Siren Promised Page 2

  “Yeah, Cyph, like back in the good old days—that’s over, Cypher.”

  She felt strong. She felt right saying it, and registered the shock in his face. She said it again.

  “It’s over, Cypher.”

  He paused and then began to laugh. He looked her over while he laughed, the look in his eyes oozing ownership. “It’s over, Angie? It’s over? I don’t remember us ever deciding on that. So fuck you.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, fuck you for running from me. Fuck you for leaving me alone. You think things are easy without you?”

  He didn’t really need her. She knew better than that. She’d seen him with other girls. Still, the need in his voice felt real.

  No. Remember. Get away from Cypher. Remember how he is, how he treats you. Get away.

  She turned to walk away, to move past the speaker banks and use the crowd to block his movement. Then she could find Stacy and they could get the hell out…

  His hand was tight on her right arm. She tried to pull away. He was too strong for her. Dancing for an hour after doing three week’s detox had left her frail.

  Then he was leading her, pulling her past the same speaker banks she’d wanted to hide behind. His free hand reached into his pocket and swung quickly up to his mouth.

  Angie hoped that whatever he was swallowing was poison. That he would drop dead and leave her alone, and let her get out of here and back to her daughter, where she should be right this minute.

  They were behind the speaker banks when he pulled her body up to his. He whispered to her, sadness in his voice that she couldn’t pin down as a lie. “Angie, please, just make things right, and kiss me, just kiss me, and then we can go dance, and I’ll let you go your way, and never see you again.”

  Angie struggled against him, but did not scream. She felt affection for him that she couldn’t shake when he was directly in front of her, looking into her eyes. Her mind swam, overwhelmed.

  What if I don’t… I mean, what will he do to me? What if he’s telling the truth? He’s too strong. I don’t know… fuck… I…

  She kissed him. Their dry lips met; his tongue pushed into her mouth, deep, running over the surface of her own as she recoiled.

  She recognized the sting in her mouth instantly. She’d had enough acid before tonight.

  He’d just kissed her with a mouth full of liquid L.

  She was dosed and wrapped in Cypher’s arms.

  She pushed away from him. He let go, and began laughing. She fell backwards and landed on her ass in the hard dirt.

  “Oh, shit, Angie… you should see the look on your face. Fucking priceless.”

  She turned and ran back into the crowd, expecting to feel his hands on her body again, ready to cry for help. As she crossed the dance area she looked back over her shoulder and caught no sight of Cypher.

  Stacy was also nowhere to be seen. Her friend was vapor, the big disappearance of the night.

  Angie knew she didn’t have long before the dose hit her system. Liquid always caught her quick and stealth-silent. She had mere minutes until her brain betrayed her and left her defenseless.

  I’m like an animal hit with a tranquilizer dart. Cypher’s probably watching me, waiting for me to collapse, hoping my brain sizzles.

  Once I’m high, he can get in. In to me. In to my head. He always does.

  Angie yelled for Stacy, but no one was paying attention. The party was in full swing. People yelled things just to hear their voice intermingled with the waves of music that pummeled the crowd. Her noise was just flotsam in a shipwreck of sound.

  She had reached the outside edge of the dance area, and was headed toward the trail leading out and away from the party, hoping she could hitch a ride out with anybody but Cypher.

  Then the acid hit, a shard of chemical shrapnel deep in her brain.

  She stopped in her tracks and stared at the scene ahead of her. Part of her brain kept asserting itself. It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real.

  But she knew what she was seeing.

  Angie knew that both of the kids making out by the white van were dead. They had to be. Pieces of them were falling off. They didn’t notice.

  Angie stood a few feet away and watched as the boy’s tongue surged into the girl’s mouth and tore through the skin on her right cheek, leaving part of her face flapping loose in the cold wind that swept through the woods surrounding them. The boy’s arm atrophied into a reed-thin stick as his hand reached up for the girl’s breast.

  The girl turned toward Angie. Her eyes were melting, dripping down her cheeks, viscous and gleaming in the strobe lights that flashed repetitive by the DJ booth.

  Angie looked away and tried to keep her deep-fried fast food dinner from relocating. Her stomach burned.

  Fucking BAD acid. No doubt. Bathtub brewed strychnine bullshit for sure. What has he done to me?

  She ran her shaking hands through her dark, greasy, shoulder-length hair, tried to remember to breathe and slow her heart beat down. She couldn’t. Her blood pump was on overdrive.

  Maybe. It could just be the acid talking.

  If it’s not the acid, she thought, then I’ll be waking up in the hospital again.

  She shuddered, remembering the last time she’d awakened to the stark white, clinical surroundings of St. David. Her mind flashed on the tubes they put into her, forcing her to stay alive. For a moment she felt the tube running down her throat again. She gagged. The world swam purple-green in front of her. She wondered where Cypher was, if he had followed her and was watching her stumble through the party, waiting to catch her alone.

  And then what?

  She turned her head to the sky and tried to shake it clear. The scraggly tops of bark-stripped water ash trees shivered and blurred together, vibrating silhouettes backlit by a full moon with an acid induced rainbow-corona around it.

  She heard a gas-driven generator rattling in the distance, overwhelmed by the constant, propulsive sounds of hard techno coming from the sound system.

  The bass pounded, relentless, over and over again, past the point of being tribal. It was rhythm turned sinister, the heartbeat of overheated reptiles trapped in mechanical wombs, being primed with adrenaline, waiting to tear into the flesh of whatever stood before them.

  She shuddered again, hearing the music, feeling separate from it and isolated even though there were hundreds of other kids at the party.

  Kids. Angie wondered if she really counted herself as a kid anymore. Shit, she was a year short of thirty, still wearing a baby tee, a too-short skirt and dirty gray platform sneaks. The costume had worked for her in the past. She had found she could still get fourteen-year-olds to trust her enough to share some ketamine rails or a joint.

  Her thoughts became dangerously random. She had difficulty focusing on any one thought with urgency. “I’ve got to find Stacy… got to get out of here… I need a weapon… something… maybe if I smoke some weed it’ll calm this acid down.”

  She had a hard time focusing on the danger that Cypher posed. Instead, it was the thought of a cloud of smoke that got Angie moving, walking awkward on the uneven earthen floor of the forest.

  Jesus, my brain’s going soft. I’ve got to get out of here. I just don’t…

  She fluctuated between terror and a feeling of strange, euphoric safety that said things were going to be okay. That this was still her party.

  Maybe Cypher really is going to leave me alone. Maybe I can find Stacy and we can find something to calm me down, and then we can roll out of here. I just need something to chill out this acid a little bit. Something to help me walk straight and master my high. Maybe some oxycons.

  Just the word, oxycons, and she felt a shiver of pleasure up her spine.

  You’re just like Colleen sometimes, huh, sweetie? Shouldn’t you be leaving?

  God, she hated that voice inside her head, acid-amplified and shrill. The voice that wanted to make her think too much.

  Shouldn’t you be gettin
g home to Kaya? You’re not safe here.

  “Shut up!” Angie shouted, and the voice in her head seemed to register it. She knew she needed to control the fear. The voice was quiet now, but there were still bad acid visions and belly aches, and the constant pulsing sound of music devolving into a steady four/four stomp. Her eyes drifted to the swampy woods around her.

  Angie walked faster, determined to find Stacy, and now. She wanted to bury the rotten acid that raced electric through her brain. Stacy could help.

  Angie walked fast, past the surging speakers and light-saturated dance floor. She brushed against a sweaty shirtless guy with a pacifier in his mouth, almost tripping over his gigantic yellow pants. She stopped and looked around. No Stacy anywhere. Her brain caught flashes, bits and pieces in the stimulus storm. Tongues sliding over each other, Virginia Slims being smoked by slouching girls in tank tops, glowsticks drawing figure eights over and over again, dreads throwing sweat, glitter in the hair on a man’s back, a boy with cystic acne jamming a Vicks inhaler into his right nostril, a girl, seated on the ground Indian style, throwing up into her cupped hands and smiling.

  It was too much. Angie closed her eyes and cursed Cypher for forcing this on her.

  Gravity felt tight on her spine, pulling her toward the ground. She had that weird feeling that everything would be okay if she’d just lie down on the ground. The acid in her skull threw a vision to the front of her closed eyes.

  There I am, half buried in the ground. People are walking on me, over me. I’m not there. They don’t care. Wooden roots have replaced my eyes and are intertwined, twisting around each other before they push into the dirt. My mouth is wide open, and full of soil.

  She screamed again, a base level shriek. The people dancing around her gave wide berth.

  No one asked if she was okay. It was like she didn’t exist. She was ether. No, less than that. Ether could kill. People gave a shit about that.

  She was surrounded and alone, and Cypher was out there, somewhere in the party, laughing at her.

  Angie grabbed the boy in the oversized yellow pants, then held up her right hand in front of him.

  “Please touch my hand. Prove to me I’m real.”

  He smirked. Angie read the look on his face. It said, “You are a burnout.” Crystal clear and loud, this judgment from a kid wearing a plush Pokemon backpack.

  She stared at her hand, watched his finger approaching her flesh.

  Her vision blurred, she felt another strychnine twinge in her belly.

  She watched his finger push right through the middle of her hand.

  She bleached white, pulled away, and shrieked in the kid’s face, fear on her breath.

  He laughed at her, and kept dancing.

  His laugh echoed in the trees around them. She heard the trees join in, low laughter, rasping from their brushing branches, a whisper.

  You’re one of us.

  She tasted soil in her mouth, and tried to spit it out. She couldn’t conjure enough saliva to erase the taste.

  She walked away from the dance area and back toward the dark of the woods, approaching a strip of yellow tape strung from tree to tree that marked off the swamp/farm boundaries. DO NOT CROSS.

  “Hey, Angie, where you goin’, bitch?”

  The voice was too deep to be Stacy’s. It sounded like boiling motor oil.

  It was Cypher, doubtless. He always managed to be around when she was collapsing. It was his gift. Angie looked around and realized there were no other partiers within twenty feet of them.

  He’d waited for her to stray from the herd.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you. Fucking talk back.”

  Angie lifted her head, just grateful that someone was talking to her. It meant she existed. That was all she’d really wanted in the past, to exist. She hadn’t wanted much more, and rarely tried to do anything but finish up a day, and then the next. And if people like Cypher helped the day go a little faster, then all the better.

  But Cypher doesn’t want to help me right now. He wants to hurt me. Doesn’t he? And I don’t just want to exist anymore. I want to be with Kaya. I want to be her mom.

  Don’t I? Jesus, what’s going on?

  Her voice came out thin, distant. “I don’t know where I’m going, Cypher. I need help.” The sentence forced its way out of her mouth, and felt like resignation.

  “You need help, Angie? I got that right here.” He opened his arms like a patron saint and laughed. The sound made Angie picture Cypher as a kid. There he is, bashing a cat’s head into a sidewalk. Over, and over.

  Angie staggered forward, fell into Cypher’s bony arms, pressed against his flat, amphetamine hyper chest.

  “There, baby, now we’re spending some real quality time together.”

  He leaned his head down and kissed her forehead. His lips were chapped, cracked. She felt the dead skin brush her hairline.

  “I mean, did you think I’m just gonna kick around solo all night while you trip the fucking light fantastic out in Sherwood Forest, cause if you think that, you’re on some real fucking bullshit, like more than ever. We got a history together, right? You know what I’m sayin’?”

  He wrapped his arms around her tighter and squeezed the breath from her. He sighed heavy. His breath smelled like Jack Daniel’s and bad fish.

  “Hey, Cypher? The acid is too much…it’s just…too much…nothing’s making sense.”

  “Not my fault you’ve gone soft. You used to be my little acid superstar, and now you’re telling me you can’t handle your shit?”

  He was amped, she could sense it. He was acting like he’d been tweeking for days. He’d shed his calm dance floor demeanor and gone simian. When he was like this she had to play it whispers and tiptoes with him. It was easy to fuck up and push him over his edge. She could feel him waiting for that push, begging for an excuse to put her in another cast, or worse. She knew of something that would chill both of them out, and maybe let her dream away the poison he’d kissed into her bloodstream.

  “Hey, you got any oxycons?”

  “Naw, Angie, we ate all those last week. They’re gone as gone can be, you know? It’s like we floated off that cloud a long time ago. It’s your fault, too. You get greedy off that shit and just shut the fuck down and stare at the ceiling like its all you ever wanted and I get bored and watch TV. Fuck them oxycons, man, you just get boring off ‘em. I do have some shit though, if you want to be a fucking rock star.”

  Rock star.

  Shit.

  Angie wanted whatever would shut the acid down. If she had to blaze it out with some crack, could she?

  She could still taste soil in her mouth. The trees were whispering to her. This trip had to end.

  “Yeah, Cypher, load it up.”

  “Yeah, Cypher, load it up?” His voice was high pitched, mocking. “What, you startin’ to think we’re little buddies and shit? You think this shit is free? You think you can just drop into my arms, fried out of your fucking mind, and I’ll let you smoke the last of my yay for nothing? For nothing?”

  It’s never for nothing, is it, sweetie?

  “No, Cyph, I can hook you up, too.”

  “Fucking right. You promise?”

  “Yeah, Cyph.”

  “Let’s go then. I got the shit in my dash, back at the ride.”

  She walked with him, felt the evening get colder and goosebumps cover her body as they walked out toward his Accord parked on an old, isolated logging trail by the party.

  What am I doing? I should run. I should run and find Stacy, or a DanceSafe booth, or anybody that might help. I can’t go back to this. I’ve run this pattern for years. It’s been killing me.

  Still, Angie followed. She felt like she was watching herself from inside her skull.

  Cypher reached his car, cracked open his door, and grabbed a plastic vial from his dash. He loaded up the pipe and pulled a butane lighter out of his console.

  “Shit, Cyph, no torch? You want me to butane this shit?”
r />   She didn’t know why she was pressing his buttons, watching his blood pressure rise. Her words left her mouth without emotion, and felt hollow and separate, uncontrolled. Dangerous.

  “Listen, Angie, I can go ahead and smoke all this by my lonely, and you can watch me and bug out and talk to God and Buddha and whoever else is probably floating in the sky above your fried little head. If that’s what you want then go ahead and say it. If not, shut the fuck up and help me out.”

  Whispers and moans came from the woods, from the space between the trees, and crawled into her ear.

  It’s quiet here. So quiet. You won’t be alone. There are others here.

  She felt her lips moving, slow and rhythmic, with the whispers that entered her mind. She felt cold inside, ice-razors in her belly.

  She considered Cypher’s proposition.

  She remained silent. She needed a way out. He had it in his hands.

  She walked closer to him; put her hand to his crotch. He was hard already. He knew which way she’d answer. She hated him for it, hated herself even more.

  She knew there was no time for romance. With Cypher, there never had been. She wanted him—would have wanted anyone she was with really—to kiss her, to talk to her, to trace his lips across her belly and kiss the little rose tattoo just above her right breast. But that wasn’t going to happen. This wasn’t love. This was a transaction.

  He turned her around and lifted her skirt. She looked back at him and feigned a smile. It was all teeth, no eyes.

  He didn’t notice the manufactured grin. He was hitting the pipe, taking a deep, hot lungful, and then shaking, the high immediate and vital.

  She pushed her underwear down to the curve behind her knees and reached back for the pipe and lighter. He pushed himself into her, rough, before she even took her first hit. He moved his hips steady, pounding with the inescapable four/four beat that reverberated through the tupelos and cyrilla trees around them.

  She put the flame to the bowl, breathed as deep as she could, pulled hard, and felt her heart explode in her chest, hitting hummingbird speed in a split second. She was dry down south, and Cypher was tearing the shit out of her, but her hit wiped everything out for a moment, a cool, perfect moment where dawn was just seconds away and the sunshine was waiting to wrap her up in warmth and hold her, curled up, forever.