The Little Black Bag

“… Stop laughing at me! I can’t take it anymore… Fine. Fine! I’ll tell them the story again! It was October 12th, 2013. I went out looking for a high.

My girlfriend had just left me ‘for someone more stable’, she said. I went straight to my normal dealer, but he didn’t have anything that would get me as fucked up as I wanted to be. So he referred me to someone who ‘had the really crazy shit’.

I took the scrap of paper, called the number. The man on the other end told me where to be and when to be there. I went there when I was supposed to, with $500 in my back pocket. I emptied my bank account to get it, I just didn’t care anymore. He said he had a few things, and showed them to me. One was just your run-of-the-mill meth, which I didn’t want. He had a couple grams of shrooms too, and a little bag of black powder.

The little black bag… I wish I never saw it. But I did, and it intrigued me. I wanted to know what was in it, and he told me, “It has psilocin crystals, LSD, ‘smiles’, and a bit of something else.”

He wouldn’t elaborate further on the ‘something else’ but he assured me that it would blow my mind. The little bag, which probably held… I dunno, half a gram? Cost me $400. But I took it, I took the damn little bag.

I got home around 10 PM and straight away, I went and got my stuff. Mixed the powder in water and plugged it. I don’t know why I did it… I don’t know! But I did it. And I laid down, closed my eyes, and waited.

Couple of hours later, I saw him.

Yeah. Him. The one ‘him’. Death. The grim reaper. He looked at me with those eyeless sockets, and his fleshless grin drove icicles into my mind and heart. I was petrified with fear, unable to think or speak.

His voice came to me in my mind. “You called, mortal? I will give you your one wish, before I take your soul.”

Terror fueled me, and I panicked. “My wish! I wish to never die!”

If it was possible… If it was possible, he grinned more. He nodded. “As they usually do, so will you. So be it. You will never die.”

I fell unconscious, and I slept. I don’t know how long I slept. I woke up, and it was dark. Completely dark. I fumbled for the light, staggering across my room. My body felt weak and I nearly fell more than once. I found the light switch… And realized it was on. I couldn’t see, and the light was on. I reached for my eyes, and realized with horror that they were gone…

I started screaming. I screamed and screamed and someone called 911. They took me away, they cauterized my eye sockets and cleaned them so they wouldn’t get infected, and they put me away here. They put me here, in this darkness, with him…

I can hear him laughing. Stop. Stop fucking laughing! I can’t take it! No. No! I won’t tell the story again! No… NO! Not again… Okay! I’ll tell it! Just stop laughing…”

The young man’s parents stood outside his room and watched him, rocking back and forth in his straitjacket. His mother turned to the nurse. “Do you think he’ll…?”

The nurse shook his head. “I don’t think so. Whatever he took, whatever he did, he really did a number on himself. To scoop out your own eyes with a knife… We still don’t know how he didn’t die from blood loss.”

There was silence again outside the room, as the man inside began the story once more.