When he opened his eyes he found that Michael and Kelly were still in the living room, sitting in the love seat across from him. He noticed Michael was just finishing rolling a joint. He then stared at Kelly and noticed her chin and forearms were covered in deep, purple bruises.
“My god Kelly, what happened?” Hank asked quickly, without thinking. Without even considering what kind of can of worms he had opened with Michael sitting right there. With his mind racing at a thousand miles an hour it occurred to him before she could answer that he had indeed possibly made a huge mistake.
“I got drunk as shit…I mean I was wasteder’n fuck. Blacked out, kept falling down and hit my chin on the counter. Then I fell down the damn steps and hurt my arms. Don’t tell anyone though…I don’t want to be embarrassed. I just tell people Michael beat me.” She said it all so matter of factly that she didn’t even blink.
Hank realized then that he was in a place where people really did perceive the world in a very different way than he was used to. He kept hoping that she would come to some sort of epiphany after the acid kicked in. Then he realized that it had. He watched as her pupils dilated, she sat back and started staring at the trails she could see in the air as she waved her hands around in front of her.
“Wow,” Michael kept repeating and breathing deeply, as if he were thinking about the most profound thing a human had ever considered. Hank knew that Michael was high too, even if Michael was still unaware himself.
They sat in silence as they smoked the joint that Michael rolled, which was big enough to last a solid half hour with just the three of them smoking. Hank wondered how the party was going outside, but figured it must be alright as the band was still playing. He closed his eyes and laid back in his seat, a large, leather sectional that was deep and sucked him into comfort instantly. He had always enjoyed tripping on acid and especially when he had the dank weed to smoke and keep himself chilled out. It wasn’t long before he was conversing with Michael and Kelly with his eyes entirely closed, sipping off of the joint like it was a fine cognac. He got lost in the psychedelic display that played out on his eyelids. Everything was groovy and Hank was the most relaxed he had been in years.
As he started to giggle on the inside due to his extremely euphoric state he heard Kelly ask him, “do you realize you got real purdy eyes?”
Michael shot her a sideways glance that Hank could not see but could definitely feel the sting of. He knew Michael to be the jealous type; the man often talked about it.
“Michael…I don’t mean it like ‘at,” she explained. “I mean those baby blues sorta remind me of that guy that sings for Soundgarden.”
Hank chuckled and opened his eyes up. Clearing his throat he said, “but his pupils ain’t as big as these are they?”
They all had a good long laugh and it was all good vibes. There was joy and mirth in the air so thick it could almost be cut with a knife. It was definitely palpable to the three psychedelic rangers, tripping across the infinite scape of their own minds.
Eventually the band stopped playing and Hank went out to the front porch to introduce the next band. The sun had set and it was dark, but with the stage lights set up on his porch, the full moon and the glow from the bonfire and pig roast it was quite easy to see everyone and all that was going on. There were pretty girls hula hooping and people dancing, even after the music had ended. Everyone seemed as high to Hank as he was. The crowd was quite large for a field party and he couldn’t be happier.
“How’s everybody doin’ tonight? Ya’ll ready for some more jams? Ya’ll ready to party?” He felt comfortable up there with the microphone even though he knew he had nothing to say. He could definitely see the appeal of being a musician. “Next up, from Lexington Kentucky, we have the one and only, the legendary, Funkzilla!”
Upon addressing the crowd and putting the mic back in its stand he finally spotted Amy, off to the side of the house. She was surrounded by a group of about twelve to fifteen people and he could see immediately that she had been busy all afternoon and evening being a good hostess to their numerous guests. He caught her attention after a few moments of staring at her. When he knew she was looking his way for sure he blew her a kiss. She caught it and blew him one back, then in front of the whole group of people she was entertaining she lifted her shirt and exposed her tits to him. She had a half drunk bottle of Woodford Reserve bourbon in her hand and as she lifted her shirt she accidentally sloshed whiskey all over her breasts, making them glisten like an oiled up bikini model who had lost her top. He smiled ear to ear as he soaked in the sight of her large, dark areolas. He knew she wouldn’t have spilled her “brown devil” as she called it all over her exposed tits if she weren’t drunk; though tonight he was thankful that she was indeed plastered. As she lowered her shirt back down nobody in the group around her seemed to mind at all, but there were a few stares. Hank ignored those, after all they were his wife’s titties. Nobody else there could say that. He got an erection as his mind raced to ejaculating all over them as he had done so many times before, early in their romance, prior to his seizure medication taking away any sort of ability to maintain consistent erections. He never knew where or when they would come any more, but he kept Amy as satisfied as any many could and he kept it as a point of pride that he did so with mostly just his tongue. And in his moment of clarity, so high he was visually and audibly hallucinating, he realized that it had been that way even before the car wreck. Before the seizures. It was his tongue that he used to pleasure her most. He knew his cock was inadequate to suit his bride. She was a full, strong woman, with a kinky streak a mile wide. Still, if he could smother her in orgasms it wouldn’t matter to her where they came from, cock or tongue, and if he kept her satisfied he didn’t feel any guilt about never bringing her to climax with his little dick. In fact he had married her because she had been so nice to him about it.
He soon noticed that everyone in the group with Amy was staring at him and he was just standing on the porch with his jaw open and slack. He laughed at himself and realized that what to him had seemed like a long, deep process of thoughts and tangents had in fact occurred over the matter of only a few seconds.
“Goddamn, I am high as fuuuuck!” he thought to himself. “They don’t know I’m trippin’.” He then flashed Amy a few quick hand gestures to let her know he wanted to smoke some more weed and he wanted to smoke it with her. He went on into the house, leaving the porch just as Funkzilla was starting to set up their gear. As soon as he got back to the living room he found Michael and Kelly laughing hysterically at god only knew what. They were arm in arm, giggling like two school girls, in high pitched shrieks.
“Hank, your fish, it is hilarious. It knows the best jokes!” Michael said as he pointed at the larger of Hank’s two aquariums. It was a fifty five gallon tank but it had a fish in it that probably needed a hundred gallons at least all to itself, a big orange fish named Oscar.
“Oh, my, god…you are so damn high!” Hank joined in laughing at them, with them, around them, through them. He was just happy to be having so much fun. Then he heard it. SNAP! The sound of a tree branch shattering in half, but slightly muffled and with a sickening crunch. Then came the screams. He didn’t know what or who he was hearing, couldn’t make out the words they were using. All Hank knew was that whoever it was had gotten hurt bad and was in immeasurable agony. The band stopped playing. Other than the screams of pain there seemed to be no noise at all except for the sound of crickets chirping.
Hank tore through the house quickly, with a sense of purpose he hadn’t often felt in his life. When he got out onto the porch he noticed that everyone and all the commotion seemed to be gathered around the bon fire. He ran over as fast as he could, across his yard that was as big as a field. Pushing his way to the front he saw one of his oldest pals from Lexington, Yuri Almeida, laying on his back next to the fire. He was gripping his knee and holding it up to his chest as his wife Ana Sophia plead with him to extend his leg out so they could get
a look at his injury and assess the extent of the damage.
“Everyone back, give him some room to breathe! I’m a doctor!” a commanding voice addressed the crowd and everyone seemed to instantly obey without question, even Ana Sophia, who stepped back from her husband to see a tall, handsome stranger with olive skin, piercing blue eyes and thick and curly dark hair stride over to Yuri and crouch beside him.
After a few moments and some words exchanged that only Yuri and the doctor could hear Yuri got up and limped to his feet. He put one arm around the doctor and one arm around his wife and hopped between them one footed up to the house. Hank watched in awe, just dumbfounded, as the party began to get back underway. Everyone seemed satisfied that Yuri would be okay.
Hank stood for some time just staring into the fire. He didn’t know how much time had passed. He just spaced out. His head felt uncomfortably clear and he wanted to return to the party. He spun hard on his right heel and started toward the house. Before he even took a full step he knew something was very, very wrong. The party seemed to have disappeared entirely. The house was oriented to the East instead of the South and although it looked quite a bit different he somehow knew it was the same house. He stumbled backwards a step, thought he might stumble into the fire and spun around again, opposite direction. He fell right down where the fire should have been but found instead he fell on cold, damp ground. As he looked up he noticed the barn was in the same place. At least something seemed familiar. He laughed at himself sitting there in the dark, in the yard, so high he was probably just sitting right in the fire and didn’t even know it. As he stood up a chill went down his spine. He felt cold and looked up and saw the moon become obscured by clouds. A thick hazy fog crept over the fields and across the yard. As it enveloped him Hank got the suspicion that he was in danger. He immediately felt like he should be running and he did not ignore his instinct. He felt almost silly, running from nothing. Still he ran towards the house as fast as his legs and mind could carry him. He heard a growling over the sounds of his foot falls. An animalistic, voracious growl that betrayed a murderous intent. Whatever it was it was close, it was chasing him and it intended that he be its dinner. That was all Hank knew. As his palms sweated profusely and his heart pounded nearly out of his chest he tried to stay focused on survival. He felt as if he were being outpaced rapidly, but still he chanced a glance over his shoulder. Not much more than the blur of two crimson eyes. The eyes he had seen on the first night he spent here in Gravel Switch, he was sure of it. There was a long howling, as if from a mutated, dying wolf choking on a thousand locusts. Hank prepared to meet his maker and let a dribble of piss out of his tiny penis, soaking through his pants.
Then as if by miracle the beast bounded right past him as if he weren’t even there and headed straight for the house. To Hank’s surprise a volley of musket balls came from the windows of his house, maybe a dozen. He knew the sound of the civil war era weapons being fired. He had attended a few civil war reenactments as a kid, had even gotten to fire a musket once at camp. He flinched, too late, at the thought of being struck. He tucked, almost fetal, as he heard the projectiles tearing through the flesh of whatever it was ahead of him. It seemed unfazed other than being slightly annoyed.
Hank chanced his first good look at the thing to see a wretched creature straight out of his nightmares. It seemed to be about the same mass as a grizzly bear but it looked much like a jackal, or a hyena…definitely not a wolf. Hank immediately noticed that it had much longer, lankier legs than either of those creatures though. This was unlike anything he had ever seen before. It had a tail of thick, shaggy fur that seemed to split into two halfway down and Hank could not tell if that was natural to the abominable beast or if it had been split as if by some injury. Its claws were as straight razors folded back into their handles, each one an implement of death, together a nightmare. Something about its head and the way it moved it seemed to reveal that the thing had an intelligence at least equal to that of a person and far beyond that of any of the animals it resembled. It appeared to take in everything it saw, smelled and heard all at once and process it rapidly. The face was elongated like a shaggy horse’s face, but the ears were long like a jackrabbit and the thing had ram like horns curling out from behind them. Its eyes flashed with red fury as it stood aloft on its hind quarters and roared another hideous howl into the thick fog and the cold night.
Hank decided to do something daring. He ran around the thing, which still did not seem to notice him in the slightest. He smelled its rank breathe he got so close, a foul mix of death and rot. He ran for the house, as fast and as deliberately as he could. Every stride a specific effort to get to Amy. Whatever this thing was a few boards and some bricks were not going to protect her or anyone else in the house from it.
When he got to the front door he went to open it and his hand went right through it as if it weren’t even there at all. It seemed as if he were incorporeal, a ghost or spirit, incapable of interacting with the physical world, yet bound to observe it. He stole his fear away and walked right through the front door. As he did so he felt a terrible cold but that passed instantly. He was in the foyer of his house, yet not his house. It appeared as he thought it might have appeared in the eighteen hundreds. As he walked from the foyer into the living room he heard voices in a whisper.
“Captain…I do not think we are going to survive this night. That thing has hunted us all day and night. Bullets do not concern it. Nor do bayonets. I have no doubt that this thing is a spawn of hell sent to punish us all for our trepidations on this earth,” Hank overheard a man with a thick southern accent. As he fully entered the living room he saw a dozen Rebel civil war soldiers gathered there. All in various states of duress and all obviously at least a little wounded. Some were obviously severely wounded. Every man in the room other than Hank was scathed in some way. He knew immediately that none of them could see him, they probably couldn’t hear him either. He tried walking through one just for fun and found it much more uncomfortable than walking through the door. Still it only lasted a moment.
He walked into the kitchen as the soldiers considered how they might prevail over the beast in the yard. It was there that he saw something that truly shocked him. Laying face down on the floor was a young black woman in a white dress and apron, with a blue bonnet. She seemed to be dead and it appeared to have happened recently. There were pots and pans and plates laying all about her. She was covered in flour and sugar and there seemed to be several broken jars around on the floor. There had obviously been a struggle. He noticed her dress was ripped in several places and pushed up to her waist, past her hips. Her legs were spread apart and as Hank examined her body he got embarrassed at himself for letting his gaze linger a little too long on her. He couldn’t help but think how beautiful her skin was, how smooth it seemed and how warm and inviting her womanly pleasures must have been before she died. As he regained his composure from the shock of it all he realized first that he too might be dead and also that she appeared to have been brutally raped and murdered. He gasped at the thoughts, almost retching at the realization that he had just sexualized both a rape victim and a corpse in his mind.
He crouched beside her and in desperation he began to cry. Grabbing his knees he rocked back and forth, weeping like a baby. “That poor thing…those fucked up soldiers…oh my fucking god…” he kept repeating to himself, as Michael had repeated “Wow” over and over earlier that night when he had first felt the effects of LSD. “Was it even the same day?” Hank wondered if he might have been…in what, Civil War times? …for much longer than it seemed.
Then Hank heard a voice that he was sure was directed at him, “Psst. Psst. Hey mistuh…look at me mistuh…We gotta get outta here, right now.” Hank looked up and saw a middle aged black man, maybe forty years old, dressed in shabby cotton clothes that were both filthy and worn full of holes. He had no shoes and a rope belt. He had a jacket that looked scratchier than a burlap bag. In his right hand he had a pistol and in
his left hand an unlit torch. He had the back door wide open and was leaning into the kitchen, staring directly at Hank.
“We gots to go Hank,’ he said matter of factly. “This house is about to burn to the damn ground. Now help me get Matilda outta here.”
To his surprise the man entered the kitchen stealthily, put the pistol in his waistband and set the torch down outside the back door. Hank found that Matilda was one thing he could actually grasp onto physically. He grabbed her arms and the other man got her legs and they rushed her out the back door. They carried her across the yard, out to the buildings Hank thought of as the slave quarters. It occurred to him right then and there that these were once the occupants of those mysterious buildings in his yard. They laid her body down inside the closer of the two shacks on a cot inside, the only piece of furniture in it. Then Hank followed the man back to the house.
The man closed the back door, locking it from the outside by securing it shut with a heavy chain Hank which had failed to notice was lying right next to the door. Then the man lit the torch and started setting fire to the building. He started several small fires along the base of the outside walls, just above the foundation.
“What is your name?” Hank asked a little sheepishly.
“I’m Sheridan…Sheridan Davis. Matilda was my wife. Those damn confederate bastards raped her and killed her. I arrived just in time to see through the window. You Hank Ramsey, have helped me with my revenge. I will not forget that,” the man said in a detached way as if nothing that had happened had really gotten to him emotionally.
Gravel Switch: the black goat chronicles book 1: a Weird Tale of Extreme Horror Page 5