Sean E. Britten

I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.

Currently Playing: Donovan – Hurdy Gurdy Man

One dose is all it took, now Liam has ripped his third eye wide open. He’s seeing strange people and creatures that no one else can see, but are they demons, angels, or something else entirely?

======

“What the hell is this?”

Liam squinted at the contents of the jar. It looked like dirt mixed with little chunks of wood. Marco gave the jar a shake and then leaned back on his log.

“They call it locura,” Marco said. “It’s from South America. It’s not even illegal because no one’s even heard of it yet.”

“It looks like dirt,” Willow said, giving voice to the same thought as Liam.

“It’s made from ground up bark, I think,” Marco said. “The tribe that makes it, they use it in their religious rituals or whatever. It’s supposed to open your mind up to, like, the spiritual dimension. Help you commune with their gods and demons.”

“Yeah, right,” Liam said.

“All I know is there’s, like, at least one retreat fully dedicated to this stuff. Rich folk go and have it specially prepared and then they all go on guided trips.”

“How are you supposed to take it?” Liam’s girlfriend, Aurora, asked.

“You’re supposed to boil it, is all,” Marco said. “You boil it and, I know there’s a bunch of ritual bullshit, but then you just drink it.”

The four of them sat on logs around the campfire, cans of beer sweating at their feet. Outside their circle of light, trees retreated into total blackness. If they stayed quiet, there were no human sounds to be heard. Just the crackle of the fire, the breeze through the trees, the hum of insects and chittering of bats.

“I don’t know,” Aurora said.

Willow, Aurora’s best friend, grinned at her. “Come on, you said you wanted to come out into the woods and do something different, right?”

“I meant smoke some weed! Maybe, maybe, if Marco could get them, do some mushrooms. Not, whatever this stuff I’ve never heard of is.”

“Locura,” Marco said. “And it’s way better than mushrooms.”

“So you’ve tried it before?”

“Uh, no, I could only get this much. But it’s like I told you, Amazon tribes do it! And rich people have started doing it, it’s a thing.”

“Liam, what do you think?”

Liam shrugged. “I guess we can try it? It’s natural, right?”

Marco dumped the contents of the jar into a pot of water and set it over the fire. As the water simmered and began to steam, he stirred it with a wooden spoon. Laughing with nervous anticipation, the other three drank their warm beers and watched. The pot started to boil. The dirt, or bark, refused to dissolve but its colour leached into the water. The steam smelled like nothing in particular. When he was satisfied, Marco pulled the pot off the fire and set it aside.

“Who’s going first?” Willow asked.

“I’ll do it, I’ll go first,” Marco said.

Marco poured the concoction into a plastic bowl and let it cool. Finally, he raised it to his lips and quaffed about a quarter of the bowl with no hesitation. Grimacing, he swilled the liquid around in his mouth before swallowing.

“How does it taste?” Liam asked.

“Honestly, it doesn’t really taste like anything,” Marco said. “But there’s bits in it.”

Marco passed the locura to Willow. She hesitated but drank another quarter of the bowl. This weekend had been her idea. Ever since Aurora and Liam started dating she’d wanted them to set her up with Marco and it was obvious she didn’t want to look uncool. There’d been a lot of flirty looks and long pauses between the two of them, even a few whispered conversations, but so far they hadn’t so much as kissed.

Willow passed the bowl to Aurora who studied it and swilled it around before taking a drink. The last of the strange brew came to Liam. It appeared to be particularly thick by that point with pieces of ground up bark. The plastic bowl still felt warm. He couldn’t turn it down after everyone else had taken a drink so he chugged the remains.

“Ugh.” Liam strained bits of bark through his teeth then swallowed. “Bleh.”

The four of them watched each other as if for a sign. A few nervous giggles escaped as they locked eyes. Liam sipped his beer to clean the woody taste out of his mouth. His tongue chased bits of grit to the far reaches of his gums.

“Is anything happening?” Willow asked.

Heat flushed Liam’s skin. Mopping his forehead, he shuffled away from the fire. As soon as he’d retreated a certain distance, however, a deep chill ran through him instead. He looked at the others with a sudden feeling of paranoia but none of them seemed to be reacting.

“I’m not feeling anything yet,” Marco said, his voice echoing from a long way away.

“How long does it take?” Willow asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Liam?” Aurora said. “Liam?”

Liam’s heart throbbed in his chest. He didn’t think it was beating any faster than normal but it felt a lot harder, thump, thump, thump, each beat like a sledgehammer falling on an anvil. Every impact rippled through his chest and vibrated across his skin. Hot and cold at the same time, he clawed the collar of his t-shirt.

“I’m feeling it,” Liam said, voice tight in his throat.

“Are you okay?” Aurora asked.

“I’m okay,” he said, as much for himself as for her.

Each heartbeat pounded through the log Liam was sitting on and into the earth. Shockwaves distorted the fire. The others moved in and out as the distances between them appeared to stretch and shrink moment to moment. Liam swallowed. He had to concentrate on his breathing as his lungs contracted.

“He drank the last of it, it looked like it had a lot more of the actual bark in it,” Marco said.

“What the hell, Marco!” Aurora said.

“I don’t know!”

“You’re the one who bought it!”

The raised voices only made Liam’s heart beat harder. Eyes half-shut, he tried desperately to calm down. The effort made him dizzy. He sought to find the pulse in his neck to reassure himself that it was actually normal but his hands felt like they were swaddled in thick mittens. All the while he had to concentrate on his breathing or he was worried it would stop. The bark concoction turned sluggishly in his stomach.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Liam said.

“Oh, baby,” Aurora said.

Marco laughed. “I’m not feeling anything.”

“Me either,” Willow said.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have eaten it?” Marco said. “Or we all should have had a bit of the bark?”

“Shut up, you guys!” Aurora said. “He’s freaking out!”

Liam groaned. He struggled to his feet on legs like stilts. The ground fell away alarmingly and he felt three stories tall. Off balance, he swayed for a moment toward the fire and elicited an alarm from the other three.

“Liam!” Aurora said.

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” Liam croaked.

As best he could, Liam staggered to the edge of the dark woods. His stomach roiled. Retching, he tried to vomit but couldn’t. Spasms sent talons through his ribs and his throat burned but he couldn’t throw up. Rivers of boiled hot and ice cold water poured down his back. When Aurora came up behind him and touched him on the shoulder, he jumped.

“Are you alright?” Aurora asked.

“I need a minute to calm down,” Liam managed.

“Okay, I’m right here, okay?”

Liam gagged but swallowed and gave up on trying to throw up. It was making his heart feel worse, like a hot, pulsing lump of metal. Breathing deeply, he leaned into the nearest tree and pressed his face against the cool bark. Darkness swallowed his surroundings. Aurora retreated back toward the campfire, watching.

Time stretched into an abyss. One hand massaged Liam’s chest as powerful waves of déjà vu wracked his mind. He was going to die. He was going to die at this moment and he’d always known it. Visions of this moment had been with him his whole life, in dreams, in idle moments, leading up to his inevitable death, he just hadn’t recognised them for what they were at the time. He was a fourth dimensional being, they all were, only trapped inside these three dimensional shells for a brief instant until they died and then they returned to a dimension where all instances were the same instance and his human mask would be lost in a screaming vortex of eternity. All there was left was the dying.

“Shut up, shut up, oh my God, shut up!” Liam whispered, speaking directly to his own brain. “You’re just super high, none of this is real.”

Eyes closed, Liam concentrated on his breathing. He had no idea how long he stood there, focusing on the whorls of bark against his cheek and the push and pull of air in his lungs. The sounds of the forest at night became as vivid as they’d ever been. He felt the life of the tree, heavy and old and growing, and it calmed him.

When Liam leaned back and opened his eyes, the bark looked like a vast landscape of canyons and gorges a hundred miles away. He struggled a little to push away with hands in distant orbit. He turned and searched but couldn’t find the others. There was only vague, flickering darkness and the treetops all around him.

“Guys?” Liam said. “Aurora?”

“We’re right here,” Aurora said.

The campfire and the four others sat an immeasurable distance less than half a dozen strides away. Somehow, Liam hadn’t been able to spot them. Legs unsteady, he made his way back over to his and Aurora’s log. The other three were sitting across from them. Some small, sane part of his mind sat in a protected bubble inside his overall consciousness. Liam felt a little like he was steering a car through a torrential snowstorm. Outside was raging madness, white out conditions, but inside the car he was safe. He couldn’t stop but he could steer and he knew the road. He was safe, he was with his girlfriend and friends. Even if he crashed the car, the worst he would suffer was embarrassment, not death, not winding up detached in space and floating through an eternal timeless madness, he knew that now and repeated back silent reassurances to himself like a mantra.

“Is it not hitting you?” Liam asked the other four around the fire.

“Not at all, dude,” Marco laughed.

“A little, I mean, things look a bit weird,” Willow said. “Patterns and stuff.”

“We were just talking about it,” Aurora said.

“You must have to eat the bark, not just drink the water,” Marco said. “We all should have eaten a bit.”

“Are you okay?” Aurora asked.

“I’m alright now,” Liam said. “I’ve just got to stay relaxed.”

The fourth person said nothing. Liam realised, very slowly, that he didn’t know them. Distances still swung wildly in and out of perspective and he had to concentrate. And there was something about the fourth person that made them hard to fully take in. Liam puzzled on that. He was just high, he had to know them. Their name was? It was?

It was?

“Who is that?” Liam said.

“Who is what?” Aurora asked.

“Who, who the fuck is that?” Liam pointed.

The stranger sat beside Willow, on the opposite side of her from Marco. The campfire leapt and crackled between them and Liam. Details swam into focus. Liam’s eyes wanted to slide away and look somewhere else but at the same time he couldn’t. He felt his heart speeding up. This didn’t make sense, high or not.

Aurora, Willow, and Marco all turned. They looked right at the man, the stranger, but stared straight through him.

“He’s right there!”

The man was entirely naked, which should have been the first thing Liam noticed about him. Hunched forward with his forearms resting on knees. His mouth worked silently. Firelight gleamed off his fat, round face. Naked and entirely hairless, overweight, and pale pink as if sunburnt.

“Liam, there’s nothing there, sweetheart!” Aurora said.

The stranger’s face sloughed to one side, his brow melting halfway over one eye. The side of his mouth turned down like a stroke victim. If Liam could read his expression though, he looked surprised. Then he shifted and his whole face slid to the other side, eyes seesawing, one ear slipping down onto his jawline.

“Are you being serious right now?” Liam asked.

“Sweetheart, there’s nothing there!” Aurora said. “There’s no one there, you’re freaking out.”

The stranger sloshed to his feet. One arm stretched, much longer than the other, like taffy. His legs, particularly his shins, bent and flexed under him like rubbery stalks. Ripples ran through his body as if through jelly or across the surface of a glass of water. Hurdy gurdy were the words that came to mind. Liam had never used that phrase before in his life, and had no idea where it came from, but they were the only words he could think of to describe the stranger.

“Hurdy gurdy,” Liam rolled the words around in his mouth. “Hurdy gurdy man.”

“I think you’re hallucinating or something!” Aurora said. “Liam!”

The sober and sane part of Liam’s mind rebelled. The drug had played with his senses, distorting his ability to judge distance and time, his sense of self. It had inscribed strange patterns of vision and touch on the world around him. But it hadn’t conjured anything wholesale out of nothing. Maybe this was a new stage of the drug, part of him argued. Maybe, even though he felt like he was sobering up, the locura was shifting into a new phase of visual hallucinations.

Moving around the fire, however, the Hurdy Gurdy Man looked so real. Firelight gleamed on his pink flesh. Each step rippled through his body and caused parts to slough from one side to the other. His arms dangled and seesawed in length. His fingers appeared particularly boneless. They coiled around one another like fat, stubby tentacles.

“Liam? Liam, are you okay?”

Liam’s eyes were wide and white. He could only stare as the wobbly, floppy, Hurdy Gurdy Man leaned over him. His own unevenly spaced eyes, growing and shrinking, tried to meet Liam’s gaze.

“You shouldn’t be able to see me,” the Hurdy Gurdy Man said in a voice like bubbling grease.

“Oh, fuck, fuck, it’s talking to me!” Liam said.

“Liam, there’s nothing there!” Aurora said. “You’re hallucinating!”

“What are you seeing?” Marco asked, fascinated.

“Who cares! We need to take him to a hospital.”

“No, no, I’m alright,” Liam said, not believing himself.

The Hurdy Gurdy Man leaned closer, flesh spilling up his chest and into his neck so for a moment it inflated like a spare tyre. Liam yelped and fell backward off his log. The Hurdy Gurdy man shrugged his hurdy gurdy shoulders.

“I don’t know, brother,” he said. “I think you took too much.”

“Shit, fuck,” Liam said.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Willow asked.

“I’m alright.” Liam waved them off. “I just-, I need to go to the tent and sleep this off.”

Liam staggered to his feet. He had an easier time of it because he was too distracted to think about what he was doing. The Hurdy Gurdy Man straightened as well, the motion causing his body to rearrange and bend and spill all over again. Without removing his eyes from the possible hallucination, Liam stumbled to his tent. Aurora came with him to help him inside and get him into their sleeping bag, pulling off his shoes and jacket. Liam watched the tent flap, worried that the Hurdy Gurdy Man would follow them.

“Are you sure you’re okay? Are you sure we don’t need to go to a hospital?” Aurora asked.

“I’m okay,” Liam said. “I’ll be okay in the morning.”

After Aurora left, Liam lay in the darkness and strained to listen. He could hear the others talking in low tones. His name came up a few times although he couldn’t hear what they were saying about him. There was nothing about the presence of the Hurdy Gurdy Man. He waited to hear the strange man’s uneven footsteps on the ground outside his tent but they never came. The darkness was calming and listening kept his mind off of things. Eventually, he faded off to sleep and to a land of bizarre, twisted, hypercolour dreams.

xXx

Liam woke up the next morning feeling shockingly refreshed despite sleeping on the hard ground. No hangover and no trouble snapping fully awake from the moment he opened his eyes. Aurora was already awake beside him looking less rested, scrolling on her phone.

“Hey, good morning, how are you feeling?” Aurora leaned over.

“Good, actually, really good,” Liam said.

“Do you remember last night?”

Liam laughed nervously. “Uh, yeah, I guess so? I was pretty messed up.”

“Oh, my God, yes! You were saying crazy stuff, hurdy gurdy? And that you could see someone around the fire?”

“Uh, yeah, I don’t know where that all came from.”

“Are you sure you’re feeling alright?”

“Absolutely, I feel great actually! And not at all high.”

Most of the night felt like a dream. He couldn’t remember or understand the sensations in a way that made sense but the Hurdy Gurdy Man remained stuck in his memory. He had to be a hallucination, of course. He had to be. None of the others had seen him. He wasn’t there, it was the drugs overriding his senses. After crawling out of the tent though, Liam found himself circling the campfire. It had burned down to nothing but chunks of ash. He scanned the dirt for footprints. The Hurdy Gurdy Man had been barefoot, completely naked, while the rest of them had been wearing shoes.There were no footprints that matched a bare foot of course. Of course there weren’t. He wasn’t real. Straightening, Liam scanned the surrounding woods, fearing eyes on him, but saw no one else out there.

“Hey, there he is!” Marco climbed out of his own tent. “You’re on the drugs and the drugs are working!”

“Yeah, what the fuck did you give me?”

“You were flying, that’s for sure.”

Liam looked embarrassed. “You didn’t end up feeling anything?”

“Not really, super minor. Not even a buzz, just a little bit of weird visual stuff. Next time, if I can get some more, we’ve all got to eat some of the bark.”

“Just don’t eat as much as I did.”

“Yeah, you were straight up hallucinating and shit, huh? Seeing some guy that wasn’t there?”

“Right, seeing things.”

Willow emerged and the four of them packed up the tents. Their sleeping bags, tents, and what remained of their food went into the back of Liam’s car.

“What was that stuff last night called again?” Liam asked.

“Locura,” Marco said.

“And it came from South America?”

“The Amazon, yeah. They use it for rituals, the tribe that makes it. It’s supposed to open the mind, help them talk to spirits and demons and stuff.”

“Demons, right.”

Liam fished the keys out of his pocket. Before he could move to the driver’s side, Aurora snatched them out of his hand.

“No way, you’re not driving after last night.”

“I feel fine!”

“Who knows what’s still in your system? No way, I’m driving.”

With Aurora driving, Liam in the passenger seat, Marco and Willow in the back, they wound down the road to the outskirts of the nearest town. Liam watched the scenery, looking for glimmers of the same unreality he’d experienced the night before. Morning sunlight played through the leaves and branches. All very beautiful but all very normal. It seemed the drug had passed through his system.

“We need to stop for gas,” Aurora said.

“We can grab some more snacks for the road,” Marco suggested.

Aurora pulled into the first gas station she saw and Liam jumped out to pump the gas. Aurora kept fussing over him like he was meant to be on bedrest and he wanted to assure them all that he felt fine. She and the others disappeared inside while he finished up. Hanging the nozzle, he went to join them.

The four of them were the only customers except for a tall woman hanging out at the end of the counter, keeping the guy working the register company. Liam wasn’t sure if Marco and Willow were anything officially after last night but he saw them walking around shoulder to shoulder, whispering to one another. Smiling, he joined Aurora near the fridges.

“Hey, did the two of them hook up last night or something?” Liam asked.

“I don’t know.” Aurora smirked. “I was worried about you so I came to bed early, you were already asleep. The two of them were still talking.”

With drinks and snacks in hand, Liam and Aurora moved toward the register. The worker looked bored, not engaging with them until he had to. The tall woman lingered, wearing some kind of brown bodysuit, not saying anything either. Liam glanced in her direction and stumbled to a stop.

The woman wasn’t wearing a brown bodysuit. She wasn’t wearing anything at all. Tall and slim, she was entirely naked, with narrow hips and high, pointed breasts, but her skin was hard and brown and glossy. Ribbed in places, seamed in others, it looked almost like glass. Or the skin of a cockroach. That was it, she was covered in shell-like material like the exoskeleton of a cockroach or other brown insect. Liam took an involuntary step backward, and then another. That put Aurora between himself and the woman. He grabbed her by the arm and hauled her backward, too roughly.

“Ow, hey, what are you doing?”

“Do you see her?” Liam asked.

“See who?”

Liam started to point and then hesitated. “At the end of the counter, do you see a woman there?”

The gas station employee, bored and inattentive until that point, started staring. The Cockroach Woman clearly realised she was being talked about. She turned silently in Liam’s direction. Her movements were stiff and insectile. Whatever her eyes were, they weren’t human, yellow and hypnotic and sickly. Brown, glossy lips parted and complicated mandibles scuttled and fidgeted behind them.

“There’s no one there, Liam.” Aurora looked frightened. “Just the guy.”

“You okay, buddy?” the gas station worker asked.

“Do you see her?” Liam pointed to the end of the counter.

The man turned, staring straight through the Cockroach Woman. When he looked back, he shook his head as if he thought Liam was making a joke that he didn’t understand. Marco and Willow walked up behind them.

“Everything okay?” Willow asked.

Aurora shoved their drinks into Willow’s hands. “Can you pay for these, please? I’m going to take Liam outside.”

Grabbing Liam, Aurora steered him back out the door. The smell of gasoline hung in the air. Liam watched as Marco and Willow approached the register. The Cockroach Woman kept her gaze on Liam but didn’t move.

“Liam, take some deep breaths,” Aurora said. “It’s okay.”

“I’m fine! I’m not high, I don’t feel anything, but she’s there! She’s right there!” Liam said.

Liam realised he was talking too quickly. He knew he sounded crazy. Panic rose in his chest. He did as Aurora suggested and took some deep breaths, gulping the tainted air. Marco and Willow walked out after paying, looking concerned.

“What did you see?” Aurora asked.

“It’s a woman, I can still see her. But she’s kind of-, she’s kind of an insect as well.”

“I think we need to go to the hospital!”

“No, no, I’m fine, I’m just-, I’m still hallucinating, right? I thought I was fine, but the hallucinations feel really different. They’re just, there.”

“How long was that crap meant to last?” Aurora looked at Marco, who shrugged.

“Maybe it was the change in the environment?” Marco said. “Last time I did mushrooms, I thought I was over it but then when I went inside it totally shifted on me.”

“We should go to the hospital.”

“No, I’m fine,” Liam said. “I know what’s real and what’s fake. I’m not overdosing, I just need to go home and wait it out.”

Aurora wasn’t convinced but Liam reassured her several times. If it didn’t get any better, he promised he’d go to the doctor. The four of them loaded back into the car, their mood subdued.

Liam tried to tell himself they were only hallucinations. The Hurdy Gurdy Man, the Cockroach Woman, they weren’t real and would go away in time. But they looked so real, and things didn’t get better as they drove into town.

A naked man stared at them from a street corner. Immediately, Liam thought of the Hurdy Gurdy Man but instead of flabby and pink this man was paper pale and cadaverously skinny. Instead of looking like melting ice cream, his body knotted in on itself at weird angles. Only when none of the others reacted did he know that the man couldn’t really be there. Chimplike shadow creatures raved through the streets, up and down buildings, appearing and disappearing as they moved through walls without meeting any apparent resistance.

“Are you alright? You look like you’re seeing things,” Aurora said.

“Nope, I’m fine,” Liam said.

On the other side of town was the freeway. Liam stared idly out the window as Aurora turned onto the onramp. Suddenly, something enormous and white loomed on the other side of the car. He stiffened and shot upright.

A giant, over ten stories tall. Like all the other hallucinations, or whatever they were, he was naked. In addition to his ludicrous size, his skin and hair were utterly without colour. Crossing the highway in a single stride, one of his massive, boat-sized feet landed directly in front of the car.

“Fuck!” Liam shouted.

Without thinking, Liam leaned over and snatched the steering wheel. Aurora screamed as he wrenched the wheel suddenly to the side in an attempt to avoid the giant foot and ankle. Rubber shrieked as the car slalomed back and forth. They came close to hitting the barrier along the side of the ramp but Aurora successfully fought him off. The front of the car slammed into the giant’s foot, and passed right through it. Liam’s eyes were filled with a blur of white flesh, a cross section of veins and muscle and bone, before they blew through the other side unharmed.

“What the fuck, Liam?” Aurora yelled.

“I-, I’m sorry, I-, I-,” Liam stammered.

Behind them, the White Giant continued across the landscape. His tangled beard reached the curve of his stomach. The towering figure showed no reaction to the car that had just driven through their foot.

“We’re going to the hospital!” Aurora said. “There’s something wrong with you! That stupid dirt crap messed you up!”

xXx

The hospital didn’t come up with anything to be concerned about. The doctors had never heard of locura but they ran all the tests that Liam’s insurance would cover. Nothing turned up in his blood or urine that alarmed them. A CAT scan ruled out other causes for the vivid hallucinations. After a frank conversation with one of the ER doctors, they decided to release Liam on his own recognisance.

Of course, while Liam had been honest with the doctors at first, he decided not to mention the chalky white figures he’d seen wandering the halls of the hospital. Travelling in packs of three, the figures were all women, all naked, and almost as pale as the White Giant. Their eyes stared through everyone and everything as they wandered the corridors as if blind. Their bodies were shapely and almost perfect except for the fact that their midsections were entirely missing. There was a gap between their upper and lower bodies so both halves seemed to operate independently of one another yet in perfect unison.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Aurora said.

“I’m fine, let’s just go home,” Liam said.

Liam pretended not to see the naked man lingering in the parking structure, reading license plates. He looked entirely normal except for his bright green skin. Even so, the Green Man noticed them and watched the two of them pass. Marco and Willow had already left, getting a rideshare hours before. Aurora drove the two of them home in nervous silence.

Hallucinations. They were only hallucinations, Liam told himself. He just had to wait for the drug to pass completely out of his system and everything would go back to normal.

xXx

Three weeks later, Liam left the house as little as possible. He could do most of his work from home but he was running out of excuses not to go into the office. Every time he went out, they were there. Something about them made them hard to fully notice at a glance, so he would overlook them in a crowd, but then suddenly they’d be standing right in front of him. And he could see them noticing him noticing them as well. They knew he could see them, unlike everyone else. None of them had done anything about it, yet. None of them had interacted with him but he knew it was only a matter of time.

White Giants crossed the landscape, never stopping, as tall as apartment buildings, passing over and through structures in their path. He’d seen other Cockroach Women and Green Men. The most common, and the ones he hated the most, were the Shadow Chimps. Partly translucent, like living shadows, they never stopped moving, scrabbling up and down streets, through cars and buildings and people, pinballing off one another and off of invisible barriers of some kind. But there’d been so many others. The man with the huge, vertical mouth down the middle of his torso. The man covered in feathers. The woman with a giant eyeball for a head. The dog on fire. The man with holes punched through him, bloodless and smooth, like holes in a piece of paper. The woman wearing her top half backward. 

“You need to see somebody!” Aurora yelled through tears.

“I went to the doctor again, I’m fine!” Liam said.

“You’re not fine! You won’t leave the house, I know you’re still seeing things! I can see it on your face when it happens!”

“I’m not!”

“Stop lying to me! And the doctors can’t help you if you keep lying to them too! I can’t just sit here and watch you do nothing!”

“What do you mean?” Liam followed her from room to room as she threw things into a backpack.

“I’m going to stay at my mom’s place, I’m not coming back until you do something real about all of this!”

Aurora stormed out, tears streaming down her face, and slammed the door behind her. Liam stood in the entryway for a moment, wondering whether he should go after her, then retreated to the living room. Frustrated, he drummed his fists against the side of his head. He wished he could batter his brain back into shape. The most logical explanation was that Marco’s drug, the locura, had broken something in him. Like those stories about people who took too much LSD in the Sixties and ended up as permanent space cases. But in every other respect, he was sure his mind was working about as well as it always had, accounting for stress and distraction and sleeplessness. Part of the reason he didn’t do more was he couldn’t shake the belief that these visions, creatures, were in fact real in some sense.

“Is this a bad time?” a voice bubbled from the front of the apartment.

Liam whirled out of his seat. Him, the first one, the Hurdy Gurdy Man, stood just inside the living room. His neck sinking into his shoulders, his shoulders sinking into his chest. His legs bowed unnaturally beneath him, one arm melting toward the floor.

“You! Oh, fuck, it’s you!” Liam said. “What are you doing here? Are you here to kill me?”

“Kill you?” The Hurdy Gurdy Man’s slipshod face looked surprised. “No! I couldn’t kill you even if I wanted to. And I don’t want to, I promise!”

“What-, then why are you here?”

“I thought I’d check in on you, brother. See how you were doing. Heard through the grapevine that you see were still seeing us. Not a lot of your kind do, and usually not for so long.”

“So you are real?”

“Last time I checked.”

“If you-, what, what are you?”

“Maybe you’d better sit down, huh?”

Liam and Aurora’s couch was a long, L-shaped sectional. Tucked into a ball, Liam sat at one end while the Hurdy Gurdy Man rested on the smaller arm of the ‘L’. His body sloshed and melted into position like a great, pink wad, boneless arms and fingers hanging between his knees.

“What are you?” Liam repeated. “You’re demons, aren’t you? Some kind of demon spirits? You really are real?”

“We’re real but we’re not demons and we’re not djinn and we’re not whatever. You don’t have a word for us, but we probably did help inspire a whole heap of things like ghosts and stuff in your weird, little stories. We don’t have a name for ourselves, collectively, because we already know what we are.”

“What do you want from me?”

“From you? I mean, nothing, I don’t think. Every once in a while, one of you guys can see us, really see us, for more than just a split-second. It makes everyone a little nervous, even though you can’t really do anything to us and we can’t really do anything to you. Word gets around, that’s why I thought I’d check on you.”

“But you’re everywhere! Everywhere I go, everywhere there’s people, you’re telling me that’s normal? That, normally, you guys are everywhere and we just can’t see you?”

The Hurdy Gurdy Man shrugged and one of his shoulders fell into a pitted crater in his torso. “Pretty much, yeah.”

“But why? What do you want?”

“Okay, this is going to sound kind of bad.”

“Bad?”

“Well, we’re feeding. We’re feeding off of you. Not you specifically! I mean, people.”

“Oh, my God.” Liam shrank even further into his seat. “I knew it, you really are demons! That locura stuff makes you see demons!”

“We’re not demons! And we’re not doing any harm, bro. We eat emotions. Certain kinds of emotions, they give off a kind of-, an emission, like a gas. Imagine emotions give off a kind of gas. And then we’re not eating the actual emotions, we’re eating the gas, if you want to call it that. I kind of regret calling it gas.”

“So those horrible Shadow Chimp things I see all over the place, what do they eat?”

“Ashmedai? Actually, they’re pretty simple, they feed on lusts. I mean, sexual lusts, lust for power, covetousness. You know when you really, really want something, really bad, until the feeling kind of spikes up for a second? They feed on those spikes, that’s why they’re always running around so crazy.”

“When I was in hospital, there were these women with no stomachs. They just had a big gap in the middle, and there were always three of them, what are those?”

“Okay, again, this sounds kind of creepy but the Zadkiel feed off of pain, depression, despair. They don’t cause it! They don’t cause it, and they can’t take it away, but they do feed in places where there’s a lot of it.”

“And the Cockroach Women?”

“Cockroach Women?”

“Tall, with brown skin, hard and shiny like a cockroach’s shell.”

“Ah, Tyche, she feeds on a certain kind of regret. Wasted time, wasted chances, that kind of feeling.”

“I’ve been seeing more than just one of her.”

“There are many aspects, but they’re all her.”

“Okay.” Liam absorbed it all slowly. “So what do you feed on then? Why were you there that night, in the middle of the woods?”

The Hurdy Gurdy Man pushed his sloping forehead back from his eyes like a loose fringe. “Sexual tension,” he said.

“You feed on sexual tension?”

“That’s right, or like, the gas, right? The gas that sexual tension gives off. Your friends, what are their names? Marco and Meadow?”

“Willow.”

“Right, they were right at that peak stage.” He smacked his soggy lips. “Not to be weird, bro, but very tasty.”

“I don’t believe this,” Liam said, burying his face in his hands. “This is insane, so why can I see you and no one else can?”

“I assume that drug you took, brother.”

“That’s it?”

“Sometimes one of you might see us out of the corner of your eye, for just a split-second, when something in the brain and in the lighting hits just right, but you probably end up thinking it was your imagination. Sometimes crazy people can see us, or babies, something going on in the brain chemistry. And then there’s a few different drugs that’ll do it. Usually they wear off pretty quick, but I guess you did yourself an injury, bro. Ripped your third eye wide open.”

“So when will it stop?”

The Hurdy Gurdy Man gestured with one wilting arm. “I’m not a doctor.”

“And even if it, the sight, goes away, you’re still going to be there, aren’t you? Every room I walk into, any time I think I’m alone, one of you could be there feeding off of me.”

“Hey, we’ve got to live too! We were here first, you know.”

“I-, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Thank you, I guess? At least I know I’m not crazy. Or maybe I’m even more crazy than I thought, and I’m making up this whole conversation in my head.”

“No problem, brother, anything else you wanted to ask?”

“Yeah, why are you all naked?”

“I mean, you see any normally invisible stores that sell, like, pants for us? We don’t interact with the same world you do.”

“You’re sitting on that couch right now, interacting with that.”

“Yeah, well, it’s complicated.”

After the Hurdy Gurdy Man left, Liam stewed over everything he had learned. Now, he didn’t know if he wanted to stay the way he was or go back to the way things were. Even if he went back to normal, he’d never be free of the unsettling truth. He puzzled over what to tell Aurora. Could he lie to her, pretend to get help, and fake going back to not seeing the creatures now that he knew they were no threat? Or should he tell her the truth, knowing there was a slim chance she would even believe him, and burden her with the same knowledge even though she couldn’t see them for herself? Eventually, he picked up the phone and made a decision.

“Aurora? I’m sorry,” Liam said. “No, no, don’t hang up. Can you come home, or can we meet? I need to talk to you.”

======

Sean: Donovan is one of those artists, for me at least, who slipped under the radar of my conscious awareness for years as “the guy who sang Atlantis”. And then one day I decide to check him out properly and find out, holy shit, he’s actually the guy behind so, so many songs that I haven’t heard in years and they’re all brilliant. I used to have that happen to me a lot because my parents always listened to the oldies station when I was a kid, and when I actually grew a musical awareness I was behind the times on what was then-modern but I knew a lot of these songs from the 60s and 70s without really knowing who the artists were. Anyway, if you don’t know Donovan, check him out, guy’s a fucking genius.

I’ve been sitting on some exciting news that I haven’t shared officially as of yet, but it’s probably the right time. My wife Tess is pregnant! I’m going to be a father for the first time, the baby is due in November right around my birthday and we’re both very excited. The last couple of months have been a whirlwind with ultrasounds and doctor appointments and getting things ready. I’m moving my office so we can turn it into a baby room and I find myself looking around at it right now and imagining what’s to come, it’s really a wonderful time.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped me from writing, I have been hard at work and hoping I keep it up right until the end of the year. See you next time, same bat-time, same bat-channel!

Next Track: Frank Sinatra – I’ve Got You Under My Skin