I heard the applause and cheers echoing from The Rusty Nail’s stage. A band called Godhand had just finished playing the last song of their set. Travis and I were hanging out in the cramped green room backstage with our amps and instruments in the loading dock, ready to set up our equipment once they had taken theirs off the stage.
“You nervous?” Travis asked me.
“N-no,” I stammered, “Are you?”
“Yes,” Travis replied indignantly, “And you’re a lia-”
Before Travis could finish that thought something strange happened. The first thing I noticed was time slowing down. It wasn’t like when I threw a punch at Jeff. This time it actually felt like the entire world around me, save my mind’s ability to process it, had become slower. Or maybe that was the exact same thing that happened when I threw a punch at Jeff. Either way, the sensation hadn’t happened to me often, and never for this long.
The next sensation was entirely new to me. The one door to the room, which I could have reached from the opposite wall with just a few steps at first, started to get further away. Now it was at least 20 feet away. 30 feet away. 40 feet. Or was the door in the same place, and Travis and I were getting pulled further away? Or was the room elongating at both ends? Despite time slowing down, the door still managed to get so far away it disappeared from my sight before I could answer that question.
I turned to Travis, and despite the challenge of communicating through warped time and space, his facial expression told me that it wasn’t just me experiencing these effects.
Had we been drugged? Did we pick this up by inhaling some second hand smoke from a stoner outside the venue?
Speaking of smoke, a black fog began to appear in the distance. Despite the room’s rapid expanse, the fog was somehow moving toward us at the same speed. Was the building on fire? Was I beginning to pass out because of smoke inhalation in a burning building? Was this some kind of hallucination caused by deprivation of oxygen to my brain?
No. When you pass out, your field of vision closes in from the outer edges. This black fog was coming at me right from the center of my sight. And unless my sense of smell was also being distorted, it was no ordinary smoke, either. Smoke has a smell. This didn’t. Smoke moves up. This was moving sideways.
But the biggest difference between this and ordinary smoke was the bits and pieces of the human anatomy that appeared within the otherwise amorphis cloud. However, the body parts were just as amorphis in a way, and just as black as the fog. I could occasionally identify a foot or an eye, and even a beating heart, but the body parts continually blended in and out of each other, making it almost impossible to make heads or tails of any of the figures. Literally. It was like watching siamese twins that could change where they connected. And could turn inside-out.
Then I heard the screaming. At first it sounded far off in the distance, but as the black fog full of morphing body parts got closer the screams grew louder. Although the fog had displayed plenty of mouths, larynxes, and other parts of the human throat I knew from learning how to death growl, the screams didn’t sound like they were coming from the fog. They sounded like they were coming from behind it. These didn’t sound like screams of fear, either. As much as I wanted to believe they were the audience cheering in anticipation of our set, the number of voices I heard must have been hundreds of times greater than the venue’s full capacity, if not thousands. They were screams of intense exertion combined with excitement, as if those screaming knew they were almost finished. Like the black fog was leading it, and they were following dutifully behind.
As the screams drowned out all other sound, in sync with the fog, which had eclipsed my entire field of vision. I couldn’t even turn to Travis to see if he was experiencing the same thing at this point.
Although I knew I wouldn’t be able to hear it, I opened my mouth to unleash a scream of my own, but I failed as the black fog lept down my nose and throat.
This was it. I was going to die. And my last thought was going to be “At least it was only the fog that went down my throat.”
Before every one of my senses blacked out entirely, I got a glimpse of something I can only describe as a dream world. Although parts of it seemed familiar, it operated on a whole other set of rules than the world I knew.
Was that where I was going? Some kind of afterlife?
Maybe not. My view of the dream world vanished as the view of my own world also went black.
–
My range of vision gradually crept back. Where was I? Who was I? When was I? What was going on? My confusion was not aided by what seemed like thousands of voices all saying stuff like:
“Guys, I think they’re alive!”
“So? If there’s anyone who knows death is no big deal, it’s us.”
“Did you not listen to a word the big guy said? They were still in the pipeline! If they had died just now they’d be gone for good!”
“I’m pretty sure these aren’t even his guys. These are just a couple of kids playing in some hole in the wall bar.”
Hole in the wall bar? Was I still at The Rusty Nail? As my eyes focused, I realized I was lying on my back staring at the ceiling of the green room. But the ceiling was back to normal. No distortion. I glanced around the rest of the room and found the same. It was the same cramped green room it had been when Travis and I entered it.
Travis! I groaned and slowly sat up. Travis was also lying on the ground, beginning to wake up. We locked eyes, letting us both know the other was okay.
Although the green room itself was entirely back to its normal size, it somehow contained a few thousand more occupants than it had before Travis and I passed out. Don’t ask me how, but we were surrounded by figures that looked human, but were all overlapped on top of each other to fit in the room. Kind of like when you find a glitch in a video game and can phase through a wall. They were almost entirely male, with long hair, black t-shirts, and denim vests with metal band patches sewn on. A few appeared to be wearing black and white face paint called “corpse paint.” However, further inspection revealed that for some of them, it wasn’t paint.
One of them looked behind him and shouted “Hey boss, is this your band?”
My jaw dropped. Not because the figure approaching Travis and I was doing so by phasing through the bodies of the metalheads around us as if they weren’t taking up any physical space. Not because a few wisps of black fog were still emanating from his body. But because the body itself was well over six feet tall, full of muscle, with the symbol for the Slavic black god tattooed on the left shoulder.
“What are you doing lying around, boys?” Charlie said, “Our set’s in ten minutes!”
