into a psychotic episode, screaming at him, clawing his face with her sharp nails, pulling his beard.

Spencer lost control of the car and plowed into a tree. He struck his forehead on the steering wheel and incurred a three-inch-long gash that gushed blood dangerously. Mary hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt and flew into the windshield, her head smashing through the reinforced glass up to her shoulders.

Holding onto consciousness by a thread, Spencer nevertheless understood he was in serious trouble. If he’d been heading in the direction of Boston Mills, he could have explained he’d been returning home when he spotted Mary alongside the road and picked her up before she went ballistic on him. But he hadn’t been returning to town; he’d been driving in the opposite direction, into the national park. He couldn’t lie about this fact. The police would want him to take him to the scene of the accident. Nor could he dump Mary’s body somewhere and pretend nothing happened. Scratches raked his cheeks, Mary’s blood coated his windshield, and he was in no condition right then to clean up himself or the car.

With a desperate, half-formed idea in mind, Spencer reversed onto the road and drove to what he thought simply as The House in the Woods. In fact, his father had built the house years ago after the bank took his Cleveland residence. It had been little more than a two-room shack then. His mother and father lived in one room, Earl and Floyd in the other. This arrangement, however, only lasted a few months. That was how long it took their father to work up the nerve to fill his wife with buckshot before turning the shotgun on himself. Cleavon, who’d been living in a trailer park in Akron and working the odd construction job, moved into the shack to look after Earl and Floyd, for it was either that or commit them to Boston Mills Psychiatric Hospital. Over the next several years he collected wood and materials from the nearby abandoned houses and enlarged the shack until it resembled some post-apocalyptic hideout with eight or nine ramshackle additions in total.

Spencer didn’t remember the drive to the house, or his arrival there. He woke the next morning in a bed with Earl sitting on a stool next to him, patting the top of his head gently. He batted Earl’s hand away and explored the gash in his forehead, finding it had been sewn closed with stitches.

“Where’s the girl?” he asked hoarsely.

“She hasn’t woke up yet,” Earl said, and put on a sad face. “We got her out of the car, and fixed up her neck, but she didn’t never wake up, and Cleave, he says—”

“Where’s Cleavon?”

“He’s in the garage, fixing up the Mustang. That’s what it’s called, ain’t it, Spence? It’s a Mustang, ain’t it?”

“Get him.”

Cleavon arrived a short time later grease-covered and cranky as usual, though his eyes were alight with a shit-eating grin.

“Who did this?” Spencer said, touching the gash in his head.

“Hell if I know, Spence. I thought it was from the car accident.”

“The stitches.”

“That was Lonnie,” Cleavon said, wiping his greasy face with a greasy dish towel. “You were bleeding a fuckin’ river, and Lonnie said he’d fixed up his boy a couple times when he’d cut himself. He said he just needed some fishing wire and a hook.”

“You called Lonnie Olsen?”

“Nah. Lonnie was already here, Lonnie and Jesse and Weasel. We were playing cards earlier and they got shitfaced and passed out. Well, that was until you came driving your car right into the fuckin’ porch. The girl’s okay. Breathing at least.” Cleavon cocked an eyebrow. “Say, Spence, what was she doing in her pajamas? Rather, what were you doing driving her around in the middle of the night in her pajamas?”

Spencer didn’t reply. He was numbed with dismay as he imagined Lonnie Olsen sitting in Randy’s Bar-B-Q right then, telling all the other drunks how Spencer had ploughed his car into Cleavon’s porch with some girl’s head poking out of the windshield like a crudely mounted game trophy—

Lonnie Olsen appeared in the bedroom doorway, rubbing his eyes as though he’d recently woken up. Jesse Gordon and Weasel Higgins crowded behind him.

“Hiya, Spencer—Mr. Pratt,” Lonnie Olsen said awkwardly, clearing his throat. “Or is it ‘Doctor?’”

“Everyone’s still here?” Spencer said, surprised.

“Where else would we be?” Lonnie said.

“So what the fuck happened last night, Spence?” Cleavon said. “We won’t say nothing.”

“Speak what you want to whom you want,” Spencer said poker-faced, though his mind was racing, for he thought he might be able to dig himself out of the mess after all. “The woman’s name is Mary Atwater. She’s a patient at the hospital. She believes she’s possessed by a demon.”

“A demon?” Earl said in awe.

Spencer said, “I wanted to try a kind of psychodrama therapy—”

“Psycho-what?” Cleavon said.

“A type of role playing. It employs guided dramatic action to help individuals examine issues they might have. I was taking her to one of those abandoned houses where we were going to perform a black mass to ask Satan to deliver the demon from her body. It’s all in her head, of course, but acting her fears out rather than just talking about them can reap substantial results. However, on the way there she had a psychotic episode and attacked me.”

Spencer paused, reading their reactions, and decided they bought it. After all, why wouldn’t they? He was the psychologist-in-chief of a large hospital and one of the most respected men in all of Summit County.

“Now, I’m still prepared to carry out this black mass,” he went on confidently, swinging his legs off the bed and standing upright. “And I don’t mind an audience, if you gentlemen care for a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle? Come, truly, you’ll find it…engrossing.”

Spencer gathered the supplies he would need for the black mass—a can of primer paint and a paintbrush, a hammer and nails, a carving knife from the kitchen, a bottle of bourbon, a candle and matches, a wilted carrot, a beer stein—then he led Cleavon and the others on a half hour hike through the forest, with Earl carrying Mary over his shoulder. At the first abandoned house they came to he painted an inverted pentagram on the floorboards of a dirty, moldy room to serve as an altar. Cleavon constructed a six-foot-tall crucifix with two pieces of scavenged timber, which he positioned upside down against the wall behind the altar. Earl placed Mary, who was still unconscious, in the middle of the pentagram. Spencer cut her pajamas from her body with the kitchen knife, to the muted delight of those gathered.

Then, when Spencer had everybody’s full attention, he crossed himself in a counter clockwise direction with his left hand and began the black mass. Channeling the intonation and charisma of Anton LeVay, he recited a collection of passages from the Satanic Bible from memory, moving from the Introit to the Offeratory to the Canon to the Consecration. Cleavon and the others watched him in an enraptured state, saying nothing, not even when he inserted the withered carrot/host into Mary’s labia—but he saw the lust in their eyes. It burned like black fire.

During the fifth and final segment of the mass, the Repudiation, Spencer passed around the beer stein/chalice filled with bourbon. When everyone had drunk from it he said in a commanding voice, “Brothers of the Left-Hand Path, the penitent has proved a worthy neophyte in our high order. It is now time to free her from the bonds of ignorance and superstition. Cleavon, come forth and partake in your desire.”