To more fully enjoy this story in living, breathing HTML,
please visit our website at:
/~vivian
Now offering over 140,000 words of pure prurience!
--------------------------------------------------------
Journey to Sxtlan
by Vivian Darkbloom
Synapse iv
The next morning, I dreamt I woke up. The alarm went off, hands
dripping over the edge of consciousness, and I got up to go to my
morning classes, but I couldn't find my underwear, and then when
I got there and tried to write down today's date, the pencil
melted through the page, so I turned to the person next to me and
said "They really shouldn't sell these at the bookstore, because
it's really a mean trick to play on students early in the
morning, particularly if they're going to go about breaking the
laws of physics by occupying the same space as another object at
the same time."
The other person kind of laughed sympathetically.
Then I woke up. It was difficult to drag myself out of bed, but I
somehow managed, and lugging my books, I stumbled down the
stairs. Everywhere it was really dark, but the clock said it was
time to get up, and it wasn't dripping this time, so I figured I
should believe it. All around I couldn't see a thing, owing to
the unusual absence of light, but nobody else seemed to be
complaining so I just kept on with what I was doing. Maybe I just
hadn't opened my eyes wide enough. I went downstairs to the
doorway of our dorm, looking out over the grassy quadrangle
between the residential halls, and there was Cliff. Only, it was
twilight now, sunset, even though I had just gotten up. I had
missed a whole day of classes. How would I ever catch up?
"The crack between worlds," he said grinning. "Twilight."
I sat down beside him, but something wasn't right. I knew I must
still be sleeping, and it was still a dream.
With great effort, I roused myself from the dream, dragging
myself up out of bed. Something was different somehow. I was in
the middle of a grassy meadow, and when I strode over to the
half-wall surrounding it, I found myself gazing over a sheer
drop, into a mountainscape of misty green grass-covered steep
peaks. Lazily, the shrouds of white fog crept, swirling, through
the valley. Around me on adjacent Andean mountaintops were the
rugged trapezoidal shapes of castillos in basalt and limestone,
angular squared-off stone figures perched on pinnacles above
flourishing terraced farmlands. I heard the sounds of pan-flutes
accompanied by singing and strumming on metal charango strings.
I knew this could not be it, but there was a woman nearby smiling
at me, dark-skinned with curly hair. A young girl stood beside
her, of the same features but cast in the mold of a half-matured
body. The girl pirouetted to and fro absently in some silent
game, a vague smile playing across her face.
Then I woke up. Not getting up, I opened one eye, and examined my
surroundings. The sheets against my skin felt more acutely real
than anything in the past few instances of reality. I heard a
match go off, and bubbling water, the intake of breath.
A significant pause, then I heard an exhale, and clouds of
sweet-smelling marijuana smoke rolled by. Yep, this was it: my
college dorm room.
"Dude, better hurry, or you'll miss your pre-breakfast bongload."
I rolled over, groaning softly. Still, the thought of facing
breakfast before having at least one bongload was daunting
indeed. Ron, my roommate positioned the face-piece where I could
reach it, and thoughtfully lit the match while I drew the dense
cloud of smoke through the tube towards me. Then, at the perfect
moment, let go of the carburetor hole and inhaled the intense
headrush, while stars and galaxies played on my visual plane
before me, until finally I let it go, exhaling a cloud of thick
tarry smoke into the middle of the room.
Just then the resident proctor, Sherry the bull-dyke, walked by
our open door.
"Shit!" I said.
"Quick!" my roommate gestured for me to let go, stashing the bong
deftly in the cranny underneath the desk.
Too late, Sherry the proctor had seen us! And there was a big old
bag of pot right there in the middle of the desk! Boy, were we in
for it now!
Menacingly she backtracked, reversing her steps, and
deliberately, slowly, stepped into our room, face like a
bloodhound sniffing, sensing something amiss, ferreting out
mischief. Her cold unfeeling eyes hidden behind silvered,
symmetrical mirrors, the only sign of life was her gently heaving
breath, visible in the rise and fall of her clearly visible
cleavage, carefully revealed by the cut of her blouse. It was
plain from the pronounced nipple-bumps that she wore no bra.
Vicious, sharp spikes ringed her neck and wrists. Savage leather
boots, laced nearly up to her knees, sounded on the hollow floor
of our third-floor room like the knell of a hammer striking
coffin-nails.
Her eye fell on the bag of pot, and I felt my heart racing. The
smell of her feminine sweat mingled with the pot-smoke lingering,
drawing out my fight-or-flight instinct.
Ron made a desperate, half-hearted reach for the bag, though it
was obviously too late for any futile attempt to conceal it. With
a swift, loud, "snap!" the nasty leather strands of her black
quirt struck the top of the desk, between Ron's hand and the
illicit bag. The former, he withdrew sheepishly.
Disdainfully, she picked up the clear plastic sack and held it up
to examine the contents.
"Disgusting," she finally said.
"Please ma'am,. . ." began Ron.
Her gaze turned icily onto him. "That's Mistress Sherry to you,
insect!"
The proctor held up the bag to the light once more. "Seriously,
guys. How can you even stand to smoke this crap? I have much
better shit than this. You should come talk to me. Here, I'll
leave you a few buds. Oh, and I got some really good acid coming
in in a few days."
"Acid?" I mumbled. "I don't do drugs."
Both of them looked at me curiously. "Hey!" I protested
defensively. "Cannabis isn't a drug. It's medicine."
____________________________________________________________
Soon I was downstairs waiting for Cliff. Man, I couldn't wait to
tell him all about the Feistel Networks and modulo-two
polynomials, right there in the mosaic! Now of course, I couldn't
exactly tell him everything; like about the girl. The cool, clear
lake was a trip, though. I wondered if he knew anything about it.
Or maybe it was all just my imagination? But it had felt so real!
And the old lady, just like he had said. I wondered if maybe it
happened to be the same old witch he had gotten the peyote
buttons from in the first place. Where on earth was he?
I waited there for a while, deciding to skip my morning class, as
I sat on the multicolored grey cement steps feeling the sky
pulsate and watching the lawn breathe, listening to "Dark Side of
the Moon." I listened to it a couple of times, because now it had
all these details in it I had never heard before. And the words
made a lot more sense than they ever had. Some weirdo hung out
for awhile sitting in the middle of the lawn playing doofy folk
songs on a guitar, but fortunately my headphones drowned it out.
I had to change batteries, right before the third time through
"Great Gig in the Sky."
Then, after what seemed like just a few minutes, I looked at my
watch, and several hours had gone by. For some reason I wasn't
particularly worried, but I was curious, and wondering about how
my friend's long strange trip had been. Heck, maybe he had found
himself shacked up with some really gorgeous broad, who knew. I
thought maybe I would stroll by his room and see what anybody had
heard.
When I got there, Cliff's roommate was sitting at his desk, amid
a pile of papers covered with curling glyphs and diagrams,
studying physics beneath a blazing white harsh bare bulb of a
drafting light.
He looked up at me impatiently.
"Uh," I stammered, "Have you seen Cliff around today?"
"Cliff?" asked the roommate. "You must be joking."
"Why?" I asked, taken aback.
"Didn't you know? I thought everybody did."
"What?" I asked.
"He's been gone for a month now. Independent study off in India
or Latin America or something. I didn't really pay attention.
Take a look for yourself."
He gestured to Cliff's side of the room. It was totally empty. A
bare mattress even, without any sheets on it. "But. . ." I must
have seemed somewhat disoriented. "He can't -- he was here last
night!"
The roommate shrugged. "Must've been someone else. He's been gone
a month. To the day, almost. " And he turned back to his studies.
____________________________________________________________
Beside a garden wall, richly bedecked with fragrant jasmine,
buzzing with insects, I gazed out at the mysterious mosaic.
Reeling desperately with sadness, I steadied myself by fingertips
against the rough surface of brick. Where was the girl? Had it
all been an illusion? Was it all an illusion right now? I felt
like I was living in some outlandish story concocted solely for
decadent pleasure. Butterflies fluttered and flitted, now and
then landing with wings still pulsing slowly, drinking sweet
nectar from bodaciously blooming blossoms.
The words of the old medicine woman rang in my head: "The coyote
has been powerful in your mind, but still you have managed to
find your spirit guide." And she gestured at the girl, my
beloved, the light of my life, now vanished, having possibly
never existed in the first place.
A faint rapid fluttering behind me. I whirled around to see a
hummingbird.
For a seeing eternity, the hummingbird hovered and darted, eying
me, curiously fascinated. So was I in return, hypnotized by the
hypnotic movement, its fitful flighty flight, until finally it
landed softly on a sprig of the fragrant blooming.
I felt a strange attraction, as I had for the girl. What was the
meaning behind the mystery? Could the hummingbird possibly solve
the polynomial equation or inequalities defining the pattern of
the mosaic? Could it take me back to my sweet lover, back to the
delicate arms that had so delicately, so sweetly wrapped around
me that night?
For a seeming eternity we communed, I and the hummingbird.
____________________________________________________________
Only because it was my turn to score the bag of pot for the guys,
and because our usual dealer was out of town at a Rainbow Family
event, that I found myself ascending the gothically themed
staircase towards the looming abode of Mistress Sherry, our
Resident Proctor. The mushrooms were just starting to come on in
the glorious mid-morning sunlight, before I stepped into the dark
curtained hallway.
Back in those days, "Goth" hadn't actually been invented yet,
aside from the long-ago Gothic Period in art and architecture
during which architects architected tall elongated pointy arches
for ornate churches to the 13^th century melodies of Leonin and
Perotin and their troubador and trouvere contemporaries, fearing
God, Satan, and the Holy Inquisitors, the FBI and TSA, or
whatever they happened to be called back then. Such fears leading
to the dark fantasies of like Bosch's garden and Poe's
preternaturalization, to zombies and vampires and demons and the
like, all to embraced by chique sophisticates emulating evil for
the aim of social ascent among the young and foolish, whose
underworldly associations lent themselves also to the procurement
of high quality psychedelics, which was the sole connection with
which I found myself drawn to the vicinity.
My skin crawled as I accidentally brushed the faux-spiderwebs,
mingled with some of authentic, organically grown variety, strung
from black iron wrought fencework that had been brought in
especially for atmosphere. I inched up the volume on Donovan's
"Sunshine Superman," in a vain attempt to ward off the
creepy-crawlies the place made me feel. Fake bats dangled on
elastic, bouncing slowly, almost imperceptibly up and down for no
obvious reason. As if they were actually alive. Or they might
have been.
Also featured in the decorations were several tombstones and
ornate silver crosses. The walls were textured in an mixture of
rust, moss, and verdigris, trimmed tastefully here and there with
a red dripping substance that appeared to be blood.
The effects seemed a lot more real on account of the powerful
psychedelics that were commencing to wash over my brain, and I
went in and out of believing that the bats were indeed real, of
the vampiric variety.
With a tremorous gulp, I reached out to knock for the door with
the word "Sherry" engraved on an antique wooden nameplate, but
before my knuckles touched, the door began to swing open with a
loud creak -- so loud that it was clearly audible through the
blaring of Donovan. Nervously, I switched off the music.
"Um, hello?" I offered.
No reply from the sinister cryptlike kinky blackness within. Er,
"Inky" I mean. Inky blackness. Jet black, the deepness of the
depths. Other than most of the jets I've been on were sleek and
silvery, the blackness was very jetlike. Unless they were talking
about the jet stream, which isn't really black either, but high
up in the atmosphere and filled with clouds.
The blurring blared through my blood, surging from the spirit of
the mushroom saying "eat me." I felt myself growing with strange
excitement as I inched (or millimetred more like) towards the
vaultlike terrifying subterran depths to which I had ascended,
the heavenly infernal vault of purgatory, heavily dark with deep
obscurity and foreboding.
____________________________________________________________
[Next]
_______________________________________________________
For more stories, please visit our site:
/~vivian