The Cult We Built to Pay the Bills
by Katy Drabek
Baylor University
Katy Drabek is a senior English major from Plano, TX. She hopes to become a fiction editor and to eventually publish a collection of short stories. Recently, her short story “Skeletons in the Closet, Shag Carpet in the Bathroom” and her poem “I Didn’t Think I Could Write a Poem About Slava Without Calling Him a Little Shit, But I Did It” were published in the 2021 edition of The Phoenix, Baylor’s literary magazine. Her Twitter handle is @katy_drabek.
I stopped being afraid of cops years ago. Lade Braes, Georgia, didn’t exactly boast a police force that couldn’t be reckoned with. It was hard to blame the officers. We had had a mere two murders in the last couple decades, and robberies didn’t occur too often when everyone knew everyone else is broke. If you were stuck behind a desk all day anyway, why not get fat and lazy?
We did have to dodge the cops sometimes, of course. But usually, that just entailed ducking into an alley or running deeper into the woods. The ironic thing was that if the police had known we were the ones behind the ritualistic activity, they would have thanked us. Real shame that we couldn’t trust anyone with the secret.
Our cult had started as a joke. There were just seven of us then, a bunch of junior high students who had just been schooled on the events of Waco and Jonestown. We thought we were the shit, holding secret meetings after school in an abandoned house far back in the thick line of trees that surrounded Lade Braes, pretending we were hiding from the law. We told our parents we were headed to so-and-so’s house and came back late so our families would be too tired to notice the smell of mold lingering on our skin and hair.
I was appointed leader of our fake cult because, the one time we went full throttle and “sacrificed” a lizard through decapitation on the playground as school was letting out, I was the only one who didn’t throw up or cry afterward. I actually just managed to choke back the nausea until my mom picked me up five minutes later, when I was able to puke in the privacy of her car. She screamed over the stain I left on the aging seats, but it had all been worth it.
The seven of us worshipped cult documentaries and movies. When we ran out of DVDs to rent from the town’s tiny library, we centered the cult around random objects. We built elaborate altars inside the abandoned house for things like Beanie Babies and Monopoly game pieces. After all, this was only for fun.
Then the recession hit. Lade Braes’ already miniscule population dwindled to a mere two hundred. The dirt road that connected our town to neighboring Senoia, Georgia, was undergoing intense construction at the time that came to a halt and never began again. Of course, the half-dirt, half-hastily-paved state of the road, combined with the mysteriously discarded construction equipment, made it un-drivable. And there were no more towns in an hour’s radius. Commuting was no longer an option, and an alarming portion of the town found themselves unemployed.
Our town had never been much of a tourist spot, but, one rainy day on the outskirts of the woods, when my friends and I were mock-chanting around a pinto bean on a makeshift pedestal in our rain ponchos, Caroline saw the flash of a camera and jerked around. We all turned to follow her gaze. Two strangers ran off in the distance, almost tripping over themselves, shooting scared glances over their shoulders at us. Caroline said they had probably been standing too far off to see that we were barely teenagers. I suppose they saw a group of cloaked people dancing in a circle, grotesquely shrouded by the pouring rain, and assumed we were actual cult members.
We dismissed it as some crazy, improbable event at the time. But shortly after, another similar tourist-scare occurred, and then another. It even happened once with a couple of locals. Word seemed to be getting around.
So, our brilliant idea was born. At fourteen, in the height of teenage bravado, we decided to take the town’s economy into our own hands. We would keep up the cult activity, but in less subtle ways, and spread rumors about a twisted sort of religion snaking into the town. Haddie can beat anyone’s grandma in a sewing contest, so she made us all floor-length, hooded red cloaks. We would have to be melodramatic about this if we wanted to get anywhere. We hoped all the reports of a cult in an unassuming small town would bring in some more tourists.
Incredibly, we were right.
The rumors spread like wildfire; bless small town gossip. More tourists came than we would have expected, giving our local stores a little more of the business they so desperately needed. Most of us had parents who ran those stores, my mother being one. Lade Braes was still sinking, but at least we’d slowed the fall. After that, we ran from the cops for real. Not the most ladylike of my endeavors, but our pretend cult did pay some of our families’ bills.
Like I said, anyway, cops didn’t normally bother me. Until we began dealing with one who had the potential to be much more of a pain in my ass.
I snuck out of my house as the sun set. I’d already changed into my hick clothes: worn jean shorts, a cropped shirt that barely qualified as a shirt and smelled like cigarette smoke, dirty flip-flops. My mother would never have approved. But anything went in the cult.
Branches caught at my thick and wavy blonde hair as I weaved a familiar path through the trees. The summer heat still lingered, and sweat gathered on the back of my sunburnt neck. A few more steps, and the abandoned house loomed over me.
It wasn’t quite a mansion, but it was certainly larger than most of the homes in town. Columns lined the front of it, with kudzu swallowing nearly half of the exterior. Flowers crowded the walkway, giving the house a syrupy-sweet smell. The exterior was really the only rich-looking part of the house; all the rooms inside were pretty plain. Still, the whole thing reeked of decaying Southern grandeur. The Ushers could’ve died there. Not much of a step up from the rest of Lade Braes.
When I walked into the rotting house, crunching broken window glass under my feet, Caroline, Rhett, and Levi were already there. Normally, there were fifteen of us, all dressed in red, but I’d called a special meeting that night. It was just the three of them—my closest friends—and me. This was a delicate situation.
Caroline grinned and waved me over to our usual spot on the floor, where we kept the creaking wood mostly free from dust and bugs. “Hey, Flor! You think it’s time we upped our human sacrifice game?”
Levi spit out a bit of dip. “Detective Milligan could be a great opportunity.”
I spoke around the toothpick poking out from between my lips. “Guys, we need to focus on actual solutions. This is bad.”
Rhett nodded. “Flor’s right. If he blows our cover, it’s all over for us.”
My other friends sobered up, their expressions turning serious. The weight of our operation had been heavier on my shoulders ever since we had graduated high school that previous May, and I was sure they felt the same. We should have been trying to get adult jobs, heading to college in the fall. Instead, we were carrying a town that was starting to better resemble a trailer park.
Milligan’s arrival had added yet another source of anxiety. We didn’t have a lot of newcomers, due to the shape that our town was in, so the moment he moved in, his neighbors began prying. Now it was common knowledge that he was a retired detective looking for a little peace and quiet, keeping mentally sharp for such an old man, and putting everything he had into cracking the mystery of our cult.
His interest made sobering sense since the rumors had reached a new level. How had we been supposed to guess that some druggie lurking in the woods would mistake a beer keg for a barrel of radioactive material, and that he’d tell the whole town that we were planning to poison them with radiation?
I sat down, completing our cross-legged circle. “How much do you think he knows?”
Caroline shook her head. She’d been tailing him for a few days. “It’s so hard. He just mutters to himself and takes notes. He asks locals about the cult a lot, but everything I heard them tell him was nonsensical gossip. There were a few conversations I couldn’t sneak up close enough to hear, though.”
My mind raced. “Any ideas for running him out of town? There must be some weakness we can exploit.”
Caroline slapped the floor, eyes bright like she’s had a revelation. “Witches!” She grinned in triumph. “No one likes witches. Oh, yeah, it’s coming together now. We’re dancing naked in the woods by his house tonight.”
Rhett frowned. “Hear me out for a second. I don’t think we should make him leave.”
Levi voiced the incredulity I shared with him. “That’s crazy. What else are we supposed to do?”
Rhett shrugged. “I don’t know; I’m not the decision maker here. But Milligan set the Rodgers boy straight about the non-stop cat-calling.” We all nodded. “The police never did anything about our complaints. But he hasn’t bothered Vivian since Milligan talked to him. I’m just saying, that old man could be useful.”
We sat in silence, turning over this impossible question. He had helped Vivian, and that couldn’t be ignored. But it wasn’t as if we could trust him to keep his mouth shut if he found out the source of the cult activity. If the cult was revealed as a sham, we would lose the tourist revenue.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go talk to him. Pick his brain. Find out what he’s about exactly, everything he knows. Maybe he’s not close at all. Maybe we have more time to figure things out.”
But the mood of the meeting was far from optimistic.
When I woke up the next morning and trudged down the stairs, stepping around moldy spots, my mother was waiting.
“Florence.” She spoke as if my name physically pained her. The dim light peeking through the kitchen blinds left her face mostly shadowed, but her mouth was doubtlessly pressed into a thin line. She was sitting at the table, looking like perfection itself in her ironed floral dress and white flats, her hair styled into big, loose curls. Too bad her dress was stained with Dad’s spilled liquor, and the leather of her flats was deeply cracked. She didn’t look so good up close. “I told you to wear your hair up when you go to bed. You always look homeless in the morning.”
There wasn’t much I could say to that. “Okay, Mother.” I grabbed the eggs from the fridge, cracked one into a pan.
She swatted at a mosquito. “If you’re going to keep living in your father’s house without a job so that you can waste the whole day, you could act like a lady, at the very least.”
I was surprised she could bear to feign that my father had any authority over our house. He was still asleep, maybe even still drunk from last night. He wasn’t an abusive drunk, nor was he a mean man in general, but that was really the most I could say in his favor. Since my mother worked to make up for his sloth, I guess it was more her house, but I’d never give her that kind of credit either.
I tried to flip the egg, but most of it stuck to the pan.
Mother sighed daintily. “Really, Florence, how will you ever make a good wife?”
So, I’m useless, am I? It’s not like I’m the leader of the people keeping this town alive or anything. I turned off the stove and slammed the pan into the sink, filling it with water to let the egg residue soak off. The sizzling drowned out my mother’s gasp. “You know what? I’ve lost my appetite.” I was out of the kitchen and through the front door, headed for the trailer park, before she could even respond.
I had run away from home, from her, just once. As I walked toward Milligan’s place, the memory rolled over my mind like a heat wave. It had been right after graduation, and I’d figured my cult experience could be twisted into something vaguely appealing to a business hiring part-time workers. I had walked all the way to Senoia, and I had been covered in sweat by the time I found a small movie theater with a sign claiming it was looking for a supervisor. I had entered the building with my hair plastered to my forehead, my clothes dusty. Luckily, the management had agreed to do an on-the-spot interview after hearing how far I’d had to walk. Apparently that kind of thing was rarer than I had assumed.
But when the interviewer had asked for my resume, I had had nothing to hand her. It had only gone downhill from there.
“Leadership experience?”
“Yeah, six years.”
“Through what?”
“Uh,” I said, “Girl Scouts.”
The interviewer had dismissed me in the next few minutes with a comment that I should probably dress like I was going to an interview next time around. The trip had been so quick and so unsuccessful that I had arrived home long before curfew, before my mother had even realized I’d run away.
But the guilt from nearly abandoning my friends had lasted much, much longer.
I shook the memory away, shielding my eyes as the sun glanced off the silver Airstream trailer home in front of us, sitting with the other trailers on the edge of the woods. I had arrived.
Milligan answered after my first knock. He wasn’t exactly intimidating in person: graying hair, deeply lined face, short stature. He just stared at me.
I made my voice nasally and breathy as I answered. It felt wrong to be straightforward about my intent—better to invoke the dumb blonde stereotype. “Um, I’m Florence Taylor. I’m really into true crime and stuff. I heard you know some things about the cult here?”His smile was so wide and instantaneous that I jumped. “Sure, I can fill you in. Would you like to come in?” He stepped out of the doorway, holding the door open for me.
I climbed inside the Airstream, unsure of what I was getting myself into.
The moment I was past the door, Milligan let go of it and hurried over to rifle through the cabinets connected to the ceiling. He arranged neat stacks of paper on the kitchen table and gestured for me to join him.
The trailer was in surprisingly good shape. The counters were shiny and clear of excess. Everything, from the bed in the back of the trailer to the narrow strip of floor running between the furniture, looked as if it had been kept clean with careful diligence. Most of my neighbors didn’t even keep their houses looking this nice.
I took a seat at the table. I had hoped for disorganization and clutter, for an unkept conspiracy theorist who was a few dozen steps away from reality. Unfortunately, the rumors had been true: Milligan had it together mentally. Leading him down the wrong path wouldn’t be easy.
I stuck with my dumb blonde impersonation as I flipped through a stack of papers that he had slid my way. “What, like, is this?”
That unnerving smile was still on his face. “These are all my notes. This is an anthology of all the rumors going around. I’ve organized them from least probable to most probable. This is a map of all the places cult activity have been spotted.” He pointed to different stacks as he talked. “I’m still trying to pin down their belief system and what exactly it is that these people worship. Someone said he saw them making an offering to a stuffed animal once.” He snorted in disdain. “Oh, and this is a list of people who fit the height descriptions, have the time to be appearing in those locations during business hours, other factors like that.”
I struggled to hide my shock as I took the list from him, but luckily, he seemed to be too focused on meticulously re-ordering the papers I’d been looking through. Mixed with dozens of other teenagers was the cult’s entire membership. The list was long—he’d have to spend some time narrowing it, but the moment he did, our gig would be up. Why hadn’t we thought about business hours?
A guy like this could have been an asset to us, if he wasn’t bent on bringing the cult down.
I forced myself to smile, looked over the notes some more, and asked a few airheaded questions about the ritual stories and whether Milligan believed that the cult was dangerous. “Think those crazies are poisoning the water? Maybe even…brainwashing us?”
He laughed and shook his head. “I really doubt that. But…” His gaze intensified, his eyes boring into mine behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “I will find them no matter what. Gotta make small-town life interesting somehow, eh?”
I made my excuses and got the hell out of there, my worst fears confirmed.
I immediately let my friends know how dire the situation was. We decided to sleep on it and try to come up with a solution when anxiety was clouding our thoughts a little less. The idea that there was no solution, that we might as well give up, nagged at me. Lade Braes was fading anyway. We might have just been beating a dead horse.
But I’d make my decision tomorrow. Tonight was the cult’s sixth anniversary, and the show must go on.
The object for worship for each ritual was selected by a different member each week; meetings were mostly off-the-cuff in general. We had to live up to the rumors and act like beasts, after all. It was Levi’s turn that night. He picked pre-Raphaelite art and artists. He may have thought drinking three beers for breakfast was healthy and may have been well on his way to having tobacco-blackened teeth, but he had good taste in paintings.
He had set up a small projector, a rental from the closing-down electronic store, in the dining room of the abandoned house. The whole of our fake cult, dressed in our cloaks, crowded around the rickety table to see the screen. Levi flicked through the slides, describing the works as he went, bullshitting everything but the names from what I could tell. He spoke like a mock-professor, presiding over a class of infidels, slowly slipping into nonsense.
“Here we have Proserpine by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. While its origins from Greek mythology are clear, the fruit in her hand and the secretive look in her eyes makes another interpretation evident: It’s a representation of the Fall of Man. Her beautiful lips are stained red with her deed; we must embrace sin!” Giggling rolled over our ranks. “We must! Eat! Our! Enemies!”
We were all laughing now. I stomped out my third cigarette and whispered to Caroline. She and I got down on our knees and bowed excessively low in the screen’s direction, chanting, “Rossetti! Rossetti!” My hood fell off with the force of my repeated bows. The other cult members began to join in.
Happiness spread through me. This gross, possibly-asbestos-contaminated place felt like home. All of us could let loose, burying whatever haunted us in reality beneath insanity and meaningless rituals. It was incredibly freeing. My mother’s words, her worship of tradition, my worthlessness in her eyes: It all meant nothing here. Hell, we were basically standing in the carcass of her clichéd Southern dreams.
The odds may have looked terrible, but I couldn’t give up on the cult.
Levi clicked to the next slide. A minute later, as we were bowing to The Lady of Shalott and yelling “Waterhouse” over and over, I made out the snapping of a twig under the chaos.
Rhett’s head swung around, and his mouth dropped open. “Someone’s coming!”
As we all broke into a run and scattered, I whirled around at the sound of a man’s yell, thinking one of my people had fallen. Instead, I made eye contact with Detective Milligan.
“Florence?” His eyebrows knitted together. “Florence!”
I tried to run but tripped over a loose board that was sticking up from the floor. My own damn hideout was bringing me down. In a second, Milligan was above me, reaching out a hand. He forced out his words between wheezing breaths. “I should’ve known. Your Valley girl accent wasn’t very convincing.”
“Get away from her!” Caroline shouted, and I looked up to see that she, Rhett, and Levi had stayed back to wait for me. Levi pulled me to my feet.
“I was just going to help her up, I swear.” Milligan was still bent over, hands on his knees, but there was exhilaration in his eyes.
“Sure, you were.” I spat the words out. “You’ve been hunting us down like pests from the moment you got here. Were we supposed to think you meant well?”
“How did you find us?” Levi asked, bringing his face close to the old man’s.
Milligan shrugged. “Pretty easily. I was running errands in town, and I noticed a bunch of kids on my list of suspects were all heading in the same direction. I followed them to the edge of the woods, then waited a bit before running over so that I could catch you all in the act.”
Rhett gulped. “Sir, this is our financial support cult. It’s not exactly what you’re thinking. You don’t want to take away revenue from a bunch of kids, do you?”
“It’s not like we’ve harmed anyone,” Caroline said.
Milligan held up his hands. “Listen, I don’t care what this is all about as long as I can be part of it.”
“But it matters—” Caroline stopped short as I sat in dumb silence. “Wait, what?”
“I meant what I told you, Florence.” Milligan nodded in my direction. “This place is driving me crazy. Nothing happens here that isn’t boring or depressing. Nothing, except for the cult.” His words tumbled over each other, as if he was desperate to say his piece before we stopped listening and continued to assume the worst. “I started looking into the cult as soon as I got here because that’s all the neighbors wanted to talk about. People here are so eager for any distraction. They’re in love with the mystery. But I can’t attend another town bingo night or drive-in movie. I need some action again. I want to join your cult. Or financial scheme, or whatever it is.”
We were all quiet at first. Then I broke the silence, relief washing over me and leaving me almost giddy. “The cult’s pretty full, and I’m not sure you could run from the cops,” I said, “but there’s another position available.”
Lade Braes kept shrinking as shops continued to close. Bills kept piling up. The outcome for our town was bleak, but the world hadn’t ended just yet. The tourists came as fast as the bills, especially now that Milligan ran a tour guide business exploring the dark rumors surrounding our small-town cult. Sometimes I worked nights as his assistant and made good tips.
Tonight, I’d finally collected enough to possibly make Mother take a second look. As soon as I got home, I ran up to my room and pulled out the box that held my tips. Moonlight shone in from my open window, illuminating the stack of bills against the backdrop of water-logged cult paperbacks and frayed clothes that were scattered around. Sitting in my hands, the money looked so insignificant, and yet money was the source of all my hope.
I walked into my parents’ room, my dad snoring deeply on the bed. My mother was in the bathroom, curlers in her hair as she washed the makeup from her face. I wordlessly handed her the money, and she flipped through fives and tens, raising her eyebrows. “Have you turned to prostitution?”
“No, Mother.”
For the first time in years, she gave me a nod of approval. “Thank you for your contribution. I suppose you are good for something.”
I turned away and headed out of the room, fighting a small smile of triumph.