Rituals

 A black Cadillac idles. It’s clean, impossibly, the dirt roads and worn trails are all slick with muck. But the car is there anyway, ominously clean. This car once ferried nightmares. Stalked quiet, sedate neighborhoods and rural properties like headless horse-mounted specters of old. It’s calling is the same. Made material by ancient fear, given breath from contemporary paranoia. It’s occupants have worn endless faces. Legends never die. 

Chilly air. Frigid. Starlight peers down at the earth between bony branches clawing at stark sky. Defiant evergreen trees are still and silent in the dark. The Cadillac idles. Waits. A black shape in the dark beneath cold, unwavering stars. 

The memories return. Churning, industrious concrete titans producing an endless stream of explosives for a war far away. Bullets, missiles, charges.  Sulphuric scents waft, distant voices waver before vanishing on phantom breezes. The bunker tombs lie deserted now, silent. Empty— and watchful. Deeper strata speak, thinning with time: chanting prayers uttered to tall, onyx pillars that drank light. Inhuman things unearthed, erected. Destroyed. 

Something stirs beyond. A flash across the sky that steals the stars and plunges night into deeper blackness. An impression of outstretched wings. Nightmare red eyes open, unblinking, burning. Mesmerizing crimson pits big as full moons. 

It begins again.

The black Cadillac, lightless and clean, backs away down decrepit road. The work has begun.