Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-35911608-20190508225431

''Note: this is my entry for Helel's Bible Black contest. My song was Master of Puppets by Metallica.''

“They call it Herbal Blue.” I studied the glow of the strange blue liquid. The neon lights of the dark club didn’t really aid in my inspection, but I couldn’t notice any impurities floating around in the vial. “So what does it do, exactly?” Scott laughed before taking another drag of his blunt. “What doesn’t it do, man? Ahh... It’s definitely a different kind of feeling. Like nothing you ain’t ever seen.” “Uh huh.” I offered the vial back to him, then took another swig of the piss poor beer this place had to offer. “Didn’t know you were into psychedelics that much.” “I’m not! I mean, I wasn’t, until Dewey introduced me to this. They say it’s completely organic or some shit like that.” “Yeah, well, they say the same thing about the apples I buy from the grocery store, but they taste the same as any other apple.” Scott huffed, showing his irritation towards my unwillingness to inject myself with that blue gunk. It was an expression I was used to; I didn’t mind joining him in his ventures to these heavy metal basement clubs, but I was pretty firm about my position on experimenting. Every time he found something new, he had to try it out, with no concern about catching cancer or something other god forsaken disease. I, on the other hand, preferred to stick to the classics of beer and smokes, the latter far less often. Scott always tried to expand my scope, but I had only agreed on a few occasions. Perhaps agreeing at all was a bad choice; it just left the door open for him to keep testing me. “What’s in it?” “Dunno. Dewey wouldn’t tell me, says it was a ‘trade secret’.” I looked over to the young bartender, who threw a wave in my direction. I returned my attention to the concert. “I’ll pass.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Scott rubbing his chin and observing me. “It’s not a needle, ya know.” I turned my head back, slightly relieved that injections were out of the equation. “Edible?” Scott nodded, then offered the vial back towards me. “Listen, mate. I know you’re squeamish about this sort of thing. But I wouldn’t offer something if I thought it was too crazy for you. Please, just for me? So you can understand what I’m talking about.” I looked at the vial, then back at him. His pierced face had gone from one of simple bliss to one of care, the kind of face a parent makes when giving their kid a life-long important piece of advice. Sighing, I took the small glass tube and popped off the cork. I didn’t need to raise it to my nose; the candy-like smell diffused towards my face instantly. I cautiously stuck my fingertip in and pulled it out, the cold goo stick slowly crawling down my skin. My heart beat in tune to the music, and after shattering any remaining doubt, I stuck the mixture between my lips and sucked. The substance was much colder than anticipated, just barely to the point of hurting my teeth, but otherwise it just tasted like candy gel – the kind you’d squeeze onto a lollipop and lick off, or something of the sorts. I smacked my lips for a few moments to try and get the taste to fade away, but Scott smacked my back and laughed. “Well, whaddya know! You’re growing up to be a fine young man now.” “Yeah, yeah. Here-“ I began to hand the vial back to its owner when I froze. An icy sensation was resonating from my stomach throughout my torso, before hurrying along my limbs and tickling the tips of my appendages. The chill passed after a moment, but once it was gone, it was as though someone had maxed out my saturation setting. The neon lights burned brighter, the lasers from the stage cut through the strengthened blackness of the clubs, lining my arms in stripes of blue and green. I no longer felt the warm buzz of the alcohol, but rather a heart racing sensation that was carried to every part of my being. I wanted to run, I wanted to jump, and I wanted to fight. At least, that’s what my body was saying. The next thing I knew, I was standing in the crowd, head banging and mouth screaming to the songs of the band. I keep flailing and jumping about to the smashing of drum and guitar, while visions of slaying heavy metal cover demons danced in my brain. Colours invaded my eyes from all directions, and I felt as though any moment, my senses would become fried and unusable. As with most drugs, I had a few lapses in memory, but based on Scott’s personal account, I nearly jumped up on stage in my enthusiastic state of mind before being taken down by security. However, the band, delighted at how much I was into the music, just laughed it off and let me stay for the show, back over by Scott of course. That wasn’t without the lead singer autographing my forehead however; a small joke to her, but an honour to me. Slouched on that leather couch once again, I could hardly keep still. My leg was bouncing rapidly on the ball of my foot. My heart was still performing the Indy 500, and my eyes were transfixed upon the stage. Scott had also had a “drop or two”, as he put it, and was currently fiddling with a metal puzzle that looked like it had fallen straight out of a junk yard. “So, you like-y?” I quickly turned my head towards and him and nodded. “I’ve never felt so energized in my life.” Scott laughed, then raised his own bottle towards me. “You said it, bruth’r,” he replied, imitating the wrestler voice as best he could. I grinned and clanked my bottle against his, and we both followed up with a swig. The rest of the evening I spent sitting around, imagining countless scenarios of heroism and destruction to the tunes of the club. Eventually, as the night wound down, the feeling passed, and not long after the club was cleared out. As we waited at the bus stop for his ride home, Scott slipped something into my pocket. I immediately pulled the vial back out and pushed it towards his chest. “Look, I appreciate it, but my parents would kill me if they-“ “Just tell them it’s candy, they’ll buy it.” Scott smiled before patting me on the shoulder and boarding a bus that had just arrived. I stood there, holding the strange liquid, its blue glow slightly illuminating my hand under the streetlight. There wasn’t a lot of it left. Looking back up, I watched as the bus departed, taking notice of Scott. I couldn’t tell if it was the lighting of the bus or what, but the whites of his eyes were gone. It looked as though two shadows were clinging to the top of his face, something I hadn’t – and couldn’t have – noticed back in the club. I got home not too long after Scott had left. I quietly entered the front door, creeped upstairs to my room, and flopped into bed, immediately falling to slumber beneath my countless posters of spike-covered guitars and flaming stages. My sleep, however, was not an enjoyable one. I was plagued throughout the night by the same hyperbolic visions of rock album covers coming to life – perhaps when I was on Herbal Blue it fit the feeling, but now it was just disruptive and honestly terrifying. What made it especially bad were the voices. The me in the dreams spoke in an unfamiliar voice, with a cruel laughter that sounded repeatedly as “I” slaughtered countless creatures and people across a hellscape of twisted metal and fire. When I awoke, my head spun and ached from a restless night. I rolled over to face my alarm clock – it was ten in the morning. My stomach also growled something horrid, so I clambered to my feet, still dressed in the same attire as the night before, and made my way to the kitchen. The only person awake was my younger brother Ricky, who was playing one of those old rock band rhythm games on the living room TV, with the fake instruments and whatnot. I threw a bowl of cereal together and flopped myself next to him on the couch. “Mom and dad out?” “Dad’s at a meeting or something, I don’t know where mom is,” the loveable termite responded, not taking his eyes off of the screen. Good kid. I slowly ate my Saturday morning breakfast while watching him attempt some difficult metal song that I recognized the sound of, but couldn’t place the name. It was hard to think with my body demanding food so badly. Eventually the song ended, and I took the guitar from Ricky’s hands. “Lemme show ya how it’s done.” “Sure,” he replied sarcastically. I stood to put him in his place with the power of musical gaming genius, but as I stood, the pain in my torso grew piercing. I groaned, but started the song. I barely got through the opening before I was doubling over in pain. I tried to hide it by acting like I was on stage, but soon I couldn’t bare it. I paused the game and ran to the kitchen, scarfing down biscuits and croissants. Ricky must’ve been watching me, but I couldn’t help myself – the hunger pangs were overwhelming. Finally, my heart dropped. The Herbal Blue. There was nothing else that could explain it. I reached into my pocket and extracted the vial once again, eying that poisonous substance. Quite the withdrawal symptoms. Either way, I couldn’t have Ricky asking questions – I could rely on the kid for good discussions, but the little bugger was terrible at keeping secrets from our parents. I opened up the fridge door and, with my back to him and my body blocking the door, I chugged down the remaining goop, reaching into the vial’s depths with my tongue to collect every drop of the sweet nectar. If I had just become an addict overnight, at least it wasn’t to some disgusting brown patch of grass. My primal feelings subsided shortly after, as my theory was correct. As the chill ran through my torso, the stomach pains disappeared entirely. The colours of my house were intensified, just as before, but I had to turn from the windows quickly; the sunlight put a strain on my eyes like no other. “You okay?” Ricky called out from the couch. I turned and nodded, closing the fridge and returning to pick the guitar up once more. “I’m good, just getting a drink.” Smirking, I rubbed my eye and started the song back up. The energy boost was like a freaking cheat code; the notes were lined up perfectly, pixel for pixel, on every stroke. My fingers leaped up and down the neck of the controller, while my mind sang along in that demonic voice from the night before. The visions were returning, slowly but surely, and my own sight began to blur between these crazed hallucinations and the flashing blips and beeps of my television screen. Regardless of how well I could see, however, the visions came to a halt as the song ended. The score screen came up, showing a big “100%” over my points. I turned towards Ricky and grinned again, but this time my little brother wasn’t clapping. He just pointed at my face and said, “What’s with your eyes?” I touched my face, trying not to show my panic. “Why? What’s wrong with them?” “The inside part, they’re all blue. You have brown eyes.” My brain raced for an answer, but something else within me supplied it: tell him they’re false lenses. “They’re, uh, special effect contacts. You know, like the kind people who wear glasses have sometimes, but just for show.” “Did you wear them to bed?” I was trying hard not to pace around the room, so my feet were bouncing me on the floor a bit. “Yeah, I went straight to sleep when I got home. Listen, I gotta head out for a bit.” Without answering to anymore of Ricky’s concerns, I yanked on a pair of sneakers and bolted out the door. On my way down the street, I pulled out my phone and entered Scott’s number. The Herbal Blue Scott had given me wasn’t enough - the hunger was creeping its way back to me. I let it ring until I hit the voicemail tone, after which I left an explicit message telling him to meet me at the bus stop now. I sat at that stop for some time, waiting for him to step off and give me answers about Herbal Blue. He never came. I waited for a call back, or even a text, telling me what to do about this insatiable hunger. Nothing arrived. Eventually, when my shadow was but a circle beneath my feet, I couldn’t take it any longer. I sprinted down the street, wobbling and teetering across the pavement. The sun was dizzying, and I felt like I was watching a J.J. Abrams film, what with all the lens flare striking my retina. Pull your covering over your head, fool. With nausea setting in, I managed to unzip my jacket and use it to block out some of the sun. It worked long enough for me to get to the club without falling over. My eyes happily adjusted to the dimmer atmosphere, though the concentration of the lights was still a bit off putting. The club was now but a casual bar, with chicks in tight dresses giggling and ordering fuzzy navels while the brutes in the corner drank their beer and eyed any piece of bare skin they could see. I ignored what I could and made my way to the way, slamming a hand suddenly onto the counter. “I need to see Dewey,” I told the barista. “He’s in the back, I’ll go get ‘em,” she responded, slinging a towel over her shoulder and walking through a curtain behind the bar. Unfortunately for her, my body was juiced up on what this Herbal Blue was, meaning my patience was, if nothing else, thin. I leaped over the table and followed through the curtain. It led into a very dark back room of cabinets and shelves filled to the brim with every one of man’s favorite poisons. The only lights were a few ultraviolent bulbs in the corners of the room. But the part that really caught my eye was the large double wooden door in the floor that barista lady had been opening when I walked in. “What the- what are you doing back here? Get out!” she shouted, holding one of the doors open. Dewey had to be down there. I started to approach her, but I was caught off guard as the second door swung upwards. The bartender I was looking for turned and caught sight of me. “Ah, there you are. Scott said you’d be coming.” I stood still – well, relatively still, if swinging one’s arm counts. I was dumbfounded by how Dewey knew I’d be coming. Before I could get an answer out of the guy how, he pointed towards me and spoke to the barista. “Look.” The whites of her eyes slowly turned towards me again, illuminated by the special bulbs. “Scott gave it to him?” “What, Herbal Blue?” I seemed to catch the two of them off guard. “So he didn’t trick you into taking it,” Dewey responded. “Oh, the hell he did. What is that crap?” I shouted. “What did Scott give me?” Dewey smiled in that dark room, his teeth glowing just like the drug he had been distributing. “Why don’t you come down here and take a look?” A new feeling erupted in my stomach. I started to back away from the cellar door slowly, but three steps in something went wrong - my feet fought against me. It wasn’t as though my limbs were going numb or anything; my body was just refusing to move. “Wh-what’s going on?” I shouted, but neither of them replied. Instead, they grabbed me under the armpits and dragged me down, beneath the cellar door. Slowly lifting me down the steps, I was taken into a rough cave tunnel, the walls lined with torches, leading deeper into the earth. Dewey wrapped an arm under my shoulder and gave a thumbs up to the barista, who promptly closed the cellar doors and presumably returned to her duties. I could no longer move my body, every limb was as stiff as a board, but I could still move my eyes. Now I saw why Dewey’s eyes hadn’t been glowing - they were a smooth navy blue, and nothing else. “Get used to it.” I couldn’t tell if the voice came from Dewey or from inside my head, but I was pretty sure my captor hadn’t moved his lips. My chest was already pounding in terror, and each step deeper into the tunnel only elevated the feeling. Soon, it grew colder, and the orange light of the torches eventually gave way to the blue glow of an upcoming opening. A million possibilities swam through my mind as to what awaited me on the other side, but I didn’t have to wait long to find out. The tunnel opened up into a large cavern, illuminated by a massive pool of what I could only assume to be Herbal Blue. A large skeletal figure rested on a rock island in the centre of the pool, with its arms outstretched and fingers in various positions. The skeleton was obviously not human, with every bone having various spikes poking outwards, but it bore a few similarities in the basic shape. As Dewey took me closer, I noticed small drops of the blue liquid dripping from its fingers. Unless this thing was hidden for centuries, there’s no way the pool could be filled this much. Or so my brain thought, until I looked to the walls. Numerous individuals were strung up against the cave walls, ragged and pale, with tubes coming out of their arms and descending back into the pool. I tried to move with every ounce of will that remained, but my body remained still. Dewey set me on the ground before the skeleton, my limbs now going limp and dropping loosely to the ground like a marionette doll. “Wh-what is this? What’s going on here!?” “You wanted to know what Herbal Blue was. This is its source,” Dewey declared, gesturing around to the countless souls strung up around him. He then stood solemnly, watching the bizarre skeleton. “Our Lord most regretfully passed a few hundred years ago, and thus our people had no leader. In His name, we drank of his essence, and noticed that He had yet to truly leave us.” The deranged bartender then moved his face towards mine. “Don’t you get it? He’s in the blood.” “Then… all the visions… the hunger…” “His. Taking part of His blood begins his movement into your frame. Thus, naturally, you’d take on his eternal hunger and memories from other realms. As you can see, His body is long gone. But for the most worthy of us, He can live through us.” A laughed rattled in the back of my head, and tears rolled down my face. “What is it going to do with me..?” I whispered. Dewey shrugged, before taking a cup from the edge of the pool and filling it with the creature’s blood. “Well, either you’ll become a meat sack to produce more Herbal Blue, in the venture of bringing more into our family, or He will live within you.” He offered the cup towards me, brimming with the luminescent substance. I didn’t want to take it. My hand moved anyways. 