Greyborn Rising

by Derry Sandy

  The memory faded and Sam found himself clutching shreds of canvas. The ground around him was littered with the broken glass of the display and spattered droplets of blood from a three-inch gash across the knuckle of the hand he had apparently used to smash the pane. His tampering had also triggered a silent alarm. The security guards caught Sam in the middle of his defacing act.

  Sam knew instinctively that he had to hide the truth about what happened, but his parents persisted in asking him why he did it. His adolescent mind could not manufacture a satisfactory lie and so he eventually told his mother exactly what happened. She did not believe him. She and his father chalked up the incident as ‘a cry for attention’ and slotted the episode away in that mental file cabinet labeled Offspring Indiscretions that all parents keep.

  But then Sam ate Simone and his life took a turn for the cesspit. Simone was the family’s pet parrot. He had been playing with her one evening when once again he was possessed by the memories of an old life. Again he lost all sense of self and he was consumed by the experience. The person whose life he was experiencing apparently thought that parrot made a fine meal. His mother discovered him roasting Simone in the backyard over a small pit fire. To say she freaked out, would have been putting it mildly. Her screams had broken the spell of the memory and he spent the next twenty minutes simultaneously crying over his dead pet and retching up bits of roasted macaw.

  After he gained a sliver of composure, he again explained to his father and mother what had happened and they in turn launched the parental full court press.

  Sam spent the next six months enduring a battery of tests, scans, evaluations and examinations. The doctors could find nothing wrong with him physically, no lumps no tumors no chemical or hormonal imbalances. Apart from the two dissociative lapses Sam’s psychological evaluations raised no points for alarm. He was given a clean bill of health and his life returned to normal for the next four years until his sixteenth birthday. One-minute Sam was having a birthday dinner with his parents, and the next, he was secured to a bed with padded manacles, in a room painted buttercup yellow.

  The only other occupant of the room was a lady dressed in a nurse’s outfit. Sam asked her what had happened and why he was here. The woman did not respond but left the room and returned with an older Indian man in a white coat embroidered with the name Dr. Roshan. Dr. Roshan proceeded to tell him that he had had a dissociative incident that had lasted three weeks. He had fled from the dinner table where they were celebrating his birthday and vanished. The police had found him on the streets a week later and he had been committed to the hospital.

  Being hospitalized had not improved his state. He had ranted about sacrifices and closing a gate to another world. The doctor said sometimes he spoke broken English and other times he spoke in a language no one could understand. In summary, he flipped his wig. When his parents visited, his mother cried the entire time.

  The first night they released him from his manacles he fled the hospital through a window that someone had left open (who leaves the windows open in an asylum?) Since then he had lived on the streets, fighting vagrants for scraps, scrounging and begging.

  The memories had now taken on a personality, an otherness. For weeks the Other had wrestled for control of Sam’s body, trying to take him on another dissociative jaunt. But Sam had learned to read the signs and symptoms of its attempts to gain control and he suppressed them.

  Did he dare speak to the other consciousness that shared his mind? Wasn’t it a sure sign of his own lunacy that he even considered reaching out to the artifact-destroying, parrot-munching psychic hitchhiker?

  Sam wished that he could go home to his mother, but he could not return until he got himself sorted out. The sidewalks and alleys of Port-of-Spain weren’t so bad, so long as you got over the rats. The conquistadors’ rats, a voice said and Sam was unsure where that thought came from.

  The harvest moon hung jaundiced and gibbous in a cloudless, inky sky. Its eerie light forced the stars to settle for mere supporting roles.

  A shaft of silver light penetrated a slit in the cardboard roof and shone across his face. The light split his visage into halves, one illuminated in silver, the other concealed in darkness. It appeared that even the moon recognized the struggle that Sam was having with the other consciousness that inhabited his mind. The Other was here tonight, not trying to wrest control of his body, but talking to him, an incessant voice in the back of his head, nattering on and on about old things, ancient things, things that crawled in the night, things that did more than just crawl.

  Tonight, the topic of discussion was the moon and the creatures that came out when the moon was as ripe as it was tonight. The Other was very concerned that Sam was sleeping out in the open. The Other thought he should know better.

  Hide yourself, Sam. Get out of the moonlight.

  The witching hour was approaching and this area of Port-of-Spain was cloaked in eeriness. The quiet was broken only by the howl of the occasional dog, or the grunts of two homeless people each finding some momentary solace in the warmth of the other’s crotch.

  “Shut up you.” Sam hissed. “It’s your fault we are where we are, out here in the night.” Sam was dismayed that he had used the word we, a Freudian acknowledgment of the Other’s legitimacy.

  They are coming. They like to hunt by the moonlight. Get out of the light, Sam.

  “I’m not moving. This is a good, dry spot. Go away and stop bothering me.”

  They will eat us alive, the maboya. You must get us out of the silver light, anywhere but in the light. Move…move…run…moverunmoverunmovemovemove…MOVE!!!

  “SHUT UP!” Sam clapped his hands over his ears even though the voice was internal.

  Too slow, Sam. Too late. They are here.

  Then Sam heard other voices in the park, two males and a female.

  “Lucien set that man-whore above us, such a weakling,” one of the male voices said.

  “Hey at least we are free for the moment until Clarence picks us up, free to have a little fun. I’m fucking starving. Let’s eat. Captain Clarence is coming I can feel him getting closer,” the female voice replied.

  “We can all feel him and you’re always hungry, Rebecca.”

  “You too, Nathan,” Rebecca shot back.

  “Shut up, you two. I’m going to gorge myself tonight before Clarence picks us up to go hunt this Lisa chick.”

  “Clarence thinks he got all the information when he joined the hive. He thinks he can control us with pain. By the time he finally figures out that his control is not as complete as he believes, it will be too late. We’ll teach the little whore a lesson,” Rebecca ranted.

  Sam lay very still in his cardboard tent. He had no idea what the trio were talking about, but their voices resonated with evil. Why would they come to Tamarind Square if they were hungry? Surely his vagrant neighbors did not have enough food to spare.

  It is not too late Sam, they have not seen you yet. Crawl out of your tent and hide in the shadow of the Columbus statue.

  The voice was back and was hissing at him. To his surprise Sam found himself complying. He crawled out from under the cardboard lean-to and hid in the shadow of the first conquistador.

  Now look at them Sam, see with your own eyes.

  Sam looked. The trio walked down the pathway in the center of the square, three dark silhouettes of ordinary stature, but when the dappled moonlight shone on them they became monstrous. The effect reminded Sam of the invisible ink pens that came with a spy kit his mother had gotten him for his twelfth birthday. Words written in the ink were only visible under a black light.

  When the moon shone on the trio, they doubled in height; their bony, reptilian bodies were covered in scabs and weeping sores. Their mouths were wide lipless slashes in their bloodless faces. They had neither nostrils nor eyes, but this did not seem to hamper them at all, and what they lacked in facial features they made up for in teeth, rows of hooked, pointed teeth like a pythons. Rebecca’s
breasts were pendulous and shriveled, the men’s sexual organs dangled to their knees. But for all their beastly hideousness, they moved with predatory grace. The hideous shapes were like mirages superimposed on their human bodies, translucent costumes only visible in the moonlight.

  See, Sam.

  Sam thought that this was an inappropriate time for an ‘I told you so’ from his mental hitchhiker. The three creatures walked into the shadows. The monstrous mirages vanished and they now looked like three ordinary people again. They stopped next to a makeshift tent of rags and newspapers erected by some resourceful vagabond. The tent was bathed in moonlight. Sam inhaled with the intention of raising a word of caution.

  Don’t you dare, Sam, the Other blurted in a near panic.

  “Meal number one,” said Rebecca as she reached into the tent and hauled out a disheveled and grimy individual by the ankles. All homeless men are light sleepers. Robbery, rape, and worse are the price of a good night’s rest on the pavements of Port-of-Spain. The homeless man came out swinging, armed with a broken bottle. He caught Rebecca flush across the face and Sam saw gouts of black blood well out of the wound and drip onto the grass. Rebecca twisted the homeless man’s ankle violently, snapping bones both at the ankle and at the knee joints. The man inhaled sharply to scream but one of the men stomped violently onto his throat silencing him swiftly.

  The three knelt around the corpse and began ripping handfuls of warm, dripping meat from the body, stuffing their mouths, and swallowing the gory chunks whole. When that method of feeding became insufficiently rapid they bit directly into the man like a pack of wolves. Soon their entire heads were covered in blood and thicker things. Sam sat frozen in terror as they ate the entire man; bones, guts, clothing and all. The nightmarish event was over in less than ten minutes. The two men rose up to move on, but Rebecca stayed, licking the last remnants of blood off the pavement.

  One of the men hauled her up by the collar, “Get a-hold of yourself Rebecca, there are many more to choose from.” Rebecca complied grudgingly. “I wish we could wash them before we ate them,” she said as she stood.

  They walked past several other dark shapes of people asleep in the shadows but the next person sufficiently ill-fated to attract their attention was a man asleep in the moonlight, out in the open. Sam could not watch another episode like the first and he began to creep away. But the voice of the Other returned.

  Wait for the cloud shadow, Sam. Then run.

  The sky is clear. There will be no cloud shadow, Sam replied in his head.

  Then call the clouds, Sam

  “What?” Sam whispered. “What do you mean call the clouds?”

  Well then hide and be silent before you get us eaten, Sam

  “What are they,” he whispered.

  Rogue Amerindian spirits raised and pressed to do someone’s bidding. Now stop talking before we get eaten

  The three were devouring their second victim with similar haste. Suddenly they froze.

  “He is here,” Rebecca said. “He is calling to us.”

  “We can hear him, Rebecca. You do realize we all hear him simultaneously,” one of the men replied with thinly-concealed scorn.

  “I’m not going to him,” the other man said. “I refuse to be controlled by that whore.”

  “You are not strong enough to resist him, Nathan. You must come, or it will be bad for you,” Rebecca coaxed.

  “No, this foolishness ends now,” Nathan said and he began walking towards another moonlit, sleeping vagabond. Mid-step Nathan doubled over and began vomiting a thick stream of red. He fell to his knees and began choking on the grotesque river. His meal poured out of his mouth and nose, he could not breathe. Somehow he managed to turn around and crawl back the way he came. Only then did the projectile vomiting cease.

  “Clarence is getting creative,” Rebecca said, a hint of admiration entering her voice.

  “Fuck him,” Nathan spat, “He will pay for that.”

  “You look awfully tough on your knees in a pool of your own vomit, Nathan dear.” Rebecca grinned. Nathan snarled something in response.

  Sam saw a white panel van pull up to the corner. He could not make out the driver, but the three abandoned the half-eaten corpse and walked towards the van. Sam took this as his cue to leave. He rose and started a stooped run towards the inner city and away from the van. Just as he began his escape run he bumped right into a skinny girl. She stood in the moonlight, wreathed in the hideous translucence of the maboya’s manifestation. Sam, who had been knocked onto his rear by the collision, began to scoot backward away from her. His horror precluded words.

  What are you doing? You’re going to get seen by the others. The Other was practically shouting between his ears.

  “I’ve already been seen by this one,” Sam shot back as he continued his crab-like retreat.

  “You’re going to get seen by the others,” the girl-monster said.

  At this point, Sam was ready to re-commit himself to St. Ann’s psychiatric hospital. He was willing to undergo any number of invasive tests, ready to be strapped to a bed, in a pastel yellow room, clad in a backless gown. He was ready to receive his daily dose of mind-numbing drugs, anything to save him from this weird world.

  “Please don’t eat me,” Sam begged.

  “Be silent, when the cloud shadow comes, leave here and never come back. I will know if you do, I will remember your scent.”

  “But there are no clouds tonight,” Sam whimpered.

  “There are now,” the monster-girl said, pointing upward where the wind now chased fat rain clouds across the inkiness of the night sky. “See?”

  “Are you going to eat me?” Sam asked.

  “Maybe I’m already full or maybe I like to chase my dinner or maybe you look like you will taste bad.”

  Sam scooted back a few inches.

  “Here come the clouds. Time for us both to go,” the girl said as she stepped around him and headed toward the panel van.

  The clouds obscured the moon and a clap of thunder heralded a violent shower. Sam ran northward on Nelson Street towards the inner city as the voice in his head chanted praises and thanks to some ancient god.

  Chapter 14

  A heady medley of fragrances—shampoo, body lotion, nail polish, and small dabs of expensive perfume—acted as a vanguard for the three women as they descended the double foyer staircase of Stone. But underlying the scent of beauty products was the smell of woman-a mixture of rain, passion, and pheromones discernible to those with noses sharp enough to catch the bouquet of smells. It was intoxicating and enticing, almost edible.

  The three women were no less beguiling. Kat had taken it upon herself to buy Lisa and Kamara new clothes for their visit to the Kings and Commoners. The soucouyant had said that she hadn’t shopped in decades and couldn’t resist the urge. Rohan doubted her excuse. He suspected that the woman had, long ago, gained control over her every impulse and whim.

  Kat remained in the black and ivory clothing in which she had arrived at the house. Lisa wore a small white club dress and tall red heels while Kamara sported skin-tight black leather pants with a thin silver chain at her waist, and a white blouse. Her shoes were metallic silver. Rohan was not familiar with designer brands of women’s clothing, but he knew quality when he saw it. The women were wearing several thousand dollars’ worth of clothing, but none of them had seen it fit to pack a gun.

  The brief meeting in the drawing room had proceeded as Rohan had expected. Kat reported on a few additional tidbits she had gleaned from the captured obeah woman after they had left. The gist was that Cassan Davilmar was the man with more information and he ran his operations from an office in the Kings and Commoners. When asked what she had done with the obeah woman, Kat had employed her skill of changing the topic of discussion and deflecting the attention onto someone else. Rohan knew the soucouyant well enough by now to know that she would not be goaded into revealing anything before she was good and ready to do so.

  This t
ime she had refocused attention on Kamara by explaining that the marks she had been given were called the Nights of Need. They conferred on their wearer any of the powers represented by the other marks when the need arose. Kat stressed the important distinction between want and need. Kat then went on to explain that the marks would change appearance from time to time so Kamara shouldn’t be shocked if they transformed.

  Rohan glanced surreptitiously the hand in question, but Kamara had covered the marks with makeup. The discussion had become most animated when Kat had repeated that the women would be the ones to visit the Kings and Commoners to speak with Cassan.

  “Explain to me why you need Lisa and Kamara?” Rohan asked.

  “I expect to have a conversation not a fight, so it will be safe,” Kat rebutted. “Also, neither you nor Voss has the necessary finesse.”

  “Finesse?!” Rohan responded, mildly insulted.

  “Why don’t we simply kidnap and interrogate him?” Voss chimed in.

  Kat responded by holding both hands toward Voss as if he had perfectly illustrated her point about finesse. “Cassan appears to be, at least on paper, a legitimate businessman, we cannot simply run around torturing regular people.”

  At least on paper, right. Rohan knew exactly what Cassan was, and he for one had no qualms about kidnapping the man and twisting his arm a little. In the end however, the steel-willed soucouyant prevailed and Voss and Rohan stood at the bottom of the staircase as the three women descended, ready to head out to the night club.

  “At least take a gun.” Voss urged as they filed past the men.

  “For what Voss? To start a firefight in a crowded club? Besides I haven’t shot a gun in generations, Lisa hasn’t shot one in her life and Kamara’s pants are too tight. Where is she going to conceal it?”

  Rohan had to smile at that. Kamara’s pants were indeed very tight and were doing a good job emphasizing her long legs. Kat continued. “We are going to converse, not to wage a mini-war. Additionally, the Kings and Commoners has a strict no guns policy.”