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CHAPTER ONE

The redheaded girl lay naked on the marble altar. 

That altar had been the pride of the Benedictine monks at one time, it had been carved by a master hand, it showed silvery in the moonlight that poured through an archway of the ruined chapel, tinting the girl a pallid white as she writhed and moaned. The voices of the worshipers were muted, sounding with hollow tones through the charred stone pillars and crumbled walls which were all that remained of what had been a proud abbey chapel when Henry II ruled England. 

The wind moved across the moors, carrying with it wisps of fog that swirled about their shrouded bodies as men and women knelt before the altar where the unfrocked priest was celebrating the Black Mass. The moon was a ball of brilliance that shone down on us through low, scudding clouds, casting long black shadows from the few pillars that were left of the great chapel which had made Exmoor Abbey famous seven hundred years before. 

I knelt with the others. My name is Eve Drum, I am an agent for L.U.S.T., the League of Underground Spies and Terrorists, which is an off-shoot of the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency. Under the wrap which I had brought with me from London, I was just as naked as the redhead on the altar. The night was warm, it was early summer, but even so, I shivered as I watched the unfrocked priest lift the consecrated chalice to the sky and intone the blasphemous words that are a part of the Black Mass. 

"Venite, benedicti Satanus, in regnum aeternum!” 

The acolytes chanted the response, heads bent and hands clasped together. Behind them, this hooded, shrouded congregation echoed their blasphemous words. 

I'm no religious nut but I felt angry as those sonorous Latin syllables rolled out over the audience. Had I not been here on an assignment for L.U.S.T., I wouldn't have been caught dead in a place like this. I admitted to a sense of excitement. My heart was hammering away fifteen to the dozen. 

The celebrant of the Black Mass was a defrocked priest, a necessary integral of the desecration; so also was the consecrated chalice and the host that had been properly blessed, then stolen from a church. He wore the chasuble, that brocaded garment draped in front and back of his otherwise naked body, while the two women who were his acolytes wore versions similar to his vestment. 

As the women bowed low at the elevation, their chasubles slipped upward, baring their pallid buttocks to the sight of the congregation. Their legs were shapely, firmly fleshed, very provocative in high-heeled slippers, their buttocks plump and pretty. 

The worshipers were chanting now, Latin verses which I did not understand. The man beside me, Kenneth Derwent, a barrister for the cult, tugged at my sleeve. 

"Make believe you're chanting, pet. It's expected." 

Latin and I were strangers, but I chanted something in a low voice so nobody would recognize the fact. My eyes went everywhere inside the ruined abbey, peering under hoods that hid faces, studying the priest and the nude woman who was the living altar for the Host. 

I had made something of a study of the Black Mass since that day three weeks before when my case officer, David Anderjanian, had told me I was about to become a devil-worshiper. I knew that the messe noire was a carry over from some all-but-forgotten pagan ritual, during which the Nature gods Pan and Diana, were adored by their followers. With the coming of Christ, this ritual took a new turn. For Pan and Diana, read the Devil. 

In the early Dark Ages, when life for most men and women of Europe had been a hell on Earth, when the only people who counted were churchmen or nobility and warriors, the serfs turned away from a God that seemed to have deserted them, and gave their affections to His rival, instead. 

The sabbats of the witches, the messe noire, the mass of St. Secaire, were both entertainments and adorations. To the peasant, aching from his daytime labors in the fields, the night brought enchantment, at the sabbat or the Black Mass. He could release the frustrations of his daily life with the daughter or wife of a neighbor, who was taking his own wife or daughter in the orgiastic rites that attended the worship of the Devil. 

A cry broke the train of my thoughts. 

The priest was bending over the naked girl, bestowing the blasphemous kiss upon her body. I watched the red head writhe and twist as she uttered demented little cries. She was under the influence of a drug that made her quiescent, yet which aroused the animal lusts of her body at the same time. 

The acolytes trembled, watching the caress. The on lookers swayed, moaning, their desires stimulated both by sight of the nude woman and by the kisses placed between her parted thighs by the celebrant. She groaned, her hips rose and fell, her pale white legs moved apart and then together. 

"Are you sure you can take all this?" 

Kenneth Derwent was beside me, solicitous for my welfare. I breathed back, “This isn't exactly my bag, but I won't make waves. Relax, Ken. You've done your duty, sneaking me in here. The rest is up to yours truly." 

His face under the woolen hood was anxious. He smiled slightly when he caught my nod. I am a mod chick, I dig an orgy every once in a while, especially in the line of duty. I would not disgrace my fellow L.U.S.T. members. 

The chanting grew stronger in tone, but now the congregation was getting into the spirit of the thing, I could make out bodies swaying closer and closer together, and hands that were dipping out of sight inside the heavy woolen cloaks that hid the nakedness of cult members. 

David Anderjanian had warned me... 

"We've stumbled onto a damn clever scheme, Eve, one so clever that we're amazed nobody ever thought of it before. You know all those cults they have in California?" 

“The religious nuts, the sun worshipers, the fun and games gang, all the kinky outfits. Yeah, I've heard of them. A bunch of kooks!” 

"Would you ever think to investigate them?"

"Me, I'm a liberal. Let them have their kicks." 

David Anderjanian grinned at me triumphantly. He is a huge Viking of a man, six feet four and with muscles to match, blond hair and sun-tanned skin. I believe he might make good husband material, but I've never been able to lead him to an altar. Except maybe one in a ruined abbey chapel where a messe noire was being celebrated. 

"It makes a perfect cover, doesn't it?” David asked. "A perfect cover...oh!” 

I thought a minute. In our business, which is that of catching and killing enemy spies and agents when necessary, a 'cover' is a kind of disguise that protects a secret agent from discovery. My cover at the moment was that of lady sociologist, studying the customs and manners of my English fellows. Kenneth Derwent, as a lawyer for the Royal Order of Satanic Societies, was in a position to get me invited to a real live Black Mass, where I was to contact a man named Brian Evans. 

When David Anderjanian told me about the cults in California and how one of them was suspected of being a camouflage for some international dirty work, I knew damn well he could be right. We Americans are a live and-let-live kind of people. If it's your bag, then enjoy it, so long as you don't hurt anybody else. 

Foreign secret agents are well aware of this laissez-faire attitude. So one of them had organized a cult all his own, and named it the Beatific Association of Devil-worshipers, with allied branches in England and in Paris. From the L.U.S.T. agent who had penetrated its ranks, David and I learned that the people were harmless for the most part, but there were a few who were not so harmless. 

It was these few who were the spies and secret agents. 

We had no proof. We did not even know who they were, really. My job was to be in England, maybe even go on to Paris, with the idea of learning who the master minds behind B.A.D. might be. 

They had a way of exchanging information that our agents in Uncle Sam country had not been able to decipher. This, too, was part of my job.... 

A hand slithered up my leg, caressing it with gentle warmth. I shivered, forgetting the Beatific Association of Devil-worshipers. That palm and those trembling fingers were moving past my knee and along my inner thigh. 

"Cut it, Ken," I murmured. 

To my surprise, he was five feet away, rubbing shanks with a dame in a white woolen cloak. I turned, ready to slap a face, when the notion came to me that this was what the young man behind me was supposed to do, in order to worship the devil. 

I changed the direction and force of my rising hand away from his cheek to his quivering lips. Instead of slapping him, I trailed my fingernails across his mouth. 

I breathed, “Do you like to kiss a girl?" 

He was about twenty. I wondered how in hell he had received an invite to these demonolotry rites. His face was flushed, his eyes glassy. I decided I was pretty lucky to have found him as a companion in carnality. He would be totally engrossed in his own libido; he would scarcely notice what I was doing. 

"Love it, pet, love anything to do with you." 

He crowded up behind me so that I could feel the size and strength of his young manhood. His arms went around me, his hands began fumbling at the opening of my woolen robe. 

"Let's not jump the gun," I whispered. "No, ducks. But let me pet you." 

I could see no harm in that. Besides, his delicate young fingers were sliding around on my belly, tickling my navel. I did a little quivering myself, pressing back into his excitement with my behind. 

The hymn to Satan was sounding now, rolling across the barren flatlands of Exmoor like a sacrilegious tidal wave, even as the priest was tolling the bell nine times, and turning counter-clockwise. My young companion was holding my breasts in his hands, shaking them to the bongings of the bronze bell. 

Now the priest was lifting the Sword of Power, aiming it at the living altar or naked redhead, and began intoning the Invocation to Satan. Behind me, I felt my robe being lifted, felt the naked thighs and something else of the young worshiper touching my somewhat heated flesh 

"You're my kind of altar, ducks," he breathed 

The Chalice of Ecstasy was being raised, filled with wine and drained by the celebrant. To one side of him an acolyte was shaking the silver phallus she held at the four cardinal points of the compass. The young man celebrating his own kind of messe noire was kneeling, kissing my femininity in a parody of what the defrocked priest was doing. 

"This is my chalice," he whispered. 

Glancing down, I decided to play my own kind of acolyte. I too grasped a phallus and shook it north and south, east and west. The young man moaned. 

The priest was chanting again. 

"By Astaroth and Mammon, Abaddon and Asmodeus, by Io, Zata, Cailo and Abbata, I conjure thee, great Satan!" 

The roll call of demons continued. The acolyte on the right was hitting the brass gong hanging on a tripod, sending out its reverberations to echo each of the demoniac names. The audience was chanting those names also, calling on Satan to hear and to appear. 

I could smell musk and incense. 

Then I heard the wail of the pipes of Pan being played somewhere in the darkness. It was an eerie sound those pipes made, a sound that went backward into Time for many thousands of years, and touched some primitive chord in every one of us who heard it. 

Now came the conjuration of Lust, as the priest cast off his lone garment and moved forward toward the redheaded priestess. Her sharp cry of happiness showed that he was possessing her female flesh. The congregation quivered as one, I heard women wailing softly and men grunting as they responded to that satyresque sight. On and on went the priest to the rhythmic adulation of the pallid hips that held him. 

He drew away. The audience was roused indeed, by that conjuration. Everywhere I looked, men were clutched to women, and some of them were halting just short of actual union only by the exercise of iron will power. 

The mass was nearing its conclusion. 

The priest was lifting the chalice from its position on the white belly of the redhead. In a few moments he would be distributing this blasphemous communion to the congregation. I had to think pretty fast. When the orgy started—as it would soon enough after that communion—I had to be ready to make my play. 

One of the congregation was a fellow L.U.S.T. member. 

I did not know Brian Evans, but I had been sent post haste from London to contact him here. He would tell me what he had learned about B.A.D. during the few months he had had it under surveillance. Working in cooperation with him, I was supposed to learn the names of the B.A.D. agents in California, and relay the information back to David Anderjanian. 

The smooth palms of the youth were sliding up my rib cage, just below the beginning slopes of my breasts as he rose to his feet. They were knowledgeable palms, they stroked the fires under my flesh until I could feel my nipples getting big. Now his hands were cupping my swelling breasts, shaking them up and down once more. 

I giggled, "Going for a milk shake, honey?"

"That I am, ducks. Love that taste." 

The priest was turning, the chalice in his left hand, a black host in the other. He was intoning more Latin words in his deep voice, an obscene play on the Latin of the orthodox Mass. The worshipers were shuffling forward; each of them would swallow that offering. 

My researches had informed me that the black host at the messe noire was thorn's apple—datura—and a smidgeon of Spanish Fly. The datura relaxed your inhibitions, made you want to dance about and sing, the cantharides did the rest, by giving your libido a powerful nudge. 

"Walk like this," my lover groaned. 

Well, what the hell. We weren't the only ones coupling as they approached the altar where the naked redhead lay. I even saw one or two robes lifted so that their joining could be more precise. The naked female hips, the moving loins of the man behind her, added a touch of erotica that my own id found most welcome. 

Lover-boy was jutting between my thighs, making rubbing movements that were driving me out of my skull. I hunched forward, moving with bent legs, my back bowed over before him. 

I lifted my tongue toward the priest. He glanced at me, blinked, and dropped the host he held. He glanced down into the chalice, fumbled inside it, and brought out another host, one that had a little red dot on it. I took it into my mouth, began chewing as the priest served the youth behind me. 

A hand lifted my robe, displaying my hips and buttocks and my slim white legs to the onlookers. I felt my lover hunch forward, felt his manhood sliding, entering. He gave a soft little cry as his hips went wild. 

I took a few steps, hunting for dark shadows and some privacy. The thought entered my mind that this might be Brian Evans taking me in the Venus reversa position. If so, he wanted solitude just as much as I did. 

We had gone about twenty feet before that surging delight between my thighs told me I was never going to make anything more private than the eroded flagstones over which I was crouched. 

Without disturbing my young lover, I went downward, landing on hands and knees. With a grunt, the youth knelt behind me and slid his hands under my belly to grab my dangling breasts. His hips surged forward and backward. 

The Spanish Fly was getting to us both by this time and he became a diddling demon. His hips rammed and dipped, swung and looped. His breath was like a creaky bellows. His hands were under me, finding my dangling breasts and stroking them, discovering my hardened nipples and tugging them while rotating them between his forefingers and thumbs. 

All around us soft cries and muffled moanings were making a satyresque symphony in the old chapel. Before me I saw a woman of thirty crouched with her ass on a fallen pillar while a man knelt before her yawning thighs to give her the same devil kiss that the celebrant had bestowed on the redhead. This woman was staring blindly at the moon, head fallen backward, her belly heaving and her thighs closing and opening slowly. 

To her right a man and a woman, both naked, were standing, performing in the el keurchi posture of the Arabs. Feminine buttocks flapped crazily as the woman hunched and jammed her hips. Just behind the seated woman another couple were going at it hot and heavy with the woman flat on her back in the succubus position. 

I couldn't see any of the other worshipers. 

I told myself I ought to disengage from my lover in order to find Brian Evans. But the pleasure he was feeding my femininity was so overpowering I couldn't bear to break away. 

David Anderjanian would have taken a dim view of all this. Not that he is any great shakes as a moralist but he does have a strong sense of duty and insists that I feel the same way. Unfortunately for my image as a secret agent, I just couldn't. My lover had pushed me too far along the line of no return. 

I began working my vaginal muscles all along his intruding flesh. In sophisticated jargon, I am a nutcracker expert. A knowing Frenchman would name me casse-noisette. Your North African wench who can milk with her privacy is greatly honored, and is known as gebbadzeh. 

My boy friend was gasping, both hands digging their fingers into my hanging breasts, adding a little pain to my pussycat pleasure. He was about to sling his jelly, as the slang world puts it. I helped him along with some side-to-side movements of my backside. He let out a yowl and collapsed on top of me. 

He had fainted from the violence of his orgasm, I discovered when I pulled free, and lay there like a dead man. I had intended to make an inspection of the abbey chapel with him, to try and locate Brian Evans, but one glance told me he was a pooped-out playmate. 

I made it to my feet, staring at the convulsing woman having a fit as the man kneeling before her performed his act of adoration. I watched her slide backward off the fallen pillar in a dead faint. 

"What a bloody let-down," the man growled. 

His date had folded up on him as had my own lover. I ran over to him, touched him on his muscular shoulder. 

His eyes gleamed as he ran them upward from my bare ankles. 

"Hello, pet. Ever see such rotten luck?"

"Sure. Look at my friend." 

My thumb jerking over my shoulder directed his eyes toward the young man who lay sleeping on the flaggings. His lips twitched into a grin. I could tell that his kisses and tonguings had only been a prelude as far as he was concerned. He was rearing to go and ready for some rantum scantum. 

"Know what I'd like to do?" I whispered. He shook his head, his grin fading. 

"Go for a ride on you," I went on, giggling. "You walk around, I'll be your passenger. I have a yen to look.” 

"Touch of the voyeur, eh? Well, ducks, I wouldn't mind a spot of voyeurism, myself. How will you come aboard?" 

My hand pushed him to a sitting position on the pillar, right alongside his collapsed companion. I lifted a leg, straddled his hips and sat down on him slowly. His lips writhed back and his eyes glazed as he felt me taking him all in. 

Of course, this was only an excuse to find Brian Evans. I couldn't very well parade around the orgy all by my lonesome. I had to have an excuse. In the janu-kuru utthitha-bandha position of the Hindus, nobody would pay me any attention. 

"I'm Ted Ahearn," he managed to get out. "Eve Drum here, Ted. Now, on your feet!" 

His big hands slid under my smooth buttocks. He heaved upward, making me cry out in rapture as he made it to his feet. My legs whipped up, locked together at the ankles behind his back. Ted nodded as he felt my inner knees grip him, because it took some of my weight off him. 

He started walking. 

I tried not to pay too much attention to what we were doing as I ran my eyeballs this way and then the other around the congregation, most of whom were flopping about on the ground or otherwise engaged in various amorous acts. I had been told that Brian Evans was a sol idly built man, with blond hair and a habit of squinting when not wearing glasses. 

Since nobody was wearing glasses at these devotions to the devil, I hunted for a man who squinted. I didn't see any, though I saw a lot of other things. 

Everybody was in on the act now. The priest and the redhead, both naked, were banging away at each other, the woman flopping about on the marble altar top and yelling fit to bust a gut with delight. I gathered that she had come out of her drug-induced swoon with a vengeance. 

A trio of two women and one man were tangled up almost at the base of the altar, the man crouched down over one woman as the other hunkered down above the upturned face of the recumbent pussycat. They were steadily moving, moving, while the man kissed the kneeling girl with open mouth. I wondered where the extra girl's escort was, then found him stretched out on top of two women, giving them both a good time. 

My mount was breathing more quickly. But me! Well, I was getting sleepy, believe it or not! My eyelids felt like manhole covers, and I kept yawning though my walking wriggler did his best to keep me interested. 

I tightened my arms about his neck and lowered my head to his shoulder. I started to snooze right there and then, knowing something was definitely wrong about all this, but not caring a damn, one way or the other. I was just too plain tired. 

"Hey," growled my mount. "Are you sleeping on me, ducks?” 

"Course not," I mumbled, snuggling closer. 

"My god, nothing like this has ever happened to old Teddy boy," he said in a dazed voice. "My bird has gone to sleep." 

I was asleep, too. I had a vague notion of sliding down his front, of hearing his rasp curses as I landed in a ball at his bare toes. I curled up and began to snore. Only dimly did I remember the black host with the red spot on it, and I realized I'd been drugged. 

I honestly didn't care. I was drifting off to sleep... 

I woke to the touch of cold, damp fog rolling in across the moors. I was shivering, lying naked on the abbey flaggings. The shadows were dimmer now, not so starkly clear, because the mist was thick and hid the moon. I made it to my feet, stood shivering. 

The ruins were deserted. Gone were the celebrants, both men and women. The priest and the redhead were nowhere around. And Kenneth Derwent? What about him? He had been my date, more or less. I'd come to the Black Mass in his Sprite. The bastard had left me here. 

My feet carried me past a couple of broken stone arches and the flagstones where thick weeds grew. This was a cold, lonely spot. The night was all around me, with no candles gleaming and no light anywhere except from the faint radiance of the moon, and that was diffused by the clouds and the fog. 

I could see twenty feet ahead of me, but no more. "Is anybody here? Anybody at all?" I called. 

I walked on, remembering that my clothes were in the back seat of the Sprite, which was by now, in all probability, well on its way to London. Then I remembered my woolen cloak. It might still be where I'd dropped it when the young man had taken me in the Venus reversa posture. 

Somebody had tumbled to my secret agent status. But why leave me here, alive? Surely they should have killed me. I moved like a sleepwalker with my hands out in front of my face. What with the heavy fog and the skeleton arches and pillars of the abandoned monastery chapel, I felt like an alien in an alien world. There was no sound, except the drip of water. Even my slippered feet moved silently. 

Then I heard the groan. I turned and stared through the mist. "Who is it?" 

Even as I spoke the thought touched my mind that I might be ten kinds of a damn fool. Maybe the Beatific Association of Devil-worshipers members were still hanging around, waiting to kill me. 

I moved forward hurriedly, away from there. I had traveled about fifty feet when my foot struck something soft and I pitched headlong over a body to land with a thump on the hard, mist-wet paving stones. I turned on the ground, not wanting to be caught with my back to danger. 

The man who lay there so limply in the mist was not quite dead. I could see his lips quivering as he tried to speak. I scrambled forward, leaned my head over his. Up this close, I could see his eyes squinting as he sought to make me out. 

"Brian Evans? I'm Eve Drum," I panted. "Diary," he whispered. His right hand lifted and something fell out of it to clink on the flaggings. I ignored it to whisper, "Which one killed you?" 

His lips quivered, then stilled. I put my hand on his chest. No heartbeat. My fingertips fumbled for his wrist. No pulse. My L.U.S.T. compatriot was dead. 

If those B.A.D. boys had killed Brian Evans, they would kill me just as willingly. I wondered why I wasn't dead already. I fumbled about on the flagstones until I found the tiny key he had dropped. I wrapped my fist around it and got to my feet. I had to get the hell out of this old chapel and fast. 

I started my search for my fallen robe, knowing that without it I could very easily freeze to death on these moors, or at best catch my death of pneumonia. After ten minutes of frantic looking and hissed curses, I discovered it lying in a heap where I had shrugged out of it. I slid into it fast. 

I knew roughly that I was somewhere on that broad expanse of barren land known as Exmoor, about ten miles southeast of Dunkery Beacon. I told myself ten miles was not so far to walk, so I set out across the moors. 

The moors of England are vast rolling wastelands, usually treeless and covered with heather and bracken. Of the three moors on this peninsula Exmoor is the most beautiful, I have been told. Dartmoor is a barren wilderness, as is Bodmin Moor. Lovely valleys and little, winding streams turn Exmoor into a fertile countryside. You see no granite outcroppings, and while there are very few trees, in the daytime Exmoor is an expanse of purple blossomed heather where wild ponies run. 

By sunlight, Exmoor may be pretty; but by night, and with a fog rolling in off Bristol Channel, it is a pretty scary place. Those abbey ruins and the empty altar where the Black Mass had been celebrated, and where the wind moaned now as it swept the mist into eddying gray whirlpools, sent eerie chills down my spine. 

I slipped and stumbled my way through the fog, alone in a world where there was apparently no other life. I believe I would have welcomed the sound of a wild pony galloping nearby, but they were too smart to be out on a night like this, when hobgoblins seemed likely to be up and about 

Underfoot the heather and the bracken tickled my bare ankles, sprinkling them with condensed droplets of mist. If I had not found my woolen robe before I left the abbey ruins, I think I would have died, wandering across this moor. 

I stumbled on for long, agonizing minutes that became half an hour, and then an hour. The realization came to me that I might be walking in circles, and the thought touched my mind that I might wander like this for days if the fog kept up, and even starve to death before rescue came. 

I never did know how long I had walked before the man loomed up out of the mists. Distance is a tricky thing on the moors, with a thick fog rolling in the wind. One moment I was slipping and staggering along, the next there was a man in front of me, in heavy coat and trousers, with a rifle in his hands. 

His eyes popped on seeing me, and the rifle came up. 

As a L.U.S.T. agent, I have been trained to react swiftly. Even as he was bringing up the rifle, my hands shot out and closed down on barrel and stock. I did not intend to wrestle him for the gun, I just wanted to use it as a lever. 

As my fingers tightened, I dropped backward. The man was caught by surprise. The rifle went down 

ward with me, and he lurched forward. My right foot came up, planted itself in his middle and I drove him upward through the air. He landed behind me a few feet, minus the Enfield. 

I whirled—the sharp underbrush hurt my bare knees when I turned—and lifted the rifle in my hands. The man was just getting up. When he saw I had the Enfield, his face went a sickly green and he lifted his right hand, palm up. 

"Easy now, ducks. No call to shoot.” 

I knew him, I had seen him at the abbey, he was one of the celebrants of the Black Mass. He had been coming back to finish me off, I guessed. "Damn your eyes, why'd you kill Brian Evans?” 

His face crumpled. I think he had aimed to trick me—say, by pretending to be a lonely hunter out for one of the red deer that frequent this corner of Exmoor at night. I had shaken him by revealing that I was aware of his little scheme. 

"Now, now," he said. 

"I ought to shoot you," I snarled. "Go on, turn around. Fast!" 

He turned, but he kept his eyes on the mists as if searching for a companion who might come striding up to take command of the sticky situation. I had intended to search him, but I decided to let him search himself. 

“Strip!” I rasped. "Long now, pet—" 

"Do you want a bullet in the back of the knee? I'll leave you here that way, if you don't do as I say. Strip, damn you!" 

He shrugged out of his overcoat. "Turn out the pockets, then toss it behind you." 

I searched the overcoat and then the tweed jacket and the Saville Row trousers he tossed back over a shoulder at me. In the left pocket of the trousers I found a little notebook and some keys. I shoved them into the capacious pocket of my robe. 

"I'll leave you your underwear, I'm taking your outer clothes along with me just to make sure you don't go running too fast through this damn wilderness." 

I was about to swing around and walk off. It was then that I heard the branch break. Without stopping to think I threw myself at the ground, whirling in midair so I could look behind me. 

At the same instant the man in his underwear turned and came for me, unfortunately for him. Because the one who'd broken that dry branch had his rifle up and was squeezing the trigger. My action had been so swift, he had not reacted to it, so he fired at where I had been. 

The man in the underwear stopped short in his headlong leap for me. The bullet caught him flush in the chest so that he landed on the ground just beyond me, stone dead. 

The Enfield was in my hands. I put its muzzle toward the living man and squeezed off three shots, rapid-fire. The black holes spoiled the rifleman's topcoat. He stood there with his rifle in his hands, staring down at me in sheer disbelief. He staggered, then, and his eyes blinked. I think he was paralyzed with shock, because he appeared to be trying to lift the rifle he held, and could not. 

With a faint sigh he turned sideways as his left leg buckled under him. He rolled over when he landed on the ground, and shuddered. Then he was quiet. 

Me, I waited. The night was still, the moon was a silver orb up there as the clouds parted and the mists seemed to be blowing away. If there were any more of these characters around, I wanted to know it. 

I started walking in the direction from which my attackers had come. I reasoned that they had not walked here all the way from Luccombe or even from Selworthy. There was a car parked somewhere in these mists. I also reasoned that, for some reason, these two had been assigned to return to the abbey chapel and finish me off. 

I was assuming that they had put poison into Brian Evans' black host, as they had put a sleeping draught in mine. There had been too many witnesses to gun me down at the black mass; they had left me sleeping quietly—telling possible witnesses, perhaps, that Brian Evans was sleeping off the orgy too. They had wanted to pump bullets into my girl-girl shape. 

I felt no remorse. It is kill or be killed in my game, and the one with the fastest reflexes usually comes out alive. 

I had searched the second man before abandoning his corpse, and I took along both rifles plus the spare ammunition the killers had carried on their persons. Later I intended to wipe them clean of all fingerprints and throw them away at widely spaced intervals. 

I trudged for half a mile before I came to a highway. 

The car had to be here, somewhere. I gambled and turned right. The macadam road made for easier walking, so in about ten minutes I spotted a little Austin pulled off to the side of the road. 

One of the keys in the key-ring I'd taken from dead man number one fitted the ignition lock. I inserted and turned it. The motor throbbed to life. I sank back against the seat and closed my eyes in utter delight. I was through walking for the evening. From now on, I rode in solid comfort. 

I drove through Porlock, Minehead and Dunster, then hit the long straightaway to Bridgewater and Glastonbury. The petrol tank was full up, the car was reasonably new, so I figured I would reach London my midday, tomorrow. 

Once in London, I had to learn what 'the diary' was. But—how?