Louisiana Ritual
The wild grass beneath us was only a little damp now after the
scorching hot day we’d had. A couple of days ago there had been a
huge super cell storm and apparently there’d been some tornadoes
out by Castor. Near as I could tell, the storms had passed on but
it was tornado season and you could never be too careful. We
weren’t technically in tornado alley but twisters were fickle
things and could appear anywhere. Eris said that tornados and
hurricanes were nature’s way of showing us that she (Eris called
nature ‘she’ because of it being called Mother Nature, I guessed)
was still the most powerful force on this planet. With all the wars
and folks chopping down rainforests and global warming, Eris says
that nature is fighting back. It sure made sense to me, especially
after I saw how Katrina had destroyed so much of New Orleans.
We were lying in the clearing between the woods and the Gum Pond bayou in Bienville Parish. Hundreds, probably thousands, of insects hovered and swooped across the water, their wings buzzing and whining as they flew, occasionally getting eaten by frogs and other reptiles that leapt like slimy green missiles out of the water. The air smelled rich and cloying, a mixture of the moist earth, rotting vegetation and animals that made up these thick swamps. The sky was clear above us and the moon was big, low in the sky and golden coloured, like syrup. It was the day after the full moon, when the moon began its waning phase. That was something else Eris taught me. I never realised until she came along how ignorant I’d been all my life. She opened my mind up something crazy. Nowadays I was looking at the world in a whole new light because she’d made me see and understand everything that much better. Eris was a miracle, a true gift from God.
I never said that to her though; she was kinda anti religion. ‘Because of how it warps people’s minds,’ she said. I’d been brought up to be a good Christian boy by my parents and I still was, I just didn’t need to go to church no more. My God was everywhere. He showed me His existence by bringing Eris into my world. I truly believed that. Some would say I was blinded by love but if I was, well then, that was just fine by me.
I’d brought a cooler full of beer for the celebration later and we were sipping from a bottle each. We sat in companionable silence and I thought over a conversation Eris and I had in bed that morning, about how and why people do such goddamn nasty things to each other.
‘You know, the thing I’ve realised, that most people don’t understand, can’t even comprehend, is that we’re all the same. We’re all capable of doing great stuff and shit stuff and all the other colours in between black and white. But people are scared and they let other scared people get to them and warp their thinking, change their path, until they could be thrown into a pit of rattlesnakes and be as clueless as you can be, become one even. You have to look out for the rattlesnakes. That’s all I’m sayin’. Eris looked at me, dubiously, out of the corner of her eye and said ‘Ok, I get what you’re saying, Marcus, except the rattlesnake part. That was straight out of the left field.’
She lifted her head so she could sip her beer and winked at me. I laughed and coughed as I sat up, grass stuck to my bare back and all messed up in my hair. Her hair, which was darkest brown and long enough for her to sit on, was splayed out around her head, looking like dark water with its dips and waves. Her skin was pale and completely without marks and her eyes, a deeper, more complex green than even the Louisiana swamps held. Sometimes I thought they flickered, danced, the way the shine on a dragonfly ripples as it flies past.
Off somewhere in the woods, crickets chirruped at each other while foxes slunk around, their small paws barely ruffling the leaf littered floor. Bats fluttered through the leaves and wolves howled in the distance. They never came here though, into the clearing. I wasn’t sure why; maybe they were scared of the ‘gators that sometimes sunned themselves here.
‘You know, I think you‘ve turned me into some sort of hippie.’ She looked at me with that raised eyebrows face she got when she thought I was full of shit. ’I mean it! You got me thinking about Mother Nature and how to change humanity and all types of stuff I ain’t never thought about before.’ I smiled my huge, dumb ass grin at her and she rolled her eyes back at me, flicking a bug off her long dress and wiggling her bare toes in the grass.
‘As for what we were saying earlier, I don’t believe none of this end-of-the-world fear mongering they keep going on about on the news and in the papers, though I get why they’re doing it. If scaring the shit out of all the idiots and rednecks means these assholes clean up after themselves, I’m good with that. Aren’t you?’ I grabbed another beer out of the cooler and twisted it open. I offered her one but she held hers up to show me she had some left.
‘But if we’re all capable of good then surely we should be given a chance to prove that by being told the truth about what’s going on in the world, not the governments spin on it. At least that way, there’ll be more well informed assholes.’
‘Erm…’ She had me there. My debating skills weren’t up to much and she was way too smart for me. ‘Well, uhm, maybe I'm just full of shit.’
She laughed and said, ‘I think that’s most likely, don’t you?’ then turned her face towards the woods. We could hear the others approaching.
There were shouts and rustling as our friends stormed their way through the trees to find us. I called out to them and soon torch beams were cutting through the darkness around us. There were six of them, just like we planned, eight of us in total, four men and four women. The sacred number, it represented infinity; the never ending cycle of life.
‘What took y’all so long? We’ve been waiting for your slow asses for nearly two damn hours.’ I got to my feet and gave Eris my hand so she could stand up. ‘Well, we didn’t wanna interrupt your little love session now did we? Though I can hardly account for the other hour and fifty five minutes,’ my friend Ben called out to me; a big shit-eating grin on his face.
‘Better than your three minutes, you drunk redneck.’ I threw him a beer which he caught, gleefully.
‘That’s enough boys, we don’t have much time.’ Eris said, her tone ringing with authority. Her being the only one of us without a Louisiana accent immediately made her sound the most intelligent, something that maybe should bother me, born and raised here like I was, but it didn’t. I’d do anything for her, even if that meant walking into the gates of Hell.
‘Do we have everything?’ She looked around at all of us and we held up our hallowed objects. Mine was a vial of snake venom on a black leather strap. I’d squeezed the venom out of the snakes myself, just like she asked, and she’d been real pleased about it.
Ben held up his silver athame, a knife used in rituals, with the black onyx decorated handle and different runes carved into the sharp, tarnished blade. I recognised some of them as ones that Eris had taught me but not all of them.
Jacob rattled his dirty cloth bag of bones, seven from different animals and one human rib he stole from the coroner’s office where his daddy worked.
Adam held a bottle of red wine that we had all added drops of our own blood to. I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to drink it later or not. Eris just said she’d tell us when the time was right.
Jessica had a bundle of long reeds tucked under one arm and a large zip lock bag filled with smaller bags of different herbs and flowers in her hand. I didn’t know what was in there but Eris helped Jessica pick them herself which made Jessica as pleased as punch.
Ava had a vial, very similar to mine, filled with her own menstrual blood. That kinda grossed me out if I was honest, though I’d never be so rude as to say anything about it. Eris explained to me that it symbolised the fertility cycle, one of the most important functions of life and was therefore a necessity.
Mary clutched a bag of sea salt, a grimy looking compass and five black candles, infused with the scent of jasmine. Because it was night blooming which Eris said was very important.
Eris and I brought the most crucial element, the piece that pulled the whole thing together. He was a known paedophile. The cops had been trying to lock him up for years but he was a devious son of a bitch and kept managing to get away with his nasty shit. We were gonna put a stop to that tonight. Of course none of us wanted to pick someone good, we weren’t evil or nothing, so this guy, Horace, had been the logical choice. Eris and I knocked him out with chloroform, stripped him of his clothes and brought him here.
‘Prepare the pentacle,’ she told Mary who got to work straight away. Eris told us we needed a pentacle for this instead of a pentagram (a pentacle has a circle around the five pointed star, a pentagram doesn’t) because the circle made out of sea salt would protect us in case anything went wrong. I didn’t really like the sound of that but I trusted her. She wouldn’t let anything happen to us, especially not to me. Eris loved me, I knew she did. I mean, she didn’t say it back when I said it to her, which kinda hurt, but maybe it was just the wrong time. She’d say it to me eventually, I knew that she would.
Mary began placing the candles using the compass until they formed the points of the star then linked them up with the reeds Jessica handed her so that the centre of the pentacle was visible. After that, she surrounded the formation with the sea salt circle. Eris smiled at her and nodded, acknowledging a job well done. Mary blushed, a deep pink colour, and fluttered her eyelashes at Eris. I was pretty sure she wasn’t a lesbian (I’d heard rumours of her fooling around with Jason Redditch in high school), Eris just dazzled everyone that way.
‘Jessica, it’s your turn. Do you remember what I told you to do?’ Jessica nodded vigorously and began to organise the herbs. She started to burn a different one at each candle, filling the air with oddly colourful and fragrant smoke that made my nose tickle and my eyes water.
Eris shut her eyes and said quietly, ‘Move the sacrifice to the middle of the pentacle.’ I looked at the other men and nodded towards Horace. We each grabbed a limb and carefully laid him out in the centre of the star, his legs apart and arms spread wide out, palms up. Now it was my turn. Eris had instructed me to dribble the venom on his forehead, over his heart, on his upturned palms and the tops of his feet. Jessica scattered flowers over his body and Jacob placed the bones around him, evenly spaced with the human rib bone above his head.
Ben was just handing Eris the athame when Horace started to stir. His eyelids fluttered as he fought to open his eyes but soon they were wide open, taking in the scene around him.
‘Hey… Hey, what’s going on here?! What the Hell are you kids doing to me? Where the fuck are my clothes and what’s this shit on me?’ He tried to get up but we moved in to hold him down while Eris approached with the athame. Horace struggled beneath our hands, terror in his eyes, clear as day. I looked away and tried to ignore him. I knew there was no turning back now, even though his pleads for release twanged at my heart strings. Misgivings or not, we had to finish. For her, we had to complete the ritual.
Eris started the chant she’d taught us and we joined in, our low voices uninterrupted by Horace’s shouts for help.
‘Abaddon, nos dico in vos. Baphomet, nos es vestri vernula. Belial, nos cultus vestri atrum vox. Asael, nos dedi vos is vitualamen. Lucifer, capimus vos in nos.’
Our chanting voices slowly got louder as wind began to churn up the woods around us. The air was hot, even for a Louisiana night in spring and we were all sweating profusely. Even Eris looked warm as she stepped inside the pentacle, athame raised high above her head. Horace took one look at it and started screaming, struggling so fiercely that it was getting close to impossible to hold him in place. The air started to smell, like electric and rotting meat, sulphur maybe. I gagged as I chanted. The wind was howling now, whipping us with leaves, branches slapping against each other, animals crying out in fright. Everything around us was moving violently; all except the flames of the candles which remained perfectly still, as did the flowers and bones within the pentacle.
Quick as a snake, Eris plunged the athame right into Horace’s heart. He howled with pain and blood poured out of the wound as she pulled the knife back out. He died with his eyes wide open, staring pitifully up at the sky, a silent prayer on his lips. ‘Ava, pour the blood into the wound. Adam, pour all the wine around him. Don’t stop the chant. He’s almost here.’ They quickly did as they were told while Eris began to dance inside the pentacle, the soles of her feet picking up grass as she danced through the wine and the blood. As she picked up the pace, so did our chanting, faster and louder until we were screaming it at her, at each other, at the world around us. Her whole body was shaking, her eyes closed and her mouth hanging open in what looked like purest ecstasy.
Suddenly she stopped, and then everything stopped. The wind died down, our chant was hushed, like something had come along and snatched the words from right out of our mouths. It was eerily quiet now and the air thrummed with power. Eris’ eyes fluttered open and we all took a scared step back. Her beautiful green eyes had been transformed. They were coal black, the whites were gone, and reflected no light, not even from the candles. Dark voids that held us transfixed. Chuckling menacingly, she turned from us and reached her arms up towards the stars.
‘He’s here.’
We were lying in the clearing between the woods and the Gum Pond bayou in Bienville Parish. Hundreds, probably thousands, of insects hovered and swooped across the water, their wings buzzing and whining as they flew, occasionally getting eaten by frogs and other reptiles that leapt like slimy green missiles out of the water. The air smelled rich and cloying, a mixture of the moist earth, rotting vegetation and animals that made up these thick swamps. The sky was clear above us and the moon was big, low in the sky and golden coloured, like syrup. It was the day after the full moon, when the moon began its waning phase. That was something else Eris taught me. I never realised until she came along how ignorant I’d been all my life. She opened my mind up something crazy. Nowadays I was looking at the world in a whole new light because she’d made me see and understand everything that much better. Eris was a miracle, a true gift from God.
I never said that to her though; she was kinda anti religion. ‘Because of how it warps people’s minds,’ she said. I’d been brought up to be a good Christian boy by my parents and I still was, I just didn’t need to go to church no more. My God was everywhere. He showed me His existence by bringing Eris into my world. I truly believed that. Some would say I was blinded by love but if I was, well then, that was just fine by me.
I’d brought a cooler full of beer for the celebration later and we were sipping from a bottle each. We sat in companionable silence and I thought over a conversation Eris and I had in bed that morning, about how and why people do such goddamn nasty things to each other.
‘You know, the thing I’ve realised, that most people don’t understand, can’t even comprehend, is that we’re all the same. We’re all capable of doing great stuff and shit stuff and all the other colours in between black and white. But people are scared and they let other scared people get to them and warp their thinking, change their path, until they could be thrown into a pit of rattlesnakes and be as clueless as you can be, become one even. You have to look out for the rattlesnakes. That’s all I’m sayin’. Eris looked at me, dubiously, out of the corner of her eye and said ‘Ok, I get what you’re saying, Marcus, except the rattlesnake part. That was straight out of the left field.’
She lifted her head so she could sip her beer and winked at me. I laughed and coughed as I sat up, grass stuck to my bare back and all messed up in my hair. Her hair, which was darkest brown and long enough for her to sit on, was splayed out around her head, looking like dark water with its dips and waves. Her skin was pale and completely without marks and her eyes, a deeper, more complex green than even the Louisiana swamps held. Sometimes I thought they flickered, danced, the way the shine on a dragonfly ripples as it flies past.
Off somewhere in the woods, crickets chirruped at each other while foxes slunk around, their small paws barely ruffling the leaf littered floor. Bats fluttered through the leaves and wolves howled in the distance. They never came here though, into the clearing. I wasn’t sure why; maybe they were scared of the ‘gators that sometimes sunned themselves here.
‘You know, I think you‘ve turned me into some sort of hippie.’ She looked at me with that raised eyebrows face she got when she thought I was full of shit. ’I mean it! You got me thinking about Mother Nature and how to change humanity and all types of stuff I ain’t never thought about before.’ I smiled my huge, dumb ass grin at her and she rolled her eyes back at me, flicking a bug off her long dress and wiggling her bare toes in the grass.
‘As for what we were saying earlier, I don’t believe none of this end-of-the-world fear mongering they keep going on about on the news and in the papers, though I get why they’re doing it. If scaring the shit out of all the idiots and rednecks means these assholes clean up after themselves, I’m good with that. Aren’t you?’ I grabbed another beer out of the cooler and twisted it open. I offered her one but she held hers up to show me she had some left.
‘But if we’re all capable of good then surely we should be given a chance to prove that by being told the truth about what’s going on in the world, not the governments spin on it. At least that way, there’ll be more well informed assholes.’
‘Erm…’ She had me there. My debating skills weren’t up to much and she was way too smart for me. ‘Well, uhm, maybe I'm just full of shit.’
She laughed and said, ‘I think that’s most likely, don’t you?’ then turned her face towards the woods. We could hear the others approaching.
There were shouts and rustling as our friends stormed their way through the trees to find us. I called out to them and soon torch beams were cutting through the darkness around us. There were six of them, just like we planned, eight of us in total, four men and four women. The sacred number, it represented infinity; the never ending cycle of life.
‘What took y’all so long? We’ve been waiting for your slow asses for nearly two damn hours.’ I got to my feet and gave Eris my hand so she could stand up. ‘Well, we didn’t wanna interrupt your little love session now did we? Though I can hardly account for the other hour and fifty five minutes,’ my friend Ben called out to me; a big shit-eating grin on his face.
‘Better than your three minutes, you drunk redneck.’ I threw him a beer which he caught, gleefully.
‘That’s enough boys, we don’t have much time.’ Eris said, her tone ringing with authority. Her being the only one of us without a Louisiana accent immediately made her sound the most intelligent, something that maybe should bother me, born and raised here like I was, but it didn’t. I’d do anything for her, even if that meant walking into the gates of Hell.
‘Do we have everything?’ She looked around at all of us and we held up our hallowed objects. Mine was a vial of snake venom on a black leather strap. I’d squeezed the venom out of the snakes myself, just like she asked, and she’d been real pleased about it.
Ben held up his silver athame, a knife used in rituals, with the black onyx decorated handle and different runes carved into the sharp, tarnished blade. I recognised some of them as ones that Eris had taught me but not all of them.
Jacob rattled his dirty cloth bag of bones, seven from different animals and one human rib he stole from the coroner’s office where his daddy worked.
Adam held a bottle of red wine that we had all added drops of our own blood to. I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to drink it later or not. Eris just said she’d tell us when the time was right.
Jessica had a bundle of long reeds tucked under one arm and a large zip lock bag filled with smaller bags of different herbs and flowers in her hand. I didn’t know what was in there but Eris helped Jessica pick them herself which made Jessica as pleased as punch.
Ava had a vial, very similar to mine, filled with her own menstrual blood. That kinda grossed me out if I was honest, though I’d never be so rude as to say anything about it. Eris explained to me that it symbolised the fertility cycle, one of the most important functions of life and was therefore a necessity.
Mary clutched a bag of sea salt, a grimy looking compass and five black candles, infused with the scent of jasmine. Because it was night blooming which Eris said was very important.
Eris and I brought the most crucial element, the piece that pulled the whole thing together. He was a known paedophile. The cops had been trying to lock him up for years but he was a devious son of a bitch and kept managing to get away with his nasty shit. We were gonna put a stop to that tonight. Of course none of us wanted to pick someone good, we weren’t evil or nothing, so this guy, Horace, had been the logical choice. Eris and I knocked him out with chloroform, stripped him of his clothes and brought him here.
‘Prepare the pentacle,’ she told Mary who got to work straight away. Eris told us we needed a pentacle for this instead of a pentagram (a pentacle has a circle around the five pointed star, a pentagram doesn’t) because the circle made out of sea salt would protect us in case anything went wrong. I didn’t really like the sound of that but I trusted her. She wouldn’t let anything happen to us, especially not to me. Eris loved me, I knew she did. I mean, she didn’t say it back when I said it to her, which kinda hurt, but maybe it was just the wrong time. She’d say it to me eventually, I knew that she would.
Mary began placing the candles using the compass until they formed the points of the star then linked them up with the reeds Jessica handed her so that the centre of the pentacle was visible. After that, she surrounded the formation with the sea salt circle. Eris smiled at her and nodded, acknowledging a job well done. Mary blushed, a deep pink colour, and fluttered her eyelashes at Eris. I was pretty sure she wasn’t a lesbian (I’d heard rumours of her fooling around with Jason Redditch in high school), Eris just dazzled everyone that way.
‘Jessica, it’s your turn. Do you remember what I told you to do?’ Jessica nodded vigorously and began to organise the herbs. She started to burn a different one at each candle, filling the air with oddly colourful and fragrant smoke that made my nose tickle and my eyes water.
Eris shut her eyes and said quietly, ‘Move the sacrifice to the middle of the pentacle.’ I looked at the other men and nodded towards Horace. We each grabbed a limb and carefully laid him out in the centre of the star, his legs apart and arms spread wide out, palms up. Now it was my turn. Eris had instructed me to dribble the venom on his forehead, over his heart, on his upturned palms and the tops of his feet. Jessica scattered flowers over his body and Jacob placed the bones around him, evenly spaced with the human rib bone above his head.
Ben was just handing Eris the athame when Horace started to stir. His eyelids fluttered as he fought to open his eyes but soon they were wide open, taking in the scene around him.
‘Hey… Hey, what’s going on here?! What the Hell are you kids doing to me? Where the fuck are my clothes and what’s this shit on me?’ He tried to get up but we moved in to hold him down while Eris approached with the athame. Horace struggled beneath our hands, terror in his eyes, clear as day. I looked away and tried to ignore him. I knew there was no turning back now, even though his pleads for release twanged at my heart strings. Misgivings or not, we had to finish. For her, we had to complete the ritual.
Eris started the chant she’d taught us and we joined in, our low voices uninterrupted by Horace’s shouts for help.
‘Abaddon, nos dico in vos. Baphomet, nos es vestri vernula. Belial, nos cultus vestri atrum vox. Asael, nos dedi vos is vitualamen. Lucifer, capimus vos in nos.’
Our chanting voices slowly got louder as wind began to churn up the woods around us. The air was hot, even for a Louisiana night in spring and we were all sweating profusely. Even Eris looked warm as she stepped inside the pentacle, athame raised high above her head. Horace took one look at it and started screaming, struggling so fiercely that it was getting close to impossible to hold him in place. The air started to smell, like electric and rotting meat, sulphur maybe. I gagged as I chanted. The wind was howling now, whipping us with leaves, branches slapping against each other, animals crying out in fright. Everything around us was moving violently; all except the flames of the candles which remained perfectly still, as did the flowers and bones within the pentacle.
Quick as a snake, Eris plunged the athame right into Horace’s heart. He howled with pain and blood poured out of the wound as she pulled the knife back out. He died with his eyes wide open, staring pitifully up at the sky, a silent prayer on his lips. ‘Ava, pour the blood into the wound. Adam, pour all the wine around him. Don’t stop the chant. He’s almost here.’ They quickly did as they were told while Eris began to dance inside the pentacle, the soles of her feet picking up grass as she danced through the wine and the blood. As she picked up the pace, so did our chanting, faster and louder until we were screaming it at her, at each other, at the world around us. Her whole body was shaking, her eyes closed and her mouth hanging open in what looked like purest ecstasy.
Suddenly she stopped, and then everything stopped. The wind died down, our chant was hushed, like something had come along and snatched the words from right out of our mouths. It was eerily quiet now and the air thrummed with power. Eris’ eyes fluttered open and we all took a scared step back. Her beautiful green eyes had been transformed. They were coal black, the whites were gone, and reflected no light, not even from the candles. Dark voids that held us transfixed. Chuckling menacingly, she turned from us and reached her arms up towards the stars.
‘He’s here.’
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6 Comments
The climax of the invocation is skilfully done, and nicely subtle. Excellent stuff!
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