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The Starface

Days crawl away and die

Forever is a long time

Surround the pain, the love's insane

Got a pseudo-systematic gain

Careening through the neon side

A horizontal mind-collide

Harum-scarum holiday

Double-dealin' on the ones who say

'Collapse me with a powerblast'

Ground-to-zero rollin' fast

-White Zombie, “Starface"

Steady as she goes

1

The more I think about it, the more I believe that my parents just grabbed the nearest phonebook they could find, closed their eyes, and let their fingers pick my name. I mean, “June"… it's just so flat, single-syllable, over-and-done-with kind of name. Do you know how many jokes can be made using the name “June?" Quite a few, actually. You can even turn it into an imitation of a foghorn, if you so minded.

But I'm not really complaining; names don't really label you. I've got a friend from high school named Damien, who was literally named after that creepy little shit from The Omen. Where's that guy now? He's pulling a nine to five at the same Little Store he's been in since high school.

I'm getting off track. Like I said, my name is June, though I prefer being called “Jay," and I want to get a few things off my chest. Some shit's been happening to me, some weird, crazy, only-happen-in-a-dream kind of stuff, and I hoped to put it all on paper before something bad happens. Joanna says nothing bad will happen, but every time she says that her eyes dart away to the floor or to the window. She's a terrible liar.

Each day goes by, I feel like I'm being pulled further into dark waters; I'm trying to put something in a bottle before I sink.

Here it goes.

2

This is the city; White Hill, Minnesota.

The date; May 7, 2003.

The alarm clock screamed a rapid-fire ringing that ripped me out of my dreamless sleep. I felt like shit, which was nothing unusual. Beside me, Sadie muttered something and shifted on the bed, away from the ringing. With as much effort as my groggy mind could allow me, I tapped the button on the little clock, painted brass and copper so that it looked fancy. I took a deep breath through my nose, hissing it out through my teeth. The room smelled like lavender and sandalwood, echoes of the candles and incense Sadie had lit the night before. It was nice, but it was cloying, suffocating, even, and I knew that if I closed my eyes just once I'd fall right back to sleep. I threw my legs over the bed and sat up, regretting it almost immediately. I had had a little bit of Wild Turkey the other night, and cheap wine; it felt like there was a gypsy party in my head. I took a few breaths to steady my nerves, then managed to pull myself up and zombie-walk to the bathroom.

I don't live in an apartment complex like ninety percent of White Hill. I had the good fortune—if you want to call it that; I've been called callous before—to have a wealthy German aunt die some time ago and give me this house in the upper district of White Hill, above the warehouses and mercantile and fish industries. No money, though; all that was sent to various charities and bogus tax firms. I didn't care, though, because I had a house. I had something that was mine.

I looked at myself in the mirror, somewhat amazed that the surface didn't crack like it did in The Munsters. My eyes were red-rimmed and a little bloodshot, bags heavy enough to sink a navy tanker. I was a little pale, though I had a warm, post-alcoholic blush about me. My earrings glittered with silver light in the mirror, as did the one in the corner of my lower lip. I glanced at the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip I had taped to the mirror and willed myself to wake up.

I keep my brown bear hair pretty short, kind of like Kimberly Williams in The 10th Kingdom; buzz-cut in the back and long—no, not long; long_er_—in the front, cut high above my rock-brown eyes. I had some scars, physical memories of bad bar fights, street skirmishes, and angry sex. I had tattoos on my arms, my thighs, my back, and my stomach; I was very proud of my Scandinavian heritage, and I felt there was no better way to divulge this pride than by engaging in an art that has been alive as long as mankind. Just having that ink on my skin makes me feel like I've manifested my thoughts into actual form on my skin. They were all Scandinavian-based tattoos, as well. Bearded Viking warriors, dragons, gold, beer steins, swords, axes, you name it. The kraken was the largest (and most expensive); it controlled my entire back, with tentacles branching and curling around my shoulders and hips. The artist thought I was a little kinky—I mean, I am, but they didn't know that—and had a couple appendages curling and pointing toward certain areas you wouldn't normally want tentacles to go.

I loved my tattoos; it made me feel like I had an army with me wherever I went.

That didn't help my cottonmouth, though, or the whirling gypsy dancers pounding a party beat in my skull. The light burned my eyes, and I stepped out without giving my teeth the brushing they needed. I ate breakfast—yes, before getting dressed—then I put some clothes on, watched the news for a bit, told Sadie I loved her, then headed out for work.

I don't work at a burger joint or a gas station; I feel fast food places are beneath me, and I have no intention of having someone point a loaded .45 at my face. I work at a pawn shop, a dinky little place called Attic Treasures wedged between a RadioShack and a used electronics store, the kind of place you hardly see as you drive by. It was run by an aging hippie named Lenny Feldman, who claimed there was beauty in everything, no matter how rusted, busted, toasted, or broken. Take it however you want, but when I see shit, all I see is shit. One of the good things about working for Feldman was that he wasn't fussy about attire. I usually just threw on whatever smelled clean enough or had the least grime on it. That Wednesday I just threw on some black-faded-to-grey denim jeans, a Blue Oyster Cult T-shirt, and a pair of army surplus combat boots.

Wednesdays are long days, boring stretches of time that seemed to drag into forever, made arguably palatable by the tapes Lenny would play through the stereo speakers. Grateful Dead, Dr. Hook, The Doors, The Mamas & The Papas, Iron Butterfly, a little Hendrix or Alice Cooper when he was feeling feisty, most of the decent groups. It was kind of like Attic's Treasures itself; you might want something better, but this is what you're getting; good enough. Then you'd remember that it was Wednesday, and you had two more days of this crap. It might not be a dream job, but it paid the bills.

During the lull in work, what Lenny often called “the doldrums," some nautical term, we usually just checked inventory or quizzed each other on music groups. I usually brought a book, the autobiography of Bettie Page or a copy of Sound Check magazine.

That Wednesday I was rummaging through the shelves past the counter, putting the ornate, hand-carved cuckoo clock that Lenny likes aside as I moved around some ceramic figurines when I heard a voice behind me.

“Excuse me, sir?"

Oh, boy, do I get that a lot. I turned and there was this guy, tall, stubbly bastard in plaid flannel carrying a box of old records under his arm. He wanted to see how much he could get for them. Seeing that I was a woman, he apologized, and I said it was alright, and it really was. I went through the motions, genuinely flipping through the 45's, as well as a couple smaller ones. John Denver; Crosby, Stills, & Nash; Janis Joplin looked pretty good; John Lennon was a little banged up; there was an Earth, Wind, and Fire record that was chipped, cracked down the middle and sadly useless; Nazareth's Hair of the Dog album (I almost grabbed that one and put it away for myself); A few Uriah Heep records that I knew Lenny would pay a pretty penny for, who, by the way, was standing aside by the Elvis Presley merchandise and giving me a stern, grandfatherly look under his shaggy coal-white hair, silently telling me to give an honest price. Forgive me for thinking of the welfare of the business, gramps.

That guy ended up getting two hundred seventy five dollars. That's about as much as I make in two days, barring any trips to the gas station or to a friend of mine who knew where to get some decent weed. He walked out without buying anything and I went back to the inventory. Maybe ten minutes went by when I heard the bell jingling above the door.

Two people in one afternoon, I remember thinking. We're on a fucking roll.

It's not hard for me to come to a conclusion about people. I can analyze their physical appearance and mannerisms and collate them into a legitimate thought, allowing me to decide how best to go about the business. It's always worked for me in bars as well as at work.

But this person I could not get a mental grip on. She was freakishly tall, scarecrow thin, and the expensive black coatdress and black pants made her look like a sliver of total darkness, like she wasn't a person at all, but a congelation of the nothingness between the stars. Her skin was pale, but tinted, and I assumed she was Mediterranean by her cheeks and brow, maybe Greek. Her hair was like a curtain of fire, orange-red like Jim Morrison, and was combed back straight. She wore a pair of sunglasses as black as her clothes, and I wondered how she could see through the impenetrable dark. She had a severe look about her. Hell, she even had a severe air about her, like she exuded trouble and danger the way some folks exude sweat.

Lenny gave her a smile when she looked at him, but glared at her with all the mistrust he could muster when she turned. He looked like a shaggy old sheepdog that had caught a bad smell. Overhead, Gene Pitney began wailing out “Town Without Pity" through the speakers, and the woman strode—just like that, strode; not walked or strutted, but strode—right to me.

I felt compelled to say “Good afternoon," but all that came out was an abridged version; “Afternoon." The woman nodded, expressionless. I can't really explain it that well; there was just a field around her. I was nervous, maybe a little scared, and that never happened before, and I think that that was the scariest part about it. She reached under her coat pocket and I resisted flinching by digging my nails into the edge of the counter. She pulled her arm out, and I half expected the shining mouth of a handgun, but when her hand came back into view, she was holding a tiny package, wrapped in a tiny brown paper bag and tied with a red string. I noticed she wore thick, black leather gloves.

“Tell me something," she said, only her lips moving, “Do you deal in jewelry?"

“Yeah," I said.

“How are your prices for jewelry?"

“Uh, depends on if its real, how big it is, what kind it is…" I was trailing off into nowhere. I couldn't look away from her shades; they were like twin pools of shadow, like Dracula's eyes.

“I'd like to have an appraisal done on this little stone of mine. Do you have someone who can do that?"

“Sure, I can make a call to, um…" I searched for the name of the business. I managed to tear my eyes away from the woman's face and down to the counter. I realized she had undone the string and opened the bag, and I hadn't even been aware of it. There was a little stone lying perfectly between her black fingers, something that glittered like a rainbow, like abalone but nearly translucent. It looked like a starfish, with spindly extra arms or ganglia. I just stared at, forgetting the sentence I had started. I actually jerked awake when she spoke.

“Well, what if I just leave this here with you guys? You can give me a call when you get a professional price. How about that?"

She had an accent, not typically European; maybe she was Greek. She took one of our business cards that lay on the counter, took a thick, fancy black pen from the confines of her coat and wrote her number down. She pushed it forward to me, and one of her fingers brushed against mine. Not by accident, I could recognize the difference between hand flirting and accidental brushing, and this was real. Normally I would have liked the touch, but this touch burned.

She put something else on the table, a small model of a P-40E Kittyhawk warplane that she must have grabbed on her walk to me. I rang it up in a daze, and she put down the exact amount on the counter. I didn't like the lack of eye contact. I couldn't tell where she was looking from under those shades.

She turned and walked out, and I was lost somewhere in my head, wondering what had happened, wondering what I had said, wondering if she had just hit on me, wondering why I couldn't get my shit together; I just stared at her back as she walked away, fire-curtain hair hardly moving as she took long strides. Then the bell danced to her exit, and I seemed to jerk awake to a fucking monster headache. I won't be drinking again tonight.

Lenny walked over, occasionally glancing over his shoulder with wide eyes like the woman was going to rip the door open at any moment. He pulled open the bar panel and stood behind the counter with me. “What was that about?" he said, scruffy white hair framing his head like smoke, panama hat in his hands. I told him I had no idea. We both just stared at the stone, wondering what it was.

“I don't like this," he said, shaking his head as he fidgeted with his beard. “This stone looks pretty valuable, a little too precious. Why would she just walk into our shop with this thing and not want any money immediately? Like she was just dropping it off or something. Seems a little fishy."

“Hmm," was all I could say. I ran the tip of my index finger along the smooth edge of one of the starry arms. It was really smooth, and really, really cold.

I tucked the stone away in a little plastic bag and stuck it under the counter. That cerebral Romani beat just got a little bit worse, but I wasn't going to leave when I had a few more hours left of my shift. There were a couple more people who popped in with cheap crap for money, and pretty soon we had to close up shop. We weren't in a crime-watch area; the pawn shop was nestled in a chain of small-time stores at the foot of the harbor leading to Lake Superior. But it did get pretty rough at night, even the police had to admit that. We had multiple safety precautions, doors and fences, alarms, et cetera.

At eight in the evening I got into my beat-up Lexus. It was rusting at the sides, but I didn't care. Decent gas mileage.

I had stopped at the red light between Beryck and Browning. When the light turned green, I stepped on the gas, my mind rolling down other routes. That woman was on my mind like an oil-drenched splinter. She was pretty in an old-fashioned sense, but she scared the hell out of me. I thought about that stone, wondering what it was, wondering if it was even real, wondering why she had it, why—

BANG. Glass jingling like the shop's bell. Wheel's scraping the pavement. Metal fucking metal sounding so much like a human scream. Then the wet warmth of darkness.

3

I was later told in the hospital my car was T-boned, struck on the starboard-side by an eighteen-wheeler. A fucking semi. The driver was half-asleep and just barreled down Browning like a raging steel elephant. They showed me pictures in the hospital. The rear of my Lexus was sheared off, shattered like someone stuck a few sticks of dynamite into the exhaust pipe. The front looked like that elephant had sat on it. In the pictures—which were surrealistically black and white, making the images vague, faded, something to forget—I noticed a smear of dark on the windshield, a splatter in the corner, and I knew if it was in color it would be red.

They treated me for massive trauma to my head and chest, my entire right side broken; ribs, arm, and leg all fractured. The doctors told me that while they were operating on me in the hospital, while I was laying there unconscious, lost somewhere in my mind, my heart had stopped. I was medically dead for three seconds, and three seconds again afterword.

I “died" twice on that table, and I never noticed. I suppose you wouldn't, would you, when it happened?

I was in a coma for two years. Life went past me while I lay in my bed, in my room, cut off from everything. My friends, the world went through holidays, friendships, spite, hate, and I lay in a black nothingness. When you're in a coma, you're not aware of what's happening to you, and humanity is all about awareness, is all about perception. When those perceptions are taken away, you take away that humanity, and you're left with a pile of unthinking meat. I was just meat for two years.

I remember opening my eyes to the bright, septic light of the hospital, burning daggers in my skull. I tried to sit up, but the pain burned in my torso, which ignited a fuse, sparking pain throughout the rest of my body. I had to lie back down, filled in a pain-fugue. I had never, ever hurt so badly in my life, and I hope nobody else ever knows what that's like. I just sat there crying, for the first time in a long time, crying like I was made out of tears. A nurse came in, probably curious of the noises the unconscious girl shouldn't be making, and then ran out to get a doctor. I didn't care; nothing much mattered apart from the pain.

After a lengthy explanation of what had happened given by a pair of doctors and even a policeman who was at the scene, I had to go through the process of getting back to health. I wanted to know what had happened in the world, what had happened in my world, but there's no individualism in a hospital; you're there to get better, and they will make you better, come hell or high water, both of which I had to go through in the exercises they put me through.

When I wasn't grunting from the pain, I was kept in a chemical haze from the butorphanol tartrate or pentazocine lactate, swaying from optimism to depression, floating in and on hallucinations and memories I had forgotten. It was almost too cruel; at first, time was rushing around me when I was unconscious, now it was rushing by while I was awake. It's difficult to remember much of what happened in the hospital because of the drugs, it was all mostly a white blur of tears and chemicals.

I didn't have many friends coming by to visit; I was a bit of a bitch whenever I got drunk, and I got drunk often. The ones I had did what they could. Support, food other than the bland hospital stuff, a little bit of money, whatever they could give, which I was sad to say, and was too glad for their friendship to say it, was not very much. My parents were gone; my mother had died after giving birth, and dad drove himself off the Superior Bridge when I was nineteen. I remember waking up one night in the hospital and seeing my mom sitting in a chair by my bed, just watching me, her hair long and brown like her daughter's. She looked like she was smiling. I went back to sleep, but when I woke up she was gone, just emptiness in the chair, emptiness inside.

Sadie had left me. I was expecting it; we hadn't known each other for very long, and I'll admit to not being the most caring person, or even the most emotional person. We both could see it coming a mile away, one of us just needed an excuse to pull away. I felt nothing when she told me over the phone, and I never saw her face again since that morning two years ago.

There were so many ways I could have died. A splintered rib could have punctured a lung; glass from the windshield could have severed my jugular; my neck could have been broken; the semi could have been a foot or two faster and crushed the front of the Lexus; the doctor's scalpel could have slipped; the hospital could have had a power failure. I could have lain comatose for far more than two years. Just the very idea of that invulnerability on that kind of scale made me want to scream, made me want to shiver and curl up into the fetal position and weep. I had always been this strong, independent, dominant person ever since I was a kid, and that part of me just…went away, stolen, or dried up.

Of course, if this hadn't had happened, I wouldn't have met Joanna. She was a nurse working on the floor, the prettiest one there. I always made an effort to drag myself into wakefulness when she entered my room. She was looking well foxy with her big, bright green eyes and long, semi-wild black hair. She just had this animal look to her, the kind of person you'd expect to live somewhere in the woods outside White Hill.

After a while, I was well enough that they decreased the amount of painkillers, then eventually took them away. It still hurt, hurt like a mother-bitch, but it was now manageable. I didn't need the drugs anymore, I could just tear through the pain now. I still had my Viking friends with me. The tapestry that was my body was scarred, but it wasn't gone.

That's more than I can say for my house. I had been in a coma for two years; the minimum amount of time the government has to repossess one's house in Minnesota is a single year. After finding out that the woman who was a vegetable is now a woman again, they claimed they could not give me back the deed to my house, though they could return to me some of my possessions. “Some" is a too-smooth term, though, synonymous with “hardly anything." Some clothes, some coffee cups, and a stereo—Apparently Sadie had disliked me a little too much. I was given a check by the government for twelve thousand dollars, a sum that was quickly cut up by the hospital; I didn't have health insurance. Being twenty six years old at the time (Christ, I lost two goddamn years of my life), I didn't think I'd need it. 20/20 hindsight and all that.

It took a long time for me to regain much of my memory. For a long while, all I could remember was that strange woman who had come into the shop and her weird little stone.

Which is rather an odd coincidence. Lenny had been more than an employer; he was one of those few people who actually visited me, friend to friend. He wanted to light some incense to restore my depleted inner energies, but the doctor's weren't having it. One day he gave me a little plastic-bag package.

“What's this?" I asked, my lungs still aching, either from the acetomenophines or the lack of them.

“You remember that woman who came into the shop, the tall one with the stone?" I told him I did remember. “Well, she never came back for it. I figure that makes it yours, your little spirit stone, Jay. That gem's been there under the counter for as long as you've been here. I figured she'd come back eventually, but she never did. After so long a time had passed, the stone's energy shifted from hers to yours. I figured…well, I figured what had happened to you was because you didn't have your spirit stone on you. I reckon you'll be keeping it from now on."

I opened the little bag as best as I could with my cast-encased arm, took off the flimsy-thin cardboard, and felt the weight of the weird, starfish-gemstone in my hand. It was cold, colder than I remembered it being, but it was a nice, soothing kind of cold, like a soft breath against skin. Like every lover I've ever had, rolled into a transparent little rainbow crystal.

I didn't believe in Lenny's spirits and energies, but I agreed with him and thanked him. After the shit with losing my house, I felt I deserved a little bit of treasure. I kept it under my pillow whenever I could, and when I had to wash up or piss I stored it in the drawer. I've always been nervous about theft; comes with city-life, I suppose.

That wasn't the start of it, the night Lenny gave me the dark woman's crystal. It wasn't the start of the dreams, but it was the beginning of, I don't know, better dreams. When I slept that night, I dreamed I had wings. Dark, navy blue angel wings the color of blueberry skin, and I knew how to use them. I flew over the earth, passing from city to city, country to country, from continent to continent. Then, I flew up, high above the earth, and I felt I could see into the planet, at all the things that really curled and revolved at the planet's center, and it was both beautiful and horrifying. Sexual ecstasy cuddling in sweaty bed sheets with Armageddon.

I didn't think it was the stone at first. Those first few nights, I had thought they were symptomatic of my head trauma, or residuals from the painkillers. That little bump pressed a button in my brain that triggered lucid dreaming or something. Whatever they were, they were far more vivid, more real, more believable than when I was taking mescaline or that shitty Canadian weed. At first, I couldn't talk to anybody about them, the hospital staff would think I was taking something without their permission. I didn't want to talk about them, because they were mine. They were beautiful, even though they scared the hell out of me. My dreams were beautiful in the same way an explosion was beautiful; all these colors and lights erupting outward, spilling over anything and everything it comes across, but it always leaves a trail of devastation.

But they were mine, and nobody was going to take them away from me.

4

When you're a bedridden invalid condemned to a musky hospital bed for a damn long time, there's not very many routes one's mind can take without somehow leading back to the self. So much time passes and you exhaust all other options and topics, and begin thinking inwardly, about you, who you are, what you are, all that noise. When you play pedestrian polo with death, those thoughts become augmented, held up on a cranial pedestal and illumined by floodlights for you to see, and you can see all the cracks and crevices you never knew existed. Or maybe you had known about them, and you just didn't want to see.

I didn't go to college right after high school. My dad was still falling apart, and so was I. We were both drinking, drowning, numbing ourselves into our own little shadow-filled corners that warded us from the pain like magic circles of power. I didn't attend the graduation ceremony because I was off driving dad's Buick, growling aimlessly down the streets of the city or the silent backroads outside city limits. I was angry, sad, scared. I was happy to leave high school, happy to leave the boy jokes, the queer jokes, the AIDS jokes, the disapproving eyes of teachers tired of trying to keep me from getting into fights with other students. The threats from the principle and the truant officer, which seemed pale and feeble compared to the threats from those other students. I was happy to leave it all, but in that happiness was the kernel of truth, sharp and biting, lodging in my throat. All those threats were just from kids in a school; now, post-graduation Jay, I was open to the world, a world that was unfathomably immense, and filled with hate.

So there's June, alias Jay, eighteen year-old butch-dyke filled and flowing over the edge with anger, sadness, and fear, and all three emotions roiling around like a tri-colored hurricane around a small island of guilt, making her sick. Making her want to do things that didn't seem like outright suicide to her, but were really just skirting the hem of death's cloak. I lost myself in the city, wanting to learn all the dark little secrets that allowed the junkies and prozzies and other forgotten children to hide their pain.

I don't believe in God or His order of angels, but I did believe I had a guiding spirit. His name was Vince.

It was early October, and already it was cold. Not yet the flaying chill of Minnesota winter but a cool, premonitory breath, a seductress's tease licking at your face with frostbitten tongue. I was wandering the sewer streets and garbage-filled corners of White Hill's Hell; steam rising from manholes like that of a primordial swamp to frame flickering street lamps; abandoned but not uninhabited brick buildings from White Hill's adolescent logging days cracked and staring angrily toward the lake like brown/black beasts; glass littered the streets, shiny diamonds born from past break-ins or drive-by shootings, tinkling a music box tune as the wind brushed by them; an old lady in grimy rags, disheveled and wild-haired, pushing a shopping cart filled with refuse, empty cans and bottles and jars, more of the city's forgotten children. She hunched over the cart and glared at the shadows, guarding her treasure chest on wheels.

I was drunk, or half-drunk, or somewhere between the realms of drunkenness and sobriety, and the world was a bucking bronco. I remember I hadn't had a drink in so long, yet I felt lit, reeling on a rotating axis of gravity. Sometimes the shadows stepped aside in front of me, and sometimes they offered me the skittering things they kept safe from common eyes. Every time I tried to scream I ended up vomiting a punched note, a squeak, and the darkness laughed with the wind's voice.

I rounded a corner, and something was hanging from a lamppost, dangling as though from a spider's thread. It was a blanket, light blue and frayed, and oh-so small, tied to the curving old metal with an electrical cable. I went to it, glancing down the dark streets to see if anyone would argue. I remember the leaves then, refugees from the forest that still covered the rest of the Hill, orange, brown, and yellow figures dancing widdershins in the cool wind's grasp. I went to the sky blue blanket, so small, and turned it around to see what it was, and the tiny mummified face inside looked at me with sightless eyes.

“Mama?" the blanket whispered, and I screamed then, shotgun loud, and ran all the way down Tamarack Street, my Doc Martin's slapping the pavement with an uneven beat as the world tilted. I knew I was hallucinating, but when your mind is sectioned off, quarantined by the booze and salty fear, you don't really care. I think that's why people drink; to get closer to the Universal Spirit, the big thing that they're really angry with, and the booze gets them a little closer to that Spirit so they can be heard, like Aztec shamans parting the web between worlds with hallucinogens. But the Universal Spirit isn't called that for nothing; it's big—bigger than the world and a whole fuck-ton bigger than you. So you just go with the flow and flow with the go, you know?

I ran on and on, past lanky gang members and the neurotic homeless. The cool succubus that was Minnesota kept licking my face, freezing me through my old coat. I had snot running down my nose, fire in my legs, chest, and face. I had to slow down, air coming in and out in ragged gasps, but still the shadows taunted me from their infinite hiding spots, glaring and sneering. They were tasting me on the air, and I wondered what I tasted like; probably Pabst Blue Ribbon.

That made me laugh. I laughed so hard I had to collapse right there on the sidewalk, near the steps of a dark old house. I bet I looked silly there, clutching at my knees, tears and snot mingling over my face, and me not able to control myself. My whole body ached from running, and my head and stomach were starting to hurt from all the laughter, but I couldn't stop. A well had been tapped, and what came up wasn't going to stop until it was all gone. I took off the jacket, letting the wind grope and scratch at what it wanted, letting the city know it had won.

This is all so stupid, I remember thinking then.

Laughter and sobbing fused together, and pretty soon I couldn't breathe. I fell onto my knees, Hallelujah White Hill, center of cosmic melancholy and cathedral but no sanctuary, savior and devourer. Things got blurry, got colder, the world seemed to fly up, and I blacked out. The wind whispered my name.

When I woke up, I was sitting in a dark room, candle-lit with several thin columns of vanilla-white wax, throwing out a light that brought more horror at the quivering darkness. The room I was in must have been a lost library, because there were shelves filled with books, wall-to-wall, covering every shelf and spilling onto the floor in dusty, obtuse columns. I was shivering and I couldn't stop, couldn't stop any more than I could have stopped the laughter. The couch I sat on was dusty, rat-eaten, patch-and-stitch fabric, floral pattern lost in the age, smelling of cat piss and fast-food grease. My jacket was bundled around me like a hobo's blanket, the material rustling as I quivered. It was just so fucking cold.

I tried to get up, but the pain in my head exploded like a grenade, and I saw fairy-lights. I groaned a squeaking moan. Just then a face appeared on the other side of the candle, hidden behind the dark tangle of black hair, half-curled and fancy. She was wearing a skin-tight, black Lycra shirt that clung to her small breasts like a humid t-shirt and exposed her washboard-flat stomach, which was laced by black spider web lines of a fishnet shirt. A leopard-print skirt that barely covered her bestockinged thighs glinted in the light, and I could just barely see the gleam of blue sequin panties. The blue eyes covered heavy in blue-black eyeliner looked at me with such concern, such worry, I didn't recognize what emotion it was supposed to convey.

“Don't try to get up yet," the girl said, and I knew that the girl was a boy. “You're hypothermic. You just need to warm up and rest for a bit."

The dancing shadows hovered behind the candle-light, behind the pretty boy, but they wouldn't advance. I could see the things in the shadows, glaring with all their eyes and teeth, and I knew they were afraid, afraid of—.

“My name's Vince, by the way."

Suddenly, I didn't feel so scared. I was cold, I was hungry, and I might have the DT's, but I wasn't scared.

Pretty Vince turned away for a bit to grab a tiny cracked china dish filled with water, setting it next to me. Then he turned again and took a bunch of burger joint napkins in one hand. He knelt by my side beside the couch, and I could see there was a grease stain on one of the napkins. He daubed a corner of a folded napkin, the water soaking into the fabric too fast.

He leaned over and dabbed a spot on my forehead, and fire flared on my face so hard I winced. I must have cut myself on the concrete when I fell, and whatever the result was, it must have been bad. I saw fairy-lights again, and when he put away the napkin and grabbed another, I saw the blood on it, blood mixed with water in a sickening shade of brownish red and I wanted to puke. I closed my eyes, breathing through my nose, counting from one to five and back again. Pretty soon it stopped hurting, and I saw Vince taking away the bloody rags, piling them up beside him. He didn't care much about germs or diseases. I could have had HIV, for all he knew, but he just did what he had to do, heedless of the risk.

“You're real lucky, you know. This isn't the best neighborhood to be falling unconscious."

I tried to say something, but what came out was a hacking cough carrying phlegm, an old-car-sputtering sound in the dimness. He tucked my jacket into the corners of the couch, a fatherly action, and I could smell perfume, Elizabeth Taylor I think. I just closed my eyes and lay there, slipping quietly again into sleep, dreamless dark.

I was with Vince for a couple days in that post-library room. He nursed me back to health really quickly, and when I could speak I thanked him for it. He had shoplifted some cans of Campbell's chicken noodle soup, and that was an angel-gift unto itself. As I ate, Vince talked about himself, about how his life had fallen apart the day he told his parents he was gay, all the times he got beat up and nearly died, all the things he had to do to keep a steady income flowing, income spent on food some days and his meds on others. How living forgotten wasn't all that bad, really, despite the dangers. I asked him why, and he just shrugged, saying that everyone belonged to one group or another. The Native gangs, the black gangs, the white gangs, the Hispanic gangs, the skinheads, crackheads, and even the forgotten children of White Hill all move together, urban tribes living together, sometimes fighting, sometimes not, just living. It sounded beautiful, like a gothic novel.

When Vince was certain I was able to go outside again, he took me down the street, walking fluidly with practiced feminine grace, and me stomping the pavement in my Docs. Someone called Vince's name, a tall black girl with brownish dreadlocks that looked like the ends were dipped in blue dye, and Vince waved. She ran over, jet black purse bouncing against her hips, breasts shifting under her shirt. When she came up, she and Vince exchanged a complex handshake and hugged.

“Girl, how you doin'?" she said, teeth whiter than any I've ever seen. She looked at me, eyes shooting up and down. Her shirt was black, jacket white with black patches, and her pale blue jeans seemed just tight enough to allow the flow of circulation. “Who's this, huh? Don't tell me you're messing around behind Mike's back now."

“No, no, you know I'm not. This is Jay. She had a fuckin' bad bender couple nights ago, got hypothermia. I just helped her get better."

She smiled at me and held out a hand. “Hey, girl," she said. I said “Hey," and participated in the complex handshake.

The streets of White Hill were brighter in the day, even though the sky was still the color of damp wool, threatening rain. The shadows were no longer dancing, and things were stable. It was funny how White Hill could, I don't know, do things in the night, and just fall asleep during the day like a vampire colossus. I suppose that's how it is in every city, though.

We walked down the streets, hugging our jackets tightly in the cool weather. The darkness might have gone away, but the succubus with the chill kiss still whistled through the city, tugging at our clothes and rubbing our bare skin. Finally, we turned a corner at Sønderborn Street, Vince and Denise talking up a storm, all the latest news from the lower section of White Hill. I just walked quietly, hands lost in pockets, not really knowing what to say.

It wasn't long before Vince and Denise suddenly stopped, so quick I was two feet past them before I noticed. They were looking up at what had once been a grand Victorian brick house. The three floors rose high and dark, with a strangely angled roof that hung low over the house like the warm arms of a mother bat; the windows were broken, the empty spaces mostly boarded up with mold-eaten wood. The front yard was strewn with tires and car parts too rusted to be of any value to the discerning thief. There were a couple stone statues darkened and cracked with age, winged cherubs dancing in limbo, their once-smiling faces pulled down into rictuses of pain. It looked dark and foreboding, but there was something almost welcoming about it, as though this were a different darkness, a warm yet cooling shadow-sanctuary.

“Welcome to Villa Villekula," Vince said, waving me forward as Denise skipped like a little kid to the imposing, yawning front porch. I followed them, glancing up to the jagged roof, its silhouette jet black against the spiderweb sky. The smell of lavender and chamomile was everywhere.

The door hinges shrieked like they do in the movies, announcing us into the building. It was musty inside, smelling of mildew dreams and rotting wood that drove away the flower-smell. I followed Pretty Vince and Busty Denise into the house, not knowing where I was going or what I was going to, certain they knew.

Somewhere in the house, Tom Waits was crooning No One Knows I'm Gone, his gin-soaked voice rough and silky like satin over concrete. We entered a room that was sparsely lit with unscented candles and peopled by a menagerie of human refuse; trashy miscreants devoted to their own tribes. Punks, goths, rockers, stoners, abnormal runaways and drifters, they were all joined together, sitting together reading poetry or prose, listening to the music in unsteady sway. The bitter-sweet smell of marijuana drove away the mildew and rot.

Suddenly a shadow darker than the wall popped out, a glimpse of a tall guy in a beatnik's pen-nib beard and dark clothing, a whiff of gasoline and generic deodorant. He leapt out and grabbed Vince by the arm, twirling him in a wild swing. I was about to cry out, or reach out, or something, but for some reason or another I held back.

“Say hey, baby," the shadow-man said, pulling Vince into a rough embrace. Vince was grinning before they started making out, right there, in front of us and everyone.

“Son of a bitch, Mike!" Denise said, throwing a hand to her chest in a theatrical stumble. “My boss don't need to hear I can't come into work again."

I watched Vince making time with his lover, slightly dumbfounded and a little too embarrassed to move, when Denise tapped my shoulder and waved me onward. I slipped past the two and followed Denise through the room, stepping over loose limbs and backs. She sat down on a chair, throwing up a cloud of dust, resting her handbag beside her. A girl with acid-green hair was lying on her back next to her taking up the rest of the couch, so I sat down on the arm next to her.

Denise reached into her bag and took out a half-done cigarette and a lighter, popping the stick into her mouth as she spoke. “You ever get into a problem, honey, find yourself lost or scared, worried or hurt, you come here. This place'll take care of you."

I was entranced and staring at the candle-lit figures, just sitting and reading, lost children at home. Vince and Mike had taken it to a corner of the room, Mike's shirt making them meld into the darkness. The final notes of No One Knows I'm Gone were fading away, and I heard the familiar sound of a tape player being opened, the tape flipped and reinserted with lightning speed, and after a pause the opening bars of American Made by Jack Off Jill kicked out from the jerry-rigged speakers. Must have been someone's mix tape.

Denise took a short drag on her cigarette and blew out a dragon whisper of smoke. From this angle her cleavage seemed accentuated and glistening in the orange flicker. God_damn_, did she have a pair on her.

“What is this place?" I said.

“You ever heard of Pippi Longstocking?" I told her I hadn't. “She's, like, this little girl in a series of Swedish children's books, but she's really called Pippi Långstrump in her home country. She's just this super strong little kid that does whatever she wants, whatever she can get away, 'cause she's the daughter of a buccaneer who's away all the time. She's always having these wild adventures, getting into trouble just like us. Her home was called Villa Villekula, and the people that own this place called it that 'cause it's our home, its someplace, you know? Man…you just have to wonder how that little ball of energy, that force, can be contained. And you realize that it can't be contained. It has to be everywhere, has to do everything because life is so fucking short. And White Hill ain't exempt from that rule. That eight year-old Swede is like an inspiration to everyone here, in one way or another, even if we don't know it.

“Everyone's so preoccupied with trying to fit into some group when really you don't need to be in a group. You got the strength to do what you want, be who you want, and fuck anyone who says otherwise. You can't just complain that you don't got friends; go out and make friends. You don't got a home? Build a damn home! Everyone here…"

And Denise waved her cigarette like an incense lantern, gesticulating to everybody who sat or lay on the floor or chairs, reading their books as Jessicka screamed in her little-girl voice from the speakers.

“We're all buccaneers' kids. Welcome aboard."

I leaned my elbow on the fabric beside Denise's head, and I smiled. I had to smile; I'd just found the philosophy I had been looking for, the one that made sense, the one that everybody here had already taken, and I was invited. I smiled, the muscles in my cheeks teasing my tear ducts. That was beautiful, what Denise said, what this place stood for, why all these people were here.

Plus, that 'buccaneers' kids' thing had a sweet kick to it.

I just sat there with Denise and the sleeping green-haired chick, just watching, waiting for nothing. Denise sat quiet and smoking, and soon I got bored enough I picked up a book; Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Jessicka gave one more roaring shriek, and the song finished with a couple more beats, segueing into Nirvana, then more Tom Waits, The Doors, Bauhaus, The Crows, David Bowie's new stuff, which seemed a little out of place, then The Coasters sang A Little Greenback, leading to Swell Maps, finishing with Johnny Thunders.

Dad died at some point while I was there. He was drunk and scared over mom's death, the shop closing down, one thing or another, and he couldn't stand it anymore. He plunged the truck into Lake Superior, D.O.A to Davy Jones' Locker. When I got to the house, I had a cop tell me everything. He also made me find the permit and deed to the house; order a copy with my name on it. I knew I wouldn't be holding it for very long, though. That house was shit, full of shitty memories. Well, a lack of fond memories, I mean. I wouldn't have cared if someone caked it in gasoline and lit it up, candle salute to White Hill's domineering power. I was tempted to do it myself.

I knew I was responsible for dad's death. At the very least, I was a factor. I drove him away every time he tried to communicate, the one link he had in a stable world, the one thing that reminded him of mom, that made him forget the troubles at work. I could have taken that one beer away. I could have stopped, just for one day, walking out the door, turned around and told him how much I loved him. I could have fucking done something.

I'll bet you two to one you now know where my alcoholism really kicked in.

5

White Hill's Villa Villekula was “owned" by a local rock band called Trigger Brides, who all worked part-time at various Mcjobs around the city. They were all too-cool guys and girls who took shit from no one and controlled the building like an elite group of club bouncers, throwing out unruly specimens when they got too rowdy or violent, or drunk, as was my case a couple of times.

Their leader of sorts was their lead guitarist, whom everyone called Razor. They called her that because of her diagonally cut bangs, closely dyed red-to-white from the center, looking like knife-edges in her short black hair. There were rumors, though, that she carried an old-fashioned barber's razor close to her everywhere she went. Denise told me that some guy tried to rape her out in the parking lot behind a club called Halverson's, and he never made it to the hospital. I saw her a few times, carrying her big purple Gibson slung over her shoulder like a barbarian's axe. She was a big girl, but not exactly fat; like, equal mixture fat and muscle, what one might call “sturdy." She towered over everyone in her army surplus combat boots, ripped jeans, and T-shirts proclaiming her love for different bands. She had strong hands; I knew this from being tossed out of the Villa a few times, after I had a bit too many.

“You gotta fucking stop this, Jay," she told me one night out in the front yard. I was sitting on the rim of a dried up, dirt-filled fountain, the little cupid child looking at me with pity, contempt, sadness, or some mixture of all three. My stomach hurt like hell, as did my arms and my head, and I was worried I was bleeding somewhere inside. I had gotten into it with a rocker (a hard rocker, I now understood), and we pissed around the rooms, just shouting and fighting, tearing shit and ourselves apart until Razor came up, hauled the rocker bitch off me and kicked my ass out the room faster than I could think. I was in a mood; I was in that frame of drunkenness where everything seems so stupid, so scary and irritating, that you need to blame something, put all the blame on it, and you gotta destroy it so there's no more pain inside you. I started beating on Razor, and she slammed one sturdy fist into my sternum, driving away my breath. Then she gave me another one right to my jaw. Everything went black, just for a moment, but when I pulled myself back to awareness I was being hauled out through the entrance, onto the porch, and the feeling of one big boot slamming my ass hard as I tumbled onto the walk.

I grabbed at the grass, cool and wet this late at night. I dragged myself to the nearest fountain and sat down on the cement rim, wincing at the smarting bruises on my body, especially the one on my rump. Fucking stung. I just held my head in my hands, trying to will myself back to sobriety. Then Razor spoke, and when I looked up with bloodshot, bruised eyes like a roadkill raccoon, she was frowning down at me like judgment itself, arms crossed over a pink Sid Vicious shirt, chains on her jeans smiling in the moonlight, eyes glaring like comet-trails. I didn't say anything, nothing to say, too drunk, fuck it.

“I'm not messing around, Jay. You fucking stop this, or your ass isn't coming back here anymore. You can't expect everyone to stand around and let you just tear everything apart while you drown yourself—look at me when I'm fucking talking to you!"

I did as she said. Tears were starting to march up to the front, but she wasn't letting up.

“This place stands for something, Jay, something a lot bigger than just you and your petty problems. You think you're the first person whose mom and dad died, the only person with no real home? You're not, and you won't be the fucking last. This place is a sanctuary, a home that all these lost and rejected kids can look to, and you are wrecking it. We can't have you fucking wrecking something that keeps all these kids safe from the world. You're dad's dead, Jay, so's your mom, and no one gives a shit! It doesn't fucking matter! There are people who've got it worse than you, all over the world, and they don't have special places they can go to feel better. Are you fucking listening to me?"

I had put my head in my hands again so she couldn't see the tears, but with her strong, steel-string-calloused hands she ripped my hands away and grabbed my head in a vice lock, fingers digging into my scalp. She stared at me, goddess of all human anger, retribution of the damned.

“You will fucking get better. You will get better, or so help me Jay, I will put you in the goddamn morgue. You are not going to infect everyone else's life with your own pathetic self-destruction."

I was crying full-tilt now, ship capsized, broken bottle. I just sat there weeping as she put pressure on my head, the pressure in my stomach and chest building and burning like bonfires. “I'm sorry," I said, over and over again, repeating it like a magick mantra. I sobbed, voice choked, my mouth tasting salty ocean tears, but still I kept on repeating it. I grabbed at her wrist, not to tell her to stop squeezing my head, but to have something to hold on to, something that kept me there, something I could feel. She pulled her hands away, but the pressure in my head remained, constricting. She was right, I was fucking everything up, ruining everything with my own stupid problems, wallowing in my self-pity, arrogant at my misfortunes. I didn't deserve to be at the Villa, didn't deserve Vince or Denise's friendship. Stupid, stupid, fucking stupid.

Out of nowhere I felt a hand reach around and take the back of my head, not rough, but gentle, motherly—what I imagined the word “motherly" to define—and pull me into a hug. Razor held me there, my nose buried in her shoulder, and I could smell something like sour milk, sweat, coffee, and a sweeter fruity smell that might have been her shampoo. Her other arm reached around my waist, pulling me closer to her. I just sobbed, sobbed like there was nothing else to do, and really I couldn't think of anything else. I hesitated putting my arms around her, but I did. I said I was sorry a few more times, my voice muffled in the fabric of her shirt.

“Easy, easy," she said softly. She didn't say “It's alright" or “It's gonna be okay," because we both knew it wasn't, and I wouldn't have believed her anyway. I moaned and cried into her shoulder, begging the tears to stop, that it was enough, but they were seemingly without end. Around us, the wind blew with a lavender and chamomile breath.

“I'm sorry," I said again.

“I know," she muttered behind me.

After that, Razor and I started sticking together. We ate lunch together at the local McDonalds, messed around on the sugarcoated snowy streets, had some fun pissing around Halverson's, relaxing with a cup of strong black coffee at the Barnes & Noble where she worked on some weekdays, sitting together on a dark velvet couch reading Kerouac or Genet. Every time I was in the same room with her, I'd always feel my stomach knot together—not from muscle memory of that stupid, drunken night—into a worried, fraying ball. I was falling for her, somebody who I just met, who I hadn't gotten on really good terms with first time around, somebody who probably couldn't stand me, my unintelligent attempts at musical philosophy or general intellectual discussion. Would you? Fuck no.

One night, a group of kids like us were seated in a circle, silently paying homage to a glass hookah, old school Skinny Puppy clashing quietly in the air above their heads. I was half-watching them, bored, reading an imported Deadline comic. Razor was among them, sitting cross-legged like a girl in school. She waved me over. I shook my head, told her I was alright, I didn't really want to, but she, rolling those damnably beautiful eyes, stood up and walked over, grabbed me by my hand and dragged me over to the ratty, cat-piss-scented carpet, seating me down beside her. Without even blinking, with no hesitation, she took the nozzle from a short goth punker with a black cavity covering one of his front teeth, and sucked in, the ornate lamp bubbling. She held in her breath, showing me how, just long enough until her lungs started burning, then let out a bitter-sweet cloud. She closed her eyes as the chemical tickled her mind, then she looked at me, the barest minimum of mellowness clouding her face, and handed the nozzle to me.

I took the nozzle, glancing stupidly from it to Razor to the other eyes staring at me, cycling around. I saw faces flickering in candle-light, and behind them the shadows stretched up, warmly dancing a Samhain jig. A thought hit me then. As Razor wrapped one strong arm around my shoulders, I looked at her, dropping the nozzle to my knees.

“Does it take away the nightmares?" I said. Razor looked at me with a curious expression, not comprehending, and I felt a stab of bloody satisfaction; now she got to be the stupid one. She just smiled and softly tightened her grip on my shoulder.

“No," she said shaking her head, and the others around us shook their heads in unison, choirboys and –girls in agreement. “Not, it won't. But it'll make them a little easier to handle."

I steeled myself, I was stronger than this, stronger than this, and I sucked in whatever was bubbling within the gullet of the hookah. Five minutes later, after vomiting whatever was in my stomach into a used coffee tin, I lay with my head in Razor's lap, staring at her eyes, the sparkle in them making me think of colliding comets, minds facing friction-burn, stars come and gone in a cosmic lightning bolt. She was stroking my hair, and we just stared at each other, time as dead a concept as it ever had been. Skinny Puppy or Marilyn Manson was finishing their vocal masturbation, and similar bands had their say, but we just watched each other, sphinxes locked in ocular embrace until I fell asleep. I woke up in a bed on the third floor the next afternoon, still dressed, a big black-and-white painting of Patti Smith in a black turtleneck staring down at me like a dark goddess, stern and loving mother, a single small, frail dove feather held between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand.

I lay there and cried, because I knew where my home was now.

I hung out a lot with Vince and Denise, learning the subtle secrets of the modestly desperate and humbly destitute. I'd wait for them to get off from work or out of their apartments, I'd be reading, eating my way through the mountains of books in Villa Villekula, and we'd hang out at burger joints or the shops. We went to Halverson's every now and then to catch the bands that were playing, usually up-and-comers doing tired covers or shitty originals, and you can bet I cheered the loudest when Trigger Brides came up, and I got to see the electric animal in Razor let loose onto the world. That's girl's passion was music, her life was music, and you could see that on her face, the way it seemed to shift with the song being played like the wind. When the gig was over, I always got to head backstage or in the rear parking lot and show Razor how much I loved the show.

The problem with constantly being in a place like Halverson's or The Green Man meant I was supplied with a steady chain of temptations. I drank, blowing money I needed on cheap beer or not-so-cheap-but-should've-been whiskey, got mean, got bitchy, got vicious, got lusty. I always tried to hold my liquor when Razor's band was up, but hair of the dog, you know? When that dog bites, it bites you hard, and the wounds go deep. Sometimes I'd lock myself in a bathroom stall, couple beers in hand, drink, read the shitty messages on the walls, watch the spider spin a world in a corner, watch as the shadows come back to life and offer their dark secrets out to me with quivering, gurgling limbs. Whenever I saw those shadow-bastards come out again, I'd just drink even more, willing them away, forcing them out. Stay cool, dudes, Pippi's got this.

When I started hearing the dripping sound, the droplet in a cavern sound, I'd stop drinking and wilt, because I knew what was coming next, same as it always had. I'd stop drinking and in my stupor try to find the source of the dripping, but all the faucets would be clean and dry. Then, I'd feel something wet splatter the crown of my head, and I'd look up and see the blackness like but not like mold, pulsating with little scratchy legs but rippling like obsidian water. Then the dam would break, and the darkness would fall onto my face, and it would splash and burn hotter than fire.

This never happened inside the Villa. It was always outside, in club bathroom stalls, lost corners of the warehouse district, the coffee house, anywhere there was a roof. The black dripping sound, the black water droplets striking tile, look up, water from a Hell-conquered Heaven raining down, rushing into nasal passages and mouth, drowning in corpse-water. Then a membrane would part, translucent, torn aside, and you'd feel that it would be far better to scream yourself to death, scream until your lungs collapsed in tow with your heart, than be touched by the thing that was staring at you.

And then you'd wake up on the floor, your head encrusted with grime and piss and restroom detritus, face damp with either that piss or sweat or likely a mix of both, your heart beating so fast that you'd just lie there expecting death, actually thinking that this was it, you were going to die here this time, full-frontal heart attack. What a shitty way to go, har-har.

One time I had lain there for so long that Denise had to come in, angry-fearful shouting, checking stalls. She crawled under the space under the door and unlocked it, hauling my ass up onto the seat, always talking. She was checking my arms for something, something I couldn't see, and I wanted to ask her what she was looking for, but I couldn't talk; something inside was knotted, if only temporarily. She was checking for needle pricks, questioning the slightest red dot on my ferret-white skin. She probably thought I had progressed from weed to heroin. I tried to tell her she was wrong, but nothing came out.

My voice came back when they dragged me back to the Villa, and boy, did I have some military-grade explaining to do.

They yelled, and I could only yell back, making up excuses because the truth, if that's what you wanna call it, was too unbelievable. They wouldn't believe me, they'd say I was making that up, just like the shit I was already making up, weaving my web into my own coffin. After Vince and Denise stomped away, Razor took me aside, and crap was she mad enough to scare the backbone out of a crocodile. She gripped my arm so hard it hurt, leaving red marks.

“Alright, what the fuck is going on with you, Jay?"

I shook my head.

“Godammit…" was all she said. She let go of me, and I nursed the marks on my arm. She turned and walked a couple of steps to the wall, crossing her arms, shaking her head.

“I'm sorry…"

“Stop it!"

She screamed at me, snarl on her lips, stage animal let out. I took a step back.

“Stop fucking saying you're sorry! I've had it with you constantly saying you're sorry. Christ, Jay…Denise had to carry you out of the restroom! You were shaking, and you couldn't talk. I know you did something in there, Jay. What was it? What is fucking wrong with you!?"

Pressure-pop, Champaign bottle explosion. “I don't know!" I screamed back at her, and I advanced as I yet again started crying. They didn't know, didn't understand, all these things I was seeing or imagined I was seeing, didn't know what it was like to see and hear and feel all these things and to think that your mind was being scratched apart piece by piece, to feel like you've got demons or devils or some fucking thing always on you. I wanted to say all these things, but I couldn't, not to Razor. I couldn't, but I did.

I told her everything, every little detail, and she just glared at me, that animal stare not changing at all. “Please," I told her, “I need help, Razor. I don't know how to get better. I don't know what's wrong, I just need help, Razor."

And that look as she turned on her boot heel, glaring liquid-metal death at me as she mumbled “Fuckin' junky," and stomped out of the room. A second later and a door slammed shut, making the whole house shiver.

She stayed at her apartment for a long time, but every now and then her bandmates kept showing up. Some of them wouldn't look at me, but one, the bassist, a little scarecrow girl in thickly woven blond-and-violet dreadlocks everyone called Nettles, had stopped to look at me, stare at me emotionless until I put down my book and looked back at her. She reached into her black raincoat and took out a switchblade, flicked open the blade, bisected the air under her eye, stared at me for another moment, then walked away.

I stayed in the house until I had exhausted what food I had. Most of the other people who lived here wouldn't look at me either. I felt angry and confused and hungry, so I decided to step out into the cold, head on to McDonald's with a pocketful of wadded dollar bills and change. It was deep into November, and the city was blanketed in a pall of white, sidewalks and much of the streets laced up in a sheen of ice, invisible under the snow.

She was waiting for me at the corner, a dark blur in the white to my side. She kicked out the side of my left knee, and I cried out when I heard-felt the pop of cartilage, a precursor shot to the fiery pain. I fell onto that knee, my other foot slipping out from under me because of the thin sheet of ice. I fell onto my hands, and before I could get up, a weight pushed down on me, driving me into the snow. A knee rammed into my kidney, a hand pressing down on my neck. I told her to fuck off, to get off me, and without speaking, she answered with a metallic snicker as the blade flipped open, and I felt the colder-than-ice blade being depressed down on my skin, just under my eye. I shut up pretty quick.

I asked her to get off, to take the knife away, but she didn't move. I glanced down the street, empty, devoid of man and vehicle.

The knife disappeared from my face, but I felt ice cut through my jacket, something sharp and freezing inside me, then fire. It happened again, then again, and there was only the feeling that I was losing something, losing something very important. Nettles got up off of me, tucked the weapon away and silently stalked off, the only girl in Minnesota wearing a raincoat in the snow, dreds bouncing up and down like agitated snakes.

I gasped and whined; I was bleeding, bleeding fast. Shit. Red was soaking into the whiteness and I quickly took off my jacket, bundled it at the three wounds, but I could feel heat, hot warmth, scarlet magma pouring through the fabric and onto my hand. I was gasping ragged breaths as I tried to stop the flow of blood. I was too hungry, too cold, too tired, too scared; my body couldn't handle the stress. I passed out.

The shadows whispered my name, and they brushed my face with mosquito kisses.

When I woke up, I was back in Villa Villekula, staring up at the ceiling at the foot of a couch. Pale white light streamed in from a window. There was a clanking noise, and I turned my head slowly to see Vince, folding a wet towel and daubing something honey-colored at its center. He looked at me with one raised eyebrow, eyelashes ridiculously long. He sighed, deep and long.

“I take it you don't remember me telling you this was a bad neighborhood to fall unconscious," he muttered. I just turned my head, trying to say I was sorry, trying to get up the courage. Just then Denise came in, small bowl of water in hand, setting it beside my head. She sat down on the couch, dust rising like mushroom clouds. She looked nervous; she took out a cigarette and lit it before sticking it in her mouth.

I moved my head and tried to talk, my sentence abridged to “She…she…"

“Fuck," Denise mumbled.

“I told Razor that bitch was bad news" Vince growled very unfeminine. “She didn't listen to me, just listened to the sound of the bass. Goddamn Nettles."

A short pause of silence began, as though that name was a curse and needed to be prayed against. Denise blew out a dragon-breath and grinned a humorless, nicotine smile. “She really knows how to use that thing, don't she?"

Vince glared at her, shaking his head. Denise shut up, putting a cigarette in it.

Vince tapped my face gently with two fingers. I turned my head to look at him. “I stopped the bleeding," he said, gesticulating with loose motions. “Don't worry, she didn't hit anything serious—I don't think—but we've got to disinfect the wounds." He held up the white towel with honey-yellow center, and I knew it was going to hurt.

“Could we not do that? Can't you just sew it up and slap a Band-Aid on it?"

Vince smiled, humorless as Denise's smile. “If we don't clean it out, Jay, you'll get septicemia; blood poisoning, and that's going to be a metric fuck-ton worse than the pain you'll experience if we did clean it. Okay?"

One warm hand on my shoulder, his thumb brushing my cheek in his anxiety. He was looking into my eyes, and I could see he really was worried. I was about to nod when a voice in the back of my head said Why? What's the rush? Death by blood poisoning seems a lot better, more dignified than how you wanted to die, doesn't it?

I nodded to Vince, telling him it was alright to proceed. He tapped my shoulder and gave a semi-encouraging smile, turning away.

“So how's this going to work? Are you going to count to three or—ugh!"

He had pressed the towel—which was ice-cold—against my skin, and immediately the medicine shot through me like a gunshot. He practically pushed it into the wounds. The pain woke me up, a stronger pick-me-up than caffeine. He held it there for several minutes before taking a length of nylon rope, looping it around my waist, tying the towel to my body. The increase in pressure made me wince even more, but he continued to make sure the compress was secure. I was clenching my fingers and growling, flinching from the sting, but I knew it was a good sting.

After a while, Vince was certain that everything was secured, sure of his obsessive attention to detail. He pulled his hands away and wiped them on a bunch of fast-food napkins. I told him his eyebrows were ridiculously too long and nobody would believe he was a chick if he kept them. Denise laughed at that, and Vince just sniffed in a huff, but he grinned, too.

I knew it wasn't because of my charm or wit that they were still friends with me. I wondered what had happened to have made them want to help me, so I asked them, and they both looked at each other for a moment, and I knew that kind of look. The silent conspiratorial question that said 'what should we tell her; what she would not tell her?' Vince sighed another tired sigh, and Denise puffed on her cigarette.

“I don't think," Vince began, methodically taking away what served as his medical equipment, “that anyone of us really knew how much Nettles loved music, and to what lengths she would go to keep the band going. After you and Razor had your fight, she stopped going to practice. Said she wasn't feeling it. The band wasn't getting any attention, and the lack of practice was a big hindrance. Nettles put all the blame on you, and I guess she figured if she, uh, got rid of you, then the band would be back in business."

Vince stopped to put his stuff away, and Denise continued the story, tapping my shoulder with the tip of her shoe. “After she stuck you with that hairpin of hers, she went up to Razor's apartment to tell her what she did." Vince turned sharply and coughed angrily, his polite way of telling someone to shut up. Denise continued.

“I guess the bitch thought if Razor knew her problem wasn't a problem no more, that she'd get back to work writing songs, back to practice, start being a band again. Razor fucking flipped a tit; she went after Nettles, breaking up everything in her apartment. Nettles is small, but she's vicious as a fucking ferret. Stuck her a few times with her knife."

“What?" I said, sitting up, ignoring the flare-up of fire in my side. Vince came around beside me, uselessly putting a hand on my shoulder.

“She cut her up real bad, Jay. From what I heard she nicked an artery. Razor managed to kick Nettles' ass out on the curb, but she wasn't right. She called us up on her phone and we drove her to the hospital, but…I don't know."

“What do you mean 'you don't know?' What the fuck happened?"

Vince tried to hold me down, to keep me calm but I wasn't having any of it. I rounded on him and asked him what Denise was talking about. He just shook his head and looked into the corner.

“Razor's dead, Jay."

There it was. No oxygen, darkness closing in, scurrying shadows. I just looked at him, back to Denise, and neither one would look at me. “No," I said, not believing them, refusing their sadness.

“I'm sorry," Vince said. Denise puffed on her cigarette, shaking her head. The snow kept pouring down outside like sugar, acid sugar covering the city, still alive and uncaring.

It was funny; I wasn't crying. I wasn't able to cry anymore.

6

Days went by. I kept reading, developing a love for Jack Kerouac and Emily Dickenson, as well as an interest in genealogy and pre-Christian Scandinavia. I poured over every book and document and textbook I could find in the house, trying to keep my mind elsewhere. Vince and Denise tried taking me out to fast food places, to the mall, or to Halverson's, but I couldn't go out. I didn't want to leave Villa Villekula.

What happened to Pippi Långstrump after she grew up? Did she leave her home, leave all her friends, get a job in town?

What happens to Buccaneers' children when they knew that mom and dad's not coming home again, that their friends are slowly fading away, that their life is slowly fading away, draining out?

I kept drinking, but not as much as you would think. A beer now and then, two times a day at the very most. The shadows were starting to get darker in the Villa, and I'd hear the dripping sound, but I'd just close my eyes, and even though I'd hear all the sounds, feel the burning water like gastric fluid from a dead god, I'd just think of Razor and let the sadness and memories face the fear and hallucinations. Funny, huh?

A while went by, the snow melted, and I felt a little better about going outside. I got a job as a grocery-bagger at the Contestant. I started taking classes at a community college, because I'm sure you know there was no way they'd want me at the University of White Hill. I took general courses, because I had no idea what I'd be fucking doing five years from now, and there was no sense in wasting time and money on something nobody would hire you for anyway. Vince and Denise were still with me, and we'd hang out like we used to. They were nervous about taking me to Halverson's, but I told them I was okay with it.

I was dating the lead singer of a goth folk band called Sister Leech. I'd always be reminded of Razor, of the times I'd get drunk and piss around, get lost somewhere between the restroom and Hades, the fight in the Villa, Nettles' knife, but I always covered it over with sex and alcohol. It seemed like the best way to bury the memories.

At the same time, the hallucinations got worse. I'd start seeing the thing beyond the membrane everywhere, in a store window, in the windshield of a passing car, staring through the wall. The skittering things in the dark grew into towering, lanky forms and crept away from their shadow homes into fresh air. I didn't want to repeat what had happened with Razor, so I told Leah everything, and she took it in stride. She also seemed to see in me a limitless resource of lyrical inspiration with my nightmares. Happy to be of help. She'd give me a couple of her Prozac, and we'd listen to music or read or screw. To keep off the beer weight I'd exercise, mostly sit-ups and push-ups, but I did a bit of running, too.

I purchased an apartment for a steal, with a good view of the lake but which rested at the head of the warehouse district, so you'd always wake up in the middle of the night from the rumblings behind the building, like a giant taking his evening constitutional. I was going nuts trying to keep up with payments on that and my student loans. To save money I'd bum a trip to restaurants with my friends, and I had Denise cut my hair for free. She's a wiz with a clipper buzzer, apparently.

This was the routine for a couple years, the thing I was afraid of, the symbol of having grown up. When a bit of money started coming in after the tuition and loans were paid off, I'd squander it on personal touches, tattoos to cover scars, tattoos to drain away the pain of memories. I got a couple piercings, simple rings, viking jewelry. Leah liked them, which led to Sister Leech making their third EP, “Kraken Dreaming." They got real popular throughout White Hill, got some radio time, and were snapped up by Satyr Records. It was Leah's dream to be signed up to Satyr, and we celebrated pretty hard the night she got the call.

Then she told me Sister Leech would be going on tour across America. I was so happy for her, but then she told me she didn't think that what we had was going to work. Said she didn't believe long-distance relationships ever worked. I was sad, yes, but I agreed, wished her well, said that I was happy for her success, we gave each other one last, lasting hug, a friend's hug, and I watched her walk out the door one last time, her long black hair swaying like smoke against her skirt, Jim Morrison singing Love Her Madly in my head.

It was a long, long time before I forgot how it felt having that hair brush against my face in the morning.

Then I got my own call a few days later. An aunt I never knew I had, Ilsa Vergut, had passed away, and, being close to my mother, had bequeathed her summer home in White Hill to me.

I had to quit my job, which wasn't an issue. The biggest part was the act of moving from the low side of the city to the upper side. I was going away from home, away from Villa Villekula, away from Vince and Denise and everyone else. That was the hardest part about any of this. They helped me out however and whenever they could, and I was grateful. I picked up a job at Attic's Treasures a few miles out, a bit of a drive, but the pay was acceptable, and the owner was nice.

I slipped into a new routine for a year or two. I still hung out with Vince and Denise, just not as often as we used to. We were growing up. The hallucinations were fading away, too, and I was happy for that. Then Sadie happened.

Then, the fire-headed woman, the stone like a starfish, the accident with the semi, the hospital, the dreams.

Life is funny, isn't it? Ha-cha-cha-cha.

7

Joanna took me in when I was admitted out of the hospital. I was told it was against regulations for hospital staff to fraternize with patients, but I wasn't a patient anymore, now, was I? She drove me to her home after letting me get a haircut at a small-time salon, a mile or two out of the city, to a high place with a rolling field of grass, surrounded by the woods. Her house was simple, a two-story with an angled outdoor cellar, but it was beautiful. There was a breezeway linking the main building to what looked like a verandah facing the sea of grass, raised above the falling hill so that it looked like a pier.

She showed me around the place, from kitchen to living room to the sweeping verandah outside. It had earthy emotion, a kind of peace that White Hill didn't have. Where White Hill was like some gigantic, oblivious force, Joanna's house was like something just as big, but caring and warm.

I went to the bathroom a few minutes after Joanna gave me the tour, more or less just to see myself in the mirror. I gripped the sides of the pale porcelain sink and stared at myself, at the skinny white thing in a black top, drab olive army jacket, camo cargo pants one size too big, jewelry gone. My hair was clipper buzzed like it used to be, only now I've got side-bangs to cover my ears. I looked exactly how I felt; like Peter Pan just got back from Nam.

I took off my clothes, wanting to see what I was like under them. I looked like a corpse. Scars draped across my breasts, stomach, arms, legs, hips, pain shared by my ink berserkers and dragons. I sighed, letting out a breath that I didn't know I had been holding.

Just then I heard the dripping sound, that oh-so familiar droplet in a cavern sound, and I wanted to scream, knowing I would never be rid of the nightmares. I looked down from the mirror, and saw the faucet was leaking, making that sound. I laughed, a sound too shrill and hysterical than I had intentioned it. Joanna was outside the door and asked if I was alright, and I told her I was fine.

I still kept in touch with Vince and Denise through social media. Denise was becoming a cosmetologist, and Vince was slowly finding himself drawn into the realm of journalism. I figured he'd go in for nursing or something in healthcare, but he said he didn't want that, too many memories, and I understood. Life goes on, and so must we.

One evening, while Joanna and I were having a dinner of what she called “solar chicken," we had the radio playing, and I heard Sister Leech come on. They were playing a creepy, punched-up cover of Bob Dylan's Gotta Serve Somebody, and as I heard Leah's haunting, lilting voice flowing through the stereo like a cold wind I flashed back to those nights we spent together, when we first met.

Joanna shook her head and turned down the radio. “She sounds like she's got issues."

“Yeah," I said, and picked at my chicken.

I slept in the guest room, a nice, sprawling area, with a pull-out bed. I didn't know if Joanna took the same road, so to speak, and I didn't ask. To be honest, I didn't really want a relationship right now. I just wanted to sleep, natural sleep with no chemical assistance.

Joanna said she was a hedge witch, a witch of the earth and nature, and I have to say, it's not as exciting as you'd think. It's a little boring, waiting for her to finish her meditation, finish her gardening, finish her exercises. The saving grace was that she had a nice library in the living room, a big group of cabinets devoted to reference books and textbooks of varying subjects, from the metaphysical to the physical sciences. There was a particular book on the study of complex occult symbolism in architecture, but only the synopsis was written in English, the rest in French.

Routines, the one thing your inner child is afraid of. The inner child loves the chaos of the unknown, the anticipation of something different, the next adventure.

One day I came into the living room and I saw Joanna putting something into a small bag of black silk. “What's that?" I asked, and she spun around as though caught doing something bad. She looked from me to the bag, and I recognized that look on her face, the look of someone who was mentally debating whether or not they should tell me something. Finally she stood up, brushing dust and dirt off her floral-print dress.

“Just Tarot cards," she said a little sheepishly.

And that was it, the beginning of another routine, the root that led to a multitude of other roots. I asked her about the Tarot, what it really was, whether it was true or not, and she explained as best as she could. She seemed real reticent about telling me, as though she were breaking a secret.

A couple days went by, and on one humid Thursday afternoon, Joanna asked me to come out on the verandah. The sun was out, the sky untainted by clouds and still Bahama blue, the trees hummed in the wind. There was a small table at the center of the verandah, flanked by a pair of chairs. At the center of the table was the little black bag with her Tarot deck. She had me sit down on one side, and she on the other.

“So how does this work?" I said, genuinely interested.

Joanna didn't answer immediately; she closed her eyes, made a folding gesture with her hands, waited for a few seconds, then took the deck out of the bag. Keeping the faces down, she started shuffling once, twice, three times, speaking as she flipped them.

“Tarot divination isn't as precise a skill as movies or books make you think it is. All that stuff about gypsy fortunetelling or sham tricksters making you close your eyes before they start, or the cards manipulating fate and destiny, it's all bunk. It takes a lot of meditation, a lot of focus, and a bit of intuition to do a Tarot reading. And then there're the cards themselves; when you hold the question you want answered in your mind, you flip the card…"

Joanna took a card from the deck, flipping it face up.

“And you read from the image, from the feeling the image invokes, from the individual's relationship with the image, or a number of any other factors. As the diviner, you make sort of a story based on the first three cards, and the question's answer is in the story."

“Sounds like you're just making it up."

Joanna looked like I had slapped her. I slapped myself inwardly; why can't someone else be the bitch for once?

“Sorry," I said. I asked her to go on, and after a little while she resumed the narrative. Her tone was just a shade darker. She tapped the first card she flipped, showing a naked woman pouring a vessel of water into a lake and another onto dry ground. Seven stars twinkled above her.

“This first card is the Star. It typically represents unexpected help or spiritual guidance. It could mean someone has had a rough time, and forces are trying to help them in some subtle way."

Got that one right, I thought to myself. Joanna flipped another card. It showed a skeleton facing the left of the card, a dark cowl pulled loosely over his body.

“This is Death."

“That doesn't sound healthy."

Joanna smiled. “It doesn't literally mean bodily death. It commonly means the death of an aspect of oneself, like a self-destructive habit. That something's going to change, which corresponds to the Star."

“Mm-hmm," I said, trying to comprehend this concept. Metaphysics was never my scene. She flipped another card and set it next to Death. It showed a tall masonry tower in the middle of a thunderstorm. At this, Joanna paused.

“Huh," she said, biting her lip. “What's wrong?" I asked her.

“Oh, um, this is the Tower. It sometimes represents great change in one's life."

“Is that what it usually means?"

“No…no, it usually means extreme danger or crisis, catastrophe. I wouldn't be worried if this wasn't the third card…"

Oh nice, I thought to myself. I looked at the image, wondering. “Could it also mean thunderstorms? It shows a thunderstorm, and I like thunderstorms."

“Take a closer look," she said, and I leaned forward. Oh, I thought mildly; a bolt of lightning was striking the tower in a shower of sparks and fire, and two people I didn't notice before were falling from the ramparts. That didn't look healthy, either.

“Based on these cards, I'd suggest you do whatever your guiding spirit tells you to. Change something about yourself, and do it quick." At this Joanna was adamant, serious, fixing me with a stare that said this was very serious, and I didn't know what the fuck to do. Joanna put the cards back in the deck, put the deck in the bag, made a folding-up gesture with her hands, and started walking to the house. Just then a thought struck me.

“Wait a minute, we didn't ask it a question."

Joanna turned and gave me a quizzical look. “Oh, didn't we?" she said in a cryptic tone, and walked away.

All in all, that was a bit of a bummer.

8

The hallucinations and dreams were still continuing, eventually bleeding together as the weeks went by. I didn't take any medicine because I actually liked them, I liked the powerful surge of emotions and feelings they caused.

Do you know what it's like to feel something so strongly, an emotion or a thought so undiluted, so in its purest form, that everything else becomes a fuzzy concept when moments before it was concrete reality? That's exactly what these dreams were like. They were, I think, visions of places and events that had happened far in the past, far in the future, and in the present somewhere that wasn't here. In the dreams, I had my blueberry wings and I was flying, hurtling through space and time as a witness to the cosmic mysteries. I was present in spirit at the falling of the tower of Ithokua, deep in a secret desert in Arabia, where magi learn and study the ultimate workings of the universe. The magi of the tower forgot to, basically, lock a door, and something that shouldn't have come through the door entered with a ravenous appetite. The magi are all dead, the tower and all its secrets is gone, lost in time, turned to dust. A lifetime of ancient eldritch history erased because somebody was absent-minded.

I traveled through the astral plane not in solid human form but in shape, in formless silhouette, passing doors and windows leading to corners of space and time, doors and windows that looked in on this and a multitude of other planes. I saw so many things in my dreams…

But when those things began bleeding into the real world, superimposed over each other like two film negatives, I started getting nervous. Like the time not so long ago when I was getting too drunk to walk straight, I was seeing things in the shadows, things that walked out of the shadows and offered me secrets, but they came with a price I didn't want to accept. Tall lanky things, pale white things, small skittering things, things you won't find in a dream dictionary. When sitting out on the veranda, I could hear the bellowing of great beasts in the distance, as that of the lumbering U'laz which wade through the abyssal waters of Neptune from island to icy island, or I would see eyes peering through the trees, gleaming eyes which seem kind at first, but when seen from an angle depict an expression of ultimate fury.

It's worse at night, when the truth of the universe is no longer hidden by the candlelight of the sun. I see things whose flesh is not as our flesh, which is invisible in direct sunlight, but which can be seen under moonlight at special times, or when there is no light at all, when the world is black and things begin to coalesce into hideous thoughtforms.

Joanna was an herbalist, spending hours at a time cultivating her garden, making things pertaining to herbs or flowers, and other projects. She probably knew of a remedy that would have helped me, but take a wild guess where I sought my comfort.

I started out with beer, and the second the first drop hit my tongue I realized just how long I had gone without a drink. The feeling hit me like a subway train, like being touched by the gaze of Nyarlahotep. I progressed from beer gradually, crawling back up the alcoholic's ladder, until by chance or design (the visions had been drastically altering my viewpoint of the universe; perhaps mankind was designed, but not for reasons we believe. Ask an ant what it thinks of itself, and it'll say it's the pinnacle of civilization) I had happened upon a bottle of absinthe.

I'm not an idiot, despite the popular vote. I know absinthe is dangerous, even the modern alternative Pernod in high amounts, but as I stared into the glowing, liquid emerald microcosm within the tall glass bottle, I felt that it was these waters I wanted to drown in, to feel the sweet dark surrounding me. The thought of where or how I had found the bottle never entered my mind; it was simply there one day, lying on its bottom on the coffee table in front of me.

Joanna watched as I killed myself can by can, but she didn't stop me. I probably would have hit her if she did, I was that kind of a drunk. Often when I was stewed, she'd keep me outside on the veranda, which I didn't mind, and she'd go to her altar and light a couple candles. I'd just sit and drink and think and watch the sun fall and the moon chase it, and watch the things that couldn't be seen in sunlight caper and dance and sing in piping, flute-like voices.

So, as the sun was going back into its grave beyond the trees, I sat in a swinging chair lost in thought, the bottle of malachite darkness clutched in my hands like a talisman, like an effigy of some god. That sort of made sense; what other deity have I been praying to for the past decade? Joanna was inside, the smell of cloves and burning herbs wafting through the mosquito-netted windows. I could hear her walking around, making a circle or something. A tall, wispy figure made of what seemed like black smoke with spidery limbs was walking on the lawn, its eyes mere pinpoints of light. It looked at me and waved a quivering, shadowy arm. I nodded to it, and it wandered off.

I ripped the label paper off the cap, tore the cap off, and began quaffing, guzzling, inhaling the green darkness. The first instant that I was sure the alcohol was taking its effect was when my head suddenly tilted, lolled to the left so that I was looking at the world at an angle. Through the bellowing of distant animals, I could hear in my mind Black Sabbath's Planet Caravan, the bongos lulling my fingers into a dance.

After I had drunk half the bottle, I stood up, for no reason I can remember. I walked out on the lawn amidst the capering things, and I listened to their voices, somehow beginning to understand them, as though the fluting notes were taking shape as pieces of broken English in my head. Soon the dark little fairies and imps, the living shadows and the pale people, the shapes and forms of no earthly matter, all began a wide circle dance, born either from spontaneity or my participation. Feeling constricted and self-conscious, yet not really feeling anything, I took off my clothes, took off my underwear, felt the night breathe against my scarred skin, and fell into rhythm between a smart-looking faun and an impossibly buxom bereginy.

We sail through endless skies/ Stars shine like eyes/ The black night sighs…

Somewhere in the dance, while I whirled around, believing myself to be a part of the wind with no physical limitations, I had blacked out, unconscious and lost to my mind once again. When I awoke I was standing in a dream that I had been in before, and I had the strongest feeling of not wanting to be here, because I knew how it ended. I was still naked, scarred, but my tattoos were gone, replaced by markings of primitive design, tribal curves and lines, done in curious inks and unguents of black, red, and white.

I was standing on a wide, rocky outcropping, a domed basalt plate in the middle of a dense and wild forest. It was night, the sky black and accented with foreign stars aligned in configuration I didn't recognize. I stood there, listening for something, but there was nothing, no night insects or forest animals busy in communication.

I walked along the stone plate, which must have measured several miles across, trees dotting the horizon all around. Soon, I became aware that I was holding something; I looked down, and saw the strange little star-shaped stone in my hand, glistening with a light somewhere within its space. I looked up, beholding two figures in the moonlight.

This was new, I thought.

One was kneeling, head bowed low, mismatched clothes looking dark in the night-light, her wild red pigtails looking skewed and dirty. She looked so young, so beautiful in innocence, and she looked up at me, and she looked like…But then her face changed, hair retracted under a filthy baseball cap; long, jagged colored stockings morphed into torn faded jeans; the youthfulness of her face was eaten up, and I was looking down at myself, at the person I was practically a decade ago. She—or I—just stared at me from under the cap's visor, familiar brown eyes glistening with unbroken tears.

Standing above her to the side was that red-headed woman from the shop, the one who once held the stone. She was naked, her body sickly pale like something that crawled out from the ocean, like something that came from a world where there was no sun. She too was inked with black, white, and red; a nine-pointed star stared from between her eyes, a larger version adorning her lower belly; a curious design covered her flat chest that I knew, with the peculiar intuition of dreams, was called the Lemniscate Tentacle, a design that represented ultimate power and energy to those who bore it, and to all others meant destruction, eternal darkness, horror never-ending. Her eyes were black, entirely black, with tiny points of light like stars in the void above, and they stared at me with what seemed like both a coldness and a warmth, but the rest of her face was stone-cold, expressionless.

In one hand she held a double-edged dagger, its blade white and glowing in the moonlight. With her free hand she gestured to the kneeling me. When she spoke, her voice was louder than it should have been.

“We gather here on the stone of N'g'Kai to see this youth back to the care of the All-Mother. She, the giver of all life, will decide the path of your future, and you will entrust yourself to Her care. State your name."

“June Fjordson," the other me said.

The fire-headed woman looked at me as if for the first time, as if I had spoken. She held out her free hand toward me, palm up. I stared at it uncomprehendingly, then I remembered the stone. I placed the freezing star-shape in her hand; on contact with her skin, the miniscule lights within began to glow, became phosphorescent like the night sky, like a myriad of things that lived in the deepest abyss of the ocean. It grew bright in her hand, casting a bluish-white light out across the stone plate.

“The One Mother's womb is also our tomb; we are born from Her womb in birth, and so return to Her in our death. She devours our body and soul, and are reborn anew according to Her whim. As she lives in the air, she delivers us her wisdom and intelligence; as she lives in the earth, she gives us our bodies and strengths. Her children need not live in fear of Her darkness, for she is our mother, and mother in the eyes of children is all that was, is, and will be. We pray now to the All-Mother, and may she see in you a strong, powerful daughter as she takes you back into her embrace."

The other me bowed her head, tears streaming down her face. She looked happy, which concerned me deeply. The woman knelt down, and with the dagger made a swift incision on younger June's cheek, drawing a small but steady flow of blood, black like shadows in the moonlight. She placed the brilliant star-stone under the girl's cheek, letting the blood coat the stone's translucent surface. The bluish-white light quickly turned to pink, then to bright scarlet. Soon a crimson glow spread out all around like a photographer's darkroom, though much brighter. Suddenly, the woman threw the stone up into the sky, and when I thought it would stop briefly and descend under the pull of gravity it just continued to go up, up, and up. Soon, it was a brilliant red star shining somewhere between the sky and the void.

The woman held out her arms, her free hand held palm up, the one with the knife held the blade downward. She closed her eyes, took a breath, and began a slow chant, building in speed and volume as she progressed.

“Iä Shub-N'gurrath, ovis corunda shoggog…Ba'al ai'soth N'gai, gongaga ah…"

And so it went, incomprehensible to me. They were nonsensical words that had no significance to me, but which to her seemed to hold some magical power. She shouted “Iä Shub-N'gurrath" again, and the cloudless sky rumbled. I could only watch as this woman was working herself into a fury, her voice rising into a scream as the chant sped up into a gibbering madness. I was sweating, cold beads falling on my skin, the front part of my head tingling. I felt like a rabbit in a world of wolves, that something terrifying was happening all around me. The crimson star above winked out in a flash, and the woman screamed to the blackness between the stars the sacred name of Shub-N'gurrath over and over again three times, five times, seven times. After the ninth time, after the final syllable slipped from her throat, the sky roared back at her.

The silence that followed was like the void, vast, infinite, a concept to be experienced only and not understood. We three were in a field of nothingness, where there was no wind, no air, no life, no light, nothing.

After what seemed like an eternity of fearful expectancy, the emptiness above rumbled again. I wanted to shout and run without knowing why, and perhaps that was why I wanted to run; to not know what was happening, because ignorance is bliss, and some knowledge is worse than hell. The woman only stared upward, her black eyes hungry in the star-light.

Suddenly, a bolt of lightning cut the sky in a deadly bluish-white incision.

It didn't disappear.

The bolt stayed there, frozen as though in a photograph, a massive crack in the darkness. This was followed by another bolt, then another, then another, filling the sky from horizon to horizon with cracks like an eggshell. Beyond the stone plate, I saw the trees swaying, dancing, and trembling by some curious form of animation in this windless place. The lightning slashed the atmosphere, flashing, stuck in time, and began widening.

Something was breaking through the sky, ripping it apart like silk, violating its molecular function, and I wanted to cut and run so fucking badly, because I knew with my dream-intuition that what was coming through was nothing good, something awful and so infinitely terrible, but I couldn't move if I wanted to, because I was entranced, spellbound by the absolute power of what I was seeing.

Only in a dream…

Then, I saw the thing that was ripping itself into this world, I saw what it was, and I screamed, screamed as loud as I could, because maybe my voice even in hysterical fright could drown out the impossible horror I was seeing, but it couldn't. I knew then that this wasn't a dream, that where I was is a real place beyond the outer moons, a real world where something that should not possibly be allowed to exist did exist, and was tearing its own with its myriad claws and tentacles and teeth and what looked like horns but were not horns, and the thousands of things that writhed and gibbered about its unimaginable shape loosed from its body to disintegrate in the air. Through the whorls of flesh and darkness formed a head, eyeless, vast and horned, vaguely reptilian in shape, though it was all animals, all birds and fish and insects and species of every universe brought to bear in one hideous form, One Mother.

I continued to scream, willing my lungs to pop, willing my throat to bleed so that I could drown in my own fluids, because any death would be profitable to being in the presence of this impossible thing.

A series of thick tendrils curled downward from the rip in the sky, curling and spiraling downward to me, and I could see and know with the mad intuition of dreams that there was no love in that thing, no affection, only the black indifference and hunger of the cosmos. I screamed louder, and louder, and louder…

And then my eyes opened, and I was on Joanna's couch.

I was wearing the same clothes I had on when I had blacked out, grass stains and dirt all over. I did black out, didn't I? I can't quite remember. Maybe I had vanished from the world and attended a ceremony elsewhere, or maybe it was just my mind, or maybe none of it really happened. No weird women with weird stones, no monster gods, no magic. I had a bad dream, a nightmare formed from, what was I drinking? Absinthe? Shit…

Joanna was sitting in a chair opposite me. She was weeping, her head held in her hands, her body heaving with sobs. God_damn_, was she emotional sometimes.

Noticing I was awake, she jumped up from the chair and knelt beside me, pulling me into a hug that pushed out whatever oxygen I had in my lungs. Her face was wet, and though I felt for her, I admit I was chafed to have her getting snot and tears on my shoulder.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she said over and over again. I held her, more to have something to do with my hands than to comfort her. After a fraction of her sadness had abated enough that she became coherent and managed to regain a modicum of control, she told me what was wrong. She said that it was her fault I had fallen unconscious, her fault that everything that had happened to me while I was living with her had happened, her fault about the absinthe—apparently she kept it for ceremonial purposes, taking a mere sip during rituals or not at all, and she forgot to put it away; and here I guzzled half the bottle in one go, new family record. She went on and on, waxing poetic about her alleged transgressions. She even stated that the Tarot reading we had was about her and not me, that she asked the question instead of me, and that its answer was for her. On and on…

I grabbed her head and pressed my lips to hers, running my tongue across her teeth and cheeks to get her to shut up.

Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.

9

What do you want me to say? What do you want to hear? Would you want me to lie to you, or do you want the truth?

I wanted to get out of here, away from White Hill, away from everything this place stood for. White Hill; the pale, vampyric sister to that black thing that tore through the dream-sky…it was too much. I thanked Joanna for everything she did, but I had to go. She worried that it was because of her, which of course it wasn't. She asked where I was going, and I really didn't know. To point B, I guess, and from there to point C. Maybe I'll come back here, when I'd forgotten a few things, cleaned myself up, got the shit out of the attic, but until then, whatever.

I took out a couple thousand dollars from my bank account. The cashier gave me a look, and I gave her one right back. I went to Attic's Treasures and thanked Lenny for everything he did for me, and he lowered his panama hat to cover his eyes as he grinned through his beard. He was a good guy. I also went to Vince and Denise's apartments, thanking them as well. They were worried about me, I could tell, but they didn't stop me from whatever they thought I was going to do.

What was I doing? Hell if I know. Running away, something I had always been good at.

I went on my Facebook account and typed something in the comment box, I don't remember. “Gone Fishin'," or some shit like that. Something symbolic. I thanked Joanna one last time as we stood on the verandah overlooking the field. She gave me an awkward, hesitant kiss—what Razor would have called a “weak-willed kiss"—and thanked me. I just nodded, hauled a hiker's backpack over my shoulder and let her walk me to the car. She drove me to the bus station in town amidst squabbling people and the mind-numbing drone of passing vehicles. We hugged on the sidewalk, and as I started walking onto the big Greyhound I gave her one last smile like they do in the movies before I stepped onboard.

I sat down in the back, the window behind me, feeling like I did in high school when I'd try to be the first one to sit in the back of the bus, desperate to be alone.

What did you want to hear? The happy ending: I lived with Joanna for the rest of my life. We married, we bought a dog and a couple horses, we opened up a flower and botanical supply shop, we lived in the same house together for the rest of our natural lives and died together under the same sun holding each other's wrinkled, aged, memory-filled hands.

I'm sorry, but life doesn't work like that. Sometimes there are no happy endings. Sometimes there is no white and black, but only grey, a constant, unceasing stream of neutral, unbiased grey. Neither good, nor bad; it's just the way things are.

There was an old man sitting in a chair ahead of me, looked to be in his upper sixties, dressed in a brown tweed jacket and matching trousers, his wrinkled crown topped by an old-fashioned fedora, also brown. His face was wrinkled, age-spotted, his nose was bent and twice the size of a normal nose—he looked like a dead ringer for Jimmy Durante. But his eyes gleamed from under his hat, shining with the knowledge of the elderly, a treasure trove of memory. I silently wished I could live to be old enough for my eyes to have that diamond glimmer.

“Going someplace special?" he asked kindly enough. Goddamn, he even sounded like Jimmy Durante.

“Not really. Just going."

At this the old man laughed and nodded, his teeth whiter than mine. He went back to his newspaper, and I turned to look out the window. Joanna had already gotten in the car, and I could see it heading back up the street, back up into the woods. I smiled; she would be alright. I opened up my pack and took out a nature guide to rocks and minerals.

What happened to Pippi Longstocking after she grew up? She moved out of Villa Villekula, her home of childish dreams and fantasy, and moved into the town. She got a job. She watched as her friends all grew up, got married, had kids, became part of the world she couldn't stand or understand. She stopped having fun, because the people around her said that fun was childish. She forgot how to dream, forgot the things that made her the troublesome know-it-all everyone knew her to be. She became just another person.

But I don't believe that.

That little Swede never grew up. She lived her life in Villa Villekula, in Never-Neverland, in a dreamworld of her construction, immune to the hate and ill will of the outside world. She stayed there forever, and when forever came and went, she went away with it gladly, seeing the end of life as another adventure to be had. And when she died, her soul spread throughout the world, infusing into all of us. That thing we call our “inner child" is somewhere in our minds having fun with Pippi on some mad adventure, and when we want to go back to that feeling of childhood, of dreamy wonder and fantastical action, we feel her absence; our inner child can be pretty demanding, but that's how it is.

The nightmares continue, as do the hallucinations, but they're fading, fading, becoming clouded by a haze as I go farther from White hill. Maybe I'll come back, some day, see all the familiar faces again, but until then, who knows? Life goes on, and so must we.

My name's Jay. If you ever see me around, look me up. I'm good for a beer or two, good for a little chat. The road gets a little lonely, but I don't mind. Things are tough all over, and some people got it worse than me. So I hope that you—whoever you are, whoever's reading my message in a bottle—are doing alright, and just know that I love you. Things are tough all over, but we'll get through it.