Into the Abyss

J. L. Langland Into the Abyss

Special Thanks and Dedication to:

Michael Begal, Jay Haesly, Sean Jones

For Maps, Details, History and more visit: www.Astlan.Net

Chapter 1

He wasn’t really positive, but Tom was pretty sure that this wasn’t what pot was supposed to feel like. He’d never smoked any before, but people had told him what it felt like and this wasn’t it. The room was swaying around him and funny colored lights were dancing about the room. Which he thought, rather muddily, is what acid was supposed to do, not grass. His stomach was beginning to dance in his middle. He sat down on the couch behind him, rapidly. The room seeming to telescope around him, sounds and faces appeared as if through a very long tunnel.

“Whoa,” was all he said as he sat down. This might not have been a good idea, thought Tom. He really shouldn’t have let Paul talk him into it. In fact, as the colored lights began to obscure the entire room at the other end of the tunnel, he began to wish he’d never let Jack and Paul talk him into coming to this party. At the time though, it had seemed the best way to meet people. He’d only moved to Harding two weeks ago and he had been awful lonely until he’d met Jack and Paul at school last week. They’d convinced him to come to the party, and then convinced him to try one of the new joints Reggie had just bought in New York yesterday.

“Hey Tom, what’s the matter? Can’t handle a little good feeling?” asked one of the guys on Tom’s left.

“I’m fine, just... thought I’d sit down and enjoy the... rush,” lied Tom, trying to save face. The world began to spin. Voices filled the air around him. The partiers laughing and joking, the music rushing in waves upon his head. His whole body seemed to be undulating in time to the rather retro — almost trance or psychedelic like — rhythm that was gushing out the fourteen inch speakers in the corners. As he turned his head towards the speakers it was like the tunnel was a reverse megaphone or something channeling the sound; it made him even dizzier.

As the rush grew, the room and its occupants seemed to sort of fade from view, the tunnel dimming, turning gray. Within a few minutes he was unable to see anyone in the room, or the room itself, for that matter. He could feel it and the music, but colored lights swirled and danced around him as his soul seemed to expand and shrink around his body with the music. Voices seemed to come to him from far away, his ‘friends’ making jokes because he’d apparently passed out. As the music and voices began to fade from his ears he slowly realized he could see again. It was weird though; through his eyes, or what he thought of as his eyes, colored lights still danced around him, but with what was almost like a second set of eyes he could see the party going on around him. The scary part, however, was that he wasn’t looking at the party from the couch. He was watching from the ceiling above, and he could see his own passed out body on the couch below him. His face pale, the joint slipping from his fingers, his chest rising and falling with the beat of the music.

Paul bent over him, laughing, and shook him, trying to wake him up. Tom didn’t feel a thing though. He could no longer hear any of the people at the party, but he could still feel the music, even though he couldn’t hear it. The room began slowly receding, as if he were backing away from it like one of those expanding long shots in a movie where they zoom from street level to outer space.

Is this one of those near death experiences? Thought Tom. No, he could still see his body breathing, and he certainly didn’t feel at peace. He felt sick and disoriented. This stuff was bad.

As he gazed at the ever more distant room, he realized that he could hear voices again. These, however, didn’t sound like the voices at the party. They were chanting something in time to the music in what sounded like a strange foreign language, something similar to, but definitely not, Latin. One voice older than the rest seemed to be leading the chanting, drawing him on. In his mind he tried rotating his point of reference in the direction of the chanting. It seemed almost as if they were saying come to us, come to us. Hey, he thought confusedly, maybe these are the voices of the doctors trying to bring me back, I better go to them, I really don’t want to die quite yet. He tried, sluggishly, at first, to move forward, towards them, through the soup of colored lights. The chanting grew louder and louder. Suddenly a face appeared right in front of him. It seemed twisted in a grim smile of triumph and determination.

It shouted in his mind, “NAME.”