I know what a freaking altar is.
How in the hell . . . I was just out on the street! How’d I get here?
Where am I?
That hiss sounds again and I see something slithering in the shade. My heart beats faster and faster, and my brain starts to suspect what it might be. Another thing I’ve learned from this city? I know a snake when I hear one.
But it isn’t just one. It’s silent partners slither into view, dark shapes gliding through the dark.
“Ah—ah Christ, what the—”
Chanting. Drums. The hisses increasing in volume behind it. Candle lights dancing in the air, a dizzying, confusing display.
I choke on my fear as my mind grapples with the question of whether this is real or not. It can’t be, right? It has to be the drugs. The stress. I’ve never hallucinated while high or drunk before, yet what else can it be?
“Desperation, my love.”
I jerk at that voice, head flying around to my left.
Out of the shadows of blackness and slithering snakes, that lady from outside glides toward me, her decrepit skirt sliding along the stone floor. My vision is crystal clear in here, unlike on the street, and her entire dismaying visage only adds to the sense of terror building in my chest.
Her white hair looks like it hasn’t seen a comb in centuries, knotted and covered in what appears to be dirt. Likewise, eons of time seem to be etched across her ancient face, a walking mummy if I’ve ever seen one.
Remembering her toothless smile sends me skittering away from her, but there’s nowhere to go. I’m already with my back against the wall.
Black, soulless eyes crinkle, as if she’s about to smile again, and I want to close my eyes to avoid seeing the void of her mouth.
I can’t, though. No matter how much I try, it’s like my lids are glued open against my will.
For some reason—mercy, perhaps—her smile remains small. Gloating. The rows of beads around her neck are in pristine shape, a contrast to the rest of her.
She’s like a corpse come to life.
“Wh-who are you?” I stutter, as she heads to the altar.
As she passes me, her head turns, one black eye focused on me over her shoulder, and what has to be another illusion hits me; it’s only a second of time, but I swear I see the face of a young woman instead of an old crone. “Your salvation.”
“What?” My exclamation is met by another hiss from that snake, and I press my back to the wall, frozen in fear.
“Yes. You’ve been calling for me your whole life.” She stops before the altar, waving her hands in circles in the air above it, and all the candles flare brighter. Objects on its surface begin to move, switching positions, and some even appear to morph into different things all together.
“I-I—please, I don’t—” I’m shaking too hard to form a coherent sentence, teeth clashing against each other. Torn between eyeing her and the snakes that seem to be encroaching nearer, I choke on both my fear and confusion.
Either I was given the best, laced pills of my life . . . or this is real.
Very real.
I want to believe I’m going crazy more than anything, yet my intoxicated gut knows that’s not the—
She’s in front of me.
Moved fast enough that I didn’t see her, but I sure as hell make out the trails of color along her form, as if she zipped across the space at lightspeed.
“Fuck!” My head bangs into the wall as I twitch.
Her head tilts back with her laugh, displaying that lack of teeth again. “So afraid, like you know how this ends already.” Moving slowly, with a grace that belies her apparent age, she kneels to my level. A wrinkled, abnormally thin hand rises, followed by its twin, and a circle spirals to life between them.
Gleaming, reflective surface, transparent and flawless.
A crystal ball.
“You’ve been waiting for this moment since that night you first realized how lost she was. How lost you both were. Staring at the cracked red paint of that room, little tummy aching for the food she was too high to provide you with. Four-years-old and so smart. Smart enough to ask yourself: ‘How could she give me life and not help me sustain it?’”
I . . . but how . . .
I’m cracked wide open from the memory; one she should have no way of being privy to. The logical desire to ask how she knows this is overridden by that crystal ball—the scenes coming to life within it.
My entire pathetic, miserable life on replay.
“You can be saved from this,” the priestess—or whatever otherworldly thing she is—intones, those bottomless eyes sparkling like the crystal ball. “Here. Tonight.”
I believe her. Don’t know why—oh, who am I kidding? She’s power, mysticism. The snakes, a legion of them now, sway behind her. The candle lights dance to the same chanting beat.
She smiles that toothless grin again.
I feel no horror upon re-witnessing it. The entirety of my dread is reserved for the scenes I can now see in the depths of that crystal ball.
The gutter-trash highlight reel of my pointless existence. Every wrong moment, each scrap of humiliation and despair. The interminable instances that left me questioning the idea of God and ultimately robbed me of my faith.
I’m lulled by it, as much as I’m wrecked by it, and that rhythmic chanting surrounding us compounds the effect.
That victorious expression returns to her lined face, as if she knows she’s got me.
And she does. I’m trapped in a sick thrall.
“I can make it all go away.” Her hand waves above the ball and the images shift, transforming into something akin to glory.
My glory.
“Look at it. The end of your misery.”
She’s right. It is. It’s me at my best, a “best” I would’ve never been crazy enough to imagine was possible. Me in shining triumph, surrounded by success, money, accolades . . . security. Safety. The assurance that the poverty-stricken life I was cursed to is finally over and done with.
My heart cracks wide open again, this time with a yearning so acute that it makes my soul hurt.
“It’s yours. That amazing life you pray for . . .” She holds the crystal ball closer, cupped lovingly between her hands. “It’s already yours.”
I scoff at such a ridiculous claim. “Yeah right.” Jerking my chin down, I motion the length of my chest in my ratty t-shirt, which is covered by grime and blood. “Look at me. Does this look amazing to you?” As amazing as the illusions she’s showing me in that ball.
Illusions that can never be, no matter how much I’d sell my very soul to have them.
A life where I’m somebody, where people care about me and appreciate me.
Most importantly . . . the vision shifts into the form of a woman; one I’ve never seen before.
The sight of her pierces me through the gut.
Obliterates everything that makes me a man, leaving behind a being of pure impulse.
An entity of destructive hunger.
Her golden skin is flushed with anger, her light blue eyes framed with thick lashes, and lights reflect off her glossy brown hair.
Not lights—flames.
She’s fucking beautiful, in a way far removed from the magazines. An exotic beauty created to destroy the minds of men.
And the fact that she’s in that image within the crystal ball means . . . what? That I can have her?