By: Daiyu Tang, Editor.
The road to Laveau lengthens after dusk, as though the town itself recoils from visitors. The tarmac fractures into uneven ribbons, each crack filled with the glint of swamp water. If I wanted to be more poetic, I’d say that the old moss drapes the cypress trees like mourning cloth to a funeral. That would be apt as that was my destination; a funeral.
The light came from a jaundiced moon supplemented by the dim flare of my bike’s headlight which caught the occasional marker nailed into wood, relics pointing to places that perhaps outsiders have no business finding.
There’s a motel and that’s the place where we gathered and where we planned. A seedy place where my accompanying shadow checked her weapons and where as I tried to lighten my thoughts, I felt sure that some would be mightily upset that Krystal and I were off in Laveau. Sometimes people you want to protect have to take a risk to protect everyone else.
I have made this drive before, sometimes in the Observer Van, satellite dish creaking like a spectre, sometimes with someone else in their car. Once in the boot of a car, bound and tied. Bad times. This time I took my bike and as I rode a fetid wind whipped at my hair and my khakis and boots were stained with the dirt and grime of Laveau long before I reached the motel.
Though a Laveau visitor before, I had NEVER driven here with an invitation like the one folded inside my pocket. It was written in a script that chilled me the more I studied it. A funeral. For a woman who was not dead. A promise that she would be breathing when buried beneath six feet of earth. The handwriting was careful, deliberate. And the signature at the bottom spoke with finality: The Salopri.
Everyone in Laveau and most in Hathian know the name, though none admit it easily, unless by chance you find one of the cult (A gang is such a Hathian word) and their smile broadens and their knives and clubs appear in their hands as if by magic; ‘You’ve found us, well done…’ I hear them say and then I imagine them raining blows down on outsiders who don’t pay their dues. Reader, I don’t pay the HPD and I don’t pay gangs. But still, prices are to be paid, somehow, sometime.
Whispers paint them as masked figures gathering under moons like this one, trading in rites that leave no bodies but too many questions. They are witches to some, demons to others. To most, they are a rumour best left alone. Not to everyone. There are the brave people who have to find out more. Me? Maybe.
And so yes, I went. I rode. I trembled. But I did it.
I would not go alone. The letter cautioned against bringing anyone else, but I am no fool. Secrets this sharp draw blood. So beside me walked Detective Inspector Krystal O’Neil of the HPD, a woman feared and respected, a cop whose command carries weight even in shadows like these. She was a risk, as all HPD are, but also an anchor. If I was to bear witness, I would do so with her steel at my side. I know my strengths and guns are not really one of them and while some of the HPD can’t shoot for shit, Krystal has a deadeye, but I hope a heart with some compassion in it.
We reached the cemetery by the abandoned airfield hangar. The stones leaned at strange angles, as though the ground itself wanted to swallow them whole, perhaps alongside other secrets, dark secrets that I had witnessed near here before, or dug into before as a student in dirt, damp and archelogy. The air was thick with the scent of wet earth and burning pitch. Torches flickered in iron stakes, their flames hissing in the damp night… ‘Oh Shit’ dear readers, ‘Oh Shit’ indeed! It was going to be one of those nights where I hoped for good and life, but was watching for and avoiding potential death.
Then we saw them. Figures in masks, cloaked in black, waiting at the edge of the graves. The Salopri.
At The Edge Of The Grave
The torches sputtered in the damp air, throwing restless shadows across the cracked headstones. Shapes moved within them, tall, deliberate, cloaked figures who seemed less like people than extensions of the night itself. The Salopri, even writing this, three times now, it makes me think of Boogeymen and Candyman. I’ve written them thrice, will they appear again even now in my filthy motel?
I’m not fearless my dear reader. Things in the night and the dark places, they scare me like they’d scare most of you. But it’s my job to go forward towards danger. Gossip and Food reviews are poor food when invitations like this are on the table and so as my breath caught despite my resolve I had to remind myself of who I was and wanted to be. I had covered gang wars, crime scenes, riots, every angle of blood pooling on Hathian’s pavements, even cults and rituals in Laveau before. Yet this was different. It was not chaos but order; a ritual that appeared older than law, older than Hathian city and her silly troubles like Storm Katrina or the Bakery or Maja or Carter…
I felt Krystal shift beside me. Her boots scuffing softly on the wet ground, but even she held her silence. This was not her domain, nor mine. We were intruders in someone else’s story.
Every instinct screamed at me to leave. To get back on my bike, or in Krystal’s car and to flee the two hours home to Hathian. But I could not. I tell you that my pulse was thudding in my ears and the damp was sinking through my camouflaged clothing, but still I forced my camera to take silent witness and my recorder to capture murderous words. Words emblazoned onto tape but fragments of something much larger at best. I knew that if I stopped recording and forgot being a witness and doing the work then I feared I would give in to the urge to run.
The ‘funeral’ was to begin. At the centre of the cemetery, a fresh grave yawned open, its soil piled high beside it. Beside that mound stood a coffin, lid propped open as though daring us to see its future occupant. The air was thick, cloying with incense that did little to disguise the smell of raw earth.
A figure stepped forward from the Salopri’s ranks. Masked, robed, and carrying an air of authority that stilled the rest. Their voice cut through the silence, low, ritualistic, almost musical. I could not catch every word, but I heard enough: a name. Sere Duvall.
The former HPD officer. The one they had promised in the invitation. Alive. But Condemned to the Grave.
I glanced at Krystal. Even through her practiced steel, I caught the flicker of something grim in her eyes. If the Salopri meant to bury a woman alive, then we were not just witnesses. We were accomplices, if only by standing there. Do something Daiyu, my heart said. And still, neither of us moved.
The Living Funeral
The Salopri encircled the open grave with a precision that spoke of rehearsal. No words passed between them, no faltering in their steps. They moved like a single organism, faceless and absolute, each masked figure lit from below by torchlight that exaggerated their shadows into grotesque giants against the stones. Different Costumes. Men. Women. Not many that I could even hazard a guess as to who was who. Of course I know some names associated with the group, some appear far more human in the light of Hathian’s concrete. Some might even do you a service in the streets of Backwater, but here, right now, they were serving only their dark ends and rituals.
And so then they brought her out.
Sere Duvall. Once a uniformed officer of Hathian’s police force, now bound at the wrists and forced forward, stumbling in the dirt. She was no corpse, no tragic casualty to mourn (or if you are most of Hathian, scorn or feel self-righteous about her fate). She was alive, terrified and her face caught the orange glow in every guttural flicker of the torches. Every detail struck me: the scrape of her boots against the gravel, the sharp cry when a masked figure shoved her to her knees beside the coffin, the frantic rise and fall of her chest.
It was a perversion of ritual. A funeral without death. A burial without consent.
The leader raised their hands, palms outward, as if conducting both the silence and the suffering. Their words followed, thick with cadence, and though I could not decipher every syllable, the intention was clear: this was punishment, spectacle, and sacrifice all in one. When I played it back, and adjusted the noise levels, there it was…
“This is the fate of those who betray their oaths and defile our order. You will not be remembered as a guardian of law, but as a lesson. Buried not in death, but in disgrace, beneath the soil you once swore to protect.” – Salopri officiant (leader?), at the living funeral of Sere Duvall
Every detail I tried to capture, whether by camera, memory or recording – alive. struggling. pleading. Each word sticking in my memory as if in bold text, as though my mind was ‘writing’ it, hard, so I could make it fill every pore and stop me from breaking if I forgot my role.
Krystal shifted beside me again. I knew her well enough to feel the restraint in her stillness, the unbearable itch to intervene, to tear through the masked mob with badge and gun. But even she understood the futility. Dozens of them, two of us. She let out a breath so slow it barely stirred the air, and I knew it was the closest she could come to cursing aloud.
The lid shut.
That sound, final, hollow, unyielding, reverberated through me. I wanted to scream, but my body betrayed me with paralysis and Krystal and I lapsed to our individual hell in the bushes. The Salopri set to their work with ritualistic calm, lifting the coffin and lowering it into the grave as though this were not a burial of a living woman but the most ordinary of funerals. A Sunday Service. Hathian’s Best. But no, this was Laveau’s ‘worst’.
Shovels pierced soil. Clods of wet earth hit the wood with dull thuds. One after another. The rhythm was unbearable. Each impact muted Duvall further, until there was no sound but the chant and the dirt. Done Deeds. Dirty Deeds dear reader. Nothing good here. Nothing sacred.
My hands shook badly, my lens wavered. The Observer has printed accounts of brutality, of corruption, of unspeakable crimes but rarely if ever had I felt myself sinking under the weight of helplessness quite like this. I caught Krystal’s eyes again, and what passed between us was wordless: we could not stop this, not now. We had to survive it, remember it, and if a chance, if a chance occurred, dig her out. But how long they would guard it, we didn’t know.
Only when the last shovelful of dirt was tamped down, when the masked figures lowered their heads in a final bow, did the ritual end. To our immense relief, the Salopri dispersed as silently as they had gathered, leaving only the grave behind, a mound of soil over a heartbeat we could no longer hear.
As the last of them drifted back into the tree line, their lanterns dimming into the swamp’s hungry embrace, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the ritual had not ended with Sere’s burial.
One masked figure lingered longer than the rest, standing with their head tilted toward the shadows, perhaps even to where Inspector O’Neil and I crouched. No words were spoken, no gesture made, yet I felt their gaze, unblinking, cutting straight through the veil like a cursed searchlight and into me. Whether it was paranoia or truth, the sensation was unmistakable: I felt they knew we were there. And worse, they wanted us to know they knew. They had invited me.
The Unearthing
When the Salopri melted into the shadows, the silence left behind was almost worse than their chants. Krystal moved first, commanding without hesitation, her voice clipped and sharp: “Get her out… now!” I remember dropping to my knees in the dirt, taking my shovel which seemed so small against all the work that the Salopri had performed and clawing with it at the earth sending soft dirt everywhere, staining myself with it. The ground was fresh and soft, but it still resisted us as if complicit in the cruelty.
Each shovelful of mud, was a race against the muffled risk of life slipping away. My chest tightened when I saw a strand of hair in the dirt, protruding from the coffin lid. Now we had to get the coffin open, something Krystal did after taking over when I, sweat stained and fatigued fell limply to one side.
The woman’s body was a ragdoll when we pulled her free still bound at the wrists. Her lips were parted, colour drained from them and her eyes were barely fluttering. For a terrible second I thought we were too late. The weight of it pressed on me: we had witnessed ritualised murder, thinly disguised as theatre but it appeared the puppet masters were good at their work… She would survive until the rescue, the rescue that their invite had allowed to be planned. I was played. An accomplice. They had tortured Duvall to the point of breaking her, made her believe she was buried and soon to be dead, but instead had invited me. They knew I wouldn’t let that death happen if I could possibly avoid it and so their plan completed. Full Circle.
What twisted plotting and cunning. Oh how good nature could be used for good purpose driven by an ill design. A terrible design. Only the raw stubbornness of two women, who refused to leave, kept this from being another disappearance written off as a rumour in Laveau. But I felt that the Salopri had known that. They had won, twice.
I pressed my ear to her chest and caught the faintest beat of life, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was unfinished business. The Salopri had let us see this. They had wanted us to see it. And that thought alone was more chilling than the grave we had just torn open. What would be next?
As we staggered back from the grave, mud streaked across our hands and faces, Krystal’s radio crackled with static that seemed louder than it should have been in the night air. The rescued woman barely clung to life, her breaths shallow, her weight supported between us as we staggered back to our motel.
A Warning Left In The Earth
What haunted me most was not her condition, it was the gnawing certainty that the Salopri hadn’t failed. They hadn’t lost control of their ritual, nor been thwarted by our presence. No, they had allowed us to take her back, to bring her into the light again.
Why? Was this meant as a warning to us or as an invitation to us? To Laveau? To Hathian? Was I, the Editor of the Observer, a pawn for them, making a spectacle of their macabre, making them appear larger in the dark of the ritual than the light of day.
Somewhere in Laveau masked eyes are still watching, waiting for our next step. They want me to fear perhaps, fear it won’t be us uncovering the grave. It will be us inside it. But I am a torch and some of us are the light and pawn or not, the stage curtain will be lifted and those smiling faces in the dark, will be the faces exposed in the light. Scars have always been my armour and while my reader, I need many a night to recover from what I say, I feel that armour. I feel the truth. I know that I can pull some strings and cut those that attempt to bind me.
For the truth. For all that is good.
((Photos by various, editing by Daiyu))
