Spooky Weird Cryptic Creepy
OK. I was bound to eventually talk about this. I had briefly skimmed at the edges of it a couple times. However it seems the time I just dive right in and stab it to the musings board. Just so it is over and done with.
Well, … $#!+… Where do I even begin? Do I start at the beginning where all that existed were books and half baked bull dung? Do I begin with the mediums and hacks? The crackpot jobs of insanity? Hmmm… well I guess I already started in by teasing the disappointments… let’s begin with the small group of misfit brainiacs that adopted a crazy person into their circle of shenanigans.
I was in my first 4yr stretch at a PAC 10 college studying film, philosophy, and theater. I immediately made some friends that liked to RPG on the weekends, within the first month of dorm life. We had a few games span throughout half the year and when the last one ended one friend (Mitch), asked if I wanted to join a new game with his class mate in the humanities department. I agreed and when the next month rolled around we all met in a dormitory I had never been in before across campus. Mitch’s friend was to be our DM (dungeon master). I only knew Mitch and he introduced me to three others. His, as he put it, close friends. We all made our greetings to one another. They seemed pleasant and normal. Your average run of the mill college students. Then the DM showed up (Stacey). She was tall, carrying with her a large duffle bag around her shoulder and holding a small collection of folders and hardbound books hugged to her chest. Her hair was glistening black. As if she had just gotten out of the shower. Her skin smooth and pale. She actually looked like she hadn’t gotten any sleep in days. She was also wearing what seemed to be a well worn ensemble of emo/goth clothing. Black lace and silk. A long draping skirt with blood red trim. And of course about nine or ten necklaces adorned with sliver pendants and what I can only assume to be costume jewels. Bracelets for days on both arms and black nail polish. Her face was calm in a expression of awareness and complacency. Her one feature that overshadowed everything else was her eyes. Deep piercing green with almost overly dilated black pupils. She would have looked haunting if she was not so pretty. The shape of her face looked as if it was sculpted from marble. Her voice on the other hand was normal and plane.
Here is where I will skip to a couple years later (the time it took for the game to reach its completion). In that time I got to know the group members quite well and we became quite close. We would hang out whenever we could when we weren’t gaming. Going out to breakfast, lunch, or sometimes diner. Catching up to see a new movie release at the cinema, or to go to the annual Rocky Horror Picture Show festival before Halloween. One night, when we were all hanging out in Mitch’s dorm room, smoking cigarettes, and listening to Neal Diamond while shooting the shit. Stacy asked me if I believed in more than just this reality. I gave a short scoff and reminded her of my family background. How our traditions were steeped in folklore and that kind of stuff. She nodded and slowly closed and opened her eyes. She then said, “Yes. But do you believe any of it?” I already knew that answer. I just shrugged my shoulders and said, “I know what I can see. Whether or not it is real doesn’t make a difference to me anymore.” She just smirked and raised her eyebrow. “So I would say that I know that this reality is not everything.” She just stared at me with the same expression. I just let out a long giggled breath and spoke a reluctant “yes”.
She then smiled and said something along the lines of ‘I was hoping that was your answer.’ This is where the normal conversations between the six of us shifted gears. For the next, what I assume spanned an hour, my five close friends one by one relayed a personal story about how they passed through the vale of this reality and interacted with things and beings beyond what people would call, “normal”. After they were finished I was about to scoff and say they were all full of shit. That none of this was funny. Stacey held up her hand and said, “I know.” I hadn’t told any of them the crap I have seen. I knew I had a mental disorder. That I suffered from hallucinations and phycological torments if I missed taking my meds. She just blankly out’d me to the group. She told me that she knew I could see and hear things that weren’t there. That she believed, that I believed, what I was seeing and hearing, weren’t real. And that technically, none of it was real. But, it was real, to the perception from another plane of existence. That she herself witnessed my energy over the past two years. When I missed taking my meds and how my whole aura shifted between this world and beyond the vale. No one knew that I took medication. I never had a conversation about my condition. Not even my parents knew. HOW THE F’ DID SHE KNOW!?
I just stared at her. My eyes watering with sorrow. As if she effortlessly opened up a floodgate of emotion I didn’t realize was dammed inside me. After a long time of reassurance that she wasn’t trying to take advantage of me in any way. She then asked me if I was willing to try something. When I said, “what”. She raised both her hands and made air quotes while Greg (our other friend in the room) said “something spooky”. This startled me and made me laugh out loud. The rest of them laughed softly along with me. Then Stacey reiterated, “yeah, it is f’ing spooky.” She then said that it wasn’t dangerous and if I had even a hint of reservation, that the option was off the table. But if I really wanted to try ‘this spooky thing’ we would all do it together. I was intrigued.
Of course I wanted to do something spooky. I was still a 20 something spazz. Just a kid, always looking for something new and exciting.
(Side note) For all you wonder-seekers out there that are currently in this kind of mind set, just be aware there is always a price to be collected when dabbling in the forbidden.
So, when I agreed, Mitch got up and walked to his wall closet. Pulling out a huge copper hula hoop. I won’t go into detail about the drawn out process we all performed in preparation. What I will say is that we each drew blood from one of our fingers, spit saliva a few times, we all held on to the hoop, and we all synchronized a poetic verse over and over. To the point where our voices seemed to reverberate a harmonic hum. What I personally saw transpire made me pee myself. We had seemed to be transported into a forest for like a minute or so. It was night time, chilly, and I could smell a damp mossy texture in the air. There were night sounds at first. Crickets and frogs. But then there was silence. I did hear a bird chip from a long distance away. But mostly just the sway sound of trees. And that was it. When Stacey told us abruptly to open our eyes, we were still sitting in Mitch’s dorm room. We obviously never left. Our eyes were closed the whole time. When I asked, “what the f’ was that?” Stacey just pointed to Isaiah (another one of us). He pretty much described what I saw in detail. Yet I never saw a mountain. Since apparently it was behind me. Everything else was spot on.
Ever get addicted to something so intently that you cannot help but want more of it? All the time? Yeah, that was me for the first month. For the next 1-1/2 years, our little group explored a bunch of different things. All of it based on a small spectrum of selected stories, fables, and acquired “grimoires”. Stacey’s parents were antiquarian occult collectors and supposedly had a small library of artifacts and books from around the world. Since she grew up around all this stuff, she seemed to have a loose but firm grasp on how some of the crap worked.
That is when all of us kinda got a little too comfortable with what we were doing. Come on, you had to see this sort of thing coming. We surly didn’t at the time. I ended up getting minor brain damage, Stacey broke both her legs, Mitch coughed up a piece of his lung and probably a pint of blood, Greg lost half of his beard and the sight in his right eye, Isaiah had three of his ribs fractured and lost the feeling in his fingertips, and Linsey temporarily lost her voice and got burns over the entire left side of her body.
Why you may ask? An attempt to rid a part of ourselves that we dislike? A chance to gain a piece of our past that we wished we had never let go of? To forget a moment in time that has haunted us to this very day? To change who we are from what we were meant to be? To seek a forbidden secret long since lost? To know things that we were never meant to understand?
The real reason is this…
Hubris.
Simple, blind, ignorant, precarious, arrogant, stupid, naïve, hubris… Nothing more.
We are all still great and very close friends. Nothing will ever change that fact. But after that last night. We vowed to never do anything like that ever again. We also vowed to never be together all at once, just to be safe.
I can say that I know what resides beyond our natural sight. What any of us “humans”can do if we have the pure will power to do whatever it is we want.
The fact of the matter is, what price are you willing pay to get what you truly desire. Is it worth the effort to sacrifice even a piece what you were born with? Just for a chance to have something you currently do not. Physics proves that you cannot destroy energy. You can only change it. And we did that very thing.
Some say magic isn’t real. Some say that magic is just science that hasn’t been understood yet. Well, I know magic isn’t real, and science has nothing to do with the shit out there that can turn your body into ash and chalk.
Morel of the story? A theoretical ouija board is just a game. Until you choose to make it something more than just a theory... That, and donuts exist in every alternate dimension.
Sprinkles, not so much. And don’t get me started on the jelly fillings.
(For clarification, we never used an ouija board. Those things are just wrong on so many levels.)
