Story 3 - The Sheath Of Madness
Red cloak wrapped around her she was like a waning fire slowly being suppressed by the cold, wet air as if it were lacking in oxygen, soon to be gone it retreats into embers and the embers supernova.
She screams as she dies inside. A complex of suicide and birth strike the veneer that is her soul and the curtain retracts revealing a newdeath babe. The babe goes supernova.
She screams as her insides are squirming with pleasure. Chugging like a choo-choo-train her heart that marvelous engine beats to the cadence of a monkey making cymbals clash around a planet somewhere in a distant universe whose people must cope with the flashes of light that both illuminate and enlighten their never-sleeping world. The sun in that solar system goes supernova.
She screams and her hair stands on end so strictly that it penetrates the concrete beneath her. The red cloak’s color fades from red to transparent as it attempts to hide her half-naked body.
She opens her eyes. Virginia. A cloaker on a world that hates cloakers. She steps out of the abandoned bank that muffled her screams with its soundproofed walls and headed north.
The city was vibrant this time of year. Some dirt-bag got in her face as she was walking through the bazar and was trying to sell her drugs that she considered mediocre. Spice was the popular drug those days. Spice has evolved from its humble beginning. Now spice is no simple mistress, she is at best, the president of your high and at worst, the dominatrix of your bad trip. Spice has been altered to now copy the effects of the entire spectrum of drugs. Once it was no longer limited to imitating marijuana the world went mad with experimentation. No spice is a word for a family of drugs. Spice means, synthetic bliss. She almost stopped when an old woman tried selling her Frankenstein; they’re like mushrooms on steroids. She was loyal to the cloak.
She turned a corner and went down into an abandoned subway. She always wonders why people hate cloakers here. Cloaking is a strange high, true, but it’s something you have to understand. It’s as if you are penetrating the mind of an insane god trapped in a vortex and are living its dreams. More accurately a blend of dream and nightmare. Not a careful mix of the two where they are grounded and then mushed together. More like a salad, everything in slices. No it’s both actually salad and then the rest of the dreams and nightmares are ground into a paste and used as salad dressing.
She got three levels underground and followed the trail of lit torches snaking its way under the earth. She liked how her shadow was cast against the wall to her right and then to her left and then to her right again as the torches alternated sides as she went further into the depths of the abandoned system.
Sooner or later- Sooner rather than later. Here it is.
“Home sweet home.”
“Back already Virginia?” Brand asked, and then chuckled.
“Yeah, I’ve only been gone, only, for what? 3 hours?” She laughed.
Brand got up to hug her and he kissed her for good measure… He decided to go for it.
“How about we get settled relax and I don’t know, have a bath together? Then we could…”
“Save it, you know how I am after I cloak. Orgasms don’t compare. Cutting myself doesn’t cut it.”
“Mmmhhmm,” Brand went back to the couch, “You make me fiend for the sideways cookie like the cookie monster. What are we, married and 50? We’re seventeen years old, let’s have sex once in a while.”
“What’s on TV?”
“Reruns…”
“Of what?”
“Your least favourite show.”
“Never mind.”
“How was the high?”
“I swear it gets better every time.”
“Time to charge that baby up.”
Virginia sighed, “Yeah. I just really would love to wear this all the time.”
Virginia dressed a mannequin in the cloak and got to her knees before the mannequin. It mattered not that it wasn’t an exact replica of the visage of Eretyfali.
“Saaaaa-yaamaaaaaa. Rekshooooo-eeeoooooooo,. Meensaaaaa-lakkaaaaaannterasa…”
She kept praying for an hour with her head at the base of the mannequin. As she did the cloak began to regain color, slowly going from translucent back to rad red.
You see it isn’t that cloaking is, like, living in the mind of a crazed god, it’s that it is, in fact, living in the mind of a crazed god. Eretyfali. Cursed to be lost for an age in a vortex some two thousand years ago. His followers used to be warriors. The cloaks were weapons. Some gave you invisibility, some invincibility for a limited time, and anything in-between. Then one day the void hit all followers of Eretyfali, warring factions died paralyzed by the dreams and nightmares of a being whose mind literally processes information over a hundred times faster than the human mind. A mind so imaginative the euphoria is endless, the depression a death-sentence. Virginia handles the trip really well, it’s just her screams that get in the way of her being able to do it around people. Same thing with Brand.
Virginia isn’t of the bloodline of the fabled warriors or at least that’s what she was told. Same thing with Brand. They’re a pair that are just as lost as the mad god himself. They both graduated from school very early. They both dropped out of college pretty fast and now they’re stuck surviving by making fake credit cards or stealing them. It’s lucrative. For now.
They’re like mirror images facing each other to cast the illusion of eternity. In other words they’re in love.
Virginia sat down next to Brand, rested her head on his shoulder and stole some of the popcorn on his lap. Brand was usually very protective over his corn. Virginia wondered why Brand was all of a sudden so unguarded.
“What’s on your mind baby?” She asked.
“You ever get tired of this?” Brand grumbled.
Virginia was sitting upright staring into his eyes intently. Subtle anger creeping over her voice like a sunset shadow.
“We haven’t been at this long, how could you be tired of this already?”
“I feel as if we’re hiding like rats. I’m… I’m getting tired of cloaking Virginia. I like this planet. I don’t want to have to leave like you plan to do.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying it’s me… Or the cloak,” Virginia got up and swatted the popcorn bowl off of his lap, “Hey!”
“Why are you doing this?” She asked, shouting.
“You know why! All you do is cloak and when you’re not cloaking you expect me to keep you from being miserable while you wait for your next trip to whackadoo land. This isn’t how I imagined our lives a year ago. You and I, we dreamed about being important one day. I’ve been meeting with a lawyer. Look, they’ve found out we cheated to graduate so early, but considering how well we were doing, they’ve made an offer for us to come back as long as we’re willing to serve the community the way the government asks. I’m about to take them up on that offer. I don’t want to do this without you…” Brand tried standing.
Virginia booted him in the chest and he collapsed on the couch, “You’re ruining everything!” She stripped the mannequin of the cloak, put it on and stormed away from their home area on the abandoned station platform.
She found herself back in the bank faster than she could say ‘addiction’ and she was saying the special words to the cloak.
It hit her like a ton of bricks. She collapsed writhing and then was still all of a sudden. She screamed in a contortion of agony and ecstasy. It felt as if her world was imploding. Air had filled her lungs to bursting and then expanded until they wore her surrounding body like a night gown.
Her world became a triangular prism and she was performing a series of acrobatic maneuvers within the space. All around her, her image was duplicated ten-fold, a hundred-fold, a thousand-fold. Like a kaleidoscope her image permeated a cup of coffee as she was the milk being poured into it and she was the pourer. She dispelled the images as she mixed the milk in with a spoon and drank the dying depictions of herself, but instantly regretted it
. The kaleidoscope fought to keep breathing and in its undying breath it spread as it coursed through her body.
She screamed and the sound waves were like needles sowing the sound into everything that surrounds making the trip outwards and then bounding back as soon as it found a solid surface. Which waves are reflected and which aren’t? A troubling question. Perhaps both happen simultaneously.
“Perhaps,” said a voice that echoed in the void.
“Who. Who are you?” Virginia asked.
A crooked, tall, humanoid shape shrouded in shadows entered the room. Virginia realized she wasn’t tripping anymore. What was happening? She was cuffed to the table. The man had a briefcase at least that was clear. He set it down on the table. It popped open of its own accord and files rose into the air like balloons. He hastily snatched them out of the air put them under a paperweight that he produced from his pocket.
“Hate it when that happens,” he growled, in a deep voice.
“Are you the lawyer Brand talked about?”
“Straight to the point are we? Well, since you want to play things that way, no use dilly-dallying. This is about Brand,” he cleared his throat.
“… What about Brand?”
“I’ll have to brief you on the way.”
“On the way where?”
“Back home. Come on now. Move your body.”
Virginia got the strange feeling that she was in two places at once. One place she had no idea of, the other she knew for sure was where her body was.
“Go ahead. Get up. Get walking,” said the shadow man.
Virginia got up and walked out of the bank. She avoided the usual route to get back home.
“What is this about?”
“Your relationship with your old god is a close one. Out of all those who still worship him, it seems you are the most devout, especially of late. Why is that?”
“I don’t care to tell.”
“Ahh, it’s personal. Allow me to pick your brain for a moment then. Hmmm. Yess. I see. Oh isn’t that sad. Oh terrible, terrible. You’re running from something, of course. Oh, well, I have everything I need to know in terms of facts, but now I need you to do something for me.”
Virginia was back at home standing over Brand’s body as he lay down to sleep on their bed.
“You know what he plans to do. You know what you can’t do. You’ve both lost your parents. Do you know what he plans to do if you don’t go back to school with him? He’ll turn you in, for a reward. He’ll turn you in as a cloaker.”
“He wouldn’t-”
“Does is seem far-fetched? Has he never done something like that before? He has hasn’t he? Why should you go under for him to get on top? That’s not fair!”
“What should I do?”
“I think… You should kill him.”
Virginia brought her hand to her mouth, “No,” she whispered.
“Yes,” said the man.
“Let me see your face,” she croaked.
The shadows receded and as they did a snout formed and a mouth with great fangs, eyes like the devil’s and hands like a gnarled old undertaker’s, but three times larger with claws that could gut fish on the ends. He stood on raptor like legs and was covered in deep fur.
“Kill him!”
“I can’t!” She cried.
“I’m the real you. Feral. Untamed. Yearning to roam in the wild. I want to bathe in the blood of my prey. I want to massacre. I want to be feared. Don’t you? Don’t you want that?”
Virginia looked up at the weathers wolf’s face.
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
The wolf picked up the briefcase after putting the pieces of paper back in and shutting it. The weight went somewhere in its fur.
“It was worth the try.”
The wolf left the room and as soon as the door shut, reality shattered and Virginia found herself back at home staring up at the ceiling in disbelief. She had seen terrible things before, but twisted as it was, she had never had a trip that bad.
Virginia struggled to get out of the cloak and instead of treating it like the most holy thing on the planet she tossed it aside as if it were nothing and crawled into bed with Brand.
“Brand… Brand, wake up… Brand!”
“Huh? I’m up. What is it?”
“I’ll go back to school with you Brand. I’ll do it.”
“You will?”
“Yes.”
“Awesome. I was afraid you’d never change your mind.”
“Some things do change,” said Virginia, as she nestled into bed, glad that she was leaving this chapter of her life behind.
About The Author
Darren Wilson is a student currently attending Full Sail University in order to acquire a Bachelors in Fine Arts for Creative Writing, a degree necessary in order for him to follow his dreams and become a successful novelist and one day, hopefully, a successful humanitarian. Darren currently lives in Winter Park, Florida and is going onto his third year of writing his novel, The Hidden Realm.
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