LIFE NEAR THE BONE

A Trilogy of Horror Stories

By

BILLIE SUE MOSIMAN

Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman, 2012, All Rights Reserved

Life Near the Bone (the short story)

Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman 1993, All Rights Reserved

First published in PREDATORS, edited by Ed Gorman, Martin Greenberg, at ROC, a Division of New American Library, 1993

LIFE NEAR THE BONE

"Where do you think life's sweetest?" Jeff Castain stood next to overflowing shelves with a book open in his hands.

"Where? Deep inside a woman who's stacked like a movie star. Let's say she owns an exercise gym. Yeah . . . that's where it's sweetest." Jeff's roommate was bent over at the waist towel-drying freshly shampooed hair.

"It says right here," Jeff said, ignoring Greg's worthless comment, pointing to a page in the book, "that 'It is life near the bone where it is sweetest.' I believe that."

"Near the bone? What's that supposed to mean? Unless it's the pelvic bone he's talking about." He chuckled at his own sexist wit.

"Henry David Thoreau said this. I don't think he was talking about a woman's anatomy."

"Still. I don't get it. It's all mumbo-jumbo to me." Greg slung the damp towel over the back of a slouch-backed easy chair and plopped down in it. He hiked up one foot onto the lip of the cushion and began pulling at his toenails, ripping them off in slivers one by one.

Jeff moved from the bookcases and lay down on the sofa. He propped the book on his chest so as to block the view of his roommate's disgusting hygiene habits. Filthy man, he thought. I'll have to go behind him and sweep the nails from the carpet and put them in the trash. It's like picking up baby shit, doesn't he know that?

"Is Thoreau your philosopher-of-choice this week?" Greg asked.

It was obvious by Greg's tone of voice he didn't care about the answer. Jeff almost failed to respond, but then decided he had taken quite enough sarcasm for one night, friend or no friend.

"I think that's unfair," he said. "I don't go around picking philosophies the way someone collects porcelain dogs. Or the way you collect those stupid arty-farty posters."

Greg paused in the ripping off of a bit of ragged nail from his big toe. He frowned over at the supine Jeff. "Low blow. Okay, maybe I'm just being an asshole. Sorry. Quote all the Thoreau you want, what do I care."

"Thanks for giving your divine permission." Jeff sulked behind Thoreau's Walden and would not say anything else.

All during the following day, Jeff read and pondered Thoreau's book. No matter how ringing and clear and intriguing the pages he read, he kept coming back to that one quote, nagging at it, taking it apart and putting it together again, trying to make it solely his property.

How does one get near enough to the bone so that life would be sweet? There stood the question, this towering, incomprehensible question that might drive him mad if he let it.

For life, at this juncture, was sour and smelling of decay; a desperate air clung to him, fumed off his clothes no matter how often he changed them. It rolled off him in waves from his pores.

He decided that must be the reason the job interviews went badly. They could detect his desperation, maybe smell it the way he did, that fetid stench of rotting peaches left in neglect on a drain-board for a month.

Not his fault he'd lost his job. Houston had been good for him when he'd first moved here from the moribund Gary, Indiana. These were boom times and jobs were for the picking and money flowed faster than a flooding bayou. But feast always gave way to famine and so it was for the city that boasted itself the jewel of the Southwest. He had clung to his managerial position at the Boston Whaler dealership for as long as he could. Why blame him for loss of sales and a slumping profit margin?

But they did. And he was out. And he was not coming in until he could find a job more rewarding than shoveling burgers out of a Jack in the Box, thank you, Charlie Brown. You wouldn't catch him demeaning himself for minimum wage. He still had--he glanced at his fingers and from a balled fist flicked out one finger at a time counting the weeks—six weeks before his unemployment check was cut off.

He'd find something worthwhile before then. Wouldn't he? The possibility that he might never find work again left a little knot of fear tingling in his belly. He began to perspire, to smell himself. Needed a shower. Needed to think.

Think about getting to the bone where life was sweet again, where it wouldn't matter fate had turned, where he might again discover his lost self-respect.

Around three in the afternoon, just before Greg came home from work at Bayshore Hospital, Jeff found a clue in Thoreau. It was like encountering an old, long-lost friend, for immediately he remembered part of the quote from high school literature books.

"Our life is frittered way by detail...Simplify, simplify."

So that's how it's done, Jeff realized. That's how you get down to the pure, gleaming skeleton of existence and find peace. So obvious. He had been trying too hard, running too fast, and complicating his world unnecessarily.

Simplify...

#

"What are you doing?"

"Isn't it apparent? I'm ridding my life of detail and clutter."

Greg turned down the volume on the television where a married couple was sparring on a sitcom. He went to Jeff and stooped near him on the floor by the stereo. "What are you going to do with those albums?"

"The Dumpster. It's all for the trash man."

"But Jeff, you've had some of those albums since we were in college together. Why would you get rid of them now? Some you'll never find again, not in the original."

Jeff paused and looked at the cover of an early Jimi Hendrix album. This one had belonged to his older sister. May she find peace in her sumptuous, overcomplicated, frivolous life. He placed it with some care on the top of other albums in a cardboard box. It wasn't worth a weary sigh, really. Just junk. Really. He wouldn't miss it.

"I don't want them anymore. I've lugged stuff around for years, that's the point, Greg. I'm through with all that. I'm simplifying my life."

"But ..."

Jeff dumped the rest of the albums into the box and he smiled beatifically at his friend before going to the shelves lining the far wall. He turned his back and began pulling out volumes and stacking them in piles on the floor at his feet.

"Now what are you up to?"

"More clutter. Got to go."

"Your library!" Greg squeaked, coming to his feet.

"Don't need it. It's just littering the place up. Books are dust catchers; everything I own does nothing for me but gather dust."

"Now Jeff, you know I don't give a good goddamn about books. I wouldn't read one if my life depended on it, but you read all the time. If you throw all these books out what are you going to read?"

Jeff just said one word—"Thoreau"—and continued hauling the bound titles from the shelves to stacks on the floor.

Greg grabbed up Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and held it to his chest. "Jeff, I don't understand any of this. You love books. You're a glutton for books. How can you give them up this way? And your music. I don't know what this means..."

Jeff turned all in a rush. He flourished two thick books by Dostoevsky in front of Greg's face. "Garbage!"

Greg, startled, backed immediately out of range.

"Can't you get it? Haven't you been listening to me" Sudden rage spiraled upward like a tornado swirling between the two friends. "Thoreau says that luxuries and comforts of life are not indispensable. They're hindrances to the elevation of mankind! Can't you see that? Are you blind as well as deaf? Are you a total fucking mindless vegetable?"

Greg carefully replaced the Miller book on top of one of the stacks and slunk away to the far side of the living room where he took up a watchful pose in the easy chair. He began to chew his fingernails to still the quake inside his chest. It didn't seem to bring an instant of relief.

#

Greg stumbled home from a double shift at the hospital so tired even his eyeballs ached. He saw that this framed posters had disappeared from the wall behind the television set. At any other time this would have served to make him go into a rant, but he was too tired to do more than search for Jeff and ask for an explanation. He would put in a mild protest and retrieve the posters, hang them again.

At Jeff's bedroom door he paused on the threshold. Jeff stood emptying his chest of drawers into a Glad trash bag. While his back was to the door, Greg glanced quickly around. The Navajo rug his friend had bought on a visit to Santa Fe had been rolled in a corner. The covers on the bed were missing except for one rumpled sheet and a bare pillow. The lampshade...the lampshade! Crumpled on the floor. Looked stomped. This frightened Greg more than any of the other evidence that his friend was losing it. Greg couldn't guess the import of the shade unless Jeff meant to live in the unprotected glare of a light bulb.

This was decidedly going too far. He must intervene the way they taught at the hospital outpatient alcohol clinics. Sometimes people had to intervene and risk getting their asses kicked if they saw someone they loved descending into perilous territory.

Now Jeff was methodically discarding his clothes. Would he go naked?

Jeff finally chose to keep two, rather than three, pairs of of jockey shorts. All he needed was a change while one was washed and drying. He bundled up the rest of the underwear into his arms, ready to stuff it all into the rapidly filling bag. He saw Greg in the door. .

"Hey there. You know what? I've been thinking about you pulling those double shifts. It's crazy, man. It's unenlightened. I told you what Thoreau said about luxuries and comforts. Wanting things is a trap. Once inside the trap, you never get free. The jaws lock down tight. Here you are working sixteen hours straight so you can afford that Camaro you just bought and those nights on the town with your girl and..."

"Jeff?"

"Yeah?" He tamped down the clothes in the Glad bag, grinning all the while.

"What did you do with my posters?"

"Oh those. I put them in your room. You really should think about doing away with that kind of stuff. It just drags you down, drags you down."

"Jeff, I think it's time you saw someone. Dr. Bronsky over at Bayshore's pretty good. I'll get him to give you a professional discount and . . ."

"Fuck you!"

Vehement. Aggressive. Even Jeff's good-natured temper was rapidly vanishing.

"C'mon Jeff, I'm serious. This is getting way out of hand. Look at you. You're throwing away your clothes, for chrissakes."

"Not everything. I'm keeping two pairs of jeans and two shirts. That's all I need. What do I need all these clothes for?"

"For starters, maybe you'd need them for a job. For going to interviews to get a job."

"Go away." Jeff turned his back, pulled out the bottom drawer of the chest and hauled out folded summer shorts and sports shirts.

"I can't, Jeff. I have to try to do something."

Jeff halted in his pawing through the drawer. He said quietly, "If you don't go away right now, I won't be responsible for what happens."

"Are you threatening me now?"

"I hear a different drummer, Greg. If you don't hear it, fine, but don't interfere. Now go away."

Jeff didn't want to go, but he didn't want to stay either. He waited only until his friend turned slowly, ominously, and he saw the look of a nervous zealot, the mad, staring look of a monk holding a flame, ready to immolate himself with the cleansing holy fire. Then he knew he must leave. There was nothing he could do. Jeff had ventured too far over the edge and he was falling without a net.

#

He had to call from the living room, too fearful to tell Jeff anything to his face ever again. "I'm moving out, Jeff " He waited. "Do you hear me? I'm going to pack my shit and I'm outta here. You're sick, Jeff. I'm not staying with you any longer when you won't listen to me, when you won't go for help. You're dangerous. Don't you realize that? You've been throwing away stuff for a week."

"Fuck you," he heard Jeff call back furiously. "Fuck you and the Gucci-Rolex-BMW-Beverly Hills horse you rode in on. I don't need you around anyway! You're nothing but a prostitute. You sold out the day you were born."

#

Jeff Castain gradually came to enjoy life again. It seemed as if he had been on a quest for the Grail and found it embedded in the pure, clean stone of Thoreau's noble philosophy. He had been walking through trash, stumbling, lost, and now he could see the path before him.

He read: "Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." From this he deduced that Greg's leaving was ordained; it helped him unearth order in a disorderly universe. He had never loved him or anything, not truly. They were just friends for a while, and who turned out to be a traitor to all that was good and right and just? So what if he proved to be the Asshole of the World, the turncoat, the Philistine?

The apartment was shaping up. Looking good. He rubbed his palms together in contentment. In the living room he'd gotten rid of everything but one kitchen straight-backed chair, an unadorned fruit crate from the Safeway, and his precious copy of Walden.

In the kitchen he'd thrown out everything but one plate, one knife, one pan. He ate from cans mostly so what was the point of owning dinnerware and drawers full of silverware and cabinets full of cooking utensils? He saw his landlady scuttle to the Dumpster and take the electric grill and the popcorn popper. Crazy old bitch. Frivolous, frowzy pack rat.

His bedroom was a spare cell now and he loved it. It was a helluva chore to lug the bed from the apartment down the stairs and out back to the Dumpster, but, sweating and swearing, he'd managed. The floor was immensely more comfortable after a few nights. He hardly ached at all anymore when he woke. He thought the Spartan idea converged well with Thoreau's philosophy so he incorporated it into his new life modality.

He had the phone company disconnect his telephone at week's end. Greg kept calling and the job agencies too. What a fucking nuisance; what a bore. He didn't need a job. His needs were too few to demand a real income. When the unemployment check ran out, he'd apply for welfare. If they wouldn't let him have it, he'd go on the streets. It meant nothing to him one way or the other.

Thoreau said: "I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

Jeff embraced that to mean he must let the world flow past. In the apartment, on the street, wherever he found himself, it didn't matter. He carried solitude with him like an envelope in his pocket and no one could divest him of it ever again. They didn't even know he had it!

He patted his shirt pocket as if solitude really was a thing of dimension and weight and it belonged to him alone.

It was not until a month later that Jeff found the quote that would change his life and get him down to the nub of existence. He'd still been searching for the place next to the bone, scraping and scraping away society's frills until he could feel the knife screeching somewhere far off in the dim nether reaches of the fog that had come to surround his days.

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

That is what he came upon in his diligent study and when he found it, he knew then he was nearly home free through the twilight of his ignorance. He heard clarion bells ringing on the reading aloud of that sentence. He shivered with anticipation at the coming understanding that crept forth from the dark corner shadows of his barren apartment. That understanding, when it took him, would rend the foundations of his misery and bring him down to the bone, down past the slime and corruption--the gate!--of flesh that barred the way.

#

"Hello, Mrs. Whipshaw."

"Jeff, how nice of you to visit. Won't you come in?"

The old woman who had nabbed the grill and the popcorn popper from the trash Dumpster let her tenant inside the dank, bird-shit-splattered living room. A white cockatiel flew through the air in protest, wings flapping wildly.

"Pay no attention to Potto. He's a spoiled brat and isn't used to polite company. Hush, Potto! Behave now."

Jeff declined to sit in the newspaper-covered chintz chair Mrs.Whipshaw gestured he take. He stood with his hands behind his back, smiling the stiff smile of the Buddha, the smile of the Inscrutable. His gaze flicked around the room and soon his smile evaporated, replaced by a sneer of disgust. White smears of Potto's crap covered the drapes, dripped down the neck of a brass table lamp, lay in dried yellow-streaked plops on top of the furniture. It looked as if an insane painter had come, and in a frenzy, swung a wet brush around and around to create a barbarous nightmare of interior decoration.

"I haven't seen you out of your apartment in ever so long," Mrs. Whipshaw said, shooing the contentious bird from her shoulder.

Jeff watched the cockatiel closely to see where it might light down. It hung upside down from the silent dust-layered ceiling fan and screeched at him, one eye cocked in his direction. "I haven't been out much," Jeff said, once reassured the bird was not coming to him.

He felt a nausea rising and had to swallow bitter gorge. It tasted of the kidney beans he'd consumed the night before. Sickening. Eating--an odious habit. Made people into worms. Scoop it in, shit it out, round and round she goes, where she stops no one knows...

"What happened to your nice friend, that Greg boy? Did he really move out?"

"Posters," Jeff said by way of explanation.

"What's that, dear?"

Jeff crossed the room, his eye trained on the bird, as he came for Mrs. Whipshaw with the one knife he'd saved for cutting tough meat.

Disposing of the bodies. Now Thoreau never gave advice about that sort of thing. Damn odd. He knew about everything else, you'd think the man would have left some sort of road map. Jeff had to ponder the situation for two days before he could decide what to do. He had Mrs.Whipshaw and Potto cooling in the huge freezer she kept, strangely enough, in the spare bedroom of her ground-floor apartment.

He had the occupant of the other downstairs apartment, punky-looking George with the orange and green blotch in his hair, stuffed over double at the waist in his broom closet. (Cluttered, cluttered. Baseball mitts, bats, skates, pool cues, bowling balls, smelly running shoes. Much too cluttered for anyone sane.)

He had James, the quiet law student, in the bathtub in apartment on the second floor. He sat shriveling like an old potato with a radio in his lap. Pity it wasn't a law manual, though what good that would do him now Jeff couldn't guess.

He had the Danju sisters waiting in their beds. Nice girls. Not a bother in the world, but the way they lived, unbelievable! Frozen dinner trays growing mold, magazines littering the carpet, thready dust balls and trailing spider webs and filmy bikini panties hanging everywhere. It was enough litter to turn the stomach. It took Jeff all night just to get their apartment under kind of control. He cursed them with every name in the book, nice girls or not. Anyone living like a pig needed to be called a swine.

Old man Shorer was no trouble at all. He was all bent and crippled by arthritis. He couldn't run, he couldn't even crawl, not toward the last. Cried, though. Cried like a fucking baby. And him old as the hills, didn't make proper good sense to Jeff, but there it was. A man who chose to live with a cat that scratched out shit-ball litter every time he used the box had to be some kind of nut to begin with. Everyone knew you could get terminal diseases from cats. Jeff had saved Shorer a prolonged and, no doubt, much more painful death.

Now to dispose of the bodies. Without Thoreau's help. Without his wisdom and guidance.

And to return the apartment house--the entire building--to neat, impersonal harmony. It would take boxes and boxes of Glad trash bags, dozens of cardboard boxes from the Safeway. A wheelbarrow!

Yes, he would need a wheelbarrow.

He hoped the Dumpster wasn't full tonight. He would be taking numerous loads to it. His heart sang with freedom he was at last seeing the very edge of the pristine bone, a flicker of purity, and it was a glorious glimpse of paradise Heaven itself.

#

He heard the pounding of feet coming up the stairs before he ever heard knocking on the door. He was tired, sweaty, needed a shower cold and long. He peeked through the viewer and saw the intruder into this place of calm and peace was the treasonous poster man, Greg.

Figured.

"Jeff?" Greg called, his face pressed against the door. "Let me in."

Jeff unbolted the lock and swung wide the door, turning away and walking across the room as he did so.

"Jeff?" There was a pregnant pause. Then: "What the hell? What did you do with all the furniture? Jesus."

Jeff wore only a pair of grimy shorts. His hair stuck out on end as he'd been sleeping. And not washing. He was covered with dirt and smudges that looked like tar or oil. "What do you want now?"

"I've been worried about you. I tried to call, but the operator told me the phone was disconnected."

"So?"

"Well…uh…how are you?"

"What do you care? You vamoosed for a decadent lifestyle, didn't you? You want to be featured on 'The Rich and Famous' one day, don't you? So why would you care?"

Greg cleared his throat. He looked like a weasel caught in a hole. The criticism, however exaggerated, was a little too close to home. "Did you…did you find work?"

Jeff chortled unpleasantly. "Go away, Greg. I have nothing say to you." He left the room and disappeared into the darkened hallway.

Greg followed close behind. "Jeff, wait. I really mean it. I'm still worried. How are you paying the rent? Are you eating? I could help, you know. I haven't really abandoned you."

"No rent. Mrs. Whipshaw said so. Dear old lady, dear bird lady." Jeff went directly into the hall bath and stepped in the tub. He slipped out of his shorts and threw them on floor. He turned on the shower, drew the curtain.

"No rent?"

"Rent free," Jeff said above the roar of the water. "Ask her yourself."

"Maybe I will."

The shower curtain snapped open and droplets of water flew in the air, spotting Greg's face. "No, you won't. Don't you dare. You stay out of my business affairs. You're no longer in my life, remember? You wanted your fucking posters and your soft cushions and your steak and potatoes. Remember?"

"Jeff, can't you talk with me without fighting? Can't you see your way clear to be reasonable?"

Jeff shut the curtain. He sudsed down his body and scrubbed himself hard with the washcloth. Finally he said, in as sane and sensible a tone as he could muster, "Let me get through and I'll take you on a tour of my new orderly world. "

Full of misgivings, Greg lowered the toilet seat and sat down to wait. This time he had to do something before he left. This time it was absolutely imperative he not leave Jeff alone with his warped delusions. He had known him too long not to try to help.

Jeff finished bathing, dried, dressed himself quickly in jeans and shirt and sneakers.

"I've seen the place, Jeff. You got rid of everything. This looks like a prison."

"Not a prison, a sanctuary. A man has to begin at home. Then . . ." he glanced slyly at Greg. ". . . he branches out."

"I don't think you're going to find very many followers. Not many people want to join a cult that denies all possession." Greg laughed easily, but soon quieted when Jeff walked past him to the front door. "Come on. I want to show you how I've hacked at the chaos and brought it under supervision. I want to show you what can be done when you simplify your life, when all the extraneous is ruthlessly cut away down to the very roots where the trouble lies."

Jeff took his friend to Mrs. Whipshaw's freezer first thing. They walked together through the scrupulously cleaned empty apartment to the spare bedroom.

When the stunned, horrified remonstration began, it was a beast of a battle to get Greg subdued enough to shut his mouth.

To shut his mouth forever.

#

Less than a week passed after Greg's visit before Jeff wandered through the silenced apartment house in the middle of the night saying good-bye to his perfectly balanced world.

People had come to inquire. Mrs. Whipshaw's son screamed that he'd be back with the police. He would see his mother, goddamnit, if he had to bring in the National Guard to do it. She never would have left town without telling him, he claimed from the bottom of the apartment steps. Don't tell him she would.

The boyfriend of one of the Danju sisters left without a squawk, but as he went to his car, he kept squinting suspiciously over his shoulder.

Two law school students stopped by to ask why their friend had not been to classes. Sick? They hadn't heard from him. Too sick to call them? Contagious? Wasn't that funny, though, he always seemed in such good health.

Yes, it was time to go. As much as he hated to. He had invested a ridiculous amount of time in creating order, in simplifying the complex. It was a shame, terribly unjust, that he must flee what was an almost perfect creation.

Ye t...yet... An apartment house in the center of a seedy district inside of an abhorrently chaotic big city was no real place for him, anyway. He needed his own Walden Pond. He needed to escape to the wilds, sequester himself away from the mad, chattering, bruising world.

With the money Greg and the apartment dwellers had on persons or in their possession, Jeff took a bus from Houston to the dry West Texas town of Midland. Once there, he hired a taxi driver to take him into the desert.

"Where?"

"Where no one lives," Jeff said, waving money in the man's face.

"Are you nuts? How are you gonna get back? No phone there, buddy. Nothing but snakes and tumbleweeds, sand and cactus. You can't go out there."

"A friend's meeting me later in his car, if it's any of your business. I'll come back with him. Now will you drive?"

He drove. For two hours. Blabbering all the way, bitching about the heat, the absurdity of this, the kooks he ran into, what a job.

Jeff ignored him in favor of reading, for the dozenth time, from Walden. He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew where the bone glistened most cleanly. It was not in the woods where Thoreau had hidden away himself. It was not in the mountains where shady towering presences safeguarded the timorous. It was not in the lush valleys where Nature rioted and the senses were overwhelmed.

It was in the plain open desert, the place man had not yet desecrated with his two-bit palaces and his glittering signs, and his bubbling, stinking tarmac laid end to end forever and amen.

It was here in the steaming heart of untrodden, forgotten land, that Jeff Castain knew he would find the ultimate simplification. He wanted that more than breath itself.

This buddy of yours don't show up in time, you could have a sunstroke out here without water. I tell ya, this is the craziest thing I've ever seen," the cabby complained. "I don't like it none-a-bit. I ain't gonna be responsible for you dying out here, you know, a hundred-five in the shade, if there was any shade. I been trying to talk you outta this, ain't that right?"

Jeff failed to answer except to say, "Pull over here. This is where I get out."

Even before the taxi made a U-turn on the infrequently traveled two-lane highway, Jeff was already heading off across the hard packed sands. He moved west toward the lowering sun, Thoreau's book clutched tightly in hand.

Heat mirages blinked on and off in the distance like defective pale blue neon tubes. A lone vulture rode the high currents, a dot in the scalding blue sky. Here was soul. Here was where eternity sat down to shake hands with creatures courageous enough to come unfettered.

Jeff Castain looked back only once to make certain he was losing sight of the long black strip of highway. To make sure he was leaving civilization behind. He thought now it had never belonged to him. That world was under rule of someone else. Someone other. Alien.

He lost all sense of time when day segued into night into day into night. He stumbled and dropped the book; picked it up, surprised to see his hands blistered black, but never mind, never mind.

Finally his tongue swelled in his mouth and hung over his cracked lips like a fat gray slug. His lungs, a fiery bellows, labored to keep him going. His eyes had swollen to slits blocking the blood red disk of the sun. His skin--his clothes at some past time discarded--seeped clear fluid from pustules that he split apart with pinched fingers.

Each passing second he could feel the loosening of the hold the world had on the flesh. He was a dragon whose scales fell clattering at his feet. Each faltering, dragging step he managed to take brought him ever nearer the crux of reality. Ever closer to the bone.

He yearned. He begged. He prayed. In the end, he raged. "Didn't I sacrifice enough?" He yelled across the endless sand. "Didn't I scrape past all the filth?"

He pulled on his sack of skin until he tore off pieces and had ripped an ear from his skull. He went to his knees and screamed soundlessly.

At last he could hear a velvety voice hissing across the still air as it approached. He was almost home, it said.

He bowed his head in relief and wept bloody tears.

Come, it said. Nearer, it said. Where life is simple, life is true. Where no one knows you, no one cares, and nothing can get you back again.

Come now. Where you belong, it said.

Ever closer.

Come with me.

Where life is sweetest,

Near the bone.

Near the white, white

Bone…

THE END

ANTIDOTE

Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman, 1995

First published in 100 VICIOUS LITTLE VAMPIRES, edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowiez, and Martin Greenberg, Barnes and Noble Books.

Carmine made it through the long tunnel and halted across from the park in the darkest part of the street to pry a quarter inch of hard bio-metal scab from the knuckle of his right hand. It would grow back, of course. All the small patches growing over the surface of his skin like a creeping cancer would eventually merge until his only opening was the vent for his nose and eyes. Thus encased in his new skin, immobile, he would die of starvation.

Vampire punishment, cruel and unusual, heartless. A strain of insecticide had been developed in the late twentieth century to control moth and butterfly larvae. It effectively encased them in their skins so they starved. This technology had been further enhanced to be used on the undead man. By the age of twenty-one Carmine had been caught in his native Italy and strapped to a gurney and injected. Nothing else killed his kind, not the traditional stake through the heart, that only pissed them off, not burning, for they could walk out of any fire, and not beheading, for they could carry their heads under their arms and have them stitched on again.

The Hosts had won the war in the nick of time and it was through geneticists who had been working to save crops. Or rather, they had won the war. For a half century Vampires and Hosts coexisted, killing and being killed in turn. Now a majority of the vampires had been captured and inoculated with the deadly vaccine. There were few left who were disease-free. When an inoculated beast bit a Host, making him a vampire, that beast too carried the tainted blood that would finally bring him down.

It was rumored, however, that Fondred, the King of the Vampires, had commissioned his brightest people to seek an antidote to the vaccine. It was further rumored that one of their kind working in research in the far reaches of the East Texas wastelands had done just that.

A cure!

But only if Carmine was able to stay alive long enough to arrive at the enclave and be inoculated with the antidote. Only if Fate allowed him time to reach Texas before his nights ran out and his skin turned to a solid case of shiny metal armor with him lying slobbering behind the cold hard mask, his eyes wild and rolling from the suffocation. It was worse than being buried alive. He'd be able to see his enemy, smell his fresh blood, hunger for him with every molecule, and yet not be capable of the pounce, of the rendering and tearing of the carotid, of drinking his fill, of satiation.

A girl's voice broke through Carmine's reverie to ask, "Do you have somewhere to go tonight? Would you like some company?"

He sneered at this approach before he turned and showed his face, his fangs. Even today the Hosts had their women on the streets offering their bodies, never knowing if they would be used for pleasure or for food. It was walking suicide, and he hadn't any remorse in his heart when he took down one of these idiot whores.

He swiveled slowly, his upper lip rising as he did so to show her true terror. When she came into view, his lip froze in place and he blinked and his heart stuttered in his chest.

She was a great old one who had been taken in her youth, she was a queen. From the fiery furnace of her gaze he trembled and shrank back. She hissed, showing him her own fangs. She was far stronger than he, her physical power rippling the muscles beneath the fair skin of her biceps as if they were full of snakes. "I'm not your supper," she said. "You mistake me for another sort of female, one weaker than I."

"How did you know I was a vampire?"

"I saw you tear off the bio-metal and fling it from you."

"Are you infected too?"

"Not me! I'm too clever to be caught. And so was my Master who made me. I doubt even now these years later that they've gotten their hands on him. So will we walk together or are you intent on your solitude?"

"Come along," he said, turning and moving through the shadows, staying close to the buildings' walls. "I'm on my way out of this morbid city. You can come with me to the outskirts if you want."

"Leave Mobile? Why would you want to do that? From your accent I can tell you're foreign. Italian, perhaps? We've had an influx of Italians lately. Mobile takes in the foreigner quite nicely. Besides, you're doomed and there's no better place than here beneath the century oaks to die. Then again, perhaps one place is as good as another. We do have a stench of death here, our kind falling so rapidly sometimes you must step over them on the sidewalks and in the gutters come early morning." She shuddered involuntarily.

"I won't die." Carmine straightened his shoulders and walked with more purpose.

"Certainly you will. You've got the metal growing on you even as we speak."

Carmine nodded his head. He picked at an imaginary fleck of the metal he thought might be growing on his left wrist. "Yes, but Fondren made finding an antidote his highest priority and I've heard one of our scientists in Texas has found it. I'll be saved. I've come halfway around the world to reach him."

She laughed, the sound so sudden and unappealing in its derision that Carmine stopped again and glared at her. His lips rose in automatic response and his fingers spread, yearning to find themselves wrapped around her young, tender throat. Strength of fury would cause him to challenge her if it came to that even though he knew she would not be overcome.

"It's a lie!" She laughed no more, seeing his face. She spoke again, more quietly, knowing his dignity ruffled, his hope shattered. "We've all heard the same, but it's not true. It's just moonbeams on a summer's night. It's wispy fog along a swampy bank. It's a child's tale to ward off the nightmare."

"How would you know that?" He knew he was speaking out of turn, that if she chose she might take him prisoner, bind him, and keep him still until the bio-metal did its harsh work, but he must know why she called it a lie.

She lowered her head and black glossing hair hung past her cheeks like a curtain. "I had a friend who believed the rumor and make the trip. He came back just days before his final encasement within the bio-metal. He had searched out the entire southeast portion of the state of Texas looking for this miracle worker and found no one remotely familiar with the legend. It's a scurrilous lie. More horrible because it sends so many like you on a fruitless last march cross country for no reason."

"Your friend might have been wrong He might not have…"

She hissed. Silence settled between them like a heavy dew fall. Finally she said, "There is no cure. There is no antidote. You've wasted your time coming this far if you thought otherwise. Where are you from?"

"Italy," he said. "You guessed correctly." He resumed his walking again though now his steps were no longer purposeful, and hope had fled from his face the way a butterfly races across the sky to flee the sticky petals of a poison bloom.

"A beautiful country, I've heard."

"Disseminated. One in ten dead," he said, thinking of his homeland and the terrible journey he had made on the strength of what his companion now called a deceit. His ship, with him in the hold, had landed in Miami and he'd traveled by night for a week to get as far as Mobile, Alabama.

"As is this country," she said sadly. "Not even many of the Hosts are left to rule. It's all collapsed."

"The world," he said, "will soon be a wilderness, overgrown with weeks, and ruled by the rodent."

She shrugged. "So why waste what precious time you have left to go to Texas? They say the Hosts have cleared out from Houston to the panhandle. The ones left alive are in a fort near Abilene. You could starve to death looking for game or man."

"And here? I've had no luck at all across the state of Florida either."

"There's many Hosts left yet in this place."

"But no hope," he said, walking faster as if to leave her behind.

She must have halted for she spoke from his back. "How much do you want saving? I see you would travel on to a desolate empty place even when you're told there is nothing there to help you, but would you kill off the Hosts with a disease worse than the bio-metal, if you could? Even if you knew it meant the end of your human source of blood and you'd be forever dependent on the lower animals?"

He hesitated, his steps slowing. He turned to her again. She was mesmerizing, a Merlin with riddles at her command. "What does this mean? That you can save me, that you have stop magic to stop this?" He pushed up the sleeve on his left arm and with long fingernails plucked a metal scab the size of a silver dollar from just above his elbow. The exposed raw skin glowed red a moment and then freely oozed his blood. He pitched the metal bit and heard it jangle as it hit the pavement of the street.

"What if I told you that I am the antidote? That I am this city's liaison to gather vampires who have heard of the cure in Texas and decide which ones I'd like to save and which ones to let wander on toward death? That there are others like us scattered across the states, seeking out the wanderers? That, yes, Fondred ordered an antidote and it was created, and I was injected, and I am it."

"I'd say that was farfetched."

"More impossible than a phantom in Texas waiting with vials to save you?"

He cocked his head and studied her. "Why do you tease me with all these stories? Just to confuse me so that I don't know truth from lie? I have no time for games! Even now there are bio-metal spots I can't reach formed on my back, and if I were to pull down my trousers, I'd find patches on my thighs. If I took off my shoes, they'd be there glittering between my toes, and here…" He grabbed one of his ears and pulled the lobe forward from hiding behind shoulder length hair. "Here is one trying to take over my skull!" With a wrenching movement and a groan he tore skin and metal and threw it at her feet. Long damp strands of hair clung to it and blood now poured fresh down his throat.

"Come to me," she instructed in the seductive voice of the hunter. "Let me drink from you and save you all at once. I promise it is not a lie, nothing I have said is an untruth. If you wish for life immortal as was promised in the beginning, come to me now."

Her hushed voice filled and thrilled him. It blinded his eyes, dampened the taste buds on his tongue, stilled the rapid beat of his heart, stole memory and fear and desire from his thoughts. He lumbered clumsily into her embrace, no more in control of his actions or emotions than he had been when he was made by his Master half a decade earlier. She was very powerful. A queen with skill enough to put him on his knees or to bay like a wolf at the stars. She could not be denied; no matter if it meant his admittance to final darkness or redemption into the everlasting ife f the undead with no worry of bio-metal encasement. He had lost all choice and did not even miss it or know the moment it actually deserted him.

She leaned her head near the web, soggy hair that lay across his throat. With her long tongue she licked it aside. His heart slowed and he wrapped his arms around her body, pulling her in close to him, loving her, wishing to be one with her forever. It had been years, a lifetime, since he had felt such peace and serenity. Perhaps she did have the antidote in her bite, coursing in her rich blood, the miracle that would return his immortality.

Just before she bared her teeth she said softly, "Now I will tell you the real truth."

He sighed against her, his strength draining from him as it would if he had been hypnotized and told his limbs were turned to tubes of rubber.

"There is no antidote in Texas. There is no antidote in me. There are no Hosts left on this entire continent, my dear friend. The few of us who are left must prey either on one another or on foreigners who come to his land. We spread the rumors that brought you. Many of us sailed to other shores, some who had the skills flew planes, but the rest, like me, who cannot leave, simply lie in wait for you."

"Noooo," he said, drawing out the word in a whisper of breath. He felt her heat and it reminded him of the emptiness of Miami and of all the state of Florida, how he had not a human meal since he landed. Other vampires he encountered had looked haunted and frail, but none had the power of his one to capture him.

"Yessss," she cooed, sinking her fangs into the carotid and drinking deep while Carmine silently cried for it to be over quickly.

The fangs fastened, his head lay back, and he submitted to the last death. As he slipped from the bounds of his body he knew she had been right all along. She was the authentic antidote, the surcease from hunger and despair. He sighed with the breath of stale air left in his lungs and took the echo of that sigh with him into the blind darkness, stepping away almost happily from a world ravaged and beyond any hope of repair.

THE END

ROSA TWO-COINS

Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman 1998

First published in HORRORS! 365 SCARY STORIES, Barnes and Noble, edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Tekno-Books.

In the moist twilight of New Orleans, Rosa Two-Coins wandered the streets like a wraith of fog, insubstantial. Some who saw her say she was a flower peddler, holding out nosegays for the tourists to buy. "Just two coins," she was heard to call. "For your ladylove, sir, just two coins."

Some say she wore a nun's habit, and when she paused on the sidewalk near the haunts dealing in sickly sweet liquors, she would bless the people who came and went, holding up her rosary in ne hand against the sky like a talisman, and in the other a tin cup for offerings.

Some called her demon. Some called her saint.

They all knew Rosa was not of his world and, depending on what they believed, either shunned her or sought her out.

On this night of summer mists and sudden showers, when the streets shined like wrinkled foil with reflections of lamplight, Bartholomew wove his way through the French Quarter in search of the mystical Rosa.

Two coins were all he had to his name, having been luckless at the game of chance in this dreadful Crescent City, but he believed firmly that if he found Rosa and paid her the last he owned, his luck would return.

Rosa found him, rather than he finding her. She stepped out from between two cedars near the church steps and said sweetly, "Young master, for two coins I will return your fortune."

Bartholomew withdrew from her, afraid for his life No one had told him that Rosa was a hag with many decades of bitterness written in dark scrawls across her aged face. "I…I need luck, Rosa. I need my luck back or I'll be homeless by morning."

He lay the two coins in her extended palm and saw them disappear. He followed her as she turned. They walked for blocks, past warehouses and closed fruit stands, walked on through the cold rainy night. Finally Rosa ducked into an alley and he rushed after her, not to be cheated of his money. There in the alley was a black door, and behind it he found Rosa squatting before a low hearth of embers.

"Please," he said, "won't you help me? I've paid what you asked."

"When you win, betting on credit, will you return to me here and pay me two thousand coins?"

He almost choked. "Two thousand!"

"It will be as nothing to a rich man like you come morning."

He agreed quickly, but jumped when she stood abruptly and handed him a chunk of coal.

"This is dead earth, cold and old, and for you, perhaps lucky. Keep it in your pocket and win your fortune, young mister."

Bartholomew hurried away, drew credit on his good name, and played through the night. It was cards, it was dice, and it was the roulette. He could not lose. He began to be cheerful, a laughing, lucky man. Rains came to flood the streets and still he played, amassing more and more winnings. The dealers looked at him askance, the gambling hall's owner came from private quarters and stood by rubbing his chin, watching with a scowl on his face. A woman hung on his arm and cocktails were provided the moment his glass was empty. He laughed and laughed and laughed. His pockets bulged and on the books there was more than he could ever carry on his person. He was indeed rich now. He was the luckiest man alive.

When morning came he had won so much that he asked for a leather bag to carry at least a portion of his winnings. The hall owner scowled more fiercely and gestured his customer be brought whatever he wanted, even a leather bag with a shoulder strap. Bartholomew's ship was sailing at noon and he must hurry, having business up-river. He snatched the bag from an employee's hand, stuffed it with his money, and tipped the boy a gold coin for his trouble.

He forgot all about his promise to Rosa until he had boarded and the ship left shore. The sun was overhead, covered by an overcast of dark gray clouds. It would rain again. He sighed, then smiled craftily. Two thousand! The old hag was mad. Even if he had remembered, he never would have gone through with it.

Before the ship docked again, Bartholomew had said too much about his luck, bragged too often, as happy, lucky people are wont to do.

The thieves found him asleep in his cot and bludgeoned him until his happy face was pulp. It looked like a meat grinder had chewed his head. When the captain found the body, he set into the first landing and called for the authorities.

A day later in New Orleans, Rose sold bouquets of violets on Desire Street. The sun was out once more, causing Rosa to shield her face with black lace s as not to scare off her customers.

Two men came to her and dropped two thousand coins into her bucket, smiled, and bowed.

"And the bit of coal?" she asked.

"In his gullet, Rosa, to keep him warm in hell."

Rosa Two-Coins cackled madly, covering her mouth with her hands. When she was done with mirth, she sobered, for she had a living to make. Her eerie voice bawled into the street, "Violets for your ladylove, sir! Just two coins, two coins only for your pretty one, two coins to make you the happiest person alive!"

THE END

Please read on for the opening chapters of my latest supernatural horror novel, BANISHED--available now as an e-book.

BANISHED

By

Billie Sue Mosiman

Copyright 2011 by Billie Sue Mosiman, All rights reserved.

Cover art by Neil Jackson, Copyright 2011

"The Magician rearranges the Universe to make himself the center, the Mystic rearranges himself to find the center."

CHAPTER 1

THE LITTLE DEATH

She could barely breathe she was so hot. She could hear the night birds call and the rustle of her mother’s palm grass skirt as she moved about the small hut. She could see just the light from the flames of the fire in the center of the floor, but she could not make out anything beyond.

She closed her eyes to blessed darkness and wondered when she would die. She knew she would never be well again, never stand and walk, never kiss her mother’s cheek, or feel the comfort of her mother’s loving embrace. She had not lived long, a handful of years, so there was not much to miss. Yet she knew she must fight against death. She must not willingly let it take her.

A blanket of coolness slipped over her bare skin and it was not from the water her mother had been sponging onto her. She tried to reopen her eyes to discover the cause, but her lids were too heavy. She was so hot! The coolness that temporarily enveloped her was not helping. She wished they would carry her to the sea and float her in the waves.

Dark grew darker. Grew to pitch black. Grew to encompass a vast void. She struggled to take a breath. It would not come; her lungs would not obey. She thought, Death has me. Death has slipped his arms around me and holds me so tightly I cannot breathe.

Faintly she heard her mother’s wails, but she couldn’t lift a hand for her to come near, nor could she whisper the compassion she felt for the loved one she was leaving behind. She couldn’t even say goodbye.

Take me to the sea, she begged of Death. Take me from this heat and pain and let me float in the cool frothy waves. I always loved…I always loved the sea.

The heat grew like a malevolent cloud in the darkness until it filled the void. She couldn’t feel her body. She knew she was but a pinpoint of matter, a tiny bit of consciousness floating in the emptiness. It seemed time had stopped or it was moving so slowly it would last forever and nothing for her would ever change.

I’m not ready, the child complained. I’m too young.

And then she was swept off into the dark beyond where there was no more thought or heat or life.

She was done with this world.

CHAPTER 2

A NEW TRUE BEGINNING

“Life. A wriggling mass of cells blindly replicating, always in motion, endlessly in search of food. Is that life? They say it is.”

The girl lay dying. Her week-long fever had put her into a coma and though her mother kept bathing her with cool water, her skin felt like hot coals. Though fevered, her light coffee-colored skin shone smooth and beautiful as a river stone in the flickering firelight.

In the little one-room shack made from date palm leaves the heat was stifling. Not one stray breeze made its way through the open doorway. Flies were so thick they congealed the air and had to be batted away constantly from the comatose child.

The mother, frantic about losing her only child, knowing in her heart death stood close with a skeletal arm extended, ran from the hut crying to the night heavens. She sped along the lone path through the jungle to the witch doctor’s hovel and stood outside wailing loud enough to wake the dead.

In her native tongue she told the witch doctor about the dying child and begged for him to save her.

It seemed to take him forever to gather his special feathers, shells, rocks, and sticks tied in bundles with strings of dried pig skin. As the mother raced back along the path to her baby, the witch doctor stayed at her side, pacing her, a pale sickle moon at their backs.

Bursting into the hut where a small fire in the center of the floor burned, grotesque shadows swathed the little girl who lay against the back wall. Both mother and witch doctor knew it was over and done with.

The child’s arm lay limp off to one side, her head was turned toward them, her eyes open, glazed, and forever stilled.

The mother turned to the witch doctor and in her grief made the ultimate request. She knew of the rumors.

“They say you have raised the dead. Raise her up!”

“I have only raised a few animals,” he said. “Never a human being.”

“Raise her!”

It was true he was renowned across the island as the most powerful witch doctor ever to have lived, but what the woman was asking he thought was surely beyond his powers. He had brought a dead chicken back to life. A dead dog. And once, even a dead panther, just to see if he could. But a human being? He had not dared try. He was not even sure that the gods would allow him that kind of power.

“I will give you anything,” the mother cried. She beat her chest and rolled her eyes. “Anything! Anything!” She was close to madness.

The witch doctor’s countenance darkened, his eyes took on a glow. His gaze left the mother and settled on the child. He stepped closer, two steps. Three. He went to his haunches and studied the girl. She was undeniably the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Her skin was lighter than most islanders, as if it were lit from within by soft white flame. Her nose and lips and eyes and brow were perfection, and the face was shaped like a heart. Her long dark hair was smooth, shiny with whale oil, and it fell in curls like coiled snakes from her scalp. He reached out and trailed his fingers along her cheek. It was cold, so cold. It was a shame she was dead. It seemed to Mujai that the gods were intentionally cruel when children died.

Suddenly, and without knowing how it happened, the witch doctor fell in love with the dead child. If he hadn’t known better, he might have suspected he was under a spell not of his own making. His face softened, his lips parted, and he let out a little sigh. He swiveled on his haunches to face the mother at the hut’s door opening.

She was silhouetted in the firelight, a gaunt figure with clenched hands held before her breasts. He could feel her grief as if it were an extra person in the hut. It loomed over her, a dark, heavy figure bearing down on her thin shoulders.

“You will give anything if I raise her up? Anything? You will even give up your child to me?” He must make sure she meant it.

A look of dawning understanding and then dismay filled the mother’s eyes. She hung her head. Her tears kept falling, drenching her sweaty naked breasts. She had to decide. Bury her child in the cold ground or see her rise up and walk again, alive and well, but belonging to someone else. Belonging to…

“Yes,” she said, jutting out her chin in defiance. “Yes, I told you, yes. Anything. If you must take her, then take her, as long as she is alive again.”

The witch doctor stood and came to the child’s mother. “When I raise her, she will be mine. You understand? Forever mine. I will take her from here and she will live with me. One day, when she is old enough to wed, she will be my bride. Tell me you understand.”

Since the mother made no protest beyond the horror of what she was doing to her only child reflecting from her eyes, the pact was sealed.

“If you break your promise, I will kill you,” he said. “I will come in the night like a shadow and kill you.”

She turned aside, unable to look him in the face.

He left through the low door and stood a moment staring up at the starry sky from whence he derived part of his power. The sky, the earth, the sea, they all gave him just a particle of their powers, but it was enough. Enough to raise a human being he did not know yet, but enough to hope to raise one.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can. Keep away the family, let no one see her, allow no ceremony for her spirit. Tell no one, ever, of what happens here, good or bad, you understand? And while I'm gone keep the flies away too,” he added. “She must be kept clean and free of vermin.”

He hurried off into the night, loping like a gazelle. His talismans were left behind, discarded on the floor near the dead girl. For this he would not need them, and in fact, they would play no part. He required special plants that grew deep in the interior of the jungle, and water from the sea, and earth from the foot of the great sacred rock where all former witch doctors had been buried. Three times he had raised the dead with the secret potion, but if he was successful this fourth time it would be such a great accomplishment he might think himself a king rather than a witch doctor.

And the little girl would be his queen.

#

The island the witch doctor searched in the dark for his magic ingredients had no name for the people. Later in history it would be called Hispaniola. It was home to a few hundred aborigines who did not remember how any of them had come to be on the island and none of whom had ever tried to leave it. The land was merely home, the place where they lived out their lives. Centuries later the island would be conquered and ruled by the Spanish, who changed the name to Santo Domingo. In 1697 a formal division of the island occurred changing the name again into Santo Domingo and Saint-Domingue. Finally, it was changed to Haiti, what an ancient people used to call it. From that period the island was ruled over by despots and dictators.

But in this time before time was kept, it was nothing more than a jungle-encrusted plot of land in the Atlantic, neglected and ignored, its people savage and superstitious and alone, so very alone.

There were other witch doctors, and other small tribes, on various parts of the island, but Mujai knew he was the greatest of all. He had learned well everything his father and his grandfather had taught him about the witch arts, until he surpassed them and discovered, really by chance, the potion that brought the dead back to life again.

His reputation had spread and, after it was known he raised up a panther, some even feared him so much they let themselves die of fevers and infections rather than call for him. Others, however, knowing his value, came to his door and kept him rich with food and weapons for his prized wisdom. Perhaps, he thought, they were afraid, too, so they left him bribes. They gave him feathers of the rare ni-ni bird that had tail feathers of royal purple and emerald green. They brought beautiful shells taken by skilled divers from the sea floor, shells radiant with rainbow colors. And every fruit and every fish and every varmint that walked the island had at one time or another been deposited before his door as a gift.

He had never really wanted for anything or worked to feed himself. Yet there was one gift he had never been granted. Mujai had never had a woman. He was too feared. He was not good marriage material, never even considered as a mate for a father’s daughters. A man who could raise the dead was a fearful being indeed. He expected to live a solitary existence and die old and alone. Until tonight, with the little sleeping-dead girl who he knew, some way, some how, he would be able to raise up. She held a promise of the one thing he wanted and missed the most.

It was true the chicken did not cluck after it was raised. And the dog did not bark. But the panther, yes, it had been almost as before, roaring, leaping, hunting prey. But it had seemed to Mujai, following the dead-before-now-alive panther’s trail for several weeks out of curiosity, it had seemed the big cat had turned into quite a voracious beast. Keeping well-hidden and down wind, Mujai watched it many times take it’s prey apart nearly on the very moment of impact, at the instant of its death from the panther’s vicious long teeth. Flesh went flying skyward, to the right and to the left, and still the beast attacked, ripping and tearing in such a frenzy that its entire face and chest was slathered with blood from its victim. It did not feed so much as battle and destroy.

Mujai loped harder and tapped on his chest for protection, thinking of the beast he had raised and how dark the night still was, dawn some hours yet in the distance. Where was that hungry beast now? And was it on the prowl anywhere nearby for the fearful master who had raised it from the dead?

And what of the child, he wondered, suddenly, his lope faltering. Mujai was not a stupid man, and could follow a line of logic as neatly as anyone. What if when raised the little girl was changed? Was vicious? Was rapacious? What if she became a beast who could not be satisfied?

Again Majai tapped his chest for protection, for good luck, for help from the gods, for the heavens to favor him, as they had done all his life. He possessed but this one chance and he would take it, no matter what the outcome.

He took up his running lope again, for he had to hurry. Many of the plants he needed for the potion were scattered far and wide. He had much work to do, much territory to cover. And already the child was cold, so cold.

The breeze from the ocean wafted across his face, filling his nostrils until he could taste the brine on his tongue. He could smell the fecund earth and his nostrils flooded with the scent of various night-blooming flowers whose perfume was so strong it could dull a weaker man. He concentrated so the spirit gods would lead him to the plants he needed. Once calm, it came again on the wind, the scent of the deep, mysterious sea. He breathed in deeply and smiled. This is my island, he boasted to himself. I am king here. I am a god here. No one can do what I have done and what I am about to do. I am afraid of nothing, nothing. If I fail, no one will know. If I succeed…

He went into a trot and then into a true all-out run. He had to hurry, hurry, hurry.

He had a child bride to save. He had a beautiful, innocent, perfectly proportioned queen to raise up from the dead and to make his very own. She could not remain dead too long or even the potion would not work.

Yet if it worked! He would be alone no more. He swore it. Like his grandfather and father before him, he had found a woman he could take and make his own. That she was so young did not matter. He could teach her everything and be patient until she was a few years older. He would spend those years tutoring her how to work for him, bathe him, fetch and cook and climb the trees for his honey. He would teach her how to behave. How to love him as her king, as her Giver of Life. She would, after all, owe him everything, forever. She would be his Child-Lover-Mother-Companion-Inspiration, his alone, forever.

CHAPTER 3

COMING ALIVE

The instant the potion was massaged down her throat so that it slid into her belly, the magic began to work.

The potion mixed with the contents of her stomach, permeated the cells of the stomach wall, drifted into the silent blood stream. Like a horde of marauding ants, the potion properties invaded the cells. Those cells twinkled to life and began to move, invading the cells next to them. Within an hour all the cells of the child’s body had been changed, replaced, even down into the marrow of her bones. Human cells still, yes, but the DNA had been tweaked into something beyond human and life now was not like any life existing on the planet earth.

After waiting the proper amount of time, Mujai said a wild prayer beneath his breath and began to pound on the child’s chest. He must get the heart moving again. This is what he had done with the animals. With each mild thump he whispered wilder and more desperate prayers to the gods, asking for this miracle, this one if no other ever again.

He had pushed the mother from the hut and forbade her from speaking of this death and this ritual to anyone. He promised to take her life if she did. This was one raising he did not want to broadcast. In fact, if this raising worked, he had promised himself he would never do it again. Somewhere in the center of him where his man spirit resided, he felt what he was doing was against all nature. Already he had broken the very rules of the world by raising animals, but to raise a human being was…well, it was a bad business. He knew that, sensed it, even though he could not stop from trying to do it.

With each thump on the girl’s dead chest, he prayed harder. Do this for me, he prayed. I want her. I need her. She is mine. Sweat dripped from his face. Outside the moon had slid around the edge of the world and soon the sun would peak from over the lip of the blue sea. He could not be found here in the day, performing this ritual on the child. If others discovered he could raise a human being, they would bring every death on the island to him. Corpses outside his hut would rise higher than the thatched roof and drown the sky.

If they knew of it and he failed, they would dismiss him as a charlatan. He’d be thought of as someone who had cruelly made a grieving mother believe in the impossible. Rather than a king, he would become a pariah. His people knew no forgiveness. When you did a horribly wrong thing, you were cast out.

He pounded. He prayed. He feared defeat. And then life happened like a spark taking hold on massed palm tree shavings.

Her eyes opened.

Mujai sank back onto his heels in true astonishment, his hands frozen over her still body. He had not really, in the heart of him, believed that this could happen. He wanted success and now that he had it, he was mortified.

“Speak to me,” he whispered in sudden fear. “If you can hear me, speak.” Would she be mute like the chicken, the dog?

“My master,” she said. “I have come back for you.”

Mujai nearly passed out. He could not move even an eyelid. His mouth gaped.

She slowly sat up, woodenly, like a doll made of sticks. The black irises of her eyes were so enlarged they nearly covered the original mud brown color of her eyes.

“I saw Death,” she said. “I was lost in the dark.”

“Yes.” He gasped the word, the air in his lungs so short he was on the verge of fainting. “You were dead. I brought you back. You…you will live with me now.”

The girl pulled her legs beneath her woven palm skirt and she leaned forward on her hands so that her perfect little face was mere inches from his.

“Of course I will,” she said in a breathy voice that sounded nothing like a child’s voice. “I will come live with you.”

It felt like a threat to Mujai. At the very moment he knew he should feel exultant and powerful, he was overwhelmed with the greatest fear he had ever experienced.

What could he do? He had brought the dead to life and now he owned her. He had bargained for her life and she belonged to him, whether he feared her or not.

He rose shakily to his feet and held out his hand. “Come with me, then,” he said. “We will go.”

Her hand was shockingly cold. He forced himself not to cringe from her touch. He wondered if she would ever feel warm, feel human again.

Outside the hut the girl’s mother fell to her knees, mewling like a newborn. Tears ran down her face. “My baby, my baby, my baby lives,” she cried.

“Goodbye, Mother,” the girl said formally and without emotion. Then she moved forward, pulling the witch doctor behind her.

It seemed she knew the way home.

#

In the first days of her second life, the girl gave herself a new name. “Call me Angelique,” she instructed the witch doctor. “I do not like my old name. Tell me now how you raised me up.”

The question caused him to pause in the whittling he was doing on a bow. He looked up at her. “I cannot tell you,” he said.

“You mean you won’t.”

He shrugged and went back to his whittling, shaving long slivers of green bark from the limber wood.

“Tell me how you raised me up,” she insisted.

Something told him the girl wanted to know his secrets for reasons other than just to know how she came to be alive again. She wanted to steal his power. With his special knowledge, she could replace him as the village witch doctor. She could perform miracles and demand the respect that was reserved for him.

He looked up again. He frowned at her, hoping to instill fear. “I will never tell you. I will never do it again so you will never see how I do it, even if you were to shadow me the rest of my life. The magic that made you come back is now forgotten.” He tapped the side of his head and shook it a little as if throwing out the recipe for the potion.

She smiled. He hadn’t expected that response and he frowned harder. “I swear you will never know how I did it! Get the idea out of your head, you hear me? I will never tell and you will never know.”

She stood. She moved now with more grace, almost the way any child might. She said, “Mujai, my master, you are a silly, suspicious man.”

Smiling, she left him sitting with his unfinished bow, wondering at how she could insult him when he was the adult, he was her master, her king, her life-giver. How dare a little child speak to him with such disrespect. "Ungrateful little witch,” he muttered, and went back to his work.

She never spoke of it again, but then she had almost stopped speaking to him at all.

Out of fear or revulsion, Mujai did not know which, he kept his distance and went about his normal routines without dealing with the girl very often. She was sullen and withdrawn. She might get over it, she might change and be nice to him if he left her alone enough.

He set food before her, but after the first time watching her eat, he made sure to go into the jungle after serving her. No human being ate the way she did. It was like the panther, only worse because it was a child devouring food like a beast who has lost its mind. She shredded the meat he made in the fire without even dusting off the soot first. She broke the bones and sucked the marrow, licking her fingers of the grease. She put her whole face into a mango, until her nose disappeared as she feasted. If he did not bring her food at least three times a day, she would rummage in his gift pile the people brought for him, and ate whatever she found there in its raw state. A bird, feathers and all. A muskrat, tail and head and all. An entire melon, skin, seeds, and all. Nothing she ate seemed to bother her stomach or make her sick.

If it had just been the insane way she ate, her sulky silence, her utter lack of respect for him, Mujai thought he could come to accept it. But there were other things and these he could not countenance.

She rarely slept. It was as if death had given her all the sleep she would ever require. She sat up during the dark hours, watching over him in the hut. He turned his back to her, trying to cleanse his mind of those black eyes staring at him, but often he failed and lay awake himself, praying for the gods to make her right. Make her right, he prayed. Make her as she was before.

She took no direction whatsoever. If he asked her to do something for him, she pretended not to understand. “No entiendo,” she’d reply. I do not know what you mean, she said. What do you mean?

After patiently explaining the most rudimentary elements of gathering firewood or climbing a tree to gather honey, her reply was always the same. “No entiendo.”

He suspected she was being deliberately obtuse, the claims of not understanding his orders more examples of a lack of respect. He thought she knew exactly what he wanted, but she wasn’t going to do it. She had from the first refused his rule over her. This was her way of letting him know he did not own her.

He once thought of beating her. He lost his temper early on and after a week of feeding the girl, bringing clean drinking water, and doing all the chores, he asked for her to bring over his spear that stood against the giant umbrella tree near his camp.

“No entiendo.”

He asked her again.

“No entiendo.”

He asked her six times, raising his voice higher in anger each time, and six times she pretended not to understand.

He stood and raised his hand to slap her into submission, but when she lifted her face to him and looked him in the eyes, his hand was stayed as if paralyzed.

I will kill you if you lay a hand on me, her look said. You will die if you ever touch me, her look said, mocking his impotency.

From that time forward when she wouldn’t do as he said, he let it go. Finally he stopped asking anything of her and realized instead of gaining a queen, he had inherited a master. He was the child’s slave.

She was useless to him. She was truly a burden. He knew when she was old enough to mate she would never let him come near her. At wit’s end, he went to the girl’s mother and questioned her.

“Before she died, was your daughter obedient? Did she help you out with the chores?”

“Certainly. Very obedient. She is a good girl.”

“And respect? She showed you respect?”

“Yes!”

“Before she died, did she ever…did she ever scare you in any way? In how she acted or how she looked at you?”

“Never! My baby was full of love, a gentle, loving child. What do all these questions mean?’

“She is not right,” he said simply, and left it at that. He thought of sending the girl back to her mother, but had a feeling Angelique would not go. She cared no more for her mother than she did for him. That was evident in the way she’d left her and how, when the mother visited, she backed away without letting her mother touch her. When called by her name she said, “Call me Angelique!” Then screaming like a wild thing, “I am Angelique!”

As his absolute last resort, and after much inner turmoil and argument with himself about the morality of it, Mujai decided he would have to kill her. He would never be free if he didn’t. He’d tell the villagers she had died of the fever. So many did and no one questioned it. When she asked, as he knew she would, he would tell the girl’s mother he would not raise her again. And then all this would be over. What he had done was so against the law of nature that it had created a creature he did not want around him. He had to fix his mistake. He certainly would never make it again. He was forever through with the raising of the dead.

The day he meant to murder the child, he broke a large shale rock from a sea cliff wall and slipped it beneath his woven sleeping mat in the hut. The rock had a sharp cutting edge and fit his hand perfectly. It would slice into her face like parting water. He would cleave her ruined brain in two.

Though she did not sleep and kept watch over him, she would never expect him to rise up with the rock in his hand to bludgeon her. He had never, after the first time when he raised his hand to her, indicated that he was dangerous or violent. The opposite, in fact, seemed to be his beaten demeanor around the girl—even subservient.

All day he was excited about his plan. He sneaked looks at her as he worked around the camp site, thinking of her dead and buried and out of his life. Then it came to him. He would not bury her! She might in some way be a magical creature after her tryst with Death. She might know how to rise up on her own and had been asking after his secret potion as a ruse. In order to be safe he would throw her into the sea and let the fish nibble her pale little body down to the bones.

If he had to watch her tear into a slab of meat one more time he thought he would go mad. Living with her was like living with the undead monster panther. As far as he could tell there was little difference between them.

That night he went to bed not long after darkfall, as was his custom. He had said few words to the girl all day and had looked into her eyes not once. He feared she might know of his murderous plan if she could see what lay behind his eyes.

After a few minutes she slipped inside the hut with him and sat cross-legged at his back. He could feel her there, her dark eyes staring. But this night he was not unnerved and sleepless.

He bided his time. He wanted to make his move when he had his wrath worked up to killing pitch. He wanted nothing to go wrong. If he missed on the first strike, she might skitter away into the jungle. He would never get a second chance, he understood that implicitly. This was an intelligent, conniving child. A manipulative child. An evil child.

After an hour he had his mind ready. What he was about to do was not a sin. Besides, she was supposed to be dead. He was going to do her a favor and send her back into the dark where she belonged.

He grasped the rock, feeling the rough hardness of it, the cold heaviness of its weight. He must move fast and not falter. He must strike like a snake, without remorse, without a moment’s hesitation. He could not dare look into her eyes.

He flexed the muscle of his right arm that held the rock. He drew in one breath and then he made his move. He sat up and swiveled around in the same motion, raising the rock high above his head. Though he didn’t know it, he was screaming one long, sustained furious scream.

He felt a sudden horrible pain strike him in his midsection, but nothing was going to stop the downward motion of the killing blow.

He swung. But where she sat, she no longer existed. The rock struck the ground so hard he broke two of his fingers and cut his palm. He dropped the rock, looking around in the near darkness for where she had moved. Panic caused him to lose his breath. He had missed! He had failed! But she had been right there a second ago, right there below his raised arm.

A shadow fell over him from the doorway, blocking the moon. He turned and saw her, so beautiful, so small, so perfect. The island child beauty with the long dark hair, the perfect features. The little dead ten-year-old.

“You will die a slow death, my master. Look to your belly for your future.” As were all her words, these were said without emotion or inflection.

He glanced to his lap and saw the long spear sticking from his stomach. Blood poured from the wound, soaking his naked legs.

“What have you done?” he asked plaintively. The unfairness of this situation was so great, greater even than the pain that was now like fire burning him inside out, that tears sprang into his eyes.

“Only what you would have done to me.”

“Death invaded you. You have a soul from a god of the deep down under.” He took hold of the spear, but he could not dislodge it without fainting outright. He knew he was doomed, but his mind railed against the injustice. Hadn’t he given her life? Hadn’t he raised her up?

“Demon,” he hissed. “Monster.”

“I am what you made. You snatched me from the dark and now you ask why the dark has come to fetch you. Goodbye, Master.”

She turned then and walked out of the clearing, leaving him alone. He had no talismans to save himself. He had no potion to bring him to life. He was going to die in her stead. He had cheated death of her presence and replaced it with his own.

He lay his head back and stared at the palmed ceiling that rustled in a breeze from the sea. At the very least he would be rid of her. Let the living be party to her baneful corruption.

He, the greatest witchdoctor who had ever lived, was now through with it all.

His body sagged to the side. His last fleeting thought was that he hoped no one ever chanced on his secret potion ever again. A world populated by the living dead would be no world for the living.

What had he done? What had he done?

CHAPTER 4

RULING THE TRIBE

First she had to find the panther. She hadn’t gotten Mujai to tell her how his magic brought her back from the dark but he had spoken—bragged really--of the three animal experiments before her.

It was the panther she felt closest to, more than to any human. She knew she was not the person she had been when alive. She was all new. And all different. If she managed to escape accident (and enemies who meant to murder her) by using her new-found powers, she thought she might live forever.

It was a pity she had to take Mujai’s life, but he had tried to destroy her. She had known he would come to that. He feared her as he would fear the green venomous viper that trailed in the island’s tree limbs.

She knew she could outwit and out live him. He was just a man. A normal unchanged man. He could not move from one place to another in an instant. He could not tell what a person was thinking by looking into his eyes. He could not hear the whisper of padded feet in the forest a mile distant. And, of course, he could not see and hear and interact with the People from the Dark, who gave her all sorts of secret knowledge useful against living men. He had none of the gifts she’d been graced with after her awakening.

She moved stealthily through the jungle, unafraid, but alert, her mind on a quest. If she could get to the panther and make it her friend, she could demand great power over the people on the island. They might not, at first, fear her, but they would immediately fear a panther, especially one that walked at her side as if her guardian. And most of them knew the rumor of a panther brought back to life by the witch doctor, a panther that was now supernatural and so fierce it was like a new beast walking the earth.

It took some time, and much concentrated thought, but finally Angelique came down a narrow ravine, following the thin ribbon of water washed silver in the moonlight and there she saw the panther.

He stood majestic, a large cat with rippling muscles and a great smooth head with widely spaced yellow eyes. He was sipping at the water when she approached. He raised his imperious head and his lips rolled back from long, sharp teeth. Water and saliva dripped down his massive chest. He growled deep in his throat.

“Don’t fear me,” she said calmly, moving ever closer to him. “I am like you. Come. Smell me and you will know. Let us be friends.”

She walked toward him, down the narrow bank path, her bare feet making no noise in the soft undergrowth. The cat did not move, but watched carefully. She could hear his breathing mingle with the gentle trickling of the waters sliding over rocks.

She got within two feet of him, holding him still and calm with her magnetic gaze. “Do you understand? I am like you. I am your brethren.”

The cat’s lips lowered over his teeth. He moved forward until he was breathing hotly on her bare skin. He lay his head against her arm where she lifted a hand and stroked him softly.

“There will be no love for us from anyone or anything else. We will be a team and help one another.” She wasn’t sure that he understood the individual words of her language, but he appeared to understand she was no threat to him, nor was she food.

The thought of food made her stomach churn. “Let’s go hunting,” she said, jolly now that she had made the panther her friend and cohort. “Come! You catch the prey and we will feast on it together.”

The panther, now completely under her power, turned with her, wheeling toward the upward bank and together they climbed back into the chaos of the jungle to look for their midnight supper.

Chapter 5

A GATHERING OF THE PEOPLE

Angelique strode confidently into the village proper, the panther she had named Sokuru, at her side. People came from their huts and dropped whatever they were doing to stare. No one moved a muscle, fearing the panther might leap. Even the children were silent and kept still.

“I am Angelique and this is my friend, Sokuru. If you obey me, I will not have him kill you. If you run or you hide or you disobey, you will die. Do you understand?”

The village elder, the tribe’s leader, stepped forward, trying to appear unafraid. He held his spear at his side, its tip in the dirt. “Are you not the daughter of Lenosa? The girl she gave to the witch doctor? Is your name not Kera?”

“I am the daughter of Lenosa, but I am emancipated. I no longer belong to my mother or the witch doctor. He is dead because he tried to do me harm. My new name is Angelique and that is what you will call me when you speak to your queen.”

The elder turned his head to the side. “Queen?”

“You dispute me?” She took her hand from Sokuru’s back and gestured for him to move forward. He went into a crouch, the way a big cat will do when it is ready to take down prey.

The elder stepped back and immediately dropped his spear, in essence giving up his title as leader. He brought his hands together before him and bowed his head. “My queen,” he said.

Angelique walked forward and again put her hand on the panther’s back. He stopped, straightening, awaiting command.

“I want a runner to go to all the tribes, island wide, and invite them to this place. There will no more be separate villages and groups. We will all be as one. And I am the queen of all. Obey me.” She glanced around at all who had gathered before her. “All of you.”

The elder motioned to their fastest runner and gestured for him to go. He immediately set off into the woods to disappear into the thick jungle to summon the tribes.

Angelique smiled now. Had she not tamed the panther and made him her vassal, this would have been vastly more difficult. She patted the head of the big cat.

“Now call for my mother and tell her I will need a maid servant and she will be that maid servant. I also require a hut.”

After dispatching another runner to collect the child’s mother, the elder went to his own hut, which was the largest in the village, and swept open the grass door. “This is yours,” he said. “Please. I can build another.”

She liked the elder and when she passed him by on the way into his hut, she tapped his arm. “I make you my chief food gatherer and advisor. Sokuru and I require large quantities of fresh food, preferably meat and seafood. Be sure to keep us well supplied and your fate is secure.”

She entered the darkened hut, the panther strolling behind her. She closed the grass door and sat down on a cushioned bed of palm fronds. It had been a long night and she needed sleep, but not yet.

Sokuru paced before the door, back and forth, until she told him to lie down and rest. “Only if I am in danger,” she instructed the cat, “do you attack.”

The cat came to her and purred as he rubbed his fat cheek against her much smaller cheek. Then he moved like the majestic beast he was toward the back of the dwelling and circled twice before he lay down for a much-needed nap.

There was a small tapping outside the door and Sokuru raised his head.

“Come,” Angelique said. She motioned with her hand for Sokuru to relax.

Angelique’s mother, Lenosa, entered. She rushed to her daughter without noticing there was a beastly presence in the room. When she went to embrace the girl, Angelique pushed her away. “Don’t ever touch me.”

Shocked and hurt, Lenosa said, “But Kera…”

“Never call me that again, I told you! Kera is dead. I am Angelique and you will address me as you would your queen, for I am your master now and not your child any longer.”

“No entiendo.” Tears stood in Lenosa’s eyes.

“Listen to me, you dumb pig woman. Your Kera died. You had her raised up, which was a selfish thing for you to do, and a thing for which you will later be punished. And then you gave me, not Kera, me, to the witless soul who did this thing. Kera drifted into the dark and did not return, do you understand that? I am Angelique and I am not like your Kera, nor am I like you or anyone on this forsaken island. I will live forever, but because that witless Mujai brought back a child, I will remain a child forever, too. I am doomed to this little body because of you and I ought to have your head on a spike, but if you prove yourself useful, I’ll let you live.”

Lenosa listened to this blasphemy with wide eyes. It was evident she would not say “no entiendo” again, no matter how confused she might be.

“I will serve you,” she said, bowing her head with grave misgiving and a sharp pain in her heart where she had carried her daughter, Kera, for ten years.

“Yes, that’s right. Trust me when I say Kera is dead and gone. I see you understand. You and Mujai carried out an unholy act. He paid for it this past night when I took his life. I would not hesitate a minute to take yours.”

“Could you…could you tell me where you came from?”

Angelique cocked her head and raised her eyebrows. She smiled and it chilled Lenosa’s heart. “I like a curious spirit. But if I told you you would not believe me. Suffice it to say I am not ten years old, but ten thousand times ten thousand. It has been a thousand years since anyone was able to raise the dead so that I could return to this world. I find it…” She glanced around the bare hut and the palm leaf walls. “I find it nearly unbearable. You are a barbaric people. Nevertheless here I am. And here this is. And that is that. Now fetch clean water and come wash me, I am dirty.”

As Lenosa bowed her way backward out the hut door, Angelique sank back onto the palm mattress. She didn’t know why she had told the woman so much. She had the very human need to confide in someone and Lenosa was as good as another. She probably didn’t understand a word of it anyway. There was nothing in Lenosa’s life experience that could parse such a tale and make reason out of it.

From the moment Angelique opened her eyes and saw Mujai in the firelight of the dirty little hut, she knew she must get away from this place. Discovering it to be an island plunged her into deep despair. These people didn’t even fashion boats, but fished with their hands and bark rope nets tied to long poles, fishing from shore. They were so primitive they still had witch doctors and hadn’t even the skill to weave cloth to cover their nakedness. When she had walked the Earth alive before, a thousand years in the past, Angelique hadn’t even known this little island existed.

But Angelique had been in dire straits before. Many times. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t work with it.

She lifted one hand and held it before her eyes in the shadowy light. She turned it from palm to top, from top to palm, examining it. Her hand was so small, so frail. She would never be a woman, never know a man, never birth children of her own. Just because she had been given life it didn’t mean she would grow. In fact, she would remain as she was the rest of her days. Fully half of life’s joys were denied her. Her physical strength was minimal. This was the cruelest curse of all, to be trapped in a child’s body, and it had never happened before.

On the other hand, she could sense the nubs of thick matter in her back, at the top of her shoulder blades and knew eventually she could make them grow, splitting human skin as easily as air parting leaves in a tree. The nubs were the buds of her wings. Her wings! She had not come into this body completely without resource.

And at least the vessel was female. Not just female, but superbly beautiful. She had some advantages, she admitted. Some advantage is all she would ever need.

CHAPTER 6

THE COMING OF THE SPANIARDS

Angelique had ruled the island for two hundred years and was so weary and bored that she instituted human sacrifice into the culture to spice things up. Each season of the year she had the people choose a victim by lottery. A large flat stone jutting out over the sea was used as a sacrificial altar and in a grand sweep of a hand-made axe, the victim’s head was separated from his body, both thrown afterward into the surging sea below the rocky cliff.

Sacrifice did nothing for Angelique; was not amusing or interesting in any way. What it did was instill in the people a fear that she needed kept at fever pitch. At first they feared her control of the panther, Kokuru. When he died of old age, toothless and clawless, they then feared her because she had not aged. She remained the same ten-year-old child she had come back into after death. That was enough to keep her power over the superstitious native aborigines for long years more.

“Our little queen,” they whispered. “Surely she came to us from the gods to remain so young and to never grow old.”

Then there were a few attempted coups and attempts on her life. The funny thing about power is that someone always wants to take it away from you. The funny thing about fear is that it wanes, grows cold and transforms into anger and a thirst for revenge unless the ante is upped.

Angelique side-stepped the assassination attempts easily enough. She could read the eyes of the plotters, she could sense the presence of someone who meant to do her harm. Though she had those traitors to their queen summarily executed, publicly torn limb from limb, she knew she needed something else to keep the kingdom on an even keel.

Everything changed the day the tribe had decided was the winter season start, either October or November, 1493, she was later to determine, when a young man had been chosen for sacrifice. He was led to his death place willingly, his hands tied behind his back with leather thongs for precaution. Some of them, at the last moment, changed their minds and screamed for mercy and tried to run away. The honor waned at the prospect of death.

An axe, made with a large piece of sharpened shale stone wedged into a length of polished hardwood, lay on the stone awaiting him. He was placed on the stone on his stomach. He turned his head and looked at Angelique who stood close by. She could see the fear in his eyes. She blinked, feeling nothing.

She turned from him, bored, and looked to sea. She was the first to spy the ships on the horizon sailing toward the island. She made an audible intake of breath. The victim, noting her alarm, lifted his head and stared out to the sea, too.

The young man lying on the altar began babbling like a mad man. In the two hundred years Angelique had been stuck on the island not one soul had come. Now was her chance to escape! Her heart raced, blood rose to her face, and she stepped back from the precipice.

She didn’t care about the sacrifice anymore; she didn’t care about the people or their fate. The ships were coming!

She must hide out before they arrived. The people

would tell the strangers about her, their queen, their long living, never aging child queen, but they would never find her. She could not take the chance the strangers on the ships might be murderous, and of course they would be superstitious, thinking her a demon if they believed she did not age. Regardless, the person in a position of power on this island would be the first to die. Chop off the head of the serpent, the serpent dies.

She must not let the strangers know of her. Not yet…

She rushed down the hillside away from the jutting stone and the gathered people. Some cried for her to come back. “Save us, save us!” they cried. Some saw the ships and crowded toward the cliff’s edge to watch, curious about what a ship meant and who the strangers might be.

Angelique sped down the hillside, through the empty village, and plunged into the jungle, taking nothing with her. She knew of a good place, a safe place. After lifetimes spent on the island she had walked, at one time or another, every inch of the landmass, from seashore to seashore.

This place she knew was not far distant. It was a natural cavern high up a mountain, camouflaged by the thick over growths of vegetation that grew there. She had found it by accident on one of her ramblings and made a mental note, knowing one day she might need a hiding place and this one was perfect. Hard to reach. Hidden. Unknown by the natives.

She knew one day someone would come. Fate could not be so cruel as to deposit her on an island in the middle of an ocean and leave her there for the rest of her days. She just knew someone would come!

#

Angelique had lived before many times, the Haitian incarnation only the one that had not yet ended by either murder or accident. She had known the royal family in Egypt when the girl queen, Cleopatra, had reigned. Before that she had known the times of the early days of the Roman Empire, before it was an empire—when indeed it was not yet Rome, but just a trail at the bottom of the seven hills leading to salt deposits. There were other and varied incarnations throughout history, all of them made interesting to her because she found a way to manipulate her way into power, into security, into riches. But never before had she come back as a child, cursed forever to a small, frail body. And never before had she been abandoned and trapped this way on an unknown little island where the populace hadn’t even progressed toward a civilization that knew how to build ships. She had tried to teach them, over and over again, and had sent off crews in rough-hewn dugouts, but either the rough seas pushed them back to shore, or crashed them headlong into the cliffs.

The ships sailing toward the island meant freedom, for they were real ships, ships with sails, wide-breasted and sturdy. They looked like greater ships than even the Romans had built during her time in that age of history.

She would wait until these seafarers left again, for surely they’d find nothing to plunder or of interest on the island, and when they left she would secret herself aboard one of the vessels. Freedom! She knew she must leave this island and these primitive people or go insane.

She had reached nearly to the top of the rugged mountain and flailed at the thick vines and bushes that covered the entrance to the cave. From her vantage point high up the mountainside, she could see the ships coming, their sails unfurled yet, the waters parting before their mighty bows. They were beautiful to her, these ships, and indicated the people who constructed them were from an advanced civilization. The sight excited her so much she could hardly pay attention to what she was doing.

She pulled and hauled and the hanging vines held fast, thwarting her. She cursed her strength, cursed the little arms, the small hands, the short legs of her tiny body.

I didn't know! She raged to herself. She had not known, waiting in the dark, that the body awaiting her entry was that of a little child. Had she any inkling she would never have made the leap, dooming herself to life lived in miniature. All she had known was that Death had found a human, had taken it, and had summoned her forth. She tried to see through the veils separating her world from this one, to determine what the dead body might be like, but everything shimmered, like light on water, blinding her. She would either enter or turn back and she couldn't turn back. She was already too close to the earth, trapped in its atmosphere, spiraling downward from stars and galaxies, falling from the dark heaven she'd inhabited for too long. She saw the body as a pinpoint of light and no more. Nothing could stop this invasion, nothing could brake her descent, and once she was inside the body, she owned it, having let go of the spirit in the other world, and embedding it in this one, in this small body of a little girl.

She was the only angel of the fallen who could do this on her own, without help from another. She was the most powerful, the strongest, the supreme angel of them all.

And now she was a human girl.

Her thoughts painfully returned to what she was doing. She swore at the vines and hacked at the bushes, pulling and tearing, cuts opening on her hands. She would not give up, she couldn’t. She worked furiously, enraged, determined to get her way, to get herself inside the cool, safe cave and away from the prying eyes of both natives and intruders sailing quickly now to her shores.

Finally some of the vegetation gave way and, parting, provided entrance. She squeezed through the narrow opening and stepped into the dark interior where little sunlight entered. She saw it was a large place just as she remembered. The overhead rock was smooth and vaulted and a great many feet above her head. The floor at the entrance was level and the earth soft and dry beneath her bare feet. She stepped forward, hands outstretched, and suddenly stepped on something sharp, causing her to howl and jump back, hopping around. She stooped to investigate. It was a cache of bones, and nearby, several long sharp teeth of an animal. The bones were those of small animals, perhaps hogs or the small deer that roamed the island, or antelope. The teeth, another matter altogether. She lifted one, laying it gently in her torn palm and studied it closely. It was an incisor, at least six inches long, curved and pointed. It could be from a saber tooth, she realized, a tiger that did not today exist on the island. The bones, then, were leftovers from dinners and snacks taken by the ancient beast, and then later the beast itself had expired here.

This was indeed an ancient place and had been home to animals for millennia.

She turned to make sure the vines were rearranged again at the entrance. She must make sure her safe place was not noticed by a hiker up the mountainside.

Now she went further into the darkness of the cave, for she heard the sound of water, and thought that was a very good thing. After some time she came to a bend in the cave wall and, trailing her hand along the damp cave, she rounded the corner, almost stepping into a hole that would have definitely taken her into the deep bowels of the mountain. She stood absolutely still, sucking in damp, cool air, thanking her stars. She could have ended it all here. Over the lip of the hole from the opposite direction, across from where she stood, came a small stream of water that slid smoothly into the opening where it dropped down into the darkness. She did not hear a splashing as she might if the water struck a surface or a pool so the hole was very deep.

She would have to find a way to get to that water across the way, she knew, to slack her thirst. At least it was there, an underground stream dropping off into the mountain hole and probably rushing away through some opening in the bottom of the mountain. To those on the jungle floor it appeared as a rushing stream.

She turned back and made her way into the cave proper, to have a look around. She would need to move some of the great piles of animal bones, get them out of her way. She would need some of the leaves from the giant vines at the entrance to fashion a comfortable bed. As for food, she would go out at night only, not much more than a predator herself, but one with preternatural powers, and hunt what she needed.

All the while she would keep an eye on the strangers and the ships, waiting patiently for indication of their departure.

She sat down on a hump of earth and tucked her knees to her chin. She breathed in deeply of the metallic scent of the mountain water deeper at the back of the cave, and sighed. A caul like soft mist fell over her face, draping it with damp.

She hoped it would not take long—the leaving of the ships. She had been living this horrible, primitive existence forever, it seemed to her, just forever and a day and she was more than done with it. She expected she was half-mad already. Her mind was an idle bit of matter sitting like a slug in her skull. It had not been stimulated. She had no scrolls to read, no writing materials, no historians or philosophers to teach her, no pomp and circumstance of politics, no passing pageantry to behold. And being a child, she could not even indulge the flesh with the animal pleasure of intercourse, which she missed as if it were a phantom appendage she longed for.

A slight rustle sounded loud to her ears and without hesitation to think what it might be she reached out swiftly with one hand and caught the wriggling, furry thing that had tried to skitter past her to the vine-covered exit.

She brought it to her face, squinting in the gloom. It wriggled ferociously and tried to take nips at her fingers. It was a rat, a rather large one, with a long whipping tail and beady little black eyes. It was in a thorough panic as it squirmed in her hard clutch.

“Hello, my friend,” she said, smiling. “It is kind of you to visit.” And then with her other hand she gripped the head of the little beast and wrenched it sideways until she heard a crunching sound of bones snapping. The rat stopped wriggling and lay limp in her hands.

Now she had something to eat. She would be sustained until nightfall.

CHAPTER 7

TAKING A NEW LAND

Christopher Columbus stood on deck and instructed his men in what they were to do upon landfall. His ship led the others forward through the swells, their sails now lowered, the land close enough they could go ashore in small boats.

“You can see them streaming down to the shore, excited about our arrival. Make friendly gestures and do not scowl at them. Remember that they have not seen a white man. Make no sudden movements and do not get too close to them. We’ve seen natives like this before and you should know what to do. We'll try to gain their confidence, trade with their leaders or elders or kings, and once entrenched we will make this great place ours in the name of the great Isabella, Queen of Spain!”

A roar rose from the clustered men. They were almost in rags, unshaven, dirty, and hungry as well, for fresh food. Their stores were low and this new land was a wonderful gift, a land of mountains and green forests, no matter that it was also a great adventure. There might be gold hidden there, treasure, what it was their captain wanted most and what they, too, wanted with every fiber of their beings. Even though they were forbidden to take gold for themselves, everyone filched a little along and hid it on the ships before sailing away. Also, as they could see, rushing down and into the small lapping waves along the sandy shore, there were women! The men had not had congress with a woman for months and were bursting with lust. Given half a chance, at this point in their journeys, they would poke a cow or a horse or any sort of four-legged beast, but a woman was certainly preferred.

“Take your time,” Columbus was instructing. “Say nothing while I hold palaver with the tribal leaders. Begin slowly to set up a camp inland, bring our cooking pots and spices, find something to cook, asking the natives politely. Now….” He paused, wiping sweat from his brow with a handkerchief scented with grated lime. The limes, almost gone now, only a few left, were shriveled and juiceless after all this time on board, but their skin still held some fragrance that revived his senses. He did not feel so well though it was a great victory to discover what he thought might be China, his real destination. He had made one mistake already, happening on the New World, but this could be the place he sought.

His stomach had become sensitive on him, growling, going sour, spewing shit that was so foul he gagged. He wondered if he’d outlast this trip unless he got stronger. “Now, let us lower our boats and strike land! In the name of the Queen! In the name of Spain!”

After the excited roar, the men set to work. Columbus staggered a bit before taking hold of the railing to steady his gait. He went into the first boat, as was his custom, and waited for it to fill with oar men and his personal guards, armed to the teeth with muskets and swords and knives at their belts. He himself did not carry a weapon, not needing one and in fact knowing he could approach people easier if unarmed. But on sighting the land, he had retired to his cabin, cursing his grumbling belly, and carefully dressed in full gear, with his silver, plumed helmet and his silver chest plate hammered to a dull shine, and his best leather boots that were now looking a little worn and creased.

He had evidence that dressed this way, in full regalia, he was looked upon by the primitives as a god come ashore, a mythical being stepping forth from the frothy edge of the sea like Poseidon rising from the waters. He was supremely confidant his stalwart men would overcome this place and dominate it within days. He hoped for gold, heaps of it, mountains of it, caskets of it. He hoped for treasure beyond all treasure to bring back to his queen, to his homeland. He hoped for an easy victory, low loss of his men, and a land that he could title to Spain that was worth titling.

He clutched his churning stomach and leaned forward and kept his hard gaze on the people awaiting his arrival on shore. This was so easy, he thought, it was almost ridiculous. They were so stupid they thought he was their friend, their new god, come to deliver them, to show them miracles.

They, at least in the beginning, the new people in these new worlds, loved him.

Everyone always loved him.

CHAPTER 8

THE TIME OF WAITING

It had been months and the Spaniards hadn’t made a move toward leaving the island. The great ships stood fast with lowered masts, rocking gently in the bay.

Angelique was dirty, her hair knotted with tangles her finger brushing could not undo, and she was mad as hell.

She had sneaked down the mountain a few times during those months, watching the interaction of the intruders and the natives. From hiding, even at a distance, she could see things were not going well. The people were sullen, hunchbacked with barely suppressed fury. The invaders wore cloth breeches and carried weapons, some of which Angelique had never seen before. She could not imagine what they did, these strange pieces made of both wood and iron, half as tall as the men who carried them. Later, on another foray down from the mountain, she discovered how the weapons were used and it astounded her. A fire came out the end of the long barrel, a small, acrid smoke wafted from it, and the man it had been pointed at fell dead instantly, a great hole in his chest, running blood. These people owned such a tremendous advantage with these weapons that she imagined they could have easily disseminated Caesar's troops in an afternoon. Astonishing!

The invaders were often bearded and they were all light skinned in stark contrast to the dark natives. It was day and night passing by one another, a strange parade of peoples. Glancing down at her arms she realized her own skin color was closer to that of the invaders than to the people. It’s just possible she might pass as one of them, if circumstances dictated. “I am one of you!” she could cry. “I was left here with these primitives when I was a baby. My skin is white like yours and only a little darker because of the sun, my lords.”

But that wouldn’t work, she knew, even if she convinced them of her skin color. The people would betray her and tell them she was their queen, their small, beloved queen, and then the strangers would kill her. Or take her captive, which would be worse. Yes, she could thwart the stupid natives when they tried to do away with her, but if standing right before one of these white men, holding the long weapon that spewed fire, she would be hard put to escape their clutches. Especially if one of them decided to dispatch her on the spot. She could move fast, sometimes faster than the human eye could detect, but she did not want to bet her life she could move fast enough to evade the death-dealing weapon.

She simply had to wait for them to get ready to leave.

She watched quietly, trying to find out what she could of the invaders. They looked cruel to her the way they swatted aside natives who might be in their path. Natives were knocked straight to the ground without the abuser taking any notice at all. The invaders were cruel in the way they yelled and scowled ferociously at the people, the way they grabbed things from the ones they had made servants, who were only trying to appease them.

She had seen invasions before, armies tramping into Rome, into Alexandria, and they were all the same. There was never remorse or compassion shown the subjugated. In the end most of the people who had been dominated ended up either dead or enslaved. Her long ago Egyptian queen, Cleopatra, had finally taken her own life rather than submit to domination. She knew too well what to expect of this present invasion. It is why she had had to flee. Why she remained hidden.

She both reviled and loved the invaders. Reviled, because they were destroying what had been her kingdom for two centuries. Loved, because they were her one chance to leave the island for the wider world. In the end she cared little for either group, invader or native. She cared for herself above all, something that most humans did not have the wherewithal to do.

Later in her spy missions to see what was happening, she discovered the invaders were building a modern city close to the sea. This excited her for she had not seen a proper building in hundreds of years. They mixed sand and clay and crushed shells from the sea, fashioning bricks that were fired in clay ovens. Already they had made a church, something she recognized. This kind of edifice made her draw back her lips from her teeth. She despised places of worship. The God who had thrown her into darkness wasn’t a being she would ever worship again.

The church had windows, with shutters that could be closed against high wind or rain. A great wooden door opened into what clearly was an antechamber leading into the church proper.

They used the natives as a work force, whipping them whenever they refused or did not work hard enough. She saw a man, dressed better than the others, who walked with his back so straight he seemed to be made of some substance other than mere flesh. He was their commander. She memorized his face, but knew she didn’t have to. He would always be dressed like a king and the ramrod way of comporting himself would always belong only to him. In his walk he said I am your commander. I am in charge here.

On another spy visit, months later, she found the city almost complete and knew the commander ruled it. She witnessed brutal beatings and rapings of her people and horrible murders that were carried out without provocation.

Then as she watched one native being cut to ribbons by a long shiny sword of one of the soldiers, she saw a man wearing a long gown of rough, brown cloth come into the street and scream at the soldier. She did not know this language, but she understood from the scene, the soldier hanging his head low and not meeting the other man’s eyes, that the man in the gown controlled some sort of power to stop the violence in its tracks. At their feet lay the murdered native, one arm sliced completely from his body, other mortal wounds spurting gouts of blood from his still body into the dust of the pathway.

The soldier skulked off, chastened. The gowned man stood over the dead man in the dirt and made gestures over his chest and mumbled what Angelique knew must be prayers. Then he was their religious man, like her island’s own witch doctors had been before she outlawed them. This religious man obviously enjoyed much more authority than any witch doctor. He had cowed the soldier, berating him for the violent murder of the innocent.

She might be able to sneak into the city and gain this person’s trust and goodwill, get him to take her under his protection. The glimmer of a plan formed in her mind like a tiny sun lighting up a dark landscape.

She watched longer, while the religious man called for other soldiers to take the body and, presumably, bury it. She watched his face closely, saw the revulsion there as the bloody body was lifted and the separated arm gathered from where it lay like a torn talisman of death. All this made her happy. Surely he was a man who could be used. Manipulated. He thought a man’s life important, when it wasn’t. He thought violent death horrible, when it was the normal state of the world. She could use his weak-minded beliefs against him.

She crept deeper into the jungle for the trek back to her mountain. She missed comfort, companionship. She missed fire, because she could not have one in her cave, too much chance of being found out. She missed bathing in the sea. It had to be said, she missed the people. Without them she was forced to live like an animal and that displeased her immensely. Pleasure, comfort, power, these were what she was used to and for which she lived. Time passed, the island changed from day to day thanks to the invaders, and she remained the same, but alone. Too alone.

#

It was at the end of a year into the occupation that she finally found a way to get to the religious man. She spent long months just watching, taking note. The first time she’d seen him, screaming at the murderous soldier, might have been an aberration of his normal behavior. She watched him for many months longer, to be sure she was right in her evaluation of the man. After a few more incidents, she was very sure, but then getting to him when he was alone proved to be difficult. He lived in a small addition added onto the church. He was a busy man, consulted all day until sunset by people who came and went from his door. At night there was a guard stationed near his dwelling and this guard was a good one for he never fell asleep on duty, never seemed less than on absolute alert for suspicious intruders.

It was proper, Angelique knew, to protect your religious leaders. Especially from a wild people you were trying to convert, which is what she saw happening. One day a week the religious leader had soldiers round up as many natives as they could muster and march them to his great church building, through the large double wooden doors, and into waiting pews hewn from the largest hardwood trees on the island. The religious man read from an open book and spoke with vigor about whatever religion he was espousing.

She would get to him, ask for his protection, but she had to find him alone.

In the deep summer following the first year of occupation, Angelique accidentally found her chance. She had come down from her mountain hide out and stood in a new hidden area in order to see the progress of the abruptly built town the invaders were creating. It was a new spot where she hid, closer to the encampment, and she thought she was covered by vine, leaf, and thick shadow and could not be seen, but a voice behind her spoke in the foreigner’s language, and she turned around, panicked she’d been discovered. She feared turning into the business end of the deadly, fiery weapon. She might have known someone was coming had she not been so concentrated on the little town of strange buildings facing the sea.

It was the religious man. He stood before her in his cassock, smiling down at her. He spoke again, but she shook her head to show she did not understand. He reached out to touch her shoulder, but she jerked away impulsively. He stooped and quietly observed her with kind, patient eyes. She knew this was her time. She brought tears to bear and let them roll down her smooth cheeks. She wept and saw what that did to the religious man. Distress entered his eyes and again he reached out on impulse. This time she let him touch her. He had her little bare shoulder and pulled her from her hiding place into the open. He brought a soft white cloth from a pocket in his gown and wiped her face. She had not felt such fine linen cloth in two centuries. She nearly swooned from the feel of it. He made gestures meaning he wished for her to come with him.

It is what she wanted. It is what she had hoped for but had never found a way past the night guard to the religious man inside the church. She had studied their language from the distance and thought she knew a few words. She used the word which meant “thank you”, looking up at the kindly gentleman. He was pleased, yes, he was very pleased with her. He smiled and led her from the edge of the jungle into the open spaces of the invaders’ town, his hand firmly, protectively, on her small shoulder.

#

She was taken under the religious man’s wing and given a soft blanket to sleep on in the corner of his room. He thought her an orphan. He had no idea what the islanders were babbling about when they pointed at her and tried to communicate with their former queen. It was lucky, she knew, that the invaders took little interest in learning the dialect of the people they ruled. They expected the population to learn their language, which in time she knew they would, out of pure necessity.

Meanwhile she made great efforts to learn the invaders’ tongue. She pointed to things and cocked her head and waited for the religious man to give her the word for it in his language. Bowl. Pitcher. Candle. Book. Having an advanced intelligence and the experience of having lived for two hundred years, never mind the thousands of years she had lived in human bodies before, she caught on quickly. By the week’s end she was communicating with him in a rough, simple exchange.

“I am a priest,” he told her. “I have been sent here from my country, Spain, obligated to Her Highness to teach the people about the one and true God.”

She agreed with whatever he said, never letting on that she thought him a fool and a fraud.

“When will your captain be leaving?” she asked innocently.

“I do not know. In a month, a year, I do not know.” He spread his hands out to indicate he was empty of this knowledge.

“But he must have pressing business with your queen. He must tell her about this place, is that not so?”

“Oh, this place,” he replied, scoffing at the idea. “This place does not seem to have gold or treasure. I am afraid your island is pretty worthless to my queen—except for the souls to be saved, of course, which are by no means worthless.” He smiled, showing small uneven teeth, and to Angelique he might as well have been a baboon picking fleas off his belly.

“Then your captain will be moving on soon, I would think,” she said, belying an intelligence not usually seen in ten-year-olds. “If there is nothing here then it is not worth staying?” Oh, for them to give up this horrid place and take her with them!

“Well, the search is not complete. My captain thinks the natives lie to him to keep their treasure hidden. It’s getting more difficult for me to stay his hand against the people.”

She shook her head. “Your captain is mistaken. Tell him for me that I know for a certainty there is no gold. No treasure. We are a poor people. We do not even have boats or ships! You saw how we lived, in palm frond huts, with little fires and no ship at all.” She felt enraged at his stupidity and the greedy ignorance of his leader, but her small face was a study in control.

He looked at her suspiciously for the first time. She realized she should reign in her anger and her tongue. She worked at looking demure and young again. “I didn’t mean to dispute you, Lord. I am nothing but a poor ignorant peasant. I am only trying to be of service.”

That she had done. She made herself useful, handing the priest his ink pot when he took up a pen, tying the knot of his rope around his rough cassock, going for cool drinks when he appeared to sweat. If she were indispensable to him, he would not send her away or place her with the villagers. She already knew she bewitched him the way he sneaked little glances when he thought she would not notice. He was both baffled and dazzled by the child. Once she was cleaned up and sweet smelling, her hair brushed to a hard shine, he could see the real beauty. She held a power over him—not one to do with lust--and not strong enough unless she also served him and remembered to keep her tongue in check. Children were not supposed to display such anger, certainly not in the presence of a conquering invader.

“It is all right,” he said now, drawing her into the circle of his arms and patting her paternally on the back. “Our captain will discover on his own, in his own time, that there is nothing here and he will leave. But…we—a group of soldiers and me--we will stay. You know that, don’t you?”

She leaned back to look up at his eyes. She put on a bright, smiling, happy face. “Of course! You must stay! I would not want you to leave. You are very kind and very smart. We are stupid. We need you. We need to know more of…of your God.”

He heard what he wanted to hear, smiling broadly now, and turned back to his large book that lay open on the table before him. “I have a sermon to write,” he said. “and my diary entry to make.”

She made herself scarce, leaving the room to roam his little house attached to the church. She went to the cook in the kitchen, who bowed to her. She walked up to her as she had done several times already and slapped her in the head and demanded she stop it. “Do not bow to me again! I told you before.“ The cook did not understand her queen, this new behavior that before demanded obedience, but which now did not want any show of respect. She mumbled an apology and offered the little queen a platter of sliced bananas and mango.

Angelique took the plate and sat at the kitchen table to gorge. These treats were really meant for the priest, but so what, the cook could procure more ripe fruit and prepare another plate.

When will he leave, Angelique thought. When will the great captain in the beautiful silver breastplate leave the island and sail for a more civilized country?

It would be another long period of time before her question was answered to her satisfaction.

CHAPTER 9

THE PRIEST OF HISPANOLIA

His name was Las Carasas. Though of humble origin he managed to join Columbus as one of his soldiers. More than soldier, however, he proved to be the most pious of the crew, his Bible always open and under consult. Due to his ability to read and write, his knowledge of the scripture, it was Columbus himself who officially made him their religious cleric. On the island Columbus called Hispanola, Las Casas took up the charge to build the island’s first Christian church. Later this man would have a son, Bartholomew, who would go to university and become a great friar who spent the latter part of his life fighting for the rights of Indians to be treated as human beings and not as serfs or slaves. But before Bartholomew was even a twinkle in his father's eyes, Las Carasas was the one who showed some small pity for some of the natives of Hispanola, especially the little girl he grew to know as Angelique.

A beautiful child, Angelique, orphaned and living wild in the jungle, he had found her in hiding and quaking with fear. Little by little he had brought her out of her shy shell by treating her with kindness. She was given a place to sleep, little tasks to make her feel useful, food, and protection from the otherwise barbaric soldiers who were building Columbus’ new city. Even this child would certainly have been raped, given her beauty, if Las Carasas had not taken her under his wing.

Many of the natives, the Indians as Columbus called them, were ignorant, backward primitives, but Las Carasas thought the child Angelique showed an intelligence that surprised him. She learned his language and within weeks was able to understand his requests and speak with him about her island. She was quick to make him comfortable and to supply at his very hand the thing he was thinking of getting for himself. She possessed an uncanny ability to know exactly what he wanted, when he wanted it.

She seemed to be more advanced than her age would belie, so he finally put her to work translating his bad penmanship from the notes in his diary to scrolls detailing the discovery of Hispanola and the building of the great city, of which Columbus was governor. He would find her each day, her small head bent over the pages, writing out in beautiful script his notes that others could hardly decipher. Out of a feeling of generosity, he began to lay one gold coin on his desk for her each day that she worked so diligently. He thought that were she to save these small monies, by the time she was grown, she would be worth more than any islander or quite a few of the soldiers.

He never saw her take the offerings, but when he returned to find his notes translated to the scrolls and Angelique gone to the kitchen, he would find the coin had disappeared. If he ever had a daughter in Spain when he returned, he hoped she would be half as smart and useful as little Angelique—and half as beautiful, for she was such a striking creature with her cafe au lait skin and stunning black hair.

He sat now reading over her careful work, making sure she did not misquote him. A fragrant breeze saturated with the scent of wildflowers wafted through the tall window over his desk. He could hear outside the tumble and crash of building going on to the east where the city was still under construction. Lucky for him that he had proven a better cleric than soldier or he would be out there right now in the hot sun, hauling stones, mixing mortar, and building sturdy structures along with the others.

He put aside the scrolls and lifted a glass of coconut milk spiked with lime juice to his lips. Sweetened with honey, this was his favorite island drink, chilled to perfection in a nearby stream behind the church. Angelique always had it brought to his study just before she left, her duties finished for the day. He sipped, smiling at the swaying palms just outside his window. Shadows crisscrossed his face and turned the top of his desk into a lovely puzzle work of light and dark.

She was a dear child, a treasure, his Angelique. It was such a sad thought for him that she was so alone and so dependent on his good graces. What would happen to the little orphan when he left? He shuddered to think of it.

#

Angelique sat bent over a scroll, translating the Spanish priest’s nearly indecipherable notes into beautiful script that one day he would hand to his Queen. Because she was concentrating so hard on being precise, some long seconds passed before she noticed the light in the study had dimmed and the temperature of the room had dropped.

She looked up with a frown. Her gaze darted from corner to corner, adjusting to the sudden gloom.

There he was. Draped languidly on the blood red sofa against the far wall, his smile wicked, his black wings sweeping the floor. Nisroc.

Angelique put down the pen and pushed aside the scroll. She rose and crossed the room to him. Nisroc, the most brilliant and at the same time the most pesky of all the fallen angels she had once ruled in the outer darkness. Before her descent into the human child’s body, it was Nisroc who took all of her attention just to keep him from wreaking havoc.

She stood over him noticing the rippling effect of the air and how he wavered in and out of her vision like a nightmare. He could not really come into this world as his angel being. He was projecting it to her. But even to do that, he was expending huge amounts of energy and willpower.

“What do you want here?” She knew the answer, but had to ask anyway.

“You know and yet you ask anyway.” He had been reclining and now he sat up slowly, spreading his great wings behind him as props against the wall. He read her thoughts as well as she read his.

“I’ll not help you today. Or tomorrow. Or the next.”

He sneered, ruining the beauty of his splendid visage. “Why are you so desperately vengeful?” He asked. “Can’t we all just get along?”

“You’re wasting your time.” She turned her back on him and marched to the desk once more, taking her place on the chair with the books stacked in the seat so that she could reach the desktop. “Why didn’t you show up before in the two hundred years I’ve been stuck and bored on this primitive island?”

He ignored her question. “Look at you.” He came after her, crossing the room in two large strides, his great wings filling the space and ruffling the air into a mild wind. “Stuck in the body of a child. What does that say about your powers, Angelique? Just how great do you think they are, that you end up this way?”

She shrugged, ignoring his jibes. It was his way to be scornful. “For a few seconds I was blinded before I entered this…this wee body. We all make mistakes. This one is not as great as the one you made.”

He now stood in front of her, hovering just inches off the floor. “Who would have seen Brutus coming? He was my friend.”

Angelique looked upon him with a fierceness that would have shriveled a lesser angel. “You took the body of the man who ruled the world. I sent you into that body, believing in you, trusting you. I should have taken it myself! You enjoyed the greatest power over men than any of us had ever been able to gain. But what did you do as Julius Caesar, Nisroc? What did you do but whore and shave your groin and write eloquently about your great campaigns so that your human doll would be remembered?”

It was Nisroc’s turn to shrug and when he did the wings lifted and the air stirred. He repeated, “Who would have seen the traitor, Brutus, and his cowardly cohorts, coming to dispatch me?”

“Caesar would have!” Angelique did not mean to shout, but the thought of that lost opportunity to keep control of the greatest power in the world was a disappointment she had never gotten over. Not once since that time had the Angels of Darkness been in a position to influence the outcome of human destiny. After his failure, she had sent Nisroc to the far reaches to live alone, and refused him entry to the world of man for thousands of years. His time was not up. How dare he come from banishment to this place just to needle her. It had taken great mental effort for him to materialize. And so solidly! But she knew his will was great and hardly nothing could deter him.

“Caesar was a man riddled with seizures. Caesar would not have lived to even cross the Rubicon and seize Rome.” Nisroc said this as if he knew it was a poor excuse for his inattention to his true role as the human.

Angelique’s gaze softened for she knew this was true. Caesar had died during one of his seizures and had not she sent Nisroc to enter his poor dead earthly form, history would have been written differently. It was Nisroc who rose up from the tent floor, Nisroc who advanced on Rome, Nisroc who took the dictatorship. And wouldn't Caesar have done the same? Had that not been his intentions all along?

But still, Nisroc had been overcome by his lusts for the pleasures of life on earth and he had not been alert to danger. He had ruined everything. With his position of power he could have thwarted all that God had created, but with his failure, the followers of the prophet Jesus had proliferated and filled the nations with hope and belief. It had been the worst disaster in the annals of time.

Angelique wearied of Nisroc’s continual pestering of her, asking that she rescind her decision. He wanted back, back into the world, another chance to rule. Given the chance, he would even rule her. Along with her, he had been one of the few who had stood up to the Creator and overstepped the boundaries. She must never forget that he was almost as powerful as she. But not quite.

“Go,” she said, waving him away. “Leave me alone. Go back into the darkness where you belong.”

Refusing her command, he began to move carefully around the large study. He touched the sill at the window and stared out at the rising city facing the shining dark blue sea. He returned to the sofa and ran his hand over the expertly carved arms. He turned to face her once more.

“Please.” One word. One he had not spoken before. Ever.

It caused Angelique to pause in the translation she had returned to and lift her head. He meant it. This was no trick. “You beg me?”

He was a mystery, this angel--old, full of pride, brimming with intelligence. And now he was contrite? Perhaps he had learned these things while living as a man. It was sure he did not know them when merely angelic spirit. If he had known how to apologize, he would have knelt before his god and begged forgiveness before ever being banished from God‘s presence. Therefore this ability was new; it was something he had learned since and it struck Angelique as the strangest thing about Nisroc. It was too human. None of The Fallen possessed conscience or empathy or remorse. It is what made them Angel and above man. Yet here was an angel who displayed human emotion. She could not decide if this was a horror or a blessing. She suspected it was the former.

“I beg you,” he replied, standing perfectly still before her. Behind his blazing eyes she could detect sincerity. And hope.

“You have changed,” she said at last. “You confuse me.”

She expected him to smile and when he didn’t, she felt a thrill of worry pass through her. What manner of thing was this? It was a new thing. What had occurred in the Outer Darkness where he had remained alone so much of eternity that he could bend his pride to ask her forgiveness?

“I only want a chance,” he said.

She nodded, examining him closely. “I think that could be true. Then I say this…” She paused, still considering her decision. “I say that when I find the right body, I’ll summon you forth. That’s the best I can do. I don’t know when it will be. I will have to have great need of you. But when the time is ripe, I’ll call you down.”

Nisroc, who had no need to blink, blinked. This too caught Angelique off-guard and the worry she had felt earlier encapsulated her brain like a snake furling into a striking pose.

“Thank you, Angelique. I can wait.” His wings folded, narrowing his form to one of a column of smoky blackness. Still he did not smile. There was no indication that he was making a fool of her.

When he vanished from the room, returning to the Outer Reaches and beyond her knowledge of him, Angelique sank back against the chair and stared into the empty room.

It was she who held the power over all The Fallen; she who allowed each of them to take a human form. They were forbidden unless she gave permission. Yet it seemed that just now it was Nisroc who had been in command.

Maybe she would keep him in limbo. Maybe she would continue to deny him. She did not like being confused and surprised. Surprise was a terrible thing and something that seldom happened to an angel.

“I am thinking of you, Nisroc,” she muttered as she took up the quill and bent over the scroll. “I am thinking hard. I don’t yet know your game.”

CHAPTER 10

IN THE NETHERWORLD

In that frigid dark void, the angel calling himself Nisroc settled his wings against the broad span of his back. He hovered motionless, nothing but the flicker of his pale gray eyes moving. He first stared into the great beyond before him. Then his eyes rolled left then right, taking in all of the nothingness that surrounded him. Who would not go mad being in this unholy place, alone, so terribly, irrevocably alone?

He was really neither male nor female, but decided after his fall to be recognized as male. His name was not Nisroc, this too being something he claimed for himself. The angels Michael and Gabriel, curse them!, had names uttered by the creator of those devoted creatures. But when Nisroc, Angelique, and the hordes of other lost servants had rebelled, they were not only stripped of their given Forever names, but even the memory of those names had been erased.

Nisroc sighed and stared ahead of him into impenetrable darkness. He wondered idly what his real God-given name had been. Was it Daniel? Was it Jebidiah?

He also wondered what kept him warm in this blasted frozen wasteland of nothing unless it was hatred, pure and simple. Vitriol flooded his veins and swelled his heart. He hated Angelique. She was no more female than he was male, but she had taken the reins of power in the NetherPlace, proclaiming herself Queen of the Damned. And she had said to them, the horde of cast out angels, “I am woman. I am your queen.”

His lips curled into a smile so brutal and sarcastic that it could have turned a neutron star to dust sifting through the galaxies. How quaint a title she gave herself. She should have called herself Angelique, Whore Dog of the Universe. Or Angelique, Foul Monster of All Creation. Something more appropriate to her real character. How dare she call herself a queen.

When Nisroc thought of Angelique, as he often did because she was the most powerful among them and because he had centuries of time in which to think, he felt a curious fury churning in the deep cauldron of his chest. She held the power of Earth life over him. She gave it and she took it away. She had only gifted him with that beautiful life twice and the second time she had sorely found him wanting.

For that one mistake--though he agreed it was a large one--she made him suffer. Alone, cut off even from his brethren, the other Fallen Ones. He lived in solitary while the stars died and birthed, while galaxies spun into extinction, while the Earth filled with more and more humans, some of whom still had hope and faith and goodness and souls that strived toward perfection.

“You ruined it all,” she had said.

As if he didn’t know. As if he was stupid as an animal or a human. He knew at what cost he’d lost the life of Caesar. He knew they might have been able to take full control of the entire world. He knew he was…

A failure.

He looked left and right, as if expecting a blast of light to penetrate the unfathomable dark that embraced him. A light that would remark on his truthfulness and then ask him questions he could never begin to answer.

He said it aloud, just to hear himself speak. I am a failure, a miserable failure. His voice was mellifluous and captivating, the voice of an angel.

Yes, he’d failed, but hadn’t he suffered enough? Didn’t Angelique make drastic mistakes herself, like taking over the dead body of a child? Yet she went without chastisement. Only he was punished, forced into spending eternities in the void.

Alone.

He didn’t expect justice. That was one thing that would always be denied him. But he did yearn with every fiber of his being to be flesh again, to feel the wind on his skin, to savor the chill of water cascading over his face, to walk in the sun and lie naked beneath the moon. He wanted flavor on his tongue like he remembered from before. Cherries, red and juicy, figs brown and meaty, the mouth-watering taste of goat roasted with garlic cloves and the heady scent of wine sweet with honey. He wanted all of it, everything, Every Thing, that could only be experienced on Earth. On the perfect planet.

Men. Oh the men and women who had been given the Earth as their home, never once realizing how precious it was! His envy was so large it was like a boulder on his wide shoulders. Men were stunted, powerless, and without a shred of worthiness; they lived short and ridiculous lives. Why had all of it been given to them? He, on the other hand, once incarnated, could conceivably live for hundreds of years, thousands! He’d never make the mistake again of turning his back on friend or foe; he would never be tricked again. As human, an angel was frail and could lose the body he possessed. But if he had another chance, he would be powerful, worthy, and drink in every atom of pleasure the planet extended to a living being. He would know paradise and worship it.

If only Angelique would allow it.

So he had begged her. And in so doing the hate he felt rose to white hot flame, almost to the brink of consuming him, but she had not known that, hadn’t even suspected what it cost him. It might have taken him a thousand years, he had no idea of time passing, but it had taken a long time for him to perfect an empty mind his queen could not read. So when he sounded contrite and apologetic, she would not know how very much he despised her and how unapologetic he really felt.

He tried to remember why she was the ruler of the lost servants. Certainly it wasn’t because she was the most perceptive, for she wasn’t. Or because she was the most brilliant, since she wasn’t that either. Maybe it was because she was the most determined. The strongest willed. It had been so long since the fall that how she’d come to be his master was lost in the long silvery wisps of time. She had probably just been the most opportunistic angel among them--taking control while others wailed and gnashed their teeth at being separated from God.

He stared ahead of him again, into nothing, into darkness, into the bowels of Hell. He felt time trickle by so exasperatingly slowly that he knew soon he would have to close down his mind and hibernate. The instant Angelique relented and called him to Earth, he would hear the siren call and come completely awake.

But for a while, despite how it scourged him and made him want to fly apart into a billion particles, he continued staring into the deep, into the far reaches, into the nowhere prison that was neither space nor non-space, neither here nor there, neither dead or alive. He let the Nothing fill his eyes, fill his mouth, fill his mind, and allowed it to devour his soul.

And then he was at one with it, drifting into dreamless oblivion, a being without regret or yearning. And in this way, the only way possible, he waited. Waited.

CHAPTER 11

ANGELIQUE IN SPAIN

When it was time to go, she was ready. She was given a few days warning and was able to make plans. She had a small woven bag filled with food--dried fruit and meat and various nuts natural to the island. What she couldn’t carry was sufficient water for drinking. She would have to find the supply on board the ship and secret it away in a pigskin bladder she had fashioned to hold liquids. She also had stolen a small tin pot with a screw type lid from the kitchen. It was a fine piece of work brought on shore by the Spaniards, along with other pots and pans fashioned from metal. She could use the pot for relieving herself, and she would later find a way to dispose of those excrements overboard once on the ship.

The most important item she carried with her was the cloth drawstring bag of gold coins. They were her ticket to a new life. Had she not put the thought into the Spanish priest’s head to favor her with gold coins for the work she did, he might never have come to think of it on his own.

She had thought of everything. Not that the voyage would be easy. She knew it would take a very long time to reach Spain. The ordeal before her was monumental, but not impossible. Once she was determined to succeed at a task, nothing could stop her.

One day before Columbus revealed he would be leaving with crews for his ships, she waited until after midnight, gathered her things, and walked into the calm surf beneath a dark, moonless sky. She could not take one of the soldiers’ outriggers. She had to swim out to the massive, waiting ships.

It was a long way for anyone to swim, much less a child burdened with supplies, but Angelique was no ordinary child, and her entire future depended on making it.

A little over half way to the ship, she tired and let herself float on her back, buoyed by the tightly woven bags she hauled with her. She stared into the sky, salt water sliding from the corners of her eyes. This would be the last time she would ever see the sky from this part of the world. When next she saw the sky, she would be in a new country, one she knew nothing about except for the few things her friend, the cleric, had told her of his home.

Far off toward shore she could see a few dots of firelight. Behind the white beach and the buildings of the new town the land rose like a clutch of hump-backed whales, the forests black and thick.

She would not miss the island. She was happily shed of it. Goodbye, she thought. Goodbye!

She turned over in the water, wallowing in the soft waves, and thrust out her small arms to pull herself the rest of the way to the closest ship. She was almost there.

#

Angelique lay inside a wooden casket of cloth, breathing evenly. She had her things stored at her feet. Though she had changed out of her wet clothes, her hair still clung to her scalp and smelled of the sea.

While living in the cave high up the mountain, waiting for the right moment to interact with the Spaniards, she had taught herself a valuable skill. In order to make time pass without it impinging on her conscious, she perfected a way to shut off her mind, lower her heart rate, and close off the world. She floated in a wandering way through a gray static world that was too close to the outer void, but at least it saved her energy and killed the time. That skill would be needed for such a long, difficult sea voyage.

When she had gotten aboard the ship and sneaked below decks without the soldier guard noticing, she felt an exuberance overwhelm her senses. Free at last! On her way!

Then when she had slipped into the hold of the ship and smelled the tang of raw wood that made up the ribs of the hull, she had to wait for her eyes to adjust to the deep gloom.

She found the stacked crates and chests and caskets of goods, opening the lids on the ones she found unlocked until she discovered the large chest she now lay inside. It was just half full of cloth, beautiful cloth, sensuous to the touch. She fingered silks and satins and cotton so smooth it was like caressing a baby’s skin. She almost groaned with delight and clapped a hand over her mouth. She knew the Spaniards were a civilized, developed people, but to possess such exquisite treasure as this was beyond anything she expected. Not since the time of ancient Egypt had she felt such beautiful material.

This, she decided immediately, was where she would lie hidden. This would be her berth for the long trip. Day and night she would lie upon this bed of sweet-smelling material, dreaming of one day owning dresses made from them. Silk would flow around her, satin would swath her shoulders, cotton would wrap her in its crisp arms. As she lay dreaming inside the darkness of the mighty oak chest, she would dream of a rich life, a civilized life full of gold, jewels, and the finest cloth to dress her little body. She would dream of meats in gravy and breads leavened with eggs, of roasted peppers, exotic fruits, and wine to wet her palate.

Yes, she would be fine in the dark hold of the ship, rocking and swaying through the ocean wide. She had food to sustain her, a source of fresh water in great round caskets just down the aisle and near the stairs. She had her cushioned bed, her dreams, her desires, and the future awaiting her in a gracious land called Spain.

She smiled into the secret dark. She was the luckiest angel in all creation.

#

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Table of Contents

Copyright

LIFE NEAR THE BONE

ANTIDOTE

ROSA TWO-COINS

BANISHED

Epigraph

CHAPTER 1 THE LITTLE DEATH

CHAPTER 2 A NEW TRUE BEGINNING

CHAPTER 3 COMING ALIVE

CHAPTER 4 RULING THE TRIBE

Chapter 5 A GATHERING OF THE PEOPLE

CHAPTER 6 THE COMING OF THE SPANIARDS

CHAPTER 7 TAKING A NEW LAND

CHAPTER 8 THE TIME OF WAITING

CHAPTER 9 THE PRIEST OF HISPANOLIA

CHAPTER 10 IN THE NETHERWORLD

CHAPTER 11 ANGELIQUE IN SPAIN