The mist that rose from the stone floor of the Smiting Chamber started out light blue, but the individual bubbles that comprised the mist began to pulse with light, turning off and on intermittently, in no particular pattern, and changing colors from blue to golden yellow to ruby red, and the effect was that the mist seemed to sparkle, flash, and burn, as it filled the space in the chamber above the heptagon.
Fascinating, the Needy said inside of Zacchaeus’s mind. I can feel the connection to myself on Earth strengthening. This is truly a wonder. There is advanced science on our Earth from the various planets of the universe that boggles the minds of humans, but all of it is based on technology; beings manipulating natural materials. That is not what is happening here. This mist is magic, arcana, produced by the Fonlands to do the things that technology does for the beings of our universe. I feel much more at home in a place like this because of the prehistoric Earth that is my true home. Prehistoric Earth was the Fonlands, maybe I am of this place and everything I am derives from a chance encounter with the magic of the Fonlands.
“I hear you,” Zacchaeus said with a nod as he allowed himself to be awed by the sights inside of the scintillating scene. “I wonder if the way Sasabo brought us here done been around for a while? Remember when we first met Coffey, she had just come to that swamp, and it was a portal to the Fonlands there. But that was a different Earth, and the Fonlanders had been there for a while. Ain’t nothing like the Fonlands on our Earth, or it wasn’t until we came here.”
Maybe it was the admiration that Xêvioso instilled in them for us that motivated them to tunnel to a new universe. Goldie seems like a trustworthy bat to give us the answers to the questions we have. But we must deal with Owuo first. What will we do to him if he cannot bring us to Jordan? Will I finally be allowed to consume a Fonlander?
“If it’s so important to you,” Zacchaeus said as the strange sounds began to rumble slowly, like the sound of thunder gathering in the distance, but the low rumble was all around them and after a moment, Zacchaeus knew that the sound came from the orbs that comprised the mist. They were vibrating.
“Zacchaeus!” they heard Goldie yell from the ledge high above them. “Are you still with me down there?”
“I am,” he called back. “You sound worried.”
“I know you don’t know me,” Goldie said, “you don’t have a lot of reason to trust me, but I think you should come out of that mist. Owuo will keep his word and find your dead soul, but he is doing something and I think it could be bad. That sound, you hear it? I’ve never heard the mist make that sound and Owuo is in a trance up here, levitating from the ground and chanting. He is doing something, using the Smiting Chamber and it is rare arcana to do something…”
The thunder had grown deafening by that point and Zaccheus couldn’t make out what Goldie was screaming. Before he could leave the heptagon, the mist seized him, the bubbles that comprised it moved to compress his body and he could not move, not even with the aid of the Needy.
“Why we ain’t moving?” Zacchaeus asked in a panic.
Do you feel it, Zacchaeus? the Needy asked wistfully in his mind. We are connected to our home universe. I can feel the pathway from there to here and I can bring all of myself to me. Do not resist the mist, Zacchaeus.
“Ah hell,” Zacchaeus muttered to himself. “I be forgetting you a primordial shadow monster, we was getting along so well. Jit!” Zacchaeus yelled as loudly as he could in the cacophony of rolling thunder that seemed to vibrate the entire chamber. “Jit! You doing this or letting it happen?”
Jit was the name of the giant who became the Needy and Zacchaeus had come to know it as he grew closer to the Needy over the years he’d carried it. He used the name to remind the Needy of the humanity he had learned over the years that he had taken an avatar, Zacchaeus’s grandmother, Mavis Turner, being the first. But Zacchaeus had found himself in an intense situation where it seemed Owuo had hijacked the arcana of Goldie’s chamber to bring all of the Needy to the Fonlands.
“Ain’t no way, though,” Zacchaeus thinks out loud. “This ain’t about us, he can’t know about all of the Needy. He trying to bring something else from our universe.”
“I know what he’s doing!” Goldie yelled from the ledge. “I know but I can’t stop him now. Zacchaeus and the Needy, I know it must be hard, but do what you can to free yourselves and hurry.”
“What he doing?” Zacchaeus yelled, suspended above the heptagon in the magical mist.
“A blind Great Power summons. It has never been used with the arcana of the heptagon. A Great Power summons will bring the greatest powers of a designated area to this spot. It’s an illegal Smiting spell because it forces unknowing beings into combat. I can only assume his curiosity to see the powers of your realm has prompted Owuo to use the Smiting Chamber with you as a conduit to your realm to force strong combatants here to the Fonlands. I’ve been talking for a while and you are not moving, Zacchaeus and the Needy. You need to move now or who knows what will appear in the heptagon.”
“Why don’t you stop him?” Zacchaeus asked. The Needy was enthralled by the magical sensations all around them and Zaccaheus knew that he wouldn’t be able to free himself in time. He did feel the mass of the Needy approaching; maybe once it arrived, he could refocus the Needy and free himself.
“I can’t, Owuo is in a forcefield and his essence manipulation is top notch. Maybe you could stop him if you get up here!”
“I’m trying!” Zacchaeus screamed and just as he did, oily black strands began to shoot out of the bubbles of the mist and into Zacchaeus. It didn’t hurt him, but it was unpleasant, like he was being shot with a million strong hoses all at once and eventually everything went black.
***
When he opened his eyes, Goldie knelt next to Zacchaeus in the heptagon of the Smiting Chamber. Everything seemed to spin as Goldie helped him up enough to sit. The short fur on Goldie’s arms was soft and she rubbed his back soothingly.
“Take your time,” Goldie whispered to him. “Owuo is speaking to the beings he summoned. I do not know if they are evil. One is black and the other is gold, just like us. We should be able to defend ourselves against them if they attack.”
Owuo interrupted with loud laughter. “You wouldn’t stand a chance against the Universal Master of Arcana! Zacchaeus, you have brought very powerful friends to the Smiting Chamber! For that, I will help you find the soul of Brad Jordan. That is who you are looking for, right?”
Zacchaeus’s mouth fell open as Goldie helped him to stand and he saw Issac Washington and Wazad the Wonderful standing angrily in the heptagon and glaring at him.
“What is going on here?” Issac asked and his voice boomed through the chamber and made Zacchaeus nervous.
“I’m asking myself the same thing,” Zacchaeus said.
“How did we get underground?” Wazad asked. Even though her arms were crossed at her chest, she was still threatening, like she could grab the large sword at her back in an instant and slice the entire chamber to bits.
“Not just underground, Maria,” Issac said to Wazad then glared at Zacchaeus again. “The underground of a whole new universe. My multiversal indicators are sounding. Are you spreading the Needy to other worlds, Zacchaeus? Did you find this place with that device you got from the razew?”
“This is much more dramatic than I expected,” Owuo said and clapped his hands together. He wore what Zacchaeus recognized as a fancy, all white tuxedo and his dark brown face was stoic even when he smiled and expressed glee. He had an air of seriousness, starkness, death maybe, that Zacchaeus recognized from his time with the Needy.
“You don’t need to be talking right now unless you telling me where Jordan is,” Zacchaeus said to Owuo, who put his hands up in surrender and took a step back. “And if you do anything else like that shit you just pulled, I’ll let the Needy eat you like he been begging to do.”
“Don’t sound so bold, Zacchaeus,” Wazad said. She was eyeing the chamber around her and her sight had landed on Sasabo on the ledge high above the chamber. “The Needy won’t be killing anything that doesn’t want to die. I put the restriction back after you helped with the witches. I appreciate your help, but we still don’t fully trust you or that scourge you allow to live inside of you.”
“Why y’all assume I’m here causing trouble?” Zacchaeus asked as he approached Maria and Issac. “They brought me here just like y’all. I been to the Fonlands before, but not on Sakpata’s Disc like this. I didn’t even know all this was here. The Needy was helping me cause Sasabo up there found his way to our Earth and he half ate a bunch of people to make them zombies to lure me here for a fight. Me and the Needy was doing good, and then that son of bitch hijacked Goldie’s set up and brought y’all here against y’all will using a illegal spell.”
Wazad looked to Issac who glared at Zacchaeus, then, after a moment of silence, he looked to Wazad and nodded.
“I’m sorry to doubt you,” Wazad said sincerely to Zacchaeus, “but we assumed that the Needy had conspired to bring all of himself to this unsuspecting universe hoping to escape the restrictions placed on him by a former Wazad.”
“Do you know this Owuo, Zacchaeus?” Issac asked and both he and Wazad stood next to Goldie and Zacchaeus.
“Never met him, but Goldie don’t like him, and I like her.”
Issac looked at Goldie who was almost as tall as he was.
“Fascinating,” Issac said wistfully. “You, and the other one up on the ledge, you are asanbosam? Vampires of southern Ghana that hunt their prey from the trees with their impressive clawed feet.”
“We are asanbosam, but what is southern Ghana?” Goldie asked.
“Ghana is on Earth,” Zacchaeus explained.
“Oh,” Goldie said and then laughed derisively, “the other realm. I have never been to that Earth place, I have only visited Bludon in the other realm. But Sasabo knows some asanbosam who moved to Earth when they were banished from the Fonlands. Maybe they are the ones in the southern Ghana. I would not trust them, though. If they were banished from the Fonlands, they must be terrible.”
“And you,” Issac turned his attention to Owuo. “You are Odomakama Owuo.”
“The one and only,” Owuo said with a bow. “I see you are knowledgeable of the beings of the Fonlands.”
Issac shook his head with a pointed smirk at Owuo. “Not at all. But I do know the religions of Africa, and you are the Akan God of death. Evil incarnate with a black smile. Are you the evil ruler of these Fonlands, or are you plotting something?”
“Me? Evil?” Owuo said and he clutched his chest dramatically. “Maybe you are mistaking me like you did the asanbosam. Whatever stories circulate about Odomakama Owuo on your Earth seems to be horrible slander. I was hoping to make friends of you foreign realmers, and I was just about to give Zacchaeus what he desires most, to be reunited with his friend Brad Jordan with the hopes of bringing him back to life. Would someone as evil as you say I am be so nice and accommodating to his new friends?”
“Owuo is not the worst that I deal with overseeing this Chamber,” Goldie admitted, “but he is far from innocent. You disrespected the heptagon, Owuo.”
“And doubled his opposition,” Wazad said angrily. “Tell us your plans, evil one, and know that they stop here.”
“Wait, wait,” Owuo said with a nervous smile. “I will admit that I overstepped, Goldie, my curiosity to see more beings of Zacchaeus’s origin overtook me, but Wazad was it? Wazad, I am not evil. And this was the extent of my plans. Well, I will pester Goldie into making two rare cards that even the Vodun do not possess, but that is harmless. I got everything I wanted. I am only still here to give Zacchaeus what I promised.”
“You have a knack for making deals with devils,” Issac said to Zacchaeus. “But this time, that is more literal than figurative.” Issac turned his attention to Owuo. “Pardon our apparent misunderstanding. Wazad and I will just observe while you do what you promised for Zacchaeus, and then we will return to our own universe.”
Zacchaeus nodded at Owuo. “Let’s do it then. Where is Jordan?”
“To find him,” Owuo said and stepped to stand before Zacchaeus, “I must know him better. I can sense him from your memories. If you tell me about him, a story of the two of you, I will be able to get a clear picture of his nature to single him out. So tell me a story that illustrates why Brad Jordan is so important to you that you would go on a journey to find his soul after he died.”
***
In the wintertime, Zacchaeus is usually in doors, even in Mississippi where the winters are mild compared to northern states. Zacchaeus associated being cold with being helpless, and feeling helpless made him angry. When he was young, and his mother left him with his aunt for two months while she tried to find a career as a singer in Atlanta–which Mavis thought was a bad idea because she had a stable life in Mississippi for her son without the deadbeat that got her pregnant, and Mavis arranged it so she could sing at the Canned Heat–Zacchaeus experienced the poverty that his cousins knew as their daily existence. He was fifteen and old enough to understand the falling out between his mother and his grandmother, and he resented his mother for snatching him from the comfortable life Mavis Turner had given them, but he kept his opinions to himself when she refused to let him stay with his grandmother while she chased her dreams and promised that when she came back, she’d have a record deal and buy them a house and finally be free of Mavis Turner’s control.
His aunt had fallen out with Mavis Turner when she was addicted to drugs, and though she’d been clean for a long time, she was too proud to ask her mother for help. She lived in a low-income apartment complex, and though Zacchaeus knew many of the other children there because he went to school with them, he felt uncomfortable in his aunt’s apartment and sharing a bed with his cousins. There were roaches and stints of time when the furnace didn’t work despite the cold that set in overnight during the winter. After his first week, he was grateful for his cousins, they were like siblings and they had fun playing at the complex playground. But no amount of fun made him ignore the differences between the life his grandmother gave him and his mother, and the life of his aunt and cousins without Mavis Turner.
One day Zacchaeus was kicking around the playground, he noticed a kid about his age talking with a group of much older guys. He was close enough to hear their conversation and he listened intently, hoping not to be noticed.
“Lil nigga, how you get yo hands on this?” one of the older guys asked with fascination as he cradled a shoe box in one hand and held a shoe in the other. “These shits been sold out since they came out!”
“I told you!” the young Brad Jordan said excitedly. “Didn’t I tell y’all I could find them? Ain’t none of y’all believe me.”
“You ain’t get me none,” another of the older guys said.
“Pie the only one said he wanted some,” Brad said. “I could’ve brought all y’all some, but y’all doubted me.”
“Here,” Pie said, handing over a large roll of money. “Fuck these niggas, they ain’t ask for shit they ain’t getting shit. You that nigga Jordan,” Pie said and they dapped each other up as the group of older boys left the playground.
Brad smiled from ear to ear as he counted his money and then he noticed Zacchaeus staring at him with wide-eyed admiration. He walked over to bask in the admiration of a stranger.
“You found them shoes?” Zacchaeus asked and watched Brad nod his head slowly as he pocketed his money. “You can find anything?”
“Anything I get paid to find,” Brad said. “I ain’t no charity or no shit like that. Nigga gotta eat.”
“I hear that,” Zacchaeus said in agreement. “I ain’t never seen you at school.”
“What I need to go to school for I’m making money like this?” Brad said with a smile and flashed his money. He sat next to Zacchaeus.
“I guess I wouldn’t go neither if I had money and my grandmama wouldn’t find out. You think you can find my mama for me? She been gone ’bout a week and I been staying with my aunt. I wanna go home.”
“How much you got?” Brad asked.
“Shit,” Zacchaeus said, shaking his head. “I just thought I’d ask. Can I help you out? You don’t have to pay me, just put it towards finding my mama.”
Even though they were close in age, Brad saw Zacchaeus as a little boy and he took him under his wing. In those days, Brad wasn’t really a drug dealer but he could fetch anything a customer asked for, including drugs. Zacchaeus went around the apartment complex and the town at large, watching Brad make deals with people he knew who worked at local stores to hide products for him as soon as they arrived in the store. He transported packages of drugs for known drug dealers and he even delivered the Sunday newspaper because they paid more to deliver the heftier paper. Zacchaeus grew to respect Brad’s hustle and eventually he learned that Brad worked so hard because there was no adult to take care of him. His parents were dead and he never really met any of his extended family. He survived by sleeping on friends’ couches until he learned to work and earned enough to afford half the rent of an apartment in the complex and he found a roommate who was much older than him and rarely home when Brad was.
After weeks shadowing Brad, Zacchaeus was in Brad’s apartment and the two played video games one Saturday afternoon.
“I found yo mama,” he said casually as he beat Zacchaeus in Street Fighter. “She on her way back out this way. She called yo grandma from Atlanta. Shit ain’t go how she wanted, so she should be back to get you soon.”
“How you know?” Zacchaeus asked. He paused the video game. By that point, he was accustomed to his life at his aunt’s house, and spending time with Brad was good for his future self that would always know how to make money to provide for himself, but he was excited at the prospect of being close to his grandmother again, living with his mother.
“You been helping me out for a while, so I asked around. I got some associates in Atlanta, they was keeping a eye on her for me. Your mama done had it hard, she tried her best, but it’s a lot of people trying to make it like she was. I told my friend to talk to her, remind her she got a son that miss her and she realized she missed you too. It ain’t easy for her, though. She love you, she yo mama, but she was really trying and it ain’t work out for her. I feel bad for her.”
Zacchaeus didn’t, not at first. His mother had a nice singing voice and she got to use it at the Canned Heat whenever she wanted. There wasn’t anything in Atlanta that she couldn’t find in Mississippi. But when his mother came and took him back to Mavis Turner’s house, he understood why Brad had felt bad for her. She tried to hide it, but it was obvious that she was devastated. Zacchaeus noticed that she didn’t sing around the house much after she came back, and it would be years before she sang at the Canned Heat again.
He never lost touch with Brad Jordan, even when he moved away. They hung out on the weekends when Zacchaeus got a car, and when he started smoking weed, Brad was always there to hook him up.
***
“Oh,” Owuo said when Zacchaeus finished. He sounded moved by the story, but his face was mostly unchanged, as distant as it had been. “He is your brother, I see. And he is still on your Earth, in a city next to the water, very near a gulf. A city of the dead. Your world is very interesting. I must see this city of the dead. Can I travel with you Zacchaeus?”
“You will not travel to our universe,” Issac said forcefully. “I am the protector of that realm, and we don’t need your brand of evil, we are fully stocked up on our own.”
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” Goldie said, “but something is very wrong with the heptagon. Owuo, do you feel that rumble, and smell the faint smell of smoke?”
“I do now,” Owuo said. “I thought I turned it off.”
Goldie lifted a hand as the blue mist rose from the floor of the heptagon and surrounded them.
“You did not!” Goldie yelled. “You have overloaded it and now it will reset. We must leave here immediately, before…”
There was a fantastic explosion that rumbled an entire chain of mountains on the Disc of Sakpata. When the dust cleared, the Smiting Chamber and the heptagon were still intact, if only barely, but only Sasabo remained in the Chamber. He was unconscious on the ledge when other Fonlanders of the disc came to investigate the explosion.
“Where is Goldie?” Yana, the queen of the caves, asked Sasabo. “What happened here?”
“I can’t say exactly,” Sasabo said. “Goldie was saying something to Owuo and the Outsiders before the heptagon exploded from the energy overload.”
“It has recalibrated itself,” Yana said dismissively. “Tell me more about these Outsiders.”
Find out what happened to Zacchaeus and the Needy, Wazad the Wonderful, and the Master of Universal Arcana in Vol. 4 of the PRL Serials!
PRL Serials 