Ritual

As a teenager, I had a lot of issues dealing with the circumstances in my life. We moved house to house every couple months, and over the course of a year we had lived in a dozen tiny houses and four different cities. I was the youngest of five and for some reason I had gifts none of my siblings had. However, my mother did and so I assumed the abilities passed down to me, although I couldn’t understand why me.

When she was a child in the 70s, it came to her attention that our ancestry had a long and wide array of witches, including her own grandmother and aunt and as a result, she had plenty stories to tell. To name a few, she had told me that throughout her younger years she could see a large black dog take the form of a man with a top hat and simple black cane. One day in particular the man had knocked on the door and handed her a single orange before turning into his canine form and running off. Her brother had even seen this and had a confused look as he couldn’t understand how, or what the significance of the orange was. After further research, it is said that oranges are a common ingredient in spells and rituals.

Another time she had told me that during an exorcism of her witch/aunt, she witnessed her face begin to melt while simultaneously my mother had felt dizzy and in her dizzy spell, she had seen three women surrounding a black candle holding a picture of the aunt being exorcised and while the flame passed over her, the rest of her skin began to melt. The exorcism was a success overall and the aunt lived to the age of 70. These stories always interested me, but one that struck me with fear was the most recent when I was 14.

I’m 22 now and I can still see it in my mind. During my angst, I had begun to meddle in the dark arts, using my own blood and spells I had made myself combining multiple spells and symbols. The homemade nature of the art made me doubt their effectiveness, until one night, at around 2 AM I had gone into the backyard from which my room had the only back door and I buried a box filled with items such as the bones of rats and seven crow feathers and the symbols I had made along with a few other key items I won’t mention to prevent any one else from doing what I did. After submerging the box in soil I had taken from a nearby cemetery, I cut my arm several times and let the blood drown out the soil.

Not long after I became very woozy from blood loss that I originally believed I had imagined it… Through the glass of the back door, I saw an outline I couldn’t quite explain, and as I stared at it trying to figure out what kind of shape I was seeing, it moved out of the doorway and my blood ran cold. I thought someone had caught me doing witchcraft so I went back inside and laid down on the floor of my step brothers room where I slept in front of his walk in closet. Nothing happened for a few weeks and I was under the impression that my latest ritual was another failure out of many.

Nevertheless, I began to have creeping nightmares about that night in the backyard. They started simply with me standing before the boxes burial ground and began increasing in strangeness, with the cemetery soil beginning to boil and bubble. They were slowly getting stranger and stranger until about a month and a half after my ritual, I dreamt of the outlined figure and for the first time, I could see it looking directly at me, its breathing was slow, but the figure was large enough for its breathing to look aggressive and ominous. Then, in the dream, my vision flew towards the doorway and I was staring at myself in the backyard. I then moved out of the doorway towards the hallway and into my mother’s room who slept with her girlfriend. I stood at the foot of their bed before a fear enveloped me and I tried to call out for both of them, to which my mother, sleepily glanced at me and gasped but couldn’t speak, while I grabbed her girlfriends ankles and pulled her halfway out of the bed. They both began to panic but they couldn’t see me.

The next morning my mother was in the kitchen and said to me that she had the oddest night terror and she couldn’t understand it so maybe I would. As she told me the same details of my dream, my skin began to feel cold. What she saw in her ‘nightmare’ was a large winged greenish black gargoyle with teeth so big that they hung over the bottom lip much like that of a sabretoothed tiger. Its snarl was enough to scare her but it wasn’t until she snapped out of the dream to find her girlfriend halfway off the bed screaming about something grabbing her, trying to pull her off. Later that month, we moved once again to a city 6 hours away, and ever since then, I’ve not used my abilities for the dark arts.

No one wants to step back into the house and they don’t want to sell it for the fear. It could still be a doorway that I had left opened.

To this day, no one knows what I had done. Until now.

  • Bonnie Manz

    I really enjoyed this story I was actually hoping it would be longer. Hopefully there will be a part 2? Great job!