—- Some forces shouldn’t be meddled
with, but there will always be those who fly too close to the sun and willingly burn themselves in the intensity of its rays. And while temptation comes in many shapes, power seems to be the top contender who lures even the brightest of minds. No one is exempt from its allure, no one can turn away when offered everything their heart has been aching for on a silver, if not golden, platter.
They are chanting, screaming, laughing. Their joy and ecstasy are cruel and unhinged as they screech like hyenas into the night, dancing around the fire and girl they lured in with false promises of a perfect summer. Her terror pours down their throats like honey, filling their hungry bellies like an appetizer for what is to come. One of them clears his throat and stops amidst the stomping. “BROTHERS, brothers! I would like to make a toast!” His words are slurred. “A toast to the gift of love, of life, of strength, of power! … OF POWER! … POWER! … POWER! POWER!” The surrounding four chant along, smashing their beer bottles to the ground as they fix their blue-dyed masks. Their victim will know of their hunger, and so they pour the bucket of blood all over her, laughing and shouting deliriously.
POWER should never be desired by a heart that’s turned corrupt, and still, all five men spit in the face of morality. Their singing grows louder, shaking the trees that freeze their limbs in fear, scaring the wind that holds its breath in anticipation, because the world knows something is amiss. It smells not only of alcohol, pig’s blood, the tears of a virgin, and utter barbarity– inhumanity, there is something else in the air: a dark prophecy that is foretold by a moon that seems brighter and redder than usual.
One of them pulls out a notebook that’s aged poorly, half its pages hanging on a thread. Everyone goes quiet, as do the woods, as does the night sky that cries for the woman and her unfortunate fate. He opens his mouth and out come riddles in languages unheard of, words that should not be spoken, a series of noises that twist stomachs of bystanders that don’t understand what hell is about to break loose. His voice grows louder, the flames reach higher, the moon is hot with anger. Somewhere, a bird’s nest drops its eggs to the ground; somewhere, a woman shuts the door on her husband with his fingers still stuck in the way; somewhere, a car swerves to avoid a deer in headlights, and crashes into a tree instead. Chaos washes over the world like a plague, and the fire is wailing, screaming, yelling, tormented by the very thing they are trying to call into existence.
Until it goes out. There is only the bloody moon illuminating all six faces, and its rumbling fury that storms the skies. Lightning tears the heavens in half. One of the boys holds the other by the arm, but they all look in awe. “It’s worked, it’s working! We did it, we did it!” The space before the died fire grows black, black, blacker than their hearts, the only spot void of moonlight. Three points connected to each other in perfect harmony, dance in each other’s orbit, until a hand comes crawling out. Its fingers are distorted, switching in and out of existence. The triangle hums as it births out something too difficult to look at, its colors bleeding and shifting into place like a melted oil painting. Somewhere, a mouth opens up and lets out a dire cry that silences all of them; somewhere, a pair of eyes go wide with anger; somewhere, rows of teeth and daggers for claws pierce through the blue that manifests.
They don’t dare look up from the soil on which they kneel, because they know looking it directly in the eye will end them before they can even utter their wish. And still, the silhouette of a gargantuan creature with horns that grow out from the front of his skull, cannot go unnoticed. He watches them, his hair bleeding like a puddle of ink in reversed gravity. When he speaks, all men groan, hands reaching for their ears. His words don’t hit the air, and it’s as if their bodies are trying to comprehend something they lack the senses for. It leaves them sick. And still, one of them bows to him, head to the ground. “Oh, great MARDINI,” they call him. “We are humbled by your presence. Please, take our offering of flesh that has not been tainted by sin! Feast on her blood and skin, and in turn, give us what we seek!” By the way his nose wrinkles and lines around his otherworldly eyes crease, one thing is certain: Mardini is not his name.
He gives all of the men a long once-over, the moon his third eye of judgment. All of a sudden, one of them shifts uncomfortably, chokes up, arms wrapped around the stomach. This one knows that what they have done was wrong, and he also knows it is now too late to repent. The entity snaps his glare to the girl, the offering, soaked in red. His jaw unhinges, throat gurgles, and as his tongue tries to mimic the language that they speak, he stares her down. The ghosts of whispers come to a stop when he closes his mouth and swallows his speech, heels touching the muddied grounds on which they all danced. This monster, however, is not dancing. “Stand,” he says to the girl with a voice that lags behind, as if still in the process of nestling in his lungs. “Have they hurt you? Tormented you?”
The supposed camp counselor spits and sputters the blood from her lips and nostrils, trying desperately to wipe it away with her hands, but it is dense and she is drenched. For so long, she had kept her strength a secret locked close to her heart, a way to keep composed and hopeful that she would find a way out. It is only now, with the stench of alcohol and the blood of pigs filling the air, that she finds herself wavering. She shrieks and sobs, the sensation is dreadful, a piercing pain that strikes her mind most of all. The distress bubbles up within her until she screams aloud, wanting a release from the overstimulation, wanting the blood off from her, a hot shower and a warm bed, but there is nothing here to offer peace and consolation.
Her words are drowned out, meeting a fate worse than being ignored. Every sound from her mouth only gave the wretched men a high. An extra skip in their step, a laughter more sinister than any noise she had ever heard. They were the very evil they were so desperate to summon, already enacting the same cruelty they wished to demand onto the world.
Only as the Earth falls silent around her does she slowly catch on to the reality surrounding her, her screams and cries falling to whimpers. She wonders if this is her own doing. Was her own outburst so extreme that it would even freeze these devils in their place? Did they feel the same anguish they injected into her heart? Her head finally lifts from where she had been cradling it, gripping into her own curls, and screaming into the ground, a position she herself hadn’t realized she had fallen into until she came undone.
She knelt against the dirt and blood beneath her, her hands resting and squeezing at her breaths with every labored breath that left her lungs. The silence is broken by one of the dreadful, and her last ray of hope is swallowed into the black hole that has become of her stomach. A void and nothing more. It was not her presence that had commanded any sort of reprieve from the human rot known as the men before her. Their minds were made up long ago that she was nothing but the sacrificial lamb to get what they wanted, and now, what they craved was finally before their eyes.
She had never been particularly spiritual, and scarcely believed in such things outside of fantasy. Ghost stories were a party trick to give friends a playful scare and nothing more. And yet, what occurred before her was no illusion, in spite of the unreality it brought to the realm. There is nothing to be done but to bare witness as the creature is summoned, luring her into a trance, as if her wish for the entire night to be nothing more than a dream had finally come true. The very essence of it, the sight of it alone, moves her to a surreal dimension of her own. Was any of this real? Was she?
She rises to her feet one knee at a time, and her focus is on the tremendous being before her. There was no sign of what to make of it. It’s demeanor was entirely unlike the ones who had brought it here in the first place, and yet, the very fact that he had appeared for them at all told her all that she needed to know. An enemy. All of them were against her, and this was but one final tally to join their ranks. She grasps at the sides of her head, tugging at her hair, and viciously shakes her head at his words. His words stings worse than salt in a wound, and she cannot bring herself to answer. All she can do is give him a pained look with quiet words. “I don’t want to be here.”
amandla
germansingergirl
origamiaround
gummygunk
blakekathryn
areudirty
