Ch. 2

The next morning I rose out of bed without the comfort of a full night’s rest and set out to find Mr. Garris. He was born in the village of Gaska, but his parents, terrified of the curse the village suffered annually, decided to leave the place all together despite the rumors that a born native of the village can never escape the devil’s grasp. After the premature death of his mother and the subsequent suicide of his father, the young Kully Garris made his way back to Gaska where, ironically, he felt the safest. I had met a mutual friend of Mr. Garris and myself in England a couple of years ago who told me the story of this ill-fated man. His uncanny misfortunes sparked my interest in the serious belief that the village had concerning the supernatural, and I prepared for a visit to Gaska.

That is how I came to meet the elder with leprosy and discovered the secrets of Panoro. According the elder, each family is observed diligently by the devil’s unblinking eye, and if the family’s number of curses does not satisfy Beelzebub, he’ll send to these people an unexpected guest who bares the gara. This sinister game that the devil plays is manipulative, twisted, and designed to wreck lives. The game is feared so much that the wind, like a thousand whispers in children’s’ nightmares, lashes out its name: Garuba. When the elder said this word, I interrupted in order to ask for a definition, but with much difficulty and seemingly physical anguish, he could only offer a single word meaning: game. I can only presumed what the term gara means since the man could barely bring himself to stutter out the meaning, but I gathered something that sounded like collar. It is a thick, coarse, hemp-like necklace made of a material similar to rope that latches on tightly and cuts into the skin like barbwire. I had only to play the game myself to understand what the ominous word truly meant.

     The elder continued to tell me that families are coerced into waking up, if they managed to sleep at all, and at Satan’s chosen time after six, a soft knock will be heard at their door. No danger is instantly met by those who answer the door, for the point of the game is to feel shock, hope, and then the devastating pain that comes with the realization of truth. In the family’s power is the decision to give the gara to whomever they please. Standing on the doorstep will inevitably be one of the family’s dearly departed wearing the garaaround their neck. They will appear as if they are alive and had never been buried. This is how Garuba then bares the twisted, sinister design of the devil.

It is through the power of the gara pressed into the relative’s neck that the family has the choice of sentencing life or death. It is all part of Satan’s sick amusement as he often reforms the person into any age or appearance he wishes them to assume. As the elder told me this, he struggled to refrain from shaking for which the purpose soon became clear. He told me of the time he was selected to playGaruba, and I admit, I was somewhat fidgety myself as he bewailed the death of his three-year-old grandson. Upon hearing that the death was caused by a common illness, I found my nerves had come back to me, but his story was not yet over. The man and his wife were awoken at eleven in the evening by a gentle knock followed by a child’s sobbing. Both the man and his wife knew what was to await them at the door, but the desire to see their grandchild again was stronger than their fear of seeing his soul. So, with as much courage as the man could muster, he opened the door to a shadowy bundle on the doorstep. The man squatted down to pull a cloth from over the child’s head, and there, on at the door of his own house was his grandson, undefiled by his fatal disease and as pitiful looking as ever. He had no choice but to bring him in the house, but his eyes never left the gara that clung to the boy’s throat.

He knew as well as his wife that they had the choice to bring him back to life, but the rules of the game call for an exchange. In order to bring the dead back from the grave, the family must give the gara to a living relation within their house. Doing this will not only kill the relative instantly but make them a slave to the devil. It’s an exchange of life for death, but the grandparents also have the choice of sending the deceased back to the grave, without any harm done other than the regret of letting a loved one slip out of their lives twice. The man, faced with such a hard decision, could not bare to watch the child go nor could he send his wife to such an enslavement in hell. He was too much of a God-fearing man to take his own life, so he tried to cheat the devil by throwing the gara in a fire. As soon as the necklace touched the flames, hissing and sparking ignited within the fireplace, and his grandson began to scream out in agony. He did everything he could to control the child but it seemed as if the boy was burning instead of the necklace. The man turned to his wife for help, but she was paralyzed in an expression of horror as if she was suffocating. Eventually the boy stopped screaming and fell limp in his arms. His wife took one deep breath before the gara flew from the fire and clamped around her neck, burning her skin from the hotness of the flames, and she ran through the door, unable to stop herself from racing into hell. From that day on, the man was damned and contaminated with leprosy. 


© Mikal Minarich