Free Dinner at Deviant's Palace by Tim Powers

old man in a white robe had entered the stadium. “The jaybush is here,” he said. “You walk out into the center of the field. We’ll talk some more after the sacrament.” He gave Rivas a push and then turned to the other groups around his tower. “All new members follow this brother!” he called. “I’ll greet you all personally afterward.”
    Rivas plodded out across the uneven ground, which was stippled now with fresh green weed shoots after the rain, and though he walked as slowly as any of the hundred or so new members who were approaching from all sides of the arena in a steadily shrinking circle, his mind was racing.
    That wasn’t my pelican, he thought, I remember mine, I saved up my jiggers and bought it when I was sixteen—okay, so why do I remember the one he stomped? Hell, I even remember that its E-string screw didn’t bind properly, and needed to be readjusted after every set.
    Set? What do I mean set ? That’s right, I play at the… what’s the name of the place? The Bom Sheltr, that’s it, in Venice; of course, and I’m twenty-five—why in hell was I thinking eighteen or thirty-one?
    And what in God’s name am I doing back among the Jaybirds? And lining up for the communion while sober ?
    He paused for a moment, but a dim suspicion that he did have some presently forgotten purpose in being here made him reluctantly resume the quasi-ceremonial pace. He surreptitiously touched his wrist and was reassured to feel his knife strapped there as usual. Okay, he thought, I’ll play this scene up to, but not including, the point of receiving the sacrament. This seems to be the Cerritos Stadium, and from my old birdy days I remember where the kitchen exit is; with surprise, speed and my knife, I should be able to be out of here and into the hills within two minutes.
    The white-robed figure of the jaybush had been walking toward the center of the field at a slightly quicker pace than the tightening ring of communicants, and just before shoulder to shoulder contact caused the ring to stop shrinking he slipped between a couple of them and then made his way to the very center. For ten long soundless seconds he scrutinized the nervously eager people in the ring.
    Then, “Kneel,” he said, in a voice like concrete blocks rubbed together.
    Everyone in the stadium did, with a rustling and thudding that seemed loud in the silence. Rivas squinted up at the jaybush, and the man’s robe shone so in the afternoon sun that the sky looked darkened to purple behind him. The man looked around the congregation again, then slowly crossed to stand in front of a young girl six places away to Rivas’s right.
    “Merge with the Lord,” the jaybush said, then reached out and touched her forehead.
    She oomphed as if she’d been punched in the belly, and a moment later she was rolling on the damp ground outside the circle.
    And suddenly it all came back to Rivas: Barrows hiring him to perform the redemption of Urania, the nightmare he’d had about her, and his own alarming susceptibility to this predatory religion.
    Let me out of here, he thought, instinctively reaching into his sleeve for the knife; if the plain recruitment tricks can make a grinning zombie of me so easily, what would a dose of the sacrament do?
    But you can’t run, he realized a moment later—not without blowing your hard-won earnest-new-boy cover and wrecking your chance of finding Urania.
    But I can’t take the sacrament sober either, he thought desperately. His heart was pounding in his coldly hollow-chest, and when he darted a glance to his right he saw that there were now only two people to be disposed of before it was his own turn. He noticed that he was whimpering deep in his throat, and with some difficulty he forced himself to stop it.
    “Merge with the Lord,” said the jaybush, touching the forehead of the boy who was next in line. The boy slumped limply to the ground, and Rivas heard his jaw clack shut as his face hit the dirt.
    Rivas