A State Of Sin Amsterdam Occult Series Book Two by Mark Hobson (golden son ebook .TXT) 📕

They found him a hundred yards or so further along. He was laying in the shallow water, twitching and breathing spasmodically and staring up at the sky.

As they approached he must have heard their feet splashing through the water, and in a sudden panic he tried to squirm away, gibbering to himself.

His Uncle Johan pushed him along, and then Bart was looking down at the man, who was coughing up blood, turning the stream red. Somewhere, they heard the engine of the pickup truck start up. Moments later, a car door slammed and Dalton joined them.

“A fucking gut shot,” Uncle Johan told them. “Great!” He turned his eyes on Bart, who felt himself cringe away from their intensity.

Reaching for his belt, he withdrew the hunting knife from its sheaf and held it out towards Bart.

“You need to finish him off, put him out of his misery. A wound like that, it could take him hours, maybe days to bleed out.”

Bart looked from the knife, to the wounded man lying gasping at his feet, and back to the knife again. He shook his head and stepped back, shivering and hugging himself even though the day was scorching hot.

A cold look crept into his uncle’s eyes. It was like looking at two icy pits, right into his soul.

“Take the knife and do it, boy. If not, then so help me God I will tie you to that tree over there and leave you out here all night, so you can watch him slowly bleed to death. And in the morning, when the vultures and hyenas come for his body, stripping the flesh away, they’ll come for you too. Those Strandwolves are a nasty breed, they won’t be too choosy, especially when they see a fat boy like you. You’ll be fucking carrion too. If the ants don’t get you first.”

He pushed the knife closer.

Bart looked around in panic. He glanced over towards Dalton, but he was looking down at the ground.

He wondered briefly if he could make a run for it. But where would he go? How far would he get, before he too found himself being hunted down?

Finally he turned his eyes back towards the man lying in the stream, slowly bleeding and moaning in agony.

Bart shouted, and his voice rolled across the countryside. He yelled again, a loud and guttural sound, like he was trying to expel something deep inside, and he was breathing hard, snorting down his nostrils, and he felt his features contort and twist.

Snatching the knife he ran headlong at the man and plunged the blade deep into his chest, who jerked in surprise. Bart stabbed again, their eyes locked together. He stabbed him over and over, in his neck, in his torso, in his face, in his stomach, he lost count of how many times he stabbed, so lost was he in his bloodlust.

Vaguely he heard his uncle whispering encouragement.

“That’s right, boy, that’s right.”

.          .          .

They slung the carcass into the back of the truck and drove back to the farm. Sometime tomorrow they would shove the body into the cesspit behind the stables, but first Bart deserved a beer and a hearty meal, his uncle told him. He’d made the family proud.

Later that night, as he and Lotte lay in their beds side by side, he told her what had happened during the hunt, explaining the day’s events in vivid detail. He felt a feeling of pride swell inside him, and he also sensed that something else had shifted within. Something that he couldn’t explain or put into words. Just a notion that he had crossed an imaginary line, a boundary that up to now had been holding him back. He concluded that this was how it must feel to pass from childhood into manhood.

Things would never be the same for him again.

He heard the bedsprings on Lotte’s bed squeak then he felt her take a hold of his hand, and draw him to his feet.

“There’s something we have to do,” she said to him in the dark, and she led him outside.

Everything was still except for the quiet lowing of the cattle in their pens and overhead the Milky Way and the Southern Cross lay serenely over the heavens.

Lotte guided him across the yard to where the pickup truck was parked, using a flashlight to light their way. The corpse lay in the back, covered over with a tarpaulin. With his help they pulled the sheet aside, Bart asking: “What are we doing? If we get caught…”

“It’s something that Dalton told me, something that they do in Africa. Something important. Here, hold this.” She handed him the flashlight.

There was the glint of a sharp blade in his sister’s hand.

“We need to… remove… some parts of the body.”

      “What?! Why?!”

“It’s for what they call umuthi medicine. The Zulu inyanga, their witchdoctors, do it. It will make us very powerful Bart, and give us supernatural control over our enemies forever.”

“We have enemies?”

“Of course, silly,” Lotte told him, sounding much older than her eleven years. “It’s me and you against the rest of the world.”

Bart watched in fascination as she started to cut a strip of skin from the corpse’s forehead, and then from one of its arms. “So that he cannot strike us even in death,” she explained.

Next she carved deeply into the chest and cut and twisted until a piece of cartilage came loose from the bottom of the breastbone. “Our shield.”

Then she turned the corpse over and removed tissue from the soles of its feet “To give us strength and speed.”

When she was done Lotte tore off a strip of the man’s shirt and wrapped the pieces inside.

Bart waited while she stepped back and looked at her handiwork, her eyes moving over the dead body, and then she turned to look directly at him and sighed.

“This next part you must do yourself.”

She passed him the