31. April 15, 2023 #2
“My family settled here long before the Arawaks. I would proudly show off the property to you, but”—he shrugged—“I fear that wouldn’t be a very smart thing to do.
You might try to run away, and while you wouldn’t get very far, it would certainly be quite inconvenient and bothersome to have to retrieve you. ”
“Well, I would hate to be a bother,” she snarked.
He smiled placatingly. “And there is the fire that our brother, General Howard, loves so much.” He tilted his head to the side, his brow furrowed and his lips pursed as he considered her. Finally, he said, “I don’t see the appeal, myself. But… no matter.”
“So if I don’t get to see the property, you could at least explain where I am now. This doesn’t exactly scream of high-end living quarters.”
His mood became that of a professor combined with a cheerful showman.
He turned in a circle, hands palm-up in front of him.
“This property is an exact replica of our family home in Italy, which is one of seven such properties—one on each continent—that serve as a residence for the direct descendants of the founding members of the Salieri. If you were to look at this estate from above, in the middle of the courtyard, there is a building that serves as the family crypt. In order to protect our ancestors after their passing, this building was sealed, making it impenetrable to the elements. My ancestors learned their lessons from the gods’ destruction of Pompeii, which destroyed our home in 79 AD. ”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning, back in history, nature was revered. When disasters struck, the people respected the messages. They understood that if a hurricane, a tsunami, or a volcano destroyed a civilization, or a part of a civilization, it was a sign the gods were angry. Scientists today will deliver all kinds of claptrap about wind currents, gas pressure, tectonic plates, climate change, but the truth that we know”—he shook his forefinger at her as if she were a child in denial—“is that over time, the people were letting go of tradition, and that made the gods angry. People become complacent, especially when nothing happens for long periods of time, and they grow to disrespect the power of nature and the old ways as their knowledge allows them to climb closer and closer to the level of the gods. Natural disasters were the punishment for people’s loss of faith.
“Like the events of Pompeii in 79 AD would eventually create, in the eighteenth century, St. Lucia suffered its own version of volcanic destruction. The Soufrière Volcano erupted, destroying much of what was in the lava flows’ paths.
Hundreds of people died in an instant, livestock abandoned and lost, agriculture drowned in debris.
This plantation and others were destroyed.
The elimination of most of the island was our punishment for our hubris.
“But even in death, there is life.” He turned his head to her, the smile on his face appearing benign.
“The destruction yielded by the mountain may have buried our home, but this building alone remained standing, mirroring events recorded in the family archives in Naples. We were the ones chosen to survive the wrath of the heavens. We had been spared. Therefore, it was our responsibility to educate others and bring them into the fold.”
“You realize,” she said, “the reason the building survived is because it had no entry. It has nothing to do with pleasing the gods or following the old ways.”
He continued speaking as if she hadn’t interrupted him.
“In our gratitude, we dedicated this shrine to our god—the god of the harvest, home, and fertility. On the columns outside, all the family names are engraved to commemorate those who have passed before us. It is here that we honor them, their way of life, and it is here that we perform our most important rituals that perpetuate our kind, for this is our initiation room.”
She was pretty sure she didn’t want the answer to the question, but she asked it anyway. “An initiation into what?”
“The truth of the Salieri, my dear.”
“The truth? You mean the truth that you people are sick, sadistic motherfuckers?”
He walked toward the wall to his left, hands in his pockets, and stood before a depiction of three men holding their exaggerated phalluses, their heads thrown back in ecstasy, eyes closed, mouths open.
They surrounded a young woman, naked, on her knees, her hands behind her back, and her head arched, eyes wide in what looked to be pain.
A slim brown line around her neck suggested some type of collar, which Cherry guessed was attached to whatever was holding the woman’s hands bound behind her back.
One hand left Giudici’s pocket so that a finger could trace the outline of the woman’s form.
Cherry knew it was the flickering of the flames reflecting in the fluid of his eyes, but the orbs appeared to glitter with both malice and joy at the woman’s position.
After his finger had traced from the top of the woman’s head to her feet, likely also hobbled to her hands behind her back, he turned to her, and the mild-mannered professor seemed to return.
He gestured all around him. “Look around this room, and you will see the art and artifacts of a time long before Christianity. A time when polytheism was widely practiced, and the superiority of men over women was uncontested. It was a pure time when things were simple, clean, and accepted as is. Not like today when we struggle to understand even the most basic of life’s natural laws. ”
He took several steps back toward the sunken stage. She countered his steps so that she was directly across from him again. There was no way in hell she was letting this man get close enough to reach out and grab her.
“One man looked at the world around him and saw chaos where there should be control, and so, he formulated a plan.
He called himself Salieri, and he made it his mission to tame that chaos.
But to do that, he needed to start at the beginning.
To rip down the world as it was then and rebuild it in the way he knew it could be.
“He began by surveying the many gods that man worshipped, and he selected the seven whom he considered worthy of worship. He followed that by selecting his seven most trusted men—the Worthy—to form their own tribe dedicated to returning the world to its balance point. They did this by taking the laws he handed down to them, and then each of the Worthy went to the continent assigned to them by Salieri to begin reforming society through their progeny and philosophies.”
“And he just expected this to happen overnight? Maybe if he’d had the internet, but communication back then wasn’t exactly instantaneous. It could take years for communication to circumnavigate the globe.”
“He knew it wouldn’t happen overnight. But he believed in his ideals, and he knew that the Worthy would carry out his laws and that their sons would carry out their laws, and so on.
Since our originations, we have grown to reside on every continent, every country–including every one of the fifty states of America.
If there was a measurable population to be found, the Salieri spread to those places.
Our people reside in all walks of life. We have come a very long way in a historically short period of time, even without the internet, and we’re not done yet. ”
“In other words, he made himself a god and gave himself demigods as underlings to cater to his sick fantasies of how the world should work.”
Giudici smiled, the expression one of indulgence as if to show her how naive she was. His voice even radiated that of a patronizing teacher when he responded. “He created laws that made sense and gave them a way to correct the wrongs in the world.”
“I saw the paintings and the symbols in the main room. The Cult of Dionysus. Sabizia. You’re nothing more than a cult.”
He made a tsking noise. “Such an ugly word, ‘cult.’ You make it sound like we’re a bunch of backward souls who believe in the end of days.”
“What would you call it, then?” she spat.
“Your congregation might not be waiting for the mothership to come collect the chosen few after drinking the fruity communion drink to test everyone’s loyalty, but you’ve created an archaic religious dogma and twisted its views on fertility, hearth, and home to rationalize and normalize your own perversions.
You’re a male-dominated society who, under the guise of some fucked-up utopia, have willfully stolen women from their lives, forced them into sexual slavery, all to bear your children before sacrificing them to your ‘god.’
“You grow your numbers by searching out the lost, the abandoned, the disenfranchised, the marginalized, and the twisted. You prey on those who feel like no one understands them, and then you give them a taste of the paradise you sell them. Once they’ve had their free taste, like a drug dealer, you addict them to your product by ferreting out their weaknesses, convincing them that being initiated into your ‘organization’ justifies killing their wives, daughters, and other immediate female family relations to feed a disgusting mythology that was created expressly with the purpose of subjugating others.