Scarleton Series I : Before the Cult by Sandy Masia Page A

and I will slit your throat!” He paused giving the man a
chance to think it through. “What is the crop? What grows
there?”
    The man began
sobbing.
    He poked the
man again and he flinched. His sob stifled. “You are a priest,
right?”
    “Yes.”
    “So you know
the truth.”
    “Not that kind
of truth.”
    “What other
kind of truth could there be?” the rider interposed sarcastically.
“You work for the man farming it? This God of yours?”
    “I know nothing
of a crop or a farm for that matter!” he cried.
    “How do you
explain the painting?”
    He did not
answer.
    “Tell me!” the
rider snapped.
    “You are a mad
man,” the man moaned. “I don’t know what you –“
    There was
stillness then his voice broke it again. “I just wanna see my
family again, Lord.”
    The rider
sighed, slumped his shoulders and then suddenly hacked the man like
he was chopping wood with an axe. He was ferocious and
cannibalistic in his execution. The sounds were eerily similar to
the one shovelling mud with a spade makes. There was a spray of red
haze spewing into the fog. Blood spurting into the riders face and
attire. He hacked the throat and the head multiple times. It was
silent. No screaming, no laborious grunts. Just the sound of that
merciless act, the man’s body shuddering as life jostled out of
him, the gurgling and the shovelling. Then the wretched man widened
his eyes, there was a stare he gave…like he was looking at
something of amazing awe. An enchanted stare, then I knew it was
over.
    The rider
turned towards me and sized me up with a couple glances. “I’m Evlin
Macfearson. What is it that you seek?” He grunted.
    Surprised he
had even noticed I was there, I blurted. “The crop.”
    And that was my
first encounter with Macfearson.
     
2
     
    We walked in
the woods, to a destination he only knew. I felt kidnapped by,
caught and trapped by tendrils of his presence, and robbed out of
thoughts of escape. At first it felt awkward but as we progressed
it felt instinctively right, like a decision I had made. One that
really mattered this time, one that would give the meaninglessness
of my existence significance. There was no mention of what I had
seen and he did not bother explain anything. There was an assumed
understanding it appeared. There was not much talk than “watch that
puddle” or “let’s go this way” or “don’t try pushing through the
branches “. I watched curiously and studied him as we went along.
He was surprisingly observant for his contemplative state. He was
fully engaged in two worlds, the mental and the real with sharp
efficacy. All I became aware of, the further we walked, was how my
calves ached and how increasingly lost I started to feel. My
thoughts began to shift from the abstract to the more pragmatic,
like the need for water and rest and how amazing it would be. As
time went by thoughts got darker and morbid, of how maybe I would
be impaled at midnight by this stranger I just met in some cult
ritual.
    Why can’t he
just have me dig a grave and rest , I thought.
    Quenching my
thirst ceased to matter at that point. Not even rest in the most
comfy of beds. I desired a deeper release… the kind death can only
offer.
    Oh, Death, you
conjuring seductress.
    Every entity …
everything …
    We got deeper
and deeper, in the uncharted corners of the cosmos. The
paradoxically inaccessible and accessible, the remote and abundant,
the foreign and very familiar, the certain and uncertain, the real
and unreal. A thin cord between the horizon of the existing and
purely imaginative. Whether this is an explanation of my experience
or a statement about the nature of things I am yet to discover for
myself. However, that was the point I lost and discovered myself,
and so I believe.
    We reached a
clearing. And as I walked into it, exhausted, a thought fleeted in
my head.
    The truth is in
the irony.
    The kind of
thought that reaches and calls from the intuitive well within.
    “You know how
it