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By Rasputtin Szczepanski
Mf Ff 1st bd best ds Mdom Fdom reluc teen tort
Introduction
This is my first attempt at a novel. I’m always seeking criticism, especially with grammar or story structure. I would love to hear what you think! Email me at Rasputtin_szczepanski@yahoo.com.
This story is open source. Feel free to write or draw your own stories using the characters or the lore. Artwork or music videos, I would love to see the story grow collaboratively. There shall never be a copyright on Shahala.
Chapter 1
My tribes, my children, they pass down their history through songs and tales, told around a warm fire, going from one generation to the next. These stories pass like embers from the fire into the air, changing until their light dies out and the ember floats through the air dark and unrecognizable from the hot flames that it was born.
I alone possess the arcane knowledge of the written word. I want the whole story told. I want the truthful story and not some twisted legend that makes me out to be some sort of heroine, some larger than life goddess. Truth be told, I don’t mind those stories so much, it feeds the ego but I think this version of my story is important as well though. This isn’t to ensure my name survives through the ages. I know it already will. This isn’t to proclaim my glory. The only glory is the peace and harmony that resulted from my rise to power. This is for the girl out there who thinks she’s worthless, for the girl that thinks she will never find love. This is for that one girl who was as I was, hopeless and alone. I hope that someday that girl reads it and thinks, “If the great Elizabeth of the Wolves could do that, then perhaps I can too.” So this is my autobiography.
Waji mjassaik. Way back, when I was a young teen, I was not only just Elizabeth, I was just Liz. I was named after my Mother, the first Elizabeth Hall. I just called her Mom. We helped differentiate the two of us by referring to Mom as Beth and me as Liz. Mom was awesome. She was smart, witty and a loving mother. Her love was archeology, history and horrible English comedy. She had graduated with honors from the Naval Academy, drove around big warships for awhile, got out, got her Masters in archeology and started travelling the world digging up the past. She met my father on a dig in Thailand. She got pregnant and had my sister Claire. They decided that digging temples out of the mud in Thailand was no place for a baby and settled in Maine. My father went into insurance and my mom managed to get a job with the State government, a job in which she basically ensured that new construction sites were not digging up old Indian burial grounds. Then she got pregnant with me.
My sister Claire, who is five years older than me, remembers our father but I don’t, because he left before I was born. Mom doesn’t talk about it much but Claire has been able to get out of her that she caught him cheating and then one day, he left divorce papers on her bed and disappeared. Claire thinks he went back to Thailand and says that sometimes Mom will get money in the mail, although she says it’s never enough to pay how much he owes in child support. Just enough to clear his conscience perhaps.
I never consciously missed him. How could I? I never even knew him. I don’t think I ever wanted a father or recognized that it was a missing component in my life. Subconsciously, that’s another matter.
When I was a teenager, Mom bought this really old house in Portland, Maine. It was over 200 years old and sat at the top of Munjoy Hill on the Eastern part of the city. It overlooked the bay and the old fort that resided out in the middle of the bay. It looked like a plain old house to me but Mom was thrilled with it. She spent her weekends fixing it up and then when it was refurbished she moved us in. Neither Clair nor I were thrilled. Clair had already graduated high school but I was moved to an entirely new school, from Augusta to the more urban Portland (as urban as it comes in Maine.) To escape, Clair joined the Navy, leaving me and Mom alone in that big creepy old house.
I was also alone at school. She at least waited until summer to move us in but I was in a school where I didn’t know anyone. I wasn’t only the new kid, I was also awkward. I wore thick glasses and didn’t know how to dress to impress. I had flat, bad hair and my boobs were too big, at least by teenager standards. I didn’t play sports and I was terribly shy. I was the classic introvert. I was the female geek. It’s something that never even dawned on me until I was removed from my junior high school friends, those children who I grew up from kindergarten with, my entire life as I knew it and plopped down into a new fishbowl.
Sitting alone at lunch period during that first day is still one of the worst moments of my life. It’s funny how what matters changes as you get older. How I would relish time by myself now. Then it was different. I was mortified. It seemed to me that everyone had friends but me. I became acutely aware that the “Harry Potter” t-shirt I was wearing was horribly out of place. Suitable for junior high school but definitely not for high school. There were girls actually wearing dresses to school. It was fall in Maine, the morning frost was appearing but they made up for the dropping temperatures with these horrible Ugh boots. I was just grateful I didn’t wear my “Star Wars” retro shirt with Chewbacca on it. It was one of my Mom’s favorite movies. She introduced it to me and I fell in love with it. I was no Princess Lei though.
It was on that first day that I met my arch-nemesis, Kris. Do any teenager girls get through high-school without having one? Cruelty is bottled in the spite and hatred in teenage girls. Her and her followers passed me in the hallway that first day and Kris delivered her first stinging blow: “Whoa, nice shirt.” They all laughed at her as they headed to their next class. If it wasn’t for that chance for her to belittle a stranger and raise her value in the eyes of her followers, I would have been invisible to all of them.
Kris McDine was pretty for her age. I take great pleasure now, knowing that she is almost 300 pounds. Back then though she was two years away from being the captain of the cheerleading squad, hot and blonde. In Maine, the most popular girls didn’t go into cheerleading. Those went to girl’s lacrosse. The cheerleaders had their own clique that provided her with the support and fed her insecurities. They were the blue collar girls, not destined for college like the lacrosse ones. They were the ones who dated the guys in shop, the boys who lived down in Kennedy Park, the lair of the bad boys of Portland. Those same boys who would continue to live in Kennedy Park for the rest of their lives, unless a stint in jail removed them from the environment.
Those first few days were rough. It would have been worse if my Mom wasn’t there. I think she recognized how hard it was for me. I could see the worry on her face and I felt guilty about that. She told me to hang in there and encouraged me to join a club. That was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted to escape from school as quick as possible and hide in my room, play video games on my Xbox or my computer. My mom worked hard to draw me out of that isolation cell, whether it was for dinner or to watch a movie. She knew how to make me laugh and she liked a lot what I liked. She got sucked into the same odd anime movies and series that I did. We missed Claire but near the end of her high school years, Claire brought a lot of drama into the house with various boyfriends, most from Kennedy Park or near Dearing Park, another forgotten neighborhood, living in the shadows of the recession, surviving on hillbilly heroin. Once Claire started dating a Somali. I guess she thought she was rebelling. Unfortunate for her, Mom broke that paradigm. The Somali was the one boyfriend that Mom really got into. He spent a lot of time talking to Mom and that was enough for Claire to dump him and move on to someone that was working his way to a life of cigarettes and welfare checks.
Clair thrived in the Navy. Mom was grateful that Claire was getting a new direction on life and I was appreciative of the calm that it brought into the house. I loved my sister but I didn’t like the tension that her drama brought to her and Mom.
The house was old but it had a beautiful location on a hill overlooking the bay. Across the street was a large park with a steep hill that I could sled when it snowed. The hill was a hair raising ride on a sled that ended in a patch of thick bushes with thorns. The occasional granite rock jutting out of the grass made it only for the most fearless. The house had three bedrooms, two bathrooms and this crazy deep basement. The stairs going down were steep and dangerous, wooden, unstable. The walls of the basement had been covered in brick. Mom decided that she liked it for her study and spent long periods of time down there working through her books. I went down a few times to bug her about various things. She was constantly refurbishing it. She had put down a cement floor and over that a large throw rug. No matter how much she tried to turn it into a comfortable office, large, tarantula sized spiders still roamed free throughout the room. She had a large desk, three huge bookcases full of books, and crates of stuff pushed into corners. Against one wall was a treadmill that was more often used as a coat rack. She often had old artifacts scattered in drawers and on the desk, or hanging from the wall that she had dug up at sites. Once while down there, she showed me some arrowheads that she found in the ground of the basement when she was putting in the cement. She told me that the Native American’s had considered the hill on which our house stood as a spiritual center so there were all kinds of artifacts lying around.
An historical artifact is a hell of a thing. You hold it in your hand and you think about the last person to hold it and to use it. Whoever did stood on this hill, back when there were no homes, no streets, no snowplows. What did they think about? Was there some girl like me that had an arch-nemeses bitch that looked down on her or was getting eaten by a wolf the worst of her problems?
She had drawings on her desk that I pointed to and asked about. The drawings were of a hexagon with strange sharp shapes in the center that seemed to make up a flying dragon. Its mouth was open and depending on how you looked at it, it could seem like it was breathing fire. It was a beautiful symbol, simple but powerful. Mom said that it was something they found here when building a parking lot at the bottom of the hill. I said “I didn’t know Native American’s believed in dragons.” She thought that maybe it was a Viking symbol that could have been adopted by the Native Americans. She loved when I was interested in her work. It was her great true love. She showed me a copy of page of a book of handwritten notes. She said “This is from an Elks lodge from 1910.” She pointed at a drawing of the same hexagon symbol. Then she hit a key on her computer, pulling the monitor out of power save and she opened some pictures. It was from a museum somewhere. It was the hexagon symbol. She said “This is from Pakistan. They think it’s about as old as the one found here.”
“How did it get all the way from Pakistan to Maine?” I asked.
“That is the big question. This item is from the museum. They think it represents something called the Cintamani…that’s a magic gem said to grant wishes.” She smiled that goofy smile of hers and raised her eyebrows as if to suggest she was Indiana Jones.
She pulled out a map. “Look at this.” On it she had marked the southern state of Maine with 10-15 red dots. One corner dot was on Munjoy Hill. “These are all significant Native American sites. We thought at first they were burial grounds, but they seem more spiritual in nature. No bones, but a lot clothing, shoes, weapons. Maybe a place they go to worship. Connect, the dots. What do you see?”
I saw it immediately as she unrolled the map “It looks like the symbol.”
Mom smiled “Creepy, huh?”
“Definitely wild. That has to be a coincidence though. It’s spread too far out” I said. “Who else knows of this?”
“It’s just something I’ve been working on in my spare time. I’ll write a paper about it soon. I just need all my ducks in a row before I pull the trigger on this. It is too crazy to be anything more than a coincidence.”
She put down the paper, pushed down her reading glasses and looked at me. “Isn’t this about the time you ditch your homework and start playing video games with Eric?”
I let my mouth drop open. “Mom! Are you listening in on me?”
“You’re so loud, how can I not hear?”
I was slowly making friends at school. One of them was Eric. Eric was one of those kids who didn’t exist in the cool kids’ camp or the geeks. He was just a nice guy, handsome and more mature than his age. He sat next to me in English class. We both liked video games. After a casual conversation about Xbox games, he invited me to play on with him online that night. We started with one first-person-shooter and then went on to other games. We also played World of Warcraft on the computer. I transferred to his server and he invited me to his guild, a collection of online friends that would quest and adventure together. His favorite game was an Ultimate Fighting game on the Xbox. I wasn’t so much into that but I went out and bought it. When I played with him, it was a lot of fun. He had a way to make me laugh and before long, I was actually beating him sometimes. This was our shared joke, our common experience. Unfortunately for me, Eric was also someone that the dark queen Kris liked. I think he saw Kris as out of his league, he never seemed to pick up on the hints she would throw at him. My budding friendship with Eric turned me from invisible to visible with a target on my back for Kris. I knew by the ice daggers coming out of her eyes that I was a threat to her and her need to bag him.
It wasn’t long after that when Kris and her friends would call me the “fat slut.” I wasn’t even fat but I guess being short with the big boobs and lacking the pencil frame figure that they had was enough to label me as fat. I was a virgin so the “slut” label was even more ridiculous. It is amazing to me now how those words were so effective in destroying any happiness I might have had. The words would sear themselves into my consciousness, repeating themselves again and again. When I looked in the mirror, I actually thought I was fat. I would turn down deserts that my Mom would make, even her delicious pumpkin pie and began to run on her treadmill at night while she worked at her desk.
I’m still convinced to this day that Eric saw nothing remotely attractive about me. He was just impressed that a girl likes to play those types of games. Guys develop slower than girls. The great mating game wasn’t something that appealed to him yet. For me, it was an entirely different story. I was at that age where I was desperate for love, for the great romance of my life and Eric filled many fantasies that flickered through my mind both in class and at night when I lay alone in my bed.
Mom taught me about the birds and the bees so those fantasies had some significant substance. Sexuality was a subject she was way too comfortable with. She had me blushing and telling her to “zip it” with some of her comments while we were hanging out. Especially her waxing poetically on how she wasn’t “getting it hard” anymore. That would get me to yell “Gross Mom!” and leave the room. My real education though, the training that brought me to the level above how flowers are pollinated, was when my Mom was holed up in her basement and I explored the world of pornography on the internet in my room. Mom explained the how and why but she never explained how good it felt. It was an anonymous chat with a guy on line that taught me how to touch myself and orgasm. He literally told me step by step how to play with myself. I didn’t have a webcam but he thoroughly enjoyed teaching me that particular skill and was an online stalker until I changed my Yahoo name. I owe him a debt of gratitude though because of how amazing it felt. Better than anything else. Having an orgasm made me forget all the bad things that happened at school. I felt sexy instead of fat, in tune with the world, instead of lonely. It was such a good feeling, that as I grew and explored, I had become very sexual, sometimes masturbating two, three times a day. Then the man ravishing me in my fantasies got a face, and that face was Eric’s.
I would seek out men online to chat dirty too, and I would pretend it was Eric talking to me like that. The filthier it was, the more excited I became. These repeated encounters was quickly molding me and corrupting me. One man told me I was naughty and that he wanted me to bend me over his knee and spank me. I came right then, sitting on my chair, staring at the words on the laptop, thinking of him holding me on his lap, struggling and him slapping my bare ass. I had no idea why I was so turned on by it and it bothered me a bit.
I’m sure Mom would not approve of my virtual sex online with men probably old enough to be my grandfather or my morbid fascination with the constant images of graphic sex that I explored. Perhaps before we moved to Portland, she would have made it a habit to go through my computer and provide a bit of vigilance to protect me from that world. To do so then would require that she left that basement of hers. As time went on, she ventured up out of there less and less. Something kept her secluded in the basement. Work had consumed her like it had never had before.
Then one day she put a lock on the door. I never asked her why but I admit, it did hurt my feelings. Sometimes when I would want to come down and just hang with her, the door would be locked. Sometimes she answered the door, sometimes she didn’t. If she answered it, she would always let me come down. I asked her once why she didn’t answer the door and she said that she had her headphones on and that she didn’t hear. I thought that maybe she was surfing porn. I shuddered at the thought but it didn’t surprise me.
It was one of those numerous things that struck out as odd, but unless with the foresight of future events, you don’t add up all these strange events until much later. For example, in the dead of winter, I came home to find that Mom had a tan and her hair was a bit more bleached than I remembered it in the morning. I called her on that one. She calmly explained that she had gone to a tanning salon. That was definitely odd. Mom wasn’t someone that went to tanning salons. In fact, I recalled times when she openly mocked those that did and said it was worse than smoking cigarettes. I didn’t even know there were tanning salons in Maine. I told her that from now on she was going to be “Tan Mom” and she promised to make more trips so that her skin would get a nice leather like complexion going.
There were days that she had dirt under her fingernails. She either said she was remodeling the basement or working out in the yard. I went out into the small, fenced backyard once and didn’t see much of any yard work. There was a large pile of fresh dirt that was taller than I was sitting just outside the door. There was no hole or really any logical explanation of how it got there.
Then one day she had the hexagon symbol hanging from a leather necklace around her neck. It was about the size of a silver dollar and made of a red stone. I told her “that is awesome! Where did you get that one?”
She said they had dug it up. She was supposed to turn those in to the University of Southern Maine but she kept it. She said she would give it to them after she finished the paper.
Then there was one day when I came home after school. She didn’t seem to be around. Her door was locked and all was quiet. She had left some bags in the kitchen. I had peaked in. She had bought leather pants and a jacket. She came out of her refuge later that night. She looked tired and I noticed gray in her hair, which I have never seen before. She smiled when she saw me and gave me a big hug. She held on to the hug long enough to make it awkward.
“Mom, what’s going on?”
“I…I just missed you,” she said, hugging tighter.
“Are you high?”
She laughed and released me. “Let’s go get a pizza!”
“Mom! You bought leather pants? What the hell is going on?”
“Oh my God. I forgot all about those! I need a beer, bad. Let’s go!”
Weird, right?
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