A black magic commune operating out of a storefront in New York's East Village . . . A high-fashion model's terrifyingly bizarre death in a luxury Manhattan apartment . . . A dignified doctor whose magnificent traveling companions are young women afflicted with a strange, terminal blood disease . . . When Doctor Owen Orient, a prominent New York physician, decided to renounce his practice and all the material comforts he had become accustomed to, his goal was to find a simpler, more meaningful existence for himself. But Orient was not like ordinary men. For years, he had been studying the secrets of the Occult and, though he sought simplicity now, found himself drawn more and more deeply into a horrifying series of events that challenged his scientific rationality, his occult powers, and the instincts and emotions that guided his manhood. The puzzle that began in a Manhattan black magic commune, eventually drew Orient to Tangier, Marrakech, and Rome, to a confrontation with an ancient ravening evil--a battle in which telepathy, telekinesis, and even sex become weapons in a frenzied struggle to the death--and beyond . . .