Sacrifice to the Emerald God (28 page)

      At dusk the real preparations began. Margie was made to inhale the smoke from the tree bark again, this time for a very long time until she was barely conscious. She had never been given the two drugs at the same time and her mind was lost in a vortex of hallucinations and fear. The face of the cruel, stern Emerald God kept appearing to her. She wanted to scream, to run away, but her limbs were bound and her voice had been silenced.

      The women and men of the tribe were outside, busily adorning themselves with their spiritual regalia, bright plumes of feathers, special necklaces of bone and beads. They painted their bodies and faces in ritualistic designs. A large bower of flowers had been assembled in the center of the compound, ready for their white captive to be carried to her destiny. Torches had been lit and ceremonial liquor had been drunk. They were ready.

      After surrounding Margie’s neck with new, fresh garlands of flowers, the old women picked up her frame and carried her out of the hut. Margie was swooning with the effects of the drugs she had been given and her body was afire with sexual desire. She nonetheless pulled desperately, if weakly, at the thongs that bound her wrists and elbows behind her, struggled to free her ankles and knees from their confining, imprisoning ties. Immediately upon her emergence from the women’s hut, the crowd of people began a ritualistic chant and the drums, flutes and other percussion instruments commenced a rhythmic, steady beat. Margie was frantic with fear as she felt herself carried from the hut. She moaned and made feeble, confused attempts at speech. The thong around her eyes was removed and she saw the smiling, demonic looking people staring at her with undisguised glee. When she felt the frame that she was bound to lowered on the bower, its middle pole descending into an awaiting hole, the dull ‘thump’ that it made felt and sounded to her like a death knell. She sobbed and rued the day that she was born.

      Four of the men of the tribe took positions around the bower and it was quickly lifted into the air. With a loud call from the old shaman, the flower bedecked palanquin started in motion.

      The shaman led the parade of chanting, singing villagers. Large torches with billowing flames held by several of the other men lit the way. Margie cried and sobbed as the palanquin swayed and bumped while the men carried it along. The procession left the village and headed into the bush along a well worn pathway. The lights from the torches reflected eerily on the underside of the broad, green canopy overhead. The trunks of the trees seemed to shift and dance as the torches passed by them, their shadows lengthening and shortening. The voices of the people echoed through the forest.

      Margie just knelt and cried. She wondered how she could have been so foolish to believe that the tribe had accepted her as one of their own. Wouldn’t it have been better, she thought, if the bandit had slit her throat and tossed her lifeless body overboard on the first day of her captivity? Had she survived all of her suffering for this, cruel purpose? Her flesh grew cold as she tried to conceive of the way that they would sacrifice her. The Aztecs cut the hearts out of their victims. That at least would be fairly swift, although the vision of her dripping, still beating heart being held up in the air for the villagers to see made her tremble with fright. But some ancient cultures burned their sacrifices alive. She panicked at this thought and frantically and futilely strained at her bonds. She tried to plead for mercy through her stuffed mouth, but the only effect was to release more of the mind numbing drug into her system. Whatever was going to happen to her, she was powerless to stop it.

      It was a mile to the emerald mine. After a while, the people had stopped singing and only the drums signaled the advance of the procession. Through her befogged mind, it sounded to Margie like a funeral dirge. She tried to pray for deliverance, but her fevered body, lusting for sensual contact, needing orgasmic release, caused her mind to drift away from thoughts of salvation.

      After about twenty minutes, the slow moving parade reached the site of the emerald mine. Margie, who had drifted into an almost catatonic state, awoke with a start as she felt the palanquin lowered. Her eyes darted open and she saw a small hole carved into the hillside. It had been covered with brush to disguise it, but the men had already removed the large branches dense with bright green leaves that had served as its camouflage. The people surrounded the palanquin on which their sacrifice knelt and began to sing and chant once more. Margie distinctly heard the name of the god, Guarito, several times as they repeated ritually the verses of the primeval poem. The shaman came up to her, draped in a broad robe made from an animal’s hide covered with flowers and feathers and bedecked with large, bright shiny emeralds. He was wearing a ceremonial hat made of white bark that rose to a point over his head. The priestess was there too. She wore a colorful headdress that made her seem six feet tall. She sang and she clapped with the other people, a broad smile on her face, watching the captive that she had trained and prepared so diligently.

      When the men came onto the palanquin to remove her from it, Margie wailed and sobbed. But the juice from the bladder in her mouth immediately silenced her. She felt the frame moved forwards and then placed on the ground. The crowd fell into a hush. The priestess came up to the victim and waved a large, carved wooden stick over her and muttered some prayers. She then handed off her staff to one of her assistants and took from the other one a bright orange gourd with a long, narrow neck.

      When the priestess signaled the men, they removed the strap that kept Margie from disgorging the leaking, mind numbing bladder in her mouth. Fat fingers pried it from her, causing more of the liquid to escape as it was removed. Margie felt a surge of lust and confusion as the drug entered her bloodstream.

      The priestess advanced with the gourd and two of the men held Margie’s head still. She placed the end of the gourd between and well past Margie’s flaccid lips and began to pour a thick, brown liquid into her mouth. Margie came awake immediately and began to splutter and choke as the sweet tasting substance entered her throat. She swallowed in self defense as the liquid continued to creep slowly from the end of the gourd over her tongue and down her throat. “Maybe it’s poison,” she thought hopefully. “Maybe I’ll die right now.”

      But the substance was not poison. It was another of the priestess’s potions and it had an immediate effect on the young woman. The hallucinations that she experienced from the smoking bark and the lust that she experienced from the milky liquid that the priestess had used on her seemed mild in comparison to what she had just consumed. All of reality began immediately to distort itself. The trees around her and the garishly lit faces of the natives seemed to melt and reform into grotesque forms. The colors around her became brighter and shimmered. The shifting shadows caused by the flickering torches took on the forms of strange, contorting creatures gathered in celebration of her demise. Her body burned with fevered excitement. Her sex contracted as if in anticipation of a sexual climax and her breasts felt near to burst with the blood that filled them. The priestess leaned over the frightened, unhappy young woman and kissed her. She then signaled the men to carry the girl into the cave.

      Although the entrance to the mine was small, once inside, it was spacious enough for the men to proceed walking upright. Torches lit the way as the frame containing the body of the miserable young woman was carried down the passageway. Lower and lower into the earth they marched, the old shaman in their lead. There was no singing now, just the huffing and puffing of silent men as they did their duty to the god that made the village prosper.

      The passageway twisted and turned. At some points it was so narrow that her frame needed to be turned sideways to pass through. To Margie, her descent into hell seemed interminable, a prolonged prelude to her torture and death. Her limp, defenseless body bumped and swayed as she was carried along. She had given up all hope that she would be granted pardon from her sacrifice and she sobbed softly and disconsolately.

      Ultimately, the narrow passageway opened into a large cavern. Margie had closed her eyes, the sight of the demonic shadows on the walls too much for her to bear and the thought of her impending ordeal too overwhelming to consider. She felt her frame being lowered and felt it lock into a hole in the floor. The shaman stood in front of her while the men placed torches into sconces on the walls. Two of the men were carrying a large basket of food and they laid it down on the floor. The old man held his hands over her and uttered an incantation. Margie cried and made effort to beg and plead for mercy, but could form no words. The image of the shaman drifted and swayed in front of her and the flickering light of the torches made his face seem to assume a different shape every second. Finally, he looked down at her and said, in Spanish, his voice deep and foreboding, “Serve Guarito well.”

      The old man signaled the other native men and they began to leave the large cavernous space. Margie turned her head to follow them as they left. She uttered a piercing scream, but the men paid it no mind. In a second, she was alone in the vast chamber.

      Margie sagged in her bonds and closed her eyes. “They’ve left me here to die,” she though miserably. “I’m going to starve to death, or die of thirst.” Her mind rebelled at the long, hard course of suffering that lay before her. She wondered miserably how long it would take for the torches to burn out, condemning her to a long, lonely death in darkness. Her mind and body reverberated with the effects of the dark potion that the priestess had administered and her extreme terror was matched by an equal yearning for contact with her burning loins, her bursting breasts. Her mouth hungered to be filled with a tongue or a cock or a cunt, anything that would assuage her unbearable desire.

      Margie looked up to take in the contents of her deep, underground sepulcher. And that’s when she saw it. It had been blocked from her view by the body of the shaman when he stood in front of her. It was Guarito himself! He was made of some kind of green stone. His face was hard and aloof, his muscles finely carved on his torso. He was standing with his strong, thick legs wide apart and his hands in the air palms out on either side of him, raised to the level of his head and his fingers pressed together. His head was clean shaven. He stood about ten feet tall, and was standing on a five foot high pedestal, just like in her vision back in the women’s hut. The figure of the wrathful, powerful god was a reflection of the one in her recurrent dreams. And, he was the spitting image of the statue in the store in
Cotabaya
, with one significant exception. The statue in
Cotabaya
had worn a loincloth over his intimate parts. But this, undoubtedly more original version of the Emerald God, was sporting a thick, long erection.

      Margie sobbed as she viewed the depiction of the cruel god to whom her life was being sacrificed. To think that she, a graduate of the finest schools, a professor at a major American University, an apostle of rationality, would be losing her life in service to ancient superstitions!

      But these thoughts were fleeting through Margie’s mind. The drug that she had been given continued to grow in its effect on her. She began to doubt the reality of what she was seeing. Was she really here, deep within a jungle mountain, tied helplessly to a wooden frame? Would she wake up in a little while in her bed in the hotel back in
Cotabaya
, her loving husband next to her? Although her travails had seemed all too real when she had suffered them, the idea that they had actually happened was preposterous. Even the walls of the cavern seemed to be turning liquid, melting and reforming before her very eyes.

      She thought that she detected some movement of the stone figure that towered some fifteen feet over her. She peered at the statue intently, her mind rebelling at the possibility. It was hard to tell, everything in the cavern seemed to be moving. And then she saw it again. The hands had moved, she was sure of it! They were lower now than before. And then, suddenly, the eyes that had been staring straight ahead as if far off into the distance turned to look at her.

      “
Oh, my God!
” Margie thought. “
I’m going mad!
”

      Slowly, but surely, the huge stone figure in front of her was coming to life. His body had begun to glow and a hazy, translucent, green mist had begun to form around him. As if awakening from a centuries old slumber, the green god stirred. His muscles, which had been still and cold, started to flex and flow as if warm blood had been piped into them. He stretched his neck and then his arms, all the while taking in the defenseless, naked form of the female sacrifice that had been laid before him. And then, to Margie’s horrified dismay, he took a step towards her.

      Margie’s body began to quake and convulse in fear. “
This can’t be happening! This can’t be happening!
” she kept repeating to herself. As she watched the green idol step down from the pedestal and approach her, she screamed and begged for someone, anyone to save her.

       The body of the green giant was within the swirling verdant mist. The closer that he came to her, the more real his features seemed to become. He was ten feet tall when Marjorie first saw him, but as he approached her and began to crouch down towards the floor to get a better look at her, his body seemed to diminish, if not in its terror for the frantically fearful young woman, at least in size. By the time that he took a position kneeling in front of her, he had almost human dimensions, although still large and towering over the kneeling figure of the white woman sacrifice.