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Trip

The tips of my fingers pulsed with an angry red ache that worked its way through my veins like poison. My toes throbbed with pulsing, searing heat, and they felt like they would burst like grapes.

By Patrick JuhlPublished 2 years ago Updated 2 years ago 25 min read
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Trip
Photo by Chris Curry on Unsplash

The tips of my fingers pulsed with an angry red ache that worked its way through my veins like poison, and my toes throbbed with pulsing, searing heat that made them feel as though, at any moment, they could burst like grapes in the sun.

“Goddamn Moranis, the hell is this–” I winced and sucked in a hiss of breath. Suddenly my knees were no longer straight, and, even as my head swam, I was laying on the floor with the dull recollection of pain. I think my head cracked across the side of the red tool-chest, and the warmth of it spread through my head like flaming cobwebs. “What the hell…” I slurred again, vision doubling and going grey, “is this,” and then Moranis was hunkering down in front of me, slapping my face lightly with one hand. I didn’t feel his touch. I barely felt the burning agony in my arm as I clutched it, fingers stretched to their limit, tendons standing out in strain.

“It hurts,” I panted, eyes rolling in pain and fear. Where was I? What was I doing? Had I been drugged? “Moranis,” I gasped through hyperventilating breaths. “Moranis, it hurts!”

“Hey!” he slapped my face again, a little harder this time, and a hint of sensation burrowed through to my swimming head.

Crickets. All around, the song of crickets. It was beautiful–a symphony so much more than noise. It swelled and faded in rhythm but outside… it wasn’t dark. A golden beam of sunlight fell across my face, blindingly bright. So bright.

“Rodge, hey, come on mate. Pull it together, we gotta get out of here. They’re coming for us.”

My voice in my head sounded low and syrupy, dripping from the tip of my tongue like cold honey dripping from the end of a spoon. “Who’s coming for us?”

Other noises fell into the symphony outside–birdsong and the rustling of leaves, rushing water and the gentle breath of deer. It was all so beautiful. Every sound as clear as a bell, as if the whole world had been turned into a great crystal goblet and set to ringing with the song of its soul. Tears prickled the corners of my eyes. It was so damn beautiful, I didn’t mind if I were going to die right then and there. I would have fulfilled my purpose: listening to that beautiful song.

“Fuck it, man, come ON!” Moranis hauled me up by an armpit and stood me upright. The little toolshed was a lot smaller than I remembered, and I was so much higher off the ground. So high.

I started to giggle spasmodically. Little belches of laughter rose from the pit of my stomach like carbonation and I turned to Moranis to say as much.

“You look funny,” was what came out instead, and that brought on another giggle-fit. He did look funny. All squished and stretched over meat and bone, eyes darting this way and that, hunched under my armpit. He hadn’t shaven in a week and the effects were obvious. “Like a little gnome.”

“Yeah,” he grunted with the effort of walking me to the door of the tool shed, “whatever you say mate, just get the fuck out there.” He reached for the handle of the door, and just as he did, the room grew cold. The sunlight seemed to dim and lose all heat, casting the room in a flat, white, nowhere light that didn’t cast any shadows. The ringing song faded and then died as the room seemed to deconstruct into its composite parts–no longer a toolshed but walls and a roof and a floor, filled with table legs and table-tops, chest drawers and chests, nuts and bolts, wrenches and hammers, all close together. The uncontrollable giggling died away in my chest as the color drained from my cheeks.

“Fuck,” Moranis muttered and suddenly I was falling again as he shoved me off his shoulder like a sack of rice. He whirled around and it all happened in slow motion. The blue of his flannel shirt was faded and dull, no longer blue, but a meaningless wavelength of reflected light. In that slow fall, I saw what was behind us, and my mind reeled at the sight of it. It couldn’t have been a real thing. Whatever it was seemed to leak out from in between the cracks of the world as if the toolshed were only drawn on the side of a ream of paper–as if it were stepping out from behind a scene-setting labeled “universe.” It was no color at all, no shape at all. Looking at it, it was impossible to grasp the scale or form. It might have been the size of a cat or of an elephant. It might have been the size of Christing King Kong, all crammed inside of the tiny little toolshed, and its makeup was all wrong. My head exploded looking at it, trying to wrap my mind around it. The thing was like an Escher painting, and my spirit screamed in bloodcurdling terror in the second that I watched it and fell to the floor.

My head bounced on the dusty floorboards as I came crashing down. My ears rang and my skull seared with cold agony. Somebody was screaming. My throat was raw and ragged, and I realized that it was me. I was screaming so loud it hurt my own ears.

“Get out!” Moranis shouted, and kicked me in the arm, hard. “Get the fuck out! Go!”

I struggled to get to my feet, but everything felt wrong. None of my limbs felt the right size or shape, or in the right places. There was a flash of white light like a magnesium flare, and I instinctively clamped my eyelids shut. Ghostly burnt figures danced behind them.

Moranis growled something that I didn’t understand. It sounded like multiple different sounds at once–maybe “Gol Mercantoc,” and there was another flash of light, this one less intense, and it stayed, shifting and casting shadows in the shadowless nowhere light of the shed.

When I opened my eyes, it was to see Moranis’ heavy work boots inches from my face where he planted himself sturdily, knees slightly bent, and holding a twisting, shimmering half-dome of white light between us and the thing across the room. I averted my eyes before I looked at it again. The light wove through the air, twisting upon itself in impossible knots and loops.

Look at us,” somebody whispered against my ear, and I almost whirled my head around straight at the impossible creature being held off by the knotted net of light. “Look. At. Us,” it said again, deeper than my ear, as if my brain stem–that vital piece of biological hardware that controls breathing, heartbeat, digestion–had been turned into a megaphone and the rest of my brain screamed at the volume and then fell deaf.

I knew this feeling. I knew that I knew it. I had felt it before, but no, I couldn’t have. I would have remembered. Yet, it was familiar. It was as familiar as the voice of my own mother, as familiar as my own face in the mirror.

Moranis grunted something again, again sounding like three or more phrases in a guttural tongue all spoken at once, and there was a flash of brighter white light as the room erupted into full, blazing color for a shuddering moment. Then it fell back into the no-color from between the worlds.

“Between the worlds,” I muttered, or whispered, or shouted, and it tickled at something in the back of my brain.

LOOK. AT. US!” the thing across the room commanded in my head, and it wasn’t simply a verbal command. It was intent braided into a solid cable that grasped my wide eyes and yanked them around to stare into the impossibly shifting void as it leaked further into the room.

“No!” Moranis shouted and dropped on top of me, wrenching my head and squishing my face into the grimy floorboards. The shield faded for a heartbeat, but a heartbeat was the only break it needed. A shimmering plane of the creature, impossibly thin and impossibly sharp, sliced through the fault in the defense. There was a sound like a single, drawn out shatter of glass, and then passed through the top of Moranis’ skull as if there had been nothing there at all. The heat fled Moranis’s body as if sucked through a straw, and he collapsed bonelessly atop me. His head was in one piece, but there was a thin silver line like a scar where the plane had struck him.

This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t be real. Moranis was dead. Moranis couldn’t be dead. Distantly, I knew I was hyperventilating.

You ran from us, Jaren Pshikentar,” the thing said into my head, except it didn’t say Jaren Pshikentar, it said Amphruz Bikenti, and it said Emiq Dolcaris, and it said Ariv Melekmendai all twisted into the same sound. “But your time is short in these sad little bodies. They are weak. They are short lived. We,” and when it said ‘We,’ as when it said ‘Us,’ it was in capital letters. “Are eternal. We saw time at its inception. We lived in the world before space itself existed. We will see a time when it does not exist again. You ran from us for a long, long time for you. For us, you have barely yet even left.

A flare of empty light glowed behind my eyelids–anti-light–and I realized that they were squeezed shut so tight it hurt, and my body would not move. Not even a single finger would wiggle. I was as prone as Moranis sprawled across me like a cast-away doll.

Look at Us,” the thing rang in my head again, and my eyes drew inexorably open. A plane of the anti-light waited before them, glowing with impossible brightness and darkness at once. The edge was too thin to focus on without hurting my eyes. It was like, both, staring into the sun and being trapped in a lightless cavern. Before I could see more, I unfocused my eyes like a camera lens, leaving the world blurred and unrecognizable. I couldn’t look at it. I could not see that thing again. It would break me. If I had to gouge my own eyes to keep from seeing the impossibility of it, I would. The pain would be less. Nonetheless, what little, blurred, image of the thing that I could see wrenched at the corners of my very sanity, filling my mind with spinning, agonized reeling as my brain contorted to understand what it was seeing and could only fail.

We will have back what you stole from us, Meleckmendai.

“No…” I whispered. “No, please.” My vision was fading, narrowing down to a tunnel of blackness as my brain tried to run from the horror into the depths of unconsciousness.

Do not think you can run away so easily,” the thing said in my head. There was a gripping sensation in my head and a tug like a stage curtain being yanked open, and the circle widened and then vanished, leaving the world in crystal clarity.

“What are you?” Tears squeezed from the corners of my eyes, but I couldn’t close them. They burned from being open, but they did not even twitch. I was going to die, just like my friend, Moranis--my friend of... how long? And all at once, I couldn't remember. Who was Moranis? I had known him. I had known him for a long, long time, and yet... I didn't know his last name.

“Just kill me already!”

You know us. We will not kill you, Meleckmendai; We will take back from you what you stole, and then we will bring you back to our father and he may mete out punishment as he sees fit. Now, look. At. Us. And remember.

Painfully, gratingly, my eyes focused and locked into the depths of the impossible abomination that filled every crevice of the shed–perhaps every crevice of the world itself. My mind screamed and tried to run, to fight, to tear itself to shreds if that was what it took to escape, but it couldn’t do any of those things. Instead, the pain exploded inside my skull like star after star bursting into flame. There was no way that the shape of the thing could exist. Every side was at the same time outside and inside, top and bottom, front and back. Facets that couldn’t possibly meet somehow merged into one another. The inside was larger than the outside, and the outside larger than the inside. No measurement matched another, and, in the innards of the horror in the shed, stars were born and died. And the sheer plane of reality began to advance towards my skull.

First, it was cold, then it burned, then it was both and nothing at all. It felt like the taste of cold mountain spring water. Neurons stopped firing and synapses ground to a halt as the impossibly thin sheet of–of what?–sliced through them like a razorblade through a stream. And inside my head, stars were born and died.

“I,” I gurgled, but I didn’t know if I said it or only thought it. “I… don’t… know…” I thought, and it heard but did not respond. It was looking for the book. Metatron’s book. That’s what it was after and it thought that it was in my head, but... “I… don’t… know it… Laschuriel,” and when I thought the name, it was as if I thought twenty different names all at once, similar, but not exactly alike, all fitting together like the sides of a cube. I had grasped the edge of something huge--something that didn't want to be seen, and I dug my nails into it--the only solid thing to grab ahold of.

We are not here for your lies, Meleckmendai, we are here the book,” and when it said the word ‘book,’ it also said ‘record’ and ‘decree’ and ‘song’ and ‘word.’

“I don’t have it,” I gurgled, but I felt a million miles away from the weak shell of my fleshy body. I felt as if I were drifting on a haze around the little shop, around and through everything. I felt the wrenches inside the tool chests. I tasted them. I felt the razor-sharp sheet of cold, empty, agony slicing its way through my body’s brain. I felt it all the way down to the minutest detail. I felt every galaxy, every star, and every planet inside it. I felt every person and flea upon those planet’s surface, and I felt their thoughts and their emotions. So many emotions. So many hopes and dreams and prayers, all flooding in all in one sweeping dose. If I had a head to move, it would have crashed against the wall, driven back by the force of the psychic impact, and all at once, I knew who I was. I knew where I was. I knew what I was doing. I knew what the creature in the room was, and I knew what it was made of. It was slicing me with a universe–with a plane of reality–because that was what it was made of. It was made of realities, all stacked atop one another like sheets of paper in a ream.

The Trip coursing through my body’s blood had dulled my thoughts and locked away my memories, leaving me only with those memories stored in the tiny fleshy hard drive that was the brain, but no longer. The eyes I had looked through only moments before stared wide and horrified at Laschuriel’s impossibly shifting infinitude, and blood poured from the nose in an uncontrollable gush.

My body’s lips moved.

“Gol Merkantok.”

“Iman Vishtinar.”

“Vracken Olkoli.”

There was a magnesium flare of white light and a nexus of light exploded into being between my body and Laschuriel, snapping the probing plane of existence in two. The sheet of it that had been inside of my head flashed flare-white and fell to ash which fell to nothing at all. On bones that creaked with effort, I rose to my body’s feet, hand upraised, blood pouring down my front in rivulets. My buttoned shirt had torn unbuttoned at some point and it poured down my chest and soaked into the waistband of my pants. My left foot didn't seem to be connected to my brain anymore. It flopped limply under my weight, bending at the wrong angle, but there was no pain.

“You won’t get the book, Laschuriel,” I thought at the angel, and it screamed inside my head. It bashed against the silver shield, sending sparks flying that bit into its being and wormed through it, searing trails as they did so until fizzling out in the unforgiving void of space. “Not as long as I live.” My tongue was thick and fleshy, unwieldy, but my mind, not entirely the mind of my body, was sharper than the edge of Laschuriel’s rage.

The Trip still worked its way through my system, turning the world on its head in ways that made my mortal body recoil and my stomach want to revolt, but I held it in check with gritted teeth. I didn’t look directly at Laschuriel. Moranis could look at her because he hadn’t taken the Trip yet, but my mind was barely holding onto the tethers of my brain as it was. There was a reason why mortals avert their eyes when gazing upon the divine.

Moranis’ rucksack lay open on the ground and the Altoid tin where he kept his capsules of Trip lay on the floor. My head pounded inside my skull and my mind was pulling at its moorings like a ship in a hurricane. It was ready to leave. The Trip was cutting all its cables and it was ready to float off at any moment, whipped out of my body and my brain and off to somewhere else. It would have to wait, though. It would have to wait.

“Yanis Mekavolikar.” I growled the words and a silver funnel extended from between my eyes even as Laschuriel continued to rail against the shield. Each hollow, booming, chime brought flashes of color back into the world as she gathered her energy into herself with each concerted blow. The funnel lengthened like a proboscis and twisted through the air towards Moranis’ prone figure.

“Moranis," I whispered through the link, feeling for the threads of his consciousness. His body didn’t move. There might be just enough of him left to drag him along with me to escape. I could only hope. If I couldn’t… if he was done for… Laschuriel threw herself at the shield again, and it dimmed. I couldn’t hold her for much longer. If he was done for, I would have to leave him. I would have no other choice, and our father who art in heaven would be able to mete out his revenge on the wayward son for all time. And that would only be after Laschuriel was done with him.

“Moranis!” I shouted in my head and hurled it down through the silver proboscis which jolted and speared into his forehead like a hypodermic needle. His body jerked and fell still.

Laschuriel gave a wild howl that made my head spin and my vision darken nearly to blackness and I gasped with the effort of maintaining my composure–maintaining my consciousness. I could not fall apart now. If I did, the Trip would drag my spirit from my body and leave Moranis to whatever Laschuriel decided to do with him in her fury. I had to hold it together or he was worse than dead, and I would be alone.

With a herculean effort, I forced more energy into my legs and my arms, bolstering the shield so strongly that the glow from it in my periphery burned traceries into my retinas.

You cannot run from Us forever, Meleckmendai!

“I don’t need to run forever!” I howled back against the sound of wind and pressure in my ears. “Just for long enough!” and I launched myself at the Altoid tin, hoping to heaven and hell that the shield would hold. The tin skittered when my palm slammed into it, and for a heart-stopping moment I thought that it would squirt from my grasp like a pumpkin seed, but my fingers closed around it, and I was wrenching open the little tin box. There was a cacophony like an entire orchestra of clattering bells and cymbals, screeching violins and basses, crashing oboes, drums, and clarinets as Laschuriel, Hunter of God, tore apart my shield like a bear tearing through a paper screen, and a hurricane blast of wind lifted me from my feet and sent me flying into the far wall of the shed with a bone-crunching thud. Pain filled my world–not the eldritch psychic pain that looking at Laschuriel had inflicted–regular, ordinary, rock-and-a-hard-place pain of the flesh. My head spun and I had no wind left in me. The force of the blow had knocked it out of me, but it was more than that. The whipping winds that Laschuriel was throwing sucked the oxygen from my lungs like air from an airlock. No matter how hard I pulled to suck in oxygen, it was sucked away before it made it to my lungs.

This was stupid. This was so. Damn. Stupid. And I was scared out of my wits. This damn useless human body was crippling! The silver proboscis still extended from my forehead to Moranis’, and with every second I felt the residual traces of his essence fading away like warmth wicked away by freezing water. I raised my hand and tried to form words, but nothing came out. There was nothing to come out, and my arms weakened as my vision grew blacker, and my face purpler, and my thoughts spiraled with the water-down-the-drain swirl of the Trip sucking my mind out through my ears.

“Moranis,” I thought, and his body twitched.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breath. Even if I got him back in his body, I couldn’t get to him to slam the Trip down his throat. My vision narrowed to a dark tunnel, and I watched the shimmering silver tube as it danced the bridge between the two of us.

We told you you are not going to run away that easily, Meleckmendai,” Laschuriel rumbled, and the blackness faded a little as a sliver of air slipped down my throat. She was going to hold me here, suffocating for who knew how long. Minutes? Hours? Days? Years? She didn’t have a concept of time. She was eternal. My stomach flipped in panic as I lay, staring at Laschuriel through the gray tunnel of my agonized thoughts, face on the floor. I had to run. I had to get out. It was the only way.

That was when the real pain began. I relinquished my mind to the Trip, allowing it to tear me free from the shackles of my body.

“I’m sorry, Moranis.”

I felt the lifting, floating sensation as my mind separated from my nerves, then there was a feeling like a staple driving through my brain, and I slammed back down again, gasping not for breath but out of sheer, irresistible agony.

Now now now, let’s not be having that. I think it’s time to get that nasty stuff out of your ridiculous body.” More staples drove down through my brain, each spike painful enough that my body, facedown on the floor, jerked with enough force to almost lift me off the ground. Each one felt like a bolt of lightning flashing from the top of my head, through my soul, and out of my feet, and it stayed. Each zap stayed, burning, searing, even as the next one slammed through me. The white hot agony burned away any chance for thought or emotion–burned away everything other than pain. There was a sucking sensation, like every cell being drained dry, and a glittering sheen began to rise off of my body like an oil slick hanging in the air. The Trip. She was drawing the trip out of my bloodstream. Out of my cells.

“Mora–” another jolt of lightning slammed through my body which jerked and spasmed, but the pain was so great that I didn’t even notice the motion. I didn’t notice my face smacking back into the ground with a crunch of my snapping nose. I didn’t notice as my bladder gave way with the force of the full-body contractions.

“Moranis…” I thought, so, so quietly. “Moranis!” He jerked and twitched, and I waited for the next jolt of pain, even as the others seared my body and mind from the inside out. Moranis’ body spasmed.

To use the humans’ figure of speech,” Laschuriel roared, “you shouldn’t have FUCKED with us, Meleckmendai. You are weak!” a blast of pain wracked through me, and another layer of Trip lifted from my skin. “You are small!” My screams died into gasps as my vocal cords tore with a pain that went entirely unnoticed. Another jolt of pain, and when my body settled back again and my eyes could once again make sense of their surroundings, they landed on Moranis who was settling back down as if he too were settling back from a jolt of pain. “You are SO STUPID!” Agony worse than any of the previous blasts, and this time Moranis’ body jerked so hard that it fell back down on its side.

He was feeling the pain through the bridge. My first thought was exhausted revulsion at inflicting such agony on my friend. Then another sort of blast hit me with frigid clarity. I couldn’t manifest any new evocations without air. But I already had an evocation manifested.

You couldn’t have possibly thought you could escape Us. We are The Hunter of God. You are an accountant. You. Are. Stupid.

“Hey dumb fuck!” I mentally hurled at Laschuriel. “You stink!” It wasn’t the most witty or cutting of insults, but I was actively suffocating, countless bolts of lightning living inside my flesh. The responding contempt washed over me in a wave.

“Who do you think

“Moranis!” I bellowed through the bridge, “Back! Now!” and his body spasmed, jerked, bridged up off the ground, and then gasped in a screaming breath as all of the agony searing through my flesh seared through the bridge into his. Like hauling over the rudder of a ship in a storm, I wrapped every ounce of my will around the bridge and swung it, sweeping, into the core of the angel. There was a moment of resistance when I thought it wasn’t going to penetrate, and then there was a popping sensation and the silver proboscis extended infinitely long, down into the endless depths of Laschuriel’s being. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the world crushed like an aluminum can as an elder angel howled in indescribable agony. My eardrums instantly burst, but it didn’t save me from hearing the scream in my head. The pressure of it made ghosts dance in my vision. My sight suddenly jumped and grew flatter as the connection between my left eye and my brain gave up. Fire and ice simultaneously seemed to burn against my skin, and it felt like hordes and hordes of ants were crawling through my lungs and my veins. I sucked in a monumental lungful of air as the wind disappeared instantaneously, and the darkness at the edges of my vision throbbed down a level. The pain vanished. I leapt with a force drawn from my own spirit, and nowhere in my broken, ruined human body, trailing the haze of Trip that had bled from my skin like a wafting cloud of cologne. It condensed back onto my skin and bled through, thrumming my consciousness back up to that frenzied whir of madness. Laschuriel came for me.

YOU WORTHLESS WHELP!” She howled, and the rage almost buckled me.

By some miracle, I was still holding the tin of Trip, and I wrenched it open, threw up a hand and shouted, through a throat that was raw, unable to hear my own voice in the deathly silence of deafness, “Gol Merkantok!” The silver nexus exploded, out of my outstretched arm.

Laschuriel collided with my shield with an Earth-rumbling boom, I crushed open a capsule of trip with one hand, praying, to whomever would care, that Moranis was awake and alive, and that the slick blood covering much of my reddened and blackened skin wouldn’t get into the fine white powder. I snatched the lank hair on the back of Moranis’ head with my shield hand, yanked his face off the floor, and jammed my Trip-coated fingers against his bare eyeballs. Hey, it’s gruesome, but it’s one of the quickest ways to get a drug into the bloodstream, and he wasn’t going to be needing them for much longer anyway.

The shield held. Laschuriel bashed herself against it, screaming in rage and hatred, but the shield only shuddered. I raised my hand again and forced more power into the shield, making it glow brighter, and I stood, stepping toward it, forcing her back further into the corner of the shed.

You will not get away with this, Meleckmendai!

“Oh yeah? Well, how about you go cry to pops about it, big sis. I’m sure he’ll love to hear about how his favorite dog got a beatdown from a number-cruncher.”

She screamed, and, if it hadn’t been for my shield, the power of it may have set my very cells alight.

A voice shouted “Come on!” inside my ear, and then vanished.

Good, Moranis got out. Didn’t take too long since he was already unconscious and mostly separated from his body as it was.

“I hate goodbyes,” I said, smiling, feeling the strain of my mind aching to be free from its tethers.

Laschuriel screamed again and the shield shuddered. “I WILL FIND YOU!

“Don’t worry, we’ll always have Paris.” I shrugged, raising both of my hands. “Tootle-loo!” I waggled my fingers in farewell and slashed through the final tiedown holding me in place, and my mind swelled and rocketed up and out of my body like a hot air balloon taking to the sky at breakneck speed.

The pain was gone. The deafness was gone, although, without a body, what was left wasn’t exactly “hearing.” All of the handicaps of mortality were gone. I was vaguely away of my body dropping limply to the ground and my shield shattering into dissipating shards, then I was gone into the black. Off to another place, another time, another body.

She would never get the book. She could chase me to the ends of the universe, and she wouldn’t get it. I would step off into that inky void before she ever got so much as a page.

Family can be a pain.

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About the Creator

Patrick Juhl

Born in California, live in Tennessee. Wanna know more? Well maybe there are hints hidden in code in each of my stories. But probably not. I've got a black cat named Peewee.

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