Chapter 6: Food of the Gods
Repulsive horror!
Never, thought the Viking, had he endured a more harrowing ordeal than watching this mewing, sucking, devouring worm of the abyss go down the line, alternately devouring a man, cage and all. At times the summoned entity would pause to watch and enjoy the torture of yet another victim, only to then devour the remaining corpse lying upon the altar which had by then been reduced to a pulpy bag of shattered bones.
After a man lay broken and busted into fragments the hideous god of these savages would then slurp and slaver the corpse with its multitude of tongues, finally devouring it, only to wait expectantly for the next torment to begin, hideously reminding Ansen of a dog waiting for its master to toss it a table scrap.
Right down the line of men in cages came the savages, methodically, ruthlessly - indiscriminately. No man’s wails, cries or pleas had any effect – upon neither the beast nor the vile savages that bowed to it. Ansen noted after a while - after many men were tortured and devoured - that the beast began to sprout tentacles from its sides from which more sucking, hungry mouths emerged, each becoming then a miniature of its parent, complete with the ring of eyes about each grotesque body.
He watched in horrible fascination as the parent, if the word can be used for such a desecration of nature, lowered its maw to the altar while the many young sucked and slurped at the pounded and pulverized limbs, in their exuberance occasionally ripping free a limb which would then disappear down a hideous throat.
He glanced down the line toward the girl, to Cecil and beyond – a couple askarii and Wamibi, who came last.
The girl seemed to be mesmerized now by the actions of the great worm and its savage worshipers. He saw her eyes moving about avidly as she devoured everything that occurred. She turned her head to Cecil and spoke.
“It is time!” she cried.
“Eva,” Ansen shouted then, thinking the girl had conceived some plan of escape. “What is it you intend to do?”
But the girl ignored him as her and Cecil’s voices, together, rose in a supplication – a prayer – of their own.
What in the name of Father Sky? Ansen wondered.
The color of the monster’s body deepened to a sullen red, a hideous shade, for all the world as if the blood of its victims coursed through every cell of its body, tinting them with the macabre hue of death. The Norseman had watched in horrified fascination as this process proceeded as methodically as a machine, noting the closing gap between himself and his own imminent destruction. His body, hardened by many years of privation and a lifetime of adventurous wanderings, tensed like a coil spring, as if he would leap to the moon as soon as the door to his cage were thrust open.
To all these happenings the natives responded in exuberant madness, their hide-covered drums and chanting voices pounding out a pulverizing, staccato celebration of the blasphemous worm-like deity. In gyrations of awful servitude the natives of the tribe danced in geometric patterns, following the path as laid out by the bizarrely located torches set in the stone. The sound of the drums and the sing-song chanting reminded Ansen of the war drums and dances of his adopted people. But whereas those memories were wholesome, the things he witnessed here, and the sounds he heard this night, were not.
With the memories of the past coursing through his mind he closed his eyes and began chanting the Ghost Song – the song of the warrior. The song was sung before every battle, promising emanate fate. His voice rose and fell with each stanza, his words somehow reverberating over the screams of the tortured and the wails of the island devils, causing disharmony to their chorus.
Suddenly the worm lunged at one of the remaining askarii next to the girl. It occurred so fast Ansen never even saw the approach of the beast, but the body lunged passed his own cage, brushing the girl’s enclosure which set it to swinging over the precipitous fall. One would have thought that this at last would have finally caused a squeal of fear to burst from the girl, but it did nothing of the kind.
Instead - she laughed!
And Cecil chortled as well, joining the girl in some mysterious merriment.
Why did they laugh? Why had the girl not become incoherent with fear? Why did Cecil not attempt to comfort her, in his narrow minded, cowardly way, during her final moments on Earth?
And then they continued, chanting in various languages, some older than time itself.
Once, over his own song, Ansen caught a few lines in English of the girl’s prayer, lines that were burned in his memory ever after.
“At Death’s dark door, night is born of Light. There, stars are crushed and galaxies flee in fright. Inside tempest’s maelstrom, black spirals careen. Solar winds blow comet dust in a time that’s never been. There squats Oth Gokka,
Oth Shothok upon his right. Mighty gods of distant chaos, wield thy power and might! Accept this lesser god, I pray, his body thy repast. And, too, these other mortal clays, that this world might stand - aghast!” she cried exuberantly.
But now Ansen’s turn had come, and he had no more time to heed these two madmen.
With face still raised toward Father Sky, his voice grew firmer and more powerful as he continued to chant the litany of The People. If he were home among the great nations his voice would have been accompanied by those of the warriors of the tribe, of the village elders - and by the pounding of drums. The song carried with it the strident strains of war which always bear as well the possibility of one’s spirit disavowing one’s body. All those who live close to Mother Earth, and all those who know the Father, know that life on the Earth is only a waypoint; that the spirit journey does not end with death, but rather begins with it.
He yet stared into the sky when he felt his own cage jerked. Spasmodically, it began to pivot about on its huge wooden bearing; slowly they brought him around until the bottom of the cage hovered over the solid rock of the cliff at which point they untied the rope to lower him. Through it all his voice never wavered as he sang his death-song. Whatever came, it would not find him lax or unready.
His strident tones, disrupting the chants of the savages, quickly drew the ire of Megrodomigran, their priest, whom he caught staring at him - as if Ansen’s song somehow profaned their god. The light of madness and zeal literally burned in the savage’s eyes. Ansen glowered through the bars at the chief, but continued his chant.
Striding over truculently Megrodomigran shouted some words to his men. It appeared the savage wizard wished to put an immediate cessation to Ansen’s blasphemy. As they prepared to take him from the cage Megrodomigran stepped in close, in obvious preparation to thrash the white man about the head and neck. Unfortunately for him, he stepped in too close.
Having awaited just such an opportunity the Viking’s arm shot through the bars and grasped the chief tightly by a fistful of his long hair that hung down his by now blood-smeared breast. With a strength inconceivable in the arm of a single man the Arapaho warrior jerked the chief from off his feet, drawing him immediately up against the bars of the roughhewn saplings that comprised Ansen’s woven, wooden cage.
Pulled inward by the hair the wizard found his face drawn in between two of the bars until he hung there off the ground, face-to-face with his intended victim. As he stared into Ansen’s eyes he saw no single glimmer of compassion or mercy.
Ansen would have taken a bite out of the man’s face with his bare teeth then, but something else arrested him. In his grappling of the chief he’d ripped away a priestly animal skin robe the savage wore, a token and badge of his office as wizard, from off his shoulders. As the cape fell from the wizard Ansen glanced downward to see his tomahawk. The token of Owejiwa – there, within in grasp!
He had not seen the axe since the fray in the jungle the day before, fearing it lost to his tribe forever. The thought of losing the talisman, precious to his people, had plagued him terribly. For centuries it stood as a token of power to the tribe, bringing them safely through times of war and
strife. He must repossess it that it might be passed on to the next physical manifestation of its spiritual double to whom Owejiwa must relinquish it, just as had Tahnaktaka.
The bit of the weapon protruded from the chief’s belt, just barely within Ansen’s reach.
The rush of relief he felt then can never be adequately conveyed by mere words. With one hand still yet grasping the chief, his other shot through the bars and grasped his weapon, which he retrieved and pulled inside the cage with him.
“I am Owejiwa!” he shouted.
And then, in short and powerful chops, he slammed the hatchet blade six or eight times into the chief’s face in less than half that many seconds.
The wounds were ghastly, cleaving out great V-shaped chunks of flesh, bone and cartilage just as an axe might do to an old oak stump. He released the corpse, and without delay took a single swipe at the ropes binding his cage, severing them. He leaped to the top of the cliff then where, not for the first time on this island chain, the natives of this den of blasphemy heard once again the cry of an Arapaho warrior that has slain his foe.
Dimly he could still hear the incantations of the two behind him. He thought that perhaps they had both snapped – their infantile, city-slicker reasoning broken and shattered by the past day’s occurrences.
Cecil’s voice came to his ears again, now that he could focus on something other than slaughtering Megrodomigran: “...this sacrifice we have arranged to show our loyalty to thee, O mighty Oth Shothok! O mighty Oth Gokka!”
As Cecil ceased speaking the very air began to tremble and vibrate. Glancing about, Ansen stuck his tomahawk back into his belt where it belonged and ran to the cage that held the girl captive. Her mind may have snapped, but he couldn’t leave her to die as the others had perished. The thought of her beautiful body being hammered into pulp was too terrible even for one with Ansen’s iron-like nerves to stomach.
“Eva – steady girl! I’m going to get you out of this!” he cried.
And then, alone, he began turning the immense wooden construction about on its pivot-point by sheer brute force and awkwardness. Slowly it pivoted about; lowering her cage became simple now.
When he hacked the rope asunder that held the door fast he noticed how the girl recoiled at sight of the tomahawk. She had reacted once before to the sight of it – while they were yet aboard the vessel enroute to this awful place. At the time he merely attributed it to close proximity to a grim weapon of war, representing as it did a wholly gruesome way to die that one so delicate as the Hollywood socialite would obviously find abhorrent.
“Do not fear, this is for those savages,” he reassured her.
And then he repeated the exercise he had just performed to free Cecil as well. In less than a minute he had the director’s cage lowered to the stone, and had cut the door free. Oddly, Cecil, too, recoiled at sight of the bloody weapon.
“Put that away!” he cried.
“Don’t be a pantywaist, Cecil - this may just save your life,” Ansen replied brutally, turning back to the girl.
“Behold,” the girl said, pointing; her gaze looked like that of a fanatic.
Looking in the direction she indicated he saw that there was apparently no end in sight to the list of astonishing revelations he must witness this night. He’d dimly wondered why the savages hadn’t renewed their attack upon him while he freed Eva and Cecil – now he understood why.
Across the bloody, sunset sky appeared a rip, for lack of better description, that spanned the entire firmament. Ansen found the sight so surrealistic that his mouth dropped agape in utter disbelief. The heavens appeared to have been rent from one pole to the other until the entire sky had been split in twain to separate the east from the west, with planets and cosmoses visible inside the cleft unlike any Ansen had before seen.
The stars he had been familiar with his entire life were gone. The entire sky seemed as if it was being split apart and filleted back upon itself, and that he was gazing into the secret inner-most recesses of the Universe. Then the appearance of the rent changed and he saw that it wasn’t merely a tear but – an immense maw!
“What the…?“ Ansen muttered.
He could not get a distinct sense of the appearance of the being, but he recognized the tear in the sky to indeed be a maw, which meant the creature must be the size of a cosmos. But he had only moments to stare before the absurd occurred.
Gravity appeared to reverse itself then, with objects falling upward into the sky rather than downward to the stony ground. The contents of the abyss in the jungle below them began falling into the sky above, including the worm-god summoned by Megrodomigran along with that worthy’s sycophants and Megrodomigran’s own gory corpse. For the remaining natives there was no chance. He saw them clutching at the stone, the torches, anything. But as well stop a tidal wave with an outstretched hand. One by one they fell, screaming, into the sky where they were consumed.
All were devoured with equal relish with special attention being paid to the mastication of the giant worm-god, Koyltentapharr. The clouds of the sky, shaped as immense incisors, carved the beast of the abyss up as one would butcher a cut of meat, the pieces then avidly gulped. The cages that had previously been their prison were now the only thing anchored that seemed sturdy enough to grasp, and Ansen wasted no time in grabbing hold of one of them just as his feet were leaving the ground.
But the other two, Cecil and Eva, seemed immune to this bizarre other-worldly negating of Earth’s physics.
With the crushing and devouring of the worm-god, gravity began to return to normal with many objects now falling from great heights back towards the surface. But the chaotic winds that erupted at the onset of the feeding, at the moment the Earth began falling into this other cosmos, continued to swirl powerfully about them.
Nearby, Eva still muttered her prayers and supplications to this hideous beast in the sky.
Ansen frowned.
This was an affront to Father Sky.
He could feel it in the quivering steel of the tomahawk. It thirsted for the blood of this so-called god with a fierceness not to be denied.
The Blonde Goddess of Tikka-Tikka Page 7