SHANNA AND THE SORROW OF THE WINTER’S SECRET

By Meriades Rai

Now…

In the past thirty-six hours Doctor Madeleine Presley had been beaten and threatened at gunpoint, been forced to traipse through jungle swampland infested with dinosaurs and gigantic insects and lord knows what else, and had borne witness to a terrifying skirmish between a savage woman with a liking for sharp weapons and a sisterly triumvirate of semi-serpentine monsters. Tuesdays weren’t usually so eventful, as a rule.

However, somehow Madeleine had survived this catalog of catastrophes with little more than a few cuts and bruises, and she was secretly rather proud of her own fortitude; unfortunate, then, that it was all going to be for nothing. For now she was surely going to drown (or freeze to death, one or the other) and that was a bit of a shame, not least because she’d been looking forward to exploring the city of Prague in all its romantic and mysterious beauty.

Still, all things considered, Doctor Presley couldn’t really blame Shanna The She-Devil for condemning her to certain death. Not after the bombshell she’d just delivered…

One hour earlier…

“Don’t. Touch. Anything.”

Marty the zebra-person looked guilty, which wasn’t uncommon, especially when he was trying to look exactly the opposite. Shanna glared at him from beneath the decidedly colossal overhang of her hood, and she probably would have wagged a finger if only she’d been able to locate her hands in her voluminous sleeves. Her companion had the knack of bringing out the schoolmistress in her, which was perhaps appropriate considering that Marty’s mental processes were often akin to that of a human teenager. It was, however, difficult to take Shanna seriously when she was dressed in her present fashion.

It was the twelfth of January, the middle of winter, and the middle of winter in Prague in the Czech Republic was very cold indeed, as Shanna and her companions had discovered upon their arrival. Materializing quite literally from thin air by virtue of the trans-spatial teleportation energies of the Mandragorgona Helix, it had become immediately apparent that traditional attire suited to the humid temperatures of the Savage Land – a low-slung leopardskin bodysuit, for example – wasn’t apt for roaming the snow-blanketed streets of Eastern Europe. Madeleine Presley, herself shivering and out of place in grubby white shirt and khaki shorts, had swiftly used her credit card to purchase (at extortionate price) three fur coats from the nearest vendor. These coats were huge, black behemoths, so over-sized that Madeleine, Shanna and Marty had ended up resembling three bears in pursuit of a hot bowl of porridge.

Shanna had complained, of course – she was accustomed to wearing animal hide, just rather less of it so as not to hinder movement – but she soon relented, burrowing deep into the hooded furs to seek much needed warmth. Marty, who had never actually seen snow in his life (ironically, considering that the Savage Land was located in the middle of Antarctica), was too awestruck to care about the cold or his cumbersome new apparel, or even that his hooves found the ice underfoot so slippery that he fell flat on his elongated snout every ten steps. If Shanna and Madeleine were bears, Marty was Bambi.

The companions found themselves a hotel – a cheap one that accepted pets and thankfully didn’t ask too many questions – and booked a room. Now it was time for Shanna to state some ground rules.

“Don’t,” she said, sternly, “break anything. Don’t steal anything. Don’t unlock the door. Don’t open the windows. Don’t eat anything that isn’t food. Don’t turn on the taps. Don’t use the shampoo, even if it’s as intended, which it wouldn’t be, as the only time you’ve ever seen shampoo before is when I brought back a half-dozen bottles from San Francisco on my last trip and you ate them all (see rule five). Oh, and, please? Don’t urinate on the carpet.”

Madeleine couldn’t help but feel chastised, even though Shanna was obviously directing these instructions at the other two members of their party. She looked at Marty and saw his zebra eyes darting left and right as he tried desperately to concentrate and remember everything he’d been told. Don’t steal the taps, don’t break the windows, don’t eat the doors… no, the carpet… no, the –

“Do we have an understanding?”

“Can I – ?”

“No.”

“You not know what I is asking.”

“Whatever it is, it’s a no,” Shanna declared. “And that goes double for the stowaway.”

Strictly speaking, Marty was a stowaway too – Shanna hadn’t planned for him to accompany her and Madeleine through the Helix – but she was actually referring to the fourthmember of their group, a small, golden-furred sabertooth tiger cub presently chewing one of the legs of the bed in the center of the room. Sabertooths didn’t develop their legendarily prominent fangs until they were about a year old, but their jaws were still powerful and the floor of the hotel room was already littered with splinters of wood and the bed was beginning to list. Shanna shook her head and sighed.

“Madeleine, just… look after him, will you?”

“Marty?”

“No, the other one,” Shanna grimaced. “Zabu would never forgive me – and I’d never forgive myself – if one of his children was harmed in my charge. As for the equ’quagga… well, if he so much as looks like he’s going to cause havoc, hit him with something heavy. Repeatedly.”

Marty’s head sagged, morosely. Then he saw the television and his ears pricked up.

Shanna walked to the door, apparently intending to leave without another word. Madeleine breathed deeply, conflicted emotions evident in her expression.

“Shanna… I wish you’d reconsider going on your own. There’s still… something we need to talk about.”

Shanna paused at the door.

“I don’t want to waste any more time,” she said, quietly. “It’s January twelfth. That’s Matthew’s day, today, as dictated by Kevin’s message. I need to get to the rendezvous location and I need you to stay here as chaperone. There’s no more time for talk.”

Especially not when you don’t want to hear what I have to say, Madeleine thought. Shanna was a woman with remarkable instincts. She obviously knew how to avoid difficult news just as surely as a velociraptor in the undergrowth.

Shanna exited the hotel room, slamming the door behind her. For a moment or two there was near silence, broken only by the sound of enthusiastic gnawing of tiger teeth on wood and the steady, ominous creak of a bowing mattress. Madeleine looked across at Marty, whose face was pressed against the dark screen of the television set, his reflection staring out at him. She pursed her lips.

“Shanna and Ka-Zar have told you stories about television, right?” she asked. Marthy nodded in glee.

“Communication devices with pictures. Eisha, Eisha! I giddy with being excited…”

Madeleine picked up the set remote and turned the television on, flicking through channels until she found something appropriate. Marty’s eyes grew huge and round as he watched a group of cartoon characters – four humans and one animal, a big, brown dog with black spots and a comical expression – pursued from left to right across the screen by a lumbering green hunchback with a dodgy eye.

“There you go,” Madeleine murmured. “It’s in Czech instead of English, but I’m pretty sure you’ll get the gist.”

“Zoinks!” cried one of the characters, on cue and in a Czech accent. Marty guffawed and clapped his hooves. Madeleine rolled her eyes. Then she headed for the door, just as Shanna had done.

“I’m just… going for refreshments. I’ll be back soon. Don’t… don’t leave the room, okay?”

Marty waved an arm distractedly, his enormous eyes still glued to the screen. Madeleine breathed deeply. Right then. With the sounds of Scooby Doo in Czech ringing in her ears, she exited the room without the zebra or the cub even noticing.

This, of course, is where things started to go badly…

Elsewhere…

“Del Vasque? It’s Bruneau. We’ve got a problem.”

Philippe Bruneau was known as Le Cadavre, French for corpse, and for good reason; he was a thin, bald man with unnaturally grayish skin, the consequence of a surfeit of lifelong illnesses that rendered him akin to the walking dead but which, inexplicably given that he’d been diagnosed as only having six months to live when he was seven years old, had never actually succeeded in killing him in the two decades since. Bruneau smoked Gitanes and drank Armagnac and subsisted on a diet of bratwurst and Dijon mustard baguettes and thirty-two different pills and supplements daily, and his continued existence was an affront to medical science.

He also only possessed one hand, the other having been replaced at mid-forearm by a butcher’s hook… but this was nothing to do with poor health.

“We haven’t heard from Drewitt for over twenty-four hours,” Bruneau said into the cell phone tucked beneath his chin. “He should have reported in three times by now, regardless of whether he’d obtained our cargo or not.”

Le Cadavre spoke in fluent Spanish rather than his native French, for the benefit of the owner of the voice on the other end of the cell. Bruneau grimaced as he listened, an unlit cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

“Because it’s called the Savage Land, not the Generally Rather Pleasant Land, that’s why,” he snapped, eventually. “It’s earned its name, yes? Drewitt was our fourth courier this year, and he was the best by far, but there’s only so long a man can ride his luck. Yes, I know I’m speaking in past tense. That’s because it’s pretty obvious to me that the poor bastard’s currently languishing in the belly of a T-Rex or squashed on the underside of its foot or something equally ungodly. You understand? I’m telling you there’ll be a shortfall this month. We’re already down to our last half-dozen specimens, and it’ll take time to secure a new pilot on contract. We – ”

There came a scream from somewhere close by, an unholy shriek that was only just about human. It was followed by a chorus and shouts and curses, and then a rattling of chains and bars and a screeching roar emanating from something that definitely was not human. The voice on the other end of the phone asked a question.

“It’s nothing,” said Bruneau. “A cat in a tree.”

There came another shriek. Bruneau scowled. “Two cats,” he said, quickly. “Excuse me a moment…”

The pale man sighed and cupped his right hand – his only hand – over the cell. “What’s the problem back there?” he barked, this time in Czech.

Bruneau’s surroundings were filthy and dimly-lit, some kind of expansive storage facility with boarded and blackened windows illuminated by dirt-encrusted fluorescents, an earthen floor and stinking of sweat and blood and dung. There were eleven men in the room other than Le Cadavre. One of these men was missing his left leg from mid-thigh. Unlike Bruneau, who’d lost his hand six months past, this was a recent wound. As in, thirty seconds ago. Bruneau swore when he saw his men crowding around their fellow as he writhed and screamed in the dirt, blood spurting from his arteries like a soda fountain and spraying Jackson Pollock art in the earth. “I’ll call you back, Del Vasque,” he murmured. Then he discarded his cell and drew a revolver from the waistband of his jeans and put a bullet through the screaming man’s forehead, ending his immediate misery if not the spasmodic death contortions of his ruined body.

“What happened?” Le Cadavre bawled. “Didn’t I tell you to keep away from the cages? Didn’t I tell you?”

There were four cages in the gloomy chamber, each massive and constructed of four-inch-thick steel bars and twined with links of iron chain. Three of the cages were silent, although occupied; from the fourth there came the sound of slamming and scratching and shrieking and crunching and hissing. The dirt floor at the nearside edge of this cage was black with blood, and the recently deceased man’s shoe from his missing leg was upside down in the oily slick.

“He got… too close. We… we thought they were all sleeping…” one of the men moaned, his expression stricken. Bruneau brandished his gun at them in exasperation.

“I told you. Sometimes the tranquilizers don’t take. You know how difficult it is to gauge the quantities? Enough to put them under but not so much that they don’t wake up again?”

“This one. The one that took Guillerme’s leg… its eyes…”

Bruneau snorted at the man, unimpressed by his terror. He glared into the darkened cage, watching the thrash and thrum of the shadowed form inside, listening to the frenzied grinding and scissoring of its jaws as it feasted on its newly acquired prize. And, slowly, he smiled. It was young yet, this specimen, but by this evidence it was ready.

Ready for The Pit.

Starved and routinely tortured with electrical prods, these beasts started out weak and pitiful in those first few weeks after hatching, but they soon learned hate and blind aggression, and the all-consuming need to secure fresh meat in any fashion possible. This one? This one was a beauty. He was going to be more than just a winner… he was going to be the best pit fighter Bruneau’s stable had ever produced.

Le Cadavre grinned, resting his narrow chin on the curve of his hook.

And, inside the cage, the four-month-old velociraptor that had never known anything in its young life save pain and deprivation now regarded its jailer with an insanely malevolent gaze, its shining eyes a shade brighter red than the blood that coated its rows of chainsaw teeth…

St. Charles Bridge, Prague…

Madeleine Presley’s message:

Remember Prague. Neptune’s Ring. Matthew’s Day. I’ll be waiting.

As secret codes went it wasn’t the most taxing message to decrypt, but Kevin Plunder had never been the sort for mind games. Not to say that he was either unintelligent or inarticulate, far from it, but whilst the man had possessed the immaculate patience required to spend an hour motionless in a tree so that he might outwait a wild boar, the subtleties of lateral thinking just hadn’t been his forte. The thought made Shanna smile. She wouldn’t have wanted him any other way.

“I’m sorry.”

Shanna turned to see Doctor Presley at her shoulder, hunched in her furs, her breath clouding in the winter air and her expression miserable. Shanna snorted, then glanced away once more, staring out across an expanse of semi-frozen river banked with wood and concrete and black iron all frosted with a glimmering polish of ice.

“Sorry for completely disregarding my request and following me here?” she murmured.

“You don’t seem surprised.”

“No. You didn’t strike me as the type of woman who consented to being ordered around. Or someone courteous enough to grant a measure of privacy, for that matter.”

The two women were standing midway along the St. Charles Bridge, one of central Prague’s most famous landmarks and the subject of hundreds of paintings and photographic compositions on display around the world. The location was so picturesque that local artists pitched their easels from one end of the causeway to the other on a daily basis whatever the weather, sometimes no more than ten meters apart, and hawked their services to the passing tourist trade who were usually only too happy to sit for fifteen minutes and have their likeness captured in portrait against a backdrop of such magnificence. Prague was pretty in the spring and fall, rather weary in the summer, but in the winter she was a beauty in full bloom, her ancient architecture black and proud and mysterious against the perpetual snow and with the air so clean and crisp and infused with a deep blue tinge where it reflected the icy white.

A woman could lose her heart in an old and stately city like this.

“I needed to talk to you, before you and Kevin met,” Madeleine said. “Is this where…?”

Shanna indicated a nearby statue, one of many weathered bronze and iron sculptures that lined the bridge’s stone balustrades on either flank. This particular piece was of a heavy-set man half-curled upon a plinth, a crown atop his head and his jaw encrusted with beard, and with one muscular arm outstretched and finger pointing out along the wide river.

“Neptune,” she said. “Kevin and I came here on our honeymoon, and one night when we stood out here beneath the stars, at this very spot, he presented me with a diamond and sapphire ring. Back to front by normal custom, I know – an engagement ring after the marriage – but traditional jewelry merchants are hard to come by in the Savage Land.”

“Neptune’s Ring.”

“Yes. And Matthew’s Day… well, even barbarians like us keep half an eye on the Gregorian calendar. When I fell pregnant we worked out what day we’d conceived and the likeliest date for the birth, and we said that if it was a boy we’d name him Matthew. Regrettably, I miscarried. And after that it was impossible to forget the date that could have marked such a happy occasion. No doubt Kevin was counting on that when he chose now to send a message and arrange a meet.”

The She-Devil related her story without sentiment, but there was a wealth of sorrow in her beautiful eyes. She’d grown used to holding her emotions in check it seemed, in any endeavor outside gutting prehistoric carnivores at least. Madeleine bowed her head. In the distance a ship’s horn blew and there was a distinct melody carried on the chill winter’s wind from the city center located on the far side of the bridge. The babble of voices from passing tourists, joy and laughter aplenty, was inescapable. It all felt like intrusion, and Madeleine was at the heart of it.

“Tell me, then,” Shanna said, quietly. “I’ve narrowed it down to one of two things, this secret of yours that’s so obviously burning you up from the inside out. Either this is all fabrication and you’ve lured me out here under false pretences – for which, be well warned, I will kill you here and now without a skipped heartbeat no matter what your explanation – or you’re about to inform me that you and my husband were lovers.”

Shanna turned and stared Madeleine Presley in the eye, her expression grim just as the other woman’s was pale and startled.

“So,” she said, “which is it?”

So engrossed was he in the unparalleled delights of Scooby Doo (and, to be fair, who could blame him?), Marty didn’t realize that his one remaining companion in the hotel room had grown bored of gnawing on the bed’s wooden legs until there was a sudden and terrifying BANG and a crack of white lightning, and the television set expired with a pop and a poof and a plaintive, dying whine.

Marty yelped and jumped backwards at all of this, then looked on, utterly stricken, at a screen that was now black and silent. He then glanced down to see the sabertooth cub emerge shakily from the direction of the power socket, half a chewed electrical cable drooping from the edge of his mouth, and his honey-gold fur now singed and smoldering, especially in the general vicinity of his snout. The cub blinked, with comical panda-soot eyes, and mewled.

“What you do?” Marty squealed. The cub cocked its head and mewled again, before spitting out the severed cable and licking its lips. The cable sputtered. Marty’s ears drooped.

“Zoinks,” he said. “And Jeepers.”

It was then that a furious knocking erupted at the door, followed by a man’s raised voice shouting in Czech. Marty and the cub exchanged glances. After thirty seconds of this there came the sound of a key in the lock, and then the door flew open to reveal two men and a woman in hotel livery. There was a second or two of jabbing fingers, quickly superceded by looks of shock and disbelief and then, predictably, screams, as the hotel staff found themselves gazing upon an undisguised human zebra and a small but nonetheless ferocious-looking tiger-panda-thing.

“Eisha, Eisha!” Marty brayed. “Run for it, Scoob!”

And so the newly christened sabertooth did just that, quickly followed out of the open door by his partner in crime…

“Okay, this is the way things are.”

Shanna’s gaze was unwavering. “There were times when Kevin and I were… troubled, in terms of our relationship,” she continued. “Before we were married and after, though more so before. We were both involved with other people on occasion. It wouldn’t be a shock to me to learn that he’d had a dalliance with you during one of his sojourns to the world outside the Savage Land, although I can’t recall him ever mentioning you by name.”

Madeleine’s face was bloodless within the hood of her fur coat. Shanna’s expression was inscrutable as ever, although the other woman believed she glimpsed a flash of contempt in those cognac-amber eyes.

“Is that it, then?” Shanna snapped. “You bedded my husband while he was visiting England one time? You believed that this would distress me, hurt me, at a time when I seem vulnerable? Don’t fret so, Doctor Presley. I’m made of sterner stuff. And it obviously meant more to you than to him, let alone I.”

Madeleine flinched, and in that moment her own eyes darkened.

“And yet, while you believed him dead, he came to me.”

The wind howled, gathering now, and laced with flakes of new snow and ice.

“He came to you, yes,” Shanna murmured. “To deliver a message to me. Because, despite everything, he obviously has reason to trust you.”

“Yes,” Madeleine said, hoarsely. “And that reason is… is because I’m his wife.”

In that heartbeat, time froze as surely as the waters of the river. Shanna turned her head slowly, her eyes black, her hair bright as fire where tendrils had worked free of her furred cowl.

“What…?”

Madeleine shivered. “We met in London, as you say. Likely after he’d met you, but before your marriage; he talked about you, said that you’d found another, that you no longer loved him. He and I, it was… a whirlwind romance.” Madeleine laughed, bitterly. “That’s what they call it in books, isn’t it? I certainly got swept away by the joy of it. Enough to accept his proposals, for us to pledge our vows in church. And if I knew he was pining for you, as became apparent later, I didn’t let myself believe it. Even after he abandoned me two months after our wedding, with just a note to explain his reasons. That he’d returned to a world where he felt ‘truly alive’. Returned to you. You see, Shanna, I know what it’s like to lose him, just like you.”

Shanna almost stumbled, grasping at the stone balustrade before her to steady herself in her disbelief. “He… was married before? Another wife, before me? He never so much as hinted…”

“Well, that’s part of the problem. You’re speaking in past tense, but it’s worse than that. I don’t know about Savage Land custom, but in England a marriage is only annulled through legal divorce proceedings, it doesn’t just get cancelled when the loving groom changes his mind.” Madeleine shook her head in despair, turning to lean against the rail of the bridge at Shanna’s side. “I’m sorry. I am sorry. But that first time I met you, when I told you my name and there wasn’t a flicker of recognition, I realized then that he’d never spoken of me, or our circumstances. We’re still married, Shanna. I’m still his wife. But, believe me when I say this, I never – ”

Madeleine didn’t get the opportunity to say anything more. Because it was then that Shanna The She-Devil, a woman who for the best part of a year had repressed all emotional responses save for cold, unremitting anger – against her dead husband and the witch who’d killed him, against herself, against the world – suddenly couldn’t help but react on base instinct, grabbing her companion (and now, apparently, rival, usurper and predecessor) about the neck.

And then she hefted Doctor Presley bodily into the air and out over the stone balustrade, into the wind and the snow and the oncoming storm, as effortlessly as a careless child casting a paper doll towards the river below.

Madeleine screamed, briefly, as she fell – and then she hit the water below with a crunch, impacting with the slim mirror of ice that floated just below the river’s surface and then vanishing into the freezing depths.

Shanna had just delivered Madeleine Presley, nee Plunder, to her death.

Approaching from the eastern berth of the St. Charles Bridge, it wasn’t what the tall man swathed in furs who’d just been about to announce himself had expected.

“Shanna?” whispered the familiar voice of Kevin Plunder, otherwise known as Ka-Zar. “By the steppes of Mount Kurj, what have you done…?”

NEXT ISSUE:

Oh man! Oh man! Believe me, you do not want to miss the next issue! What’s Ka-Zar’s story? Will Shanna even give him the chance to tell it? Is Madeleine dead? What will happen to Marty and Scooby the sabertooth, at large in the city? What are the plans of Philippe Bruneau, Le Cadavre? What about Ezlenza, the Red Priestess, and her minions?

Be here!

If you have any comments on this story you’d like to pass on, please feel free to email the author at ameriades@hotmail.com . Hope you enjoyed chapter five!