Back in my tent, I ate a breakfast bar and had some water, trying to breathe and ground myself again. I thought about Rosa Vermelha’s advice. Figure it out. Great. Very helpful.
Okay, one bit at a time, I told myself. It was like untangling a knot of necklace chains, and I turned the mass over and over in my hands to find that one spot where I could start working them apart. So. If she thought I could figure it out, then whatever I needed to do to find the demon’s victim must be within my ability.
I had actually seen the demon manifest, and he was in a more or less physical form. To the best of my still-limited understanding, that took a lot of energy, and one of the best sources was intense human emotion. That would make sense here. If the victim’s death was an imminent possibility, some part of them might be feeling strong emotions, or physical pain, or just a sense of urgency. It would be like the air around them was charged with electricity, and an immaterial being could plug into that.
I’ve always had a pretty good intuition, and a sensitivity to the atmosphere of the space around me, which used to just be good for things like being able to walk into a room and tell that the people there had been fighting. Since the accident, that had gotten stronger. Would that translate to simply being able to walk around until I sensed a strong enough vibe from someone? I supposed it was possible, but a long shot at best--in a camp full of two thousand people, I could walk around all weekend and never cross paths with the one person I wanted. I tried to remember who else was there by the fire spinners, but I could only recall a few faces at best.
So I tried to remember what it was like when the demon had his hooks in me, something I usually try to forget.
At first it had been just a faceless, terrifying figure in my nightmares. I would feel like I was being watched, even when I was alone. Then there were whispers, sometimes in my head and sometimes just at the edge of my hearing, dry as autumn leaves. The anti-psychotics slurred it, but didn’t drive it out. The worse I felt, the stronger it got. I started catching glimpses in mirrors and dark windows, fleeting, awful. Suze brought me to an occult store for the first time. There was a movie out about witchcraft that I thought was dumb, but it convinced her that we could fight back against him if we were witches. Our candles and chants helped. But Suze’s parents found out, and took her books and ritual things away. She warned me so that I could hide mine before my mother tossed my room. But then Suze died, and I didn’t have the energy to fight him anymore.
Stop. I had to stop. I was shaking again and tears were rolling down my face.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and inhaled deeply, letting it out in a long shaky whoosh. I reminded myself that I survived it all. Even got to the point where I didn’t want to die any longer, although it had taken years. He’d lingered in the background of my life, though, waiting for me to sink below the surface again. Seizing on any chance to try to keep me there. The meds helped me function, let me work on ways to cope with my depression, and that helped me resist.
On the island after the accident, there had been rustling in the bushes when I strayed beyond my Beloved’s walls, like a wild animal getting ready to pounce. I remembered that last night with my Beloved, when he gave me Rosa’s key and told me to run and not look back. There’d been a loud, high, terrible noise behind me, and then abrupt silence, and then there was nothing in the brush following me. The worst part about my life falling apart after my recovery--well, one of them, besides the bills and the bankruptcy and the eviction and being abandoned by everyone in my life--was no longer being able to get my depression meds. I’d been terrified that I would be vulnerable to the demon again. But although the depression wasn’t gone, the demon was.
Now I knew why.
I pushed myself to remember more. It was difficult to piece it all together; I’d blocked out so much. What had it felt like when he was near?
Doom, like crows or vultures gathering near carrion, waiting to feast, except the food was my unhappiness or grief or despair. Vultures--yes. I had seen vultures in my dream about Suze, and perched near Charlie’s body.
Cold. I remembered being often cold. But not the way you read about in ghost hunter stuff where they talk about drastic changes or cold pockets. This was more like a bone chill where I never seemed to be warm enough even if other people were comfortable. Bundling in sweaters and blankets and thick socks even in summertime.
Wait--there was something else. Rainstorms? No. There was something about storms, though. I remembered for some reason always being convinced it was going to rain, but why? I could picture myself, curled up and sobbing, thinking that I hurt so bad that the sky was going to cry with me.
Smell! That was it. I would catch whiffs of air that smelled like a storm was coming. Like a lightning storm--yes, that was it, slightly metallic--an ozone smell. Even when it didn’t rain at all.
It wasn’t much, but it was a place to start, at least.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I combed out my damp hair and set out from the tent. I needed to find out what time it was. That blinking 12:00 was a surreal and unsettling feeling; in a life that is so ungrounded in so many ways, I rely on my ugly, sturdy little watch to give me a touchstone when otherwise days would melt into each other. By now Morph was fully stirred up, camps full of tousle-headed hangover zombies and damply perky morning larks fresh from the shower, the breeze carrying the tantalizing perfumes of eggs and bacon and coffee and French toast from grills and camp stoves. The site’s owners, a grizzled collective that looked like they’d be more at home with shotguns and hound dogs than hippies, drove a pickup truck loaded with bags of ice through the grounds, stopping to sell them to campers who ran up waving money. It was the one exception to the nothing-for-sale rule of the festival.
Everyone looked happy and energized, even those still struggling to be awake, and the party mood was palpable even this early in the morning. I ached to be part of it. I wished I could just forget about everything, at least for a few hours. Couldn’t I, though? I didn’t know how to look for what I was looking for, or what I could possibly do when I found them. And I was just one person, with very few resources. I couldn’t even look at the demon without running and panicking. How was I supposed to stop him? I didn’t even know what that meant.
I was immediately ashamed of myself. Maybe I was right, and I wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing. But I wouldn’t be alive today if there hadn’t been people willing to act on their belief that no one is disposable. It seemed pretty shitty of me to repay that by giving up on someone else before I even tried to help them.
Still, I felt okay wishing that this whole situation could have saved itself for another weekend.
Preoccupied as I was, I almost didn’t realize that Sarafina was walking in the opposite direction headed toward me, lugging a bucket of water from the spigot. She was wearing low-slung jeans and a cutoff t-shirt, barefoot, with her braids up in impossibly adorable double ponytails. In the dark last night, I hadn’t noticed that her dark hair was streaked in places with purple. I wasn’t sure if she hadn’t noticed me or if she was avoiding eye contact. Shit.
“Hey,” I said, stepping in her path and offering an apologetic smile. She slowed and bobbed her head at me. She smiled, but her face was guarded. “I’m really sorry I took off last night like I did.”
“No worries.” She shrugged.
Dammit, I’d hurt her feelings. Way to win friends and influence people, Mari, you charmer. “I just...that wasn’t cool of me. I’m sorry. I freaked out a little bit. I saw--well, I thought I saw--someone who was pretty terrible to me a long time ago. I kind of hid out in my tent and melted down. I wanted to tell you that I had a lot of fun hanging out with you last night and I didn’t mean to ditch you.”
She wavered, but concern was winning. “What’s his name? Maybe I can tell you for sure if he’s here.”
I hesitated. “I’d be really surprised if you k
new him.” That was the damn truth. “But listen,” I added hastily before she could ask any other questions I didn’t want to answer, “is there a time today we could hang out for a bit? There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
Now she just looked weirded out. But I guess I intrigued her, because after a moment she said, “Sure. Meet you at the pavilion in an hour or so?”
“Yes,” I said, hoping I’d know when an hour was up. “Perfect.”
She gave me another wavering smile, hitched up the bucket, and passed me with a too-casual “Seeya then!”
My next stop was Science Faction. There was a loose circle of camp chairs in front of the Lab Oratory where members of the camp lounged eating breakfast, Dove and Chris and Vivi among them. They waved me over, getting up to hug me good morning, inviting me to join them. I recognized a few of the other Faction people from setup, too, as they greeted me and pulled over another chair.
“Want some grapes?” Dove asked a bit too eagerly, and passed me a bowl of large, luscious looking red grapes.
I scooped out a few and popped one in my mouth. As I bit through the cold skin, it--fizzed. It was like eating the illicit love child of fruit and Pop Rocks.
I can only imagine the look on my face when that happened, because the entire group burst out laughing. I realized they’d all been watching me to see my reaction. “What--?” I said, laughing too in my surprise and staring at the grapes in my hand. They looked for all the world like normal ones.
“We carbonated them with dry ice!” Dove beamed, her eyes shining. “Isn’t it cool? You’re the first person who ate them who didn’t know what they were.”
“Glad I could entertain you,” I said. To be a good sport, I ate another one. It popped and fizzed too. I had to admit, it was pretty cool.
“You have to come back later this afternoon when it’s really hot out,” Vivi said, pouring herself a big bowl of cereal. “We’re making nice cream.”
“Nice cream?”
“Ice cream we make with liquid nitrogen,” Dove clarified. “Molecular gastronomy is kind of a thing with us. Want some coffee? I guarantee we brew the most chemically perfect in camp. Unless you’d rather have coffee caviar?”
“I’d love some regular old hot,” I said, and followed Chris as he grabbed my hand and tugged me toward the Lab Oratory, reminding me that I hadn’t seen the inside yet.
It was cool inside the yurt, almost cold. I noticed that at each of the cardinal points, there was a low table set inside a plastic bin, with a huge ice block on top of the table, and a generator-powered electric fan set behind each ice block to blow cooled air toward the center of the room.
The interior canvas of the ceiling was painted like a night sky, complete with constellations. “We have string lights aligned with them,” he told me, “so that when it gets dark we can light up our own little sky in here.”
There were lab tables with equipment and gadgets, chairs scattered around, posters and objects hanging on the walls, a large chalkboard mounted on a frame so it could be flipped. There was so much to look at that I was struggling to take it all in. I wanted to see it in action, when it was full of people talking and playing.
Chris beckoned me over to a cart with a laptop and opened it, clicking through a few things until he found the file he wanted. “One of our presentations is more artful, even mystical, than most of our stuff,” he confided. “And it’s a multimedia performance. We have projectors we’re going to set up to do 360-degree projection all around the room, with people doing readings and dancing. It’s based on work that a friend of mine did, building a satellite and sending it into space to record data as sound files. He made the recordings available for musicians to work with and interpret ‘the music of the spheres’ however they chose, so they mixed up a bunch of original pieces. Then I built one of those record players that can play the rings in slices of a tree trunk just like they were vinyl records. I worked with one of the musicians to make a satellite piece that goes with it. It’s amazing, like a duet between heaven and earth. Check this out.”
He started the file and lowered the needle onto the slice of wood. It was like...spending your life hearing only classical music, and for the first time hearing jazz. Or rock. Maybe metal. It was music in a very unstructured, abstract sense, coming in bursts and fits and then long tangled skeins of sound, odd and haunting, and much more so because I could identify here and there sounds that I recognized--some kind of flute, the thrum of what might have been a guitar, a soft pulse like a muffled drum--but woven through it were sounds that I couldn’t really identify. High wailing sounds, tinkling, ringing, clashing...it sounded electronic yet organic, the way a theremin can sound like a voice or a violin without exactly sounding like them.
It was so compelling. I found myself drifting in the sounds, felt them pierce my heart with their intensity. I closed my eyes and swayed a little on my feet. “Oh my gods,” I whispered as Chris stopped the music. “That’s...” My throat was too tight for words.
He was grinning, excited as a child. “Wait till you see the fractal art that was created to go along with it, all these beautiful animations projected all over the room, and people dancing to it, or reciting verse. It’ll blow your mind. Will you come see it? We’re going to do it Saturday night after the burn, when everyone’s charged up on that energy.”
“Wouldn’t miss it.” I coughed and sniffed. I needed something normal to hang onto. “Speaking of schedules, what time is it?”
“Um, ten of ten.” He shut everything down as I set my watch, and I followed him out of the yurt.
I was struck by a sudden thought. “What do you know about ozone?”
“That it’s a triatomic molecule, a relatively unstable allotrope of oxygen that’s formed from dioxygen by electrical discharge or ultraviolet light? Um, that it’s an oxidizing agent and also explosive in large quantities?”
“How unstable?”
“Well, you can’t store it,” he said. “Why do you ask?”
“So if you smell it, you know it has to have been formed really recently, right?”
We were resuming our seats. Dove handed me a travel mug brimming with coffee and I smiled at her in thanks. “What are we talking about?” she asked, and others in the circle were paying attention too.
“It’s my science lesson for the day.” I faked a carefree grin. “I was asking about ozone.”
“Very recently,” said Chris. “If you’re talking about open air, like when you smell it after a lightning strike, it breaks down very quickly.”
I absorbed this. “So how do you measure the presence of it?”
Vivi paused as she poured her second bowl of cereal. “Smell is reliable. Humans can detect the presence of ozone through smell at extremely low concentrations. But you want to know what’s cool? If you mix it with nitric oxide, you get chemiluminescence. It actually glows.”
“’Not a science nerd’, huh?” Dove teased Vivi, poking her. Vivi laughed and hopped her chair a couple inches away.
Okay, I had to give it to her, that was pretty intriguing, and not just because we were at a burner event where glow-anything is revered like monkeys at the monolith. “Glows, huh? So where do you get nitric oxide?”
Chris jumped in. “Find an asthmatic. People exhale nitric oxide, but asthmatics have a higher concentration. They use this test where people breathe into a tube of ozone and then measure how much it lights up.”
The conversation veered a hard left into a debate about various forms of respiratory treatment. Vivi and a couple others pulled out inhalers to compare them. I mulled over what they’d said and blurted the thought that popped into my head. “What if emotions have energy? Like, what if you could build up the equivalent of a static charge of anger? Could you smell ozone from that?”
One young guy laughed and rolled his eyes. Everyone else stared at me like I was suddenly
Dove and Chris’s weird hippie friend who believes in crystals and unicorns. They should only know. “Not...really,” Chris said, kindly.
“It’s for a story.” As if that made me sound any less stupid. “Uh, this coffee’s really good.”
Conversation bubbled up again, but in small pockets around me. Maybe I was being a little paranoid, but I felt like most of the group had written me off. I huddled in my chair and finished my coffee in silence. A couple of minutes later, Dove got up. “Okay, everyone, first talk is at ten-thirty. Cleanup chores are on the board, everyone please hop to it. And make sure you know what your lunch assignment is. Burner time is no excuse for making everyone wait for food.”
That seemed like my cue. I washed out the mug in the washbins they’d set up for their camp, thanked Dove for the bean, and made as graceful an exit as I could. No one tried to stop me.
I felt rather alone as I headed toward the pavilion. On the one hand, I was surrounded by all these bohemian types who were all about the hugging and the welcome-home and who were, in fairness, quite friendly. On the other, everyone still had their cliques, and I was somehow still the weird kid. I wasn’t there with a big camp or with any art or a bunch of friends. All I had was a crazy idea about saving someone I couldn’t even identify and stopping a demon who terrified me.
Still, MetamorphosUS in the daytime was a glorious sight, cheering me despite myself. With all the creative living structures and generator-rigged systems here on this spit of wilderness, it made me think of some kind of post-apocalyptic settlement. But in a utopian, not dystopian, way, like some hardy band of relentless optimists were determined to carve out a space for beauty and peace and equality to thrive in the midst of whatever horror had ended the world.
The daylit scene was so different from Morph at night, more relaxed and full of the practical motions of everyday life, showering and cooking and unloading gear to set up. Yet it was no less otherworldly or carnivalesque than it’d been last night. Most people were in costumes or wild clothing of some kind. A much smaller number were nude, although shirtless and sarong-skirted was a popular look for all genders. Even the people dressed in ordinary shorts and tees looked like they were on vacation.
MetamorphosUS: Book 1 of the Mythfit Witch Mysteries Page 10