"Nina Kiriki Hoffman - Skeleton Key" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Nina Kiriki)

five-dollar bill on the sidewalk.
It was as close as I got to religion.
By the time I was sixteen, the words "Hermes help me" came out of my mouth instead of cuss words
whenever the sit-uation warranted an exclamation, and I didn't even notice. Mom stopped commenting
on it after the novelty wore off; Dad had never even noticed.
When we were seventeen, Sasha, who had skipped a grade in junior high, left for college. In our
letters we never talked about the Sisterhood; she was never home at the right time of month for ritual,
and I didn't know if she did something about it where she was. I continued to go to the hilltop to offer
fire, wine, words, and the incense of burning meat to the open sky, but I felt lonely without Sasha. The
mystery seemed more distant.
Sasha had gone on to the University, but my grade point average and my ambitions weren't as high
as hers. She planned to be a psychologist. I didn't know what I wanted, so when I got out of high school,
I decided to settle for General Studies at State, and see if anything excited me. Sasha's let-ters got
shorter and shorter and mostly talked about the fact that she had to study a lot now so she didn't have
time to write. I talked about my excitement when I moved into my own studio apartment and how weird
it was when Mom and Dad were right across town.
Then I met Steve.
If I had seen highlights of my first college semester in a horror movie, I would have been yelling at
the girl on screen not to be such an idiot. I mean, it's like when people split up to search the scary house
with all the lights offтАФyou know: stupid.
But I was just me, and Steve was just a great-looking curly-haired guy from the coffee shop who
invited me to his apartment a couple of times. We had a great time at his place. We rented horror movies
and ordered out for pizza and played Monster in the Closet after we turned off the TV.
So when he invited me to a Halloween party where there would be a lot of other people like him, I
thought it was a ter-rific idea. Of the four guys I had dated so far in college, Steve was the most fun. If
there were more people like him, I was ready to meet them. As long as I got home before midnight, so I
could celebrate my fifth anniversary of the Sisterhood up on Lindley Hill. I put a twenty in my pocket for
cab fare in case Steve didn't want to leave when I did.
Only he didn't take me to somebody's house; he took me to an abandoned church.
"It's awfully dark," I said when we drove up to the build-ing, which was on the outskirts of town
without even a street-light near it. The only light came from the building itself, a flickering behind broken
stained glass windows.
"It's that kind of party, Tess," Steve said, ushering me in through big wooden double doors and
barring them behind us.
I began to feel suspicious and just a little sick around then, because beyond the entry hall, in the
church's chapel, stood a circle of fat lighted black candles on the flagstone floor, and around the circle of
light stood a circle of people in dark hooded robes, and on the far wall hung a big black cross, upside
down.
The air smelled of patchouli and singed hair.
In the center of the circles of light and people, there was a black slab about six feet long and three
feet wide, with shackles attached. It was crusted with something dark and flaky.
 I glanced up at the windows. The faces had been broken out of all the saints.
"Hermes help me," I muttered.
They dressed me in a white gown. A young woman with green eyes combed out my hair before they
shackled me to the stained stone.
They told me no one would hear me scream, and I tested it and discovered they were right.
They told me Satan would be pleased with me, that each act of humiliation, degradation, and cruelty
they practiced on me would bring them power; and that my ultimate sacrifice of blood and life would
bring them extreme power. And in the end, they were wrong.
When at last I wept, voiceless, an aching in some parts of me, sharp shocks in others, burning and