The Girl from the Blood Coven

  Dedication

  To my good friend Greg “Magick” Bernstein

  June 21, 1972

  As Sheriff Travis Keagan drove through the pine country of East Texas, he had two things on his mind: drinking a cold beer and watching the second half of the Rangers baseball game. On the radio, the announcer said it was top of the fifth and the Yankees were winning five to three.

  “Come on, Rangers.” Sheriff Keagan felt absolutely beat and needed his team to lift his spirits. It was the end of another long, hot and balmy summer day of dealing with traffic accidents, drunken domestic disputes and escorting a wife beater to the county jail. Now the shadows of dusk were gathering in the forest, and judging by the flickering clouds, a stormy night was fast approaching.

  A woman’s voice squawked on the CB radio. “Dispatch to Sheriff. Over.”

  Sheriff Keagan sighed and picked up the microphone. “Yes, Connie. Over.”

  “Earl Potter called and claims he saw the ghost of a girl cross through his pasture. Says she spooked his horses.”

  “Ghost…” Keagan chuckled, shaking his head. “Last week it was flying saucers. Did he sound drunk?”

  Connie laughed. “Like he always does. Over.”

  “Tell Earl he needs to lay off the moonshine and go to bed. I’m calling it a night. Have a wonderful evening, Connie. I’ll be at the Armadillo if you need me. Over and out.” Keagan parked his police car in the gravel lot of the Lazy Armadillo. The roadhouse and connecting gas station were isolated on a wooded road just outside of the small town of Buck Horn. Inside the restaurant, the jukebox was playing a Willie Nelson song. A half-dozen townspeople acknowledged the sheriff as he entered the bar. He knew everyone here by name, where they lived, where they worked and their nighttime habits. He knew that Dale and Judy in the corner booth were cheating on their spouses. At another table, Tommy Green was studying to be a lawyer so he didn’t have to end up selling cars his whole life like his pops. And the sheriff knew that the Kincaid brothers, who were casually playing pool, would later get drunk and start throwing fists at one another. Just a typical night at the Armadillo.

  Taking off his cowboy hat, Keagan sat at his favorite bar stool, where he had a perfect view of the Rangers game on the TV. “Damn, Yanks scored again?”

  Sheila, the sexiest redheaded bartender in the county, put a frosty mug in front of Keagan. “Rangers’ pitching is terrible tonight.”

  “Their bats aren’t hitting squat either,” Keagan said.

  She pulled out her order pad. “Your usual tonight, Sheriff?”

  “Nah, I’m in the mood for a steak. Tell Jorge to burn it.”

  Sheila leaned against the bar. “You know all that red meat isn’t good for your colon.” The student nurse was always looking after his health. “How about the grilled catfish with some stir-fried veggies? You’ll thank me twenty years from now.”

  “Fine. But you’re not talking me out of the pecan pie.”

  “Maybe I’ll have a slice with you.” She winked.

  Keagan’s cheeks flushed and he felt warm all over. Since his wife left him a few years back, moving to Houston with their daughter, he missed having a woman care about him. He admired Sheila as she delivered his order to the kitchen. If the college girl wasn’t half his age, he’d ask her out in a heartbeat.

  On the TV, the Rangers hit a homer with two men on base, tying the game.

  Keagan cheered and waved the runners around the bases. He raised his beer in celebration and was about to drink when he heard a commotion behind him.

  A man shouted, “Holy shit!”

  Keagan spun around in his seat.

  Standing in the front doorway was a young woman covered head to toe in blood. Her soaked nightgown clung to her body. She walked into the restaurant, stiff and grimacing, as if her bare feet were walking on glass. The girl’s face was a mask of solid red and her eyes were wide with terror. She stretched out an arm. “Help me…”

  Keagan reached her first and she collapsed in his arms. She was trembling.

  So much blood. It covered his hands and stained his uniform.

  A crowd of onlookers gathered around, and the sheriff shouted, “Everyone stay back. Sheila, call for an ambulance. And somebody get her some water.” Keagan walked the girl to a booth and sat her down. He examined her exposed skin for bleeding wounds, but found none. It looked as if someone had dumped buckets of dark red paint over her head. Her long hair was littered with leaves and pine needles. Her gown was slashed across the chest and he could see part of one of her breasts. “Are you hurt anywhere?”

  The girl looked at him, her lips quivering, and made a croaking sound.

  The waitress gave her a glass of water.

  As the girl drank, Keagan said, “You’re going to be okay. You’re safe now. An ambulance will be here soon. My name is Sheriff Keagan. Can you tell me what happened?”

  “Dead…” she managed. “They’re all dead.”

  At the hospital, Sheriff Keagan paced the hall, eager for some answers. His two night-shift deputies, Pete Stubbs and Big Mike Jablonski, were standing beside the door to the room where the girl was being treated. When a doctor in scrubs finally came out, Keagan rushed to him. “How is she?”

  “Stable.”

  “What’s the status on her wounds?”

  “Oddly, the girl has no wounds. Just a few bruises and scrapes on her feet.”

  “Then where did all that blood come from?”

  “That’s for you to find out, Sheriff. But it wasn’t hers. I did get one thing out of your mystery girl. Her name is Abigail. Oh, and she’s definitely on some kind of drugs, and not the prescription kind either.” The doctor nodded toward the door. “She’s awake if you want to talk to her.”

  Keagan entered the private room and closed the door. He said softly, “Hey, Abigail, how are you?”

  The girl was sitting against a pillow on her bed. She had been cleaned up. Her pale skin still had pink marks from being scrubbed. Her damp black hair hung over her face and shoulders. At first Abigail looked catatonic; then her eyes followed the sheriff as he rounded the bed and sat in a chair. She cowered away from him.

  “It’s okay,” he soothed. “You’re safe with me.”

  The girl stared at him with haunted blue eyes. Her dilated pupils were almost as wide as her irises. She looked to be around twenty-five. Definitely not a native to Buck Horn. Keagan knew everyone in town.

  “I know you’ve been through a lot, miss, but I need to ask you some questions so we can find your family. Can you talk to me?”

  She teared up as she nodded.

  He pulled out a pen and notepad. “What’s your last name?”

  “Blackwood.”

  “Abigail Blackwood,” he wrote, offering a comforting smile. “You can call me Travis. Now, can you tell me what happened?”

  Her lips trembled as she tried to form the words. “We…we were all inside our house.” She sniffled and wiped a tear off her cheek. “We were just singing and dancing and then it attacked us.”

  “What? An animal?”

  “I don’t know. Something in the house. Everybody started screaming. Then there was all this blood and my brothers and sisters were…” She wiped away more tears.

  “Did you see what was attacking them?”

  Abigail shook her head. “It was too dark. All the power had shut off. I just ran.”

  “I need to go to your house. What’s the address?”

  “The Blevins House off Copper Creek Road.”

  Keagan felt a burning in his stomach. “The hippy commune?”

  Abigail said, “We preferred to call our family a coven.”

  A God-fearing Christian, Keagan had
trouble even writing the word coven in his notes. He had known enough about the Blevins House to stay away from it. Set far back in the woods, the commune was run by a witch named Lenora Ravenmoon Blevins. She had a reputation for giving the people in town a hard time. Lenora was always taking in strays, mostly teenage runaways and college dropouts. Keagan had busted a few of them for possession of marijuana and psychedelic drugs. The members of the Blevins commune represented everything Keagan hated about hippies. Abigail certainly fit the description of a flower child. Knowing that she was also a witch made Keagan uncomfortable.

  “How many people were in your group?”

  “Twenty-five of us.”

  “How many men?”

  “Five. The rest were women and children.”

  “Anyone else escape?”

  She shook her head.

  Keagan sighed, trying to think of what kind of animal could attack an entire house of men and women. Abigail’s story sounded hard to swallow. Keagan knew plenty of religious groups in these woods who didn’t like having witches for neighbors.

  “Did you hear any gunshots?” he asked.

  “No, just screams.”

  “Is it possible you were attacked by a group of men?”

  “No, it definitely wasn’t human.”

  The burning sensation in Keagan’s stomach spread to his chest. “One last question. Were you doing drugs earlier tonight?”

  Abigail shook her head no, but Keagan could tell by the twitch in her face as she averted his gaze that she was lying.

  The sheriff stepped back into the hallway and huddled his deputies. To the six-foot-four man, Keagan said, “Big Mike, guard this door and don’t let Abigail leave. As soon as the doctor releases her, take her to the station. She’s a possible suspect.”

  “Is she under arrest?”

  “Not yet.” To the smaller deputy, Keagan said, “Pete, you’re coming with me.”

  “Where are we going, Sheriff?”

  “The Blevins House.”

  Driving away from the hospital, Keagan radioed Connie at the station and explained where they were going.

  She responded, “Want me to call in some backup? Over.”

  “Hold off. Pete and I are going to investigate the matter first. Over.”

  “Be careful. Over.”

  “Roger and out.”

  No use waking up half the police in the county if it turned out Abigail had suffered a bad LSD trip and imagined the attack. Keagan couldn’t explain all the blood that had covered her body. Although, he had heard reports from some of the neighboring ranchers that the Blevins witches were performing blood sacrifices. Maybe some of the hippies pulled a prank on Abigail and dumped goat’s blood all over her.

  The last thing on earth Keagan wanted to do tonight was drive out to the Blevins House. It was set far back on two hundred acres of thick forest land. He’d heard plenty of rumors about the commune, but had never actually gone there. The Blevins witches were strange folk, but for the most part they had kept to themselves.

  Lightning crackled in the night sky. The car’s windshield wipers fought against torrents of rain as Keagan sped down a narrow dirt road between two walls of trees.

  He could tell by the way Pete gripped his door that he was close to shitting bricks.

  “Hopefully this is just a girl’s wild imagination,” Keagan said.

  “I knew something bad would eventually happen at that house,” Pete said.

  “How so?”

  “’Cause them witches are devil worshippers. And when you mess with the devil, it can only end up bad.”

  The road opened up to a driveway full of VW vans and old cars. Keagan parked, but left the engine running. They remained seated in the car for a moment. The headlights shone on a rock house that towered three stories. All the windows were dark. Every few seconds, lightning flashed, illuminating the pitched roof. The thunder that followed made Pete jerk in his seat.

  “Damn, I hate storms,” he said.

  The wipers continued to squeak across the windshield. Rain thumped on the car’s roof.

  Keagan studied the gloomy woods that surrounded the house. He kept a stone face, but inside his nerves were bouncing. “All right, let’s check things out.”

  The sheriff and deputy switched on their flashlights and stepped out of the car. Keagan unsnapped his holster and kept his hand on the butt of his pistol as he approached the house with Pete flanking his left side. Their beams reflected in the windows. Rainwater dribbled down the glass, making it damned hard to see inside.

  Keagan stepped up to the front door and knocked. The door opened an inch. He knocked again. “Hello?” When no one answered, he pushed the door open wide. “Police! Anybody home?” His voice echoed off the cobblestone floor in the foyer. A dark hallway stretched straight ahead. To his right and left were two living areas. The walls were covered in colorful hippy art: peace signs, rainbow buses and marijuana leafs. On one wall, he spotted an arc of blood splatter.

  Keagan drew his pistol and entered. He was immediately hit by a stench that was undeniably death—a mix of blood, urine and evacuated bowels. In the den to his right, the floor was covered in feathers. The cushions on a couch had been torn to shreds. In the center of the room a man lay face down in the feathers. His head had been smashed in like a melon.

  “Pete, we got a body.”

  His deputy stepped up beside him. “Oh, God…” He covered his mouth and puked in a corner.

  Keagan didn’t blame the rookie. This was his first corpse. “Pull yourself together and stay with me.” The sheriff walked forward, more on edge than before. The entry into the next room was a beaded doorway. All he could see between the streamers was pitch darkness. The killer could be hiding inside that void. Keagan’s heart quickened. The beads rattled as he pushed them aside. He jerked his beam left, catching a bloody handprint on the wall. He followed a trail of blood smears past a long dining table that was still covered with plates and bowls of food. A bottle of wine had tipped over, spilling crimson liquid all over the rug. Hippy shit everywhere–bongs and pipes and ashtrays filled to the brim with cigarettes and ash.

  They found a second body in the kitchen—a woman with several knives in her chest. When Keagan moved his light up to see her face, he found only the bloody stump of her neck.

  Pete whispered, “Christ almighty, where’s her head?”

  Keagan signaled to keep hush. He passed through the kitchen, checking the countertops and sink, but didn’t see the woman’s severed head anywhere. The other end of the kitchen led into a hallway. The smell coming from the darkness ahead was so horrendous it pushed his gag reflex. He glanced back at Pete. The young deputy was wide-eyed with terror, but keeping pace.

  Keagan entered a den with a stone floor that was sticky to his boots. His jaw dropped as he panned his flashlight around the room. The floor and walls were decorated in pagan symbols. Some kind of ceremonial room. In the center of a giant circle on the floor was a bowl of animal skulls and various bones.

  Pete said, “I knew they were devil worshippers.”

  There was blood everywhere, pooled on the floor in multiple places, spattered across the walls, but no bodies. Keagan observed another detail that bothered him. Scattered across the floor were dirt clods and broken roots. Ahead something slammed, startling both men. The sheriff and deputy rushed into the next room—an enclosed patio with screen walls. The noise turned out to be the storm slamming an open back door against the house.

  On the ride back to the police station, Big Mike Jablonski fumbled with the radio dial until he landed on Merle Haggard singing “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive”.

  “You like country music?” Big Mike asked the girl.

  Abigail Blackwood was sitting in the backseat, a silhouette against the storm light from the back window. She hadn’t said a word since he walked her out of the hospital. The doctor had given her a tight jumpsuit to wear. The hippy girl was a looker. Youthful face, skinny body, perky tits. The fact th
at she was a witch made the fantasy that played in Big Mike’s mind all the more taboo.

  He passed the forest road that led to the Blevins House and wondered how the sheriff and Pete were doing.

  Sheriff Keagan’s frantic voice suddenly squawked on the CB. “Big Mike, you there? Over.”

  The deputy shut off the music and grabbed his mic. “Roger, Sheriff. Over.”

  “What’s your twenty?”

  “Halfway to the station. Over.”

  “When you get there, lock the suspect in a cell. Copy?”

  “Roger. Everything all right, Sheriff?”

  “Just follow orders. Out.”

  Damn, his sexy little witch was going behind bars. Big Mike looked in the rearview mirror and couldn’t see Abigail. He glanced over his shoulder. She was lying across the backseat.

  He turned the radio back on and was assaulted by ear-piercing static. He surfed the dials, but got nothing but more static. Strange. Buck Horn always picked up at least four radio stations. Then he heard singing. Only it was coming from the backseat. A lilting song in a language Big Mike had never heard before. He whirled in his seat.

  Abigail sat up suddenly. Her eyes were rolled back to whites.

  Sheriff Keagan and Pete stood by the car in front of the house. After talking to Big Mike, Keagan radioed Connie. “We need backup at the Blevins House and lots of it.” He named off the nearby towns in which to call. The sheriff had seen enough to know this was a job for a county-wide task force. Whoever murdered twenty-plus people was not someone Keagan wanted to face in a dark house with just one inexperienced deputy.

  The rain continued to drench them. Water dripped over the brim of Keagan’s cowboy hat and soaked his uniform. He was cold and miserable as he watched the house.

  “Who do you think did all that?” Pete asked, visibly traumatized.

  Keagan shook his head. “Someone with a sick mind. Possibly multiple killers.” He thought of the Charlie Manson Family and all the bizarre killings they had committed in California. The blood on the walls of this house reminded him of the crime photos that had been published from the Manson case. Hippies doing all those mind-altering drugs. It was only a matter of time before somebody flipped out and went on a killing spree.