I honestly wish they made a big deal out of it. I wish it was exactly how Hollywood made it look. You know, in a candle-lit room with high ceilings. A choir hidden in the shadows, chanting in Latin for ambience. Everyone standing around in red (or black), floor-length robes, hoods obscuring their faces as they look down at the sacrifice who is tied down in the middle of a pentagram drawn with blood.
I’m not even sorry if you think this is super-specific. I refuse to apologize for wanting my sacrificial murder to have had some pageantry.
The only similarity to the movies is that it takes place in a dimly lit room. Other than that, it happens the same way every time. People are brought in, terrified or passed out (because they’ve either been drugged or knocked out). At this point, they’ve already marked with the names of the people who supplied them. The chief priest says a quick incantation over them and in less than a minute, their throats are being violently slit. Their blood goes into a rectangular-shaped patch of soil surrounded with a bunch of symbols I don’t recognize.
You don’t need to know how I ended up here. What you need to know is that I’ve been here for three months and two weeks. Another thing you need to know is how much it hurts to have your throat slit.
That’s why when a soul wakes up here, they let out a blood-curling scream that lasts approximately two minutes, triggered by the physical pain they didn’t finish feeling before they passed on. Which is insane because I always believed that the death of the body was the end of physical pain. Maybe the rules are different for non-sacrificial deaths. What do I know, really?
We call this place purgatory. It’s where the recently sacrificed souls go. Where all the souls gather to comfort new ones and make their transition as easy as possible. From an aesthetics POV, it’s a stone cave with just one opening – the one through which we see the killings.
We’ve also put two and two together to figure out how money rituals work. In layman’s terms, sacrificed souls are used as batteries to power money ritual deals. This brings us to another depressing thing.
The reason this place was never called hell is that everyone knows that hell is final. This place isn’t. At least our stay here isn’t. The life forces of souls are used up by their assigned ritual deals. When a soul has been completely drained, it goes somewhere else. A place that, judging by the reactions we get from the drained souls during their last moments, is much worse than here.
When a ritual deal’s soul is drained, the one who made the deal has the choice to either extend their deal with another soul or face whatever punishment is thrown their way. Based on a woman I watched here and gone in less than a week, I learned that not every soul’s life force is used at the same speed.
We have no idea what’s waiting for us on the other side and we have no idea how long we have until we have to go there.
Lol. I wish a trailer had just fallen on me jeje.
Click here to read other stories in the NIGERIAN HORROR STORY series.
