James Hutchins (0roborus) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-08-16 01:47:00 |
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Entry tags: | james hutchins, npc |
The First Ride
Who: James, NPC Arnette
What: A Flashback
When: December 1998
Where: Near South Sandia Peak, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Rating: Some Graphic Imagery
Arnette Ashburn gave birth to James Hutchins at a campground near Coyote Springs, Nevada, in the company of a coven of witches she’d known for 10 months, one of whom was his father, Sam. She was clairvoyant, a seer. It was a rare gift for a human, but one better bestowed upon someone else. For all that Arnette could see, she had little discipline for learning and her primary mental state was ‘frightened doe in the headlights’. Sam was a temporary touchstone, one that lasted longer than most, but Arnette was destined to be a nomad. When it came time for her to go, she left her three-year-old son in Las Vegas and resumed her pattern: a flash of divine inspiration would lead her to a new town and, eventually, a new man. It didn’t matter if he was an investor, drug runner, a gambler, or a religious zealot. Arnette would latch onto whoever lent her vague visions a purpose and live a quiet life of acquiescence, until the next inspiration arrived or her use had run its course.
James loved her and Sam encouraged his son to go on holidays and build a bond with her. The older James grew, the more he craved the freedom and adventure of those solitary journeys and the brief windows they offered into faraway towns and other kinds of lives. Arnette was sweet but frail, a mother without any inclination of how to be one, and the minute he walked into her door and set his bag on the floor, she would embrace him and let her strong son take the wheel for a while.
In the winter of 1998, when James was fifteen years old, Arnette rented a one-bedroom unit in a multi-family house in southeast Albuquerque, not far from the Sandia mountains. Her income came from a smattering of patrons in and out of her kitchen, where she read tea leaves and palms in exchange for food or cash. James crashed on a Navajo-print couch and watched the comings and goings in silence, a pair of headphones playing Death’s The Sound of Perseverance around his neck, a thumb under his bottom lip when it was hardest not to say anything, his notebooks in messy stacks around him.
He’d been there a week when Arnette began to struggle.
The summer prior, in Phoenix, she had been happy, the clearest he’d seen her, pretending to channel ghosts for a local quack who sold people promises of reunions with dead relatives and better health through spiritual cleansing. But then she began waking up in cold, drenching sweats, sometimes heaving her stomach’s contents into a pot he put beside her bed. One night he brought her a wet washcloth and she told him about a woman who called herself the Emissary. What followed was the blackest period of terror in his mother’s life, a sense that she’d stumbled across something dangerous for the first time, not an ephemeral vision of the future, but a being from hell or somewhere like it. Phoenix just wasn’t meant to last, she told him; when she packed up and left the city, the problem faded in her rear view mirror.
Six months later, she was unwell again in Albuquerque, but this time was different. There was no waiting for sleep to come before the fear set in. It was with Arnette all the time, a negative energy field around her that made her twitchy and unfocused, unable to see anything but darkness in people’s palms. She couldn’t be trusted to feed herself. She burned things on the stove, stared sightlessly at the bathroom mirror, sat in her parked Ford Taurus and let it idle until the car overheated. When she was too tired to carry it anymore, she told James about the thing she’d seen. The thing that was trying to get out of the cave. Arnette traced a simple design on a piece of loose-leaf paper, an inverted triangle with three lines at its center and a wavy line that passed through them. She pressed the paper into her only son’s hands and told him to go deep into the cave, as far as he dared to go, and paint the symbol on the rock so the thing could not pass through to their side. She told James he’d have to make a sacrifice. As he started to take the piece of paper, Arnette snatched at the corner until he thought it might rip.
“Don’t look into its eyes, Jay,” she begged.
He promised her that he wouldn’t and he began to practice drawing the symbol, first with his eyes open and then with them shut, until he could replicate it.
Up to that point, James had only done white magic, the kind his father taught him. He had learned about incantations and the raw materials he could harvest from the earth. He knew how to make offerings and ask for strength from the gods to bless a spell. He knew that a good witch never forced magic’s hand. Symbols and blood rites were a world away. So when he trapped the squirrel outside Arnette’s house and slit open its body, he was sick watching it die, and he had no reference point for how little blood it would give him, or that he’d have to slice open his own arm to fill the old jelly jar he found under his mother’s kitchen sink.
On the day of the ritual, he spent all morning hiking to a place indicated on a topographical map. At noon, he stood alone at the mouth of a narrow cave near South Sandia Peak, adjusting his backpack and getting his bearings. James took a couple of breaths of clean air and extended his arm. His fingers touched the wall of granite. It was warm from the sunlight. It felt solid to him, the same earth he trusted. So he shielded his eyes and began to walk, darkness looming the farther he went into the cave, sunlight dwindling at his back. The path was narrow and littered with rocks. Lizards darted up the walls as his boots navigated the tricky footing and disrupted the ecology. He picked a careful route into the cave, mindful not to twist an ankle, until the ambient temperature dropped and a strange feeling made the hair prickle on the back of his neck. He remembered Arnette’s warning: “Don’t look into its eyes”. James closed them tight but kept up his slow progress, shoulders and head bumping against rocky protrusions. The air began to taste like dust and damp.
James caught himself when a rock slipped out from under his boot and bounced a long distance into nothing. Shaking with adrenaline and starting to sweat, he eased the backpack from his shoulders and fumbled with the zipper pull, trying to ‘see’ how to open it by memory. His fingers found the jelly jar wrapped in a t-shirt and he unrolled it and unscrewed the lid. The young spellcaster returned his hand to the rock wall and blindly explored it until he found a broad, flat spot. He dipped two of his fingers into the solution of strong-smelling blood and began to paint the symbol from memory.
As he finished the last mark, he imagined the creature his mother had seen, and he said the words he’d practiced on the way to the cave: “I forbid you from passing through this gate.”
There was a whoosh of cold, damp air from the pit beyond his foot, ruffling his hair and his shirt. Then a buzz behind his ear, the unexpected sound of a fly. It landed on his neck and began to tiptoe its tiny legs up his neck and into the cavern of his ear. James held still. Then came a second fly at his nostril. A third traipsing along the sealed line of his mouth. They brought a staggering odor of decay. James turned in the cramped space and did what he promised his mother he wouldn’t do.
He opened his eyes.
There was only the absolute darkness of the hollow space underground, a darkness that seemed to press on him with suffocating force. James blinked but he could no longer tell if his eyes were open or shut.
Then, from that void, he heard a voice that was not quite human but trying to be, telling him that it had been waiting... Not behind the veil, wanting to break through, as his mother had said, but hibernating in that breach of granite and limestone, waiting for someone to draw its seal and welcome it home. An entity that now coiled around him like a worm, cold and segmented and somehow wet. There was a sensation of having his head forced back and James saw that it was not completely dark, after all, but that his pupils had yet to adjust, because he found himself staring into a pair of wet, black eyes.
The entity opened its mouth and howled, expelling its consciousness into a screaming boy. It flowed into every corner of him, a demon finding a host to take for a walk into the world.
It was a connection forged. The first of many times James would open a door and let something take a ride.