A Shaman's Black Cloak: Vol1

manifest around you. You become its source of conduction.

  Depending on the strength of the spirit, it will take on less-than-ideal sources of conduction other than a body, like the energy in the heat in a specific area, or the white-noise in a room, and it will make weak manifestations, like EVP's or altering the outcome of a dice-roll, or something like that. This is kind of like how a high-voltage current will want to jump out of a wire and into something else when the circuit is suddenly severed.

  A very very strong spirit will be able to override a relatively weak spirit that's inhabiting a body; and you get a possession. But... Every night, when you sleep, regardless of how strong your conscious spirit is; it's vulnerable; it's not there to defend the body it left behind from any attackers, so it's very easy to get possessed in your sleep-- we call this sleepwalking.

  Of course, just getting approached by a weak but spiteful spirit in your sleep is a nightmare; it doesn't mean they break in though. You just look out at them, and they just look out at you...”

  “Interesting.”

  “That night was the first night I sleepwalked. I went to sleep, and I don't remember anything. The dream was just black. But I remember waking up to the high-beams of a car beaming through the curtained windows of the house and straight into my open eyes. I had been drawing on the walls. With my blood. It was all symbols and figures in a then-incomprehensible dialect that resembled mutilated Korean. There were depictions of canyons, valleys, and clouds, and tall amorphous people with their arms outstretched over plenty of characters and symbols. I hadn't come to full wakefulness quite yet then, but I remember not believing it and turning my head towards the window where the light had woken me up and seeing my reflection in the glass, but right behind me, in the reflection, was a half-faced man in a bloodied long-sleeve collared shirt, with a single, long horn sticking out the right side of his forehead. It was like a stag horn, but it went straight up, and never ended-- like it was something winding and dark-red that was either coming out of or going into his head. I just looked back into the reflection, and the man stretched his hand out and went to put it on my shoulder. When I saw that, I freaked out and turned my head and fell over. There was no one there. But I knew I was fully awake.

  The door I had left open with the wedge that said 'key' on it swung shut, and I thought I heard a tingling sound of the key hitting the floor outside the door. I hurried over to it because at that point I had had more than enough to seriously upset me, but when I tugged on the door, it didn't budge. I looked through the window to the ground and saw the wedge laying on the old back porch-- almost like it was mocking me. I tried banging on the door and kicking it, but the damn thing wouldn't budge at all, and when I looked back outside the window, the key was gone. So at this point I start to freak out-- even though it's not that late; it's probably somewhere around 8:30-9:00, but it's dark, and that living room attic is pure black and the house itself is getting more and more uneasy.

 

  The door won't budge, regardless of how hard I kicked it. I tried punching out its window but that was too strong for me to break, so I climbed up on the counter-top of the kitchen and tried heaving open the kitchen window to try and climb out, but the window-frame had rusted and oxidized shut, and the kitchen window itself was this heavy plastic that I couldn't break loose. I started getting pretty frightened at that point, trying all the windows in the house but the ones in the living room because I just didn't want to go in there but they were all the same. They wouldn't open and it turns out that the window material was surprisingly unbreakable; I couldn't distinguish exactly what it was made of; it wasn't glass because it didn't crack or shatter when I kicked it, and it wasn't plastic either... it was something else. I went into the bathroom and tried sticking my arm or leg down the hole where the toilet would've been, but it was too narrow for me to fit through, and besides... It was where a toilet used to be; I didn't exactly want to be trying to struggle through that part of the floor if I didn't absolutely have to.

  Then I looked in the living room again. A light breeze blew by the house and the curtain moved; I almost shrieked at first before I realized that it was because of a hole in the window by the front door. That window was already broken somehow, so I rushed over to it, clambering over insulation, and crumbly bits of sheet-rock and hardened pieces of bat and bird shit. I ducked my head under the curtain and gave the broken window a shove to see if I could break it open any more; it wouldn't. Then I heard two voices and kept very, very still in fear for a moment. After a moment I heard some jingling. I peered out the window and could see two adults walking a dog on the other side of the street maybe thirty or so feet away from me. I stuck my arm through the hole in the window to waive and call out to them 'Hey! Hey you two! You two with the dog! Can you help me?! Help me out of here, please!' but... they just kept walking and talking, like they didn't even hear me whatsoever. I was mad at first but then terrified at how they couldn't hear me. I sighed and gave up when they were out of sight.

  Then I felt something touch my shoulder through the curtain-- not like a firm grab, but like a sudden and distinct hand on the shoulder. My arm was still through the broken window and I shouted and tried to pull it back too quickly. The window gashed my arm right in the inside fold of my elbow and I quickly curled up in a ball and checked the bleeding. It was bad. Like really bad; I thought for sure I was going to bleed out in that fucking house by then. That's why I decided 'what the hell; might as well get high if I'm not getting out of here.' and went over to the room I was sleeping in before and lit up my first deliberate hit of DMT.

  There's this distinct taste to it when it enters your mouth and goes into your lungs-- almost like it has a hint of a tingly sensation, but not a subtle taste. By the time you notice that; you're already out of it. You're gone. You're gone like I was gone. The very last thing I can remember is my back sliding down against the wall.

  I can't remember the transition at all, but where the memory starts out is with a bright pulse of white light that suddenly stopped and fractaled off into other other more complex colors, almost like a firework, but it felt like I was leaving a place made of flesh and covered in cilia and living bone-- like a womb. Like the flash meant I was out of the constraints of flesh. And there was the guy from earlier, in all his horrible glory. He only had half a face but the side that was missing was like... flung out and stretched over a funnel-like reflection, only a curved funnel, like a trumpet. His hands were on backwards, and that fucking horn really did go on forever; I could distinctly remember it stretching endlessly upwards into the black void. He opened his mouth to say something but blood just poured out, and his tongue was a baby dove caked with dried blood-- he didn't speak but I could hear him. I am not the tyrant; be brave. He telepathically communicated to me.

  In his hand was a teacup that his pinky finger curled around, entirely. He stretched it out to me-- but I didn't have any arms or hands; in fact I didn't have a body or... I did... kind of. I had an entity-- my body was made of white flame, wrapped inward on itself like a collective wad of inter-weaving mobius strips, only it was a liquid, too-- almost a plasma? I couldn't accept the teacup and in stead just watched as he dipped the cup straight into me and pulled out a chunk of my... soul... I guess. I could feel that what he had in his teacup was a tiny portion of my being, and I had changed colors slightly; where I was once white and whole, I now had a tiny tinge of red to me.

  He held the teacup at eye-level for me and at chest-level for him, and it was then that I noticed that on the side of the teacup was a drawer with a lotus-flower knob that bloomed and irradiated my eyes. I was so fixated on it that it opened. The drawer itself was an alabaster ivory white, with black wavy velvet lining the bottom of the inside. At first, there was nothing-- and I remember thinking 'there's nothing' but the guy replied 'that is because you are in astonishment. Brave yourself, and you will see what is only there in your heart.'
I squinted my eyes and I remember my perspective zooming in on a single fiber of black velvet-- down to the micro-scale precision.

  Sitting atop the single fiber was an imperceptibly tiny, beating human heart. I realized that it was my own, but the beat that it had thrummed loudly and irregularly in my ears; it was struggling. As soon as I gave into pain, it grew, and so did a fire that surrounded it, until the entire world it seemed like was just the teacup, the heart, and the man-- only the proportions were different. The teacup had enlarged to an impossible size. The heart was as big as I was tall, and it was sitting in the open drawer. The world in the distance was on fire in stead of being dark like it was before, and the man was still there, standing on the rim of the teacup filled with a piece of my soul. He was still holding the smaller teacup wrapped in his pinky finger. Fire was everywhere but nothing burned-- except the heart in the drawer, which beat faster as it charred.

  The man would laugh in hysteria and groan in agony at the same time while he watched the heart accelerate and smolder. I was just