Death Before Facebook

Sublime One! Mother of the Dead! Enlightener! Destroyer by Plagues! Lady of the Waters of Life! Great One in Heaven! Devouring One! Bountiful One! Warrior Goddess! Beloved Teacher! Beloved Sekhmet! Come into Brianna!”
    Under the scarf, he saw Kit straighten suddenly. Neetsie lifted the scarf and stepped away. Kit’s bearing was different, Pearce thought; and one of her hands had drawn itself into a clawlike shape. With the other, she raised her ankh, slowly, agonizingly slowly, and pointed it straight ahead: “I am the Lady of the Place of the Beginning of Time. I am Sekhmet, Great One of Magic. Come forward, you who would know.”
    One of the women stepped forward and spoke quietly to Kit, who answered her too softly for Pearce to hear. The supplicant then lit a candle she had brought with her, a white candle in a jar apparently meant to serve as a wind shield.
    She stepped back and another came forward, then another, till everyone had had a turn.
    Meanwhile, the ones who weren’t eating from the tree of knowledge, or whatever they were doing, chanted some godawful spooky thing: it could have been “Om” or just “O,” Pearce couldn’t say, but it sounded like the baying of all the hounds of hell.
    For a while, though, he forgot to be unnerved or even cynical, and was caught by the beauty of the scene—women in flowing garments, candles, chanting.
    Oh, God, watch it, Pearce; this is how people slip into things. This is how smart people get converted to cults. They hypnotize you. They know techniques that work on your reason.
    Well, forget me. This is a nut that’s not gonna crack. Who the fuck does Kit think she is, the Pythian Sibyl?
    Those poor little girls. They actually believe that crap she’s handing out. Whatever it is.
    He amused himself composing words of wisdom she might be passing to the others:
    Give me all your money and jewels.
    Do whatever I say for the rest of your life.
    Go out and make your bones—sacrifice a human being to prove your allegiance.
    Preferably a child under ten.
    Wait a minute! Sacrifice a human being? That was even better than the other idea—the one where things got out of hand and Geoff died by accident. Could he sell this one to the cops (and of course to his esteemed readers)?

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
     
    SKIP CAME AWAY oddly unnerved. Not terrified, the way she’d been before—instead, somewhat reassured, since no one had been sacrificed and no blood had been drunk. In fact, now she knew what the cookies were for at the last meeting—they were to eat. At the end, Kit had taken off her headgear and her fierce look, and the whole bunch of them had sat down and had a tea party. It was certainly a study in different styles.
    She was unnerved at her own reaction.
    She’d loved the thing.
    “Uh, Jim,” she said, “what the hell do you think that was?”
    Hodges grinned. He had worn dark clothes and he was dark. His teeth glinted in the closed car. “Don’t know, but it shore was pretty.”
    That helped. Skip had thought so too, but it made her feel weirdly guilty—as if she were breaking some kind of basic rule of society.
    She still wasn’t sure it was benign—maybe they only did sacrifices once a year, or every two months or something. And there was all that talk of bloodbaths. And of course the skull last time, the pentacle, the reference to “the horned one.” And what on Earth was a Sekhmet? In short, there were a lot of very suspicious things still to be dealt with.
    Which was why it was particularly worrisome that she felt as if she’d fallen under a spell. After she dropped Hodges, she even had trouble driving home, kept drifting off. Well, they’d called themselves witches. Maybe they’d done some sort of magic on her. Maybe one of those young women who walked up to Kit had said, “I just saw Skip Langdon hiding in the bushes. Why don’t we neutralize her?”
    What was a witch anyhow? She pondered the word. The black robes fit, but the white ones didn’t. And where were the broomsticks, the orgies? What there had been, of a witchy nature, was a cauldron, and apparently some sort of attempted contact with the spirit world.
    But she remembered that post of Kit’s on the TOWN—weren’t witches supposed to have intercourse with Satan? Only if Torquemada insisted they had, the post seemed to say, but there was still that bothersome word: Satan.
    She fell into bed and dreamed of water—of a tidal wave engulfing her—and awakened sweating. She got