Witches of Rascar Pablo: Part III

Chapter 12: Wrath of Rascar Pablo

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It took only seconds for the hound to sniff out Lucas and, before he could make a run for it, had him by the foot and was dragging him out from the pile of granite. The nun cracked her whip at him. “No descansar! No descansar!” she said.

The hound’s gnawing teeth sank into Lucas’s foot and he wailed. When the nun noticed his clothes and that he wore no shackles, her eyes bulged with shock, and she too screamed. “Intruso!”

Several guards broke from their posts and gathered about him. One of the bigger ones shooed off the hound and, with his foot, drove Lucas’s face into the cold, wet floor then and chained his hands together from behind.

A war-cry sounded. Sudden ululations and thunderous clop of hooves drew the attention of the guards. An axe-wielding warrior on horseback smashed into them and after a flick of his wrist the severed head of one of the guards came rolling down the causeway. A score of riders entered the gorge from all sides. They came out from adjacent tunnels and from eroded veins in the coarse rock with hooves hammering. They wielded bows, spears and rifles.

The guards dispersed in hysteria.

“Es Rascar Paolo,” shouted the one who had Lucas. “A las armas!” He slung Lucas over his shoulder and bolted for cover toward the entrance of one of the artificial tunnels.
A tomahawk glided right past Lucas’s face and sunk into the back of the guard, severing his spine. The warrior to whom the it belonged swooped in on horseback and, without slowing, took Lucas by the arm, threw him over his saddle, and rode away from the chaos.

With his head violently bobbing up and down to the gallop of the horse, Lucas watched hundreds of pale-skinned men in white shirts and wide-brimmed hats flood into the gorge with rifles and hounds and clash with the warriors in the center before the massive marble relic. Shamans wearing nothing but loin cloths, covered from head to toe in mud and devil’s root, leapt from the backs of horses and spit fire onto the minions. Arrows soared onto the balconies and walkways above, piercing the flesh of the aristocrats. Slaves launched hammers at guards. One group of slaves had their chains around the neck of a giant hound, suffocating it. Lucas heard the fevered whispers of the Katatonian moon calling his name, “Lucas… Lucas…” could feel its soft manic light on his neck. The smooth boundary of the marble relic’s surface morphed into the smudgy graphite edges of a rough illustration. The pink moon deformed into a single fluorescent light bulb humming over him in the classroom. The voice calling his name was that of his trigonometry teacher, Mrs. Davis. “Lucas,” she shouted, “this is math time, not nap time!”

Lucas looked around. The entire class stared at him. There was whispering and snickering. His stomach churned and a sudden wave of nausea left him pale.

“Are you alright?” asked Mrs. Davis with concern. “You don’t look so good. And it seemed like you were having a bad dream.”

Laughter sounded throughout the class.

“Shush!” said Mrs. Davis.

Lucas looked over his shoulder. There was Orion, snapping his fingers, grunting and groaning, as usual. His stomach churned again, and he felt like vomiting. “Can I go to the bathroom?” he asked.

“Go,” said Mrs. Davis.

With one hand over his stomach, Lucas charged down the corridor and into the restroom. Deezer was there smoking a cigarette, relieving himself at the urinal.

Deezer glanced over his shoulder at Lucas, smoke rolling out of his nostrils. “You okay?” he asked.

Lucas smashed through the door of the closest stall and blew his lunch all over the porcelain bowl.

It was all a dream, he told himself – it was something he’d gotten used to telling himself. He slouched over the toilet panting, hands on his knees.

“Damn!” said Deezer, ogling at the mess from over his shoulder.

Lucas was hyperventilating. Something in the bowl moved.

“What the… what is that?” asked Deezer with a curious look. A single tadpole swam amid the floating chunks. Lucas’s legs wobbled as he leaned over the bowl again. “You’ve been eatin’ tadpoles? Sick, dude!”

A commotion in the hallway drew their attention. Deezer exited the bathroom. Lucas pulled himself together and followed. They stood and watched as the entire special needs classroom emptied into the hallway. Students who’d been diagnosed with Samos disease who, for years, could neither speak nor function, and had been deemed mentally ill, now paraded down the halls talking amongst themselves ecstatically as if they’d all been cured. The special needs staff called after them to come back to the classroom, but were universally ignored.

“Wow… they can talk again,” said Deezer. “That’s some trippy shit.”

After school, when Benny, Lucas, Deezer and Paul got off the bus at their stop on Demoray, the Channel Seven News van was parked next to the tennis courts of St. Anne’s where a news crew was interviewing a girl and her parents.

“So,” said the news anchor, a blonde woman in a pantsuit, “how does it feel to be reunited with your daughter who, for the past year, has been in a state of… in a state where she was unable to walk, or even to speak?”

“It’s a miracle,” said the teary-eyed mother, sniveling. “We don’t know what or who is responsible for it, but we’re thanking God every moment.”

“We’ve had multiple, matching reports from the sudden Samos recoverees of being forced to do labor in some kind of underground caves. Many of the recoverees reporting these experiences are doing so without any knowledge of others reporting the same. We were wondering if your daughter might have something to say about that?”

The parking lot of St. Anne’s was empty save a single black sedan. “That’s your sister, right?” Deezer asked Paul.