In the middle of the forest, the clearing is illuminated by the dim light of the stars. A slight breeze blurs lightly between the leaves, causing the grass threads to sway, ready to receive the dew.
The ancient trees keep the secret of that clearing as green oyster valves, jealous of their green pearl. It is difficult to get there if the trees do not allow it. And trees allow only a few. A few.
Those few are the consecrated women, who walk barefoot along the secret paths in the thick forest, safe to move among friends.
Women arrive almost at the same time. They do not carry fire. That rain of distant light is enough for them to orientate themselves. They look at each other. There are twelve.
They enter the clearing. They sing an ancient song, whose melody originates together with the dance of the stars themselves.
The witches take hands, beginning their dance. Their brown, green and blue cloaks sway around their ankles in the slow rhythm of arcane flutes and distant words. The witches exchange complicit looks as they take off clothes and cloaks, making them slip along the hips. They are beautiful and ugly. They are young and old, they are tall, low, thin, fat. From moon to ebony skin.
They are the thousand faces of the Blessed Mother, who have come here to worship.
Increasingly faster the rhythm involves the dancers of the night. The wind plays a flute made of leaves while invisible drumming drums in the undergrowth. They shake old sistriums. Cymbals.
Women once again raise their voices to the distant black of the night. At first harmonious, the singing becomes tougher and turns into screams of ferine. Women no longer dance but jump and roll to the ground, prey of the fever induced by the goddess.
Their songs, their movements, their spirits are performing a spell, of which they are only partly aware. Words and gestures reverberate through dimensions, to reach chaos in the center of the cosmos and take a fragment of it, bringing it into that forest.
When the rite reaches its climax, an even darker shadow comes out of the shadows at the edge of the clearing. Its appearance is that of a man, but the light is not reflected in his body.
A black man enters the circle of witches who still contend in the spasms of divine orgasm.
He looks at them all, then approaches the youngest of them. The unripe breasts just formed are damp with sweat, which shines like diamond powder in the distant light of the stars. The wheeze for the dance that has just ended, raises his eyes towards the shadow man who is approaching.
He speaks in a language unknown to them, but she understands it, grasping the echo of meaning in the assonances of ancient memories now dormant. He kneels in front of her. He lies down and opens his legs with no shame. Without fear.
The black man stretches out on her, penetrating her with sharp sweetness. Its breath is perfumed and alien. Its warm skin. In a few moments the man lays his seed inside the young witch.
The black man caresses the face of the young man, his yellow eyes with a vertical pupil pose one last glance in those of her, and then dissolve in the darkness of the night.
The sisters are approaching, putting on a black coat of light soft wool, which she wears without speaking.
When he gets up, he feel the painful belly wrinkles. Pain that he can barely control, keeping himself on his legs. That's not right, he thinks. This should not happen. Terror thoughts.
Suddenly he hears a warm liquid flowing through his legs. Although the colors are canceled by the dim light, he understands that it is blood, his blood, a black puddle under his feet.
Dizziness. Pain. A stab in the belly that breaks into a black and obscene waterfall. A soft and shapeless bassoon makes its way between the jagged pieces of meat, with a thud falling to the ground. From the bassoon some growths tend to form rudimentary arts, which the monstrous being uses to propping up and rise from the ground. It grows, meanwhile. The black creature gross of blood takes on the appearance of a man with a clear, almost shameless skin. Her golden, gilded eyes with a vertical pupil look at her mother on the ground, prey of pain and fear. The being bows down to kiss her lips, suggesting her soul with the greed of the first feeding. She dies.
The demon seems to hear a noise, turn it. His pupils are slits of hatred. The dilated nostrils flicker with repressed fury. Man sees. Jumps forward. Darkness.
Manlio Dellastiara woke up completely covered with icy sweat. Around him the walls of the room swirled dangerously into the darkness of his bare room.
While chills of cold and fear were running down his back, he felt a strange familiarity with those images and sounds. With those smells.
The hand still shakes the light on. The bulb was illuminated hanging sadly from the ceiling, on