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Blood just gushing out the motherfucker, and here I am with an electrical cord trying to tie off the damn artery. You ever be laying by the side of the road covered in another man's blood talking to the cops and your girlfriend breaks up with you? I have.

FUNK brs @FUNKbrs

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Misery Merchant

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Posted by FUNKbrs - February 8th, 2008


Chapter 12

When something seems unbelievable, it normally is. The devil, as they say, is always in the details. The voracious questioning mind seeks out the details, and many times finds the devil instead. This was in fact how Mrs. Black changed from a respectable widow and officer of the church into a practitioner of the dark arts. What began as an in depth study of fasting, meditation, and prayer led her to meet her first demon. This demon, posing as various angels and even God himself, led her down the left-hand path that ended in the violent miscarriage of an innocent young girl.

One of the hardest things about being a true teacher and mentor is pointing out your own shortcomings in hopes that your student may one day overcome them, and possibly avoid them altogether, like a parent explaining to a child about a raging drug habit from prost-pubescent years, or a machinist explaining away missing fingers to a protégé.

Caroline stared angrily at Mrs. Black as the left side of her face turned bright red from the full-handed blow.
"Maybe you don't understand why I'm doing this, so I'm going to have to admit to you something that may change the way you look at me, whether that be for good or ill." Mrs. Black took a pained breath and prepared to admit to her something she had never even told her own children. "I never intended to become what I am now. However, after my husband died I had nothing left to live for but my craft. I was too old to remarry, and all my children were grown and living on their own."
"So you became a witch." Caroline said flatly, the last word dripping with spite.
"No. I decided to be the best midwife I could be. Women were dying of shock and blood loss in childbirth, and babies were dying of the fever all around me. I dedicated every moment to prayer and service. I could no longer be wife or mother in my own family, but I could still function as caretaker to the village as a whole."

Mrs. Black turned her face away from Caroline and continued with her hands clasped behind her back as she stared at the wall. "It all went bad when I met my first demon. I had been fasting for six days, drinking nothing but water, and a beautiful face appeared in my basin mirror. The face claimed to be an angel named Justice, and that God had sent it to teach me the hidden secrets of medicine as a reward for all my hard work."

"How did you know it was a demon?" Caroline asked, her demeanor changing in response to Mrs. Black's guardedness despite still being bound to the chair.

"I didn't. That's my point. It lied to me, and I believed it, and there was no one to warn me about the danger I was in, not even after I saved Charlie Knocker."
"Charlie knocker? Is that the name of the boy who drowned?" Caroline latched onto the discrepancy, hoping somehow that this example was positive.

"Hah, yes, I see you've done your home work. It was the demon that taught me how to do that. I was lucky enough to be watching the boy from the shore of the lake. The demon had taught me to be able to see souls, and worse, how to manipulate them. I watched him die; I know he was dead long before they took turns jumping on his stomach trying to get the water out." Mrs. Black said with bittersweet misty-ness.

"So how did you save him? How can you return a soul to a dead body?" Caroline asked, her wrists beginning to chafe within their unnecessary bonds.

"I created an avatar of pure spiritual force, and bound the boy's soul before Death could take it into the afterworld. That innocent soul was bound for heaven, and I stopped it cold. After they got the water out of him, I slammed it back inside of him and held it in place with pure force of will. That's when he started breathing again."

"So the demon taught you this? I still can't see what's wrong with what you did. You saved that boy's life!" Caroline interjected.
"NO!" Mrs. Black shouted angrily, her eyes blazing. "That boy was dead! It was against God's will!"
"He lived, how is that wrong?!" Caroline retorted.
"I'll tell you. The second I let go of that boy's soul, it LEFT. God had called it, but the boy was still alive. The boy was alive, BUT WITH NO SOUL. His children had no souls. Their children had no souls. The grandchildren have no souls. For all of eternity, a race of soulless, all my fault Caroline! I wasn't the first, Adam was the first with his son Cain, but now I was guilty too!"

"Adam and Cain... you mean like Genesis?" Caroline grasped.

"Yes! Cain had no soul, because Adam used the knowledge from the forbidden fruit to save his son. With his soul already gone, Cain had nothing to lose when he killed his brother Abel. That was why God marked him, because killing a man with no soul is no worse than killing a dog, and all of Adam's descendents knew it."
"And your sin was creating another Cain?" Caroline finally understood.
"Worse Caroline. I created an entire race of Cains. I'm not the only one, but I'm partially responsible."

Mrs. Black nonchalantly began unbuckling the leather straps holding Caroline's wrists, still not quite looking her in the eye. "It gets worse, Caroline." She said, leaving her feet still bound to the legs of the chair. "But you know about Charlie, so then you know about Mary Folkshire?"

The question hung in the air like foul smoke form a cheap cigar in a dingy barroom. The name sounded familiar to Caroline, but on a subject she had tried to write off as impossible, the one story she had heard that day with Berry she blatantly didn't believe.

"You mean why this church is empty, don't you?" Caroline said gently, beginning to realize just how vast the repercussions of the forces she was involved with could be.

"That's one way to put it, yes. A very polite way. But I killed that baby, Caroline. I killed it, just like I killed all those other children, even though they had never really been conceived." Mrs. Black stared at the wall in a distant way Caroline herself had become all too familiar with in the past few weeks.
"But how? All I've learned about so far is scrying, and none of that can do anything real."

Once more, Mrs. Black looked Caroline square in the eye, the steely matron's reserve back in the line of her jaw. "There's a very important reason why I can't tell you that yet, and yes, before you ask, it's because I don't feel I can trust you with it, at least not now. You're not here for that lesson. There's something you'll have to see first to understand why, and me trying to explain it will only confuse you."

Thug stood in front of the window, exactly where Mrs. Black had told him to wait. To wait for what, he had no idea, but he was used to that. That's why when the bottle full of burning gasoline crashed through the window, his head was in the perfect place to intercept it without having it's flaming contents burst deadly hell all over the only escape route from the basement.

This of course happened at the expense of knocking him unconscious, but then again that was also part of Mrs. Black's plan.

Berry recoiled from hurling her Molotov cocktail through the window of 646 Cottage Church Lane and waited for the delicious explosion of flames that never came. She threw another that landed with a meaty thump, this time the sound not covered by the reverberations of smashing antique glass.

What had she struck? She walked slowly onto the porch and peered in the window to find Thug lying prostrate on the floor, both beer bottles full of volatile liquid snuffed by the impact. Thug! Truly something supernatural was on her side! How else could she have avoided killing her friend? Poor Thug; he was born in thrall to that evil witch. Apparently Caroline wasn't the only one of her friends needing rescue.

The power that helped focus her mind kept her on track. Now that the window was broken, she could see the door was unlocked. Why had she assumed Mrs. Black would have prepared for this rescue mission? Berry walked boldly through the open door and check on Thug. He was breathing, but completely unconscious. She returned her improvised bombs to her tiny purse. Her thoughts clicked as she realized Thug would try to stop her if he woke up.

Again, the new presence in her mind fed her the answer as if she'd thought of it herself. She unlatched her vinyl purse strap and used it to tie Thug's hands behind his back after a struggled to get his heavy arms into position. She used his own shoelaces to tie his ankles together for good measure in case he woke up and was able to walk towards someone or something that could free his hands.

With Thug now thoroughly packaged, Berry continued checking doors until she heard two female voices arguing. She held her ear against the antique wood and recognized a brief snatch of conversation...
"...a darker side of power, and the weakness of that power..."

Berry opened the basement door quietly and slipped like a kitten down the stairs unnoticed. As she descended the stairwell the voices fell silent. Berry turned to look and saw Caroline wide-eyed in shock as Mrs. Black pinned her wrists together over her head and delivered a full-mouthed sensuous kiss to her helpless prisoner.

Mrs. Black was still nose-to-nose with Caroline as her black latex cat suit created highlights over her surprisingly supple body. Lillith looked Berry straight in the eye. "Hello Berry. You're just in time to teach my student a very valuable lesson."

"Who are you?" Berry said, frozen in place by the blatant display of lesbian eroticism.
"Why, I'm Mrs. Lillith B. Black, pleased to make your acquaintance. You may call me Mistress Black, however." Mrs. Black casually placed the gag over Caroline's mouth before she had a chance to speak.

The new sensation in Berry's gut screamed there was something wrong, but the sense of danger only excited her all the more. When she'd thought of Mrs. Black, she'd always assumed she was some dykey old crone, but now she saw Mrs. Black as an embodiment of her own twisted fantasies.

"I've come to set Caroline free." Berry said robotically as she ogled Mistress Black and her part-time sex partner's exhibitionist display of bondage.
"Oh, but we shall. We shall set her free of all her sexual inhibitions, won't we Berry? Now be a dear and hurry down so you can help me discipline this disobedient girl."
"Yes Mistress." Berry replied, unable and unwilling to fight Mrs. Black's sudden unexpected sensuous onslaught. Mrs. Black was too much like her fantasies, too much for Berry to refuse. How could anyone who knew this much about pleasure be an enemy?

This was the lesson Mrs. Black couldn't teach Caroline with mere words: seduction as a tool of control. Just as The Glass had used sexual pleasure to distract and control Caroline, Mrs. Black applied these same occult principles to Berry. Berry's physical body was now only a pawn in a battle of wills between Mrs. Black and The Glass for control of Caroline's allegiance. Caroline, still bound and gagged, was unaware of this object lesson however.

"Bind her wrists, Berry." Mrs. Black demanded imperiously. Berry came to Mrs. Black's side like a spoiled lapdog, only to balk at such a sudden reversal in her own intentions. Mrs. Black glided silently behind Berry like a ghost, and gently licked the nape of her neck. "Now, are you going to be a good slave..." Mrs. Black whispered breathily into Berry's ear as her fingers penetrated Berry's coiffure, "...or a bad one?!" She continued, yanking Berry's head down viciously by that silky, elegant mane.

"Yes Mistress!" Berry shouted in orgasmic pain.
"Yes mistress what?!" Mrs. Black barked, still tugging painfully on Berry's scalp.
"Yes Mistress! I will be a good slave Mistress!" Berry blurted.
Mrs. Black's fingers relaxed without letting go and pulled Berry's head to rest her lips on her own supple neck, allowing her to speak directly into Berry's ear.
"Then do what you're told, like a good girl." Mrs. Black said huskily, gently pulling Berry away and pushing her towards Caroline's bound frumpy body.

Caroline fought dumbly against Berry's restraining touch, unable to exclaim through her gag her frustration at berry's sudden betrayal. One by one, Berry forced Caroline's wrists down and strapped them to the arms of Mrs. Black's chair. Caroline struggled and screamed into her gag, availing nothing.

Mrs. Black produced a razor sharp stiletto knife from the top of one of her skin tight latex boots.
"Now cut off her clothes." Mrs. Black demanded.
"Yes Mistress." Berry obeyed, unable to hide her perverse delight at taking advantage of the girl she had just recently tried to save. Who would want freedom in the face of such delicious bondage?

Berry started slowly, first slicing though the laces of Caroline's homely running shoes before pulling them off. Then she slipped her thin blade down the side of Caroline's white cotton socks, using her other hand to hold the fabric taught as she neatly bisected the material revealing Caroline's bony naked toes.

She worked around Caroline's ankle restraints and inserted the bright silver cutting edge into Caroline's black khaki pants leg, cutting the cloth all the way up her soft, warm, meaty thigh. She started again with the left leg, leaving only the knotted seam holding the underside of the crotch together.

Berry paused and tucked the knife into he neck of her own short skirted dress between her tiny breasts, freeing her hands to explore Caroline's newly exposed skin. Mrs. Black's empty glove struck with uncanny sting against the side of Berry's face.
"No touching until I say!" Mrs. Black barked again in that imperious tone.
"Yes mistress." Berry replied shamefully, pulling the knife out once more to cut the last scrap of cloth from Caroline's pants as her victim writhed furiously.

The knife severed the seam of the crotch, then sliced effortlessly parallel to the zipper, finishing just short of Caroline's navel. Berry continued the fluid motion, pulling the knife slowly through the lower hem of Caroline's work shirt all the way to the collar, then slit each shirt sleeve up to the shoulder and once again to the collar. Mrs. Black removed Caroline's unrecognizable pants with a single savage jerk as Berry slowly pulled her mangled stretchy cotton shirt from under her back.

Trickles of blood began to flow from various careless nicks caused by Caroline's struggles, staining her otherwise pristine bra and panties. Signaled with a nod from Mrs. Black, these too were removed, the panties with a slice just above each hip, and the bra with a single slash from between the breasts.

Mrs. Black took a step back, mentally detaching herself from Caroline's nakedness and vulnerability.
"Do as thou wilt." Mrs. Black quoted archaically, knowing full well she had left Caroline in the hands of a possessed woman.

The shard of The Glass within Berry struggled to maintain control against the same animal desires it had used to enter her. Sex is a more powerful force than prayer, and the presence of the demons of sexuality more powerful than The Glass by an order of magnitude was not lacking. The Glass was overcome, unable to control the knife in order to turn it against Mrs. Black. Rendered impotent for the moment, it waited in the dark place inside of Berry's mind for its opportunity.

Berry attacked her friend and lover with abandon, tracing her tongue down the zig-zag row of minor nicks that ran up her helpless partner's inner thigh. Caroline felt these sensations, felt the burning of saliva on her fresh cuts, but felt them absent of any eroticism in some strange mechanical way. The suckling of her clit felt robotic, the probing inside her of Berry's fingers missing the primal fire they'd once possessed.

Caroline focused through her hood, through the sensations, focused in the way that allowed her to see the dream world that had gotten her into this position. Immediately she saw Mrs. Black's presence, a dark pillar of concentrated force. Berry, however, was a prismatic green, the same color as The Glass, but somehow weaker and distorted.

"Do you see now?" Mrs. Black's voice cut in gently. "Do you see the true cause of these activities? Berry is possessed by The Glass, and that prismatic sheen is a tell-tale sign. Humans normally are some form of blue or red pastel, although some are white in rare cases. My own aura, black, tells the tale of the effects of my activities taint on my soul."
"But Berry's all over me. Normally this would be so hot! Me and her got off really hard on each other before. Why do I feel something's broken between us?" Caroline conveyed through the astral state, disconcerted.
"If you'd quit thinking with your pussy, I'd explain it to you." Mrs. Black project coarsely, "YOU were never attracted to Berry. You weren't gay before you met her, and you aren't now. If you'd read your history, you'd know demonic activity and homosexual blood orgies go hand-in-hand. While you were under the influence of The Glass, the demon used you to gain access to Berry's body. Berry herself is one of those soulless I'd warned you about; that's why you only see the faint aura of The Glass and not both auras, with hers reduced to a single kernel within the mass."
"Is that why this feels so...so...BLANK?" Caroline expressed as Berry sucked with animal need on her body.
"Basically...yes." Mrs. Black verified succinctly.

Caroline thought for an empty second.
"But if all that's true, why did YOU kiss ME? You've never presented yourself as anything other than some old church lady, but you're every bit as big of a dyke as Berry in that latex catusit. Who are you to preach to me now? Who are you fooling with this act? You could let me go at any time. You STOPPED berry from saving me with this deceit. If you cared at all about my well-being like you claim you do, you'd know I'm supposed be at work right now with Jaleesa, not tried to this goddamn chair!" Empathic feelings of resignation flowed through the empty void Caroline had created.

"Go ahead and fake an orgasm then. It's time to cut to the chase."

"Untie Caroline, Berry." Mrs. Black commanded.
Reluctantly, Berry obeyed and unbuckled Caroline's wrist and ankle restraints. Caroline immediately rose, reaching for her hood and gag as she stood naked and bloody in Mrs. Black's dimly lit basement. Before she could remove them, Mrs. Black gently pulled Berry towards her from behind and touched her lips to Berry's ear, whispering: "Now it's your turn."

Berry sat obediently in the chair, not struggling at all as Mrs. Black bound her with remarkable efficiency. By the time Caroline had removed her gag, Mrs. Black pulled it from her hand and placed it securely over Berry's mouth, then blindfolded the tiny girl with similar quickness.

"What did you mean 'cut to the chase'? Looks like you're really just going in for round two." Caroline spat acidly.
"Well, to be honest, getting Berry tied down for the exorcism was the only reason I had you tied up in the first place." Mrs. Black explained.
"Exorcism!?" Caroline exclaimed.
"Well, of course. You didn't think I was going to let The Glass get away with sending Berry down here to kill me, did you?"
"But she came her to save me!" Caroline retorted.
"Then why was she so quick to take advantage of you? People possessed by demons aren't under their own control. They're like animals, reacting in predictable and prescribed ways to environmental stimuli. By seducing Berry, more powerful demons than The Glass were able to exert external control of her. I assure you those Molotov cocktails in her purse are no joke, and if you go upstairs, the lump on Thug's head has absolutely nothing funny about it."

Mrs. Black found a plain brown dress for Caroline to wear as she explained the exorcism procedure to her form an ancient leather bound manuscript after taking time to tend her grandson's head.
"So let me get this straight: in order to exorcise The Glass from Berry, one of us has to create an avatar to take over Berry's mind and kick out the demon from the inside, while the other has to physically restrain her and keep her from killing the exorcist with her bare hands?" Caroline summarized.
"Exactly. However, demons get pretty nasty and they prefer to use a weapon if they can get it. Also, Berry's adrenaline is going to be really high, and she'll be considerably stronger than she looks." Mrs. Black filled in.
"So, when do we start?" Caroline said, watching her friend wait patiently for sex that was never going to come.
"Now." Mrs. Black said flatly.

Caroline relaxed her breathing and watched Mrs. Black form the avatar, this time an amorphous cloud of several tiny bees, climbing one by one into the astral aspect of Berry's mouth and nose. The kernel of green aura that signified The Glass's presence flared. Berry's physical hands tightened into tiny fists under her restraints as The Glass's aura waxed and waned inside of her. The bees used their stings to corral the green aura as the leather strap holding her left leg strained and ripped free with a resounding slap.

Caroline dived to hold the unrestrained foot, only for the right foot to break free as well, popping loose like a slingshot to knock her back across the room. Mrs. Black's bees drove The Glass's aura up into Berry's head, away from her heart and toward the mouth they had entered. Berry stomped her feet, bucking wildly to dislodge the chair still attached to her wrists. Caroline ran to tackle her as Mrs. Black muscled the first of The Glass from her face, only to be knocked back again as her left hand came free.

Caroline stared up from the ground as Berry stood, viciously ripping the hood and gag from her head with her free hand. Finally, the last of the green aura dissappated from her face.

"You fucking bitch!" Berry screamed, her voice cracking with rage. "I'm nothing again!" Berry, free of The Glass, raised the remains of her chair high above her head, bringing it down with a scream of primal rage across Mrs. Black's thin frame and smashed her down with an uncharacteristic crunch, breaking the chair to fragments.

Berry escaped up the stairs, still screaming incoherently. Caroline ran to Mrs. Black, rolling her over to reveal a mosaic of broken brown beer bottle glass and the reek of gasoline.


Posted by FUNKbrs - January 10th, 2008


Chapter 11

Mrs. Black stared at the figure in the chair just as she had stared at others in that same chair countless times before. This chair, always this chair. Decades passed, generations passed, but always this one chair. Even as a child, she remembered the simple unpadded ladder-back chair from its days of service as the dunce seat in the local one room schoolhouse. What it represented to her had changed over the years, but the shame of being seated in that chair transcended everything.

The stillness in Mrs. Black's gaze was easy to mistake for ageless serenity, but it wasn't. Neither was it poise, or for that matter even the mild opiate intoxication inherent in many arthritic seniors. The stillness in Mrs. Black's gaze was always her secret focus on that same rainbow static that Caroline could see, that rare substrate that even The Glass could not. Demons share their omniscience with angels, but certain abilities required a mortal human soul. There were dark rites under which a demon might acquire such a soul, rites that Caroline was ignorant of that every demon by definition was well versed in.

An uncharacteristic shiver crawled up Mrs. Black's spine as she sipped increasingly tepid tea and searched methodically for the telltale green shimmers in the static that revealed a demon at work. One of the things she'd learned in her studies was that demons have a certain kitten-like viciousness; they attack any target presented given enough time.

With that knowledge, Mrs. Black's unease only increased when instead of that faint green over saturation she saw Caroline's face shine through her hood in bright, unmistakable pink. She was actively scrying, a technique Mrs. Black had not even suspected she had mastered yet. Yogic masters had spent lifetimes in meditation without mastering the technique, and yet there Caroline was after a brief stolen lesson flawlessly opening her third eye.

Finally The Glass proved true to his nature, green bits of static coalescing to form an avatar in front of Caroline's naked pink one. In this element any demon is on home ground and even Mrs. Black had to be careful to defend against the demon's allure. If she used a human avatar, she was just as subject to the demon's powers of suggestion as Caroline was. Hiding your true identity was the first rule of scrying, a rule The Glass had of course omitted in his instruction.

The Glass was fully capable of hiding whatever it was telling Caroline from Mrs. Black. Caroline's words, were clumsily obvious. Mrs. Black was disgusted. How dare this girl trust a demon more than her! And to immediately suspect her, despite all she'd done to be circumspect and gentle with her. This girl was too smart for her own good, and the bitter kernel of shame Mrs. Black felt for abducting her only added to the force of her angry indignation. Bees were too good for this demon. Dogs were too good.

A kraken, now, that sounded about right.

In the realm of dreams, in the space below the mind and above the soul, in that rainbow static of the seers, there is a different type of physics. The mind is finite, bound by focus and physicality, but the soul is by nature infinite. It could be said that the soul is a splinter of God, undilutable and split from the soul of Adam himself.

Therefore, for the human soul in the realm of dreams, the only limits exist in the power of focus the mind can bring to bear. A seer's avatar only defaults to the mind's image of self. The Glass has no real physical form, so his avatar is only a hollow contrivance. The only mind he has is one that he emulates in the dream world.

Mrs. Black, however, has a splinter of God, a soul. Her avatar or avatars can be any from she can sufficiently imagine and control. This is all by way of an explanation of how she was capable of keeping an eye on the world of dreams without forming any avatar at all, and furthermore the giant black-tentacled monstrosity desecrating the corpse of The Glass's now headless avatar.

Gruesome. Bloody. Excessive. These are the hallmarks of Mrs. Black trying to make an impression. Caroline was such a novice; she didn't even notice when The Glass's will dissipated and Mrs. Black's will recreated the avatar so she could continue to destroy it. Caroline still didn't understand at any time in this world she could merely get out of that chair and leave, although she would still be bound in the real world.

Mrs. Black took ruthless advantage of Caroline's ignorance, pulling coil after coil of black tentacles out of thin air until the head of the vile kraken appeared. She allowed the avatar of The Glass to dissipate and focused dinner plate sized eyes on Caroline, who was paralyzed by fear and naïveté.

The giant squid's two long grasping tentacles wrapped around the defenseless girl, this time binding her in a way that wasn't just a trick of the mind. The chair Caroline had imagined herself bound to disappeared as the sheer brutality of the even striped it from her consciousness.

The kraken's eight holding tentacles withdrew into its conical fin-tipped head. The entire mass shrank saving for the two grasping tentacles that still held Caroline in thrall. The finned cone thinned and stood upright, the fins themselves fragmenting and lengthening to form Mrs. Black's waist-length hair only to coil itself back into a bun as a white face emerged from the kraken's inky skin. The dinner plate eyes shrank as they slid up the body, reaching human size only when they crept over Mrs. Black's blank eye-sockets.

The tentacles continued to hold Caroline in their grasp; exiting Mrs. Black's avatar just below her should blades and bracing themselves against the ground as they held her feet mere inches from any solid surface. Mrs. Black herself no longer wore he school marmish attire, but now wore a skin tight glossy black dress that put Morticia Adams to shame.

In contrast to Caroline's frumpy frame, Mrs. Black was a stunningly beautiful woman despite her abnormal lifespan.

"Mrs. Caroline Parker!" Mrs. Black announced, her anger only betrayed by the icy cold sharpness of her voice. Caroline's mouth was still covered by sucker studded gripping pads that denied her the ability to answer. She struggled imperceptibly against Mrs. Black's will, only to be rendered motionless by her iron grip.

"You have been caught in the act, soliciting the favors of demons, practicing forbidden techniques, and worse, acting under direct orders from a know demon against a fellow human." Mrs. Black paused, allowing Caroline time to think about the accusations before uncovering her mouth to hear whatever frail defense she could offer.

Caroline even surprised herself when she sent the patterns away, amazed at how easy it all was. She was back in the chair, still wearing the hood, still feeling the restraints on her wrists and ankles, but no longer held at arms length by Mrs. Black's tentacles. It was then that her hood was violently ripped from her head.

She barely had time to register Mrs. Black's flesh and blood face before her delicately boned hand left a resounding slap across the right side of her face, shaking her head like a rag doll.

"You can't run from me, Ms. Parker. If tying you down in a dream was sufficient, I never would have risked having Thug bring you here." Mrs. Black continued with frank severity.
"And why did you bring me here? Caroline countered, "You knew I'd come if you called. Why should I trust you, if you won't even trust me?"

For the second time, Mrs. Black wavered uncertainly. Had she overstepped? Was she so used to dealing with strippers and prostitutes Thug dragged into that chair that she'd forgotten how to respect other people's boundaries? There was more at stake than Caroline's life here, but if Caroline realized how strong her position was, there was no telling if she'd cooperate.

"This isn't about me trusting you, or even you trusting me. What part of The Glass being a demon don't you understand?" Mrs. Black said, her haughty mask dropping as much as she dared.
"The part where he teaches me things. All you ever do is break into my dreams, break into my life, and break apart my sanity. The Glass makes things make sense. All you ever do is make me feel weak, make me feel ignorant and confused." Caroline stuttered flatly.

"What about that scar on your hand? Has it even healed all the way yet? How about the other one on you stomach?" Mrs. Black reminded her, "It was The Glass that first intruded on your life with the dream about the plane crash, not me. Those scars are from The Glass's influence. He wants to have you so wrapped up in pleasing yourself you forget that he's controlling you."

"And what do YOU want from me? The Glass is a demon, so you say, and that explains why he came around, but what about you? Aren't you a witch?" Caroline reversed spitefully.
Mrs. Black sighed and answered, "Yes. I am, technically, a witch. And I do want something from you. I want to train you to be a witch. The Glass is the one that wants to steal your soul."

The Glass, however, had other priorities.

Berry sat alone in Raz's apartment, drinking a lukewarm bottle of Schlitz Malt Liquor on the third day of a bender. Raz's ability to stay up for days had at first attracted her to him, but now that same ability meant coming home was a marathon of isolation. It was disturbing how much vehement, spiteful will they could muster against each other just to avoid sharing a bed.

Berry's lack of a job, her lack of motivation, her lack of everything saving a pretty face and whip-like conversational ability drove her to depths of depression lonely ugly people could only dram of. She KNEW what it felt like to be wanted, to be handed everything on a silver platter, just for being herself. Entitlement, luxury, she'd been raised to be a princess her entire life. What had it gotten her, though? A dinky ass little apartment and a boyfriend who'd rather type hastily written messages to complete strangers in an imaginary world than talk to her.

All those ugly single girls she'd made fun of in high school would be rolling in the floor laughing if they could see her now. Hell, even Caroline's life was more exciting than hers. Weird dreams, meetings with witches, Todd, even her job gave her life flavor despite her saggy ass and tiny tits. "Why not me?" She thought angrily through her drunken and sleep deprived tears.

Little did she know how interesting her life was about to become.

Sleep deprivation is it's own special kind of trance state, and just like the dram quests of ancient tribal shamans, it opens the mind to the influence of other-worldly powers. Thanks to Caroline's carelessness, in this case those otherworldly powers knew exactly where to find her.

Despite what evangelist would have us believe, not every human being has a soul. Berry was such a sad case, although her condition is quite common. The Glass's options are different with such an individual, especially one that would willingly choose demonic possession. Berry would never be able to scry, or to be contacted through spiritual means. However, as a hollow, vapid, willing empty shell, she was almost as good as being able to create a real living avatar.

Like a mushroom popping up out of mycelium-cultured earth, The Glass formed a different kind of avatar to creep into the empty place inside Berry where a soul should be. In a way, The Glass became her soul, making her more than she was on her own, making her BETTER. Once in control of her mind, The Glass was able to focus it in a way Berry had never experienced before.

Illusions are the stock and trade of demons, and it could be said with some accuracy that all a demon really is is a series of illusions based around a single malevolent law of human nature, created alongside of the speed of light or nuclear physics. The Glass started slowly, unfocusing Berry's eyes on the suds of her cheap imitation beer until it had enough room to form an image.

Once Berry's eyes were suitably disabled, The Glass created a single point of focus in her vision. Like an artist carving a figure from marble or wood, The Glass sculpted from the raw substrate of unfocused light the rough shape of a figure in a chair first, taking its time to give Berry's grain alcohol addled brain time to recognize the illusion. Then The Glass added shade to contrast the blank image, defining straps holding increasingly discernable hands and feet bound to the arms and legs of the chair. Finally, it defined Caroline's face to Berry's zombie-like consciousness.

The Glass pulled from a stock book older than literacy itself a single phrase: Burn the witch. To give it strength, he put it in a pattern of threes repeating in her head, with a silent pause between them.

Burn the witch.
Burn the witch.
Burn the witch.

The phrase contained three one syllable words, the three repetitions adding up to nine, the number of division and separation, and the opposite of indivisible one.

The Glass added the detail of a single, fraudulent tear running down Caroline's face and repeated the phrase in triplicate again:

Burn the witch.
Burn the witch.
Burn the witch.

In sharp contrast to the way The Glass conjured Caroline's image, he imposed Mrs. Black's figure slapping Caroline's face with whip-like severity and repeated the mantra again.

Burn the witch.
Burn the witch.
Burn the witch.

Three sets of nine, adding up to twenty seven, purity and couples, adding up again to form nine, making division once more and reinforcing the message by an order of magnitude.

The Glass's possessing avatar relaxed inside Berry's intoxicated brain and waited for pseudo-sobriety to do its sordid work.

Berry's eyes slowly swam back into focus. Was what she had seen a hallucination? Or was it a prophetic dream, like what Caroline had been having? None of that mattered, though. It was if she'd had a religious experience, lying on that couch. Her problems with Raz didn't matter anymore; all that mattered was her own internal influence. What an epiphany! She'd lived her entire life trying to sum up to others expectations of her; now, she no longer cared.

Raz's bottle strewn apartment was no place for a focused mind such as hers. She hit it full on, cleaning with a frenzied energy only known to habitual meth-heads. Normally she'd spend more time putting off such menial chores than actually doing them, but right now she felt just like she did that night with Caroline when she'd tapped Raz and Todd's veins for blood. Who'd have though her spurious collection of medical paraphernalia could have done such a thing? Normally she would just fantasize about that kind of stuff, but that night something had come over her, just as it had now.

Maybe she and Caroline shared a special bond since that night? The vision she'd seen HAD to be real. There just wasn't any room for doubt. Caroline was in trouble, and this dream was her only chance to get help. Still, she had no idea where she could be.

Berry placed two fingers on her temple, like a child imitating a television psychic. From inside, The Glass answered: 646 Cottage Church Lane.

How exhilarating! She couldn't remember her own phone number half the time, but now she could remember the address from the flyer from so many days ago! Whatever was going on had to be her subconsciously developed skills coming out when they were needed most.

Berry took Raz's keys and closed the door quietly, carrying the trash with her uncharacteristically. She thanked whatever spirits there were that Raz was fully immersed in that stupid game he was playing.

"Don't worry," she tried to project toward Caroline. "I'm coming."

Every aspect of The Glass capable of emulating human empathy winced at Berry's ego-driven hubris. Such a weak mind would be little defense against Mrs. Black, and such a weak body could never be a match for Thug physically. Did this girl even know that her naïve fantasies only made it easier to use her as a tool? Other minor demons of vice had already all but destroyed her fragile life.

Still, if The Glass could get Mrs. Black to kill this girl in front of Caroline, there would be no chance of Caroline ever trusting her again, and that was all the success it needed.


Posted by FUNKbrs - January 10th, 2008


Chapter 10
Friday is the last day of the workweek for more reasons than just the Christian Good Friday. After a week's preparation, Friday is the traditional day of war and dedicated to the goddess Fria, queen of the Valkyries and patron of warriors. Caroline had spent the last week humbly following Mrs. Black's orders and thankfully not once being visited by The Glass. However, one of the harder lessons of the spiritual arts is that even the smallest seed can sprout after it's been thought long buried.

The dead lump of plastic Caroline called a cell phone vibrated into life sometime after lunch on a lazy Friday afternoon. As usual, Caroline had finished early and was methodically attempting to solve the newspaper's crossword puzzle despite the radio and computer within arm's reach.

The phone didn't recognize the number calling as it normally did when Jaleesa or even Berry dropped a line.
"Hello?" Caroline answered, praying it wasn't some sort of telemarketer. The voice that answered back sounded frighteningly like The Glass, but as it continued she was relieved to realize it was Todd.
"Hey Carl, what's up?"
"Oh, nothing much, just bored at work. Why?" Caroline said in a singsong voice.
"Well, I just finally got Raz back into his old place so I've got the apartment to myself again. I was wondering if you'd drop by." Todd said directly.
"You don't want to go to The Fool's Card?" Caroline replied hopefully. There was just too much drama up there, and a night alone with Todd would be nice after dealing with Berry's craziness.
"Nah, I'm broke, and I was mainly figuring it would be easier to get you to spring for booze at the liquor store than at the bar."
"You bastard! You're almost as bad as Berry!" Caroline snapped playfully.
"Oh, and I guess my darling company is worth nothing to then?" Todd demanded in mock haughtiness.
"Well..." Caroline equivocated cutely.
Todd cut her off. "Cut the bullshit. I bought the last round, Damnit. It's your turn to pony up for wine."
"Well just suck the fun right out of it, why don't you?" Caroline whined.
"Whatever. You know I'm awesome. Now get your ass down here with my Shiraz!" Todd demanded with sarcastic severity.
"I'll see about that when you pass out and wake up with a Tabasco bottle in your butt." Caroline threatened.
"Promises, promises..." Todd intoned.

Caroline spent and inordinate amount of time in the wine store, until finally a seasoned wine concierge took pity on her and pointed her in the direction of a decent quality Chilean Shiraz.

With that complicated choice out of the way, she went to the grocery store for a brick of tofu and a pack of jasmine incense. Caroline had never even tasted tofu before, but because of Mrs. Black's advice and the incidents at work she wasn't willing to take any chances. She toyed briefly with the idea of using Mrs. Black's rose oil and the Shiraz to make a vinaigrette, but after a second thought decided it would probably end up just a waste.

Caroline drove past The Fool's Card on the way to Todd's apartment. On the street out front she noticed Raz's beater parked with Raz and Berry engaged in full histrionics over the top of the car. Only a sharp honk from behind reminded Caroline that the stoplight she'd been waiting for had turned green as she watched the couple nosily.

Caroline drove the final two blocks to Todd's, relieved to for once not have anything to be apprehensive about. She was following Mrs. Black's advice and the worst was finally over. She was free to spend another simple, miraculous night with Todd.

Caroline raised her right hand to knock on Todd's door as she demurely held the bag with the food and wine behind her back. Todd opened the door widely with a smooth motion, as if in some conceited way he was using the archway as an excuse for Caroline to look at his shirtless body without feeling obligated to speak. And impish grin took over Todd's face as he crooned.
"What, no hug?"

Caroline stepped into Todd's arms, luxuriating in his embrace like a personal sauna. Todd nuzzled Caroline's neck as his left hand slipped behind her and lifted the bottle of wine from the shopping bag in her fingers. Sensing the bag becoming lighter, Caroline drew back only to have Todd immediately break and run away with the bottle. Todd covered the distance to the couch in the cramped efficiency in four long strides before Caroline had a chance to snag his wrist. He jumped over the low-backed couch easily held the bottle's label at eye level for inspection. "Chilean? I thought Chileans only ever made crap wine..."
"Well, the guy at the store said it was a good bargain. You could have warned me, you know." Caroline countered.
"Blah. The proof is always in the taste. I'm not afraid to have my prejudices challenged." Todd placated noncommittally.

Caroline reached in the bag for the remainder of its contents. "I also scored some tofu. Mrs. Black says I shouldn't eat meat, so I guess I have to try this stuff sometime."
Todd made an ugly face, "Argh, the only decent way to cook that stuff is to bread it and deep-fry it. You're lucky I'm domesticated enough to carry bread crumbs and a deep fryer; otherwise it's just as bad as eating cottage cheese straight out of the tub." Todd said as he walked the handful of steps back into the kitchen to get a better look.
"Really? Maybe I should get eggplant next time." Caroline said, trying to explore her vegetarian options.
Todd gave her a look of exasperated disbelief, "Ew...no. You're best bet is stuff like fried mushroom omelets and lots of cheese. I mean... you're not trying to go vegan, are you?"
Caroline had no idea what the word 'vegan' meant, but she knew Mrs. Black's restriction was on meat, and that was only because of it's relationship to blood, "I'm just gonna stop eating meat. Just as long as it's not meat, I'm good."

Todd inspected the container of tofu that Caroline was offering like some sort of alien life form. " Ah. Extra Firm. At least we have that going for us." Todd took the tofu and imposed a strict grid on it with his knife, creating a multitude of short strips.

Caroline opened conversationally, "I had a weird experience with Thug the other day."
"He's a weird guy. What happened?" Todd replied, listening to Caroline with his back turned as he emptied breadcrumbs into a bowl and turned on the deep fryer ambidextrously.
"Well, he showed up to my apartment drunk as a catholic priest crying about Mrs. Black."
"Mrs. Black again?" Todd questioned.
"Yeah. Ends up she's his grandmother."

Todd shook the tofu strips into the breadcrumbs and began taking them out one by one to ensure each was thoroughly coated.

Caroline continued, "He was absolutely convinced she was going to die, and that it was all his fault. The weird thing was that he though I had something to do with it."
"That's pretty damn weird." Todd responded, "How was she going to die?"
"He didn't know. He thinks she knows, but she won't tell him." Caroline explained.

The liquid from the tofu soaked through the breadcrumbs and Todd gave them all a liberal second coat. "Frankly, I get tired of all this mysticism crap. Hell, you can try to use the serial number on a dollar bill to predict the future, but if you don't know what it means, what good is it?"
"The idea is that nothing is ever really random, just too complicated to understand." Caroline's brow furrowed as she explained the concept as she understood it, "The hard part is focusing enough to be able to have it make sense."

Todd dumped the double-breaded tofu sticks into his stovetop deep fryer, sending a shower of hot grease onto his hastily placed glass lid.
"I've done the dollar bill trick a billion times, and it's always been totally random." He said, shaking the crumbs off of his hands into the garbage can next to the sink.

Caroline handed Todd the bottle of wine and the opener and spoke with her back turned as she retrieved the wine glasses. "How do you do this trick, anyways? It's just a dollar bill."
"Well, give me a dollar and I'll show you." Todd offered as he opened the wine bottle with deceptive ease. "It's just some middle-school hoodoo." He added deprecatingly.

Caroline laid the glasses on the counter so Todd could pour, and then pulled a dollar from a weather-beaten plastic pocket purse. "I better get this back, you broke bastard."

Todd took her money and handed her a wineglass. "Well, it's all based off of numerology. Like, one is the number of beginnings, two is the number of couples, three a number of strength, four is the number of the earth, five the number of work, six is the number of corruption, seven is the number of purity..." Todd continued the list with a bored expression on his face. "Eight is the number of the unknown, and nine is the number of division."
"I can't believe you can remember all that mumbo-jumbo." Caroline giggled.
"Well, I've always had a lot of wiccan friends." Todd explained wryly, "Anyways, the combination of numbers on the serial on a dollar is supposed to tell something about the person who owns the dollar. It's a filthy pun, really."
"What? That your money shows your fortune?" Caroline interjected.
"God damn it, this sounds lame no matter how I put it..." Todd faltered
"No, no, go ahead. It's cute." Caroline invited in her most snuggly voice.

Todd looked at the dollar's serial number. "Ok, here goes: D4777134C."
Caroline was stunned. She immediately recognized the significance of the numbers in a way that seemed to fit into her head like a puzzle piece.
"Mind if I give it a try? I wanna see if I can get it right."
"Go ahead." Said Todd lackadaisically.
"Ok. The fours on either side mean 'inside the earth'. The three sevens mean strong purity. Does thirteen mean what I think it does?"
"We always said it meant death, because it's one that was part of four, the earth, that was separated from three, strength, that is no longer part of the earth." Todd supplied, his brow gaining an ominous furrow.
"Ok, 'strong purity on the earth is going to die' is what I think this means." Caroline decided.
Todd looked off in the distance. "Whatever. This is a bunch of crap. Wanna watch a movie?"
"Aren't you gonna tell me if I was right?" Caroline queried.
"I ...I just don't want to talk about this anymore." Todd stammered, for the first time in Caroline's presence.

Caroline pulled into her own parking lot, her mind consumed with the sudden change in Todd's demeanor. She couldn't help but think that the weirdness she'd been dealing with lately was somehow putting Todd off. She liked Todd, she definitely wanted a relationship with Todd, but just when she felt they were getting close he would disappear for a few days, or withdraw emotionally.

Was her relationship with Berry acting as a dividing factor? Was he trying to distance himself from her as a way of solidifying his friendship with Raz? Maybe Raz had told him about the thread she made on polibicker. The very fact that something would bother him that he wasn't willing to talk to her about was proof enough their relationship wasn't going in the right direction.

Caroline got out of her car and locked it with the remote as she walked towards the stairs. Todd had warmed back up on the couch for the movie, but after that he was uncharacteristically quick to go to bed without her after the wine was all gone...

Blackness fell in front of Caroline's eyes as her right hand came up sharply behind her into the small of her back. Her feet jerked off of the ground with painful sharpness. Smothering black stifled her cries of surprise. She flailed her feet in violent desperation, but couldn't seem to hit anything as she floated in mid air by her twisted arm.

Finally the upward pressure on her arm released as she came to rest on some cushioned, yet slick surface. The arm, however, remained pinned in place, as it's sister came to join it behind her back. A sharp zipping sound cut through the soft blackness around her, binding both of her wrists together suddenly. Her ankles were then bound with equal vicious efficiency.

As quickly as it came, the force controlling her ceased, leaving her free to try to determine her surroundings once more. The soft surface under her vibrated slightly and she recognized the sound of a heavy door slamming. A few seconds later, another door shut in a different direction, and the vibrations increased.

Time stopped. She was in a car. She was bound. She was gagged. The car was moving. Her abductor was fast, strong, and efficient. The muffled sounds of classic rock permeated the hood.

Time began again. Caroline struggled futilely until for some reason her ankles met her wrists awkwardly behind her back. The car continued to move as this happened with centrifugal force causing her to slide uncontrollably now that her limbs were too entangled to stop it. She screamed again for help, but through the hood her cries were unintelligible even to herself. The volume of The Eagles track "Hotel California" increased callously and the car picked up speed.

Jarringly the car stopped and the engine and music died in unison. Rough fingers grasped behind her knees mechanically and her body rose, coming to rest on a round, warm, moving surface. She screamed and struggled again, and the surface supporting her disappeared, knocking the wind out of her as she struck the cold, clammy ground gut first.

The rough fingers grabbed for her again and again she was hoisted onto the soft surface. Again she struggled, and again was knocked flat as she fell onto an even harder part of the ground, possibly gravel, or maybe even asphalt.

The rough fingers reached a third time, and a third time she was lifted and carried. She struggled again, but this time she wasn't immediately released. She continued in hopes of gaining some sort of moral victory only to be slammed a third and final time onto a hard, long curb, smashing her right breast painfully.

She rose into the air, this time in too much pain to register what kind of force was holding her. She finally ceased struggling and was carried bodily into the hands of whatever or whoever had taken her.

After an awkward moment where her feet snagged on an open doorway, she was deposited into a rigid wooden chair and her bonds were released, only to be retied to the respective arms and legs of the chair in a comparatively more comfortable position. Her hood was not removed.

Hours? Days? Minutes? Seconds? Caroline had no idea how long she was left there in the stifling silence of her hood, only that the initial shock of her abduction was over. She tried to think of who was capable or motivated to abduct her, and there was only one name that came to mind: Thug. Hadn't Thug taken Star a few weeks a go to rehab? Caroline didn't think Thug was a sexual predator; there certainly wasn't anything sexual about how she'd been kidnapped.

Still, her abduction had been good, too good. Whoever had done it had had practice, and if anyone was capable of murdering her and getting away with it, this was it. After all, if a murderer gets away scot-free, who's left to tell who did what, or where the bodies were?

The longer she sat, the fewer options she seemed to have. Eventually she'd have to pee, have to eat, have to something, and she had no way of getting help, even from whoever it was that held her captive. Inside the black bag Caroline's eyes opened wide and she began to take deep, slow breaths, just as The Glass had taught her. It seemed like an eternity before she calmed down enough to see that strange rainbow static that underlies the normal range of vision.

Patterns flitted across Caroline's field of vision, each missing just enough clarity to render it unrecognizable. Finally a green outline of a man in some kind of robe or gown defined itself in off-putting shades of green. The lines filled in, making a green-and-black two-tone image of The Glass until the whole form solidified and came alive.

"Good for you. Had you not remembered my training, you'd be helplessly in the grasp of that Witch right now." The Glass said greasily.
"This was Mrs. Black?" Caroline replied, astounded.
"Of course it was. Only Thug is capable of doing such a thing. Why else would he make so sure to cover your eyes and not speak? He didn't want you to recognize him." The Glass disseminated.
"But why? Mrs. Black knows I'd come if she asked." Caroline wondered.
"Who knows why the forces of evil do anything? Why isn't important right now. Right now you need to know where you are, and how you can get out. You're in the basement of Holiness Pentecostal Church. I'm under the impression you know where that is?" The Glass prompted.
"I've been there several times in dreams, and once in person. How do I get out of here?"
The Glass's eyeless face dripped with sympathy, "I'm sorry. The only way out of here is to fight your way out. Mrs. Black's house is too cursed for me to do anything overt, but I can teach you how to fight back using your mind, just as you are doing now."

Caroline's mind raced like a greyhound after an electric rabbit. Is this why Mrs. Black was trying to keep her from dreaming? To keep her from preparing for Thug's attack?

It made an eerie kind of sense. After all, how did Mrs. Black get so old? Didn't witches in stories eat babies to keep them young, like Hansel and Gretel? If Glass really was her guardian angel, and Mrs. Black really was evil, it would explain why Mrs. Black always attacked Glass in her dreams. Everything Glass had taught her about scrying was true, and Mrs. Black didn't seem to have any interest in teaching her anything functional like that. Glass had taught her more in two dreams than Mrs. Black ever had. Which one was really on her side? What if neither of them was?

"Ok, how do I fight back? I'm not exactly in a position to do anything but sit here." Caroline said as she resolved to do something proactive, instead of being a passive victim in the struggle between Mrs. Black and The Glass.
"The only technique I know that can help you now requires a powerful strength of will to make it work. It makes the concentration you're using for scrying look like child's play. The principal, however, is simple." The Glass cracked his avatar's fingers, and began the lecture in earnest.

"Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. Prayer, as it is taught in churches, is actually a fully functional way of dealing with problems, provided you pray with sufficient faith. Jesus himself said that faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains, and this is as true as any other part of the Gospel."

Caroline listened intently, this time not wasting effort on questioning The Glass's information.

The Glass continued, "Life, as it was created, is a purely subjective experience. What you believe is true IS TRUE, even if only for you. However, since your life is the only one that matters, reality is determined by what you believe. The hard part is having the strength of will to put down your doubts and exercise true faith that the change you pray for will come about."

The Glass gave his dissertation in high oratorical style, like a professor of philosophy and with just as much confidence. His green robes seemed strangely timeless and appropriate like the convoluted robes of a judge in a court of law, or the orange robes of a Buddhist monk. Despite his alien nature, for once Caroline felt The Glass's presence as completely in place and normal, and the outside world as being strange and unimportant. Caroline used The Glass's now familiar voice like an anchor as she sat, in every other way adrift in her situation.

"Imagine if you will, an insane man. For him, reality is much different than for the rest of us. Inside his head he could be a king, or a famous artist. What the rest of us believe is inconsequential."

Caroline could no longer help herself. "Wait...you just want me to PRAY my way out of this?"
The Glass laughed. "Well, what other options do you have, tied to a chair like you are?"
The direness of her situation struck home as Caroline realized The Glass was right. She stared into the bloody gray meat visible through The Glass's transparent eyes, and could find no trace of deception, or, for that matter, any emotion at all.

It was at that point that a long black tentacle snaked out of nowhere and crushed The Glass's head like a wine glass at a Jewish wedding. School was officially over.


Posted by FUNKbrs - January 10th, 2008


Chapter 9

Raz sat in his dimly lit den with windows blocked with tinfoil and a layer of white Rustoleum. The only light in this tiny haven came from various computer monitors and an assortment of mysterious gray and silver boxes, each festooned with lights and wrapped in wire like lesions on a cancerous and devolved Christmas tree.

Raz didn't wake up, because that term implies sleep. Rather, he merely switched mental gears from the silence of predawn to the zombie energy of morning. All-night raid sessions with his clan were an almost daily occurrence in his addiction to various MMORPGs, and he had long since learned how to make sixteen hours of sleep last for three days straight.

Raz used the manic energy that sunrise brings to the insomniac to look through The Fool's Card's web page, searching for people he knew that could entertain him during the dry hours of the player vs. player hacker servers. Many slackers keep their IM programs up all day at work, so it normally was no problem to find someone to chat with. At the least, Todd was usually available during his office hours at the college and worse comes to worst, Straight Mike was almost constantly logged in.

Raz checked the list and was surprised to find Caroline's picture under the friends log. She'd always given him a nerdy-girl vibe so it wasn't too out of the ordinary to see she'd posted her information on the club's website.

Clicking her profile, Raz soon discovered just how big of a forum whore Caroline actually was. Xanga and Myspace were only the tip of the iceberg on the gratuitous list of accounts on her profile.

Raz clicked again; his eyes the only sign of life in his otherwise deadened and sleep deprived body. He chose the first link on the list, which was a site devoted to political debate called "polibicker.com." He snooped around and eventually came across Caroline's polibicker account with the sadly accurate alias FLWRGRL101.

Raz was just casually bored enough to pull up Caroline's recent post history. Even his jaded mind was shocked to immediately see the last post was a vulgar and immature display of exhibitionist lesbianism. Still, internet being serious business and all that, Raz decided to sign up a quick vagrant account just to post in Caroline's topic. After all, if Caroline could be so blasé about posting a rape story about his girlfriend, the least he could do was pop in and shake things up a bit.

Luckily the name "Raz" still hadn't been taken on the relatively small website. Posting under his newly formed spam account Raz posted the spammiest thing he type up quickly.

"OMFGTEHNOES!!!11! MAI GF R TEH GHEY!! FLWRGRL STOELS MAH GF!!

MODSPLS BAN, kthnxbai"
Underneath in more civilized language he posted in parentheses

"(sup Carl, long time no see)"

He opened the window in a fresh tab and waited in case Caroline came back to post. He really hadn't seen Caroline in a while, after all, and it would be nice to catch up with her.

Caroline, of course, was in the worst emotional state possible to deal with this.

What Caroline was prepared for, however, was another six tedious hours of waiting for more work orders. Heartbreak specials paid the bills, and funeral arrangements were steady work, but after a while there was something blindly mechanic about what should have been a very liberating profession. Technically flower arranging is a fine art, but as time wore on Caroline felt more and more like a short order cook instead of an emotional concierge.

As usual Caroline chalked up her last night of frenzied mania to nerves, just as she had the Exacto knife incident. She ignored the warnings of Mrs. Black just as she ignored that scar: ignored purely for the sake of convenience and lack of mental discipline. Such vices have been the downfall of common man for all of recorded time, and Caroline was no exception.

The mere act of clocking into work that morning overrode the lessons she had learned both through advice and misfortune. Luckily, the school of hard knocks can be relied on for a level of consistency no human instructor could ever match.

Caroline logged onto her polibicker account and once again went trolling through the sludge of adolescent linguistic failure as she searched for a spark of interesting philosophy. She checked her post history, selfishly preening in the mirror of Internet.

Fresh posts in her topic? Maybe today's reading might be some fun after all. Scrolling past a pathetic dribble of spam, Caroline found Raz's post but didn't quite register it's meaning. She read the post again looking for a funny way to reply when the two names in the post clicked insider her head. A poster named Raz, with only one post under his account, mentioning the name Carl? Isn't Carl what all her friends from The Fool's Card called her?

This wasn't just some alt account. No alt would know Raz was Berry's girlfriend. The land without consequences Caroline had foolishly allowed her mind to lack the discipline to reside in had come back to haunt her. Raz didn't seem mad, but Caroline didn't have the confidence to reply. Raz and Berry's relationship was in a sensitive situation. Did Raz really know she and Berry had been sleeping together? What if he thought it was a joke now, but if she replied, he'd give it more thought and realize what was happening?

Caroline used the Internet as a way of avoiding real situations, and yet here she was placed in a worse dilemma by the very thing she used to escape them. Caroline kept attempting to write something funny to diffuse the situation, but when she read it before posting it invariably had some fatal flaw that could potentially destroy her friend's relationship with each other and herself.

She agonized over the wording for fifteen minutes, typing and deleting numerous messages without sending them. Finally her indecision won out and she gave up entirely on the matter. What was the worst that could happen? Besides, Raz drank a lot, so there was a chance he wouldn't even remember about it later to mention it.

Caroline rose from her chair and slid her right forefinger over the monitor's power switch with practiced ease. She avoided even looking at the blank monitor directly as she threw her patterned cotton scrub coat from the winter over it to block the screen from view. She turned and walked towards the worktable determined to do some kind of productive work. She carefully filled the time by breaking and taping the stems of the bland arrangements awaiting pick-up, the breaks subtly changing the angles of the heady blooms. These new angles, created by seeming random destruction, were actually strategically placed to create expressive curves and lines much like seemingly random scars and laugh lines of a human face add intelligence and emotional content to an otherwise blank expression.

Two hours later she was surprised to find herself still fussing with the arrangements when the noon carrier arrived for pickup.

Caroline drove home that afternoon without ever turning on the radio, using the gritty pseudo-silence in her car's interior as a whetstone to sharpen her thoughts. Passivity and repetition such as what her radio had comfortably provided for so many years now made her feel paranoid and anxious, wary of the trap such distractions seemed to invariably hide. Perhaps it was time to pay Mrs. Black a visit?

It was with those thoughts in mind that Caroline drove past an uncharacteristic black Cadillac parked in the lot of her low-rent efficiency complex. Her preoccupied brain, however, gave it no notice as she walked up the stairs to her personal safe haven.

She'd even made it halfway through sautéing spinach Alfredo in accordance with Mrs. Black's instruction when a sloppy arrhythmic knock broke her concentration. Caroline turned down the heat, mentally calculating whether it was Berry or Todd seeking solace at her door.

The large shadow cast when she opened the door quickly disillusioned her of such simple notions. Thug stood in front of her with the stiffness and composure of an experienced alcoholic. The smell of whiskey enveloped him like a cloud, drawing Caroline's eyes to a brown paper bag peeking out from his suit coat pocket.

"Hello?" Caroline answered during Thug's delayed reaction time.
"Hey Carl..." Thug said slowly and carefully as he enunciated Caroline's curious nickname for the first time within earshot, "Mind if I have a seat? She couldn't explain it, and it's ripping me up..." Thug continued, finishing the statement with a bracer from the bottle in his pocket.

Considering the door was already open and that Thug was too drunk to be anything more than a charity case, Caroline let him inside to the couch and surreptitiously eased a round metal garbage can next to him with her foot.

"Explain what?" Caroline asked, genuinely confused.
"What I did wrong..." Thug stumbled, still not making any sense. Caroline looked at him questioningly until he continued.
" I mean... I was polite, right? I made sure you got the invitation and everything. She said it wouldn't matter, but she was the one that taught me not to give up hope..." Thug's wet eyes stared blankly ahead, no longer motivated to take in his surroundings.

"Who? Mrs. Black?" Caroline asked, guessing the obvious.
"Yeah. Her. Who else?" Thug rambled, "I tried to convince her, you know, that there was... was... A CHANCE... you know? I mean... people make choices. You can't just KNOW what someone is going to do. You can change people... She smiled, like it was cute, and stopped talking about it, but I had to try."
"A chance of what?" Caroline sniped, getting irritated by Thug's indirect nonsense.
"A chance that she could live. But now it's too late, and I believe her."

Thug was drunk and talking out of his head, but his thoughts ran in circles that were all orbiting the same issue as if he were just too drunk to spit it out. Caroline studied his face and was surprised to see his eyelashes filled to the edge with tears that never seemed to fall.
"She's gonna die, and I couldn't stop it..." he finally spat out.

Thug hungrily gulped from his glass bottle and then placed it back in his pocket.
"Mrs. Black said she was going to die?" Caroline said in shocked reflex. Mrs. Black was old, certainly, but she seemed to be in amazingly good health earlier.
"She's never wrong." Thug mumbled despairingly.
"But how is she doing to die?" Caroline asked, still trying to understand what could kill a woman nearly two hundred years old.
"She wouldn't tell me. She NEVER tells me. Dad had the same problem, back when he was First Boy. 'Go get burned in your own kitchen' she always says. Dad says she used the same thing on him. He never could figure out what it meant either."

Caroline had a lot of preconceptions of who Thug was from what Raz and Berry had told her, and nowhere in that stereotype was any room for the idea that Thug spent a lot of time helping an old lady. Thug seemed so monolithic on the surface; it was disarming to see him so vulnerable. He looked like the kind of guy that would eat his grandmother before he'd run an errand for her, and yet here he was, out of his mind with grief over a woman who wasn't even sick.

Caroline tried to think of some words of comfort and dredged up a memory of her now long dead grandmother.
"Nana Parker was hard to let go of too. We knew she was leaving two years before she passed, but it was still just as hard on us when she died."

Thug looked at her with a quizzical expression as if she'd said something totally irrelevant and unrelated.
"She always took care of us," Thug said, ignoring Caroline's point, "She delivered my grandfather. When he died, she was the one that put him in the coffin. She delivered my father. When he died, she put him in the coffin. She delivered me. What will happen when I die?" Thug spoke distantly with his eyes never meeting Caroline's gaze. "When Mike broke his leg, she set the bone. I've been shot twice, and each time, she was the one that pulled out the bullet." His eyes looked up, finally facing Caroline. "Did you know I've never even been inside a doctor's office?"

Caroline felt completely impotent. Here was a friend in a moment of weakness, and she had no way to comfort him, not even the capacity to understand his loss. This wasn't just existential depression for Thug, it was the loss of his entire belief system, like the death of the Pope would be to a Catholic, but without the anticipation of a new papal appointment and on a much more personal scale.

Thug raised the bottle to his lips, a thin dribble of whiskey spilling on his black silk tie. His knuckles turned white around the bottle as his head hung low between his shoulders. The smell of burning cheese crept its way into the room, yet another unwanted reminder of the unstoppable nature of harsh reality.

Caroline sprinted to the stove; relieved to see her Alfredo sauce was barely scorched. Thug continued to sit where she left him, oblivious to what she was doing.
"I've got some spinach Alfredo. You hungry?" Caroline said, trying to use food to comfort where words had failed. Thug looked up and shook his head, then groaned nauseously and rubbed his stomach, indicating his guts were far too fried to even consider eating.

Caroline scraped off of the supposedly stick-free Teflon cookware and winced at the thought of how much of that flaky plastic must have chipped out into her meal. Thug's empty bottle greeted her when she returned from her attempt at culinary salvation, gleaming evilly back up at him as he played with his keys. Caroline choked back an insincere offer for him to stay the night on her weather-beaten couch.

Thug rose unsteadily to his feet and took a moment to readjust his equilibrium through sheer drunken will.
"Are you okay?" Caroline asked.
"Hah. I've only had a pint. I gotta get out of here, though. 'S been nice seein' you."
Caroline walked him to the door, ignoring years of government propaganda and countless beer commercials.
"If there's anything I can do, let me know, ok?" Caroline said plastically.
"Like I 'd have a choice..." Thug responded, and then turned to walk down the concrete steps to his car.

Caroline watched him appraisingly as he tottered all the way to his car from the bedroom window. The black Cadillac backed up with surprising ease and precision from its parking place and roared into the evening, its driving lights cutting through the overcast sky.
Caroline finished her spinach in silence with no television or radio to distract her from her situation. There was a faint plink sound above her head, and her living room light burned out.

It is interesting to note that before any truly great darkness, there's a small but interesting hint of what might befall. The screw that resists just a little too much before it strips, the small chip in a windshield before it cracks, the whistling sound of a tornado before it hits, these are all barely noticeable in comparison to what they portend.

Before the great plague fell over Europe, there was an epidemic of sickly and dying rats, and before Pompeii there was a curious blizzard of gray ash. It's no dark and arcane secret, but rather, it's the same knowledge that gives a mechanic his ability to listen to an engine and know what's wrong with it, or for a doctor to take a patient's pulse and diagnose their symptoms.

So when Mrs. Black found a dead bird lying with it's neck broken outside one of the large windows of her cottage, it didn't take her long to look into her crystal ball and find Ms. Caroline Parker.


Posted by FUNKbrs - January 9th, 2008


Chapter 8

Mundanity is the oft-underestimated force that has the power to fling newborns into dumpsters, heroes of war into gutters, and the great gurus into mental asylums. The law of supply and demand is not a natural law, but rather a perversion of man that led to great power. Not fifty years ago, moving images on a screen or a pocket sized two-way radio were miraculous inventions. Such marvels as televisions and cell phones are now consigned to the smashing hands of adolescents, armed with baseball bats and cinder blocks. What was once sacrilege to our elders, through the power of mundanity, becomes commonplace and unremarkable. It is important to remember, however mundane, that these profanities are capable of hitting a kind of critical mass. Pregnant like an underground cavern full of natural gas, all it takes is unsuspecting spark from an exploratory lantern to destroy everything a people once took for granted.

Berry's thin, soft arms failed to react to the coaxings of Caroline's shrill alarm clock. Unlike Berry, however, Caroline's body was well attuned to Father time as its taskmaster. Caroline woke up wrapped in Berry's entangling limbs acting as an awkward fleshy straight jacket. Almost stubbornly, Berry refused to awaken and cooperate with Caroline's self-extrication. Finally freeing an arm, she turned off her alarm clock and peeled Berry off of her with the slow deliberation of a snake shedding its skin.

Groggy, but filled with a zombie-like motivation, Caroline's frumpy naked body trundled the short walk from the bedroom to the bathroom. Mechanically she showered, this time not interrupted by her houseguest during morning ablutions.

She returned to her room with her damp towel resting lackadaisically over her shoulder to find Berry still fiercely asleep despite the fact that the bubble of warmth they had shared the night before was long since broken. Caroline turned her back and dressed for work, dismayed to find her emotionally unresponsive in the last few precious minutes before Monday's call of labor.

The clock crept towards Caroline's departure time, and Berry remained soundly asleep. Caroline didn't have the heart or the time to wake her and eject her in the gray morning sun. Instead she wrote a note and locked the door behind her as she'd done a thousand times before and stumped her sleepy legs down the stairs towards her car. She ignored Raz's car parked nearby in the background as she pulled away towards Jaleesa and the Gulag.

Caroline unlocked the heavy oak door to Pugh's Flowers and turned on the fluorescent lights. Without losing a step, she walked into the tiny break-room and made a pot of the black amphetamines that passed for coffee. She returned to what was once called a front desk, clocked in and laid her head down for a brief respite until Jaleesa got in with breakfast from some scandalous relative's restaurant. As an afterthought, and without raising her head, she clocked Jaleesa in as well.

It was a full thirty minutes later when Jaleesa dragged herself into work. As a part of their now ancient pact, she brought steaming hot sausage biscuits and hash browns cooked in home-rendered bacon fat as propitiation for Caroline's time-clock manipulations.

Caroline, however, was blissfully asleep, and totally unaware of it being Monday.

Jaleesa plunked her crinkly plastic bag down roughly mere inches from Caroline's nose. She waited for the scent to do its sordid work and helped herself to the coffee Caroline had brewed. Silently she thanked God for its mud-like consistency and crack-like potency. She returned to find Caroline robotically eating the seared and macerated flesh of the world's most profane animal, her head still resting uncomfortably against the wooden desk.

Caroline's head slowly rose from her desk as her jaw acted like a jack to raise her neck above her shoulders by degrees. When her head finally reached an intellectual human posture, Caroline filled Jaleesa in on the day's work orders.

"We have three heartbreak specials, a small wedding with just lapels, corsages, and a bridal bouquet, and um..." She stuttered sleepily "a... uh... yeah, a centerpiece for some fancy dinner." In common language, this translated to "six hours of real work between us, and goofing off for the rest of the day."
"How many lapels and corsages?" Jaleesa asked as she tried to figure out her share of the workload.
"Three lapels, six corsages," Caroline replied, not even bothering to speak in complete sentences.
"I call wedding then," Jaleesa inserted, taking advantage of Caroline's groggy state to grab the easiest work, leaving her with the complex problem of the centerpiece arrangement.

Caroline rose in defeat to get herself her first cup of liquid motivation, trying to wash down the dry, flaky biscuit. Now fully awake, she even remembered a plastic fork and knife for her hash browns. She came back to find Jaleesa still standing and munching another sausage biscuit.

Caroline sat down and squirted bright red ketchup on her hash brown from its foil packet. She then methodically cut up the hash brown patty with her fork and knife.
"Using a fork and knife for your hash browns? What is this, dinner at the Ritz?" Jaleesa commented as she lifted her own hash brown in its wax paper wrapping to her mouth just as Caroline usually did. Caroline shrugged, not wasting the energy to think of a decent explanation for such a trivial thing. The spirit of Monday descended in earnest as they finished in silence. Jaleesa retreated to her worktable in the back to watch soap operas on a tiny television.

Plastic knife. Styrofoam cup. Sausage. Wax paper. On Mondays, even demons are just phoning it in.

"heartbreak-special" is a jargon term for the most common order in a floral shop: a dozen roses. The reason for its name is based upon the most common circumstances in which it is ordered. Any spousal offence committed by a man, whether it be infidelity or merely missing a family function can be properly absolved through the traditional gift of flowers. The number twelve in particular is significant, each flower representing one of the twelve apostles. The missing thirteenth flower, representing Jesus, is implied to be the recipient. This grants the recipient the power to forgive sins ceremonially.

What then, does this imply towards the florist? This common, yet still holy rite is enabled by a paid professional. A paid professional that engages in and facilitates holy sacrifices is by definition a priest, or in this case, a priestess. A florist is today considered a mundane profession; the ancient days of intricate cutting gardens has been replaced by greenhouse flower farms, days of searching for rare plants replaced by order forms and refrigerated shipments. Wrapped up in the technicalities, society has forgotten the true power that drives the industry.

Caroline was blissfully unaware of this as she placed the sprigs of Angel's Breath into the heartbreak specials, carefully inscribing the destination and message onto the cardboard card on each one and placing it near the door for the twelve o'clock courier. A single hour of the day standing for each apostle, the thirteenth Father God Himself, the maker of all time.

On the day of the moon, Caroline completed the three common ceremonies and then began the commissioned fifty-dollar centerpiece. This arrangement had the power to unite a family into a single cohesive social and cultural unit, not that Caroline noticed. She was too busy choosing a wide, expensive base to reduce the number of carnations and sunflowers she'd have to add to justify the fifty-dollar cap Mrs. Markie had set on the commission.

Caroline finished her work quickly, using a haphazard style to imply intimacy by informality. Finished with her duties she logged on to her favorite forum and interpreted the slew of linguistic symbols as she looked for an interesting thread. She didn't find one, however, so she decided to make one of her own.

The denizens of the Internet are strange creatures indeed, and Caroline was no exception to this rule. In common life, anal sex is considered reasonably perverse. On the Internet, such acts of sexuality are referred to as a matter of course. There the lurid and disturbing tales that Caroline has lived over the past few weeks are merely light reading. This may perhaps explain to the uninitiate the perverse and inherent joy she felt at explaining her escapades with Berry.

FLWRGRL101 posted:
Title: Me and Berry's V: a love story

Body: I just got back from a friend's house. And by house I mean pants. And by friend I mean vagina, or "the V" as her friends call her.

Berry's V is my BFF. We were frolicking through the cottony field of Hanes when we tripped and fell into each other and my nose gently bumped into V's clitoris. It is then that I realized I loved Berry's V. I whispered those words as Berry slapped me across the back of the head because I had her pubic hair stuck between my teeth, and when I talked I yanked some of it out.

That's when I raped her.

EDN.

The first three replies were the standard "Pics or it didn't happen" and "TLDR" posts. With nothing funny to reply to, Caroline let the thread slip deservingly into the abyss of other worthless topics. She stared listlessly at the screen until she finally dozed off with her head propped up by her left hand.

Plastic knife. Meat. Coffee cup. Computer screen. Eye, hand, foot.

The Glass peered gently into Caroline's undefended mind, pleased by her lack of urgency in following Mrs. Black's advice. Determining whether or not that was a result of its own intervention was of no consequence. The rough edges of this hole into the world were beginning to wear smooth with use, like an oft-tugged earring, and this opened certain new opportunities.

Caroline found herself sitting in a comfortable wooden rocking chair next to a card table covered with a purple silk embroidered cloth edged with beaded tassels. On top of the table was a shallow ebony bowl with straight sides, as if carved from a single round section of tree-trunk. Around this peculiar shallow bowl were eight impressions of the same symbol, equally spaced and symmetrical. The figure was made of three intersecting circles that formed a round-sided equilateral triangle in their center.

The space itself was small, with the walls either made of or covered with garish red silk curtains with large gold tassels. The curtains also, like the tablecloth, were embroidered with stylized birds made of straight lines and perfectly rounded curves. These curtains rustled and under an ornate tasseled edge the empty eyed face of the Glass appeared wearing a comfortable Asian cut suit and carrying a padded purple velvet string bag.

"Hello Caroline," said the Glass in greeting, seeing instant recognition on her face. Caroline stammered as she began to realize the importance of Glass's reappearance. How could this happen? She was at work! She was safe at work, right? Work is a normal place, where normal things happen. Nightmares were for her once lonely bed, or strange couches, not office chairs and scratched desktops.

"Hello," Caroline said in reply, still trying to collect herself.
"I brought you gift. Do you want to see?" the Glass offered smoothly in his now all too familiar sounding voice.
"Yes, thank you," Caroline lied. Politeness had served Thug well, and Mrs. Black seemed to be its queen. 'When in Rome,' after all. The Glass opened the bag to reveal a perfect crystal ball, large and heavy. The ball was completely perfect and flawless, like a bubble of empty space from a universe much denser than our own.

The Glass held the ball lightly, a gossamer soap bubble in his hands, but when he set it down it made a heavy knock against the ebony base that belied the Glass's adept handling. He carefully wiped off an imaginary smudge with a white cotton cloth from the string bag.
"This," he said, sitting in a chair that had not been there before he sat down, "is merely a tool. A device for analyzing reflections of one's self, nothing more. However, for a beginner it is a training wheel to keep the mind balanced and focused on the task at hand."
"What task? I don't even know why I'm here," Caroline replied, as she grew more nervous. Her ears pricked for the sound of buzzing wings.
"Why, it's the same task every person is faced with: living a gratifying and fulfilling lifestyle, and that is best facilitated by knowing the right decisions to make."

The Glass eased his eyeless face close into Caroline's

"Wisdom, Caroline. Wisdom comes from within. Thus, a device to reflect that wisdom back into itself so that it can be better viewed. A ball with a single focal point, forcing its reflections into the center where they can be properly rendered and interpreted. In the end, though, this ball is merely a reflective surface," The Glass rationalized.
"How can wisdom come from within?" Caroline asked dubiously. "I though wisdom was learned from life experience, or at least from the elderly."
The Glass tsked to himself, "Of course that's what they taught you. If you became too wise, you'd no longer be subservient to your teachers now, would you? That's why no one outside of yourself can be trusted to teach you."
"How can I teach myself what I don't already know?" Caroline asked again, confused.
"That, my dear, is what this crystal ball is for." The Glass answered, showing all of his perfect white teeth.

The Glass raised a hand gloved in white leather expansively. "The trick is to empty your mind of mundanity, of useless processes, of technicalities. Open your mind to the primary inspiration of your existence."
Caroline was beginning to get irritated with the Glass's word games. "And just how do you propose I do that, Mr. Glass?"
"Patience. First we must start with the obvious processes. Breathing, for example."

The Glass stood, and the lesson began.

"The trick is to empty yourself of breathing, to empty your lungs as a symbol of an empty mind. Merely exhale all the breath you have inside you, and stay empty until your body breathes in on its own, with no instruction from your mind," the Glass instructed.

Obediently curious, Caroline cooperated and looked at Glass for more instructions. The Glass waited for Caroline to begin the cycle of ever-deeper breathing before continuing.
"Now, open your eyes as you have already opened your lungs and try to look at the ball in all places equally with no particular focus. This technique is designed to tune your mind to its ultimate level of receptiveness."

For Caroline, the silence expanded to fill the tiny room when The Glass finished speaking. Her own breathing ceased to register in her ears as the baser elements of her mind relegated themselves back to running the engine of her body, freeing her entire mind to focus on the ball in front of her. Her eyes pinpointed on a single highlight on the upper left side of the sphere, causing all aspects of her view to dim in comparison. Over time she was finally receptive enough to see the static of her own nerve endings supercede the transient peculiarities of her surroundings.

Though her eyes were wide open, Caroline's internal panorama became a series of shifting and vibrant pinpoint colors. It was the ultimate expression of chaos, actively defying all patterns. It was at this point The Glass spoke again.
"This, Caroline, is the background noise. It's always been with you, ever since you first developed sight receptors in you mother's womb. These seemingly random colors are a complicated pattern encoded with every law of physics, the position, history, and future of every molecule in existence and all compressed into a space small enough for a human mind to comprehend."

Caroline struggled to balance her focus between The Glass's voice and maintaining the mental abstraction that allowed her to perceive the universal static. The room began to fade back into view, but Caroline steeled herself and focused on her breathing. The Glass paused while she struggled, neither helping nor distracting her. When her eyes ceased blinking and regained their focus on the chaos pattern, The Glass continued.
"Remember that your sense of the pattern can give you all the input you need. Sense my words through the pattern, not your ears. Your natural senses will only distract you."

Caroline struggled again to maintain focus, however, she noticed thin branching streams of green to her left but somehow behind her. At the end of every word, the streaks would disappear. As he spoke, she realized the lines bore a striking resemblance to an oscilloscope she saw as a kid on the Mr. Wizard show. Her own words came to her, not as sound, but as pink lines. Her lips didn't move as her voice answered.
"Wait, like this?"
"Very good." The Glass answered; just a bit shy of the way a master might speak when rewarding a dog with a treat.

It was then, that even through the pattern Caroline clearly saw a black bee enter the room. The lines of the curtain wrapped room became visible again as she turned to focus on it, and the bee faded ominously from view. She began her breathing once more and the bee reappeared and settled unnoticed on The Glass's right shoulder.

More bees followed, starkly recognizable only in the pattern and invisible to the naked eye. The bees, apparently invisible to The Glass, covered the demon. Then black bold-faced text appeared concretely over the pattern, unmistakably foreign yet somewhat familiar, like a porcelain teapot.

"You were supposed to open the bag." The words stated flatly, like text on the back of a traffic ticket. Caroline tried forming her own text and failed as she lost all focus on the pattern. She looked around and saw she was still in the curtained room. The Glass nodded encouragingly, apparently oblivious to what Caroline was experiencing.

Caroline recaptured the pattern more easily this time and broadcast her pink lines.
"What bag?"
The Glass apparently heard her this time.
"Stay focused!" he said with a note of irritation, oblivious to the other side of the conversation. The black text appeared again. "Housecleaning..." it read.

The black bees Caroline had perceived surrounded The Glass as he noticed them for the first time, immediately fighting back violently. They overwhelmed him quickly with practiced ease and carried him back through the curtain from which he came.

Caroline was shocked, and lost focus instantly only to see Mrs. Black standing in an empty concrete room, like some sort of third world prison. The gypsy-like furnishings had disappeared, and Mrs. Black pursed her lips reproachfully.

"The plastic bag. With the envelope. That was where I put the instructions on how to use the oil. Now it's too late, and there's nothing I can do. Up to now there was still a chance. Poor Thug will be heartbroken." Mrs. Black started sternly, but ended wistfully.
"Heartbroken over what?" Caroline asked.
"It doesn't matter." Mrs. Black replied bluntly, "Jaleesa's coming to wake you up soon. Make sure and remember to read the letter when you get home."

Jaleesa jerked forward on Caroline's left hand and snorted gleefully as Caroline's still sleeping face made rough contact with the clacking keyboard in front of her. Caroline sputtered in shock, spurring Jaleesa to gales of laughter.
"You slept through lunch!" Jaleesa explained after her laughter subsided. Caroline looked groggily at the computer clock and was surprised to see it read 5:00 PM so soon.
"C'mon slow-ass!" Jaleesa continued as she punched out on Caroline's computer, "They're not going to pay you overtime to sleep!"

Raz's car was still in the parking lot unmoved as Caroline pulled in, meaning Berry was still at the house. Caroline climbed the stairs, happy to know Berry was there, but concerned that she would still be there as if she had no place to go. As she opened the door, Berry rose from the computer to meet her with a cheap bottle of Boone's Farm fruit flavored malt liquor in hand. Berry spread her arms high and wide with her elbows slightly inverting to hug Caroline.
"Hey Carl," she said, drunkenly stroking Caroline's back.
"I'm surprised you're still here. I figured you would have gotten Raz's car back and locked up while I was at work." Caroline said frumpily.
"Fuck him." Berry replied shortly as she pulled back.

Berry and Caroline separated and Caroline immediately began looking for the brown bag Mrs. Black had given her. Shockingly it sat in the garbage of all places.
"Berry," Caroline asked as she tried to hide her pique. "Why did you throw away this bag? It was from Mrs. Black."
"I tried that oil," Berry explained haughtily. "It smelled like kitchen grease, no scent at all. So I threw that knock-off crap out."
"Berry!" Caroline shouted, no longer capable of hiding her irritation. "That was supposed to be an anointing for the house!"
"You don't have to talk to me like that..." Berry drawled, seemingly hurt by Caroline's outburst.

Caroline saw other bottles laying around and realized Berry was completely wasted. Raz and Berry had been fighting, hadn't they? Maybe Berry had come for a place to escape, and here she was yelling at her.

"I'm sorry." Caroline said softly, but it was too late.
"No, I understand." Berry slurred, "'I've got some things I need to care of anyway..."

Berry kissed Caroline gently on the cheek and left to drunkenly drive Raz's car to God-knows-where.

Caroline pulled the bottle of oil and plastic-wrapped letter out of the brown paper bag, and then threw the ketchup and garbage stained thing away. She opened the plastic bag encapsulating the letter pleasantly surprised by Mrs. Black's forethought.

"Dear Caroline:

Hopefully if you're reading this you've opened this letter promptly. However, should you be reading this on a Monday afternoon, please know that Thug has always been an obedient grandson, and he has always known the line between the guilty and the innocent. Hope, however, can do strange and evil things to a man's heart."

"Now for the practical instructions. Use this oil on all entry and exit points to your home AND work, and any other place you may be for an extended period. Anoint all doors, windows, and air vents three times with this oil, making sure to leave a small amount of salt at each site. This is designed to prevent demons from entering the sanctity of you home, which is considered your altar. The three applications represent the trinity and is a number of unshakable strength. "

"Also, continue to avoid eating meat, or being exposed to naked television or computer screens. Your sensitivity to these objects grows with every exposure, so it will take fewer and fewer sacraments to induce scrying. If you're not careful, it may begin to happen with none at all."

"Best wishes
Mrs. Lillith Black"

The first paragraph merely confused her, but the last was disturbing. Caroline had never considered the option that her mind was somehow being broken in by The Glass, like some sort of old shoe with the heel beaten down like a slipper. How much damage had already been done to her mind? Was she slowly going insane?

Caroline spent the next three hours anointing every door, window, air vent, faucet, and drain, hoping to somehow undo the damage by making up for her past apathy with last minute industry.

Now tired and frazzled, she ate a garlic-laden vegetarian meal ravenously from having slept through lunch. She was now no longer able to use the computer or even watch television without paranoia. She found herself lying in bed and staring at the ceiling trying to fall asleep, dreading what she would find once she finally did.


Posted by FUNKbrs - January 9th, 2008


Chapter 7

Sunday, the day that commemorates the giant burning cloud of gas that sustains the Earth and every living thing on it. It is the first day of the week, the cold reality that remains after the hellish fires of Saturday have been quenched by the cold, liquid light of the midnight moon. Sunday is the day of purity, with all the complexities of the past week left behind, leaving only what is fresh and new. A day for new beginnings, for taking stock of fresh opportunities, and ultimately, Sunday is the day on which the time for corrections has passed, and only judgment remains.

Caroline dragged a disconsolate spoon though her soggy cornflakes after, apparently, passing out early and waking up at the ungodly weekend hour of 7:51 AM. Unable to go back to sleep or wake Todd, here she sat, attempting to outstare a half empty bowl of eyeless breakfast cereal.

Needless to say, the cereal was winning.

A warm, gentle creak, however, broke her melancholia as Todd ghosted his sleepy way into the room, wearing a frayed cotton quilt.
"Hey Carl," he mumbled, as he grabbed a spoon from the dish drainer and helped himself to the milk-logged remains of her unwanted meal. Caroline thought about keeping her dream to herself, and then second-guessed.
"I had a nightmare again last night. There was this weird creature that kept telling me ... things, and then it turned into a giant zit and exploded. It kept warning me about the woman from this," she shook some spilled milk off of the tract, "church. I'm invited to go today, but now I don't know if it's such a good idea."
"Why not? It's just an old church," Todd reasoned, "Besides, it sounds relaxing. You always have weird dreams. Don't worry about it," he continued dismissively.
"I guess you're right..." Caroline equivocated.
"Of course I'm right." Todd asserted, "Me and my grandma used to make grave rubbings on the tombstones in old churchyards all the time. The worst an old lady did was give me a really nasty burnt coconut macaroon."

Caroline considered this. She'd had pleasant dream about Mrs. Black up to this point. Glass claimed to be an angel, but Caroline was never more than customarily religious. Old ladies with tea and cookies, though, she believed in ferverently. A childhood of visiting her grandmother couldn't be broken by a strange dream and a couple of hardly reputable web pages that were probably made up by Blair Witch fanatics. She was surprised none of the stories called her "the black witch" for crying out loud.

Caroline's spine stiffened, her mind stimulated by early morning conversation.
"You know, I met you by going somewhere by impulse. My life does need more gardens and old ladies now, not more dirty techno clubs. I've decided to go." Caroline concluded.
"Good for you," asserted Todd, "I've gotta teach my three hour Sunday class today, though. Mind if I use your shower?"

Todd's mind had more in common with Berry's than perhaps Caroline was willing to believe in.

Caroline dropped Todd off at the university and pulled away, fumbling for her hastily printed directions to 646 Cottage Church Lane. Ten minutes into her drive, she realized her deceptively simple directions failed to mention that although Cottage Church Lane did in fact completely bisect the town, it did so by dead ending into every major thoroughfare and continued a block to the right of where it ended. Consequently, she spent the next thirty minutes a course that should have only taken fifteen.

Cottage Church Lane, with all its twisting narrow ways, eventually straightened out as it entered the historic district. The wrought iron fence of a gated community became recognizable from her dream, blurring the lines between fantasy and reality in an oxymoronic way.

624...626...628...

Caroline counted down the house numbers as she drove, waiting for the iron fence to break into hedges and roses, or, better yet, not. 632...634...636... only ten large historic homes between her and her destination. The tiny car buzzed slowly down the lane as Caroline rubber necked the house numbers.

644...650...652...

Caroline swore, and continued down the lane looking for a safe place to turn around. 664...646...668... and there, standing under the arch of roses between the gap in the hedge, was Thug, sweating into the collar of his suit.

"Good morning Ms. Parker," Thug said nervously, wiping his forehead with an over starched ornamental handkerchief. "Mrs. Black asked me to wait here, in case you got confused by the street numbers."
"So I guess she's in the front room waiting for me with some hot tea then?" Caroline replied jokingly.
"She said you'd know that..." Thug replied, staring at the stepping stone path that led to the small church. Thug took off his shades, and looked at Caroline with stunningly blue eyes that contrasted his dark features.
"I just want you to know...I never hurt anybody that didn't deserve it..." he said in a voice barely above a whisper, and then turned to walk back into his aging Cadillac.

Caroline was left alone, standing in the rose arch absorbing Mrs. Black's magnificent garden. The flowers here were cartoonishly large, with rose bushes bigger than inner city trees. Roses of every color sprouted from stalks that had been carefully braided as saplings, now as thick as Caroline's ankle. Caroline followed a smaller stepping stone path that branched off the walkway to the small church, inspecting the impressive blooms there with a professional eye. When she reached out to touch them, however, fat black bees raised a buzzing chorus that matched the volume of the chirping birds in the background. Taking this as an omen, Caroline reluctantly continued into the open door of the church.

"That's okay, dearie, take your time. I have all evening if need be," chimed Mrs. Black, speaking to Caroline for the first time with human lips. She looked exactly as she had in the dream, thin, but not emaciated, and dressed in an almost school-marmish fashion, as if the small church were some kind of one room schoolhouse from earlier in America's history.

"So...you're Mrs. Black?" said Caroline, her voice rising slightly at the end in doubt.
"Of course I am, sweetie, I've been Mrs. Black for longer than that street outside has been paved. When you get the time, I'll show you my vegetable garden and beehives out back." Mrs. Black responded soothingly.
"You raised those bees?" asked Caroline, still only reacting to her current surreality.
"Hah, girl, this is going to take forever if you keep questioning things. Here, have a seat and a cup of tea, and I'll explain everything." Mrs. Black said with finality.

Caroline sat and sipped her tea with honey and cream, better than any Starbucks she'd ever tasted. Mrs. Black began to explain: "Your dreams-everything that's been happening to you-are all caused by you accidentally becoming an initiate. As time progresses, the world gets more and more wicked, just as John the Revelator predicted. He had the dreams too, you know." Mrs. Black said with a wink. "Anyways, getting to the point, you happened to have brought together the seven sacraments of scrying, and of course, the inevitable happened."
"Seven sacraments? I've never even studied magic! I'm agnostic!" Caroline announced, suddenly wishing this old woman would show some sign of senility, give her some reason to discount these words.
"Oh, I imagine the first scryer found it all on accident too. However, the fact remains that you ARE having prophetic dreams. How do you think I found you? How do you think I know your name, Ms. Caroline Parker, employee of Pugh's Flowers and friend of Jaleesa Jones? How about the scar on your left hand, or the scab on your stomach? You didn't think those came from somnambulism, did you?"
Caroline was dumbstruck. If Mrs. Black wasn't the real deal, then she was at least having someone spy on her. Considering the main suspect for that would be Thug, she was at least powerful enough to hold a strip club bouncer in thrall.

"So, if this is all true, then why do you use Thug?" Caroline inquired pointedly.
"I don't 'use' Thug, dearie. He's a good boy, and he does what his Grannie Black says. I'm every bit as old as you think I am, and I try to keep an eye on the children. There may be ten generations between us, but he's still my grandson." Mrs. Black paused a moment, letting this new revelation sink in. "Why do you think he's so nervous about you? He knows that to some extent you are what I am, and he's seen what I do to the girls he brings here. Sometimes they're in awful shape, but I straighten them out like a wrinkled shirt in a steam press."

"Enough about my family, though. Let's get down to brass tacks." Mrs. Black's face took a serious expression as she steepled her fingers over her steaming teacup. "Somehow, you combined a knife, a dish of some sort, blood, a scrying glass, and a human subject with both eyes, hands, and feet intact, namely you. When that happened, you opened a window into the spirit world, or dream world, and a demon found you through it. From then on, that demon has been using you to keep that window open." Mrs. Black paused in her lecture, waiting to see if Caroline understood.
"So let me get this straight," Caroline interjected into the space left for her by Mrs. Black's Socratic speech, "You mean Glass, don't you?"
"Is that what he told you to call him? I guess it's pretty accurate. He has other names, of course, being a demon." Mrs. Black provided.
"How am I possessed by a demon, though?" asked Caroline, visions of The Exorcist floating through her head.
"Well, demon possession isn't as dramatic as they make it out to be on television. For example, there are the common demons that are summoned by potions. So common, in fact, you know them by other names already. Alcohol is a perfect example. Alcoholism is merely the demon Alcohol trying to maintain the same kind of window the Glass demon has found in you. Ever notice certain neighborhoods are always infested with drugs? Those are places where a certain demon is extremely powerful, and can attract hosts at will. After all, what is a bar if not a type of altar, and it's tender a type of priest?" Mrs. Black spoke quickly and clearly, trying to pack as much into Caroline's malleable mind as she could.
"Is this demon in me now? Is that why I'm here?" Caroline asked, her situation sinking in.
"Hah, no, this particular demon cannot possess the body without explicit permission. He's physically very weak. Even in the dream world, I'm more powerful than him." To emphasize her point, Mrs. Black placed a small drop of honey on her fingernail and allowed one of her tame black bees to drink from it contentedly in a casual kind of way, like throwing a meat scrap to a dog.

"As to how the convocation of sacraments happened, you probably didn't know a television screen is a type of scrying glass." As she spoke, Mrs. Black stroked the oversized bee affectionately with her free right hand, "All you would have had to do was fall asleep watching television and eating undercooked bloody meat to make it happen, really. People forget television is a form of witchcraft these days. You just got unlucky that the Glass found you."
"So...the changes in me... That's the Glass?" Caroline wondered.
"If you mean the lesbian blood sex with Berry, then yes." Mrs. Black supplied in the kind of cut and dried way only a midwife can discuss sex with.

Mrs. Black sipped her tea graciously off of the table that Caroline now realized was emblazoned with a cross. Tea as a communion for a temperance minded woman from the 1800's, and there, in front of her, was a cup from which she had partaken in it.

"Go ahead and have your cookie, dear." Mrs. Black said, "It's only a sugar cookie, although, yes, this is technically a communion. 'As oft as ye do it' said the good Lord, not just whenever they serve at the church, after all." Caroline ate her cookie, which was deliciously buttery, and was definitely not a nasty burnt coconut macaroon.

"Now, however, is the day of your first lesson," lectured Mrs. Black.
"First lesson? I thought this was a church," interjected Caroline.
"Oh, it WAS a church, and IS, for that matter. However, like it or not, you're known to world of demons now, and it's not safe to let you leave without you knowing how to protect yourself. Come to my garden, and I'll explain the basics." Mrs. Black said as she placed her empty cup with it's smattering of tealeaves unnoticed on the bottom.

Mrs. Black strolled through her backyard vegetable garden with the poise of God the Father strolling with Adam in the Garden of Eden.
"Let's start with the nature of life and death; why you, and the Glass, and the rest of the world exist." In true pedagogical fashion, Mrs. Black walked slowly as she talked, her hands clasped loosely behind her back. "We, human beings, exist much like these roses; sustained by our creator for His aesthetic sense, to be cut at His choosing, the world being his cutting garden." Caroline followed slight behind Mrs. Black, keeping the elderly woman's left shoulder in clear view. "Angels are like the bees, who freely traverse to and from God's garden which is the world of the living, and back out the other side fertilizing the flowers of this garden and other gardens. Demons like the Glass are like wasps, or ants, free like the angels, but existing off only those things they can plunder from the various gardens and dung heaps. This is of course an oversimplification, but we've covered a lot for your first day." Mrs. Black said with a tone of finality.

Mrs. Black stopped, and turned to look Caroline directly in the eye.
"Now for your practical advice. Throw out all your knives, especially new ones. Cover any shiny object with a cloth, especially televisions. No more meat, cooked or otherwise." Mrs. Black said sternly, shaking a finger, "You can't live without dishes, we all have to eat, but keep them all put away if possible. You have to fight this thing on its own ground, so I've made you an anointing of salt and rose oil to put around the windows and doorframes of your apartment to de-consecrate your home as an altar to the demon."
"Anything else?" Caroline asked, her mind boggled by this new wave of actionable information.
"Oh, there's always something else..." Mrs. Black said, leading Caroline around the path to the rose arch at the gap in the hedge. She reached into her oversized beaten leather purse, and pulled out a brown paper bag, "In this bag is the anointing oil and instructions on how to use it. Just remember you only know the bare minimum right now. You won't be safe until you're an adept due to your exposure. If I was able to find your true name and the names of your friends, just imagine what a malicious demon might do now that you've stopped cooperating."

With that, Mrs. Black hugged Caroline, kissed her on the neck chastely, and sent her on her way.

Caroline felt as if every stitch of logic had just been beaten from her brains with a lacy tea cozy. Mrs. Black wasn't just an old lady, or even some closeted wiccan, but a true mystic gifted with shamanistic wisdom that allowed her to command even the most basic aspects of nature such as horticulture and human longevity. Even worse, she had called Caroline an initiate. She wasn't human anymore; she was something like what Mrs. Black was in the first stages of its infancy.

The oil stained brown paper bag might as well of contained a dead body for the weight it carried in Caroline's mind as she made the series of difficult left turns to return to her apartment. It was barely noon when she finally pulled into the lot below her building. She managed to carry it all the way into the main room of her efficiency before daring to open the bag's arcane contents. To her surprise, all it contained was a zip lock baggie with an envelope addressed to "Mrs. Parker" and an ornamental looking Bath and Body Works style bottle of oil. The oil had floating inside of it three of Mrs. Black's curiously braided-stem roses, somehow in full and vibrant bloom despite the bottle's comparatively small spout. Below this, a sediment of large crystal sea salt rested on the bottom of the bottle.

A knock on the door broke Caroline's inspection of Mrs. Black's gift. Cracking the door to see who it was, Berry smiled brilliantly at her from the other side. Caroline released the chain on the door and allowed Berry to enter carrying a small but tightly packed bag. Before saying hello, Berry pulled out a magnum of chilled wine. Face still beaming, she pulled out take-out steak for two from a western-style steak house nearby.

"Hey Carl," Berry said demurely, "I brought you something," holding her treasures high for Caroline to inspect. Caroline had been so preoccupied with her meeting she had forgotten all about lunch, let alone Berry's overweening curiosity for the arcane.
"Effin' excellent!" Caroline exclaimed hungrily, tearing into the bloody rare steak Berry presented. Berry wasted no time opening the bottle of sweet red wine and decanting it into a matching set of wine glasses, also cunningly packed into the small black bag.

"So, how was your visit?" Berry asked, already prying into Caroline's escapade with Mrs. Black.
"It was crazy, is what it was. Thug was there. Did you know Mrs. Black is Thug's grandmother?" Caroline informed Berry.
"Really?" Berry responded dramatically, ready for more juicy gossip, "You know he and Mike are cousins. That means she's Mike's grandmother too!" Berry deduced. Caroline took another bite from her bloody meal, and sipped from Berry's shining glass, settling into another night of girlish bonding.

In Caroline's dream, she sat in a giant banquet hall, the table stretching as far as her bleary eyes could see. Lying before her was a plate covered in a bright red sauce. To its left, a knife. To its right, a shining goblet of crystal clear water, its delicate stem seeming to dribble from its truncated sphere of reflective fluid.

It was only then Caroline was made aware of what sat before her: the sacraments Mrs. Black had warned her about. Involuntarily, her left hand reached out towards the knife. Incredulously, her traitorous eye forced her to watch as her hand picked up the knife gingerly and dragged its sterling blade through the plate of blood, rising to drip the crimson fluid into the goblet, the blade's point held down ominously.

The solitary droplet of blood maintained most of its viscous integrity as only its outer extremities dissolved, making a pattern akin to the design of a cat's eye marble in the once unpolluted water. The blot lost color and darkened as it spread within the glass, turning the water a dark but partially translucent mist gray.

Caroline tried to move, to somehow get away from what was happening to her, but her left foot turned against her and wrapped her soft bare foot hard against the sharp edges of square chair leg. Her left hand grabbed her chin, forcing her to watch as the gray mist inside the once pristine water coalesced again into the animated shape of a flying bee. As the bee became more concrete, the mist in the background cleared to reveal a tightly knit spider's web, some victims already entrapped.

The bee held in place in the center of the goblet as the web approached unseen from behind. Then the bee shrank in perspective as the vision scope of the glass increased, revealing the web wasn't anchored to any stationary object, but was held in place by six huge wasps flying in unison formation. Suddenly, all six wasps converged turning the web into an inescapable net. The whole mass, wasps, bee-victim, and web fell to the bottom of the glass in a frenzy of stinging rage. The bee swelled in perspective again, the glass violently depicting its death throes. As the bee died, so did the image, snapping back to its necrotic gray state.

Caroline awoke to find Berry still lying against her breast, but despite their close contact, she still felt desperately, desperately alone.


Posted by FUNKbrs - January 9th, 2008


Chapter 6

Warm surgical steel caressed Berry's neck and the supple underside of her chin as she snuggled gently against the blunt side of Caroline's Farberware fillet knife. Even in the dull illumination of sleeping electronics, the knife's finish shot dim, dazzling lines of reflected light towards the ceiling. Caroline lay on the bed next to her; wearing silk pajamas Berry didn't remember her having on the night before. The consciousness of texture, however, led towards half sleeping luxuriation, which quickly grew boring as Caroline seemed too dead asleep to notice her sleeping partner's early morning stirrings. Berry's ascension into the waking world struggled against her natural passivity like a juggernaught, bringing her slowly and unwillingly towards Saturday morning wakefulness.

Berry inched her way out of Caroline's bed, looking forward to the solitude and security of having a sleeping lover in the next room. After all, the soft tantalizing touch from behind caressing the back of the neck or the scented recess of the ear didn't happen on its own. Such seduction required a level of orchestration that could only be achieved by artful separation.

Intimacy is a direct result of comprehensive knowledge, and nothing gave Berry that thrill quite like examining the personal effects of her lovers. The color of a curtain, whether there were pictures or posters, the state of the furniture, all these criterion educated her to the passions and artistries of her intimate companions. Berry surveyed the efficiency's main room, picking up and examining trifles that sparked her curiosity, and then carefully placing them back in the positions she'd found them in.

The knife, however, slept gently in her sleeve.

What was this? Thug's invitation! Berry picked up the still remarkably pristine tract. The names "Mrs. Black" and "1st Holiness Pentecostal Church" reminded her of something she'd read in an occult sampler somewhere, or possibly a book of saints. Luckily, there lounging in its own dark crystalline opulence, was Caroline's sleeping computer. Berry slid into the wheeled, teacup-like chair and fell into the arcane sea of endless information.

Surprisingly, there was a Wikipedia article on Mrs. Black, and after a quick scan, Berry saw the same picture as the one on Caroline's invitation in the body. She'd heard the story before somewhere but she'd had no idea that it was in town. Considering the nature and history of the place it was no wonder it didn't attract the same kind of tourism most locations with that nature of story did.

Standing to stretch her burning tendons in the early morning hours, Berry realized the knife was still carefully tucked in her sleeve. Her proprietary senses tingled, and she ceremoniously rinsed it and respectfully placed it back in its wooden block. Sliding back into her pattern of peeping investigation she opened the refrigerator door, revealing cheap beer, a large pot of beans, assorted odd vegetables, including a half eaten head of cabbage. A candy or nothing girl herself, the most appetizing looking thing she found was a sweet potato, and even that was a stretch. Behind a bloody tub of chicken livers she found a carton of pineapple juice, easily moochable. Helping herself to a full day's supply of vitamin C, she settled back down behind the computer to finish reading.

Caroline awoke to the sound of a brief burst of running water, followed by a few clunks and random shufflings from Berry's explorations. Yawning and stretching her way to her feet, she wandered into the main room where she discovered Berry perusing the Internet. Disheveled bits of hair that had broken from Berry's nighttime pigtails formed a dark halo around her head in the strengthening morning light.

In an uninhibited moment, Caroline placed her right hand gently on Berry's lean, defined neck, then snuggled the bridge of her nose in the warm recess under Berry's jaw. Berry turned in appreciation, placing her left hand on Caroline's tousled head and casually continued her search for information on Mrs. Black.

"Say, that's the picture on the tract, isn't it?" Caroline inquired.
"Uh-huh. The name seemed familiar when I thought of it this morning, so I decided to have a look around. Mrs. Black is apparently quite remarkable" Berry explained.
"Did I tell you about my dream last night?" interjected Caroline.
"No...." Berry hesitated. She knew how bad Caroline's dreams could be. That was part of the danger that made Berry so enchanted with her. Berry knew Caroline was dangerous and unstable, but she didn't act dangerous and unstable. It was almost as if Caroline were the perfect liar. Taking a deep breath, Caroline explained:
"The dream was short, maybe the shortest one. The woman in that," she pointed to the screen, " picture was in my dream, telling me my dreams were dangerous, that I wasn't safe there, or something."
"So, she can really do that?" Berry asked, incredulous. After all, these sorts of witch stories were all over, but almost none of them were actually true, and those that were were still never current.
"Either I'm crazy, or she did. I saw her in another dream before, in the same country church, waving at me. If there's something you know about her, I need to know it too before maybe it's too late," Caroline concluded, looking worried.

Berry clicked on the largest, most believable article she'd found yet. Apparently there were a lot of people who hated Mrs. Black over the years; there were conflicting stories about things she had done. Some stories said she stole all the children from a church nursery, cooked them in some secret recipe, and made an elixir that kept her alive eternally. Others said she'd poisoned a communion with syphilis. Still others said she'd never done anything wrong, and she was just a poor old woman who'd outlived all her friends and lost her birth certificate. The most complete article, by a student of religious sociology in Berkeley named Allison Rice, said something even more outlandish than that.

According to Rice, Mrs. Black was born in 1809 to Phillip Bones and Goodie Franklin Bones in her parents home. Phillip Bones was flunked out of seminary correspondence school for holding "primitive fundamentalist beliefs." Goodie Bones was a woman; apparently no record other than her genealogy remained from that more sexist time. They named their only child Lillith Ivory Bones, after her maternal great-grandmother

Phillip Bones became a cobbler, but his passion for the faith led him to become deacon of 1st Holiness Pentecostal Church. According to Rice's research, Mrs. Black was saved and baptized at the tender age of 3 years old, remarkably young even at that time, on Easter Sunday in 1812. From that time forward, church records indicated she never missed a single service, not even during her seven later pregnancies.

At the age of 16, Lillith Ivory Bones married Conscientious Adam Black, normally referred to as "Mr. C. Adam Black" in records. Two years later, Mrs. Black gave birth to Stalwart Marcus Black, and had six other children over the next fourteen years, two of which, Patience Alice Black and Fortitude Richard Black died of dysentery in 1835, survived by their older brother Marcus, and two younger siblings Precision Adam Black and Chastity Angelina Black. Afterward, two younger children were born, Purity Gertrude Black and Temperance Mary Black.

Rice's in depth biography continued, mentioning the death of Mrs. Black's husband by being kicked to death by a mule in 1852, and the appointment of Mrs. Black that same year as church midwife.

At this point, Rice's biography became more interesting.

In 1854, Mrs. Black revived a child declared dead by a licensed doctor after a drowning incident. In 1855, Mrs. Black cured a case of polio using an unknown tea and a salve containing, reportedly, an extraction of poison ivy. In 1857, she was prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license. During the trial, the head prosecutor was diagnosed with smallpox. After a visit from Mrs. Black, the prosecutor was cured and all charges were dropped. In 1858, Mrs. Black performed an amputation of a gangrenous toe, which reportedly grew back over three months with another mysterious ointment. In 1860, Mrs. Black "gave a stern talking to" to a young mentally challenged boy who was disturbing a sermon. Afterward, the child was reported as having "above average intelligence" in studies.

The juiciest part, however, was not initiated by Mrs. Black at all. In 1861, the bodies of three young black men were found under a compost heap on the property of one Reverend Victor Belforte, Pastor of 1st Holiness Pentecostal Church. The bodies had been beaten, sodomized, and eventually lynched.

There was never any investigation or charges filed. Rev. Belforte wasn't even excommunicated. According to Rice and some of the more believable accounts, several motions were filed in the church minutes by Mrs. Black herself demanding investigation by the church internally of Rev. Belforte, all of which were voted down unanimously. Rice provided a copy of a letter to the editor of The Tribune by a Mrs. C. Adam Black, demanding investigation of Belforte. In response, the editor defended Belforte by claiming the evidence was as setup by the "true sodomites" who supposedly chose Belforte because of his vehement stance against homosexuality.

What made this case noteworthy in that time period, according to Rice, was the obvious homosexuality, and not the act of racist lynching, which was common. Basically, there was no investigation because no one cared what happened to three blacks, even if it was the heinous act of violent anal rape and murder. To compound the issue, all three bodies were the same level of decomposition, insinuating that the crime was committed by an organized group. Common knowledge was that lynch mobs were organized by white churches, and in this case 1st Holiness Pentecostal Church.

Publicly, Mrs. Black did nothing mysterious. However, from the date of the discovery, not a single female member of 1st Holiness Pentecostal Church became pregnant, at a time when child mortality was a whopping 50%. None of Mrs. Black's five living children had been members of the church for two years previous to the incident, for unknown reasons. For two years, not a single pregnancy occurred among the thriving congregation of young, active members.

Then Rice threw the icing on the cake.

In 1863, Mary Folkshire, a pregnant woman visiting from Carolina and relative of a member of the congregation, attended Sunday service. Within thirty minutes, Mary had a violent miscarriage.

Berry stopped to read that line again, and tried to imagine what a "violent miscarriage" must look like. Caroline merely shuddered.

After that incident, a large portion of the congregation split and joined another nearby Pentecostal church. Due to the now infamous story of Mary Folkshire, church records revealed no new members. 1st Holiness Pentecostal slowly dwindled down over the years with no incidents of note until 1923, when the last surviving member other than Mrs. Black died of congestive heart failure. Mrs. Black had been living off a church pension since she was appointed midwife in 1852, and the church assets were rolled over into a care-taking fund. Upon Rice's investigation, it was discovered that Mrs. Black still held the deed on the church, and furthermore Mrs. Black was never issued a death certificate. No attempt has ever been made to have Mrs. Black declared legally dead due to the political cumbersomeness of the church's history.

Caroline did some quick mental math.
"Wait... that means Mrs. Black is almost 200 years old!" she exclaimed.
Berry sat there for an empty moment, still assimilating what all this meant.
"I think this is real..." Berry said quietly, " I mean this is really happening to us..." Berry had seen Caroline the night she stabbed herself, but she'd assumed that was simple insanity, a plague that ran rampant in even her best friends. Berry herself, certainly, was not famous for her mental stability. After all, Berry knew Thug. He and Raz used to hang out by the bar on weeknights while she tried to get free dances from the girls at the Velvet Glove, back before the cops shut that place down. Thug believed in Mrs. Black enough to make him nervous around Caroline for some strange reason, as if he knew something no one else did. Thug was no sucker, either. If he was involved, this was serious business.

However, today, Berry had Caroline all to her self, and that, as the British say, was a more pressing matter.

Animal blood, if you're indiscriminate, is remarkably cheap and easy to get. Sure, you can't just buy it by the bucket at your corner grocery store, but it comes free with all sorts of delectable organs. Hearts, giblets, livers, they all come floating in their own delicious juices by the tub.

Human blood is potent, to be sure, but a mage that uses his own too willingly ends up too faint and scarred to be of much use afterwards. While preferable, the blood of others is difficult to obtain in any substantial amount willingly. Thus, animal blood is the staple choice of the working class diviner who wishes to avoid criminal charges.

Caroline rubbed her right hand over the fresh scab on her stomach, and then looked at the scar on her left hand. She had always been clumsy and prone to accidents, but she'd never thought of herself as being scarred or hacked up looking before. Berry had taken the car and a little money to the wine store to get a magnum of something red; Caroline still had no idea what kind of wine she liked. Regardless, it would be nice if she'd get here already....

Todd strolled into the virgin apartment nonchalantly, with a bottle of dark pink, almost red sparkling wine in either arm, cradled like a set of breast-feeding twins.
"Hey there, Carl," he said, turning Caroline's head away from her old addiction.
"Todd, where's Berry?" Caroline responded, not knowing how to react emotionally to Todd's welcome but uninvited and unexpected presence.
"Oh, Raz finally tracked Berry down to the liquor store. I don't know if you've ever seen them fight, but it gets pretty nasty. We spent three hours trying to break into Raz's car; that crap's not as easy as they make it look on TV," explained Todd.
"Wait... where's my car then?" Caroline asked, trying to tie up the loose ends of her derailed evening.
Todd struggled with the bottle in his right hand, "Oh, I drove it..." POP! The cork flew out of the bottle, hard enough to snap the filament in the ceiling light as it struck, "Sorry about that," Todd rallied, "But I don't think we'll have any use for the light for a while."

"Wake up, Caroline. It's me."

A soft, steady nudge poked Caroline in her shoulder.
"Todd?" Caroline asked, snuggling deeper into her fleshy pillow.
"No, it's not Todd," said the voice, only slightly drier and deeper than Todd's voice. "You're asleep, in a real dream. I'm here to help you."
"Who are you?" Caroline asked in her sleep trance. A human face appeared as Caroline rose to greet the dream phantom, remarkably similar to Todd's. The eyes, however, were made of pure, clear glass, revealing the gray and crimson workings behind them.
"You may call me Glass," said the demon.

"I'll tell you everything you need to know, but you have to let me. Will you accept my story, and all of it? I would never want to intrude on your dreams, after all," said the Glass smoothly. At this moment, Caroline felt all the gravid power of the dream-trance leave her, regaining her full but limited logical processes. Knowledge, after all, was power, and all this Glass wanted to do was educate her. Maybe this was one of those things, like demolition chemistry, where a little knowledge was a lot more dangerous than none at all?
"Yes," she assented, and the power of the trance took hold once more.

"First of all, please let me explain just who, and what, I am. It could be said with some accuracy that I'm your guardian angel. Certainly, I was created by God to watch over and protect you. It's a little more complicated than that, but that would take a thousand years to explain. At any rate, as an angel my specialty is dreams. I'm sorry you couldn't stop the plane crash; I thought maybe there was some way you could stop it."

The Glass paused for a second, considering his options. The plink of some sort of flying insect hitting a windowpane rattled in the background.

"Do you like Todd? I sent you Todd, because I knew you needed someone in your life to make you happy. You seemed lonely in your quest for knowledge. I, of course, always support education. I want you to think of this as a learning experience. You're perfectly safe with me."

The Glass's voice dripped with honey and wisdom, like the maitre de of an expensive Asian restaurant.

"Now, the dreams that I give you, they all come true. They're complex metaphors, but they're all true. Just figure out the symbols, and the dreams tell you what's going to happen, or in some cases, what has happened or is happening. This is not one of those dreams, though sweetling, this is a real dream, just like normal. I'm not real in any physical sense; I only exist through and in dreams."

There was a faint cracking sound, and the tinkle of a tiny piece of broken glass. There was a brief buzz, and then the Glass's hand snapped out and crushed a tiny black bumblebee that floated near his face, flicking its mangled corpse into one of the corners of the dream space.

"I don't want you to be scared, Caroline. Maybe you'll never see me again; I just want you to know that the dreams aren't from some sort of scary dream world, someone who cares about you sent them, and that person is me. I'm not going to lie to you, or try to frighten you, or tell you what to do. There are people out there that just want to use you for the dreams. Don't let them fool you...."

Three more bees entered, this time with no tell tale sounds, each from a different direction. The Glass crushed two of them with Shiva-like quickness, but one of them got through and stung the Glass's temporary dream form on the face.

"Not everyone is like me, Caroline. Someone is trying to cheat the rules," the Glass said, his face beginning to swell. Veins in his forehead began to pop out, and his cheeks flushed bright red.

"It's not fair... there's been no convocation...this is a real dream... that witch should have no power here..." moaned the Glass, as his face continued to swell to inhuman proportions. The wound turned crimson red as it grew, then purple. It formed a white head of purulent material at its center the size of a pea, the swelling itself the size of a grapefruit protruding from the right side of the Glass's face. The Glass's voice became muffled as the swelling filled his mouth.
"That witch.... Mrs. Black... she doesn't want me to warn you... to protect you..." The Glass gasped. He leaned garishly close to Caroline's face, and the giant cyst on his mask burst into a malevolent mix of blood and pestilence...

Caroline started up from her dream, gasping. Who was this Mrs. Black? Worse, what was she?


Posted by FUNKbrs - January 9th, 2008


Chapter 5

On a sleepy Friday lunch break, Caroline pulled two steaming bowls of leftover red beans and rice out of the microwave and placed one in front of Jaleesa on the cramped break room table.

"Berry's been begging me for your number all week," mentioned Jaleesa as she plunged her plastic spoon into her unevenly heated rice, mixing the scalding outside edges with the lukewarm center, " do you want me to give it to her?"
"Wait, you mean she's been asking and you haven't told me?!" whined Caroline.
"Meh, Berry's kind of worthless," explained Jaleesa, "all she ever wants to do is get fucked up and club hop. I figured it wasn't your thing."
"Did she tell you about last weekend? We had a blast!" countered Caroline.
"Well, to be honest, Berry's a dyke, and I figured she was just crushing on you. I know you're freaked out by that kind of shit," admitted Jaleesa.

For the first time since they'd become friends, Caroline realized that there were some things she just couldn't confide in Jaleesa anymore. Up to this point, Caroline had never done anything Jaleesa didn't write the book on. Apparently sexual deviance was the kind of vice even Jaleesa wouldn't touch. Drugs, alcohol, violence, infidelity, Jaleesa had never failed to understand and have the answers for it all. It was a kind of loneliness even Caroline's reclusive lifestyle couldn't prepare her for.

"Please, Berry couldn't handle all this," Caroline said in what she hoped was a decent copy of Jaleesa's voice, pushing up both breasts to emphasis what on another woman would be luscious curves, but in Caroline's case was more like just hanging skin. Jaleesa's head cocked to the side suspiciously, but she decided to get back on topic.
"So, you want her to have your number or not? Or do you need a REAL woman?" questioned Jaleesa, actively diffusing any latent homosexuality with traditional locker room flair.
"I think I'm mainly going to stick with Todd," Caroline replied, "at least he doesn't have to bring his penis in a bag." Jaleesa chuckled, and Caroline relaxed a bit. Caroline had never realized how difficult it was for freaks to fit into so-called "straight" society. Racism isn't the only kind of prejudice, after all.

"I don't have Todd's number, though, and I know Berry has it," continued Caroline, thinking quickly. She did after all, want Berry's number.
"Mmm... you have a point. Hand me that old flyer over there, and a pencil," requested Jaleesa. Obediently, Caroline handed Jaleesa a small brick of Post-It Notes and a Bic mechanical pencil over the table. In bold, looping letters, Jaleesa wrote the numbers 652-0013 and slid the brick back across the table to Caroline.
"There you go. Now I'm going to clock back in so I can get paid for sleeping."

As five o'clock rolled around, Caroline became more and more anxious about calling Berry. Last weekend had been one of the greatest, strangest, and most frightening of her life, and the idea of that being the be-all and end-all of her life scared her in the desperate way a junkie is scared of losing all her dope connections.

For example: What about Todd? They'd had fun last weekend, but she'd never remembered to give him her number. He'd never given her his number, after all. Was it just a one-night stand? Did Todd sleep with every new girl that showed up to The Fool's Card? Berry was Raz's fiancé, though, and Raz spent a lot of time at Todd's.

Thinking like that made Caroline feel guilty and manipulative, even though she was pretty sure that's what Jaleesa would do in her situation. Still, here was Berry's phone number, and if there was one thing Caroline knew, it was what Berry wanted her around for.

Jaleesa had gotten a phone call from her married daughter earlier in the afternoon and barely responded to Caroline's wave on her way out. Caroline slid slowly into her car, savoring the freedom only granted on Fridays. She still had half a pack of cigarettes left over from last week in her center console, so she pulled one out, careful to leave a single inverted cigarette in the box. It was a superstition harkening back to her days of smoking old butts behind the school and trying not to get caught, but as a non habitual smoker, she'd never had enough packs of cigarettes pass through her hands to make it an inconvenience.

Caroline took a long drag of smooth but cheap menthol smoke from her 100-millimeter cigarette. She picked up her bedraggled and much ignored cell phone and dialed Berry's number. Already, she began to feel the glossy slick sensation movie stars must feel schmoozing socially over the phone from the patent leather seats of their limousines. At that point, it was a shame when the robotic voice of Berry's answering machine picked up. Rallying suavely, Caroline used her smokiest voice to allure Berry into a few drinks at The Fool's Card. Even if Todd was just a one-night stand, he wasn't the only fish in the sea. However, if she were going to ignore the attentions of people like Straight Mike, she'd need Berry to pull her away from their blandishments.

It was 6:43 in the evening when Berry had finally finished putting on her make-up. Being presentable to the world was on a long list of things Berry had to finish, or risk spending the rest of the day feeling "unsettled" as she liked to think of it. Perfection, after all, was not a state achieved with mere intent; only through compulsive measurement could some form of order be maintained. Half-measures and dabbling had long since been broken from her nature after years of dynamic emotional turmoil. Controlling the state of her life was impossible, but her hair was definitely a known variable.

Berry turned from the mirror and walked towards her baby: a sleek, matte black phone. Inside its memory was the combined result of five years of social networking proficiency.

She removed the stubby black umbilical chord that connected it to Raz's computer. It's R2-D2-like beep of dismay at being separated from the big mother power grid sounded cute to her ears in its own special way. The only difference between her and the homeless was that tiny black box. It was a dependency, to be sure, but luckily there's a short list of dependencies still condoned by society.

A message from a new number? Hopefully some schmuck hadn't dropped her number to some random horny loser again. A familiar voice, Carl's voice, was on the message, doing what sounded like an impression of a drag queen with a decades long smoking habit.

The contents of the message, however, were quite pleasing to the ears:

"Hey there, Berry. Whadya say you give me a call and we what we did last weekend?" Carl was naïve, true, but it seemed like she had some kind of untapped well of creative perversity inside her. Carl was acceptably attractive, but by no means beautiful. It was the freshness of her personality that attracted Berry to her like a moth to a flame. She'd never met anyone so good at hiding their sexually deviant fantasies. Considering how many Berry had to hide, she could do well to take notes.

Slipping on a mental mask of socialism over her already painted face, she dialed the number Carl left on her phone.

"Hello?" said the familiar, insecure voice.
"Hey there, cutie!" Berry replied, "So... The Fool's Card at 8:00?"
"Of course," Carl said back, in that cute little 'I don't know I sound like a drag queen' voice.
"See you then." Berry closed.
Then, almost as if stolen from a bad 80's movie about New York, Carl said, "Ciao."

Berry could tell this was going to be another crazy night.

Caroline strolled through the shadowed doors of The Fool's Card attempting to coolly smoke an over priced black clove cigarette she'd had offered by some random stranger. The bar was as empty as a church on Super Bowl Sunday, and Raz sat disconsolately drinking overpriced draft alone at the bar. Straight Mike was blissfully preoccupied talking to a pair of obvious drag queens while trying to sip his rum and coke huskily through a straw propped between his fingers.

Caroline tapped Raz on the shoulder, "You wouldn't happen to know where Berry is, would you?"
Raz turned slowly and drawled, "You didn't really expect her to be on time, did you? Besides, she's still driving my car."
"Wait, you mean you're stuck here?" Caroline asked.
"Hah! No, I'm technically stranded at Todd's. Berry has a bad habit of running off with my car while I'm passed out 'so I don't drive drunk'. It's one of the many reasons I'm over there so much." Raz explained
"So, where's Todd?" questioned Caroline, looking around the bar disappointedly
"Oh, Todd's grading papers in his office on campus." Raz told her.
"Hmm.... So, what's going on?" said Caroline, steeling herself for a night of crying alcoholism with Raz.
"Well, I don't know if you know him, but Thug showed up to the club tonight. Last time that happened, someone had sold Straight Mike some fake X, and Thug ended up ripping the guy's face off" gossiped Raz.
"Wait, which one is he?" asked Caroline. She'd seen a lot of bad bar fight movies, and wanted to be prepared if guys in cowboy hats showed up chucking bottles and waving switchblades.
"Thug's the one in the overpriced suit smoking a cigar," pointed out Raz in his detached drawl.
"Wait, which one?" Caroline asked, squinting in the dimly lit club. A cherry the size of a dime glowed into existence after shedding its load of ash. It partially illuminated a shaven face and shades, under what, against all odds, appeared to be a fedora hat.

It was as if Jake Blues himself had gotten out of prison after ten years of fighting in the Folsom Boxing league, sitting alone behind a rickety table in a seedy niche bar.

"Don't stare." Raz warned her in his easygoing monotone. "Thug is probably here on business. He used to work security at The Velvet Glove; he's not so bad to hang out with. He's probably looking for Star again."
"Why would he be looking for Star?" Caroline asked curiously, completely ignorant of who Star was.
"Star's had a coke problem for a while. Whenever she gets in debt or stops doing shows, Thug shows up, takes her to rehab, and she comes back a few weeks later with a couple of extra pounds and religion."

"Oh shit! Scar's here! Watch this, this is going to be funny!"

A tall, lanky but muscular man with a pierced eyebrow entered the bar, paid his door fee, and strolled up to the bartender. As he got closer, Caroline noticed a huge scar extending from the corner of his mouth midway into his cheek. He was shirtless under his leather vest, sporting a waxed chest and gauged nipple rings. As he went to order his drink, the bartender whispered in his ear and pointed down the bar towards the dime-sized replica of hell floating beneath the gaudy fedora. Then the bartender reached into his own tip jar and placed three dollars, the exact amount of the cover charge, into Scar's outside vest pocket. Swallowing visibly, Scar broke into a cold sweat. Briskly turning, he walked out of the bar at a pace that would be considered jogging by any other standard.

"Ha ha!" Raz chuckled, "normally Straight Mike and Scar just ignore each other these days, but it looks like Scar's not taking any chances tonight."
"You mean that scar on his face... that was Thug?" assumed Caroline.
"Well... yeah. It's a small scene. You get in a fight with somebody, you're still gonna see them around. Unless you're Thug, of course," Raz corrected.

A pair of car keys slapped Raz in the forehead and fell into the empty cup in front of him at the bar.
"You wanted these?" Berry said demurely, posing in front of the bar. Raz sighed, turned towards the bartender, and ordered a stout mixed drink.
"So, did I miss anything?" Berry asked Caroline. Raz had already withdrawn into his alcohol, the position he always seemed to be in when Berry was around.
"Some guy came in, saw Thug was here, and left. That's about all I know." Caroline supplied.
"Was it Scar?" Berry giggled.
Caroline nodded, "I think so."
Berry shrieked with schoolgirl laughter, "I guess this means Star's back on blow, then. That's weird... she didn't seem coked out when I saw her last night..."

Berry went slightly stiff, as though her puppeteer had raised her strings a little too high.
"Oh crap...Straight Mike is looking over here. Damnit Raz! Stop making us look so single!" Berry exclaimed, punctuating her exclamation by slapping Raz on the back of the head. In response, Raz chugged his drink and ordered another. The bartender solemnly served the empty cup containing Raz's keys to Berry.

Meanwhile, instead of coming over to annoy the two girls at the bar, Straight Mike walked over towards Thug and whispered in his ear. He pointed towards the trio, and then slunk back over to the queens he'd been talking to previously. Thug took a large hit from his cigar, and killed his neat whiskey. He thumped the cherry from his cigar, wrapped the stub in a napkin, and placed it in his inside pocket. The cherry fell from his fingers in a tiny spray of sparks and dropped cleanly into the ashtray in front of him. He pulled a small card from his suit coat pocket, his hands cupping formally around the card like an usher carrying communion.

"Excuse me. Ms. Parker?" said Thug politely. Caroline turned. It was her last name, after all. And last time she checked, none of the people at the bar with her knew that. She didn't know how to respond, but Thug was being polite, and Raz didn't think he was all bad.
"Yes?" she replied. What else did she have to say to him?
"Mrs. Black has sent me to cordially invite you to 1st Holiness Pentecostal Church Sunday" Thug said formally. A bead of sweat formed on his forehead and trickled down under his black-framed shades to drip from his chin. His eyes were covered by the dark, almost matte black lenses, hiding his expression.
"She asked me to give you this..." he continued, and handed her the card.
"Thank you," Caroline said instinctually. Thug sighed with relief.
In a much coarser tone, he parted," Alright, you guys have a nice evening." Thug turned and left almost as fast as Scar had, nervously relighting his cigar on the way out.

"What was that all about?" Caroline asked Berry.
"I'm not sure. What does the card say?" Berry asked with kittenish curiosity. Caroline looked at the card, and realized it was actually a bible tract. The tract was folded in a Z pattern, and the front panel was a picture of a cottage-like church surrounded by a tall, thick hedge. A black wrought iron fence, in turn, surrounded the hedge. The address read 646 Cottage Church Lane.

Exactly like her dream.

"I think I want to get out of here," Caroline told Berry. Berry was still holding the plastic cup with Raz's keys in it, a parody of ice. Raz had killed another drink since Berry had shown up. The bartender gave Berry a knowing look.
"Yeah, I know how you feel. Whatever can make Thug sweat is something I don't want to stick around for," Berry agreed. She took Caroline's hand, and led her to Raz's car.
"Wanna go to your place?" Berry asked.
"Yeah, why not?" Caroline answered. Nonchalantly, Berry opened Raz's car door, locked it, and then threw the keys in the driver's side seat.
"If Raz is sober enough to jimmy the lock with a coat hanger, he'll be sober enough to drive home," Berry explained. Then she reached into Caroline's purse, snatched her keys, and raced her to the car.

It's startling how big of a bong you can fit in a tiny purse.

Grayish white smoke filled the air of Caroline's efficiency. It appeared, however, that under all of Berry's façade of social sophistication, down inside she was just trying to re-enact the 80's cartoon "Gem" with her life, with her playing one of the 'bad girl' characters. Thanks to the power of file sharing technology, Berry had access to Rainbow Bright, Strawberry Shortcake, Punky Brewster, and all the other cartoons that had filled the void in her life left by her parents' complete inability to raise a child, let alone coexist peacefully with one another.

While Caroline proudly displayed her computer skill in downloading cartoons, Berry snooped through the house looking for a nice fuzzy blanket. Lesbian seduction, after all, required slightly different tools than the heterosexual kind. When she came back, Caroline was holding a bright, shiny knife in her left hand, with that strange, dreamy expression she'd had that first night they'd made love. Caroline's eyes never left Berry's as she gently drew the blade across her own lower abdomen.

At first, no blood exited the wound as the pressure of the blade reduced circulation to the affected flesh. Berry stood there, holding the fluffy blue blanket, as blood began to well from the shallow cut and formed droplets that hung from Caroline's slight love-handles. And to think, she was the one attempting the seduction. A call of blood, however, cannot be denied, at least not by Berry.

Berry fell to her knees, and pulled down Caroline's boyish khaki's and panties. Fresh blood was not to be wasted on mere clothing.

The Glass gleamed happily. Everything was going according to plan.

In Caroline's dream, she sat in a cozy, candle lit room. Across from her sat Mrs. Black. How she knew this, she didn't quite know. Mrs. Black smiled, and handed her a cup of tea.
"One lump or two?" she asked pleasantly.
"Two please," Caroline answered. Tea, she could deal with. If the worst thing about Mrs. Black was dreams about tea, she was in the clear.
"So, do you know what's been happening to you?" Mrs. Black asked in the same tone one would use to ask about the weather. Uncertainty opened a black hole inside Caroline.
"Not really..." She stammered in answer.
"Make sure you come and see me at the church then, dearie. It's not safe here for you. In fact, you'd better wake up right now."

And she did.

It was a show cut, a mere scratch. The kind of thing fakirs and shamans have used for centuries to prove their impunity to pain. It burned more that it stung, but that was most likely due to Berry's intervention. Berry lay sleeping at this point, snuggling a fancy and overpriced knife Caroline had been given as part of a set. She'd never needed to use a nine-inch fillet knife, so it had sat unused in its wooden block. Maybe she'd used it once to open a tub of chicken livers or something, but it was curious to see Berry act so attached to it.

Caroline nudged Berry, who was now soundly asleep. Oh well, there was always morning...


Posted by FUNKbrs - January 4th, 2008


Chapter 4

The funny thing about prophecy is how boring and mundane it can be. Sure, seers have prophetic dreams about disasters, wars, famines, and fires, but the ones that tend to be more reliable are the ones who have dreams about traffic tickets, broken dishes, finding a quarter on the street, or walking into a room with a blown light bulb. You just don't hear about mailbox psychics, who can tell if they've received a bill or a check just by resting their hands on their mailbox. You don't hear about psychics who can look at an old man driving a Cadillac and can tell whether or not that turn signal means "left turn" or "left on." In fact, you could have a prophetic dream every night for a week and have all of them come true and not even notice, if they were about things like gas stations or what outfit a friend is going to wear. The ability to finish other people's sentences is normally considered more annoyance than clairvoyance, in the final analysis.

Just as the stripes of a tiger can look as mundane as overgrown underbrush to the untrained eye, the dreams of a seer can appear to be just normal dreams to the uninitiated. Those who have learned to cope with tiger attacks wear masks on the backs of their heads so tigers think they're being watched, and don't strike.

The Glass gleamed smugly, considering this. You can't wear a mask on the back of your mind.

Six concerned emails. Considering that Caroline was by no means e-popular, that was a lot. Sure, there was a bunch of irrelevant spam breaking it all up, but it was comforting to know so many complete strangers actually gave a damn about her well being.

As an Internet nerd, Caroline could only respond one way; she made a topic bragging about sex with Todd. None of these people would ever meet her or him, so she felt free to embellish as only a hardcore forum regular could. In the thread, she described her own body as hard and lean, with rippled abs and perfectly rounded hips. Instead of describing Todd as dorkishly emaciated and covered with stubbly once-shaved body hair, she described him as having the body of a middle weight prize fighter.

It was a boring weeknight. You can't expect one good weekend to turn someone into the life of the party.

It was strange, the way things she had cared about so much meant so little to her now. There was a time when she would have happily spent a weekend arguing that the only difference between Andrew Jackson and Hitler was that the Jews had more allies than the Native Americans did. These days, though, she was more concerned with art, wine, and food, all things that are best enjoyed with company.

Caroline had had such a great time over the past few days, she had difficulty believing she ever settled for whiling her hours away trying to explain to some 13 year old that no matter how big of an ass hat George W. Bush may be, he's not a fascist dictator because he hasn't abolished the House and Senate yet.

For once in her life, Caroline had felt wanted, smart, funny, and capable. Her acne and bad fashion sense had ruined any chance of her being a socialite in high school, but when she was at Todd's, she felt she was part of the in-crowd. The Internet had always reinforced her sense of alienation. Just being a female user in a male dominated medium had destroyed any real empathy she could have felt for her fellow posters.

Berry and Raz, though, made her feel like a real human being. There was nothing she could do or say that would make them reject her; they actually appreciated her quirks. She could suck the eyeballs out of a live rabbit, and not only would they not be disgusted, they'd be fascinated. She'd never thought of herself as half the extrovert they acted like she was, but the more she saw of the social scene around her, the more she realized how great of a time she'd been missing out on. The best part was the feeling that things were only getting started.

She still had to sleep sometime, though.

Tired, and with that boiled-eyeball feeling that only a boring night on the computer can give, Caroline trudged into bed. Slug-like with sleep, she oozed out of her clothes on the way to the bedroom, leaving her dirty laundry on the floor behind her like some sort of slime trail. She didn't so much as climb into bed as she did inject herself into it. Almost instinctually, her left hand crept out from beneath the depths of her quilts and sheets and laid her glinting glasses on the pile of books she used for a night stand next to her bed.

The Glass smiled, as much as a thing such as the Glass could be said to smile. In this place, even when it's ability to touch the world was weak; the Glass still had the power to command.

Soft green light shined off of two small reflective discs. In this world, there was always a crack, and it had been found. The left foot slid from its hiding place towards the floor, and the left hand pushed away from its soft support. The left eye opened, and led the foot to the place where the reunion could occur.

The hand found its tools there in a small, recessed alcove. The knife was found in a dark wooden block, and the blood revealed itself in a cold closet. Soon, more blood would be needed. Purer and more plentiful, yes, but for the purposes of this night and until the spiral came around again, this blood was sufficient.

The Hand thought about all of this very carefully. It was only alive during the convocation, after all, and besides, thinking on its own was still a novel experience for it...

Caroline's dreams were myriad over the next few days, but all were equally and thankfully mundane. This time, she was a tiny hamster in an exercise wheel. At first, walking in the wheel seemed futile to her logical mind, but she noticed with each revolution of the cage the bars grew thicker and stronger.

With the compulsion only a dream can carry, she continued running in the track. Soon, she began to notice her body lengthen and strengthen along with the bars of the cage. Her tiny hamster ears rounded and dropped as she ran, her little forepaws became more articulate as her rear legs lengthened, and her gait began to change from quadrapedal to bipedal as she passed through an ape-like proto human form.

The cage continued to expand as she ran, her fur receding and being replaced by pale sweating skin. The spokes of the wheel flattened to a solid floor and slowed down to more of a walking pace. On the left edge, however, the spokes sprang upright into chest high tripods, each topped with a block of dry, familiar Styrofoam.

On the right edge white and yellow roses appeared, pre cut and resting in trays. The wheel slowed to a strolling pace, and Caroline began plucking the flowers with her right hand and arranging them into the floral stands that had formed on her left.

She placed a single yellow rose into each block as it passed. Each tray held three yellow roses, three white roses, and a single five petaled violet. The wheel was made of twenty-eight flat panels, each three feet wide and four feet long, each panel with a tray on the right and a floral arrangement stand on the left.

After she'd placed a single yellow rose in each of the twenty-eight blocks, she placed another six inches to it's right. Another cycle completed, she placed the third yellow rose below the first two to create a perfect inverted equilateral triangle.

She didn't know why, but the numbers seemed very clear and important to her. She looked at the floor and knew the panel was three feet by four feet. Deep in her gut, she could feel where each flower belonged, like a Cajun chef who sprinkles in spices with his bare hands, measuring by feel and by tradition as opposed to some hard, cold, stainless steel measuring cup.

Three cycles complete, she began again with the white rose, assembly line fashion, inserting them in another equilateral triangle, this one sharing the same center point with the original yellow trio. The combination of roses re-created the Star of David, with six points.

The wheel slowed again, with only the five petaled violets left to place. On this, the seventh revolution, she placed each violet in the center of the star. As she placed the final one, the wheel crawled to a stop. Fully human, now, Caroline was finally free to leave the wheel.

As she stepped outside, she noticed a fat black bee crawl out of the final violet. She followed it with her eyes as it flew to catch up with her. Ignoring it, she strolled in a random direction away from the wheel, only to be confronted by a very solid looking set of bars.

As she stared into the blank limbo that is the edge of the world of dreams, the bee sussurated directly in her ear. When her head turned towards the right, the black bee flew a few feet away, and then circled. With nothing better to do, she followed it.

The wood chips that had made up the floor hitherto began to transition towards compost along the bars between her and the abyss. The ground she walked became harder packed and drier, forming a kind of forest trail through the softening soil.

The bee continued to lead the way as the rich black soil gave way to luscious flower bearing vines, like one would find in the shade of a large oak tree. These became interspersed with low azalea bushes, bordering a tall hedge, more than a foot taller than Caroline's head.

The hedge, however, continued on through the bars and out the other side, blocking all view of what lay beyond. The path cut through the hedge by means of a leafy green portcullis, almost like a doorway arch made of living plants. As she spied through the portal, she saw a small, cottage-like church in the distance. On it's porch sat a tall, thin woman drinking tea from an antique teapot.

The bee flew away into the garden surrounding the church and the woman, dressed in a modest black ankle length dress and tight, silvery white bun, smiled and waved, like a lonely old grandmother running across a grown grandchild in a supermarket. In the first human voice Caroline had heard since leaving Jaleesa that afternoon, the old woman spoke.

"See you Sunday!" her brittle voice called. Above her head, the address on the doorway read "646"...

6:46 AM, the alarm clock read, just inches away from Caroline's bleary-eyed face. Fourteen whole minutes before her first alarm was even supposed to go off, and she was already awake.

"Well," she thought as she rolled over, "at least I didn't have one of those crazy blood dreams."

In the dish drainer, the soft pre-light of the dawn sun glinted off of the still wet plate and knife.


Posted by FUNKbrs - January 4th, 2008


Chapter 3

Monday, the word corrupted from moon-day, the second day of the week, when the powers of original creation still linger in the air. Sunday was powerful for primary causes, but Monday, Monday was the day of power for those things contrary to normality.

The Glass was one such thing.

So much blood, and so pure. So...available. Where there was life, there was always blood, but not so cooperative, not so willing. The dim glint of the television shined like the teeth of a child-molesting clown. The Glass knew compulsion; the Glass was compulsion, but this was like it's human embodiment. For once, even the Glass felt compelled.

Hell, someone had even gone through the trouble of tying the girl's right arm behind her back this time.

There was a different knife. There was different blood. In this world, the Glass was omnipresent. The hand, the foot, and the eye were always with the girl. The plate was a stretch, but the power of this day was close enough to suffice.

The girl's eye opened, but the rest of the body was held in place. This time, there was no need to move, although there was no real capacity for movement. The glint of one shining surface touched the glint of the shining eye, and the dream began...

In Caroline's dream, she was lying on a bench, surrounded by the scent of roses. She tried to sit up, but she found herself wrapped in thorny vines. She opened her eyes, and the center of her vision was filled with a huge, pink rose, the size of a large man's widespread hand.

The flower retreated from her face, and she could see that a single thorny vine supported it. The flower acted like an eye mounted on a tentacle, scanning her body from head to toe. Like a breeder inspecting a newly acquired purebred, the petals of the flower gently touched her naked body.

Caroline noticed that despite being wrapped in sharp brambles, she hadn't been pricked by a single thorn.

As if satisfied with its acquisition, the flower retreated again. Surprisingly, painlessly, the vines encapsulating Caroline gently constricted and pulled her into a sitting position.

In her new seated posture, Caroline could see an endless field, every inch of which was covered by the creeping vine. Smaller pink roses in various states of bloom studded the ground. The large bloom was suspended off the earth like a rearing cobra, the petals spread like the hood of the snake as it stared at her eyelessly. In total, it was raised five feet above the ground, just slightly above eye level.

In her right ear, Caroline heard a rustling of dry leaves. The rustle grew louder and louder, like a ten year old walking through a gutter in the fall. She tried to turn her head to see what was making the noise, but the vines tightened around her.

For the first time in this dream, Caroline could feel the thorns.

The giant pink rose reared back, as if to strike. Caroline's eyes widened in irrational horror at its vegetable anger. Just as the vine was about to attack, a slender black rope whipped around the flower, like a lasso on a young calf.

Before the rope could wrestle the vine to the ground, brown withering death spread along the vine, turning its verdant expanse into dry brush. The thorns around Caroline's neck sharpened, then suddenly released as the vines that held them instantaneously turned into dusty twigs.

As Caroline tried to stand, she woke up...

...Only to find she was naked, and strapped to the couch. Todd's couch. And Berry was asleep, with her head resting in Caroline's lap. On the coffee table across from Caroline was a mostly empty IV bag containing the dregs of an entire pint of blood.

As Caroline looked around the room, she felt a dry, crackling sensation from her mouth all the way down her chest and onto her stomach. As a kid Caroline had often covered her hand in glue, let it dry, and the flexed her hand, feeling the dry, brittle glue crack and split as fresh air touched her suffocated skin. It felt like that, only less dramatic.

Looking at her restraints, she saw only her right dominant side was strapped to the arm rail of the cheap futon she'd spent the night on. Under the couch, she felt her right leg similarly bound. Her left hand and foot were unrestrained.

It took a clumsy minute, but Caroline was able to unhook the bulky chrome buckles on her glossy black leather restraints left-handed. The more she moved, the more crackling she felt. Tiny bits of whatever was caked on her face and chest fell into her lap like Greek baklava pastry without the syrup.

Caroline ran her hand over her breastbone to brush whatever it was that had dried on her. Only when she brought her hand up to see what was on it did she realize what it was: dried blood. Dried blood covered Caroline from chin to navel in a pattern of dribbles from the sides of her mouth like a thinner, more sinister kind of candle wax.

Now free to move, she gently pushed Berry's face out of her lap, trying not to wake her in what, according to the light in the window, was predawn sleep. However, she encountered more of that strange, crackling resistance.

Unlike Caroline, Berry's angelic sleeping face was covered from forehead to the point of her chin, the entirety of which was glued by the protein rich blood to the tops of Caroline's thighs. Still warm and dreamy from the afterglow, Berry's face slipped from her lap onto the couch without waking.

Not certain if she was still in some kind of freakish dream, Caroline's demeanor became almost ethereal as she wandered into Todd's small bedroom towards his bathroom. Pale white and naked except for the dried blood, she looked down at the bed to see both Raz and Todd shirtless with huge bruises on the insides of their left arms. Todd's chest was still carved with Caroline's name. Raz's chest was devoid of tattoos, but patterned with old deep scars, many of which spelled "Berry" in various styles and calligraphy. Some of them were not so old, but still disturbingly deep.

Todd's Panasonic clock/radio/alarm read 5:26 AM in harsh red letters. Plenty of time to take a shower, put on last night's clothes, eat breakfast, and make it to work on time, her half sleeping brain told her. Reflexively, and with uncharacteristic grace, Caroline slid behind the shower curtain and eased up the hot water. The cut on her left hand had scabbed up tight and clean, but otherwise the warm sudsy water failed to reveal any fresh physical damage on her skin despite all the blood.

Enraptured in sauna-like ecstasy, Caroline felt a soft set of exploratory lips on her lower back. Reaching behind her to pull Todd's face closer to her own, her hand instead found Berry's long locks. Still sleepy, Caroline rested her hand on Berry's head as her lips slid over Caroline's slight love-handles towards her navel as Berry eased into the shower with her.

"Hey Carl," Berry whispered in Caroline's left ear after her still bloody face slid between Caroline's humble breasts and across her neck. Only the sharp digging of Berry's nails into her right shoulder grounded Caroline to reality as the memory of last night's escapade returned to her.

Not Todd. Berry. But Caroline had never had a lesbian experience before. Why now?

Berry wriggled her face into Caroline's neck like a suckling kitten, using the friction of flesh on soapy flesh to soften and remove the blood from the night before. Berry recounted to Caroline in a lover's whisper what they had done earlier. How Berry had strapped Caroline to the couch while she had been sleeping, how she'd held her slumbering eyes open with scotch tape and forced Caroline to watch as she tapped Todd and Raz's veins to fill the pint bag with fresh blood, how Berry had forced Raz and Todd out of the room, how she had punctured the bag with an ornamental knife and forced Caroline to drink, how erotic Caroline had become once she'd tasted the blood, how she had writhed in ecstasy as Berry poured blood over her face and breasts, how Berry had fallen asleep licking salty blood from Caroline's body as Caroline pushed Berry's head hard between her legs...

It's times like these that make it a real bitch when the hot water runs out.

At 6:30 Monday morning Berry was dressed in silk pajamas and fast asleep on the couch again, but this time deliciously clean. Caroline slipped into worn New Balance shoes Jaleesa had picked out after her squeamish incident yesterday and strolled down the stairs like a jolly sailor who'd just gotten lucky the night before to look where Berry had parked her car.

Thirty minutes to get home, thirty minutes to change and eat, and another thirty to squeak into work on time. Normally Caroline's biological clock left her a couple of minutes late, but these days she was feeling more and more in tune with the cyclical nature of things going on around her.

Stepping into her apartment for the first time since her incident, she was glad to be alone with her embarrassment. Compared to last night, there was hardly any blood spilled at all. Looking at the state of the place, it was pretty clear she owed Jaleesa lunch, though.

Jaleesa stumbled into work sixteen minutes late with Caroline pulling the Cheshire cat face at her from over the top of the front desk.

"What's got you in such a great mood?" demanded Jaleesa grumpily. She'd spent the last night dealing with her oldest son's baby mama drama.
"Well, mainly I'm just happy I've got the kind of friends that would wash the blood off my sheets while I bang some hot guy I'd just met that weekend," said Caroline in a voice that sounded like a female version of Frank Sinatra.
"Yeah, well, friends like that don't exactly come cheap. For example, you owe me lunch...." countered Jaleesa.
"No problem..."quipped Caroline a little too fast.
"Wait! I'm not even CLOSE to finished yet," Jaleesa continued, "...at Red Lobster. AND you're doing all the wreathes for Reverend Johnson's funeral."
"The Johnson Funeral?! But Reverend Johnson had a congregation of over two thousand!" whined Caroline in a voice that sounded a lot more like her old self. Jaleesa smiled a bit, happy to have taken a little wind out of Caroline's sails.
"That reminds me. Here's the orders on it we've gotten so far. And yes, at least five of them want a Bible laminated to the backboard opened to a specific verse. You know how nuts they go when you mark the wrong one. And notice how I said 'you' and not 'we,'" said Jaleesa.

Sometimes, no matter how crazy your weekend was, it's still Monday when you wake up.