The Scholar, the Sphinx, and the Threads of Fate

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2

“It’s rude to interrupt a performance, Mr. Sandoval.”

The indigo creatures were gone. The audience was gone. The tent, the magic lantern, the images, were gone. It was all replaced by a small room, ten feet long and eight feet wide, with two plush red chaise lounges placed across from one another. Bottles of various colors, straw dolls, mobiles of bones, and dried herbs dangled from the ceiling on braided ropes, and jars of the advertised oddities of the Eccentricities Emporium were scattered about the room. It was amazing how much could fit into such a small space, and despite the cramped surroundings, Professor Shakpana looked positively at ease as he sat on one of the chaise lounges, tapping his fingers on the head of his cane.

Degare blinked, as his conscious scrambled to make sense of what was going on.

“Where…how…what were those…?”

“You are wondering about the Obambous?” Shakpana said with a grin. “Spirits of insanity. Invisible to the n***d eye…at least, the n***d eyes of the living. I didn’t think you would see them either, since I always considered not existing different than being deceased. But that might be splitting hairs.”

“Not…living…are you saying I am dead?”

Shakpana sighed. “If only. It would make things so much easier. But first, if you don’t mind…” He started scratching around the edges of his face. “This illusion is irritating me. The things we do for show business, eh?”

He then peeled his face off.

Degare’s tongue jumped backwards down his throat as Shakpana removed his facial skin like a later of fabric, and beneath it was a featureless, smooth surface like marble, with black and white vertical stripes painted on it. He hung his “face” on a hook on the wall behind him. “Ah, much better,” he said, despite no longer having any visible mouth. “Now, where were we?”

“I…I…” Degare could barely urge his lips to move.

“You’re much too tense. A little liquid courage should make you more conversational.” The lovely Lyssa was at Degare’s side with a tray carrying a bottle of deep red wine beside three glasses of the crimson liquid.

Degare took one of the glasses with a shaking hand but didn’t drink. “Wh…where am I? You called me Sandoval, do you know—”

“Don’t be so fidgety. I like fidgety only when it’s a symptom of my work. When it’s a perfectly stable person doing it, it’s annoying.” Shakpana helped himself to one of the other wine glasses, while Lyssa took the remaining one. “Now, the problem is, I would personally prefer you to be dead, Mr. Sandoval. Bringing back the dead is simple. Bringing back a nonexistent, now that’s a trick. Nyx did quite a number on you. I would think that fool was delusional for being so concerned with you, if my Ilomba hadn’t witnessed firsthand just how troublesome you are.”

“Nyx? Ilomba? You’re not making any sense,” Degare retorted.

Shakpana and Lyssa turned to one another and laughed. “That comes with the job,” he replied.

“Frankly, you’ve had me working mental muscles I haven’t used in ages, trying to unlock your brain,” Lyssa said to their guest. “Your eyes were so empty at first, but the longer I pried, the more little leaks of secrets began to drip out of your subconscious. Which is unusual for a nonexistent. Most nonexistent have nothing at all, even less than spirits of the deceased who continue to haunt for whatever reason. Something about you lingers, David. Something that Nyx couldn’t destroy.”

“Which is why I wanted you in the first place,” Shakpana said. “By the way, when you sliced off my Ilomba’s second head, I felt that. No one has ever wounded one of my snakes before. That made me very…unhappy.”

Degare wiped a hand across his forehead. “You must be mistaking me for someone else. I don’t know what all this is about. Spirits, the dead, snakes…snakes…” The images from the magic lantern returned to him, particularly the one of a two-headed snake biting him. The feeling of teeth sinking into his arm echoed in his skin. “That story, in the tent, that was all about me, wasn’t it? Who are you people? What happened to me? You said someone named Nyx did this to me?”

“All your questions are pointless, Mr. Sandoval. The fact of the matter is, in order for you to be dead, you have to exist first. Presently, you do not, which should be evident from the fact that everyone forgets you the very moment you present yourself. As long as you are nonexistent, you are without a destiny, without a life, without an afterlife. What we need to do is get you to afterlife status.”

“Wouldn’t I rather have ‘life’ status?” Degare asked, feeling awkward to even be having such a discussion.

“Probably. But I do not. Unless, of course, you were to pledge yourself to me as a living mortal? I tend to find that much stickier than just resurrecting you as my permanent undead servant, but I admit my current minion has been disappointing. Plus, a living one has so much more to lose should he cross me.” Shakpana leaned back in his seat. “I like that kind of leverage.”

Degare felt a chill ripple throughout his veins. “Are you serious? Are you…can you…raise the dead? Those ghosts I saw back there, weren’t just some illusions made by the magic lantern?”

“Control the dead, inflict smallpox, invent sesame seeds, he’s quite talented,” Lyssa said. “I, however, merely drive people crazy.”

“Just like every woman,” Shakpana said.

“Oh hush, you love that I can do that,” she replied with a honey-dipped sweetness.

Degare—or, as these people were calling him, David Sandoval—stood up, as several of the rope-hung items bumped into his head. “You still haven’t told me WHO—ARE—YOU—PEOPLE??”

The professor’s stripes narrowed into thinner lines, and he radiated an air of annoyance. “Being nonexistent doesn’t necessarily mean you get leniency to be stupid. We are exactly who we’ve always been saying we are. I am Professor—well, perhaps that title is a bit deceptive— Shakpana. God of Madness, although Madness itself would be more accurate. You know my friend Lyssa, goddess of the same vein, but more of the aggressive rage variety.”

“And rabies,” Lyssa added, a little too happily.

David stared at the two of them for a long moment, judging whether or not these people truly were entities of madness, or merely mad themselves. But they knew so much, why David had not been seen or heard by anyone, who he really was, his past…they couldn’t be fabricating all of this. “And, you also have the ability to make nonexistent people exist again?”

“It’s…not one of my specialties,” Shakpana admitted. “But to accomplish such an impossible feat, it would take a good deal of insanity, wouldn’t it? After all, impossible is only for those who take logic far too seriously. Perhaps, if we bind you to an already existing being, a vicarious existence…a binding to an Obambou, that might work. Then you would be bound to me as well, but you wouldn’t have any of those bothersome human weaknesses that could pose a problem.”

“You want me bound to one of your…bambis…why?” David asked, as he was scanning the room for a door to escape through. Disturbingly, there were none.

“Because Lord Nyx is infuriating!” Shakpana hissed. “He desires the ability to devour any and all worlds, in order to bring everyone under his control. His pitiful sense of order. As you might have guessed, order is not my thing, nor is having entire worlds devoured just to make a point. Because, in order for there to be Madness, there must be people to inflict madness upon. No people, no Madness. You, however, have proven to be a possible thorn in Nyx’s side—a thorn I will personally lay claim to. You belong to me, then I possess the one thing Nyx fears. Then we’ll see who exactly is dominating whom. Not to mention, if I were to gain power over the Night, oh, how many dreams of insane delusion could I spread! It’s a delicious thought.”

“But I haven’t agreed to anything,” David said. “You seem to believe you already own me. Maybe I’d rather remain nonexistent if the other option is to belong to you.”

Shakpana’s black stripes began to bubble and drip a blackened sludge down his head and along his neck. The white stripes were now a sunset red, bleeding down his front as well. “And you seem to think you have a choice in the matter.”

The glass that David was holding began to pulse. The liquid inside overflowed and a coil, the hue of an overripe avocado skin, grew out of the glass, slithering around David’s wrist and up his arm. David jumped up from the lounge and staggered, slamming into the wall as he tore at the coil with his free hand. The coil lengthened and thickened, splitting at one end into a two-prong fork and producing two reptilian heads with glittering fangs. The python entwined David, tightening into a crushing vice, and David could sense his mind being clouded by fear and confusion.

He had confronted one of these before, if the story of the magic lantern were true. What had he done last time? Sliced its head off? How, and with what? He had no weapon available to him, and he could see Shakpana and Lyssa advancing on him. Shakpana held up his cane to David, and the mouth of the cane’s skull snapped open. Out poured an indigo mist, swirling into a face with ruby-red eyes, jaws gaped open as the materializing Obambou closed in on David…

She despised how dark it was. Always, always dark.

Acacia rested her head on her forepaws, no longer aware of the coldness of the cage floor. Her eyes glanced across the bars of her prison, her teeth and claws unable to leave even a scratch on them. She had given up on trying to break free…how long ago? It felt like weeks, months, but it may have been but a few days. Time was irrelevant here. She had to wait for an opportunity, a momentary lapse of attentiveness from her captor, to strike.

After all, she was a sphinx. Sphinxes were as patient as the sands of the desert.

There was barely enough room in her prison to stretch her golden-furred limbs, or her violet-black wings, but she considered herself luckier than her fellow inmates. Suspended in the darkness not far from her were five more cages, bell-shaped and no larger than mantle clocks, that each held an unusual bird in its stomach. Although they were not true birds, that was certain. Poor Hypnos, reduced to a bizarre little bluebird with wings protruding from his head—although that particular cranial feature was nothing new to the god of Sleep, even in his traditional dream-state form. The other four, Acacia was not so familiar with, but she knew they, as was Hypnos, were the siblings of their captor.

Even thinking of their vile warden sent a hot wave down Acacia’s backside.

She wouldn’t give in to him. Oh, Lord Nyx had certainly come close to making her c***k, when he thrust her into one of his shadow pools, submerging her in the freezing void while she was taunted by a legion of his twisted Shades. After having spent the last several hundred years with a Shade of Nyx inside of her—a blight set upon her by the previous Madam Nyx, planted in her belly by her loathsome cousin the Teumessian—and to have every waking moment of her life tormented by the searing pain of it inside of her, there was little else in the universe that frightened her more than a Shade. But she was free of the Shade now, so she withstood the taunting of those nasty wraiths. She focused her thoughts away from the horrid shapes, the shadowy extensions of Lord Nyx’s sinister will, and after what felt like an eternity, she had been pulled back out and tossed back into her cage.