by Rink Wester
Her minds image stuttered and now she was again standing in that Halifax County, North Carolina kitchen, once again that little boy scared to tell his grandma he was a little girl. She was there inside a memory she had forgotten was even there. She looked up and saw her grandmother’s eyes glowing purple, yelling at her to run.
Run!
A humming scratching sound had distracted her somewhat, because she was afraid that it came from a praying mantis that had wandered into their trailer. Her grandmother had taught her a very great fear of mantises, and like many members of their family, she feared some secret regarding mantises and their origins, a secret her 9 year old mind struggled to remember. A secret Her grandmother with those strange glowing purple eyes sang as she ran,
Force rise out of the mantis theyselves, out of their makings and their sublime masks. The mantis is a göd what done disguised itself. Øyä. Ánänsi. Sängø. The mågÿck of the old göds is endurance. Force gone always rise when u call it Victor!
For the third time her vision shifted and she was standing in a great travertine lined hall surrounded by a sea of hooded fluctuating figures all with smouldering fulgent purple eyes. One stepped forward, her authority parting that deluge to capture Vickie’s slowly fraying sanity,
Hello Ms. Basse, she said in a siren song so deep it was the ocean oceans drown in, Welcome to the Pörø Society. My name is Grynn Xanthopoulos and I have been waiting for you an awfully long time. Finally I’ve found you my little devil mantis.
Vickie blinked and found herself on terra firma again in the chaos of Peachtree, purple lightning and earthquakes. She came to herself huddling under that awning, on the verge of vomiting, both frightened and confused. What in the hell just happened? she cried, Why did that great hulking beast with the 6 tusks keep calling me Nänå? Who the hell was a Nänå? And what was a Pörø Society with all those people and their freaky glowing ‘Celie-until-you-do-right-by-me’ Color Purple eyes? She had seen eyes like that before as a child. Her Granny Carrie Tyree. But what did it all mean? What the fuck was happening to her?
I really need to stop smoking weed.
12
Detective Tony Mozee entered the lobby of The Sallie Douglas Building in a mob of flashing lights and pandemonium. CNN vans crammed the street, the broken nose persistence of reporters mechanically turning the alien into a comfortable news cycle. Down French hounds that were unfortunately ubiquitous to the police landscape these days.
-Detective...detective...care to comment on what happened here?
-Look guys, this is ongoing. Once we know anything at all conclusive you will know.
-Isn’t it he job of the Atlanta police department to investigate and know such things? Public good and all?
-Then shut the hell up, stay behind the yellow tape and let us do our jobs.
Assholes, Tony shook his head, entering the vestibule and nodded a hello to fellow Detective Lori Faulk who was busy talking with the building manager.
Tony Mozee was an unassuming 32 year old man: well dressed, but not overly so, with a kind symmetrical face that made people want to spill their guts to him. Unassuming, that is, if you were 6’7”, deep butterscotch mocha brown, weighed 210 with broad chiseled shoulders and zero body fat. The women on the workforce, including Detective Lori Faulk, and a large number of the men had to stifle gulps and prurient low and tight urges when he looked at them. When he strolled, his detective trousers hugged tight his well defined thighs and strained to hide a knotted bulge that was to every woman and gay man the “P.O.P.”. That “Promise Of Power” that implied so many other sweaty panting intimate gifts to come. He led with a palpable sex-i-ness. Every syllable of it. He was the kind of man who walked into a room, caught breaths, tingled skin and with a smiling hello made you want to crawl across the floor on all fours and worship at his fount.
He had thought a degree in finance and a straight office job were his ticket to success, but he was bored stiff and so became a cop. It had taken him years, slogging through bureaucratic blood and corruption dipped red tape, and far too many car chases and shootouts before he had actually made detective. All of that to being him here to this bizarre case with its bizarre leads and eyewitness accounts.
Detective Faulk walked over, swallowed hard, and fired off, Hey T. How’s it hanging? As if I need to ask?
Tony blushed but kept his composure, What’s shaking Lori? How much progress have you made with the building owners?
-The owners actually work in the building themselves. Küqålä. You heard of them I’m sure. Mr. Milk Chocolate JD Rockefeller Richest Britches Himself, Gærüt S. Lång’s company. No one has seen or heard from him all morning. Getting the runaround from his assistant. Tried to get access to the top floor but their lawyers are being assholes and forcing the warrant issue.
-Shit. Fucking lawyers. Headache Houdinis. Let me know when you pry a few doors open and make some headway, I’m going to see if I can rattle some cages and open some windows.
Tony wheeled around, almost knocking down one of the techs, having seen something whiz by out of the corner of his eye. He walked towards a private bank of elevators off to the left that a fÖrênsic team had just finished processing. There it was again, that streak of light, hummingbird fast. One second there the next gone, leaving only the impulse to follow it. As he turned the corner he stopped dead. There standing in front of a golden bank of elevator doors that existed in no blueprint of this building, conjured out of pure thought it seemed to Tony, was Gærüt S. Lång and another impossibly dark man with what looked like lightning playing in his lapels.
Hello Detective. You were looking and so for you and only you I have allowed myself to be found. Won’t you join us?
Detective Tony Mozee stood there mesmerized and glued in place, his feet resisting the urge of brain and muscle to move. Those golden doors pinged open as Gærüt and his companion climbed aboard and stared at Tony compelling him to join them. Like an uncharacteristically timid prey animal Tony inched forward entering that golden elevator as the doors slid shut in silent command.
A million questions raced back and forth through the sieve in his mind, warrants and depositions, felony rules of engagement, visions of purple lightning and lapels scorching his mind and so he turned around, facing the richest man in the world and said casually,
What does the S stand for?
14
Gwynn Xanthopoulos pushed aside her half eaten hoagie. Their newest recruit, Vickie Basse would be here soon. Grynn had felt her powers awaken with the dark göddess. The prophecy had begun. They would need her cardent to stave off disaster. The Pörø Society had long welcomed those with the cardent or göd-touch, for training and induction. Their job was and had been for 4000 years to track, observe, monitor and police immortal threats among us. The lesser cryptid göds. It was their foreordinance, she’d always trusted beyond any attrition. It was their highest calling.
To the uninitiated around the globe, in circles and languages only whispered in spells and incantations, they were known as the Illuminati of Mystics. The Devil Dancers. One of her favorite authors, Anne Rice, had beautifully fictionalized them as “The Talamasca”. European clerics called them The Watchers Council. Asian monks referred to them in prayers and in millennia-old scrolls and parchment paintings as HeiShe MoFaHui, The BlackWater Cabal.
They had a thousand different names in a thousand different tongues, but they were now and had always been the Society of the Pörø. “Pörø” meant “star stone” in the now defunct language of the first ancient Yoruba speakers. The “devil dancer” shaman witch of old, Abdourakhmane, was the first of to find the living shard of Sihiosia. The Fragment struck from that great Amulet of the Sky Father, as the gröötslâng lord snatched it from the gröötslâng queens neck, his mågÿckal talon striking it and knocking from it that tiny shard. A fleck of cosmic dust it was. But large and wide enough to be found and gathered together to give their order it’s first true cardent shaman witch of old. An infini
tesimal vein of Sihiosia flows through all in Pörø.
She let her astral self float up and out across the inner training area where teams were being deployed this morning to deal with a threat in the Transvaal region of Southern Africa. Something large was awake there. Far more menacing than anything she or any of the Society had ever felt.
The Myth of the Sky Mother must be true. The Demon Mistress has awakened.
She had come to personally ensure the team leader had prepared his men for every mystical and mågÿckal contingency.
With a mental push of astral telepathy she wished her men a safe journey, hoping that this time wasn’t the one time the big bad monster on the other end got the royal flush.
Fire team Øyä. Monitor all back channels. Execute with extreme prejudice. The light is green. Move out.
15
Vickie’s cab driver was solemn and competent as he pulled away from the curb. When she told him her destination he had just hmmphed, easily merging into that early morning midtown traffic. After a few long red lights, as if his responses were also on a delayed timer, he looked in the mirror and whispered, Yeah I know where that is.
It was an odd strangely out of the way place for a fare to need to go at this hour but he didn’t seem to care.
They drove through dank early morning streets past oddly framed buildings, shopping centers, bars and nightclubs with the names of local microbrews in sad screaming neon. Streets seemingly dedicated to some red faced early pre-dawn Asian walk of shame. To the left was some abandoned industrial loft awaiting the gentrification fåîrÿ to touch it and make it a real boy. Off in the dark a MARTA subway train rumbled past.
The trees thinned and the urban sprawl all but melted into a landscape populated by one massive building. The driver began to slow as Vickie looked down at her watch. It had been 17 minutes since she had “received the mental missive” and left her apartment.
This is it, the cab driver said, The Pörø Society Annex.
Vickie rounded the curb and made her way to the massive security Gâte, manned it seemed by a single statue of a guard. While deciding if she had arrived at the wrong entrance and taking out her phone to call another taxi, the large ornate door to that great hulking building exploded, cracking the pavement and knocking the Gâtes off their track.
The guard statue immediately sprang to life, and as a crystal shaped like an African battleshield burned bright on its forehead, it drew from its stone rock scabbard a sword of shifting metallic segments growing longer as it screamed through the air and cut the Gâtes to lead ribbons. It ran towards the building just as a hive of beasts that looked like a cross between an ant and a lion, covered in matted fur and fish scales, the size of a midsize SUV, burst from the ground and out of those broken shattered doors in a scattering hive.
In the middle of that melee, in a cloud of sorcery, hexes and snapping mandibles, was Grynn Xanthopoulos, slashing in a frantic ghost dance, hands shining and burnished in unshed power, body levitating, she struck 3 of the attacking ant lions with heliotropic tentacles of fire hot mågÿck instantly desiccating and breaking them into a thousand parched LEGOs. Her eyes blazed, a million amethyst gnats darting hither to and yond, mågÿckally disintegrating and repelling score after score of cryptid invaders as she battled back to back with the other wizards of the Pörø Society, many fighting bareassed, robes shredded and ripped off in the fracas.
Hear me creatures of elsewhere! I am Grynn Xanthopoulous! Born of Sihiosia! Grand Mage of Abdourakhmane! Child of the flowing cardent! We will not be cowed before the likes of you! We are all of Pörø. Like you yourself once were! Now back vile emps! Back I say!
She raged and frightened the hunt itself. In almost slow-motion she barreled into beast after beast, spells and hexes ripping and cleaving, cutting them down, her own malicious forest to cull. She turned to Vickie, standing there frozen in panic and unfaith, wrenching her hands, mind akimbo at the delusive scene painting itself before her.
Run little mantis! I have not lived 513 years to lose one such as you to creatures such as these and their dark sovereign! Run!
As if in choreographed evil, the ant lions all stopped and turned towards Vickie, antennae twitching as if receiving radio signals from some distant far-flung radio tower. The lead beast, the demi-göd Divåd Nirrêp, with thorny outgrowths covering his beast form’s carapace, mandibles scraping pieces of flesh from his feline face, growled in low hungry menace,
She is the human female! The one our Lord Ôlôrun wants! After her you fools!
As a rolling ocean of ant, lion and mågÿckal menace missiled her way, Vickie did what any one trapped on that side of the kaleidoscope would have done.
She screamed. Pissed herself. Turned and ran for all she had ever been worth.
16
Nänå smiled and opened her power as she wiped blood from Åpsät’s mouth. She walked to the mouth of her dwelling and marveled at the beauty spread beneath her.
Far from the waves teasing the parched wrinkled shores of the Okovongo, her lair was a hidden and nestled in the highest peak of the Mafadi mountains of Kwazulu Natal. There on the border of Lesotho, she looked out and listened to the chanting amashoba and isinene clad Zulu men, their cow tails and leather patches worn on the upper arms and below the knees and across the genitals hinting turgidly at the strained appearance of greater bulk. She could smell the early afternoon smells of the chapparal. Mugs of beer and amazi, curdled milk, being passed around in the family gourd, refilled immediately and never cleaned. Even up at those frosty heights pineapple marinated rump, fillet, sirloin and roasted sausages beckoned from countless braai bbqs burning across that flat shrubbed landscape.
The wretched wailing Ndebele women, not to be undone by smoking meats, sang up to her walking along the Ingulukudela, the Limpopo River, from Matabeleland in Zimbabwe to work in the gold mines and quarries of the eastern cape.
Sayiwela, sayiwela
Sayiwela sibili
Sayiwela Ingulukudela
Siyofuna imali
Baphina obaba? / okoko?
Basemazulwini
Basitshiyel'indubeko
Indubeko zomhlaba
We crossed it, we crossed it
We really crossed it
We crossed Ingulukudela
To look for money
Where are those fathers? / mothers?
They are in heaven
They left us problems
These earthly difficulties
So much hungry sorrow and promised beauty dressed that morning that Nänå almost pitied her brother Åpsät and the other who had come to rescue him. Almost.
She turned to face her other brother, Sphelix Thorne, who had just arrived in his AndroSphinx form answering Åpsät’s psychic distress, claws scraping away stalactites and making the walls of her lair vibrate in growling menace. She wondered how the next part of this new unexpected plan would unfold.
Sawubono Ågänjû. Hello brother. We can argue the toss of who gets to kill whom later, but first you will fold time, enter the past and pluck for me once again the rose of memory.
An adept curator of truths and maxims, Sphelix Thorne could summon any reality through time and space and unpeel the core of any action captured by time. He could, in essence, see in technicolor anything that had ever happened at any time to anyone, göd or man.
Truth is a guiding river little sister and like all rivers it’s course can and often over great swaths of time alters itself. What you seek may no longer be yours to know. It is a dangerous river you have long left unnaviGâted.
As Nänå shifted into her gröötslâng form, she levitated just outside the mouth of her lair stretching herself to her full measure before saying, voice dreadlocking inside wind and braai and river song,
There is toothsome truth to your words Ågänjû. Annoyingly so as always. I need you to tell me what Gærüt did to me 4000 years ago! Tell me or drown deep in that river.
I desire not your iremoje brother, but
I WILL crack open heaven, drink your portion and sing your dirge.
Truth and memory shattered as the AndroSphinx reared up and roared and the river of time there in that cave crested and fell off the edge.
17
Gærüt stared at the detective sitting across from him and willed himself to not destroy him.
Tony stared at the infamous Gærüt Stånłëy Lång sitting there in that smug suit and smug shoes surrounded by all his smug corporate sycophants and willed himself not to choke and vomit on all the pretension.
-I now need to caution you Mr. Lång, and it’s important that you understand what caution means, so you do not have to say anything but it may hamper the progress of any investigation made here today. Anything you do say may be given in evidence and your lawyers may remain present. Obviously, this conversation is being tape recorded so that all that is said remains just that. Do you understand?
