Blood Cult Week-end
By Richard Logsdon

I. I prefer to think of myself as a kindly man given to gardening, scholarship and prayer. On cold, drizzly weekends in late fall or early winter, I like to 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 and the Devil 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 hanging on the tops of the pine trees, I can always see the white tip of the Baptist cross and the third floor of 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 overshadow the good. One memory so haunts me 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.

The memory, of course, involves David Harris.

II. Blind to his potential for evil, I brought Harris aboard the college years ago. As department head and chair of the 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 had just completed his first book, The Pleasure of Paradise Lost, published four years later by the now defunct Druid Press.

When I first met him at Portland International, he walked with a limp, muttering to himself and slightly dragging his left leg as he moved forward. Nevertheless, I found him 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 put me off by somewhat arrogantly refusing my offer to carry his bag. But I chose tolerance over belligerence and forgot the slight. By the time we hit the freeway on that overcast day in December, he was talking a mile a minute about the pagan/occult influences upon European gothic architecture. 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 over lunch, between mouthfuls of hamburger and occasional eyefuls of the dancers, he exhibited bizarre mannerisms, which I should have seen as warning signs: 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, laughed and watched the dancers, he picked a scab on his left cheek until it bled; he avoided eye-contact with me, concentrating on a point just over my head; and he hissed when he drew in a breath.

But my mind had been made up for some time, and at the college, Harris waltzed through the interviews and was hired to begin by mid-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 now wonder how many of his colleagues telephoned the young, brooding professor who, chanting to himself, walked about the often gray and drizzly campus in an ankle-length fur coat? And when I asked him over coffee in the faculty lounge one Monday morning, a year or two after he was hired, why he and his wife never attended our weekend faculty get-togethers, he gave me that smile that students eventually found so charming and commented that they were always busy with their children over the weekend. I later discovered that David was never invited.

While the college shunned David and his family, he seemed almost content with his isolation. Certainly, in his solitude, he published scholarly articles at an unbelievable rate, a fact that did not earn him the merit pay increases that he so richly deserved. Perhaps the most peculiar and revealing thing about David and his family, however, was that by his seventeenth year at the college, no one ever had ever seen his beautiful wife Abigail. No one but me, that is; I came to know Abby very well. Until her untimely death, some of my colleagues even wondered if David had a spouse; 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 some 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 about 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 mountain. The story was that he and the students always left on Friday, spent the weekend screwing each other, and returned on Sunday evening too haggard and exhausted to attend class the next day. This rumor was not worth my concern, I thought, and I didn’t want to risk calling the Harris’ home and asking Abby about it.

But later 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 from the region. Refusing to acknowledge a correlation, I struggled to bury myself in administrative work, class preparation and research. I continued with my affair. But tuning out the stories became impossible when the "blood-letting tales" began: the most popular focused on female students who consented to sex with several males and then were bloodily sacrificed while strapped to some contraption called "the Devil’s chair."

Lending credence to the rumors, one of my students at the time-Cindy Banks, now a banker in Portland-met me after class and showed me a photo, taken during one of the retreats. The picture showed a topless blonde female, the side of her face and her breasts bloodied; during the retreat, this blonde and another girl had removed their sweaters and engaged in a "cat fight" in front of all the other howling members. I was disgusted and asked Cindy how she had obtained the picture.

Then, Cindy told me something else. 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 and between her legs. Supposedly, the pole had been fitted with a halter to secure the participant’s waist and ensure her safety while perpetuating the illusion that the she was being sexually impaled. However, the girl had neglected to fasten the halter and, raised for all to see in the final scene of an Easter weekend play performed at the cabin, had allowed herself to be impaled in a climax to a life marked by suicidal depressions. "At first, we didn’t think anything was wrong. Jenny just hung there, screaming, her face writhing in pain. We thought she was joking. This wasn’t supposed to be for real. Then we saw blood trickling down the pole and down the side of her mouth," Cindy stated.

Yet, it was becoming difficult not to ignore the possible damaging impact of the stories. 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 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 talked to David, if I had insisted upon an investigation or if I had argued that the administration should no longer support this club, things may have turned out differently. But I failed to act and contributed to an enormous evil.

I remember the night: December 2^nd, when Barb and I were relaxing in our family room to watch the evening news. We’d heard that a huge front, combining Arctic and Pacific air masses, was headed for our area in what could be the worst storm in one hundred years, so we nervously awaited the weather report. Then, thinking of Abby, I saw David’s picture upon the screen, the words "Blood-Cult Leader" inscribed in red letters below him, and I sat up in my chair, heart racing, and woke Barbara, who had been asleep on the couch. Spell-bound, 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 in the region and that likely explained the disappearance over the past decade of numerous high school and college girls from the region.

Then the screen flashed a photo of the young woman whose confession had revealed Harris’ participation in something that shook the college; blonde hair disheveled, wearing a blood-streaked T-shirt and torn blue shorts, the confessor was a student I knew quite well.

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

A former student, Stephanie has remained an intelligent, literate woman with a proclivity toward decadence. 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 wall of tall, dark, thick pine trees. Lights blazed and shadows danced from the cabin windows, and as Stephanie walked from the car to the door she heard a kind of shouting that did nothing to dispel the impression of wickedness.

I say "impression;" let me explain. 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 ability to discern the presence of evil, something her parents considered a gift from God. As Stephanie later told me, the night, the area, even the cabin for the weekend retreat exuded evil as tangible as hot oil.

What she found inside the cabin at first struck her as a typical college frat party. 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: the picture of the goat’s head over the door, wall paintings and photos of naked and bloodied women hanging from crosses and of men and women performing every conceivable sexual act, and 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 dabbled or streaked in what looked like blood but which Stephanie assumed was washable paint. A few, she observed, were openly having sex, and while she had enjoyed watching the few adult movies that I had loaned her, 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. She couldn’t take her eyes 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 with her. "They were huge," Stephanie said. "I wanted something that large in me. I wanted to do that, so I took off my clothes, walked up to one of the men and took his cock in my hand. He smiled and motioned to the wall. Panting yet apprehensive, I braced myself against the wall, opened my legs-I was already aroused--and told the boys to slide right in. They did. Soon, I found myself on a mattress on the floor, one male under me, one behind me, and one in my mouth. It was bliss."

Devilish debauchery prevailed that night and into the early hours of the morning. According to Stephanie, by three or four, sexual activities had ceased. Partially dressed males and females sat around in small groups, drinking, smoking weed, muttering in low tones when Dr. Harris stepped to the front of the room. Feeling a chill cut through 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 wearing the same kind of cloak and displaying himself in the same manner. Stephanie was not clear about what he said, but I doubt very much David’s words would be welcome in the church liturgy. What was remarkable, according to Stephanie, is the effect his presence and words had upon every one else there; the students worshiped and adored this man who beckoned students in the back to "bring forth the offering."

"The Spirit within me leaped, " Stephanie told me, and she felt her bones freeze as she saw one of her friends-Amy Ewing from Twin Falls, Idaho-being led forward at Harris’ request. A beautiful tall woman with long raven hair, Amy was dressed in a sheer white robe through which her body looked almost ethereal.

Crouched naked in a far corner, clutching her bag and beginning to shiver in spite of the warmth from the huge fire in the fireplace, Stephanie wondered if she should flee. She was two feet from the door. Spellbound, her soul coursing with yet fighting dark, draining energy, Stephanie held her breath and watched.

"Amy seemed different, maybe in some kind of trance," Stephanie told me. "I went numb, stopped thinking, my mind a blank white slate. All eyes were on Amy. Standing erect, faintly smiling, she let Dr. Harris and his assistants to 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 Harris and his assistants took turns with her. I found that part of me was actually enjoying this. Wishing I were Amy, in fact, I watched them shove inside her again and again.

"Amy couldn’t fuck the whole night away and soon lay limp and exhausted," Stephanie told me. "I wondered what it would feel like to get fucked that much; since then, I guess I’ve found out. Anyway, from that point, things didn’t go the way I thought they should. First, Harris gave her something to drink from a paper cup and then just waited. The silence was leaden with the darkness that chokes the innocence out of little lambs. Maybe fifteen minutes later, one of the assistants produced a huge serrated hunting knife and handed it to Harris. I couldn’t help it: drawn like a fly to honey, I came forward from my corner-several did, in fact-and walked as close to the chair as I could. At that moment, I was again struck by Amy’s beauty: 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. I wanted to hold Amy in my arms, as I had done several weekends before; I wanted her to hold and caress me. She knew I was thinking about her because she looked me in the eyes, her own eyes a glossy brown, and silently cried for help.

"The sensation was unreal: I felt born out of myself, dead to everything but Amy. Wondering if I was going crazy, I turned to Dr. Harris, who had been watching me in that steady, unfathomable calm that had drawn students to him for years. Smiling, turning from me and back to Amy, he placed the tip of the blade just below her sternum. Then he looked at me. Again I heard Amy and chose to ignore the voice. I clenched my jaw and fists, and watched as the man neatly, quickly thrust the blade through taut tanned flesh. I watched; I couldn’t stop myself. Blood spurted from the wound in tiny glorious geysers, showering some, spattering me on the cheek. In the silence of my mind, Amy’s scream ripped through me. No one else could hear the scream.

"I still have dreams about this: Dr. Harris leaning forward as Amy bleeds, stroking Amy’s hair, kissing her on the mouth, and then drawing back and cutting slowly, neatly down to her pubic area. Through all this, Amy’s eyes stayed fixed on me, her silent screams increasing in volubility. I was near passing out. Then Harris removed the knife slowly, and as he did blood poured out of Amy into the basin around the foot of the chair. There was something eerily beautiful and grotesque about this that I still feel.

"Next, Dr. Harris made a deep horizontal slit through the cut and just above the navel-he made a kind of cross, I know realize--and, reaching down, pulled back the flaps of skin. I had to be dreaming, I figured. I should have been sick, but I think I was too drunk. I could see everything glistening red inside Amy, whose eyes were still open, dully glaring at me.

"You know how God comes on you when you least expect. Well, then it hit me with the ‘fury of an apocalyptic storm’ (one of your old expressions, I believe): I had entered Hell. Or Hell had just entered that cabin, consuming everyone and everything in a rotting stench that, late at night when I’m alone with myself, I can still smell. My soul was ‘dangerously perched,’ as Daddy used to say, quoting the Pentacostal wisdom of his father. Shaking, mind flooded with a vision of myself rowing across the Lake of Fire, I turned and glanced behind me at other faces. Most stood, mute, stupidly watching Harris carry through the procedure.

"Legs trembling, sickened, I shuffled to the back of the room-I couldn’t walk normally, I shuffled-barely able to move my arms from my sides. When I got to my bag, I forced myself to kneel, reached down and pulled out a T-shirt and shorts, and shaking almost uncontrollably put them on. Rising, I took deep breaths. My heart thundered in my brain, and my brain filled with images of lava and blood. I willed myself to shuffle to the door, tried to will myself invisible, and moved out onto the porch and into the freezing night air. Just over the trees, looking at me, the moon was blood red.

"The moon didn’t claim me, for as soon as the wind bit into my flesh, it was like someone snapped his fingers: my mind cleared some, trembling stopped, just stopped, and I ran like hell for the thick black forest which still crowds out my most pleasant dreams.

"I was free, I told myself; I would not go back; I would find my own way back to the college. However, after only a few seconds, I heard angry voices behind me, and I remembered what Dr. Harris had told me before the weekend trip: ‘No one who wants to live will leave the cabin.’ With ability developed as a high school sprinter, I picked up speed and moved like the wind, my feet finding a path on the frozen ground but never seeming to touch the earth. I flew, certain they couldn’t catch me. Running with all my strength, I suddenly heard heavy footfalls behind me, impossibly gaining. Icy panic surged through me, and I was tempted to stop and give up. I wouldn’t be fast enough, and I would be dragged back and hacked to death.

"But I ran. Freezing night air burned my lungs. I was between 4000 and 6000 feet and knew I was going to die. Just as the footsteps were on me, just as hot breath burned my neck, my pursuer stumbled and fell. The force of his weight cracked my back and threw me forward onto the cold hard ground, rocks and dead wood cutting face, hands, arms, and legs. For an instant, I lay still, then rolled over onto my back. The clear, starry night sky swirled overhead. Bleeding, my nose 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. Like a big dog ready to strike. The devil was in him. His eyes gleamed hatefully, and he sprang, but with a twisted ankle or broken leg, he could only drag himself toward me with a sickening snarl. As if in slow motion, I turned and pushed myself far into the night, through the unending forest, running until I must have lost consciousness.

"You know the rest: the old couple finding me wandering like a wounded animal on the road, picking me up, washing me with water from their thermos, then wrapping me in a blanket and driving me to the police station in the next town. Regular 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. Daddy always said angels walk among us unawares."

^{V. Maybe they were angels, as Stephanie claims. No one will know because the old couple disappeared as soon as they dropped Stephanie off. It’s possible that I’ll never see an angel.}

Six months after a brief hospitalization, Stephanie offered testimony in court against Harris and his faithful, all of whom got life sentences with no possibility for parole. Then, fearing reprisal, Steph moved with her parents to live with relatives in Pennsylvania. She left Pennsylvania after several months with no warning. According to the letter she sent me some time ago, in between films she’s now working some nightclub in Las Vegas. Her next film comes out in three months; she will send it to me, she says. "Prone to mildly psychotic episodes"(her own words), she is still on the anti-depressants the doctors gave her following the bizarre and traumatic incident involving the cult.

During the trial, a number of students involved in the rituals got reduced sentences for testifying against Harris and for revealing that the bodies of the "sacrifices"-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. Harris referred to the place as his "flower garden." It took local authorities and the FBI several months to find the place, a long high ridge looking down on an old abandoned farm. Over two hundred corpses were found buried along and in that ridge, some dating back forty years, long before Harris became the leader of the cult. Police investigators are still working on identifying bodies, most badly decomposed and beyond recognition. It was easily determined, however, that these were the remains of people who had been violated numerous times and then disemboweled. Faces of the most recent corpses, all females in their late teens or early twenties, were so mutilated that any sort of positive id was impossible. Experts are working on matching the dental records of the missing girls to the corpses.

As for Harris’ wife and children…. One day after 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 that circled Abigail’s beautiful garden, 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 daughters-aged nine, twelve, and fourteen--undressed and uncovered. All were in separate beds, all had had their throats slit. None had been violated, not even Abby, who in death retained the almost unearthly beauty that I had found so attractive when she was alive: long dark brown hair, gorgeous full breasts, a wonderful figure, and the most striking legs I have ever seen. In death, she had become a beautiful, bloodied flower whose juices I would never taste again.

Approaching sixty, I am not sure where I want to go. Thankfully, I was cleared of all charges. It should come as no surprise to learn that Barb left me and is living with her sister in Wisconsin. I have thought of moving back to southern California, where I can teach part-time, erase the memory of the blood cult and begin life anew. I’ve also dreamt of going to Europe and live with my children, but they aren’t speaking to me. Maybe I’ll accept Stephanie’s invitation, go to Las Vegas, and move in with her. In the meantime, I’ll read, write, pray, and garden in this gray and drizzly place. Maybe I’ll find redemption in that.

©2002 Richard Logsdon