*** TRIGGER WARNINGS: Violence, blood and gore, rape and rape themes ***
There were no signs saying, "off-limits," at the borders of Devil's Thicket, the vast stretch of untamed acreage around which the town of Omphalos spread out like diseased flesh around an open sore.
There were no fences or cameras, but it was understood, even when we were little, that no-one was meant to go there.
It was our town's wilderness, a place where beasts went for their nightly orgies, and where all the bodies of missing locals were presumed to be buried.
Truthfully though, it was neutral ground, a place where tortured souls could go to escape from our malignant society.
Omphalos almost sounds like an interesting place to outsiders, with its Greek name and its thriving punk-goth culture, which sprang like mold off the crust of its stalwart religious community.
In all honesty, it's a really boring place.
It got the name Omphalos from a defunct business, no oracles or pagan rituals, just some rich asshole named Angel Kuerning, CEO of the Omphalos corporation that went bankrupt almost as soon as it started up.
He came here with his millions, back in the nineteen-fifties, and built his tech company, whose main office would later become town hall, its housing complex, the high school, its warehouses, the local shops and supermarket, and so on.
When his business failed, of course, the government stepped in and bought up a lot of the development contracts.
They subsidized the town into existence and our grandparents just kind of forgot why they came here, forgot that the money would eventually dry up, forgot to warn our parents to get the fuck out.
Omphalos is a place where things go to be forgotten and Angel Kuerning was no messenger of god, but a devil sent to trap believers and their kids in small town hell.
Devil's Thicket is all undeveloped land, not because it's dangerous or evil, just because no-one besides the rising homeless population wants it.
We all knew this, but of course, when you're living in a place like Omphalos, where you're either buying drugs, selling drugs, making drugs, or just wasting your life, sometimes you allow the shadows to be devils, because the truth is just not as interesting.
It was a Friday night when we pulled up to one of the abandoned properties outside the area known as Devil's Thicket, and climbed out of Mildred's old beater. This was oddly one of the only places where drug deals didn't seem to happen in Omphalos.
Ash, Mildred, and I were dabblers in the dark arts, but we looked like full-blown Satanists to the older generations, whose idea of teenage delinquency was cutting your hair short and wearing anything that wasn't up to Sunday school dress code.
The three of us first bonded in seventh grade over death metal and our combined household drama and we've been good friends ever since.
Once when we were in high school we drove out of town and came back with our tongues pierced and matching back tattoos.
Ash was grounded for a year after that, and the next time we went out of town together we got our clits pierced as retribution.
It hurt so bad when he pushed that piece of metal through me, but it felt kind of good too, and doing it with my girlfriends watching was kind of hot.
Ash had an orgasm when they did it to her, she would later say.
"Spoooky scaaaary," Ash remarked as we hopped over weed beds toward the middle of an open space in Devil's Thicket.
It wasn't really, "woods," but it was lightly forested and we had to walk between some trees to get to that open area that we'd spotted earlier. It was just a patch of bare earth with some shrubs growing on it where we could sit down, out of view.
"It's honestly creepier than I thought it would be," Mildred said, looking around at the withered trees reaching into the dark sky from all sides.
"I don't feel cursed yet," Ash said, her hands stuffed in her hoodie.
"Of course not, we haven't awakened any of the spirits," I said, trying to show some enthusiasm in the face of my own growing disinterest.
"Maybe we should get naked and do a seance," Ash suggested, "... or not, it's kinda cold," she said, hugging her arms close.
"You don't have to get naked to have seance," Mildred answered, flipping her raven dyed hair, her bracelets jangling as she reached behind her head and gripped the collar of her shirt.
"... I'm going to though," she giggled, pulling her top up over her head, her large pale boobs dropping out of her shirt. She had big round areolas with silver barbells piercing her nipples.
She sure loves to show those off, I thought, staring at them while she unbuttoned her jean shorts and pulled them down.
Mildred winked at me as she exposed her hairy cunt to us both, beads of metal glistening in her bush. I rolled my eyes.
"Mildred, one of these days I'm actually going to fuck you," I teased, watching her nearly fall over as she tried to slip out of her shoes with her pants still around her ankles.
"Umm, Ashley has dibs," she joked, making Ash blush behind her bleached tips. "... besides, you don't have the balls Sarah," she said, standing up straight, hands on her hips.
"Bitch, I will push my tongue so deep in your asshole ..." I started.
"Oh my god, gross, can we just get this over with so I can get back to my Minecraft server," Ash complained.
"Yeah yeah, hold on," I said, pulling my phone out of my jacket pocket and scrolling to the website about Devil's Thicket.
I squinted at the Times New Roman lettering creeping across my phone screen amid a graveyard of web one-point-o tables and gif animations while my two friends swayed impatiently on both feet.
"It says, in order to bring forth Ixim ... Ix-mal ... Ix-Iximaltu ...?" I read, raising an eyebrow at the word, "First spread yourself in a circle surrounding the place where his effigy is drawn ..."
I looked down at the bare dirt between us. Mildred huddled close to me to look at my screen as I scrolled to the part with the symbol, hearing Ash kick at the grass to find a stick.
"Jeez Sarah, I thought we were summoning the Devil, not some middle management, pagan nobody," Ashley said, handing a dry branch to Mildred.
