by Mat Laporte
“I bet you can’t wait to get back home where everyone wears hats like this?” he nodded at Tex. “I’m going to give mine to a charity for short people,” New Hampshire said, patting the top of his hat. “Wearing one of these makes a person feel tall.”
There was a crash of utensils on ceramic as something hit the table; it was Vermont’s hat falling off his head and landing on his plate again. This time the little boy hid behind the booth, but not very well. I could see a wisp of his light brown hair sticking up over the edge of the cushion and a balled-up, pudgy little hand; it wasn’t the little boy we were looking at though, it was Vermont.
With his hat knocked off, we could see his scalp; it was no longer a mess of scars and burns like the rest of ours. The top of his head was still bald, but it was pristine. It was so smooth and perfect-looking, I thought it might be a bald cap but, from where I sat, I could also see some brown stubble emerging and even a vein or two, so it was his real head after all. No burns. No scars.
“I’m really sorry. That’s the second time he’s done that isn’t it?” the boy’s mom said to Vermont over the seat cushion.
“No ma’am. That was the first,” Vermont said, not looking at her. Oblivious.
“Can I give you some money to get it cleaned?” she asked.
“That won’t be necessary,” Vermont said, looking over his shoulder at the boy’s mom and turning back around to take a sip of his coffee, as if nothing significant had transpired.
“Eric, I want you to apologize—” the boy’s mother said.
There was a pause and then the boy’s disembodied voice squeaked from the other side of the booth: “Saww-rree.”
“That all right,” Vermont said. Then he saw all of us staring at him. “What?” he asked, sensing that something was wrong. “I won’t need it much longer, anyway.”
New Hampshire snapped his head to the side to look at me and then at Tex and Colorado. I nodded my assent, as did Colorado, then Tex passed his hand over the table, releasing us from breakfast. New Hampshire jumped up from his seat, crawled across Colorado while taking a knife out his belt, and stabbed Vermont in the neck. He sawed it out backwards, then rammed it back in. New Hampshire repeated this action five more times until Vermont’s neck was thoroughly bloody and slashed. Vermont squealed, pig-like. His blood sprayed on the table and on the booth in front of us. His legs kicked out from under him, he gurgled some more, and fought to get free, but New Hampshire just kept pulling the knife out and ramming it back in. It was a dirty technique and a bloody mess, but it did the trick.
Everyone in the restaurant ran out except us, the state men: Texas, Colorado, New Hampshire, the recently deceased body of Vermont, and myself.
The sky was almost completely black when I pulled up to the ranch. As I got out of my air-conditioned rental car, the humidity was unbearable. I lit a cigarette and waited for the Caretaker to appear.
When he finally did, the sky was rumbling with the first phases of what promised to be a damaging storm.
“I have the body,” I said to the Caretaker, not knowing how else to put it.
The Caretaker just nodded and let me in. I drove slowly past the empty pigpen and waited for the others to arrive. By the time they parked in front of the barn, fat drops of rain were splattering my windshield.
Colorado and Texas helped me get Vermont’s body out of the trunk and into the barn. We’d wrapped it in a hotel bed sheet now dripping with blood. The Caretaker told us to lay it in the cement circle surrounded by a donut of hay under the solitary light bulb under which we had stood the night before. Once we’d laid the shrouded body in the circle, the Caretaker told us to get out. All of his attention was now focused on the body of Vermont and the circle of pigs that had just assembled around him. We backed out of the barn into the rain and into our respective cars.
By this time it sounded like rocks were falling out of the sky onto my roof and windshield. As I sat listening to it, I wondered if it would put me to sleep. Then I felt something in the backseat with me and heard Kameel’s clear, subliminal voice in my head. He ordered me to get each of the state men out of their cars and into the barn. I wasn’t allowed to use physical force and I wasn’t to say a word to any of them out loud.
He told me he was testing my dream-walking abilities and my loyalty to the ritual at the same time. He informed me that, if I didn’t obey his orders, then the ritual wouldn’t work. He didn’t need to threaten me, though. I was completely under his spell, just like the first time we met.
I looked out my passenger-side window at the other three cars. I was parked next to Tex. He was looking out his windshield at the barn. As I closed my eyes and concentrated all my energy on him, his head slumped to the side, his hat hit the door frame and fell off, he moved back to the centre of the windshield again and then winged his bald head hard off the passenger-side window, crumpled onto the steering wheel, twitched, opened his door and fell out, face first in the mud, his legs still inside the car.
He struggled with me some more. Tex was a strong motherfucker and harder to control than I had anticipated, so I moved to the passenger seat to get a better hold on him. I could feel Kameel in the backseat, just behind my lowered eyelids, judging my dream-walking abilities. I eventually positioned myself inside of Tex and got an unbreakable hold on his involuntary responses. He began crawling on all fours through the mud and rain toward the barn.
Kameel told me to focus my energies on Colorado and New Hampshire next. I got out of my car, slogged through the rain and jumped into Tex’s rental to get a closer read on the other two state men.
Colorado was wiping the inside of his windshield with the sleeve of his shirt. He craned his neck to see who or what the mound of clothes crawling toward the barn was. Then he turned in his seat to look at me, narrowed his eyes and wrinkled his forehead, already bracing for a fight. I eventually got inside him by setting up a decoy: I triggered his sleep reflex and, while he was fighting that off, I took control of his motor functions. He started jumping up and down in his seat like a frog and flailing his arms. After an agonizing but brief struggle, I was able to get him out of the car, too, his head cocked at an angle, eyes staring straight at me, enraged.
Outside in the rain, he started yelling at me. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I could just see his mouth open wide as the torrents of rain swallowed up the sound, his body tense and shaking as he waddled against his will in the direction of the barn.
New Hampshire was easier to control than the others, maybe because he was more willing to go. As soon as I got into Colorado’s car and hijacked New Hampshire’s nervous system, he opened his door and walked with purpose towards the barn, as the other two crawled and shuffled behind him. When they were all inside, the doors of the barn were closed and I was alone in Colorado’s car with the rain coming down hard.
I waited for a long time, not knowing what was going on. I could see that the light was off, but I couldn’t see or hear anything else. Kameel was silent, but I knew he was still inside, keeping an eye on me. I started wondering what I was doing there. What part was I playing? Why had I joined the ritual, I asked myself, and what did I want to get from it now? Then Kameel moved and spoke inside of me. He told me that I didn’t need to know what was happening inside the barn, or anywhere else, for that matter. He said that I should be proud to serve the Caretakers of the ritual and to help maintain the order. To wish for anything else, Kameel said, was treacherous, and could warrant a severe punishment if I wasn’t careful.
I remained quiet and tried not to let him know how much I resented his patronizing tone. I believed even less in the ritual after that. Were the others being inducted into some secret rite, while I was parked outside like a chauffeur? Kameel didn’t say anything further.
We sat together in silence while the rain continued to fall.
Eventually the barn doors opened and the Caretaker walked
towards me through the rain. I rolled my window down and he asked me to move the other vehicles. From where I was parked, I tried to see inside the barn, but it was too dark. So I am the chauffeur after all, I thought.
After I moved the cars, the Caretaker said I wasn’t needed anymore and I drove to the hotel, feeling deeply despondent.
That night Kameel visited me again. He told me to show up at the pancake house, at the same time as usual, the next morning. He said the others would be there as well. He told me that this would be our last breakfast together, and following the completion of our meal, the ritual would be complete.
I wanted to ask him what was going to happen and what it was all about, but when I spoke those words in my warped high-pitched dream-walker’s voice, there was no one around to hear them.
The next morning I drove from my hotel to the pancake house with the sole purpose of finding out what had happened the day before. They were all there when I arrived, except Vermont, and they were all wearing the same old cowboy outfit, including the white cowboy hats we had always worn.
That’s when I realized I’d left my hat in the hotel room. I raised my hands to touch the still-fresh burns on the top of my bald head. I must’ve been really out of it to forget something that important. I considered sneaking away and going back to the hotel to get it, but it was too late, the remaining state men were looking at me from the booth with horrified expressions.
“I know,” I said, squeezing into the booth beside Colorado.
“How could you forget it?” New Hampshire hissed.
Tex put his face in his hands and Colorado scanned the room to see if any of the Caretakers or their spies were there, observing us. Sure enough, the same little boy and his mom were in the booth in front of ours. The state men must’ve ordered before I arrived because the waitress appeared, balancing a brown plastic tray with all of our plates on top of it, not long after I sat down.
As she put the plates in front of us, the three remaining state men stared at me and my disgusting, bald head, with charred skin and sparse clumps of hair for everyone in the restaurant to see. I looked back at them, and realized that I no longer cared what happened to them or the ritual. As soon as they were in front of me, I dove into my plate of pancakes without letting Tex do his hand waving thing. I believe I even mouthed the words, ‘fuck you,’ at him as I did, and he stared back at me with a look of disgust.
The pancakes tasted fine and nothing fell from the sky. The state men were all too intent on my transgressions to notice the little boy behind them making a grab for Tex’s hat. He knocked it off Tex’s head and it landed on a plate of recently syrupped pancakes.
Everyone looked at Tex. Without his hat on, we could see that he was sporting a bountiful new head of hair—a brunette pompadour with the lustre and coif of a man twenty years’ younger—growing naturally on top of his head. Tex looked at New Hampshire, as though he was waiting for a signal or a word about what to do next. Then he lifted his hat off the plate and turned, with his exquisite new head of hair, to look at the boy.
The boy was frozen, staring at our terrifying table: two men in white hats, one with a ridiculous new pompadour that didn’t suit him, and me with my badly burnt scalp, covered in shiny black scabs.
Tex stared hard at the boy until there was a loud shucking sound and the boy’s head popped off his body; it launched off his neck in a short, smooth arc. The boy’s headless body fell backwards and his free-floating head hit the wall at the back of the restaurant, ricocheted off of it, and landed on another customer’s table, where it knocked a glass of orange juice over and came to rest on a plate of waffles.
Outside the sky became very dark and the ground began to rumble. That’s when I knew that the ritual was definitely real and that I had ruined it because I was the impure one, not Vermont.
I started to laugh at the exact same moment something started to scream very loudly in my ear.
Always Dark
In a one-room cabin, in the middle of an always dark forest, under a perpetually full moon that spins in circles above the roof, a mother brushes something that looks like paste through her youngest daughter’s hair. Her older sister sits at a dining room table and pours milk into a bowl. She pushes the bowl in front of a cat, roughly six feet long, with gossamer white fur, sitting at the table, looking sullen and bored.
Martens play in the moonlight outside the cabin. They nose big black bugs out of the ground and take them into their mouths.
A woman on a motorcycle drives up a long, dark stretch of road that cuts through the always dark forest toward the cabin, the beam of light on the front of her bike a V-shaped mouth that envelops everything in its path.
The mother and her daughters hear the motorcycle approach and start to scramble around inside the cabin. They open cupboards and doors and search frantically under the table and chairs. The cat looks at them blankly, as it laps the bowl of milk.
The three women continue to clamber through the cabin as the motorcycle woman gets close, the bright front lamp of the bike visible to them now through the thick growth of the always dark forest. They find what they were looking for in the kitchen cupboard: three wide ceramic masks, which they attach to their faces with the aid of a rough piece of twine, pulled tight around the head, and tied at the back in a bow.
Each mask is identical: flat, white and hard like a dinner plate, with two eyeholes and a mouth hole drilled into it. The mother attaches her own mask and then helps her youngest daughter attach hers, gripping the twine behind her brown locks and tightening it with a couple strong pulls.
The grand cat finishes its bowl of milk and blinks twice, as it enjoys doing. The three women stand in a row, as though awaiting orders, each with a white dinner plate with eyeholes and a mouth hole drilled into it attached to their faces. The cat gets down from its seat at the kitchen table, stretches its back, curls up in front of a black pot-belly stove with a fire burning inside of it, and closes its eyes for a snooze.
The three women have to manoeuvre past its broad shaggy frame to draw three metal pokers from the stove. The pokers have been resting in hot coals for hours and as the mother and the oldest daughter take them out, each one pops and glows. The mother hands her youngest daughter a poker of her own. The little girl grips it proudly with both hands and smiles, as the glowing orange point warms her face through the hard porcelain of her mask.
The motorcycle woman comes to a stop, the engine of the bike still running, the V of the front lamp swallowing the front of the cabin, bathing it in chimeric yellow light. The motorcycle woman removes her helmet and turns off the engine, but not the front lamp; it stays on as she steps off the bike. Her heavy boots crunch gravel, dried ferns, and beetles, and a pack of martens scurry into the safety of the always dark forest with live black bugs squirming around inside each of their mouths.
The driver of the motorcycle has a ruddy sack slung over her shoulders, which she removes as she advances toward the cabin. She stands in front of the door now, her stance wide, and yells to the three women on the other side.
The front door of the cabin hurls open, the lamp on the front of the motorcycle shatters, and the always dark forest returns to utter blackness, as three hot pokers emerge from the doorway, like the three glowing eyes of some mythical beast. The motorcycle woman doesn’t break her stride. She opens the sack, lifts a slab of purple, quivering meat from out of it, and holds it up for the women inside the cabin to see by the light of their simultaneously gleaming pokers.
The women raise their pokers and cheer at the sight of the elusive, purple meat. They had been waiting for this moment, growing hungry, worried that the motorcycle woman might never arrive, or if she did, that she might arrive empty-handed. The motorcycle woman tosses the rare hunk of game into the cabin. It lands on the dirty, wooden floorboards and begins quivering and jerking spasmodically, as though it’s making a desperate attempt to escape.
The three women pounce on the meat slab and keep it pinned to the dirty floorboards with the tips of their ever-hot pokers, pressing down, puncturing the flesh; sparks spurt up and collide with the solid ware of their masks. The motorcycle woman walks past the preoccupied women—she enters the cabin tentatively and surveys the impoverished interior: a warped and weathered dining room table; a bench and two chairs; the black, pot-belly stove, chipped and old, in front of which the big, fluffy cat lays wrapped in heat; a rocking chair; and two threadbare cushions nearby.
Outside, the trees of the always dark forest continue to sway and the perpetually full moon continues to spin and revolve above the roof, and the martens—now safely ensconced in the security of the forest—enjoy their dinner of black bugs, which they crunch happily in their mouths.
The motorcycle woman looks over at the three hungry women, who laugh and cry loudly as they cook their beautiful bounty. Steam and smoke rise from the once purple and quaking husk, now baked and pinned to the floor. The oldest daughter giggles as it turns a shade of light brown in front of her. Her giggles echo inside her mask. They wake the slumbering cat giant who looks up at the motorcycle woman, sniffs at the air now thick with a heady stench of broiled meat, and licks its chops in expectation of the immanent feast.
The oldest daughter retrieves a serving plate from the kitchen cupboard and brings it over to the doorway. Her mother spears the meat with her poker, hoists it onto the plate, then she and her oldest daughter carry it over to the dining room table. The steamy meat is no longer purple but a delicious brown with black, burnt ends.
The youngest daughter stands at the motorcycle woman’s feet. She stares up at her inquisitively through the eyeholes in her face protector. The motorcycle woman smiles, kneels down and unties the rough twine holding the dinner plate to the littlest one’s head. The mother, as she carves the meat with a sharp, serrated knife, watches the motorcycle woman lift her youngest daughter off the ground, and seat her on the bench alongside the dining room table.
