Rogue Phantoms
Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 17
*
“Are you sure he was a real cop?” Arne’s stunned expression amplified the dour atmosphere of the rain-swept night. “Did he have a gun?” The priestess fixed the younger teen with a sapphire stare and gave a nod of assertive certainty. The reflective frowning glaze of Racheal’s introspective gaze bespoke the fragility of her unfazed equanimity.
The lumbering vessel breasted the bow wave of a speeding hydrofoil which swept past the older vessel in a one-sided race to the cove of the quay. Streaming rivulets fissured the wood-framed windows of the old diesel fuelled craft and Arne’s bear-like paw folded around a flaking steel bulkhead as the ferryboat rocked from side to side. The small group of Centraxians was half soaked from their dash through the summer downpour; pools of water spread around their feet beneath the wooden benches, sloshing across the deck as the ferry approached its terminus.
“I didn’t have time to get his number.” The Lady Racheal spoke into her cup and secured her new scarf more tightly about her open necked frock. When Ram’s fingers enveloped her slightly scuffed kneecap the warm heel of his hand pinned the blue cotton garment’s sodden hem to her sleek white thigh. Lady T’Ruth refilled his cup from a glass-lined thermos as the lovers scrunched closer on the hard slatted bench. “I’m pretty sure he wasn’t wearing one,” the tribal shaman confided. “A badge, I mean; but that’s hardly unusual. He could have taken it off while we were getting our bearings.” He caressed his lady’s thigh as Arne grimaced out the window. “Maybe he was a tulpa,” the martial monk mused.
The priestess reared upward in her seat. “I’m damned sure he wasn’t some Tibetan illusion,” Racheal snarled at the youngster’s reflection. “I can still smell his stench oozing out of my pores! I can hardly stand it!” T’Ruth leant across the passageway and grabbed the priestess’s wrist. “Don’t fret, there’s a dear,” the tribal poetess mumbled soothingly as the ferry rocked and rolled across the unusually choppy waters of the ancient ocean-flooded river valley.
The roiling harbour was a mass of white-capped waves beneath the steel immensity of the
Racheal leaned her head onto her prince’s shoulder and raised her bare feet from the dirty bitumen, draping pale legs across his velvet-clad thighs. The various intrusions and myriad interferences the lovers had experienced during their tumultuous relationship had thus far served to weld them ever more closely together; the teenagers clove ever more inseparable even as their lives were spinning apart and cleaving down branching avenues. They clung to each other, thoroughly adhered as the encrusting barnacles studding the wood and steel vesicle which was ferrying them across the dark abyss to the magical temple of the Dawn of Ra.
And yet we each maintain separate abodes... Ram’yana contemplated the most recent convolutions of their unique young lives and enfolded Racheal’s slowly crumpling form with a long slender arm. How can we stay together? He stared into their reflections in a stained plane of glass, seeking the starless outer darkness while his hand caressed Racheal’s bare knee. How can anyone?
The Cold Wanderer and Count Marco had moved into the shaman prince’s harbourside apartment soon after his priestess bride had unexpectedly vacated the only truly private love nest they’d ever shared, alone and together at last. She’d literally run away barefoot and naked into a dark suburban night, fleeing their apartment in an unexpected schism of unheralded haste. Marco and Wanderer had been swift to console Ram and Racheal; indeed, their fellow Centraxians had helped speed the High Priestess and her possessions onward, helping her move into a new derelict squat on the far side of the
Arne Stook peered at the refracted nightscape of the city while T’Ruth turned towards the second fully initiated magician of the Dawn of Ra who was seated by her side; the two women were chalk and cheese, yet it was nonetheless easy to see they were sisters. “Catching ferries is a crashing bore,” Stardew declared in a ‘public’ schoolgirl’s posh English accent. “If only the Trumpie had good enough tyres to handle all this sodding rain…”
She zipped up her hand-tailored white leather jacket and settled a matching helmet onto her upraised knees; it was obvious she hoped to catch a lift with one of the Group’s other bikers when the evening ritual was complete. “But the lad might be right, after all,” she said as she watched Arne watching Racheal’s reflection in the window. “Any half-arsed local coven of witches could easily raise a semi-corporeal spirit, or send an illusion embodied by their collective will – if they had the nouse…”
“And the talent,” T’Ruth added.
“Or if Rowie was with them - or one of her ilk.” Arne’s mention of the notorious witch’s name went down like a lead zeppelin, stilling the conversation into a momentary lull while the ferry bucked through the uncommon swell. “There are none of her ilk,” the priestess declared into the silent maelstrom. Racheal’s fingers grasped more tightly round Ram’s wrist, enveloping a leathern band tooled with arcane geometries – ornate symbolic names of archangels who dwelt in several kabalistic sephira.
“’T’was no illusion,” the shaman reaffirmed on his beloved’s behalf. The prince was riven by the fact she’d informed their peers of the cop’s intrusion into Renondal’s flat, after agreeing to wait until the next evening’s moot. The lack of detail in her premature and sketchy account had only served to spur their conjectures toward the most improbable scenarios imaginable. How much does she remember? He pondered the question while her fingers caressed his fuzzy jawline.
The lovers hadn’t had time to discuss what had happened in detail; when Ram’yana had awoken in Renondal’s apartment his lady had already split without him. Their host had similarly disappeared, leaving the prince alone with his dazed imaginings whilst he recovered his wits and vitality after many drug-hazed hours in the violated dwelling. He’d only found Racheal again on the next afternoon at Arne’s party in the Centraxian compound, before the dark and stormy eve of their current harbour crossing.
As the ferry plied its way across the surging surface of the flooded chasm, Ram’s mind bounced back and forth like a well-played pinball. He barely listened to the informed chatter of his peers as Racheal sank into his side, a ravaged Eve retreating to the primordial womb of his missing male rib. Arne’s voice was pitched loudly enough to penetrate the shaman’s dazed internal meanderings; “I mean, he probably was a real cop – but you never know what foul spirit can come at you out of nowhere… or come into you...”
“How droll,” Princess Stardew sneered, waving a queenly wrist in airy dismissal. “They only have power over you if you give it to them,” she proclaimed, “and the Seal will keep them out of your aura in any case…” The common name of the Group’s Hermetic talisman was capitalised by the cyanide pout of her painted blue lips.
“But the Lady Racheal doesn’t have her seal any more,” Arne pointed out with nod toward the priestess. Four sets of eyes flickered to Racheal’s equine throat, where the inscribed silver disk could no longer be seen hanging beneath the ligature of white silk which enwrapped her proud neck. “Nice scarf,” remarked T’Ruth. “You can always put it back on,” the poetess suggested as she stroked the priestess’s forearm.
“Not likely!” Arne snorted derisively. “She threw it into the harbour.” Ram’s eyes flashed from the lad to his bride; this was the first he’d heard about the fate of her talismanic seal. “The harbour?” The hierophant locked eyes with the priestess and her mild tone pinned him to the bench while the world rocked around them; “If I recall, thine own first talisman was hurled from the top of a certain sandstone cliff…” Her fleeting smile was a brittle porcelain crescent that faded as swiftly as the cloud-occluded moon.
The Lady Racheal’s status in the circle of magicians, alchemists, healers, hedonists and Hermetic philosophers known as the Dawn of Ra had become questionably moot of late. She’d long since ceased attending the Group’s rituals, healing sessions, practical work or tutorials. Now that Ram’yana and Arne were entering the final phase of their pre-initiation she had virtually no chance of rejoining their circle – the pre-initiate class of friends and associates with whom she’d entered the Group as a newbie neophyte; not now that they were so close to initiation. Not now, if her seal lies on bottom of the harbour… Racheal’s bland expression betrayed neither confirmation nor denial as her hand continued to grip Ram’s wrist like a lifeline in a hurricane.
The Centraxians who were also members of the Dawn of Ra held out stubbornly strong hopes that Racheal might still rejoin the Group, despite the opprobrium of their liege lord, the Baron Kha-Aan – who seemed to suspect hidden motives on the part of the reclusive adepts of the ‘Magic Circle Club’ (as he called it), and distrusted what he viewed as the magi’s infiltration into the court of the Centrax.
The Centraxian magicians had quietly tutored their High Priestess in the various techniques and practices of the Group against their lord’s clearly expressed wishes. Her mate had continued to inculcate many of the minutiae of the Dawn of Ra’s works and philosophies into the priestess’s capacious and absorptive brain, drumming information and insights into her curious mind by sheer force of his near-endless proximity. They all agreed that the Lady Racheal was a natural; even the Group’s reclusive leader had been noted to have recognised her talent – among other alluring details of Racheal’s worthy being, when they’d all disported skyclad in beachside magic circles on the island continent’s salubrious south-east coast.
Racheal soaked up the Group’s teachings like a veritable sponge, studying and painting in her new abode while making fresh contacts of her own. The attractive young psychic made secretive forays into various semi-visible magical societies and less easily discovered Wiccan covens. She practiced magic, the craeft, invocation and divination all alone in her dilapidated squat; the Centraxian shaman suspected his wayward bride must be actively working with other magi or Wiccan circles as well. Yet she definitely doesn’t want to complete her initiation... Much to Ram’s ongoing befuddlement, the conclusion was inescapable.
Arne’s loud comment distracted him from his musings once more; “But they can confuse you, or attract your attention long enough to cause mischief,” the lad was insisting with a constrained display of vehement grace. “And they make excellent spies - or whispering sprites that confound communications or spread sickened emotions…”
“Only if there’s a chink in your armour,” Stardew haughtily declaimed from the high rocking horse of her wooden bench. She placed the leathery soles of her long white bike boots on the bulkhead beside Arne as she raised herself against the backrest to gain higher vantage over the his rapidly growing mass. “Or a chink in your amour,” her sister demurred with an insinuate smile.
“Let’s leave Li Po out of this,” Arne laughed, to the unanimous silent opprobrium of his fellows. The Lady Racheal rescued the lad from the aftermath of his semi-racist slur with an unexpected burst of cheeriness. “We must leave him out of nothing, for nothing hast been left out of him!” The priestess’s smile descended into a frown and her oracular remarks continued while they considered her entendre; “That poor poet’s broken-down ex-heartthrob is a devil incarnate – a minor specimen, to be sure, with but a single blunt horn.” She pulled herself from Ram’s embrace and sat erectly on the seat to match Stardew’s height while her fellow Centraxians mustered an uneasy chorus of swiftly fading laughter. “It could be worse,” Stardew declared, and unexpectedly broke into warbling song; “If he only had horns… for me...”
The scantily veiled references to Renondal reignited Ram’s internal reverie as he glanced at his statuesque bride. How much does she remember – and what really happened? Aside from the fact she was obviously strangled, I have no real idea… A jumbled heap of disquieting ideas flopped around in his forebrain, blinding him to his peers and the storm-wracked night. And Renondal choked her earlier…
The shocking recollection riveted his mind to the vision of the older man bearing down on the neck of Ram’s beloved bride, while fucking her supine body with relentless semi-violent zeal. The memory warped and wove through the oozing fog of the befuddling night’s drugged perceptions. Were those bruises left by Renondal – or by his goddamned friend? I have to ask her when we’re alone, he decided as his arm wrapped around his lady’s slim waist. But why did they do it? To frighten her?
“Who would do such a thing?” Stardew asked the bulkhead. Her words drew him back from the brink of swelling anger, echoing his ruminations with an eerie synchronicity. “Surely they have better things to do with their time?” T’Ruth stared at her sister in disbelief while Ram’yana attempted to jigsaw Stardew’s words into the pattern of his fractured thoughts.
“Surely you can’t still be so naïve after everything that’s happened,” T’Ruth was saying. “You know how the other circles view the Group… or Centraxis, for that matter.” Racheal rocked against her beau and crossed her bare legs on the bench. She pulled Ram’s hand from her knee and slid his fingers onto the tented cloth, stretched tautly over her radiant lap; a soft round breast rolled into his armpit with every passing wave. Heat flowed into his palm and suffused his left side as she pressed against him, filling him with a happy glow as his thoughts wandered anew. If she wants to remember – or forget - I could always do what I did for her last time…
As the tribal shaman entertained the challenging idea a squirming schism of doubt and guilt betrayed his true opinion of the hypnotic technique he’d once been impelled to employ. It had been a psychic salve he’d used to dispel and rechannel Racheal’s kaleidoscopically shattered memories, after even more horrendous violations than the drug-hazed molestations she’d more recently suffered. The teenage High Priestess had been abducted soon after she’d formally joined the Centraxian tribal court and had been violently abused for three unrelentingly torturous nights and days. Carefully applied hypnotic regression and displacement - and tender sessions of ongoing magical and mundane healing - had brought the greater portion of her now intermittent night terrors to an end.
It had taken a handful of moons before Racheal’s unbearable memories were finally counterfeited into vague fading memories of a terrifying nightmare, by the double-bladed artifice of modern mesmerism. Her horrific experiences had been rendered into an unsettling shadow of a disturbing dream by Ram’s ongoing private ministrations – but only at Racheal’s repeated request that her shamanic lover ‘take it out of my brain’; otherwise, he wouldn’t have seriously contemplated performing what amounted to psychic lobotomy. It was hardly a precise or predictable technique, and required all the avid concentration, abstruse logic, dogged patience, intuitive willpower and devoted love the shaman could muster.
The prognosis was still uncertain; despite his best efforts, Racheal’s experiences had wrought fundamental changes in the depths of her psyche, rippling through her thoughts to erupt from her being as unfathomable words and unexpectedly wild acts. The tribal magician blamed himself for his lover’s every wanton, impassioned and sometimes unseemly deed, and had grown accustomed to dancing on an oscillating tightrope of vibrant or turgid emotions. His older blood brothers assured him that her behaviour was entirely appropriate and normal for a nineteen year-old girl (and he’d had ample personal verification of their claims from his own experiences), but he still burned with guilt for every perceived and spurious scrap of evidence for her unhealed and ongoing trauma.
“You have to visualise her in a whole and hearty state,” the Lady Ringell had advised, “or you’ll direct her toward your negative visions.” She’d extolled his efforts with high and hearty prase, remarking on the improvement in the Lady Racheal’s previously depressed and ravaged demeanour.
Despite the relative success of the technique, it wasn’t an experience the prince wished to repeat for a number of reasons. Although he hadn’t edited Racheal’s memories per se, the psychic surgery represented too many ethical dilemmas and was laden with too many potentially cataclysmic pitfalls. And besides, he told himself as he stared at his paramour’s closed eyes through dripping strands of her golden hair; something could easily go wrong, or come unhinged... There must be another way…
The prince glanced out the window toward the place where the outline of his rectilinear apartment block should be faintly visible in the stormy night - where Wanderer and Marco still kept the home fires burning with a few fellow nomads, seeking solace in the blanketing wet night – but all distances were obscured by reflections and refractions of light, mist, rain and sea spray.
Another stark recollection entered Ram’s awareness as he stared into watery space; he reviewed the image of the intruding phantasm that had interrupted their lovemaking, when Racheal and he had first consecrated their new abode with a customary Tantric blessing. The vision returned to him in full-blown translucent ectoplasmic Technicolor, blocking out all awareness of his surrounds. He recalled the electrifying shock that had passed through him at the sight and near-touch of an obviously malevolent entity – and the events that had subsequently transpired to shatter the domestic tranquillity of their new private love nest.
His lady’s stern admonition rejoined him with the present in a dazzling fulcrum of intersecting incidence; “Possession is nine-tenths of the lore,” she declaimed as her eyes sprang widely open. She turned within his embrace to meet Stardew’s gaze with a wilfully icy aquamarine stare; the princess blinked and glanced away from the younger priestess’s laser beam glare. Ram’s mind continued its relentless orbit, spiralling around the memory of the dire apparition who’d intervened during their lovemaking consecration. The memory of one intrusion led to another and he was drawn into a recollection of unendurable feelings of powerlessness, reliving the time when he’d ended up pounding and kicking at the heavy sealed door of Renondal’s womb-like bedroom.
The teenage lovers had stared up at the hazy blue apparition with surprised expressions on their sex-slaked faces. Barbiturate-infused blood drained from nakedly blushing skins and the pink glow faded from their enflamed features at the selfsame moment, as from the entwined limbs of a single body. They swivelled to face the intruder with identically stunned and pallid expressions and stared with wide-eyed shock, as if a ghost had passed right through the door of Renondal’s bedchamber, to materialise before them uttering baleful words; “That all depends…”
When the import of his phrase finally penetrated her befuddlement the Lady Racheal had been even more alarmed than her handsome young prince. She reeled against his chest and her body tensed around his loins as she shook her head slowly, still two-thirds immersed in a foggy state of disbelieving semi-awareness. Thick creamy jism dribbled from the corners of her lips and sticky white streamers dripped from her nostrils. Her eyes couldn’t focus on the dark blue clothing of the officious troll-like figure, looming over the teens and punctuating his suggestive comment with a ragged cough. The priestess sighed and swore; “Shit.”
The tall intruder extended long blue-clad arms in a threatening stance. He pinned the drugged and drunken lovers to the bed with an authoritarian stare. The policeman’s stern expression twisted into a meaner mien as he glared down at their naked bodies, and a glint of subtle menace appeared in an icy blue eye. Not again, the prince prayed. He emitted a subsonic moan that vibrated Racheal’s rigid spine against his bony sternum; the hippy lovers had been wakened by policemen on more than one occasion during their many moons occupying squats, communes and other communal spaces right across the great southland. He was careful to keep his blurred vision fixed on the blue uniform while frantically wondering, Where did I leave the stash?
The cop stared down at their nude sweaty bodies and repeated his words with a suggestive sharp-eyed sneer; “That all depends…” His macho tones rumbled around the messy room, followed by a grunt of sly approval when his gaze slipped down from the girl’s face and slid down along her perspiration-soaked skin. His wordless leer was heavily laden with cunning intent as his eyes traced a course along Racheal’s slimly curvaceous form. She belatedly covered her rigid nipples and the puckering pale pink areolae of her fulsome milk-white breasts with her lover’s large hands.
The cop’s eyes stayed glued to the teenage priestess when he leant down toward an ashtray to snare an unfinished smoke, and he held the roach up gingerly between thumb and forefinger, eyeing her through the finger-formed circle. When he sniffed the remnant reefer his eyebrows rose heavenward beneath the beak of his cap. “Smells like good hash,” he observed with matter-of-fact ease and a well practiced smile. He waved the joint in their faces. “Which one of youse is going to own up to this?” His lips split into a gold-capped grin. “Looks to me like you’re both in it together,” he said through a narrowing wry smirk; “All the way up to your necks in very deep shit. I’m sure you both know hash is a narcotic…”
Ram’s eyes kept darting toward the door, ears straining to hear beyond the man’s voice as he listened for the sounds of another cop – or anyone else – in Renondal’s apartment. Why’s he here now of all times? The inebriated shaman’s mind reeled as he began seeking an escape route in the sealed rat-trap of the ground floor flat. “Uhh,” he began, in what he hoped was a reasonable but confident tone; his mouth didn’t seem to be working properly and the room was swaying around the uniformed man in a dizzying swirl. “This isn’t our place…”
“You look pretty comfortable here to me; so does she. In fact, you look really fucking comfy, girlie.” The smirking policeman unbuttoned his breast pocket and removed a small leather-bound writing pad. “Really… fucking… comfy…” He repeated the words slowly, accompanied by a trio of percussive taps on the notebook’s hard cover while he stared down into the watery pools of Racheal’s dilated eyes. He dropped the joint into his pocket and removed a small pencil from the pad’s binder. “For starters, you’re both going to tell me your names and addresses...” The sentence had been honed to a drone by endless repetition.
His eyes slipped down to follow the sway of Racheal’s breasts as she pulled from Ram’s enfolding hug and wobbled onto her knees on the soft spring mattress. “Pleashe, orrificer…” she slurred. Ram’yana couldn’t quite tell if the blurred epithet had been a deliberate provocation and he held his breath, hoping the cop wouldn’t react too badly. Racheal placed her palms together in supplication, covering her softening nipples with pallid thin wrists. Come-smeared breasts pressed outward beneath her forearms as the man glared down at her. “He’s telling th’ truth… thish ishn’…”
“Constable,” the policeman growled.
“…an’ hey,” she went on, “doncha need a warran’ or summing, man?” The drunken witch smiled as she swayed on the bed. She steadied herself with one hand on Ram’s furry thigh, teetering like an unbalanced tightrope walker while the other arm flailed above her head. The shaman prince watched the cop’s eyes swivel to track the stonkered girl’s exposed breasts. He pulled a twisted blanket around his bride’s hips, tugging it from beneath her derriere as she leant back against him. The cop pocketed the notebook and roach while his eyes followed the rolling orbits of her fleshy orbs.
Ram marvelled at the way his beloved’s swaying mammaries effectively hypnotised the older man. After an interminable moment the constable shook his head slowly and frowned down at her from a dizzying height, hands clenching into fists at his hips. “Don’t take that tack with me, girlie, or I’ll show you what I can do – with or without any warrant.” His predatory clench-toothed leer was aimed squarely at Racheal; he barely seemed to register her young lover’s presence.
The cop’s hand wandered to the butt of his holstered pistol and he employed a tone as flat and calm as his cold pale eyes. Racheal’s wobbly movements stilled when he leaned forward and a sour wave of beery breath washed over her. “I can do whatever I like with both of youse, so keep a civil tongue in your head, little girl, or I’ll keep it there for you.” He kicked a convenient pillow across the room and reared upward before her. “Your neighbours made a complaint and the door was wide open when I got here. I knocked and clearly identified myself, and when no-one answered…” He glanced around the bedroom and stepped to a position where he could keep an eye on the door and ogle Racheal at the same time. He cut her lover off as he attempted to raise the pointless objection that they were both visitors to the apartment; “But now a couple of other things have cropped up - and you’re both going to give me your names and addresses…”
“What kind of complaint?” Ram’yana blurted out. Racheal climbed into his lap in a futile attempt to distance herself from the cop, snuggling more deeply within her young man’s warm embrace. The other man’s smile widened to reveal an extensive array of expensive gold and silver-filled teeth that starkly contrasted with his relative youthfulness. “They said they thought someone was being murdered,” the metallic mouth snarled. “Lots of screaming, they said.” He barked a short laugh. “Now show me those drugs – all the stuff you have on you!” His voice transformed to a sibilant screech. “I said NOW, you slack fucking hippies!”
The Lady Racheal cringed into Ram’s embrace. The glaring authority figure reached for a small towel hanging on a vintage art deco chair and threw it at the naked priestess. The cloth landed on the peak of one of her breasts and hung there in unlikely swaying defiance of the lore of gravity. His attitude altered in an instant and a smile suddenly replaced his angry grimace. “And clean yourself up a bit, girlie. You look a disgrace.”
His glare hardened again as it shifted to Ram’yana. “Don’t try to squirm your way out of it – hand the stuff over or I’ll take it out of your skinny hide.” He squinted down at the young woman while she towelled her sticky body. She fell sideways onto the bed as Ram pulled the sheet around her shoulders. “What else have you been taking, little lady?” Racheal held the cotton material over her breasts with one arm as she lurched up into a sitting position, but the sheet twisted around to reveal the rest of her body. She crossed her legs and covered her slick loins with the towelling. “Nothin’,” she said as her eyes rolled around the edge of his aura. “I’m jus’ pished…”
“For starters, maybe,” he said with a renewed smile. “You been taking rowies, girlie?” His mention of the slang term for Rohypnol – a well-known recreational sleeping pill - incited a tremor that ran up Racheal’s rocking spine; he seemed unaware of the double entendre that had produced the reaction in the teenage witch. “Thought so,” he said as his eyes roved Racheal’s unblemished inner arms. “On your feet, both of you. Come on, I haven’t got all day. Up! Now!”
Racheal glared at the cop without moving an inch, and the inebriated prince decided to make a feeble protest as he rolled onto his knees beside her; “I don’t know if we can…” His legs wouldn’t respond when he shifted to the edge of the bed; they flopped loosely on the mattress, and with a vague sense of surprise he discovered that he couldn’t feel his feet. “We haven’t had any sleep…” He slapped at his legs in an attempt to restore blood flow and feeling, and Racheal fell sideways against him; Ram’s hands felt as numb as his immobilised feet as he steadied her on his lap.
The policeman frowned down at the naked teenagers as their bodies lolled into the soft centre of the huge mattress. “Damn useless hippies,” he said with a tolerant sigh. “All right then – show me some I.D.” He watched Racheal’s eyes shift toward her bulging velvet shoulder bag and leaned down to retrieve it from a heap of blankets on the varnished floorboards. He emptied the bulky bag’s cornucopian contents out on the end of the bed and a multitude of objects rolled into the depression around the priestess’s smooth pallid flanks.
Racheal’s body flexed into rigidity around Ram’s thigh as the cop’s hand slid along the sleek skin of her slender leg. He rummaged through the detritus of artist’s implements, tarot cards, tiny purses, trinkets, lighters, matchboxes, empty tobacco pouches, crushed cigarette packets and a tangle of feminine gewgaws and mysterious necessities. The heel of one hand glided up her thigh and his fingers wrapped around her limb while he searched through her belongings.
Just as her boyfriend opened his mouth in outraged objection, the cop’s fingers slipped from her inner thigh and Racheal released her breath against her lover’s belly. “Is this yours?” the man asked as he pulled a well-thumbed bankbook from beneath a tartan pencil case. A swift perusal of the typewritten characters on the inside of the book told the constable what he wanted to know, and he stepped back and pulled the small leather notebook from his pocket. He copied Racheal’s name and address before flipping through the bankbook’s handwritten entries.
“Is that ‘missus’ or ‘miss’,” he asked with a fleeting wink. Racheal turned her face toward him and rolled slightly swollen eyes in exaggerated exasperation. “Misanthrope,” she replied with surprisingly clear enunciation. “Miss Anne Thrope.” He ignored her sneering confabulation. “Is this your current address?” She nodded up at him from Ram’s crotch. His eyes followed the lump sliding down her slender throat as a nervous swallow passed beneath her studded collar. “And no cash in your purse? On the dole, eh?”
“At least y’can’t ’rest me for vagrancy,” the witch-girl snapped back.
“I told you – I can do whatever I fucking like with you.” The cop threw the bankbook onto the bed and tore open the zipper on Racheal’s pencil case. He poured a quiver of brushes and a clutch of lead paint tubes onto her lolling legs. “How about you?” he said to the prince without taking his eyes off the blonde teen. “Show me some I.D.”
Ram’yana shook his head. “I don’t have any with me...” The prince was still on probation after having been busted less than a year earlier, and was hardly about to provide his real name if he could avoid doing so. For the first couple of years after he’d left home the teenage hippy had been continually accosted by policemen, who’d routinely questioned and searched him on city streets and rural byways. Ever since he’d finally faced his fears and walked into his local police station under the impetus of a huge dose of LSD – demanding to be locked up by the sergeant in charge – the shaman had been left almost completely free of authoritarian attention; but old habits returned to him as he smiled up at the cop, and he decided to lie to the truculent arsehole as shamelessly as possible.
Even though his brain was reacting about as swiftly as a drug-soaked sponge, Ram’yana automatically gave a false name to the constable. He ensured to enunciate it clearly enough for Racheal to hear and hopefully remember, in case she was called upon to verify his falsehood. He was certain that the address on her bankbook was well out of date – but the cop had written her real name down in his notepad.
The prince gave the address of a vacant lot on the other side of the
“Neither’ve I,” Racheal averred as the constable’s smile transformed into a steely grimace. “Why doncha try one?” she asked with a lopsided smile. “Y’might dig it.” He dropped the pills into his uniform’s side pocket and folded up his notebook as he leered down at the priestess. His nostrils flared and thick brows met above the crumpled bridge of a poorly repaired broken nose. “You’re both wasting my time,” he said, reaching down to grasp the girl’s upper arm; a meaty hand completely enfolded her slim bicep as his knuckles dug into her breast through the sheet.
“Maybe I should take it out of your hide – might be a lot more fun than beating up your scrawny boyfriend. That’s right - keep an eye on my truncheon.” He released her arm to unhook his baton and brandished the black Betty leather phallus in Racheal’s frowning face. “What do you say to that, eh girlie? Cat got your tongue all of a sudden?”
He poked the truncheon through her belongings and his eyes lit up when he spied a small ball of aluminium foil. “Well what have we got here…” He unpeeled the metallic wrapping to reveal a chunk of brown Paki hash. “More narcotics, eh? Looks like you’ll be coming with me after all. Now get on your feet,” he said, waving the billy club toward the lovers with an attitude of idle menace. “Not you,” he said as Ram’yana attempted to climb off the bed. “Rightio, girlie, up on your feet; I’m going to have to search you.”
“Hey!” Ram objected as he attempted to rise. “You can’t…” He somehow ducked a half-hearted swipe of the baton and the cop knocked him backward with a swift tap of his boot heel instead. The sozzled young man almost fell off the mattress and the cop scowled at the lovers while Racheal grappled Ram’s body back onto the bed. “I said her – you’ll get your turn. And if I hear one more word you’re both going to go down for assaulting an officer and resisting arrest.”
As he raised his foot for a more decisive kick Racheal reached out and placed a trembling hand on his trouser leg. “I thought y’said y’were a stable cunt, orrificer,” she purred. She moved toward him across the bed, dragging herself up his uniform until she knelt on the mattress beside him with her eyes at the level of his breast pocket. “Leave him alone,” she said in a voice pitched an octave lower than her earlier disputatious soprano. “Y’ve got me.” The sheet draped from her arm, covering a small portion of her nakedness as the girl’s dilated eyes wavered around his angry face.
He stared down at the fingers grasping his lapel and her other hand approached the baton while the sheet dropped onto the bed. “I sure have,” he replied with a widening grin, raising the club out of reach and brandishing it above his tilted cap. “And I warned you - I’ve got you for assaulting an officer now, too.” Racheal’s hand dropped to her breast as his smiling eyes fell from her glazed gaze. “You’re coming with me!” he roared in a commanding tenor. “You could have anything secreted on your person. On your feet! Now! Up!”
The High Priestess’s expression shifted as swiftly as the rising pitch of her voice. “Please…” she began in a breathless rush, and her eyes rolled up into their sockets as her head tilted upward and back. Racheal swayed sideways and spiralled forward, falling face-first onto the damp sheet as her hip slid down the cop’s thigh. Her body teetered on the edge of the bed next to the rigid crease in his blue-uniformed trouser leg, and he reached down to steady her. His huge hand’s broad fingers splayed so widely they almost covered the girl’s upper back as her long blonde hair tumbled across his forearm. “Come on!” he growled. “I’ve got no time for any more silly games. On your feet, girlie!”
He grabbed Racheal by the elbow and dragged her up off the bed, glaring down at the prince and thrusting the blunt point of the black club against his chest when he dazedly climbed to his knees. “Don’t try anything.” He said, laughing at the teenage shaman as he prodded his chest with a curiously restrained series of taps. “You’re so damn drug-fucked, you’re not even capable of standing up for your girl.”
The prince groaned and cursed himself as he rocked back and forth; he knew the words were truly spoken - he still couldn’t feel his lower legs and could barely stay upright on his knees. His head spun so wildly that he couldn’t even move without swaying from side to side. “You can’t search her without a policewoman…” he began. The cop ignored him and holstered the truncheon, using both hands to drag Racheal’s supine body up off the mattress.
“Shut up.” The constable ignored the prince’s continuing objections as his hands wrapped all the way around Racheal’s biceps. “Come on,” he said to Ram’s utterly unresponsive girlfriend. “I’ll help you up.” The shaman watched through a wave of immobilising dizziness. He blinked though long draping swathes of Racheal’s flaxen hair as the cop lifted her by her arms and pulled her to her knees on the bed. She seemed to be genuinely out of it, and hung from the man’s grip like a boneless rag doll as he hoisted her body higher.
“Don’t worry,” the cop remarked as he gripped her naked waist with both hands. “I won’t damage your little pussycat.” He returned her lover’s snarl as he bent down and lifted the priestess in a fireman’s lift, folding her body neatly over a massive shoulder. One hand slid up along Rachel’s thigh to grip her by a firm pale cheek as he reared to his full height, and wandering fingers slid into her cleft as he steadied her swaying body.
“Light as a feather,” he said to her prince, unclipping the black billy club from his belt with his freed hand. “I’ll search her in the lounge room. You wait right here.” He pushed the prince backward with the club as the drugged teenage mage reached for the ‘non-lethal’ weapon, and gave him a swift clout on the side of the head for good measure. “Resisting arrest and assaulting an officer of the law,” he reminded him with a snarl. “I’ll be back for you next.”
Ram’yana rolled off the far side of the mattress and landed on his knees on the piled blankets as the cop walked to the door. While he rose onto wobbly legs the door slammed shut; he managed to walk around the bed by supporting his weight on his arms, balancing on the mattress as he lurched toward the doorway. Before he could reach the brassy knob he heard something sliding across the floor and slamming against the other side of the door; when he tried to force it open he realised something was barring the wooden portal from the other side.
A true story
- R.A.
Images – author’s
See
Further True Tales from the Prince of Centraxis -
Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 1 - Doves and Serpents
Nesting Urge – Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 2
See White Bird Must Fly – Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 3
Which Craft – Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 4
Black Dog – Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 5
Mandrake & the Magician – Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 6
Watching the Watcher – Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 7
Promises & Compromises - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 8
The Invisible Great Divide - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 9
Circles Within Circles - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 10
Three Flaming Arrows - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 11
Round Peg, Square Hole - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 12
Monkey Business - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 13
The Blue Pill - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 14 Crossed Swords - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 15
Power Corrupts - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 16
*
Dreaming Entities - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 18
*
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 1
Psychedelic Water Part 1 - Fractal Rainbow
The Shaman of Centraxis Part 1 - The Whole is Greater
And see -
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Please add your perspective to the collective mind NOW! - Prince Ram'yana