Nightmare Fuel #27: Moloch's Pact Part Two: Satanic Panic
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Welcome to another edition of Nightmare Fuel, creeps and peepers. I'm Dan Cummins, and I'll be sharing another original short story of the fictional horror variety. Today's tale, as I'm assuming you guessed from the title, is a continuation of the previous Nightmare Fuel. I hope it wraps up the story to your satisfaction, at least for now.

As always, I highly recommend noise cancellation headphones for the best experience. Hope you enjoy this new nightmare. Time now for the tale of Moloch's Pact II, Satanic Panic. Deacon's Point, 1988. One month following the disappearance of Lincoln Clay and Tara Jennings, and just before midnight.

34-year-old Detective Rob Shoemaker sat in the living room of his two-bedroom duplex, sipping instant coffee from the world's number one dad mug his sister Lana gave him when he was home from college over a decade earlier, a year or so before she had drowned in Sand Lake at a house party, a party he was also at. He was inside drinking by the keg, laughing with some friends and hitting on some girl from out of town whose name he can no longer remember when it happened.

He didn't even know she had gone swimming until she was already dead. He'd had the cup so long now he didn't always think about where it came from, who gave it to him, or how guilt over not being able to save his sister's life pushed him into a career of trying to save the lives of others. It didn't always fill him with both sadness over Lana's death and also joy, or at least something close to joy, over the memory of her absurd, quirky sense of humor.

She'd bought it for him after he and his girlfriend at the time had had a pregnancy scare when his condom broke. And he was freaking out. He was freaking out again now. And he wished he still had Lana to talk to. He wondered what kind of humor she could mine from what he was currently worried about. At the moment, he didn't feel like he had anyone he could share what he was dealing with. And absolutely nothing about it seemed funny. Rob stared at the wall in front of him intensely. A wall he'd been staring at every night for almost a month now.

a wall that he had been adding photos and notes to on a near daily basis. Earlier that night, he tacked up a photo of poor April Mullins. April was a 15-year-old girl who had disappeared just three days prior, only two weeks after she had moved to Deacons Point to live with her mom, Chloe, and a few days after she had enrolled as a sophomore at Bishop High School.

Chloe had called to report her daughter missing, but when Rob started walking out of the station to drive on over and ask her some questions, his police chief, Joel Martinez, stopped him. He'd insisted that he would speak with Chloe instead, and that he would do it alone. It was a strange encounter, not like Joel at all. Joel hadn't told him to step aside on any part of an investigation, any investigation, in over two years, not since he was a rookie detective.

And not only had Joel cut him out of questioning Chloe, he'd shot Rob a pointed look when they spoke. A look of intimidation, maybe? It felt like he was telling him without explicitly stating it to back the fuck off. But to back off of what, exactly? Rob thought he knew. Joel had to be a part of it. A part of what had happened to at least four local teen girls now. He and Joel had never been close, not exactly friendly,

But Joel had become a lot more terse and withdrawn over the past couple of months. Rob had noticed dark circles under his eyes more and more often. Something was going on. He assumed he was probably having trouble at home, marital problems. But now he thought it was something else. Something a lot darker than wondering if you and your wife were growing apart. A strange exchange. And what happened later that day.

led to Rob tacking a picture of Joel up on his wall, a wall that had transformed his living room into one man's private investigation of a local satanic cult. When Joel had come back to the station, he'd stopped by Rob's desk to tell him that April wasn't actually missing, so there was no case to investigate. He said it was a false alarm, that she had simply had a change of heart and had moved back to the coast to live with her dad again. Rob knew in his gut immediately that that was a bunch of bullshit.

Joel didn't know it, but Rob knew April's mom, Chloe, personally. They hadn't spoken in a while, but she was a close friend of Don Larson, a local woman he dated a few years back. And when his shift was over, Rob decided to pay Chloe a visit. And while she wouldn't admit that April was, in fact, missing, she looked scared. Her eyes watered up. And when he had asked for the phone number for April's dad, she had refused to give it to him. And she asked if Joel knew he was speaking with her.

And when she mentioned Joel, she seemed real scared. And then she completely shut down. What had Joel said to her? Rob wondered. Had he threatened her?

Rob stared at photos of Bishop High School Principal Buck Stowers, Deacons Point Mayor Ray Fitch, Forrest Wilkes, the guy who owned the paper, Lincoln Clay, the still-missing high schooler thought to be hiding out from the law who had tried to kidnap Piper Zimmerman the same night that Tara Jennings had went missing, the same night Rob had seen Buck, Ray, Forrest, Lincoln, and a bunch of other men in masks walking out of the abandoned Masonic Temple downtown.

He knew they were all guilty of something connected to the girls, something terrible, but it was going to be a bitch to prove it. Rob had a picture of the temple on his wall also, right in the center, just below the photos of those men. And underneath the photo of that temple, he had photos, or at least blank squares of paper with a name written on it if he wasn't able to find a photo, of the four girls who had gone missing from Deacon's Point that year.

Four girls, including April, who he was convinced had met the same fate as the others. 15-year-old Sandy DeWitt, 18-year-old Teresa Lane, 14-year-old Tara Jennings, and 15-year-old April Mullins. He had to sneak into that temple soon and do some snooping around. He just had to be very careful about it. He'd been hoping that some opportunity to explore it would fall into his lap.

Maybe there would be some report of a break-in he would need to investigate, but he knew that was a long shot, that he'd almost certainly have to trespass. But, as much as he hated to admit it, he was scared to do that. Scared not just of what might happen to him if his police chief found out, but genuinely scared of what he might find inside. Why did they take the girls there?

Why exactly did so many of Deacon's Point's most powerful people gather there? A group he was now convinced included his police chief. Joel must have been one of the masked men that night. Why would any of these men join a satanic cult, though? Did they really believe they'd be rewarded somehow? Did they really believe that the devil and his demons were real? Could something like that actually exist? If he snuck into that temple, would he see what they worshipped? And more importantly, why?

Would it see him? And what would it do? Lincoln Clay sat inside the room, empty of anything besides a small bed on the second floor of the Masonic Temple, the room that had been his bedroom for almost a month now. He stared down at the tennis ball-sized tattoo of Moloch on his forearm, tracing its now-heeled edges with his finger. Turned out he hadn't needed to contact the tattoo artist after all to get it.

When his former principal, Buck Stowers, found out the police were looking for him in connection with his failed attempt at kidnapping Piper, Buck had had the artist come to him, yet another member of his cult. In the closet, Lincoln had a few changes of clothes, some books on the occult Buck had given him to read, and not much else. He'd never had so much time just to sit around and think in his life. And damn were his thoughts so fucking dark. After he'd stayed with Buck at his place the night of...

The sacrifice, the night you helped murder that innocent girl, his mind corrected. He'd been snuck back into the temple and told in no uncertain terms that he needed to remain hidden and make zero attempts to contact anyone. That to do so, or to leave without permission, would be to forfeit his life, which would mean he would never receive his reward from Moloch that he'd been promised. The reward he'd paid for by spilling innocent blood. Lincoln was fine with remaining hidden. In fact, he was relieved that Buck had hidden him.

Where the hell would he even go? He'd broken his best friend Chance's arm when he tried to kidnap and help murder Chance's girlfriend, Piper. The police were looking for him regarding that attempted kidnapping, and he was also the primary suspect in the disappearance of Tara Jennings. Buck had assured him that as long as he stayed hidden, he would never get in trouble for any of that. And he believed Buck. I mean, the chief of police was in his cult, too. He had the same tattoo. Who was going to arrest him?

Lincoln did sometimes miss his family, his parents, and his brother and sister, but honestly, not nearly as much as he would have previously thought he would. He mostly felt impatient and curious. He wanted to get the rest of the sacrifices over with as quickly as possible so he could have his reward and not only live free again, but live like a god or something like a god.

He still wasn't totally sure exactly what his reward would be and what life would look like when they had fully summoned the demon into this plane of existence. When Buck spoke of how Moloch was going to reward them, it was always in pretty vague terms. They'd all be given power. So much power. He'd have his deepest, darkest desires indulged. But what did that mean exactly? What even were his deepest, darkest desires? Would he get to be part of an orgy?

Would that be his deepest, darkest desire? It did sound pretty cool. Would he get to have sex with whomever he wanted, like his freshman English teacher, Miss Summers? Would she be at the orgy wearing one of her plaid skirts and one of those cotton blouses where he could sometimes catch a glimpse of her bra in the slight opening between two of the buttons? She was probably the woman he desired most. And he'd been embarrassed enough about how much he was attracted to her that he hadn't told anyone, not even Chance. So was Miss Summers his deepest, darkest desire?

Would Moloch give her to him? In fleeting moments, he thought about how his deepest desire wasn't actually a dark one at all. How if he could have one wish, it would be to have never watched that fucking video in the first damn place and gotten all wrapped up in this mess. But was that really true? Would he change anything? Sure, it'd have been fun to have been a normal high school kid, and he'd been really looking forward to football season, which had been just about to start when he'd gotten dragged into the cult.

He was going to be Bishop High's starting varsity running back, which would have been awesome. But he had a feeling that what was in store for him was going to be so much more awesome. Or, he sometimes worried, it might be the worst thing ever. Moloch scared the shit out of him. The two sacrifice rituals he had now been to had been completely terrifying, like scary to the point he thought his mind might break and that he would go insane in moments. But in other moments, they had been exhilarating.

The second more than the first. When he just got to watch and chant and didn't have to cut. It was hard to describe how it felt to be close to that much raw power. To be aligned with something so strong. And he hadn't even felt bad for the girl the second time. He was surprised what he had felt for her. It certainly wasn't pity. It definitely wasn't empathy. It was lust. Powerful. Burning. Lust. Lust.

By the time Moloch began to devour her insides, his erection was painfully throbbing. He knew that that should have disturbed him, that he should be ashamed of it, and that the old Lincoln would have been. But he wasn't the old Lincoln anymore. He wasn't the least bit disturbed or ashamed. He loved the way he felt. He'd been reading in the books that Buck had given him about how Christianity had blinded him to his true, rightful, primal nature.

How there was nothing wrong with pursuing one's carnal desires, even at the cost of someone else's life. That was the true way of the world. It was natural. It was the way things were supposed to be. He'd been reading about how pointless it was for humanity to resist its carnal, animalistic desires. About how every other species of mammal on the planet killed when it suited them, and fucked and raped when it suited them as well. And did they feel any shame? No. So why should he...

He'd read about how shame was bullshit, a made-up constructed emotion, created by those who wanted to control and exploit while they secretly did everything they preached against. Now that Lincoln was almost rid of shame and guilt, he couldn't fucking wait to find out how he would feel after the sixth sacrifice. And to find out what he'd be able to do, what he'd now be able to get away with once he was again free. He hoped if she hadn't already been sacrificed as the fifth girl to die...

that Piper Zimmerman would be the sixth. When Lincoln laid in bed and thought of Piper, while he thought of her naked and terrified and tied up and squirming and crying, he became terribly aroused. He laid down now to feel that again. Maybe this was his deepest, darkest desire, to defile, desecrate, and destroy any girl he wanted. He pushed down his boxers and began to touch himself. He masturbated for the third time that day to thoughts of a scared girl dying at his hands.

He decided that if she wasn't sacrificed to bring Moloch fully into this world, that he'd track her down and kill her himself in the aftermath. Kill her after he had taken his time doing so, so many other things to her. Things that would make her scream and beg for mercy. Things he'd do to her while she was dying. So that her last thoughts and experiences in this world were filled with blood, fear, pain, and violation. As Lincoln again pleasured himself thinking the darkest of thoughts, the demon Moloch.

Floating as a shadowy, ethereal shape in the darkness, which was his natural form in our plane of existence when he wasn't being actively summoned into a physical being, he looked down upon Lincoln and smiled, feeling satisfied to have irrevocably corrupted and destroyed yet another soul. That same night, at the same time, Chance Watkins laid quietly with his girlfriend, Piper Zimmerman, in her bed while her two younger sisters and parents slept.

Piper's dad had had a new window installed in her room with a better lock, like he had promised the night Lincoln had broken in. And Piper was keeping it locked at all times, like he had demanded, almost. It was always locked, except of course, when she was sneaking Chance in. You really, truly believe that, and aren't just saying it to, well, you know, Piper quietly questioned him.

"'I do,' said Chance bashfully and sincerely. "'As crazy as it all sounds, I really believe it. "'I think Lincoln took Tara that night, "'and I think it had something to do with that movie he saw.'

And I think April Mullins got taken by someone connected to that movie too. Maybe Lincoln. I really believe that there is an honest to God satanic cult here in Deacon's Point. A very dangerous one that is literally sacrificing virgins to the devil or to some demon. Maybe one named Moloch. Piper stared at the ceiling and frowned and furrowed her brow before she spoke again. It sounds so crazy when you say it. Thinking about it freaks me out. I don't want to believe it, but I think I do.

Then she turned her head, looked into Chance's eyes and smiled. And so, I guess by taking my virginity, she said, you're kind of saving my life. What a hero, she teased. Chance smiled sheepishly and spoke barely above a whisper. I mean, technically, yeah, she said sarcastically. What a kind, noble, charitable young man you are. Always thinking of others. I should really thank you for making me such a generous offer.

Stop, Chan said, embarrassed, and folded his arms across his chest. Piper grabbed one of his arms, the one that wasn't broken by Lincoln and hadn't had a cast on it until the day before, and pulled it to his side as she rolled on top of him. Even if you are making all this up, she said, I think I should probably sleep with you anyway. I mean, this has to be one of the most creative ways to get into a girl's pants that any guy has ever come up with.

Really? Chance asked, unable to keep a wide, shit-eating grin from spreading across his face. Now? Yeah, she said. Now. And then Piper sat up and took off her bra. Chance began to kiss her neck and then her breasts. And then a few minutes later, both of them were laying on their backs, smiling, lightly panting and a bit sweaty and no longer virgins. Chance was, of course, beyond excited that they had finally done the deed. It was everything he had hoped it would be.

And he was also truly relieved. He did think this would help keep Piper safe. And he was right. But what about all the other girls in town? Who was going to help save them? When would the next girl go missing? It didn't seem like the police were doing shit. Chance thought about the abandoned Masonic Temple downtown. How more and more kids were spreading the same rumor. That not only was there a murderous, powerful, satanic cult in Deacon's Point, but that they met in that temple. That it was their church.

that it was where they had sacrificed the missing girls. He decided to go back to Video Ventures and talk to Doug again. Tell him he knew that that movie, Moloch's Pact, was connected to it all. That he knew what they were doing in the temple. And if Doug wouldn't give him that movie, he was going to go to the police. He wanted to see how Doug reacted to him saying that. And also, if Doug actually did give him that movie, he would take it straight to the police.

Across town at this time, Deacons Point Police Chief Joel Martinez was, once again, the only person in his house who couldn't sleep. His wife, two sons, and his daughter, they could all sleep just fine. Cleaner consciences, he guessed. They'd all been in bed for a couple of hours. Joel sat in front of the TV he'd put out in the garage for when he had friends come over to watch a hockey or football game or drink some beers. At the moment, he was thankful that the TV faced away from the door into the house.

If his wife or one of his kids woke up and decided to check on him, he'd be able to turn it off before they saw what he was watching. Grainy home video footage of him having sex with two women. Two girls, actually. Neither of whom obviously were his wife. Both were girls he had thought were women, but then learned later they were underage. That motherfucker. He'd secretly taped him every time, at every party. He'd been so stupid.

Buck's towers had lured and then trapped him into his sick cult the same way he had trapped most of the other key players in town through blackmail like this first and then through fear He'd been invited to one of buck's parties for the first time back in late february or maybe early march It was a guy's only get together with the mayor and a few of the town's wealthier pillars of the community It was supposed to have been just drinks and a poker game. He'd felt like he'd had to play politics and go

He'd had a few drinks and started feeling good. And then he had started feeling weirdly good when instead of playing poker, some girls showed up. He didn't think they'd been paid to come over. Not at first. He just thought some of the other guys must have known them. He was about to go home. But then this one girl, this very seductive girl, she was waiting for him right after he had walked out of the bathroom. She'd grabbed his hand and it had felt so, so good to be touched. She'd said something like,

"'Hey, before you go home, I have to show you something real quick.' When he'd asked her what that was, she'd told him it was a surprise. She'd led him down the hall and into a dark bedroom, and he'd felt his resolve slipping with each step he took. He'd never cheated on his wife before. He hadn't even ever been seriously entertaining stepping out on his marriage before. Right before they'd walked into the room, she had told him to close his eyes, that he could open them once he was in the room and she'd shut the door behind him. His surprise...

had been another girl, another woman, he'd thought at the time, and she was fucking gorgeous, and butt naked outside of the high heels, stockings, and sheer bra she'd had on. As he'd looked her over, the girl who had walked him into the room took his hand and pressed his fingers up against her bare skin where her panties would have been had she been wearing any under her skirt. She'd said, we can keep a secret if you can, sexy, and that was it. That was what had led him to stripping off all of his clothes and having sex with both of them.

Sex with both of them twice, actually. And unbeknownst to him, the whole thing had been recorded. It had all been a setup from the very beginning, a setup he now strongly assumed included someone slipping some molly into his drink when he first showed up. That was why he had felt so good. It took him a while to find out he had been secretly taped. They gave him plenty of time to incriminate himself further, again and again.

Three weeks after that first night, he had gotten invited to another party, and he went again. And this time, he knew what he was getting into. He had hoped those same two girls would be there from the first party. He was foolish enough to think that they had stayed quiet, that no one else knew. They weren't there. But another girl was. Another girl he had thought was a woman. And when she again led him into a bedroom, he had started to wonder if they were all escorts.

But since he wasn't paying them, and since he had never discussed paying them, he didn't think he was incriminating himself. And so he cheated on his wife again, after coming to the party hoping he would. This happened three more times. And then a few days after his fifth party, Buck had stopped by the police station. He'd handed him a VHS tape and told him to watch it, but only when he was alone, and to give him a call and tell him what he thought about it after he was done.

Joel was fucking furious. He wanted to kill Buck for what he did, for violating his privacy. He wanted to arrest him, but he knew if he did, he'd lose his family, his career, and his freedom. When he spoke with Buck, after he was done screaming, Buck had asked him if he knew how old those girls were. His stomach sank. 15 and 16. They were all either 15 or 16 years old, and he was 45. Fuck. He felt like he was going to throw up.

And then Buck promised him that while, yes, he had multiple copies of the tape and should anything happen to him, those copies would be made public. But as long as Joel played along, he would never release them and he would never tell a soul.

He said he didn't want money, he just wanted Joel to come to one more gathering. A much more secretive gathering at the old Masonic temple. And he said that after it was over, if Joel wanted to be done, if he wanted to never hang out with him and the rest of the crew ever again, he could walk away. No questions asked. No punishment. That secret gathering was the sacrificial murder of Sandy DeWitt. The first of a planned six girls to die in order to bring a demon fully into this world.

When Joel had first seen the nude girl being brought into the room, he had started to object. He really was going to try and save her, to try and have them all arrested, knowing he too would go down. But then Buck said something in Latin, and he saw a flicker of movement in the shadows in the back of the room they were all in. When he looked more closely, he saw what had made that flicker. Moloch, the demonic devourer of children, of virgins, one of the horrid kings of hell. And Joel was immediately paralyzed with the most intense fear he had ever felt in his life.

That was the moment when the old Joel Martinez, the family man who'd become a cop because his dad and grandpa had both been cops and because they'd also both been his heroes, the man who had always considered himself a defender of the weak and the powerless and an enemy of corruption and vice, that was the moment that that Joel had died. And it was the moment a greedy, soulless, lecherous, morally bankrupt servant to a monster was born and took his place.

And now, months later, he was no longer going along with everything because Buck had copies of this tape and copies of even worse tapes of the sacrifices he'd attended. Now he actually wanted to see it through to the end. Now he couldn't wait for them to kill two more girls. In the grand scheme of things, he had convinced himself, with Moloch's help, that their lives meant nothing. That the only lives that mattered were the lives of those brave enough to do the demon's bidding.

Those who were helping bring the great beast fully into this world where it would take the lives of meaningless millions. Where it would reward Joel and a small circle of other devotees with more pleasure and power than they could even comprehend. Pleasure and power they were entitled to. Pleasure and power that had been stolen from them by a selfish God who wanted to be worshipped more than he wanted to make life worth living for his creations.

Joel was aroused watching himself with the girls on the tape playing in his garage. He wondered what could be more pleasurable than that. And then he thought about blood. He thought about slicing them open. He thought about hearing them scream, watching them cry, listening to them beg and cry out to the God who he knew would not save them. And these thoughts engorged his manhood with so much blood it felt like his skin might split open.

Moloch was almost here, and Joel would do anything, anything at all, to make sure their final two rituals were not denied. And as he thought these horrible, horrible things, it didn't even cross his mind that his 13-year-old virgin daughter could be one of the great beast's next victims. But even if he had thought about that, he wouldn't have cared. It would have changed nothing. If asked if it was what his new god, Moloch, wanted, he would bring his daughter to the ritual himself and slice her open.

As Joel thought these horrible thoughts, as he, like Lincoln at the temple, pleasured himself to fantasies of death and pain, the demon Moloch appeared unnoticed above him for a few flickering moments, again floating as a shadowy ethereal shape in the darkness, again feeling satisfied to have doomed another soul. Late afternoon, the following day,

Chance braced himself in the parking lot of Video Ventures, where he had walked directly after school. Luckily, he was on the way to Pizza Heaven, where he had just gotten a job to save up some money to buy a car. He could see Doug through the glass, to the right of a poster for Monkey Shines. He'd heard it wasn't a bad movie, but he'd completely lost his taste for horror, at least for now. He hadn't watched anything scary since he had watched most of The Prince of Darkness with Lincoln the night everything had changed. And where the hell was Lincoln anyway?

Despite most of the kids at school thinking otherwise, he didn't think he was dead. So where had he gone? Did he really kill Tara Jennings? He thought maybe he did, which was crazy. But watching Moloch's pack had changed him, corrupted him somehow. Also, how come the paper was barely reporting on his disappearance? Zero front page articles.

Nothing made sense anymore, which is why he was where he was. He wanted some answers. He needed to follow his gut and find out what the hell was really happening in Deacon's Point. He inhaled and exhaled deeply, steeled himself as best he could, and then he walked into his former favorite local video store with all the determination he could muster. What's going on, little man? Doug greeted him with a sly sneer. Chan suddenly wished he was bigger, stronger, braver.

He'd wished in that moment that he was the kind of badass that would just smile and walk right up to Doug after he had said that. Walked right behind the counter. And then when Doug started to say something else snarky, he would grab him by his beat-up Slayer t-shirt and headbutt him right in the face, hard enough to break his nose.

Then he'd drive his knee up into his nuts so hard he'd feel him pop. Then he'd drive his knee up again into his face this time and he'd punch him in the jaw hard enough to lay him out flat on his back on the floor. And then he would kneel down over his chest, put his hands around his throat and tell him that if he didn't answer every single fucking question he was asked, he would kill him. He would choke him out and Doug would sob and beg and do what he said as snot and blood spilled out across his stupid fucking smug face. But...

He wasn't that kind of badass. Not even close. So instead, Chance walked up to the counter and he tried, and failed, to deliver the speech he had rehearsed in his head over and over on the walk from school. "'I know Moloch's pack has something to do with all the missing kids this year, Doug. And I know what you and a bunch of other people from around town are doing it—' "'Shut the fuck up, dork!' Doug rudely interrupted him as he continued to grin and his eyes grew cold. "'You don't know shit!'

How could a movie be tied to some missing girl, stupid? And then he laughed in his face. Chance froze. He hadn't prepared for anything like this. In his mind, as he had rehearsed, Doug had never, ever interrupted him. He had just stood there and listened. Chance was now completely thrown off. Yeah, well...

How come you... He stammered, growing more frustrated by the second over how the exchange was going. Yeah, well, how come... Doug repeated in a mocking impersonation before he laughed again and then asked, Forget how to talk, dork?

Chance's face now became flush with embarrassment and anger. "No, I... what? I know what you... you and a lot of them..." "I know what you and a lot of... I'm stupid!" Doug laughed. But then his laughter stopped when Chance yelled much louder than he had intended. "I know what the fuck goes on in the Masonic Temple with you and the girls and a whole lot of other people, asshole, and if you don't give me Moloch's pact, I'm going to the police!"

There it was. A flicker of fear in Doug's eyes. And more importantly, a flicker of recognition. There was something going on at the temple. He knew that now with certainty. But then, Doug did something else he hadn't planned for. He walked out from behind the counter and grabbed Chance by his shirt. Grabbed him hard. He was weirdly strong for a skinny goth stoner who looked like he had never seen the inside of a gym. "'You better watch your fucking mouth, little man!' he venomously spit."

Someone else already checked it out today. And even if they hadn't, I still wouldn't give it to you, dork. That's not how this shit works. Doug then looked around the store and out into the parking lot real quick before he added, I don't like your attitude, dickwad.

"'How about instead of you going to the police, "'how about I choke you to death right here in the store "'and watch the light go out of your eyes? "'And then I drag your scrawny corpse into the back, "'and when I'm done with work, I take your body to the dump "'and throw it in with the trash like the garbage you are.' "'Let me go!' Chance yelled as he tried in vain to pry Doug's hands off of his shirt. "'Instead, Doug quickly pulled him closer, "'followed by immediately pushing him down onto the ground.'

Doug was on top of him almost instantaneously. His hands were around Chance's neck and he was choking him. Chance was shocked by how quickly his vision began to dim as he desperately and futilely fought back. Doug was squeezing his neck so hard he thought he was going to break it. And was there a bit of red in his eyes?

Chance started to think this was it for him, that he was going to die on the floor of Video Ventures, that the last things he would ever see were Doug Hinckley's ugly face, demonic eyes, a poster for the Princess Bride behind him near some boxes of Raisinets, Red Vines, movie theater-style microwave popcorn, and what the fuck was that shadowy demon-looking thing floating just below the ceiling? A second or two before Chance was going to pass out, someone pulled into the parking lot, and Doug let him go.

"'Save by the bell, little man,' Doug said with a disappointed sneer and normal-looking eyes again as he stood up. "'Go ahead and call the police. They'll just file that shit away with all the other crazy bullshit stories they get. Tell them about what just happened here, too. They won't believe you, dickwad.' Then as he walked back behind the counter, he threatened, "'And if you ever come back in here again, it'll be the last time. Now fuck off!'

Chance scrambled to his feet, turned and stumbled out as he coughed and gasped for breath. He wanted to steal a glance back up towards the ceiling to see if that thing was still up there, but he was too afraid. He tried telling himself that he hadn't really seen anything, that the shadow was nothing more than a product of him starting to black out, but he knew better. He also promised himself that he was not going to let his fear of Doug keep him from breaking into the old Masonic temple, and that he was going to break in soon.

Before we find out what Chance sees inside the Masonic Temple and what happens next in the story, time for our mid-show sponsor break. If you don't want to hear these ads anymore, please become a Robert or Annabelle on the Scared to Death Patreon and get these nightmare fuel stories and all other Scared to Death episodes ad-free and more.

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Thank you for hearing out our sponsors. And now let's return to the action of Moloch's Pact 2, Satanic Panic. Three nights later, 17-year-old Joni Wright was naked and afraid. She'd been blindfolded and gagged. She'd also been tied down to a cold concrete floor. She could hear a bunch of men around her chanting in another language. It sounded like Latin. She could also hear and feel something terrible behind them. Something that didn't sound or feel terrible.

If someone were to have taken the gag out of her mouth and to have asked her to explain exactly what she was hearing and feeling, she wouldn't have been able to find the right words. No matter how much time she might have been given to do so, she would only be able to say that whatever it was, it filled her with an indescribable terror. Joanie was so confused in addition to being afraid. She didn't know where she was, why she was there, or what was about to happen to her.

Hours earlier, she had been attacked by Mr. Wilson, a friend of her parents from church in Whittier Park, a man she had known for years, who had only ever been kind to her before. She thought she might have seen him looking into her bedroom window from across the street the night earlier, and now she wished like hell she had said something about that to her parents, or to anybody. But she wasn't sure. Not then. And she didn't want her dad or anyone else to freak out, or for a harmless, lonely old man to get into trouble. But he was far from harmless.

She had been walking back home from her piano lesson when it happened. She was supposed to have been walking with her friend Christy, but Christy wasn't feeling good and hadn't shown up for their lesson. Her parents hadn't wanted her to walk around anywhere by herself, not since Tara Jennings had gone missing. Not until the police figured out what happened to her and the other girls and made an arrest. But she hadn't thought it was a big deal since it wasn't even dark out yet, and she'd only had to walk about a quarter of a mile.

There was only one little stretch in the park that she had been a bit nervous about, a short trail that cut through a small wooded area in the park center next to the pond. She'd almost walked around it, but she'd felt silly feeling scared. She'd hated how scared she'd been feeling for months. Now she knew, painfully well, that she'd been right to be scared, that she wasn't being paranoid or silly.

that she should have taken the longer safer route around the edge of the park a path that was much more visible to anyone else either also in the park or driving by or living along its edge and it would have only added a minute two tops to her walk but she hadn't taken the safe path and he had waited behind some bushes alongside that trail to the center he must have somehow known she would be out walking by he was so ready for her he had calmly called out

Hey, Joanie, how was your piano lesson tonight? It sounded so harmless, so kind, that it had disarmed her. She was startled and she had gasped, but she was also smiling when she turned around. When she had turned just in time to see her parents' friend, the kind old man from church, push a damp rag up against and over her nose and mouth. When she began to regain consciousness a little while later, it was still light out. Her hands had been tied behind her back and she'd been gagged.

She was still at the park, behind those bushes, laying on her stomach. Mr. Wilson was on top of her, pressing a knee into her back and holding a knife against her throat, telling her that if she made a sound, he'd kill her. Mr. Wilson was also crying, and he kept whispering stuff like, And then he had covered her mouth again with that rag.

When she came to next, she was lying in the back seat of his car. She was now blindfolded, in addition to being gagged, and her feet had been tied together and also tied to her bound hands. When the car stopped, Mr. Wilson got out, opened her door, climbed into the back and bent over her and placed the rag over her mouth and nose yet again. The next time she had woken up, she was naked and chained to a cold floor, and she was listening to the sounds of a bunch of men chanting.

Great Moloch, receive this sacrifice. Feast on her virgin blood. Grow strong and rise again.

She'd tried to scream. She'd tried to call out for someone, anyone to help her. She'd wanted to tell them that she wouldn't say anything to anyone if they would just let her go. She wanted to beg for her life, to ask them why they were doing this, but she could only make such sad, muted, pathetic sounds. She'd shaken against her chains even though it hurt her wrists and ankles to do so, even though she knew she wasn't nearly strong enough to break free.

She'd then heard the chanting stop when a man, a familiar voice, cried out, "He is here! Moloch is here! It is time for him to feed once more! He is nearly risen!" She'd heard the name Moloch before, at school, and she knew immediately it was a demon.

The same demon she'd been hearing her friends and kids at school talk about. The demon a local cult had been sacrificing girls like her to. And then imagining what it might do to her, thinking about what kids had said it had done to the other girls, she had started to go mad with fear. As the cultists continued to chant around her, as Yoni thrashed wildly about and began to scrape some of the skin off of her wrists and ankles, she suddenly felt a naked man's body sit on top of her. She was convinced he was about to rape her.

that this waking nightmare was going to be how she was introduced to sex, that it would be her first and only sexual experience. She had no idea it was about to be so much worse than that. She heard Mr. Wilson's voice. She felt his body shake. He sounded like he was crying again as he quietly said, I'm so sorry, Joanie, but it must be done. And then his voice grew louder and stronger as he proclaimed, Once you've seen him, you're a part of him. He started saying something in Latin next.

and then he'd started to scream a loud guttural roar and as he roared, Joanie felt cold, sharp steel plunge into the top of her stomach. The pain was immense. It radiated out to every single part of her body from the tips of her toes to the top of her skull and the pain grew the more she tried to wriggle away from the blade despite how badly it hurt, she couldn't stop moving and as Mr. Wilson continued to scream, so did she as he dragged the blade painfully down towards her crotch.

She felt blood. So much of her own warm blood spilling out from inside of her. She was so afraid. She was dying. She knew she would be dead very soon unless someone intervened quickly and saved her.

She tried to pray in her mind, begging God to stop this madness. And then, she began to completely disassociate from reality. To convince herself that none of what she was experiencing was actually happening. It was far too horrible to be true. Too evil to be real. It had to be a dream. A terrible dream that she desperately needed to wake up from. In her dream that wasn't a dream, she now looked down at herself from up above. She watched a naked, bloody, and shaky Mr. Wilson stand up and walk away from her mutilated body.

and then she heard a few of the cultists standing around her gasp. They paused for a moment in their chanting, and she heard and felt it again, and understood why.

It was the same strange, terrible sound and feeling from before, the one she would never be able to fully describe if she had been given a million years to do so. The sound that skipped your ears and went straight into the depths of your mind. The feeling that completely overcame you, as if someone had thrown a massive, heavy and cold blanket on top of you. Then as the cultists resumed their chanting with much more vigor and volume than before, she somehow saw it in her mind's eye. Moloch, the great demon.

The devourer of children, of virgins, one of the horrid kings of hell. The ancient entity that had just taken the physical form of a monstrous minotaur. A massive creature with the naked muscled body of a large man, with legs like those of a bull, with cloven hooves instead of human feet. The nightmare with a bull's horns, a bull's nose but human-like eyes that glowed red and a mouth full of fangs.

She was filled with so much fear at the sight of Moloch that she suddenly wished that if she couldn't wake up, she would just die instead. And quickly, before it had the chance to touch her. But she of course would not get any of her wishes. Luck, like God, would not save her. Instead, Moloch stood over her, bent down, and began to feast as her consciousness returned back into her body. She could feel the beast eat her alive. And she knew, right before she lost her mind completely,

that this was no dream, that while she still hadn't quite yet died, she was already in hell. In addition to the members of the cult of Moloch, someone else witnessed young Joni Wright's death, Bishop High School Jr., and former best friend of the cult's youngest member, Lincoln Clay, Chance Watkins.

About two hours earlier that night, just before 10 p.m., under the cover of darkness, Chance had managed to pull himself up to the base of the old metal fire escape stairs in the alley between the Masonic Temple and the old former hotel, now luxury downtown condos, next to it.

He'd scouted out the building a few times the previous two nights, and he thought his best bet would be to bring some rope with the grappling hook on the end of it. Thank you, local hardware store that always has so much weird shit. And then he would hook the metal stair base with the rope, pull himself up, and then try to get into an unlocked window or the roof. His plan had worked. After attaching the hook to the metal platform on the third try, after only loudly clanking the hook against the grating once, and then waiting a few minutes to see if any cult member or demon was going to come for him,

Chance was able to pull himself up to the base of the stairs, and from there, walk up along the side of the building, quietly checking windows as he ascended. They were all locked. But, once he was up on the roof, he'd found that the door leading down into the building was not locked. Jackpot. He had his way in. He just had to take it, which was so much easier said than done. He'd never been more afraid to do something. This was ten times scarier than confronting Doug Hinkley at Video Ventures...

But he did it. And unlike his worst fears, he was not attacked by the demon immediately upon entering. He wasn't dragged further into the building and ripped in half or eaten alive or anything. No chanting, torch-holding Satanists grabbed him and sunk ceremonial daggers into his chest or carved a pentagram into his stomach. Nothing happened. It was completely quiet. After he had shut the door behind him, chance remained still for around a minute and let his eyes acclimate as best they could to the darkness around him before he began heading down the stairs.

When he'd made it down to the fourth and top floor, he had stopped again, and still, he had heard nothing. He lurked around as silently as possible, grateful that the old building's solidly built floors didn't creak or groan as he peeked into various rooms. Rooms that, as far as he could tell, were mostly being used for storage. Boxes of old paperwork were stacked nearly up to the ceiling in some of them, along with some old desks, chairs, and other not-satanic-looking supplies.

Nothing he came across looked nefarious in any way. Nothing had any pentagrams drawn into it, no satanic bibles, no closet full of cloaks, no remnants of what looked like blood, no bodies or body parts, not even any daggers or knives or even candles. It was mostly the same for the third floor, except some of the rooms there were completely empty and two had beds in them. But still, not a single sign of the occult.

but then on the second floor he'd found something and his heart had began to beat faster someone else had been where he was and recently in a bathroom there was a toothbrush some toothpaste a stick of deodorant and a small tube of hair gel lined up against the wall in the back of the sink and there were fresh piss stains on the floor around the toilet

Then down the hall in another room with a bed, a bed that definitely looked like it had been recently slept in. There were some clothes in the closet. Men's clothes from someone about his size. A few t-shirts, a couple of pairs of underwear, some socks and some jeans, and a robe. A black hooded cult robe. Further incriminating were a handful of books, occult books, the lesser key of Solomon, the satanic bible, satanic rituals, the devil's notebook,

and the Book of Black Magic and of Pax. Chance felt both vindicated and more scared than ever. It was true. 100% holy shit true. There really were Satanists in Deacon's Point. But this still wasn't the evidence he had broken in to find. It wasn't enough to share with the police. It wasn't illegal to put on a robe and read about the devil. It wasn't even worth digging his Polaroid camera out of his backpack and taking some pictures. He'd have to keep exploring. And he felt certain he would find some...

"'Shit!' Chance about jumped out of his skin when he heard a door slam shut on the floor beneath him, and then it was followed by an even scarier sound, footsteps on the stairs. Someone was heading up towards the floor he was on, and they were moving fast. "'Shit, shit, shit!' Chance spun around looking for a place to hide. There wasn't nearly enough shit inside the closet to hide behind, but he couldn't risk leaving the room he was in and being spotted in the hallway either, or being heard moving around.'

The bed. He'd have to hide under the bed. Chance dropped down onto the floor as he now heard whoever had been on the stairs walking down the hall towards him. It was probably whoever was staying in the room he was in. Chance shimmied as fast as he could on his stomach, trying to slide himself under the bed, but then his backpack got stuck on the frame and the footsteps were so close now.

There wasn't time to slide back out and take his backpack off, and there wasn't enough room between the floor and the bottom of the bed for him to twist around and grab and adjust it. He'd have to just push and hope he could somehow jam it in. They were almost in the room! Thank God they hadn't turned on the lights yet. Chance heard his camera break against the metal bed frame as he slid fully under the bed just in time to avoid being seen. So much for taking any pictures. But it beat being cut and then skinned alive or crucified or something.

His heart was now pounding so loudly in his ears that he actually wondered if whoever had just come into the room could hear it. They flipped on the lights, and now they were taking off their clothes. They sat down on the bed and crunched Chance's camera even further with their weight. Luckily, it was a quiet crunch. Chance could only see their feet as they sat down to take off their shoes, and those shoes were black and gray Air Jordan 3s.

Chance had to stifle a gasp when he caught a glimpse of the soul of one of them, when the guy on the bed tossed it onto the floor, and black marker were the initials L.C. Lincoln Clay.

Holy shit.

Chance was suddenly filled with rage. He almost slid out from under the bed and tried to attack Lincoln for trying to hurt his girlfriend, for trying to kill her, and for almost certainly killing or helping to kill Tara Jennings. But then he thought about Moloch's pact, about who Lincoln had always been before he had seen it. He reminded himself that Lincoln hadn't been a bad guy before he saw that movie. He was another victim of whatever this evil was that had infected their town. Chance stayed put, stayed quiet, and waited for Lincoln to leave.

He assumed that if Lincoln was putting on his robe, he was going to a satanic ceremony. He would need to follow him, see exactly what it entailed, so he would hopefully have something concrete to bring to the police, even if he wouldn't be able to take any photos. After Lincoln left the room and walked back down the stairs, Chance quietly snuck out from underneath the bed, took off his shoes so he could move about more quietly, and headed down after him.

Halfway down to the next floor, which was the main floor, he heard the murmurs of what sounded like a dozen or more people milling about and talking. And then someone loudly announced, She'll be here soon, everyone! The fifth sacrifice! Time to move downstairs! He recognized that voice. Are you fucking kidding me? He thought. Was that Buck Stowers? His principal? And also, shit,

Another girl must have went missing. He wondered if it would be someone he knew. And how was he going to stop it? He hadn't seen any phones in the building. And even if he found one, would he be able to call the police and not get caught? And even if he did call the police, would they actually help? What if the rumors that even some members of the police were in the cult, including the chief, were true? It was one thing to walk into the station in the middle of the day and talk to someone. It was another to witness a murder and then hope they would help instead of just killing him too.

He didn't know how he would be able to help her. He hoped he would just think of something soon. At the moment, he needed to make it downstairs undetected. Once Chance could no longer hear anyone else on the main floor with him, he poked his head around the corner. It looked empty.

He heard movement and voices downstairs, and after a few moments spent gathering up the courage to walk across the main floor and possibly be spotted by men who he assumed would definitely kill him, Chance glided silently over to the door that opened to a set of stairs that led to the basement. For some reason, possibly to make the basement a bit harder to access, the stairway he had walked down stopped at the main floor. He put his ear up against the door, listened for a few moments, and after he decided no one was nearby on the other side, he cracked it open.

Peeking through, he couldn't see anyone either on the stairs or at the bottom of them. And then just for a moment, he thought about bailing. He thought about quietly shutting the door, quickly throwing on his shoes, sprinting out the front door and waiting, like everyone else in town who wasn't in on it, for someone else to shut it all down. But then he thought again of Tara Jennings, April Mullins, Sandy DeWitt, Teresa Lane, and whoever else they had gotten a hold of tonight. How many more girls would they take before it was all over?

Leaving the door at the top open in case he needed to turn around and make a break for it, he headed down the stairs. He was so glad it was so dark, the stairwell and basement both. When he'd made it to the bottom, he peeked around the corner and saw somewhere between a dozen and fifteen hooded, robe-wearing guys moving around in the darkness on the other side of the room. And then he heard noise from above. Someone had just come in through the front door. ''I got her! I've done what Moloch commands!'' He heard what sounded like an out-of-breath old man yell.

"'Shit!' Chance thought as he dropped down to the floor and began army crawling toward some stacks of chairs to his right as many of the men in robes now looked in his direction. He was positive for a moment or two that someone had seen him or that they would see him, but he was able to make it behind the chairs without being spotted.'

A few moments later, after wondering if Moloch was actually real, and if he was about to witness something so much scarier than anything he had ever seen in any of the dozens and dozens of horror movies he had watched over the years, Chance looked on in terror as the man who had yelled from above burst into the room with an unconscious and hog-tied girl flung over his shoulder, a girl he recognized.

Holy shit. It was Joni Wright. They'd gone to school together since kindergarten. They hadn't ever been friends exactly, and they had gone to different junior highs, but they had gone to the same grade school and were in the same math class. Joni was quiet, smart, and it always seemed so nice. He was pretty sure she'd even been friends for a little while with Piper in seventh or eighth grade. And now she'd been kidnapped by these bastards. What the fuck were they about to do to her?

They're gonna sacrifice her to a demon just like the kids at school have been talking about, his mind answered. Chance wanted to scream to try and run away and get help, but how? He felt sick. He felt worthless. He needed to know for sure what was about to happen so he could tell someone, but he also needed to help her, and he didn't know how to do both. Feeling paralyzed and powerless, he stayed still in the darkness and watched.

He was still trying to figure out how he could help her as men started to chant. He still hoped there was something he could do as he watched them take off her clothes and chain her to the floor in the middle of a candlelit pentagram. He kept telling himself he would somehow figure something out, how he wasn't going to let them actually hurt her until he saw it. Moloch. At first, he didn't believe his eyes. He thought it was just some combination of flickering shadows from the candlelight, his imagination fueled by months of rumors around town, and the crippling fear he felt.

But then he clearly saw Moloch, pacing behind the pentagram in the darkness. And more than seeing it, he felt it. He felt the most intense, paralyzing, crushing fear he had ever encountered. And that was when he had stopped entertaining any delusions of being able to save Joanie. He now didn't think the odds were good of him living much longer than she was going to.

He watched helplessly as the old man, nude after disrobing, straddled his classmate with a knife in his hand. He watched him plunge the blade into her stomach. He watched the demon approach the mortally wounded girl after the naked man had backed away and right before it began to devour her. Chance first puked and then pissed himself before he fainted. When he woke up several minutes later, the demon had already vanished and the robed men were talking excitedly about how they now just needed one final sacrifice.

He heard them saying shit like, "Molok will be unbound, free to bring hell to earth and heaven to his disciples!" Several of Molok's disciples had pulled their hoods off and he could see their faces. His principal. The mayor. Some guy he had seen driving a Porsche around town a couple of times. Fucking Doug from Video Ventures. And Lincoln. Lincoln was mopping up the floor where the girl had been, cleaning up her blood. Her body was already gone. He wondered if the monster had eaten her whole.

Chan stayed still behind the chairs and waited to be spotted, but no one saw him. He waited for the last of them, which was Lincoln, to leave. And then he tried to wait another hour or so before he made his escape, but he couldn't take being alone in the basement where that thing had been. He worried it was going to come back, and he decided he would rather die fighting against some cult member than to be devoured in the basement by that demon, and he ran up the stairs.

And when no one was on the main floor, he had kept running, right out the front door, not stopping until he was crawling back inside the window to his bedroom. Six days later, after sitting on what he had seen for nearly a week, after going through back issues of the local newspaper and looking at all the articles you could find that related to any and all of the disappearing girls at the library, Chance determined that Detective Rob Shoemaker was the police officer most closely connected with trying to get to the bottom of what was happening.

He decided he was the person he should talk to about what he had seen, unless, of course, he was in on it and just going through the motions. But then six nights after the murder of Joni Wright, Chance followed Rob home. He peeked into his living room window and he saw all the photos of the missing girls on the wall. The photos of his principal, the mayor, the police chief, Lincoln Clay and others. And in the middle of those photos, a photo of the old Masonic Temple. Rob was not in on it.

He was clearly trying to figure it out, just like Chance, to figure out what the hell was going on in Deacon's Point. And now finally Chance felt comfortable sharing what he had seen, and he knocked on his door and told him everything. And to his immense relief, Rob believed him. He believed it all. Even Chance claiming to have literally watched a demon start to approach Joni Wright after she had had her stomach sliced open in front of the mayor, his principal, and other men from town.

Chance asked Rob why Joni's disappearance had yet to make the paper, and Rob told him that his chief, Joel, had taken over the investigation. And since he was part of the cult, that meant he had killed the investigation. He told him how Rob was currently trying to convince Joni Wright's parents that she wasn't actually missing, that she had ran off with some kids she had met from another town. Joel even claimed that Joni had called the station and spoken with him, that she wanted him to tell her parents she was safe and that she would be home soon, in just a few days.

Rob felt he was clearly trying to buy a little time until, what? Now he knew. The cult believed that once they had killed the sixth girl, what anyone thought they did wouldn't matter anymore. That Joel and the others would no longer have to hide who they were and what they had done. So, now what? Rob told him that he needed to catch the bastards in the act. That no one would believe their claims. No one who could help them stop the cult anyway.

He said that all they could do was wait until another girl went missing and then Rob would head to the temple and do everything and anything he could to stop them and save her. But what if he couldn't? Chance asked. What if they killed the sixth girl and unleashed that thing on the entire town? On the world? Rob shrugged. He told Chance that if he had a better plan, he'd love to hear it.

Chance left Rob's house that night feeling both grateful that the homicide detective actually believed him, but also dejected regarding how little help Rob was actually able to offer. He had wanted Rob to talk to some officers from another town or to contact the FBI, but as much as he hated to admit it, Rob was right. Who the hell would believe him? No one. And if he did contact anyone, they would for sure contact his police chief and Joel would probably suspend him and start the process of firing him or have him killed.

Chance wasn't feeling very good about their prospects of being able to bring the cult down when he walked into his house later that night. And then, when he saw the look on his mother's face when he stepped inside, he felt even worse. She looked like she had been crying. Mom! Mom, what happened? Piper called, she said. Someone broke into the Zimmerman's house this afternoon and now Courtney's missing. They think she's been kidnapped. Chance's mom kept talking, but he didn't hear anything else she said. That motherfucker!

"'Lincoln was behind this,' he thought. "'He couldn't take Piper, "'so he took her younger sister instead. "'She had just turned 15. "'She was still a virgin. "'Piper had referenced that "'when she had made a sick joke "'and asked if he'd be willing to save her younger sisters, too. "'Motherfucker!' he said slowly in a daze."

and then he ran into his room, grabbed his backpack that still had the rope and grappling hook in it, and ran out of the house. He was aware of his mother yelling after him in the background, but he didn't care. He didn't have time to explain. He had to make it back to Rob's place and hope to God he was still home. They needed to get to the temple, and they needed to get there now. Less than 30 minutes later, high school junior Chance Watkins and Deacon's Point's lone homicide detective Rob Shoemaker were parking Rob's unmarked car two blocks from the old Masonic Temple.

Rob hadn't wanted to bring Chance and risk him getting killed at all, but Chance had convinced him that if he just walked in the front door like he had planned, if it was even unlocked, they would hear him. Some of them might be armed, and he would be as good as dead. He'd convinced him that it would be much better to enter through the roof again, and that Chance had the equipment to pull that off, and knew the layout since he'd been inside before. Rob reluctantly agreed to bring him along.

Luckily, the door on the roof was still unlocked, and Rob and Chance were able to sneak in, make it down to the second floor, and creep into Lincoln's room. Lincoln wasn't there, and his robe was missing. Clearly, they'd already gathered downstairs, and now it was time for Rob and Chance to put an end to Moloch's cult, or die trying. The unlikely pair crept down to the main floor, which was also empty, and then they made their way to the entrance to the basement stairs. And when they cracked the heavy soundproof door open, they heard enthusiastic chanting.

Oh my god, Chan said, looking at Rob with wide, fearful, sad eyes. We might be too late. Courtney might already be dead. All homicide detective Rob Shoemaker said back was, stay behind me. He removed his Beretta M9 from his hip holster, put a round in the chamber, and started practically running down the stairs. It was go time. By the time they burst into the basement, it was almost too late.

The cultists loudly chanted around a pentagram, chanted what in English translated to The chaotic violence that came next played out in slow motion and chanced his mind.

He saw a naked man he didn't recognize straddling a nude and chained down Courtney Zimmerman, and he was beginning to lift a ceremonial dagger above him. He heard Rob scream, ''Put the knife down or I'll shoot!'' He heard the cultists stop their chanting. He saw the naked man pause. He watched Moloch begin to approach the pentagram from the shadows. He heard Buck Stowers scream, ''Do it! Do it now, goddammit! Complete the sixth sacrifice and no one will be able to stop us!''

Chance then watched the naked man with wild eyes turn his focus back to court in his body beneath him and start to say something in Latin as he began to bring the knife down. Then he heard three loud shots ring out in quick succession.

All three hit their target, and the naked man with the knife slumped over and was dead before he hit the ground. He then heard Buck scream, You fool! as he then turned and started to move towards Rob. Another two shots rang out, one of which caught Buck in the head. He fell back and down to the ground as some of the cultists stood frozen in fear while others began to scatter and run towards the door.

and then he saw something he could have never expected. He watched Moloch race out from the shadows and, instead of attacking Courtney, he stepped past her, grabbed the closest robe-wearing man, roared and threw him against the wall across the room behind Chance, blocking the door back upstairs. Chance then watched as another cultist, the chief of police, grabbed the dagger from the floor and Rob opened fire again, shooting him four times, stopping him from killing Courtney.

Moloch then grabbed two more cult members by their heads, roared again, and slammed their heads together hard enough to flatten their skulls. The demon appeared to be furious that his devotees had failed and denied him his ascension. Another cultist, they were all panicking now, tried again to grab the dagger, and Rob shot him as well, while Moloch bit into a different man's throat with a ferocity that nearly decapitated him.

Chance next watched Doug from Video Vixen's run for the dagger as Moloch threw another Coltis across the room. That man slammed into a guy near Rob, sending the man ricocheting into Rob, knocking him down and sending his gun sprawling out across the floor. Shit! Chance worried they wouldn't be able to stop Doug now. He started running as he screamed, No! And just as Doug went to stab Cort, he slammed into him and knocked him aside. But Doug didn't let go of the knife and he was able to scramble to his feet before Chance could stand back up. He

He sneered as he raised the dagger up and then swung it down towards Chance's chest. Moloch roared as he swung his claw into Doug's face, hard enough to completely obliterate it. Then he stared at Chance for the briefest moment, still roaring, before he turned his attention back to the rest of the cult. The demon's fury seemed to be only directed at those who bore his mark or those who wished they bore it. Chance watched as his old friend Lincoln stared at him from across the room, stared at him with nothing but hate, and ran towards he and Piper's sister.

Chance crawled over to Courtney to try and protect her, and then, as he turned to defend them from Lincoln, he heard another shot ring out, and the contents of Lincoln's head exploded out from above his eyes, drenching Chance with his brains and blood. His body fell limply next to Courtney, whose body Chance now covered as best he could with his t-shirt, as he told her everything was going to be okay, that they would save her. But he still didn't know if that was how this was all going to end.

Chance heard more shots ring out and the demon roar again. He heard more cultists scream and cry out in what sounded like death wails as the demon destroyed them, one by one. And he tried not to think of how he had just watched the best friend he'd ever had die. He curled up in the fetal position next to Courtney, closed his eyes, covered his ears with his hands and begged God to spare them. And then after another minute that felt like it had lasted a lifetime, Chance felt a hand on his shoulder.

He heard a voice saying something over and over. It took him a while to understand it, to realize he wasn't hearing gunfire anymore, or the roar of a demon, or the death cries of his cult members. He wasn't hearing anything other than Courtney crying and Detective Rob Shoemaker saying, Chance, Chance, it's over. They're all dead. It's gone. It's over, Chance. It's over. One year later, Deacon's Point, 1989.

The town was finally out of the weekly news cycle after months of headlines like Satanic cult behind murders of five missing girls. The real satanic panic of Deacon's Point. And when the mayor, the high school principal, and the chief of police sacrificed teen girls to a demon. The true story of the Deacon's Point murders. Life had still not gone back to normal. It would never go back to the way it was before. But at least the town was no longer paralyzed by terror or infested with reporters and journalists.

13 men, including local teen Lincoln Clay, and five teen girls had all died. Detective Rob Shoemaker was given all kinds of national awards, declared a hero, and credited with saving both Chance and Courtney and killing the entire cult single-handedly. Rob had done his best to share how Chance had also helped, but the media didn't seem to care about that. Chance didn't mind. He assumed the narrative of one brave cop gunning down an entire satanic cult made for a better story, and it was basically true.

Not surprisingly, there were no mentions in any articles or news stories about an actual demon doing any of the killing. The demon that had just, according to Rob, vanished once the last cult member was dead. It was too much to believe. A few months after the massacre, Rob had been recruited to join the FBI, and he'd left town. Chance didn't blame him. Who would want to be linked to a satanic cult for the rest of their life? Chance was going to leave town too, just as soon as he graduated high school, which wouldn't be long now.

Courtney, after a bunch of therapy, had seemed to recover from being almost sacrificed to a demon. A demon she thankfully never actually saw, thanks to her blindfold. Chance, even though he didn't get any therapy because his dad felt that was only for, quote, crazy people and crybabies, had mostly healed as well. He still had nightmares. He wondered if he always would.

Nightmares about both the demon and also dreams of watching lincoln's brains come out of his face or worse Dreams of a faceless lincoln coming for him and trying to kill him despite what lincoln had done He still grieved the loss of his best friend someone he would forever think had not been a bad person But instead someone who got infected with evil chance was still pretty sad about piper breaking up with him It had all been too much for her

Seeing him reminded her of Lincoln trying to kidnap her, of her sister nearly being murdered, and of a demon terrorized near town who had wanted to devour her. Before Rob had left town, he and Chance had sometimes talked about what happened the night the cult was massacred, since no one else would ever believe the entire true story. Now that Rob was gone, now that he and Piper were no longer together, Chance didn't have anyone to talk to about what really had happened. Not anyone he wanted to talk to, at least.

The goth kids at school pestered him constantly for grisly details, grinning while they asked, as if it had been a horror movie or a game instead of real life. They often asked if he knew where Moloch was currently as well, if he still saw him sometimes. And they didn't always believe him when he said he had no idea. But he didn't. If Moloch was still somewhere in Deacon's Point, he didn't know about it. He hadn't seen him or heard about him, and he hoped he never would see or hear about him again.

Six months later, Kells Beach, 1990. Hollywood hits videos. A young horror movie lover brings an odd and empty VHS case for a movie he has never heard of to the counter to ask the clerk about it. Moloch's packed, he says, reading the cover and then flipping it around and reading the back. Once you've seen him, you're a part of him. What the hell is this?

And that's it for another Nightmare Fuel. I hope you loved or were horrified by, or at least entertained by, tonight's Moloch-packed part two, Satanic Panic. Hope that wrapped this little 80s horror movie homage satisfactorily for you. And thank you again for the recent ratings and reviews. Please take the time to leave one if you haven't already. They definitely help keep this show and these stories going. Today's tale was written by me, Dan Cummins, and scored by Logan Keith.

If you enjoyed it, please check out the rest of the Bad Magic Productions catalog. Time Suck every Monday at noon Pacific time with little short sucks on some Fridays and these nightmare-fueled episodes on some Fridays as well. And new episodes of the now long-running Paranormal Podcast, Scared to Death, every Tuesday at midnight. Please go to badmagicproductions.com for all your bad magic needs, including all show-related merch, and stay scared. Bad Magic Productions.

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