Witness to a Black Mass

Beneath the aging balconies of C Street, where the Comstock’s old grandeur now serves only the tourists, something darker has taken root—an underworld masquerading as entertainment, fueled by saffron, sex, and sacrilege.

It started with unusual whispers. Reports of late-night “ghost tours” extending well past 2 a.m., of abandoned buildings glowing with candlelight, and of a sudden uptick in sexually transmitted infections—syphilis and gonorrhea foremost among them—across three counties serviced by the Quad-Counties Health Division.

What tied the symptoms together, health workers quietly suggested, was an unusually high concentration of cases in and around town. What tied the people together was harder to say—until one former saloon girl turned bartender told me, “They don’t believe in disease. Just pleasure. And if you’re married, so what? They’ll swap partners like playing cards.”

Months of off-the-record interviews led me to a decaying structure tucked behind the C Street façades. From a nearby alley, I watched as cloaked figures slipped through a side entrance.

At the door, a hooded sentry challenged me. I gave the passphrase—learned from a frightened man who’d begged me not to write his name down.

Inside, masked sentinels questioned me at intervals, but bits of ritual knowledge got me through. Then I entered the room: a candlelit chamber centered on a black-draped altar, above which hung a crucifix so grotesquely altered it turned my stomach.

Several men and women gathered—some nude, others gowned, all altered by wine and pills. Several couples openly engaged in lewd acts while others cheered them on. I recognized more than one face behind the masks—shopkeepers, a councilman, even a school secretary.

The priest arrived clad in crimson robes, flanked by three acolytes with swinging censers. The liturgy he offered was a vile reversal of the Holy Mass—every gesture an insult, every prayer a mockery. As he spat on the bread and invoked Satan, a man, unfamiliar to me, stood abruptly.

“Stop this farce!” he thundered.

The room froze.

“Who are you to interrupt the sacrifice?” the priest barked.

“I’m a seeker of truth,” the man replied, stepping forward. “And I know exactly what this is—a fraud. Your entire ritual depends on Christ’s doctrine. You can’t create your own, so you steal and pervert His.”

The crowd murmured, some confused, others furious.

“If Satan were your true god,” the man continued, “you wouldn’t need to mock Christ. But you do—because without Him, this whole farce collapses.”

The priest clenched his fists. A few worshippers shouted. But none moved to stop him as he turned and walked out the same door he entered.

I left shortly after, heart pounding. Outside, the Nevada wind cut sharply, and the sky seemed darker than it had before.

I submitted this story to my editor the next morning, but it got declined without explanation. A week later, I lost my job with the paper.

They said I strayed from objectivity, but this wasn’t about my belief. It was about truth, and the truth is this: under the guise of tourism and ghost stories, a cult of moral rot has taken hold in this town, trading in sacred blasphemy, body fluids, and a spiritual hunger gone wrong.

Whether anyone listens or not, I don’t care, but I recorded it because someone has to.