Dreams and Shadows (8 page)

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

O
N THE
P
SYCHOLOGY OF
F
OREST
B
OGIES

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

T
HE
V
EIL
R
ISES ON THE
G
REAT
S
TAGE

E
wan 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.”

E
LSEWHERE 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.”

“I'm serious,” said Dallas. “If that was Abe, he could really be hurt.”

Stacy grimaced. “Well, why don't you go check it out?”

Dallas shook his head. “I'm not going out there alone.”

“Yeah,” Stacy nodded. “You really are.”

“It's dark and I'm tripping balls.”

Carly handed him a camping lantern from her pack—crisp, new, fresh out of the plastic, having never seen a day of use. “You better be careful then.”

“Yeah,” Stacy giggled. “Don't walk off any cliffs there, stud.”

“Yeah.” Dallas looked down at the lantern, fumbling with it for a second, trying to figure out just how to get it switched on, then, finally working it out, turned it all the way up. His head was fuzzy. Everything was hazy, out of focus. The light was
sooooo beautiful
. Colors he'd never seen before scintillated within the bulb, casting wicked shadows across the faces of the two beautiful women huddled before him. Their eyes twinkled in the light, catching the stray, brilliant rays and reflecting them back like—

SNAP!
Stacy snapped her fingers inches away from Dallas's nose. “Focus,” she said firmly, waving her hand in front of his face.

Dallas shook off the wandering, distracted feeling and remembered for a moment that his friend was somewhere out there in the dark. Standing to a crouch, he scooted out through the front flap of the tent, staggering off into the woods looking for Abe. “And bring back a pizza!” shouted Carly jokingly.

“Yeah! Pepperoni!” Stacy giggled. Carly laughed along with her. Then, not wanting to look at the creepy, misty darkness outside the tent any longer, Stacy hurriedly zipped the front flap back up.

“These guys are losers,” whispered Carly sharply, beneath her breath.

“Shut up.” Stacy smiled. “Dallas is cute.”

“Yeah, but his friend is a
night
-
mare
.”

“I know. But you still owe me for the cabin. I got stuck with your brother all week. You can deal with a creepy little dork leering at you for two days.”

D
ISCOMBOBULATED FROM A
head full of high, Dallas stumbled through bramble patches, his footfalls heavy and uneven; his senses disconnecting further and further from reality.
Where am I going?
he mumbled incoherently
.
He had no idea where Abe had wandered off to and it was dawning on him that sometime between entering the tent and hearing Abe's cry, a thick, dewy fog had set in. It swirled through the dim wood, rivers of elegant mist pouring down the sides of knobby mounds like swift, wispy waterfalls, spilling a thick pea-soup miasmic sea across mossy earth, ankle high and impenetrable by the naked eye. The air was thick with the humid nighttime sweat of Texas spring, tendrils of misty haze reaching up waist high, swallowing entire sections of the forest whole.

This was a very, very bad idea, thought Dallas, now sure that his friend had taken a nasty spill off the side of some cliff. “ABE!” he bellowed. “AAAAAAAABRAHAAAAAA
AM
!” There was no reply—not from crickets or cicadas, or Abe in distress. Then Dallas felt it. Despite the heat, there was something about the air that held the cold, damp chill of death upon it. It wasn't a smell, it was a feeling, a creeping doom; a bleak, barren, soulless hollow that the light of the moon couldn't pierce.

All the light had fallen away from the world, with only the fog illuminated now. Even the stars struggled against the black, managing only the slightest pinpricks of twinkles through a gloom that was both everywhere and nowhere at once. It wasn't the dark of night; it was the tenebrous shadow of bad omens. Dallas had done a lot of things to score a night with a girl like Stacy in the past, and he would easily have done a lot more to score a night with both Stacy and Carly at the same time. But suddenly, ingesting hallucinogenic mushrooms and stumbling through
the middle of fucking nowhere
didn't seem worth it.

He'd been walking for at least ten minutes, his legs growing heavy, his head wobbling a bit on his neck. It was time to turn around; he'd done his part for Abe. He spun on his heel, gazing across nebulous fog, only to see the flicker of a campfire and the tent not fifty paces away.
What? But I . . . ?
“Shit.” He hadn't been out there ten minutes. He hadn't been out there five. Time was fucking with him. And no matter how little he cared for Abe's predicament compared to his own, there was no way the girls would let him back in the tent so soon after leaving. So he turned back into the night, calling out to Abe once more.

T
HE GIRLS EACH
drifted off into a deep sleep. Carly slipped immediately into a colorful dream fueled by afterglow, laced with Dallas's musky scent. Stacy wasn't so lucky; she sank into a grim, dusky void, vacant of restful peace. There was something dark and lonely here, something unnatural. She wasn't alone in her dreamless sleep, unsure what it was that loitered in the empty black of her subconscious, leering at her thoughts, sifting through her memories with filthy, perverted fingers.

Perched above her, in plain view, stooped a skeleton of a man, an ancient, drooling Methuselah, with hollow, sunken sockets surrounding lifeless black orbs; an unfettered beard speckled with wood chips and slivers of cedar; and a flare of wild, untamed white hair exploding out of his skull like a dying dandelion.
Nibbling Nils. The Buber.

Stacy was a feast of shame, brimming with insecurity, lashed together with frayed strands of delusion. Nibbling Nils ran his slobbering tongue over his shriveled, cracking lips. He stroked Stacy's cheek with a bony hand, pinching both sides of her face, forming a gaping pucker. Then he leaned in, kissed her deeply, his enthusiastic tongue flitting around the inside of her mouth. She tasted like an unripened raspberry, a bitter, tart fruit laced with regret but full of promise.

Delicious.
Her soul flooded into him like a geyser, an eruption of despair and self-loathing, salted with empty bliss and drunken diversion. He cringed a bit at the taste of her childhood—far too sweet for his liking—but the broth upon which a thousand of her disappointments were stewed.

Everything that was Stacy Long faded away, swallowed hard into the belly of a dirty old man. He would soon drink her dry, hollow her out, slide in and wear her into the night like a silk dress. But there were still several years of staggering mediocrity to finish gulping down, and he was in no hurry.

E
LSEWHERE,
D
ALLAS CONTINUED
blindly through the woods, calling for Abe. It was pitch black and the misting fog had developed a personality all its own, at times sweeping up like a storm surge, silently herding him farther off the trails. Slowly but surely, Dallas was getting lost. It seemed now as if finding camp was going to be as impossible as finding Abe. He tried convincing himself that nothing had happened—that Abe was sleeping off his mistakes under a tree somewhere, dreaming of all the things he was never going to do with Carly—but the mushrooms were getting the best of him and panic was setting in.

Scratch! PAIN. Dallas glanced down at his arm with a wince. He'd somehow walked into the sharp end of a jagged branch, his pink exposed flesh flooding with a shock of crimson. He cupped it with his hand, trying to stanch the flow.

He swore repeatedly. He cursed the tree; he cursed himself; he even cursed the way the fog began to turn scarlet as blood dripped, swirling into it, splashing into the thick, frothy roil before diffusing into the surrounding mist. The fog ran red with blood, pinkening into a soft blush before vanishing into the black.
Wait, that's not right.

Dallas didn't care whether this was the drugs or not. He'd had enough. He turned without thinking, running blindly into the night, his legs pumping furiously, managing to make it a full fifty feet before a looping root reached out of the earth, took hold of his ankle, and twisted it, slamming him face-first into the rocky soil. Gasping, he tried to catch his breath, but it had been knocked clean out of him and sat swirling in the impenetrable fog beside him. Then he reached out, trying to grab hold of it. His lungs wheezed to life.

That's when he heard the scuffing sound of footsteps through brush. Then the tinkling notes of a soft voice whimpering in the evening air. “Dallas?” Stacy called out. “Dallas, where are you?”

“I'm here,” he coughed out, trying to form wheezes into words. “Here.”

“Dallas?”

“Here!” This time the word came out, all the way out. Dallas pushed himself to his knees, rising to his feet, careful of the ankle that was throbbing too much to merely be twisted. He didn't want to look at it; he didn't want to know. “Stacy?”

Stacy made her way carefully through the soupy darkness. There was something strange about the way she walked, as if she were uncomfortable with her own feet and measured every stride, but Dallas was only just beginning to notice it as she took her final few steps toward him. Then he looked into her eyes, saw only milky white orbs, the irises cloudy, drained of color. She had no expression, showed no emotion, a bag of flesh held steady by the hooks and pulleys of an invisible puppeteer.

“Stacy?”

Without a word, Stacy slashed his throat with her camping knife. His severed windpipe gurgled his surprise as he reached out futilely in self-defense. She thrust the knife violently into him, stabbing each individual organ alphabetically, one by one and twice for the lungs. Dallas twitched with a sickened spasm, his body convulsing, the last seconds of life clinging desperately to remain behind in this world. He reached out, lost two fingers; he swung with an open paw, lost three more. Stacy's strength was unnatural and Dallas never landed a single blow for himself before tumbling to the ground to bleed out in the thick fog.

The trees rustled. “He was mine,” a voice called from the dark.

“I got him first,” said Stacy, her voice raspy and cold.

Bill the Shadow stepped out from behind a thick tree. He was an inky blot of a man, a tattered black coat and weathered fedora the only details that weren't too fuzzy to see. Except for his eyes. There was no missing his eyes. He drew a deep drag off a cigarette, its bright orange cherry searing the dark surrounding his featureless face. “Oh. I see.”

Then, with a wave of his hand the trees descended upon Stacy, their branches like talons and teeth, anxious to sink into her waiting flesh. Stacy recoiled, but the forest was far quicker.