Author’s note: You know the drill: Don’t read this if you’re a minor, all the work is completely fictional, don’t try this at home or anywhere else, reproduction allowed for non-commercial purposes only AND only if you tell me, all that.
Author: Pancho Lopez
HEART’S DESIRES
Part I: The Fool Tempted
It’s OK if you’re one of those cynic types that don’t believe in magic, the gods (yes, polytheistic gods) or de supernatural. It’s actually easier for me if you don’t even know a think about magic, African gods or trickster spirits. And no, this story is not a weird tale of how I suddenly developed amazing omnipotence that I use to enslave people on a whim – I wish. No, this is a tale that starts in the real world, about taking your chances and finding your heart’s desires.
Now, a heart’s desire is a tricky thing. Everybody has at least one, and it’s the primary motivator for their lives. The thing is, it’s pretty hard to find out exactly what your heart’s desire is, even harder to change or modify, and almost impossible to find out why we have them. Some people have the heart desire to become rich, famous or happy, but they’re a minority. Some of them have the desire of never working, eating at fast food restaurants all the time or being at school forever, for example. Other heart’s desires can be things like never washing their mouths, letting people they love down, getting a PHD or what-have-you.
There are even people whose heart’s desires are actually self-destructive: going to jail, destroying their marriage, having a car wreck. Those heart’s desires are dangerous, and such people are better off finding them, understanding them and changing them. It’s not that difficult, really, to change them when you finally find them on your heart – and the alternative is actually not pretty. Most of us don’t realize it, but most of the time; we’re arranging things to follow our heart’s desires without realizing it. But I’m getting ahead.
The story begins when I was visiting a good friend of mine. Her name is Arlene, and as you could guess she was quite a pleasure to behold. Light brown hair, deep green eyes, tall complexion, statuesque figure – you get the idea. And yes, indeed she will be my first victim, great deduction Holmes, keep up the good work. Anyway, Arlene is desirable not only for being a total knockout, but also because she is a) extremely sweet, charismatic and sometimes even naïve and b) utterly frigid in the realms of the flesh. She had had boyfriends, but all her relationships ended up badly, mainly because she was such an ice queen (to put it mildly).
But Arlene is – for this story or any other purpose – more than a piece of flesh to be hypnotized and used (way more, you psycho). Arlene comes from a very traditional family, one with deals something very weird by our modern standards – witchcraft. No, she doesn’t have any spectacular powers or curses, not to my knowledge at least. But they follow the pagan rites, pray to the old gods and follow the old ways, in a strange mixture of pagan, old African and Christian tradition. Yes, is like Santeria or something. I told you, the more ignorant you’re about this sort of thing, the more sense the story will make.
Anyways, she and I were pretty much friends (which is a way for women to tell us “I don’t want to have anything remotely intimate with you, as we all know), and she knew what type of cynic I were. And seriously, going to visit her was quite a hassle. Weird traditions were followed everywhere; there was a shrine for a coconut and you couldn’t visit on certain days, and no, sadly there wasn’t even something fun like a mandatory orgy at midnight every equinox or anything – stop getting ahead, dammit. The juicy parts won’t start ‘till later.
As I was trying to tell you, one day I was visiting her, she and her family invited me to an event – some kind of celebration. Nothing scandalous, mind you, but sounded like fun. As they described it, it was like a party: just a bunch of people together, dancing at the rhyme of the drum. I had nothing better to do, and sounded intriguing. And yeah, it was a chance to get closer with Arlene. No, we guys just never let it go.
The evening was full of surprises from the start. Boy did Arlene look radiant. She dressed modern from time to time, but that evening she looked sexy beyond description. That pagan dress was REVEALING, and her arms and legs were adorned with snakelike laces and bracelets. Not only that, but her attitude was radiant and expectant, I had never seen her in such a mood for partying. Briefly, it occurred to me that her gelid attitude was blessing for me after all – were she a modern and popular chick, she would dress much more attractive all the time, and she would had been way out of my reach, even for “friendship”. As it was, at least I could bask in her sexiness from time to time, even if touching was not allowed.
The party was not what you would expect from a religious ceremony, either. Indeed, if you ignore the fact that all the African decoration and the fashion of the participants had a deeper meaning, this thing was a party – a WILD party. Hell no, not an ORGY you perv. Stop thinking about it already will ya? Geez, that’s why you end up single like that in the first place. It was just dancing. Dancing like hell and in general having a damn good time.
No, I’m not a good dancer, and I wasn’t even dressed for the occasion. And you know what? It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter at all. The room was barely illuminated, and everybody was dancing with just everybody, and the room was so filled with exotic odors that mixed with body sweat, and the music was so primal and inviting that… aw, hell. I felt so free. So free to dance, and scream, and laugh, and just have a good time. I lost myself on the dance, and as the beat got louder, and quicker, I danced faster, and wilder, and stronger; as I forgot my worries, and hopes, and frustrations a finally found it. My heart’s desire.
Take into account that what is coming next is an oversimplification of what actually happened. It was similar to a dream, in which you kind of know what’s going on, but at the same time you can’t control yourself. I was in a forest, lost, and I knew I had been lost for a very long time. It’s the kind of dreams in which you don’t ask yourself the specifics (How did I survive in a forest for so long? Where was I going? How came I still had clean clothes?) I was simply lost. And I found another traveler.
He was very tall, and very skinny. My take was that he was African American, but he was not black at all; he was dressed like some of those extreme Bills fans, half of his body was painted in red and the other part in blue. When I approached me and asked who was he, he answered only with questions.
“Why are you here?”
“I… don’t know”
“What are you looking for?”
“I… don’t know”
“Why are you running so fast and so far from home?”
“I…don’t know”
“Do you really want to get your heart’s desire so badly?”
“I… don’t know”
“If I give you your heart’s desire, what will you give me in return?”
“I… don’t know”
“ I see. Do you know anything at all?”
“I…”
(Here, I tried to tell him something else, just trying to prevent to prove a TOTAL fool of myself. I was going to tell him that 2+2=4, or that the moon is smaller than the sun, or that I was never going to fuck Arlene, but as I tried, I felt that I didn’t know any of those things FOR SURE)
“… don’t know”
Then he smiled with that patronizing smile (I HATE patronizing smiles), and he gave me something simple. A small pendant, an amulet with the form of a tiny spider, black, made of obsidian.
“Here” he said “one with such a slow wit as you might be fun to watch. Since you don’t know anything, I will be generous and explain it to you. Quite simply, with this amulet you will be able to hypnotize females. Simple huh? Just show it to them, and they will pretty much do whatever you say without a second thought or the slightest resistance. HOWEVER”
(He said, just when excitement was filling my humble being)
“Right now, it only works on those who give you permission to do it. To fully activate it, you must grant three wishes to one of your victims. Three of her heart’s desires. Once you have done this, all the females of your world will be at your mercy”
After that, reality became a blur, the dance and the forest rapidly converging. As you expect from these stories, I fully came to my senses at the end of the dance. Everybody was talking, and I didn’t even realized what was going on until Arlene approached to me and told me she had to go home.
As I drove her home, more and more of my personality came back and began questioning the nature of the dream. Of course, my interest in this… religion had increased exuberantly, and we talked about it. I learned certain things there, some of which disturbed me greatly. She told me about Eshu, who was a trickster African god, and in a lot of areas, the most powerful and important god. She even told me that once, a villager had seen a traveler dressed completely in red, but when he commented that with the neighboring village, they said the traveler was dressed in blue, and the argument managed to escalate to the point of war and obliteration of both villages, while Eshu, dressed half in red and half in blue, watched in amusement.
When I hear the tale, it came me as a shock – surely it was too much a coincidence. I looked at her in amazement – and when I saw her, I was filled with lust, and desire, and impatience. The dress she had barely concealed her graces anymore, and her air of relaxation and happiness was such, I just wanted to have her, I wanted her very much, with all my heart and all my soul. When I took her home, we hugged as friends sometimes do, and she… kissed me. Not a deep, passionate kiss, but not a peck in the cheek, either. It was a successful date kiss, a let’s-see-each-other-again-sometime kiss. And it was delicious. As I said goodbye and she turned around, I decided there wasn’t any other way about it. She was going to be mine, only mine. The only question was how.
By know, it will come as no surprise that I actually found the spider amulet in my pocket when I was looking for my keys to get home. I know that since you’re so smart and you’re placidly reading this stuff wondering when the juicy parts will start, you saw it coming; but ME, it literally pissed my pants (betcha that’s the image you were looking for). I was so freaked, in fact, that when I found it my first reaction was to toss it out, run away and pretend it didn’t happen, and I did. After that, I regained my cool and went back for it. I did mean to lose it and do all the characters in this story (including myself) a big favor, but in retrospect, odds were the pendant could have ended up in hands much worse than mine. Yours, for instance.
Anyways, there I was, in the middle of the night with a spider amulet, which (if a hallucination of total asshole of a god was to be believed) could entrance any girl into my power. I remembered the clauses; I had to somehow convince a girl to be hypnotized to it, and not only that, but I had to “grant” that girl three wishes, three of her heart desires! How was I going to find such a girl? How in the world would I was going to grant her three wishes? Arlene had, in the past, told me about heart’s desires, and some of them were absolutely impossible, like being able to fly or resurrect a grandmother. Even if I could, how would I know which the desires actually were? Most people don’t know them, even if they dedicate their life to find them. And some of them have one or two, and the most hollow people have none…
I stared at the pendant. The spider like figure was amazing in proportion and detail. Not that I knew more about spiders than of desires or magic, of course, but it looked so… well done. Proportioned as an arachnid must be. Perfect in every angle, from every position. It was aesthetic, even for a guy with as much animosity (“fear” sounds so girlie) towards true spiders like me. As I contemplated my little treasure, all the stress accumulated by this night flew by. I had solved the riddle. I knew exactly what to do, and to who. My heart’s desire was on my reach, with no chance of error. Tomorrow I was to visit Arelene; tomorrow Arlene was going to be mine.