Chapter Three: Boom Ba Boom!
Charity couldn't stop giggling the whole time she was being tied down to the stone slab. It wasn't the scratchy feeling of the ropes biting into her plump freckled flesh that made her want to laugh, it was the sight of slim, blonde Dr. Edith Beddington dressed as an ancient druid priestess, complete with a feathered headdress and a pair of elk antlers!
"You should have given her more soma," complained a masked figure holding a torch. All the other priestesses were disguised as various animals and birds, and from Charity's perspective on the slab they all looked quite ridiculous.
"It would take a lot more than soma to make me think you're really a primitive nature goddess," Charity snarked, giggling even more as Batty Beddington began dabbing her face with paint. "What sort of animal am I going to be?" she asked, grinning cheekily up at her guide and mentor.
"You're not any sort of animal, my pet," Dr. Beddington teased, lightly flicking the redhead's snub nose with the tip of her finger. "You're the offering to the Horned One. He is the male force in nature that makes rain, and fertilizes the earth. He must have a sacrifice or the crops won't grow."
"A sacrifice?" Charity didn't feel quite so much like laughing now. She wished she hadn't taken so much soma and fallen asleep in Dr. Beddington's helicopter. One minute she was laughing her head off and chatting away about her humdrum job and her handsome boss and the next she was being tied down on the sacrificial slab!
"Male god, wild and savage! Male god, hard and hungry! Take the flesh of the earth, male god, and make it fertile!"
Tall, blonde sophisticated Dr. Beddington raised her bare arms to the heavens, and to her horror Charity saw that the sensible research scientist was actually holding a bone knife in her hands!
"NO!" Charity screamed and squirmed, but the knife thrust into her defenseless flesh never came. Instead a couple of heavy-set women in earth-colored robes began pounding on a pair of enormous kettle-sized drums. Boom, boom, boom ba-boom. Boom, boom, boom ba-boom.
"The Horned One is with us!" Batty Dr. Beddington shrieked, and all at once the other women began to dance. The beat of the drums seemed to sink into all of them at the same instant. It penetrated the earth, sank into the stone slab, and echoed off the black crags and filling every woman present with the same primal urge. Boom, boom, boom ba-boom. Boom, boom, boom ba-boom.
"Let me up, let me up, please, please let me up!" Charity was squirming and wriggling like a worm on a fish hook, trying desperately to get free. Yet her shrill cries and frenzied movements were only partially caused by fear. There was a growing excitement that seemed to take hold of her with every throbbing beat of the drums. Boom, boom, boom ba-boom. Boom, boom, boom ba-boom.
"Just feel the goddess inside you," Dr. Beddington whispered, using her jagged knife to cut the redhead free from the slab. "Give in to the ancient call of the Horned God."
Charity didn't know anything about any goddess inside of her, but the moment she was free her body began to move in a sinuous manner to the throbbing heartbeat of the drums. Boom, boom, boom ba-boom. Boom, boom, boom ba-boom!