Curiosity, perhaps. And where else did he have to go?

The church sat forward on the one-and-a-half acre plot, separated from the street by a semicircle of gravel for parking. Stone walkways led both to the front door and around the side of the building to the even smaller parsonage in the rear. He checked the latter as he approached and found the windows dark, but there was a light burning in the chapel. And there was something else . . . music playing, though not the monotonous groan of the pipe organ. Something familiar and strangely incongruous . . .

Sammy Hagar?

The strains of “Heavy Metal” grew louder as he neared the front door and found it standing open. He stood there on the walkway, staring into the darkness of the vestibule and beyond where the shadows receded and a light burned. A row of pews was in sight, and half the podium. Nothing else. No one.

He stepped into the darkened entryway and through the arch into the church proper. The overhead lights were off; only the track lamps above the pulpit shined, and they cast the lectern and its oversized Bible in a spotlight. The big, impressive crucifix on a pedestal to the rear was nearly as tall as Del and, since it was on the periphery of the light, its shadow was etched dimly on the back wall. The rest of the chapel was in darkness, and an adolescent imagination could easily have peopled those empty pews with twilight faces and parishioners of shadow. But Del’s eyes were focused only on the pulpit as he walked slowly up the center aisle. He saw that Sammy Hagar’s screeching guitar riffs were spilling from a dual-cassette machine sitting on the podium next to the lectern. He was concentrating on it so much that he didn’t see the figure slouched in the first pew until he was right on top of it. Then he shrieked and tripped over his own feet and scrambled crablike across the floor, covering his head.

The figure did not move. Del realized that and jumped to his feet, and every shred of common sense told him to run. It told him that, even as he crept closer.

The position of the body and the circumstance of it were both so outright bizarre that Del could only stand there, gaping. It was male, no doubt about that. It wore a dark T-shirt but no pants or underwear. The legs were splayed wide and one hand was locked around its rigored member while the other clutched a bondage magazine with a big-breasted centerfold and lots of chains and straps. The boy couldn’t identify him; the man’s whole head was hidden beneath a big rubber mask, one which, in the gloom beyond the track lights, looked suspiciously like Tor Johnson. Del knew he would have to lift the mask to be sure. His stomach started doing flips as he crept still closer and looked. The head was tilted just enough to one side that he could see under the edge of the mask. The red puckered impression of a mouth could still be seen on the throat, surrounding two ragged punctures. And a trickle of blood, all that was left, had seeped down to defy the sanctity of the white collar. “Knutson.”