“That’s why he did all his business before noon.” Caleb said, taking an orange and peeling its green skin. Delilah looked out from the tailgate of the SUV and stuck her tongue out at Caleb. Sleeping on the side of a road was worth not having to negotiate a hotel room while pretending to be a happy couple. It was worth not having to paying for her luxuries. It was worth the night of stars shining overhead, the only gift Caleb would allow from the Night. He pulled his fingers through sandy hair and listened to the sound of internal combustion trundling along the highway around them. Bragi’s saga had left another thin twist of confusion in his search. Bad blood between brothers. The worst possible sin?
Caleb stopped in Kumasi for gas. Delilah stretched her legs as Kofi went to buy a couple fuel cans and food for the rest of their trip.
“You should leave the Lady here.” Kofi said, attaching a jerry can to its’ spot on the Land Rover’s side.
“Delilah can handle herself.”
“Has she told you about the man we’re going to see?”
Caleb spat on the dirt and jiggled the handle of the gas spigot.
“Said enough.”
Kofi’s eyes narrowed. He tapped at Caleb’s arm.
“He wasn’t her lover, Caleb.”
“How would you…” Caleb stopped as the gas nozzle clunked and ceased filling the tank. Kofi tapped his forehead and cinched the can in place.
“She can handle herself, thanks.” Caleb said, stuffing cedis in his wallet.
“I’m more concerned about you. You always did take big bites.” Delilah cooed, pushing a plastic shopping bag into the back seat.
“Aw, shucks. You care.”
“I don’t want your father or you dead. It doesn’t mean I love you.” She retorted, smiling and putting her hand on her hip. Caleb’s smirk disappeared as Delilah dipped into the car. He stared at the scenery, rubbing his forehead against the dust in the air.
Down the dirt road, Caleb, Kofi & Delilah began to come upon signs written in Arabic, English and Ewe. Each was the same, give or take their vernacular:
‘Turn Around’
‘Keep Out’
‘None May Enter Here’.
Lined on all sides with barbed wire, one sign was painted with an eager, shaking hand.
‘Angels of the Damned. Run Away.’
“Cheery place.” Caleb mumbled, gearing the SUV down to climb a hillock.
“Take their advice, Caleb.” Bragi said through Kofi’s voice.
The Shami Hazia Refugee Camp wafted into their noses before Caleb apexed the hill and saw it. Arrows of sweat, gunpowder, blood and spoiled garbage sped from the unclean barbed wire fences which surrounded the camp. Children hung around the courtyard. A ball made of scraps rolled toward one of the dim-eyed, slant shouldered kids. Caleb heard a girl weeping. He drove to the gate and slowed the Land Rover after the guards fired warning shots across the SUV’s roof. The bullets clanged. One lodged in the far left corner behind Delilah’s head.
“Christ!” She screeched, ducking down and covering her head.
“Hey! Don’t swear.” Caleb slowed to the gate and pulled his phone from his pocket. Four guards surrounded the Land Rover. Their machine guns pointed at the metal doors in case the glass was bullet resistant. A pale skinned man of African descent exited the guard house and shone a flashlight at their eyes. Caleb kept his hand on the wheel.
“Easy, guys. Hands up.” Caleb said.
“How is this easy for you?” Delilah whispered, hands on her head. Kofi kept his palms forward, a slow grin pulling across his dimpled, dark face.
“What is your business here!? Your business! Votre travail! Qu’est que votre travail!?” The guard asked, his accent reminiscent of South Africa, or Zimbabwe.
Caleb flicked through his phone with his palms on the steering wheel, until he found the tattoo photo. He put the phone’s screen against his window.
Eyes forward and teeth clenched, Caleb stayed in the stillness. He lived beyond the trigger-pulling gunmen and the guard’s screaming for Caleb to get out of the car. Delilah’s breath rushed in and out of her lungs. He shut her out, staying in the confidence he kept for situations of potential violence.
Caleb revved his engine.
“Open the gate, Lieutenant.” Caleb ordered gruffly.
The guard leaned into a walkie-talkie, and conversed with a person on the other side. The dialect was foreign. It sounded germanic to Caleb’s ears. Kofi leaned over and whispered in Caleb’s ear.
“Gaa. The Gaa tribe are coastal folk, many believe they’re a lost tribe of Israel. I do not speak much of their language. Why are they here inland?”
Inside the camp, the one lone girl was still weeping.
The head guard looked up from his walkie and rushed away from them, yelling at two men at the gate. The men opened the gate while the gunmen kept their machine guns pointed at the car. Caleb let his foot off the break and coasted. He eased off the accelerator petal when one of the machine guns tapped menacingly at the engine block.
“Okay. We’re in.”
“Joys. I suppose patching up my faff with Finnegan may come a dollar short?” Delilah said, leaning into the middle of the back seat with her hands above the door recess.
Caleb snorted. He drove one-handed down the refugee camp to a small dirt road hewn out of tire tracks in the jungle. Beige and grey tents lined the camp. The tents rested patched and re-patched with any manner of cloth the Reverend could think up in his less than ample sewing experience.
He nodded to one tent, where a woman held onto three older boys, no younger than eight, no older than fourteen.
“US Military canvas. There, on the side.” The Marines’ insignia embalmed a cheap collection of patio tablecloth and shirt pockets.
“Someone's getting paid to keep these people.” Delilah piped up, resting her hands on the headrest of Caleb’s driver’s seat.
“How can you tell, Lilah?”
“Demographics. Keep looking. The only women I see are girls under ten and older mothers. Where are the teenaged girls, Caleb? Where are the pre-pubescent girls or young mothers? There are no babies. Look at how the men position their shoulders. There’s stacks of ammunition, gun boxes and food supplies everywhere. They don’t care. Their women are their currency.”
“Fetish priests act around this area.” Kofi said, the kindly false smile plastered on his face.
“Girls are sold as slaves to the Fetishists.”
“I don’t know if that’s it.” She said.
Caleb kept driving. The guards had mounted ATV’s in front and behind, controlling their speed through the underbrush.
“Glad I didn’t rent a sedan.” Caleb quipped.
“Makes two of us, Land Rovers ride well.” Kofi said, turning up the air conditioning.
“You men are crazy. Look, in the bushes.”
Caleb kept his face on the road, flicking his eyes left and right and relying on his peripheral vision. Delilah's eyes had seen through the brick-a-brac and bush. Men and boys carried brushes, pick axes, buckets and shovels. They worked on the sides of jungle tracks, moving in spiderwebs through trails hidden in the mass of vegetation.
A man stood and faced the road. Delilah eyed him and shivered.
“We should turn back. We shouldn’t be here.”
“Stop talking.” Caleb said, brow furrowed as a guard watched Delilah. He pulled the Land Rover up to a circular clearing, faced on the far corner by a yawning maw of ruddy, red caves. The ATVs swirled around Caleb’s rented SUV like hornets escaping a burning nest. Guns waved, but muscles relaxed. The Land Rover’s engine shuddered off and Caleb put the keys in his pocket.
“Wait here.” Caleb said, hands up and one reaching for the door handle.
“Not flipping likely! Come and get me, Reverend.” Delilah said, sniffing through her nose in a quick inhale before throwing open her door.
Bragi snorted.
“Now I get it.” He said, reaching cautiously for the door. Cal
eb sighed, rolled his eyes to the heavens and opened the door after Delilah.
“Lilah!”
Chapter 10
“Marick! Helloooooo! Marick are you here today, oh listen to little me, you’re always here aren’t you? My dour little emperor.” Delilah clip-clopped on her heels, gently pushing down the barrel of a gun and smiling at the guard who’d raised it. Delilah glanced at Caleb and his ‘guide’, as her mask of socialite philanthropist reappeared.
“Marick, honestly! Do you need the guns?”
“A wily woman’s reason enough to bring in the army. Delilah Micheva, you are a sight.” The voice ascended out of the cave’s dark interior, lit only by a single yellow incandescent bulb. As Caleb walked toward it, he put his hand on Delilah's back. The red ochre of spilled blood or the tang of copper stung the air. Bragi sauntered in his borrowed skin. Caleb imagined Bragi would whistle if he’d not felt the wet smack of stale, moist air, body odour, copper and mould. Delilah walked into the cave with her shoulders back and a swagger Caleb had to respect.
The cave was a ruse. Hollowed out of an outcropping, it was manmade with pickaxe and claw marks criss-crossing the walls. Men and boys crawled across the network of tunnels in the uncompromising stone. The carpet on which Marick set his office had been red, once. Ruddy with grime, the carpet sank into soggy ground. A massive wooden desk sat upon it covered in tin boxes and paper slots made of wood, bone and old axe heads. A modern fan blew cool air on a man in an impeccable linen suit sitting behind the desk on a gold painted throne. Caleb’s shirt began to stick to his skin, a bead of sweat rolling down his perturbed neck. The man opened his maw and grinned at Delilah, feeding an ivory comb through tidy brown hair.
“Delightful Delilah! Thought I’d lost you, when you scurried off to Canada, you dumb thing.” He circled around her, taking Caleb’s hand in his index finger and thumb and tossing it back. Caleb bucked. The guns clicked. Delilah stood still in the pit, shoulders down, chin up.
“Marick, comforting to see things’ve changed outside. The refugees. They all have tents, I assume?”
“Yes, the delightful Delilah. Ought to split you on my desk, eh?” Marick slid behind her and pushed her into his desk with both hands on her hips. She grunted and slapped her hands on the desk, panting and pushing back. He sunk a hand into her hair at the base of her neck, tugging and pushing down. Delilah kept her eyes forward, fingers curling around a piece of paperwork.
“Hey!” Caleb barked. The crack of a gun butt snapped into his shoulder. Caleb didn’t move.
“The lady’s not enjoying it. Let her go.” Caleb said grimly. Bragi whistled and stepped back from Caleb’s side. Marick turned, his hands still on Delilah’s hair and hip. His pelvis smashed against her backside.
“And what would you know about ladies enjoying it?”
“Marick Breytenbach!” Delilah gasped, her voice trembling to keep its’ earlier levity.
“Meet the Reverend Caleb Mauthisen, an old friend who wanted to meet you.”
“Reverend.” Marick tore his hands off Delilah and wiped them on the linen of his trouser legs. He took Caleb’s hand and shook firmly. If Caleb had shaken the hand of a crocodile or Komodo dragon, more kindness would have seeped through their scales. Caleb’s whole body revolted. Marick's touch pulled at the decency in him, shook it away for cleaner, lighter pastures. The single yellow bulb fizzled and swung in the cave’s damp air, stapled to the ceiling with a wire and railroad spikes.
“Gonna sell me Jesus Christ, Mauthisen?” Marick’s hand hung in the handshake, his brown eyes a cold and unyielding descent toward grey. Was that a forked tongue between his hungry teeth? A creaking rumbled in the back of the cave.
“Ms. Micheva told me you might be able to track down a symbol I’ve been investigating. I didn’t realize she was taking me to a labour camp.” Caleb extricated his hand, releasing a handkerchief from his pocket and wiping it off. Delilah inhaled, busy fixing herself back up with Bragi’s kindly offers of a small mirror and a comb.
“Refugee camp, dear. Marick Breytenbach runs a refugee camp.”
“My mistake. I’m not used to seeing refugees carry pickaxes, surrounded by soldiers with guns.” Caleb said, the muscles on his neck growing taught.
The cavern resounded with Marick’s sputtering, caustic laughter. Delilah finished fixing her hair and thanked Kofi, setting herself between the two men.
“Caleb, d-“ She warbled.
“These are my cattle and I breed them for good stock.” Marick said, spreading his fingers wide. Delilah’s hands fell to her side and she moved closer to Caleb. Marick reached forward and shoved her aside to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Viking.
“Is that what you’ve been wanting? An admonition of my guilt? You’ve not got enough grace in your bonnet to save me, preacher. If you got past my guards, then you must be less of an academician. You strike me as a practical man. King of his domain, eh? Have I got a visiting royal peeking at my throne? Let us cast off these haggard rags of civility and talk as Konig to King. I see by the ice in your eyes we’re the dominants of our spheres, raised from Common Man’s place below us. Eh!? And there the Sacrificial Queen, long may she rut.”
Caleb fought bile in his throat, biting his jaws and trying not to breathe the foul air. His pocket was cool, as he pulled out his smartphone and flicked on the screen.
“You’re sick.” Caleb grimaced. In the corner of his eye he saw Bragi pull away from Delilah and sink into the mire deeper into the cave.
“All the others kept dying, so I bred better ones.” Marick shrugged.
“What purpose could you have for breeding people like cattle?”
“These are blacks, not people. Maybe you have to be South African to understand. Mauthisen is it?”
The cavern rumbled.
“I understand plenty. You’re sick.” Caleb said, holding up his phone’s bright screen into the black.
Marick looked into the pitch, his reptilian mind divining the glow of Caleb’s phone.
“You like that, eh? That name. Mauthisen. You like that, my pet?” Marick padded into the dark. A rumble spread in the cave, descending into Caleb’s feet and up his back like a raptor piercing its’ talons up his spinal column. Caleb glanced at Delilah. She stepped backward to the edge of the desk and shook her head.
Caleb held up his smartphone and walked into the black. The rumbling inside the cave stole air from his lungs. It ebbed and waxed in ragged, rippling time. The blue-white light from his cell phone shone dimly into the deep. He coughed and covered his nose with his arm, nostrils burned by the smell retching into stale air. The guards dropped to their knees. Guns pressed at the tips of their fingers as they pushed their brows to the moist ground.
“There’s a fortune of gold in the mountains. Diamonds not far by, but you and I, Mauthisen, we look for more expensive prizes. Eh? My lieutenant radioed me from his gatehouse. You found my pet’s mark. We dug out of the ground the only thing that keeps these ruddy blacks following orders. Other than my whip and taking their daughters. After Apartheid ended in South Africa, a man like me wasn’t wanted. Hunted. Me! Hunted by the ruddy people I’d protected from the infestation of superstitious, hunter gatherer morons who had no respect. Houses! Roofs! We taught them grammar and the cradle of your infant baby Christ, but did they like it? Did they thank us for our gifts? I hated every stare from their thick nosed faces. Stole a convoy of mining supplies and thought, what the hell, Africa’s a big continent. Got called, see. Called by this malaria infested jungle. Started looking for gold and found something far more expensive.” Marick raised his hands and a series of dull yellow oil lamps flickered into life.
“Welcome to my archaeological dig, Reverend Mauthisen.”
The rumbling in the cave nearly cast Caleb to the ground. Kerosene smoke from the lamps stung his eyes and gave a welcome relief from the uncanny smell within the cave.
“I give you proof of our past. I, Marick Breytenbach, discovered the Cave of Semihaz
ah. Prison of the Fallen Angels. You’re welcome.”
Bragi stepped toward the outcropping of stone Marick’s men had surrounded with the lamps.
“Found you.” Bragi whispered, clicking on a small flashlight from his pocket.
The clank of chains rusted by moisture and time sunk into the rumbling ground. Caleb saw the rumbling came not from the ground but the unclad barrel chest of a creature hung upon the rock wall. Hair black as the Ginnungagap spilt across his shoulders, brow and chest to the floor, curling in inky pools. The strands soaked up the moisture which had settled in the jagged, uneven ground. The beast’s arms spanned near half again what Marick’s had as he displayed his prize.
“I keep my office in the cave, because you are my truth-teller, aren’t you, Semihazah!? Took to our women too much, did you!? Love sick?” Marick snapped his fingers. A teenaged girl got up from a shawl on the ground and moved hesitantly closer to the beastly apparition. Deep grey eyes craned up to see her shaking face. The beast’s chin fell as his eyes drifted.
“You didn’t like the last one, either. Send her off!” The girl didn’t have to be dragged. She ran toward the sun, yelling in a language Caleb didn’t recognize.
Bragi leaned against Caleb’s shoulder. “She’s praising your Lord. Demon didn’t want her, she’s being sent away from the camp.”
“Your servant talks a lot for a hired man.” Marick said.
“Yeah. He does.” Caleb stood in statuesque and constant shock. His eyes scanned between the long greying beard and the pale, gaunt features of a man the size of a dragon. The rumble cascaded into his chest. A low noise rippled in the dragon’s chest and the thin line of cracked lips.
Rumble.
Caleb felt an electric thrill pursue his spine from the bottom of his toes through nerves and myelin to the back of his skull.
Rumble.
Thrill.
Rumble.
Thrill.
Rumble.
“Mauthison.”
The creature’s forehead knitted with furrowing lines. It pulled upward. Crashed back down. Locked in place by the weight of his own hair, chains and throbbing arms. Caleb shouldered past Marick, raised his cell phone and pulled the hair away from the dragon's naked shoulder.
Son of Abel (The Judge of Mystics Book 1) Page 9