Frigid air outside, height of the Canadian winter. Going out to the bars would’ve been nothing short of a nightmare, but we still wanted something to do.
So when Jack brought out a small plastic bag filled with those dried caps and stems, I admit I got a bit excited.
“What would you guys do without me,” he said, grinning.
I replied, “fair enough”. This time he could have his dues. After all, he’d saved us from another stale weekend of drinking cheap beer and watching horror movies in my basement.
I brought out the scale and Jack doled it out. Three grams each, save for Lisa, whom we gave one and a half to since it’d be her first time. I didn’t bother asking Jack where he’d gotten them from, because I knew he’d been using the same dealer for years, a reliable enough guy who ranked on the lower end when it came to sketchiness.
That’s why when Jack told me he’d switched up his source, I felt something of a jolt at my side. It wasn’t that I didn't trust the guy. But you know. Shit happens.
“Dan said he was done with it,” Jack explained. “Gave me this new guy’s contact. He didn’t seem like a weirdo when I met up with him. Aren’t shrooms like borderline legal anyway?”
“Sure”, I said. Likely it’d be inconsequential. I mean, it tasted about the same as anything I’d had in the past. Still. We made sure one of us, Brown, remained sober just in case.
The five of us, Jack, Brown, Lisa, Amber, and myself went about commencing our night. For the first hour we mostly just sat, drinking, smoking a bit. Not too much. Then came the giggles. Whatever came out of Jack’s mouth seemed to warrant prolonged bouts of raucous laughter, and most of it wasn’t even funny in the slightest. We talked about life. About our jobs, relationships, aspirations. Memories. Theories about aliens, dinosaurs, the origins of the universe, trying so hard to blow each other's minds. So far it was looking to be a good trip.
About two hours passed before anything of concern happened. And it started with Lisa.
“Jesus Christ,” she said. “Are you guys seeing shit?”
I looked around. “Not really,” I said. “What do you see?”
For a while she stayed silent, and I watched as she lowered the can of beer she was drinking and placed it down onto the table in front of her.
She shook her head. “What the fuck…” she muttered.
I followed her stare and looked up at one of the corners of the ceiling. Nothing.
“What do you see?” I repeated. Again no answer. She just stared. Soon her mouth fell open. I looked around at the others, who just looked back and shrugged.
You see, crazy hallucinations aren’t exactly a trademark of shrooms. Sometimes you’ll look at a painting and the lines will be a bit funky. Maybe you’ll see a few swirls in the ceiling. Anything beyond that and maybe you gotta start asking yourself what exactly it is you’ve just taken.
Brown laughed. “Amber, c’mon. You gotta tell us what you’re seeing.”
Slowly she closed her mouth and sat back, enveloping herself in the couch. She looked down at her lap and shook her head again. “I don’t… I don’t know…” she said softly, before stealing one more glance at the ceiling. “It’s gone now.”
The mood in the room certainly took a hit after that. In order to lighten things up, Brown put on some Netflix stand-up comedy. More laughs followed. Eventually Lisa joined in as well. Back to normalcy. Still curious about her earlier ordeal, I kept my eyes on her, watching as her rigid demeanor slowly melted away into something more jovial. But after a few jokes that landed flat, her gaze began to wander away from the screen. And back up to the ceiling. Never before had I seen anybody’s eyes bulge out so wide in ostensible horror so quickly.
She looked she wanted to scream, but the only thing that came out was something like a stifled gasp. She reached for the television remote, grabbed it, and flung it at the ceiling before pulling a blanket over her head and turning to the side. Underneath it I could hear her sobbing softly.
“Lisa, what the hell?” Brown yelled out. He turned to me. “Dude, she just cracked your wall!”
I looked up. Indeed the wall right under where the ceiling began had been damaged. The remote laid on the floor beneath with its batteries spilled out. But for obvious reasons, that wasn’t my biggest concern at the moment. I looked back at Lisa, still shivering under the covers.
“Lisa, what was it?” I asked. “What did you see?”
When she didn’t answer I moved over and gently pulled the blanket down from her face. Immediately she covered her eyes with her hands.
“What was it?”
She shook her head. “I can still see it,” she said.
“Jesus Christ, Jack,” Amber exclaimed. “What the hell did you give us?”
Jack put his hands up in a defensive gesture. “Nothing we haven’t taken a dozen times before!”
“If it’s from a different dealer, how can you be sure?” Brown added.
“Look,” Jack continued, “It’s her first time. My first trip wasn’t so fucking great either,” he got up, walked over to Lisa. “Hey, Lis. You okay? I’ll sit with you, alright? I’ll talk you through this.”
He reached down and pulled her hands away. “Look, it’ll be alright. We’re all here. Your friends are here.”
She tilted her head up, revealing a face stained with tears, but her eyes remained shut. She mumbled something.
“What?” Jack asked.
“Y… your… shoulder.”
“What?”
“It’s… looking at me… over your shoulder…”
Jack sighed, let go of her hands. Immediately they went back to covering her eyes. “Fucking hell,” he said. “I’m gonna have to kick this dealer’s ass next time I see him.”
He looked at me, then at Amber. “You guys see or feel anything weird?”
Amber shook her head. I considered it for a moment. I was definitely high, but it was about as mild as a trip could get. Maybe it really was a first-time thing, I thought.
Jack walked back to the couch he was sitting on, ran his hands through his hair. “We just gotta stay with her and wait till it wears off,” then he laughed. “Boy, wait till Dan hears about this. He’s gonna flip shit.“
Some more time passed without incident. I wasn’t sure how long. Lisa had stopped crying, but it was still a bit unnerving sitting next to her while she kept her hands practically glued to her eyes. Every now and then we’d try and say something comforting to her. It was unclear whether or not it ever helped.
At some point Jack went to the washroom. Instead of sitting back down when he came out, he stood over the couch and looked around the room, his face contorted and his nose scrunched up as if he were standing right in the heart of a landfill.
“Tell me I’m not the only one who smells that,” he said.
“Make sure you turn the fan on,” I replied.
“Not that,” he said. “What, none of you smell it?”
I looked up at him. “What are we supposed to be smelling?”
My question was answered as soon as I asked it. No gradual buildup. One second there was nothing and then suddenly it was all around me. I’m not sure how to describe it. Not quite like rotting meat, but just about as unpleasant. Something sharp and pungent, but also strangely unfamiliar to anything that I knew. I got up, took a few steps forward and the scent lessened. A few seconds later and it was back in full force. I looked at Jack, but he was already looking at me. No. Not at me. Behind me.
“Sh… Shawn…” he spat out.
I shook my head. “I know, I know. Don’t say it.”
It wasn’t just the smell anymore. There was also a presence. That feeling you get when somebody’s standing uncomfortably close behind you. My heart started beating like a drum.
“Well,” Amber said, standing up. “You guys are freaking me out. I’m gonna go lay down in the other room.”
I could’ve told her that was a bad idea, but at that moment, the words weren’t able to come out.
Brown looked between us, visibly confused.
Never in my life had I heard about shrooms yielding olfactory hallucinations, AKA fake smells. Yet, it was happening now. But that’s all it was, right? Hallucinations. They weren’t real. I took a deep breath, steeled myself and turned around.
Nothing. The smell was gone as well. Jack let out a sigh of relief.
I looked at him. “What was it?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“The hell do you mean?”
“I don’t know how to describe it.”
I swallowed. “Like… a creature or something?”
He nodded slowly. “Something like that.”
For a while we just stood looking at each other, not quite sure how to register what had just happened. Then came a scream from the other room. Jack, Brown and I made a beeline for it, only to find the door locked.
“Amber?” we yelled. Another scream.
“Move,” Brown said before backing up and ramming into it with his shoulder, his body going right through the wooden frame. We followed close behind and as soon as we entered, the smell was back. No, I thought. There was a subtle difference about it. Almost the same as whatever I’d smelt before, but just slightly off. As I stumbled in, I could see Amber crouched in the corner, and for a split-second I thought I’d seen something standing in front of her, some dark, blurry shape. Of course it disappeared immediately, and the smell once again followed.
“What the hell happened?” Brown asked.
She looked up at us, wide-eyed, pale. “Fuck this,” she said, and stormed for the washroom. She kneeled before the toilet and put a finger in her mouth and down her throat, gagging and gagging before out came a surge of vomit.
She sighed. “You guys should probably do the same,” she said.
I wasn’t about to argue that. I went upstairs to the sink and vomited out what I could. In the bathroom next to me I could hear Jack gagging. Once Amber had finished up, she helped Lisa do the same. When I came back down, Brown was pacing around.
“Jack, I’m gonna kick this dealer’s ass myself,” he said. Then he got up. “Give me the fucking bag.”
Jack rinsed his mouth with some beer. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, and tossed it over to him.
Brown caught it, placed it on the counter and took out a few of the stems. For a while he just looked at them.
“Do you still have your microscope?” he asked me after a few minutes.
“Maybe man, I don’t know. Why?”
“Where could it be?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Check the storage closet.”
Even though I’d puked out as much of the contents in my guts that I could’ve, the high was still there. Likely it was already too late to be purged out so easily. I looked over at Jack, who was sitting with his hands buried in his face, then at Amber, who was holding a borderline-catatonic Lisa close, trying to comfort her any way she could, although none of it seemed to be working.
Brown came back momentarily with the microscope in hand. He set it down and blew off some of the dust that had accumulated over the years since I’d left university before picking up one of the stems and placing it onto the stage. Then he looked into the eyepiece and zoomed into it.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
No response. After a while he breathed deeply.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. He looked up and then at Jack.
“You son of a bitch,” he said.
“What, man?” Jack replied.
Brown marched towards him, grabbed him by the collar of his sweater and dragged him over to the counter.
“Take a look,” he said.
Jack jerked free from his grip. “Jesus man, alright!”
He bent down and pressed his eye to the lens. Seconds later, he vomited again, all over the floor.
He wiped his mouth and fell back. “What the fuck, what the fuck!”
I turned to Brown, and he gestured for me to come take a look as well. I already knew that I wasn’t going to like what I was about to see, and I was right. Even at maximum magnification, they were small. But they were there.
Lined all the way up and down the stem were eyes. There must have been dozens, all different colored irises, blinking, staring blankly back at me. I began to taste the vomit as well. After a while Amber also looked. She didn’t say anything. Really none of us knew what to say.
Because we knew things were only going to get worse.
Jack took out his phone. “I’m calling this motherfucker,” he said.
“And what’s that gonna do?” Brown asked. “You gonna rat him out to the police?”
“No, I’m gonna find out what the fuck it is that he sold me.”
By now we should’ve been reaching the peak of our high, and I could feel as much. If you haven’t experienced it before, then I’m not sure how to describe it, but know that the factors separating a bad trip from a good one are one’s state of mind and the environment around them. And in circumstances like these, that could only spell out disaster.
I took a deep breath, trying hard not to let panic flood my system. I put my headphones in, played some upbeat music. That seemed to help slightly.
But then the smell came back. It was fainter this time, and it seemed to be coming from somewhere up and to the side of me. Right near that corner of the ceiling. Trust me when I say that I didn’t want to look. But how could I not? Slowly I turned my head.
And there it was.
Clinging to the walls and the ceiling, some diabolical thing looking right down at me. I couldn’t tell how many limbs it had upon first glance, eight, maybe ten. A human-like torso, spider-like legs. A ghoulish head that hung low. Save for a pair of bright, beady eyes, there was no color to it, its body constituted completely by a stark absence of light. Soon the rest were looking at it as well. What were we supposed to do? How could we react?
“Whatever you’re seeing, it’s not real,” Brown said. “Just ignore it.”
Ignore it. He couldn’t have known how hard that was. That thing stayed up there, just staring at me for a long while before it disappeared, crawling into the ceiling. I kept my eyes glued to that spot, waiting for it to return. Then the smell came back, closer now, coming from below me. I didn’t look down. Instead I backed up and away.
Brown was right, I told myself. Just ignore it.
But easier said than done. Because one minute later Lisa was screaming bloody murder, and once again the source of her fright was a mystery to the rest of us. We all looked around, seeing no creatures present at the moment. This time though, we held no doubt that something was there.
A few seconds later and she was bolting up the stairs. We raced up to catch her, but it was too late. She’d already run out into the cold of the night. I don’t know how long we spent chasing after her, but it was long enough for the freezing air to start nipping at my skin.
In the end, none of us were able to reach her. I couldn’t tell you how she was able to run as fast as she did, but it happened. I bent down, wheezing for breaths before looking up to see her disappearing into a turn down the street. I turned around and saw the others some meters behind me, equally exhausted.
I stumbled over to them.
“We have to call the cops,” I said.
Jack’s teeth chattered. “Shouldn’t we drive around and look for her first?”
“It’ll take too much time. We have to call them now.”
No further objections. I took out my phone, dialed 911 and passed it off to Brown, who spoke to them.
“Ten minutes,” he said, and handed the phone back to me.
We began walking back, and I forced myself to keep my eyes forward. Because I could see them. They were standing in the spaces between houses. Some larger than others. I never tried getting a good look at any of them. Once I noticed that they seemed to be getting closer, I began to run. And the rest soon followed.
By the time we got back to my own house, the cops were already there and waiting. They came inside and we explained the situation. Then they set off to look for her, with Amber and Brown riding along in the backseat.
Jack and I just sat in my kitchen, silent. Listening to my clock tick in the empty air, I clenched my hands. Lisa hadn’t run when she saw that first creature. So why did she run now? What did she see and how could it have been so much worse?
Logic dictated that whatever she’d seen, we’d be seeing soon as well. But it didn’t matter. Because they weren’t real.
Of course they weren’t real. How could they be?
I watched as Jack picked up the bag and looked around, apparently thinking about hiding it somewhere. Then he set it back down where it was, likely realizing that sooner or later, the cops were going to know about it, and sooner would probably land us in less trouble. For now all we could was wait. Wait and hope we’d see nothing else.
Of course that was wishful thinking.
It didn’t take long. Maybe about a few minutes after the cops had left. There was no smell this time, no warning of what was to come. It was tall and clad in some kind of sweeping robe, its back hunched as to clear way for its head, which appeared to be contained within a rusted cage that was tight against its skull, causing its charred skin to poke out from the spaces between the bars while its eyes drooped out of their sockets and swung about in front as it looked down at us. It appeared so fast. I blinked once and there it was in the corner opposite to us. I blinked again and then there were more. Then there were three. Had they been there the whole time? Or only now was I able to see them?
Even if they were hallucinations, Lisa had run for a reason. I kept that thought in the back of my mind.
To call the next few minutes tense would have been an understatement. The robed creatures stood where they were, swaying just slightly around, while the two of us remained seated, too petrified to move. Slowly shifting my eyes, I considered the distance between us and the creatures, along with us and the door. They were in the far end of the living room. We were in the middle of the kitchen. The door was closer to us.
“Dude…” I heard Jack mutter. “The ceiling… look at the ceiling.”
I looked up. White specks were falling down from the points where their heads were grinding against it. For a moment I was confused.
“What about it?” I asked.
Then the realization washed over me like freezing ocean waves. Those subtle scraping noises, something that my brain had written off as logical at first, had now become thunderous. Now we had a choice. Brave it until the cops came back around. Or make a run for it. Moving as little as I could, I reached into my pockets. No keys. They were back downstairs.
“I have mine,” Jack said. “Are we gonna do it?”
I didn’t respond. I didn’t know. After a while one of the creatures lurched slightly forward. And that’s when I bolted up from my seat and ran. Swinging open the door, I almost hit Jack in the face. But he was out. We were both out. And so were the creatures.
We could hear them behind us, their stomps heavy, their cages rattling around. Their croaking. God, that croaking. Once we’d made it into his vehicle, he started the engine and sped away so fast that we nearly swerved into the curb. By the time he’d gotten things under control, we could hear the banging against his trunk.
But we got away.
As we drove, I asked him where we were going.
“Dan won't pick up my calls,” he said, gripping the wheel tight. "So I'm gonna ask him a few questions in person."
I could feel the hairs standing tall on the back of my neck during the entire drive over. About five minutes in, something appeared in the backseat. After ten, it was joined by something else. I didn’t look. I forced myself not to look. Sometimes they’d also be there in the backseats of the cars that passed us. Some were standing on the sidewalks. Some stood on the road in front of us and Jack carefully swerved to avoid them. Most of the time. There was this one creature, humanoid, wrapped in bandages like a mummy, baring large, clawed hands that he ran over without hesitation. I could feel the impact, and it left a large crack on the windshield.
When I looked over at him, he was pale, his expression like stone. I asked why he’d done that.
“I had to,” he said. “I had to.”
At one point, I felt something touch my shoulder. Closing my eyes, I reached for the water bottle sitting in his front cup-holder. Then I turned around and flung it into the backseat.
A hoarse whimper. I’d hit something.
It was strange. Even though my eyes were closed, I could still see it. More accurately, the outline of it was palpable through the patterns in the dark. It was a feeble thing, some toddler-sized larvae creature with stick-like appendages. Even stranger was that I could sense it wasn’t a threat. There was an aura around it, something heavily contrasting what I’d felt from those robed creatures. Still. I didn’t want it around me. I didn’t want it in my world.
After twenty minutes, we pulled up at a modest property nestled away at the very end of some suburban street. Jack stopped the car, and we scanned our surroundings. Silent. Still. Then we got out and walked up to the front door.
Jack knocked. Nothing. He knocked again, louder. “Dan!” he yelled. Nothing still. Then he tried the door, and it was unlocked. Cautiously he entered and I followed right behind. The living room was empty, normal looking. The bedroom was a different story. Clothes and papers were strewn around, a computer monitor was smashed and face-down on the desk, blood was on the floor, bullet holes in the walls. On some of the papers, I could see symbols drawn, strangely detailed and utterly alien.
Jack shook his head. “Shit.”
“What about the other guy? The new dealer?” I asked.
“No clue where he lives. And I doubt he’s gonna answer my calls.”
For a while we stood silent. Then we walked out into the living room and sat down. I grabbed a knife. Jack held a bat. And we waited. Before we knew it, the sun had risen.
“It’s worn off, isn’t it?” I finally asked, breaking the silence which had persisted for so long.
Jack nodded. “Yeah.”
I checked my phone. No calls from either the police, Brown, or Amber. I called them back. No answer. I felt a pit forming in my stomach. We walked out into the morning light and towards his car, and I saw that there were dents in his trunk, and that the crack on his windshield was still there. Neither of us commented on it.
He drove me back to my house and then went off on his own way. It’s been days since then and I still haven’t heard from the police. Or Brown. Or Amber. Or Lisa.
Just yesterday some men in suits came and knocked at my door. They said that they know what happened to me. That they just wanted to talk. But I don’t trust them. I know what they’re really here for, and I know they’ll be back and next time they won’t bother knocking.
Jack never came back for the bag, and I’ve kept it in one of my drawers. I know that I should’ve flushed it down the toilet. No. I should’ve thrown it into a furnace. But I’ve kept it around. And I know why I have.
Because I have a feeling that it might be the only way I’ll ever see my friends again.
---
Credits
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