February 1984. It’s a freezing night in Copenhagen, Denmark. Under heavy snow, the streets are silent.
In a rooftop apartment, something weird is going down. King Diamond, the singer with Danish heavy metal band Mercyful Fate, is entertaining four guests: Timi Hansen, the band’s bassist, and his girlfriend, and ’s Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield, who are in Copenhagen to record their group’s second album, . It’s been a long night, and all of them are drunk.
For hours they’ve been sitting in the living room, talking and soaking up the heavy vibes from old records by Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Blue Öyster Cult. In one corner of the room is an altar: a table draped in a black cloth, lit by tall candles and decorated with a figurine of the pagan idol Baphomet and occult books and , the centerpiece a human skull. King Diamond is an avowed Satanist.
His obsession with the dark arts is expressed in Mercyful Fate’s songs and in his theatrical image: his face painted white and black, like , but with an inverted cross between his eyes. This occult shtick is of no interest to Hetfield and Ulrich, they just like the guy and love his band. But what is about to happens on this night at King’s place scares the shit out of Hansen and his girlfriend.
“I remember it clearly,” King Diamond says now. “At one point we left Timi and the girl alone in the living room, to have some fun. Lars and James and I went to my bedroom to play a game of table football.
And then we h.