##Part 2 - Ritual Night...
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#####Chapters:
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Tuesday, November 21st, 2023
I’ve been locked in here for a day and two full nights now and the only thing I can think is if I don’t die in here from starvation, listening to the endless rumbling from my empty belly, then I’ll surely go insane listening to the endless quiet babbles of these things that replaced my family. Those dark, shapeless forms that I saw in my vision as they came up from the ground on the night when Vorgrath, the god of Mystic Visions and Thunder blessed me with his kiss and sent the whole ritual spiraling out of control. Everything had gone so well until that point. According to plan as it did last year and the year before that and the year before that. I’m still unsure of what I’ve done to deserve this. I don’t know why they’re still out there on the stairs, scratching on the other side of the old attic door.
Why has no one come out to inspect the ranch’s lack of lanterns yet? Have they not noticed the lack of light on this, the third consecutive dark, lanternless night? And If someone does come to see what’s gone awry will they save me or will they simply die? Will those haunting shadows-come-to-life pry apart their jaws and jitter down inside? Will they climb behind their eyes and take control? Swallow themselves down and down their throat, creeping in without a sound to smother out their soul? To add another whisper? Can I even take another whisper? Can I listen to much more? Can I stand the sound of yet another finger scratching at the attic door? Will they save me up here? Can they find some way? Why has no one come out here to either find their death or save me from this fate? Have the townsfolk lost their faith?
How much longer can I take it? How much longer shall I hide behind this ancient door before I finally lose my mind and throw it open wide and let the Feast of Midnight Stares finally eat its way inside?
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The next morning is Thursday and we spend all morning making scarecrows. Yesterday it’s just me and Father at the slaughtering barn, but this morning it’s the entire Thompson clan except for Leah and the twins. This is a Thompson only tradition and Leah is still a Marshall deep down. I overhear as she assures her son and daughter, handing them each a basket and leading them away from the main house and down to the berry patches, that picking berries is more of a fun time than making a scarecrow.
They’re only five and they’ve never made a scarecrow before so they don’t know any better when their mother lies to them like this. I made my first scarecrow with everyone when I was four, so I would have known this for the lie that it was.
That was the year that Uncle Gideon was crushed to death. The old grain mill that stood at the crest of the Holybrook Falls for almost 95 years decided to suddenly throw a gear on its worn water wheel and the 15-ton stone building collapsed on top of him. When they finally found what was left of him beneath the rubble his body was so pulverized that Father declared, much to Gideon’s wife Seraphina’s dismay, there wasn’t enough left of him to warrant purchasing a casket to bury it and she’d have to cover the cost of the funeral herself if she wanted to have one. Although as the Patron of the Thompson Heritage Ranch, Father could have easily covered the cost of burial a dozen times over, he said he’d rather not because the whole thing was a waste of time and money.
To say that this created a rift between the two branches of the family would be an understatement. The ritual requires seven Thompsons to complete and Gideon was the last of Father’s brothers still alive. When it came time for Seraphina to participate in Gideon’s stead as a Thompson wife is expected to do upon the death of her husband during the Feast of Eternal Abundance…well, that year she declined.
This was a grave mistake and this was something she learned very soon after. The whole of Holybrook needs for The Feast to happen or the whole of Holybrook is seen as thankless by Zygomar and thanklessness is the worst sin of all because everyone is punished for it. So in her refusal to be thankful, Seraphina became the second Thompson to die beneath a pile of stones that year. They didn’t come from a building that collapsed around her, like those that killed her husband…they were thrown at her head in Holybrook’s town square by a mob of angry Holybrook residents.
Although I was still very young, younger than any participant our family has ever recorded, Father convinced Mother that I was old enough and the only thing stopping me was my height, so that year was the first year that I painted my first silly face on my first sheet of burlap. Mother quickly sewed the burlap into the proper shape as she did for everyone, and she still does every year and after that, I stuffed it full of hay. It was the first year that I tucked a brand new plaid shirt into a pair of new store-bought overalls, and tied the sleeves and pant legs on the scarecrow shut with twine. It was the first year that I stuffed those limbs with more hay and the first time I filled the rest of my scarecrow’s torso with handful after sloppy handful from a bucket of entrails collected from one of Father’s slaughtered steers. The sloppy buckets full of sacrificial guts stink to high heaven the day after Slaughtering Day so we always do this on the grass in the yard out front of the main house. I stopped doing silly faces on mine when I was eight, opting instead to mimic the sinister or maniacal looks that my brothers always chose for theirs. The girls always do theirs the same, trying their best to make their burlap faces look like oversized Raggedy Anne dolls.
It’s messy and smelly and fun and has been one of my favorite activities every year for as long as I can remember. I never really thought about where the entrails came from before yesterday if I might be entirely honest about that…and it’s still one of my favorite activities even after yesterday if I might be entirely honest about that too.
Once the scarecrows are stuffed they are each taken to one of seven points throughout the ranch in a pattern that forms a giant seven-pointed star. Then they are mounted in place and a lantern is hung from each of their left hands. These lanterns are filled with tallow instead of lamp oil–the fat rendered down from the sacrificial steer–and starting the night we stuff them and put them in their places each wick is lit in succession once the moon peeks just above the tallest stalks of corn in the sky of the north field. Father lights his first. Then Mother. Then Josiah. Then Caleb…and so on.
We do this every night for the seven nights that lead up to Thanksgiving when the moon reaches the right position overhead. Then later, in the dead of night, the lanterns are snuffed with the ceremonial lantern snuffer by the last Thompson awake. They walk from lantern to lantern, snuffing the fires out in the order they were ignited. The walk takes roughly an hour to complete. Usually Father takes on this responsibility himself because he’s ultimately the party responsible for the successful execution of each step in the ritual of The Feast, but he’s let Josiah do it once and Caleb has done it on at least five different nights in the years since he took to the cloth. That’s why this year, I’m hopeful since he’s taken me through the steps of Slaughtering Day he’ll leave the extinguishing duty up to me…at least for one night this week. It would be such an honor to be trusted with such an important task.
That first year, my brothers and sisters were all each tall enough to light their lanterns on their own but I was two feet shy of the lantern I’d need to light, plus I was only four and Mother insisted I couldn’t light the flame unsupervised. Father eventually convinced her to let me join them because he had a plan and once he explained it to her she’d finally agreed. He told her that anyone in town whom he invited to fulfill the task of lifting me high enough to light my wick would not only thank them for the opportunity, but that man or woman would gladly pay for such an honor also…that’s why for the first three years I participated in the Lighting of the Lanterns for the Feast of Eternal Abundance the job of lifting me high enough to reach my lantern was auctioned off to the highest bidder. The way Father explained it to Mother, since they didn’t exactly need the money, it was just another blessing they could be thankful for.
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Everything goes as planned on Thursday night. The scarecrows are mounted on their pikes throughout the ranch and we light the lanterns one by one when the moon hits its mark. Father first, Mother, Josiah, Caleb, Rebekah, then Tabitha and finally me. The Feast of Eternal Abundance has begun! Though it’s meant to be a private affair only for the descendants of Ezekiel Thompson who not only founded Holybrook but brought with him prosperity, faith and religion to this godless land in the heart of Kansas, there’s usually a small crowd of looky-loos. They watch anxiously from the highest point in the road on the hill that winds its way down to the ranch’s valley. What they might do if something went wrong from that distance–if the entrails spilled out of a poorly sewn scarecrow or a lantern didn’t light–I couldn’t tell you. It’s not really much to see, but they come to see it and then they leave. I asked once and Father says they’re never still up there when he puts the lanterns out for the night. Every night from Slaughtering Day to the night before Thanksgiving our dinners are large, extravagant affairs consisting of beef in the main house.
Friday night is the same. First the moon hits its mark, then Father, Mother, Josiah, Caleb, Rebekah, Tabitha and lastly me.
Saturday is the night that everything changes. In my mind, when I replay it in my memory, everything happens in slow motion but I know it actually happened in just the blink of an eye. The moon seems to take forever to move across the clear, cloudless sky, but once father sees that it’s risen high enough, he lifts the glass of his lantern and flicks a strike-anywhere match to life across the rough-spun fabric of his scarecrow’s dirty coat near its crusted, blood-stained belly. Mother’s scarecrow is to father’s left and she lights her lantern next, opting to use a long-stemmed candle lighter rather than a match. As she carefully lowers the glass of her lantern around the flame, Josiah who uses the same matches as Father uses takes his turn next. His wife Leah stands nearby watching him with a look of pride and the faces of his children, Micah and Hannah, are painted with a mix of genuine curiosity and solemn wonder. Next is Caleb who holds a metal rod shaped like a Shepherd’s Crook. Dangling from the end of it by a chain is an ornate glass candle holder that already glows with candlelight inside. He lights the end of a stick of incense from the candle that’s already burning and touches the incense to the wick of his lantern and then blows on the stick until the flaming end goes out and the incense smolders and delivers an endless exhale of slowly rising white smoke. He kneels before his scarecrow in prayer, sticking the incense into the ground so it can continue to burn. He is very devout and will remain in this position long after the smoldering end of the incense has grown cold. Rebekah and Tabitha each use a candle lighter with a long stem like Mother’s to start theirs…
Then it comes to me. I take my Zippo from my pocket. It’s my preferred method of lantern-lighting because it’s windproof and works in the rain as long as the wick and striker don’t get too wet. Tonight there’s no wind and the weather has been dry for weeks so there shouldn’t have been any problem. That’s what made this so strange, you see? There was no indication of what was about to happen. I flick my lighter to life and the the fire that ignites from the Zippo’s wick burns blue at the base and a small amount of oily black smoke wisps into the air above the flame. The moment I touch the flame of my lighter to the wick of my lantern, every hair on my body seems to grow rigid and stand on-end. Less than a moment passes and I feel every muscle in my body contract. My entire view of the dusk-blanketed ranch turns a blinding white as my feet leave the ground and I’m thrown backwards, away from my scarecrow. Thunder rings in my ears and the world fades away, the blinding white replaced by and endless void of black.
I feel my soul float quickly up and away from my body until the motion comes to rest with an abrupt stop, hovering 15 feet above where the lightning struck and where my body lay crumpled on the ground. A perfect ring of fire circles the scarecrow in a ten foot radius, but my body is several feet beyond its reach so the circle’s flames don’t touch me. The fire is vibrantly hot and the circle burns blue as the tongues of the flames lick the stalks of corn that surround the scarecrow until they wither and turn black.
My body is singed and my clothes are smoking from the event but I can see from here that I’m simply unconscious, not dead.
Yesss child, you yet live, Vorgrath’s voice echoes quietly through the darkness and untethered from my body it doesn’t come from the space between my ears but it surges forth from the center of my soul itself, You are unharmed. Now open your eyesss in this darknessss that you may truly see.
I inspect my injuries from above and his voice speaks the truth. They appear superficial and no permanent damage seems to have been done to me. I watch my chest rise and fall with rapid breaths. I hear Mother screaming and everyone is running toward me except for Leah who is doing her best to calm her wailing children, dealing with an overload of her own panic and dread as she does it. Even Caleb has gotten to his feet and he’s sprinting across the fields faster than any of the others.
I watch all of this as I watch my rapid breathing as I watch my eyes roll wildly behind their eyelids as I watch the blue fire burn as I watch everyone run from every corner of the seven-pointed star to rescue me from the flames. None of them can tell if I’m alive or dead but they’re all running toward me just the same. I watch as one of the Looky-loos dials 911 on his cellphone from the front seat of his car parked far up on the hill. Now I watch as the dirt around the scarecrow begins fissure and crack into massive chunks. Pieces of earth that fall away into a void of nothingness as though a great mouth has opened wide so that its throat can swallow the ground down into the darkness from far below. I don’t see the creatures that claw their way up from the hole and spring across the ground in their dark, evil way through the blue of the flames at first but I can sense their presence there because I can sense everything and everyone from where I float.
More than a dozen of these dark shapeless things climb up out of the hole. Jittering across the ground, their giant dark forms shift through the flames and into the unburnt crops with disconcerting precision. Their inky black skin, reminiscent of crystalline shards, is hard and refractive against the purple moonlight glittering in defiance of the shadows where they seek to hide. As my family grows ever closer, closing the distance to my body, they extend and retract themselves with jagged, sharp pseudopodia, moving past my body and into the darkness of the rows beyond with calculated and rigid geometric precision. Within moments they’ve moved away so quickly from the hole that they dragged themselves up from that were I not floating, disembodied and in position to watch it all, nobody would have even known they were there. The only trace of their presence left behind is an intricate lattice of geometric imprints in the dirt from where their heavily mineralized and craggy skin made contact with the ground as they jerked rapidly away into the obscure gloom of the night.
Before anyone reaches me in defiance of logic, gravity and physics, the hole around my scarecrow fills itself back in as if it were never there at all, the ground rising back into place from where it fell away. The blue flames of the circle extinguish themselves in little puffs as if turning off the gas on a cooking range, blinking out of existence when the fuel that lit them was suddenly pulled away and shut off by a switch. The soil is black with the ashes of the stalks that burned and grows blacker still as the ashes pushed skyward by the flames begin to rain back down to the ground around my body.
I feel myself falling then, pulled back to the earth and into my body with such speed and force that when my soul reconnects itself inside the space where it belongs, I sit suddenly upright and my eyes fly open. I breathe in a long extended gasp of air and double over onto my side in a fit of coughs.
Caleb reaches me first. He falls to his knees and begins to sob in a mix of relief and horror and ardent joy.
“It’s a miracle! A bonified miracle right before our eyes! My own brother! A Thompson doubly blessed by our gods! Born bearing The Mark of Zygomar and now blessed with the kiss of Vorgrath! The kiss has killed men twice his size and yet he lives! He lives! He will receive more and more gifts from our gods as time goes forth! He has received Vorgrath’s kissed unscathed and he lives!” Caleb declares.
“I certainly don’t feel unscathed,” I complain, “in fact I feel very, very scathed.” I raise my hand to my singed hair and a clump of it crumbles and falls away at my touch.
Mother kneels to clutch my body against hers ignoring my protests about every inch of my skin searing with pain.
When the ambulance called by the looky-loo on the hill arrives, they are sent away at my insistence. I’m burned, yes, and while in a few places my skin blisters with 2nd degree level injury, those spots are sparce and far between. the majority of me is simply red and no more sensitive to the touch than a severe sunburn.
That night before bed, Mother shaves away what is left of my hair until I’m as bald as an Acolyte of The Order of The Zygomarian Sect. Until I’m as bald as Caleb. She rubs a soothing salve into my skin and promises to burn an offering–a whole chicken–to Trula, the Goddess of Health and Vitality, in my name to speed up my recovery, that the burns on my skin might heal faster. She promises to use the small furnace set before the alter next to the chicken coop to burn the chicken while it’s still alive and I thank her with tears in my eyes. Mother is too kind-hearted and has more than once told me that live offerings are against her nature. She reminds me that torturing an animal to death hurts her very soul but she promises to do this in my name right away and sends me to bed.
As I lay in my room, staring up as my ceiling fan spins around and around endlessly in the dark, I begin to softly and tunelessly hum from the back of my throat. I’ve never been good at opening my mind to the gods with The Humming Trance but tonight I try with all the might I can muster from my soul. I never thought to ask Vorgrath what the creatures from my vision were. They defied nature with their very form and being and I needed to know what they meant.
I can feel my mind open to the gods so quickly with The Humming Trance this time that I wonder if maybe Caleb was right…maybe I shall receive more and more gifts from our gods as time goes on?