Threat from the North - a Percy Jackson & the Olympians tale
[WARNING: this is NOT a delightful chapter]
Chapter 2 - Tea Time Terror
Knoxville, Iowa
Three weeks until Autumnal Equinox
She sat at the edge of the playground's sandbox, happily serving tea to a rag doll from a plastic, pink-and-white teacup. A normal, sunny day. A normal playground full of happy children and their fathers. A normal, seven year-old girl…Or so one would think at first glance.
"Would you like some more tea, Miss Dugan?" she asked sweetly. After waiting a second or two in silence, the girl mimicked pouring tea into the doll's cup from an imaginary pot before taking a sip from her own cup.
"What was that, Miss Dugan?" she asked, cocking her head to the side, which caused her bouncy ebon curls to sway like a pendulum. She giggled, a musical sound that carried across the playground against the wind. "Oh, you naughty girl! You know as well as I do Arthur will not be joining us."
She giggled quietly into her cup, this time cut short as the pale, grandmotherly doll was pulled from its seated position on the sand by the twine noose wrapped around its neck. "Hey! Give her back!" The girl's pale grey eyes flashed upward. Her ivory cheeks flushed with anger, quickly draining to match her eyes as she looked upon the captor of her doll.
"Sssuch exquisssite craftsssmanssship," the snake-woman hissed over her forked tongue. "Did your mother make thisss?"
The girl shook her head in the negative.
"You father, perhapsss?"
The girl again shook her head. "I d-did…"
"Sssuch a talented morsssel…pity…" The dracaena dropped the rag doll of Eva Dugan and lunged for the girl, who closed her eyes, tripping backwards and screaming. The scream merely a reflex action, for suddenly, the girl was not afraid. Not when the sandbox emptied into a pit crawling with skeletons. Not when those skeletons dragged the dracaena down into the earth screaming. Not even when one skeleton remained behind for a moment, picked up and dusted off the fallen rag doll, and returned it to her before vanishing into the earth along with its brethren.
Activity in the playground came to a halt as all eyes turned to the girl. "Hollie!" a woman cried, her voice breaking in a mixture of fear and concern.
"Mommy?" the girl - Hollie - called, searching for the source of the voice. "Mommy?!"
Two of the older children who had been playing on the monkey bars earlier, a girl with fiery red hair and a boy with dusty brown hair, had Hollie's mother by the shoulders, forced into a kneeling position. An older man with a ruggedly handsome face and peppery black hair held a strange thing against the back of the woman's neck. It looked like the ax that the nice fireman next door owned, but it was a LOT bigger. The remainder of the playground's inhabitants were drawing what looked, to the girl, like big letter openers, more ax-things, pointy sticks, and coat hangers from hiding places in the playground mulch and underneath the playground equipment.
The handsome man spoke, addressing Hollie. "We do not wish harm on your mother. We just want you to come with us, daughter of Hades."
The playground began to inch towards her. Hollie did not have any idea who these people were, who Hay-deeze was, or why they wanted to hurt her mommy. She looked around in a panic, barely noticing that all the boys and girls had strange marks on their faces and on the things in their hands, almost like block letters, but they didn't look right. She took a tentative step backward, clutching her doll close to her chest. "Mommy…" she murmured, her eyes brimming with tears.
As she looked at her mother's tear-streaked face, she could smell the trees more acutely. Her mother shook her head and mouthed: "Go!"
"Silence, woman!" the ax-man shouted, his face contorting ugly in rage as he struck her across the face.
Hollie's mother glared up at him with fire in her eyes, the left already beginning to swell, and spit in the man's face. As the spittle struck him, a small hand slipped into Hollie's. A girl no older than she, with thick curly brown hair and eyes that danced, stood just behind her. "Come on!" she whispered. "We have to go. There's nothing you can do for her right now."
Hollie sniffled and nodded, squeezing the girl's hand. The girl turned and sprinted away from the playground in the blink of eyes, practically carrying Hollie.
The man and children in the playground stopped moving and stared at the spot where Hollie seemed to have vanished. The ax-man snarled angrily. "You!" he pointed at the boy holding Hollie's mother. "Kill the wench then take scouts to their home. The rest of you: find the girl. I must return and report our failure to the jarl."
Five boys and seven girls remained at the playground with the appointed executioner. The rest split up in teams of three and began to leave in different directions. Hollie's mother did not scream or flinch as the ax blade descended…
Disclaimer: Percy Jackson & the Olympians is Copyright Rick Riordan and Disney's Hyperion Books, New York. I do not own rights to any of his characters, locations, or events.
Hollie is the imaginative "love child" of myself and Crazytop14. Her name comes from the German word "holle", meaning "hell" in English. As stated, she is a daughter of Hades. The little girl who escapes with Hollie is copyright me and Crazytop14.
Eva Dugan, the doll, was a real person. In the late 1920s, she murdered her neighbor, Arthur Mathis, age 65, at his ranch. In 1927, she waqs found guilty of first-degree murder, at the age of 43. On February 21, 1930, she was hanged.. The executioner misjudged the distance her body would have to fall so that the weight only broke her neck. When her body dropped, the weight and force snapped her head clean off. Five official witnesses fainted. Her execution led to Arizona adopting the gas chamber as the method for execution on the grounds that it was "more humane".
"jarl" (pronounced yarl) is the old Norse word for "chief".
Knoxville, Iowa, is a real location, approximately 39 miles southeast of Des Moines. My best friend grew up there. Her character will be showing up in a later chapter.
As always, please leave reviews and comments upon reading. Writers are insecure by nature (I am anyways), positive reaction to our product is always a surefire way to get more of the same.
We're still looking for a few characters to fill major roles in Threat from the North. So, if you've got a son of Athena, daughter of Aphrodite, or son/daughter of Hephaestus laying around gathering dust, send them my way and we'll incorporate them in the story.