Down below, nestled in her dark domain, Mandy knew that she was not alone. She had also surmised that it was Bvrenda, yet again, who had come to disrupt her solitude, by the telltale sound of her cursing and crashing around upstairs. Mandy could see everything unfolding from the vantage point of her occulted third eye and heightened senses, with a little help from her foil’s propensity for stentorian entrances. Upstairs, leaning against the basement door, which looked more like the entrance to a broom closet than a portal of doom, Poor Bvrenda crouched, nearly frozen in terror, but still locked onto her mission like a kamikaze pilot. Below, Mandy sat in lotus position, naked as a jaybird on the cold cement floor, chuckling maniacally at the chills she could feel winnowing down the spine of her pathetic nemesis.
Wailing passionately to the dark goddess, Mandy outstretched her pasty white blue veined arms in dire supplication to the forces of evil. Her ghostly flesh was stained with stygian symbols and inscriptions scrawled upon her body in her own fresh menstrual blood. As fortune would have it, it was that time of the month. Howling another incantation to the dark goddess, Mandy bowed prostrate before a square black altar she had positioned in the center of her inverted pentagram surrounded by a sacred circle of candlelight. After kissing the base of the altar, as if it were a giant boot and she was a footman eager to spit shine the fetish before her with her own slobbering tongue, she rose, and turned to the box where the tiny kitten was waiting, silent and afraid.
As if in a dark, arcane trance, Mandy approached the box, all the while chanting incantations to Satan. Rambling on in Latin, backwards, of course, she ceremoniously picked the kitten up by the scruff of its neck, and carried it over to Jewel’s tank, where she dangled it in front of the glass for the snake to see. “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” She called out in a singsong voice. Smelling the kitten, Jewel’s tongue flickered excitedly, and her coils writhed in anticipation, while the hapless feline mewed and struggled frantically to break free, paws swimming in the air desperately. Mandy laughed fiendishly, and reached her free arm into the tank, allowing the legless reptile to wind its way up to Mandy’s neck and work its way toward the live offering she held in her other hand.
Dangling the kitten by the scruff of its neck over the expanded jaws of her beloved python and psychic familiar, Mandy knew that a sacrifice of this blasphemous magnitude would surely imbue her with enough power to squelch Bvrenda with ease. But was her plan evil enough? After all, Bvrenda would make a much better sacrifice to Satan, since she was technically a virgin, so hard to find, and human, and of such fine stock… Returning to the altar, she placed the kitten on table spread out before her for the unholy sacrament, and allowed the python to slowly descend down her arm to feed on the innocence that had been laid before it. Pinning the kitten down with her free hand, Mandy made sure that it could not run or hide. The snake made its way down her arm to the altar and began to slither it’s coils around the kitten while it mewed frantically for its defenseless life. Mandy cackled to herself, pleased to have mastered cruelty to such a profound degree. She had become death.
Just as Mandy hoped, Bvrenda’s ears pricked up when she heard the cries from the kitten below. What unspeakable evil was Mandy concocting in her Luciferian laboratory this time, Brvenda wondered? And how could she possibly turn her back on a kitten in danger? She reasoned instinctively that, knowing Mandy, the kitten was probably being used as bait for a trap. But, hearing more furtive cries from below made her put all thoughts for her own safety aside. Tightening her grip on the knife in her right hand, which pulsed wildly with each heartbeat and stagged breath, and, kissing the blade for good luck, she braced herself to open the cellar door. Trembling, her left hand reached forward to turn the doorknob as quietly and imperceptibly as possible. Just as her fingers touched the frigid brass handle, a tremendous power surge caused all of the lights in the house to swell in a blinding synchronized flash. Just as suddenly, every last bulb in the house exploded, shattered into tiny shards of red-hot razor sharp fragments of glass that scattered in every direction.
Just as precipitously as the power surge and explosion had arrived, darkness fell upon Pinkerton manor, followed by several moments of dead silence that seemed to last for an eternity. Time became irrelevant. Every moment was indistinguishable from the next in the inky, claustrophobic darkness that was thicker than blood. With her back braced against the wall, Bvrenda sank slowly down to the floor, perched on her knees like a cornered pigeon with a broken wing. She was shocked to hear the sound of her own voice, gibbering softly like a depraved idiot. She tried desperately to remember the words she had always recited in prayer to invoke Archangel Michael. With accelerating panic and consternation, she found that the words falling from her rambling lips were merely unintelligible syllables. Which only amplified and exacerbated the cathartic avalanche of emotions beyond anything that the mere words “unspeakable terror” could even begin to describe.
The moon had just emerged in its full white beauty from behind a snarling canine cloud, and it cast a blue light that broke through the shroud of darkness engendered by the power outage. Cast in the pale moonlight, Bvrenda didn’t pose a promising picture of immanent triumph. Tragically, she was far from it. Visions of death and torture clouded her capacity for reason like the vaporous shapes that crawled and slithered across the moonlit sky. The house was so quiet, there wasn’t a sound to be heard, except for the distant snores erupting out of Hortence, who was still comatose on the couch in the living room. As for the cries of the kitten, they had vanished. Which wasn’t a good sign.
Bvrenda surrendered to the hopelessness of the situation. “I can’t win. I’m nothing.” She whispered to no one in that fateful hour. But she wasn’t “nothing,” and she knew it. Perhaps she was just a pawn being lured into a death trap, but even pawns have souls. All at once, she remembered that she was a divine being by nature. She could not die. She would simply pass on to a better place. A place where little girls don’t grow up to become the puppets of evil forces beyond their control, swallowed whole and consumed by hatred, insidiously warped into thoughtless instruments possessed by compassionless demons who turn them into soulless weapons of mass destruction. Suddenly, Brvenda knew what she had to do. She had to open the cellar door. She had to stop Mandy Pandy from accumulating any more occult powers. She had to save the world from this daughter of the anti-Christ who was clearly getting ready to pave the way for the New World Order!
“I must fight this war.” The words came out of her mouth faintly and in a tone that was horse but resolute. They drifted from her tongue and touched the darkness with the silver light of truth. It was then that she remembered something she had learned from her favorite yoga teacher, Polly Amorous. When all else fails, call on the Durgha! Durgha, the destroyer of demons! Durgha, the goddess who was created by the gods to vanquish the King of Demons after Brahma granted him a boon that no man could kill him. Durgha! Who rides a lion and takes no prisoners! Quietly, she began to chant the mantra she had learned to call upon Durga for protection in her hour of need. “Om Dum Durgayei Namaha…” She repeated the mantra over and over again, with every breath, gaining momentum as she chanted, “Om Dum Durgayei Namaha…”
Bvrenda wasn’t afraid anymore. She felt Durga’s lion heart welling up inside her breast, and knew what she had to do. Repeating the holy words, she was astonished to discover that as her will to fight grew stronger, the knife in her hand grew colder until it became so icy it was almost too hot to handle. But somehow it wasn’t too hot to handle, and as she became used to the icy hot sensation, it began to spread up her arm, and the tip of the blade became radiant with a glorious iridescent purple glow.
At last Bvrenda opened the cellar door. On the onset, it hardly made a sound, but once she tapped it gently, the hinges creaked and moaned as if she had haphazardly unleashed all of the lost souls that had ever been swallowed and trapped in that odious vicinity. Standing at the head of the bare wooden decrepit stairway plummeting into the gates of hell, Bvrenda could see the candles arranged for the black mass that Mandy had spread out before her. Undulating candlelight illuminated the vague shadowy contours of Mandy’s hulking form. Which was positioned strategically at the epicenter of the witch’s circle. Bvrenda could see that her former friend had transformed into a monstrous figure of abominable proportions. Her body was covered with festering boils, and what appeared to be a pernicious staff infection. There she sat, silent and as still as death, in a circle of flame. Nothing but a ghoulish allusion to the girl she had once been remained. Her aura was a swirling mass of parasitic astral compost. A pervasively repugnant odor of rotting flesh, sulfur and death exuded from her pores, like an ill wind blowing nothing but pain, suffering and chaos to anything and anyone it touched.
The flames of the black votive candles danced in the putrid air, causing the shadows they cast to pulse and heave hypnotically on the walls, like the mesmerizing gaze of a viper ready to strike and devour its prey. Bvrenda cautiously descended the groaning stairway with the knife thrust forward into the thickness of the cruel din. She chanted the holy name softly as she went, “Om Dum Durgayei Namaha!”
The mocking flames expanded and their heat intensified as Bvrenda neared the spectacle of Mandy’s blood smeared body and the obscene fetish within the blasphemous circle of flame. Holding out the incandescent knife before her with a death grip in her fist, disheveled, teetering on the precipice of fight or flight, and half caked with mud and rotting ectoplasm, Bvrenda was a wonder to behold in her own right. Mandy broke the silence by laughing savagely at her pathetic and ravaged appearance. Her heckling laugh ricocheted and reverberated maddeningly throughout the cellar, threatening to undermine Brenda’s frighteningly resolute composure by ruffling her already frazzled feathers and insulting whatever was left of her dignity.
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