Читать книгу Love, or the Witches of Windward Circle - Carlos Allende - Страница 9
Оглавление4
In which we are invited to a ball inside of a cemetery
As each of her two elder daughters turned nine, the mother continued her explanation, she took them to their first Sabbath, where they vowed to love and honor Satan and all things foul in a ceremony equivalent to the one nuns have when they commit to love the Lord and his church. Instead of wearing a bride’s white dress, a decked veil, and pearls and flowers woven in their hair, however, the two girls wore black gowns and bones of dead animals in their hair; and to complete the ceremony, instead of kissing a crucifix, as a bride of Christ would have done, they bent and kissed the Devil’s second mouth, the one in his posterior. The Devil found them agreeable and pretty, and after eating their offerings—a chubby unchristened baby each—he gave them a swarm of flies and a black toad as their familiars, to serve them in every matter in return for blood.
One year later, around the time the youngest turned six, the witch reckoned that the little girl was old enough to be introduced to the pleasures of infernal partying and began preparing her for the occasion of her first Sabbath. They walked to Third Street in Santa Monica and the woman bought for her a black dress and a pair of shoes at a pawn shop for twenty cents.
“It was a complete waste of money,” the woman interrupted her own story with a growl.
Getting new clothes made the little girl shiver with excitement. To her innocent eyes, the raggedy dress looked like an elegant gown, even if it was half-eaten by moths and had a few holes through which you could insert your fingers. She liked her new shoes especially. They happened to be her very first. Unlike her sisters, who had secrets to hide, she ran barefoot. If you have no secrets to hide, you can be spared a pair, was the mother’s reasoning behind it. Glass, nails, or hot pavement were not a real concern because, with the years, she had developed thick soles full of calluses. The new shoes were one size too big, but the mother wouldn’t pay for any better. It didn’t matter. The little girl squirmed with happiness the moment she tried them on. A little uncomfortable at first, she learned to walk in them gracefully, and before you could say la fée carabosse recoule, recule, recoula! she was running in them, jumping in them, clapping and dancing. Had she known what a princess ballerina looked like, she would have felt like one, but never had she seen any real dancer.
The mother had, however, and thought that her daughter looked ridiculous. When the little girl approached to say thanks with a curtsy, as she saw her sisters had done earlier for their presents, a silk ribbon for Victoria and a Japanese paper doll for Rosa, the witch gave her a box in the side of the head that caused her to stumble.
“You look like a monkey!” Victoria scowled at her when, back at home, the girl tried on her new garments.
“You look like a monkey’s butthole covered in vomit!” added Rosa.
It was an unfair comparison, to be honest, since neither one had ever seen a real monkey.
“SHUT UP!” the drunkard yelled from the bed, where he had been sleeping. “Shut up or I’ll give you good reason to cry!”
At night, while their parents slept, the two sisters bragged to the little girl about the countless delights of being the Devil’s servants. The two of them slept on a cot at the foot of their parents’ bed; the little girl slept on the floor over some damp rags by the hearth. From above, the sisters commented on how pleasant was the smell of sulfur that emanated from the demons, on how much fun it was to dance naked around the bonfire, how tasty were the bat-wings soup and the cake of lizards, how much wine and liquor they had drunk, and how much candy they ate during the Sabbath. All of this in a quiet voice, for they feared awakening their parents. They celebrated especially the qualities of the Devil: how brave, strong and beautiful he was; how powerful he looked as he munched unchristened babies in his jaws; how tall and dark he was, how thin was his waist, and how firm, round and hairy were his buttocks.
“It pains so much the way we love him!”
They expounded upon how much more charming and alluring the Devil was compared to the pale and bony Jesus that hung inside the Church they attended on Sundays, that looked down at you and knew all of what you did at all times.
“Even when you fart.”
“The Little Master closes an eye to all your misdemeanors.”
“He respects your privacy.”
“He doesn’t care about your noises.”
“He likes them.”
“He likes you the way you are. You don’t have to be nice—”
“—or to do nice things.”
“He likes it when you lie—”
“—and when you steal—”
“—or when you hurt people.”
“And he is so handsome!”
Victoria insisted that the Devil looked the best as a black dog; her sister, that as a buck he looked the most attractive. Both rejoiced in the memories of how low hung his balls and how thick was his penis. What a pleasure it was to celebrate his rise, drinking wine and cursing in all directions, dancing back to back with all the other witches, swearing by all high and mighty to cause grief and unhappiness to others!
The little girl listened in total fascination. The stories frightened her, but she wished with all her heart to succeed at the Sabbath.
“I made out with Prince Baal,” said Victoria, referring to the fiend as if he were a boy she’d met at one of her catechism classes.
“I kissed his buttocks,” said Rosa.
“I kissed the palms of his hands, his horns, and hooves,” argued again Victoria.
“Little thing,” Rosa played with her curls. “Unless you kiss his seat, no honor is transferred upon thee.”
On Friday morning, the three girls went to church. They were to take communion, bring the hosts back home, and mix them with baby blood and excrement to make biscuits for the Devil.
“It will be yummy!” Victoria laughed, spilling out of her mouth parts of her breakfast.
The little girl planned to obey her mother’s instructions to a T. Of course she did; one does not plan to fail, even if one is prone to failure. She thought all this as she played hoppity-hop with her new shoes, jumping over the ponds and running through the marshes on their way to the parish: She would confess her sins first. She would say that she had been mean, and that she had called her sisters bad names, as recommended by her mother; that she had fought with them, and that she’d been vain and disobedient. She wouldn’t tell the priest that she and her sisters had peed on her neighbors’ roof to make their son die of measles, however.
“Mami will be mad if we don’t keep that a secret,” Victoria reminded her with a threatening fist.
She would take communion, without salivating too much, lest she ruin the wafer, and she would hide it. Back at home, she would pee on it and mix it with chicken droppings and blood from the little brown pup, who still counted as a baby. She wouldn’t hurt him, just pull a few ticks off his pelt and squeeze them in the mix.
When she offered her biscuits to the Devil he would bob his head down and say, “You did fine. Yours is the best present.” That would make her sisters turn green with envy, she reckoned. And then all of the witches and warlocks, she fantasized, and all of the demons and goblins and corpses brought to life that night at the ball would try her biscuits too, and they too would find them yummy and nutritious. Everyone would compliment her shoes and her dress and the mice tangled in her hair as well, and they would shake hands with her, instead of giving her a box on her temple. That alone would make her happy. Not being abused just once would make her heart swell. She would thank them all with a curtsy, and they would like her even more, the poor fool dreamed, because, she had noticed, people liked well-mannered people. Maybe they would think she wasn’t that ugly after all. Oh, yes, maybe they would find her pretty and everyone would love her. The day of her wedding to the Little Master would be the finest day of her life!
“What are you grinning about?” Rosa tried to hit the little girl in her shins with a long twig of grass, but the little girl saw it coming and ran faster.
Victoria hid the Holy Bread in the hem of her skirt, lowered herself onto the kneeler and prayed: “Please, please Jesus, please, please, Mary: let the Prince of the Damned like me the best tonight. I promise I’ll be a good girl and go to mass every Sunday, for all the rest of my life.”
“Please, please, Saint Joseph,” prayed Rosa, “let the Devil take me instead as his favorite.”
“Please, please, Saint Judas,” insisted Victoria, “let the Devil find me more beautiful than my sister, so my Mami will like me better.”
“Please, please, Saint Cecilia,” prayed Rosa, wrinkling her nose at Victoria, “let the plague and sickness fall upon Victoria. Make the Little Master take my Papi, so he stops beating Mami. Please, please, God, make the Devil kill my two sisters, and all my enemies, too. Amen!”
Too nervous about her task, the little girl didn’t pray.
She should have, though, for the one thing she ought to have done right, she did wrong. Dumb-fuck little ugly girls never do anything right, she learned that night, and would remember it forever: she had been so hungry during mass that she could feel her gut stuck to her backbone, and the priest took so long in telling people to feel guilty and embarrassed for what made them feel right, so long in telling them not to drink and not to dance, so long in telling them not to do this and not to do that, and so hungry she was, so to the point of starvation, the long tapeworm inside her little tiny gut begging for a grain of rice soaked in soup seasoned with a grain of pepper, that she had a teensy bite of the wafer—just a very little one, an eensy-weensy tiny bite, enough to learn what the body of Christ tastes like, and then…she swallowed.
One bite alone couldn’t expose her to all the delights of paradise, but it seemed enough for her. She was used to being hungry. The rest of the wafer went to the safety of her knickers. And that would be it, for there was still enough of the bread to make the cakes of chicken caca, but a crumb remained between her teeth, and while it wouldn’t bother her too much—she never flossed, nor had she ever heard of flossing—it would be enough to prove to her that you must do as your parents say, exactly and to the T, because, no matter how evil your mother may be, no matter how perverted and corrupted she is, mothers know best, and hers, a consummated witch, murderer of thousands, knew better than anybody.
That night, the mother stuffed a potato sack with old rags to make a life-sized doll and put it under the blanket on her side of the bed, which is a way witches have to deceive their husbands of their presence. She put Rosa’s toad next to the doll, so it could say “Move!” if the man got too close and started groping the doll in his sleep. Sometimes a full-size demon stayed instead, but that night was special, that night was the eve of October 24, year of the Lord of 1903, thirty-two years after the Chinese massacre on Nigger Alley, that put so much joy in the heart of the Devil, and no spirit with a rank higher than Earl of Hell would want to miss the party.
“I think I should go,” the amphibian expressed his disappointment on being left behind. “I am a Captain, with a full legion of thirty-two demons under my orders.”
But it was his duty to stay vigilant, the mother reminded him, and guard the drunkard’s sleep next to his pillow.
“Be a good toad,” said Victoria, kissing the pout-lipped demon, “and spare my dad of wily spiders.”
Two minutes before midnight, the mother’s familiar appeared outside, again in the shape of a black goat. On his back, he carried a basket with two beautiful five-year-olds inside, a little boy and his twin sister; two little blond and blue-eyed German cherubs, who had been naughty.
“Mommy—,” the children cried, slurping their snot.
“My, oh my!” The mother celebrated the demon for his catch. “These children look so fat and lovely!”
She chained the basket to the goat’s neck, then she and the three girls mounted the beast. Whoosh, it lifted up, with one jump, and up they went, flying through the sky, up above the clouds, high and high above, up to the mother’s three-thousand-and-ninety-eighth—and her youngest’s first—Sabbath.
Victoria rode by the goat’s neck, holding onto its horns with both hands, pushing her head forward to feel the cold air pull her cheeks towards her ears. The witch sat just behind, pressing her chin against her daughter’s shoulder, clenching the goat’s long hair. Just behind, rode Rosa, grabbing her mother by the waist. The little girl rode on the goat’s rear end. Afraid to offend her sister with her touch, she held instead to the beast’s hairy rump as tight as she could. Every time the goat went up or down, the two elder sisters celebrated with a hurray, and the mother laughed. Even the two children inside the woven basket celebrated the thrills of the ride—then returned to crying. The little girl prayed to the twelve apostles not to fall.
As they flew, the mother gave her daughters a few recommendations about the party: “You must insult all witches,” she said, raising her voice over the wind, “including the old.”
“Yes, Mother,” responded the two elder, sounding miffed, like a child when reminded how to behave in front of others.
“You must be ungrateful if anyone hands you food or candy. Don’t forget to spit on the Cross, and interrupt people when they speak. Clean your noses on the tablecloth and dance around the throne, cursing and swearing by all that is saintly or divine.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“For the Sabbath is the time to do all anti-Christian things, the worse the better. I tell you now; I’ve been to many. I know well, and I know better—Did you write down your lists of evil deeds?”
“Yes we did!” the two elders responded with enthusiasm.
The little one gave a firm nod.
“I have such a long list of awful things I did this week…” began Victoria.
“My list is longer,” interrupted Rosa.
“Is it?” the first asked. “I poisoned the cow of a poor man and I killed a granny’s only cat.”
“I made a woman lose her baby.”
“I made a man lose his mind.”
“I made a man kill his wife.”
“I ruined the wedding of a rich man.”
“I made a rich man murder his brother and then marry his bride.”
“I made the bride of a rich man kill his sons, then eat them, then spit them out, then bring them back to life and marry the three of them and have their babies.”
“I did just the same the previous month.”
“I did it twice.”
“I did it blindfolded.”
“I did it in my sleep.”
The mother laughed at their boasting. Her two daughters could not have done so much badness in just one week.
“Lying is an evil feat,” she said. “And we the wicked love to do mischief.”
The little sister didn’t laugh. Innocent as she was, she listened in awe to all that her sisters had to say, and believed every single word that came out of their mouths as a man of faith believes the words from the Bible.
As they approached the site where the Sabbath would take place, they saw other witches flying along. Here, one in her birthday suit mounted a horse flying backwards; over there, two more shared a dog’s back while a third hung from the tail. Yonder, one drifted alone, without mount, dragged by the winds. Half a dozen others, reduced in size to fit their mounts, flew on top of dragonflies fitted with reins and saddles, as if they were tiny horses taking them to mass.
Some of the women mounted wooden objects: a broom, a chair, or a barrel; most rode on the backs of animals, goats and dogs being the preferred conveyance. Some were empty handed but most carried a basket containing children, like our witches, as an offering to their infernal master.
The goat landed at the base of a hill inside a walled cemetery. As they arrived some distant church bells chimed midnight.
There were already six hundred sixty-six witches inside the cemetery and about seven times that number of aerial spirits flying around them. Every nationality was represented, from the Spanish meigas to the Turkish cadilar, every shape, every size, and every color, all fellow enchantresses from all corners of the planet.
Those on the ground greeted the recently arrived with lots of clapping. “Welcome, my friends!” they said, opening their arms, as if the recently arrived were royal envoys greeting ambassadors from another kingdom.
The little girl felt a sudden chill as one of these women approached them. She looked like one of those ladies one could see strolling down the Linda Vista Park in Santa Monica on Sundays, wearing a shawl and a dress with a lace collar.
“Rosa, Victoria!” she said, helping the girls get off the goat. “You look so beautiful!”
The two girls bobbed their heads courteously.
“You two are the most adorable girls I’ve ever seen. You must be so proud,” the wench said to the mother. She boasted an ear-to-ear smile, but her eyes seemed full of anguish. “Let me see your dresses,” she continued. “Turn around… The little ribbons…! Is that a mouse?” She espied a little rodent climbing down Rosa’s hair into her dress.
The girl replied with a giggle.
“How cheeky of you! How very cheeky of you, you enchanting little doll,” the woman pinched Rosa’s nose.
The mother thanked her with a smile.
“Now, look at this little boy,” the wench approached the twins who had just jumped out of the basket. “And his sister. How plump and beautiful! How big are their eyes! How red their lips! What did you do, my darlings? You probably didn’t eat your soup, did you?”
The twins nodded with a sob.
“And did you say your prayers? You didn’t! Oh, don’t you cry, you poor babies. One should do as told. That’s a lesson to learn—a little too late, in your case. And who is this?” The wench noticed the little girl getting off the goat. “Is this your youngest?” She asked the mother.
“Yes, ma’am,” responded the mother, expecting another compliment.
But the greeting witch had lost her smile. “God’s hooks,” she said, covering her mouth and looking at them with pity. “She’s the ugliest child I’ve ever seen. By far! Who was the father, a boar?”
The little girl hastened to bob a curtsy, remembering her mother’s words about how witches are expected to be rude to one other, but her mother pulled her by her arm and turned a disdainful eye back to the hag. The two elder daughters started laughing, but their mother threatened them with a tight fist and they stopped.
“You should at least have dressed her properly,” the wench said, adjusting the little girl’s dress. “And washed her face,” she added, pulling a handkerchief from one of her sleeves to clean the little girl’s face with saliva. She gave up after a few passes after seeing how dirty the cloth got. Putting it back into her sleeve, she gave another look of disapproval to the mother, and then moved on to talk to other witches.
Freed from its load, the goat left to join other familiars. Rosa and Victoria disappeared too, to join a pig chase occurring nearby.
The little girl looked at her mother’s sullen face. How come she was upset, when an insult was the expected thing to hear at the Sabbath? She didn’t understand the logic of the Devil, and the mother didn’t care to explain. The woman took her youngest daughter by the hand, who in turn took the hand of the little boy, who in turn grabbed the hand of his sister, who ended up carrying the basket with the fecal biscuits, and the four set off walking uphill through the crowd, the two children still crying for their mother.
Everything looked strange and confusing to our little friend that night. Earlier, Rosa and Victoria had explained to her what she should expect from the Sabbath. They told her there would be a procession, a banquet and a Black Mass. They said there would be a dance in which all of the witches and the warlocks would sway back-to-back with each other, and then, just before dawn, they would all lose their clothes and have an orgy. The program was correct, that was precisely what was supposed to happen. What they didn’t say was that one event wouldn’t succeed the other, but everything would happen at once, the women would be feasting, fencing, fisting, fighting, flaunting, dancing, and parading long before any of such businesses had either properly started or concluded—all at the same time, for it was more important to just do than to do well, another common, if incorrect, presumption among witches.
A clever eye would note that this party was the most perfect imperfect illustration of a reversal of celestial harmony. It made no sense, but if it did, it wouldn’t be the like of the Devil.
Here, a group of witches marched in a circle, each of them holding a large wooden stake with a hog’s head on top and a cloud of flies flying behind them. Blood ran down the poles covering their arms and faces. There, a pair of witches sang a cantata, squatted under a long table set across four tombs, on top of which another woman swore by all the names of the Emperor of Hell, which are many, that if they didn’t move she would cut off their breasts and eat them. Over there, a group of witches walked backwards, some on two legs, some on all fours, with their chins pointing up and their pubes indecently exposed. Yonder, a few were engaged in seducing a sexton. Many were fighting and a few were snoring, already drunk. Hundreds of spirits floated above them, playing with their hair and clothing, disappearing and reappearing at will. Some of the women sang alleluias to the spirits, as if they were symbols of rejoicing. The demons responded by spreading out their wings as if they were angels in ecstatic merriment. You could feel the breeze they caused when their wings flapped; it was a sudden chill, as if you had left a window open in the middle of winter.
The twins trudged with mouths and eyes wide open, commenting with a squeal or with a scream at everything they saw, or with a “Do it again!” if a goblin did a cabriole or a pirouette they fancied.
“Disgusting,” the mother said, every so often.
The little girl walked openmouthed too, but for all the awe in her gaze, and all of the terror in her heart, she remained silent.
The witches had profaned the tombs and, temporarily revived, a few corpses wandered around, wailing and grieving. Others remained inside their graves, barely showing their heads above the ground, pulling on the few hairs they had, completely baffled, wondering what awakened them before Judgment Day, and what was the spectacle they were being forced to watch.
One of the flying demons yanked an arm from one of these corpses and started using it as a club to pound on a woman.
“Harder!” the witches yelled as the woman received a hit on the buttocks.
A second fiend snatched a head and threw it against the same woman being beaten. Then a third grabbed the poor wench by her feet, raised her up in the air and let her fall inside a pond of water.
The little girl got scared and started crying.
“Do not cry,” the mother said coldly. “That only happens to the weak, to the ones that didn’t finalize their list of evil tasks on time, to those that had relinquished their allegiance to our master. These are our friends—” She pointed to the spirits flying around them, monsters with the faces of goats and lions, bodies full of scales, and bat-like wings ending in elongated spikes like the fangs of a tiger, “—they like us for what we are, not for what we’re supposed to be. As long as you remain true to your own self, they’ll never hurt you.”
At the top of the hill, at the very center of the cemetery, lay a small charnel house inside a fenced section surrounded by a circle of willows. It was from up there that the Lord of all Mayhem and Despair, the Little Master, presided over the chore of Sabbath. To there, as well, was where the witch and the three children headed.
Unearthed corpses dangled from every major branch of the trees surrounding the crypt, eerily lit from the inside, like flashing lanterns hanging from a Christmas tree. These were no ornaments, the witch explained to her daughter, but tools of which the demons availed to contain their essence in order to have commerce with the witches. As our group approached, the corpses started shaking their arms and legs, singing and whistling, trying to call their attention. One of them made eye contact with the little girl and, mistaking the horror-struck expression on her face for fascination, started gnawing the rope from which he hung to meet her.
“Not yet,” said the witch, pulling her daughter and the two children forward. “We’ll get to play later.”
As the group passed by, the bodies collapsed, insentient.
Behind the trees and before the mausoleum awaited a pack of black hounds fastened by His Malign Majesty’s most loyal officer, Prince Beelzebub, Chief Lieutenant of Hell and Lord of All Things That Fly, in whose honor the parade downhill was being held.
The hounds barked ferociously at the children, threatening to get free of their leashes. The demon held them tighter. The twins let go of the little girl’s hand and tried to run away, screaming, but they were intercepted by a group of vampires that locked them inside a crate, which they then piled atop other crates containing more children.
The witch picked up the basket full of excrement biscuits that the little German girl had dropped, gave it to her daughter, and pushed her closer to Prince Beelzebub. The little girl resisted, hiding behind her mother’s dress, but the witch grabbed her by the hair and whispered something into her ear that made the little girl prefer to face the demon.
She had reason to be scared. Prince Beelzebub was over ten feet tall. He had the legs and the body of a buck, four human arms covered in fur, the wings of a vulture, and just one head, but three faces. The one to the right was the yellow face of a lion; the one to the left, the rosy face of a young maiden; the one in the middle, the face of a boar, with big fangs coming out of its mouth. All three faces had long beards braided together. The lion and the young woman’s faces chewed little children offered by the vampires standing at both sides; the boar’s lips moved as if mumbling a prayer. He was dressed in a white cassock with a golden hem, pontifical gloves and a purple biretta, and smelled so strongly of blood that every other smell in the air seemed to vanish.
The little girl offered Prince Beelzebub one of the excrement biscuits and then retreated slowly, bowing down and without turning her back to the demon.
Prince Beelzebub ate the biscuit. Then, one of the vampires fed him another child.
The little girl watched the demon devour the poor rascal.
“He refused to bathe,” another vampire hissed into her ear.
“They were disobedient to their mothers,” Beelzebub’s maiden face added, pointing with her chin towards the wooden crates full of children.
The dogs stopped barking. The little girl approached the crates. The eyes of the maiden face followed her steps, but otherwise, the demon seemed indifferent to her presence.
“I didn’t brush my teeth,” said one child, with tears in his eyes.
“I stole candy,” said another one.
“We didn’t finish our soup,” cried our twins.
The little girl sniffed.
A boy inside one of the lower crates pulled the hem of the little girl’s black dress to call her attention.
The little girl squatted down.
“Are you coming to meet the Devil?” the boy asked.
The little girl nodded. She took one of the biscuits from her basket and offered it to the child. The boy wrinkled his nose, shaking his head politely. The little girl put the cake back inside her basket.
“With that nose?” asked a proud voice from atop the pile.
The little girl looked up to the one speaking. The voice came from a girl with red curls dressed in a gingham dress with furbelows and trimmings far too modish to let her play anywhere dirty.
“You are certainly not meeting the Prince of Darkness with that nose, are you?” the snooty girl continued. “It’s full of boogers.”
The little girl stuck her two index fingers inside her nose to clean it and then rubbed her fingers on her dress.
“Yuck!” said one of the boys.
“She’s disgusting!” said another.
“She’s filthy!” said the snooty girl atop.
“How gross!” said the snooty girl inside the crate. “How icky, yucky, repellent, and repulsive. You are such a mess. Cleaning your boogers on your new dress—if you can call that thing a new dress. Show me your hands.”
The little girl looked at her hands for a second; realizing how dirty they were, she then hid them behind her back, and shook her head from one side to the other.
“Her hands are filthy!” said one of the boys in the lower crates.
The little girl hid her hands under her dress.
“And your teeth?” asked again the snooty girl atop, with a deep sigh, realizing how pointless it was to expect clean hands in such a grimy individual. “Did you brush them?”
The little girl opened her mouth and showed her teeth in a gesture more typical of a rodent than of a little girl proud of her choppers.
“How incredibly filthy, dirty and disgusting. And you expect the Devil to find you to his liking?” the snooty girl continued. “He will think you’re disgusting—I, myself, think you’re terribly inappropriate and disgusting, and I must be right, for mommy always says that I am incredibly clever.”
The little girl slouched her head down. She felt like spitting on that snooty girl’s tidy dress. She was repulsive, yes, she very much knew it, but there are more courteous ways to say these things, it is not necessary to hurt people. No wonder the children inside the crates were the Devil’s supper, she reckoned. Those misbehaved rascals had never learned to say thank you, or please, or excuse me, much less to have a courteous conversation with a stranger. They deserved well to be eaten.
“I bet your skirt smells like tinkle.”
The little girl pulled her skirt up to her nose. It did smell a little.
“And those shoes. I would be so embarrassed if I had to wear them.”
The snooty girl had just finished saying that, when one of the vampires feeding Beelzebub wielded a hook to lower the crate that contained her. Another one seized the crate, opened it, snatched the snooty girl by her curls and offered her to the demon.
“Mommy!” sobbed the poor snooty girl, before the maiden’s face swallowed her completely.
“Are you here to meet the Devil?” asked again the little boy that had pulled the little girl’s skirt before.
The little girl nodded.
“They’re going to make you sign something,” the boy said, gesturing towards the demon.
The little girl followed the boy’s gaze back to Prince Beelzebub. The demon called her with a sign of his finger and reached inside his garment for a piece of parchment, which he then extended to the little girl.
Our little friend stared at the document but made no attempt to grab it.
The document was a pact of allegiance between her, the nameless little girl from the adobe house at the end of the only road in Rancho La Ballona, in Los Angeles County; the seven princes of Hell: Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Elimi, Astaroth, Belphegor and Leviathan; and at least sixty other demons, plus witnesses. The terms were the usual: her soul and the promise of a sacrifice of blood every year to her new masters in exchange for a series of banalities: honors, pleasures and riches. Very standard.
A small wingless fiend with the face of a cat, the body of a squirrel, and the limbs of a lizard, slipped from under the three-faced demon’s cassock holding a long pin. He took the biscuits from the little girl and gave them back to her mother. Then, he used the pin to prick the little girl in her right palm. He then extended the pin to the little girl and asked her to sign the document with her blood, “right at the bottom.”
The little girl took the pin, but still made no attempt to grab the document. Instead she kept staring at it.
“She can’t understand what it says,” said one of the caged children.
The little girl didn’t know how to read yet, and even if she did, she would have not been able to understand it. The document was inscribed in mirror writing and in Latin, using only consonants and no vowels.
“That’s all right, she don’t need to know what it says,” said the small wingless demon.
“She doesn’t know how to sign, either,” said a vampire.
“Then just an X, sweetie,” said the small wingless demon.
“Right here,” said Beelzebub, through the mouth of the lion, extending a long finger to the document to indicate where the little girl was supposed to sign
The little girl did as the demon told her.
“What is important is that it is your blood.”
“Now—” another demon, this one all black and gangly, like a match that’s been blown out, appeared from nowhere and grabbed the parchment, “—let us fill the date and place in here, and sign it here and here, and…that’s it. You do understand that your soul belongs to us now, don’t you?”
The little girl nodded.
The vampires stepped aside. Now there were almost two dozen demons surrounding her, each presenting the most diverse physiognomy: dogs and lizard heads, goose feet, vampire wings, serpent tails, wolf-like torsos and dragons.
“And that you are bound to us for all eternity?”
The little girl nodded again, unaware of what the words “bound” or “eternity” meant.
“Now, you have to kiss it,” laughed the boy that had asked before all those questions about seeing the Devil. “You have to kiss the Devil’s butt!”
That was the last step. She was supposed to give the Little Master the osculum infame, the kiss of shame.
The little girl pursed her lips and raised her neck trying to give a little peck to Beelzebub’s haunches, but the demon moved back with a frightened expression on his three faces.
“Not to me!” he said, covering himself with three arms and drawing a five point star in mid-air with the other.
The girl turned then to the small wingless demon that had pricked her hand to sign the contract, but the aberration rapidly hid under Beelzebub’s cassock. Before she attempted to kiss another demon, all of them moved aside to reveal what stood behind them. It was his Malign Majesty, the Devil himself, the Little Master, the Prince of the Damned, the Perverted and the Ruined, Emperor of Hell and King of All Things Rotten, an even more horrendous creature than any of the other four thousand six hundred sixty-two demons in the party, seated atop a wooden stool, thirteen feet above ground, presiding over the banquet.
He was a foot taller than Beelzebub. He had the body and the legs of a goat, the tail of a cat, enormous bat wings and the face of a Babylonian warrior, with dark, rough skin, bony cheeks, a black beard and eyelashes so long you could feel a soft warm breeze whenever he closed his eyelids. Thick curls of dark hair framed his forehead. On the top of his head, he had a set of antlers, like a deer, and he was totally naked. He too spent his time devouring naughty children, but he seemed to be sucking them, rather than chewing, as Beelzebub did. The lips closed around the little children heads as if he was about to kiss them; then, he slurped them in, like oysters.
His nakedness became the more apparent as he descended from the stool and turned his posterior to the girl. His nubby sack hung as low as one foot below his buttocks.
The small wingless demon came out of Beelzebub’s cassock and gently pushed the little girl towards Satan. Her lips remained pursed but her expression changed from one that intended to please to one of profound terror. The smell of blood and sulfur that permeated the air inside the cemetery was nothing compared to the horrific stench that came from the Devil’s posterior. The sight revolted her more than anything else she had seen that night; you could tell that the Little Master didn’t change his bedclothes often. The little girl tried to escape, but the small wingless demon kept pushing her face firmly towards the Devil’s second mouth.
“It ain’t but a kiss my dear,” the small demon insisted.
The little girl closed her eyes as a cluster of flies flapped over her face. When she opened them again, one inch away from the malign orifice, she could see tiny black roaches coming in and out of the hole, greeting each other, having conversations, welcoming her to an underground lair.
“One tiny kiss,” the small demon grunted, “then it’ll be over.”
“One kiss is all it takes,” the roaches caroled. “One sign of willing heart, one sign of duty…”
If she could sing, it would have been the time for the little girl to sing, too. What were her favorite things? Fishing for tadpoles and black necked stilts; water with sugar; milk with her tea; feeling the wet sand sink under her feet… She took one last breath and pressed her tongue between her teeth and then her lips to reach the Devil’s buttocks, unwittingly pushing the little piece of consecrated host trapped between her incisors to the rear end of the enemy of all things holy…WHAM! The Emperor of Hell kicked the little girl in her forehead. He knocked the stool down and rubbed his buttocks against the grass as if trying to put out an invisible fire. With the kick, the little girl, together with half a dozen demons and a few witches that were just behind her, flew up in the sky, like weightless rag-dolls thrown by a wretched child at her nanny. The demons landed graciously; most witches were courteously assisted by fellow enchantresses who ran to catch them, but our little girl fell on top of the pile of wooden crates with such a crash that she broke a few dozen, letting the children escape, which only added more fire to the demon’s rage. On top of all that, she became trapped inside one.
And there she remained, covered in her own blood and tears inside a wooden cage, for the rest of the Sabbath, for the rest of the week and the following two years, so embarrassed was her poor mother by her clumsiness and lack of grace before Satan, Emperor of Hell and King of All Things Rotten.
