Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Fiction
vr 3.00
2008-02-16
"Aguila" by Abraxas | 2005-03-02
Chapter Three
Days, weeks and months – time passed and their lives settled into a routine.
Jackalman worked in the courtyard and in the lawn that surrounded the temple. Amid the wild mix of overgrown, mutated vegetation, he pulled the weeds, cultivated the ripe legumes, the juicy fruits and in so doing became a makeshift farmer. He became a gatherer which was surprising for it was the history of Plunderian canines to be hunters by nature. And although from time to time he allowed himself the luxury of venison and boar, for the most part his diet consisted of nuts and berries. For money – what the natives used for money – he worked odd-jobs in the village. Often, though, he and the villagers kept their distance – like all of the villagers in that, backward portion of Third Earth the locals were very uneasy about strangers.
Unlike his father, Koha’ did not seem to be bothered by the ostracism. Perhaps it was something about the exotic nature of his mixed heritage – that every day was showing more and more – or, perhaps, it was something about the respectful, quiet passivity of his personality that just did not arouse even a modicum of the attention that the full-blooded Mutant stirred. In either case the boy adjusted – yet not with children. It was the adults he watched and studied with almost infinite patience as if he was not a boy but a man far wiser and older than his years.
Koha’s domestic habits were also quite opposite. He worked inside the temple – the small rooms, the winding passages – and, of course, the large, domed vault underground that he took to be his nest. Indeed, it seemed that he spent all of his time there – except when he followed his father into the village, when he tracked his prey through the forests, vanishing and returning with fresh, bloody meat.
He cooked the food in a pit carved out of the floor of the subterranean chamber – over time the bones of the various animals added to the piles of debris that despite everything were not cleaned only shuffled about.
One day Jackalman explored the litter. He noticed elements of elk and boar bones – that he himself hunted – and traces of other creatures smaller, more familiar though nothing obviously ghastly. So he dismissed the fragments of skulls and jaws – a boy, even of his extreme, acute instincts, could not capture food as large as a man, a boy, an infant – no, he rationalized, those were the after-dinner leftovers of the temple’s original inhabitants.
In the day he could be at ease within the chamber, but in the night he was not comfortable. Still, he and Koha’ slept together under the dome, over the straw beds his son kept at the center of the ring of pillars. A few times – more than a few times – he tried to lure the boy to sleep in one of the smaller, cozier dens above, where he made his home, but the child would be beset by nightmares. Tense and nervous, he just did not rest well anywhere else but that – that room.
Jackalman loved his son and could not bear to leave him alone in that place. As much as he enjoyed his new life, his new home he could not help but wonder if it would have been better if the temple was free of that aerie. While his son was tormented upstairs, he was haunted downstairs. Not by ghastly, eerie images but by a sense of unjust and cruel reality for there was something about Koha’s beds and something about the ring of pillars and something, too, about the windows that called up images of Aguila –
Aguila dying in his arms, her eggs smashed, devoured by Slythe –
All the while during the long, hot summer he was free – tied up with his work, busy with his job – he was free to forget the past. But at the midnight hour, his mind stagnant and idle, in that room it was impossible to overlook the fearful symmetry.
And – he wondered – why did Koha’ choose that room? Was it coincidence? Just what did the boy know – what could he know – what did he remember?
When he was younger he never, really asked about Aguila. Every now and then he asked ‘who that lady was’ and he just assumed it was an uncertain, timid reference about his mother. It was only lately – in that temperate and stormy season – that Koha’ voiced those innate, childish curiosities.
“How did you meet Aguila?” he asked, turning to his father – it was a humid, damp evening and they were sprawled over their beds.
Jackalman faced his son – and paused, shocked for a passing, fleeting moment. It was not Koha’s way to call her ‘mommy’ but to call her by name – it shocked him, disturbed him to hear ‘Aguila’ pass the boy’s lips.
“It was night,” he started.
“Night – like this?” the boy interrupted.
The canine scratched his chin, shook his head – to be honest, he did not remember. Indeed, he did not remember it anymore than he remembered telling his son his mother’s name. It was as if the boy was born knowing.
“I don’t remember – I really, really don’t remember,” he explained. “But it was night. A friend of mine introduced us.”
“One of your Mutant friends?”
“Yes, Vultureman.”
Jackalman squawked – whenever he talked about his former life, friends and enemies alike, he copied their voices and mannerisms.
Koha’ laughed – the vulture was his favorite.
The Mutant continued: “He saw that I was lonely and thought she might cheer me up.”
The boy inquired: “And did she cheer you up, daddy?”
“Oh, yes,” he smiled, almost blushing. “The moment I saw her – just the moment I saw her – I was not the same. I loved her, Kohaku, I loved her.”
For the moment that fiction was as far as he wanted to go – the boy was just too young to understand the truth. And, more and more, he wondered if he wanted to go further – ever – did he really need to know what kind of prisoner his mother was, did he really need to learn what sort of ways she was exploited? It would be better to let some things die but some things would not die....
But he knew his mother was not there and he knew how often he stopped from time to time to think about her – and that must have been how, surely that must have been how he knew.
“Why did Aguila die?” Koha’ asked. It was morning; he and his father were tending the garden, cleaning the mess a nocturnal storm wreaked within the courtyard.
But Jackalman could not answer with the boy looking up at him with those eyes, those ever blackening eyes.
“What was it like?” he asked, holding his father’s wrists playfully.
“What, boy?”
He brought his father’s hands onto his neck and shoulders.
“Nothing, daddy,” he said, slipping from his father’s grasp, falling as it were away from his body.
It was after that weird, strange interlude that Koha’ stopped asking about his mother altogether. Maybe because he realized it saddened his father. Maybe because he learned what he wanted to know. But either way Jackalman could not shake the feeling of ominous fear and dread, the sense that his son did not need to ask, that he was born with memories – as if knowledge itself stretched across time and space from one generation to the next for here and there, in the most unnoticeable, subtlest of ways, it seemed he did know more, much more than he unfolded.
* * * * * * * * * *
“Aguila,” Jackalman sighed, again and again as he kissed the creature’s mane just under the earlobe, over the neck.
Aguila cooed, her lips teasing, brushing his cheek, her voice so sweet, so soft it evolved like a melody. Even the stops of her breath seemed timed to an ethereal music. She clasped his head onto her shoulder and stroked his mane, his ear.
“I can get you out of here,” he said, wrapping his arms about her waist. He leaned back and she snuggled against his body – together they reclined at the edge of the nest. The only light in the tower room was it coming out of the forbidden nest or was it coming out of the alien Aguila?
“It’s so simple,” he continued. “I know the guard’s routines, I know what passages are safe – and I’ve been scouting places up north. It’ll only take a little snap to break this,” he said, stroking that tight, iron collar that did not seem able to restrain its prisoner. “They won’t notice until it’s too late – and they won’t find us! Slythe’s too busy fighting the Thundercats; he wouldn’t be stupid enough to waste the time and manpower to get us.”
Aguila smiled and dug herself into him, her light, feathery form fit deep. Why could it be? How could it be? That the congruency could be so symmetric and flawless? Were they meant to be together?
The canine was about to speak but the avian stopped his lips with a kiss – she was such an enigma, in a thousand lifetimes he would never understand her infinite variety.
“I love you.”
Her eyes gleamed with a starry wetness and almost crying she clasped him tighter and tighter –
“I’ll buy you from Slythe – if it costs me my soul you’ll be free, Aguila!”
* * * * * * * * * *
“Free,” Jackalman gasped, his voice neither a-whisper nor aloud. Shocked – unexpectedly, suddenly – wide-awake as if shaken out of a dream of unmitigated dread. Adrenaline surged through his body, his heart raced, his breath quickened, but why? What was it about that recollection that made his blood run cold? No – it was not the dream, it was the reality he awoke to. For as he lay there, there in that bed, there in that room, it was as if he were transported into the tower room that caged Aguila.
A scent – a feeling, eerie and spooky – an atmosphere of the past clung onto the environs. He looked around the chamber: he saw little more than shadows and darkness punctuated by vistas through the wide, open windows of a star-filled, moonlit night. And he heard nothing – nothing at all – as an unsettling, shattering silence languished about the room.
The Plunderian calmed himself, lying back in his bed, wiping off his sweat, he calmed his nerves and soon he was asleep again.
Yet that was not the first, not the last incident. It used to be rare, happening every now and then when he recalled his encounters with Aguila too intensely, too deeply. And as long as the lapses were confined to the after-effects of memory it was little more than like a waking nightmare, suggested and amplified by the weird coincidences of his son’s nesting room. As time passed, though, it became regular. But even that was not all there was to the change for as it increased in frequency so, too, its atmosphere became more and more a perfect recreation of Castle Plundarr’s tower room.
And then he heard it.
As he laid back, his hands over his heart, feeling its wild, frantic palpitations, he was still and quiet so much so that at last he heard it. By the gods, how long was it there – there in the background – there without notice? Even then, when he was not as afflicted by the lapses as he was now, was it happening then? It took him to be still and quiet for it to become clear – indeed, the very sounds of his breathing in his head muted out the sensations that a voice echoed about the chamber. A voice – a whisper to be sure – light and airy but not distant.
It was a voice and it was speaking. Uttering, chanting. But he could not recognize the words. If they were words, they were like disconnected tones piecing themselves together into melodies of nonsensical words.
Shivering, frozen by the fear, his skin scrawled, his hair stood at the pauses – the knowing pauses – that punctuated the scream of whispered, songlike conversation. Mustering every ounce of courage, he raised himself out of the bed and, sitting up, he looked about, his head, his body trembling and shaking, his very vision unsteady and unfocused as he inspected the scene around the bed, around the room, trying to locate the source.
And at last his eyes rested atop the image of Koha’ resting peacefully upon the straw mattress beside him. He lowered his body – his head, his ear – closer and closer to the sleeping figure. Inch by inch he reached the boy after what seemed like an eternity, his heavy breath roaring loudly in his head, muffling completely the sound of the whole, entire world. But when he stopped, when e froze, he heard the voice coming out of his son.
The boy sat up suddenly, quickly – he shot up, facing his father, eyes opened wide and focused laser-like upon him.
Jackalman tumbled aback, shrieking and falling out of the bed. He struggled through the columns – he arched his back against the length of a pillar, he got back to his feet and looked: back on the bed the boy was sleeping on his side.
Had Koha’ moved?
The queasy atmosphere lifted and the universe returned to its senses.
But it was only the start – now it was such that whenever the nightmarish terror resurfaced the Mutant was acutely aware of that voice. And each and every time it seemed the language evolving like smoke out of the cacophony was taking shape, becoming louder and more familiar. Until, at the end, a new kind of horror was revealed: muffled and hushed yet even distorted once it settled into his brain it was undeniable for he knew that whisper better than his own and someway, somehow – the voice of Aguila – was coming through Koha’s lips.
Jackalman as he worked the garden, as he toiled the fields – eyes sore and blood-shot – searched through every corner of his mind to find a logical explanation until a plausible excuse materialized. Thinking about it, he convinced himself of it surety, of its soundness – it was a theory worthy of a Vultureman. What he mistook for a voice was not a voice. It was the weird and eerie atmosphere combined with his fears – always keying onto the anxiety of the situation – that fooled him into experiencing it as a voice. But, in fact, it was just the way his son respired. The boy’s voice box – a mixture of his Mutant and Aguila’s avian species – was changing as his body was changing and in so going from one genetic heritage to another his nocturnal breathing attained that tonal and melodious whisper.
It was so obvious, so clear – it could not be that another voice was talking through Koha’ – it was the easiest version of reality to believe and it was easy, too, to ignore the voice, what it was saying and what he was hearing night after night.
* * * * * * * * * *
“Koha’,” Jackalman said as he and his son ambled about the upper chamber the canine turned into a den. It was cramped, cozy; shadowed, dark. “The villagers keep a school for children – for children your age.”“School, what’s that?” the boy asked, stopping by a window, looking up at his father. The room was littered with loose scrolls and crumpled papers as if it used to be a library.
“Hmmm,” Jackalman scratched his ear, rubbed his chin. He never imagined he would be explaining school to anyone, let alone to his son. Kneeling, he answered: “Back on Plundarr, school was a place where children were sent to learn.”
Smiling, he replied: “But I already know everything I need to know, daddy.”
He shook his head with a half-smile, a half-smirk. The Plunderian should have known this was not going to be easy.
“You’d be around children you’re age,” he added. “Wouldn’t you like that? Hmmm?”
“I don’t need other children,” he said, looking at his father inquisitively. “What would I do with other children?”
Sometimes – sometimes Jackalman wondered if Koha’ even knew he was a child.
“You won’t be alone.”
“I’m not alone.”
The boy stopped; he was about to say something but stopped, looked around, looked up – at the hole in the roof where once a glass skylight had been installed.
“You’re not alone, too, daddy,” he said at last in an almost shameful whisper.
Looking at his boy he blinked and asked: “What do you mean?”
Koha’ shrugged and retreated – staring at the ground he scratched one foot with the claws of another.
“What do you mean, Kohaku?” the Mutant pressed.
“I have – a friend – we talk,” he relented, again in whisper.
The jackal smiled, chuckled.
“A friend you met in the woods?”
“No – it’s not like that.”
“A friend you et in the house?”
Koha’ nodded and Jackalman sighed – the moment of levity faded.
“I know – you get scared,” he looked up at his father. “I know – daddy – so I didn’t say. I didn’t think you’d want to live here if you know. I like it here, I like my friend –“
“And does your friend have a name?” he asked, rubbing his son’s mane.
A sort of pause followed – hesitant, expectant – the boy seemed to stare not at his father but at the space beyond his father. At the door to the chamber, the door that was little more than ajar, yet to his eyes it could have been as gaped as a canyon.
“You can tell me, can’t you, boy?” he asked, oblivious to the boy’s glazed stare.
“She, he doesn’t say,” he answered.
Jackalman’s eyes widened, thinned. “Come on, Koha’.”
His son shrugged, falling utterly, totally silent.
He sighed – it just was not like the boy to keep secrets – and asked: “Can you describe this friend?”
Playing with his hands, his fingers, Koha’ sat below the window while his father hovered above. “I don’t know what it is. It’s tall, like you, but very, very thin. Sometimes it looks like a bird, sometimes. It’s got these white feathers and black eyes.”
Gasping for breath, Jackalman stood.
“I didn’t want to tell you, I knew – I knew – you’d be afraid,” he stammered through tears. “The stories about this place, what the villagers say about this place being haunted. But it’s not evil – I swear – it’s not evil, daddy, it’s just lonely.”
He sighed and hugged his son. What was it about the boy that he was so strong when others many times his age would be so weak?
The canine was afraid for a moment – just for a moment – but he convinced himself it was innocent, child-like behavior. It could not have been a description of Aguila – it could not have been – he did not describe his mother to his son. And, of course, the description the boy gave was too vague, too generic – indeed, it was more like those faded, broken images that lingered about the hallways. The paintings and murals no doubt affected Koha’.
“Koha’,” he exhaled.
He invented an imaginary friend, a bird-like friend.
“You’re not mad at me, daddy, are you?”
It made sense it would be like that. It was a phase.
“No, son, no. I’m not mad,” he said, kissing the top of the boy’s head. The mane was thick but its substance was feeling less like hair and more like feather everyday.
“You hear it?” he asked, reassured. “You hear it, don’t you?”
“Hear it?”
“Speaking.”
“Your friend?” The boy nodded. “And what does it say?”
“Things – things I don’t always understand –”
“What does it say, Koha’?”
He stood on tip-toes, grabbing his father’s ear and pressing it to his lips – he whispered.
* * * * * * * * * *
Jackalman did not question it, he accepted it: it was the way the room was constructed, it was the way the nest was built – but whatever it seemed to be it was all in his head. All in his head. As a child he was a daydreamer and not very good at school. As an adult he was beset by fear and paralyzed by the dread conjured up by an overactive imagination. Thinking led to worrying led to agonizing and it was that paranoia that retarded his progress throughout life.He could have been a great general – or so he told himself – if only his inner drive was not so damped by his outer doubt. But to be honest with himself he knew he was destined to be at the tail-end of Plunderian hierarchy. And that was why he chose to go to Third Earth: in that unexplored, uncharted region of the galaxy everyone was ‘equal,’ more or less, giving him the ability to rise through the ranks.
Elsewhere, anywhere the smarter, more fearless examples of Mutant-kind would have overtaken him. But on Third Earth the low-end versions would have allowed him to climb as high as possible. And though the situation was promising, the safety-net formed by that collective of society’s dropouts led inescapably to the process of personal destruction. Failure became expected even accepted. So it was that he rose as far as general but his incompetent management of men – of himself – doomed him and at the end the man who was second only to Slythe was not wealthy enough to save his lover from her fate.
Outside the gloomy half-world was warm; inside the domed chamber was cool.
Stroking his son’s head, in the moonlight wilting across the stars, in the soft, gentle breeze sighing through the windows the eight-year-old’s mane seemed to attain an aura heretofore alien to the boy but familiar to the man.
It was Aguila’s feathery crest – and why should it not be? Vultureman used to chide Plunderian elitists, reminding the fools that scales, feathers and hair were all the same. But why should it not be that he inherited a mixture of his mother’s and his father’s characteristics?
Still, touching it, feeling it, it took him back – back – back to that night. He saw it again, looking at his hands, at his fingers, the child’s mane falling back, away. He saw it – the way Aguila’s man ruffled about his arms as she fell through, her head arching back, her neck, ringed by the chain, bending unnaturally as she stumbled backward onto the bed, whose light was dimming as the creature was dying.
The hideous beating of his heart alarmed him. Free of the vision, he found himself back in the chamber, sitting up on the straw mattress, looking down on his son. He stood and quietly walked out of the room, into his own, crowded den. It was just too difficult to sleep in there, in that aerie anymore.
Was Koha’ making it up? Jackalman wondered, thinking about that imaginary friend – nameless but not formless and able to exert itself through the boy’s imagination. By the pits, he knew all about it – growing up, he invented most of his friends, his real friends. And the child, no doubt, inherited that, too. But how could that friend be so much like Aguila? How did he inherit that? There were those infernal pictures yet he wondered if perhaps, just perhaps, he described her to him. And he just forgot. The youth was able to remember things, all sorts of things, things he ought not to remember.
So it if it was not imaginary, if it was real, how could it be real?
Standing by the window, overlooking the canyon that spread wide and far on the other side of the cliff, he shuddered to think about the onyx abyss and what terrifying horror lay dormant down beneath the cover of the night. It was unpleasant submitting and relenting into that childish rampage; it was easier to do that than to contemplate or acknowledge or accept the other fears racing through his mind, fears all too adult in nature.
“It’s not the boy,” Jackalman whispered, as if in prayer. “It’s me, it’s got to be me. I’m the one reading too much into this. Seeing things, hearing things.”
Turning away, he was confronted by the murky outlines of his den, the uncertain, hazy shapes coming into and out of sight.
He sighed: could it be that he wanted to experience those things, like a part of him was not finished with the events of that night? Maybe he needed to relive it. Maybe he needed to finish what started.
But Aguila was dead. All of her eggs – save one – were smashed by Slythe. She was gone – gone! – leaving only Koha’ –
A gale, stiff and bitter, brushed his cheek and he looked at the window – wide and open – but he saw nothing, nothing amiss in that world.
Even at that – at that brush of air searing and scorching his face – he felt anew Aguila’s last breath: her dying breath that passed out of her into him.
He inhaled it and in so doing could it be, would it be that her soul was part of his?
“It’s crazy! What am I thinking bout?” He wrapped his hands about himself, acutely aware he lacked a jacket though in that season there was not a need for one. “It’s got to be MummRa – or another red-eyed demon – playing tricks. No doubt with Slythe pulling a string or two. It’s not what I think it is, it’s not real!”
Yet as he spoke he knew it could not be so easily dismissed. Koha’s friend, the voices, the feelings, all of it was part of the same, exact it. How long was it there, laying in wait perhaps, evolving unnoticed perhaps, but there, always forever there, tireless and persistent and until that moment lingering under the surface of things, threatening to destroy his world and his sanity. All the while, throughout all of those years, were they ever alone? Was it not indeed always there – physically, mentally – always there trying to emerge into view?
* * * * * * * * * *
“Aguila!” Jackalman shouted, grasping her shoulders, pushed her face toward his face, her body toward his body.
He shouted – gasped – as words failed as Slythe appeared.
The reptilian commander was enraged, snarling and cursing: why was he so angered, he wondered in those fleeting moments of calm before the storm. He made mistakes, worse mistakes, why was the lizard so bothered by that one?
It was against the rules to be with Aguila without paying – he snuck into the tower room in the middle of the night. It was against the rules to be with Aguila naked in bed – anything was allowed, anything was allowed but that –
You were not allowed to fall in love with Aguila and she was not allowed to fall in love with you –
And it was certainly against the rules to escape with Aguila – Slythe’s ultimate, top prize.
He looked down at the avian goddess – already limp and lifeless – as the reptile, unable to destroy her spirit in life, attempted to eradicate her persistence in death, stomping and destroying everything throughout that chamber. He turned to her body, grabbed it spitefully, flung it hatefully and tore apart the nest to discover the two eggs hidden beneath. Incensed as if betrayed --
He looked down at the body lying across the floor between the pillars – like a fallen bird, its wings broken – Aguila’s eyes were open. Would that they would ever shut. Her eyes were open and stared like daggers into his –
Enraged, Jackalman broke through the guards and lunged at Slythe –
“Aguila!” Jackalman shouted to drown out the sounds that only existed in his mind – the sounds that he himself invented to accompany the terror unfolding within that room after he escaped it. He shivered at the horror of it: at Slythe slobbering over the eggs and at Aguila looking from beyond. It was all the worse that her eyes did not shut, as if she saw it all and that, more than anything, haunted his memories.
And in another moment pangs of horror snaked up and down his spine: he thought he was in his den but he realized he was in Koha’s dreaded aerie chamber. He had fallen asleep, he had forgotten and fearing the worst he paused, he held his breath. But it was not like the night terrors of old – that did not cease even in his den – it was a new level of fear in which he found himself.
Was the illusion really, only just in his mind? Did he see her because he wanted to see her – did she live because she wanted to live? Was it insatiable – the desire, the need to defy the ultimate fate and complete the final scene the way it should have been completed – was it so much so that through the powers of Nature Aguila returned? There it was – and he could not deny the evidence of his senses – there it was, revealed by the silence, by the lightlessness, looking at Koha’ he saw that the boy – his boy – was transfigured into the specter of Aguila, he turned into her, not in soul but in body.
The hair, the feathers, the brown, earth tones, the white, spectral aura.
Caught in the grips of the horror, surrounded by the terror embodied by the windows, the pillars, the beds the full weight of the realization climaxed with the awareness of the fact that the tower room and the underground chamber fused across time and space into a conglomeration of every fear that made his hair stand on-end and his blood run cold. The temple was a charnel house, a tomb for the living and the dead. And he understood that he, too, was caught in a paradox: he lived in the real-world yet trapped in that moment – trapped and unable to escape, ever, until Aguila was appeased.
“But, she’s dead, Aguila’s dead! She knows she’s dead, doesn’t she? Is it something I have to do, something I haven’t done?” He shut his eyes and pressed his hands onto his face. “Tell me, tell me! Why didn’t you come with me? Why?” he cried, venting out a frustration seething in the turmoil.
And then Koha’ turned to face his father. The small hands took the large hands away with unnatural strength. He whispered into the Plunderian’s ear words only the Mutant understood.
“And I love you, too, daddy,” he said – aloud – kissing his father’s warm, moist cheek.
END OF CHAPTER
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