I couldn’t sleep.
Tried as I might, I just couldn’t find sleep, or it couldn’t find me…or, who knows it certainly seemed valid that it was in fact fleeing from me. Whatever the reason, my mind just wouldn’t let me slip down into the sphere of serenity I so passionately sought after. The sheep went on and on throughout apparent eternity, and no matter how many I tried to number…sleep still wouldn’t give in and let me have it. A glass of cool, refreshing water? Check…didn’t work. A mug of warm milk? Hah! It might as well been a mug of hot espresso for all the good it did. I was almost ready to go to the sketchy territory of the nearby Snack Barn to see what drowsiness inducing drugs they purveyed, but the doubts managed to enter and swim around in my head enough to make me wonder if even Tylavin PM could help my situation.
And all those doubts and thoughts of whether or not I would actually even yawn anytime in the next century just made it even worse, buzzing in my mind, waking it up and setting it aflame with a quantity of thoughts I never thought my 20 year old male mind could ever be capable of processing. It quickly became too much for me, and before one of my mental fuses blew or my cerebral motherboard shorted out I slapped my pillow in a display of admitted defeat, and with a sigh I flung myself out of my creaky bed. The tangled sheets slid off my skin like a lover being torn from her partner, and I certainly felt as if I was leaving behind something I should be embracing for a long but so enjoyable period…but in this case my relationship with sleep looked like it needed some serious counseling.
“Graaaarghubin…” I groaned out, which could be translated as ‘I haven’t the foggiest of notions why I am up at this dark hour, I should be sleeping, but I can’t’. Taking care not to step on a CD that might’ve been left on the floor or a pizza box or some other random item of miscellaneous clutter, I tip toed across the floor of my room, the size of which could be compared to a high-security prison cell. I snatched my phone from my small bookcase, and ripping out the charger the screen lit up with a *ding* and felt like it burned through my cornea with its sudden light. The time was a surprise, although at the same time it certainly wasn’t—it was already 2 am!
“Whatevs.” I said with a truly apathetic shrug. It didn’t really matter to me anyway; I could sleep when I’m dead! (Which, from the looks of things, might happen before I got any sleep)
I had the idea in my sleep-deprived mind that I was going to plop down on my saggy couch and play around on my absent roommate’s Gamestation 4, after I grabbed a soda from the rumbly fridge and some chips from the creaky cabinets. But after I swung open my door and exited my tiny room, the sight which greeted my eyes made me forget all about THAT idea…
My eyes widened in confusion and my mouth open slightly in an effort to say something, maybe a question as to what in bloody oblivion was going on. Sitting across from each other at the little round table which stood in the middle of our tiny kitchen were two figures, dressed completely from head to toe in black. And not black like my black shirt either, this was a black darker the night sky during a starless, moonless night. Just looking at the cloth that wrapped around their strange bodies made me wonder if the dark was going to consume the entire room, and then me.
I couldn’t make out the face of the one closest to me, since his back was to me, but the one on the farther side of the table was looking straight at me, a smile spreading across his pale, white face that looked as if it was made of a thick, white smoke.
He spoke in a voice I could only describe as the sound of the wind outside, yet put into words. “Ah, so you have come finally! Good!” Despite his death-like appearance, the strange man expressed his emotions exuberantly. Only when he spoke did I take a second, closer look at my cheap table and noticed the dirty-white tea pot sitting in the center, surrounded by a small squad of teacups commanded by a bowl of sugar cubes and a tiny pitcher of what could only be cream. Again, my eyes grew even larger…
The other turned its head, revealing its face, which was totally wrapped in black strips of cloth, like a mummy, save for openings to expose two green glowing eyes and a small one for his mouth. I thought I could see a smile within the black rags, and he spoke in voice that growled like an angry pit bull but also hissed like a snake…
“Friend! This is good; we’ve been waiting a long while for you to arrive.” He nodded his hooded head in apparent satisfaction, and with a thin, twig like hand he motioned for me to join them at this obscure, ethereal gathering which for some reason, was taking place in my house.
The question was simply too obvious and refused to stop stabbing at the inside of my mind, so it quickly cut away my wonder and fear and I blurted out “What are you…people… doing inside my house!?” I demanded, nearly yelling to my own surprise, and that of my unexpected guests. The ghostly-faced one seemed taken aback most of all, his misty face flowing from satisfied surprise to surprised confusion. His black eyes squinted at me, which was like morning fog partially wrapping around two shining, black stones. Finally, he spoke, a relief to me as I didn’t know whether I had angered him and what that could mean…
“Oh, hah!” The laugh was like the sounds of rocks grinding against each other echoed through a cave. “You jest, I see!” the shocked face simply dissolved and his happy, satisfied face returned, yet this time even more jovial. “Truly though, come and join us at last, my tongue yearns for tea.”
Then it was my turn to squint. “Tea? At 2 in the morning? What for?!” unlike the ghostly faced one’s, my confusion had not disappeared, in fact now it had grown.
Now the ghostly faced one barked another laugh and shook his smoke-like head in dismissal, an entertained grin slicing across his pale complexion. “Why ever not? You silly earth ones worry all about your silly time and days, meeks and wonths, and then you waste half of it laying around with your eyes shut! What for, I ask? Ah, see now I jest too. Come, sit with us, friend, it is time for tea!” The one with the glowing eyes still stared at me, smiling, and I could see that there was no other option but to join them for tea time.
“Well, seeing you insist, and since I’m not going back to sleep anyway, I will.” I said, knowing not what to expect (I had never been the tea-drinker type).
“Oh, wondrous! I hoped you would!” Finally, he turned his gaze back onto his dark companion. “I do hope you have not eaten all the mucrepets now, Rooath?”
Rooath, as he was called by his friend, laughed. “No, Ssaath, our friend has given us many blessings!” Rooath motioned toward yet another thing I hadn’t noticed on the table; a large round platter stacked high with delicious looking pastries. Round ones were spiraled across triangle shaped ones and square ones precariously hung on the edge, looking as if the only thing keeping the tower of treats from a disastrous collapse was the mass amount of frosting cement that looked as if it had been dumped over them. All the speckles of berries seemed to hold every color in the rainbow and beyond that. The smell that greeted my nose was a deliciously sweet smell of which I had never smelled before, not even in my favorite bakeries and restaurants.
The attractive smells cooled down my wonder and nervousness and so, seeming to care less of the downright grotesque and curious appearance of my unexpected guests, I took a seat between the two. An empty tea cup awaited me, though it stayed that way not long as Rooath gripped the stained teapot and filled my cup with a deep black tea, so black it could’ve been mistaken as espresso, or even motor oil. Still, it smelled wondrous, like the spicy sweetness of cinnamon with the savory smoothness of green tea…but yet nothing like that at all, this was a beverage I’d never experienced before….and I still hadn’t taken a drink of it yet.
“We must applaud you, friend. Your taste in mucrepets is purely impeccable. We had expected you to have some, of course, but by no means our favorites and ALL of them stacked on one platter. Goodness, you have out done yourself!” I looked at Ssaath strangely–his face was filled with as much glee as such a ghostly apparition could convey–what was he talking about? What are…mucrepets…and these pastries randomly piled on my kitchen table, why are they acting like I made them?
“Mucrepets? Why, you jest again I see, ha-ha! You must be, for if you had no idea what mucrepets were, you could not have baked such a delicious variety!”
I jumped at Ssaath’s sudden response to my thoughts. I didn’t realize I had spoken them. “Oh…uhh…yes. Of course. I…yes.” I stammered.
“Well, go on now, have one! And please do try the tea; it is truly the finest from the great tea trees of Mouwakralk.”
I nodded at my new friend, ghastly as he was, and with two fingers I gingerly removed one from the behemoth-tall stack, nearly fully convinced it was going to implode if I did. To my satisfaction it didn’t, even so I still expected it to and myself having to clean up the resulting mess…
I bit into the…mucrepet, as it were called, and the threat of a mess suddenly seemed to fade far away into the foggy wastelands of my mind. The taste exploded through my mouth like a flash flood or an army storming into a castle. I had never tasted anything like it before!
But this little moment of nearly orgasmic eating was interrupted, and my eyes shot open as I suddenly felt an unusually cold draft wisp across my skin. I felt my hairs stand up on end as goose bumps came to life all across my arms and legs (I hadn’t realized I was still in nothing but my grey wife beater and Alpine Ale boxer shorts, this was a good reminder). My open eyes just widened even more at the realization that my kitchen did not look the same anymore, in fact, I wasn’t at all certain that I even was still in my kitchen! A thick, blue-grey fog had somehow creeped into my kitchen, blanketing over everything so I could see nothing but my ghostly companions and the table that we sat at. It seemed almost that the fog had quite literally consumed everything but what I could see, sending it into oblivion and out of existence.
Rooath and Ssaath seemed to notice my shock, and Rooath spoke as reassuringly as he could in his ghostly, guttural voice. “Fear not, friend, the mist of change often comes during our tea times.”
“Mist of change?” I exclaimed, bewildered at the sudden appearance of this mysterious fog and a bit frightened as to what this change could mean. What were they, or the mist, going to change? My kitchen? My apartment? Me?!?
“Yes!” exclaimed Rooath and Ssaath in perfect unison (a rather creepy sound, believe me) as enthusiastically as if I just brought up their favorite thing in the entire strange world to talk about, which, I feared that I had. “The mists of change come when they will, come when they won’t, do what they do, and do what they don’t.”
I blinked silently a few times. “…what is that supposed to mean? What? Some sort of riddle or poem? Tell me!” Anxiety began to knot up in my chest, the fog was making me nervous about what I had just got myself into. There was something…foreboding about this tea party that I could not put anything on but yet knew it was there.
“Oh, friend. Do not trouble your own self with the trifle of understanding such things of the mist of change. We do s-” Ssaath began going on in his calm, assuring tone that suddenly was getting on my nerves. I glared at him and cut him off without a thought of what was rude or polite or whatever.
“I asked a question! Why does it always come whenever you have tea, answer that! Is this some sort of sick prank!?” I almost felt bad for my sudden outburst, but the tension that the mist had brought onto me kept me from feeling such emotions. Anxiety had twisted itself into an even thicker, tangled knot that didn’t seem like it could come undone for a long time.
But neither Rooath nor Ssaath seemed at all fazed by my snap at Ssaath, in fact it seemed to pass right through them. Ssaath simply resumed his calm speech. “Friend, please, it does not come every time we have tea, no. I only said it often comes often. My goodness, what a world it would be if it came every time! Ha!”
Ssaath’s replies were doing nothing at all to dispel my growing nervousness; in fact they were doing exactly the opposite, stabbing me in the heart with an evil needle and injecting my veins with a sludgy slew of rotting fear. I sucked in a deep breath, and going against everything that seemed right, I took my warm teacup in hand and sipped in the warm beverage. Why I did, I am not sure. Perhaps to warm me in the sudden cool, or maybe just as a nervous reaction. Whatever the subconscious reason, I did, and the tea warmed me well as it flowed down my throat in a black river of replenishment. Much like when I bit into the so called mucrepet, the thick coil of anxiety seemed to unravel like a ball of yarn in the playful paws of a kitten. Warmth and comfort spread first through my throat and across my chest, and then traveled everywhere from the very tips of my toenails to the ends of my millions of shaggy hairs. The goose bumps sank and were gone as quick as they had appeared and my hairs laid down to rest. Serenity returned to my mind and I no longer felt so aggressively suspicious towards my weird guests. My eyelids fell shut as fast as my nervousness dropped away from my consciousness. I even let a pleasantly satisfied ‘mmmm’ escape from my throat.
A voice spoke from outside my newly formed sphere of total peace. “Ah! So you are enjoying the tea! Excellent, I nearly knew that you would love it. I mixed the leaves myself, you know.” It was Ssaath, I remembered, and I opened my eyes to answer him. Whatever I was going to say to him quickly dropped out of my mind into the eternal abyss of forgotten thoughts. For now an even stranger, nearly terrifying sight greeted my weary eyes once again. The fog was gone, that much was good, I suppose, but not in comparison to what lay before me. It seemed as if upon its disappearance the mist of change had not only taken my kitchen away with it, it had taken my entire apartment! Now all around, in every direction imaginable there was nothing but barren ground, grey and dry. Strange trees shot out from the ground, leafless and dead, their bark twisted around them up to the few branches that shot out from the trunk like dead, bony fingers from some dead and mutilated hand. Small shrubs of the same sort of form speckled across the far spreading plains at random, and no bird flew across the dark, grey sky nor did any mouse skitter across the dry, barren field. Everything around me was like looking at some bleak, monochromic photo from the days of old, except seen through my own eyes. Directly in front of me the land went up slightly to a small ridge, the other side of which I could not see, but I imagined that it could transform into a steep hill or a cliff or chasm.
And yet again the peace fled from me as if I was Satan himself and this time, instead of fear and anxiety, anger erupted inside of me! I slapped the only partially drank cup of tea off of the table with the back of my hand, the black liquid spraying through the air to splat on the ground on top of the shards of shattered porcelain. “What the hell is all this!!!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, “Where in hell is my apartment! Tell me now, what is this, a trick, or what!? TELL ME!!!”
I had never noticed the rising and falling of their chests that would show breathing, but in that moment it seemed they nearly sucked in a deep, thoughtful breath as if they were men like me. They both looked on at me, thoughtfully, silently, there normally reassuring responses strangely absent. All was quiet but the soft whispers of the wind as it flew past us, rustling my shaggy locks a bit but seeming not to touch any part of my spirit-like guests (captor now seemed a better description). My heart pulsated, and I could hear it in my head, the blood rushing through my head with an intense pounding. Fear, was one thing. Wonder, another. I surely was more nervous and, yes, afraid then I had been yet. Where had I been taken? What was going on? Would I die here, wherever here was, and what nightmarish death awaited me? Ideas were conceived inside my mind: perhaps it was only a dream? Maybe it was only a strange vision, an unknown anomaly of sleep deprivation. Or, as far fetched as it was, had my room-mate spiked my soda with LSD?
These ideas came to life within my mind, but died quickly. I knew well what I could see was more real than anything I’d ever experienced in my life. I could feel it in my heart, and in my mind, and even in my very spirit.
But, then, even stronger than the fear was the wonder! This strange plane of abstract existence which I now was having tea-time in fascinated me! That was the truth! Never in my life had I experienced anything like this, and now I felt more in tune and alive than I had ever felt before, not even the strongest energy drink on the convenience store had ever given me the mental buzz I was experiencing now. I could smell the moisture in the breeze, mingled with the dry, scratchy dust that it had riding along with it. Everything seemed sharper than the edges of freshly cleaved crystal. Even the dead, grayscale nature of this strange realm I found myself in appeared glowingly vibrant. I couldn’t imagine why exactly, it could have been the tea, or perhaps it was simply a strange and ironic effect that came from entering this world. The cause of this sudden alertness mattered not to me, though. I still was trapped inside this world, with not even a scrap of a clue as to how or why.
The strange silence that hung in the cool, damp air between us seemed to stretch on for eons. I wondered if this in fact was my dreadful fate, to be trapped in an unending void of silence. This notion was shattered when Ssaath, turning to look nearly mournfully at Rooath, finally opened his ghostly mouth. Relief settled itself within me…but was unfortunately cast out quickly, for the words spoken to me were far more fearful than anything I had yet heard…
“Friend… here is the full truth. This was no mistake. The mists of change came to us for a reason. There is something gone terribly wrong. And if nothing is done, you, us, our peoples, and our entire worlds will be torn to shreds and consumed like prey of wild beasts…”
TO BE CONTINUED
(AGAIN)
Drew Otteson 