Taltos



        It doesn't really matter what the kid was in for, except that it

was definitely a murder rap and he definitely deserved it. Maybe it was a

crime of passion, beating his ex-girlfriend and her mother to death, maybe

not. It doesn't matter. All that matters is that he found himself in the

van, cuffed hand and foot, with several other miscreants all bound for

Augusta Correctional Institute, dazed and scared and trying to look tough.

        There was another guy in the van, some hard-ass dealer in for his

third time, who smelled greenie all over the kid and picked him out to be

his new boy once they were safety ensconced inside. But that doesn't really

matter either, because he didn't last long. The kid made the often fatal

mistake of mouthing off to the guy doing the strip-search, and when the

screws take a disliking to you it isn't pretty. That's how the kid ended up

in the same cell as Jack Taltos, and that's how his life really changed.

        The warden owed Taltos a favor anyway, it doesn't really matter

what except that it involved a small wax doll of his ex-wife, and he knew

Taltos wasn't one to turn down a new boy himself. So when the word came

down, the screws rolled their eyes, smiled grimly, and marched him in the

other direction. Troublemaker. Getting your asshole stretched was

practically part of the prison experience for first-time kids, but Jack

Taltos was something else again.

        Not that he looked like much at first. Not big, like the sleek

black mountains that called themselves the Leopard Brothers. Not tall, like

the almost-Nazis. Hard to tell what he looked like, slumped in his cell that

first night, hard to tell what age he was except that it wasn't young. Not

with that harsh, grating crow's voice. Hairy all over, like an animal.

Shaved head, like everyone else in AMCI, like the kid now with his fresh

stubble burning under his resentful hand. Hanging above his bed were long

braids of dishwater hair, lots of them, with pieces of bone and stone and

weeds and nails and broken glass braided in. Jack Taltos' braids had reached

past his waist when they'd brought him in, and they'd cut it all off, but he

still had them, played them like a rosary. 

        And the tattooes, those they hadn't been able to take away. Even

his skull was tattooes, with a screaming face on top of his head, black

wings sweeping down to his temples, tongue lolling out to the nape of his

neck. The prison barber had nearly fainted when he'd uncovered it. That was

the only tattoo that made any sense, if you could call it that. Every other

one was twisty-squirmy ribbon patterns, black and red and green, knotting

and unknotting, maybe forming letters and maybe not. They writhed over his

arms and legs and torso, and the weirdest thing was that they weren't always

in the same place. At least that's what would occur to you after watching

him for a while, and then thinking, wasn't that red swirl on the left

forearm yesterday instead of the right? And just when you were thinking,

naw, couldn't be, I must be crazy, he'd look up at you and grin that sly

yellow-toothed coyote's grin, evil-eyed, and you'd break out into a sweat

and never dare say a thing.

        The kid learned all this about Taltos the first day, sitting on his

cot across the cell, huddled up to the wall, but he didn't learn what the

guy was in for until the next day, when he heard that from other inmates.

Taltos was a Most Wanted. He'd killed at least one person that they'd been

able to prove, and about thirty more that they hadn't. The only reason

they'd been able to pin the one murder on him was that he'd been caught

sodomizing the corpse behind a dumpster. The inmates who related the story

to the kid looked at him almost in pity.

        Taltos himself didn't deny  the charge. "That one was a mulengro, a

black sorcerer," he said sagely, staring at the kid with eyes that were

maybe blue and maybe grey and maybe greenish-yellow. It changed from day to

day. "Dude like that, you kick his bucket, maybe he comes back to bother

you, y'know? Fucking the body's the best way to neutralize the spirit.

Remember that. You might need to do it yourself someday, you never know." He

grinned at the kid, who was trying not to look at his tattooes. 

        "Yeah," said the kid. "Sure." He wondered why this guy wasn't in a

mental institution, in a padded cell. The whole first week, all Taltos did

was talk to him. Said he was a wizard, a shaman. Told him about turning into

a bird or an animal, about creatures he'd seen and people he'd killed. About

what happened to the last kid in that cell, the one who fought him. There

was a brownish smear on the wall where he'd beat this head against it until

he'd fractured his skull and died. Taltos had sat there the whole time

watching, not lifting a finger. Taltos had never killed anybody that people

in AMCI could see; people that he didn't like just died mysteriously, or

sometimes killed themselves. Nobody bothered Jack Taltos. Nobody.

        Again, it was the inmate grapevine that filled in the picture. The

last kid had told people, white-faced and drawn, that whenever he got a

hard-on his dick looked and felt like it was crawling with maggots. After

two weeks he couldn't take it any more. The new kid didn't believe a word of

it, of course. All bullshit. All of it. Until that dealer decided he'd had a

long enough time to settle in and made his preliminary move.

        The other guys had warned his about it, of course, warned him that

the kid was Taltos' boy now, or as good as, but this guy had spent his last

two terms in AMCI before Taltos had gotten caught, and he didn't believe it

either. Taltos himself didn't say a word, just watched with narrowed eyes

while the dealer pushed the kid up against the wall and told him what was

going to happen to him as soon as they got some time alone. He didn't say a

word, but that night the screams started.

        They were terrible screams, bloodcurdling, anguished. The kid could

hear the screws banging on the pusher's cell, yelling at him to shut up, but

he didn't. Then the cell door ground open and they went in to convince him,

but he still didn't stop screaming. About this time the kid heard Taltos

chuckle in the next bed and opened one eye.

        He was sitting up in bed, toying with something. As the light went

on down the hall the kid could see that it was a figure about three inches

high, a little man, dangling from a string, made of wound paper. Taltos

chuckled again, batted it with his hand like a cat. Its legs were spread,

and there was an unbent paper clip shoved up between them.

        They took the guy away to the infirmary, and he never came back. No

one that the kid asked was able to tell him what had happened. That night,

Taltos came to his bed. "You owe me, kid," he said. "I did it for you, to

keep you safe from him."

        That the kid gave in at that point doesn't matter. What does

matter, very much, was why he did it. It wasn't just fear, although that

would have been a perfectly understandable reason. It was power. Maybe

Taltos couldn't really do the things he'd bragged about doing - change

shape, make cars run without gasoline, talk to trees, become invisible.

Maybe all he could do was make his tattooes crawl around and make people

hurt real bad without maying a hand on them, but that was enough. That was

more than the kid had seen in his entire boring life, and he wanted a taste

of it, wanted to learn. And if he had to go down on his knees for it, so be it.

        Taltos pulled his dick out of his pants, and it was just as nasty

as the rest of him. It was tattooed with a snake crawling around it, with

the snake's green head right on the head of the dick, fangs bared. There

were little indentations all over where they'd taken out his piercings, and

under the pubic hair on his balls was the vague murky tattoo of something

unappetizing crawling its way over the scrotum. All in all it looked like

something you'd rather vomit than put in your mouth, but the kid squeezed

his eyes shut and did what he had to do. Afterwards, Taltos rolled him over

and took him, and he could have sworn the thing squirmed its way in, and it

felt so good, so good he moaned and came and was disgusted with himself.

        "If you're so powerful," the kid gasped to him, laying on his back

and looking up, feeling the hot jism leak out his sore asshole, "then why

the hell are you in here?"

        Taltos gave him a wry, grim smile. "Every seventh year, my power

wanes. They caught me, and I should have expected it. But it's getting

stronger already. Month or two, I'll be out of here."

        "Yeah, right. How you gonna do that? Fly?" Sarcasm was acid in the

kid's mouth.

        "Nah. Walk right out."

        "Yeah. Sure."

        There was silence for a moment while Taltos chewed on a hangnail.

"You want to come with me?" he asked finally.

        Every muscle in the kid's body stiffened. He desperately wanted it

to be true, and just as desperately hoped it was all bullshit. "Well, sure,

if it was real," he said, hiding his feelings with scorn.

        Silence again for a moment. Then, "If I get you out, you belong to

me, on the outside," he said. 

        The kid dropped all pretense. "Will you teach me?" he asked.

        Taltos shrugged. "Maybe," he said. "We'll see. First you gotta

clean off my dick."





Raven Kaldera