The Initiation

It was the night of the initiation ceremony.

The darkness seemed to be woven thick that night when I walked down a road I’d never before, clinging to every surface it could find, only to be interrupted by dim pools of flickering light from the unevenly spaced street lamps. The moon hung low in the sky like an ominous crystal ball glowing with ill omen as my footsteps echoed in the emptiness of the night. The houses by the side of the road possessed an air of abandonment, pitiful wooden structures, broken and crippled. It was a neighbourhood of nobodies forgotten by time.

The icy wind, waspish and testy, stung my eyes and nipped at any bare skin, stirring bushes by the side of the road, giving me the sinister sensation of being shadowed. Doubt and fear trickled into my mind. Was it too late to turn back? Should I have gone ahead with the ceremony? Alas, those questions were to only be answered too late. Far away in the distance, a canine howled into the night and the night seemed to get darker still.

The asphalt road under my feet turned into a paved brick road and there in front of me stood a dark looming forest, all wood, no leaf; all thorns, no flowers; all cruelty, no clemency. Thick vines slithered out from the woody undergrowth towards the paved road, wrapping their thinning tails around the bricks, ready to crush then to dust. The bricks, broken and treacherous, threatened to make me lose my footing as I walked on. The road ended as abruptly as it had begun, and soon I was walking down a dirt path, leaves and twigs crunching beneath my feet. Pale moonlight filtered through the unceremonious intertwining of skeletal branches above, casting menacing shadows everywhere. My heart was pounding against my ribs, the deadly cocktail of fear and adrenaline coursing through my veins, I decided to stop thinking and get it over with before the adrenaline was flushed out of my system.

I walked on as if in a trance, my peripheral vision blurred. I entered a clearing in the forest, the one I was instructed to come to at midnight. Shrouded figures stood along the perimeter of the circular clearing, garbed in robes as black as the night.  In the centre was a small pile of logs, behind which stool a figure in red, holding a bowl in her hand.

“You came,” she noted, her raspy voice lingered in the air “Many thought you wouldn’t turn up.”

“They thought wrong.” I replied

She lit the fire without saying a word. Handing me the bowl, she said “You must make a blood sacrifice.”

She thrust a curved blade into my hand when I didn’t move and pointed to something behind her. A boy. Tied and gagged.

“Go ahead. Prove your loyalty.”

The blade in my hand started to tremble. Surely, they couldn’t ask this of me, could they? Surely, I wasn’t able capable of murder, was I? I was.

The blade sliced through the air and his throat. His back arched and his eyes widened as blood sprayed outwards into the bowl in my outstretched arm. The fire hissed and sizzled as it drank up the blood.

“Welcome to the Calvariae society.”