A Summertime Journey

than see, pure evil in his eyes. I shove Joey off me and scramble to my feet.
“What the fuck, what the fuck just happened?” I yell as I stumble around to the corner of the building, nearly tripping on a scrap piece of two-by-four. It’s all there—the big yellow front-end loader, the lot Joey disappeared into to gather rocks just minutes ago, and my pile of perfect hand-grenade-size rocks. Everything seems normal except that night’s turned into day, and a strange man is sitting here singing an AC/DC song. Jeremy, Ryan, and Joey scramble to their feet, looking around, dumbfounded, trying to make sense of what just happened.
When Ryan looks around, his expression has changed; his face is now that of an infant oblivious to the cruel world that awaits—that’s the best way I can describe it. He’s not excited like the rest of us, he doesn’t look confused, and he seems content standing there in a boy’s body with the expression on his face of a one-year-old: pure, happy, no fear, no prejudice. I examine Ryan from head to toe, and he looks normal, except for a slowly spreading dark spot. “Ryan, what the hell. You pissed yourself,” yells Joey. Ryan looks in Joey’s direction but doesn’t offer an explanation. “What’s going on?!” we all exclaim at the same time.
Then the man stands—the dirt below his feet swirls like tiny tornadoes.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
◊
THE CONSCRIPTED SOUL’S FACE was distorting between this world and the other, glitching like a subliminal message on TV, so brief you don’t even know if you saw it. The man was somewhere in Chicago in an abandoned brick building with the windows boarded up and mattresses and hypodermic needles littering the floor, gang graffiti on the walls. The stench of human waste soaked into the beds was overwhelming.
He’s at one of his many portals where our world, Adamah, and his world, Sheol, meet.
In his current stance, the man looks humorous the way the arms on his leather jacket barely pass his elbows. The odd man swirls and turns toward his flock, both arms raised high above his head, fingers flashing the peace sign. He is singing a Doors song,
You know the day destroys the night
night divides the day
He points at two girls in his flock.
Tried to run
tried to hide...
The two girls begin to fight, scratching, punching, and kicking each other. He raises his arms back up over his head and continues.
Break on through to the other side
When done singing, the two girls stop fighting and look back up at their master. He is bored with them, and with a simple nod and no spoken word they end their own lives and dissipate into nothingness like hairspray from an aerosol can. Gone.
“Listen to me, grouplings.” He calls his flock of followers “grouplings,” like groupies that follow their favorite band around the country while touring. However, these groupies are coerced into a doomed life of servitude, unlike hippies looking for endless parties and fun. As humans they are duped, usually with the promise of drugs or sex, to cross a threshold into Sheol, where their human self is sacrificed and they are reborn, or maybe a better word is transformed into grouplings. The grouplings interact and mingle with humans, mostly junkies and prostitutes, the type of crowd that does not ask or judge. But more importantly, the kind of crowd that will not call the police when one comes up missing.
When in Adamah, they can speak, show emotion, and integrate quite well among the living. By all appearances, they’re normal humans. In Sheol, they can be whatever their master desires. He uses the grouplings as he wishes and then discards them when their usefulness is used up, or he grows bored. He was bored when he commanded the two girls to fight and then end their lives. The odd man was socially inept when alive in Adamah, but in Sheol, he is confident and powerful. He proxies his grouplings to Adamah to do his dirty work and prefers to stay in the safety of Sheol. There’s another reason he remains in Sheol—if you die in Adamah, you’re dead, ashes to ashes. But in Sheol, you can come back, like a cat with nine lives.
“I’ll be leaving soon to start my journey,” he says as the grouplings start shuffling closer to him. The only sound in the room is their dragging feet and a distant police siren from the streets above, bleeding through the threshold.
“There are three boys that I must go see, three special boys that hold the key.” He turns around, and in the blink of an eye, he’s gone, leaving a tiny trail of dust so small and fragile that the movement of the grouplings dispels it from existence. His last command to his grouplings is to prepare to make the pilgrimage when the time comes.


CHAPTER SIXTEEN
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“WELCOME BOYS! WELCOME TO your hell,” says the oddly dressed man. I don’t know if we should run away or run toward him and try to tackle him. It doesn’t matter; my feet are now firmly planted in the same imaginary tar as when Larry caught me after school. I can’t move. Damn, this psycho is going to kill all four of us, and I’m going to stand here not able to run or protect myself.
“It looks like Ryan isn’t cut out for this journey we’re about to embark on, eh boys,” says the man, fiddling with the cords on his pants. I look at Ryan and the man is right. Ryan is in no condition to do anything except stand there with that infantile look on his face.
“Ryan, you in there, buddy?” Joey asks. He inches closer to Ryan and looks into his eyes. It’s dark and blank in there, like looking up at the sky on a clear night—nothing but black for eternity with little speckled shimmers of distant stars. Joey grabs Ryan’s hand in his and drops it as quickly as someone