“Good morning, Jan! I'm glad I could catch you before you got out on your errands today. Did you hear that I was throwin' my ol' hat in the ring?
“Yes, honey, I decided to give those good ol' boys a run for their money.
“Time enough we had some common sense and a woman's touch in office, don't you think?
“Now, I won't pressure you. Not now. We're still three months out for the vote. But I would love for you to spend a little time before then considering me for your Mayor.
“First thing I'm gonna do is get a fundraiser together to bring the Community Garden in the Square back to life. Place is just a shame now. An eyesore, what with all those angry kids and drifters and druggies hanging out.
“Well, like I said, I don't want to get to buggin' ya, just yet, but, I would like to put a sign in your yard if I can. I'd sure appreciate it.”
Bounding down the speechless woman's front porch steps without waiting for an answer, Judy Chisora plants a 'Judy for Mayor' sign in the front yard and moves on to the next house.
She was in her element, and it was glorious. Judy loved it here.
Coming to New Hope, PA some ten years ago had been the best decision she'd ever made, and now, as one of its most prominent citizens, there are those who can't remember a time without her in their lives.
She was the consummate neighbor, the perfect small business owner and all around good citizen, and, most of all, she loved New Hope with a passion. It had become her pride and joy.
She loved to volunteer for the communities many Committees and Boards and Associations, donated regularly to local causes and was one of the high school's biggest boosters.
There was nothing like any of this where she was from after all. A place far from here. Far different from here.
Thinking of her homelands, she is reminded to take a break. She could keep at this all day, the canvassing, the conversing, the bustling, remaining just as fresh and as chipper as when she'd first started.
She didn't grow tired like them. Her neighbors. She wasn't, in fact, very much like them at all. As much as she wished it so.
She loved them for their differences, for their diversities. It allowed her to hide in between, down between the cracks and quirks of an ever shifting identity.
She walked amongst them. Dressed in their skin. Flesh and bones stretched over her true form, she wore a mask, indistinguishable from the real thing.
There were many more of her kind. The kind at least that could pass for human. There were, in fact, dozens of different types of Shitani, the little demons which dwelled on the far side of the Wilds, the broken ground which lay beyond the lands of the Incata.
Her homeland.
A mythical world, it was a twinned realm tied to the Earth through the dimensional void that formed a barrier around them both.
It's here, through the broken lands on the far side of the Great Forest, that grew adjacent to the Long Plains Kingdom where the Incata thinned away into the dark nothingness of the void, that the Shitani arose.
Once breaking through, they scattered like wind-borne little spiderlings left adrift to settle where they may. Chisora had alit, far from the Great Forest, far from the Long Plains Continent upon which it grew, and had taken root in the Casteurope Region to the West.
It was a land of Dark mythologies and Druidians and the Chaesor, who ruled over the Braekhus with their ancient superstitions and witch-hunting traditions.
There, Chisora was hunted through the woods which encircled the high mountain villages, stalked as she grew her form, transforming and refining her magics until she could wear their faces.
Their fears fed her. She grew strong. Strong enough to defend herself against their relentless attacks, at least.
But she grew weary of it, the ceaseless harassments. She sought escape. And not just from the backward superstitions of the Casteurope.
Chisora knew that there was nowhere, anywhere in the Incata for her to go and feel safe. She was, after all, Shitani. There were none in this world who would ever allow her to live un-harassed. It was bred into them, their automatic distrust, but the truth of her kind was much more complicated.
There was no single species of Shitani. Some soared as high and as wide as billowing clouds, some even bigger, while many more were smaller, much lesser things.
Some even, like her, could wear many different faces and forms, pass for many different people. Barely managing to survive while utilizing this skill to avoid their constant suspicions and threats of violence, Chisora was nonetheless trapped in the Casteurope, a magically barren land.
Their Elementals had long since been shackled and severed from their connections to the Source by the ruling families and their Merchant Clans, who's own wealth and influence had grown to eclipse that of the Royals.
But there were still places there that had grown thin. Where the ley lines still lightly pulsed, their faint connections to the Source still, barely, intact and extending over to the Earth.
It was here, at one such place, that Chisora had spent the last of her magical coin, entrusting her material form to an agent of the Long Plains Kingdom, wagering that her debt to this man, along with the decade of free reign that he would allow of her, would be worth the cost of transit.
And, so far, it had been. She felt that she had reaped her reward several times over.
This was a magically barren land, but its people brimmed over with potential, and now, having tasted of what this world, this realm, had to offer, she couldn't see herself giving it up.
She knew enough to appreciate and recognize the necessity of his assistance, but being in debt to the ever scheming Jasi Kapele wasn't ideal, even if he had facilitated her transition over to the Earth, allowing her to make her way here. To this place. This town that she had grown to love.
Or, the closest thing that her kind could approximate to love. In truth, her feelings, her 'emotions' were no more than an emulation, like the mask, the face that she wore. It wasn't real. It couldn't be. Her kind were incapable of such things.
They hungered. That's it. That's all. They sought to satiate an endless need. To devour. To consume.
Some learned to control this need, to curb its persistence. They could sip, dip into their victim's minds and feed, just enough so that the host wouldn't die. Right away, at least.
Hook worms. Tape worms. Vampiric. Arachnid.
Thirsty.
They could hide and abide amongst the people for years, undetected. They were parasites. Even Judy, with her pleasant smile and neat little shop.
Spending a good part of the day canvassing around town, Chisora finally makes her way back to that quaint little shop on Main St., 'Judy's Tailoring and Embroidery' that she'd opened almost immediately upon arriving in New Hope.
It, along with the town at large, was her pride and joy. She kept a loose schedule, hanging her Open sign whenever she was ready to take in new consignments.
Prom and wedding seasons were her busiest times, the satin-y fabrics and dresses piled high on the service counter.
It never took her long, the stitching and hemming and sewing. It was a simple trick for her kind. But it bored her. She let it pile up until it became problematic, forcing her to set aside her true work, for one night, to finish it all in one great flourish, shedding her disguise in order to free up her hands. All of them.
Still, it was just a bore. A necessity that allowed her to indulge in her true passion. Her real purpose in coming here, to New Hope, Pa, where the world grew thin along certain stretches of the Allegheny River.
It had taken a considerable amount of effort to align the weak ley line here beneath the town to the Casteurope, across the void in the Incata. There were few such places left here on Earth, let alone the mystically barren lands of North America.
Kapele had helped to facilitate the passage and the requisite distractions and false identities and histories necessary for her escape and transition to Earth.
She needed to be free. But she chose not to be beholden to the Merchant Clans who would have charged her a premium, would have likely bound her over, stripped her of her free will and consciousness instead.
None of the Kings could be trusted. Their contracts were ceremonial, at best. And yet, her kind always found themselves falling for the allure of their charms, often leaving them brutally subdued and beholden to the whims of lesser men.
Judy wanted neither.
She had found Kapele. Or, truth be told, Kapele had found her, and she had struck a deal of a different sort.
Chisora knew that Kapele had an agenda all his own. He wasn't the kind of man to perform a service for a shitani out of the goodness of his heart, despite the easy smile and charm.
Whatever he required in return, though, for her it was definitely the lesser of the two debts.
Bustling around her work room, she perks up at the sound of the tinkling little tin bells above her front door.
Rushing out to greet her latest customer, Judy is all smiles,
“Hello, Mrs. Dennison!”
“Hello, Judy. I heard you were out and about this morning. Thought I'd come by on my way home. Is it true? Are you really going to do something about that riff-raff over-running the Community Garden? Oh it would be so nice to finally clean up the Square. Such an eyesore. Right there in the center of town, too--!”
Judy tsk-tsks and harrumphs and agrees and makes promises, like a true, small town politician.
Thanking Mrs. Dennison after fifteen minutes of small talk, she sees her out the door and notes that it was beginning to grow dark out on the Square.
The rabble would begin to gather soon.
The drifters and druggies and skate-boarding delinquents were new to New Hope.
A once idyllic, crime free, haven, trouble seemed to spring up out of nowhere, back some ten years ago. Right around the time, ironically, that Judy had moved to town.
But it, too, the trouble, like her sudden and mysterious appearance, had gone unnoticed, growing in scope until the Community Garden in the Town Square, right in the heart of New Hope, had become an overgrown tangle of weeds and discarded detritus, like a growing tumor.
Locking the door and flipping the Open sign over to Closed, Judy switches off the lights, plunging the shop into darkness.
Staring out the door, hidden in shadow, she stands unnaturally still for more than an hour, watching out over the Square until they come; first one, sitting on the big boulder with the commemorative bronze plaque embedded in its street-facing front side, smoking what Judy can only guess to be a cigarette, and soon the others, wandering up in twos, threes, alone mostly, and their raucous laughter and brusque language begins to fill up the Square.
The remaining store owners and employees, closing up late, hurried from their shops and bustled to their cars, abandoning their places of employment and possessions, throwing quick, furtive glances over toward the Community Garden in the Square, and, subconsciously ducking their eyes down and away as they rushed past Judy's shop.
She made them uneasy on some level, even more so than the thugs gathered on the Square. They couldn't really say why. Or, in truth, even acknowledge their unease. Judy Chisora didn't allow for that.
As the last of New Hope's upstanding citizens vacated the Square, she waited and continued to watch for a moment more as the rabble-rousers began to ramp up their noise level and raucous behaviors.
One of the skate-boarders sends an empty beer bottle arching high across the parking lot adjacent to the Square and Judy follows its trajectory but turns away from the door before it hits the pavement, shattering with a loud crash.
Unlocking the door alongside the supply closet, she closes it behind her and descends the short flight of stairs leading down to a cramped storage space.
Here, surrounded by sewing machines and storage containers and boxes and bolts of cloth, in the middle of the floor, was a spectacularly tatted, multi-colored rug, so vibrant that it seemed to shine.
This is all that Judy had brought with her when she had crossed over from the Incata, leaving behind everything else that she had managed to accumulate.
She didn't mourn for the loss. Her kind were typically uninterested in material accumulation, and money, the predominant form of worship here on Earth, held little appeal to them.
There were those who were drawn to the allure of its accumulation. What they wanted most, though, what Judy wanted, was to feed. She sought to quench her thirst. Her insatiable thirst. And what she drank in great droughts was worth much more than mere money could afford.
Sitting cross-legged at the center of her beautiful rug, Judy got to work then at her true occupation. She was, by day, a tailor, stitching and hemming and repairing their clothing; at night though, she wove. She spun her threads and bound them all.
Night after night she wove a working that entrapped all of New Hope in its inescapable threads, and when she had them all, held them all within her glistening web, she tapped into their hearts and minds, spinning them up in such fine, silken threads, and drank deep of their fears.
Such a glorious tapestry she was creating. Such a weaving, so elegant in its construction that most never noticed what she took. What was missing.
Some though, already troubled, already dealing with a loss, were pushed over the edge. Suicides were on the uptick. So were the random acts of violence and atrocities, the domestic incidents, missing children, violent assaults and other crimes that were once thought to be big city problems.
Not theirs. Not New Hope's.
You wouldn't know any of this, though. Their sunny smiles, their persistently good nature and positive attitudes belied this.
In the face of the rising crime rates, their persistence could even be mistaken for naivety.
There was a calming, though, woven into her working, constantly turning their minds away from the horrors mounting around them.
She loved them for this, knowing it was their willingness to not see that allowed her to bind them so tightly. That allowed her to cast her web far and wide, creating a magical deadzone, drawing a curtain down around the entire area, where she could thrive, undetected and undisturbed.
Kapele had truly given her a priceless gift.
Tasting the air, indulging in their miseries, she can feel every bruise, feel the sting of every insult and slight, savor their spilled blood.
A decade. Ten years Kapele had promised her before he would return to claim his payment. She'd grown fat, meantime. Full up with power. She was at her apex.
She wouldn't give this up. She had determined that she couldn't give this up. She was as certain of this as she was that Kapele would come, any day now.
She knew that he would, and when he did, she knew also that she wouldn't abandon her people. Her town.
It was this conviction that had led her to run for Mayor.
Rather than lose this, she'd thought, maybe, when he does come, she refuses to pay his marker. Maybe she kills him instead.
Yes. That's what she had settled on. She would kill him. She would drag him down here, to her nafasi madaraka, her place of power, and she would feast on his bones.
And then, she would be New Hope's next Mayor. She wasn't afraid.
She'd finally, officially become one of them. And she would be their leader. Their most beloved and trusted leader.
Seated here, in the center of her brightly colored rug, Judy Chisora revels in her good fortune.
Her tongue lolls and her eyes roll in her head as she grows drunk on the golden flow of emotion that she draws forth from her neighbors, who, for the last ten years, have suffered intense nightmares and night terrors and thrashing anxieties and horrors in their dreams, sometimes even spilling over into their waking worlds.
She leaves them spent, dry. Given over to the worst of their desires as she sinks her talons deep within their hearts and minds and drinks, sucking at their innocence, leaving them broken and confused.
She doesn't consider the harm she does, the damage she leaves behind. Judy doesn't concern her self, in truth, with the rabble in the Square or the rising crime rates, the violence and pain.
These are simply the castings left behind by her great work. The detritus sacrificed in service to her insatiable need.
A sacrifice.
To her? Perhaps. More likely, she knew, sacrificed to Jasi Kapele's own plans.
She knew of his reputation. He had once served as the Second, Advisor to the Great Hunter, Askauri bin Askai, the wayward Prince of the Long Plains Kingdom, Commander of their Royal Expeditionary Forces before his exile.
Their kind had once found great pleasure in slaughtering the shitani, unlike the Merchant Clans and the Fallen of the Forge, the offshoot branch of religious fanatics based over in the Incata, who were just as likely to enlist or enslave them.
Kapele's true reasons for assisting her were suspicious, then, to say the least, and she expected no less than the sword when he came back to her.
She was ready. Her power was at its apex. She wasn't afraid.
Suddenly, though, the little tin bells hung above her shop's locked front door tinkle merrily, abruptly announcing someone's entrance.
Judy freezes in place, wondering if she had forgotten to thumb the deadbolt into place, listening intently to the scrape of footsteps as they approach the door leading down here to the store room and pause.
“Ju-udy!” Jasi Kapele calls out. “I'm back--”
Judy Chisora, wanna be Mayor, fearsome demon from the Casteurope, looks around frantically for somewhere to hide, and wets her pants in terror.
*from the forthcoming, full-length novel, Bealz, Prince of the Southside
end
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