The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

you to swear that if you ever tell, may your dick shrivel and grow putrid and wither away.”
    â€œI swear that if I tell anyone may my dick wither and die,” I said solemnly, knowing full well that I would need it in years to come.
    â€œWieners take all,” John sneered, punching me painfully in the muscle beneath my shoulder. “So let’s go, wiener.”
    He led me to the back of the barn, and we climbed a ladder to a hay loft. The straw was splattered with dried blood. Strewn around it were bird carcasses; snakes and lizards with half their bodies missing, and partially decomposed rabbits with maggots and beetles eating away at the flesh still left on their bones.
    â€œThis,” announced John, gesturing to the giant pentagram drawn in dripping red on the floor, “is where my brother holds his black masses.”
    It was like something out of a bad horror movie, where a troubled teen dabbling in the black arts takes things too far. There were even blood-caked pictures of various teachers and ex-girlfriends nailed to the walls and covered with obscenities written in thick, jagged strokes. As if he was taking on a starring role in the movie, John turned to me and said, “Do you want to see something even scarier?”
    I was torn. Maybe I’d seen enough for one day. But I was also curious, and I nodded my assent. John picked up off the floor a stained and tattered copy of The Necronomicon , a book of spells which he claimed contained black magic incantations from the Dark Ages. We walked back to the house and John filled a backpack with flashlights, hunting knives, snack food and a few trinkets he said had magical powers. Our destination, John said, was the place where his brother sold his soul to the devil.
    To get there, we had to climb through a sewer pipe that started near John’s house and ran underneath a cemetery. We walked crouched over in the sludgy, rat-infested water, with no entrance or exit in sight, constantly conscious of the fact that in the mud on all sides of the pipe were dead bodies. I don’t think I’ve ever been more terrified of the supernatural in my life. On that half-mile odyssey, every small noise produced a large, ominous echo, and I kept thinking I was hearing skeletons knocking on the outside of the pipe and undead creatures ripping through the metal, ready to grab me and bury me alive.
    When we finally reached the other side, we were covered from head to foot with a thin film of sewage, spiderwebs and mud. We were in the middle of nowhere in a dark forest. After a half-mile of hacking through the overgrowth, a huge house loomed over us. Weeds had grown all around it, as if the forest was trying to reclaim the space, and every exposed patch of concrete was covered with pentagrams, upside-down crosses, renderings of Satan, heavy metal band logos and words and phrases like “cocksucker” and “fuck your mother.”
    We cleared away the vines and dead leaves covering an open window, climbed inside and searched the room with the beams of our flashlights. There were rats, cobwebs, broken glass and old beer cans. In a corner the embers of a dying fire let us know that someone had recently been here. I turned around, and John was gone.
    I called his name nervously.
    â€œUp here,” he yelled from the top of the stairs. “Check this out.” Though I was starting to panic, I followed him upstairs and through a cluttered doorway. The room looked inhabited. There was a putrid yellow mattress on the floor, which was littered with hypodermic needles, a bent spoon and other drug paraphernalia. Lying around the mattress, like dried-out snake skins, were half a dozen used condoms alongside disintegrating pages from gay porno magazines that had been smashed into the floor.
    We walked into the next room, which was completely empty except for a pentagram drawn on the south wall and surrounded by indecipherable runes. John pulled out his copy of The Necronomicon .
    â€œWhat the fuck are you doing?” I asked.
    â€œOpening the gates of hell to summon the spirits that once lived in this house,” he said in as ominous a voice as he could muster. He traced a circle in the dust on the floor with his finger. As he completed it, a sharp sound came from downstairs. We stood completely still, barely even breathing, and listened to the darkness. Nothing, except for the sound of my pulse beating like a triphammer in my