Ch. 3

Although I felt sympathy for the man, I refused to accept that his story was true. Nothing that I had heard about Mr. Garris or from the town elder held any irrefutable proofs. I was intrigued more or less by the severity of the villagers’ superstition about Satan and his mad game. Most the elements of Garuba seemed so well thought out that I had naively believed them to be convened by the villagers themselves to scare foreigners away from their ancient village. The village was remarkably old and maintained by a long line of Gaskanians for many years. They didn’t marry outside of the village, and if they did, they were ostracized from Gaska for the rest of their lives because they strongly believed that marrying outside of the village would only bring despair to innocent people, and that was not only a sin, but a welcome to the devil into the homes of God’s children. It seems like the Gaskanians were martyrs in a way. They knew they were marked people and took their undeserved punishment as if it was simply a matter of life.

I was very taken aback by their martyr attitude towards their fate. It came across as a little too honorable to me that the majority of a village, with the exception of a few, were willing to sacrifice themselves to a game that was wickedly cruel. Before the elder had reached the limit of his sanity, he let me in on a few more disturbing aspects of Garuba. Apparently, the devil has a tendency to visit families who suffer from various things; be it poverty, age, illness, or any other bad predicaments; he will turn the table by equipping the dead relative with a precious offer that proves to be an advantage to such unfortunate situations. Perhaps a deceased relative retains the knowledge of a cure for the brother’s fatal sickness, or maybe it will be an uncle who can bequeath a nephew with successful business secrets, or even a mother who can heal the ache in a daughter’s heart. The advantages of the devil’s puppets are not necessarily limited to vital things, either. If a mother wants to exchange her dead relative for youth, she has that option. Don’t be fooled, however. There is no deal with the devil that doesn’t end in some severe consequence, and despite that fact that I was aware of this, and despite all the warnings from the old man, and even though I trembled from head to foot, I was still drawn into the allure of the game. It was like I was being tempted to roll the dice of chance, and I couldn’t resist the desire to let them fly.

And so it was that I happened to stride quite confidently down the secluded path that leads out of town in a sinuous, winding walk directly to the gates of Gaska. Gnarled and termite-invested trees bent overhead in a massive tangle of branches that just barely allowed enough sun to fall on the path. The narrow strip of dirt was polluted with rocks, roots and holes, and resembled a shallow ditch hardly providing enough space for a man’s body to squeeze through which caused my jacket to snag numerous times on thorns that were impossible to dodge. Many small cuts and scratches appeared on my hands and face as those were the only two exposed areas of my body, but I thought nothing of it other than the inconvience it presented, and continued on my way.

Around two hours went by and the sun had retired. The patches of sunlight were replaced by speckles of moonbeams with just enough light with which to see by. I confess I was unsettled as I walked beneath the long, twined, crooked fingers of the trees locked together in a sort of web, and the thorns aimed more accurately as I was blindfolded by limited light, but I was soon in view of the gates of Gaska, and so quickened my pace. As I broke through the relentless thorns and out of the woods, I entered a small opening of gravel just before the gates. I stared up at the massive corroded iron that reached high up into the night sky. Eight vertical iron bars spiraled up about twelve feet on each gate and ended in a dangerously sharp arrow at the top. The two horizontal bars were spaced at about three feet from the bottom and top of the gates and were much thicker than the vertical ones. I took one step forward in a kind of dazed awe of the spectacle that was the gate, but the taste of a liquid iron distracted me. Something was dripping from my upper lip, and upon dabbing my finger on the spot, I found I was bleeding lightly. For some bizarre reason, I was suddenly consumed by an internal panic, which petrified my body into an immobile state. All I could do was glare down at the blood at my finger with mouth agape.

Then, with as much shock as the sight of my blood had irrationally given me, I jumped at the intrusion of a timid voice asking me in Gaskanian if I was lost. The faculty that commands my voice was not yet functional, so all I could do was shake my head in the negative. Two pleading eyes scrutinized me from head to toe before the voice questioned me again, though with more skepticism, “What is your business here?” Offended by the accusing tone he had taken, I knitted my eyebrows before telling him that I was in search of a Mr. Kully Garris. The stupidity I must have been filled with throughout the whole trip refused the acknowledgement of all the warnings that the forest and the gate guard had hinted at me. He shook his head slowly and sadly, giving me the impression that the Mr. Garris had died, but strangely enough the man was actually indicating the opposite of my presumption. In Gaska, the living pity the living. “I will fetch him for you.”

I watched as the man slunk away in a hunched posture as if his head was being forced towards the ground by some unperceivable magnetism. My confidence had been shaken by my reaction to the blood and the man’s voice, but as I was left alone to my thoughts, I began to regain some of the excitement of entering this ancient village. I shuffled my feet through the gravel with an impatience I was unfamiliar with. The sound of the shifting rocks jarred on my ears. I felt goose pimples all over my body though there was no wind or chill. A tingling sensation burned on my heels and toes as if they were recovering from numbness. Suddenly the trickling of blood from all my cuts became obvious, and I tried to brush all of them away, but I managed only to smear them. There was no grass or leaves to wipe my blood off with, so I used the inside of my jacket. My nose ran, my eyes watered, and my stomach was beginning to churn. The oddity of this physical phenomena shook my whole body until all at once the corporal chaos ceased as my ears rang with a harsh grating voice unlike the first. “I am Kully Garris.”

© Mikal Minarich