BEHIND HIDDEN EYES
Lift the penny
CHAPTER 1: Old Friend/fiend
Lorcan, a inheritor of The Sight, walked slowly down the towpath next to the canal near the cemetery. To his left was an old man hopping around on one leg and chanting ‘I’m a clown I’m a fool’, a small nod and a wink in his general direction was enough for the old man to stop and sheepishly fade away.
( Ghosts, ghouls and such like, find it amusing to parade around people to alleviate their boredom, however, if you can see them, its no fun at all. )
As he approached the small deralic bandstand at the edge of Coulton-Tey, his friend Anelle called out to him. Looking up at her he realised for the first time that she was the most special of people, someone just like him, rare indeed, and especially in the same town, even in the same part of the country.
She had often glimpsed things out of the corner of her eye, like all of us have at many times of our lives, but lately they had been clearer, more frequent, and spine tingling, almost exhilarating. An occasional mist of a smudged shape in the distance, while out at night was becoming a more obvious shape, a person maybe. In any case, she wasn’t in doubt as to why, she’d been praying for The Sight despite Lorcan’s objections.
His over-bearing but level voice would ring out on her deafened ear’s.
“Really, this is not a thing to wish for, it’s a fucking pain in the arse, I barely know when I should walk round someone, or bowl straight through’em”.
As much as it saddened him that she wouldn’t listen to his words, he had to teach her how to use and control the ‘gift/curse’.
“It can make you as mad as a hatter, or as twisted with power as the priests who used it to control people with fear in medieval times”.
Something that he wasn’t gonna let happen to the innocent little thing, she would dispute the fact, but much as she was 2 years older, and in college, she was well aware of the fact that he was a walking bank of power, incite, and knowledge, he could look though you, in you, or grind your insides into mush with a thought, his strength belies his temperament. Being able to kill with a thought is an awesome responsibility which he was taught by his Grandparents, both See’ers.
He was told the stories of old times, how the ‘First ones’ used their power to hold dominion over the ‘mundanes’ and abused it to the point where the witch hunts started, and pushed them underground into hiding.
(Historical Note: Merlin had the power to control weather, a fact that U’phra Pendragon used to attack his enemy and sire Artor ‘King Arthur’).
“So let me get this right yeah, we’re See’ers, but we can do more than see, we have psychokinesis, telepathy, and mild suggestive powers” she waited for a nod of approval.
“No, your taking it to literal, we SEE the big picture, we can see pass what holds our potential back, we are as skilled as our own control. A lazy slob might be able to switch a light on and off, but a practised adept can lift a mountain at will”.
Standing opposite the pair were two children singing and dancing, hands joined and giggling.
“What’s wrong with that picture”
“I don’t know ? they’re fuzzy ?…oh, I can’t hear them” piped Anelle.
“Correct” Lorcan smiled“ you might be able to just make them out, but SEEING and hearing is another thing entirely”.
He was glad that she noticed, most don’t, such a minor detail and she didn’t miss it, clever girl he mumbled to himself.
“Now we’ll try something a little harder”.
Out of his pocket he produced a chewed up old penny, with the faces worn away and a subtle curve against a flattened edge.
“This is what I practised on in the beginning”
Anelle took it into her hand and inspected the knarled up piece of copper
“How old is it, it looks like its been through the wars”
“They said move it, so I sent it on a ride through an entire terrace house row at about a thousand miles an hour, they thought it was a small meteorite”
Lorcan’s chin could just be seen to tremble an intricate grin against the stoic plainness of his features.
He took the penny from her tiny white hands shaking in the frosty days whether and placed it down in front of her, turn around and looking straight into her eyes the penny lifted from the bench and began to rotate, his eye’s sparkled slightly with green flecks of light. Slowly, the penny lowered till it was again on the bench.
“How comes you can do that without looking at it” the puzzled look on her face was enough for Lorcan to amuse his usually repressed humour.
His eye’s glowed green again, but more intensely this time and with a slightly wincing face, he said “Look up”
As Anelle raised her head, she could see a balloon, no, wait, a ball ?
A jet of laughter exploded from him as the object shot over head and began harassing a flock of pigeons. He could hardly contain himself, it was almost putting him off, with every chest squeezing laugh the object dropped lower and faltered, only to rise when he recomposed himself.
“What the fuck !!!! it’s a Lolly-pop Ladies sign” bleated Anelle.
Lorcan turned to her with a small trickle of laughter tears running down the side of his face
“You should never do what I just did, it brings attention to us, even if it is funny, the only reason I did it is because 1: knew there was no one near the sign, and 2: there’s no one in the park”
“Fine, I won’t, not that I’ll be able to do stuff like that. Although, I do have one little trick up my sleeve”. Glancing to her right and looking into a tree, her fore-head let off a faint blue light, and a pair of Starlings began chirping ‘God save the Queen’ by the sex pistols.
“So, so corny, my god” Lorcan chuckled.
“Well, I take pride in my Country” She barely managed to get the words from her lips before slipping off the bench in hysterics.
She got up off the ground and brushed herself clean, then they proceeded to Gohbehs, Lorcan decided their little trip would open her eye’s somewhat. Walking down Lesbeth road they saw a girl dragging along a decrepid old dog, Anelle looked at Lorcan with a ‘please’ face, he winked with a green eye, and the heel of the girls shoe snapped off.
“That should even the pace a tad”
As they neared Coulton by-way he took a sharp right into an over-grown path that lead up to a dingy old house that looked like something out of a horror movie.
“So this is where Gobal” She hesitates “Goby whatever lives”
“Gohbeh, GO-BEIR, and yes he lives here, AND whatever is a very good description”
As they walked up the moss covered porch, Lorcan pushed open the door that was laminated with what looked like a hundred years of bird shit. Squeaking across the floor into a damp hallway a loud dual-tone voice thundered through the house
“Lorcan ‘The Green Fire’…. Who’s the pinkie, have you brought your old friend a treat”
“Sorry, but alas I haven’t, I just brought her here to give her a little lesson in the faces of the world”
“And what a pretty face you’ve chosen to show her” Thundered the voice again, and swinging down from the ceiling came a large bulky creature, leaning into the light a face could just be made out in the darkness.
The smooth fine scales of intermittent reds and blues caused the light to shimmy across it, a large pair of double horns rose from the dreded mass of bony looking linked hair, and a red and green compound eye slowly inspected her from top to toe.
The creature leaned closer as it opened it’s mouth hundreds of razor-blade teeth could be seen lining every inch of available space,
“Hmmm, you didn’t recoil in horror; see something you like?” The creature struck a pose like the golf accessories model from a thousand and one catalogues.
“Oh please, I watch Buffy every week on cable, you ain’t all that” piped Anelle.
Gohbeh inhaled enough air to inflate the ‘Virgin around the world Challenger Balloon’ and let out a bellowing roar of laughter that knocked the pair of humans of their feet and stripped the wall behind them of its plaster.
“Heh, I hope to see more of you then, I’ll explain the rules of the Contra-world and what wanders around in it” Gohbeh slumped onto the stairway and carried on laughing.
Lorcan picked himself up and faced the creature “Well that’s for me to decide, when and if she’s ready, speaking of which, how comes you’ve been in the middle world for so long”
“Maab is about to be reborn, so I thought I’d take her out for an Indian, maybe two” The creature rolled about on the floor in fits of laughter again, breaking several floorboards.
“Ahem…we’ll be off then” Lorcan’s words fell on deaf ears, Gohbeh was in a hilarious world of his own.
As they returned back down the path Anelle lurched towards Lorcan
“What’s up with him, he seems a bit hyper, not that I know anything about demons”.
“He’s a Djin, he’s sort of like a ‘Lads mag demon’ FHM incarnate, if its edible he’ll eat it, well he’d eat it anyway even if it weren’t, and if there’s an orifice in view, he’ll try and fuck it…. With both his cocks”
Anelle’s eyes flickered “both”.
CHAPTER 2: Earthquake
The next day as Lorcan opened his eye’s Anelle was standing in front of him with a cup of coffee and a kebab,
“Come on get up, there’s things to do, minds to read, old ladies to levitate”
With one eye still welded together with morning eye goo Lorcan swung his leg’s out of the bed “A kebab, a semi-fresh hot meal in the morning, beats a fry up I suppose”
“Err sorry but its a bit cold now” Anelle handed it to him with a dumb smile.
“It’s hot now.” He took a bite out of the steaming pile of offal and lettuce.
“That’s so cool, I wanna learn that to, I’ve spent the last four years watching the things you can do, and now I have a chance to do them, I could just explode…”
Lorcan interrupted her prattling “And if I don’t show you how to control them you just might explode, in the ‘Hiroshima’ sense of the word, and I for one don’t want entrails and brains splattered all over me, so calm down.”
He pulled up his baggies and found a shirt screwed up in a ball down the side of his bed, he told her that they’d go down to ‘The Plain’ to practise some more. She looked at him puzzled “The plain ?”.
Later on, he lead her to cemetery. As they walked through, she could see the dead clearer than before, amongst the crowd were two old ladies playing Bridge on an alter and a man in his late thirties in 19th century clothes. He tipped his top-hat and spun his cane as they walked past “Afternoon” she heard his hollow sounding word.
“Wow, I heard him, you must be rubbing off on me” Grinned Anelle.
“Rubbing something” Lorcan muttered to himself, “We’re here” .
He looked at the rusty old door of the crypt ‘click’ went the lock and it opened.
Anelle looked down the stone walled passage and saw a dot of light at the end, as they got to it, they walked out on to a large open plain with the odd apple tree dotted here and there, the edges were walled with huge white cliff’s of salt, stained a reddish orange colour by the surrounding rocks.
Inevitably her favourite phrase came out of her mouth
“What the fuck….?” She peered around, she was baffled, she walked into a crypt, and out into cave ? No, there was a sky, the tunnel must of been longer than it seemed and they at the bottom of a local spot that she didn’t know about.
“This a portal, this particular one was Eden in the old testament, some mundanes got trapped here and had children who fucked each other and had their own children, and then there grandson eventually found his way out, and well, history gets twisted and a story is born.”
“Oooo-k” Anelle looked puzzled still.
“Right” Lorcan spoke slowly as if to a child “About three thousand years ago Addisurm and Et’va wandered into the portal in which you can travel large distances in a few seconds if you know how they work, it’s an intersection of ‘Lay-Lines’, and they couldn’t get out. Luckily for them they met an Ellopian demon… a snake like thing, and it told them what they could and couldn’t eat, and thus the ‘Snake and the Apple’ thingy in Genesis, but unlucky for them, Ellopian demons can’t bring non-demonic beings through portals, you getting all this ?”
“ Err, yeah, I think.” Anelle said.
Lorcan carried on the history lesson
“Eventually they had kids and they lived their whole lives in there and they had kids and one of them finally managed to escape back to the middle-world, the occasional demon or angel would pass through, and before you say anything, angels are full of crap, they made up the whole ‘Messenger of God’ stuff, just so people would be pleased to help them do shit to interfere in the path of humanity. Jesus was half angel half human, all he could do was cheap parlour tricks and mild hypnosis, that’s how he got the weak minded ‘down-and-outs’ to listen to his shit.”
Anelle peered from slitty eye’s “Cheap parlour tricks ay, like making a cold kebab hot again, hehe, and I suppose you can walk on water too”
“Hell yeah, I can do better” he took a deep breath and hovered in the air with his feet a metre off the ground, a strange humming sound came from his mouth, and with one big wrench, a blue ball of glowing energy fired from his torso, as it shot across the plain grass was torn up and tree’s blew aside until it hit the cliff at the far end about 2 miles away. First came a flash, then the noise of crumbling rock and salt; slowly a large cloud of dust reached them. She turned to him.
“I… had no idea. My god, your a regular one-man army” her eye’s were as wide as they could go “I’m impressed, do I sign up as a groupie now, or do you have to impregnate me first ?”.
“I told you I had a gift, this is the one place where I can use it to it’s full potential, and no, I don’t have groupies, although the sex bit I could do with” He smiled, somewhat more emotionally then usual, he actually looked as if he meant it.
When they finally returned through the portal, three little girls playing with a rope started singing as the one in the centre hopped.
“Shaky grounds got the shakes coz the Seer’s crash bang makes”
The ground trembled, birds took flight from the tree’s and a few old tombstones fell over.
“That’s just the delay of my out-burst, just takes a bit of time to catch up through the world-dividers.”
When they got into town there was a traffic jam, something that was rare seeming as their town was a no-mark shit hole. Drawing nearer they saw a large tear in the ground with water gushing from old pipes and surrounded by old Ladies gawking into it.
“It just appeared out of no where, I nearly had a stroke” her scratchy withered voice had a vibrato to it that made Lorcan chuckle to himself
‘Old people are so melodramatic’.
When he got home and waved off Anelle he sat back in his Dad’s comfy chair and thought about his out-burst ‘I’ve never done one that big before, and certainly not one that made it through the world-dividers so violently, it’s working, everything is as it should be’.
CHAPTER 3: Lost on the Boat of the Dead.
Anelle, got home just as her little sister was leaving.
“Where you been all day” screeched her annoying voice.
“Out with Lorcan” She responded
“Why you always out with him, he’s a weirdo, fancy him do’ya”
“Fuck off you little shit” as her sister ran off down the road, the straps of her ruck sack smouldered till flames appeared “Hehe, I can burn things”.
She jumped on her bed and began to smugly practise her new skill.
First she set out a row of objects, a piece of paper, a candle, and pencil, and a cup of water. She glared at the paper and up it went without hesitation, then the candle, at first she keep melt the wax off the tip, till she managed to direct it to the wick. Success! The pencil was thicker, she pushed as hard as she could, ‘Crack’ went the lead, she tried again, the paint on the outside began to peal away, finally it began to smoke and was engulfed.