The Cult of Kishpu

by J. J. Shetland

  “Excellent!”

  Lukeson was predicting Petunia’s voice was coming from the crystal ball and they were communicating through it.

  “And what of the soldiers from Global Creature Alliance?”

  “The four of them are dead now,” said Sarah. “I sent my most trusted mothmen to destroy the tower they were imprisoned in and they reported to me that it was.”

  This was all making sense to Lukeson. That’s why those mothmen in the tower tried to blow us up. Sarah knows about us more than we think she does and wants to have us dead.

  “Good,” said Petunia’s voice. “I had the mer-folk taken care of the elephant and the grownup penguin. I have my zebra student and the other little penguin with me. They will get their final present. Just keep up the good work until I arrive.”

  “I will, Ma’am,” said Sarah.

  Petunia is the ringleader behind this war? And Princess Sarah is her apprentice? And they have killed Meng, Toronto, Paula and Larissa Guzman? Lukeson had his share of confusions during his entire career, but this war has been his most mind-boggling event he ever experienced. The more he tried to make sense out of it, the more frustrated he got and the more he wanted to deliver justice to Sarah and Petunia for having four of his favourite soldiers dead.

  Then he heard laughter. He peered through the hole and saw the sinister princess flying in the air. She picked up a golden crown and admiringly looked at it. Lukeson recognised it; it was the Sky Crown that King Strigiformes must have left for her in case anything happened to him.

  The sergeant knew she waited since her birth to become the new ruler and now she didn’t have to wait long until she could finally become queen. Louise had told him that she was desperate to be queen, but he could never imagine her own blood sister would be too impatient to take the Sky Crown and with mothmen no less.

  Lukeson saw Sarah about to put the Sky Crown on her head, but a sniper gunshot made it fly out of her hands.

  “Potter, quick!” Lukeson yelled, as he tried to open the door.

  Stu Pot tried to help him, but the door couldn’t budge. Then both of them found themselves flying away from the door as it opened sesame.

  “That helped?” asked Rustom, who stood by the right-hand door.

  “Yeah, helped me nose get banged, that is,” Stu Pot moaned, rubbing it.

  “Look on the bright side, why don’t you?” muttered Rustom.

  Lukeson and Stu Pot got back up and ran into the room. They saw it was filled with broken ceilings, sooty walls and dark smoke. They saw where the smoke was coming from. As the smoke cleared more, they found an unconscious, slightly burned and deeply scarred Sarah lying next to the wall.

  “Rustom, care to explain this?” Lukeson demanded.

  “Firstly, we found where Sarah was and I made an entrance with this beauty,” Rustom said, kissing his R.P.G. “Then Louise and Pedro fired the Sky Crown out of her hands and then I fired my R.P.G. at the ceiling so it would trap her down and stop her doing any magic on us.”

  Then they heard groaning. They looked to Sarah slowly crawling out of the ceiling rubble. She felt her fingers and kept touching them as if she had lost something.

  Rustom looked very close near Sarah and saw her little golden ring with the small emerald stone not too far away from her. He noticed the princess saw it too and was crawling for it. Then he remembered Akins’s stone; she had the one out of the same make.

  Sarah caught the ring, but she was forced to drop it as she screamed. Rustom was slamming his strong left foot on her weak right foot. The ring was now in his metal hand and he wasted no time to crush it with his thumb and his index finger.

  “Look at the mothmen!” Louise cried, as she looked through a hole in the wall that Rustom created with his R.P.G. Lukeson, Pedro and Stu Pot joined her watching the mothmen around the Capital screaming and disintegrating into dust.

  “Check out the portal!” Pedro cried.

  Everyone looked up in the sky and watched the portal crumble and sparkle with blue lightning before exploding into smithereens.

  “Well, that’s that done,” said Stu Pot.

  “Yes, but we’re not done up here yet, Potter,” said Lukeson. He turned around to face Sarah who was being held by Rustom. “Everyone, outside, now,” he ordered.

  Sarah gave Louise a furious stare before Rustom yanked her forward. Her younger sister sadly followed her friends as she didn’t know how this was going to end. Even though she was glad she helped to stop the mothmen invasion, she wasn’t over the moon as she didn’t know what had to be done to Sarah for her crimes. She still loved her and didn’t want her to die.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  Petunia gave a white tea cup to Rachael and sipped on her own.

  “Thanks, Ma’am,” the croc said, slurping from her cup. “This super green tea is what I need for keeping an eye on our friends for the last hour.” She was out of her British Army uniform and was now wearing a brown jumper and a pair of black trousers, all covered by a dark blue robe that Petunia had magically created for her.

  Kathy and Larissa were chained to a chain ball at the back of the helicopter and had nothing to do, but glare at Petunia and Rachael.

  Kathy was not only angry about the fact her mentor and best friend were the ringleaders behind the entire war, but she just witnessed Petunia speaking to a Princess Sarah of the Sky Capital through a small crystal ball and just learnt that Lukeson, Stu Pot, Pedro and even Rustom have been killed by mothmen. But worst of all, she felt that her childhood and everything she stood up for in the name of Petunia Clockson was for nothing but a big fat bag of lies.

  “You’re not a magical demon, are you, per chance?” asked Larissa.

  “No, she’s not like Mengy or Rustom,” Rachael told her.

  “But you’re too magical and immortal to be human.”

  Petunia smiled. “For a diva, you sure are a clever penguin. I am a very rare magical creature. I am what the real name is called a Homo Maleficos. But everyone including my own species decided to use that baby word: ‘Sorceress’.”

  “There’s more of your kind?” Kathy said.

  “I haven’t seen another one for centuries aside from Akins,” Petunia said. “Those human scums must have wiped them out.”

  “Is that why you’re doing this, Petunia?” Kathy asked. “A whole world war for revenge?”

  Petunia smiled. “My real name is not Petunia Clockson. It’s actually Anne Dunbury and I’m actually English. I have no idea if my parents were magical because I can’t remember them at all. I don’t know whether they died or they just deserted me after I was born. I spent my entire lonely childhood hiding and fending in the Surrey Hills with no money, no education and no future. It was hard times living in England during the Stuart Period.

  “But I never knew I was a sorceress until I saw a baby bird with a broken wing one day when I was seven. As I touched it, a yellow light came out of my finger and went into it. The bird was healed and it happily flapped away. That was when I discovered I had magical powers to control. Many more wounded animals came to me and I began to put my powers to good use, but I always knew that the humans were never the easiest of species so I tried to hide my powers from them.

  “By the time I was in my mid-twenties, the odd humans came by the forest every now and then. Whether it was a broken leg or a wasp sting, I made a special medicine to heal them quicker than a normal medicine from any doctor in Guildford. For my own protection, I didn’t give anyone the recipe and I asked them not to tell anyone what I did for them. While I was making my living, I bumped into a human called Simon Dunbury who drove people around in his stagecoach with horses for a living. He was suffering from a heart condition I still don’t know what it was called, but my medicine was able to cure him. We bumped into each other every now and again and we fell in love. After three years of dating, we got married.”

  “Married?” Rachael cried. “You were married to a human?”

  “I was always
wearily of humans, but didn’t despise them at that point,” said Petunia. “Simon and I had four wonderful children. Victoria, the eldest and very bright; George, so strong and hard working; Henrietta, my youngest daughter who always looked on the bright side; and baby Matthew, who only lived to the age of five months.” She closed her eyes and tears started to come out of her eyes.

  “Were they magical themselves?” Larissa asked.

  “No, they were mere human beings like their father,” Petunia said. “And none of them reach adulthood, thanks to someone who spilled the fucking beans! Sometime before the English Civil War started, some royal soldiers came to my cottage and tried to burn us alive in it, but we survived by vanishing away from the flames, only to be captured by more royal soldiers. We were taken to Surrey to meet with King Charles I himself. After another failed attempt to escape, Simon’s throat was slit and my children were burnt to ash in public.”

  “What happened to you?” asked Rachael.

  “I was on the stake with my children,” Petunia told her, “and I turned myself to ash in order to fake my death.”

  “If you’re the world’s most powerful sorceress,” Larissa said, “why didn’t you save your own children?”

  “Well, genius,” Petunia snapped back, “if I tried to save them by either lowering the flames or making them fire-proof, the king would only kill them by beheading them. He wouldn’t let them rot in a dungeon or enslave them. There was just no way out of it.

  “Then when the ash was picked up and dumped into the pond, I, disguised as a pile of ash, flew to the Canadian Rockies where I transformed myself back to normal. I built myself a cottage and been protecting the animals that lived there from harm since. While I’ve been doing that for millenniums, I’ve been planning my revenge on humanity for betraying me after all the good I’ve done for them!”

  Despite the tragic story and understanding her pain as both their families were killed by human beings, Kathy was no less angry at Petunia and knew that her blaming King Charles I for what he did to her was still no excuse for any of her evil actions. The only good thing the zebra was thinking at the moment was that she and her G.C.A. friends rose above their tragic pasts better than Petunia and Rachael did. “You’re not the one who started the Great Mutation Storm two decades ago, were you?”

  “If I ever sent out a storm,” said Petunia, “all the humans and the animals would be dead as dodos. Sometime after the storm, the first talking animals I met scared me to death. Then I realise if I was scared of them, the human race wouldn’t stand a chance so that’s why I decided to be the bigger person and turn my cottage into an orphanage for the little homeless cubs to protect them.”

  “Just little cubs?” Larissa asked. “No middle aged or elderly animals?”

  “They must have been killed by human poachers,” Petunia said. “That’s my very best guess.”

  Rachael approached Kathy. “Whether you believe it or not, Kathy, you’ve been a great asset in this war.”

  “How can Kathy be a part of it?” asked Larissa.

  Kathy gasped. “Rachael, you knew Petunia was alive the whole time I thought she was dead, didn’t you? And you told her all about G.C.A. so you guys could bring it down before you could take over the world. And when I fired the bullets to save Adofo from that cobra sphinx, that’s when you murdered Martin and Bowe yourself, wasn’t it?” Whenever she thought she couldn’t be get any angrier, the more news she kept getting proved her wrong.

  “And you didn’t use Pedro’s bleeding toy to fake your death at the Spitzkoppe, did you?” Larissa said. “You had Akins put you into a magical sleep until your casket was away from us.”

  “And you’re the one behind everything for the last nine days, Petunia?” Kathy went on. “Akins and his cobra sphinx attack in Egypt? The colossal squids attacking us? Blowing up the United States of America and setting us up to take the blame? Creating and sending those wendigos with the emerald belt buckles over their trousers to kill us and the US marines?”

  “And those poor guards you knocked out with your shortbread biscuits and stun guns, you actually killed them, didn’t you?” Larissa said.

  Petunia grinned. “And so much more, including turning myself into a mermaid as Mer-King Coralbeard’s advisor and had him sentencing your elephant and penguin friend to a drowning death. And now I helped to turn the people in the sky against your leader, the other zebra, the rhino and the other little penguin.”

  Larissa was shocked. “Oh, no! Oh, no!”

  “How does it feel to lose the very creature that came out of the very same egg as you?” Rachael chuckled.

  “Oh, it’s not Pedro I’m worried about,” said Larissa. “It’s doing his chores as well as my own when I get back home.”

  Everyone went silent again. Sometimes no one could really believe this penguin any more than her bizarre brother.

  “You guys have only one option,” said Petunia. “Join us and our friends. Become new members of the Cult of Kishpu, the very last group of what we Homo Maleficoses stand for, and the only hope for the future of the world.”

  “Was it Akins who introduced you to this cult?” Larissa asked. “Was he a Homo Maleficos like you?”

  “He was,” Petunia confessed. “He was the only surviving member of the cult since it vanished before the dawn of Human Civilisation. But because I was more powerful and I had more Kishpu Rings than him, I was the one who raised the cult from the ashes and reinstated him.”

  “No, we will not join your pathetic cult,” said Kathy.

  Petunia and Rachael were shocked to hear that.

  “We are your childhood, Kathy,” Rachael said.

  “But not my future!” Kathy snapped.

  “Or mine!” Larissa roared.

  “Well, you don’t have a choice anyway,” Petunia said.

  “Yes, we do. We always do.”

  A small explosion took place behind Kathy and Larissa and the heavily dark smoke quickly overtook them.

  Petunia waved the smoke away with her right hand and saw a hole fifty inches behind where Kathy and Larissa were chained up.

  “They vanished like magic!” Rachael cried.

  Petunia bent down to pick something up. “And this was their magic trick.” It was a bomb detonator. Kathy must have secretly hid a tiny yet powerful bomb and threw it a metre behind her and Larissa before Petunia and Rachael chained them up. Then she must have hid the bomb detonator in her trouser pocket and whipped it out and activated it with her unchained tail. She sighed frustratingly. “I should have chained her tail up as well.”

  Rachael was confused. “How could they set a bomb off while they were chained up?”

  Petunia hit her on the nose. “No more stupid questions! Now, get after them!”

  If Rachael wasn’t so scared of the powerful sorceress, she would have gladly eaten her for hitting her on the nose. She looked down and saw through the hole burnt and scorched land with lots of water. “They’ve landed in the Everglades!”

  “Well, you’re a crocodile, aren’t you?” said Petunia. “And the sawgrass prairie is burnt so they can’t hide from you. Now, for the final time, get after them!” As she lowered her arms down, the helicopter was lowered closer to the water.

  Rachael took off her robe and dived in.

  Petunia smiled as she watched her loyal soldier swim after their escaped prisoners.

  * * *

  Kathy and Larissa had been swimming through the waters of the burnt Everglades for they didn’t know how long. They were glad that small bomb exploding worked; it not only helped them escape the helicopter, it freed them from their chain ball. They had not stopped swimming since they entered the dirty and ashy water. They had been on the alert for Petunia, Rachael, wendigos among unpredictable creatures, but they have only encountered burnt grass and red skies.

  “I won’t lie to you, Larissa,” Kathy panted. “I’m certain we’re lost.” Her swimming was starting to slow down. “No land, no roads, no vehicle
s and nowhere to hide.”

  “But on the other hand,” said Larissa, “not a soul to be seen. That means no enemies. No pests. Especially no crocodiles.” Then she looked ahead and gulped.

  “You spoke too soon, Larissa.” Rachael grinned as her upper body emerged out of the water.

  Kathy grabbed Larissa and swam backwards at maximum speed. Two minutes later, she stopped to look back. She thought they had lost Rachael as there was not so much a ripple let alone an eye on the water. Then she looked forward and quickly jumped back before she was in the grasp of scaly dark green crocodile hands.

  “Give it up, Kathy,” said Rachael. “Why continue to fight us when there is no other way?”

  Kathy put Larissa behind her back. “There is always another way.”

  “Lukeson’s dead. Why do you still follow his advice?”

  “Because I don’t want to grow up like you or Petunia,” said Kathy.

  “I don’t understand,” said Rachael. “You once called us your family and in return I loved you like a sister and Petunia loved you like a daughter.”

  “If I was like a sister to you, why didn’t you tell me about Petunia and her magic powers instead of letting me dwell on her death when she wasn’t dead?” Then Kathy realised that Rachael and Petunia were even worse sadists than she thought they were.

  “I never lied about how much you meant to us,” Rachael protested. “We just wanted to make the world a better place with people like you.”

  “By starting a war?”

  “Well, if the humans looked after the planet much better and crocodiles more often rather than letting them be critically endangered,” said Rachael, “we wouldn’t need to start this war. But you know the humans. They’re never going to change anything especially themselves and, if it wasn’t for Petunia, the world could have ended much sooner.”

  “What can she do that Lukeson can’t do?” Kathy demanded. “Apart from doing magic tricks.”