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By Jemma Foster
Jemma Foster
‘Leiurusquinquestriatus. The deathstalker scorpion,’ the croupier announced.‘Player five dies in this roulette round. Gentlemen, please collect your bets.’
Anxiety cramped his body. His gut tightened as his heart quickened, its beat the harbinger of his fate. Draining the last of his drink, the gambling man nervously stole a glance in the direction of the ringside box. Seated beside The Beloved was the General, the fleshy ripples of his stomach cascading over the gallery. He leaned forward to inhale the acrid fear of the desperate men beneath him, to many of whom he had preached his gambling creed long ago, assisting their prayers until they were at his mercy.He returned Ernesto Drangosch’s gaze by waving a black handkerchief – the final call for debts unpaid. Punishment was death and Ernesto could feel the wings of the vultures beat against his cheeks as they circled above.
A cloaked child-waiter approached, his gait marred by the onset of rickets.
‘Pint of sea, sir?’
‘Is there any telephone?’Ernesto choked, the humid air working its way into the fibres of his lungs.
‘As you wish.’ Bowing, the child revealed a flash of porcelain skin. Deprived of natural light it was the untainted colour of innocence preferred by The Beloved for the flesh of his children. As the city was in celebration, the stakes were high enough for the final round to delay his sentence a while longer, but the very last of Ernesto’s borrowed money had gone on the previous round. Nothing else was his, save the promise of death. Ernesto watched the cockroaches at his feet as they weaved their scavenger’s paths, leaving behind abstract sketches in the dust. With a ceremonial gravity, he knelt down and began to untie his shoes.
‘What can I get for these bridges?’ he said, handing the shoes to the bookman to inspect.
‘Rhino hide,’ the gaunt man replied, impressed. ‘Enough to enter the game, but the bet will be slim.’
‘Give me what you can,’ Ernesto pleaded.
Fingering the coins, Ernesto watched as the players were brought back into the ring and arranged in a circle. Standing on stools, nooses were tied around each of their necks. The true length of each rope was obscured– two would fall short, hanging the men sufficiently to kill them, while the rest would be long enough to grant survival. Ernesto put the culmination of his life’s worth down on his chosen player to die so that he himself might have a chance to live.
The awkward shadow of the child returned again with his telephone, the amber liquid placed on his table along with a complimentary copy of Special Teachings of Our Leader The Beloved, Volume 346. The hungry crowd shifted impatiently in their seats, craning their heads as they vied for a better view. Ernesto felt the familiar burn of his faith coursing through his veins as the croupier assembled the children – ‘kickers’ – around the circle of players.
The gong sounded and all eyes turned to the ring, the stench of anticipation of his fellow gamblers was as intoxicating as it was repellent. The world around him contracted and Ernesto felt the gravity of his fate gnawing at the marrow of his bones. ‘All bets are off,’ called the croupier. ‘And now for the song of Our Leader Beloved, in celebration of his quarter-year birthday.’
Our Saviour, Leader Beloved
Your flock salutes you
On this, your special day…
Ernesto Drangosch eyed his player, skin pallid and eyes blackened with a resolve peculiar to the enslaved. The pin grazed the record on the gramophone, static working its way through the ancient speakers as the incongruous melody of a gypsy love song flooded the arena.
The Beloved clapped his hands and the kickers began to dance, circling the unfortunate players. The music increased steadily in tempo, with each circle the crowd jigging in frenzied excitement as the children whirled, their heels smacking against the stage. Ernesto tapped to the beat as he rocked in his chair, a furious desire for his player’s end driving him to the edge of his seat. The hem of the children’s cloaks twirled until the needle parted from the record, scratching death’s path and suddenly the children kicked the stools. The sound of wood splitting and limbs crashing to the floor masked the distinctive snapping of the vertebrae of the men who now dangled from the ceiling, faces clown-like and their feet quietly twitching – death’s metronome heralding the last of their breaths.
The gambling man clutched at his heart as it plummeted to his bowels, registering his player’s survival and his own impending death. TheGeneral’s men, smelling blood, descended from the gallery towards Ernesto, forcing him out of his paralysis. Felling a path through the bodies of the crowd, he made for the chaos of the street above, his pupils retreating desperately as he was met with the glaring sunlight and the heat of the day knocked the air from his lungs.
The parade was underway for The Beloved’s birthday – a garish display of colour, brazen against the crumbling façade of the buildings and a city long starved of joy. The false scent of roast hog pumped from vents into the air as women wheeled dusty carts piled high with glass figs and sugared paper corn that not even the ants could feast upon. The performers were a vibrant mess of limbs and painted faces and he felt the drummers beating with his heart as if to mock its numbered toll. He crawled through the legs of dancers, losing the General’s men and immersing himself in the tide of circus freaks. The distant drone of the cicadas rose to a deafening pitch as they appeared on the horizon, a torturous plague of trumpeters as old as the regime, buried underground for thirteen years they had come of age today to tour the skies. The soles of his feet torn and bloody, Ernesto slipped into the underbelly of the city, spiralling down beneath the streets into a web of shacks and the empty promise of salvation. Navigating a sinuous path, he found himself in another world that knew nothing of its sister above. Shapes danced, colours yawned and shards of light pierced his vision; sounds of days long gone strummed against his ears and as his feet carried him further down, the fingers of whores tickled him and hunched old men whispered incoherent tales. Forbidden words were scrawled across walls depicting the forgotten outside world – its wonders and temptations attributed to the mundane, trapped in the bizarre language of The Beloved.
Rounding a corner, he was met with an alley of signs offering bargain kidneys, discount courage and the loan of hope. Sellers called out to him, pleading for his custom. Closing down sale, everything must go – two-for-one on selected parts. Guilty conscience? Look no further! Ernesto paused for breath outside Natalia Moron de Diaz –Fine dealer of souls and other faculties. Standing in the shop window stood an amber-haired beauty who halted his heart. With nothing left to guide him, his spirit shattered, he followed her beckoning finger, crawling on his hands and knees to enter a wooden trap door that led to a narrow passageway. He chased her small shadow as it ducked and dived through a network of tunnels until they emerged into a capacious warehouse, a library of jars. The walls were lined with clear glass vessels, filled with unidentifiable objects bearing tentacles and fingers that were, on closer inspection, uniquely deformed foetuses. Nestled amongst them were forms pulsing with the sublime lights of the auroras and emitting a delicate hum. Racks of test tubes hung from the ceiling – a rainbow of pigments linked by a system of levers and pulleys. Sitting herself at a large desk that swamped her petite frame, Natalia fixed her eyes on his.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Yes please, a tele–.’
‘No need for that, down here we call a plane a plane, a fork a fork.’ Pouring him a generous measure of rum, the soul trader allowed her eyes to evaluate the broken man before her. ‘I struggle to imagine what, if anything, you have to offer but please, enlighten me.’
‘What would you take?’
‘You are likely lacking in foresight, reason and self-awareness. There is perhaps a residue of dignity inside, or self-worth lurking in the shadows but certainly not enough to warrant exploration.’
Ernesto failed to respond, disabled by his awe of the woman before him and absorbed in a state of despair.
‘All is not lost, though,’ she continued. ‘Are all your senses in tact? We purchase up to but not including the sixth, if you qualify for intuition we might be able to work something out, though I imagine a lack of it is just what got you in such dire straits.’
He considered his immediate senses and reasoned that sight was essential, while taste and touch delivered the greatest pleasure.
‘What would I get for hearing and smell?’
‘We’ll have to run some tests, but I would estimate around7,000 golds.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Market price. There’s a sizable deaf list but not much for smell. How much do you need?’
‘30,000.’
Natalia let her head fall back and let out a loud, guttural laugh. ‘How are your kidneys?’ A bony finger jabbed at his back.
‘Not for sale.’
‘Well, there are a few faculties we purchase.’
‘Faculties?’
‘Fear, honour, hope, inspiration, euphoria...you got any of those?’
Ernesto was struck by the notion of trading fear – it was nothing but a hindrance and its loss would be his gain.
‘How much for fear?’
Natalia produced a large abacus and slid the coloured beads back and forth. ‘That will bring you up to 13,000 but you’re still falling short.’ She closed her eyes briefly in thought. ‘You dream much?’
The gambling man shook his head, it had been many years since he had truly slept at night, let alone dreamt.
Disappearing into a drawer, Natalia produced a large file caked in a layer of dust, and began to sift through the papers inside.
‘I’ve not done one of these in a while but it is a fairly straightforward procedure.’
Ernesto drew up a chair to face Natalia. He could see that one of her eyes was the colour of milk, its pupil drowning in the opaque pool of its iris.
‘Here we go,’ she said, placing a contract in front ofErnesto.
Pawn Your Soul
‘Depending on the strength of the results, we should be able to get you up to that 30,000.’
Natalia ushered Ernesto to the corner of the room where a large metal contraption, consisting of a bed and a web of tubing and jars, loomed ominously. There were, he noticed, a disconcerting number of needles, ranging in length and width.
‘This is where we’ll extract your hearing, smell and fear. These you understand are non-refundable and we do not accept liability for damages arising from complications as a result of the procedure as this is deemed to be the fault of the host,’ she said as the machine whirred into action to illustrate its master’s point.
‘Now,’ she laboured. ‘Your soul remains absolutely yours but will be claimed if full payment of the loan is not received in up to twenty-four weeks. There is of course accumulative interest of seven percent per week.’
‘So provided I pay the debt, nothing happens to it?’
‘Untouched,’ Natalia purred. ‘Unless of course you die before the sum is paid, in which case your soul will be collected by these gentlemen here.’
At the end of her extended digit two men reclined in large armchairs with an ease that implied they had been there for some time.The soul collectors were ancient, their willowy physique mottled with age and tufts of white hair on their thin heads scarcely covered a mesh of purple veins. Battered dark green doctor’s bags rested at their feet and mercenary tools lined the insides of their long cloaks, glinting in the lamplight. One wore a brass monocle that magnified his eye to a perturbing degree with a wire that linked it to a small earpiece - a bronze spider with spindly legs that danced across the lobe. The other man, identical to his neighbour in physique, sported a cranial brace that seemed to hold his head together. As they smiled weakly in unison, Ernesto reasoned with relief that the likelihood of these twins still being alive when he died was rather improbable.
Natalia wrapped Ernesto’s hand around the quill and tapped on the papers before him. The true severity of his decision, the drastic turn his life had been forced to take, could only resonate in part – for he was a man destroyed, a man with nothing left to lose.
After signing on the dotted line, Ernesto slipped into the extraction machine and Natalia set about removing the gambling man’s innermost parts.
On emerging from the cavern, leaving his fear, hearing and smell behind but with a pocket full of gold, it was the stillness that at first confounded Ernesto. The bustle of the streets no longer accompanied by its lively soundtrack – his surroundings distant and strange – yet he felt no fear in his isolating disability, only an appreciation of change. His broken feet were inspired to skip to a different beat and the revelation of his emancipation carried him up through the maze to the streets above. A few of the parade performers still remained, twirling soundlessly and beating dumb drums, their voiceless mouths moving deliriously. Ernesto stood, amidst this abstract mime, and prepared to face his tormentors and liberate his debts, to begin anew in his city.
The thundering beat of the hooves and the smell of paraffin were wasted on Ernesto, but as they grew closer he felt their rhythmic vibrations under his feet. He turned, evenly and without trepidation and stood boldly as an inky wave of stallions flecked with fire crashed over him, their fury pressing him to the ground, the yells of their masters inaudible as they called to the people announcing the uprising that they had for so long waited for. Rounding up their comrades, they celebrated a triumphant entry through the gates of the city.
As he came to, he prised his eyes open to see a slither of cobbled street before him, his vision obscured by debris.Disfigured images of The Beloved leered back at him from torn posters strewn across the pavement. His neck creaked and his vision blurred. His torso was caked in blood and his ribcage exposed. His right arm hung limp against his side, its fingers crushed together in a swollen mass. Despite all this, he felt no pain. Lifting himself awkwardly to his feet he surveyed his desolate surroundings. On the hill rising above the city he saw the palace, licked by flames that threatened to tear down the night’s sky, as the stars retreated into the distance. He felt his body lighten as he was struck with the thought that, after thirteen years under the rule of The Beloved, his country might be its own again.
Entering the palace gates, he saw the entire city had gathered in a state of reverence, a wild celebration of independence.The Liberation Front had stormed the capital and seized the palace. The soldiers of The Beloved surrendered with compliance and led the victors to their narcissistic despot who, stripped of his dignity, now swung from a rope that dangled from the tower of his chambers. Ernesto, his head light, dived deeper into the epicentre of the crowd. His questions fell on deaf ears as he asked after the General, his touch ignored as he fought for attention. Isolated in his silent world, he scanned the walls of the palace and found what he had been looking for. On the other side, awkward and grimacing on the end of a spear, lit by the flames of torches, was the head the General. For the first time in along while, Ernesto felt a moment of pure joy, a heady mix of rapture and abandonment as his burdens disappeared.
It was then that Ernesto Drangosch saw the glint of a bronze spider from the corner of his eye and felt an arm – firm yet mottled with age – link through his left and then another his right. As his identical companions led him away from his world and into theirs, it occurred to him that his final gamble had been rather misguided.
Jemma Foster
‘Leiurusquinquestriatus. The deathstalker scorpion,’ the croupier announced.‘Player five dies in this roulette round. Gentlemen, please collect your bets.’
Anxiety cramped his body. His gut tightened as his heart quickened, its beat the harbinger of his fate. Draining the last of his drink, the gambling man nervously stole a glance in the direction of the ringside box. Seated beside The Beloved was the General, the fleshy ripples of his stomach cascading over the gallery. He leaned forward to inhale the acrid fear of the desperate men beneath him, to many of whom he had preached his gambling creed long ago, assisting their prayers until they were at his mercy.He returned Ernesto Drangosch’s gaze by waving a black handkerchief – the final call for debts unpaid. Punishment was death and Ernesto could feel the wings of the vultures beat against his cheeks as they circled above.
A cloaked child-waiter approached, his gait marred by the onset of rickets.
‘Pint of sea, sir?’
‘Is there any telephone?’Ernesto choked, the humid air working its way into the fibres of his lungs.
‘As you wish.’ Bowing, the child revealed a flash of porcelain skin. Deprived of natural light it was the untainted colour of innocence preferred by The Beloved for the flesh of his children. As the city was in celebration, the stakes were high enough for the final round to delay his sentence a while longer, but the very last of Ernesto’s borrowed money had gone on the previous round. Nothing else was his, save the promise of death. Ernesto watched the cockroaches at his feet as they weaved their scavenger’s paths, leaving behind abstract sketches in the dust. With a ceremonial gravity, he knelt down and began to untie his shoes.
‘What can I get for these bridges?’ he said, handing the shoes to the bookman to inspect.
‘Rhino hide,’ the gaunt man replied, impressed. ‘Enough to enter the game, but the bet will be slim.’
‘Give me what you can,’ Ernesto pleaded.
Fingering the coins, Ernesto watched as the players were brought back into the ring and arranged in a circle. Standing on stools, nooses were tied around each of their necks. The true length of each rope was obscured– two would fall short, hanging the men sufficiently to kill them, while the rest would be long enough to grant survival. Ernesto put the culmination of his life’s worth down on his chosen player to die so that he himself might have a chance to live.
The awkward shadow of the child returned again with his telephone, the amber liquid placed on his table along with a complimentary copy of Special Teachings of Our Leader The Beloved, Volume 346. The hungry crowd shifted impatiently in their seats, craning their heads as they vied for a better view. Ernesto felt the familiar burn of his faith coursing through his veins as the croupier assembled the children – ‘kickers’ – around the circle of players.
The gong sounded and all eyes turned to the ring, the stench of anticipation of his fellow gamblers was as intoxicating as it was repellent. The world around him contracted and Ernesto felt the gravity of his fate gnawing at the marrow of his bones. ‘All bets are off,’ called the croupier. ‘And now for the song of Our Leader Beloved, in celebration of his quarter-year birthday.’
Our Saviour, Leader Beloved
Your flock salutes you
On this, your special day…
Ernesto Drangosch eyed his player, skin pallid and eyes blackened with a resolve peculiar to the enslaved. The pin grazed the record on the gramophone, static working its way through the ancient speakers as the incongruous melody of a gypsy love song flooded the arena.
The Beloved clapped his hands and the kickers began to dance, circling the unfortunate players. The music increased steadily in tempo, with each circle the crowd jigging in frenzied excitement as the children whirled, their heels smacking against the stage. Ernesto tapped to the beat as he rocked in his chair, a furious desire for his player’s end driving him to the edge of his seat. The hem of the children’s cloaks twirled until the needle parted from the record, scratching death’s path and suddenly the children kicked the stools. The sound of wood splitting and limbs crashing to the floor masked the distinctive snapping of the vertebrae of the men who now dangled from the ceiling, faces clown-like and their feet quietly twitching – death’s metronome heralding the last of their breaths.
The gambling man clutched at his heart as it plummeted to his bowels, registering his player’s survival and his own impending death. TheGeneral’s men, smelling blood, descended from the gallery towards Ernesto, forcing him out of his paralysis. Felling a path through the bodies of the crowd, he made for the chaos of the street above, his pupils retreating desperately as he was met with the glaring sunlight and the heat of the day knocked the air from his lungs.
The parade was underway for The Beloved’s birthday – a garish display of colour, brazen against the crumbling façade of the buildings and a city long starved of joy. The false scent of roast hog pumped from vents into the air as women wheeled dusty carts piled high with glass figs and sugared paper corn that not even the ants could feast upon. The performers were a vibrant mess of limbs and painted faces and he felt the drummers beating with his heart as if to mock its numbered toll. He crawled through the legs of dancers, losing the General’s men and immersing himself in the tide of circus freaks. The distant drone of the cicadas rose to a deafening pitch as they appeared on the horizon, a torturous plague of trumpeters as old as the regime, buried underground for thirteen years they had come of age today to tour the skies. The soles of his feet torn and bloody, Ernesto slipped into the underbelly of the city, spiralling down beneath the streets into a web of shacks and the empty promise of salvation. Navigating a sinuous path, he found himself in another world that knew nothing of its sister above. Shapes danced, colours yawned and shards of light pierced his vision; sounds of days long gone strummed against his ears and as his feet carried him further down, the fingers of whores tickled him and hunched old men whispered incoherent tales. Forbidden words were scrawled across walls depicting the forgotten outside world – its wonders and temptations attributed to the mundane, trapped in the bizarre language of The Beloved.
Rounding a corner, he was met with an alley of signs offering bargain kidneys, discount courage and the loan of hope. Sellers called out to him, pleading for his custom. Closing down sale, everything must go – two-for-one on selected parts. Guilty conscience? Look no further! Ernesto paused for breath outside Natalia Moron de Diaz –Fine dealer of souls and other faculties. Standing in the shop window stood an amber-haired beauty who halted his heart. With nothing left to guide him, his spirit shattered, he followed her beckoning finger, crawling on his hands and knees to enter a wooden trap door that led to a narrow passageway. He chased her small shadow as it ducked and dived through a network of tunnels until they emerged into a capacious warehouse, a library of jars. The walls were lined with clear glass vessels, filled with unidentifiable objects bearing tentacles and fingers that were, on closer inspection, uniquely deformed foetuses. Nestled amongst them were forms pulsing with the sublime lights of the auroras and emitting a delicate hum. Racks of test tubes hung from the ceiling – a rainbow of pigments linked by a system of levers and pulleys. Sitting herself at a large desk that swamped her petite frame, Natalia fixed her eyes on his.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Yes please, a tele–.’
‘No need for that, down here we call a plane a plane, a fork a fork.’ Pouring him a generous measure of rum, the soul trader allowed her eyes to evaluate the broken man before her. ‘I struggle to imagine what, if anything, you have to offer but please, enlighten me.’
‘What would you take?’
‘You are likely lacking in foresight, reason and self-awareness. There is perhaps a residue of dignity inside, or self-worth lurking in the shadows but certainly not enough to warrant exploration.’
Ernesto failed to respond, disabled by his awe of the woman before him and absorbed in a state of despair.
‘All is not lost, though,’ she continued. ‘Are all your senses in tact? We purchase up to but not including the sixth, if you qualify for intuition we might be able to work something out, though I imagine a lack of it is just what got you in such dire straits.’
He considered his immediate senses and reasoned that sight was essential, while taste and touch delivered the greatest pleasure.
‘What would I get for hearing and smell?’
‘We’ll have to run some tests, but I would estimate around7,000 golds.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Market price. There’s a sizable deaf list but not much for smell. How much do you need?’
‘30,000.’
Natalia let her head fall back and let out a loud, guttural laugh. ‘How are your kidneys?’ A bony finger jabbed at his back.
‘Not for sale.’
‘Well, there are a few faculties we purchase.’
‘Faculties?’
‘Fear, honour, hope, inspiration, euphoria...you got any of those?’
Ernesto was struck by the notion of trading fear – it was nothing but a hindrance and its loss would be his gain.
‘How much for fear?’
Natalia produced a large abacus and slid the coloured beads back and forth. ‘That will bring you up to 13,000 but you’re still falling short.’ She closed her eyes briefly in thought. ‘You dream much?’
The gambling man shook his head, it had been many years since he had truly slept at night, let alone dreamt.
Disappearing into a drawer, Natalia produced a large file caked in a layer of dust, and began to sift through the papers inside.
‘I’ve not done one of these in a while but it is a fairly straightforward procedure.’
Ernesto drew up a chair to face Natalia. He could see that one of her eyes was the colour of milk, its pupil drowning in the opaque pool of its iris.
‘Here we go,’ she said, placing a contract in front ofErnesto.
Pawn Your Soul
‘Depending on the strength of the results, we should be able to get you up to that 30,000.’
Natalia ushered Ernesto to the corner of the room where a large metal contraption, consisting of a bed and a web of tubing and jars, loomed ominously. There were, he noticed, a disconcerting number of needles, ranging in length and width.
‘This is where we’ll extract your hearing, smell and fear. These you understand are non-refundable and we do not accept liability for damages arising from complications as a result of the procedure as this is deemed to be the fault of the host,’ she said as the machine whirred into action to illustrate its master’s point.
‘Now,’ she laboured. ‘Your soul remains absolutely yours but will be claimed if full payment of the loan is not received in up to twenty-four weeks. There is of course accumulative interest of seven percent per week.’
‘So provided I pay the debt, nothing happens to it?’
‘Untouched,’ Natalia purred. ‘Unless of course you die before the sum is paid, in which case your soul will be collected by these gentlemen here.’
At the end of her extended digit two men reclined in large armchairs with an ease that implied they had been there for some time.The soul collectors were ancient, their willowy physique mottled with age and tufts of white hair on their thin heads scarcely covered a mesh of purple veins. Battered dark green doctor’s bags rested at their feet and mercenary tools lined the insides of their long cloaks, glinting in the lamplight. One wore a brass monocle that magnified his eye to a perturbing degree with a wire that linked it to a small earpiece - a bronze spider with spindly legs that danced across the lobe. The other man, identical to his neighbour in physique, sported a cranial brace that seemed to hold his head together. As they smiled weakly in unison, Ernesto reasoned with relief that the likelihood of these twins still being alive when he died was rather improbable.
Natalia wrapped Ernesto’s hand around the quill and tapped on the papers before him. The true severity of his decision, the drastic turn his life had been forced to take, could only resonate in part – for he was a man destroyed, a man with nothing left to lose.
After signing on the dotted line, Ernesto slipped into the extraction machine and Natalia set about removing the gambling man’s innermost parts.
On emerging from the cavern, leaving his fear, hearing and smell behind but with a pocket full of gold, it was the stillness that at first confounded Ernesto. The bustle of the streets no longer accompanied by its lively soundtrack – his surroundings distant and strange – yet he felt no fear in his isolating disability, only an appreciation of change. His broken feet were inspired to skip to a different beat and the revelation of his emancipation carried him up through the maze to the streets above. A few of the parade performers still remained, twirling soundlessly and beating dumb drums, their voiceless mouths moving deliriously. Ernesto stood, amidst this abstract mime, and prepared to face his tormentors and liberate his debts, to begin anew in his city.
The thundering beat of the hooves and the smell of paraffin were wasted on Ernesto, but as they grew closer he felt their rhythmic vibrations under his feet. He turned, evenly and without trepidation and stood boldly as an inky wave of stallions flecked with fire crashed over him, their fury pressing him to the ground, the yells of their masters inaudible as they called to the people announcing the uprising that they had for so long waited for. Rounding up their comrades, they celebrated a triumphant entry through the gates of the city.
As he came to, he prised his eyes open to see a slither of cobbled street before him, his vision obscured by debris.Disfigured images of The Beloved leered back at him from torn posters strewn across the pavement. His neck creaked and his vision blurred. His torso was caked in blood and his ribcage exposed. His right arm hung limp against his side, its fingers crushed together in a swollen mass. Despite all this, he felt no pain. Lifting himself awkwardly to his feet he surveyed his desolate surroundings. On the hill rising above the city he saw the palace, licked by flames that threatened to tear down the night’s sky, as the stars retreated into the distance. He felt his body lighten as he was struck with the thought that, after thirteen years under the rule of The Beloved, his country might be its own again.
Entering the palace gates, he saw the entire city had gathered in a state of reverence, a wild celebration of independence.The Liberation Front had stormed the capital and seized the palace. The soldiers of The Beloved surrendered with compliance and led the victors to their narcissistic despot who, stripped of his dignity, now swung from a rope that dangled from the tower of his chambers. Ernesto, his head light, dived deeper into the epicentre of the crowd. His questions fell on deaf ears as he asked after the General, his touch ignored as he fought for attention. Isolated in his silent world, he scanned the walls of the palace and found what he had been looking for. On the other side, awkward and grimacing on the end of a spear, lit by the flames of torches, was the head the General. For the first time in along while, Ernesto felt a moment of pure joy, a heady mix of rapture and abandonment as his burdens disappeared.
It was then that Ernesto Drangosch saw the glint of a bronze spider from the corner of his eye and felt an arm – firm yet mottled with age – link through his left and then another his right. As his identical companions led him away from his world and into theirs, it occurred to him that his final gamble had been rather misguided.
Jemma Foster is a writer and artist, founder of Wild Alchemy Lab, Mama Xanadu and Semantica Productions.
By Jemma Foster
Jemma Foster
‘Leiurusquinquestriatus. The deathstalker scorpion,’ the croupier announced.‘Player five dies in this roulette round. Gentlemen, please collect your bets.’
Anxiety cramped his body. His gut tightened as his heart quickened, its beat the harbinger of his fate. Draining the last of his drink, the gambling man nervously stole a glance in the direction of the ringside box. Seated beside The Beloved was the General, the fleshy ripples of his stomach cascading over the gallery. He leaned forward to inhale the acrid fear of the desperate men beneath him, to many of whom he had preached his gambling creed long ago, assisting their prayers until they were at his mercy.He returned Ernesto Drangosch’s gaze by waving a black handkerchief – the final call for debts unpaid. Punishment was death and Ernesto could feel the wings of the vultures beat against his cheeks as they circled above.
A cloaked child-waiter approached, his gait marred by the onset of rickets.
‘Pint of sea, sir?’
‘Is there any telephone?’Ernesto choked, the humid air working its way into the fibres of his lungs.
‘As you wish.’ Bowing, the child revealed a flash of porcelain skin. Deprived of natural light it was the untainted colour of innocence preferred by The Beloved for the flesh of his children. As the city was in celebration, the stakes were high enough for the final round to delay his sentence a while longer, but the very last of Ernesto’s borrowed money had gone on the previous round. Nothing else was his, save the promise of death. Ernesto watched the cockroaches at his feet as they weaved their scavenger’s paths, leaving behind abstract sketches in the dust. With a ceremonial gravity, he knelt down and began to untie his shoes.
‘What can I get for these bridges?’ he said, handing the shoes to the bookman to inspect.
‘Rhino hide,’ the gaunt man replied, impressed. ‘Enough to enter the game, but the bet will be slim.’
‘Give me what you can,’ Ernesto pleaded.
Fingering the coins, Ernesto watched as the players were brought back into the ring and arranged in a circle. Standing on stools, nooses were tied around each of their necks. The true length of each rope was obscured– two would fall short, hanging the men sufficiently to kill them, while the rest would be long enough to grant survival. Ernesto put the culmination of his life’s worth down on his chosen player to die so that he himself might have a chance to live.
The awkward shadow of the child returned again with his telephone, the amber liquid placed on his table along with a complimentary copy of Special Teachings of Our Leader The Beloved, Volume 346. The hungry crowd shifted impatiently in their seats, craning their heads as they vied for a better view. Ernesto felt the familiar burn of his faith coursing through his veins as the croupier assembled the children – ‘kickers’ – around the circle of players.
The gong sounded and all eyes turned to the ring, the stench of anticipation of his fellow gamblers was as intoxicating as it was repellent. The world around him contracted and Ernesto felt the gravity of his fate gnawing at the marrow of his bones. ‘All bets are off,’ called the croupier. ‘And now for the song of Our Leader Beloved, in celebration of his quarter-year birthday.’
Our Saviour, Leader Beloved
Your flock salutes you
On this, your special day…
Ernesto Drangosch eyed his player, skin pallid and eyes blackened with a resolve peculiar to the enslaved. The pin grazed the record on the gramophone, static working its way through the ancient speakers as the incongruous melody of a gypsy love song flooded the arena.
The Beloved clapped his hands and the kickers began to dance, circling the unfortunate players. The music increased steadily in tempo, with each circle the crowd jigging in frenzied excitement as the children whirled, their heels smacking against the stage. Ernesto tapped to the beat as he rocked in his chair, a furious desire for his player’s end driving him to the edge of his seat. The hem of the children’s cloaks twirled until the needle parted from the record, scratching death’s path and suddenly the children kicked the stools. The sound of wood splitting and limbs crashing to the floor masked the distinctive snapping of the vertebrae of the men who now dangled from the ceiling, faces clown-like and their feet quietly twitching – death’s metronome heralding the last of their breaths.
The gambling man clutched at his heart as it plummeted to his bowels, registering his player’s survival and his own impending death. TheGeneral’s men, smelling blood, descended from the gallery towards Ernesto, forcing him out of his paralysis. Felling a path through the bodies of the crowd, he made for the chaos of the street above, his pupils retreating desperately as he was met with the glaring sunlight and the heat of the day knocked the air from his lungs.
The parade was underway for The Beloved’s birthday – a garish display of colour, brazen against the crumbling façade of the buildings and a city long starved of joy. The false scent of roast hog pumped from vents into the air as women wheeled dusty carts piled high with glass figs and sugared paper corn that not even the ants could feast upon. The performers were a vibrant mess of limbs and painted faces and he felt the drummers beating with his heart as if to mock its numbered toll. He crawled through the legs of dancers, losing the General’s men and immersing himself in the tide of circus freaks. The distant drone of the cicadas rose to a deafening pitch as they appeared on the horizon, a torturous plague of trumpeters as old as the regime, buried underground for thirteen years they had come of age today to tour the skies. The soles of his feet torn and bloody, Ernesto slipped into the underbelly of the city, spiralling down beneath the streets into a web of shacks and the empty promise of salvation. Navigating a sinuous path, he found himself in another world that knew nothing of its sister above. Shapes danced, colours yawned and shards of light pierced his vision; sounds of days long gone strummed against his ears and as his feet carried him further down, the fingers of whores tickled him and hunched old men whispered incoherent tales. Forbidden words were scrawled across walls depicting the forgotten outside world – its wonders and temptations attributed to the mundane, trapped in the bizarre language of The Beloved.
Rounding a corner, he was met with an alley of signs offering bargain kidneys, discount courage and the loan of hope. Sellers called out to him, pleading for his custom. Closing down sale, everything must go – two-for-one on selected parts. Guilty conscience? Look no further! Ernesto paused for breath outside Natalia Moron de Diaz –Fine dealer of souls and other faculties. Standing in the shop window stood an amber-haired beauty who halted his heart. With nothing left to guide him, his spirit shattered, he followed her beckoning finger, crawling on his hands and knees to enter a wooden trap door that led to a narrow passageway. He chased her small shadow as it ducked and dived through a network of tunnels until they emerged into a capacious warehouse, a library of jars. The walls were lined with clear glass vessels, filled with unidentifiable objects bearing tentacles and fingers that were, on closer inspection, uniquely deformed foetuses. Nestled amongst them were forms pulsing with the sublime lights of the auroras and emitting a delicate hum. Racks of test tubes hung from the ceiling – a rainbow of pigments linked by a system of levers and pulleys. Sitting herself at a large desk that swamped her petite frame, Natalia fixed her eyes on his.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Yes please, a tele–.’
‘No need for that, down here we call a plane a plane, a fork a fork.’ Pouring him a generous measure of rum, the soul trader allowed her eyes to evaluate the broken man before her. ‘I struggle to imagine what, if anything, you have to offer but please, enlighten me.’
‘What would you take?’
‘You are likely lacking in foresight, reason and self-awareness. There is perhaps a residue of dignity inside, or self-worth lurking in the shadows but certainly not enough to warrant exploration.’
Ernesto failed to respond, disabled by his awe of the woman before him and absorbed in a state of despair.
‘All is not lost, though,’ she continued. ‘Are all your senses in tact? We purchase up to but not including the sixth, if you qualify for intuition we might be able to work something out, though I imagine a lack of it is just what got you in such dire straits.’
He considered his immediate senses and reasoned that sight was essential, while taste and touch delivered the greatest pleasure.
‘What would I get for hearing and smell?’
‘We’ll have to run some tests, but I would estimate around7,000 golds.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Market price. There’s a sizable deaf list but not much for smell. How much do you need?’
‘30,000.’
Natalia let her head fall back and let out a loud, guttural laugh. ‘How are your kidneys?’ A bony finger jabbed at his back.
‘Not for sale.’
‘Well, there are a few faculties we purchase.’
‘Faculties?’
‘Fear, honour, hope, inspiration, euphoria...you got any of those?’
Ernesto was struck by the notion of trading fear – it was nothing but a hindrance and its loss would be his gain.
‘How much for fear?’
Natalia produced a large abacus and slid the coloured beads back and forth. ‘That will bring you up to 13,000 but you’re still falling short.’ She closed her eyes briefly in thought. ‘You dream much?’
The gambling man shook his head, it had been many years since he had truly slept at night, let alone dreamt.
Disappearing into a drawer, Natalia produced a large file caked in a layer of dust, and began to sift through the papers inside.
‘I’ve not done one of these in a while but it is a fairly straightforward procedure.’
Ernesto drew up a chair to face Natalia. He could see that one of her eyes was the colour of milk, its pupil drowning in the opaque pool of its iris.
‘Here we go,’ she said, placing a contract in front ofErnesto.
Pawn Your Soul
‘Depending on the strength of the results, we should be able to get you up to that 30,000.’
Natalia ushered Ernesto to the corner of the room where a large metal contraption, consisting of a bed and a web of tubing and jars, loomed ominously. There were, he noticed, a disconcerting number of needles, ranging in length and width.
‘This is where we’ll extract your hearing, smell and fear. These you understand are non-refundable and we do not accept liability for damages arising from complications as a result of the procedure as this is deemed to be the fault of the host,’ she said as the machine whirred into action to illustrate its master’s point.
‘Now,’ she laboured. ‘Your soul remains absolutely yours but will be claimed if full payment of the loan is not received in up to twenty-four weeks. There is of course accumulative interest of seven percent per week.’
‘So provided I pay the debt, nothing happens to it?’
‘Untouched,’ Natalia purred. ‘Unless of course you die before the sum is paid, in which case your soul will be collected by these gentlemen here.’
At the end of her extended digit two men reclined in large armchairs with an ease that implied they had been there for some time.The soul collectors were ancient, their willowy physique mottled with age and tufts of white hair on their thin heads scarcely covered a mesh of purple veins. Battered dark green doctor’s bags rested at their feet and mercenary tools lined the insides of their long cloaks, glinting in the lamplight. One wore a brass monocle that magnified his eye to a perturbing degree with a wire that linked it to a small earpiece - a bronze spider with spindly legs that danced across the lobe. The other man, identical to his neighbour in physique, sported a cranial brace that seemed to hold his head together. As they smiled weakly in unison, Ernesto reasoned with relief that the likelihood of these twins still being alive when he died was rather improbable.
Natalia wrapped Ernesto’s hand around the quill and tapped on the papers before him. The true severity of his decision, the drastic turn his life had been forced to take, could only resonate in part – for he was a man destroyed, a man with nothing left to lose.
After signing on the dotted line, Ernesto slipped into the extraction machine and Natalia set about removing the gambling man’s innermost parts.
On emerging from the cavern, leaving his fear, hearing and smell behind but with a pocket full of gold, it was the stillness that at first confounded Ernesto. The bustle of the streets no longer accompanied by its lively soundtrack – his surroundings distant and strange – yet he felt no fear in his isolating disability, only an appreciation of change. His broken feet were inspired to skip to a different beat and the revelation of his emancipation carried him up through the maze to the streets above. A few of the parade performers still remained, twirling soundlessly and beating dumb drums, their voiceless mouths moving deliriously. Ernesto stood, amidst this abstract mime, and prepared to face his tormentors and liberate his debts, to begin anew in his city.
The thundering beat of the hooves and the smell of paraffin were wasted on Ernesto, but as they grew closer he felt their rhythmic vibrations under his feet. He turned, evenly and without trepidation and stood boldly as an inky wave of stallions flecked with fire crashed over him, their fury pressing him to the ground, the yells of their masters inaudible as they called to the people announcing the uprising that they had for so long waited for. Rounding up their comrades, they celebrated a triumphant entry through the gates of the city.
As he came to, he prised his eyes open to see a slither of cobbled street before him, his vision obscured by debris.Disfigured images of The Beloved leered back at him from torn posters strewn across the pavement. His neck creaked and his vision blurred. His torso was caked in blood and his ribcage exposed. His right arm hung limp against his side, its fingers crushed together in a swollen mass. Despite all this, he felt no pain. Lifting himself awkwardly to his feet he surveyed his desolate surroundings. On the hill rising above the city he saw the palace, licked by flames that threatened to tear down the night’s sky, as the stars retreated into the distance. He felt his body lighten as he was struck with the thought that, after thirteen years under the rule of The Beloved, his country might be its own again.
Entering the palace gates, he saw the entire city had gathered in a state of reverence, a wild celebration of independence.The Liberation Front had stormed the capital and seized the palace. The soldiers of The Beloved surrendered with compliance and led the victors to their narcissistic despot who, stripped of his dignity, now swung from a rope that dangled from the tower of his chambers. Ernesto, his head light, dived deeper into the epicentre of the crowd. His questions fell on deaf ears as he asked after the General, his touch ignored as he fought for attention. Isolated in his silent world, he scanned the walls of the palace and found what he had been looking for. On the other side, awkward and grimacing on the end of a spear, lit by the flames of torches, was the head the General. For the first time in along while, Ernesto felt a moment of pure joy, a heady mix of rapture and abandonment as his burdens disappeared.
It was then that Ernesto Drangosch saw the glint of a bronze spider from the corner of his eye and felt an arm – firm yet mottled with age – link through his left and then another his right. As his identical companions led him away from his world and into theirs, it occurred to him that his final gamble had been rather misguided.
Jemma Foster
‘Leiurusquinquestriatus. The deathstalker scorpion,’ the croupier announced.‘Player five dies in this roulette round. Gentlemen, please collect your bets.’
Anxiety cramped his body. His gut tightened as his heart quickened, its beat the harbinger of his fate. Draining the last of his drink, the gambling man nervously stole a glance in the direction of the ringside box. Seated beside The Beloved was the General, the fleshy ripples of his stomach cascading over the gallery. He leaned forward to inhale the acrid fear of the desperate men beneath him, to many of whom he had preached his gambling creed long ago, assisting their prayers until they were at his mercy.He returned Ernesto Drangosch’s gaze by waving a black handkerchief – the final call for debts unpaid. Punishment was death and Ernesto could feel the wings of the vultures beat against his cheeks as they circled above.
A cloaked child-waiter approached, his gait marred by the onset of rickets.
‘Pint of sea, sir?’
‘Is there any telephone?’Ernesto choked, the humid air working its way into the fibres of his lungs.
‘As you wish.’ Bowing, the child revealed a flash of porcelain skin. Deprived of natural light it was the untainted colour of innocence preferred by The Beloved for the flesh of his children. As the city was in celebration, the stakes were high enough for the final round to delay his sentence a while longer, but the very last of Ernesto’s borrowed money had gone on the previous round. Nothing else was his, save the promise of death. Ernesto watched the cockroaches at his feet as they weaved their scavenger’s paths, leaving behind abstract sketches in the dust. With a ceremonial gravity, he knelt down and began to untie his shoes.
‘What can I get for these bridges?’ he said, handing the shoes to the bookman to inspect.
‘Rhino hide,’ the gaunt man replied, impressed. ‘Enough to enter the game, but the bet will be slim.’
‘Give me what you can,’ Ernesto pleaded.
Fingering the coins, Ernesto watched as the players were brought back into the ring and arranged in a circle. Standing on stools, nooses were tied around each of their necks. The true length of each rope was obscured– two would fall short, hanging the men sufficiently to kill them, while the rest would be long enough to grant survival. Ernesto put the culmination of his life’s worth down on his chosen player to die so that he himself might have a chance to live.
The awkward shadow of the child returned again with his telephone, the amber liquid placed on his table along with a complimentary copy of Special Teachings of Our Leader The Beloved, Volume 346. The hungry crowd shifted impatiently in their seats, craning their heads as they vied for a better view. Ernesto felt the familiar burn of his faith coursing through his veins as the croupier assembled the children – ‘kickers’ – around the circle of players.
The gong sounded and all eyes turned to the ring, the stench of anticipation of his fellow gamblers was as intoxicating as it was repellent. The world around him contracted and Ernesto felt the gravity of his fate gnawing at the marrow of his bones. ‘All bets are off,’ called the croupier. ‘And now for the song of Our Leader Beloved, in celebration of his quarter-year birthday.’
Our Saviour, Leader Beloved
Your flock salutes you
On this, your special day…
Ernesto Drangosch eyed his player, skin pallid and eyes blackened with a resolve peculiar to the enslaved. The pin grazed the record on the gramophone, static working its way through the ancient speakers as the incongruous melody of a gypsy love song flooded the arena.
The Beloved clapped his hands and the kickers began to dance, circling the unfortunate players. The music increased steadily in tempo, with each circle the crowd jigging in frenzied excitement as the children whirled, their heels smacking against the stage. Ernesto tapped to the beat as he rocked in his chair, a furious desire for his player’s end driving him to the edge of his seat. The hem of the children’s cloaks twirled until the needle parted from the record, scratching death’s path and suddenly the children kicked the stools. The sound of wood splitting and limbs crashing to the floor masked the distinctive snapping of the vertebrae of the men who now dangled from the ceiling, faces clown-like and their feet quietly twitching – death’s metronome heralding the last of their breaths.
The gambling man clutched at his heart as it plummeted to his bowels, registering his player’s survival and his own impending death. TheGeneral’s men, smelling blood, descended from the gallery towards Ernesto, forcing him out of his paralysis. Felling a path through the bodies of the crowd, he made for the chaos of the street above, his pupils retreating desperately as he was met with the glaring sunlight and the heat of the day knocked the air from his lungs.
The parade was underway for The Beloved’s birthday – a garish display of colour, brazen against the crumbling façade of the buildings and a city long starved of joy. The false scent of roast hog pumped from vents into the air as women wheeled dusty carts piled high with glass figs and sugared paper corn that not even the ants could feast upon. The performers were a vibrant mess of limbs and painted faces and he felt the drummers beating with his heart as if to mock its numbered toll. He crawled through the legs of dancers, losing the General’s men and immersing himself in the tide of circus freaks. The distant drone of the cicadas rose to a deafening pitch as they appeared on the horizon, a torturous plague of trumpeters as old as the regime, buried underground for thirteen years they had come of age today to tour the skies. The soles of his feet torn and bloody, Ernesto slipped into the underbelly of the city, spiralling down beneath the streets into a web of shacks and the empty promise of salvation. Navigating a sinuous path, he found himself in another world that knew nothing of its sister above. Shapes danced, colours yawned and shards of light pierced his vision; sounds of days long gone strummed against his ears and as his feet carried him further down, the fingers of whores tickled him and hunched old men whispered incoherent tales. Forbidden words were scrawled across walls depicting the forgotten outside world – its wonders and temptations attributed to the mundane, trapped in the bizarre language of The Beloved.
Rounding a corner, he was met with an alley of signs offering bargain kidneys, discount courage and the loan of hope. Sellers called out to him, pleading for his custom. Closing down sale, everything must go – two-for-one on selected parts. Guilty conscience? Look no further! Ernesto paused for breath outside Natalia Moron de Diaz –Fine dealer of souls and other faculties. Standing in the shop window stood an amber-haired beauty who halted his heart. With nothing left to guide him, his spirit shattered, he followed her beckoning finger, crawling on his hands and knees to enter a wooden trap door that led to a narrow passageway. He chased her small shadow as it ducked and dived through a network of tunnels until they emerged into a capacious warehouse, a library of jars. The walls were lined with clear glass vessels, filled with unidentifiable objects bearing tentacles and fingers that were, on closer inspection, uniquely deformed foetuses. Nestled amongst them were forms pulsing with the sublime lights of the auroras and emitting a delicate hum. Racks of test tubes hung from the ceiling – a rainbow of pigments linked by a system of levers and pulleys. Sitting herself at a large desk that swamped her petite frame, Natalia fixed her eyes on his.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Yes please, a tele–.’
‘No need for that, down here we call a plane a plane, a fork a fork.’ Pouring him a generous measure of rum, the soul trader allowed her eyes to evaluate the broken man before her. ‘I struggle to imagine what, if anything, you have to offer but please, enlighten me.’
‘What would you take?’
‘You are likely lacking in foresight, reason and self-awareness. There is perhaps a residue of dignity inside, or self-worth lurking in the shadows but certainly not enough to warrant exploration.’
Ernesto failed to respond, disabled by his awe of the woman before him and absorbed in a state of despair.
‘All is not lost, though,’ she continued. ‘Are all your senses in tact? We purchase up to but not including the sixth, if you qualify for intuition we might be able to work something out, though I imagine a lack of it is just what got you in such dire straits.’
He considered his immediate senses and reasoned that sight was essential, while taste and touch delivered the greatest pleasure.
‘What would I get for hearing and smell?’
‘We’ll have to run some tests, but I would estimate around7,000 golds.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Market price. There’s a sizable deaf list but not much for smell. How much do you need?’
‘30,000.’
Natalia let her head fall back and let out a loud, guttural laugh. ‘How are your kidneys?’ A bony finger jabbed at his back.
‘Not for sale.’
‘Well, there are a few faculties we purchase.’
‘Faculties?’
‘Fear, honour, hope, inspiration, euphoria...you got any of those?’
Ernesto was struck by the notion of trading fear – it was nothing but a hindrance and its loss would be his gain.
‘How much for fear?’
Natalia produced a large abacus and slid the coloured beads back and forth. ‘That will bring you up to 13,000 but you’re still falling short.’ She closed her eyes briefly in thought. ‘You dream much?’
The gambling man shook his head, it had been many years since he had truly slept at night, let alone dreamt.
Disappearing into a drawer, Natalia produced a large file caked in a layer of dust, and began to sift through the papers inside.
‘I’ve not done one of these in a while but it is a fairly straightforward procedure.’
Ernesto drew up a chair to face Natalia. He could see that one of her eyes was the colour of milk, its pupil drowning in the opaque pool of its iris.
‘Here we go,’ she said, placing a contract in front ofErnesto.
Pawn Your Soul
‘Depending on the strength of the results, we should be able to get you up to that 30,000.’
Natalia ushered Ernesto to the corner of the room where a large metal contraption, consisting of a bed and a web of tubing and jars, loomed ominously. There were, he noticed, a disconcerting number of needles, ranging in length and width.
‘This is where we’ll extract your hearing, smell and fear. These you understand are non-refundable and we do not accept liability for damages arising from complications as a result of the procedure as this is deemed to be the fault of the host,’ she said as the machine whirred into action to illustrate its master’s point.
‘Now,’ she laboured. ‘Your soul remains absolutely yours but will be claimed if full payment of the loan is not received in up to twenty-four weeks. There is of course accumulative interest of seven percent per week.’
‘So provided I pay the debt, nothing happens to it?’
‘Untouched,’ Natalia purred. ‘Unless of course you die before the sum is paid, in which case your soul will be collected by these gentlemen here.’
At the end of her extended digit two men reclined in large armchairs with an ease that implied they had been there for some time.The soul collectors were ancient, their willowy physique mottled with age and tufts of white hair on their thin heads scarcely covered a mesh of purple veins. Battered dark green doctor’s bags rested at their feet and mercenary tools lined the insides of their long cloaks, glinting in the lamplight. One wore a brass monocle that magnified his eye to a perturbing degree with a wire that linked it to a small earpiece - a bronze spider with spindly legs that danced across the lobe. The other man, identical to his neighbour in physique, sported a cranial brace that seemed to hold his head together. As they smiled weakly in unison, Ernesto reasoned with relief that the likelihood of these twins still being alive when he died was rather improbable.
Natalia wrapped Ernesto’s hand around the quill and tapped on the papers before him. The true severity of his decision, the drastic turn his life had been forced to take, could only resonate in part – for he was a man destroyed, a man with nothing left to lose.
After signing on the dotted line, Ernesto slipped into the extraction machine and Natalia set about removing the gambling man’s innermost parts.
On emerging from the cavern, leaving his fear, hearing and smell behind but with a pocket full of gold, it was the stillness that at first confounded Ernesto. The bustle of the streets no longer accompanied by its lively soundtrack – his surroundings distant and strange – yet he felt no fear in his isolating disability, only an appreciation of change. His broken feet were inspired to skip to a different beat and the revelation of his emancipation carried him up through the maze to the streets above. A few of the parade performers still remained, twirling soundlessly and beating dumb drums, their voiceless mouths moving deliriously. Ernesto stood, amidst this abstract mime, and prepared to face his tormentors and liberate his debts, to begin anew in his city.
The thundering beat of the hooves and the smell of paraffin were wasted on Ernesto, but as they grew closer he felt their rhythmic vibrations under his feet. He turned, evenly and without trepidation and stood boldly as an inky wave of stallions flecked with fire crashed over him, their fury pressing him to the ground, the yells of their masters inaudible as they called to the people announcing the uprising that they had for so long waited for. Rounding up their comrades, they celebrated a triumphant entry through the gates of the city.
As he came to, he prised his eyes open to see a slither of cobbled street before him, his vision obscured by debris.Disfigured images of The Beloved leered back at him from torn posters strewn across the pavement. His neck creaked and his vision blurred. His torso was caked in blood and his ribcage exposed. His right arm hung limp against his side, its fingers crushed together in a swollen mass. Despite all this, he felt no pain. Lifting himself awkwardly to his feet he surveyed his desolate surroundings. On the hill rising above the city he saw the palace, licked by flames that threatened to tear down the night’s sky, as the stars retreated into the distance. He felt his body lighten as he was struck with the thought that, after thirteen years under the rule of The Beloved, his country might be its own again.
Entering the palace gates, he saw the entire city had gathered in a state of reverence, a wild celebration of independence.The Liberation Front had stormed the capital and seized the palace. The soldiers of The Beloved surrendered with compliance and led the victors to their narcissistic despot who, stripped of his dignity, now swung from a rope that dangled from the tower of his chambers. Ernesto, his head light, dived deeper into the epicentre of the crowd. His questions fell on deaf ears as he asked after the General, his touch ignored as he fought for attention. Isolated in his silent world, he scanned the walls of the palace and found what he had been looking for. On the other side, awkward and grimacing on the end of a spear, lit by the flames of torches, was the head the General. For the first time in along while, Ernesto felt a moment of pure joy, a heady mix of rapture and abandonment as his burdens disappeared.
It was then that Ernesto Drangosch saw the glint of a bronze spider from the corner of his eye and felt an arm – firm yet mottled with age – link through his left and then another his right. As his identical companions led him away from his world and into theirs, it occurred to him that his final gamble had been rather misguided.
Jemma Foster is a writer and artist, founder of Wild Alchemy Lab, Mama Xanadu and Semantica Productions.
By Jemma Foster
Jemma Foster
‘Leiurusquinquestriatus. The deathstalker scorpion,’ the croupier announced.‘Player five dies in this roulette round. Gentlemen, please collect your bets.’
Anxiety cramped his body. His gut tightened as his heart quickened, its beat the harbinger of his fate. Draining the last of his drink, the gambling man nervously stole a glance in the direction of the ringside box. Seated beside The Beloved was the General, the fleshy ripples of his stomach cascading over the gallery. He leaned forward to inhale the acrid fear of the desperate men beneath him, to many of whom he had preached his gambling creed long ago, assisting their prayers until they were at his mercy.He returned Ernesto Drangosch’s gaze by waving a black handkerchief – the final call for debts unpaid. Punishment was death and Ernesto could feel the wings of the vultures beat against his cheeks as they circled above.
A cloaked child-waiter approached, his gait marred by the onset of rickets.
‘Pint of sea, sir?’
‘Is there any telephone?’Ernesto choked, the humid air working its way into the fibres of his lungs.
‘As you wish.’ Bowing, the child revealed a flash of porcelain skin. Deprived of natural light it was the untainted colour of innocence preferred by The Beloved for the flesh of his children. As the city was in celebration, the stakes were high enough for the final round to delay his sentence a while longer, but the very last of Ernesto’s borrowed money had gone on the previous round. Nothing else was his, save the promise of death. Ernesto watched the cockroaches at his feet as they weaved their scavenger’s paths, leaving behind abstract sketches in the dust. With a ceremonial gravity, he knelt down and began to untie his shoes.
‘What can I get for these bridges?’ he said, handing the shoes to the bookman to inspect.
‘Rhino hide,’ the gaunt man replied, impressed. ‘Enough to enter the game, but the bet will be slim.’
‘Give me what you can,’ Ernesto pleaded.
Fingering the coins, Ernesto watched as the players were brought back into the ring and arranged in a circle. Standing on stools, nooses were tied around each of their necks. The true length of each rope was obscured– two would fall short, hanging the men sufficiently to kill them, while the rest would be long enough to grant survival. Ernesto put the culmination of his life’s worth down on his chosen player to die so that he himself might have a chance to live.
The awkward shadow of the child returned again with his telephone, the amber liquid placed on his table along with a complimentary copy of Special Teachings of Our Leader The Beloved, Volume 346. The hungry crowd shifted impatiently in their seats, craning their heads as they vied for a better view. Ernesto felt the familiar burn of his faith coursing through his veins as the croupier assembled the children – ‘kickers’ – around the circle of players.
The gong sounded and all eyes turned to the ring, the stench of anticipation of his fellow gamblers was as intoxicating as it was repellent. The world around him contracted and Ernesto felt the gravity of his fate gnawing at the marrow of his bones. ‘All bets are off,’ called the croupier. ‘And now for the song of Our Leader Beloved, in celebration of his quarter-year birthday.’
Our Saviour, Leader Beloved
Your flock salutes you
On this, your special day…
Ernesto Drangosch eyed his player, skin pallid and eyes blackened with a resolve peculiar to the enslaved. The pin grazed the record on the gramophone, static working its way through the ancient speakers as the incongruous melody of a gypsy love song flooded the arena.
The Beloved clapped his hands and the kickers began to dance, circling the unfortunate players. The music increased steadily in tempo, with each circle the crowd jigging in frenzied excitement as the children whirled, their heels smacking against the stage. Ernesto tapped to the beat as he rocked in his chair, a furious desire for his player’s end driving him to the edge of his seat. The hem of the children’s cloaks twirled until the needle parted from the record, scratching death’s path and suddenly the children kicked the stools. The sound of wood splitting and limbs crashing to the floor masked the distinctive snapping of the vertebrae of the men who now dangled from the ceiling, faces clown-like and their feet quietly twitching – death’s metronome heralding the last of their breaths.
The gambling man clutched at his heart as it plummeted to his bowels, registering his player’s survival and his own impending death. TheGeneral’s men, smelling blood, descended from the gallery towards Ernesto, forcing him out of his paralysis. Felling a path through the bodies of the crowd, he made for the chaos of the street above, his pupils retreating desperately as he was met with the glaring sunlight and the heat of the day knocked the air from his lungs.
The parade was underway for The Beloved’s birthday – a garish display of colour, brazen against the crumbling façade of the buildings and a city long starved of joy. The false scent of roast hog pumped from vents into the air as women wheeled dusty carts piled high with glass figs and sugared paper corn that not even the ants could feast upon. The performers were a vibrant mess of limbs and painted faces and he felt the drummers beating with his heart as if to mock its numbered toll. He crawled through the legs of dancers, losing the General’s men and immersing himself in the tide of circus freaks. The distant drone of the cicadas rose to a deafening pitch as they appeared on the horizon, a torturous plague of trumpeters as old as the regime, buried underground for thirteen years they had come of age today to tour the skies. The soles of his feet torn and bloody, Ernesto slipped into the underbelly of the city, spiralling down beneath the streets into a web of shacks and the empty promise of salvation. Navigating a sinuous path, he found himself in another world that knew nothing of its sister above. Shapes danced, colours yawned and shards of light pierced his vision; sounds of days long gone strummed against his ears and as his feet carried him further down, the fingers of whores tickled him and hunched old men whispered incoherent tales. Forbidden words were scrawled across walls depicting the forgotten outside world – its wonders and temptations attributed to the mundane, trapped in the bizarre language of The Beloved.
Rounding a corner, he was met with an alley of signs offering bargain kidneys, discount courage and the loan of hope. Sellers called out to him, pleading for his custom. Closing down sale, everything must go – two-for-one on selected parts. Guilty conscience? Look no further! Ernesto paused for breath outside Natalia Moron de Diaz –Fine dealer of souls and other faculties. Standing in the shop window stood an amber-haired beauty who halted his heart. With nothing left to guide him, his spirit shattered, he followed her beckoning finger, crawling on his hands and knees to enter a wooden trap door that led to a narrow passageway. He chased her small shadow as it ducked and dived through a network of tunnels until they emerged into a capacious warehouse, a library of jars. The walls were lined with clear glass vessels, filled with unidentifiable objects bearing tentacles and fingers that were, on closer inspection, uniquely deformed foetuses. Nestled amongst them were forms pulsing with the sublime lights of the auroras and emitting a delicate hum. Racks of test tubes hung from the ceiling – a rainbow of pigments linked by a system of levers and pulleys. Sitting herself at a large desk that swamped her petite frame, Natalia fixed her eyes on his.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Yes please, a tele–.’
‘No need for that, down here we call a plane a plane, a fork a fork.’ Pouring him a generous measure of rum, the soul trader allowed her eyes to evaluate the broken man before her. ‘I struggle to imagine what, if anything, you have to offer but please, enlighten me.’
‘What would you take?’
‘You are likely lacking in foresight, reason and self-awareness. There is perhaps a residue of dignity inside, or self-worth lurking in the shadows but certainly not enough to warrant exploration.’
Ernesto failed to respond, disabled by his awe of the woman before him and absorbed in a state of despair.
‘All is not lost, though,’ she continued. ‘Are all your senses in tact? We purchase up to but not including the sixth, if you qualify for intuition we might be able to work something out, though I imagine a lack of it is just what got you in such dire straits.’
He considered his immediate senses and reasoned that sight was essential, while taste and touch delivered the greatest pleasure.
‘What would I get for hearing and smell?’
‘We’ll have to run some tests, but I would estimate around7,000 golds.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Market price. There’s a sizable deaf list but not much for smell. How much do you need?’
‘30,000.’
Natalia let her head fall back and let out a loud, guttural laugh. ‘How are your kidneys?’ A bony finger jabbed at his back.
‘Not for sale.’
‘Well, there are a few faculties we purchase.’
‘Faculties?’
‘Fear, honour, hope, inspiration, euphoria...you got any of those?’
Ernesto was struck by the notion of trading fear – it was nothing but a hindrance and its loss would be his gain.
‘How much for fear?’
Natalia produced a large abacus and slid the coloured beads back and forth. ‘That will bring you up to 13,000 but you’re still falling short.’ She closed her eyes briefly in thought. ‘You dream much?’
The gambling man shook his head, it had been many years since he had truly slept at night, let alone dreamt.
Disappearing into a drawer, Natalia produced a large file caked in a layer of dust, and began to sift through the papers inside.
‘I’ve not done one of these in a while but it is a fairly straightforward procedure.’
Ernesto drew up a chair to face Natalia. He could see that one of her eyes was the colour of milk, its pupil drowning in the opaque pool of its iris.
‘Here we go,’ she said, placing a contract in front ofErnesto.
Pawn Your Soul
‘Depending on the strength of the results, we should be able to get you up to that 30,000.’
Natalia ushered Ernesto to the corner of the room where a large metal contraption, consisting of a bed and a web of tubing and jars, loomed ominously. There were, he noticed, a disconcerting number of needles, ranging in length and width.
‘This is where we’ll extract your hearing, smell and fear. These you understand are non-refundable and we do not accept liability for damages arising from complications as a result of the procedure as this is deemed to be the fault of the host,’ she said as the machine whirred into action to illustrate its master’s point.
‘Now,’ she laboured. ‘Your soul remains absolutely yours but will be claimed if full payment of the loan is not received in up to twenty-four weeks. There is of course accumulative interest of seven percent per week.’
‘So provided I pay the debt, nothing happens to it?’
‘Untouched,’ Natalia purred. ‘Unless of course you die before the sum is paid, in which case your soul will be collected by these gentlemen here.’
At the end of her extended digit two men reclined in large armchairs with an ease that implied they had been there for some time.The soul collectors were ancient, their willowy physique mottled with age and tufts of white hair on their thin heads scarcely covered a mesh of purple veins. Battered dark green doctor’s bags rested at their feet and mercenary tools lined the insides of their long cloaks, glinting in the lamplight. One wore a brass monocle that magnified his eye to a perturbing degree with a wire that linked it to a small earpiece - a bronze spider with spindly legs that danced across the lobe. The other man, identical to his neighbour in physique, sported a cranial brace that seemed to hold his head together. As they smiled weakly in unison, Ernesto reasoned with relief that the likelihood of these twins still being alive when he died was rather improbable.
Natalia wrapped Ernesto’s hand around the quill and tapped on the papers before him. The true severity of his decision, the drastic turn his life had been forced to take, could only resonate in part – for he was a man destroyed, a man with nothing left to lose.
After signing on the dotted line, Ernesto slipped into the extraction machine and Natalia set about removing the gambling man’s innermost parts.
On emerging from the cavern, leaving his fear, hearing and smell behind but with a pocket full of gold, it was the stillness that at first confounded Ernesto. The bustle of the streets no longer accompanied by its lively soundtrack – his surroundings distant and strange – yet he felt no fear in his isolating disability, only an appreciation of change. His broken feet were inspired to skip to a different beat and the revelation of his emancipation carried him up through the maze to the streets above. A few of the parade performers still remained, twirling soundlessly and beating dumb drums, their voiceless mouths moving deliriously. Ernesto stood, amidst this abstract mime, and prepared to face his tormentors and liberate his debts, to begin anew in his city.
The thundering beat of the hooves and the smell of paraffin were wasted on Ernesto, but as they grew closer he felt their rhythmic vibrations under his feet. He turned, evenly and without trepidation and stood boldly as an inky wave of stallions flecked with fire crashed over him, their fury pressing him to the ground, the yells of their masters inaudible as they called to the people announcing the uprising that they had for so long waited for. Rounding up their comrades, they celebrated a triumphant entry through the gates of the city.
As he came to, he prised his eyes open to see a slither of cobbled street before him, his vision obscured by debris.Disfigured images of The Beloved leered back at him from torn posters strewn across the pavement. His neck creaked and his vision blurred. His torso was caked in blood and his ribcage exposed. His right arm hung limp against his side, its fingers crushed together in a swollen mass. Despite all this, he felt no pain. Lifting himself awkwardly to his feet he surveyed his desolate surroundings. On the hill rising above the city he saw the palace, licked by flames that threatened to tear down the night’s sky, as the stars retreated into the distance. He felt his body lighten as he was struck with the thought that, after thirteen years under the rule of The Beloved, his country might be its own again.
Entering the palace gates, he saw the entire city had gathered in a state of reverence, a wild celebration of independence.The Liberation Front had stormed the capital and seized the palace. The soldiers of The Beloved surrendered with compliance and led the victors to their narcissistic despot who, stripped of his dignity, now swung from a rope that dangled from the tower of his chambers. Ernesto, his head light, dived deeper into the epicentre of the crowd. His questions fell on deaf ears as he asked after the General, his touch ignored as he fought for attention. Isolated in his silent world, he scanned the walls of the palace and found what he had been looking for. On the other side, awkward and grimacing on the end of a spear, lit by the flames of torches, was the head the General. For the first time in along while, Ernesto felt a moment of pure joy, a heady mix of rapture and abandonment as his burdens disappeared.
It was then that Ernesto Drangosch saw the glint of a bronze spider from the corner of his eye and felt an arm – firm yet mottled with age – link through his left and then another his right. As his identical companions led him away from his world and into theirs, it occurred to him that his final gamble had been rather misguided.
Jemma Foster
‘Leiurusquinquestriatus. The deathstalker scorpion,’ the croupier announced.‘Player five dies in this roulette round. Gentlemen, please collect your bets.’
Anxiety cramped his body. His gut tightened as his heart quickened, its beat the harbinger of his fate. Draining the last of his drink, the gambling man nervously stole a glance in the direction of the ringside box. Seated beside The Beloved was the General, the fleshy ripples of his stomach cascading over the gallery. He leaned forward to inhale the acrid fear of the desperate men beneath him, to many of whom he had preached his gambling creed long ago, assisting their prayers until they were at his mercy.He returned Ernesto Drangosch’s gaze by waving a black handkerchief – the final call for debts unpaid. Punishment was death and Ernesto could feel the wings of the vultures beat against his cheeks as they circled above.
A cloaked child-waiter approached, his gait marred by the onset of rickets.
‘Pint of sea, sir?’
‘Is there any telephone?’Ernesto choked, the humid air working its way into the fibres of his lungs.
‘As you wish.’ Bowing, the child revealed a flash of porcelain skin. Deprived of natural light it was the untainted colour of innocence preferred by The Beloved for the flesh of his children. As the city was in celebration, the stakes were high enough for the final round to delay his sentence a while longer, but the very last of Ernesto’s borrowed money had gone on the previous round. Nothing else was his, save the promise of death. Ernesto watched the cockroaches at his feet as they weaved their scavenger’s paths, leaving behind abstract sketches in the dust. With a ceremonial gravity, he knelt down and began to untie his shoes.
‘What can I get for these bridges?’ he said, handing the shoes to the bookman to inspect.
‘Rhino hide,’ the gaunt man replied, impressed. ‘Enough to enter the game, but the bet will be slim.’
‘Give me what you can,’ Ernesto pleaded.
Fingering the coins, Ernesto watched as the players were brought back into the ring and arranged in a circle. Standing on stools, nooses were tied around each of their necks. The true length of each rope was obscured– two would fall short, hanging the men sufficiently to kill them, while the rest would be long enough to grant survival. Ernesto put the culmination of his life’s worth down on his chosen player to die so that he himself might have a chance to live.
The awkward shadow of the child returned again with his telephone, the amber liquid placed on his table along with a complimentary copy of Special Teachings of Our Leader The Beloved, Volume 346. The hungry crowd shifted impatiently in their seats, craning their heads as they vied for a better view. Ernesto felt the familiar burn of his faith coursing through his veins as the croupier assembled the children – ‘kickers’ – around the circle of players.
The gong sounded and all eyes turned to the ring, the stench of anticipation of his fellow gamblers was as intoxicating as it was repellent. The world around him contracted and Ernesto felt the gravity of his fate gnawing at the marrow of his bones. ‘All bets are off,’ called the croupier. ‘And now for the song of Our Leader Beloved, in celebration of his quarter-year birthday.’
Our Saviour, Leader Beloved
Your flock salutes you
On this, your special day…
Ernesto Drangosch eyed his player, skin pallid and eyes blackened with a resolve peculiar to the enslaved. The pin grazed the record on the gramophone, static working its way through the ancient speakers as the incongruous melody of a gypsy love song flooded the arena.
The Beloved clapped his hands and the kickers began to dance, circling the unfortunate players. The music increased steadily in tempo, with each circle the crowd jigging in frenzied excitement as the children whirled, their heels smacking against the stage. Ernesto tapped to the beat as he rocked in his chair, a furious desire for his player’s end driving him to the edge of his seat. The hem of the children’s cloaks twirled until the needle parted from the record, scratching death’s path and suddenly the children kicked the stools. The sound of wood splitting and limbs crashing to the floor masked the distinctive snapping of the vertebrae of the men who now dangled from the ceiling, faces clown-like and their feet quietly twitching – death’s metronome heralding the last of their breaths.
The gambling man clutched at his heart as it plummeted to his bowels, registering his player’s survival and his own impending death. TheGeneral’s men, smelling blood, descended from the gallery towards Ernesto, forcing him out of his paralysis. Felling a path through the bodies of the crowd, he made for the chaos of the street above, his pupils retreating desperately as he was met with the glaring sunlight and the heat of the day knocked the air from his lungs.
The parade was underway for The Beloved’s birthday – a garish display of colour, brazen against the crumbling façade of the buildings and a city long starved of joy. The false scent of roast hog pumped from vents into the air as women wheeled dusty carts piled high with glass figs and sugared paper corn that not even the ants could feast upon. The performers were a vibrant mess of limbs and painted faces and he felt the drummers beating with his heart as if to mock its numbered toll. He crawled through the legs of dancers, losing the General’s men and immersing himself in the tide of circus freaks. The distant drone of the cicadas rose to a deafening pitch as they appeared on the horizon, a torturous plague of trumpeters as old as the regime, buried underground for thirteen years they had come of age today to tour the skies. The soles of his feet torn and bloody, Ernesto slipped into the underbelly of the city, spiralling down beneath the streets into a web of shacks and the empty promise of salvation. Navigating a sinuous path, he found himself in another world that knew nothing of its sister above. Shapes danced, colours yawned and shards of light pierced his vision; sounds of days long gone strummed against his ears and as his feet carried him further down, the fingers of whores tickled him and hunched old men whispered incoherent tales. Forbidden words were scrawled across walls depicting the forgotten outside world – its wonders and temptations attributed to the mundane, trapped in the bizarre language of The Beloved.
Rounding a corner, he was met with an alley of signs offering bargain kidneys, discount courage and the loan of hope. Sellers called out to him, pleading for his custom. Closing down sale, everything must go – two-for-one on selected parts. Guilty conscience? Look no further! Ernesto paused for breath outside Natalia Moron de Diaz –Fine dealer of souls and other faculties. Standing in the shop window stood an amber-haired beauty who halted his heart. With nothing left to guide him, his spirit shattered, he followed her beckoning finger, crawling on his hands and knees to enter a wooden trap door that led to a narrow passageway. He chased her small shadow as it ducked and dived through a network of tunnels until they emerged into a capacious warehouse, a library of jars. The walls were lined with clear glass vessels, filled with unidentifiable objects bearing tentacles and fingers that were, on closer inspection, uniquely deformed foetuses. Nestled amongst them were forms pulsing with the sublime lights of the auroras and emitting a delicate hum. Racks of test tubes hung from the ceiling – a rainbow of pigments linked by a system of levers and pulleys. Sitting herself at a large desk that swamped her petite frame, Natalia fixed her eyes on his.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Yes please, a tele–.’
‘No need for that, down here we call a plane a plane, a fork a fork.’ Pouring him a generous measure of rum, the soul trader allowed her eyes to evaluate the broken man before her. ‘I struggle to imagine what, if anything, you have to offer but please, enlighten me.’
‘What would you take?’
‘You are likely lacking in foresight, reason and self-awareness. There is perhaps a residue of dignity inside, or self-worth lurking in the shadows but certainly not enough to warrant exploration.’
Ernesto failed to respond, disabled by his awe of the woman before him and absorbed in a state of despair.
‘All is not lost, though,’ she continued. ‘Are all your senses in tact? We purchase up to but not including the sixth, if you qualify for intuition we might be able to work something out, though I imagine a lack of it is just what got you in such dire straits.’
He considered his immediate senses and reasoned that sight was essential, while taste and touch delivered the greatest pleasure.
‘What would I get for hearing and smell?’
‘We’ll have to run some tests, but I would estimate around7,000 golds.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Market price. There’s a sizable deaf list but not much for smell. How much do you need?’
‘30,000.’
Natalia let her head fall back and let out a loud, guttural laugh. ‘How are your kidneys?’ A bony finger jabbed at his back.
‘Not for sale.’
‘Well, there are a few faculties we purchase.’
‘Faculties?’
‘Fear, honour, hope, inspiration, euphoria...you got any of those?’
Ernesto was struck by the notion of trading fear – it was nothing but a hindrance and its loss would be his gain.
‘How much for fear?’
Natalia produced a large abacus and slid the coloured beads back and forth. ‘That will bring you up to 13,000 but you’re still falling short.’ She closed her eyes briefly in thought. ‘You dream much?’
The gambling man shook his head, it had been many years since he had truly slept at night, let alone dreamt.
Disappearing into a drawer, Natalia produced a large file caked in a layer of dust, and began to sift through the papers inside.
‘I’ve not done one of these in a while but it is a fairly straightforward procedure.’
Ernesto drew up a chair to face Natalia. He could see that one of her eyes was the colour of milk, its pupil drowning in the opaque pool of its iris.
‘Here we go,’ she said, placing a contract in front ofErnesto.
Pawn Your Soul
‘Depending on the strength of the results, we should be able to get you up to that 30,000.’
Natalia ushered Ernesto to the corner of the room where a large metal contraption, consisting of a bed and a web of tubing and jars, loomed ominously. There were, he noticed, a disconcerting number of needles, ranging in length and width.
‘This is where we’ll extract your hearing, smell and fear. These you understand are non-refundable and we do not accept liability for damages arising from complications as a result of the procedure as this is deemed to be the fault of the host,’ she said as the machine whirred into action to illustrate its master’s point.
‘Now,’ she laboured. ‘Your soul remains absolutely yours but will be claimed if full payment of the loan is not received in up to twenty-four weeks. There is of course accumulative interest of seven percent per week.’
‘So provided I pay the debt, nothing happens to it?’
‘Untouched,’ Natalia purred. ‘Unless of course you die before the sum is paid, in which case your soul will be collected by these gentlemen here.’
At the end of her extended digit two men reclined in large armchairs with an ease that implied they had been there for some time.The soul collectors were ancient, their willowy physique mottled with age and tufts of white hair on their thin heads scarcely covered a mesh of purple veins. Battered dark green doctor’s bags rested at their feet and mercenary tools lined the insides of their long cloaks, glinting in the lamplight. One wore a brass monocle that magnified his eye to a perturbing degree with a wire that linked it to a small earpiece - a bronze spider with spindly legs that danced across the lobe. The other man, identical to his neighbour in physique, sported a cranial brace that seemed to hold his head together. As they smiled weakly in unison, Ernesto reasoned with relief that the likelihood of these twins still being alive when he died was rather improbable.
Natalia wrapped Ernesto’s hand around the quill and tapped on the papers before him. The true severity of his decision, the drastic turn his life had been forced to take, could only resonate in part – for he was a man destroyed, a man with nothing left to lose.
After signing on the dotted line, Ernesto slipped into the extraction machine and Natalia set about removing the gambling man’s innermost parts.
On emerging from the cavern, leaving his fear, hearing and smell behind but with a pocket full of gold, it was the stillness that at first confounded Ernesto. The bustle of the streets no longer accompanied by its lively soundtrack – his surroundings distant and strange – yet he felt no fear in his isolating disability, only an appreciation of change. His broken feet were inspired to skip to a different beat and the revelation of his emancipation carried him up through the maze to the streets above. A few of the parade performers still remained, twirling soundlessly and beating dumb drums, their voiceless mouths moving deliriously. Ernesto stood, amidst this abstract mime, and prepared to face his tormentors and liberate his debts, to begin anew in his city.
The thundering beat of the hooves and the smell of paraffin were wasted on Ernesto, but as they grew closer he felt their rhythmic vibrations under his feet. He turned, evenly and without trepidation and stood boldly as an inky wave of stallions flecked with fire crashed over him, their fury pressing him to the ground, the yells of their masters inaudible as they called to the people announcing the uprising that they had for so long waited for. Rounding up their comrades, they celebrated a triumphant entry through the gates of the city.
As he came to, he prised his eyes open to see a slither of cobbled street before him, his vision obscured by debris.Disfigured images of The Beloved leered back at him from torn posters strewn across the pavement. His neck creaked and his vision blurred. His torso was caked in blood and his ribcage exposed. His right arm hung limp against his side, its fingers crushed together in a swollen mass. Despite all this, he felt no pain. Lifting himself awkwardly to his feet he surveyed his desolate surroundings. On the hill rising above the city he saw the palace, licked by flames that threatened to tear down the night’s sky, as the stars retreated into the distance. He felt his body lighten as he was struck with the thought that, after thirteen years under the rule of The Beloved, his country might be its own again.
Entering the palace gates, he saw the entire city had gathered in a state of reverence, a wild celebration of independence.The Liberation Front had stormed the capital and seized the palace. The soldiers of The Beloved surrendered with compliance and led the victors to their narcissistic despot who, stripped of his dignity, now swung from a rope that dangled from the tower of his chambers. Ernesto, his head light, dived deeper into the epicentre of the crowd. His questions fell on deaf ears as he asked after the General, his touch ignored as he fought for attention. Isolated in his silent world, he scanned the walls of the palace and found what he had been looking for. On the other side, awkward and grimacing on the end of a spear, lit by the flames of torches, was the head the General. For the first time in along while, Ernesto felt a moment of pure joy, a heady mix of rapture and abandonment as his burdens disappeared.
It was then that Ernesto Drangosch saw the glint of a bronze spider from the corner of his eye and felt an arm – firm yet mottled with age – link through his left and then another his right. As his identical companions led him away from his world and into theirs, it occurred to him that his final gamble had been rather misguided.
Jemma Foster is a writer and artist, founder of Wild Alchemy Lab, Mama Xanadu and Semantica Productions.
By Jemma Foster
Jemma Foster
‘Leiurusquinquestriatus. The deathstalker scorpion,’ the croupier announced.‘Player five dies in this roulette round. Gentlemen, please collect your bets.’
Anxiety cramped his body. His gut tightened as his heart quickened, its beat the harbinger of his fate. Draining the last of his drink, the gambling man nervously stole a glance in the direction of the ringside box. Seated beside The Beloved was the General, the fleshy ripples of his stomach cascading over the gallery. He leaned forward to inhale the acrid fear of the desperate men beneath him, to many of whom he had preached his gambling creed long ago, assisting their prayers until they were at his mercy.He returned Ernesto Drangosch’s gaze by waving a black handkerchief – the final call for debts unpaid. Punishment was death and Ernesto could feel the wings of the vultures beat against his cheeks as they circled above.
A cloaked child-waiter approached, his gait marred by the onset of rickets.
‘Pint of sea, sir?’
‘Is there any telephone?’Ernesto choked, the humid air working its way into the fibres of his lungs.
‘As you wish.’ Bowing, the child revealed a flash of porcelain skin. Deprived of natural light it was the untainted colour of innocence preferred by The Beloved for the flesh of his children. As the city was in celebration, the stakes were high enough for the final round to delay his sentence a while longer, but the very last of Ernesto’s borrowed money had gone on the previous round. Nothing else was his, save the promise of death. Ernesto watched the cockroaches at his feet as they weaved their scavenger’s paths, leaving behind abstract sketches in the dust. With a ceremonial gravity, he knelt down and began to untie his shoes.
‘What can I get for these bridges?’ he said, handing the shoes to the bookman to inspect.
‘Rhino hide,’ the gaunt man replied, impressed. ‘Enough to enter the game, but the bet will be slim.’
‘Give me what you can,’ Ernesto pleaded.
Fingering the coins, Ernesto watched as the players were brought back into the ring and arranged in a circle. Standing on stools, nooses were tied around each of their necks. The true length of each rope was obscured– two would fall short, hanging the men sufficiently to kill them, while the rest would be long enough to grant survival. Ernesto put the culmination of his life’s worth down on his chosen player to die so that he himself might have a chance to live.
The awkward shadow of the child returned again with his telephone, the amber liquid placed on his table along with a complimentary copy of Special Teachings of Our Leader The Beloved, Volume 346. The hungry crowd shifted impatiently in their seats, craning their heads as they vied for a better view. Ernesto felt the familiar burn of his faith coursing through his veins as the croupier assembled the children – ‘kickers’ – around the circle of players.
The gong sounded and all eyes turned to the ring, the stench of anticipation of his fellow gamblers was as intoxicating as it was repellent. The world around him contracted and Ernesto felt the gravity of his fate gnawing at the marrow of his bones. ‘All bets are off,’ called the croupier. ‘And now for the song of Our Leader Beloved, in celebration of his quarter-year birthday.’
Our Saviour, Leader Beloved
Your flock salutes you
On this, your special day…
Ernesto Drangosch eyed his player, skin pallid and eyes blackened with a resolve peculiar to the enslaved. The pin grazed the record on the gramophone, static working its way through the ancient speakers as the incongruous melody of a gypsy love song flooded the arena.
The Beloved clapped his hands and the kickers began to dance, circling the unfortunate players. The music increased steadily in tempo, with each circle the crowd jigging in frenzied excitement as the children whirled, their heels smacking against the stage. Ernesto tapped to the beat as he rocked in his chair, a furious desire for his player’s end driving him to the edge of his seat. The hem of the children’s cloaks twirled until the needle parted from the record, scratching death’s path and suddenly the children kicked the stools. The sound of wood splitting and limbs crashing to the floor masked the distinctive snapping of the vertebrae of the men who now dangled from the ceiling, faces clown-like and their feet quietly twitching – death’s metronome heralding the last of their breaths.
The gambling man clutched at his heart as it plummeted to his bowels, registering his player’s survival and his own impending death. TheGeneral’s men, smelling blood, descended from the gallery towards Ernesto, forcing him out of his paralysis. Felling a path through the bodies of the crowd, he made for the chaos of the street above, his pupils retreating desperately as he was met with the glaring sunlight and the heat of the day knocked the air from his lungs.
The parade was underway for The Beloved’s birthday – a garish display of colour, brazen against the crumbling façade of the buildings and a city long starved of joy. The false scent of roast hog pumped from vents into the air as women wheeled dusty carts piled high with glass figs and sugared paper corn that not even the ants could feast upon. The performers were a vibrant mess of limbs and painted faces and he felt the drummers beating with his heart as if to mock its numbered toll. He crawled through the legs of dancers, losing the General’s men and immersing himself in the tide of circus freaks. The distant drone of the cicadas rose to a deafening pitch as they appeared on the horizon, a torturous plague of trumpeters as old as the regime, buried underground for thirteen years they had come of age today to tour the skies. The soles of his feet torn and bloody, Ernesto slipped into the underbelly of the city, spiralling down beneath the streets into a web of shacks and the empty promise of salvation. Navigating a sinuous path, he found himself in another world that knew nothing of its sister above. Shapes danced, colours yawned and shards of light pierced his vision; sounds of days long gone strummed against his ears and as his feet carried him further down, the fingers of whores tickled him and hunched old men whispered incoherent tales. Forbidden words were scrawled across walls depicting the forgotten outside world – its wonders and temptations attributed to the mundane, trapped in the bizarre language of The Beloved.
Rounding a corner, he was met with an alley of signs offering bargain kidneys, discount courage and the loan of hope. Sellers called out to him, pleading for his custom. Closing down sale, everything must go – two-for-one on selected parts. Guilty conscience? Look no further! Ernesto paused for breath outside Natalia Moron de Diaz –Fine dealer of souls and other faculties. Standing in the shop window stood an amber-haired beauty who halted his heart. With nothing left to guide him, his spirit shattered, he followed her beckoning finger, crawling on his hands and knees to enter a wooden trap door that led to a narrow passageway. He chased her small shadow as it ducked and dived through a network of tunnels until they emerged into a capacious warehouse, a library of jars. The walls were lined with clear glass vessels, filled with unidentifiable objects bearing tentacles and fingers that were, on closer inspection, uniquely deformed foetuses. Nestled amongst them were forms pulsing with the sublime lights of the auroras and emitting a delicate hum. Racks of test tubes hung from the ceiling – a rainbow of pigments linked by a system of levers and pulleys. Sitting herself at a large desk that swamped her petite frame, Natalia fixed her eyes on his.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Yes please, a tele–.’
‘No need for that, down here we call a plane a plane, a fork a fork.’ Pouring him a generous measure of rum, the soul trader allowed her eyes to evaluate the broken man before her. ‘I struggle to imagine what, if anything, you have to offer but please, enlighten me.’
‘What would you take?’
‘You are likely lacking in foresight, reason and self-awareness. There is perhaps a residue of dignity inside, or self-worth lurking in the shadows but certainly not enough to warrant exploration.’
Ernesto failed to respond, disabled by his awe of the woman before him and absorbed in a state of despair.
‘All is not lost, though,’ she continued. ‘Are all your senses in tact? We purchase up to but not including the sixth, if you qualify for intuition we might be able to work something out, though I imagine a lack of it is just what got you in such dire straits.’
He considered his immediate senses and reasoned that sight was essential, while taste and touch delivered the greatest pleasure.
‘What would I get for hearing and smell?’
‘We’ll have to run some tests, but I would estimate around7,000 golds.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Market price. There’s a sizable deaf list but not much for smell. How much do you need?’
‘30,000.’
Natalia let her head fall back and let out a loud, guttural laugh. ‘How are your kidneys?’ A bony finger jabbed at his back.
‘Not for sale.’
‘Well, there are a few faculties we purchase.’
‘Faculties?’
‘Fear, honour, hope, inspiration, euphoria...you got any of those?’
Ernesto was struck by the notion of trading fear – it was nothing but a hindrance and its loss would be his gain.
‘How much for fear?’
Natalia produced a large abacus and slid the coloured beads back and forth. ‘That will bring you up to 13,000 but you’re still falling short.’ She closed her eyes briefly in thought. ‘You dream much?’
The gambling man shook his head, it had been many years since he had truly slept at night, let alone dreamt.
Disappearing into a drawer, Natalia produced a large file caked in a layer of dust, and began to sift through the papers inside.
‘I’ve not done one of these in a while but it is a fairly straightforward procedure.’
Ernesto drew up a chair to face Natalia. He could see that one of her eyes was the colour of milk, its pupil drowning in the opaque pool of its iris.
‘Here we go,’ she said, placing a contract in front ofErnesto.
Pawn Your Soul
‘Depending on the strength of the results, we should be able to get you up to that 30,000.’
Natalia ushered Ernesto to the corner of the room where a large metal contraption, consisting of a bed and a web of tubing and jars, loomed ominously. There were, he noticed, a disconcerting number of needles, ranging in length and width.
‘This is where we’ll extract your hearing, smell and fear. These you understand are non-refundable and we do not accept liability for damages arising from complications as a result of the procedure as this is deemed to be the fault of the host,’ she said as the machine whirred into action to illustrate its master’s point.
‘Now,’ she laboured. ‘Your soul remains absolutely yours but will be claimed if full payment of the loan is not received in up to twenty-four weeks. There is of course accumulative interest of seven percent per week.’
‘So provided I pay the debt, nothing happens to it?’
‘Untouched,’ Natalia purred. ‘Unless of course you die before the sum is paid, in which case your soul will be collected by these gentlemen here.’
At the end of her extended digit two men reclined in large armchairs with an ease that implied they had been there for some time.The soul collectors were ancient, their willowy physique mottled with age and tufts of white hair on their thin heads scarcely covered a mesh of purple veins. Battered dark green doctor’s bags rested at their feet and mercenary tools lined the insides of their long cloaks, glinting in the lamplight. One wore a brass monocle that magnified his eye to a perturbing degree with a wire that linked it to a small earpiece - a bronze spider with spindly legs that danced across the lobe. The other man, identical to his neighbour in physique, sported a cranial brace that seemed to hold his head together. As they smiled weakly in unison, Ernesto reasoned with relief that the likelihood of these twins still being alive when he died was rather improbable.
Natalia wrapped Ernesto’s hand around the quill and tapped on the papers before him. The true severity of his decision, the drastic turn his life had been forced to take, could only resonate in part – for he was a man destroyed, a man with nothing left to lose.
After signing on the dotted line, Ernesto slipped into the extraction machine and Natalia set about removing the gambling man’s innermost parts.
On emerging from the cavern, leaving his fear, hearing and smell behind but with a pocket full of gold, it was the stillness that at first confounded Ernesto. The bustle of the streets no longer accompanied by its lively soundtrack – his surroundings distant and strange – yet he felt no fear in his isolating disability, only an appreciation of change. His broken feet were inspired to skip to a different beat and the revelation of his emancipation carried him up through the maze to the streets above. A few of the parade performers still remained, twirling soundlessly and beating dumb drums, their voiceless mouths moving deliriously. Ernesto stood, amidst this abstract mime, and prepared to face his tormentors and liberate his debts, to begin anew in his city.
The thundering beat of the hooves and the smell of paraffin were wasted on Ernesto, but as they grew closer he felt their rhythmic vibrations under his feet. He turned, evenly and without trepidation and stood boldly as an inky wave of stallions flecked with fire crashed over him, their fury pressing him to the ground, the yells of their masters inaudible as they called to the people announcing the uprising that they had for so long waited for. Rounding up their comrades, they celebrated a triumphant entry through the gates of the city.
As he came to, he prised his eyes open to see a slither of cobbled street before him, his vision obscured by debris.Disfigured images of The Beloved leered back at him from torn posters strewn across the pavement. His neck creaked and his vision blurred. His torso was caked in blood and his ribcage exposed. His right arm hung limp against his side, its fingers crushed together in a swollen mass. Despite all this, he felt no pain. Lifting himself awkwardly to his feet he surveyed his desolate surroundings. On the hill rising above the city he saw the palace, licked by flames that threatened to tear down the night’s sky, as the stars retreated into the distance. He felt his body lighten as he was struck with the thought that, after thirteen years under the rule of The Beloved, his country might be its own again.
Entering the palace gates, he saw the entire city had gathered in a state of reverence, a wild celebration of independence.The Liberation Front had stormed the capital and seized the palace. The soldiers of The Beloved surrendered with compliance and led the victors to their narcissistic despot who, stripped of his dignity, now swung from a rope that dangled from the tower of his chambers. Ernesto, his head light, dived deeper into the epicentre of the crowd. His questions fell on deaf ears as he asked after the General, his touch ignored as he fought for attention. Isolated in his silent world, he scanned the walls of the palace and found what he had been looking for. On the other side, awkward and grimacing on the end of a spear, lit by the flames of torches, was the head the General. For the first time in along while, Ernesto felt a moment of pure joy, a heady mix of rapture and abandonment as his burdens disappeared.
It was then that Ernesto Drangosch saw the glint of a bronze spider from the corner of his eye and felt an arm – firm yet mottled with age – link through his left and then another his right. As his identical companions led him away from his world and into theirs, it occurred to him that his final gamble had been rather misguided.
Jemma Foster
‘Leiurusquinquestriatus. The deathstalker scorpion,’ the croupier announced.‘Player five dies in this roulette round. Gentlemen, please collect your bets.’
Anxiety cramped his body. His gut tightened as his heart quickened, its beat the harbinger of his fate. Draining the last of his drink, the gambling man nervously stole a glance in the direction of the ringside box. Seated beside The Beloved was the General, the fleshy ripples of his stomach cascading over the gallery. He leaned forward to inhale the acrid fear of the desperate men beneath him, to many of whom he had preached his gambling creed long ago, assisting their prayers until they were at his mercy.He returned Ernesto Drangosch’s gaze by waving a black handkerchief – the final call for debts unpaid. Punishment was death and Ernesto could feel the wings of the vultures beat against his cheeks as they circled above.
A cloaked child-waiter approached, his gait marred by the onset of rickets.
‘Pint of sea, sir?’
‘Is there any telephone?’Ernesto choked, the humid air working its way into the fibres of his lungs.
‘As you wish.’ Bowing, the child revealed a flash of porcelain skin. Deprived of natural light it was the untainted colour of innocence preferred by The Beloved for the flesh of his children. As the city was in celebration, the stakes were high enough for the final round to delay his sentence a while longer, but the very last of Ernesto’s borrowed money had gone on the previous round. Nothing else was his, save the promise of death. Ernesto watched the cockroaches at his feet as they weaved their scavenger’s paths, leaving behind abstract sketches in the dust. With a ceremonial gravity, he knelt down and began to untie his shoes.
‘What can I get for these bridges?’ he said, handing the shoes to the bookman to inspect.
‘Rhino hide,’ the gaunt man replied, impressed. ‘Enough to enter the game, but the bet will be slim.’
‘Give me what you can,’ Ernesto pleaded.
Fingering the coins, Ernesto watched as the players were brought back into the ring and arranged in a circle. Standing on stools, nooses were tied around each of their necks. The true length of each rope was obscured– two would fall short, hanging the men sufficiently to kill them, while the rest would be long enough to grant survival. Ernesto put the culmination of his life’s worth down on his chosen player to die so that he himself might have a chance to live.
The awkward shadow of the child returned again with his telephone, the amber liquid placed on his table along with a complimentary copy of Special Teachings of Our Leader The Beloved, Volume 346. The hungry crowd shifted impatiently in their seats, craning their heads as they vied for a better view. Ernesto felt the familiar burn of his faith coursing through his veins as the croupier assembled the children – ‘kickers’ – around the circle of players.
The gong sounded and all eyes turned to the ring, the stench of anticipation of his fellow gamblers was as intoxicating as it was repellent. The world around him contracted and Ernesto felt the gravity of his fate gnawing at the marrow of his bones. ‘All bets are off,’ called the croupier. ‘And now for the song of Our Leader Beloved, in celebration of his quarter-year birthday.’
Our Saviour, Leader Beloved
Your flock salutes you
On this, your special day…
Ernesto Drangosch eyed his player, skin pallid and eyes blackened with a resolve peculiar to the enslaved. The pin grazed the record on the gramophone, static working its way through the ancient speakers as the incongruous melody of a gypsy love song flooded the arena.
The Beloved clapped his hands and the kickers began to dance, circling the unfortunate players. The music increased steadily in tempo, with each circle the crowd jigging in frenzied excitement as the children whirled, their heels smacking against the stage. Ernesto tapped to the beat as he rocked in his chair, a furious desire for his player’s end driving him to the edge of his seat. The hem of the children’s cloaks twirled until the needle parted from the record, scratching death’s path and suddenly the children kicked the stools. The sound of wood splitting and limbs crashing to the floor masked the distinctive snapping of the vertebrae of the men who now dangled from the ceiling, faces clown-like and their feet quietly twitching – death’s metronome heralding the last of their breaths.
The gambling man clutched at his heart as it plummeted to his bowels, registering his player’s survival and his own impending death. TheGeneral’s men, smelling blood, descended from the gallery towards Ernesto, forcing him out of his paralysis. Felling a path through the bodies of the crowd, he made for the chaos of the street above, his pupils retreating desperately as he was met with the glaring sunlight and the heat of the day knocked the air from his lungs.
The parade was underway for The Beloved’s birthday – a garish display of colour, brazen against the crumbling façade of the buildings and a city long starved of joy. The false scent of roast hog pumped from vents into the air as women wheeled dusty carts piled high with glass figs and sugared paper corn that not even the ants could feast upon. The performers were a vibrant mess of limbs and painted faces and he felt the drummers beating with his heart as if to mock its numbered toll. He crawled through the legs of dancers, losing the General’s men and immersing himself in the tide of circus freaks. The distant drone of the cicadas rose to a deafening pitch as they appeared on the horizon, a torturous plague of trumpeters as old as the regime, buried underground for thirteen years they had come of age today to tour the skies. The soles of his feet torn and bloody, Ernesto slipped into the underbelly of the city, spiralling down beneath the streets into a web of shacks and the empty promise of salvation. Navigating a sinuous path, he found himself in another world that knew nothing of its sister above. Shapes danced, colours yawned and shards of light pierced his vision; sounds of days long gone strummed against his ears and as his feet carried him further down, the fingers of whores tickled him and hunched old men whispered incoherent tales. Forbidden words were scrawled across walls depicting the forgotten outside world – its wonders and temptations attributed to the mundane, trapped in the bizarre language of The Beloved.
Rounding a corner, he was met with an alley of signs offering bargain kidneys, discount courage and the loan of hope. Sellers called out to him, pleading for his custom. Closing down sale, everything must go – two-for-one on selected parts. Guilty conscience? Look no further! Ernesto paused for breath outside Natalia Moron de Diaz –Fine dealer of souls and other faculties. Standing in the shop window stood an amber-haired beauty who halted his heart. With nothing left to guide him, his spirit shattered, he followed her beckoning finger, crawling on his hands and knees to enter a wooden trap door that led to a narrow passageway. He chased her small shadow as it ducked and dived through a network of tunnels until they emerged into a capacious warehouse, a library of jars. The walls were lined with clear glass vessels, filled with unidentifiable objects bearing tentacles and fingers that were, on closer inspection, uniquely deformed foetuses. Nestled amongst them were forms pulsing with the sublime lights of the auroras and emitting a delicate hum. Racks of test tubes hung from the ceiling – a rainbow of pigments linked by a system of levers and pulleys. Sitting herself at a large desk that swamped her petite frame, Natalia fixed her eyes on his.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Yes please, a tele–.’
‘No need for that, down here we call a plane a plane, a fork a fork.’ Pouring him a generous measure of rum, the soul trader allowed her eyes to evaluate the broken man before her. ‘I struggle to imagine what, if anything, you have to offer but please, enlighten me.’
‘What would you take?’
‘You are likely lacking in foresight, reason and self-awareness. There is perhaps a residue of dignity inside, or self-worth lurking in the shadows but certainly not enough to warrant exploration.’
Ernesto failed to respond, disabled by his awe of the woman before him and absorbed in a state of despair.
‘All is not lost, though,’ she continued. ‘Are all your senses in tact? We purchase up to but not including the sixth, if you qualify for intuition we might be able to work something out, though I imagine a lack of it is just what got you in such dire straits.’
He considered his immediate senses and reasoned that sight was essential, while taste and touch delivered the greatest pleasure.
‘What would I get for hearing and smell?’
‘We’ll have to run some tests, but I would estimate around7,000 golds.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Market price. There’s a sizable deaf list but not much for smell. How much do you need?’
‘30,000.’
Natalia let her head fall back and let out a loud, guttural laugh. ‘How are your kidneys?’ A bony finger jabbed at his back.
‘Not for sale.’
‘Well, there are a few faculties we purchase.’
‘Faculties?’
‘Fear, honour, hope, inspiration, euphoria...you got any of those?’
Ernesto was struck by the notion of trading fear – it was nothing but a hindrance and its loss would be his gain.
‘How much for fear?’
Natalia produced a large abacus and slid the coloured beads back and forth. ‘That will bring you up to 13,000 but you’re still falling short.’ She closed her eyes briefly in thought. ‘You dream much?’
The gambling man shook his head, it had been many years since he had truly slept at night, let alone dreamt.
Disappearing into a drawer, Natalia produced a large file caked in a layer of dust, and began to sift through the papers inside.
‘I’ve not done one of these in a while but it is a fairly straightforward procedure.’
Ernesto drew up a chair to face Natalia. He could see that one of her eyes was the colour of milk, its pupil drowning in the opaque pool of its iris.
‘Here we go,’ she said, placing a contract in front ofErnesto.
Pawn Your Soul
‘Depending on the strength of the results, we should be able to get you up to that 30,000.’
Natalia ushered Ernesto to the corner of the room where a large metal contraption, consisting of a bed and a web of tubing and jars, loomed ominously. There were, he noticed, a disconcerting number of needles, ranging in length and width.
‘This is where we’ll extract your hearing, smell and fear. These you understand are non-refundable and we do not accept liability for damages arising from complications as a result of the procedure as this is deemed to be the fault of the host,’ she said as the machine whirred into action to illustrate its master’s point.
‘Now,’ she laboured. ‘Your soul remains absolutely yours but will be claimed if full payment of the loan is not received in up to twenty-four weeks. There is of course accumulative interest of seven percent per week.’
‘So provided I pay the debt, nothing happens to it?’
‘Untouched,’ Natalia purred. ‘Unless of course you die before the sum is paid, in which case your soul will be collected by these gentlemen here.’
At the end of her extended digit two men reclined in large armchairs with an ease that implied they had been there for some time.The soul collectors were ancient, their willowy physique mottled with age and tufts of white hair on their thin heads scarcely covered a mesh of purple veins. Battered dark green doctor’s bags rested at their feet and mercenary tools lined the insides of their long cloaks, glinting in the lamplight. One wore a brass monocle that magnified his eye to a perturbing degree with a wire that linked it to a small earpiece - a bronze spider with spindly legs that danced across the lobe. The other man, identical to his neighbour in physique, sported a cranial brace that seemed to hold his head together. As they smiled weakly in unison, Ernesto reasoned with relief that the likelihood of these twins still being alive when he died was rather improbable.
Natalia wrapped Ernesto’s hand around the quill and tapped on the papers before him. The true severity of his decision, the drastic turn his life had been forced to take, could only resonate in part – for he was a man destroyed, a man with nothing left to lose.
After signing on the dotted line, Ernesto slipped into the extraction machine and Natalia set about removing the gambling man’s innermost parts.
On emerging from the cavern, leaving his fear, hearing and smell behind but with a pocket full of gold, it was the stillness that at first confounded Ernesto. The bustle of the streets no longer accompanied by its lively soundtrack – his surroundings distant and strange – yet he felt no fear in his isolating disability, only an appreciation of change. His broken feet were inspired to skip to a different beat and the revelation of his emancipation carried him up through the maze to the streets above. A few of the parade performers still remained, twirling soundlessly and beating dumb drums, their voiceless mouths moving deliriously. Ernesto stood, amidst this abstract mime, and prepared to face his tormentors and liberate his debts, to begin anew in his city.
The thundering beat of the hooves and the smell of paraffin were wasted on Ernesto, but as they grew closer he felt their rhythmic vibrations under his feet. He turned, evenly and without trepidation and stood boldly as an inky wave of stallions flecked with fire crashed over him, their fury pressing him to the ground, the yells of their masters inaudible as they called to the people announcing the uprising that they had for so long waited for. Rounding up their comrades, they celebrated a triumphant entry through the gates of the city.
As he came to, he prised his eyes open to see a slither of cobbled street before him, his vision obscured by debris.Disfigured images of The Beloved leered back at him from torn posters strewn across the pavement. His neck creaked and his vision blurred. His torso was caked in blood and his ribcage exposed. His right arm hung limp against his side, its fingers crushed together in a swollen mass. Despite all this, he felt no pain. Lifting himself awkwardly to his feet he surveyed his desolate surroundings. On the hill rising above the city he saw the palace, licked by flames that threatened to tear down the night’s sky, as the stars retreated into the distance. He felt his body lighten as he was struck with the thought that, after thirteen years under the rule of The Beloved, his country might be its own again.
Entering the palace gates, he saw the entire city had gathered in a state of reverence, a wild celebration of independence.The Liberation Front had stormed the capital and seized the palace. The soldiers of The Beloved surrendered with compliance and led the victors to their narcissistic despot who, stripped of his dignity, now swung from a rope that dangled from the tower of his chambers. Ernesto, his head light, dived deeper into the epicentre of the crowd. His questions fell on deaf ears as he asked after the General, his touch ignored as he fought for attention. Isolated in his silent world, he scanned the walls of the palace and found what he had been looking for. On the other side, awkward and grimacing on the end of a spear, lit by the flames of torches, was the head the General. For the first time in along while, Ernesto felt a moment of pure joy, a heady mix of rapture and abandonment as his burdens disappeared.
It was then that Ernesto Drangosch saw the glint of a bronze spider from the corner of his eye and felt an arm – firm yet mottled with age – link through his left and then another his right. As his identical companions led him away from his world and into theirs, it occurred to him that his final gamble had been rather misguided.
Jemma Foster is a writer and artist, founder of Wild Alchemy Lab, Mama Xanadu and Semantica Productions.