The board was extricated and positioned at the mute head-nodded directions of Eugenio the priest. He squinted at the sun to check its position and was satisfied.
Both boys knew what to do. The smaller took the awful thing, the thing none of them wanted to touch, from his plastic carrier bag and laid it carefully in the centre of this makeshift altar, while the other unsheathed the salvaged hunting knife.
Eugenio glanced at the doll, if anything so repugnant could be described as a doll. Its head was formed from the skull of rat, which had been stitched onto the leather body by means of a strap through the sockets, onto which two black orbs of cloudy stone had been glued to mimic eyes. Below it, tiny irregular tin teeth had been meticulously embedded into the yellowed bone, bestowing a manic grin upon the skull that was worse than the grimace of any corpse. It topped a grotesque torso, worn shiny leather that described a bulbous belly, gashed open and stitched back with the same loving craftsmanship as the head attachment. There was a cavity inside, open and ready to receive their sacrifice. It was ovoid like a recently-vacated womb, hardened and blackened from previous offerings, and the scabbed interior gave the slit womb an authenticity as though any baby’s exit had been a bloody and fatal one. But if the figure was meant to be female, then the horrifically-oversized leather penis that hung obscenely between its legs was a strange contradiction. The arms and legs were thin, reptile-like, too long for the squat body; but the worse aspect of their fragility were the long, serrated shards of metal, like broken claws, that completed each limb.
Eugenio began to feel nervous. If his aunt discovered that he had taken this figure from her few possessions she would make him suffer. Her rage was always contained and deadly, and he swallowed at the idea of what she might do. But she would not know. The ceremony would be over in minutes and if successful, would grant him the power that would make even her spite meaningless. His greatest fear was that it wouldn’t work. His knowledge was patchy, only a tiny portion of what his aunt and her clients discussed in their drugged ramblings. The rest he was going to invent. Somehow he felt sure that improvisation would suffice. The power of the ceremony after all, he had convinced himself, was in the intention, not the vocabulary.
Tiny as it was, it took all three of them to hold the rat down as Eugenio sliced through its filthy fur. It bared its teeth and piped its agony in a series of shrill screams that fascinated the boys as they worked. They heard rats fight all the time, but the piercing, high-pitched squeals that accompanied those scuffles, so high they operated on the very edge of human hearing, were quite unlike this. These protestations were guttural, having a power that defied the small lungs that expelled them, and secretly, Eugenio enjoyed the sound. He hated rats. They crawled on him at night, pissing on his blanket, boldly feeding on the scraps of food that were never cleaned from the hard-packed earthen floor of his family’s shack. Now here was fitting revenge.
Delicately Eugenio sliced out the beating heart and pincered the ludicrously tiny organ between thumb and forefinger, quickly transferring it to the leather slit, poking it into place with a bloody finger and wiping his hand unconsciously on the side of his shorts.
Three pairs of eyes darted between each other’s faces then closed in reverence.
Eugenio cleared his throat and began to speak with a curious mixture of the self-consciousness of a young boy, and the gravitas of a priest.
‘Fallen One – whether male or female, at any rate commander of heat and reproduction, being one who even with his spittle can work sorcery – where art thou?’
He opened his eyes and looked at the now-still heart in its leather nest, but the figure’s empty eye-sockets stared past him into space, oblivious to the gift in its belly. Eugenio closed his eyes again, this time screwing them tightly shut as though the effort would increase his potency.
‘I shall be seen by thee, and thou wilt know me. Would that thou were not hidden from this son of thine. Eat of this sacrificed heart, and also of the one still beating in the body of thy servant.’
He stopped. This was as much as he had memorized from his aunt. From now on the quality of the prayer would plummet. He would have to make it up. His saliva dried, both from the tension of what he desired to happen, and the terror of looking a fool in front of his companions.
‘I am … no one. You … thou … are eternity. We want you to come to us … and to give us power to … do many things.’
One of the boys opened his eyes and looked across at his leader. The change in tone had not gone unnoticed. Eyes still closed tightly, Eugenio continued undaunted.
‘Come to us now, as you have come to others before us. As you have come to the older ones before the Spanish came.’
He opened his eyes and saw that his entire congregation of two were now staring at him.
He stared back defiantly, then let his eyes drop to the useless, static doll, and the flat-furred husk of the rat, mottling the already-stained hardboard altar with its thick, poisonous blood.
A terrifying and powerful bellow broke the silence, and the three boys jumped in fright.
There was a brief moment of confusion, a moment in which they believed the Fallen One had answered them with that fearsome bestial noise, and then their inbred survival instincts processed the information and made them scatter like rats themselves. There was trouble approaching. But not of the supernatural kind. In seconds they had disappeared.
Their hurried departure knocked the altar at an angle, and the figure flopped over, slowly letting its tiny prize slither onto the wood and down into the trash.
The shout was repeated, but this time it was followed by a sharp laugh from another source. Scrabbling in the rubbish like a runner in sand dunes, a youth burst over the short horizon of plastic bottles, car tyres and old mattresses.
His face was contorted with fear, his mouth a black downward crescent of horror, as he stumbled across the unforgiving terrain like a drunk. Close behind came two men, running, but with less urgency, the broader of the two allowing a gun to dangle casually from his hand.
Anything could have tripped the runner; a piece of metal lying beneath the cartons and rotting vegetable matter; a rope tangled in the mesh of discarded chicken wire; a broken drawer from a chest protruding from the sea of trash like a dorsal fin. But it was actually the hardboard altar that snagged the pursued man’s foot, and sent him slapping into the undulating mush with a soft, revolting thud.
His assailants slowed then approached him with party smiles, while the fallen youth stayed face-down in the trash, shoulders heaving, hands closing on discarded newspapers and coffee grounds.
There was no dialogue, no conferring or taunting. The man with the gun in his hand swivelled his limp wrist and shot the youth through the back of the head.
It was a gun without the benefit of a silencer. The sharp crack reverberated shamelessly through the still afternoon. Both men looked around like lions after a kill. Not afraid, nor guilty, but bored, indifferent, blank.
No resident of this filthy colony would come to investigate. No policemen would gallop to a chase. In this landscape they were the law. They had the gun. The smaller of the two men bent down and fumbled in the dead youth’s jacket until he had retrieved the tightly-packed plastic envelope of white powder that had sentenced him to death.
Even then, there was no conversation, their companionship being the company of animals, dumb and cunning at the same time.
They turned to go, and as though some primitive electrical connection had been made in his brain to remind him of his last deed, the executioner turned back and spent one more bullet on the corpse.
This time the trajectory took it through the very top of the skull. He watched for a beat with satisfaction as the back of the head burst off and a dark black and grey mess oozed from the splintered head. Then he turned and followed his companion.
The leather doll lay on its side mere inches from the dead youth’s head, its impassive features regarding