The Dragon Cult (Part 1)

“The Dragon Cult”  

By 

Dale W Tice  

  

Part I 

 

 

 

Copyright 

Dale W Tice 2020 

  

 

 

                                     

                                                                       

 

In a small city in east central Mississippi at the hour of midnight of October 13, 1928 a man was hung for murder.  Today the people of Meridian have no memory of it because it has been erased in the wake of time and forgotten.  The hanging once was something all the locals talked about, until it slowly passed from history to legend but the legend didn’t age well and the generations that followed eventually forgot that a noble man was hung for murder in their city.   

The night of the hanging was uncommonly cold with a curious wind blowing across the land.  In the hills south of the city a fog had collected upon them and was creeping slowly downward upon the square where the hanging was taking place.  Occasionally, a flash of orange lightning flashed in the cloudy black sky.  The hanging was to take place at the hour of midnight so when the first of twelve tolls of the bell rang out over the land the judge, an old round short man with a long white beard and moustache wearing a white suit and panama hat begin to read the charges of the condemned.  

The man to be hung was Count Drachen Blutgespart who stood contemptuously before his noose as he curiously observed the spectacle taking place in his honor.  His face was unmasked, at his request, having argued to the judge that it was his right to witness the events that were going to climax in his death.  The judge agreed, but he couldn’t think of why.  What the count saw was many people from all over south Mississippi who had for some odd reason like to see a man hung. Some of them brought torches on this night because the city lights were of poor quality and what light they cast was quickly swallowed in the descending fog that hovered just above their heads impeding many of their ability to barely make out anything but a vague image of the Count staring down at them.   

The judge requested the hanging to take place at day when a proper hanging should happen, however, the Count requested it take place at night, and again the judge agreed to it, to which he could not explain why.  The Count had very persuasive friends who had a strange ability to make people do things they wouldn’t normally do.  Most that gathered that night also found the midnight hour to be extremely odd and unnatural for a hanging.   

Drachen Blutgespart was a not a real Count with a castle and crown and all the accoutrements of royalty.  His family was royalty, but they were royals with little of the old fortune that the family once owned and none of the power.  The count was the last heir of his family, so Drachen received the title.  The land had been taken by the stong central governments who used their strength to subject the people.  His father, seeing unrest building in Europe, knowing what happened in France the previous century, fearing for the safety of his family, left for America. Looking for a home they wandered into the deep south where he set up shop to make suits for men and dresses for women.  Having heard Meridian to be a cosmopolitan city accepting of people of different religions and cultures, he decided to settle down and grow his business.  On death of his father, Drachen became a Count with no gold, no crown, and no castle.      

Everyone called Drachen not by his true name but by the nick name his father had given him, Drake.  Drake’s father chose to give him a nick name to hide the boy’s peculiar name and their east European past.  Drake’s father accepted the religious climate in the south wasn’t tolerate as he hoped, though it was a city of Jews and Gentiles.  Their religion was a little more difficult for the town folk to accept and many of them referred to the Blutgespart families religion as devil worship.     

Drake’s parents did what they could do to hide their son’s east European heritage so he would fit in with American society while in private closely adhering their own beliefs.  They even occasionally attended Christmas and Easter ceremonies at one of the local churches to meet people within the community.  However, when your son is six feet six inches it is difficult for him not to draw attention of locals.  He was a man among boys in high school.  After graduating school, he joined the Army and was shipped off to Europe to fight for the allies against his own people in the bloody battles of the western front.  When he returned home after the war, his parents both died shortly after being infected with the Spanish Flu.  Drake wasn’t interested in continuing the family business, so he sold his family business to a Lebanese family that recently moved to town.   

Settling into a common man’s job Drake grew a beard and moustache which were both dark reddish-brown color as his hair.  He had a long hawk shaped nose which hooked downward at its tip.  His eyes were green and set deep inside his skull and his lips were thin and the color of cherry.  Normally, his skin was fair but, on this night, it was as pale as death itself.  One man in the crowd observed how white Drake’s face was.  He quietly snickered with some of the men and whispered to them, “he is damn scared of dying that all his blood has left his face,” and the others around him that heard what he said laughed with him.  One short stocky woman replied, “if he were a Christian man, he wouldn’t be afraid of dying.”  

Drake continued to observe the spectacle while listening to the fat round judge continue to read the findings of the court.  He didn’t need to hear the judge because he knew the facts of the case and the fact is, he knew he never killed the Rei, but he knew who was guilty of the crime, it was his wife. Yet, he would never stand back to watch his wife hung for a killing that the dead man deserved, so he confessed to the crime.    

Drake wondered quietly, as he looked down on these men who had brought their families to see him hang, why they needed to see a man being put to death like it needed spectators.  “It’s morbid,” he told himself.  “What sort of person would bring their kids to watch a man takes his last breath from the end of a rope?”  But he knew the kind, the kind of man who would do this and he also knew there was no use in begging for his life or trying to explain to them what really happened, they would never listen.  They all knew Rei and liked him even though Rei may have even slept with some of their wives.  That was the sort of guy Rei was.  He did not respect the boundaries of marriages and made his moves on women married or single, it made no difference, he wanted them all.  Therefore, Drake didn’t plead to them that he was innocent, they would never hear his words, only his cries.  He had been fairly tried and a jury of his peers have found him guilty and the judge sentenced him to “hang until dead,” and that was good enough for them.     

Some of the men he saw watching him from below he knew well.  Drake was a belfry at the Union Hotel, and he had seen many of these same men come to spend the night with other women and some them, well, they would secretly meet other men at the hotel.  He did not pass judgement on them for them indiscretions.  He understood the nature of the beast that exists in all men.  What good would it do if he were to start shouting down at them, calling out their sins against God and the damage they have caused in their own marriages even as some of these same men now shouted up at him calling him a “devil worshiper.” They were the real devils living sinful lives of alcohol and sex. “What good would it do if I spoke of these things,” he wondered. “It would bring no good in the world,” he told himself and what Drake wanted to see in the world more than anything else was more love and goodness.   

The reason the people below called him a devil worshiper was because of his religion which was brought up in the court and revealed to everyone in town that Drake was a secret member of a secret church called “The Dragon Cult.”  The cult followed the teachings of secret traditions of the Dragon Society, a secret organization created in Europe in the fourteenth century.  The word cult has different connotations in different parts of the world. The people in the south recognized the word as a small group of devil worshipers while Drake’s mother’s Hungarian family saw the word as the equivalent to English word worship.  No, they were not devil worshippers nor were they Christians, in the sense of what American Christians believed.  However, to the Southern Baptist, Catholics and Jews gathered below saw it as devil worship, regardless of what Drake Blutgespart said.   

The Dragon Cult believed in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit but they were polytheist and believed all these forms were not one in the same but different spiritual beings. They also bowed before the cross, but their cross was squared with flames burning at the four ends. They believed in the power of the blood bonding men to their God. They were baptized in a ritual called a bloodbath, where newborn babies are bathed in blood rather than dipped in water for salvation. They also ate the flesh and drunk the blood and believed in eternal life.  Another difference is the Dragon Cult believed certain followers were destined to spend eternity here on Earth.   

The Dragon Cult had few members allowing them to pass through the centuries overlooked by the church, kings and dictators.  Their priests were secretive about their matters and revealed themselves to non-followers only in difficult times and out of necessity.  It was this reason that one of the Priest and six of his followers visited Drake in jail the previous night to give him his last rights in jail.  They also married Drake to the woman he loved and wanted to share the rest of his life and his death with.      

The priest convinced the sheriff in charge of Drake to let him have privacy with his wife to consummate their marriage.  The sheriff, who was a man of God, was adamant, at first, that he would never allow anything of the sort to take place in his jail. “It’ll be over my dead body before I allow an inmate of mine to make love to a woman in my jail.”  The sheriff was persuaded to allow the act to take place by the priest, who had a way of convincing people to do things against their will.  Days later the sheriff would find himself thinking and questioning “why he allowed such a thing to take place in his jail.”  He never knew he had been convinced by an old technique of the called mystification.  

With the last rites performed, his soul cleaned, and marriage consummated, Drake was filled with neither anguish nor sorrow as he stood on the scaffold facing the noose. He had been saved, married and had intercourse with his wife, during her ovulation period, giving him a chance of passing along his seed to another generation of Blutgespart.  Things were looking up for him, if not for the fact that he was moments away from dying. 

The judge finished up the last lines of his pronoucements with these words “Count Drachen Blutsgespart will not be hung until dead for the murder of our lost son, Rei Kikuchi.”  The judge gave a slight cough, then rolled up the piece of parchment into his hand, turning to Drake and asked him “Do you have any last words to speak?”     

Drake look across the sea of faces until he settled on one standing in the front row, wearing all black, with a black veil over her face and sobbing into a white handkerchief.  The woman, he knew, was Rei’s wife.  She and Rei hadn’t been married long, having eloped only few months back.  Her name was Sarah and she, hearing that Dabria, Rei’s fiancée was to visit Meridian in the coming weeks, convinced Rei she was pregnant with his baby and that they should be married.  Even being betrothed to another woman, Rei conceded and married Sarah, telling her that he would have to tell his fiancée in his own way.  Sarah agreed.  As Drake looked down on her, focusing on her belly, he could tell there were no signs of her being pregnant, and he did not sense another life inside of her.  Drake raised his eyes, turned to the judge and spoke these words “I have nothing to say.”  Murmurs erupting in the crowd, they expecting to hear Drake say something before he was hung, he was not going to give them anything.   

 

The judge head dropped pushing his chin into his chest.  He had to take this moment to collect himself before he continued.  He was hoping Drake would confess to his crime and ask for forgiveness, but instead he chose to speak no words to the accuser. He knew both Drake and Rei and considered both to be good men.  Rei hadn’t been in town long but had made a name for himself in the legal field.  Drake, the judge knew to be a quiet man, who spent most of his time alone, reading and sometimes writing poetry. The judge hoped Drake would say he was sorry for murdering Rei and reject his devil worshipping religion, but he didn’t.  The judge took a moment to collect himself then raised his face again to say, “then may God have pity on your soul.” The judge turned to look at a tall gaunt man standing in the corner of the scaffold with a dark mask covering his face. Nobody had to be told who he was, they all knew.  He was the hangman, the bringer of death who had brought death to many a guilty man and some innocent ones, which he lost no sleep over.  You see for as long as Dragon’s existed there have been those that have searched for them to slay them.   

The man had holes cut in his mask for his eyes to look out of and a hole cut for his mouth to breath from.  He enjoyed the pageantry of a hanging and being that Drake being a devil worshipper would make this hanging even more special.  He stepped forward to pull the lever to hang Drake making a dramatic sound with each of his slow cautious footsteps.  He walked around to where Drake could see his face and Drake did not look into his eyes but instead focused on the ugly rotted teeth hanging from his mouth, covered in brown tobacco spit.  The hangman secretly enjoyed the act of hanging a man.  He liked to listen to heavy breathing of a condemned man about to breath his last breath.  The cries of forgiveness sung like a song in his ears.  People also feared him because they knew that he was the hangman and he liked that.  But when he walked over to where Drake stood he was disappointed because he heard no tears, he heard no heavy breathing, and being his faced was not covered he was able to look into his eyes hoping to see fear however, all he saw was a man standing proudly prepared for the next phase of his life, death.  “You want be so brave when you feel the air denied of your lungs as you kick for life at the end of my rope,” the hangman whispered to him.  

Drake smiled at the man then whispered back “look at my face.  Study it well because this will be the last face you see as your heart’s last beat fades to lifelessness.” 

The hangman paused for a moment to take in Drake’s words but as he thought about them, he told himself “how can he seek revenge.  He’ll be dead,” the hangman laughed at himself for taking the threat seriously. The man then took his slender fingers and wrapped them tightly around the wooden lever.  He now took a moment to look at the crowd staring up at him.  He liked the attention he always got at that moment.  His fingers then adjusted around the wooden lever and he turned to look at the judge and when the twelfth ring of the bell began to peal, the judge nodded, and the hangman gave the lever a violent jerk.  Below Drake’s feet a gate opened, and he fell through it.  And that is how the mortal life of Count Drachen Blutgespart came to an end.       

But there’s so much more to a story than just the end of the story itself.  The curious reader must know more than the end.  They want to know how we reach this point in the story and what events took place that got us to the end.  And so now I will tell you what events came before this and what events followed this, so the inquisitive among us may this all happened.  So, if you dare, read on.