Choose
Your Own Nuthouse
Section 67
And what kind of name is Grrrnaorth, anyway?
It sounds like somebody had a seizure on his
laptop keyboard, or something.
“Hi Harlan I was talking to Grrrnaorth and he told me
that I should ask you to show me The Trick please don’t do anything
that’s
going to kill me,” you say nervously.
You know you are speaking the way Harry Knowles writes*,
but don’t care.
“Grrrnaorth?”
Harlan asks. He gazes at you
unblinkingly, head cocked slightly to the side.
“Yes.”
“The Trick?”
“Um. Yes.”
“Lemming Powder?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Harlan smiles at you slightly, as if you were a small
child who doesn’t understand what Daddy is saying.
You do not enjoy being condescended to by a guy who can’t be
bothered to cast his shadow in the right direction.
“Um. Follow?
Me.” Harlan indicates the door, and
turns to leave. You ignore the fact
that the door opens without Harlan having actually touched it, and
follow him
outside, where you seem to be alone with him.
The sun has fully set now, and the moon is not up yet, so
it is fairly dark. You look up as you
follow Harlan and see that heavy clouds have gathered, just visible in
the
deepening night, and hanging very low.
The forest is unusually quiet and still. This
nags at you as a vague sense of something being out of place
for several moments until you are able to put your finger on it. Especially at night, a forest is a noisy
place. Things are hunting other things,
and those things are warning other things like themselves that
something is
hunting them. Some other things are
looking to get laid, or to tell anything in earshot that anything in
earshot
should go away, because everything in earshot is the rightful territory
of the
thing that is making the noise.
In short, there shouldn’t be such a dead silence in the
woods. Even the sound from your friends
in the cabin muffles and disappears by the time you and Harlan reach
your
car. Not that you have walked very
far. The cabins are still within sight,
even through the dense forest.
You car beeps and the lights flash as you approach.
You hope you have simply bumped the unlock
button on the key fob in your pocket, but you suspect that isn’t the
case. Harlan opens your door and leans
into the
car.
“Grrrnaorth?”
“Harlan! What’s
up?”
Three minutes of silence later, you are getting a bit
irritated. Harlan hasn’t moved at all,
and neither he nor Grrrnaorth have said a word. And
yet you have the distinct impression that they have been
having a conversation.
“Um, hey.
Harlan?”
“Oh. Um.
Yes. (balloons go south. No.
Not yet.) Trick.
You ah, want me to show you The Trick?”
“Yeah, man!” says Grrrnaorth. “Show
him, Harl! It’ll
knock his socks off! What?
Oh, yeah, I’m sure he can handle it…Hey,
buddy, Harlan wants to know if you are absolutely positively sure that
you want
him to show you the Trick. Say
yes! It rules! You
won’t be disappointed.”
While every molecule of your being screams otherwise, you
say, “Yeah.”
Harlan, meanwhile, has just been looking at you.
While his gaze doesn’t seem to hold any
meaning deeper than an innocent, casual gaze --the way you would look
at
somebody you are talking to-- you can’t
help but feel Harlan is somehow observing your soul.
You fidget.
“… Harlan, it’ll be okay. He said
he wants to see it, didn’t he?” Grrnaorth
continues, still apparently engaged in conversation
with the increasingly creepy Harlan.
“Look, I know you’re concerned about your friends’ safety, but I
assure
you they’ll be just fine. You’re just
being overcautious…yeah, well, that was an isolated incident. You know what the odds of that happening
again are?…Well, okay. You have a
point. But I’m sure this time will be
alright. Really. He’s
a big boy.”
Harlan seems to concede the point. “Um.
I hope you like The Trick,” he says to you.
“Slinkycannon,” he adds enigmatically.
“Oh, man, are you in for a treat! This
totally rules. You won’t regret this at
all.” Grrrnaorth sounds like a kid on
Christmas
now, and you find it a little unbecoming for a supernatural voice that
communicates telepathically with creepy weirdoes whose clothing doesn’t
blow
properly in the wind. “Give me a
second. I want a better view….” Grrrnaorth is silent for a moment. Then there is a muffled sound from Harlan’s
pocket. Harlan reaches into it and
pulls out a small portable radio with a pair of earbuds.
He sets this on top of your car and turns up
the volume. “That’s better,” say the
earbuds. Grrnaorth’s voice is a bit
tinny, but audible enough in the deep, silent night.
Thunder rolls.
The noise is so abrupt, and the silence before it so complete,
that you
actually jump, and even scream a bit, severely startled.
Well, okay, to be fair you don’t actually
sceam. It’s more of a startled yelp. Barely even a noise. Okay?
You are a manly man. Yadda yadda
yadda.
In the distance, a wolf howls. Leaves
blow in a breeze you cannot feel and spin in a lazy,
sloppy circle about Harlan’s feet. As
Harlan reaches into his long trench coat, it seems as if the trees
themselves
bend toward him slightly in anticipation.
If weren’t so totally and absolutely ludicrous, you would swear
that the
trees were literally doing just that.
But that’s silly.
Right?
Harlan seems to have located what he was looking
for. Lightning crackles above you,
somehow lighting Harlan from underneath.
It’s subtle, but it’s there, and the part of your mind that
notices it
chooses to ignore it. Slowly,
carefully, Harlan pulls an object from an inner pocket.
It is long, curvy, and clear. It
is…oh, what the hell? A coke bottle? A goddamn glass coke bottle?
Well, so it’s not terribly dramatic.
“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!” Says
Grrrnaorth.
Are the clouds swirling overhead? You
can’t be sure, but it seems so. Like
something out of a Steven Spielberg
film. Unsettling. Yes,
quite unsettling.
“Harlan asks for you complete attention,” Says
Grrrnaorth from his perch on top of
your car. You can feel the air, it has
an almost electric charge to it. Harlan
is staring intently at you. The tension
mounts. Lightning, thunder.
“Now, OBSERVE! BE WITNESS TO… THE
TRICK!!!”
Harlan sweeps off his trench coat. He’s
wearing a tee-shirt underneath, black
enough that you think it is actually swallowing light.
Harlan holds the bottle in one hand. In
the air, just below the level of hearing
- you can feel more than hear it - comes a very unsettling humming
noise. You foolish imagination tells you
it sounds
like sixty thousand undead zombie druids humming in a low bass register
through
the fabric of the space-time continuum.
Then, with a flourish, lightning reflecting in Harlan’s
eyes (despite the complete lack of lightning in the sky at that
moment), he
sweeps his free hand in front of the bottle.
The bottle has disappeared.
There is silence.
You are, at once, slightly disappointed and more relieved
than you have ever been in your entire life.
“HOLY CRAP!
WASN’T THAT AWESOME?!?!” shouts Grrrnaorth from the
pocket radio.
“Pretty neat.
Um. Damn good sleight of hand,
there. Nice, Harlan.”
Harlan just smiles at you. He
continues smiling as he walks past you to the cabins.
You decide to join your friends down at the lakeshore,
where there will be skinny dipping, Jetskiing, and drinking. Despite the brewing storm.
Dumb, yeah, but you’re young. You
decide to take Grrrnaorth with you. He
gets on smashingly with your buddies, and
is the life of the party. Harlan spends
the night standing perfectly still on the roof of the cabin, staring
intently
at something only he can see.
Hours later, you are trying to convince your friend
Dave’s girlfriend to sneak off into the woods with you when you are,
without
warning, clobbered into unconciousness by a glass coke bottle hurtling
earthward from the stormy clouds.
YOUR WEEKEND IS OVER.
YOU ARE NOT BADLY INJURED, BUT YOU DO REQUIRE FIFTEEN STICHES IN
YOUR
SCALP. THE PARTY IS RUINED BECAUSE
NOBODY WANTS TO GO OUTSIDE AND DEAL WITH
SEVERAL FEET OF SHATTERED GLASS ON THE GROUND.
GRRRNAORTH SWEARS HE HAD NO IDEA THAT THIS
WOULD
HAPPEN.
BELIEVE HIM IF YOU WANT.
I THINK HE’S KINDA FISHY.
GO BACK TO SECTION 30 AND MAKE ANOTHER CHOICE.