“Is that a knife in your hand, or are you just happy to see me?” Mandy taunted.
Bvrenda tightened her grip on the knife, but kept her cool, answering in a firm voice with a frayed edge. “It’s a knife, Mandy. Make no mistake! And I’m not afraid to use it.”
“Who said you were afraid, little girl?” Mandy hissed chidingly. “I’m just glad you are making some attempt to meet me on a level playing field. It’s such a pity you must die, my dear, sweet little puppet!” Spitting out these words, her eyes lit up like two red-hot coals, revealing the volcanic depths of her hatred for humanity.
“Don’t patronize me!” Snapped Bvrenda, who had never been one to appreciate being on the butt end of a joke.
Mandy’s eyes darkened as she scoffed in rebuke, “Patronize you? Ha! I wouldn’t dream of such a thing! That would take all of the fun out of killing you!”
Bvrenda’s pulse quickened until she could feel it pounding in her throat, “Not if I kill you first?” She growled.
Chortling with twisted glee, Mandy volleyed back, “You’re a fucking pussy and you know it!”
“At least I don’t have to torture small animals to prove how bad ass and cold hearted I am!” Brvenda snarled accusingly. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she was able to make out the contours of the serpent, Jewel, wrapped over Mandy’s shoulders with its head burrowing through her matted locks of hair. The kitten was nowhere to be seen or heard.
“You and your messiah complex!” Mandy chortled. “Don’t worry. Jewel hasn’t eaten yet. We were waiting for you.” Mandy had cunningly placed the kitten back in its box when she had heard Bvrenda coming down the stairs. The universe had sent her the perfect sacrifice. Jewel would have to wait. “Today is the last day of the rest of your life,” she hissed.
“You can murder me if you want, Mandy Pandy Pinkerton, but that does not change the fact the YOU are already DEAD!” Which was an exceptionally good point, and gave Mandy a moment to pause and think. Because Bvrenda was right, and she had hit the nail on the head. Yes, Mandy was dead inside. And she had been dead for a very long time. It happened by inches. Was growing up being raised by two alcoholic drug addict total garbage heads masquerading as parents to blame? Perhaps it had been the violence and incest that she had been born out of and raised in. And then there was her own addiction to snorting Adderall and popping Xanex, and her new favorite, shooting Ketamine. Then Mandy remembered it was high past time she self medicated again. “You’re right.” She agreed with Bvrenda. “I’m a zombie. The walking dead. At least I’m not a pathetic virgin who’s about to be cannibalized in the name of Lucifer!”
“But who will save your soul?” Bvrenda asked.
“It’s too late for that, my heart belongs to Satan now.” replied Mandy Pandy, matter of factly.
“It’s never too late, Mandy!” Bvrenda implored her blood thirsty former BFF. Her memory flashed back on the kiss Mandy had stolen from her the night she cried, and she couldn’t help but hope that there was some way she could pull her back into the light, before she slipped away completely into the madness of her own personal hell.
“Don’t you understand?” Mandy asked. “This is the real me now. This is my essence. I like it this way. I want to be angry. I want to be unhappy. I want to be jealous. I want to be miserable. I want to be evil…”
“…and cheat on tax?” Bvrenda added.
“Taxes are for the little people…” Mandy was craving another snort of Adderall, and her patience was wearing thin. Wishing, vainly that she had penetrated a chink in Mandy’s armor, Bvrenda hoped that she could milk a little more kindness out her and pull the situation around to a win/win.
“What’s happened to you, Mandy? We used to be sisters, remember?”
Did she? Mandy tried to remember her childhood, and all of the days she had spent hanging out at Bvrenda’s house, hiding out from her father’s incessant wrath and the terminal misery of her collusive mother. But she had blocked out so many bad memories from her childhood, even the good ones had failed her. Because for everything that Bvrenda thought she knew about who Mandy was, there was so much more buried under the surface that she didn’t know, Hemingway’s iceberg couldn’t even begin to not describe what lay hidden there. There was so much that Bvrenda didn’t know and couldn’t understand, had absolutely no context for, and could never fully appreciate, because she lived in a parallel universe and another class.
What Bvrenda didn’t know about was Uncle Rex’s other job. Uncle Rex’s other job was a sideline related to his bread and butter, which was manufacturing homemade crank and selling it. Everybody knew about Uncle Rex’s crack racket, because it had been in the papers, and it was all over the town gossip mill before it ever hit the papers. What nobody but Mandy, her venerable father and the local Klansmen knew, was about a little sideshow operation known as “Stuffin’ Muffin.” Muffin was Uncle Rex’s pet raccoon. She weighed upwards of fifty pounds, and Uncle Rex liked to keep her hungry and mean. “Stuffin’ Muffin” was a side show attraction that had become popular at local fight clubs, where he would take the opportunity to sell his hand-crafted home spun product, as well as provide a warm up act to bare-knuckled brawls and cross burning ceremonies. Once in a blue moon, “Stuffn Muffn” was a prelude to a lynching, but those had been scarce during the Obama years. 2016 changed all that. Before his most recent arrest, Uncle Rex had been making bank. Bigly.
“Stuffn Muffn” was a simple operation. Muffin was stuffed in a gunnysack and placed in a large chain link cage. A cash prize of $1000 was available to any man who could stuff Muffin back into the gunny sack after she had been set loose on the man in the cage. The men were thrown into the cage one at a time. The audience howled with laughter as Muffin chased her would be captors around the cage, slicing them to bits with her teeth and claws while they desperately tried to climb to safety out of the enclosure. Almost all bets usually where on the raccoon. It was easy money for Uncle Rex, not the men in the cage. Uncle Rex always gave Muffin meth laced treats before setting her loose on an unwitting contestant. She performed so much better that way. The men in the audience were there for blood sports, and he aimed to please.
But there was an even dirtier little secret that Uncle Rex never mentioned, save but to a few select gentlemen who he had profiled and pulled aside for another special attraction that he liked to call “The Sequel.” After he made his rounds selling crank, he would lead men back to the car, one at a time, where Mandy was waiting. Waiting against her will. She had tried running away before, but he always caught her, always punished her, always made her wish she had just gone numb and gone through the motions instead of trying to resist.
What Bvrenda didn’t know was that Mandy had been a victim of human trafficking since before she had been able to even say the word “no.” A word that had been denied to her over and over again once she had learned what it meant and how to say it. What Bvrenda didn’t know was that Uncle Rex had pimped his daughter through the ranks of Beelzebub’s Minions biker gang, and auctioned her off as a human slave at an after hours “men’s club.” That the highest bidder had been a Satanic priest, who used her in ceremonies as a temple prostitute to reenact neo Nazi occult rituals created by Hitler’s SS. That the “temple” was just a brothel that ritualized sex crimes and pandered to the lowest monsters masquerading as humans on earth, and a honey trap setup by a clandestine intelligence agency for blackmailing targeted individuals and politicians.
What Bvrenda also didn’t know, was that although her friend had continued to live at home with her supposed parents, she was frequently whisked away in the middle of the night to be forced into participating in blood-letting and death rituals, acts of cannibalism and forced perpetration. How could Bvrenda have ever known the girl she had been playing with since the second grade was being trained to be a high priestess for a fringe sect of the Illuminati? Pandora had never told a soul. She had never even admitted it to herself. She woke up in the mornings after the Satanists had abducted her feeling like it had all just been a nightmare. The closing mantra to every ritual was “This never happened. We don’t exist. You’re insane.”
But the gas light spell broke when she overheard a telephone conversation her father was having with her handlers, and discovered that he was negotiating the terms to use her in a snuff film in which she was going to be roasted alive on a spit as an offering to Moloch. To be shot on location in the Bohemian Grove. That was when she woke up. That was when she called the cops. Just as her father was sealing a deal that was supposed to leave him set for life. That was how she got away from him. She set “Muffin” free before her father had even pulled away from the driveway, glaring at her from the back seat of the police car while the neglected and abused animal lumbered off as quickly as it could into the shadows of the forest.
From that moment on, Pandora was determined never again to be a victim. If the law of the jungle was to eat or be eaten, then she was a wolf and the sheep were all fair game. As for the other wolves, she was a lone wolf. She knew the spells. She knew the rituals. She wasn’t afraid to make a blood offering. And, as a true Satanist, her objective was the pursuit of pure evil. She wasn’t a spineless Luciferian who believed evil done for the greater good isn’t really evil. She wanted to become the embodiment of soulless cruelty, to vindicate her wrath toward a god who obviously didn’t exist. Because Pandora could not believe that an all-powerful, loving, wise, intelligent being would ever allow anyone to suffer the dehumanization she had endured.
Pandora had tried to tell her mother what was happening to her when she was four. She didn’t have the language to describe her abuse, so the best she could do was to try to explain that she had been attacked by monsters. Her mother had told her that God loved humanity too much to allow such beings to exist. Pandora tried to tell her Sunday school teacher what was happening to her, and she got the same answer again. It couldn’t be real. God wouldn’t allow it. But Pandora knew the monsters were real. She had seen them, been violated by them, and lived in constant terror of them. Because the truth was, her father was getting her out of bed in the middle of the night and handing her off to strangers who could do anything they wanted to her for whatever price her father had negotiated with them in advance. Tips were always welcome.
Now Pandora was in control of her own life. And if Bvrenda had been provided as her first human sacrifice to begin her great work, then so be it. What Pandora was blind to was that she had become a predatory victim. Her victimization had become her entire identity, and it had festered into a narcissistic bubble of shame-based grandiosity that made it impossible for her to see that she was basically becoming her father. It was as if the hatred that had devoured him were jumping ship and landing on her, amplifying the delusion that she had finally won by fueling her with demonic power.
What Pandora had forgotten that Bvrenda remembered, were all of the happiest moments of her childhood. Which had been the only genuine moments of her childhood, because Bvrenda had been the only one who had ever taken the time to teach her how to play. Pandora had never been allowed to be a child. No one had ever played with her before. She was to be seen and not heard. She was to perform as expected, like a human robot. Waiting on her parents hand and foot, she was just a house elf, dreaming someday that one of her captors might hand her a moldy sock and set her free.
What Pandora didn’t know, was that she could never be free. Because even her impulse for freedom had been hacked by the Satanists, who had programmed her to become a psychic super soldier. She had been forced to listen to hundreds of hours of cult propaganda in a nested loop under severe sleep deprivation, among other extreme forms of psychic driving and brain washing. What she didn’t realize was that the impulse she had to go “rogue” and break out on her own as a solitary witch was a post hypnotic suggestion planted in her mind by the evil magician who had initiated her into the dark mysteries. What she did not see was that she was just a puppet for the forces of the darkness. The very forces that had destroyed her soul. She was like the classic image of the snake biting its own tail, unaware that the enemy is within.
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