I drew the curtain aside and peered in.

The scene that met me sent a chill down my spine. For a moment I thought I was going to faint. I clung to the door frame, closed my eyes, shook my head and opened them again.

I hadn’t been seeing things.

I was still in my right mind.

The woman sitting in the lotus position with her broad, white back to me was naked apart from an old-fashioned, quilted, pale-blue dressing gown, casually wrapped around her hips as if she’d just let it fall from her shoulders.

In front of her was a primitive altar, clad in black velvet, with two silver candlesticks containing tall, black candles. On the wall above the altar hung the most blasphemous picture I had ever seen. It was a copy of a medieval copperplate engraving of Jesus on the cross. In red someone had painted an unusually evil smile on his face, bloodstained horns on his forehead and a colossal, engorged penis rising from his loincloth.

But that was not all. Above the altar a beheaded chicken hung from a wire attached to the ceiling. Hot, fresh blood dripped from the open carotid artery into a silver dish placed between the candlesticks and directly in front of the repugnant image of Christ.230

As I was peering in, the woman reached out a hand, dipped a finger in the blood and daubed her body, chanting all the while, so low and monotonous that it was impossible to catch more than fragments of what she said.

‘…Make your sign on my body … Lord of Darkness, here and here and … the fruits of lust … the gateway of life, I write my words of welcome to you … Oh, Lucifer, let me ride on your staff through the myriads of darkness … Oh, Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, fill my carcass with your servants, may they suck blood from dead animals and raise me to the Queen of the Dying … embrace the Universe with your dark hands and … make all races of the Earth your disciples as you baptise them in the name of Blood, Pain and the Holy Death … to you, in the name of Astaroth, Elimi incarnate and Baal Berith’s burning desire … fill me, fill me, fill me.’

While she was talking like this she raised her arms slowly to the picture on the wall and leaned back in blind desire. Eventually her head was so far back she would have looked straight into my face, had it not been for the fact that only the whites of her eyes were visible. In ecstasy she drew down her hands again, held them in front of her groin and began a series of focused, rhythmic movements. A gurgle came from her throat and her tongue appeared between her teeth. The flickering flames of the candles made her face look like it was growing and her short, swept-back, blonde hair was dripping with sweat. ‘Satan, Satan, Satan,’ she groaned as her movements became more and more frenzied. There was an arousing, strong aroma of incense and the sea in the room, and I stood transfixed, aroused and nauseous, and gripped by a fear I had never experienced before.