Corella would have been, more or less, a sexual deviant prior to the publication of the Kinsey report, but now her sexual appetites were considered tame. She dabbled in BDSM and lesbianism and anal play, but nothing more outlandish than that. She didn't consider sleeping with a woman as being unfaithful to Tim, because she didn't see the sexual experiences as being inherently similar. Men were like the sun; aggressive, sharp, passionate, and women were like the moon; distant, calm, placid in love. How could one cheat on a man if there's no phallus involved? Not to say she didn't also sleep with other men. Or use phalluses on women.

She stayed in a coven in the Whittaker district. She had learned of it from mutual acquaintances of Tim, who considered themselves more Wiccan than Stegonoria, but were open to her interpretation of the paranormal. Their names were Jesse and Carly, and, unlike Tim and her, both of them were swingers. Carly was dark haired, wide eyed, olive skinned, thin as a bike axle and less than the required height of some amusement park rides. Jesse was her exact opposite. A score and ten years prior, during her first periodic break with Tim, she had stayed on the commune that they lived on, and was indecently intimate with both of them. She was underwhelmed by Jesse, but was infatuated with Carly, who she, after that point, regarded as her second, softer lover.

The coven was a maze of RV's, tents, trailer houses, single family levitt homes, orchards, and grape terraces all connected by tunnels that had been dug in the 1970s and 1980s by two separate yet allied anarchist groups. Surrounding the dwellings were statues of Roman Gods, as well as painted bas reliefs of Aztec and Mayan deities. Above ground and below ground were rooms swathed in stolen persian carpets and soft candle light, and in these rooms seances and card readings and exorcisms and ritual orgies (especially during equinoxes or solstices) would occur, and leave the participants of whichever heathen activity transpired overwhelmed with love or bitterness or melancholia or confusion.

The head of the coven was a woman with the christian name of Jennifer Bridehead. Everyone in the coven knew her as Saoirse (only Saoirse). When Carly first introduced her to Corella, she, like everyone, was struck by Corella's intrinsic etherealness. Saoirse herself could come across as nothing but disingenuous, given her constant, airy sanguine smiles, oversized wire rimmed glasses, her skinny body swathed in clothes appropriated from the Rajneeshee, and her retina problem that often made her address and introduce herself to the air next to people. She told Corella that she was welcome to join the coven, and stay in their collective whenever she pleased. Corella was never one to refuse generosity.

Corella's room was under a fig orchard. It had been constructed as a bunker for the assumed apocalypse when the U.S. felt inflationary pressure from OPEC. The walls were wooden but the roof was concrete with a mural of Throbbing Gristle walking through a despondent Cleveland. At night the eyes of the band members glowed for certain people. There was a cot, and a folding table with a deck chair covered in Cyrillic graffiti. During the day witches and coven members would drop in on Corella and consult with her about various potions and spiritual projects, trying to get an outside, Stregoneria perspective.

A lot of the consultations devolved into the blusters of fools. Corella considered a lot of the so-called magic of the coven to be either placebo or lies, and many of the coven considered a lot of her (and others) magic to be the same. The only truth that every member agreed on was that there was an unseen world and that that unseen world could be accessed and used in our world. All other truths were false.

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Carly lay prone on the cot, her hands gripping the towels from nerves. Corella reached under her hips and lifted her bottom into the air, and as she felt the lube on her she began to understand what Corella meant by truth through domination.

" Go slowly, please". Her teeth were grinding as she felt it, the contradictory pain, and if this pleasure was true than anything could be true. When Corella was done she put her head on Corella's chest and Corella stroked her back, and they began to gossip, and Carly asked her about Tim.

" Tim?" Corella scoffed. " If there is a man more pigheaded then I will gouge my eyes out from disbelief". Carly massaged Corella's back and pretended to agree with her, but she doubted Corella. Tim had always been kind to her (kinder than Corella) and she secretly thought that if there were problems in the relationship, it probably came from Corella. She would never say as much.

Corella's back had knots that suggested she was older than the half century that she claimed. Carly loved feeling the flesh break up in her fingers, reminding her of kneading dough into pastries. As she touched Corella's sags and cellulite she thought of her own aging skin, and wanted to consult with Corella about spiritual or hormonal solutions. She knew of one, but figured it too evil for a plebian witch such as her.

" You heard of adrenochrome?" Corella's voice was tinged with drowsiness.

" No".

" It's what Epstein gave all those politicians to stay young". Corella turned her neck and looked up at Carly.

" You believe in all that shit?" Carly nodded.

" It's true- there's evidence, they've found bottles of it on the island. I've also consulted with others, and I've had dreams- visions about it". Carly took her hands from Corella's back and propped herself up on her elbows. " I've seen the children. Thousands of them in the military tunnels. There are thousands of them sure. They got wide eyes and they look like rats and the soldiers torture and rape them and they produce this chemical, called adrenochrome that keeps you young forever". Corella sighed.

" That can't be true". Carly had a different form of bravery when defending her beliefs.

" I know it's real. I've had visions". Corella shook her head.

" You can't just hide people like that– they'd be found". Carly raised her hands to the soil above her.

" We're hidden now". Genesis stared down and her eyes glowed.

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Corella had a low tolerance for deceit. When she stayed in the coven, she often felt nothing but the falsities of others who believed roughly what she believed. Nonsense would spew from their mouths and Corella was forced to listen and debate it, because to them she spewed nonsense as well. She never considered that maybe her beliefs were as truthful as the other's until she looked at Carly, naked and wide eyed, and saw her conviction in mole people and Hollywood pedophiles and Donald Trump as the savior against the vampires that run the country, and saw it was the same as her conviction in Spiriti famili and Spiriti Caviti and the evils that can come from not heeding the warnings. It's different. She had performed spells, given a man cancer, been called back to life from her mother. She had performed undeniable miracles that would make the testaments of apostles look like lazy tricks.

" Describe your vision to me". And Carly described how she had this recurring vision on weekdays. As she lay falling asleep with Jesse a door would appear in her room, and she would walk through it into a grey tunnel with fluorescent prison lighting, and there would be naked children with ant eyes in cages, and soldiers would stand by, smoking, spraying perfume that masked the smells and playing sad indie songs to mask the screams, and then she would turn the corner, and see the grinning suits, muscles tearing them to naught, and she would turn and she would be in a slaughterhouse, and the children were chained as they swept the blood and the flesh, and those were the lucky ones. Half drunk vials of the hormone would be strewn on the floor and they smelled like dying chickens.

Corella's nature was too hot to care much about the feelings of others, even those that she loved. " Just sounds like a nightmare". Carly didn't speak. Her floral summer dress was on the floor but it was soon on her. Corella halfheartedly pleaded, but she didn't look back. Her hips swayed back and forth as she turned the corner out of sight and Corella was left equal parts angry, remorseful and horny. She lit a cigarette.

She didn't completely know why she was so difficult to the people she loved. Part of her assumed it was due to her father abandoning her and her mother, and her family subsequently abandoning them because of her mother's controversies. Maybe that taught her that it's all right to treat family and lovers like lesser beings if you disagree with them. That would certainly explain all the times she abandoned Tim. However, part of her knew it was something deeper. Perhaps a malignant spirit had infected her when she nearly died as a child, and, throughout the years, had been transforming her into it. Ash fell on the lube stain on her blanket. Why couldn't she just humor her soft lover? What harm is there in believing in nonsense? She had a clear picture of Carly, her lips quivering with fear and shame as she defended her convictions. She knew why she couldn't tolerate deceit. Especially from those she loved. If they were so convinced in their deceit, enough so that no matter what she said or what she did or how disrespectfully she treated those beliefs (or lack of beliefs) and they still were unwavering in their convictions, who was to say that her own beliefs in Stegonoria and light voodoo weren't a misplaced faith equal to that of mole children and atheism?

Corella flicked the butt on the floor. Perhaps it had nothing to do with her beliefs. Perhaps Carly had walked out on her because Corella was being disrespectful to a recurrence that obviously meant a lot to Carly. Perhaps Carly had bottled anger from being the submissive during their meetup and she decided to gain back some control by walking out. Perhaps she had had an argument with Jesse, and just needed an excuse to get angry at someone else. Or perhaps she was convinced of mole people, and thought Corella evil to not even consider them as truth. Either way, the point was moot. Corella was mad at Tim, and now Carly was mad at Corella, which left Corella alone in the tunnels of the unhinged.

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Corella would have been considered a sexual deviant sixty years prior. As Saoirse looked at the naked abductee, she hoped that in the subsequent sixty years, she would be considered a sexual visionary.

When Saoirse joined the Rajneeshee, she had been a virgin. That changed within two days. She slept with hundreds, including Osho himself, and by the time Rajneeshpuram was seized by the tyrants her nymphomania had become inconvenient, because almost every sexual activity had become more laborious than pleasurable. Almost every sexual activity.

She had first heard of adrenochrome on infowars. The more she looked into it, the more sense it made to her. She lived in an unregistered tunnel with unregistered people, so who's to say the U.S. military also wouldn't construct unregistered tunnels for their mole children? Athletes kept playing longer, and actors kept looking younger, and politicians kept living despite acting like corpses, and billionaires were openly transfusing the blood from the youth into them, so who's to say there wasn't a hormone in a tortured child that let you keep living? Who's to say it's wrong if every leader and public figure is partaking in it?

Almost every sexual activity had become dull. This one hadn't. Saoirse looked at the child's smooth brown skin, and saw the trickle of urine down the child's thigh. After she had bought her from the chicken farm in Iowa she had taken Spanish on duolingo to try and build a repertoire before the inevitable horror.

" Estás listo?" The child didn't respond, and Saoirse brushed her arm and felt the wrinkles.

" Estoy empezando". Afterwards she swore that the wrinkles disappeared. Almost completely.