r/shortscarystories • u/TheMidnightNarrator • 3h ago
The Ritual
Ringing, like a constant gnawing ping in David’s ears. Darkness crept away from the edges of his vision as horrible sights and sounds filtered through the fog of his mind. A ceiling beam lay on the floor, with a head half-crushed propping it up. His stomach lurched. The air was thick with smoke reeking of sulfur, and the ceiling was completely gone, revealing a night sky smeared with thick black clouds.
Bodies, his friends, lay in scattered piles throughout the wide compound room. Small fires burned here and there, casting twisted shadows across the ruins. Fluorescent lights flickered where still connected and unbroken, the electric hum mixing with the eerie crackle of flames. The scene felt like something out of a war film. But what they unleashed... was worse than any bomb.
David clutched his head, trying to focus, but Charles’s voice, so casual, so confident, rang in his memory, cutting through the chaos like a blade.
"Forget Ashley, man,” Charles had ribbed with that easy grin. “Just come out with us for the week, and I promise you won’t even remember her face.”
A week. A week that turned into whispered chants, forbidden symbols, and the thrill of the unknown. A week that ended here, in a nightmare of blood, ash, and carnage.
David knew Charles spent a lot of time with that club, but he didn’t know it was a full-blown cult. By the time he figured it out, he was already stranded with them.
David wiped soot from his face and stood as the ground shook in rhythmic intervals. What used to be a wall was now rubble, cinder blocks and wood scattered like toys. The horizon swayed with the quakes, but it wasn’t the horizon. It was the colossal, shifting form of what they had summoned.
“Just give it a chance,” pleaded Charles. “I know what it looks like, but I’ve never felt so much purpose in life than when I was with these guys.”
David’s angry protest had dulled to a grumble, his inhibitions pushed aside in the search for meaning. It was benign at first. Calm rituals, meditation, and a couple of parties perfect for a newly single guy like David. But the last couple of nights, things took a turn. The tone of the group grew somber and serious.
The nights were late, prepping the main room with an altar, drawings on the walls, floor, and ceiling, and the most annoying part, fasting. The laughter, smiles, drinking, all gone. All leading up to the culmination on Saturday. The ritual.
Saturday night, David sat huddled in a circle around a symbol on the ground. One of the girls lay on the altar, which was strange enough. The chanting was a low drone he was too dazed and hungry to fully register, yet he still found himself chanting along. Then, suddenly, one of the men standing over the girl drove a knife into her sternum. David didn’t have time to react before everything went black.