“Get away from me, creep!” Sarah shouted..
“C’mon baby, I’m just trying to give you a compliment. Why you gotta be such a bitch?” Jim asked, “Y’know, you’re all walking around here showing off your bodies, and then you all get pissed off when guys look at what you want them to look at.” Jim lurched towards her, “I just wanted to let you know that I think that you’re good looking. I’m not trying to harass you, I’m not a rapist, I’m just a friendly guy in a bar who thought it would make you feel nice for someone to let you know that you’re pretty.”
She eyed Jim warily, considering her options. “Oh… okay. Sorry.” Sarah demurred strategically, not wanting to escalate the situation.
Jim smiled. “No problem, baby. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to weird you out. Let me give you a hug and make it up to you.”
Sarah forced a smile. “Uhh.. that’s alright, I know you didn’t mean it. Look, I gotta go my friends are waiting for me.” She took a tentative step towards the lounge.
Jim moved in front of her, preventing her from getting back to the bar from the bathrooms. “Jesus Christ, I just want to give you a hug to make you feel better. Why you gotta make this so difficult?” He smiled bigger, spreading his arms.
She thought for a moment and, looking for the path of least resistance, hugged him so she could get out of there. Sarah threw an arm around his neck, and one around his waist, adding almost no pressure to the embrace. Jim returned the hug, and pulled her in close. Her nose crinkled as she smelled the beer and sweat coming out of Jim’s pores. She felt Jim’s hand on her ass, and started pushing him away. “Get the fuck off of me!”
People were starting to stare.
Jim scowled. “Ah c’mon, if you didn’t want this you wouldn’t have worn those jeans.” He groped at her with a bit more force, and Sarah froze, her eyes wide. Jim loosened his grip and began to laugh. He let go of Sarah and swung out of her way, still laughing, “You should see the look on your face, so scared. I wasn’t gonna hurt you, you need to lighten up. God, you girls are all the same, so serious.”
Sarah fought back tears as she ran past Jim, keeping her head down. She was scared of Jim. The things she had sensed when he grabbed her were horrific.
She had always been an empath, sensing the feelings of others, but after Sarah had her first period the power had grown stronger, and she had since become able to perceive remembered feelings of people she made physical contact with. When Jim had groped Sarah, her power triggered and she felt what Jim was thinking about.
Sarah had thought about Jim and all those women the whole way home. She saw the fear in those girls eyes, and she felt Jim’s reaction to the fear. She felt his pulse quicken, and his breath get shallower. She felt his mouth dry up, and his hands get clammy. She felt his excitement. She saw what that excitement had led to.
Sarah knew that Jim had no remorse, she knew that he believed that women just “played hard to get”, and he was just playing the game. Their pleas to be left alone, and their repeated rebuffs fell on deaf ears. Saying “no” just seemed to make Jim push harder. Even attempts at physically fighting back only made Jim feel better about using force with his “dates”. Sarah knew that she was lucky that her encounter with Jim had been public. She knew what the consequences would have been for her otherwise.
Sarah hated how powerless Jim managed to make her feel, especially since she wasn’t actually powerless, quite the opposite, in fact. Her powers were neither accidental nor unplanned. She came from a long line of powerful women, women who communed with the Great Mother, women who could leverage their relationship with Gaea herself to right wrongs. Not only was it a moral imperative to teach Jim a lesson due to her knowledge of his proclivities of sexual violence against her sistren, it was Sarah’s birthright.
By the time the next full moon appeared, Sarah was ready. She had spent her time gathering the needed supplies, as well as making and blessing the candles she was going to need for the ritual. She packed her duffel bag with her supplies and headed out to her altar in the forest giving herself enough time to setup for the ceremony.
Sarah pulled a golden cloth with a pentacle printed on it out of her bag and placed it on top of the altar. She weighted the corners down with the large, black, clove-scented candles she made in her kitchen, and lit them. Sarah knew that this ritual was dangerous if she lost focus so she was taking no chances to lose her mental and spiritual center. Upon each corner of the pentacle she placed a jar containing a serpent. Sarah didn’t enjoy handling snakes, but when she was set on doing something, she had the capacity to follow through, and she recognized that her path often forced her to interact with them.
She moved to the edge of the clearing and looked up at the sky, dark now, making the full moon appear even brighter. Standing now a few paces from the altar, she began breathing deeply, and focusing on the flickering lights of the candles. Walking slowly towards the altar, she began her invocation.
“O Great Mother, hear me. My words cross my lips as the wind caresses the trees. My blood flows through my veins as the creek winds through the forest. I serve you, I venerate you, I beg of you, hear my pleas.” Sarah stood in front of the altar now, eyes closed, with her head back and arms raised to the sky. “I ask now for your assistance. I wish to satisfy your desires for natural balance in all things, and to prune the branches of those who would seek to tip the scales in their favour against those who follow you. Against my sisters. Against your daughters.”
As she spoke, Sarah focused on the smell of the air, clove filling her nose. Her peripheral vision captured the flaring of the candles, and excitement of the serpents. The breeze picked up, caressing her skin, moving her hair out from her face. Eyes closed, Sarah stopped moving.
“You are here, Mother. Your presence is unmistakable.” said Sarah.
“When one of my daughters cries for me in the night, I cannot ignore her. I am a good and loving mother. I nurture and I protect. From whom do my daughters seek protection?” The wind circled Sarah. “Ah. I see. Worry not young one, you have done the right thing. Mother is here, and now you must sleep.”
So Sarah did.
Jim was tied to an altar. It was carved of cold, rough stone, though it felt smooth under his body where the previous occupants had worn it down. The bindings were tight around his wrists, to the point that he had a hard time knowing where his hands were in relation to the rest of his body. He hadn’t been quite sure that they had still been attached to his arms except that he could see them. Looming above him were large stalactites, long and piercing, threatening to skewer him if one dropped. Light from a bonfire danced through them, twisting the shadows into a mass of writhing snakes. He was sure that he could see the scales and the eyes and the teeth as the light played tricks on him. He thought he heard the sounds of scaly skin sliding across scaly skin, and hissing, punctuated with the flicking of forked tongues, but that couldn’t have been the case.
After he tore his eyes off of the mesmerizing display on the ceiling above him he turned his head and saw the tall shadows of people dancing on the walls. The hissing faded away in his ears and was replaced with chanting, and the scuffle of feet on dirt. He couldn’t make out the words, they sounded like a language he didn’t know, but he could recognize that it was being repeated, the ostinato soothing and relaxing Jim. Once he could focus on the people around him, he could see a number of women in sheer white dresses dancing around him. Some twirled, others swayed, others moved in a way that made Jim think that they were possessed by a demon, all the while maintaining the chant.
Jim turned his head to the left and discovered that he was in the center of these women, and off behind them there was, he thought, a larger shadow or statue. Hulking and black, it appeared to be a sitting figure, but his brain couldn’t really parse what he was seeing. It came to a tall point, and he hadn’t been sure if it was swaying back and forth to the rhythm of the dance, or if the fire was playing tricks on his eyes yet again. As he tried focusing on it, the dancing stopped, so too, the chanting. All Jim could hear was the heavy rasping breaths of two dozen women, tired from dancing. The women he could see were facing the dark mass that Jim was looking at. That’s when it stood up.
It was a tall woman in a dress similar to what the rest of the women were wearing except that it was black. On top of her head was a tall, pointy hat, Jim thought it made her look like a witch. As she approached, every eye was on her, no one daring to look elsewhere. She crossed the threshold to the circle of dancers and as she got closer to the altar, the rest of the women closed ranks. Jim had never suffered from claustrophobia, but while they were nearing he was finding it harder and harder to pull oxygen into his lungs, as though the air was a slurry, thick and wet and suffocating. When the women had closed the circle around him, he could feel the heat radiating off of them, and Jim thought that he could feel his skin starting to burn.
The woman in black climbed the stone steps leading to the altar and stood over Jim. He tried to look at her face but he couldn’t keep his focus on it, it seemed to shift, always different, always familiar, but he could never discern who she was. It was as though she was many women, and not just one. His eyes were drawn back up to the swirling mass in the stalactites. Now he was certain that there were snakes in the ceiling, coiled around each other and the stone points above him. The sound of their movements filled his ears and panic set in.
She knelt, keeping a leg on either side of Jim and he had never felt skin that was so hot to touch. He watched her look to the ceiling, arch her back and outstretch both of her arms. She shouted something he didn’t understand, and the mass above him froze for a moment before a large, oily snake slowly uncoiled, lowering itself down to the woman in black. Like a heavy drop of tar, it dripped in slow motion stretching ever closer to the woman, until it slipped into her mouth. He could see it’s body force her jaw wider, distending her throat and finding it’s home. As it filled her belly, it cooled her, he could feel the extra weight pushing down on him, and she seemed to grow even taller. When tip of the snake’s the tail eventually made it’s way into her stomach, another followed. He could see and feel the snakes swirling around inside of her like a nightmarish fetus was trying to turn itself around in her womb.
As the movement of the snakes settled, she looked at Jim, and it was like he finally had permission to look at her. Her swirling features were tugging at Jim’s memory, but he didn’t recognize her. In contrast to her dress, her skin and lips were pale, and her hair and eyes were white. Jim wondered if she was albino, he had never seen a complexion like this. She shone, smelling of sweat, but it wasn’t unpleasant, it was like an earthy honey oozed out of her pores, the aromas filling Jim’s nose making it harder yet to breathe.
As the woman in black and Jim held each others gaze, the women encircling them began to chant again. Jim had forgotten their presence, so enraptured by the albino as he was, their voices only reinforced his fixation on her face. His inability to place her only frustrated him and made him more unsettled. Fear was beginning to take hold. Jim mumbled to the albino, “Please, let me go. I don’t understand what’s going on, why I’m here. Do we know each other?”
“You know us, and we know you.”, she said.
“What’s going to happen?”, said Jim.
“A balancing of accounts.”
Even if he hadn’t been restrained, Jim would have felt frozen by the coldness in her eyes. She continued, “We will take what we’re owed.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? What do I owe you? I don’t even know who you are!”
“You owe us fear. You owe us pain. You owe us trauma. You owe us more than you can know. You know who we are, you just refuse to see.”
The chanting began increasing in intensity.
Jim peered at the woman’s face, determined to see who she was, who was doing this to him. Her face didn’t stop changing, the faces flicking in front of Jim’s eyes and the more he stared the more he recognized. The faces were all women he knew, women from his past. Had he dated them all? Was that what this was about? What did these women have to do with fear, and pain, and trauma?
Suddenly, the albino reached down and grabbed Jim’s neck, squeezing his windpipe. He struggled to free himself, but his restraints and the toll that his emotions took on his will meant he couldn’t go anywhere. He slumped, sure that he was going to get choked to death in a cave. He was surprised when she leaned down and kissed him. His mouth parted instinctively, and he felt her tongue press on his.
By the time Jim noticed the snakes leaving the albino’s body and entering his, it was too late. They slithered past his teeth and into his esophagus. They pushed his jaw to the edge of breaking and he was sure he would choke to death as they made their way to the pit of his stomach. Once the snakes found their new home, the albino stood, turned and stepped down from the altar, passing the women in the circle and they followed her out, giving the altar a wider berth.
The circle began to dance again, more frenzied than before. As the women flittered around Jim, so too did the snakes within. They writhed, laced, twinned, wove, twisted, braided, and entangled in his abdomen. Each movement stretching the limits of his skin. Jim, now released of his enchantment could feel every bit of it and screamed. The snakes were pushing lungs and liver out of position, tearing apart his insides. Jim was sure he was going to die. Desperate to escape his bonds, Jim began twisting and coiling like the snakes inside him, pulling and straining, arching his back and slamming his body down onto the stone behind him. His heart raced, and he gulped for air, eyes bulging out of his head as though they were trying to escape where the rest of Jim couldn’t. As he struggled, he became weaker, and as he weakened he noticed that the women had gone silent. They only stared now.
The snakes had also ceased their dance. Jim was no longer sure that he could even feel them in his stomach. Where had they gone?. He tried begging to be released, but his screams had been so loud, he could hardly manage to whisper. His silent pleas were ignored, and the women continued to stare.
He felt something in his arms. He could see the snakes leaving his torso, entwining his arms, under the skin. His arms screamed in pain, and Jim was frozen in terror as he watched the bulging shadows slowly move down towards his hands.
He had forgotten his hands.
All of his struggling had tightened already snug ropes around his wrists. They were numb and bloated. They looked like what Jim imagined a decomposing body might look like if none of the gas could escape. The skin on his hands was so taut that it was translucent. Jim could see the blood pooled inside them, and make out a shadow of the bones within. The snakes spiraled down Jim’s forearms, increasing the internal pressure of his hands. He watched them swell until his fingernails lost their purchase on the tips, popping off his hand like buttons being ripped off of a shirt.
They women screamed. They returned to chanting and dancing, louder and faster than before.
The snakes picked up speed on their way out of Jim’s body, and the skin of the hands split, blood spraying out, assisting their exit. The snakes made their way through the remains of Jim’s hand and crawled onto the altar, coiling on top of his legs and chest. They reared up, mouths open, heads covered in Jim’s blood. Jim’s howls filled the cavern
Jim woke, the nightmare over. Sweat had soaked his sheets and pillow, leaving them cold, wet, and sour-smelling. The scenes he had dreamed had been vivid, and he hated feeling such a lack of control. As much as he had wanted to, despite it being his dream, he couldn’t stop the albino from restraining him, and forcing herself on him. The memory of how the snakes felt churning inside of him was fresh, and he was uncertain that the sensation, still concrete, would ever fade completely. Thoughts of the snakes slithering down his throat made him nauseated, he threw up in his mouth and choked it down, the taste of bile lingering on his dry tongue. The lights and shadows of the cavern had been disorienting, and Jim still hadn’t gotten his bearings. He could tell that he was not in his own bed, the air was antiseptic, and he could make out footsteps and muffled conversations.
“…neighbours heard him screaming…”
“…butcher’s knife…”
“…lost a lot of blood…”
“…lucky to be alive…”
The sunlight reflecting off of the stark white walls of the hospital room burned his retinas. Instinctively, he raised his hands to shade his eyes, but they were not where he expected them to be. He had freshly bandaged stumps, pinholes of blood seeping through the gauze.
Jim’s howls filled the halls of St. Mary’s.
END