| Destroy the Heart (B) - (My last story of the year) |
[Dec. 30th, 2008|04:53 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | fiction | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | The Witch House | ] |
| [ | Psychic Weather |
| | chill | ] |
| [ | Aural Atmosphere |
| | A brief history of Ambient vol.1 | ] |
Continued from Part A.
Dawn in the Duat.
A thick ashen mist fills streets narrow as the corridors of old houses. Its wisping banks soak up the pale amber light spilling from the crimson West. Faintly, morning seeps through the crooked alleyways and cascades down the huddled rooftops. Illuminated, the mist begins to burn off into a swirling haze of dull sepia. As a puff of breath that ripples away the dust from the surface of an old photograph, the Magicians Ghetto slowly comes into being through the lingering gloom.
Empty barrel of a claustrophobic road made of closing gray walls and doors long unopened.
Muffled click-clack echo of approaching footsteps from an unidentifiable distance.
There at the edge of a squint, the faintest sketch of a figure emerges through the last tendrils of mist clinging to the still morning air.
Approaching closer the silhouette sharpens into broad shoulders draped in a long flowing trench coat that whips around the advancing steps of a large man. The head is tucked chin to chest and flanked by an upturned collar so only the top of a dirty fedora can be seen. Fists thrust deep in the coats pockets. A tie slithers with sudden life in a splash of wind, anchored to a crumpled white shirt and trying to fly away. Immaculately polished shoes splash through the shallow puddles.
The stranger pauses mid stride. Phosphorescent red eyes flicker into life from under the shade of the hats brim pulled low. The long muzzle of a big, bad, black dog lifts its snout up to sniff furiously at the air. Officer Anubis (oh how he loathes the vulgar Greek of this name the locals had derisively bequeathed him) growls distastefully through a long slash of yellowed sharpened teeth, sifting through the sewer and rotting heart stink wafting off the tail end of a dying breeze.
"There!", he snorts to no one at all catching the scent of the wayward Ba. He lights up a papyrus rolled cigarette of Kief and spiced tobacco, takes a ponderous drag or two, before turning on the all but invisible corner to his left that distinctly wasn’t there a moment ago.
*****
Even for the wisest of Gods, the Magicians Ghetto was an easy place to get oneself lost in. This was due in fact to the unique relationship held between memory and geography in the sculpting of the city’s boundaries. The slum is a sprawling maze of shifting architecture; carved out of the dwindling memories of the Unjudgables from their brief lives in the Waking Lands. For example a three star hotel one day might be remembered as a decrepit tenement house the next. An entire boulevard could blink out of existence if enough people forgot about it at the same time... only to reappear days later running where a stream once fed off the Nile's Shadow. The crowded open air markets that can never be located by the same route twice. Needless to say there are no maps to the Magicians Ghetto. A local here either learned to navigate themselves around by a process of luck and/or intuition… or eventually just gave up to become a migrating ghost, slow-motion looping through the currents of an unending labyrinth. That was just the way it went here. As in life, as now below - so it is that no two memories can ever truly be the same. Each act of recollection changes the framing of the narrative even if only slightly so. Hence the procession of permanently closed shop fronts and galleries of boarded-up windows - it was just easier to remember it that way.
Still Officer Anubis persisted. He was locked on the heart-scent of the Ba and he used it as his own personal Ariadne’s Thread. He made his way through the winding roads that vanished once crossed, pressing forward his considerable bulk against the paradigm tides that flowed through the cities tightening veins against him. He passed as quietly as a dream through the ramshackle Beat Sector, which resembled little more than a decaying stage set of 1950's Times Square (sparsely populated with fraying film shadows lurking under the blank marquees and from portals of doorways). Fragments of Miles Davis Moon Dreams drift ominously around him from nowhere at all.
He travels deeper into the Ghetto, entering the Victorian Housing Projects by crossing over the black waters flowing through the Dreaming Thames. Nothing more than a reflection of the real thing, growing thinner with each season, trickling now as a subsidiary stream off the Nile’s Shadow. Deeper, following the scent through the ‘chartered streets’ of London Town (where his trench coat shortened into a sensible cape and his fedora rounded over his temple into a worn bowler hat). At one point he feels himself being watched from a vague memory of a Whitechapel alley – he pauses and catches a flock of Spring-Heel Jack’s hissing malevolently through gas-mask snouts at his sudden awareness of them. Crackling gas-blue flames flare up from deep within the rounded lenses of the mask, before dying out into glittering cobalt sparks, as the creatures slink back into the darkness of the alley.
Officer Anubis snorts dismissively, making sure to take his time in leaving Whitechapel’s Memory. Moving at a slow, steady pace that conveys neither fear nor patience for common carrion-demons who have forgotten how to behave around their betters.
He cuts through Rosetta Park, hoping to catch a sudden short-cut that he senses had just manifested open on the other side. Quickly now, he makes his way over the rolling Rock Garden hills of the Park, leaving no footsteps to defile the raked waves of sand behind him. He weaves through the massive stone boulders etched a brief eternity ago with fading steles revealing nothing. He walks around hooded old men in black but sun bleached robes. Each sitting petrified in their varied Asana’s, hovering ponderously over a never-ending game of chess or weeping dry verses from the Book of the Law into the glare of a small wingless sun.
Know; former Masters of the Temple all.
Finally he steps out of the Park just as the gravel walkway vanishes under a sea of browning Kudzu, the short-cut reverting back into an empty lot. A battered green street sign hanging over the corner tells him he’s somewhere on New Osiris Boulevard, which would put him somewhere in Echo Town. A steady pull of sharp sniffs tells him he’s close. Real close in fact. A block or two tops. Another sniff tells him to the right and with a tuck of the brim of his fedora, off he goes down the quiet boulevard flanked by barbwire fences guarding unsalvageable factories and vulture infested junkyards.
Echo Town is the most recent addition to the protean neighborhoods of the Magicians Ghetto. One drafted from the memory banks of the new breed of Unjudgables who began arriving recently from a place in the Waking Lands called the 21st Century. They came in modest but steady numbers these gaunt, brooding souls with their thin limbs heavily tattooed with jagged weaves and petulant scowls pierced randomly with little steel rods. Baring meticulous scars, that served where symbols should, each earned in the hollow absence of a culture without ritual.
To Anpu they were little more than a savage race of somnambulists, barely coherent at best and filled with an almost parasitic complacency…
“Wait”, the scent whispers into the ear of his intuition, as he steps off an empty corner of the Boulevard…
“… here!”
He almost walks under and misses it. He turns around and looks up. With a squint and an illumination of his eyes, he catches a flickering green and white neon Square and Compass hanging perpendicularly off a squat two story brick building. It insect buzzed and sputtered a sickly light through dirty tubes. The sign was acting as some kind of cloaking spell, decent work too… for local talent that it is. It takes him a moment to recognize the building as one of the old Lodges from the Masonic Quarter of the Magicians Ghetto. Abandoned ages ago when the secret words and their ceremonies could no longer be conjured by their initiates. Now the Lodge was simply the half-buried skeleton of a charged reminiscence, too stubborn to fade away and to senile to remember it’s Secret Word, a relic annexed without notice into the spread of Echo Town.
He sniffs again, double checking his nose…
… yep! Right there underneath the stale Mad Dog and fresh piss and unwashed Unjudgables squatting within - the distinct bubblegum and burnt peaches scent of the Poet’s Ba. Too weak to actually still be in the building… but strong enough to indicate that it had left only just recently.
His hunch was right. The Poet’s Ba had indeed come back to its old neighborhood.
This came as no surprise to Officer Anubis (aka “Anpu to you, asshole”). Hearts have always been treacherous by his experience, because they are little more than creatures of habit after all. Often indulging in the curious need to return to the exact place it had once sought so desperately to escape. Why should the Poet's be any different?
He tosses the roach of the papyrus cigarette into the gutter and pushes his way through the grime stained glass door.
Once inside he quickly realizes that the interior of the Lodge is much wider on the inside than the outside could possibly allow. He was standing in a massive hotel lobby, beneath a vast concentric spire of floors that reached distant patch of gray skylight.
He can feel he is being watched from the floors above and the fur on his neck bristles. Strangers drew attention easy here, sure, same as anywhere really. Still he doesn’t like being gawked at. Call it the Royalty in his blood. He growls lightly, but a light growl from a God, if it is his will, is more than enough to make the walls of the building tremble - no matter how deceptively spacious they seem. The quake resides, a tense silence, followed by the steady clap of closing doors slamming from the floors above.
“That’s more like it”, Officer Anubis grumbles making his way across the lobby towards the rickety cage of an elevator that waits patiently to the side of the deliberately abandoned check-in desk.
He gets on and hits the top floor button designated with a smudged Eye of Horus without looking. He folds his arms behind his back and begins whistling absently as the cage door rattles close in front of him.
A few moments ride later and he arrives several flights down with a jerking halt to arrive at the lowest sublevel of the Lodge/Hotel. Before him: A tight corridor of cream colored walls splattered with graffiti-glyphs and interspersed on both sides with a series of pumpkin orange doors. Above him: A flowing necklace of dull bulbs down the hall, casting a steady ochre light down the corridor before vanishing into a dull black patch at the edge of his vision. Below him: The floor heel deep in fast food trash and blank pages torn from word drained books. Behind him: No turning back.
Anubis steps with no rush down the winding hallway, whistling the same sad little Aria from a opera he can neither completely forget nor remember. A papyrus shadow travels behind him, a tethered projection of Anpu, (as he appears in the New Kingdom Tomb Paintings travels), travels over the black marker sigils and crude cave painting scrawls. In the time it takes the Officer to repeat the looped strand of Aria an excruciating ninth time, he arrives at a door whose room number had been replaced with a yellow ribbon forming the Sa glyph of Protection.
Anpu raps his fist three times against the door. Sparks fly off the knuckles on each shot and a current of electric pain courses up the Guardian’s wrist. He snarls in disgust at the talisman, it was charged stronger than it looked. He barks out – literally – “Police! Open up!”
No answer silence: Purple smoke drifts off his burnt knuckles, acrid stink of burnt dog hair fills the hallway .
He sniffs again - “I know you’re in there, asshole… I can smell you shittin’ yer draws from here!”
A muffled shout from behind the door, high pitched and quivering with naked fear – “You, um, a, got a warrant?”
“A what?”, Anubis would roll his eyes in exhaustion if his eyes had pupils to roll them with.
“Y’know…”, the voice steadying into a tenuous confidence behind a muted flush of a toilet, “… a warrant, man. I don’t have to let you in unless you have a warrant.”
“Says who?”, Anubis shrugs with sincere bafflement at the door.
More silence… save another conspicuous flush of the toilet, then – “It doesn’t matter. You can’t get in. I mean you know I have the door sealed, right?”
“I noticed”, he mutters before addressing the door, “Look, kid, I ain’t got all day here. Just let me in and we’ll talk about it…”
“Or what… you’ll huff and you’ll puff and you’ll blow my door in? ”, the ‘Kid’ laughs with nervous spite, “I don’t think so.”
Anubis grumbles, tilting up the brim of his fedora to rub a mounting headache from between his eyes. Why can’t it ever be the easy way for once, he snorts a sigh through his snout - “Alright, Kid, have it your way then”.
He takes a few steps back until his shoulders press square against the wall behind him. He cracks his neck with a shrug and a popping twist of his neck, pulls the brim down low once more over the eyes, crouches down, tucks his head into chest, takes a deep breath… and charges forward, right shoulder first.
On the other side of the room the Kid waited, standing in a poorly drawn magick circle chalked across the hardwood floors. He watched the door intently, its surface covered with a series of varying protection wards as a back up to the Sa on the other end. He giggled, he licked his lips with anticipation for that inevitable moment when the Big Bad Jackal-Wolf would try kicking the door in and the ensuing detonation that would repel him back. It was the scream of pain he looked forward to the most.
Instead a thunderous crash, followed immediately by an explosion of stucco and mortar off the wall just left of the charged door. A cloud of white dust envelopes the room. The Kid winces, tears up under a coughing fit and when he looks up again, Anubis is rising from a crouch a few feet away from him. His red eyes glowing through the swirling miasma of his entrance to peer into his bulged stare.
“Pffft…”, Anubis straightens up, brushing powdered stucco off his coat, “… amateur mistake, really. Never just seal the door to a room, Kid… walls don’t mean shit to my kind. Now, where were we… oh yeah, something about ‘huffing and puffing’, right?”
Anubis walks around the Magical Circle, unimpressed by the Alchemical symbols and rudimentary hieroglyphs that orbited it. Already he’s starting to see the cracks in its curves and the slight errors in the glyphs. He takes in the Kid now. The Kid could be best described as looking ‘Scumbag Chic’ - lanky tall, tight fit t-shirt over a bird chest torso, slender thighs in piped brown corduroys, worn Chucks, unkempt shoulder length blond hair with matching stubble patches across hollowed cheeks. Bright green eyes hover in perpetual sunset over the horizon of dark bags .
“So what’s the plan, here?” he asks, “You just gonna stand in your little circle… is that it? Try’n wait me out some… ‘til you get too tired to stand or I find my way in? You know either way that goes down, I’m going to have lost time I didn’t have to spare and will console my wrath on your sorry ass, Boy. So? What’s it gonna be, huh? ”
The Kid answers with a quick draw reach behind his back. With practiced speed, he pulls out a foot long rod (white-blue-white-red-white-yellow striped) that he kept tucked through his belt, thrusting it tip forward with a double handed grip on the God.
“Leave!”, the Kid shouts excitedly, “I command you by your true name – AhhNuuuPuuuu…” .
Anubis stops in his tracks, the red eyes spark out into black under the hat. He turns to face the Kid with shuffling half-steps and speaks remotely from a cold echo of a voice – “Yes, Master”.
The Kid’s face slackens with involuntary surprise -
“Really?”, he lends the hope breath. Uttered just faintly from unmoving lips.
With a burst of life the eyes flare up again. Officer Anubis moves in a blur of motion, grabs the end of the wand that poked by mere inches out of the circumference of the circle and tugging at it with a fraction of his terrible strength. The Kid, doesn’t have time to think. He holds on out of instinct to the wand and goes stumbling out of the circle. He lands throat first into a slap of opened fist, gets lifted off the floor, swiveled around 180 degrees and slammed back first into the ground.
Anubis straddles over the supine Unjudgable, pinning him down hard, hand still wrapped around his throat, jaws inches away from face, a slight trickle of spittle hanging between the opened teeth.
“No…”, Anubis breathes a furnace blast of breath into the Kid’s face, “… not really”.
The God releases his grip from the Kid’s throat and savors the bottled scream that comes roaring out.
*****
Later, after a brief conversation conducted over broken bones and eloquent threats of death by mastication, Office Anubis stepped out of the Lodge, onto the cold corner sitting on New Osiris, taking with him the full story:
Turns out the Kid was good friends with the Poet from way back in the day when they knew one another in the Waking Lands. They were brothers of the Pipe together, connoisseurs of a giddy amnesia, who had found themselves (much to their surprise) as full time residents down in the Duat. The friendship only grew firmer when the two pals started squatting for shelter in the abandoned buildings populating Echo Town. When the Poet’s heart took flight shortly before his arrest, it must have remembered the Kid and found its way to pay him a visit out of some sickening, human need for nostalgia.
It took a little persuading, the kind that stains a white shirt red, but eventually the Kid spilled on the fact that the Ba did indeed tell him where exactly it was going.
And that’s when the old guardian cop-god’s day really got interesting.
Turns out the rumors were allll true. There was indeed an underground railroad of escaped Ba’s, aided by not one traitor god, but rather two. Major Leaguers at that, not just some household deity or attention hungry luck god either, but…
“Excuse me…” a voice scrapes against the Officer’s thoughts, “got a light, Buddy?”
Officer Anubis turns around wearily.
Two men in identical black suits stand there behind him, the one on the left shoulder high to the one of the right. Two pairs of implacable sunglasses floating off bland matching faces. The tall man has a filtered cigarette dangling from his lip and stares expectantly at the God.
Anubis reaches into his coat. The two men tense and ease when he pulls out a pack of cigarettes, plucks one out with the side of his long row of bared teeth, replaces it with a dull silver Zippo, lights up the cigarette and blows a puff of smoke into the two men’s faces.
“Nooo…”, Anubis sneers, returning the Zippo to his pocket, "I’m afraid not.”
The two men begin coughing under the cloud of smoke. Their suits and skin begin to melt under the lingering blue fumes revealing bubbling wax yellow flesh and faces that are nothing but a set of oval lips lined with thick rusted nails of teeth.
Demons, but not locals. These were lesser creatures of the Qlippoth, husks of bad habits that snuck their way in on the backs on some of the more occult inclined Unjudgables and took shelter off in the distant Red Lands that waited outside the Duat. Occasionally they would wander into the varying cities of the Western Lands, feeding off the Ka of wary souls.
The creatures both begin emitting a piercing screech from their snapping fangs. A single eyeball hangs in the center of their throats in place of tonsils. The smaller one coils into a pounce and the taller one begins lumbering forward.
Officer Anubis recoils under the wail, covering his pointed ears and doubling over in a sudden pang of nausea.
When the taller one reaches him and lays a cool, tendril of a hand upon his shoulder, the God looks up and smiles. Anubis stretches his jaws as wide as they can go and releases out a blast of a thousand jackals howling.
The roar is deafening. The boulevard before him trembles under the unremitting howl. The two demons stumble back. Their own shrieks of pain now deafened under the blast. Anubis straightens up and cuts off the howl. Before the other can react, he punches a hole through the tall demons chest, pulling out a three dimensional sigil of black light. He crushes it in his fist and the demon crumbles into dust.
The remaining demon drops to its knees, genuflecting and gibbering in a clipped tongue.
Anubis walks over to it, plants the heel of his shoe down on its throat and drives the creature down with a stomp .
“Who sent ya?”, he asks, “And answer clearly, got it?”
The demon chokes and nods.
Anubis eases up on the pressure.
“No one!” it hisses up at the impatient God.
“’No one’, huh?” he answers pressing down a little harder.
“The heart is ours by right…”, it spits out defiantly through a sickening gurgle, “… The Poet traded it for the gift of inspiration. It was to be ours upon his death. Instead he cheated. Came here where he thought we couldn’t find him…”
“Uh-huh…” , Anubis flicks the ashes off his cigarette into the creatures mouth, “… and what’s this got to do with me?”
“You know where it is…”, the demon gasps up through the spilt ashes, “tell us.”
“You didn’t say ‘please’”, Anubis pushes down on his foot and a wet crack of crushed neck splashes up his thigh.
Officer Anubis stands there a moment. He takes a thoughtful drag of the papyrus cigarette. Turns out he wasn’t the only one looking for the runaway Ba. There would probably be more of the Qlippoth on his trail before too long. On their own they weren’t much of a threat, but with enough numbers, they could give him a hard time. Which was exactly the last thing he need right now.
Mister Anubis makes his way down New Osiris Boulevard, the cool morning sun trailing into a punishing noon. He is thankful that his business in the Magicians Ghetto was finally over and looked forward to reverting to his proper form. Then he remembers just where it was he was heading to next. He swallows back the heart burn that swells up his esophagus in a sour dread.
Next stop… the Sanctuary. Where cat headed Bastet and her magician lover Thoth would be waiting for his arrival. |
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