Vacations from Hell

“Wow. Charming,” I said.



“I know. Fear is no way to live.” Mariana pushed open the doors and we went inside.



“Whoa,” Baz gasped.



From the outside there was no way to tell how freaking beautiful it was inside. The walls—every single bit of them—shimmered with colorful, gold-leaf murals. They’d been pretty amazingly preserved.



“This was all done in the Middle Ages,” Mariana said. “It is a history of the town.”



On the left the panels were like something out of a horror movie. Freaky images of dying crops. Diseased, half-skeletal people covered in sores. Children crying. Dogs attacking each other over a scrap of meat. Dead bodies laid out on carts and set on fire, women weeping nearby. On the right the murals showed a happier story than on the left. Farmers working in their fields. Women baking bread. The crops thriving. Animals grazing peacefully. It looked pretty much like the village we’d just toured, except for one weird thing you had to sort of squint to see. In all the pictures on the right there were shadowy images of children and teenagers in the forest, watching.



“Even the ceiling’s painted,” John said, craning his neck.



Overhead was just one image. It showed a lake surrounded by forest. The villagers stood in one clump beside it. The children stood in the lake up to their waists. Their hands were tied together with rope. A priest in a red, hooded robe held aloft a goat’s head that seemed to have braids coming down from its horns. It was creepy but also kind of funny. Heidi the Goat’s Head of Satan. Actually, I’d seen girls in the clubs sporting a look pretty similar to that. A thick mist was coming over the trees, and the children had their faces craned toward it while the adults kept their eyes on the goat’s head. The water around the children bubbled and swirled.



“That’s a happy picture,” I cracked.



Mariana shivered. “So bizarre, isn’t it?” She laughed. “You didn’t have to grow up staring at that thing. Believe me, it kept us all in line.”



I was glad for the joke. The church really did give me the creeps.



“So what’s with the Heidi braids on the goat?” I asked.



Mariana walked to the altar where a huge book was propped. She flipped pages until she got to a drawing that showed the goat’s head up close and personal: the glowing eyes, the braids pooled under its chin. But in this drawing, it was clear that the braids were made up of lots of different kinds and colors of hair.



Isabel recoiled. “What. The. Hell?”



“The Soul of Necuratul,” Mariana explained. “According to the story, during the dark time, every seven years, each family sacrificed one child to Satan in exchange for security. To show that you were loyal, that you would keep your promise and follow through, you had to cut the child’s hair and twine it into a plait attached to the goat. By doing that you promised your child’s soul.”



“That is seriously f’ed up, man,” Baz said staring at the picture.



“But they believed it was necessary. And beliefs have power. That’s why superstitions are so hard to root out,” Mariana said. She ran a finger around the ancient edges of the page. “They say that up until the English missionaries came in the late eighteen hundreds, the sacrifices were still going on.”



“Whoa,” John said.



“Sorry to scare you,” Mariana said with a half-hearted laugh. She closed the book with a heavy thwump that sent dust motes spiraling. “Of course, the missionaries put a stop to it right away, destroyed the goat’s head, all the symbols, and the red robes—in fact, to this day, the color red is forbidden in this town. It’s supposed to be the devil’s color. The missionaries started making sure the children were educated and sent some of the boys away to school in England.”



“Boys. Figures,” Isabel harrumphed.



“Where does that go?” I asked, pointing to an ornate wall at the front of the church. It was painted with golden saints and angels. In the center was another set of carved doors.



“It’s called the iconostasis,” Mariana said. “It conceals the altar from the commoners, basically. The priest can choose to open the door during mass and let people see the altar or not.”



“Can we see?” John asked.



“Sure.” Mariana tried the door, frowned. “Weird. It’s locked.” She held her palms up. “Sorry.”



“That’s okay,” Baz said, standing a little closer to her. “So are they really going to build a power plant here?”