"Remember earlier," I said to Baccha, "when I made you promise that we'd bail at the first sign of trouble?"
"That I do," Baccha began, but I wasn't about to let him carry on.
"Yeah? Well, that first sign actually showed up a few paces back," my voice dipping, "when those things appeared. In the trees."
The three of them crossed looks. Funny how none of us had mentioned the shadowy figures from earlier. I know why I hadn't; I was cold and then overwhelmed by all this business with roses and amusement parks and friggin' portals. But the three of them, now high and apparently telepathic, had been clearly avoiding the topic.
"You've seen them before," I stated simply.
"They're always around," Baccha said, "always just on the periphery. We know them as Praedatores Umbrae. Shadow Predators."
"They were more excited than usual just now," Frank said, lifting up his Ray-Bans to reveal gunmetal-blue eyes. Lisa nodded in anxious agreement. She still had her shades on, but I assumed her eyes were just as pretty.
"What does that mean? Do they come from the portal?"
"It probably means that they can't wait to get at us. About the portals, the theory so far is that they're there to entice us, to trap us." Lisa said. We fell into silence, and I felt all the now-invisible hairs on my nubile, hot body stand.
All threads coalesced into a narrative of feeding. At the beginning of the lunar cycle, the portal attracted flies to its web. Once said flies entered, they were separated and further hunted. Jon, having gone in alone that last time, must have been an easy target.
I scanned their faces and could tell that I was on the mark. In the silence of their consent I realised how affected they were by the loss of one of their own. Frank's eyes were actually watery.
So this wasn't a search party, it was what, reconnaissance? Revenge? Were they planning to trip out the spooks with weird tales and appalling stoner behaviour?
"Why involve me?" I'd asked the question out loud, directing it at no one. But I knew it was meant for Baccha. An expression of perhaps guilt mixed with conviction took over his face.
Shrugging, hand fishing for cigarettes in jacket pocket, he said, "Look at the change you brought on with your appearance, without even really focusing on it. Imagine what you could do if you focused on a set intention." He lit up and exhaled sharply. "Say, weakening the power of those things and enhancing ours."
"We asked you along because we're sure you can decide the outcome of what happens here tonight," Lisa continued.
"From past experience," Frank said, "we know that we're dealing with elemental forces who use fear and other emotions to enforce control over us."
"The shadow predators are powerful," Baccha said, "if they can manifest all this, the portals, and whatever lays beyond them. But their whole scheme hinges upon us forgetting our own power."
"That happens a lot?"
"Every time. It's like when you take that first drink and get absorbed in the switchover in consciousness. Takes you a while to realise something's off, right? You lose your balance and say aloud what you're actually thinking, and then you know."
"So, you guys have been going into those portals, willingly, and getting tangled in whatever illusions they spin to extract what, your energy? And you guys always remember that you're in their trap at the last minute?"
"Something like that," Frank said.
"Sounds like unhealthily dangerous thrillseeking to me. That can't be all, right?" I said, looking at Baccha and recalling my reply when he'd first asked me out. "Are they, like, putting out frequencies or something that you guys are on, that draws you in?"
"Maybe, possibly. But they can never make us do anything we don't want to," Baccha said, "And, there's a very significant reason why we keep going back, why Jon literally ran back in. And it's best that you experience it for yourself."
"If you decide to," he finished softly.
Not the best pitch ever. I still felt like I was walking into a trap empty-handed, having only been told that I should believe in myself and my abilities. It was an assertion that my whole life up to this point seemed to have been a demonstration against.
"Hey, what the fuck man?" Frank said. He'd brought along a water bottle and had unscrewed the cap for a sip. Baccha just extinguished his cigarette in it.
"Oh shit, my bad. Thought you were holding up an ashtray!" Then the three of them burst into giggles.
It was settled, then. These guys needed all the help they could get. What else was I going to say anyway? Sorry, you guys need more stringent protocol for selecting allies. Ciao! and walk back out on my own? I was certain no amount of glowing self-concept would guarantee my safety through that.
So we padded through the garden, literally stopping to smell the roses. And to look for anything out of the ordinary, the range of which was practically infinite: we might discover a keychain, a plate of carbonara (I was hungry) to a bottle of pink sunshine labelled 'Do Not Open,' along with a skull and crossbones.
Every so often we'd hear a rustle coming from the trees, the fluttering of leaves a reminder that we were not alone. I noticed that Frank and Lisa always kept the beams of their torches to the ground, never aimed them at the trees. I was about to point this out to Baccha, just because we'd been walking silently for a bit too long. I turned to my right and he wasn't there. I sensed a brightness on my left, and spun round and felt my chest tighten.
He had a grotesque expression on his face, lit up by the glow of the torch held at his chest. Like every horror movie scene in history, right before the joker got butchered.
Fighting the hammering of my heart and total loss of muscle control from the shock, I had to repress the urge to shout, "Do NOT do that shit, Baccha!"
"Sorry, sorry. Just trying to lighten the mood, y'know?" He came up close and put his hands on my shoulders. I immediately felt how raised they were. He softly massaged them, and they lowered. "You should lighten up, laughter is always more effective when dealing with them."
"You're a little too relaxed for my liking," I said. Cold sweat had soaked my back, and I prayed to god that he wouldn't run his hands down them. Why would he?
"Can you blame me? This is truly paranormal phenomena." He stopped in front of yet another plot and pointed at the offending fauna, at the batch of roses behind, to the left, then up at the sky. "Roses need direct sunlight. There's no way that's happening with all this foliage. And yet, they thrive."
"I'm going to bombard you with more questions now," I said to Baccha, noticing Frank and Lisa had finally wandered over to the far end, "Number one, what's the deal with those two?"
"You can tell that they're close huh? With that strong women's intuition of yours."
"Har har."
"They're not siblings, I'll tell you that much. Let's just say they're partners."
"Partners," I parroted. "I used to think that was an exquisite way to say 'let's avoid commitment and real feelings for as long as possible.'"
"And now you don't quite feel that way."
"I don't know." I really didn't. He was right though;I had intuited that they shared a bond, one that went beyond their decision to match outfits. It didn't need a label. It was just there, even though I hadn't actually heard them address each other yet.
"Next question: what's the actual plan here?"
"I feel like we've been over this already. We're all going to go in there, and get answers. You're going to do that magic that you do, and together we'll exterminate those translucent fucks."
"Riveting. What, am I going to just think myself into safety when I discover myself in the heart of a volcano?"
"Exactly. Your one job is to breathe, and remember."
Again, I didn't like it. It was too flimsy. Emotions and thoughts overwhelmed me on a regular basis. A chance encounter with a stranger in the morning could render me completely useless for the rest of the day.
More and more questions kept coming. I wanted to ask him how we would find each other, if they'd ever found each other before, but I had a feeling that I'd regret asking. I never got the chance to, because a cry from the other side of the garden ruptured the uneasy hush.
"Lisa!"
We turned to see Frank standing alone.
"There was a pocket watch," he said once we'd ran over. His voice had lost all its coolness from before, and his hands were trembling violently. He was staring intently at something in the ground. "And when she picked it up the ground gave way to that." It was an opening barely wide enough to fit any human.
"Well, that's a bit on the nose." Baccha sniffed, actually looking around, as if to see if his diss had warranted a reaction from them.
"It sucked her in," he said, a breath away from hyperventilating. "She didn't even get to say bye."
"A pocket watch," I said. "Like Alice in Wonderland. Wait, can they read our minds too?"
"Ethereal beings are dimensionless." He shrugged. "They inhabit the same formlessness as our minds."
Baccha motioned to the gaping mouth of the tunnel with his head. "She's probably still tumbling down that rabbit-hole," he said to Frank. "I suggest we carry on our own searches."
I'm sure he meant that we should split up. Yeah, no thanks. Under the guise of having my remaining questions answered, I stuck with Baccha.
"And you three," I began, "what are you guys going to do over on the other side? Magick?"
"It's already done. We cast our own protections long ago, but we've fortified them for tonight. Earlier," he said, stopping and facing me, "you asked if we were all chaos magicians."
I nodded.
"It's a little more complicated than that. Well, maybe it's not. There's a left-hand path, and a right-hand path. The right, is well, all light and the great divine and ascending. Any darkness is obliterated. The left-hand path subsumes the dark, uses it, and instead of seeking god, the focus is on becoming gods."
"I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you three subscribe to the latter."
"That would be correct."
"So, I ask you again, Baccha, what is the plan here?"
"We're going to avenge our fallen, and we're going to subdue the praedatores umbrae, and make them our bitches."
"Um."
"We're going to bind them. They'll be under our command."
"Oh."
"I'm telling you this, because we will need your help doing this. We need your belief to be on our side. Things will shift in our favour."
I didn't feel like asking questions anymore, and we trudged in silence once again.
My religious upbringing had been so stereotypical. I was taught that there was good, and there was evil, and never the twain shall meet. But I couldn't think of Baccha and his friends as the bad guys here. It seemed like a cop-out. Sure, their aspirations to shadow-dominators might be ill-founded and naive . . .
And then I flashed back to earlier, when he put his hands on my shoulders. Most inappropriately timed, I know. Cut me some slack. My senses were dialled up to a hundred, and it had felt good to be touched. I recalled our exchange, his goofy face as I turned and told him that he was being too relaxed for my liking. Anything to turn the focus away from how much I was actually enjoying his touch.
But it was more than that. it was like I had felt his intention. He'd really wanted me to relax. But describing him as being relaxed then, even now, was quite the understatement. It might have been the mushrooms, but he seemed borderline euphoric. Weird choice of mood, given our circumstances. The shadow predators were dancing around us; we were on their turf. It was their rules, and who's to say they wouldn't spring any number of unexpected twists on us?
"Uh, guys?"
Frank was holding one of those shiatsu neck massagers that only old people used.
"Hey, nice," Baccha said, then to me he said, "dude's always complaining of a stiff neck."
Too weird. Were they messing with us? Was I being messed with? I looked around for any sign of Lisa. Maybe she'd just ran off and hid behind a bark, giggling in a gothy baritone. Maybe the whole Invisible Scorpion cast was in on it.
"See you on the other side," Frank said as he heroically donned the device, "and Ryan? Don't forget to remember." He pressed the on button and vanished. Yup, into thin air. No dissolution or anything. I blinked and he was gone.
We looked at each other.
"Never a dull moment," Baccha said. We resumed scouring the roses.
"I hope mine's pancakes, I skipped lunch. You caught that, you fucks?" He said to the tree surrounding us, raising his torch. No shapes scurrying about. It was eerily quiet now. As if it was really just the two of us in the garden.
This was as good a time as any to wonder what would happen if I went missing. Probably my parents would be the first to raise the alarm. Then . . . Aunt Constance, perhaps? Not many other people were left in my life who'd care if I was gone.
Wait, why would I even think that? Especially after Baccha and gang made it explicit that I had the power to actually affect our success rate?
Ethereal beings are dimensionless. They inhabit the same formlessness as our minds.
"Baccha," I cried, my mouth suddenly very dry, "they're in my head."
"Took you long enough," he said, "they always are. Tell them to piss off!"
He grabbed me by the shoulders. "You have to focus. Like, trying to straighten up and appear sober as you're about to enter your house and say hi to your folks."
His touch again. This time I was sure that he was sending me . . . something. Just like the shadow predators, but on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. This was empowerment. I felt the fog of foreign voices and their vicelike grip clearing.
Oh, that's all I had to do, I thought, suddenly feeling cocky. The sober-up-before-entering-the-door, I knew that routine by heart. Internally, it was like squeezing all awareness down, tunnel vision at the middle of my forehead. I opened my eyes and zoomed in on Baccha's nose. I started laughing, and it caught on. My arms flew out and held onto him for dear life. I didn't even care. I knew they had been shut out. Nice try, fuckers.
"Talk about mindfuck," I said giddily. There was ringing in my ears, and I wondered what that was about. But whatever. Now Baccha's aloofness made sense. That was how he remembered himself, kept the control.
Put aside all the things planted in us by the apps we used, the news, what we heard other people say. What thoughts were actually ours? Were all self-sabotaging thoughts theirs? In a way that would've been a huge weight off my shoulders, to know with certainty that I wasn't intentionally shooting myself in the foot with each step. Ah, the sweet relief of being able to push the blame to another. And Baccha, Frank and Lisa want to bind these entities? And make them do what? Whisper things to others?
My philosophical-spiritual quandary would have to wait. The glint of something on the ground caught my eye.
I couldn't believe it. Twinkling in the grass was a ring with a halo of diamonds circling a sapphire. It looked like I could sell everything in my basement room and still not afford it. I also knew it was meant for me. Either that or Baccha had a lot more depth than I'd made him out have. He whistled as I dipped down to pick it up.
"Maybe you oughta just run back into town, visit the pawn shop."
"Yeah, yeah. And watch it disappear like Frank did."
"Smart girl." Something was different in his voice now. Was it fear?
"I could wait, til you found your item," I offered. Truth be told, I was not looking forward to whatever lay ahead of me, even if it was all salon trips and spa days.
"I'm good. For some weird reason, I'm always the last. Go on."
"I'll remember," I said, recalling Frank. "And I'll see all of you."
I slid the ring on the uh, ring finger. What do you know, it was a perfect fit.