- What is it?
- Nah, it’s nothing, Pam.
- C-mon, spill it out. What’s bothering you?
- Well, it’s Greg. After that night I don’t recognize him anymore.He’s dressing weird, began to listen to this weird occult music. He doesn’t answer my calls, and I suspect he spends most of the time with Dion.
- Awww… Someone’s getting jealous…
- What?! No? I’m just afraid that something bad actually happened to him. And that Dion guy is a bad influence.
- Ok, then… So what exactly happened that night? You never told me any details.
Gabriel hesitated for a minute, but Pamella has always been a good friend of his and he knew he could trust her with this. Meanwhile the two crossed the crossroad and were heading toward the park.
- We entered the clearing and walked to the middle. There were remnants of an old crossroad; paved stones, shaped as a crucifix, each way leading nowhere, coming from nowhere, erased by time, consumed by frigid soil.
- Ok…
- Greg said it was the place where they burned Lucil Dowton. Only then I realized how silent it was all around.
Dion took his backpack off and shook a bunch of stuff out of it. Among them there was a book bound in black. He took it along with a piece of chalk. Then he put the lantern in the middle of the crossroad and began looking something out in the sky constantly checking his observations with the book.
Apparently Greg went a bit bored out by Dion’s preparations so he asked me about what happened to the priest from Lucile’s story.
- By the way, what DID happened to him after all? - inquired Pam.
- He tried to stop the procession but people pommeled him near dead. Despite all the rumors and Lucile’s father’s attempts to blackmail him, a lot of villagers still believed that killing a holy man was a bad omen, so they declared that he was merely influenced by the witch, and after her execution he will be released from the demonic gripp.
- How generous of them.
- Yeah, they even insisted on him returning to his services at the church after the event.
- And the girl’s father?
- Seamingly he wasn’t present at the execution, but a couple days later he was found hanged at his barn by his neighbor.
- Huh… But how do you know all this?
- The priest described it all in his diary, which was discovered few decades ago during the church renovation. Later the church made it public and printed the diary in small circulation. I came across ф copy at uni’s library when preparing an essay.
- Ok… So what happened next to you?
- Apparently, Dion wasn’t all that happy with “MY” version of the story. He said that the priest could just write the lies about it, but, it looks like, upon reading the objection in my eyes he added that there’s no need to argue about it since we’re going to find out the “truth” soon enough anyway. When I asked him what it meant, Greg intervened and told me that we came to that place to summon the spirit of Lucil Dowton, and Dion knows how to do it.
- At that moment it felt like the dead silence around us had somehow become even deeper. The whole clearing became surrounded by low-creeping fog. The round disc of the moon, previously pale as death itself, gained a pinkish tint, almost as it was blushing in anticipation of the demonic ritual that was about to take place.
- Ok…
- Dion took a piece of chalk and drew a large square around the center of the crossroad, one side, apparently, facing South. He drew three concentric circles within it and “sealed” it’s corners with pentagrams. When he was busy filling the circles with some scriptures I came closer to his backpack that was laying on the ground to take a closer look. Few black candles rolled out from it, some herbs and a brass bowl. But something else caught my eye. I poked the flap of the bag with my food and underneath there was a knife. But not some fancy ritual dagger or something you would expect on this occasion, no - it was a regular kitchen knife; seemingly, pretty old, pitted with rust and the blade all thinned-out from countless reshapenings. Chills ran down my spine. I saw Dion got up from his drawing and before he turned around I stepped away.
Once again I decided to convince Greg to drop this shit and just get the hell out of there. But the moment I turned to face him I was astonished by the change that occurred to the surroundings.The clearing was now enveloped in a wall of thick mist, and the moon turned crimson-red… as if Satan himself knocked a chalice of blood over...
- I got it.
- Ok... Greg looked as if he was hypnotized. It scared me a lot but for whatever reason I was reluctant to act. Then I smelled something - a smoke, and when I turned to Dion I saw him standing in the middle of the inner circle, dimly illuminated from underneath, where the bowl with smoldering herbs stood at his feet.
- Interesting…
- I don’t remember much about what happened after that. Only some fragments… images.
- The herbs… Maybe those were some drugs, hallucinogenic or something.
- Maybe, but I afraid something else was involved as well.
- Like what de…
- Watch out!
- Wha?...
Distracted by the conversation Pamela didn’t notice a large tall man heading right at her with little to no intentions to change his course. With a swift move she barely avoided the collision.
- You asshole!
The sudden pedestrian didn’t react.
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