Hedonism.

Evening came quickly, or something that seemed like evening. The sky so bizarrely grew darker so fast that I wasn’t sure if it was really that swift of a dimming, or if the drugs I had consumed earlier made it appear so. Regardless, the others didn’t seem to care. If anything, it only made them more exuberant and feral.

Several of the revelers sprung to their feet and scattered in all directions, leaving a trail of tracer images behind. They didn’t seem to be running from anything or heading in any particular direction, but there was definitely something new happening here. The energy I felt from everybody and everything was more pronounced, like I was starting to feel something reaching into me as well, like I was becoming part of this mass celebration or whatever it was.

It was a tingling sensation, almost as if I was being pricked by hundreds of tiny needles all over the most sensitive parts of my body, particularly the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet.

“Do you feel that too?” asked the gentleman I was leaning against.

“Yeah,” I replied, struggling just to get that one word out of me.

“Ohhh…It’s wicked, isn’t it?” he continued.

I was…strange, to say the least. At some point I must have fallen up against this guy. I figured I lost sight of Etand, Soren and Luci long ago. Surely they had already thrown themselves in among the throngs of bodies milling about the darkness. There were all kinds, everyone from an older, grandmotherly-type clutching tightly to a young couple in their underwear to a heavyset gentleman in a wheelchair being pushed by a gang of kids.

Yes, there were kids present. Dozens of them, in fact. Many were participating in various activities and miscellaneous destruction of the temporary property lying around; still others just kept to themselves and seemed lost – as lost as I was.

From what I was witnessing, it was a free-for-all with one of those attitudes in the air that seemed to say, “If it feels good, do it!” and “Whatever happens, happens.” The place was in more total anarchy now than it was when I found it. And if the shroud of shade didn’t have to do with it, I wanted to find out what did.

I groaned and breathed heavily as I got to my feet using my new neighbor’s shoulder to support me, but he didn’t appear to mind.

“You going in?” he asked me.

Hesitantly, I answered, “Yes, I think so.”

I was not twelve paces into the fray before I heard a familiar voice call my name.

“Evan!!!”

I turned to look and through the constant motion of silhouetted shapes before me. In the distant crowd, I could see him. It was Etand. He saw me? But how? That rhetorical question got even more unusual as I noticed that he effortlessly passed around people as me made his way over to me, and he even stepped over someone in his path that was lying on the ground. I suddenly realized that he could now see, and the “Why?” would soon be revealed to me.

“Evan,” he said with enthusiasm, “it’s happening!”

“What is?” I asked. “What’s happening, and how is it that you’re able to see?”

“It’s the magic of the lake. This place…it heals you! I was told before, but I didn’t believe it. But look!”

He grabbed my hand and held it in front of his face. “Hold up some fingers!” he demanded.

“What?!”

“Just hold some up! I want to tell you how many there are!”

I dropped all of my fingers except my index. “What does this pro—“

“ONE!” he announced. “Do it again!”

I pulled my hand back. “No, Etand. I get it. Where are the others?”

Etand glanced around with his new vision. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know faces yet.”

“Yet you recognized me…” I added.

“Yeah.” He stopped and thought about that for a moment. “How did I know you and not anybody else?”

Before I could even think about attempting to explain that little mystery, another familiar voice piped up from behind me.

“Hey! You two! I know you! I remember you from the forest!”

“The forest?” Etand wondered aloud. “Sir, what are you talking about?”

It was Soren, wielding a large club of some kind. As soon as I saw him, he released the collar of a guy begging him to leave him alone and rushed toward us. Etand and I backed up slightly, but we didn’t flinch when he got closer to us. I knew him, but I guessed that because his speech and demeanor had changed from the Soren I recalled, Etand had no clue who he was.

“You’re the two guys I was with in that cabin in the woods,” he asserted. Not wanting to say or do anything to enrage him, Etand and I nodded in agreement. Soren dropped his weapon and embraced us. “You don’t know how confused I’ve been.”

“Try me,” I quipped.

“I thought I was all alone here. I don’t remember a lot about what happened to me, but all of the sudden stuff started making sense.” He leaned inward toward us and whispered, “It does something to you.”

“It’s done something to all of us,” Etand told him. “It’s allowed me to see, and it’s obviously allowed you to release all of your pent up frustration.”

“What about the girl?” he then asked.

“What girl?” Etand replied, forgetting.

I spoke up. “I think he means Luci.”

“Yeah, Luci!” Soren uttered. “Is she here too?”

And then, almost as if it was on cue, we all heard a loud, bloodcurdling scream. I looked up to see Luci, completely naked and straddling the top of a large Bendo figure. She was leaning halfway off, and a crowd had gathered below her expecting her to fall.

“She climbed up that thing all by herself?” questioned Etand.

She was just about to tumble off the side. “Luci!” I shouted to her, but she just looked at me and said nothing. So now she could hear? This place was truly unusual, but what hasn’t been? I yelled at her again. “LUCI!!!” Another glance, then she turned her attention back to the sky. “Luc—“

Before I could finish my thought, she let out another ear-piercing scream. Something had triggered her inner banshee, and she was answering the call. That’s when the wind picked up. Gusts so strong that they blew around debris and nearly took some of us with them. I smelled smoke and turned around to see some of the Bendo sculptures aflame, and the wind was whipping the fire onto the rest of them.

“What’s she doing?” asked Soren.

I turned my head back to Luci. She was clutching something in her fist, and I had to squint my eyes to see what it was. “A lighter?!” I thought, “She couldn’t be!”

She did though. “Everything!!! Everything comes…at a price,” Luci exclaimed before using the lighter to torch the very Bendo she was clutching.

The crowd suddenly let out a raucous cheer that echoed of both enthusiasm and fear. I was afraid for Luci though. She wasn’t coming down, even as the flames traveled down the giant structure and inched closer to her toes. I yelled to her one final time. “LU-U-U-CI-I-I-I!!!!” This time when she looked at me, her eyes stayed fixed on me through the smoke and flames.

“Chao—“ she tried to say to me before choking up. “Chaot-kaa,” she struggled to repeat.

“What’s she saying?” Etand asked me, assured that I’d know the answer. And I did, but I didn’t want to admit I heard it.

“Chaotica,” I replied.

previous : back to top : next