There are three vampire stories on my blog. Dig around and find them if you want vampires. I want to expose a different side of me by putting a non-vampire story on here. Please don't hurt me. I'm frail. Hope you enjoy. Adios bitches. MASQUERADE Jeff Prebis Copyright 2006 Perry Perry came to the hotel for the Harry Potter convention. He received an email four months back calling on all wizards to come out and waited impatiently for the months to pass. His daily life was a monotonous series of banal events that formed a chain that bound his neck and restricted his ability to breathe easily. The convention would free him from the trivial world he lived in. He wore his wizard costume when he checked in and the lady at the desk struggled to suppress a hearty chuckle, her quivering face went through myriad changes while she confirmed his reservation and handed him the key to his room. There was something irresistibly hilarious about a thirty-seven year old man in a purple robe with a puffy, furry white collar, and a blue thinking cap that was as long as a tube sock. Something about him screamed geek and questions about the frequency of his sexual dalliances would come into play, does he ever, who would participate, nobody would. He struggled to maintain eye contact with most women. He couldn't help but wonder how they would look in a purple robe and wondered why they weren't wearing one. He was very interested in witches. He dated a few elves when he was younger and they didn't put out. He needed a woman who could match his power with power of her own. He hoped to meet such a woman at the convention. This was the first time that he had been to one. For the longest time he had been a closet wizard, hanging out like dirty skeletons that promised humiliation and perdition to the owner of the closet. As it was the only woman in his life was his mother, a fine Jewish woman who held onto a tenuous hope with all her strength that he would meet a kosher woman, and move out of her basement. Jewish witches were about as common as women who could tolerate a wizard who worshipped Harry Potter as the living messiah. To a man like Perry, Daniel Radcliffe was Harry Potter, and if he ever played a different character, he would pull a Misery on him, lock him up in a room, break his legs, and make him recite dialogue from the books, the type of shit that any sane man would do when his liberty was stolen. Perry emptied out his suitcase recklessly on the bed. He brought three robes with him, three pairs of pants, three shirts, and twelve pairs of underwear. He suffered from jock itch once and cured it with medication. But he worried that if he didn't change his underwear enough, it would return like a witch's curse, and haunt him again with more intensity than the first time. It was tough at work, he would have to go in the community bathroom and find a stall, remove his pants and the soiled white briefs, and put new ones on before someone came in and asked what in the hell was going on. Here at the convention, he could change his underwear as much as he wanted in privacy. Perry was placing his robes into the drawers of the bureau when he saw purple smoke blowing by. There were grates for heat and air to blow in but the strange smoke wasn't coming through the vents. It was impossible to determine where the smoke was coming from, why it was purple, and what it meant. He brushed purple plumes out of his face with his tube sock hat. His sinuses were bothered by the purple smoke. He couldn't handle cigarette smoke and this was even worse, these odd vapors could have been deadlier, poison could have been entering the room, and entering his lungs, he could be seconds away from death, and was too ignorant to notice. The ceiling, walls, and floor were devoured by the purple smoke. It became so thick that it was the world around him. The handsome room that he checked into disappeared and he was left in wild environs that made him fearful. Strange people popped up who were consumed by strange activities, their movements were incorrect. They were walking sideways, similar to how a side-winding snake would move. There was a legion of these oddballs. Even more disturbing than the way they moved was the way they looked. They had malformed heads that were as small as the heads of small children, on bodies at least as big as Perry's. The strange heads unnerved the dullard the same way that his immature appearance unnerved the human race. He cowered sheepishly, stooping over, attempting to blend in amongst the all-encompassing smoke that had gained an even greater presence than before. He was like a new angel in Heaven, standing on clouds, and then realizing that it was Hell when the Devil came out with a broom to sodomize the new recruit with for a few centuries. He wished that he was a real wizard. He needed a spell to extricate his earthly form from this unplumbed realm. It seemed as though as he was low in the ground, in the belly of Earth where the pinheads held sway. He wanted to be back in the hotel where the other pinheads held sway. He stumbled away from where he had been crouching. Panic was ringing his neck and his vertebrae were rippling like waves on the brink of striking land. Bugs were flying around him with huge heads and comparatively puny bodies, little bug legs and torsos, bulbous heads that appeared to weigh in the neighborhood of a pound. One of them thumped into his nose and he went through a sneezing fit that reminded him of time he had been stung by a bee in first grade, and sneezed for four hours straight until an ambulance came, and announced that he was fragile. He saw shapes that reminded him of horse galloping in the distant smoke. Above him he saw shapes that looked like angels floating through the purple clouds. Below him, he saw fire, and many devils, each one would have given Harry Potter a battle for the ages. He had a collection of the singular bugs on him. They were embedded in his hair and clothes, and would join him in this adventure no matter where it led. He waded through the deep smoke like it was water that was gradually deepening. Each step he took brought him closer to drowning. He saw a large gathering of the pinheads up ahead, they were sitting on chairs with obvious civility, and conversations were taking place in a weird tongue, forming one solid cacophonic sound. The closer he came to them, the more of them there were, thousands were seated, a population that the city government would have deemed illegal due to their uncouth heads, and uncommon language. He was naïve enough to approach strange fellows and ask for aid. He saw a line of people who had regular heads standing between the crowd and an absolute illusion. The illusion made him rub his eyes as if he had been eating powder sugar, another item that he was allergic to. The illusion was a tall chair that rose up at least fifty feet off the ground. Seated in the monolithic chair was the largest baby he had ever seen. It was larger than him, but it had baby features, chubby flesh, and a hairless head, bare chest, and large diaper around groin. The humongous child was beating people against the chair to gain the attention of the crowd below it. It was squawking like a disillusioned crow. He found an empty chair and took a seat to blend in. Like a few thousand pinheads wouldn't notice a man with a head of proper proportion. The large bugs were prevalent around him. They dove at him rapidly, touched him, and lifted off again before he could raise a hand against them. He felt them on his feet and looked down, seeing hands instead of bugs reaching out of the smoky area that could barely be described as ground. He looked over at the pinheads next to him and was bewitched by how small their heads were; at least half the size of his head, precisely the size of apples. There were few differences with these odd fellows. Each one was identical, mesmerized by the big baby in the high chair. He noticed odd details to the regular people who were standing in front of the baby. The flesh around their necks was loose and gave him the impression that the heads were fright masks which didn't belong to the people wearing them. They were close enough that the details of the heads were perfectly clear. They killed people and stole their heads. Several processes of extraction came into his mind and none of the processes were pleasant. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and his eyes scanned furtively around. Two of the pinheads in disguise stepped forward from the line, breaking formation. They danced in the most frenetic way possible, one part African voodoo cha- cha, one part hoot nanny, and two parts river dance. This dramatic dance drew murmurs of approval from the pinheads around Perry. He tried to imitate the strange tongue of the pinheads and failed foolishly. Instead he clapped his hands to show his approval, which none of the pinheads were doing. While they were still dancing, the huge baby hollered several incomprehensible words that baffled Perry, and yellow liquid poured out of its mouth, splashing the dancers with its vileness. The pinheads didn't shake the despicable liquid from their bodies, instead they rejoined the line, and blended in, trying to forget about the humiliation. Perry shifted in his seat uncomfortably. Several of the pinheads were staring at him unabashedly as if it was polite to stare relentlessly at a wizard. They must have liked his tube sock hat. Little smiles were on their diminutive faces and their eyes were glazed. He cleared his throat self-consciously. The bugs with the bulbous heads were on his shoulders, scrutinizing his head. He opened his mouth to object and a couple of them climbed in, crawling down his throat before he could spit them out. Instantly his throat burned from their passage. He rubbed his belly with his hand making a wax on/wax off type of gesture. More masqueraders stepped out of the line to dance for the huge baby. They failed to impress the harsh critic, trotting back to the line with its bile dripping off them. More pinheads were staring at Perry. Murmurs were growing louder. He slouched down in his chair, hoping that they would just watch the masquerade, and not dwell on his proper head. But they couldn't. His head was too offensive to them. They lived their lives as freaks and wanted to be left alone, segregated from the world of proper headed people. Pinheads jumped from their seats angrily and accosted him in a language that hurt his skull. He spoke back to them, gesturing the way they did mockingly, and they crowded him uncomfortably. Little beady eyes looked him and up down with jealously. They envied his head unabashedly. He saw some of them with shiny blades. A few of them had spoons and he was baffled by what the spoons were used for. He had enough. It was a gamble to stay as long as he had. He had to run away before his head was worn as a mask by a pinhead trying to please the god-like baby. He jumped from his seat and flung the chair over in the process, pinheads tripped over it, and were slow to rise again, giving him a chance to put some distance between he and them before they began their pursuit. The purple smoke made his retreat difficult. He couldn't discern where he was. He could only make things out that were two feet in front of him. He expected to run into a large group of them and succumb without a chance to fight back. Instead he ran into a gummy deterrent which was semi-solid, but at the same time sticky, and covered in bugs. He ran into it forcefully. It stuck to his skin and moved with his body instead of propelling him back after he ran into it. The material of the stuff he was tangled in was like the gossamer of a spider web. It held him in place. He doubted that he would be able to escape. Soon they would find him and decapitate him, then the humongous baby would judge his head as it had judged the others. Jessica Jessica checked into her room at 4 p.m. and made her room into a Harry Potter shrine that could have scared the shit out of any Star Trek enthusiasts who were singled out as the fall of Western Civilization. She decorated the walls with posters of the many book covers, the goofy little wizard looked at her seductively in multiple forms, wondering what she looked like in her underwear, he would find out when she changed in front of the posters. She was in town for the convention. The convention excited her to a point where she screamed hysterically like a sorority girl when she found out about it. She hadn't been this excited since the last book came out and she fought a twelve year old boy for a copy, biting his arm and pulling his hair, running away from security with the book in her hands. Everyone knows how women in their twenties are, these types of things happen every day. One should never challenge a banshee to a fight. This weekend was going to be a celebration, a chance to escape the pressures of college. She attended John Hopkins and was studying to become a surgeon. At this stage she had performed surgery on more corpses than Doctor Frankenstein and still wasn't certified. The classes she took were crucibles, the lame were burning out, and the cream was flopping out of the pot, writhing on the floor like fish out of water. Something had to give inside her as it had to give inside all of her contemporaries. This convention was a chance to forget about her clinically boring life, and have fun. She planned on losing her virginity this weekend. There would be men who looked like Harry Potter at the convention and the man who looked the most like Harry Potter would wear her panties on his head, and taste the cherry on top of the Sunday. She had five blue robes spread out on her king-sized bed. Each robe was exactly the same to a casual observer but to her discerning taste the differences were obvious. She had five pairs of John Lennon glasses that were also worn by Lenin secretly when he read Bolshevik documents by candlelight. She had each pair of glasses sitting on a blue robe. She closed her eyes and spun in a circle magically, stopping with her right hand extended and pointing at the blue robe she would wear. She loved it. It was so different from the others. She removed her regular clothes and flipped the robe on hastily as if someone would burst in the room any minute and comment on the wretched state of her mosquito bites. With her robe on and goose bumps spreading across her body like an infectious disease, she placed the glasses on the bridge of her nose, and picked up her magic wand that looked like a recorder that a student in a music class would have to play to get an A, pick up the dildo with the holes in it and play it monkey, play it like you love it. She skipped into the bathroom and posed in front of the mirror. Her roommates asked her if she wanted to go to a Kappa Dappa Du party with them, and she told them where she was going. Initially they thought she was joking and laughed with her; then they realized that she was serious, and laughed at her maliciously like birds shrieking at a lady that wore their excrement as a hat. She was too sexy for her friends. They were fools to date Kappa Dapp Du boys. Most of those guys drank way too much, and woke up in a puddle of their urine without a single recollection from the night before to guide them to dry land. She blew a kiss at her reflection in the mirror. She strutted out of the bathroom confidently, ready to find the right man to deflower her. Over the television that was nailed to the dresser, purple smoke was wafting out of the wall ominously. She was petrified by the smoke. There could have been a fire next door and any second a ball of flames would shoot through and cook her. More purple smoke came through the wall with the posters on it. The smoke resembled shapes, people with tiny heads. She jogged to the phone with her arms flapping bird-like at her sides, nearly bringing her off the ground. She grabbed the phone and a wailing sound poured into her ear like acid, threatening to eat her brain. She dropped the receiver and ran to her purse on the nightstand by the bed. She grabbed her cell phone and turned it on, only to be greeted by the same relentless wail of misery. She was like a Christian when it came to Harry Potter. She would ask herself what Harry Potter would do in a given situation the way Christians would pontificate on what Jesus would do. This one wasn't easy. The walls were swaying, an unsteady undulation that brought water to mind. The space of wall right next to the bathroom was pushing in; a human-like form became apparent with an expression of anguish on its face. The human form was trying doggedly to enter the room via the wall. Hands were pressing through along with the face. The wall was like elastic, stretching and stretching but not tearing. Purple smoke was billowing in from around the body, forming a circle around it. The face, which was masculine, broke through first and the mouth gasped for air. He noticed Jessica and a helpless look found purchase in his eyes. "Help me please. You have to pull me through before they take me back down there. I don't want to go back down there." There was a childish quality to his voice. Clearly he had seen something that terrified to him to a point where his façade of maturity had been taken away, and his inner child was now exposed to the world. She didn't bother to ask whom he was talking about. She grabbed the fabric of the wall where his hands were, gripping onto his hands, tugging them through the thin fabric that had a slimy feel. "They're pulling me back. You have to pull harder." "I'm trying my best." His face vanished from view. His hands were jerked back with his body and she was pulled right through the wall into a vacuum of unprecedented blackness. Her hold on the man's hands was relinquished when she discovered that she was falling down a tunnel that easily could have been bottomless. There was no illumination of any kind. Around her little things were falling also. She scrutinized them closely as her eyes adapted to the darkness and noticed that they were roaches with long, rodent-like tails. On the walls crawling sideways with no concern about gravity were several people with miniature heads. They must have been unpopular with a voodoo priest, victims of a lesser god. These freakish people were running on their hands and feet in a bestial way, moving faster than her eyes could follow, only ephemeral glimpses were available. Perhaps they had normal heads and the heads were blurred by their jerky movements. The malformed people were the only ones who could help her. This sad fact brought the scream out of her belly. Echoes of the scream rose up and were swallowed up by the same, dreadful wailing that had greeted her unsuspecting ears when she tried to call for help. Some of the roaches latched onto her by their disgusting tails and squealed at her. The bottom became apparent to her, and looked like marble, a second before her body splattered on the hard surface, a pair of hands jerked her sideways. Her eyes rolled in their orbits and she lost her bearings, forgetting where she was, and seeing Harry Potter closing in for a kiss with her. She stuck her tongue out dreamily and kissed a tiny face with two tiny eyes which were unusually far apart, a little nose, and a little mouth that was obscenely vaginal in appearance. She was gripped by her hair and was being dragged across the ground. Purple smoke obscured the tunnel that she fell down, obscured what she perceived as the real world. She spotted the man who asked for help, fighting with the pinhead that was dragging him by the hair. He was biting the pinhead's leg viciously. The pinhead was stepping on his eyes and nose with a barefoot that was more like a hoof. Her scalp throbbed from rough treatment. Roaches were all over her clothes, using their tails to hang on tightly. A few of them darted into her robe and saw things that no one had seen before. A ludicrous number of pinheads were coming into focus. She and the man were surrounded by them. They were popping out of the smoke every second, walking past, kicking her, gawking at her, and dropping roaches on her as if that was good luck in their culture. "Dippity, dockety, sharaattiiicrockettty," she said immaturely in a failed attempt to turn her assailant into a tampon. The man's hair came off in the pinhead's hand and he was free. He rolled to his feet and ran to her aid gallantly, if he had looked like Harry Potter, he would have won her heart. He grabbed her assailant by the head and pushed him to the ground, roaring like a lion. He stepped on the tiny head and it squished like a soft lemon, spraying juice on her. He kneeled over and gave her a hand to use as a spring to rise up from her prostrate position. She kissed his lips gratefully, feeling warm and wet between her legs. He grabbed her chest and squeezed as hard as he could. He licked the side of her face and something hard poked her leg. She slapped him across the face and kissed him again. He led her to an area of this nether realm where the smoke was thicker, where the pinheads wouldn't be able to find them. The smoke was too thick where they stood. It was impossible to locate the tunnel that they had fallen through. The two of them drifted with their heads tilted upward, searching through the purple haze. Strange rain fell on their faces that were actually small beetles with large heads. They yanked the beetles off them. They were bitten in several places, their scalps and faces. The air around them was infested with the uncouth beetles. Below them hands rose from the solid ground and grabbed them by their ankles and bound them in place. Jessica saw a large shape emerge from the omnipresent smoke. It was a large pinhead with a huge axe. It swung the axe and missed Perry by an inch. The huge blade split the smoke and gave them a clear view of their surroundings. They were surrounded by pinheads, the high chair with the big baby was near them, and several headless corpses were strewn across the ground inconsiderately. They shifted closer together. This proved to be a bad move. The executioner swung the axe again and lopped both their heads off at the same time, the heads tumbled into the hands of happy pinheads that perused them for a second, and carried them off to clean them out. Their bodies collided after decapitation and blood shot out of the severance points for several minutes after. The heads were cleaned out with spoons. The offal was strewn across the smoke laden landscape with careless flicks of the spoons. Once the excess material was removed the heads were donned for the amusement of the huge baby. These pinheads were part of the second line that formed. The first line lurked in the area where the omnipresent smoke was thickest; lying on the ground in shame while hundreds of hands that grew out of the ground groped them perversely. The masqueraders who took the heads of our heroes stepped forward together and danced frantically, stomping on the ground as if it was on fire, and waving their arms as if to protect themselves from low-flying birds that wished to assault them. When the dance was done, they looked up at the temperamental baby, and he approved. He opened his mouth this time and two headless figures fell out, dropping to the ground softly. The pinheads removed the heads of Perry and Jessica and handed them to the headless figures. The headless figures took the heads and jammed them on their necks. The crowd of pinheads applauded loudly. The huge baby laughed uproariously. The purple smoke became thicker than before until there was nothing left of the convention. |