Baccha Yelin was online and hanging on the edge of his seat awaiting my response, presumably. I read his message once more:
Im assembling a search party to go into the woods, emphasis on party u in?
So the idiot wanted to go into the woods where, as Aunt Constance had just pointed out, from time immemorial bad things went down. I thought of Jon Hodkins, the missing biker who'd dashed into the darkness and never came back.
Why u so keen on ur untimely demise? I texted and watched the dance of the typing indicator, the three dots vanishing and then reappearing. Finally, he responded:
Jon Hodkins was a regular at IS. Some of us know our way around the woods.
Hmm. I looked at the TV, then at the record player. I felt like I'd gotten all the mileage I could from them tonight. I'd spent the afternoon cooped in, and I just knew the night air would do me something good. Even if it meant that I'd be going into an apparently haunted forest.
My Aunt C. says I'm not to see you ever again,I sent.
Now you're just teasing me.
I smiled at the message. I had a feeling he was probably standing outside, waiting. Like he used to all those years ago. I got up and walked over to the egress window. Yep, a pair of legs were there.
"Hiya," I said.
He crouched down.
"Oh, hello gorgeous."
Damn it. I really liked being complimented. Again I felt the hot flush rise on my cheeks. Quick, divert, divert!
"Are you already drunk?" I asked.
"Just one can, and a bit of something else, maybe," he sang out. Oh boy.
I motioned for him to come back in. I mean, what was Aunt Constance going to do, ground me for seeing him? Tell my parents?? As it stood, I really could use his help finding out more about what she wasn't telling me.
"I'll go with you, but first sign of trouble and we're out, clear?" I began.
"As a gem, my fem," he said, grinning wide. Great, he was rhyming now. I focused on him, studying the olive face bathed in the citrus yellow of the hanging bulb overhead. When we were dumb teenagers he'd had chubby cheeks, a remnant from infancy that refused to be shed. But it was all chisel now. My eyes dipped to the crooked, half-smirking lips and immediately shot up to the dark, mess of coils on his head. Say something!
"Let me just change. No, you can't come with me."
"You're no fun."
10 minutes later I'd finally found a top large enough to conceal my boobs, though it still needed a second layer to really cover it up. Instinctively I'd reached for a faded denim jacket I hadn't worn in ages, but at the last minute went for the black Harrington with the classic checkerboard lining. I grabbed a green beanie as I opened the door to see Baccha hunched by the PS2.
"I was just about to load up Metal Slug 3," he said.
"How're we getting there," I asked as I accepted Baccha's hand and he pulled me out the window.
"Well," he began, but said nothing more. We both turned toward the road, where a motor's roar reduced all the other sounds of the street to low background noise.
A four-door convertible stopped across the street. It was painted glitter-silver, an image of what a child thought a sick car looked like.
As we got closer to it, I saw that there were two people in front. A man and a woman who looked an awful lot like the cover of Sonic Youth's Goo record. They might have been siblings; they had the same haircut, almost.
"Your friends are wearing sunglasses," I whispered to Baccha, "at night."
"They're vampires," he whispered back, making zero sense. "Yo!"
They both turned and acknowledged us by nodding very slowly.
"This is Frank, and Lisa," Baccha said when we got in the back. I recognised 'Love Like Blood' by Killing Joke playing.
"Love this song," I said, and waited for them to say something. Frank returned his gaze to the front and drove off. I wondered if I should be nervous about Baccha's quip.
Baccha said, "Do you know that it's a new moon tonight?"
"Not you too," I sulked. He gave me a quizzical expression, but probably figured out who I was referring to. "Why's it relevant to Jon Hodkins?"
"The moon's phases play a big part in magic," he said, brows doing a dance. From this I gathered that what he was about to share was common knowledge to everyone in the world but me. "Many mark the new moon as a time to set their intentions for the period. It's a time of focused work, daily rituals to escalate the yearning for their desires as the moon waxes."
I thought that made sense. Witches harnessing nature's momentum, or rather working alongside it.
"The full moon is the peak?" I ventured.
"Yes," Baccha replied. "If you observe, things get a little intense in the week leading up to it. Couples argue, then make up like rabbits. More bar fights, accidents too."
"Women's periods usually align with the moon too, right?"
"Yup. At the same bar you might notice more of them dressed in red. Makes sense if you think about it: The tides go high and low because of the moon's gravitational pull, and we're mostly water." He leered conspiratorially, "Many cultures acknowledge a male cycle too."
"Okay," I said, deciding to steer us all back to the death trap we were fast approaching. "so, what, you think Jon's disappearance has to do with a ritual? He was sacrificed?"
"Something like that," Lisa said. She lifted her shades and our eyes met in the mirror. Her gaze was piercing, broken only by the slow flutter of her lashes. Maybe she was trying to decide whether to call me dude or dudette. But if Baccha hadn't told them anything about me, then he would've introduced me earlier. So it was safe to assume that they knew much, much more about me than I did about them.
I kept quiet then, opting to let them talk, or not. All this new moon stuff, it felt like something important was going on, and that I was in the dark about it all. I felt the need to be careful, to be especially attentive to what was going on.
Frank had just parked outside the Invisible Scorpion when I realised my two new friends were high as fuck. Make that three. Frank and Lisa stumbled out of the car and looked around, as if blinded by the fuzzy orange glow of the streetlights, even with their sunglasses. I thought they were going to start hissing and dive back into the car. Instead they began trudging through the grass, towards the woods.
"What are you guys on?" I demanded. Baccha didn't hesitate.
"Mushies," he said.
"You weren't joking about partying," I fumed, because no one had thought to let me know, because Frank had drove us here while coming up on it, because maybe I wouldn't have minded taking a dose. What with the new moon being a special time and all that!
"Actually, the psilocybin helps with the magic. It might make it easier for us to pick up Jon's trail."
"Then why didn't I get some?" I asked.
He stopped and turned to me. "We had a feeling you probably didn't need it."
Uh, okay. We walked on in cemetery-level silence. I was starting to feel cold, even with the Harrington. An atrociously loud owl hoot scared the shit out of me, and I resorted to crossing my arms and sucking in my breath to keep from shivering.
"So, are Frank and Lisa chaos magicians too?" I asked in a hushed voice. Not that it was necessary; they'd gone much further ahead. The pair of white lights from their torches bouncing about in the distance were all we could see.
"Are they chaos magicians," he repeated slowly, "I wouldn't say that. Do you know anything about the left-hand path?"
I shook my head and waited, staring upwards. Through the canopy I glimpsed the numerous stars in the cloudless sky. No moon.
"Well, for the record, I don't consider myself a chaos magician either."
I couldn't speak. When I'd turned my gaze away from the sky, figures like shadows were moving all around us. At least that was my first thought. A moment later I became sure; the black shades were darting from tree to tree. At once the uncanny sensation of being stalked was very palpable.
Baccha must've sensed them too, but we kept on walking, as if we knew that to stop now would've been the end of us. Forget this night air, I was suddenly filled with longing for the warm cocoon of my basement room.
Passing a tight bound of trees we emerged into a clearing, where the weird couple were waiting. I couldn't believe it. I'd expected monsters, bats and snakes. I'd expected to find Jon Hodkins crucified upside down with his innards trailed over a bloodied shoulder.
It was a garden, filled with so many variations of roses.
I shot a glance at Baccha; for once, he was just as surprised as I was.
"This is the place," Lisa said. Frank nodded.
"What place?" I asked, as a complex blend of floral, musk, and fruity scents hit my olfactory senses.
"This is where Jon . . . disappeared."
"You guys said he was part of a ritual or something?"
"Yes, and the ritual involves a portal."
"A portal?" Portals are real now? What else was going to happen? Would I eventually get abducted by a spacecraft?
"It's not how you're picturing it," Frank said to me, clearly out of sympathy for my confusion. "The portals we're talking about, you don't step through them."
"Then how . . ." I looked at the sea of red, pink, and yellow surrounding us. "The roses?"
"Yup."
"Like, you gotta pick the right one or something?"
"That's what we've been trying to figure out," Baccha said, "We've been visiting this forest for years, this spot. It's not always a rose garden."
"What? What else was here before, an amusement park?"
"Once, yeah." It was clear he was not amused, and hadn't been then either.
"The traveling circus," Lisa contributed, "That was a wild weekend."
"Jesus." I remembered they were all probably tripping balls. None of them were laughing. Thankfulness surged in me; I doubt I would've been handling all this well under the influence of mushrooms, or even dime-store alcohol.
"So this time around it's a garden. And you've been coming here frequently?"
"Each new moon," Baccha said. "Anyway, about the portal. Each time, it's the same, regardless of whatever's out here. You have to walk around and find the object you're supposed to find."
"Most importantly, perhaps," he added, "what you gotta know, is, that each person goes separately."
"Excellent," I sighed, "to where?"
"That's the fun part," he said, slowly smiling.
I was about to ask if that meant that it was always the same place, or otherwise, but then it clicked.
Jon knew about this place. He'd been coming here for years with this trio of doofuses.
I saw Baccha give a knowing glance my way. He shrugged, as if in reply to my thoughts. Was he actually reading my mind?
"Yes," Lisa said, "we've been doing it since the shrooms kicked in."
"Pretty standard phenomenon," Frank added.
Ugh.
"One weird fucking thing at a time," I said, desperately holding on to the strings of information. "So Jon ran in here because he wanted to go through the portal. But he didn't make it out. Did he get lost?"
The three of them exchanged looks. This was when I realised that they were probably communicating telepathically. Of course, I made sure to not think it. Finally, Baccha spoke out.
"The shadows got to him."