Secret Text Part One

In my own way, I loved Artemis too. She was delicate, pretty, and very much the hobbyist kind of witch. Or, well, maybe. I often wonder if she didn't put a spell on me to make me forget the name of that damned Processian. In the days before the Son of Sam killings, she told me how one of the Church of the Process cultists had sought her out. The Processian had been a priest, she said, and his attributes included that he served both Christ and Satan, and generally eschewed sex. But, to my horror, she went on to explain, after months of professed abstinence on his part, he had sex with her in her hospital bed as she was recovering from surgery. Generally, however, the coven of Artemis consisted of articulate suburbanites; hobbyists who haunted occult bookstores and hobbyists. I began to theorize that the Processian was calling Artemis, demanding my removal from the coven. Perhaps he was. Or perhaps I had imagined it all; a decade later, I would join a dissident Krishna sect in Berkeley, then find the Temple set upon by reporters, when a former imprisoned priest, who had slept there before me, had tried to kill Manson in prison.