I sat in a van surrounded by people singing friendly road trip songs and eagerly discussing what life would be like from now on. We all wore the same plain, white t-shirt and jeans, and had short hair that stopped at our earlobes. The vans weren’t anything that I remember seeing in real life. A long, bench-like seat wrapped around the inside walls like a limousine. The wall that slid open like a door didn’t have a seat. A pole stuck out of the floor so that people who had to stand could hold on to it. The only forward-facing seats were in the very back and in the front for the driver. There must have been three or four vans in our convoy. The air was pretty clean, and the forest surrounding the gravel road looked like a painted background moving behind the van windows.
We stopped at a sort of warehouse and parked among dozens of other bus-like vehicles. Dozens of other cultists like us were obviously inside. The building looked unfinished on the outside, like it was quickly built and intended to be taken apart again easily. White tin siding, unfinished pinewood, wing bolts. Inside, there were fluorescent lamps and clean checker patterned floor tiles. Aisles and aisles of metal shelves filled the whole inside of the building. Halloween costumes and toy weapons were neatly arranged on the shelves. Inside each costume was supposed to be an individual demon waiting to be merged with a human. Something on the way to this place had gotten me in a bad mood and I wasn’t feeling eager to go along with all of this. If I absolutely had to give my body to a demon, if I were forced against my will to wear a stupid costume, at least I’d be able to choose one out of such a wide variety. Irate by everyone else’s enjoyment, I found what looked like a whip in the middle of a bunch of soft, furry animal heads. Black and shiny, it was covered in scales with thin needle points sticking out. When I picked it up it slung itself out of my hand and around my body, and I felt a sharp pinch at the end of my spine and in my left nostril. This thing stuck out of my back like a tail. A spike like a toothpick was sticking out of the side of my nose. If I touched it, I could feel it rip at the inside of my nose, but I could also see things that I couldn’t before. I understood more information than I normally should have just by looking at something. I’d “merged” with this thing, but I didn’t feel at all like I was sharing my body with another soul and felt completely disillusioned by this stupid cult’s bullshit.
The group I arrived with began to collect at the entrance/exit of the building and we started moving out to leave. There was yelling and screaming outside. It sounded like quite a commotion. Where the buses and vans were parked, people in Halloween costumes were being stabbed by the hand-less arms of a tall creature and ripped apart in its wildly thrashing jaws. It had a thin body and thin limbs, was smooth, and so brittle that when it moved violently enough, parts of itself would accidentally break off. The joints in its arms and legs were hollow pot-like structures where the ends of each limb segment were sticking out. As it ran after people, it stabbed its footless legs into the ground like a person running on stilts. And its head looked like a shark’s head, and it moved chaotically as if it were trying to escape its own body. Some of the cult members ran into the fray to fight the thing. A lot of them were killed. The idea of killing this thing felt like fun. I ran in to get its attention, and dashed around it so that it would make sharp turns and trip over vehicles trying to chase me. It finally crashed to the ground and shattered. The head still wriggled around and snapped its jaws at everything it saw. I picked up a 4×4 piece of lumber that was lying nearby and smashed the head. Nobody around me seemed to care that I’d done something amazing. Nobody praised me, and it didn’t seem like anyone was any more glad to still be alive than before. I wanted attention and screamed like a child.
Then I woke.
