The residents, all of them, were descendants of Nord people. You couldn’t, even if you wanted to, see a person of color anywhere. All were moon-white. When immigrants from Ireland, Britain, and other parts of the world had come to America, these people had come here too, and this particular tribe of immigrants had chosen this place as their home.
This town was where they had been living for more than a couple hundred years, cut off from the outside world by a veil of ignorance and fear. Now, as the age of internet and lightning fast communication reached a ripeness, the veil grew thin, but it was there nonetheless.
Judith McCaw, Beth’s mother, was checking the density of the lutefisk she had prepared for dinner. Henry, her sister’s eldest and only son, had arrived last night telling her that he had tried to convince Beth to come home but had failed. This made Judith sad. This was the first time in decades that someone from her immediate family had been given the opportunity to partake in the sacrifice, and it broke her to see that her daughter was rejecting this honor. Kids these days didn’t take religion seriously, she thought.
This whole sacrifice business wasn’t some illegal cult-ish thing, she believed. As far as the law was concerned, the folk at Drumfort never killed a real live person. And besides, the county sheriff was in on it. Every resident of the town was in on it. News seldom, if ever, got out. And it wasn’t like there weren’t other religions of the sort thriving all over in small pockets in America. Judith couldn’t understand how her daughter, of all people, would turn her back to this. Judith had spent her entire life teaching Beth everything there was to know about their religion, about the region, about their God—the Being, about the sacrifice, and life.
A town elder chose a person after the person’s name appeared in a dream to the elder. The person chosen had to go into the woods with an ax, a Nordic ax, and there the Being would manifest a vision that the person had to kill. Sometimes it would be something as meek as a deer, and sometimes it would be something as terrifying as a grizzly bear. This pretty much depended on the inductee. They weren’t supposed to talk about it, but gossip seldom remained silent in peoples’ hearts—especially when there were so few people.
Jerome Whittaker, the guy who was chosen last year, told everyone that he came face to face with an arctic wolf. Melissa Fairburn, the year before that, told Judith over the phone that her ex-husband had come to her. “And I’d gutted that mean sumbitch the way he deserved! Funny thing. The moment I killed him, he disappeared into thin air, just like that! No blood, no nothing!”
“Course it’ll go back to being nothing! Ain’t real, none of it! That’s the point, isn’t it? You’re tested, and if you pass, then the town can breathe easy for a year, and if it ain’t so that you passed, then Odin save all of us because we doomed, elsewise,” Judith had replied.
What doom? Well, sometime back in 1998, this fellow named Elmore Husk hadn’t made his sacrifice. His case was more exciting than Old Man Sim’s. That's a story you can’t make sizzling gossip out of. But Husky’s story, on the other hand, was a basket full of holy-frikking-craps. This story you could tell a dozen times to a dozen different people, and it won’t ever get boring.
Husky was called out in front of the commemoration dinner, and he had walked confident and haughty, took the ax from the elder, and went into the forest, chewing on a toothpick, muttering something intangible. In short, all riled up and ready to meet whatever came his way.
Everyone was waiting at the town square. Half an hour passed, then two hours, then three, and people began going back to their homes. That’s when, and this was around 9 PM, Husky came yelling, “Goddamn dragon done burned me whole!” His clothes were barely there, and from beneath them his red, seared flesh showed, all burned up. How he was still alive was commendable and questionable, but he didn’t stay alive for long. The townsfolk saw him running out of the woods, but he didn’t make it that far. A giant talon slithered out of the nearest thicket of trees and pulled poor Husky back into the darkness. They could hear his yells, his cries for help, and the sound of a man screaming as he was ripped apart.
Either you sacrificed, or you got sacrificed. In Sim’s case it was the latter, and so it was with Husky. For both those years—during which the sacrifices couldn’t be finished—the town was laid to squalor and unending trouble, one after another. Someone’s kid got cancer and died. Someone had an accident and got their limbs cut off by the flour mill machinery; crops perished; rats festered in storage warehouses and ate the supplies for winter. The water tower started supplying red water instead of the usual colorless—and when people investigated, they found a ton of dead bats floating on the water’s surface. It was their blood that had made the water a weak shade of Kool-Aid.
Naturally, following that, people got sick. Eighteen people died. Then there was the whole horror of the fire. This was right after Husky’s death: the wood stocks in the outskirt circumference of town caught fire, and the entire town was trapped in a circle of raging flames. Fifteen people died because of that, too. A whole year’s worth of fiascos entailed after those two failed sacrifices, but other than that the townsfolk succeeded and everything was well.
Judith put the lid on the lutefisk pot and went to the living room. She resisted the urge of calling her daughter for the tenth time that hour. The last dozen calls had all gone to voicemail. This was going to be extraordinarily embarrassing. “Eh, maybe they’ll like the lutefisk and let it slide,” she said and laughed. At that moment the door slammed open, and Beth walked in.
“Beth!” Judith yelped, half out of joy, half out of surprise.
“Save it,” Beth said. She had a bag under her arm and another one she was holding in her hands. She threw them both to her side and slammed the door shut. “I didn’t come here for whatever is happening out there.”
“Ah, Beth, you and your humor.” The way Judith said it, it sounded like she thought she was joking.
“No. No humor, ma. You sit here. No, don’t get up, don’t go to the kitchen—no need to fluster after whether I need water or not. Listen to me,” Beth said, her eyes aflame, her cheeks flushed; last night’s haunting dream still dangling in her irises, it’s scarring showing in the way she stood cross-armed, in the way she talked raptly, in the way she sought comfort in this fight with her mother.
“All right. What is it? But you better hurry up. The dinner’s going to take place soon.” Judith stared at the clock, then at her daughter’s face, then at the kitchen door.
“Screw it. Screw them. You listen to me. What is happening to me? This is puberty all over again!” Beth rambled on. “I told you this, and I told you this a million times: keep me away from your cult and your beliefs. I don’t even want any part in this. You call me endlessly, you send Henry—and thanks, by the way; he scared the hell out of me—and now this inexplicable thing…” Beth stopped to take a breath. Her mother’s face remained stone solemn all the while. A slight twitch around the lips, maybe, but that was all. “Dreams! Ma! Dreams! I’ve had them vivid as day!”
Now Beth took off her hoodie, and standing in her sleeveless t-shirt, showed her mother the dark rashes on her arm. She held out her other hand, the one the Being had crushed in the dream. It was marked by two deep lacerations.
“Look at this! Look at me! I noticed these this morning!” Beth had cried enough last night. She had also cried on the way to town in the Greyhound, inviting pitying looks from the old man sitting across the aisle, but now wasn’t the time to sob anymore. She needed answers. She'd searched and examined what her dreams meant, anxiety manifesting in her dreams? But there weren't any answers to what happened to Old Man Sim and Elmore Husk. How did they go crazy? It was all nonsense. Mass hysteria. It had to be. The root of the problem was here, at home. She had to come back.
Roots. Roots. Roots.
“Sit down, Beth.” Beth sat down. “You know it to be true, all of it. Hell, it’s all cooking up right there in that noggin of yours, and you just deny it. We have a god, and we
call him the Being—”
“Yeah, real creative, mom!”
“—Shut up and listen. You know it. You’ve been told tales of it since you were a kid; you’ve seen other men and women partake in the sacrifice; all the signs are there for you to see. Hell, you tell me the Being came to you in a dream. Do you know how many people would give everything they have just to catch a glimpse of him? Our God? Our savior? You should count it as a blessing!”
“To hell with this blessing. Screw your Stockholm syndrome, all of yours!”
“Yeah. Go ahead. Screw everything, right? That’s what they teach you at college these days, don’t they? Nothing is sacred anymore!” Judith stood towering over her daughter, completely in charge, completely convincing. The seeds of doubt, of fear, were blossoming in Beth’s heart, and the dream had done just about enough to drive that nail home. “But you deny your God’s will, you deny your role in the sacrifice, and you watch your entire life, and the lives of people of this town go to hell. You will be responsible for it, you hear me! You selfish brat!”
Beth didn’t reply. She’d broken. Acceptance, but of a stubborn kind, cocooned her. Conniving acceptance. Her mind began working on a plan, some plan, any plan better than what these people had in mind for her.
“What do you want me to do?” Beth asked, finally.
“You come with me, you meet the elders, you greet everyone, you put on a smile, and you take the ax, and you go into the forest!” Judith said. Convincing people face to face was so much easier than over the phone. It was an unprecedented turn of events, her daughter showing up at the last minute.
“I…I still don’t believe any of that,” Beth whimpered.
“Who cares? You, post-modernist people, are all alike. All with your heads filled with irony, and cynicism! All with your heads filled with science and disbelief in the greater, grander picture!” Judith said and left for the kitchen. A tough love she believed in, but as she went in to put the lid over her cooking pot, she sensed that she had gone a little too far in being tough with Beth.
Perhaps that was for the best, she thought. You have to trim the hedge to keep it pruned.
These people are my people, but I couldn’t feel more aloof from them, Beth thought. Mr. Edgar. Mrs. Savana. Father. Little brother. All the greetings were driving her nuts.
When everyone was done meeting her and telling her what a fantastic opportunity this was and what a sacred honor it was, the whole town feasted. Beth tried to look for her old friends from school, from slumber parties, but all those girls seemed lost in the cacophony of the crowd. People were chanting verses from some scripture; other people were talking about their past sacrifices. Her father sat on her side, and her mother sat on the other. Her father wasn’t a man of many words. He only grunted in affirmation or negation and smiled toothily—add a straw hat and jeans, and you had yourself the perfect simple Bob.
Dinner was had, and it unnerved Beth to see how everyone was so festive, so okay with what was about to happen. They didn’t see themselves as a cult, as close-minded people who indulged in ancient rituals. They saw this all as hey-how-ya-doin-this-is-just-another-day. After dessert and post-dessert coffee, everyone stood up in humble silence.
Beth knew this part well, having taken part in her fair share of these dinners in her childhood: the elder was coming. The town elder who saw the dreams and designated people their roles. She couldn’t help but feel a pathological loathing for him. It was he who decided, whether there was any dream, he had dreamt at all or not, that she was going to be the chosen one. Everyone stood solemn, the town air quiet at dawn, and then the elder took his place at the rostrum placed at the helm of the first table.
“We gather here today—” he began, and Beth zoned out. She didn’t need to hear this; it sounded like he was going to announce a wedding. Instead, she turned to the forest path behind the buildings. That’s where she was supposed to go after the elder handed her the ax. The ax with its Norse inscriptions, the same one from her nightmares. The same ax that had gutted her.
I’m not drunk enough for this.
While everyone else was staring orgasmic-eyed at the elder, Beth helped herself to the bottle of Jim Beam whiskey right next to her on the table. Her mother saw it, nudged and grunted, but Beth didn’t stop. One shot. Two shots. Three shots…five shots.
Good.
The world swam, her eyes burned and so did her throat and stomach, and then a complacency took hold of her. She could hear the elder speaking throughout all this. Now he was coming toward her, and now he was giving her the ax, now he was saying something about being brave and going into the unknown.
Everyone was clapping and ushering her to move on. She took the ax, rather roughly, from the old man’s hands, and walked on the narrow dirt road disappearing into the woods. Her parents were saying something encouraging, and someone else was telling her to make the Being proud.
How did I wind up here in the first place? She thought, the decision of ditching her dorm room for this insanity seeming stupid in hindsight. Oh, wait. Yeah, you were scared shitless, weren’t you? I guess there’s no accounting of reason in fear.
Trees all around her, the dark weaving hallucinatory shapes in and out of her vision (that she was drunk didn’t help either), Beth followed the path inwards until the distant sounds of the townsfolk became muffled, and then grew mute altogether. Overhead, the moon, looking like an eggshell, threw light that filtered through leaves and branches and twigs. Beth saw, ahead in the clearing, an altar.
“Classic. An altar. Now they’re gonna do a flank and stand all around it dressed in robes. Pfft!” Beth said, tightening her grip on the ax. It felt heavier, and now that she looked at it, it looked like it was glowing. It had green, blue streaks running through the wood to the metal. Holding it now made Beth feel drained as if it was siphoning her strength.
Something howled very near. She jumped and held her ax in front of her. It sounded like a wolf, but what would wolves be doing here? “Oh, I forgot I was in freak show capital, where anything goes!” Beth yelled.
She reached the clearing. There were shadows upon shadows of twisted trunks, vile looking branches, and of leaves that looked like locust swarms. She didn’t want to be here, but, oh well, she had come so far and to turn back now would be stupid, even by stupid standards.
It was then that she heard him, the Being. First she saw a figure circling behind the trees. It was the same person from her dreams: had the same height, the same menacing gait, and she could even spot his long Norseman beard and his shaved head. As he strode, his robes swished on the ground over dead leaves on the forest floor. He was laughing, ever so subtly, and there was a satisfaction to him.
“You’ve come.”
“I’m not scared of you,” Beth found herself saying. She was lying. Part of her knew that this guy, whoever he was, was someone from the townsfolk dressed like the Being and not the Being, but part of her wasn’t so sure. How would she have ever known how he would look in her dreams? Or how would he know?And to put her aspersion to rest, the figure disappeared from behind the tree trunks and manifested right in front of her. There went the faking possibility out the window.
“Now are you scared?” He held her shoulders, giant hands with clawed fingers digging deep in her hoodie, in her shirt, in her skin. She whimpered.
“You’re not real. None of this is. You’re the harboring of these people’s collective delusions. You’re…you’re explainable. Scientifically explainable!” Beth quavered.
The man-god-being pushed her back, put his hand on his forehead, and laughed. It rang everywhere in the clearing. He disappeared from in front of her in a glare of green light only to reappear at the altar. To two posts there were two hands tied with rope. A woman, tied to the floor, lay writhing and sobbing, and nude. She tried to throw her legs but they wouldn’t budge; they were tied to a third post—a tall crucifix.
“Is this real enough for you? Do you think still that all this is ancient f
oolery? Do you not still believe? Well, then, come here and take a look at the altar!” the Being screamed.
Defiance took root in her at that moment, or maybe it was the final kick of that fifth shot of Jim Beam. “No.”
“You defy your nurturer? Your caretaker? You defy your God?”
“You’re no God, and if you are, you’re a messed up version of one. Who plays these games with their people? What are we to you, cattle? What do you think you’re entitled to? Well, you’re not entitled to me!” Beth spat and did a turn. She ran the way she had come, and she kept running till she was well out of the clearing. She knew it had to be a mistake, what she was doing, but did she have anything left to lose? She ran.
His malicious laughs resonated behind her, closer, now everywhere around her, and from her peripheral vision she saw him striding beside her, floating on air—he was playing cat and mouse with her.
“What do you think? I oversee you all. I see that with my blessing your babies get born the right way and not get stuck on their mother’s hip bones. I nourish your crops, I keep the bugs away from tearing you all in your sleep at night. I keep the snakes from the forests at bay! Even though you moved away to wherever you thought you were safe, I kept an eye on you, Bethany!” he sneered. “And if it is running away from the truth that you choose to do, then so be it. Make it out of the woods alive. I dare you!”
There appeared a pack of feral wolves, white as the moon above them, their eyes emanating unholy light and bloodlust. They howled, and they pounced—but their paws did not touch the ground; they disappeared in spectral smoke and shadow—chasing Beth close at her heels. She ran faster than them at first, but soon her lungs began hurting and slowing her down, her feet felt like lead, and the path that led out of the woods felt like it would never end. In fact, she was positive that this was some part of the Being’s trickery. From ahead, ravens and crows swept at her, cawing, clawing, swiping their wings on her feet, scratching her face. She ran. She ran in spite of all that.
The Unbeliever: A Morbid Tale (The Morbid Tales Book 5) Page 2
