Chapter 7: A Token of Power
Ansen had been played.
It wasn’t the first time evil people had tried to use him, but it was certainly the first time anyone had succeeded.
And it made him angry.
Cecil’s irritating voice supplicated this vile creature from beyond, urging it to finish off the remaining porters and askarii in their cages and begging to be rewarded for his faithful service. Things weren’t falling into the sky any more, and the winds, although still powerful, were no longer like to blow him off the cliff so Ansen let go his hold on the wooden cage that had fallen back to the stone. He approached the movie director.
“You lied to me, Cecil,” he said darkly.
Then the girl spun venomously on him.
“Did you really think you were worth the price we offered?” she spat.
He eyed her darkly.
“So the movie - all of it - was a sham? Just an excuse to get all of us here – to feed us to that thing,” he accused with a finger stabbed toward the sky. “And here I was just starting to like you.”
She laughed, shaking her head in disbelief.
“You? You, a barbarian, believed the likes of Eva Desyre would – oh, you do flatter yourself, don’t you?” she taunted.
“I’m confident in my instincts,” he replied quietly.
He didn’t look for Cecil. There was no need. He could tell the girl purposely attempted to distract him while the man approached him from a blind side. Without warning he pivoted on the balls of his feet and faced the director. Cecil had approached within ten feet of him and now held the sickle-like sword of Megrodomigran in his effete grip. It had somehow miraculously missed being sucked into the sky – or maybe it had fallen and landed near the director.
“So why me?” he asked the girl over one shoulder without taking his eye off Cecil.
The girl smiled at his back.
“It’s all numbers, Ansen. These things are always all about the numbers. In our case, our troupe was short – by one!” she laughed.
“The porters, the askarii, we were only missing our leading man – you!” she punctuated.
“And here I thought it was my classic good looks and muscular physique,” he quipped.
He tried to stall for time until he could figure out how to get himself out of this predicament – he and Wamibi, too, who still lay unconscious in his cage the last he’d seen.
“No,” she said, seriously then, her smile instantly gone. “We had thirty-two; we needed thirty-three.”
And then Cecil came for him. But the Viking was not unarmed. Instantly the ancient tomahawk appeared in his grip. He ducked under Cecil’s first swing and took a sideways swipe at the director’s leg. Ansen never knew a foppish weasel like Cecil could move so fast. He dodged the swipe, and riposted with one of his own that Ansen barely avoided. But he noticed a look in Cecil’s face – he seemed to be staring awfully hard at the Norseman’s tomahawk.
“What - you afraid of this, Cecil?” the Viking taunted.
A ghastly look sat frozen on Cecil’s face, but he made no reply. Instead he cast a doubtful glance at the girl, and then ran at Ansen, swinging his weapon and screaming.
“Kill him!” she shrieked.
Cecil swung the immense cleaver viciously, the weapon clanging on the raw stone where Ansen stood a moment before. Ansen rushed him and they clashed. From the onset the Viking obviously had the upper hand. The other man was physically weaker; and although his weapon might have been the deadlier in the right hands with its longer reach, his palpable fear of Ansen’s tomahawk crippled his efforts.
And it wasn’t as if he simply feared a death blow from the weapon. The fear seemed more to be an almost supernatural awe of it, which Ansen thought odd for a man who had just summoned an extra-dimensional deity – one of the Old Ones of which the medicine man had spoken. It seemed Cecil couldn’t keep his eyes off the ancient axe, but Ansen did not for a second believe that made himself invincible.
Without warning something heavy smashed across his forearm, causing him to drop the tomahawk from an instantly numbed grip.
Cecil came at him hard and fast then; obviously Eva had thrown something to aid her cohort.
“Stupid, filthy barbarian pawn!” she screamed. “Do you think to stop a god? You puny man - your body will be slowly digested in another dimension in the bowel of Oth Shothok, along with that of this woman you care for. Yes - I have seen your affection for this woman in your eyes - maggot! Know that all of your futile efforts will come to nothing!”
Ansen threw himself into a roll, coming in under the heavy swinging blade of Megrodomigran. Using his momentum he continued on up, throwing a right hook into Cecil’s groin that doubled the dandy over, causing him to lose his grip on his sword. But not stopping there the Norseman followed up with a kick that straightened the dandy up, at which point the barbarian grabbed him by his shirt front. Ansen’s ham-fist, closed up tighter than an oak knot, rained a number of concussive blows upon the director’s face with all the force of a hammer man swinging a railroad maul, with each punch carrying the blunt force of a kick from an angry mule.
Stunned, Cecil fell to the stone at Ansen’s feet.
Glancing about hurriedly the Viking spotted his tomahawk. The girl looked like she would have liked to have retrieved it herself to keep it from him, but dared not. He refused to lose it again. His knotted fist closed on the brass-studded grip, the man delighting in the feel and heft of his weapon back in hand. For a moment he felt as Thor must have whenever he grasped hold of Mjölnir – a vibrant field of energy coursed up the corded musculature of his powerful forearm. Grimly he stalked toward where a dazed Cecil attempted to rise to his feet.
With no words of gloating or wasted breath Ansen strode straight up to the Hollywood socialite and slammed the hammer end of the tomahawk into Cecil’s temple with all his brute strength – which was considerable. The man’s skull burst like a melon, his eyes bulging from the explosive force. Without any further consideration of the man as a threat, he jerked the bloody weapon free from the ruined skull, whereat the corpse hit the stone face first like a ton of bricks.
The man’s body quivered as if from some internal goings-ons. His throat bulged and in a trice a smoky, black object crawled out of the gaping mouth of the corpse. The creature, obviously from the same world as the monstrosities they’d summoned, started to leap away but Ansen was too fast for it. In a sideways swing he caught it midways, lopping it in half. Its death throes and cries were disgusting, but also encouraging.
“At least they can die,” he muttered.
As if gravity held no sway over this creature, its sundered body floated gently away, hovering in the air about four feet off the ground. He watched as a smoky effluence, pouring from both halves, just kind of puddled in the air around the carcass - the vapory ichor of the abomination from beyond.
Fearful, the girl went from gloating to shrieking in terror as she fled from death incarnate in the form of Ansen Grost and his tomahawk. Instantly he ran her down from behind, grasping her by her long, blonde locks. She squealed, but he jerked her backward off her feet to fall beneath him on the hard, stony surface of the cliff. She rolled over to stare up in horror at the tomahawk and then her eyes rolled back into her head and the girl’s body convulsed.
“By the Sky!” Ansen burst, recoiling.
Just as it had with Cecil, a hideous black amorphous creature - not really solid and definitely not of this world - crawled forth from the beautiful girl. As it fled into the sky away from Ansen and his axe the girl’s head lolled sideways – she had lost consciousness.
“What are these damnable things?” Ansen muttered in disgust.
Then he noted the rapid movement of shadows, sliding and slithering across the stone of the precipice.
He had momentarily forgotten the rent sky and the amorphous beings summoned by Cecil and Eva. He jerked his face skyward in time to s
ee an immense mouth descending toward him. Pouring out of the immense maw were literally hundreds of the smaller, dark things, circling him like vultures awaiting their prey to become too helpless to prevent their feeding upon him.
He had only a moment to react and did so with an instinct that had guided many others the talisman had chosen over the centuries to carry it across the surface of the physical world.
He could not know it, but this tomahawk was only the token’s latest form, having taken a shape that the Arapaho admired and revered more than two centuries before. But before that it had been at times a sword, or a war hammer, or a shield - whatever it needed to be that it might fulfill its destiny, at one time even a tiny pebble used to slay a giant.
Ansen, he heard a voice speak.
For just that one, still moment it seemed that time stood still.
“I am here,” he replied.
Slay, the voice commanded.
Ansen’s ham fist gripped the studded handle of the axe while his storm-colored eyes stared venom at the descending monstrosity of another time or dimension, he knew not which. The man’s entire body seemed to tense like a tightly wound coil spring and then, in a burst of pure raw energy, his arm – drawn back to a position far behind his head – shot forward and released the tomahawk.
The axe spun end over end, straight into the descending maw which, due to its proximity, he could in no way miss. The beast of cosmic chaos had no chance to dodge the flying missile. The tear in the sky screamed, and then began to curl up, inside out. The torn edges of the sky of Earth began coming back together, closing the rip in the firmament and hiding the death throes of the outer cosmic deities.
With a force that would have shattered an anvil into individual atoms, the tomahawk flashed out of the closing rift just as it snapped shut, twirling end over end to slam blade-first into the altar and splitting it in twain. The disembodied creatures of smoky darkness, along with the ‘body’ of the beastie that had vacated dead Cecil, were sucked back into the closing rent just as the whole thing collapsed and disappeared.
Above his head Ansen saw an innocuous, sunset colored sky once again, with recognizable stars beginning to reappear in the east.
At the foot of the cliff the gaping abyss had vanished, it having closed up with the death of the worm god, Koyltentapharr. The savages were gone, every last one of them having been eagerly devoured by Oth Gokka and Oth Shothok – the bizarre deities of a dimensional aberration that somehow managed to split the heavens, creating a door to our world from theirs that they might feed on lesser mortals and lesser gods – only to discover their own mortality, thanks to Ansen and the tomahawk of Father Sky.
Leaving the girl lying for the time being Ansen walked over to Wamibi’s cage, the headman having regained consciousness. The American began pivoting the headman’s cage about on its fulcrum.
“Great bwana! You live!” the black man said.
Ansen smiled. It was typical of Wamibi to delight in Ansen’s welfare with no consideration to his own. He was a good man, and a faithful friend.
“Yes, Wamibi! And you, too, thank God,” he replied.
Having released the headman of the askarii, of which not a soul survived, they approached the girl who now sat up, dazed. Ansen helped her to her feet and held her, as she seemed unsteady.
“Are you unhurt, Miss Desyre?” he asked.
“Wh-what happened? Where am I?” she asked, seeming confused.
“What do you remember?” he asked her gently.
“The last thing I recall is being at the studio. I was in my dressing room, rehearsing lines and dressing for a shot. I can’t seem to recall anything after that…” she trailed off.
“My name is Ansen – Ansen Grost. This is Wamibi. Come, Miss Desyre, we have a long journey back to Zanzibar. We’ll fill you in on the way,” he said.
“Please, Mr. Grost, you’re too kind – call me Eva,” she said, smiling. “Did you say Zanzibar?”
Ansen strode over to the former altar of the savages to retrieve his tomahawk, marveling that it had not broken into fragments. The solid piece of stone had been splintered with its landing, but the talisman of the Arapaho stood firm, although it looked perhaps just a bit more battle-scarred to the Viking’s eyes. As he pulled it free it made a grating sound as it separated from the stone, reminding him briefly of the Arthurian legends of yore. His brows contracted as he looked hard at the axe, wonderingly. Could it be? Shaking his head, he returned the weapon to his belt, and walked back to his friends.
After leaving the cliff they repaired back to the beach upon which they had landed days earlier; with relief, they found their ship still floating offshore, completely unharmed. The ship’s captain and crew were delighted to see Ansen and Eva, but lamented the loss of the ‘boys’. The rest of the whites they were unconcerned with – especially Cecil, who had treated them as if they were sub-human.
Although a wanderer, Ansen invited the girl to join him on his journey to visit the land of his fathers in the Arctic Circle.
Strangely drawn to the man, she agreed.
The End
Consummatum est
Afterward
My dear reader,
I hope you enjoyed the first story in my series about Ansen Grost, a series of connected stories which I refer to as Tales of the Tomahawk. I hope to complete the next volume shortly which is grander in both scope and scale, and which I estimate will finish at roughly double or longer than is Blonde Goddess.
I do wish to extend an invitation to leave feedback for this story in the form of a review should you be so inclined. As a beginning author good honest reviews are nearly invaluable in their net worth. I will be the first to admit that each and every thing to which I lay hand is flawed in some manner – whether that be building a deck or crafting a story. With your help I hope to hone my skills as an author.
Best regards,
Chris.
An Invitation…
Join the discussion about The Blonde Goddess of Tikka-Tikka!
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Never heard of some of these guys? I encourage you with my whole heart to seek them out. Their works are amazing. And believe me, there is so much more to Burroughs than Tarzan, and greater depths to Robert E. “Two Gun” Howard than Conan. Some of you know exactly what I’m talking about.
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Acknowledgements
I wish to extend my heartfelt gratitude to my wife for listening to me go on and on about my stories. I know she has got to get tired of hearing about my plots and counter-plots, characters and places, and all those ideas and questions that are always going through my head. But she always listens and offers what advice she may – so thanks!
I wish to express my gratitude to my good friend and sounding board, Scott Belton. Scott is my second self – a man after my own heart who enjoys much of the same things in life that I do. As such, we talk stories – a lot. He has helped me through writing three novels of Barsoom and a host of short stories, offering his sage advice along the way. I’ve often sought his opinion in many ticklish situations in my yarns and he has always helped me out of any self-inflicted conundrums that I might continue the tale. We both have a hearty love for the pulp era authors and have spent many an evening discussing John Carter, Conan, Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth over a pint.
After devouring their written material for years and years I absolute
ly must acknowledge the many fine authors who influenced me from beyond (for many of them have sailed the Darkling Sea, as McKiernan, another favorite, would say) to begin writing myself in order to give a little something back to the world of rich, well-spun tales I’ve consumed since I was little. I’m a huge fan of temporal themes, and so, yes, gadzooks do I wish I could time-travel into the past that I might meet in person the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Clark Ashton Smith, H. P. Lovecraft, Edmond Hamilton, A. Merritt, William Hope Hodgson, Stanley Weinbaum, Lester del Rey, Robert E. Howard and others.
And I also wish to thank God for giving me whatever it is that drives me to write stories. I just have one favor to ask: keep ‘em coming!
About the Author
I was raised on an 80 acre horse farm in what I affectionately refer to as BFE, which is shorthand for Rock, WV :0
The Farm, as my family refers to it, is neat, being surrounded almost entirely by the Bluestone River, in the shape of a giant horse shoe, if the horse shoe were bent and mangled and distorted a bit. The only place it is connected to 'dry land' so to speak is a railroad tunnel built during the First World War that runs through the narrow stretch of land that isn't under the river. So gads, I know my mom feared for my life while I was growing up, as this place is surrounded by a river (anybody ever go swimming in the river during Dog Days?), it has cliffs, wooded trails, wild life, the railroad tunnel, you name it.
I used to scale cliffs, pole down the river in a flat bottom boat like Huck Finn, and me and my buddies played war with an arsenal of BB guns. I've heated up many a derriere with my trusty Red Ryder, and had the favor returned tenfold. Where we lived they didn't have cable, and my folks wouldn't pay for satellite, so I ran the woods and cliffs, rode horses, climbed trees, waded, ETC till dark. Then I would read.
I read a lot. I read everything I could get my hands on, from classics (my mom had a giant collection of Readers Digest Condensed Books - I read ‘em all), romances, you name it. Then I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith (heck, you can read almost all of those guys just by picking up a copy of The Macabre Reader - that's where I got my first taste of pulp authors), in short - I fell in love with a bunch of authors that were mostly dead 30 or more years before I was even born, knowing beforehand that after I read what was out there, there would be no more.
But I never let that bother me. Some of their works are very obscure, and I've thoroughly enjoyed every volume I've ever stumbled on or run to ground. I love collecting old paperback reprints of these guys-- Oh yeah, there's Edmond Hamilton, A. Merritt, the entire Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series (which I've yet to complete!). There are others, Philip M. Fisher, Lester del Rey, the list goes on. These are the guys who drive the type of writing I'm attracted to emulate. You'll find their influence heavily in everything I write, whether it's a short macabre piece, or a fisticuffs, or any other form of arm chair adventure you care to mention - they're there.
Tarzan, John Carter, Conan, Malygris, Avyctes, Dwayanu, Cthulhu, Randolph Carter, they're all there...
Time Frames of Ansen’s life as known
1893: Born to Hanlo and Elisabet Grost
1896: Parents slain. Ansen captured at age 3
1897: Adopted by Tahnaktaka at age 4
1914: Leaves the Arapaho to fight in WW1 at age 21
1918: Discharged from US Army at age 25
1918-1924: Wanders the world; undocumented; age 25-31
1925: The Blonde Goddess of Tikka-Tikka at age 32
1926: The Banshee of the Atacama at age 33
List of Works
List of works that are currently available:
The Valley of Despair (February 2016)
On A Winter’s Eve (February 2016)
The Treasure of Akram el-Amin (May 2016)
The Blonde Goddess of Tikka-Tikka (Volume I of Tales of the Tomahawk) (October 2016)
Coming soon:
The Banshee of the Atacama (Volume II of Tales of the Tomahawk)
The Cosmos of Despair (Sequel to The Valley of Despair)
Valk (tentative title)
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