by Dyrk Ashton
Keeping an eye out for any reaction from Mol, Zeke takes a tentative step toward Fi. Once fairly certain he isn’t going to be eaten, he says, “Fi, I--”
“Zeke,” she interrupts, “it’s okay.” Of course it isn’t, but she really doesn’t like uncomfortable conversations of any kind. Especially heart-to-hearts. Or--gulp--breakups. Her mind races recklessly, as it often does. Even if she did want a relationship with Zeke--which she doesn’t--she wouldn’t know what to do in one anyway! She hasn’t had the best of role models. Her father left her mom before Fi was born and her Uncle Edgar has never been married, and he certainly doesn’t date. The only woman Fi’s had in her life since her mother died is Mrs. Mirskaya, the brusque Russian immigrant widow who babysat Fi for much of her youth, and whom Fi worked for at her Russian store through most of junior high and high school. Not the kind of person Fi can talk to about boys. Besides, relationship-equals-vulnerability-equals-heartbreak. Fi’s had enough of that in her life, thank you very much!
But who am I kidding?! I’ve got nothing to worry about! Zeke can have any girl he wants. Any woman he wants. He’s brilliant, talented, focused, driven--everything Fi’s damn sure she isn’t. All they really have in common is they’re both busy all the time, they’re both “only children,” having no brothers or sisters, and they both lost their parents when they were young. His died in a fire when he was a baby, Fi’s mom in a plane crash when Fi was seven. That could be why they bonded in the first place. The shared tragedies, that they’re both orphans. Well, at least she thought they’d bonded!
Zeke wishes Fi would listen, and look at him with those beautiful green eyes of hers. He watches her hand go anxiously to her lips. Full, wide lips, great for kissing, and smiling. A smile that beams sunshine. But she’s far from smiling now, and he knows it’s his fault. She presses her fingernails to her teeth as if she’s going to bite them, but instead pushes a wayward strand of red hair that’s escaped from her ponytail back over her ear. He loves it when she does that...
He takes a deep breath, gathering his resolve. “Look, Fi, I don’t know why I shut down like that tonight. I wasn’t thinking. Or maybe I was thinking too much. Shit. I like you Fi.”
Great, he “likes” me, Fi groans to herself. Here it comes, “we still have to work together, so let’s be friends.” Fine with her, that’s definitely for the best.
Zeke squirms. “I mean, I really like you.”
Fi frowns. Oh, that’s much better. Just get it over with, will ya?
He takes another deep breath. “I think I just didn’t want to, you know, get too hot and heavy when I’m leaving Monday night for the conference. I’ll be gone for a week. And honestly, I didn’t say anything before because I’m not sure how you feel about me... other than for, you know...”
This just keeps getting better. Now he thinks I’m a slut!
Zeke hushes another pending protest from her with a gesture of his hand. “And, I’m a coward, alright? I admit it. But you’ve got this wall up--and I get it, I do. It’s a self-preservation thing. Not letting anyone get too close.”
You’ve got that right!
“I do it too, but I’m trying not to. I don’t want to be that way anymore, be that guy anymore. We’ve both lost people we love and we don’t want to get hurt like that ever again.”
All the while he steps closer, his voice genuine, soft brown eyes sincere--but Fi’s so incredibly nervous and worked up all she can think about is his breath’s going to smell like vomit and, God help her, she’s going to laugh, an uncontrollable, crazy person’s laugh--wait--did he say “love?” Her insides turn oily and cold.
Zeke marshals on, “This is totally insane, what I’m about to say, but... Fi?”
She’s begun to shake.
“Are you alright?”
Her eyes roll back in her head and she goes limp.
Zeke lunges and catches her gracelessly, jamming one knee painfully into the sidewalk just before her head hits the ground. “Fi!”
She’s quaking all over and unconscious--obviously having a seizure--but Zeke has absolutely no idea what to do. If she suffers from some sort of condition, she never told him about it. Should he put a spoon in her mouth? They don’t do that anymore, moron! And it’s not like he just happens to have a spoon in his back pocket! Call 911! Run and get her uncle! Scream for help!
Then he feels hot steaming breath on the side of his face, accompanied by a deep rumble in his ear. The hair prickles on the back of his neck. Mol.
Zeke turns very slowly, tries to keep his voice calm and even. “Mol?... Good dog?”
The monster hound is only inches away, glaring at him, unblinking, pensive even. Gazing into those clear brown eyes, a bizarre thought pops into Zeke’s head--this is no ordinary dog. Then he imagines powerful jaws snapping closed on his face, fangs stabbing his skin, crunching into his skull, and Mol shaking him like a rag doll until his neck snaps.
But the tension sags from Mol’s big hairy face. He heaves a heavy dog’s sigh, looks to Fi, and whimpers.
* * *
Fi has no sense of Zeke’s trembling arms holding her tight, or the spasms that wrack her body. All is calm and darkness. And she dreams. A dream that she’s an old man dreaming...
Soft light on open water, pulsing, alive. It flares brightly--
An infant floats on his back, sputtering, giggling, rocking on a broad ocean of reddish waves. Naked, chubby and pink, sky blue eyes beaming. His baby face, round tummy and little pee-pee bob on the surface while his pudgy hands splish-splash in the water.
The baby gurgles, spits, blinks at the full moon, impossibly close, looming in a break between storm clouds that throb with heat lightning, pink, purple and green. Soft sultry rainfall tickles his face. His eyes are stormy gray. He coos at fireworks blasted aloft by a nearby volcano, ahhs at the hiss and steam of flaming orange lava flowing into the sea. His eyes are golden brown.
Shooting stars whiz through the hazy atmosphere, red, blue, and yellow. One keeps coming, hurtling hot and fast. It strikes, sending a plume of vaporous sea-water shooting into the air. A torrent, a rushing wave, and the baby tumbles into the red depths. Then he’s paddling upward, emerald green eyes wide open. He pops to the surface, burbles water, and shrieks with delight...
* * *
“Fi! Oh God! Fi, please!”
Warmth and wetness on her cheeks, up her nose, in her ear, across her lips. Slimy wetness and dog breath. The vague memory of a dream, slipping away. Then it’s gone.
Her eyes flutter open.
“Oh my God! Fi, are you okay?!”
A fuzzy image of someone hovering over her, then Zeke snaps into sharp focus. Night air. Moonlight. Mol.
“Shit!” she cries. She shoves Mol and Zeke away and scrambles to her feet. “Oh no! No-no-no!”
“Are you alright?!”
She frantically wipes dog slobber with her sleeve. She already knows the answer and is mortified, but she has to ask, “Did I have a seizure?!”
“Yes!” he shouts, then steadies himself for her sake. “Yes, you did.”
Fi breathes deliberately, trying to alleviate the humiliation, stave off the panic. It doesn’t work. “I have to go.” She spins and hurries toward the house. Mol trots after her.
Zeke stands there, stunned. “Fi!”
She makes herself stop and face him. “I’m fine!” He starts toward her, opens his mouth to speak, but she holds up a hand to cut him off. “Zeke! Please!”
Her voice is so desperate and pleading that Zeke stays where he is, stricken but resigned.
Fi can’t bear to see him look at her that way. She knows it’s little consolation but offers anyway, “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” then turns away.
Her mind’s a maelstrom, whirling at hurricane speed. On top of everything else, a seizure?! She’d cry if she could, but she never cries. Not since her mother died.
This is not how Zeke imagined this evening going at all--but he knows Fi has to feel the same way. Eve
n worse. He watches her approach the back of the house, her head hanging low, then sighs deeply and begins the lonely walk home.
Fi curses as she stumbles up the sinking crooked steps to the screened in lattice porch, then realizes--at least Edgar didn’t come outside. This old house has thick walls, and Fi’s convinced that her uncle is a little hard of hearing, even though he won’t admit it. She can be thankful for that.
The screen door creaks at her pull and the impression she’s being watched returns with a sudden tingling chill up her spine, so ominous it halts her in her tracks. She quickly surveys the back yard. Nothing there. The place where Zeke stood is empty, but he wouldn’t make her feel this way. Humiliated, remorseful, yeah, but not scared. And Mol’s right here. She has absolutely nothing to fear. Nothing rational.
You’re crazy, that’s all, she tells herself, only half joking. Her attention is drawn once again to the gleaming full moon. It gazes back at her like a blind but omniscient cosmic eye.
* * *
Upon entering the outdated but sizable kitchen, Mol heads further into the house and Fi recognizes the tantalizing aroma of Beef Bourguignon. Edgar prepared her favorite dinner. Having missed it adds further regret and guilt to the tumult of emotions she’s experiencing already.
Behind what looks like a closet door next to the pantry is a narrow set of what once functioned as servant’s stairs that lead up to the hall outside her bedroom on the second floor. She’s used them to sneak in and out of the house before, but she can’t bring herself to do it when she knows her uncle’s waiting up.
She passes into the open stairwell, sees candlelight and the warm glow of the fireplace through the open double-wide living room doorway just down the hall. Good old Uncle Edgar, predictable as always. Last chance. She can head straight upstairs right now. Instead, she straightens herself, shoves a rebellious lock of hair back over her ear and enters the living room.
Edgar is on the couch, scratching Mol behind the ears, an open Bible in his lap. In Latin, this time.
“I’m home, Uncle,” she announces meekly.
Edgar looks up as if just realizing she’s there, his impassive narrow face framed by bushy gray sideburns that travel down to his deeply cleft chin. The firelight glints in his flint-colored eyes. “Miss Fiona,” he greets her with his polite English accent. He presses a thumb and forefinger into his eyes, squeezes the curved bridge of his proud hooked nose with long calloused fingers, then tucks a stained silk ribbon he uses as a bookmark into the crease of the Bible.
“Sorry Uncle. I...”
He stands, tightening the sash of his wool tartan robe (his “sleep coat”), which half-conceals striped pajama pants. “Are you well?” he asks, as if she hasn’t spoken.
She won’t tell him about her night with Zeke, absolutely not. And as for the seizure--that can wait. “I’m fine, thanks.”
He pauses only a moment before responding. “Excellent.” He steps to the hearth and closes the folding glass doors. Edgar would probably be about 5’ 10”, but his shoulders are hunched and he walks with a stoop, which makes him appear shorter. His hair is mostly silver, streaked with black, pulled back and knotted in a tight braid that goes to the middle of his back. Fi asked him once why he had long hair. He said it was the “in thing” when he was coming into his prime, which she took to be the 1960s or 70s, when the style was more fashionable.
Fi’s eyes lift to her uncle’s heirlooms mounted above the fireplace, thick with dust. An antique medieval shield with a smeared red cross, the color degraded to rust, over a background of cracked white paint. Hanging down behind it is a long two-handed greatsword in a tarnished steel sheath. He says they’ve been in his family for centuries. They remind her of him. Old, outdated, inflexible.
He retrieves a brass candle holder from the arm of the sofa, pinches out the flame of another perched on a stand. “Good night, then,” he says, and shuffles around her in his worn fur-lined moccasins, keeping a personal space of at least three feet between them like he always does. He stops at the doorway. “There’s a bit of beef in the cooler, if you’re feeling peckish.”
“Thank you,” she calls over her shoulder. Cooler.
Mol gives her a lingering look then follows her uncle. Standing alone in the flickering firelight, Fi listens to them ascend the creaking staircase.
He never hugs her, her Uncle Edgar. In fact, he never touches her at all, not since he insisted she take over the task of raking the tangles from her own wildly unmanageable red hair when she turned thirteen. Luckily the curls have relaxed as she’s grown and her hair now has only a slight wave.
She shrugs her backpack, hugs it to her chest, and stares into the fire.
* * *
Moonlight beams through paisley lace curtains, projecting dappled patterns across the otherwise unlit room. Tucked tight in her antique brass bed, Fi dreams that she’s an old man dreaming. A soft pulsing light and a baby boy, floating on an ocean of reddish waves.
Remember this time, she commands herself with that part of her mind that’s still her own, remember...
* * *
In a tiny room, sterile white, a withered old man gasps awake on a hard twin bed, wide-eyed and bewildered. A simple thought sparks in the darkness, struggles for space amongst the brambles and fog that infest his addled brain, forcing a tiny gap in which to breathe. I don’t dream! He clutches at thin sheets and stiff foam pillow. The thought trips over itself, I don’t dream, stumbles, I don’t... and falls, I... The old man’s sky blue eyes swirl to golden brown, then stormy gray, and emerald green, then fade, becoming dull, colorless, vapid. Brambles close in and the smothering fog of dementia billows, once again pervading every corner of his mind.
CHAPTER 3
Obsidian
The cavern pool is dark and still, the only movement the flickering reflection of amber torchlight and feathery mist that crawls on its surface. With barely a ripple, Ao Guang’s bald head and long angular face rise until his nose is just above the water. Breath escapes in a slow huff, dissipating the mist, and he sniffs the humid air. His lime-green eyes scan a domed chamber of glassy purple obsidian. Wide chiseled steps lead up and out of the pool. In the middle of the straw-strewn floor above squats a roughly hewn altar of stone. Torches jut from the walls, held by crude sconces of pounded gold. Ao cuts through the water and trudges up the steps, a lumbering giant, long-limbed and intimidating.
Baphomet emerges next. Short white hair and goatee, noble features, light complexion, with eyes of the faintest pink. He comports himself proudly to the floor of the chamber.
Dimmi follows, dark of skin, eyes and hair, sputtering as he stalks up to Baphomet’s side. All three wear the same military-style khaki shirts, pants and boots, drenched and dripping.
“No need for cloaking here, I’d imagine,” says Baphomet in Olde English. Ao Guang clacks his crooked angling teeth together once, loud and unnerving.
The men’s images shudder like reflections in a shaken mirror--and become no longer the images of men.
Dimmi has peaked furry ears, black marble eyes beneath a jutting brow of golden fuzz, spotted black, and a mouth like a smiling gash. He shakes vigorously, spraying water from his coarse coat of hair the color of sand, with jagged black stripes. Baphomet glares at him.
“Sorry,” Dimmi apologizes in a language known to linguists today as Akkadian. “I’ve never liked the water, ever, never ever.”
Of course not, it might make you clean, Baphomet remarks to himself, folding his arms to his chest. Tall horns climb from his forehead, sweeping in a backward curve to end in dagger-sharp points. White fur covers his goat-shaped head and his waist down to his cloven hooves, but he refuses to shake himself, preferring to drip dry in a civilized manner.
“Anything?” he asks. Dimmi bounces softly on his stubby legs, digging at one ear with a black claw. Can’t he ever be still?, Baphomet wonders.
But then he is. Dimmi closes his eyes, his ears twitching. He snuffs deeply with his wet black n
ose. “Something. But...” He shakes his head. “I do still hope it’s female, business and pleasure, fun fun fun!” He chitters and yips at the possibility.
“Ssshhh,” Baphomet cautions.
Dimmi forces a yawn in an effort to stifle himself, his face becoming a ring of jagged fangs around a fat pink tongue. He boasts he can fit an entire parvulus’s head in that mouth, and has been known to rip the face from the skull with a single twisting bite--one of his favorite tricks--especially when he manages to remove all the flesh in one piece, leaving the eyes intact so he can see his victim’s shock before the pain takes hold.
Baphomet turns his attention to Ao Guang, “Ao?”
He’s just feigning regard, Ao Guang is convinced. He doesn’t care what I think. He straightens to his full eight feet of height. Torchlight slithers across smooth gray scales that cover his chest and stomach like armor plates. His algae-colored back is even more heavily armored, ridged to the tip of his tapered tail which still hangs in the water. His head is crocodilian but his snout exceptionally long and thin. He cracks his mouth, droplets of water forming at the ends of needle-sharp teeth that edge the length of his jaws, and snaps it shut with a clack.
It frustrates Ao Guang deeply that their master retains Baphomet as his most trusted adviser and made him the leader of this little sortie. Ao is five times his age--and the years make him strong, even more than his size and the species of his gharial mother. Baphomet may be an accomplished leader with a compelling personality second only to the Master, but Ao Guang is not without legend or glory.
Few Firstborn who have lived in the age of the parvuli have not become legend. Their histories are rich and very long, and their names virtually countless. The history of human civilization is far lengthier than any parvulus knows today, having begun well before the Second Magnificent Holocaust, even before the First. High societies and literate, artistic cultures have come and gone, risen from primitivity, been knocked back into stone ages or wiped from the face of the earth by natural disaster and war, then built and again destroyed. But the memories remain, handed down generation to generation. And before the humans, there were Firstborn. There have always been Firstborn. Almost always. There has always been Father.
