Colin Cotterill - Curse of the Pogo Stick

The muscles of his steed flexed and relaxed as the huge white wings found currents of air on which to glide down toward the building tops. Siri’s stomach heaved as the creature soared and dove between the skyscrapers. He clung to the cusp of a wing and its force vibrated through him. They flew down past office windows where men in shirts and ties drank coffee and watched them pass with looks of astonishment on their Western faces. Then an apartment building where a woman in curlers hanging washing from her window was so shocked she dropped her stockings and they floated down to the street like wisps of smoke from the tenth story.

Lower and darker: the smells of smog and fried meat and garbage and hairspray. And a bump. The winged steed skidded to a stop on the icy sidewalk and white steam smudged the air around her nostrils. Her front hoof scraped at the ground and she shook her mane. Siri stayed put.

“This is the Otherworld?” he asked. For some reason he expected a flying horse would have the ability to speak. “This is where all the shamans come to negotiate for lost souls? Fm disappointed, I don’t mind telling you.”

She didn’t answer with words and he didn’t speak whinny so he gave up and climbed down. He wasn’t appropriately dressed at all. He knew he’d catch his death of cold. He felt the burn of the ice on the soles of his bare feet. Yet instinctively he knew the thrill of it-the warming excitement of being on the other side-would keep him alive. His thudding heartbeat alone could power a tank.

They’d arrived on a deserted main street at the mouth of a dark alleyway. He looked at the horse, who in turn looked toward the side street.

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

Siri walked into the yawning darkness and immediately felt a morbid sense of familiarity. He’d been here recently. He’d walked along these uneven paving stones and squinted through the gray lamplight. It was his dream. This was the selfsame place he’d walked on the day he was given the sleeping poison. He knew what to expect. He knew that up ahead he’d meet two thugs and be attacked. He stopped. Common sense told him that he should learn from his mistakes. The dream had been a warning. He had no weapon still. He couldn’t outrun them.

“No, Siri. Go back to the horse and find a different path. Once bitten…”

He turned on his heel and headed back the way he’d come. But the stones seemed more uneven than they had just been. The street lamps stretched further into the distance than was possible. He passed a doorway he hadn’t noticed and heard familiar voices from the shadows.

“Well, whaddya know? The gook’s back.”

“So he is. What’s new, Red? Been busy torturing the good guys, have ya?”

This was wholly different from the dream. It had an extra dimension. In dreams he was in some kind of control, aware that he was in a dream. Even when he was frightened by them, something at the back of his mind told him it would all be over at cockcrow. But this felt so real. His feet and fingers were aching from the cold. He had a terrible urge to go to the bathroom and a tingle of fear rode the back of his neck. Up ahead, in the direction he thought he’d come from, he saw the lights of the Silver Pheasant. Somehow, he had to do a better job of getting past these goons.

“Look,” he said. “If you leave me alone I won’t call on my auxiliary spirits.”

“Ooooh,” mocked the first thug, stepping out of the doorway. The lamplight turned his skull the color of nicotine-stained teeth. He seemed to have grown in stature since they’d last met. Siri considered asking whether he’d been working out but decided it was a bad time for humor.

“You hear that, Eric?” the thug said. “Grandpa’s gonna call the auxes.”

Eric remained in the shadows.

“Think you might be too late, Red Man,” the second thug said.

Siri knew the skeleton was right. That was what he’d forgotten. He could see it underlined on his cheat sheet. “Must invoke guiding spirits before going into trance.” He was a hopeless shaman. But, hell, he hadn’t planned all this. It was supposed to be a hoax. It was worth a try anyway.

“I’m warning you,” he said.

“I’m trembling,” said the first thug.

“Very well.” Like some ancient magician, Siri raised his arms to the tops of the buildings that towered over him. “I invoke the spirit of the otter.”

“Tsk tsk,” came a sound from the shadows. “Did he invoke the otter, Danny?”

“Sure did, Eric.”

“Bad choice, Reddo. You should have gone for the eagle.”

“Much better idea, gook. Otters are for water problems and what you’ve got-”

Eric stepped out of the doorway, almost twice his previous size. “-is mugger problems.”

“Go through his pockets while he’s still standing, Danny boy.”

The first goon had a solid presence about him, like a front-end loader with attitude. Siri had no pockets but he allowed the pouch to be plucked from his waist without any retaliation.

“Then I invoke the spirit of the great eagle,” Siri said, halfheartedly. Nothing happened.

“Give it up, Red Man.”

“Don’t you listen, gook?” Eric said, leaning against the wall with a Lucky Strike dangling unlit from his lower jaw. He was even more stained and chipped than his colleague. “You’ve blown it. You gotta invoke before you get on the horse, man.” He leaned down into Siri’s face and breathed rotten teeth at him. “You’re aux-less.”

The first thug was digging down through the pouch, throwing out puffed maize.

“He got any money?” Eric asked.

“Nah, nothing.”

“Shit, let’s kill him.”

“No wait.” The thug known as Danny had found something deep in the pouch. “Oh, man, look!”

His hand emerged from the bag with two bone fingers holding onto a button. Siri had forgotten all about it, didn’t even recall putting it in the pouch. It was the button he’d dredged up from the bottom of the rock pool. Danny handed it to Eric, who looked at Siri with as much emotion as a skull could ever hope to muster.

“So he knows.” Eric nodded.

“Looks like it.”

“Have to let him go.”

“I guess.

“You owe us for this, gook.”

“Big-time.”

Eric flipped the button into the air like a coin. Siri glanced up for a second and caught it on its way back down. But when he turned his head toward the muggers, they were no longer there. He looked around and he was all alone in that badly lit place.

“Most peculiar,” he thought.

He looked at the button. There was nothing special about it: green plastic, normal size for a shirt. He held it to his nose to see whether his enhanced sense of smell might tell him something. It had been submerged in water so he didn’t hold out much hope, but there was a very faint scent of… desperation.

“Remember where you are, Siri. Remember, none of this is credible.”

He put the button back in his pouch and staggered forward over the uneven stones to the end-or the beginning-of the alley. On the far side of a busy boulevard the gaudy lights of the Silver Pheasant beckoned. He negotiated the traffic with no problem as it was without substance, blurs of metallic paint flying past in either direction. But on the far sidewalk he encountered a long queue of shamans dressed much like he was, all waiting to get into the club. A huge black bouncer stood at the door with a list in his hand and a pistol sticking out of his belt. As Siri didn’t consider himself to have any special rights over the others, he nodded and smiled at the waiting men and women and joined the back of the line.

Four hours later he was still there and the queue hadn’t advanced more than a step or two. Others had fallen in behind him but none of his line mates seemed particularly talkative. He kept himself entertained by singing the Hmong refrain to the dead he’d learned at the funeral.