2 December 2007
Chapter 1: Bad Trip
Matt walked quickly, purposefully, down Broadway, glancing through the windows of all the shops and cafes, all of which were dead at this time of night. He hiked his pants up a bit with one hand to keep them from falling as he walked, cursing his fashion choices and looking for a safe place to duck into. He pulled his lightweight black jacket around him with his other hand and also wished he’d been practical enough to bring a hat. His bleached blond hair was unmoved by the unusually chilly late night Seattle breeze, having been gelled into submission. Intentional chaos that reflected the unplanned mess that his evening was becoming.
The streets were wet from the mist that descended from the permanent overcast every winter, and the strip, usually lit so bright you could forget it was nighttime, was mottled with patches of darkness. It seemed that several streetlights had managed to burn themselves out all on the same night, coincidentally. Matt swallowed hard and walked a bit quicker every time he left the safety of the ugly yellow spotlights.
He couldn’t explain the feeling. He’d been at a party across town just an hour before, dosed with just the right amount of holiday cheer and completely in his element. The music had been a perfect blend of sublime beats and familiar riffs, new flavors and fan favorites that kept the house shaking in unison. In his ecstatic state, he’d even begun a good-natured battle of wills with a slender girl with close-cropped hair across the dance floor, each of them daring the other to make the first move and proceed to the next phase beyond smiles and coy body language invitations.
But his buzz, built up so solidly and carefully over the course of the evening with this pill and that, unraveled in a few, short minutes. The friendly, welcoming crowd suddenly turned cliquish and suspicious, judging him with narrow eyes. He imagined that their every laugh was about his clothes, his hair, the way he moved. He went from room to room trying to find a spot to get comfortable, but he could feel nervousness and self-consciousness building inside him, making him sick to his stomach. A panic had settled over him that he couldn’t shake no matter where he went.
After an unsuccessful attempt to cool down outside with some ice water and a break from the music on the front steps, he’d said some hasty, barely-audible goodbyes and stepped out into the night. He turned to give a last, half-hearted nod to the girl he’d sparred with earlier, but she also recognized that the moment was gone and barely returned his gaze.
He’d wandered up and down the residential streets aimlessly, aware of something… someone… just out of his sight. It was stalking him, waiting for him to make a wrong turn so it could catch him. The sensation was all the worse because it felt so familiar, though Matt couldn’t remember a time he’d felt this jittery before. He nearly fell flat on his face, stumbling backwards after mistaking a shrub for someone crouched in wait near a fence.
He’d kept moving, kept changing direction, kept watching the shadows, and before too long he’d found himself here on Capitol Hill. It was more brightly lit here, though there were still enough shadows to keep him from getting entirely comfortable.
When Matt turned one particular corner, he felt something strong grab him at the waist, pulling him off balance and sending him to the concrete with his hands flailing. Whatever had snagged him was behind him, out of his sight, but could feel something large, heavy and cold coming down on top of him as he fell. Panicked, he pushed and kicked and tried to roll away, but the thing held him with a grip like a steel cable around his midsection, cutting into his side just where… just where the waistband of his pants were.
He calmed himself down and stopped struggling long enough to take a better look at what had happened. His wallet chain had gotten caught on a frayed wire garbage can and pulled the whole thing over onto him, and his thrashing around had gotten the chain and the wire mesh pretty well entwined. Matt pried the chain loose quickly, managing to scratch his fingers up on the sharp wire edges in the process, and hauled himself to his feet again. His light blue, baggy denim pants were smudged up with crisscross patterns of dirt and grease from the garbage can, and his side was completely soaked from landing in a puddle of what he hoped was rainwater.
“Mother FUCK.” Matt cursed, jamming his wallet back into his back pocket and continuing down the hill, his jacket open, revealing the mottled rust-orange long-sleeved t-shirt he was wearing. A lone pedestrian stumbled up on the other side of Pike street and studied him warily. Flashbacks to the fashion police at the party got the better of Matt and he took his black jacket off to tie around his waist and hide as much of the damage as he could. The man, in his forties with a dark mustache and a dark denim jacket on, gave him a drunken smile and raised his eyebrows with a suggestive look.
“Wait a minute,” Matt said to himself, taking a look around to see where he’d ended up. All the time he’d been weaving and dodging down the streets, he had an idea in the back of his head that he was headed somewhere, but hadn’t stopped to think it through very carefully. He figured he’d know when he got there. But now he found himself three blocks away from the four busiest gay bars in the city, nowhere near anyone he knew—at least nobody he knew well enough to drop in on at three AM. His new friend across the street seemed ready to offer him a bed, if not a place to sleep.
Matt turned his attention away quickly and fished in his grimy pants pocket for his mobile phone. There was one person who he could call, though he’d ended up a little too far south. That could have been where he was headed.
“This shit’s never going to come out,” he bitched to the empty air. “A week of extra shifts at the fucking Hi-Tone for nothing.” He inspected the phone after getting it out and unlocking the keypad, making sure he hadn’t crushed it in the fall. He held down number 2 until it dialed a saved number and he walked more slowly, his embarrassment at how worked up he’d been getting keeping him plenty warm.
“Cat, it’s me,” he said when a voice half-answered. “Are you up?” A few more subverbal groans and mumbles followed.
“Are you still up?” He repeated, not caring how obvious it was that she wasn’t. When he heard the half-awake, yet polite response in the affirmative, he siezed on it. “Well then, get out of bed because I’m coming over.”
Matt leaned up against the wall near an ATM as he spoke, his eyes scanning the street for any sign of a pursuer, but feeling more and more like his mind was playing tricks on him, and more and more ridiculous. In the alleyway nearby, he noticed something moving through the rubbish, something gray and pink on the underside… his pulse pounded in his ear for a few moments until he recognized it as a rat. He forced himself to relax and and close his eyes for a second. It doesn’t hurt to be cautious, he assured himself, but this is heading into paranoid territory. Once you get to Cat’s, you can relax.
“I did go, but I left maybe an hour ago,” Matt answered into the phone, catching the tail end of what she’d been saying. He mentally counted the blocks to Cat’s place, figuring that if he ran, he could get there in ten, maybe fifteen minutes. “It was pretty good, at least early on… it got pretty awful later.” Understatement of the year.
Matt could hear the skittering of the rat’s tiny claws against the pavement as it rummaged in the piles of garbage looking for a snack, but he steeled himself not to open his eyes and look at it again. I am going to be a man, he told himself, eyes clenched shut, and not jump at every little thing. He couldn’t help imagining that the rat had friends… a gang of dirty, furry things ready to come out of the alleyway and follow him up the street. He couldn’t see them, but he could hear them rustling around.
“I think someone gave me some bad K or something,” Matt admitted into the phone, his hands shaking a bit. “I’m totally ’noiding.” From the sound the rats were making in the trash, he imagined they were huge. Or maybe they weren’t rats at all, but snakes. Huge, gray and pink snakes slithering all over the garbage and hoping he’d keep his eyes closed and not see them coming. Jesus.
“Yes, Mom,” he said sarcastically into the phone. “I know drugs are bad for me.” Boy do I ever, he thought, as the imaginary snakes in the alleyway turned into tentacles, connecting to some slimy gray creature hiding in the shadows. I’m not going to look, he told himself, I’m not going to look.
He opened his eyes quickly and saw the single rat, munching on a stale hamburger bun, not even acknowledging his presence. The breeze rustled the empty Starbucks cups and burger wrappers. He was a complete idiot.
Matt turned around at the precise moment that the creature came forth from the shadows and lunged for him. It was about eight feet tall and massive in size, a sickening gray with patches of pink that looked like huge burn scars. It had no mouth or nose to speak of, just two large, featureless black eyes. Perfect, inhuman, shiny black spheres. It also had scores of tentacles branching off of it, pink on each underside and slimy gray matted hair on top. Some of the tentacles were shorter and ended in crude hand or foot shapes, and had joints that bended this way or that, allowing the thing to move silently, if awkwardly. It looked not unlike a giant gray walking root system.
Matt surprised the creature, with a well-placed kick to its trunk, forcing its weight onto a single one of its stubby legs and causing it to stumble back and reach out with its many snaky limbs for support. He followed with some sharp punches to the nearest tentacles which encouraged them to retreat. His eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched tightly, he scanned the pavement all around him and moved quickly to a spot where he could get out of the thing’s reach.
He surprised himself with his next move: a charge directly at the creature, ramming his shoulder into it just under its left eye, causing it to shudder reflexively and fall even further back into the alley. This time, though, it gathered its many tendrils back under itself in order to get its balance completely.
“Hide and seek’s over, afterbirth,” Matt snarled, emboldened by his little successes. “Now you’re gonna get yours.”
His attitude did a 180, though, as the thing’s many tentacles swarmed at him all at once, forcing him to stumble backwards, off-balance. He could feel the thing snaking around his legs, another trying to get a grip on his arm. A smaller tendril snatched at the hand that held his mobile phone and it burned like stinging nettles where it made contact. He kicked at the ones near his feet and found himself flipping backwards over the hood of a parked car. He took advantage of the leverage, pulled his legs free and rolled away to the other side.
Matt took off at top speed down the hill, his phone in his hand. He barely made an attempt to watch for oncoming traffic as he crossed the street to get away from… whatever it was that was stalking him.
“Matt!” he heard a tiny and insistent voice call from his mobile, clenched tightly in his hand. He let himself slow down and look around… he tried to remember what the thing had looked like, but could only remember flashes of that sickly color and the feeling of things trying to grab him. His impressions of it were fading into soft focus, like the details you forget after you wake from a dream.
“Cat, forget I even called,” he said lamely into the phone, feeling sick to his stomach. “No, everything’s cool… or will be. I’m just having a really bad trip. I might come by tomorrow, though.”
“Whatever,” she answered, yawning. “If you call me this late again, make sure you’re being raped or murdered first.”
The call ended with an understated electronic “beep”.
Remembering his daydream, Matt rubbed the hand his cell phone was in—the one that had been “stung” by whatever it was. There was a scrape across it, and it still was a little tender. A quick glance at the car parked in front of the alley where he’d been “attacked” explained it; the antenna was bent over where he must have rolled over it.
“Who’m I? Fucking Xena,” he panted angrily at himself. “‘You’re gonna get yours,’” he muttered sarcastically, shaking his head and fighting off the headache that was starting to settle in from all the adrenaline. “Trying to beat the shit out of some slime monster in a fucked-up drug hallucination. Good thing I didn’t actually fuck with some club kid in pink fake fur or they’d be having one of those ‘Take Back the Night’ marches looking to pummel my ass.”
As foolish as he was starting to feel about his battle with the hallucinated creature, he didn’t feel much like continuing the night without a drink. Matt homed in on the sound of a busy nightclub and worked his way into the queue to enter, either for safety in numbers or to try and salvage the evening, he didn’t know which. The crowd was regular late-night R Place: early twenty-something stylish gay boys and their best girlfriends, along with some adventurous open-minded straight boys who knew there was a good dancefloor and half-decent music to be heard inside. That and R Place was one of the only places in the area open after hours.
The doorman looked him up and down warily—especially at the stained jeans peeking out from under his jacket tied around his waist—before asking him for ID. Matt responded with a devilish smile and his open wallet, making a show of giving the beefy guy the once-over in return. Most gay bars wouldn’t think twice about barring a drunken straight guy who was such a mess that he’d fallen over and gotten himself dirtied up, but they were always willing to let in another cute boyish fag with his defenses sufficiently weakened. Matt even toyed with the bottom of his shirt a bit, letting the mustachioed bouncer get a look at the results of his grueling daily abdominal workouts. Within moments, he was headed inside, and the bouncer was watching him go with great interest.
After hours club or not, it was still approaching the end of the night, and for every person who was still riding the wave, there were two who were floundering in the surf and didn’t want to admit it and head home. Matt got his first hopeful, pre-sidewalk-sale come-on inside of five minutes. As if it was any less pathetic to score one hour earlier than to pick up someone on the street after closing. Straight or not, if it was 10pm, it might have even been an ego boost, but at 3am it was out-and-out creepy and depressing, especially when coming from someone in his late thirties with bushy eyebrows and acne pockmarks from steroids.
Matt smiled noncommittally and headed in the opposite direction of the would-be fuckbuddy, making his way up the stairs to the dance floor level. It was nowhere near full, but the alcohol and drugs consumed throughout the night made the small group blissfully devoted to staying put. He couldn’t recognize the track the DJ was playing, but it seemed to be the middle of an extended mix and building toward something good. He made his way out to the middle of the floor, started to sway to the beat and tried to relax into it.
People were jostling against everyone else, too wasted to care where they were dancing. The upside was that the other people they bumped into were too wasted to care, as well. Matt didn’t have that advantage, and didn’t relish the idea of trying to reach that state himself, especially considering the hideous trip he’d been on in the past hour. But he wasn’t going to get back to his happy place strictly though music, at least not with this bunch, so he extricated himself and headed over to the bar for some assistance.
“Long Island,” Matt said to the bartender, who perked up at the idea of actually mixing a drink and getting a tip. If Matt guessed right, there was no way he’d been getting much business from the current crowd, except to unscrew bottles of water. Long Islands always hit him hard, but he figured he’d rather be sluggish than as keyed up as he had been. He could always get a cab later.
He dropped a ten on the bar and took a sip of the drink after ditching the plastic straw. He always hated the bar custom of adding a straw to every drink to trick you into drinking faster. More often than not he ended up accidentally poking himself in the eye when he tried to take a sip. At least the drink had come in a proper glass; most straight bars served everything in plastic because their clientele were more likely to pick fights and cause trouble. Gay bars could always be counted on for real glassware.
He made his way back to the wallflower tables and took a seat, watching the crowd dance and waiting for the moment to feel right to dive back in. He also checked out a few of the girls who were dancing, but they almost invariably ended up dancing with each other. Unlike a lot of the straight guys he knew, Matt knew better than to imagine they’d want him to join them in their bed later this morning. It was fun to watch, nonetheless.
He took another sip of his drink and looked past the dancefloor crowd at two guys leaning against the bar, arguing about something. One was an exotic-looking guy in his thirties, of Arabic descent with a shaved head, a sizable nose and a pumped-up gym body covered by a maroon latex t-shirt. He had both ears pierced with heavy gauge hoops with ball ends, and Matt could see that he had both nipples pierced as well with matching hoops. Despite himself, he muttered the Queer Eye mantra, “don’t match, coordinate,” under his breath.
The white guy was younger, maybe late twenties, with dark curly brown hair that was close to reaching his shoulders. He wasn’t dressed for the club like his friend, instead wearing a chocolate brown sweater and some black pants. When Matt finally got a look at the younger man’s face, he choked on his drink.
Déjà vu, the strongest he’d ever felt, hit Matt hard, and he nearly dropped his drink altogether. He did manage to spill some of it onto himself, but luckily it was only on his jeans, which were already so stained as to be a lost cause entirely. He wiped at them a bit with the cocktail napkin, but while staring, completely transfixed, at the man in front of him. He had the strangest notion that he should know who he was. It was the second time tonight he’d felt powerful, familiar emotions, but unlike his paranoid panic, this time it wasn’t unwelcome. Not in the least.
“I know you,” Matt murmured, studying the man’s face and trying to place him. “I know you.”
[Leave a comment, then continue with Chapter 2…]
3 Comments currently posted.
Brian C says:
Andrew says:
I second that notion. More, dammit. MORE!
Max says:
It’s very nice. I don’t like the latex maroon shirt though…. just something icky and wrong about maroon colored latex if you ask me 
GREAT WORK!
Very good , gritty , relatable and sexy ,I want more !