‘Part of the Ritual’
by Peter Walsh
Part Four
Christina Carnez was indeed impressed by the work of the late
Russell Masters. The notes and sketches in his journal were the last word
in detail. They filled in the gaps in her own knowledge but they also
provided so much more.
Masters had been more of an observer than a believer but he had been
passionate about his research. If Masters had been inclined to use the
knowledge he had so meticulously documented he would have tapped into some very
ancient and very real powers. He had chosen not to, yet had opened the
door to a true believer. The ritual for summoning Lilith was all on the
pages in front of her.
Lilith, known as the first amongst the ten evil sephiroth, the queen
of demonesses and the ‘Terror by Night’. Christina Carnez would provide
the host for Lilith to walk the earth. It would be both wonderful and
terrible for the mortals in her path.
She sat at the desk, working by candlelight, it was night outside,
her favourite time. The room in which she sat was void of any furniture
save for her chair and desk and the full length mirror propped against one
wall. The candles flickered in the dark and created a thousand mad
shadows. She looked up from Masters journal and smiled. It was all
going perfectly.
She had Masters journal, the house was a perfect location for the
ritual and she had her ‘Sisters’. She smiled again, her ‘Sisters’, the
four kidnapped women currently bound and gagged in the summoning chamber.
There always had to be five in any Sisterhood of Lilith and Christina Carnez
was the fifth and most important member.
She stretched like a cat and got to her feet. She walked over
to the mirror and looked at herself. Her hair with its red and black
shades was loose over her bare shoulders. Her black eyes seemed to glow
with a distant red fire. She was naked she supposed in the fact that she
wore no clothes but her body was shrouded with the dark knowledge of 6000
years.
Her long, lithe body was almost black with a mass of tattooed texts
and symbols. Christina was her own living library. In her thirty
one mortal years she had painstakingly had recorded all her desired knowledge
onto the soft, supple surface of her own skin. The pain and discomfort
had been considerable but it had been more than worth it. Only one person
had ever seen her as she now was. Sofia and she was now her
prisoner. The texts on her living flesh were her special secret from the
world. Her secret and Lilith’s.
A chill draught snaked through the room and caressed her. She
was oblivious to any extremes of temperature just as she was to any
emotion. All that had ever mattered to her was bringing Lilith back to
the domain of the Earth.
She ran her hands over herself and smiled. Soon, it would be
soon. She turned away from her own image and back to Masters Masterful
texts. She was amuse by her own little joke.
Sofia Van De Nord looked at her three fellow captives with both pity
and envy. She was sad that they were here as mere conduits for the
conduction of something that was truly evil. She was also slightly
jealous of their ignorance, if they truly knew what Christina was planning they
would probably be dead from fright.
Sofia sat bound and gagged in the chair. She was secured back
to back with a well dressed blonde woman. The ropes secured their bodies
and chairs together. Sofia looked down at the ropes cutting to her wrists
melding them painfully to the arms of the chair. She could hardly move
but knew that any struggles she made would be futile. Christina had bound
her well, there would be no escape.
She inhaled carefully through her nose, Sofia was fearful of choking
on her gag. Christina had stuffed her mouth full of cloth, roughly
securing it in place with a narrow band of cloth drawn against it between her
teeth and tied off in a firm knot, trapping multiple strands of auburn hair at
the back of her head. A broad band of folded black material had been
tightly put in place over her gag stretched mouth. Sofia could not speak,
indeed she could make very little in the way of sounds at all.
Her ankles and knees were bound and she angrily stamped her boot
heels on the bare floor of her prison. Christina had prepared the stage
of the coming ritual all too well. The Pentagram was perfectly drawn and
the tallow candles were there for more than just atmosphere.
She looked at the young women, tied back to back a few feet
away. The buxom blonde girl had her head hung forward, her chin resting
on her ample breasts as she fitfully slept. The beautiful dark-haired
girl looked back at her, the uneven light of the candles reflected in her blue
eyes. The girl's mouth was covered with tape and the bulge in her cheeks
indicated a heavy packing held behind it.
Sofia shook her head and extended the muscles in her jaw in an
effort to loosen her gag but it was no use. The blonde woman she was tied
to made a muffled sound to Sofia. Sofia knew that with a gag in your
mouth, you could only speak in distorted vowels.
Sofia Van De Nord felt a terrible sense of deja vu and a cold fear
began to snake its way through her. It had been eight years before in the
basement of that building in Canal Street in Amsterdam. Sofia was a
student and it had been a time of abandonment for her. Sex, drugs,
alcohol and cigarettes had been experimented with and indulged in to quite an
extreme degree. Sofia had been an addict for every new experience in her
young life, then she met Christina Carnez.
Christina Carnez just appeared out of nowhere one day. A tall,
pale beauty with a well sculpted face and long black hair that had an enticing
reddish sheen to it. Then there were her eyes, inky black and quite
bottomless.
She always wore black clothes and was adorned by exotic jewellery
which was heavily symbolic. She could have been Spanish, Italian or from
Latin America.
‘Where one is from counts for little, it is for what one is destined
that is of true consequence’. She had told Sofia. Christina was
charming and sinister by turns.
Christina was involved with the University crowd but was not a
student, however she was exceptionally well educated, widely read and also more
than a little scary. She was an exciting new friend to Sofia and offered
some help and guidance in Sofia’s studies in Anthropology and Theology.
Christina had her own opinions on spirituality and morality, they could be
quite extreme but Sofia put it down to eccentric character traits. They
spent considerable time together. They shared drugs, boyfriends and deep
conversations.
Then Christina told Sofia about a little club she had formed with
three other girls, a very exclusive little club.
‘It’s a Sisterhood’. Christina had told her.
‘Of what?’
‘Of dedication to someone very special-and very powerful’.
‘Who?’
‘Lilith’.
Sofia had heard the name and of vague connections but Christina was
more than happy to elaborate.
‘Lilith was Adam’s first wife, created by God out of mud and
filth. Adam’s and Lilith produced offspring that became demons.
Lilith left Adam to consort with lascivious demons and she produced her own
race of demon children called Lilin, a hundred for every day while God created
Eve to comfort Adam. Lilith is the true one and she must return accordingly’.
‘How?’ Sofia was intrigued and frightened in equal amounts.
‘Join the Sisterhood, Sofia’.
Sofia did and that had been her first mistake. She went to
meet Christina and the others at an address in Canal Street at midnight.
Sofia’s recollection of the events that followed were muddled.
There had been drugs in abundance, all of the hallucinogenic
variety. Sofia remembered three other girls, all beautiful and all in awe
of Christina Carnez. There had been the basement, the Pentagram glowing
on the floor, the tallow candles. Then there was Christina as the
mistress of the ceremony. She had made them all strip naked and take up
position at individual points of the Pentagram. Christina then shed her
clothes and through drug hazed vision Sofia saw the marks which adorned her
nude body.
Christina raised her arms above her black scarred breasts and began
screaming incantations into the darkness. Her hair danced on an
invisible, icy wind and her eyes became red with fire. In the centre of
the Pentagram something mist-like in quality began to rise and take shape and
then...
Sofia could remember nothing further. She had been found by
the Police wandering dazed and naked by the canal just before dawn. The
Police had gone to the house in Canal Street. In the basement they found
the Pentagram but Christina and the three other girls had vanished. Sofia
was sent home to her parents for three months before being allowed to return to
her studies in Amsterdam.
Sofia writhed in the heavy wooden chair, uncomfortable with her gag
and bonds. Christina Carnez was a nightmare that had now returned to
haunt her. Sofia was now Christina’s prisoner.
Inside their ring of dancing candle flames Toni Tyrell looked at the
new captive with interest. She was tall, leggy and very attractive.
Just how many girls was this Carnez woman going to kidnap? Was she
planning to grab every single female in Brighton? If she had not been so
scared, Toni may have found it amusing.
Toni had lost all track of time since her own abduction. The
rest of the world suddenly seemed to be a long way away. Toni felt her
world had become one of flickering candles and darkness. She heard
Shannon snoring softly and envied her friends ability to fall asleep so easily
under virtually any circumstance. Toni’s sense of unease and the
tightness of her bonds kept her senses keen, sleep lay buried in that beckoning
state called exhaustion.
Toni again contorted her lower facial muscles behind the heavy layers
of tape trapping the packing of the gag in her mouth. There was some give
in the tape but was a long way from coming loose.
Despite the dark chill of the chamber where she was a prisoner, Toni
felt like she burning up. Her long dark hair framed her face in damp and
tangled strands and her top was sticky with her own perspiration. Toni
knew it was all down to fear. However, fear of what? She again
looked down at the glowing symbols on the floor. She knew that they
signified something evil. What part was she to play in the ritual her
kidnapper had planned?
Toni tried to calm herself again by thinking pleasant thoughts,
about the things that made life good. Her Mother, her love of and skill
at languages, having her own home, being able to travel in her work and of one
day sharing domestic bliss with somebody special.
Toni again glanced at the power dressed blonde, tied back to back
with the mini-skirted, auburn-haired newcomer. Despite being tied up and
gagged for a considerable time, the blonde seemed to barely have a hair out of
place nor a single snag to her stockings. Toni felt ratty and dishevelled
by comparison.
Whatever the Carnez woman had planned for her captives Toni wished
she would just get on with it. She knew she was tempting fate hugely but
the waiting was starting to get as unbearable as the ropes and gag that held
her prisoner.
Toni then started as she heard the door to chamber open and then
slam shut. She and her sister captives-including a suddenly wide awake
Shannon-all turned in the direction of the sound.
Christina Carnez almost seemed to float towards them out of the
darkness beyond the candles and the glowing Pentagram.
She was barefoot and walked with the deliberate grace of a stalking
cat. Her hair was long and loose and her eyes seemed to be glowing with
something red and malevolent. Her blood red lips were curved into a
diabolical smile.
She wore a red robe of shimmering silk which covered her whole body.
The robe was emblazoned with all manner of symbols captured in
silver and gold thread.
Toni, Shannon, Clare and Sofia watched her approach like terror
stricken mice.
Christina Carnez circled about them with a swirl of red silk.
She then came in closer.
Toni could scent the exotic musk that seemed to mist about the
Carnez woman. It delighted her senses and chilled her soul.
Her long fingers caressed Toni’s gagged face.
Clare flinched away from her touch.
Shannon was weeping again.
Sofia was frantically trying to say something through her gag.
Christina Carnez then came to a halt and looking skywards, raised
her arms and started to move them in circular motions. She then spoke.
‘Sisters. It is time’.