An Excerpt from Chapter 4
by Lee Allen Howard

Agatha Abbott led the young goat into the shack behind her house, which lay hidden deep in the woods of north-central Pennsylvania. Bats chittered overhead in the darkened rafters as the old woman fixed the rope to a gore-crusted post planted in the hardpacked earth. The animal bleated, and Agatha yanked the rope, hard. She had no heart for animals. No heart for anyone but her Master.
At Baphomet’s bidding, she had mated her chosen Samael and Lilith, and their unholy union had produced the beast—the new god that would break the oppressive grip of Christianity off the world.
Agatha withdrew items necessary for the ceremony from her dress pocket and arranged them on the dirt floor.
The time had come. The song of the cicadas had begun, heralding another long-awaited opportunity to reclaim what she and her now-dead grandsons had toiled for years to produce. They had tried and tried again to breed so many girls who’d either killed themselves or otherwise failed to carry the ceremonial seed to full term. Finally, the Abbotts had succeeded, only to have the offspring stolen from them. Snatched away and hidden for over three decades.
The captor of the beast-child had kept it secretly confined. Coerced it somehow into an unnatural state of hibernation. But the infernal progenitor was meant to awaken forevermore and enact the Master’s plan: to fill the skies with winged death. It was time to set her beast-child free.
As she’d done years before, Agatha unfolded a lace handkerchief and picked out a few dark hairs and some fingernail parings she’d saved for thirty-four years. She scraped some flaky material from the clippings and brushed it all from her gnarled hands into a shard of broken crockery on the floor.
From the belt of her tattered dress, she pulled her kitchen knife and tested the blade with her thumb. Sharp as a razor. She sucked salty blood away.
The old woman grasped the kid by the nub of a horn and, with a deft motion, slashed its throat. The goat jumped once and then collapsed.
Agatha caught the hot, coppery blood in her withered hand and drizzled the dish’s contents with it. Outside, the wind moaned through the trees and buffeted the shack as if in answer.
“O wise Baphomet, I bring thee the hair of the woman, the skin of the man. Solve et coagula…” Agatha incanted the ancient spell, spilling three handfuls of blood upon the shard. She lifted a final draught to her lips, willing the darkness to be released once more.
“Come forth,” she croaked. “Come forth!”
Agatha licked her bloody hand, then raised it overhead.
“I command thee to come forth,” she cried, “and sing!”