The Ritual ( part I )

I don’t think there’s a college that doesn’t have its share of legends. Stories range from the ghost of the girl who was pregnant with the football coach’s child to the creature that roams a building at night. And everything is said to kill you in the most horrible fashion if you run into it, of course. My school, Miskatonic University, up in Maine, was no exception.

In addition to the obligatory ghost stories of the suicides and murder victims still haunting the grounds, there was a story of an evil creature that liked to torture its victims by scaring them for days on end before killing them. The thing is, you have to call this monster, invite it to hunt you. The monster is called Achildes and it feeds on the terror.

Yeah, that’s brilliant, call up an otherworldly horror to come and torture you.

But there were tons of people who did this and they didn’t die. It was some sort of rite of passage. Frats and Sororities had it as part of their initiation ritual. They would take the new kids out to the old run down building on campus.  Despite its sorry state, it still was usable, there just weren’t any classes being held in it. That wasn’t common knowledge, though. The members would send the pledges in and have them call up Achildes. The pledges would do the ritual in the men’s bathroom and then someone in a mask would jump out and scare the bejesus out of them. Most of the time the kids would run screaming out of the building, sometimes they would go deeper into the building and get lost. Which meant that all the lights would have to be turned on and a search would go on until they were found.

What a great way to get people into your frat, give them heart attacks and/or mental issues.

Then my friend Tiffany told me and my girlfriend, Alexia, that she had found the actual ritual and where it was supposed to be done. I didn’t really want anything to do with it, and neither did Alexia. We told Tiff not to do it, that it’s not a good idea to mess with things that aren’t of this world. Of course, she didn’t listen. I remember when it happened, it was at the end of November…

It was a dark and stormy night…

I was lounging on the couch in the apartment that Alexia and I shared just off campus, playing Mass Effect for the twenty-eighth time. Alexia was sitting at her desk nearby, playing some Facebook games on her laptop.

“Remember that ritual Tiffany told us about?” Alexia asked me,

“Vaguely,” was my muttered reply.

“She has a status saying that her, Mark, Tonya, Steve, and Jeff are going to perform it tonight. That was about 3 hours ago.”

“What time is it now?”

“9:27″

“Wonder if they’re still alive.” I wasn’t taking it seriously.

“Probably not.” She said in a similar tone to mine.

A while later the phone rang. It was right next to me, but I was shooting people, so obviously I couldn’t answer it. I quickly checked the caller id. “It’s Tiff,” I said as I tossed it to Alexia and went back to shooting people, but with the volume down a bit more. I didn’t really pay any attention to the call, I was too busy trying to snipe some mercs, and Alexia had gone into another room. Not sure how long the call lasted but it was long enough for me to get out of that area in the game.

“Find a save point,” Alexia called out to me, “We’ve got to go get ‘em.”

“Why?” I asked, saving and shutting down the system.

“They did the ritual and are scared out of their minds.” She replied as she put her coat on and grabbed her purse.

“Okay, so where are they?” I grabbed my coat and keys.

“The old mental hospital.”

“Why am I not surprised?” We went out to the car and started towards the old mental hospital that was just outside of the warehouse district of the city. Alexia reminded me what Tiffany had told us about the ritual.

The location for the ritual has to be a place where great fear has been felt – the mental hospital was perfect for that – and at night with no lights on. You have to have 27 black candles and, after arranging them in a specific pattern, light them. Then everyone who is participating in the ritual has to stand in the middle of the symbol that the candles form and start chanting a challenge to the demon. And you have to use its actual name, not Achildes, which is the bastardized version of it.  It takes 27 times of saying the chant for it to work. If it works, then the candles are supposed to go out and then you have to run for your life because the creature/demon/entity/thing is now hunting everyone who took part in the ritual.  Supposedly this thing feeds off of the fear that is generated by its hunt and it will try to terrorize you for days before finally killing and eating you, not necessarily in that order either.

From what Tiff told my girlfriend, it succeeded.