's Black Cloak
Vol. 1
'The interview with a Shaman'
Where does he keep getting those? I thought they didn't let you in here with those. He thought before he sat down.
The cigarette smoke (or was that cigarette smoke?) seemed to linger; waving and curling about the room-- not dissipating the way normal smoke does. Nor did it smell the way normal smoke did; oddly enough... it brought a distinct familiarity to it-- the thought of wet early-autumn leaves that were being burned anyway, along with an aromatic murmur of misty fog and moss.
Somewhat disoriented by the distracting thought, he remembered suddenly what he was here to do and spoke, “So let's get this underway, mister....”
“ 'Name's Val.” Val leaned forward from the very austere metal chair he was sitting in, extending his hand out an uncommon distance to be more than gracious. “And yourself?”
“Elwain.” He shook Val's wide, hard hand. Val had a strong, rugged grip, and Elwain could sharply feel the little nicks and tears that littered the calloused pads of Val's hands. Everything about Val seemed rough around the edges and well-worn.
His face had a permanently haggard look to it that draped over his piercing light blue eyes, though the way he carried himself seemed to indicate that he still had plenty of energy. His hair was dark white mostly with hints of fiery red in them, and his voice had a heft of gravel in it that instantly filled the room and reverberated off the walls when he spoke. His attire looked to be mostly patches; the boots he was wearing didn't have matching shoelaces, his jeans were black but had self-sewn patches over their tears and splits forming along the seams, his shirt was a dark green color with what looked to be spots of bleach-stains on them, but most interesting was the cloak.. It looked to be a home-made … something... almost a duster-length coat, but it was made of so many patches of dark-colored material that it looked more like feathers than fabric. It seemed thin and meshy around the wrists, but thick and warm around the breast, back, and collar, though the end of the cloak around his ankles was just as gossamer and relentlessly worn as it was around the wrists.
“Val.... ummm...?”
“Yes...?” Val led on, thinking it was some sort of a question before he realized the predicament. “Oh; yeah it's just 'Val'-- no last name.”
“You don't have a last name?” Elwain asked. Awkward silence hung in the air for a moment while Val just nodded knowingly. “Alright I'm just going to put 'N/A'...”
“That's fine; that works.”
“So... How did we find you... again?” Elwain asked. “This was rather spontaneously thrown together and all...”
“Yeah, I get that a lot. Spontaneous.” Val chuckled. “No, I found you, actually. Through a buddy of mine. Mr. Alexander Wraithe.”
“Alexander Wraithe. You know Alexander Wraithe?”
Val looked back directly at Elwain for a few moments, as if to say express the obvious sincerity of his claim. “Yes.”
“Alright. Camera rolling, please?” Elwain said to the crew in the shadows. The camera focused on Val. “Tell us everything. From the beginning.”
“My first experience was back in the 1970's. I was young then, and a fresh dropout; I had gotten caught up with this half-indian half-ACTUAL-indian chick that was about in her twenties. Her name was Jasmine, and she was a free spirit. Before ya' knew it we were hopping trains from Oregon and crossing the boarder until we ended up getting caught in Idaho and held in county jail for a day in this middle-of-nowhere town that was little else than a county jail and a train yard called Millstown.
Anyway this wasn't going to be the place to settle down and we needed cash to get the hell out of there, so I started hustling drugs as best I knew. I don't think there was a point in my life where I didn't know how to cook meth, or whip up some only-I-knew drug that could get anyone anywhere high as balls. So... y'know, naturally we start asking around and hanging out with the local crowd of hooligans trying to pedal some not-so-bad stuff I managed to cobble together from the general store's cleaning isle and the natural elements for pocket-change.
So Jasmine and I start to mingle with the locals come sundown, and we're also looking for a place to stay. The kids are younger than me and live with their parents so we can't stay with any of them, or sell anything hard to them besides some grass that we bought off a mexican dude for a little less than what we let it go for. We start looking for abandoned houses just to take some shelter in and we find this one, but the kids are all like 'Nahh man don't go in there; that place is haunted! A really bad guy shot himself in there!' even though it looked fine to me; the fence was tilted and there was a broken swing-set out in the front lawn, but other than that it looked okay; just like any other house on the street, but surrounded by thicket.
Now only one of the local bunch are older than me and that dude was Jasmine's age-- which bothered me because the dude was a super-douche. Jasmine was really into all that supernatural stuff and had me intrigued by it so I kinda was familiar with the wiccan and new-age movement, though, at the time I thought her saying she didn't want to stay in the abandoned place was because she really wanted to have a bounce with douche-face. Whatever; I wasn't about to be mad about it, since said douche-face let her stay the night but not me-- he didn't live far, though, and she said she'd check up on me.
And all I have is a sleeping bag, my pocket knife, and some drugs, mind you. So it's dusk, Jasmine is gone off with the other guy, and I'm using my knife to jimmy open the door to this abandoned place. I slide the pry portion of my best-thing-I-own Rockey custom knife I nicked off of this biker guy when I was like twelve and pull back against the bolt of the door. It moves, I pull more-- I'm not really all that great at this yet, so the pry shatters, and I'm all like 'FUCK!' The rest of the knife is fine, but that pry split down the middle, and I go down to pick it up. The name 'Rockey' was split in the middle and the broken piece just says 'key' on it, and it's a narrow pry, so I think 'huh. What the hell.' pick it up, and jam it in the key hole. Nothing moved, I didn't feel any clicks or anything like that; the door just opened as soon as I touched the keyhole with the pry.
Inside, at first, seems kind of normal. The back door I came in through opens up to the kitchen with some of its cupboards torn out and its old-timey refrigerator door hanging wide open with a single cardboard box inside. Then the kitchen opens up to a parlor, or a dining room I guess? Which was empty save for an old comfort-chair with its seat-cushion missing, then things started getting kind of fucked up in the bedrooms. Maybe some kids had been in there or whatever but there were crayon drawings of little monsters with sharp teeth and big fucked-up morbid muscle-dude drawings where it looked like like... a guy was literally being crushed under the weight of this big heap of warts growing on his shoulders, back and arms that I guess was supposed to be muscles because it clearly said underneath it in crayon 'mussle man' that creeped me out a little. The bathroom just had holes from the bottom of the tub to underneath the house and where the toilet would've been, and the other room was just empty-- but the living room was something else...
All the sheet-rock in the ceiling had fallen out and onto the floor, which exposed the attic that was just creepily dark. I could remember stepping into the living room and everything getting quiet-- I thought it was because the insulation that had fallen just canceled noise but... They do that.”
“Do what?”
“Cancel noise. When they can't get the heat out of a room, they'll take the ambient noise in stead. It doesn't seem like much... 'til you see them. Then you know.” Val took a drag from his cigarette and exhaled in a sigh before continuing.
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“Dimethyltryptamine. That night I took my first hit of DMT; I had some on me, and I'd had access to it before, but I never tried it because up until then I had only sold it, and I was all out of my soft-drugs. I didn't take it right away. First I tried forgetting about it and sleeping in the non-creepified room. But in deep REM sleep, when you're really dreaming, your body generates DMT by itself in large quantities-- see DMT is... a complex thing. I prefer to think of it as the Death Message Taker; your spirit needs a heavy dose of it while you die in order to pass on to... wherever it is you need to go. A consciousness needs a body, a conduit, in order to change and adapt to the world around it-- including making an exit. DMT is that substance that gets in the brain and essentially flings the consciousness back out of the external reality that we live in. It is to the body and consciousness the way a subway is to the subway station.
If your body suddenly ends, or ends in a way that your dying brain can't take the spirit elsewhere; the spirit lingers-- just as it is-- until it can move on. It haunts an area. Or an idea. The two are really one and the same. If you know a ghost-- and it's harmful; thinking of it is inviting that spirit to