CREATIVE CONSULTANCY X EXPERIENCE DESIGN

RAFA

Rafa had a ferocious loathing for flies.  Mosquitoes, ants, cucarachas and just about any insect met with equal animosity.  The only thing he hated more in life was Thiago, and he imagined that the flesh he held in his hands was his.

A thirsty swarm gathered around him at the first drop of blood and he punched the air, propelling the winged vampires against the wall and reducing the remains of their brief lives to a thin smear.  Knocking out a fly with a fist was a skill he had acquired as a young boy, forced to stand outside in the bold heat of day, dowsed in sugar water, while his father trained his eyes for a target as he fought to defend himself against the drove.  Those buzzing vultures, relentless in their pursuit of death, had plagued him ever since, but he considered it to be an occupational hazard in an otherwise rewarding career.  After sharpening his butcher’s cleaver, he hacked at the carcass with the ease of habit.

The blade grated against the bone as it seesawed, rocking through the meat and snapping the tendons like the strings of a puppet, letting the fingers uncurl from their fist in reflex as they released their final grasp on life, defeated, their puppeteer gone.  It was a signature of the gang to leave behind only the thieving hands of those that had betrayed them, so that their souls may never rest in peace and their loved ones never bury their hearts.  It was also a warning to other prospective traitors of the fate that awaits them if they too were to cross the gang.  When he was done, he would leave the rigid hands on the table, fingers pointing skyward and palms together in a voiceless prayer that would not be answered. 

Rafa could have ordered any of his cleaners to kill the man, certainly to carve him up, but truth be told, it gave him a hard on.  Bones breaking beneath his fists, the caving in of a defeated skull, flesh and cartilage merging as one under his rule - all of these excited him.  He honoured those moments when the fight was over and the man kneeling before him met his gaze with pleading eyes and begged him to pull the trigger and end his life.  Since he could remember, Rafa had destroyed anything that got in his way, but there was nothing that quite matched the exhilaration of taking a life.  Afterwards, there was a silence and energy peculiar to murder and he felt like a god, the scent of sweat and fear dancing with death in the air.

Though he cut a round silhouette, he was all muscle and manoeuvred the body of the man almost twice his weight with ease, his cigarette still resting between his lips.  Wrapping the body in tarpaulin, he fished around the mess of brains on the floor for the bullet.  Wiping it clean on his shirt, he slipped it into his pocket to add later to his collection.  One day, he planned to melt them into caps for his teeth so that when he smiled, it would be with the lives of the men that he had killed. 

Slamming the door against the weight of the dead man, he lay back against the bonnet of the truck and blew smoke at the moon, momentarily erasing it from the night in a haze of grey.  It was full and, standing alone, appeared to be cut out of the sky.  His mother had told him as a boy that when the new moon came, God would break up the old one into stars.  These days, his heart was as godless as the sky was starless and polluted by the deceased breath of the city.  Shoes dangled from the electricity cable above, representing the souls of the departed, and Rafa wondered how long they would survive up there before they found their way to someone’s feet.  Through the tropical decay of the favelas, marred with sewage and rotting waste, Rafa detected the distinct aroma of pão de quiejo wafting up from a nearby stove.  Despite having feasted the previous evening on enough meat - liberated from a delivery van - to feed the neighbourhood, his ungrateful stomach had already forgotten the favour and interrupted his thoughts with its rumblings, spurring him into action. 

The wheels bounced along the potholes, splashing black water up against the sides, as the corpse lurched awkwardly in the passenger seat.  The flooded narrow streets of the favela were littered with debris from the broken remains of homes crumpled in the mudslide.  Clothes fallen from a washing line bobbed on the surface like bloated bodies and rafts of corrugated iron drifted across the paths carrying no survivors.  Pots and pans that had washed up on the shores tumbled in the wake of the truck and these vessels were forced to take to the seas and ride its waves until, at sunrise, the scavengers would be out hunting for treasures to sell back to their owners.  There is a sound peculiar to the favelas.  It is constant day and night, even when to an outsider it might seem silent, it is still there, purring and humming in the dark, its breath rising and falling with the energy of the lives within.

‘It would be wise to take the high route if you’re going to dump me in the water.’

Rafa ignored the man but took his advice.  The last thing he wanted was to be stuck knee-high in mud with flies attacking him and a talking stiff.  From the corner of his eye he could see it shifting upright in the seat and turn towards him, animated.  Rafa, who was prone to such delusions, was well aware of its absurdity, but it never ceased to unnerve him.  He pushed the body back against the door and turned up the radio.

‘You’ve got blood on the window now.  The heat will make it congeal and you’ll have to scrape it off, you hate that.’

He turned to see the corpse had worked his way out from the tarpaulin and was tugging at the rope with his teeth, leering at Rafa with a delirious, clownish grin.

‘Fuck you.’

The dead man laughed and began to sing along to the tune on the radio, a Bahian classic from the seventies, with the obnoxious glee of a child seeking attention.  Rafa lit another cigarette from the butt of the previous one and focused on the road.  The air was already warming up at the first hint of sun, which lit up the iron roofs of the shacks, blinding his vision as if a thousand bulbs had just been switched on by its rays.  He rummaged in the glove compartment for his sunglasses, blood dripping onto his arm, wincing as they grazed the bridge of his nose, but he was grateful for the shade.  Broken countless times, it was now bent in a myriad of directions and was susceptible to resurrecting its pain at the hint of contact, last night being no exception.  Not that it was that which bothered him; it was the sound of the bones creaking and blood gurgling inside that he could not stand, particularly when accompanied by the mumblings of a dead man.

His head lolling around drunkenly, the corpse switched off the radio with the stub of his wrist, leaving the controls glistening and crimson.

‘So what are you going to do about Thiago?’

‘I’d rip his heart out in a beat if I could get to him,’ Rafa shot back as he sucked on his cigarette, turning the radio back on and wiping the blood on his jeans.  ‘Just a matter of time, the Lord only has a few years left.’

‘Bullshit if you ask me.’

‘I didn’t.  You’re fucking dead.’

Thiago and Rafa had grown up in each other’s houses and, only a year apart in age, they were like brothers.  One night, after closing a deal, their fathers had spent the evening with a couple of bottles of cachaça.  They had stumbled back to the slum as the skies were pulling at the curtains of the night, the sun dressing for the day.  Finding themselves in the wrong beds, it was revealed to each of them that the other had been sleeping with his wife, and for some time.  After a barrage of gunshots, the boys woke as orphans and enemies.

The Lord, an elusive character whose face few had seen, managed the gangs of the city’s major favelas and he summoned the boys to his castle high above the cardboard kingdom.  They would stay separately with aunts and uncles but he would act as their guardian and, in return, their lives would be his.  Heirs to the criminal thrones of their respective fathers, they were gang royalty before they reached puberty but the rift between them, and the blame they cast upon each other, drove them further apart.

Adapting well to the transition from friend to foe, the boys sought to injure each other at any given opportunity, and as children the drowning of one’s dog led to the burning of the other’s.  As adolescents, one boy’s girl became the other’s property, deals were botched and friends bribed.  Seven years ago, Thiago had coerced Rafa’s twelve-year-old cousin into acting as a mule.  The condoms of white powder had burst in his stomach and his toxin-riddled body had never made it through the night.  Around the same time, Rafa had torched the house of a friend of Thiago’s who was behind on payments and blocked the exits, reducing the tenants to ash.  Word got out that they were going to kill each other, but, perceiving unrest as a sign of weakness in his troops, the Lord ordered a truce.  He forbid them from any contact with each other and anyone that assisted them would find himself buried alive.  Rafa was to handle all local deals and Thiago international ones.  He had all the eyes of his domain on the pair and they could not get within a few yards of each other without him being informed. 

For years they had managed to get on with work and build their separate empires but their sons, reminders of their youth, had developed a bond.  They were only three years old, but the sight had dredged up the past and the unhealed wounds between them.  Rafa had watched them fighting with toy soldiers, and had understood that his son would never be immune to the inherited hatred and threat of Thiago, unless he settled it at last.

‘You’re already beginning to fucking stink,’ Rafa chastised the corpse as he wound down the window.  ‘Filho da puta.’

Pulling off the road, he parked up close to the waterfront.  It was a regular dumping ground for the deceased and the only living company were the flies but, fortunately at that hour, not even the mosquitoes were awake.  He lifted the body from the truck, the dead skin already paling against Rafa’s dark arm.  The blood, now redundant, trailed behind as he dragged it to the edge and rolled it over, ignoring his grumblings and pushing it into the inky water that bubbled and consumed it hungrily. 

‘Good riddance,’ Rafa muttered as he spat his disgust onto the floor.

As he made to leave, the glint of something on the surface, strangely rejected by the gluttonous water, caught his attention.  Flicking his cigarette aside, he lay down on his stomach on the edge of the bank and stretch out his arm to pull it in.  His fingertips caught the leg of a doll, dressed crudely from offcuts of material and stuffed with cotton wool, at once disturbing and comical.  He held it up to the light, ringing out the water and observing its mismatching eyes, stitched smile and felt-tip nose that gave it a ghoulish appearance.  Rafa searched his mind for the memories of his sister’s dolls and how, at his hands, each one would meet its fate with a pair of scissors, limbs severed with a knife, or find itself nestled in the latrine.  Regardless of the extent of his abuse, she would always play nurse and restore them, carefully sewing on a fresh eye or reattaching a head.  It was his niece’s birthday and he had not thought to get her anything, his wife, seemingly capable of haemorrhaging the money he gave her, would have picked something more substantial up but this would at least put him in good favour.  First, there was breakfast to be had and a deal to be cut.

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The early evening air stifled his mind as he gasped, unable to draw it into his lungs.  His head whirled with the stench of the street as the heat on the tarmac sent waves across his vision, sucking him into its kaleidoscope and he slammed hard on the breaks.  He had to breathe, pull himself out and straighten the lines, rearrange the sounds.  The cars danced, shifting and moving towards him as if bricks of a computer game.  He traced them left and right - reds, greens and yellows - willing them out of his way but they were building up around him and he was trapped in the gridlock, sucked into their engines.

The deal was far gone in his memory but he was still coming up off of it, the delirium was subsiding and leaving him only with a brain that pushed against his head, pounding at its walls to be released as it gnawed at his thoughts.  He had to get a drink and dull the thud, put them to sleep before they started to crawl around inside him.  Children were throwing stones at bottles at the side of the road, each smash of glass shattering his insides.  He swerved into the favela and the paco runts instantly pounced on him, mauling the car, banging on the doors like apes and howling for a hit that is gone in the blink of an eye.  Child soldiers for the gangs, they were cheap labour, armed with nothing more than a crippling and unforgiving addiction, they scoured the streets for business, selling to their peers.  Rafa threw a few wraps out of the window and the rats scurried around, hissing and fighting to get the prize.

Checking for signs of life inside the house, Rafa scuttled in, snatching a beer from the fridge, closing the curtains and turning off the lights, but they screeched on again.  His ears began to vibrate and bells toll at an unforgiving pitch until everything around him went quiet, the volume of the favela turned down.  The ringing grew louder again, warped noises flew inside his head and he turned to see his mother-in-law.  He held his hands over his ears but her mouth was wide and yawning colours as it came towards him.  He shut his eyes but forced them open again, squinting in the path of her vision, as he felt himself falling.  Words washed over him and he drowned in their waves as she thrust the doll in his face.  It screamed with her voice, a ventriloquist’s stooge, its felt nose pulsing, button eyes spinning; its body expanding and shrinking, breathing with her words.  Spit sprayed in his eyes and when he opened them she was writhing on the floor like a cobra, fangs bared, twisting her coils around him. 

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When Rafa woke, it was night and he was lying awkwardly across a chair, his hand still clasped around the beer can that his throat screamed for.  Bringing it to his lips, his tongue was met with tepid, ashy liquid and he sprayed it across the floor.  The sound of stirring in the bedroom forced him up and he staggered towards the door, pushing it open to meet the chill of the evening air as the sweat evaporated from his shirt and his head began to contract and clear.  A stray dog, balding and malnourished, sniffed around his feet and he kicked out at it, his boot landing in its ribs, producing a faint whimper before sending it skulking off into the shadows, conceding its defeat.  Rafa sat back on his haunches and breathed in deeply as the bricks of the words his mother-in-law had yelled at him began to cement together in his mind. 

The doll that he had unwittingly given to his niece was of the Voodoo variety and before his mother-in-law had hurled it out of the window, repulsed by his foolish ignorance and fearful of the forces he had invited in, she had reminded him of his ancestral dealings with the dark religion.  Macumba had sprung from the Voodoo religions of African slaves forced into Catholicism, merging the deities and saints and creating Candomble in the northern state of Bahia and more commonly in the south, Umbanda.  When his mother moved with his grandmother from the provinces to the city, she had abandoned her faith in its entirety, bitter at the unravelling of her hopes and unable to defend the tragedy that plagued her life.  Rafa’s grandmother then switched to Umbanda and practised it ardently until she died and it was her tales and spells that had intrigued the boy.  He would stand on a chair, peering down into her room and watch as she swayed, arms raised in prayer, the smoke of incense whispering in her hair as she made her offerings to the gods, anointing icons with oils and scattering flecks of bone, shaved from the skull of a goat, across the floor with coloured powders.  These voyeuristic moments had installed an irrational fear of the religion and its spirits in Rafa, the belief in which, though incongruous to his very being, he struggled to shake.  He saw faith as a need, a weakness, for he had no need of a god or anyone else.

The dog reappeared, chewing on a rag and maintaining a safe distance.  Through shards of light reflecting from its gleaming jaws, thick strings of saliva hanging suspended from its teeth, Rafa saw that it was the doll that it was devouring.  As it pierced its flesh, spearing an eye that cracked under the pressure and contorting its figure as it tugged at its head, Rafa imagined that it was Thiago.  With each spike of a tooth, each smack of its jaw, he heard him scream, felt his agony and an idea began to thread its way through his mind.  Suspending his doubts, he prised the doll from the mouth of the dog and headed in the direction of the Macumba quarter.

The new moon bounced off the tin roofs as he weaved his way through the narrow paths of huts and he felt the adrenaline stirring in the pit of his bowels as his mind played through his prospective torture of Thiago.  The drumming drifted towards him as he turned a sharp right in the direction of the temple.  Outside, children were goading a cockerel with a stick and he snatched it from them, throwing coins into the dust.  It clucked and crowed in his ear for a moment, then fell silent and still as if submitting to its impending fate.  People were gathered in a small courtyard, flanked by huts.  Candles covered the floor and illuminated shrines to the spirits on the walls, adorned with petals and sweet offerings.  Intoxicating incense wafted in the air and Rafa removed himself from its path, but was waved into it by the priest.  The congregation recognised him and parted in respect, born from fear, creating a path between Rafa and the priest, a slight, athletic man with skin that matched the night.  Handing over the cockerel, one of the mãe-de-santos offered him wine, which he declined.  This offering symbolised temptation from the devious hougans that belonged to the Loas, spirits that were contactable in prayer and invoked by rituals, often taking possession of the body of the priest.  Man could not communicate directly with the Supreme Being - Bondye - but the Loas acted as mediums and the priest began calling on them to take him, speaking in tongues, dancing and convulsing with an inhuman fervour, moving amongst the people, touching them on the forehead as the beat of the drums struggled to keep up with his feet that tapped until his motion became fluid and he floated across the ground, toes leaving a trail in the dust, his skin wet as he beat his fists against the wall, his voice no longer his.  Rafa slipped to the back of the crowd and waited until the end of the ceremony for a moment alone with the priest. 

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Rafa’s three-year-old son, the image of his father, was playing at his feet, pounding the mud with a stick.  The doll safely stashed in his back pocket, Rafa waited impatiently for the sun to make its retreat, restless and on edge, the anticipation simmering in his gut.  The priest had instructed that he could only use the doll once a day, after sunset and before midnight.  He had been reluctant at first, but Rafa had greased his palm and made amends.  There was no one who could not be bought in the favelas.  The use of dolls was rare and he had offered him an alternative that was more commonly practised.  Producing a bucket of water and a knife carved from the skull of a Brahma bull, he told Rafa to visualise the face of his enemy in his reflection in the water, then stab it once with the knife.  If the water turned red, Thiago would be dead.  Rafa had hesitated, wanting him to suffer before death, but consumed by temptation he had plunged the blade into the water.  It remained clear and, after some talk of spiritual toxicity and karmic repercussions, the priest had agreed to curse the doll.

As the pink skies slipped from the horizon, Rafa held the right arm of the doll between his thumb and forefinger and twisted it, bending and pulling it until the stitching around the armpit split and the stuffing exploded from the seam.  An image of Thiago, suddenly leaping up, convulsing, his arm twisted around his back and bones snapping, danced in Rafa’s head but it was not enough, he had to wait for Leon to return with news and, for the first time since he was a child, he prayed.  An ambitious twelve-year-old from the neighbouring favela, Leon had made himself available to the gang and had proved to be a valuable addition with his industrious manner and sharp thinking.  Whenever there was a job going, he appeared instinctively from nowhere.  That afternoon, he had come to Rafa asking if there were any errands to be run and he had confided his plans to the boy, setting him up as a scout to report back with news of Thiago’s torture.

Irritated by the distraction of his son who was relentlessly vying for his attention and eager to play with his father’s doll, Rafa decided it was wise to hide it, away from the clutches of suspicious mother-in-laws and curious sons.  After searching through the cupboard, he found a shoebox full of toys and buried the doll at the bottom before slipping it under the bed, as far as his arm would stretch.  When he turned to leave, Leon, his long hair wild and unruly, was standing at the doorway with the smile of a slave who knows he is about to please his master and Rafa knew that his prayers had been answered.

Rafa barely slept that night, for all the thoughts of what he was going to do to the doll and the suffering and pain he would inflict upon Thiago, safe from the eyes of the Lord.  In the days that followed, each night Rafa would ceremoniously take the doll from its cardboard coffin, cradle it in his arms and, in the seclusion of his perch on the roof of the house, prince of his private slum, he would wreak havoc and wait for Leon’s reports of Thiago’s broken ribs, bleeding nose and lacerated face.  His obsession taking hold of him and Rafa shunned deals, his appetite waned and his unshaven chin grew a beard, for nothing could occupy his mind if it was not thoughts of the doll Thiago.  The thrill of taking a man’s life had been replaced with a darkness, born from revenge, and it was a part of him, coursing through his blood.

On the fifth night, when he reached under the bed for the precious box and pulled it out towards him, he lifted the lid and found it empty.  The doll was gone.

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THIAGO

Thiago wiped the rim of the glass with his sleeve before pouring the rum.  He concealed his disgust as the Dutchman lifted the blade to his nose and eyed it with a fiendish, salivating hunger, before inhaling the powder with wolfish enthusiasm.  There was only one thing in life Thiago hated more than gluttony, and it was Rafa.

The impish grin that spread across the man’s face implied that he was satisfied with the goods.  The ship had arrived packed with Argentine beef to deliver to the parillas that line the streets of Amsterdam in honour of the princess, and a cocktail of drugs to distribute across Europe.  A boy returned from counting the money and whispered into Thiago’s ear.  He stood, allowing his tall, willowy frame to tower over the portly and graceless gringo, and extended a hand.  The man shook it and beamed, his crooked teeth protruding through his flushed lips, before knocking back the last of his drink.

As the car drove away from the docks, and the ship set sail, Thiago held the counterfeit notes up to the sunlight that was just peering through the clouds to herald the coming day.  There were just a handful of them, but he was a man of principle.  When the cargo eventually arrived at its port, he had seen to it that the dealers would find one of their henchmen strapped to the deck, skin charcoaled and flesh torn apart like a Parsi corpse.  Thiago had personally seen to his end.  First, he had crucified him with ropes tied to his wrists and ankles, splaying him across the deck.  With the patience and dexterous ease of a surgeon, Thiago had castrated the boy with his own knife.  When he passed out from the pain, his body sparing him from the torture of Thiago’s hands, he had forced him awake with the threat of gouging out his eyes if he were to go under again.  Spearing the severed member on a pole to the wind, he ensured that the boy would have a front row seat as the birds picked at the flag of his manhood.  To guarantee that he would not bleed to death but instead face agonising days of hunger, sunburn and the beaks of vultures, Thiago stitched up the wound.  With a length of thread left over, he removed the gag and responded to his pleas by piercing the flesh above his lips, sewing his mouth together and leaving him with a twisted, dribbling, pout.

Leon, so-called for his sandy mane and courage that surpassed his experience, would be waiting for him at home that morning with tales of Thiago’s supposed injuries and ailments from the previous night.  The son of the priest that Rafa had confided in also worked for Thiago, and on the same evening of Rafa’s visit he had betrayed the trust of his father in return for a rung on the ladder, but Thiago had no intention of fulfilling the promise as he despised disloyalty.  On learning of the news, he had called for Leon, in whose ambition he saw something of himself, and sent him to Rafa to make himself available to him and thus act as a spy.  Thiago relished in the game and welcomed the entertainment, for unless he was constantly occupied he struggled with the frustrations of his mind and there was a madness that growled in the shadows and threatened to consume him.  Over the past few days, Leon had been watching Rafa playing with the doll from a neighbouring roof and reporting back to Thiago with every pinprick, twist and rip, before also delighting Rafa with elaborate stories of Thiago’s agony in return.  Thiago drank in the reports and relished in mocking Rafa’s naivety and treasured the day that it would be exposed to him.

Despite his conviction that Rafa’s spiritual weakness would not give credit to the curse, Thiago always erred on the side of caution and had paid a visit to the priestess for prudence’ sake.  The vile temptress had welcomed him in with her open thighs, her rolls of indulgence spilling from her dress and her medusa locks piled on top of her head.  Placing an offering of milk into a coconut shell at the altar, he knelt before her and allowed himself - though every part of his being was repelled by it - to be caressed by her heavy hands and dagger nails, as she warned him of the dangers of the doll, of the afflictions it might cause him and the irreversible evil that it would unleash.  From a wooden chest she produced a naked doll and the materials to create a true likeness of the intended in order to fully incant the curse.  With each stitch she called on the malevolent spirits to grant the degree of suffering Thiago desired to fall upon his lifelong enemy.  Before he left the clutches of her voluptuous iniquity, she placed on him a protective spell so that, if Rafa did manage to manipulate the doll effectively, no harm would come to Thiago.

The following night, Thiago turned into the favela, where Leon was waiting for him.  Shielding the sun from his eyes, his mane ablaze in the light, he came to the window to deliver news of the doll’s success.  Rafa had suffered headaches, palpitations, burns and temporary blindness that had reduced him to a howling wreck, disturbed by the mystery of his afflictions.  The night before, Thiago had traced the outline of the doll Rafa with even pinpricks, twisting the point around the stuffing, scratching at the seams with a needle and pressing the end of a recently extinguished match into the plastic buttons of the eyes, warping their frame.  He thought of the strength vanishing from Rafa as he searched for his tormentor, madness consuming him as his mind struggled to process his agony.  Finally, he had watched with twisted fixation as the flames of a match licked the synthetic fibres of its groin.

Leon interrupted his thoughts to inform him that the doll Thiago had disappeared.  Rafa had been seen tearing apart his house, a whirl of feathers and debris, until he was incapacitated by Thiago’s revenge.  A tide of concern rising within him, Thiago realised that he would not be protected if the doll fell into another’s hands.  He instructed Leon to join Rafa in the search, while privately conducting one of his own, then to ensure that Rafa went along to the deal that afternoon as planned. It was not enough to hear reports of his enemy’s agony, Thiago wanted to witness the suffering with his own eyes.

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The afternoon was surrendering its heat to the evening wind as the car came to a set of traffic lights.  The road had been torn apart by a collapsed bridge, its metal body rusted and mottled, lying forgotten at the curb.  A legless man, perched on a crude wooden trolley, pushed himself awkwardly across the tarmac with the palms of his hands.  He hovered expectantly beside the car and Thiago rolled down the window to greet him, holding out one of the counterfeit notes between his fingers.  The man reached out for it and Thiago let go with a feigned gesture of remorse as it fluttered in the wind to the other side of the road.  As he gently put his foot on the accelerator, Thiago watched in the rear view mirror as the man struggled after the worthless paper.

Pulling into a dirt track that ran above the quarry, Thiago searched for a place that would give him a clear view of the scene while concealing him from the eyes below.  Doll in hand, Thiago lay down a blanket on the ground, removed his shoes and placed them carefully to one side.  As he waited for Rafa to appear he surveyed the landscape, the favela flowing down to the sea, its banks bursting with a jumble of brick and iron, painted haphazardly in a rainbow of colours.  Thiago loathed the disorder of it, and thought its vibrancy vulgar.  When he replaced the Lord, the certainty of which he considered to be only a matter of time, he planned to tear it all down and instruct the people to rebuild identical huts, painted white and in a grid that would appease his eyes and aversion to chaos.

The wheels screamed the truck’s arrival as it came careering round the corner and to a dramatic halt a few yards from the waiting men.  Rafa stepped down gingerly onto his ankle, wincing as he made his way towards the dealers with a lumbering gait, swinging his legs wide apart and to the side.  Thiago marvelled at his work, gently moving the foot of the doll backwards and forwards so that Rafa stumbled drunkenly.  He tripped, sliding on the gravel, but managing to regain his balance just before his arms started to flail around and their hands betray their master, scratching at his eyes.

The men got out of their cars, unsure of what to make of the spectacle ahead.  At first, they mocked and goaded him in good humour, but as Rafa dropped to the ground and began crawling on all fours, his limbs jerking as if a rabid dog, their laughter grew nervous.  Rafa’s hands clutched at the ground, pulling him along while his legs dragged reluctantly behind him and he began to howl as his skin tore against the rough surface.  As the men advanced, this time with aggression, Thiago decided it was time to play, for this was the part he had anticipated with zeal.

Rafa began to gag, doubling over, his expression of humiliation and confusion turning seamlessly into panic as he embarked on a series of violent convulsions, coughing and choking.  Sucking desperately at the air through his nose, his eyes went white as they slipped into the back of his head.   Frantically clutching his stomach, as it rippled to expel what was brewing inside, his face turned to horror as his skin began to visibly crawl.  Raising his face to the sky, a growl ran through his body from his gut and vibrated in his throat, growing in strength until his mouth was forced open in a scream.  A thick black plume of flies billowed out, spiralling in the air and pouring from his eyes, ears and nose, forming a dark cloud that cast a shadow over the ground as it hovered above Rafa who was left dazed and trembling, crying quietly into the dust. 

Thiago wafted the flies away from the honey-coated doll and wrapped it in a plastic bag, leaving behind Rafa’s screams as they merged with the humming swarm below.

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Thiago woke with his fingers clawing at his throat and searching for the hands that strangled him, the breath gone from his lungs, but they fell short.  The screams of his wife invaded his ears and she found the lamp, flooding the room with light, but they were alone.  Thrown from the bed, he crawled on his knees to the door, reaching out for the handles but his hands recoiled, cramping into a fist, crippled by a crushing sensation as his knuckles cracked and bones broke.  His screams merged with those of his wife, who had been reduced to a wreck of tears and fear against the wall.  The pain subsided momentarily before he was dragged by the hands of a ghost, along the corridor and down the stairs, his head smacking against the steps, ringing his internal bells until there was silence.

When he came around, he sent his wife to retrieve the doll Rafa from the back of the drinks cabinet, but she returned empty handed.  A message arrived from Leon to report that Rafa was in a worse state and that word had spread to the Lord.  After three days of Thiago and Rafa enduring endless, random and painful afflictions, tortured and broken, cowering under the sheets of their bloodied beds, they were called to the castle.

The Lord was a myth to many of the residents of the favela, though they feared and revered him nonetheless.  He lined the pockets of wealthy landowners and politicians, and in return kept the cucarachas in check.  To the people of his cardboard kingdom, he provided for them and robbed from them in equal measure, a necessary evil.  To those that worked with him, he was referred to as the Father of Fear.  A merciless and calculated ruler, he promised salvation so long as it was returned with unconditional love and obedience.

It was the first time that Rafa and Thiago had come together since they had last been summoned to the Lord as young boys.  Thiago, despite his agony, had insisted that his wife clean him up, bandage his wounds and press a fresh suit.  Rafa, by contrast, crawled in with the aid of a stick, a mess of sweat and blood, caring not for his appearance, his pride long abandoned.  The pair did not acknowledge each other and avoided eye contact, fixing their gazes on the Lord.  He was sat in an elaborate armchair, propped up by a number of cushions that supported his eighty-three-year-old frame.  Dressed in his signature three-piece white suit with purple piping, he puffed gently on a cigarette, black with a gold filter, his staple Sobranie Black Russian.  Obsessed with Russia and its oligarchs whom he idolised - even claiming some distant Soviet ancestry himself - he imported premium vodka and insisted on drinking only White Russians. His eccentricities, for which he was famed, were counterbalanced by his fierce and tyrannical rule, which knew no limits in its barbarity.  Thiago thought of the throne as one day his and noted with confidence that the Lord appeared weak, his frame fragile and pathetic, a shadow of the fearsome warlord they had stood before as children.  Yet there remained an air about him, dark and unforgiving, that disturbed Thiago and quietened his thoughts.

‘Hate is a disease, a parasite.  It feeds off the host, consuming those around him and tricking them with its many faces of evil,’ he said before erupting into a series of coughs and wheezes.  His white hair curled in wisps around his weathered face, his skin pallid and eyes cold.

‘You must make amends with the spirits you have angered.  It is up to them whether you live or die,’ he resumed.  ‘You will battle it out right here, as equal men, with your words and fists alone.’

Rafa and Thiago were silent as they digested his words, without exception it was never considered appropriate to speak to the Lord unless a question was directed.  He stared into their eyes to ensure that the gravity of his words had taken effect, and for a moment he had the expression of a man about to confide some internal darkness in order to offer another light, but instead he waved them out with a dismissive flick of the wrist.  Flanked by his men, Thiago and Rafa were escorted to the square that lay on the border of the neighbouring favelas.  It was as if the entire city had been summoned to watch the battle, scores of people had come out in the midday heat to witness the demise of the men and there was an already triumphant fury in the air.

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Standing at opposing corners of the square, the ruined men swayed in the wind while enterprising youths took bets on the sidelines, the crowd chanting and jeering, thirsty for blood.  Rafa came hurtling towards Thiago and he ducked to the left, crashing to the ground as he lost his footing, the triumphant whoops of the spectators sounding out at the sight of those they had long feared so defeated.  Thiago lurched awkwardly towards Rafa, throwing misguided swings and empty punches, his expression one of bewilderment as he struggled with his body as it defied his commands and control slipped from his grasp.

Thiago scanned the crowd and his eyes finally rested on his wife, and then his son, who was playing soldiers with another little boy, his back to the square.  As the light danced with the hair on his son’s head, the other boy turned and Thiago saw Rafa’s son, his image the same as the boy Thiago had grown up with.  A punch to his stomach winded him and propelled him across the ground.  As the legs of the crowd shifted and blurred, he focused again on the boys and saw that it was not soldiers in their hands but the dolls.  Each one was holding the effigy of his father, playing with the dolls just as they had seen their fathers do, unaware of the sinister effect of their game.  As the priestess had warned Thiago, the spirits had channelled themselves through the young boys, who, as children were blank canvases and susceptible to the persuasions of the dark spirits.  Now they unwittingly held the fate of their fathers in their hands.  Thiago watched with horror as his son twisted the arm of the doll and he felt his own cracking behind him.  As the boys fought with the dolls, he and Rafa swung empty punches and hollow kicks at each other with mechanical limbs.  Thiago tried to call out to the boys, but as he did so he felt his lips pulling closed, his mouth sealed and his screams stifled.  He clasped his hand to his mouth and felt with his fingers the stitches crudely sewn across and his eyes hardening to buttons.  He tugged desperately, picking at the invisible string until his lips came apart and the flesh of his gums tore, but when he gasped for breath they were sewn again and his metamorphosis progressed.

Thiago turned to Rafa who was dancing, his leg jerking back and forth and his neck twitching, his limbs pursuing different directions as his son played puppeteer, the crowd cheering at the pantomime clowns.  Thiago clambered to his feet and moved towards Rafa.  Taking a rock in his hands, he hurled it at Rafa to get his attention but he refused to acknowledge him and Thiago fell back down, squirming in the dust, until his son picked him up and resumed his torturous play.

Leon, with cunning that matched or surpassed his courage, appeared, crouching down next to the boys.  He turned and met Thiago’s stare with menace.  Raising his hand, Thiago was blinded by the glare of the sun as it bounced off the instrument of death that he held in his hands.  Thiago waited and watched, unable to act, fear replaced with acceptance and a sense of admiration that could only be sought between two evil souls as Leon lowered his palm to reveal a pair of scissors.

An intense, burning sensation erupted in Thiago’s stomach, its flames licking his bowels and his legs screamed as they were torn from his torso.  A street dog had snatched the doll from his son and was now in a tug-of-war with another mongrel that had joined in the excitement, its teeth impaling the button of an eye, saliva drowning its stitched mouth and nose as it was ripped apart.  Stuffing spilled out, sending cotton wool into the air, much to the amusement of Thiago’s son, who clapped and chased the innards, oblivious of his father’s brutal and impending death a few yards away.

As he was torn from the world, Thiago watched as Rafa’s son dangled his father by a leg.  With the other hand, he opened the scissors and brought them around the cloth neck, slicing the blades together with deliberate and innocent zest.  As Thiago’s torso hit the dusty ground, his legs dragged elsewhere by an unseen force, he watched the head of his old enemy bounce and roll in the dirt, spinning on its crown until it finally came to rest in front of him.  Rafa’s eyes stared back with tears of blood and a tongue that lolled deliriously from the corner of his mouth, clamped in a foolish grin, and Thiago laughed his last breath.

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