The Blonde Goddess of Tikka-Tikka
By Chris L. Adams
Written by Chris L. Adams
Artwork by Swendly Benilia
Copyright 2016
All Rights Reserved
Contact information for Swendly:
If you enjoyed Swendly’s creative artwork on the cover of this story, and find yourself in need of similar work, please contact him at:
Swendly Benilia
Character Designer & Illustrator
@ Swendly Design & Illustration
Phone: +31613272685
Email:
[email protected] Portfolio: www.swendly.com
Introduction
Chapter 1: In the Jungle
Chapter 2: Death in the Moonlight
Chapter 3: Village of Stone
Chapter 4: Caged
Chapter 5: Atop the Cliffs
Chapter 6: Food of the Gods
Chapter 7: A Token of Power
Afterward
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Time Frames of Ansen’s life as known
List of Works
Introduction
In keeping with the flavor and intent of the other stories I have written I conceived the idea of a tale heavily influenced by the likes of H. P. Lovecraft, where the frail senses of humanity are called upon to confront nameless entities from other spheres of existence.
Being a fan also of Robert E. Howard who was as adept in his exploration of the Cthulhu mythos as he was in his creation of the Hyborian Age, I always appreciated the way Howard’s characters, when faced with something blasphemous from beyond, rather than running away in fear and horror with their sanity blasted to ruination, they instead put cold steel in their fists and began slaughtering said entities. There is certainly something to be said for the manner in which Lovecraft handled the unnamable - that building of dread and horror of which the Man who was Providence was a noted master; but there’s also something to be said for burying a hatchet in its forehead.
When I was still working on the amorphous ideas that eventually became The Blonde Goddess of Tikka-Tikka I asked my good friend Scott for help in creating an interesting hero. I had the genesis of a huge, hulking bulk of sheer mayhem in mind but none of the personal details that would make him unique. I didn’t want to clone Conan or Tarzan. I wanted something different; and given my fascination with things of the past the guy we created was perfect for this tale.
I do hope you enjoy reading this introductory short story of Ansen Grost, because there is definitely more on the horizon.
Chris
Chapter 1: In the Jungle
Bezilbora, his eyes fixed unflinchingly on the object of his intent focus, walked quietly along a tree limb fifty feet above the matted growth that grew at the feet of an immense acacia.
Above him, in graceful loops, many flowering lianas drooped. These the dark-skinned native automatically swept silently from his path as he advanced along the broad limb of the jungle giant.
His naked feet gave forth no sound as he descended to a lower branch and then crossed into another tree, every step made as silently as a ghost and with scarcely any disturbance of even a single leaf. The group of individuals upon the ground below him remained completely oblivious of his presence.
Ah, he thought, Megrodomigran shall reward me well for this creature.
As well he should.
For the blonde-haired goddess to who’s bizarre and almost supernatural splendor and allure Bezilbora had succumbed would have drawn the fascinated stares of even the most sophisticated ladies’ man of any modern, civilized city she cared to grace with her presence. The splendors of her exquisite magnificence would easily overcast a ballroom full of beauties, so it is not to be wondered that this untutored savage, once having seen the girl, determined to capture her.
In a broad clearing below him where decades ago a former Goliath of the jungle had been stricken by the gods with flashes of fire from the sky and had fallen and perished, leaving the great dearth of growth but for the lush grasses which had sprang up from its corpse, the group of foreigners were pitching their camp.
Several tents were being hauled up by the porters and staked in place while the askarii, toting rifles slung across glistening ebon backs, took charge of establishing a boma consisting of branches to circumscribe their camp site. For they well knew the great cats were wont to prowl at night, seeking their evening meals wherever they might find them.
But more than the predators of flesh and sinew and bone, they feared the woods of these islands to be supernaturally haunted. Already, many had sensed eyes upon them…
One of the group, however, took no part in the activities, a giant of a man who stood apart from the group at the extreme edge of the glowing circle of light from the campfire. He had positioned himself with his enormous back to the flames, the Arapaho way when a man found himself in a strange country, far from the familiar paths of home. A wise warrior would stare into the unknown dark, keeping the warmth and light of the fire behind him. By looking away from the cook fires his eyes might then maintain their adjustment to the darkness - a necessity if one wished to remain alive in deep, foreboding forests filled with stalking predators and night haunts.
Ansen Grost looked like no Arapaho, not having been born of them. Rather, he had been discovered in a Mormon wagon train in Utah in 1896 that had been wiped out in a Shoshone night raid. Three years old at the time, Ansen was then swapped between tribes until he ended up with the Arapaho who raised him. He stood as an enigma of his time.
A heavy mane of golden hair fell past massive shoulders, bespeaking the Nordic heritage bequeathed him by his Norwegian parents who’d immigrated to the New World before he was born; his long locks he kept tied back with a leather wrap set with red beads. A deeply bronzed skin stood in stark contrast with his blonde locks; his features were angular with eyes of stormy gray that held an inscrutable focus and clarity.
He cradled a shotgun across his chest in arms the size of saplings, and a Colt’s automatic hung low on one angular hip in cowboy fashion. For the most part his clothing and various accoutrements and impedimenta reflected the times of his day and age, the one exception being an ancient tomahawk thrust through the belt encircling his lean waist; the piece looked as if it might be hundreds of years old, bearing as it did the scars and marks of hard use.
The handle on the piece appeared to have been handled by the medicine men of a thousand generations, while the blade, honed and sharpened countless times during its untold days on the Earth, presented the chips and marks of wear that come from the hard hammering of human bone.
Grost hired on with this expedition in Zanzibar as head of security. The description of the job had held the sound of intrigue, being a position with a movie outfit from Hollywood, California. And anyway, the pay they offered had been astronomical. A desperate producer explained that Ansen would also be standing in for an extra who had not shown up for the shoot, and that the proffered salary was a reflection of the double-duty asked of him. The producer insisted that Ansen would be perfect for the part. And as far as his security responsibilities were concerned, he looked like he could handle a small army all by himself.
But it hadn’t been for money alone, and for fame not at all, that he’d agreed to take on the job. Rather, it was simply that they were traveling somewhere he had never been before – a place that no one had ever even heard of before. How these elite snobs from Hollywood knew of it he never learned; but it offered him a chance to make a fistful of dollars, and also a few weeks of forgetfulness for the melancholy wanderer from the plains and forests of the American
Midwest.
He recalled the moment in the pub in Zanzibar while he mulled the producer’s offer over a couple of harsh whiskeys. A drop-dead gorgeous blonde had suddenly sashayed through the door and approached the bar where he sat. She walked unhesitatingly up to a barstool and sat down beside him although there were several empty tables where she could have sat alone. Every eye in the room followed her every curvaceous step.
“Well?” she asked as she sat down, provocatively crossing one leg over the other.
The action revealed slices of creamy flesh nearly to her waist. He immediately became the envy of every grifter, thief, vagabond and workhand in the pub. He swallowed the burning, amber fluid in his tumbler and plunked the empty glass down on the bar.
“Well what?” he asked.
“Are you going to take the movie job? I’m Eva by the way,” she introduced herself, “the star of the picture.”
“I should think you would enjoy the part,” she encouraged. “It’s very like your real self, as Cecil described you to me. You play a white explorer, battling your way across the African jungle in search of a fabled city of gold. You know – Tarzan stuff.” The girl eyed him up and down, admiring his unusual cut and physique. “Actually, you would have no problem landing a role as a Tarzan.”
“What’s the name of the movie?” he asked. “Mr. What’s-his-name, Sennett, never said.”
“The Blonde Goddess of Tikka-Tikka,” she replied.
“Interesting,” he said noncommittally. “And what role will you be playing?”
She smiled at him until he grinned in return.
Thinking of the shores of this previously unknown chain of islands upon which they’d made land earlier that afternoon reminded him of his youth when he first began to stray beyond the lands of his people, something inborn within him driving him to explore beyond the tribal hunting grounds and the haunts of childhood.
“Where will you go, Owejiwa?” the ancient medicine man had asked him.
“If I knew that, there would be no need to go,” Ansen replied, partly in gest, and partly being cryptic.
The medicine man who raised him chose well when he named the orphan waif who fell to his care. Ansen’s Arapaho name meant far-walker; for even in his youth the horizon had ever been his goal. Amongst the braves it would be he who would always scout the furthest afield, and Owejiwa who brought in the first kill from the approaching herds. Over time Owejiwa began to wander farther, and to stay away longer than he had in his youth. Sometimes absent for entire seasons, his stays with the tribe grew shorter and shorter. They knew that one day he would leave and not return.
His reveries were abruptly interrupted when from the area of the tents a voice shouted in alarm. Spinning, he saw the askarii with their rifles leveled at a bizarre sight. In the dancing orange light of the cook fires there now stood an apparition the description of which might be used to frighten children into submission.
Inside their hastily constructed boma stood a giant native, naked but for a loin cloth that hid the shame of his nudity, although Ansen doubted this man knew ought of modesty or shame. Equipped with an enormous frame, the black’s heavily muscled body appeared to have been developed from a lifetime spent in grueling effort – effort that taxed the muscles of the body in ways they were not designed to be used.
His face had been painted in a grotesque manner to resemble a blue skull, his pupil-less black eyes, surrounded as they were by black smudges, appearing like empty sockets. Skin piercings covered most of his body, with silver and gold ringlets running down his forearms, through his ears and his septum. Long black hair, sprouting thickly from a low hairline, hung half-way down his back; upon one hip depended a foot-long knife.
But Ansen found the scariest aspect of the man to be the fact that he now gripped Eva, the movie star, in his massive arms, the beautiful body of the blonde substituting for armor in that it protected the savage from a hail of bullets from the askarii; they dared not fire for fear of hitting her. He noticed these things in passing as he ran like a charging lion through the deep grasses that covered their camp site toward the native who crouched at the foot of the giant acacia that stood just within their camp.
“Tu sakka nu!” the painted man shouted in seeming defiance. “Su attal - Koyltentapharr!”
And then, before any could prevent it, he dragged the girl behind the tree. They heard a slight disturbance in the foliage and then a scream. An immediate hush fell on the camp – but only for a moment.
For with the disappearance of the girl and the native, the wail of the easily frightened porters began. Wamibi, the headman of the askarii, shouted orders to his men who immediately began tearing a hole in the boma they had only just completed the construction of, and began fanning out into the jungle.
Ansen hit the tree at a run, literally running up the bole like a squirrel. Entering the lower limbs, he climbed about, searching futilely for the girl, calling her name but receiving no response. She and the native were both gone. Ansen dropped to the ground before Wamibi. The entire episode had only taken maybe five or six seconds, and had occurred across the encampment from him. Wamibi had been closer, maybe fifteen or twenty feet from Eva when the savage grabbed her, so it was from him Ansen hoped to get any details the headman might have caught.
“Wamibi!” he asked the native. “Did you understand any word of his talk?”
“No, great bwana,” replied the native, shaking his head negatively. “No any boys I know talk like that!”
This small island chain lay far off the coast, out of the known paths of shipping lanes and the international flights of the new-fangled zeppelins and twin-propped aeroplanes. No man knew who might have settled here in the past, so the language could belong to any race of people on the planet.
The producer and director, a dandy by the name of Cecil Sennet, rushed up to the two men, his eyes twin pools of fright.
“What are you two going to do, just stand there?” he screamed. “That frightening man just kidnapped Eva!”
Ansen’s eyes were smoldering with the desire to plant a heavy-knuckled fist in the man’s face for overstating the obvious. But remembering just then that this was the man who’d hired him, he filed that idea for possible later use.
“Yes, Cecil – that is a fact I am well aware of,” he replied coolly instead, turning immediately back to Wamibi.
The hour waxed late and they were one and all tired from the day’s hike – and they had yet to prepare the evening meal. But none of that mattered to Ansen as he began barking orders to his askarii. Shouldering light packs that consisted primarily of ammunition for their rifles along with a few rations, they prepared to enter the jungle in pursuit. The few porters and askarii who had fanned out earlier were returning, empty handed. It was dark, they said.
Indeed, thought Ansen, while through his mind flashed memories of himself hunting wolf, cougar and bear through trackless wastes and lightless nights in the wilds of America. Gripping a lantern in one rough hand and his shotgun in the other, he set out, with 15 armed men at his back.