by Stacey Longo
He recalled how, years ago, unable to fathom how adults abandon their childhood toys, Dylan had sworn he would never stop playing with his toys—namely Transformers, Zoids, and Star Wars figures—even if he lived to be 100 years old. Of course, his interest in toys began to dissolve not too long after making that statement. It was an odd feeling, but Ben felt sad that a similar chapter in his own life had never existed, a playing-with-dolls chapter, and a moment when he could have confidently announced his intention to play with dolls until he was 100 years old.
Ben steered needle and thread through the holes of a navy blue button to form the Dylan-doll’s second eye. As he stitched the button into the cloth-skin of the doll’s face, Ben shuddered suddenly. Despite sitting in the stuffy, hot air of the Fort, he felt a chill in his bones. Marrow-deep. This sensation was followed by a bizarre feeling, an impression that something was...missing. At first he didn’t know what that thing could be.
But his mind quickly formed a theory.
Earlier, so that a small part of their souls would be captured in the voodoo dolls, Ben and Dylan had each snipped off a lock of hair and pricked their thumbs to draw a small amount of blood. They had added the hair and the blood to the bellies of the dolls before closing them up.
Ben was now nearly certain that he could feel the absence of that tiny mite of soul he had given away so freely.
***
By the time they finished the voodoo dolls, the late-June sun was beginning to die its red-orange-purple death on the western horizon. The dolls lay at one corner of the table. With their button eyes and noses, crudely stitched mouths, stiff, crucifix-shaped bodies, and tufted Spanish moss hands, the dolls resembled stunted scarecrows. Ten-inch-tall scarecrows. According to the instructions, the necessary consecration ceremony to imbue the dolls with magical power had to be performed after nightfall. That meant they still had a little time to kill.
“Poker?” Ben suggested.
“Nah.”
“Crazy Eights?”
“Pfft. Shit.”
“Chess?”
Dylan exhaled a blue-gray nebula of smoke, eyes scrutinizing Ben. “I heard Rachel Baker still digs you,” he said. He sounded as if he were slightly annoyed at being forced to bring the topic up.
Ben was quick to respond, just as quick to avert his eyes. “Yeah, so what?” A spell of silence ensued, Dylan presumably waiting for Ben to elaborate. “She’s not all that hot,” Ben resumed. “Plus she’s goth. Not my type.” As he spoke, Ben reached over to the shelf below the window and grabbed a battered deck of playing cards. He began shuffling them nervously on the table.
“Not your type?” Dylan asked. “Pussy should be your type,” he added matter-of-factly before taking a deep drag on his cigarette. “Goth? Pfft. We’re all just hilljacks around here, dude. And like an emo hillbilly never hooked up with a goth hillbilly before.”
Ben knew how to play the game of appearing straight well enough, even with Dylan. But that was the only secret he was good at keeping. He could not hide the fact that he was a virgin from Dylan. He would not even dare attempt that lie. The two had been friends for too long for him to pull that one off.
“Easy for you to say,” Ben said after a moment. “You’ve been nailin’ the cream of the crop since freshman year.”
“So what, you’re gonna wait for Megan Fox to call you up before you finally get yourself laid?” Dylan chuckled wryly. “Be one waitin’ motherfucker, bro. That’s all I’m sayin’.”
Old habits die hard. For maybe the hundredth time in a year, Ben caught his tongue just before he accidentally made a “your mama” joke to Dylan. He had nearly said I won’t have to wait long for yo mama, bitch. That was a close one. Nearly a year ago, Dylan’s mother had taken all her prescription pain medication, anti-anxiety pills, and anti-depressants at the same time, chased them down with a couple slugs of rotgut vodka from a plastic bottle, in an effort to make all her pain, anxieties, and depression go away. It worked. Dylan’s obsession with the occult began shortly after her suicide.
Instead, Ben improvised a lame lie. “Laura, that new waitress who just started working at Slausen’s, I was thinkin’ about asking her out next week. And...”
“Don’t think about doing anything,” Dylan interrupted. “Fuckin’ do it. Like Yoda said, ya know?”
“And I’m not emo, dude,” Ben said, ignoring the last bit of advice. “I’m not...anything.”
Dylan cocked his head, shrugged his shoulders, held up his open palms in a gesture of resignation. “Yeah, well, fuck it in a bucket,” he said, a phrase that indicated the conversation was over and that, when it came down to it, Dylan really didn’t care when Ben eventually got himself laid. Ben knew that Dylan occasionally brought up the issue mainly out of a stupid sense of duty that he felt as a friend. But Dylan never dwelled on the topic for very long, and Ben was very grateful for that. Other kids at Shelbyville High who suspected Ben of the crime of sexual inexperience were not so forgiving.
Dylan never judged Ben. That was just one of many reasons Ben had fallen in love with him.
“I’m just sayin’, dog,” Dylan added as an afterthought as he stubbed his cigarette out in a small glass ashtray brimming with bent-up butts.
Not only was Ben in love with Dylan, he envied him. In the three years that had passed since they began high school, Ben had drifted from the goths to the skater punks to the emos in search of acceptance and identity, although he resented all those labels whenever they were applied to himself. Dylan, on the other hand, had never fit into any stereotyped group, nor had he ever sought to be a part of one. Dylan was just Dylan: part jock, part stoner, part loner, part small-town Ohio white-trash tough kid.
Once again, Dylan grew quiet. He inserted his earphones, pressed play on his iPod, threw his sandal-clad feet up on the table, folded his muscular arms, and stared out through the Fort’s little square of a window. His face reverted back to a mask of melancholy tinged with something else, possibly boredom. But his face was beautiful no matter what expression it wore, thought Ben.
That’s how Dylan was whenever they hung out these days. He’d come out of his funk, seem interested in the normal goings-on of life for awhile, act a little bit like his old loose-lipped self, and then retreat back to brooding silence.
Ben spent what little remained of the day’s waning light playing solitaire. He avoided looking at the voodoo dolls. Now that the semi-darkness of the Fort’s interior was thickening, the dolls were starting to creep him out a little. Being out at the Fort after nightfall was always a little spooky, but at the present moment he could literally feel his bravery slipping away alongside the daylight. When he realized he was having trouble seeing his cards, Ben reached up and switched on the battery-powered electric lantern that hung from the ceiling. He raised his eyes from his cards ever so often to find Dylan in the exact same position, still staring out the window with the same forlorn look on his face.
“It’s time,” Dylan said, his voice startling Ben. Dylan peered down at the glowing face of his cell phone. “It’s 9:14. Sundown was officially at 9:05.”
Dylan set his phone and iPod atop an overturned milk crate. He cleared the table except for several steel pins that he pulled from a pincushion. From the wall shelf, Dylan then took a black rectangular pillar candle and a clear plastic sandwich bag filled with petals of a red rose.
He placed the candle at the center of the table and lit it with his Zippo. “Kill the light,” he said. Ben reached up to the lantern, switched it off. The lamp’s harsh, white fluorescence melted into the warm, orange, flickering incandescence of the candlelight.
The abrupt change in lighting produced two conflicting reactions in Ben. For one, seeing Dylan bathed in the velvet candlelight, the athletic contours of his body accentuated by the deepened shadows, sent an electric tingle radiating from his groin. For a second, Ben imagined the candlelight was not there for the purpose of them performing some crazy voodoo ritual, but rather to set the mood f
or a lovers’ tryst—their first.
But at the same time, Ben felt most of his remaining courage leave him, his courage to play around with voodoo magic in a candlelit shack out in the woods in the dark of night.
Dylan re-took his seat at the table. He produced a folded piece of notebook paper from one of his short pockets, placed it on the Dylan-doll, and slid the doll over to Ben. Just as their instructions prescribed, Ben positioned the Dylan-doll face-up on the table, making sure his own body, the prone doll, and the flickering candle formed a line. Dylan did the same with the Ben-doll on the other side of the table.
Ben noticed that all four bodies—two human, two doll—formed a single line with the candle at its center. Since their voodoo doll instructions were written for an individual making one doll and not two people making two dolls, this was purely a coincidence. Ben was just about to point this out to Dylan, thinking for a moment that their accidental dual alignment might screw up the magic or make some unintended bad thing happen. He almost smirked when he realized he had forgotten, for just a split second, it was all a bunch of bullshit in the first place.
“I’ll go first,” Dylan said and cleared his throat.
Ben detected a quaver in his friend’s voice. He knew Dylan was afraid the ritual would fail just like all the others had failed. Dylan never discussed his motivations for his recent obsession with the occult. But Ben knew him too well; he knew that if Dylan could not prove the existence of God, the Devil, or the Eternal Soul, then he at least wanted to discover something—anything—that confirmed the existence of a world above or beyond the observable physical world.
Dylan held up a scrap of paper and read from it, the cadence of his spoken words oddly reminding Ben of the Pledge of Allegiance. “Hail Papa Gid. This doll is a likeness of Ben Hirsch. Ben Hirsch is a likeness of this doll. Pleasure to one brings pleasure to the other. Pain to one brings pain to the other. Hail Papa Gid. Amen.” Dylan then eyed Ben full in the face; Dylan’s eyes reflected the candle’s flame as two shimmering leaves of fire. “Your turn,” he said.
Bunch of horse crap, thought Ben, despite the wave of cold shivers that passed down his neck into his body. Let’s just get it over with. He cleared his throat and began reading the words aloud that Dylan had scrawled on the piece of paper, reading considerably faster than Dylan had.
“Hail Papa Gid. This doll is a likeness of Dylan Rhodes. Dylan Rhodes is a likeness of this doll. Pleasure to one brings pleasure to the other. Pain to one brings pain to the other. Hail Papa Gid. Amen.”
Dylan reached across the table with a pin when Ben finished reading his part. Ben reluctantly opened the palm of his hand to receive it.
“Go ahead,” Dylan said. His breath had quickened. “Poke the doll in the middle of the right arm. Not deep though. Just prick the surface of the cloth.”
Ben leaned in and placed his left hand on the Dylan-doll’s belly as if to prevent the thing from standing up and running away. With his right hand, he gingerly brought the sharp point of the pin near the thing’s arm. He felt like a surgeon about to make some critical incision. Ben paused when the pinpoint was a hair’s breadth away from the cloth.
Something was wrong. Ben felt that awful, unsettling sensation from before, the feeling that a piece of his soul was missing. A hollow pit was burgeoning in his gut. He withdrew the pin.
“This is stupid,” he said. “It’s not gonna work. Just like the séances and all that other shit. It’s bogus, man.” Ben timidly raised his face to meet Dylan’s angry gimlet eye, not caring that he sounded like a pussy.
“Then put the fucking pin in its arm,” said the other. Dylan’s alpha male personality often had him speaking with an air of authority, or at least mock authority. But Ben had never heard this hostile, threatening tone before.
“Fine then,” Ben acquiesced, feeling a sting of resentment at being bullied by his best friend, by the person he loved most in the world. Without further delay, he pricked the doll’s right arm with the pin.
Dylan’s right arm extended from the sleeveless shoulder of his shirt like a pink albino python, his clenched fist—the python’s head—resting on the table. Ben glanced from Dylan’s arm to his face, scanning his features for any sign of pain. Nothing. Dylan just stared intently down at his arm, presumably waiting for the pin’s delayed effect.
“Stick it in again,” he muttered after a moment. “Deeper. And leave it in this time.”
Ben did as he was told. He probed Dylan’s face again for any sign of a reaction. There was none. Rather, Dylan continued to stare blankly at his arm. To Ben’s relief, his bad feeling began to melt away like the waking residue of a bad dream.
A full twenty feet of bullshit, he thought smugly.
“Stick it in the hand,” Dylan said flatly, as if he had read Ben’s thought but chose to ignore it.
Ben stuck the pin in the doll’s right hand.
After the right hand, they tried the left arm, the left hand, the stomach area, the back—all with no observable effect.
Ben sat in silence, slumped in his chair and staring down at his own folded hands, thumbs twiddling. The Dylan-doll was prostrate on the table. The pin protruded from the center of its back. Ben hoped this would be the end of this test, or experiment, or whatever the hell Dylan wanted to call it, and they could get the hell out of the woods finally, maybe head down to the local beverage store on Route 59, score some booze, then find a party to crash.
His head shot up when he heard muffled sobs coming from the other side of the table.
With his down-turned head hidden in his hands, Dylan was softly crying. Ben had heard him cry only one other time: at his mother’s funeral. Now, he listened as Dylan wept for his mother again. At least that was Ben’s initial assumption. Or maybe, Ben thought, Dylan cried for himself now.
Or perhaps for everyone.
Ben stood up and stepped cautiously to Dylan’s side. Wanting to comfort his friend, he reached out to Dylan’s shoulder but hesitated, his hand arrested by all those complicated feelings—feelings about Dylan, about himself, his insecurities, his fears. His slightly trembling fingers floated inches above Dylan’s shoulder. Finally he worked up the nerve and lightly grasped him. Dylan did not jump at his touch as Ben had expected.
“It’ll be okay, man,” Ben said dumbly, not knowing what else to say. He gave Dylan’s shoulder a soft pat. The floodgates on Dylan’s tears were now fully opened, and he no longer attempted to mute his sobs.
Then, to Ben’s infinite surprise, Dylan stood up and embraced him. Crying at full steam, he buried his hot wet face into Ben’s shoulder. Ben hung there in Dylan’s arms for a moment, a beanpole enveloped by a bear, his own lank arms dangling at his sides before hesitantly wrapping themselves around Dylan’s back. He held Dylan for what seemed like a long time.
Then, against Ben’s intentions, the pure physicality of the moment began overtaking the emotional intimacy of it. He could not help it. Ben had simply never been locked in an embrace with another male before for this length of time, let alone with the person he was most attracted to in the world. There was the musky, sweaty, tobacco scent of Dylan’s skin mixed with the faint lavender of his shampoo, the heat of his breath and tears, the taut feel of the muscles of his broad back. Ben felt a swooning lightheadedness. The stiffness growing uncomfortably in the crotch of his tight jeans was starting to become visible. No...I must focus on comforting my friend.
But how many thousands of times had he dreamed of holding Dylan like this?
Dylan’s sobbing subsided. His hold on Ben slackened as he pulled his head away from Ben’s shoulder, intending to sever the embrace. Before Ben had a chance to suppress his own impulse, he tightened his arms around Dylan, leaned in, closed his eyes, and kissed him on the mouth.
For a time-stopping moment, their lips remained smashed together in a kiss, that first kiss that Ben had dreamt of so many times. And during that time, Ben mistook Dylan’s shock-induced paralysis for acceptance, consent, reciproca
tion. For just a half a heartbeat, Ben was not merely kissing Dylan: Ben and Dylan were kissing each other. But then reality for Ben returned in the form of the solid wall of the Fort, as Dylan picked him up by the armpits and launched him across the room like a ragdoll.
Ben bounced off the wall, cracking the brittle plywood and shaking the entire structure of the Fort. He landed on his side on the hard, compact ground, which was covered only by a thin layer of threadbare carpet scraps. The force of the fall drove the air from his lungs. A second after the impact, Ben attempted to say I love you to Dylan but could not even draw a breath. As he rolled onto his back, Dylan swooped down on top of him like a predatory beast, his hands clamping around Ben’s throat. Ben grabbed at Dylan’s wrists, tried to break the strangling grip, but the crushing pressure on his windpipe only increased. All he could do was gape up at the fury and hate that was now Dylan’s face. His eyes bulging in his sockets, spittle streaming from the corner of his mouth, Ben felt his consciousness start to slip away from his oxygen-starved brain. Exploding splotches of purple, green, and white light multiplied before his eyes like electric amoebas.
Ben’s aching lungs suddenly expanded as sweet air rushed in through his throat. Dylan had released his grip.
In the same instant, Dylan’s right hand shot up to his face, as if he had just been struck in the eye. With his other hand, he hefted himself off Ben, his entire body shaking. Covering his right eye with both hands, Dylan staggered backwards. His arms trembled as if he were struggling to keep the eye from plucking itself out from his face.
Ben succeeded in pushing himself up to a sitting position. Through the dusky light that suffused the interior of the Fort, he was able to see the black rivulet of blood that had begun running out from under Dylan’s hands, coursing down his cheek, chin, and neck, and then spreading nearly invisibly into the red fabric of his shirt. As Dylan crumpled back down to his knees, Ben heard him defecate. He watched as the dark urine spot that had bloomed at Dylan’s crotch grew larger and larger, like blood exiting a gunshot wound.