Shavuka

I was running, running, running, I didn’t know why, but I felt as though if I stopped I would have to face some evil. An unknown evil, an evil which I somehow knew would be beyond comparison with any other evil I ever knew or thought I could know. I ran, ran for my life, for I was certain that if I stopped I would die. I ran for hours, till my legs would not obey and stopped, abandoning me to the unspeakable evil. And I saw it, it walked with an unnatural grace, almost gliding across the ground. I couldn’t move, it’s malevolent gaze paralyzed me.

I woke with a start and slammed by head into my brother's bed right above me. I looked at my alarm, it was seven o’ six on Monday. I tried to remember what had scared me so much, but the dream had already faded away. Later during an AP social studies class, we were discussing a strange culture of people from northern Mexico which had been wiped out by smallpox, they where a people that would purposefully drink deadly poisons to impress each other, this lead to much of them dieing. We were going to visit one of their most northern temples, The Temple of the Goat, as they called it. It layed only an hours drive away as we lived in southern Texas. This would be a normal lesson if Mr. Salvner hadn’t shown pictures of it. They showed a small hut in the middle of a clearing.

I was at the edge of the clearing looking upon the small hut when an albino man walked past me and nelt at the front of the hut. I watched him pull a knife out of a small box by the door. I some how knew what he was going to do but I couldn’t, I would not move, my lungs would not breath, my heart would not beat, my brain would not think except for an overwhelming feeling of terror. The man drew the blade up to his face and began to cut, as he cut he pulled away at his face, till nothing of a face remanded. I some how saw all this though I was looking upon his back. He turned and looked directly at me. His eyes were vacant, unseeing, I knew he was under a trance. The eyes flashed and the blood flowing from his face down his chest stopped for a second before renewing at an amazing rate. His entire body was covered in blood which all of a sudden stopped. It all evaporated and leaved him, a man with no face, eyes filled with blood, and skin which was stained all over a deep, deep, blood color. He smiled despite the pain he had to have felt, and I ran.

I awoke to my freind shaking me, with a scared look on his face, “Man you just collapsed, are you ok?” I told him I was fine, and I stayed for the rest of the school day. Although my mind was elsewhere.

When I got home I began to search for anything that could tell me about the strange temple. What I found was shocking, they had religious ceremonies where they wouldn’t just drink poisons, but would also perform gruesome acts of disfiguration. Their holiest of practices were when they would cut the shin off of different parts of their body to allow their twisted gods to possess them.

I searched for several hours, I searched,I searched every where. From the Vatican's online archives to Wikipedia, but  found no reference to the temple. Soon I could not bear to leave my eyes open for a second long and I passed out.

The next couple of days passed without event, until the day of the trip. I knew something would happen at the temple, I didn’t know what but I knew it would be big, and very bad. The trip began with several people calling in sick, almost half of the people that were going to be on the trip had called in with the strangest of symptoms, one person even had called in because he had a one hundred and thirty degree fever. On the way there we had two flat tires, and we hit a goat.

The temple was vacant, we were the only ones there. It was just as the pictures had shown, in fact it was so small that one of my friends complained about, he had said “What the heck? We drove all the way out here to see this dump?”

Mr. Salvner respond and said “It’s more than meets the eye.” I noticed a person, someone I didn’t talk to normally, begin to act strange. He had a vacant look on his face, and appeared to be chanting in a demonic sounding language. One by one the rest of the people began to join in. They all were chanting, even Mr. Salvner. One of them stopped and started to stumble, almost drunkenly to the temple. There was a small wooden box by the door. I knew what was going to happen but I couldn’t move. He nelt in front of the hut and opened the box revealing a knife, the knife in my dream. I realized that he and I were the only ones here, everybody had disappeared. He brought the knife to his face and began to cut, and pull, and cut. Blood poured from his face as he turned and look at me. I tried to run but I could not, I couldn’t breath, I couldn’t think. He smiled as the blood stopped, then began to pour even faster. As the blood paused I had control over my body again and I ran. I knew what would happen, I didn’t need to see. I knew that if he caught me I would die. I ran so long, so far that I wouldn’t know that I had legs if I couldn’t see them. I knew if I looked behind me I would see him, still smiling, always following. My legs collapsed, they wouldn’t move, and he was here.