“Dude,” Dallas repeated, “you blew it.” Abraham’s jaw went slack. “You had your shot, Bro-ham. Come on,” he whispered, quieter still, “I’ve got both of them in here. And you saw them. I can’t pass this up.”
“I don’t . . . I don’t believe you.”
“No, seriously. They’re both—”
“No, no. I believe that. I just. I can’t believe . . .”
“Look, dude. What can I say?”
“Nothing. Just, just don’t say anything. I’ll just sit out here all night. Alone.”
“Yeah, about that.” Dallas gave him a concerned but pleading look. “Can you do me a solid and not hang out by the tent? I mean, it would be kind of creepy, you know?”
Abe tried to speak up, his mind sifting through the hundred or so things he would like to say were he to man up. Then he sighed and did what he always did: he slunk away, envied his best friend for what he knew was going on, and dreamed of a day when it might be him in that tent. As he walked away, he stepped on a large twig. The SNAP echoed, bouncing around the camp. He looked around, startled, realizing what was going on.
Great, he thought to himself. Now the stuff kicks in. He listened for a moment to the fire, the crackling pops and snaps like an orchestra of Black Cats set off in a soda can. Abraham was sweating, cold, and had a headache beginning to crescendo. Now the auditory hallucinations were settling in, meaning he was just moments from finding out how badly the mushrooms were going to hit him. Looking up, he saw the moon, big and bright in the sky, and decided that if he was going to trip his balls off, he might as well find a good spot for staring at the stars while he did.
It didn’t take long to find a large, almost comfortable limestone boulder resting cautiously on the edge of a steep cliff overlooking a lush, serene valley. Moonlight dripped over it like pooling blood. Colors were sharper than before, flickering—almost shimmering—ghost trees waking from their daylight slumber, stepping out of their stumps to walk and sway amongst the living. Abraham stared at the ghost trees wondering if they hungered, if they had any desire to scare anyone, or if, as ghosts, they simply wanted to feel the slightest touch of sunlight again. As Abraham stared at the ghost trees’ sultry moon dance, he felt time slowing to a crawl, the whirling spin of the world reduced to a slow-motion stutter as he fell out of the time stream entirely, able to look in at the captured moment, waiting, paused for him, beyond the thin veil of reality.
Yes. The mushrooms had finally kicked in.
If he wasn’t going to get laid tonight, he might as well have the trip of a lifetime. So once again he raised his eyes and took in the splendor of the moon. Larger and larger it loomed, until it could come no closer and it too began to shimmer, shake, and finally lose the tension that held it together. Slowly the moon melted before his eyes, first with small, single droplets forming on its craggy surface before streaking, then in waves as entire patches buckled and ran down the front of the sky, vanishing. Shocked at the sudden loss of the moon, the stars took photos, winking in and out as they captured pictures of the strange turn of events.
With the moon gone, the stars had a full-blown freak-out, each spiraling through the night on a panicked carousel, screaming, wailing for help before several thousand of them collided, exploding in the center, together forming a brand-new moon so the earth would no longer be so alone. Everyone needed a partner. Everything needed a friend. Nothing in the universe wanted to be found sitting alone on a rock in the middle of nowhere wondering why they weren’t allowed in the tent. Everyone should be allowed in the tent. After all, that’s all the world was: one big tent for us all to fuck in. But not Abe. Abe wasn’t allowed in that tent either. No, Abe was destined to spend the rest of his life outside that tent, outside of time, outside of himself, looking back in at a moment when he would be left alone forever.
Dallas, Carly, and Stacy hadn’t taken this many mushrooms. They wouldn’t be able to step out of time like this. So they would stay at the camp, trapped inside the thin walls of reality, unable to see what Abe saw. And that made him even more alone. Alone.
Alone.
Psst. Over here.
“What,” mumbled Abe. Or at least he thought he mumbled what. Did he? Had he really said anything? He tried again. “What?” That time it worked. The word came out. Or did it? “What,” he repeated again. Or maybe he hadn’t repeated it at all.
Come here.
Okay. That wasn’t really a voice. That was all in his head. He wasn’t really hearing anything.
“Come here, silly.”
Abraham looked up, saw a shadow in the tree line behind him. The voice sounded familiar. Feminine. Sexy. Carly.
“Carly?” he asked in a shouted whisper. “Is that you?”
“Yeah, sweetie. It is.”
“How did you get out of time?”
“What?”
“Time. How did you escape it? You didn’t take as many shrooms as I did.”
She giggled. “Time isn’t all that hard to get away from. Like you.”
Abraham tried to spin around on his rock. It wasn’t working. His head merely flopped back and forth on his neck. “What do you mean?”
“You wouldn’t know hard to get if it walked up and hit you with a brick.”
“Hard to . . . hard to get?”
“Yeah.”
“You were playing hard to get?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“You’re good.”
“You’ve got to be,” she said with a wry smile.
“Why’d you wait so long?”
“I wanted to make sure you weren’t a creep.”
“Oh. Am I a creep?”
“No, but your friend is. Do you know what he wanted me to do?”
He thought for a moment about the dozens of stories Dallas had told him, about all the things he’d gotten women to do. “Probably.” It wasn’t hard to imagine how he’d chased Carly off. “I can guess, I mean.”
“Well, do you have any ideas about what you could get me to do?”
Abe giggled a little. “I could think of something, I suppose.”
“Well then, what are you still doing on that rock?”
“I can’t really move.”
“Yes, you can.”
“No, I mean, I’ve become one with it or something.”
“No, you haven’t. I’m not coming over there. You’ll have to come over here. So summon the strength of the earth or the ancients or whatever you have to do, but get your ass off that rock and over here. I want to show you something.”
That got Abe’s attention. He sat up, the energy of the universe flowing through him, the stars and wind against his back, and he levitated from the rock as if willed to do so by a powerful force. There was an electric pulse on the night air and he could feel it now. It originated deep inside the pit of his gut, tethered to the shadowy, naked form of Carly, hidden just behind the bushes. He was drawn to her. It was meant to be. There he floated above the ground, his legs no longer responding to what his brain was telling them, his torso drifting, barely supported by them. Wait, was he drifting or was he walking? He couldn’t tell anymore.
His floating stopped a few feet from her, his center of gravity shifting as he wobbled atop a pair of rubbery legs. The pulse was stronger standing next to her, the dull hum of the world originating from where she was standing, as if Carly herself was the center of the universe. Was she, he wondered, the center of the universe? He didn’t know. There was a lot he didn’t know; he was beginning to realize that. The universe was a vast expanse, far greater than he could ever conceive, and he had seen but a fraction of an inch of it. Tears started to form in the corners of his eyes as he finally understood what the universe was trying to tell him.
“Those were really good mushrooms, weren’t they?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Abe snapped back. For
an instant, he wished his mouth could match the poetry in his mind. That his mouth worked at all astonished him.
“Will you dance with me?”
He smiled and giggled oafishly. “Yeah.”
“Dance with me,” she cooed. She shimmered, as if she were made of gemstones, and as she swayed, the moonlight glimmered off her curves. Her eyes locked with his, her sway becoming a writhe. Then the writhe became a swagger and she took slow, sensual steps toward him. A twirl, a wave, a beckon. She was dancing now, fully invested in the throes of a lurid seduction. “Dance with me.”
He wasn’t going to blow it this time. Abe began to dance. There was no rhythm to his movement, no fluidity, no poetry. The moves he made were absurd; a prancing duck amid elegant swans fared better at attracting a mate. Carly smiled; the dance was enough. Every molecule in his body exploded, awash in tingling arousal, doused in a transcendent, enlightened glow. This moment, this moment right here, was the very best twenty or so seconds of Abraham Collins’s life.
It was then that Abraham Collins realized that not only was he dancing rather poorly, but that he could not stop dancing poorly—or stop dancing at all. Something else had taken him over, thrusting his legs in the air before slamming them back down on sharp stones and prickly burr patches. And as he tried to gaze down to see the state of his feet, he realized something odd: he couldn’t look down. It was only then he noticed that Carly didn’t look like Carly at all.
The drugs weren’t wearing off, but he was beginning to see through them. This wasn’t Carly; this wasn’t anyone resembling Carly. Sure, she was lithe and beautiful, but it wasn’t her.
No, this girl was different. A waifishly thin goddess with a ballerina’s body and a virginal face pristine with innocence; she shone in the moonlight like a ghostly angel, wisps of magic misting off her as she moved. Her movements blurred, blending together—a liberal mix of her speed, the shadows, and the psilocybin coursing through his veins. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, not for a moment. Not even to look at where he was dancing. The fog of the high was lifting ever so slowly, but for some reason he was no longer in control of his own feet.
“Do you love me?” she whispered.
“Yes,” he answered without thinking. He wasn’t sure why.
“Will you love me forever?”
“Yes,” he answered again without hesitation. “I will love you as long as forever and more.”
“Then I will see you at the bottom.”
It was then and only then that Abe saw that his feet were no longer touching the ground. He was floating—the earth a hundred feet below. He hadn’t flown or ascended in any way; rather he had danced past the rock he had once reclined upon and found his way over the cliff. Abraham was falling, his velocity far outracing the slow speed at which he could take it all in. In his head, it might have taken an hour to hit the ground. But to the watching fairies, the moon and the stars still swirling around it, it took but seconds for Abraham Collins to plummet to the rocks below, and even less time for his legs to fracture and splinter beneath him as he impacted with the force of a speeding truck.
It would have been best had he blacked out, had he not felt every painful snap and shattering bone. Unfortunately, even at the end of his life, Abraham Collins couldn’t catch a break.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF FOREST BOGIES
An excerpt by Dr. Thaddeus Ray, Ph.D., from his book A Chronicle of the Dreamfolk
The chief problem in dealing with forest bogies is their complete and total lack of self-awareness. While they are unconsciously driven to certain behavior, they may not understand why, or even desire the outcome they will inevitably achieve. This is the unfortunate conundrum of many bogies’ existence. Not everything that causes harm sets out with that intent. Sometimes their motives are far more profound or lofty.
This is not meant in any way as a defense of the bogey. While not all of them are innately and intentionally evil, many are. Take for example the Buber. A Buber is a vicious, mean-spirited, shape-changing beast (often appearing in the guise of an old woman or an elderly man with a long gray beard) without an ounce of humanity anywhere in its hideous form. It will kiss a sleeping human being and consume its life force before slipping into its body and possessing it. Once it has consumed every last ounce of a person and done all the evil it can, it leaves behind the empty, lifeless husk with white, colorless eyes the only sign of possession. Bubers are dedicated purely to evil.
On the other hand, by all accounts Aufhockers are friendly, mischievous spirits known for their proclivity for jumping aback a person and riding them like a horse. In centuries past, many pixies and sprites were known to jump astride horses in the middle of the night and ride them to a lather, returning them before dawn exhausted and useless for the next day. This was not done with malice as much as it was done in the name of good humor. There was no permanent damage, as a tired horse could always rest. Such is the thinking of the Aufhocker. Rather than riding horses, they jump on the backs of travelers and ride them into the forest. Much like pixies and sprites, they find the stunt funny, intended only to scare the traveler, riding them until they are exhausted and cannot take another step. What the Aufhocker does not consciously realize, however, is that they are driven to ride these people to their deaths.
It is why one should never trust a bogey, even a well-intentioned one. Like a wild dog, it might look approachable, but if you get too close its nature kicks in. These creatures must be avoided and their tactics understood. If you run across a maiden in the woods and she asks you to dance, she’s a bogey. Perhaps she might offer you gold or some manner of payment to dance, lie, or otherwise find yourself occupied with her, but the end result will always be the same.
Or take for example the infamous Erl King (or the Elf King’s Daughter, from whom the tales of the Erl King arose) who will strike you ill for rejecting him. Damned if you dance, damned if you don’t. In this case there is nothing one can do. Thus it is wisest to ignore any and all travelers while wandering through the woods. There is a good chance they mean you harm.
It would seem that these creatures feel emotion only to serve an end: to feed. Like a human being feels a rumble in its stomach to alert him to the need for food, a forest spirit feels love, jealousy, or anger. In this way they are both drawn to their food and possess the means to lure it to its doom. It is entirely feasible that a nixie truly loves the men she lures to watery graves, hoping and believing that they will live forever beneath the waves. Though one must never mistake this emotion for true feeling, nor believe you might be the exception to the rule. The soils of many forests are littered with the bones of people who thought the same.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE VEIL RISES ON THE GREAT STAGE
Ewan and Dithers hovered over the small boulder, careful not to step in any of the blood pooling at its base. Abraham Collins lay sprawled across it, his back broken, legs shattered, savage fragments of bone tearing out through flesh. His legs twitched and jerked, still dancing, jagged bone sawing away at muscle and skin.
Dithers looked down with pity. This was no longer sporting. Abraham Collins looked up from his rock, broken almost in two, reaching for Ewan, his eyes bleary with blood.
“Angel?” Abraham wheezed out in between coughs. Ewan took one deliberate step backward, leaving Abraham’s hand pawing desperately at the space between them. Dithers and Ewan exchanged looks.
Dragana the Veela peered over the side of the cliff, one hundred feet above them, her heart as broken and mangled as Abraham’s body below. She flung herself over the side, dancing slowly down along the cliff face, each elegant foot kicking off stray rocks and ledges, toes perfectly pointed as she stepped. Drifting to the ground, she rushed up, put a gentle hand on Abraham’s chest, watching as blood seeped—occasionally spurting—through gashes punctured by splintered ribs. She looked away, dramatically. “Why did
you have to leave me?” she whispered, her voice cracking with tears.
Dithers motioned to Ewan and then pointed at Abraham. “You know what you have to do.”
“What?” asked Ewan, not actually sure what he had to do.
“Like I showed you, like you would a rabbit,” said Dithers. He paused, waiting for Ewan to catch on. “It’s not kind to let them suffer like this.”
Ewan nodded.
“I can’t watch this,” said Dragana. She took a step back toward Abraham, cradled his cheeks in her hands, and kissed him deeply on the mouth. Then she pulled away, wiping a smear of blood across her lips with the back of her hand. Dragana turned away, facing the night.
Ewan wobbled Abe’s blood-soaked head in his hands like a large pumpkin, looking to Dithers for approval. He rocked it back and forth just a little to get the motion right, as if he were testing a hammer or perfecting a golf swing. Then, in one swift motion, Ewan snapped Abraham’s neck. The sound was quick and slight, barely even noticeable. Dragana flinched anyway.
And with that, the twitching dance ended and the blood gurgled no more.
Ewan smiled cautiously. “Was that right?”
Dithers smiled back, reaching over, ruffling Ewan’s hair like a proud father. “That was exactly right. Come on, there are still three more.”
Dragana wept quietly, turning back to mourn her lover, clasping his hand to her breast. Dithers and Ewan together walked away from the corpse. Ewan leaned in close, whispering ever so quietly. “If she loves them so much, why does she do that?”
Dithers put a hand on Ewan’s shoulder and shook his head. “Because she doesn’t know any better.”
ELSEWHERE IN THE forest, Dallas’s disembodied head once again poked out from the front of the canvas tent. “Did you girls hear that?” he asked of the pair hastily dressing behind him. The girls both nodded.
“Yeah,” said Carly. “Your creepy, high as hell little friend probably just walked off the side of a cliff or something.”
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