Page 67 of Beneath the Dirt

Like a twisted jack-o’-lantern getting ready to be lit on Halloween. The day he detested more than anything.

Oh, the irony.

Up, down, slide.

Up, down, slide.

The makings of a jagged grin form on his abdomen.

I peel my gaze from the bloodbath, registering the mouths moving around me, but I can’t hear their words.

Too distracted by the rich smell of earthy incense and the click-clack of coins being dropped around me, my hearing becomes robbed.

A fellow heathen with a hood that protrudes more outward than any of ours walks over to my side. A soft, feminine voice follows, leaking into my ear. “She’s doing so well. Adhering to what has been written.”

I turn to face the woman I know to be Frida, but her cloak offers a veil of anonymity that my eyes can’t penetrate.

“Shh,” she breathes and her voice coils around me like a rope, securing me to her words and twisting my body in the direction of the cross.

“The initiation passage has begun.”

Frida’s wrinkled hands raise, one holding a key and the other holding two masks. Two familiar masks. Almost identical to the ones from the Halloween shop.

The Ferryman and the passenger.

“She left these with me the last time she came to see me.” Thewoman takes it upon herself to lower my hood as she stretches the elastic band over my head, lowering the mask into place.

She hands me the key next. Another surge of eerie familiarity ripples through me. “He won’t be needing this anymore.” She tilts her head towards my father’s lifeless body. “He’s gone. Lost to the abyss he created. Now she’s ready for you. Your perfect passenger with payment in tow. Go to her. Make her pay the toll. Let her sail. She can’t escape you now.”

I close my eyes for a second to blink, but the moment my eyes open she’s gone and that horrid song starts replaying in my mind, infecting my brain. Even worse, my brain is reciting it in the same sinister singsong she did when I heard her sing it in the graveyard years ago.

“Harlan Rainey has to go. Has to go, so no one knows. Harlan Rainey has to die. Blood for blood. Eye for an eye.”

“No, this isn’t right,” I mutter to myself as I look up to Araceli who is now exhausted on her knees in front of a very dead and gutted Pastor Harlan Rainey…senior.

The song should’ve stopped. He’s dead. The sick and twisted melody infects my brain. The one from the graveyard, and the one she sang over and over again while she smothered me with her pussy, that undoubtedly belongs to me now.

Frida’s voice sounds again. Whispering to me from deep within, but she’s nowhere to be found.“The song was never about your father. It was always about you. She wants you dead, Harlan. Kill her before she kills you.”

I know. She’s right. It’s nothing I haven’t already known deep down.

It was always about me and her.

Little did she know that the last part of her song, the whole blood for blood and eye for eye bit, is part of the credo of the Heathen’s. Being Lucian Suárez’s daughter may mean she has Heathen in her blood, but it starts and ends there. To be a member of Heathen’s Cross is to believe in fatum enim eligimus—for we choose fate.Except our fate is very seldom a solitary path.Often people find a way into our stories and sometimes when they do, betrayals occur. That’s where the credo comes in, that her father, Lucian Suárez, created when he founded Heathen’s Cross, back when it was known as La Cruz De Los Paganos in Puerto Rico, before he moved stateside. Blood for blood, eye for an eye, adds a layer to choosing one's fate. It means deciding how to exact revenge when necessary. Granted, Lucien meant that part for enemies of his people and those who didn't respect their spiritual freedom like my father, and not his daughter. But what he doesn’t know won’t kill him… he’s already dead.

Araceli rises from her knees. Blood stains her skin, only adding to her allure, but it’s the knife in her hand that steals my attention. The way it’s clutched in her grip. The way it shines beneath the moonlight as she moves it up and down with each step of her stride over to me. It reminds me that if I don’t end her the way the ancestors of the cross wanted, she will finish me…for good.

I lift both my hands, snapping my fingers for my fellow Heathens to attend to my command.

“You,” I point to one, “retrieve the bucket and bring it to me.”

I turn and point at another random, yet willing, heathen, “And you, put this on her.” I toss the mask over. I point to two hooded members, both built so broad and tall, they look as if they can be on stilts. They can handle her when she puts up the fight that I know she will start once she realizes what I’m making them place on her face. “You two. Make sure she doesn’t go anywhere.”

Araceli’s gaze falls to the mask and horror blossomes on her face, dulling her natural glow. “No,” she cries, trying to fight the two members approaching her. “I don’t want it.”

My loyal Heathen’s ignore her. The two I instructed to hold her down, grab hold of her arms, holding her in place while the other stretches the mask over her face.

“I changed my mind!” she pleas.

---