By contributing writer J.M. Lucci
I.
I cannot say with certainty my sanity has held these past few weeks of my incarceration in this dreaded asylum. Ever since that night of thunder and torrent—I grimace at the horrors beset upon mere mortals that nocturne. The head-shrink assures me these are eidolon phantasies brought about by the drugs, but I know what I saw at that wrecked, Pennsylvanian rest stop, and what really happened in the wooded area near the rest stop. Even now, my reclamations of the events bring uncontrollable shudders to my soul—again, the medical doctor and his staff of minion interns assure me these involuntary spasms are imagined. But what does he know? He wasn’t there.
The police found no trace of any of my fellow travelers, of course, and without personal knowledge of their last names—save Gregory Eliot—or records of my frantic phone call, or even the existence of said phone, there had been little effort to search for them; my horrid state at the time did not help in convincing the police of my story, but my frazzled mentality wasn’t affecting my judgment or memory. I’m sure of it.
The medications aren’t working to soothe the pain; thank Mercy they allow me paper and ink, or after my passing there would be no one to know of that night, and of the rest stop of madness.
It was a blissful summer’s eve, and my collegiate band of road-trip drunkards and revelers and I barreled down bleak Amish backroads, content to sing and rejoice in our recent exploits concerning music festivals and unions of sexual nature. Our rickety wagon roared gently under yellow moonbeams cast like a beacon upon our route. I was in the back, along with the siblings Marcus and Marianne, drinking gaily of the draught remaining from the night ‘fore last. Gregory Eliot, sober and Mormon—a redundant and abhorrent combination not for normal folk—helmed the rust-bucket, careful to cruise nine miles over the posted limit. His current fling, a woman whose features reminded me oddly of slightly fish-like, sat shotgun and carried the name of Alba. I dared not ask her last name to dear Gregory—as I’m sure in my inebriated state would have stridently fancied her surname as Core—and was content to keep her genealogy shrouded in mystery. For the time being, of course, as curiosity drives all men to knowledge, especially drunken collegiate minds.
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I knew only Gregory personally; the others were students of a Massachusetts university whose named eluded me in the din of the outdoor festival we had commonly attended. The Poconos region has long been home to various musical troupes, and Gregory and I had happened across such an event by chance; our wagon had run out of fuel just a brisk walk from the 12th Annual Poconos Indie Rock Festival (a dream-land surrounded by vibrant trees and pleasantly infested with equally vibrant female trim). Gregory wandered off in search of fuel while I partook in the festivities. Blonde-, auburn-, raven-, and red-haired maidens swayed drunkenly in the field while hipsters (smelling foully of hemp) belted out hypnotic tunes reminiscent—to me alone apparently after a brief survey of the crowd—of cultish days long forgotten among the Catskills and only whispered in small circles of the musically adept.
I immediately joined in and danced with many a collegiate whore that afternoon. Jealous boyfriends and hopeless male romantics laced in patchouli oil watched with envy as I spun and jumped in perfect harmony with the beat and caused women to swoon for my attention. Merchants dressed in hemp and stringy pale dreadlocks attempted to sell me love beads, knick-knacks, and henna tattoos—my refusal came in the form of expletives apparently unheard of in their self-absorbed bubble of pinko commie ideals. I did, gratefully, embrace their charitable kegs of piss-beer so lovingly strewn about the field. Waste not, I say.
By the return of Gregory with a few gallons of ill-obtained fuel, I had secretly used our wagon as breeding grounds for my future offspring, twice over. Unfazed by my tales of fortune, he produced at his side the aforementioned fish-like chick called Alba. I say fish-like because her eyes protruded slightly from her forehead and her chin dipped at a gentler angle than most people; dare I mention I rarely, if ever, saw her blink. She exhumed a pungent stench, faintly of saltwater, as well. Gregory was never one to pick up pork-able women; I blamed his perpetual sobriety. Oddly, he blamed my inebriation for the same notion. The fuck does he know of college, anyway? If you must fuck ugly, fuck whilst drunk. Ignorant, Mormon punk.
Fuel in hand, we quickly made haste to get back on the road, as our fraternal brothers were no doubt waiting to hear of our exploits in the haunted villages and cities of the Northeast. Before we left, however, we did pick up the siblings Marcus and Marianne, a drunkenly happy couple who would have been forsaken to hitchhiking had not my loins persuaded me I could bone the dark and lovely Marianne. How or when I would accomplish this task was up to Fate. At the time, I did not think to consider Gregory and I were taking our three new traveling companions far from their native Massachusetts, further south toward the glorious Confederacy, nor did I ponder their silence on the matter.
We managed to push the wagon to an all-night gas station after our ill-obtained fuel ran out near the witching hour; the attendant, a disheveled, old gentleman, silently and creepily refueled our ride as we checked the map. The station’s interior was closed, and some of our party—the fickle women—were in dire need of a bathroom stop. I inquired the attendant for information of any nearby rest stops, and he pointed out one not far off, approximately five miles southbound, that would suit our needs. This location was in contrast to the map, which told the nearest stop was over forty miles yonder. He looked at me with chalky and slimy teeth and laughed, informing me the map was wrong; this facility was too new and our map too old. I scoffed at the premise, perhaps because the old man seemed almost too eager to divulge the information. Alba, the fish-headed whore, saw this as divine providence from some summer spirit or some other karmatic-hullabaloo—Gregory, following his penis, agreed and took the helm in unsubtle manner to impress his potential patchouli-and-saltwater-stanched lover.
It is at this point I truly began to fancy things were amiss in our wagon. As superficially gay and merry our words and motions were, I could not, at the time, decipher a budding sense of dread from within the recesses of my mind. All of our travelers were from the same university up north, none seemed to have rides home, and none seemed to mind we were going in the wrong direction for them—I chalked all these compulsive apprehensions up to the fact we were all college folk, and thus prone to adventurous exploits even if the future lay dim. That, and they seemed to be flower-children by nature, poor in pocket but rich in whatever nonsense English majors absorb in those musty tomes of fag poetry and post-modern nihilism.
The night was clear and a gothic moon waxed high over our wagon, blanketing pale yellow light over the looming pines and evergreens of the region. I made a subtle joke about the “dancing with the devil” and Batman; apparently none of our hipster-travelers liked Michael Keaton. It hurt my chances of tea-bagging the exotic Marianne, so I laid low and gazed out the window at the ghastly, finger-like trees jutting skyward in a haze of alcohol and speed (my contempt for hippies and weed does not extend to hard drugs). I was about to dismiss the old attendant’s prophecies of the new and secretive rest stop when lo’, an exit ramp seemed to magically appear off to the right. Gregory, at the fevered behest of our female travelers, haphazardly veered from the far left to the off-ramp—I spilled my beer in the process.