A Bright Shiny Night
It seems to be working faster tonight. We only took the dose half an hour ago, and even now I can begin to feel the rush. My heart beats faster, my skin feels warmer, the lights shine brighter. Their electric glow is almost too bright. I look at Amy and can tell she feels it too. I look out of the window. The snow has stopped and it’s now a bright, clear winter’s night, the stars glinting and the moon gleaming low over the apartment blocks. The night looks so wonderful I want to be out in it, to feel the light on my skin, a cool clear light from above, not the tawdry imitation made by man. The cold holds no fears. My skin is warm and fresh. Nothing can chill it.
“Let’s go out onto the roof,” I say to Amy. She nods, smiling. She must sense the same urge, something in the trip drawing us up and out into the night. To see it, to breathe it in, to become it.
We hurriedly climb the stairs, and head out, through the fire escape, onto the roof. It feels wonderful. The dark, the glow of the moonlight, the stars, the dusting of snow reflecting it all back. I can nearly feel the starlight on my skin. I have to feel it on my skin. I start to remove my shirt, then my pants and underclothes. Amy is doing the same. We’re both excited now. The drug seems to be taking us somewhere different tonight. Not just the euphoria and energy we had before, but outwards, into something bright and new, into space perhaps.
I look down, and realise there is snow beneath my naked feet, but it’s not cold. It’s fluffy, inviting, comfortable. I lie back into its woolly embrace, staring up at the stars, the stars that seem so nearly right in some way. They talk to me. Are talking to us both, but the sound won’t come in. We need to let it in.
“What can we do to let it in?” asks Amy. “I want to hear the stars sing to me.”
I remember something. I’d forgotten. I’d bought something for this, I realize. Something had told me this would happen. I reach down to my discarded pants, and there I find the two survival knives I bought just the other day.
I pick one up, and give it to Amy. She stares raptly at the blade, so sharp, so clean, so fresh, and then lovingly, tenderly, she makes a precisely shaped cut in my chest. I feel nothing except elation and pleasure as the stars start to reach in to me. I smile, hold Amy close, and we begin to open ourselves up to the shining bright freedom that the sky, the stars and the powder offer us.
I’m connecting to a world beyond our own, and sense something uncoil, stirring in its eternal slumber in the walls between the worlds, tentacular tendrils seeking a way through. And I have a strange realization that the old man on the Innsmouth boardwalk might sell something more than just drugs.
But there is no turning back. We’re committed. The ritual has taken us. Slowly, red mixes with the white fresh snow on the roof. And as we let in the light of the stars, we become darker ourselves. Until nothing is left but the stars and the sky, and some small fragment brought through to make the world a little darker.
