when the farmers and their wives had desired something more, Santos and Cayetano had initiated a beautiful village girl to serve as a priestess. Her full figure and her nude dances had kept the men’s minds off the treasure for several weeks. But recently the villagers had become very impatient. They had begun to complain that they had grown weary of purging their bodies of demons. They were now demanding their share of the treasure.
In a last desperate effort to keep the villagers’ minds off the treasure, the Hernandez brothers had promised them the reincarnation of a local faith healer who had been dead for 50 years.
“In the eyes of the villagers,” Santos explained, “this woman has become a goddess. We have promised them that she will return to them in the company of an Incan god. Supposedly, even now, we are up on the mountaintop praying for their holy arrival. We decided that it would be to our greater advantage to come to Monterrey to bargain with you.”
Cayetano had already aroused Eleazor’s interest by his mention of the simple, but muscular, farmers. Magdalena had made no secret of her preference for love-making with her own sex, so Cayetano launched into an elaborate description of the charms of Celina, their local village priestess. With the Hernandez brothers focusing a dual attack on the vanity and the lusts of Magdalena and Eleazor, the prostitute and her pimp eventually succumbed to the lure of sex and money.
Magdalena’s frustrated creativity and sense of the dramatic were given full expression with the carefully orchestrated appearance of the reincarnated faith healer and the god before the astonished farmers and their wives. She and Eleazor appeared in the sacred cave in a puff of billowing smoke. When the “holy mists” cleared, the villagers fell in awe before the forms of the goddess and the ancient Inca god.
Magdalena imperiously informed the villagers that before she could once again perform healings or reveal the treasure, there must be a serious purging of their lusts and their bodily demons. Once she had warmed to the idea of being a goddess, Magdalena found that she had a real flair for fashioning impromptu rituals. On the night of the “holy one’s” arrival, the farmers and their wives were led through an orgy that included weird chants, bizarre dances, uninhibited sex, and the communal sharing of a bowl that had been filled with chicken blood and marijuana leaves.
The two priests and the two deities settled into comfortable adjustments. Eleazor and Cayetano had the robust farmers on whom to indulge their homosexual yearnings; and in the interest of harmony, Santos surrendered his claim on the beautiful Celina to Magdalena and contented himself with the rustic charms of the farmers’ wives.
After a time, however, there were once again rumblings of discontent. Jesus Rubio, a villager whom the Hernandez brothers had taken into their confidence since he was too bright to fall for the scam, came to them with tales of impatience and distrust among the people. Magdalena pacified the potential rebellion with an extra portion of marijuana leaves in the brew that she dispensed at the ceremonies.
Eventually, the day had to come when marijuana and group sex could no longer distract the poor villagers’ thoughts of ending their poverty with the Inca treasure. Jesus Rubio informed the conspirators that the men had grown weary of Eleazor and Cayetano using them for sexual acts that they considered loathsome and unnatural, and their wives had become impatient with the continual purging of demons from their bodies. The villagers wanted to see the glorious gold that they had been promised for so many months. Magdalena told the others that she would handle the problem. Her hardened survival instinct was about to bring the villagers a terrible kind of fear and immerse the cult into new depths of loathsome perversion.
That night she told the group assembled in the cave that, while it was true that most of them had been faithful, there existed among them those who had profaned the priests and the gods. “It is these doubters who are keeping the gold from you,” she screamed at them, “not the gods!” Pausing for effect and allowing the murmuring and the nervous side-long glances to subside, Magdalena continued: “It is the gods’ wish that you should be happy. But they will not release their ancient gold into the hands of those who doubt. Alas, all of you suffer because of the lack of faith of a few.”
A confused babble and wailing arose as the villagers loudly protested their fidelity and their devotion to the gods. At a secretive nod from Magdalena, Jesus Rubio pushed two men into the center of the circle.
The inca civilization left behind many artifacts of their religion, such as this figurine of one of their gods.
“Your Holiness,” he shouted above the gasps of surprise and the whimpers of fear. “These pigs have denied the old gods and their priests. They have blasphemed your own holiness. The guilt lies not with the others, O Holy One, but with these dogs!”
Magdalena was swift in her judgment. They must be destroyed. They must be killed or the gods would never release the gold of the ancient kingdom! With cool efficiency, the blonde “goddess” commanded the two men to be stoned and their blood collected in basins for the group communion.
After her grisly orders had been obeyed, Magdalena told the villagers that they must now work even harder to convince the gods of their love and sincerity. And thus it was that Magdalena Solis had created a method by which to guarantee the scam a longer life at the expense of a few villagers’ lives. She had discovered that impatient and dissenting followers might be dealt with in that most ancient and heinous method—human sacrifice.
By May 28, 1963, at least eight villagers had been eliminated by Magdalena’s primitive manner of cult purification. But also by that time, those men and women who guessed that they might be marked for sacrifice had begun fleeing Yerba Buena. Jesus Rubio reported that the villagers had been pushed as far as they could. It would probably be only a matter of a very short time before some of those who had fled the village would be contacting the Federales.
Cayetano, Santos, and Eleazor all voted to terminate the scam at once and head back to Monterrey before the authorities learned of their cult. Magdalena, however, decided that what the cult really needed to survive was one great and dramatic act on the part of the priesthood. Celina, the lovely village girl, had existed only to serve the cult. In spite of all the perversities that she had witnessed and the unnatural way that her body had been used, she had never lost her faith in the gods and the priests. Now, in Magdalena’s demonic mind, it was simply expedient to put the girl to death in an elaborately staged sacrifice.
Then, in one of those remarkable coincidences that so often halt a career of crime, perhaps the only citizen of Yerba Buena who did not know about the gods and the goddess of the cave, happened to walk by the cave at that terrible time and witness the vicious sacrificial murder of Celina.
Teenaged Sebastian Gurrero was a young man with ambition, and each day during the school year, he rose before dawn so that he might walk the 17 miles to the small, one-room schoolhouse in Villa Gran. With such a schedule to keep, young Sebastian had not even heard a whisper of group sex and ritual sacrifices. But now, all at once, he was witnessing a scene out of humankind’s primordial past.
After the girl had been beaten to a bloody, faceless corpse by ceremonial clubbing, a blonde woman in flowing robes put a torch to the pyre at her feet. A man, whom Sebastian recognized, stepped forward and shouted something about how he now wanted the gold at once. The woman in the robes screamed at him for being a doubter and commanded the others to fling him to the ground and to slash out his heart with machetes.
While Sebastian watched the gruesome act with disbelieving, horror-widened eyes, the villagers hacked upon the chest of the man and ripped out his still-beating heart.
