Flicker

There are many worlds to walk in, many existences to live by.  Don't be so quick to assume that there is only one reality.

The candle molds were actually supposed to be used for popsicles.  We had cut the tips in order to thread the wicks through.  The tray had six molds, one for each of us, little blue obelisks pointing up from the counter.

     To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I was doing there.  I was barely sure why I had come at all, all I knew was that it was some sort of cult ritual, and I would rather be anywhere than at home, starting my chem paper.  Dylan had called around six to ask if I would come, saying that it was something his girl and her friends had found.  Girls, chem paper, there was just no competition.  So there we were; me, Dylan, and Jack sitting in a basement belonging to El, or Eleanor, a sophomore who I had never seen before but wouldn’t have missed for the world.  She was tall, thin but not overly so, with black hair and a pale, elegant face with just enough gothic to be sexy.  Black clothes emphasized her figure, which was beautiful bordering on perfection.  There were two other girls; Rose, Dylan’s girlfriend, and Skye, both of whom were also wearing black.  Rose was a short, pixie-figured girl with brown hair and a fiery spirit.  I had known her for a while; Dylan and I had been friends since high school.  Skye was new, not unattractive, but relatively plain compared to the other two.  Slightly wider, blonde, nice form, classic sorority girl.  Jack and Dylan were also wearing black, I noticed.  I was wearing blue jeans and an orange sweatshirt.  Guess I had missed the memo.

     Skye was the one who had found the book.  It was a little thing we had read through maybe half an hour ago, describing a ritual whose importance was far outclassed by the importance of El’s fantastic curves.  I mean, don’t think I was just sitting there drooling, I was actually listening, but the little book was written in some Shakespearean English that was impossible to understand without concentrating fully on it.  It involved candles – I got that part – but past there it was so much distracting babble.

     By the time we got around to making the candles, we should have been either bored, or drunk.  We were neither.  There was a pale, oppressing silence over the room that seemed to urge you to speak and yet threaten anyone who dared try.  I was standing by the range, watching a cube of black wax melt in a small pot.  El was leaning against the counter, cutting lengths of white twine for wicks, but even watching her didn’t quite take off the edge the room had acquired.  Jack was next to me, watching the wax and stirring every so often with a wooden spatula.  It seemed like a bad idea; how does one clean wax off of wood, exactly?  But I didn’t say anything.  Dylan and Rose were sitting on a dirty couch, bent into opposing ninety-degree angles and not touching.  Rose was pacing the back of the room, in front of the staircase.

     Somewhere outside, there came the sound of screeching tires, and we all jumped.  The sound seemed to reverberate between my ears, bouncing back and forth until it died down.  Suddenly, I wanted to leave.  I could call a cab, if Dylan wouldn’t give me a ride back.  But I didn’t want to stay here; I had the strange and utter sensation that we weren’t alone in the room, that we were sharing it with spirits and demons and things I didn’t want to see.

     Then El was next to me, turning off the burner on the wax and wrapping one thin, warm arm around my waist.  “You excited?” she whispered.  “I am.  I can feel it in the air, this is going to be good.”

     Oh, I could feel it.  I wasn’t as sure about the ‘good’ part, but I could certainly feel it.  Still, I let myself be led over to the small, hexagonal wooden table in the corner, below the stairs.  I sat down on a stool, and El got up and walked to the stool opposite me.  Skye sat on my left, holding the lengths of string and a stack of small china bowls with a pattern of red and blue spirals painted on the outside.  I might as well stick around for a while, I thought.  See what happens.  I can bail later, if things get too weird. 

     If I only knew.

     She took a bowl and passed them to me, I passed them to Rose, who was on my right.   They went around the circle, ending with Jack.  Then Skye cleared her throat and began to speak, and the tension snapped like an old guitar string, replaced by a surreal innocence.

     “All right, guys.  So here we are, time to start, I guess?  Um.”

     El nodded at her reassuringly.

     “So, how this works is, in modern English, I think; we are going to separate ourselves from location, and reality.  The purpose is to deny space and time, evolve, I guess you could say.  To escape the bindings of the physical world.  The ritual was created by the cult of Scarbo six hundred years ago, and has been passed down ever since then. 

     “The six of us – the thing needs six people – will transcend our mortal forms, set our spirits alight.  That’s the purpose of the candles.  The hexagon of alternating sexes forms a microcosm of human society, the candles the lifespans of our mortal forms.  I have to stress that, for all of you here, we are bonded.  There is no turning back now.”

     The phrase sent shivers up my spine, but I didn’t put too much stock in it.  I could bail.  Anytime, I could quit, if I wanted to.  El got up and walked to the counter behind me, taking something out of a drawer.  I watched her, starstruck.

     She was beautiful.  Mesmerizing.  The soft, organic curves of her hips, back, and breasts seemed absolutely perfect, beauty in its purest form.  The thing she held was a knife, small and cold.  It wasn’t a sexual desire, as much as a powerful hunger, a need to be with her, to watch her, to take her form into my eyes, my mind, my body.  She was left-handed, I noticed.  Her head tilted slightly to the side as she looked at me, the faintest trace of a smile upon her lips.  There was no turning back; how could I leave her now?  How could I ever, ever have enough?

     Snap out of it, I thought, frightened and confused.  All of the sudden, she was just a girl, a pleasant person holding a not-so-pleasant item.  I stood up, knocking the table a little with my hip. 

     “No,” I said.  This was madness.  This couldn’t be happening.  It wasn’t the knife that scared me; it was just the whole attitude of the place, the feel.  It was tense, excited and yet scared in a bad way, it made me feel sick.  Vertigo struck me; I grabbed hold of the edge of the table. 

     “There’s no turning back,” Dylan said.  “For any of us.  You can’t leave, not now.  Nor do you want to.”
     “Well, you’re wrong about that,” I muttered, walking towards the door.  None of the others stood up.  I stepped onto the first stair, looking up at the basement door.  Blinding light streamed out from the edges of the door; I noticed for the first time that it was completely dark in the basement.

     Dark, but I could still see.

     Arms wrapped around me.  Such sweet arms.  “Don’t worry,” she whispered.  “Don’t be afraid.”  A pair of soft lips touched my neck.  “This is fate.”  I turned around, confused, disoriented, breathing heavily.  The light from behind the door had burned itself into my retinas; everywhere I looked was obscured by the glowing rectangle.  Hands turned me around, and then touched my face.  The kiss was ecstasy, lighting a fire that burned against her cool touch.  I didn’t even feel the knife as it slipped down and into my palm.

     We sat down in our place, me and El opposite each other.  I held my bleeding hand over the small china bowl in a daze.  I felt somewhere between waking and sleeping, in that grey area where thoughts take on a life of their own, the conscious and subconscious merge.  I could feel my heart beat, my eyes dilate.  The subtle flexing of my diaphragm sent air through my lungs.  I could feel it all, and yet didn’t acknowledge that I did; my mind was elsewhere.

     The world began to leach the color from my eyes; everything faded to black and grey.  The blood trembled in its’ cup, reality trembled in time.  Lines became curves, non-Euclidian shapes drawn on spheres and viewed at the wrong angle.  Entropy became a dark shape, the shadow of a shadow crowding in from all directions.

     This is location, I thought.  The thought swam through my head like some dark fish.  This is location; this is reality in all of its flaws, in all the unbelievable, uncontrollable chaos that we never see.  This is true reality.

     It was bizarre, disorienting.  It was a world I think that we, as humans, shut out, hide from.  It was a world from which the order and normality, all this time nothing more than a thin veneer of perception, had been stripped.  We passed around the wicks, white against the black of the table, the black of our blood.  Then the wicks, too, were black, stained with what might have been red, in daylight.  Daylight, what a joke.  There was no daylight here.  We poured the candles, threading the wicks through the molds and holding them as the wax was poured in.  We never got them confused; each one of us got the candle made with our own blood.  I don’t know how.  The wax took an eternity to cool; I watched the rise and fall of galaxies, reflected in a mote of dust.  The physical had become transparent, like stained-glass.  Microbes grew in my intestines, multiplying, consuming. 

     We lit the candles, the flame from the lighter, a blinding yellow; the flame from the candles, black.  The flames sucked light from the room, their progress only visible by the slow melting of the wax and the curling of the wick, which fizzed as the blood boiled away. 

     Dylan’s candle was the first to burn down.  I watched as he grew translucent, transparent, and then invisible, and something rushed by me, like a bird in the night.  I didn’t flinch.  His shadow still danced in the non-light of the other candles, multiplied fivefold.  Rose went next, then Jack.  My own candle had burned maybe half of the way down.  I felt the slow passage of time, movement along some unsuspected axis.  Skye faded away, her shadow a mere double now.  What would she look like, I wondered, when all the flames have died?  Eleanor disappeared.  I didn’t say goodbye.  Why would I?  I waited.

     And waited.  The shadows watched me, the last mortal remains of the other five, held back only by me.  I waited.

     The candle flickered, sputtering at the bottom of its inexorable downward journey.  Then a sound like a train whistle, or maybe a woman screaming.  The candle began to build itself back up in a reversing process, a black obelisk growing from a black flame.  The air turned white, and for a moment it was just that, the black candle, the black flame, the white world, I looked around and saw something a little like a sphere, a sphere that pulsed along some cracked, unknown reality, something that I could not perceive, but only imagine; the growing dark, the crack, spewing light, the pulsing, maddening beat, like a heartbeat that resonated across planets as a sound wave resonates across molecules.

     The flame flickered, flared, and vanished.