by Joshi, S. T
I didn’t see Tommy much during the next week or so, but I knew from the occasional reference that he was spending time with Cheryl. One night, about ten days after our encounter with her, I got back to the apartment later than usual. I know what you’re thinking. No, I didn’t find Tommy and Cheryl in bed together—not that night, anyway. I came into the apartment and heard a kind of chanting from his room. I looked in, and there was Tommy, sitting naked and cross-legged on the bare hardwood floor. The dream stone was on the floor in front of him, with a white candle standing up from the depression in its center. He was sexually aroused. By that I mean that his penis was erect, but he wasn’t touching it. He held his arms crossed over his chest at the wrists with his hands closed.
I stood there listening for several seconds. The chanting wasn’t words, at least not words I recognized. It was rhythmic and varied, almost musical. He rocked back and forth as he chanted. He seemed to be staring through the blank wall as though trying to make out something on an imaginary distant horizon.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
He jerked slightly and shuddered, then took a deep breath and turned his head. His eyes were rolled up so far in their sockets that only the lower parts of the whites were visible. He blinked several times as he gradually become aware of me.
“Hi, Walt. I was just trying out my dream stone.”
“You’re pointing at me.”
I gestured discreetly with my little finger.
He frowned and looked down at himself, then covered his erection with his hand.
“Sorry about that,” he said a bit sheepishly. “It just happened.”
“I thought the dream stone went under your pillow.”
“That’s not the only way to use it. I’ve been doing some research. Cheryl’s helping me. You know, the girl who bought the green stone pendant?”
“I remember her.”
“She came to me with some information she dug up online. Crazy stuff, but fascinating. I was just trying out one of the techniques. You set the candle in the hole and light it, then look through the smoke while chanting certain sounds.”
“Did you see anything?”
He hesitated, then grinned crookedly and shook his head.
“Just some crazy stuff. I must have been daydreaming.”
“Whatever it was, it must have been hot.”
He looked down again and removed his hand. His erection had subsided.
“Yeah, well, to tell the truth, I didn’t even notice that happening.”
Unfolding his legs stiffly, he stood up, then bent to take the stone from the floor and blew out the candle.
“Can I touch it?”
His face took on this strange expression, a mixture of irritation, anger, and confusion. I’d never seen that look on his face before, which I guess is why the memory of it stayed with me, even though it only lasted for an instant. Almost at once he removed the white candle, which had some symbols carved into its side, and handed the stone to me.
“Don’t drop it,” he said. “Cost me a lot of money.”
It was heavy, and hard—much harder than soapstone. The hardness was more like granite. The dense greenish rock absorbed heat from my hands and felt as though it had just come out of the refrigerator. There was a kind of smell about it, like a faint musk, and it was slightly oily to the touch. I turned it over. Incised on the back was some sort of occult symbol. I’m not into the occult, so I can’t say what it was. If you want, I’ll try to draw it later, but I doubt I remember all the details. It was quite complex, and the line segments and angles were irregular.
When I passed it back to him, he took it quickly and cradled it in both hands as though afraid it might slip from his fingers.
“You’ve been seeing a lot of Cheryl,” I said casually while he put the stone away in a drawer.
“She’s a smart kid. She’s in her final undergraduate year. We’re both interested in the dream stones, so we pooled our resources.”
We stood looking at each other. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him naked, but it felt awkward for some reason.
“I’ll let you get dressed,” I told him, and left his room.
I’d like to stop again, please. I need a few minutes to collect my thoughts.
3
OVER THE FOLLOWING SEVERAL WEEKS, I SAW LESS AND LESS OF Tommy. Some nights, he didn’t even bother to come back to his room. He spent much of his free time with Cheryl, and with some others they picked up along the way. I gathered from overheard bits of talk around the university that they were all interested in the dream stones. It was like a quiet little cult of some kind. They didn’t dress outrageously or draw attention to themselves, but when they passed each other on campus, a secret look and a little smile passed between them. Tommy was their leader, I think. That was the impression I got from the way the others remained silent while he talked, and the way they followed him.
I decided to go back to that corner where he had bought the large dream stone, and buy one of the pendants like the one Cheryl wore. I’m not quite sure what I was thinking—maybe that if I had one of the stones, I would fit in with the rest of them. Well, the homeless man and his beach towel were gone. No, I don’t mean moved to another corner, I mean just gone. I walked up and down Barrington Street a dozen times and I could not find him. I asked the other street people where he was, but for some perverse reason they refused to talk about him. They claimed that I had imagined him, that he had never existed. They must have thought he owed me money. Why they would protect him, I don’t know. None of the clerks in the nearby stores remembered seeing him.
Another curious thing—I went on the Internet and looked up dream stones. The term exists, of course. You can type in almost any pair of words in Google and you will get thousands or hundreds of thousands of hits. But none of the stones described as dream stones had any similarity with the stones owned by Tommy and Cheryl. Neither was there any clear, consistent description between sites on the Internet about what dream stones were or how they are to be used.
I did run across an obscure reference to an Antarctic expedition in 1930 sponsored by a university in Massachusetts that had brought back with them a stone that must have been very similar to the dream stone Tommy owned, to judge by the textual description. I could never find a photograph of the stone, and when I e-mailed the curator of the university museum, she denied having any artifact of that description in her collection. Yes, I still have the e-mail on my computer’s hard drive, the one you confiscated from my apartment.
It was my habit to spend Wednesday nights at the library, just as a way of varying my study routine. The Wednesday after I tried and failed to locate the homeless man, I went to the library as usual, but found that I couldn’t concentrate. I kept thinking of the dream stone and what Tommy was doing with the members of his little occult circle. In frustration I finally shut my books and returned to the apartment. The living room was dark. At first I assumed Tommy was still out with his new friends performing one of their silly rituals, or whatever it was they did when they got together. I hung up my jacket on one of the hooks beside the front door and took my books into my room.
That was when I noticed noises coming from behind the closed door of Tommy’s room. I should have guessed what they were. You must think I am very naïve. In my defense I can only tell you that Tommy had never brought anyone back to his room before, and the sounds were like someone choking on food caught in their throat. I didn’t take time to think about it, I just dropped the books onto my bed and rushed to Tommy’s bedroom door and threw it open.
How to describe what I saw? No, I don’t believe I will give an actual description. Let me only tell you what it involved. Tommy and Cheryl were in the room, on the floor, engaged in some kind of sexual act. I’m sure you had already reached that conclusion. There were candles around them. I saw blood dripping from the end of Tommy’s erect penis into the central depression of the dream stone, which rested on the floor beneath th
em. Cheryl had a knife in her hand. They were both cut and bleeding in many places on their bodies. Small cuts, so that the blood didn’t drip off, but merely ran down their skin and created a kind of scarlet zebra effect. That’s the only way I can think to describe it.
And they were doing other things. Obscene things. Disgusting things. No, I do not feel a need to describe them in more detail. It is enough that you know they were sexual, if the term can even be applied to acts so perverse that the mind prefers to withdraw rather than even consider them. Let me only say that I stood in the open door, looking at them locked together and straining with lust, for several seconds before my eyes even made coherent sense out of what their bodies were doing. When I finally understood, I felt my stomach heave and very nearly vomited.
They turned to look at me, both of them, but their eyes were inhuman, like the eyes of feral animals. Their bodies continued their rhythmic undulations as if imbued with a consciousness all their own. I’m not even sure if they fully comprehended the act they performed together.
One other thing I noticed before I withdrew and shut the door behind me: the air directly above the blood-filled hollow of the dream stone shimmered and danced. Have you ever looked through the heat rising from a bonfire at distant trees and buildings, and seen the air dance and shimmer? It was something like that. The air above the stone was doing what the air on Barrington Street had been doing just before Tommy and I came across the homeless man. How I curse that day in memory! If only I had not noticed the trinkets on his towel.
I left the apartment to settle my gorge and get my thoughts straight. For an hour or so I walked the night streets and wandered around the Dalhousie campus. I could have gone back to the library, but study would have been impossible in my mental state, which was one of mingled horror and confusion, and yes, I will admit it, betrayal. I felt that in some way Tommy had betrayed my trust. Not by having sex with the girl. That was none of my business. He betrayed me by not including me in his experiments with the dream stone. After all, I was the one who had noticed the old man on the corner. That should count for something, shouldn’t it? If not for me, he would never have bought the unholy thing.
Cheryl and Tommy were both gone from the apartment when I went back. Tommy never returned to it again.
Let me stop here for a short while. No, I must take some time. I have gastro-intestinal problems, and I need to take my pills. I’ll be fine if you just give me half an hour. Thank you. Yes, I want to finish this. I must finish it today, because after today, I will never talk about it again.
4
TOMMY DIDN’T EXACTLY AVOID ME ON CAMPUS, BUT WE SELDOM seemed to find ourselves in the same buildings, and when we did encounter each other in the lecture halls or the library, he was always with one of his younger friends. Didn’t I mention that? They were all undergraduates. Another thing—they all wore small dream stones around their necks. I can only presume that Tommy and Cheryl went back to the homeless man on the corner before he disappeared and bought the remaining stones. It would have been the height of coincidence for all four of the other students to have bought them independently, wouldn’t it? No, I think my explanation makes better sense, from the standpoint of probability.
The less I saw of my roommate, the more intensely I wanted to understand what he and the others were doing with the stones. What I had seen in his bedroom gave me some clues. It must be some kind of sadomasochistic sex cult. But how did the stones fit into the picture? Why had Cheryl been filling the depression in the stone with warm blood from his erect penis, of all places on his body to cut?
I began trying to follow the students I recognized as members of the cult. I wanted to understand what they were doing, or what they believed themselves to be doing, and knew that Tommy would never tell me directly. I was not a part of it. Perhaps in his own way, he thought he was protecting me by keeping silent about the stones, and by avoiding my company. It didn’t matter, I had to know what was going on. Let me admit freely that I am uncommonly poor at detective work. The first few times the students I set out to follow saw what I was doing almost immediately, and simply went to the library or back to their residences until I got tired of hanging around outside.
Then I got lucky. It was a windy, rainy day near twilight in late October. Well, you know the date. Must I state it for the record? It was October nineteenth. Maple leaves were blowing around the campus plaza and through the parking lot. I spotted one of the girls in the cult who had never seen me with Tommy. I knew she must be on her way to a meeting by her self-conscious, fugitive manner. This time, I stayed well behind my quarry, on the reasoning that it was better if I lost her, and could try again the next night, than if she realized who I was and started watching out for me.
She was a small girl with short red hair, and she wore a yellow raincoat. It made keeping her in sight easy. She didn’t walk far, just across the parking lot and along Coburg Road, then down Henry Street to an unlit white house. She let herself into the house through the front door with a key. I don’t know what I thought about it. That she and the other cult members had rented a house together so that they could be close to each other. Or that the house was vacant and that she and the others had made duplicate keys to the front door. It was only afterwards that I learned that the owners of the house, an elderly man and his wife, were both dead and wrapped in plastic in one of the upstairs bedroom closets.
I waited outside on the street until I saw a light go on through the basement windows. The concrete foundation of the house is raised about three feet above the grade of the yard and has windows all around. The street was deserted, thanks to the rain and the wind. By this time it was almost fully dark. I decided to risk getting closer. As you know, a mature hedge surrounds the front yard of the house, and wooden fences run down each side between the properties, separating the driveway on one side and a walkway on the other from the neighbors. It was about as private as a house could get in the middle of the city. Maybe that was why Tommy and the others had chosen it for their ritual. Or maybe they had some other esoteric reason. I can’t be sure about anything at this stage.
I crept into the yard and went along the right side of the house, where the fence is closer to the foundation, so that it would shield me from anyone in the house next door who happened to look out the window. By this time I was almost soaked to the skin, and the rainwater was icy cold. It was just starting to turn to snow and hit my face and neck as cold little dots that clung for an instant, then melted. Anyway, I crawled under a bush near the window and peeked into the basement.
The view was perfect. It might almost have been staged just for my benefit. I took off my glasses and opened my coat to wipe them on the front of my shirt, and when I put them back on, I could see everything. What did I see? I’m coming to that, don’t rush me. I need time to settle my thoughts and separate out what I saw from what I only imagined I saw. The concrete floor of the basement was a large open space, the floor above supported by two thick wooden posts that were painted white. I saw the furnace in one corner and a matching white washer and dryer set on the far side. There were some boxes and a work bench, but otherwise the floor was open.
There were six people in all. I should have guessed that beforehand from the number of pendants the old man offered for sale, but it had not occurred to me. I had assumed that the pendants were cheap imported trash, and that he could get as many of them as he wanted to sell. I did not think then that the five small ones and single large stone might constitute a set, or that there were no similar stones to be found anywhere on the face of this planet. These thoughts only occurred to me later.
They were all naked, three men and three women. Tommy lay on his back on the gray concrete floor with the large dream stone resting on his abdomen, just over his navel. A white candle burned in the depression of the stone. His penis was erect and stood straight up, so that the candle and his penis were like two pillars—the Jachin and Boaz of lust, you might say. A biblical reference, it doesn
’t matter. His penis had been smeared with something red that gleamed in the overhead light—blood, of course, it had to have been blood. Probably blood from the elderly couple murdered upstairs. You should test the DNA—but you must have already done so. Anyway, his arms and legs were spread wide, so that his body formed a pentagram. Each of the other five members of the cult knelt on the floor at one of his extremities, sitting on their heels, with that limb of his body trapped between their knees. Cheryl knelt in this posture above his head, with his head between her knees.
They all chanted the same rhythmic chant, their hands clasped together and held tight to their chests. Needless to say, they wore the small dream stones on their brass chains around their necks, and their clasped hands covered the actual stones, but I could see the chains. It sounded like a different chant from the one Tommy had been using the night I caught him kneeling before the large stone in his bedroom. I’m not certain about that, no. I didn’t recognize any words, but the cadence of the chant was different. This one was more aggressive, or more insistent if you will.
All at the same instant, they stopped chanting and raised their clasped hands over their heads. For the first time I saw what they were holding—small daggers. Their blades looked about five inches long and were highly polished. They caught and reflected the overhead light. Time seemed to stop for me. It can only have been a subjective impression, but they seemed to hold the knives raised for hours. Then Tommy turned his head slightly between Cheryl’s knees and rolled his eyes to look directly at me, through the glass of the basement window. His gaze met mine. His face was calm. There was no fear, just acceptance mingled with expectation. On his lips was that familiar crooked smile.
The blades of the knives penetrated his body in unison in a circle around the dream stone. He made a kind of involuntary cry that was loud enough for me to hear, but not loud enough to carry to the house behind me on the other side of the fence. The blood welled forth when the daggers were simultaneously withdrawn and quickly held above his erect penis with their points touching, so that drops of blood fell from their tips onto the tip of his penis.