Reddit Collection (Fresh-Short #10) by DeYtH Banger (books to get back into reading txt) 📖

demons. In this case, my brother was a target. Also, a fair warning for you. His body is still out there somewhere, possessed by something sinister, along with Smokey; the cat with human teeth.

 

CREDIT: R.T. Maxim

BAD TRIP

 

It was my fifth day in Gloaming, Nevada – an unincorporated township skirted on all sides by scorched barrenness. I had never been this far west before, and so the craggy, acacia-dotted desert was dazzling to my senses. I remember wishing that I could extend my stay, but also knew that doing so would be impossible. My business in the town was concluded, and the presentation had gone well. I was expected back at the home office on Monday.

Rather than spend my stay at a hotel, I lodged with two old friends who had moved out to the area after graduation. Jason and Clara were old sweethearts who eventually married and moved west to “live freely and without external instruction,” as they often phrased it. They were glad to host me for the week, and I enjoyed catching up with them – even if they had become hallucinogen-fueled desert spiritualists.

I was afraid to try mescaline, and I was especially terrified to experiment with psychedelics so far away from the (relatively) settled streets and services of Gloaming. Still, Clara assured me with eager confidence that the experience would be safe as well as beautiful. “When we’re way out there in the silent air of the desert,” she told me, “and the peyote kicks in and there’s no motion at all except for us and the campfire, all under a billion glittering stars…” She searched for more words, but instead could only smile serenely. “You’ll know what I mean.”

I agreed to join them on one of their “trips” before returning home.

…

That night, as we were preparing for the drive out together, Jason retrieved a glass jar with a tin screw cap from his closet, and held it up for me to see. Inside were perhaps two hundred small, clear gelatin capsules. Jason removed the tin cap and tipped several of the strange pills into his palm for me to inspect. I saw that each capsule was packed with shredded bits of something fibrous and hazel-colored. It reminded me of tree bark.

When we were ready, the three of us headed out together. Jason drove while Clara directed him out of the city, then along dozens of miles of unpaved roads. Eventually we were completely off-road, and I could feel the crags and small boulders of the landscape beneath us jostling the car as we drove. Soon Clara and Jason decided that they were satisfied by the pristine quality of the nature around them, and so Jason parked the car. The two of them set up camp while I prepared a makeshift fire pit.

When the dusk came and deepened into night, Clara lit the campfire they had built and Jason brought me my dose of peyote, along with a beer to help me swallow down the fistful of capsules. “Just eat them one by one,” Jason advised. “It won’t take long.” He demonstrated, placing a gelcap onto his tongue, sipping his beer, and then opening his mouth to show that the pill was gone. Over by the campfire, I could see that Clara was taking hers three or four at a time, pausing only to swig from her drink.

Soon we had each finished taking our dose. We drank and watched the fire together, and waited for what would come next. At first we spoke aloud to each other while we waited, but before long we were sitting in silence. The emptiness of the desert pressed inward with a tangible urgency for quiet, and it had rendered us mute.

Eventually, I noticed that I had become raptly attentive to the campfire flickering in front of me. Prismatic streaks of color had begun to spark out from the flame and into the night air, each one cascading like a living mote of light. I felt giddy, and noticed that Jason and Clara both seemed to have entered similar states. With smiles and searching eyes, they were watching the stars.

I turned my eyes back towards the fire, eager to lose myself once again in its dazzling movement. I began to melt back into its warmth, but soon noticed in myself a strange sense that something large was moving through the darkness nearby. Turning my focus towards the motion, I saw a human shape standing alone out in the desert, only barely illuminated at such a distance by the campfire’s flickering light. If it were only a few paces further away, I thought to myself, the shape would be completely obscured by darkness.

“I see something.” I heard myself say it out loud, but my voice sounded hazy and strange. Jason and Clara lazily turned their attention towards me. With a peaceful smile, Jason spoke.

“What do you see, Vince? Describe it for us.”

I strained against my own vision, which was already limited by the dark but now also warped by the peyote. Indeed, even the sand and the trees seemed to be moving and shifting around me. Still, the figure was not something abstract. It looked like a large man who was marching in place unsteadily, listing back-and-forth as he did so. It would take a step forward, then two steps back, then perhaps four rapid, mincing steps in our direction again, then another three steps back. It was staring in our direction the whole time this went on. The figure’s torso bounced gently against the elastic, up-and-down motion of its knees.

“I see a person,” I began hesitantly. “Or, I think I do.” I shifted in place nervously and then corrected myself. “I don’t think it’s a person. The eyes haven’t blinked at all.” Indeed, the eyes were shining bright to me, like two illuminated pinpricks against the darkness around them. They never flickered or dwindled at all as the figure marched.

“It’s probably just an owl,” Clara offered, her back still turned away from the thing. “Does it seem like the eyes are darting around in circles, or making shapes in the dark?”

“Yes,” I replied with a sobbing sort of crack in my voice. “But see for yourself, it’s not like an owl.”

Clara propped herself up on one arm, and looked over her shoulder to follow my pointed finger. Her lazy smile turned suddenly into a deep frown, and I felt nauseous to see the way her face had dropped. Jason noticed too, and turned to look with the same, sudden loss of relaxation. It seemed the thing was really there.

A series of warbling, clicking vocalizations rang out suddenly from the thing’s direction. As it continued, the procession of sounds grew more complex and strange, and soon the noise was rolling over itself like an ungodly, squealing battle-cry. It seemed to me that the thing was calling out to us deliberately, and this idea made my whole body tense up until I began to feel paralyzed. Clara and Jason began to shout at the form which still marched aimlessly without moving closer.

“Get lost, asshole!” Clara’s voice rang out fiercely, but I could hear that she was growing afraid.

“You’re going to wish you hadn’t fucked with us!” Jason added, projecting his voice across the desert in a similarly unsure tone.

But the thing did not seem to mind their threats. In fact, it began to advance slowly and deliberately. Soon it was close enough to the campfire that I could see it more fully. I wasn’t sure, but I felt that I could see the thing spasm badly across its whole body with every few steps that it took. It was as if the creature was struggling through some kind of grand mal seizure at it moved – and somehow it was winning the fight. In my vision and in my mind (both of which were already swimming with peyote fantasies), the thing contorted and twitched like a grotesque and poorly-directly marionette.

As it lurched unevenly across the sand, seemingly unresponsive to our shouted insistences that it leave, the thing began to click and mumble its strange sing-song noises again. This time, though, the sounds it made were more like English.

“Just get lost already!” Clara shouted, and rose to her feet to confront the humanoid creature that was now only a short distance away.

“Juss geh loss!” the creature bellowed back, and then added a hiccupping sort of chuckle that echoed softly in the night’s silence. It did not slow its approach.

“Find me the car keys,” Jason said quietly to Clara. “I’ll scare it away.”

Keys in hand, Jason moved quickly to unpack a tire iron from the trunk of the car, and then stood by the campfire with the makeshift weapon brandished over his head. “This is your last warning!” he shouted. “Don’t make us hurt you!” He took several steps towards the thing, as if prepared to attack. To our relief, the creature planted its feet and stood still. Clara and I shared a glad smile before turning our attention back to Jason.

When we did, however, we saw that Jason had dropped both the car keys and his weapon to the earth. He was now walking – lazily but deliberately – towards the thing that now stood patiently in the nearby darkness. The creature, staring at Jason with its shining and seemingly lidless eyes, waited patiently for him to join it where it stood, and then seem to lead Jason backwards into the opaque dark beyond the campfire in a marching sort of dance.

It had squatted down low and craned its head forward into Jason’s face; that’s what I saw. It seemed to me that the creature had hypnotized my friend with its unbroken stare as it backed away into the dark. Worse still, the thing actually had to stoop down, drop its shoulders, and bend its knees before its eyes were level with Jason’s. Whatever it was – it was much taller than humans generally get.

Clara and I both began to scream. We were so lost in panic that we couldn’t register anything besides our own begging sobs for Jason to return to the campfire – to please, please, please come back. We howled until we were both breathless, and when we finally stopped, we felt that utter and complete silence from before pour back over the desert. For perhaps a minute, the emptiness of the place was punctuated only by the soft crackling of the fire.

Then there was Jason screaming – screaming from somewhere that sounded like it was an impossible distance away. He was crying out in the kind of frantic anguish that only comes from someone who truly can’t believe the pain that they’re in. I looked at Clara in wide-eyed terror, and she mirrored my expression perfectly as her head swung around to look back at me. As suddenly as they had begun, Jason’s lamentations died into silence with a slushing, drowning sort of final gasp.

I was too petrified to move, but Clara was already on her feet. She hoisted me up by the front of my shirt and ran me over to where the car was parked. Before I could even fully register what was happening, she had pushed me into the backseat, and then rushed to retrieve the car keys