kain ꄗ @kainskaligraphy - Tumblr Blog

prositution and it's sex market

synopsis: your filth covers you and leads you into a church (sacred in its own ways). enchanted by their amenities, you stay, simultaneously pulling the strings to the discovery of your new found home // wc: 7927

tags: au – canon divergence, au – church, priests, religious imagery and symbolism, sacrifice, occult, implied vampirism, suggestive themes, knifeplay, bloodplay, light sadism

ONLY THE STARS could tell if you belonged in your self-inflicted state of escape. Deemed a local threat, you had no choice but to stumble your way into a thick forest of pine trees with rocky footing. Its paths narrowed with each step and the looming trees stalked your every footstep. It would have to do. You made it from the blare of their sirens but sensed the police making their way on foot. Who knew how long it would take before they caught up? Dashing further into the woods, the wind’s howls and rumbling clouds drowned out the sound of their cars. You slumped yourself over a nearby tree, hoping that they lost you, and slouched over your knees. A metal taste swirled in your mouth as you caught your breath and tried to ignore the tackiness of the blood drying on your skin.

You took regular breaks by tree stalks, when needed, while the wind whipped through your hair as you trudged further into the forest with aching ankles. The sky dropped its water which cooled the burning on your forehead with its weight. Giving you an arguably well-deserved morsel of relaxation in your time spent hiding on the run. When you licked your lips in an effort to quench your parched throat, with the raindrops your skin caught, and when you started foraging for berries on your aimless amble, an uneasy pinch at your muscles told you the police roamed nearby. Time didn’t stop for nobody, not even you. So you needed to find a place to hide under, and fast.

Luckily, your discovery trip hadn't been in vain as you came across a little clearing of land, with a church sitting in the middle of it. It was nothing simpler than a white building, where parts of the wooden planks rotted from the weather and stray shingle pieces gathered around the building, leaving parts of its roofing exposed. A few sheep roamed with their mildly soaked fur, watching diligently over their young ones, who pranced about without a care in the world for the abyss behind the trees. The church even had a tall steeple with a rusting metal cross, bent and disfigured, like Satan chose to wreak His havoc as a silent announcement He lived there. Any ordinary person would make the sacrifice and skip the place, but you? You needed a church more than anything. Going in would kill three birds in one stone: divine protection from the law to having food and water. But most importantly, providing the first steps in forgetting your sins.

You stepped closer towards the lone building with the severity of your crimes weighing upon you. It all happened in a blur, too fast to process. The last thing that came back, before the hiss of their radio static and blaring sirens, was the heat of the knife’s plastic in your hands as it bore into the chest of the person under you. You shook your head and leaned a hand on the church’s open doors, expecting to find an empty church in which you could take refuge in but reality met you with the complete opposite.

PEOPLE SPARSLEY PACKED the pews lining the church from its front and to its back; the pungent smell of sweat, fused with melting wax and lavender, doused the room. Just like its exterior, the inside had a simplicity to it, one that could be explained by its lack of shining golds and silvers, replaced by bare wood with the grain peeking under its finishes. Your parents raised you a devout believer of Christ so the look of intense worship on the congregation’s faces surprised you to no degree. But it’d been a large gap of time from your last visit to a sacred place; the typical traditions became a fading shadow in the back of your mind. Everyone in the mass squeezed their eyes shut while a quiet list of murmurs left their lips and wisped the tips of your ears. Many tables fixed themselves in place on the altar. All draped in white, except one. From the black-covered table, a sliver of silver twinkled. You tried to raise your head to get a better glimpse but everyone swayed firmly in their prayer. They all stood facing the wooden altar, with a gold carpet sweeping across it, and two men in robes atop: one in a red chasuble, the other in a green dalmatic, leading the service.

One of them had a bulkier build than the other, with his muscles unsuccessfully hiding under the silk of the robe. He wore a stern look on his face with judging eyes that surveyed the mass. His companion closed his and mumbled under his breath in the same manner as the rest of the congregation, carrying the look of a baby at rest on his face. Upon noticing the absence of the staple crucifix with Jesus on the altar, the more you watched at their compressed faces, it seemed they worshiped the men in front, more than their supposed God in the sky.

Your stomach grumbled and sent a twisting pain through your abdomen. You walked closer to one of the pews and took a seat; the rest of the mass’ figures towered over you. From where you sat, you searched every surface for remnants of food or drink as a spinning nausea overcame you like an ebbing wave. Your eyes threatened to shut but you peeled them open with determination lingering in the remains of your courage. Certain circumstances left no time for waste but this would be the last place where you found rest before continuing your long run into the world's unknown. What space would a humble church have for a person like you, painted with suspicious marks of red? With the little of your faith, left behind from your days of youth, you closed your eyes and folded your fingers, daring to say a tiny prayer. Nothing too fancy, but to test the waters, in case He really did hear those in their times of need.

After you finished your prayer of pity and half-hearted forgiveness, you pressed a hand to your chest to calm the tightness in it, presumably coming from the taller man on the altar. His eyes stared through you. As if the body you inhabited was nothing but a transparent sheet, exposing the true nature and intention of your every organ. As if you put your racing thoughts and pounding heart on display for his judgemental gaze. You looked back at him, watched the graze of the wind ruffle a few of his stray brown hairs, then moved your eyes back to the aging paint on the wall’s wooden planks. But his stare possessed you. As you put your hands together, to distract yourself from him, the second man opened his eyes and rang a bell. The man whose eyes refused to leave yours leaned over to his companion and whispered in his ear. Did they hold certain rules in this church where they forbade sitting down during prayer? Well, you had just arrived, maybe they’d give you a pass.

At the bell’s tinkling chime, the mass erupted in shuffles and creaked the pews as they dropped to their seats in obedience. The man with the bell nodded and smiled a toothy grin, holes jabbing their way out of his teeth before taking his position behind the podium.

“Thank y’all for joinin’ us, I'm sure She’s more than pleased to see a couple o’ new faces ‘round us too,” his eyes scanned the area then landed on yours. “And for the new people with us, I’ll be your Father Hillwalker and behind us, Deacon Hillwalker.”

Brothers. The fact they were a happy family, leading a service together, raised a twinge of jealousy in your throat. Back when the joys of family were no stranger to you, your best friend often swung by your house and you'd enjoy your time spent on the park's swings – with your brother, if he came along – until your hearts had their fill. Sometimes you joined them and ran across a large field to determine who would eat the last apple tart from a bag of twenty and even when no one won, you'd all laugh at how breathless they became. While they all could still breathe, of course. Without their oxygen masks. But ever since that awful day, the day you swore all hell broke loose, you abandoned your faith and the concept of forgiveness. Would this church restore the trust you lost long ago? Or shatter the hidden small fragments into dust?

“Let’s start with the parts She’s given us from Her life. We’ll celebrate Her teachings,” Father Hillwalker said as he turned to the table draped in black cotton.

Deacon Hillwalker picked a silver platter and Father Hillwalker placed it on one of the tables beside the podium with a gentle clatter. From where he stood, he folded his hands together and whispered a prayer in which some words left with a sharp hiss from the tongue. Deacon Hillwalker reached for an elaborate dagger with a red jewel centered at its pommel and more across its cross-guard, you itched at the sight of it. A dagger? And they called the place a ‘church’. Father Hillwalker took quiet steps away from the table, with clasped hands, as though his prayer put him under a spell. He ended his prayer, with the tips of his fingers circling around his head and made a central downward motion to his navel. It looked nothing like the sign of the cross your parents accustomed you to.

On the platter, Deacon Hillwalker pressed the flat of his blade into the grey fur and white wool of the animals sprawled on top. He stuck the dagger into the laxly open jaw of the fierce one. Its metal clinked against its jagged teeth while drying saliva coated the blade, then smeared the metal over the eye of the meeker looking one, shutting its rectangular pupil from the rest of the mass’ gawking stares. You shuddered at the squelch that escaped from the lamb as he forced the dagger into its stomach. The lamb’s face deflated and its mouth relaxed to an open. Life drained from its muscles with each slice the deacon made. And the lamb didn’t resist, but accepted the fate laid before it. Above the congregation’s heads, silence soared. Occasionally interrupted by the hiss of the lamb's tissue and the splatter of its blood through the initial beads around the new stomach wound, before pouring gracefully like a graceful waterfall, into the platter. If you had to die, right there, right then, nothing looked more beautiful than the lamb in its last moments. What else did you have to accomplish? You got the revenge you needed, you wouldn’t mind going too. A couple of tears pricked the corners of your eyes as the deacon pulled out the blade after cutting with such precision and care. He brushed his tender hands across its wool and pressed at the bite mark around its neck, so more of its dazzling red spilled out and dyed the lamb’s milk white coat. He repeated the same process on the wolf, only with a rougher grip and sloppier cuts. And as expected, the sight didn’t bring that much to thought.

Father Hillwalker brought a polished chalice under the lamb’s gash, the deacon opened the flap of its wound to let blood flow into the cup with a delicate tink. Then, he held another chalice, dirtied by stains of red across the edge, under the wolf’s slash where blood gushed into it. The deacon wiped his fingers on his dalmatic and the blood masked into the silk like it never existed to begin with. The father walked closer to the podium, with fingers flecked with freckles of blood, then he smiled another one of his gap-toothed grins.

“We’ll start,” he spoke out into the drifting breeze from the door.

The congregation rose to their feet with one hand on top of the other held in front of their chests. Father Hillwalker held the dirtied chalice while Deacon Hillwalker had the polished one; they made their way around the church, giving out the blood row by row. Each group sat in the pews lined up before them for either the father or deacon to give them a taste from the cups. The taste of blood wasn’t something you were unfamiliar with, rather a taste you didn’t want to come across again. But from what you remembered in your last biology lesson as a kid, blood had some sort of water. With the way your throat dried, it had no difference to the regular water you could’ve found in a nearby river, had you kept walking. After tending to the rest of the mass, the brothers made their way to you at the back of the church. You tripped your way to stand up, putting aside the throbbing ache in your knees, not sure if you wanted to try blood from raw animals. Did it matter what kind of blood you tasted, anyway? Whatever it meant, you just wanted a drop of anything to get over with the pangs surging through your stomach.

A slim awkward moment slipped by as the brothers stood beside you, the only person in your pew, holding the shining cups. The father eyed you, especially at your face and neck where most of the blood blotched in its unconventional patterns. He took a hesitant step forward, his brother put a hand, blocking him, and made the next steps the father wanted to. A sheep’s bleating mewed in the tap of the rain. The deacon closed the gap between you, the pressure of his steady breaths pressed into your skin unevenly.

“You’ll take this cup,” he said, in a tone which, distinguishing if he asked or commanded, proved a challenge.

Not knowing what or how to answer, you made short, repeating nods and watched how the blood’s shine scattered in the chalice from its soft ripples. The deacon took another step closer and stood one chalice in distance away from you, the lukewarm heat almost radiating onto your skin, past your clothes. He pushed the metal to the plush of your lips and it stung at the miniscule tears on them, earned by running days without sustenance. But you hungered and thirsted for this drop; with its sight alone, a small, wavering flame of completion kindled in you. The blood seduced you into a heavy trance in which your eyelids heaved; you impatiently licked at the blood inside. The deacon pulled it away from you. Making it unclear if the blood already triggered your hallucinations, or if the corner of his lip really flicked up into a smirk. However, the metallic smell floating from the pool of red allured you, too much for you to care. You swallowed. A dry but needy swallow. While the slick of your sweat gathered near your hairline and edged near your ears. An insatiable sultriness pulsed over your face and you forgot the pounding that disturbed your limbs. All you wanted, needed more than anything, willing to give up your own life for it, was a singular drop of the blood in the chalice.

And he gave it to you.

He tipped the chalice from its shaft, the warm liquid poured down your throat. It was sweet, like honey. Sour, like the acid boiling in your joints. It fizzed and soothed your throat as you gulped furiously for more. Under your clammy skin, the centre of your neck bobbed and yearned for the drops of the tangy blood. You didn’t care that it trickled from the corners of your mouth or that the deacon grabbed onto your chin with such force, it almost felt loving. Nonetheless, his gaze was the burning heat of the blood; his deep brown eyes promised a safe place while the world outside went up in flames. They were the eye of a hurricane, the calm before it and the silence that came with the damage after. A world where your past sins, crimes and unforgivable acts of human nature could be forgotten and put to rest. A world where you could live away from the expectations of society constantly glaring at you and be free, naked and raw. If you could, you would’ve guzzled down the blood, and its chalice, and jumped straight into the world pictured behind those eyes. But their daring sheen dissolved and the shadows enhanced the bottomless pit of his irises. The dreary side of it all, including your so-called safe place. After all, a room clouded with thick smog is no safer than the blazing fires outside.

“Enough,” he said in a quiet voice, loud enough for the both of you to hear.

He snatched the chalice and left you breathless. Your eyes refused to budge off him as he walked his way back to the altar. Everyone set down to their seats but you plummeted. Your back bumped against the hard of the pew’s wood and you mustered the little energy you had left to clench your fingers around the seat’s edge. Though filling in its own ways, the blood failed to complete you. You wanted more than the drink in the chalice as much as you wanted your strength back. You slid into the crook of the pew, your legs wobbled with less stability than you had before you stepped in. Could this be the price you paid for the long-lost hope he filled you with? Maybe it was similar to how His Holy Spirit often seized its victims and left them begging and breathless. But what you had, and you were extremely lucky to have it, proved to be better than His Spirit. If the place of authenticity behind his eyes were of Her making, you couldn’t risk avoiding it. Where else would you go? Wandering around the forest, uncivilised, and competing for your survival? No. Life breathed between the walls, in the floorboard’s cracks and swallowed you in its security. You no longer needed to run. Your home found you.

☮ ☮ ☮

THE REST OF the service passed in a speedy blur, which gave the sky enough time to sprinkle more water from its darkening clouds. The father muttered a few words here and there about a Culling Day, a Gracious She who opposed and replaced the traditional conventions of a male God and acted as the epitome of eternal life. Other words scattered about, entailing the reach to spirituality’s heights with the union of humanity and its animals. As She intended. And the final words, before the mass started emptying, detailed how She holds responsibility over weeding out the contradictions in society. You dozed off to the pattering of the exiting footsteps and went over their words at face value. Their meaning to you, unidentifiable but something about them struck a chord within you. Resonance or incongruence? You threw your head to the side, shrugging off the puzzling ideas but also nudging the person digging deep into your pockets, who poked near your crotch. You shifted to the side, startled; you stared at a knelt down Father Hillwalker, who did the same to you.

“What the hell?” You croaked.

“Didn’t think you’d get up,” he tutted and looked over to the altar. He slipped out the two coins left in your pocket, scoffing at them and stuffing them into his own, “It’s like an offerin’ of yours.” He gave a gentle smile, which was odd for a thief to do, and maybe it was done in the hopes you'd brush off the villainy within his intentions.

“Yeah, no. What?” You stuttered.

“An offering? We don't do all this for free, y’know,” he deadpanned, cutting out the light in his eyes. “Y’ain’t got nothin’ to worry ‘bout, you're offerin’s gonna mean so much more, much later,” the light returned and he winked.

Your eyes wandered around the church to find Deacon Hillwalker also rummaging through someone's belongings while everyone else groggily woke up, their groans lilting among the church.

“Clearly,” you muttered as the father walked off.

He took his position behind the podium again and rested his hands on its slanted surface.

“We’re beyond glad, honestly, to have y’all at our special service. You won't know how much you bein’ here means to us,” he beamed from ear to ear.

“When can we leave?” A young, tan man sitting in the middle pews called out with a bored tone. His face reddened and he turned his red baseball cap backwards.<

The father gripped at the edges of the podium, white knuckled, and his face crumpled with a subtle anger he tried playing off with a tight-lipped simper. He opened his mouth but before a puff of his breath escaped, a boom of thunder broke out and its aftersound drummed upon the church’s roof, probably snatching away parts of the fragile shingle.

The father hummed, “Well, we wouldn't want you out in the storm, that's for sure. Y’all can leave if y’want.”

The church had never been so still. Aside from the sheeps’ outdoor bleating, before a harsh snap and snarl cut it short.

“Alright then. We'll offer y’all a place to stay, if that's what you'd like.”

You would've wanted nothing else but a place like this. Free food, with people who had no clue how you arrived and a place to stay. Maybe God did exist. Or was it Her doing?

The father motioned his hand over to him as he opened a latched door beside the altar.

“C’mon then,” he said.

The people shook to a stand. Some pushed their palms against the backs of the pews for a better balance, then staggered their way down with Father Hillwalker, who travelled into a long passageway of stairs. You did the same, at least tried to. Each time you rose, the floor sucked you in and threw you back to your seat. You gritted your teeth after the fifth time of fighting against the unbeatable ground while a pair of footsteps thumped along the floor. Deacon Hillwalker made his way to you. His broad figure blocked the light from the central light bulb and casted his distinct shadow over you.

“Help, please. They—My legs, they can't work,” you said.

“Are you a virgin?”

You widened your eyes and pressed against the soft of your ears to make sure you heard correctly.

“I'm sorry? Me?”

“No, the person behind you,” he exhaled, sucking back his irritation. “You. Are you a virgin?”

“Don't worry about me, could you just… Help me up?” You groaned, pushing yourself to a stand, once more. To fail, once again.

“Won't help you ‘til you answer the question,” he said with more bass in his voice.

Like you and your brother, they had a relationship in which one of them acted differently to the other. Except their opposites were extreme and had a hint of danger sparking behind every action. The deacon walked behind you and pulled something out; it sounded with a ring amongst the rumple of his dalmatic. You smelled blood. Blood that you took deeper breaths to inhale for and already imagined it dripping from your lips. This time, it masked itself in a colder, earthy aroma. Strong, but not strong enough to hide its true scent whisking up from its source. Deacon Hillwalker brought the sanctified dagger to your collarbones and pressed it along its side so you could feel its sharpness. Under what remained of the central bulb’s light, its shine blinked your eyes to a close.

“You're not answerin’,” his shallow breath skimmed past the tip of your ears as his nose hovered over your hair. “You'd be of great use to our,” he paused, “church, if you were.”

You focused on the red dropping slowly as it formed more marks of blood over your clothes. You stuck out your tongue, almost as far enough to tear it away from where it hung, but he swiped the dagger away, leaving a thin, precise cut across your bones. Your own blood resurfaced this time, in round rubies; with the help of the deacon, his firm press got more of it flowing down your torso. The firm pressure stung with the dulcet pain picking a scab, where your skin thinned, brought. You cocked her head forward and tasted the blood, expecting a refined, rich taste, and insulted by its real, salty nature. If this was the same blood flowing through your brother's vessels, you felt inclined to apologise. Definitely not worth it. He dragged the point of the dagger from your clothed sternum to the base of your stomach, edged your groin and watched the blood trail by in a narrow thread. The blade ran and grazed with a colder sensation than it should, it still sent a shivering chill, one that conflicted with the warmth of your body. You squirmed under him and he observed the shudder of your lower jaw and the almost unnoticeable eye roll under your eyelids. Your breath hitched, you laboured for more; the scent of the blood's residue intoxicated you, to which you threw your head back and licked off what remained of the blood on your lips. An involuntary sound left your mouth while you met the deacon’s solid stare and only then did you ponder on his words.

“I wanna be of use. I wanna be useful, for once,” you whispered under a fistful of air, it sounded like you breathed your last.

“You're like a dog,” he wiped the rest of the blade's blood on you, smiling as you frowned. “This shit’s not cheap. And that's why,” he grunted, “you're gonna answer me.”

The deacon moved from behind you and stood beside your pew, close enough to lend you a helping hand but far enough to stand his ground. He liked seeing you like this yet he tried to mask his underlying sadism. What a terrible actor. You played into it, gave him what he wanted, might as well make your stay enjoyable since you planned to stay for a while.

“I might be,” you looked down to the floor.

“Are you? Or you're not? Quit playing around, it’s… Important,” he chewed the inner of his lip.

“You never know what might've happened to me,” you whispered.

All the light left his eyes; he tightened his grip on the dagger.

“No, I was—I'm just playin’ around, for real,” you exclaimed. “I am, I really am. I swear,” you waved your hands in innocence.

His grip relaxed as he squinted at you.

“You gonna help me up now?” You stretched out a trembling hand in which he took and pulled you out from the sinking ground.

“I can't let you join ‘em yet. We need to do somethin’ first,” he walked over to a door on the altar’s other side, opposite the exposed row of stairs. “Get in.”

The deacon leaned his back against the door's frame with crossed arms and watched you enter.

PAST THE DOORS, a wooden rectangular box, as tall as the separate room, stood. On its sides, a smaller door creaked open while the other one kept shut. A confessional box.

“We gots to make sure you're as clean as you'll ever be,” the deacon said, entering his side of the box.

You followed suit and took a seat. A black curtain draped over a set of holes separated the both of you. In order to distract yourself from the itchiness and pit wedged in your throat, you patted over your knees like it was a known remedy.

You cleared the blockage, “What do you want me to say? I mean… I don’t really got much to say, anyway.”

He paused in the rushed rustle of his clothes, “Y’know—You know that ain’t true.”

A long exhale filled the confines of the box. You wanted to look outside, focus on the needles of each pine tree and drown your thoughts out with the soft, distant pattering of the thunderous rain but only the thin curtain met you. You fiddled with the hem of your clothes, dug your hands deep into your pocket and rolled the lint in there too. The deacon was far from wrong. You had plenty of things to confess for. Like the time you argued with your brother since he felt cheated that you spent more time, with your best friend, over him. Or the other time you smack talked your brother in front of the said best friend. You all used to be so happy. But ever since she started disappearing without saying a word, things flipped on their heads.

“I watched her,” you paused. “I stood there and watched her get shoved into the back of some guy’s truck,” you blurted.

You clutched onto the thick silence but it slipped past your hands relentlessly, it didn’t want your hands of sin getting anywhere near it.

“I should’ve done something. I know, I know but—My legs, they—I couldn’t move them, like,” now. Like now, you wanted to say, but the damned pit tangled itself in your vocal chords and chewed on your words. You sat with the words about to leave next, slightly disturbed by the rushed breathing you heard on the other side. “I don’t know, I was too busy thinking about him. Why him? The brother I always put my friend over, I didn’t get it then but… What am I saying, I don’t even get it now.”

You leaned forward and pressed your forehead against the curtain and pinched at the small wound by your chest.

“So when her body floated by our creek, I couldn’t do nothing else but give her a burial. Her body? Bruised. Real bad. So bad that blood leaked out from the slightest touch. Her body was… Fresh,” your heart shivered behind your ribs as your breath thinned. “It was the last I could’ve done, you know? But then behind me, I didn’t even sense him, like… Like he was some ghost, always standing right behind me. He—My brother stood there and I could tell, in that moment, he had all the hate in his heart for me. All of it. He ran and ran. I couldn’t see him anymore. And before you know it, I’m a criminal.”

You peered through the curtain; the little holes behind it let you see his eye darting back at you. You lied to yourself and leaned back in your seat like all you had to tell had been said. You knew that wasn’t true, so did he. Since the same look he gave when you first stepped in, disheveled and with nowhere to go, pointed to you. He saw through you.

“What’re you trynna hide,” he said, breathless. “There’s more to that. Y’can’t just walk in, snortin’ up all the air in the room, with blood all over your clothes and say you didn’t do nothin’ to her. Y’think I was born yesterday?”

You shook your head. The gentle shifts of his fabric continued and what could’ve been the repetitive gusts of wind subsided. Either that or Deacon Hillwalker breathed heavier than before.

“You good there?”

He coughed, “You’re not done.”

“I can’t continue.”

“Y’can.”

You sucked in a decent amount of air, it chilled against your teeth. What would he do with your information? The church sat in the middle of nowhere, where else would it go? Your mind flickered back to the safe place you pictured behind his brown eyes. Yes, how did you forget? You’d tell him your regrets, lay it all out clean and he’d give you your safe place with a never ending flow of the lamb’s blood. Where you’d sit and drink greedily until its wasteful downpour fills the rest of the room, while everything around you burns in a wicked set of flames. The safe place had no worries, it had no judgement. What it did have was a community, and all you had to do was come clean with your crimes so they’d forget them too.

“I’m not proud of it,” you muttered.

“You ain’t meant to be.”

You swallowed, with the blood’s aftertaste hanging at the back of your tongue. The truth sucked at the roof of your mouth and burdened your tongue but slowly slid to its tip, where it waited to fall.

“He got too loud, one day,” you said. The truth teetered over, hung on its tired limb, like you kept your tongue curled around a thick stick of suspense.

You took a deep breath and hid your bottom lip, but not too hard in fear of your own salty blood returning.

“I couldn’t take it anymore,” you pressed your palm into the bone of your knee. “So I got rid of him.”

“What d’you mean by that?” He asked in short puffs of breath.

“You know what I mean, stop.”

“I really don’t.”

The slimy movement of his gums slid through the still of the box as he crimped his lips into a smile.

“Carry on,” he said.

“You’re judging me.”

Silence.

“I killed him.”

The deacon hummed.

“I’d ask more,” he paused, forcing a rushed stillness. “We’re short for time,” his clothes ruffled again, louder this time.

He slid up the grate of holes behind the curtain and pushed it to the side, revealing his angled glare. He stuck out his thumb; light, entering the box’s sides, scattered above the substance on his thumb.

“Bring your head forward,” he murmured.

“What’s that?”

“...Holy oil.”

You tilted your head, almost resting your brows on the ledge of the cut out square. There was nothing holy about this place. He forced his finger on your forehead, anointing you with the inverted sign of the cross that had an arrow head pointing to the ground. Your head had a lukewarm temperature to it, courtesy of the cooling sweat; once he pressed his thumb, it strangely burned up. Only when it dripped down the bridge of your nose, did you conclude: what he painted across your forehead was far from holy oil. You wiped the excess off with the back of your hand and rubbed it on your clothes, tempted to taste it. Not too much now, you didn’t want to anger your deacon.

YOU SAT CROSS-LEGGED at your ankles on the cellar’s cool concrete floor, along with the rest of the people left behind. The room clad itself in a blanket of darkness, devoid of the shortest sliver of light. You could tell everyone’s position from their shadows. How you all huddled up in a circle of a specific diameter, around a tall object in the centre. How Father Hillwalker traced his footsteps around each individual with the clicking of his boots and how Deacon Hillwalker stood behind you from a noticeable distance. With the lights being off and the darkness around you deepening to shades unseen, his gaze still lingered and singed at your back. As if he remained entranced by the fleeting idea that he skimmed his dagger’s point across the ridges of your spine, gawking at how it bumped so steadily. Well, that was only a thought, nothing more. But, what other problem could he have with you? You did as he directed. You told him your truth. You told him how you got there. All of that and he refused to move his eyes off you.

“After our waitin’, we can now, finally, make it on to the next stage,” the father said, his voice bouncing between the walls.

While he walked, the air around him bowed as you caught the silhouette of metal in his hands. He frequently brought a finger to press against one of its sides after releasing it from a tight hug. The deacon’s steps commenced too, making swift strides your way. He crouched, hovered the side of his face next to yours, like he did at the pews, and dropped a wet but rough rope onto your legs. He walked his way around the rest of the circle, trailing it around to everyone else. The rope slapped onto where it landed; people shifted closer towards it in their interest. You squeezed your hands around the thick rope. Liquid squeezed out from the gaps in between your fingers. You raised a thumb to graze over the rest of your palm, comparing the liquid’s texture to anything else your brain remembered sensory-wise. Now that was oil. But for what? And why on a rope?

“The hell are you trynna make us do? I just came here to find myself, man. Not here for all this creepy occult shit,” a voice yelped out from the corner.

Must’ve been the young man from before.

“Shut up!” The father yelled back. “You’re lucky you’re here. Let’s start with that. She’s been waitin’ to grace you with Her presence.”

The man's voice quivered, “Nah, I’m really not up for this. I gotta go, I got things back at ho—”

“Didn’t y’hear me?” The father shouted, clanging his scrap of metal on the wall.

“You’ll all now stand up and walk around in a circle. And do not even think about steppin’ out of line,” the father demanded.

Everyone dragged themselves to their feet and circled around the object in the centre. You squinted your eyes to catch further details on the rugged edges of the thing. Though there were many options for what the thing could be, you knew for certain that it smelled horrible. A mixture of rotting fruit and meat gone bad while distant streaks of fresh floral scents passed above you. You found yourself sniffing for the rare hibiscus and plump smell of cherries hiding among the object’s foul decay. It could’ve been anything. A pile of rotting flesh, a stack of organic matter covered in writhing maggots and dead flies. You guessed some more, then made out the shape of a cross in the shadows.

A harsh skittering interrupted your thoughts. Followed by heavy breathing, then skin contacting skin. And finally, a violent squelch of metal hitting the concrete, plucking out a shrill scream. You wouldn’t have missed a sound like that. It was too close to the same knocking your knife did to the floor as it met the kitchen floor on the other side of your brother’s body. You closed our eyes and grimaced in an effort to dismiss the ringing picture while the scream carried on, and went on until its source grew weak and hoarse in the throat. A familiar hissing simmered over the room and a fresh liquid bubbled onto the floor with the same sound a steady stream might make. The father’s boots thumped, his clothes whispered, he crouched to retrieve something off the floor. Then brushed past you and stabbed the thing on the shadow in the centre.

“Sit,” Deacon Hillwalker boomed.

You all shuffled down, inhaling the distasteful scent of human blood. The brothers walked from the edges of the oil circle to the central object, their cans glugging as it spewed its liquid. The swift strike of wood on a box. Its quiet drop to the ground. And with that, a ring of fire lit up before you. It roared and hunched over your skin; not in a way you might consider invasive, rather one comparable to the scorching sun radiating its sweltering heat. And because the sun couldn’t control it, you put your complaints to rest. However, this was different to the safe place he promised you. Wasn’t the fire meant to be outside of the room? It glowed with the fire’s orange hue and tiny flecks of ash (separating from piles large enough to be their previous fires’ offspring) jumped around the room. You turned to the young man from before, (his gory sight now illuminated) left in a crawling position with one of his hands stretched to the stairs as if someone awaited him there. But he should’ve known from the crooked steeple, God didn’t dare to visit such a place. His legs missed their second half. Through the clean cut and fray of his jeans, the inside of his muscles and artery vomited blood that drifted down the floor like forbidden paint, while they spasmed and jerked persistently. Blood, enough to fill several chalices for an entire country, pooled around him in its dark crimson colour and dispersed around his body like a blooming black dahlia. It took everything in you not to rush over and help but he breathed his last, in a strained whimper, and his neck dropped to the floor with a thud. Your sorry eyes palpitated over the body for a brief moment then hesitated to a slumping, crumpled sheet of paper. Since you sat a distance from it, most of the words looked like bleeding ink and yet, you didn’t miss the pictures of the brothers' faces, with ‘WANTED’ written in big and bold. You started to see why now.

“We’re here with an offerin’,” the father strolled closer to the ring of fire with open hands.

He pulled on your wrist, dragging you across the floor for a split second before you dangled off his hand. You? The offering? No. You had a future waiting for you. A future spent with them and their never ending flow of blood. Though you knew it wasn’t much, other than a life spent in hiding from the law. But that still meant something. To you.

“Standing here is a person, pure and impure. In one body. That simply can’t exist ‘round here, especially not with Her here,” the father said above of the roaring flames.

You quit shying your eyes from the flames’ blazing heat since the tears they brought gnawed at the corners of your eyes. It’s not like they could extinguish the fires, anyway.

“No, you got it all wrong,” you gasped with a mouth full of smoke. “I’m one of you, I’m meant to be here. Sacrifice?,” you coughed, “That’s not me!”

Your tears fizzled and cracked against the blaze, shrivelling up into their own stream of white smoke on your face. Smoke, in larger volumes, plumed into your lungs and covered their branches with ash. You threw up another cough; it tipped you closer over death’s bridge.

“There’s no need for the lyin’. You told us on your own,” he said to you.

With your wrist in his, he tossed you in the ring of fire amidst the pentagram-forming lines. Your feet seared at their soles and spread the pinching pain to the rest of your legs. You looked to the ceiling, your tears scratched as they rolled down your face faster than ever. In the darkness behind your eyes, your pain manifested into a white ray of concentrated heat, emitting a case of red with a low hum. The flame’s golden tint reflected in the ceiling, inescapable like the flame you swore flicked in your brother's eyes on that evening. Once you brought your eyes down, they feasted on the demonic material hung on the cross. A human head with matted hair beyond saving, and a face paler than that of your dead friend’s skin; it adapted to take on the amber the flames pushed upon it. Besides its head, nothing about the body seemed human. Everything else was an amalgamation of blackened farm animals' limbs, limp from death, mushed together to mimic the very skin you stood in. A pig foot hung from the roughly sawn off leg of a cow and a singular horse leg, covered in dead flies, joined another cow leg to make a pair. Maggots itched every tissue of the body, resisted the fire, and hung around the ribs that ripped the cow’s torso down the centre; infested with deep sores exposing the burgundy meat under its cowhide. You couldn’t miss the group of bloodied human hands sticking out of its back, forming a cursed halo of some sort. But your eyes drew back to its face. Calm and tranquil despite the bones browning under their untimely death. It met you like the deacon’s eyes without the ravaging storm but a field of scarlet poppies, sprouting in their desolate landscape. You stared at its closed lids and searched for a resolve that perished the second you stepped foot in the place. Even though you knew your time to leave the hellscape (you invited yourself into) had long passed.

“Pure and impure?” You muttered to yourself, as if you couldn’t swallow the truth while you gazed at the figure of nature.

“What’re you doin’? Wake Her up already!” A voice shouted from behind you, muffled in the crackle of the flames, but your attention refused to divide between Her body and unnecessary calls.

Your skin stretched taut over your muscles. Fitting like plastic wrap over a skeletal hand, with fingers longer than they were bony as they lengthened to grab hold of your arm. Was She the solution? The solution to end the circles you found yourself running around each day? You wanted your out and She gave you your exit. What kind of person would you be if you declined? An idiot? A lost cause? A coward? No matter what you chose, you were all three. You could add ‘selfish’ on top since you thought a ‘church’ would provide you everything without taking a piece of you. Rather, all of you.

“Ma! We got a lil’ somethin’ for you.”

The head, thrown over the shoulder of the cow torso, blinked its eyes to a wake. They shone with a luminous glow of green; the colour of a fresh start. Your barren land of poppies were no more, in the murky coloured sky a beating sun flowered, giving way to brave blades of green and trees, growing around the poppies. You took a hesitant step into the vast field, each one tearing through more layers of skin than before and snatching larger portions of your breath but determination washed over you, in your journey to the sun. A low growl drawled among the crackle of the flailing grass, which burst into an ear-popping shriek. It scraped at your ears and pierced through your head like someone had forced you under a needle destined to meet the other end of your skull. But you persevered.

On your impossible trek, the soil buried bones, abandoning eyeballs, almost clean from any cluster of earth, still in their eye socket. And his judging gaze plastered over them. You turned away from it, shuddering at the slim chance its decomposed skin would reassemble, along with its organs, muscles and tissues, throwing mud, dirt and soil as it resurrected, to strangle you out of your trance. But when you searched for the sun once again, the sky grew black. Blacker than the shadows you saw in the cellar, blacker than his pupil hole and blacker than the cavernous wound you tore through your brother's chest. Your breathing stopped and your brain scrambled under an immovable force that ground and ground and ground to no end. The air condensed to stringy water, sticky and putrid, before it plucked your flesh and hair, along with your bones, after those, and throbbed against what She left behind. And it stung, burned and twinged in a way you didn’t even know was possible; in a way you only thought sinners in hell suffered. But in that darkness, you so desperately searched for light.

And you found it. In a childish flame that you saw grow to make many others. Until they became all you ever could see. While they shaped his grave face. And His judgmental stare.

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