Chapter Fifty-Seven

Natalie lay on the floor, bound but not gagged. She was naked except for a leather belt on her waist to both sides of which her wrists were chained. Her feet were tied together with black adhesive tape.

She tried to suppress the impulse to shiver but failed. The cement floor on which she lay was quite cold. She was in some sort of a basement.

It was vast, like a hangar or a warehouse, and illuminated by torches, of all things. Torches and candles. The torches hung from the walls and the thick red candles were scattered seemingly without pattern all over the floor. The closest candle was a yard from her head.

There were many men inside the basement with her. She counted them twice. Sixteen. Half of them were over fifty, half of them were around thirty or below. They were dressed in white robes and held wooden staffs.

These men in white had now bunched together about twenty yards away and were muttering. One of the younger ones walked over to her and crouched by her head. He was grinning in a very disturbing manner.

“Hello, bitch,” he said with a quivering voice. “We meet again.”

His face was flushed. His features were familiar. Natalie recognized him—he was that clown with the temp-freeze, who had tried to pick her up in the Faceoff bar. She had a good memory for faces.

As he sat crouching, Natalie saw perfectly well that he was naked under the robe and had a hard-on. No doubt, he wanted her to see it.

“Hello, shit,” she answered.

The young man laughed out loud and stood up, “You’re lucky I shouldn’t damage you before the ceremony. You’ve given us so much trouble, you and your stupid pals. You know,” he walked over and pressed his foot on Natalie’s face.

She didn’t react.

Disappointed, he applied a little more pressure, and then took the foot off. “You know,” he said again, “we shouldn’t really be doing this now. We should wait for the winter. But for you, bitch, we are making an exception.”

“Maybe you should all just kill yourself?” Natalie volunteered.

The man walked away and rejoined his robed buddies. They started chanting something.

Natalie strained to hear, but all she could make out was something like ‘Semu’, or ‘Ksemu’.

She wanted to cry, not so much out of fear, but rather out of frustration. Her Dad had warned her and yet she was caught so easily. A stupid girl. Stupid, stupid girl. She had actually believed that Eberstark actually knew what he was doing. Because it was easier to believe that.

Now she was tied up in the basement of some freaks playing at a cult.

She saw the men spread out a little. Without much warning, one of them swayed and groaned.

Another one also started swaying but the first one yelled so he stopped his attempts and gave the yeller precedence.

The man who first entered his trance yelled some more and then babbled gibberish. Perhaps he spoke in tongues. He picked up the folds of his robe and suddenly let out a jet of urine.

Immediately the other man fell to their knees and scrambled to get closer to the fountain. The gibbering man pissed a little on everyone’s face and this time he had fallen back on some sort of ritual routine. Natalie heard him repeat in a deep voice something like:

“Wash away the pretense

Wash away the fear

Wash away the human mask

Wash away the weakness

The sacred bond

The sacred men

The puny animal

The sacred bond”

So it went. Perhaps he was rapping, improvising at the moment or perhaps reciting some sacred text.

The fountain of urine faltered, sputtered, and dried up. The men turned their glistening, drenched faces to Natalie.

There was something in the way they looked at her.

Ecstatically and at the same time, very, very malevolently.

The young man left the group again and went to a shadowy corner and then came back with a big transparent plastic bag. Then everyone shuffled solemnly over to Natalie and surrounded her in a circle.

“Your turn to die,” the young man said and waved the huge bag in his hand.

“How about a last cigarette?” Natalie said.

The man spat in her face. Then another one. Then another one. A part of the ritual, no doubt.

Then two men took hold of Natalie and picked her up, seemingly oblivious to her squirming and yelling. Another two were holding open the plastic bag. She was placed inside it and then they sealed it.

She looked at their hazy figures through the plastic walls of the bag.

I probably have a minute of air, she thought.

She tried to grab hold of the plastic bag with her teeth and make a rent. It didn’t work. She tried to rip it with her knees or elbows. It clung to her body. In fact it clung to her body more and more with every passing moment.

She had already almost used up the air inside. She squirmed and yelled with a weaker voice.

As the transparent bundle in the middle of the circle moved and mewed, the men poked it with the points of their staffs.

“Ksemu be born again. Ksemu be born again.”

Natalie felt the ceaseless impacts of the wooden staffs on her body, but they didn’t have her attention. The plastic was now clinging to her face and trying to get inside her mouth as she tried to take a breath of air that wasn’t there.

Something like distant thunder rumbled far away.