Ritual Dreams

by Hadena James

  There were about nine so called witness in the room. Clustered around an alter and podium, sitting in folding chairs. Most of them were crying. They weren’t wearing black robes, they didn’t have pentagrams tattooed on their faces. They looked very, very ordinary, however since I had been told this was the group that had found the bodies, they obviously weren’t tourists, they had to be church members. However, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman had hit the nail on the head in the book Good Omens when talking about the Order of the Chattering Nuns and describing Satanism as something that was mostly done on weekends. Satanism, like most religions, was something to be worried about on feast days, saint days, holidays, and sermon days by the majority of the population.

  Aside from close friends and family and other members of the church, I doubted anyone knew these people were Satanists. Satanism still wasn’t main stream and the majority of the world was happy to blame them for all sorts of things, even though most of them were about as evil as a donut. It didn’t help that serial killers were fond of claiming to be Satanists when they weren’t. Even those that claimed to be devil worshippers rarely were.

  One of those very large, shiny emergency mylar heat blankets was laid out on the floor covering some rather large lumps that I assumed were the bodies. A woman in a HAZMAT suit was kneeling on the floor next to them. It was never a good sign when someone was there in a HAZMAT suit. The mylar blanket didn’t help since mylar was used as a thermal insulator because it was an air barrier. Once upon a time, after being pulled from Lake Michigan in the freezing cold, I had been wrapped in one of those things.

  “Aislinn?” A woman said my name. I recognized the voice, but not the woman’s face. I nodded a few times, still looking at the HAZMAT suit and the lumps under the blanket.

  “Do I,” I stopped, sentence unfinished. The woman walking towards me had grey streaks in her hair, but her blue eyes were something that I remembered from an earlier time in my life. “Florence,” I asked.

  “I go by Kimberly now,” Florence answered. “When I finished my criminal justice degree and started working as a police officer, I decided to start using my first name instead of my middle name.”

  “That explains most of why I didn’t recognize the name,” I told her, reaching out to shake her hand. Florence had been my roommate in college. The one Malachi had tried to assault.

  “Husband’s last name,” Florence/Kimberley told me.

  “Gotcha,” I smiled or tried to.

  “When I started working this case, I immediately thought of you. I almost called you about the first couple we found. Now, I wish I had. They are getting worse.”

  “What’s getting worse?” I asked.

  “The condition we are finding the bodies in,” Kimberley answered.

  “Oh,” I looked at the blanket.

  “I’ll let you look once we finish getting statements from everyone and can usher them out of here.” She told me.

  “That bad?” I asked.

  “One of the worst things I’ve seen since I started working here about six years ago.” Kimberly responded. “However, the gruesome nature isn’t why I almost called you the first time. The case is weird.”

  “Like aliens abducted me and forced me to translate Latin texts for them or like sacrificing root vegetables to conjure up ghosts using a Ouija board?” I asked remembering what we had once considered the weirdest things we’d ever heard in our abnormal psychology class was. Kimberley had been willing to deal with a fifteen-year-old roommate in a college dorm. I considered her a friend even though we weren’t close and hadn’t spoken to each other since she graduated.

  “Patience Worth weird.” We both agreed that the story of Patience Worth was possibly either one of the cleverest hoaxes ever or the weirdest paranormal exchange in the history of the world. Patience Worth was theoretically a ghost that dictated novels using a Ouija board and the woman she spoke with was from St. Louis and wrote those novels down and published them. Except there was a lot of crap in the novels that was just wrong for the time period that Worth supposedly lived in and there was stuff that at the time had been considered inaccurate, but had later proven to be accurate, which made the case of Patience Worth not entirely open and shut to either of us. We were both fairly sure it was a hoax, but I was fairly sure that Malachi was going to kill someone, for fun. But I’d been thinking that for almost a decade, though, and he still hadn’t.

  “You mean beyond the Helter Skelter type writings on the wall?” I asked.

  “Well beyond,” Kimberly nodded.

  “Great,” I frowned at her. I wasn’t sure whether she considered us friends, but we hadn’t been enemies. She had found me a little annoying as her roommate and she probably held Malachi’s actions against me. I would have. However, I had been young in college, too young to be exact, and I was a know it all. Despite this, the first year she was gone, we had kept in touch. Then she had decided to get married and start thinking about having a family, which weren’t things I could relate to, and we had drifted apart because I was me. Looking back on it and, knowing that she had specifically asked for the SCTU because of me, made me feel something akin to pride.

  The last of the witnesses exited the main chamber of the temple, following behind a uniformed officer. Kimberly tapped the shoulder of the person wearing the HAZMAT suit. After a moment, the gloved hands pulled back the sheet. One victim had nearly been decapitated and a frothing foam was still seeping from the wound. The other had nearly been bisected at the abdomen. In both cases, the spine held them together. If I had been frowning before, it had gotten worse. I understood why the bone was still together, bone was tough to get through and it didn’t look like either body had been hacked at. The wounds had clean edges, a sharp blade, except a blade didn’t explain the pale blood colored foam on either victim or the pale pink puddles near my feet.

  “Wow,” Gabriel commented.

  “Acid?” Xavier asked.

  “Yes, tests have confirmed it was sulfuric acid in the earlier cases. The ME says that’s why the spines don’t dissolve. I guess sulfuric acid doesn’t eat through bone easily.” Kimberly told him.

  “It does, it just takes more time than soft tissue,” Xavier told her.

  “That is a brutal way to die,” I commented while looking at the female victim. The male had also died in pain, but at least with the throat he would have died very fast, probably drowning or suffocating as the acid ate through his esophagus and trachea. The female would have died much slower as the acid destroyed her internal organs and shock would have taken longer to set in.

  “Is the killer forcing them to drink it?” Gabriel asked, and I suddenly realized it could be a whole lot worse. Drinking acid would have damaged the esophagus long before the acid entered the stomach to start eating away at the digestive system and working its way outward.

  “We think he’s injecting them,” Kimberly told us. “There isn’t enough flesh to confirm that, but in the cases of the female victims, they don’t show signs of damage to their mouths or throats indicating they drank it.

  “He’s injecting the men first,” Lucas said. I agreed with that. Incapacitate the men, because men tend to fight for their wives, quickly so that the plan doesn’t go awry, and then take the time to torture the women.

  “That is a lot of sulfuric acid,” I told her. “Have you guys looked at large purchases of it?”

  “It’s drain cleaner.” She told me. I nodded. When Cassie had been young, she had flushed a guinea pig down the toilet after it died. It had been a disaster. Drano and Liquid Plumber just didn’t work for some clogs. Eventually, we’d had to decide between running to the hardware store or calling a plumber. To everyone’s horror, I had chosen the hardware store. We’d found a massive five gallon jug of sulfuric acid drain cleaner and I had poured it down every drain in the house, because we weren’t sure exactly where the deceased rodent had ended up. As I had poured, a few of the drains had started to emit smoke, a horrible smell, and a hissing
fizzling noise. It took about 30 minutes for all the drains to start running clear again.

  It had cost my mom and Elle about forty dollars to dissolve a guinea pig. If one was going to use an acid to get rid of a body, sulfuric was a decent choice, it was cheap, available at most hardware stores in the form of drain cleaner, and with enough patience, it would indeed dissolve bones. Hydrochloric was better, but it was harder to get and not very cheap. Also, sulfuric wasn’t neutralized with plain old tap water, you had to have baking soda to neutralize it. A fact most people didn’t know. Water could make sulfuric acid more corrosive. Not in the same way it made nitric acid worse, but similar. Nitric acid became extremely caustic when mixed with water.

  Our killer was maximizing pain and torture by using sulfuric acid as his means to kill. He was stalking his victims. He was speeding right along from victim to victim. And this was really just the beginning.

  I turned away from the victims to read what had been written on the wall. I read it twice and shook my head, not completely understanding it.

  “Hey diddle diddle, the cop and the riddle, you have two days before I exterminate some more.”

  “Okay, that isn’t their blood,” I commented to no one but myself, really.

  “We know, when the next bodies turn up, it will turn out to be theirs.” Kimberly told us.

  “He doesn’t just pick his victims and stalk them, he somehow gets blood from them,” I gave a low whistle.

  “Right and we aren’t sure how.”

  “What about blood rituals?” Lucas asked.

  “Unlikely,” I responded. “While some rituals do require blood, goat or chicken works as well as human, and most Satanists aren’t opening veins for their religion.”

  “Plus, the blood from the other writings have had anticoagulant in it, we are checking to see if any of them donated blood in the days before their deaths, but so far, none have as far as we can tell.”

  “You don’t mark your religion when you donate blood.” I commented, still trying to figure out how he had managed to kill only Satanists. He would have to be following them home from church.

  “How many Satanic Temples in Tallahassee?” Fiona asked.

  “Six maybe seven, if you consider the Church of the Goddess.” Kimberly responded, and in my head I gave Fiona a point for thinking like me.

  “I actually don’t know anything about the Church of the Goddess,” I said.

  “It’s a Wiccan-like religion that worships nature, but some people confuse it with Satanism because they don’t worship a male god.” Kimberly told me.

  “It’s still a pagan religion, then.” I nodded.

  “Have you had many problems with devil-worshipping cults in the area?” Lucas asked.

  “Devil worship and Satanism are two very different things,” Fiona told him. “Devil worship is very taboo, even among Satanists. Plus, devil worshippers and devil worshipping cults are mostly just fronts for people looking for excuses to kill other people.” I agreed with that too. I had grown up during the years of the Satanic Panic.

  “However, this is a Tallahassee problem right now, but it may not stay that way. Florida has been very embracing of pagan religions the last couple of decades including, but not limited to, organized Satanism. In the state of Florida, there are probably three dozen different Satanic Churches and maybe fifty or sixty other pagan religion temples and sites.” Kimberly told me.

  “In other words, it’s good to be a pagan in Florida,” I commented dryly.

  Three

  The person kneeling next to the body suddenly stood up and motioned for guys with a gurney to come over. I hadn’t been introduced to this person, but judging by how short they were, I guessed it was a woman. However, HAZMAT suits are notoriously gender neutral. It could just have easily been filled by a reptilian hominid exterritorial with dwarfism as a woman.

  I don’t have enough peppermint oil for this, I thought, taking a step back as the men came closer. Vivisected bodies have a distinct smell. One that could gag a maggot. I had shoved a fingertip full of peppermint oil balm in my nose before getting out of the SUV to combat it, but it wasn’t going to be enough when they started picking up the pieces and putting them on the gurney to take them outside.

  However, the inside of my nose was still tingling from the peppermint oil, even though I could only faintly smell it. Fiona must have seen something on my face, she extended a small metal container to me. She used more than just peppermint oil, she added a trace of lavender to her “please don’t let me throw up because of the smell” balm. I accepted and using a gloved fingertip I swiped my fingertip along the top of the balm and spread it under my nose and around my nostrils hoping beyond hope that the extra lavender and peppermint oil would cover the smell.

  Several cops in suits were moving even further away from the bodies in the temple, moving towards the doors from what I could tell, probably so they could rush outside as need be. I had a disturbing thought, at least the bodies weren’t still sizzling and smoking. In one of my chemistry classes, we had dissolved the flesh off a dead mouse using sulfuric acid, the same kind used in drain cleaner. It had been one of those pivotal moments in my life, I had stopped studying chemistry afterwards and when I had needed one extra biology credit, I had wussed out and taken botany.

  The coroner’s assistants were carefully wrapping the body parts in plastic sheeting. I didn’t nod my approval, but only because I realized I was about to. Xavier was up close and personal giving some advice on the best way to move them and gather all the evidence. Someone else in a HAZMAT suit showed up with a wet/dry vacuum.

  Sometimes I marveled over how many everyday items were used in crime scene investigations. Kimberly was talking again and I didn’t know what about, distracted by the scene in front of me, waiting for them to screw up and lose what was left of the woman’s organs on the floor. It sounded like something from a bad movie, but I had seen it happen before. Most people did not split bodies in half, and even the most seasoned coroners occasionally didn’t think things all the way through.

  “Ace?” Xavier asked, turning around.

  “Sorry, what?” I responded.

  “You okay?”

  “Mostly,” I answered, eyes still watching them wrap the body to be picked up.

  “You don’t look it,” Xavier said.

  “Sulfuric acid, especially not an 80/20 mix like what is found in drain cleaner, wouldn’t dissolve bone in just one night.” I told him.

  “I think it might have had help with the spine.” Xavier told me.

  “That is a brutal way to kill someone,” I sighed after a moment. “I cannot think of a lot of things more painful at the moment.”

  “Do you want to be there for the autopsy?”

  “Not really, I think the smell of the acid will get to me fairly quick, even if the room is well ventilated.”

  “Yeah,” Xavier answered. Xavier and I had learned that sometimes my nose was helpful during an autopsy, but not this one. This autopsy would smell of sulfur and dissolved soft tissue, those smells would be stronger than any others.

  “Are you okay?” Fiona asked me as Xavier went back to the bodies and assistants.

  “Not sure why everyone is asking me that.”

  “You look haunted,” Fiona answered.

  “She’s thinking about our psychology class.” Kimberly answered. “I had a similar problem at the first two murder scenes.” I hadn’t been thinking about our psychology class, but now that she mentioned it, I was. Some death cults and terrorist organizations used acid as a form of punishment. Some acids become more corrosive when mixed with water and or salts off the human body, making them extremely brutal forms of punishment.

  There had been a cult in Central America during the 1980s who made members that wanted to leave, submerge their hands in hydrochloric acid. When they attempted to wash the acid off, it would become stronger. Most died because the pain sent their bodies into shock. If they didn’t, they usually lost
the hand thanks to infections like gangrene. It was a strong deterrent to not leave the cult.

  In the movie Alien v. Predator, Predator had used the acidic blood of the xenomorph to mark the girl as a hunter. I could think of a handful of cults that had done similar things, using acid to etch a person’s position onto them, permanently. It was a demented form of branding in my opinion.

  Our psychology professor had studied cults and cult mentality for his thesis, and while cults normally fell into the realm of sociology, figuring out how a cult member ticked had earned him some academic acclaim. What he hadn’t mentioned was that his sister had been a member of a cult, a murderous death cult, that thought bringing about the end of days was their mission and the only way to accomplish that was to kill the antichrist before he could grow up. They had killed every male child born into the cult, because their leader had been convinced that he would father the antichrist.

  His sister had been a victim of the cult. They had allowed her to leave, and then after she had been deprogrammed and my professor had started his thesis, they had killed her, her new husband, and their two small daughters, in some bizarre way. I didn’t remember the details of their deaths and I wasn’t sure it was important at the moment, but if anything could cause someone to be haunted, it was memories of people brutally murdered for reasons that didn’t make sense. At least serial killers killed because they liked it. I understood that more than believing you were going to father the antichrist and killing all male children born to you as a result.

  However, what I remembered most about our group psychology class was that our professor became a cult leader himself. My last semester there he managed to convince a bunch of undergrads to abandon their academic pursuits and follow him to a little ranch somewhere in Wyoming. There had been a lot of effort expending covering it up. I had to admit, if you were going to specialize in learning how the willpower and psychology of an individual can be subjugated to conform to the psychology of a group, teaching it was a good place to start and cult leader seemed like a natural extension of that knowledge.