THE SPORES ARE IN YOUR MIND NOW
LET GO AND BE NOWHERE
WE WILL INHABIT YOUR VESSEL
WE WILL UNDERSTAND FOR YOU

Feedback screeched across the house and forced the partygoers’ attention towards the makeshift stage. Kai, muting his guitar strings, chuckled apologetically into the microphone “hey, sorry, sorry”. His bassist stumbled piss-drunk to his station and plugged in while the drummer reminded him once again to tune his damn guitar, idiot. A couple dozen were crammed into the living room underneath a tangled web of Christmas lights taped to the ceiling. “Free Bird!” some prick yelled from the hallway, much to the delight of the crowd that was dangerously close to leaving. Kai glared at his bassist, signaled to his drummer, and met the mic once again. “We’re Spunk, and this is one is for Mr. Free Bird!” From there, they exploded. Kai was sloppy, but his distortion was too high for the people to distinguish him from Hendrix, and the drunk bassist charmed the drunk sorority sisters who had no idea there was going to be a show tonight. The drummer was just perfect as always and wished he was in a better band. Amidst the cacophony, the rowdy bunch suffocating themselves in the pit, Kai was only slightly distracted by a girl in the corner. She was wide-eyed, slack-jawed, intensely stiff, completely disconnected from the chaos next to her. She looked like a dying fish gasping for water, and when Mr. Free Bird reached for her arm to pull her into the circle, she jerked back in disgust. Kai kept screaming his nonsense, and everyone ate it up but her. They hit their enormous final chord, and once the new followers stopped howling and clapping, they began the next one. “This is for the girl tripping balls in the corner!”

A light drizzle lasted for ten minutes before lifting from the warm asphalt, making it unbearably muggy. James took his coat off and refrained from reading his letter for the fourth time for fear of the moisture bleeding out the ink. He didn’t need to anyways. He knew some parts would embarrass him and possibly embarrass Kai, who James was sure to come off as a massively obsessive weirdo towards. What the hell was he doing? Obnoxious beads of condensate formed on his pink, shaven face, just as the blonde hairs on his head were reaching out towards the static force in the air. Water seeped between the seal of his headphones and his skin. When he took them off, the silence of Oakton Street washed over him. It was Saturday and the streetlights had just beamed their yellow hue onto the puddles and parked cars, but no music, no crowds, no multicolor lights shooting through the cracks in the blinds… He didn’t hate it, but it just wasn’t natural. A mutt was chained up in the yard of a sorority house, thrashing violently against its restraints and with each jerk hacking up something guttural and nasty. He couldn’t look long at this poor creature, its brittle, white-freckle infected limbs barely standing the husk on equilibrium, the torso reduced to a crude frame of wooden pegs and canvas paper wrapped so tightly around the ribs it might just tear. The wet smell of sick clung to his nostrils and pushed him to the other side of the street. 

Hgh… hgh.. hghain… hgharr… hghaiin… hgh…

When it continued to limp alongside the yard, looking at what was seemingly the only human on this corner, still trying to eject what shred of filth might still remain in its belly, James swore it sounded like it was trying to speak to him. 

Hgh… ach… hghach… 

…hgharr…

James was just on his way to burn a bridge with his old friend, but now he had to find someone to put a dog down. All windows of the house were pitch-black but one on the second story, where James finally saw people, their backs pressed to the windows on the edges of a great crowd. Packed like sardines, James noticed. When he craned his neck to see past those on the windows, he only saw more still bodies, blank faces, wall-to-wall like a storage room for a wax museum. The only sound that escaped the window pane was the humming, the blurry collection of grey murmurs from everyone in the room. He didn’t see anyone whose mouth wasn’t moving. It wasn’t the static of the weather that was rippling across James’ skin anymore. The front door was marked with weak, black paint:

CONDUIT

Against the crushing weight of the air above it, the dog somehow raised itself on its hinds and balanced with the chain, strict and straight, quivering. Its big, black eyes had nowhere to seek but the miserable sky, blanketed with dark clouds, offering no mercy but the chance of rain. The anchor finally slipped out of the moist ground, and the mutt keeled over stiffly with a damp thump. Resisting the urge to vomit, James ran breathlessly towards Kai’s place.

He figured that the dead dog was not a good conversation starter, so he just said “hey”. Kai’s straight, black hair was now down to his shoulders, he had a new tattoo of an eye on his wrist, and he smelt like cigarettes. If Kai was actually there, he’d have noticed James’ mustache had fallen off sometime in the past two years. That hair of his was blocking his vision anyways. He pointed to the kitchen.

“Want a beer?”

James figured if he was going to do this he might as well have a buzz going. 

“Yeah, ok.” 

“So… What are you doing?”

“Like, in life? Yeah, I’ve got a job finally and I’m saving up on a new car and classes are fine so far and…”

“Yeah.” 

“…What are you doing?”

“Nothing right now.”

“Well, you can’t be doing nothing. Like, how’s school going? Met any girls yet?”

James chuckled in self-hatred. He might as well have brought up the dead dog. He restarted.

“Oh, shit, man, you won’t believe what I saw down the street… Oh, do you have a bottle opener?”

Kai was so blank. This was not to say James was making eye contact with him, but he could feel the miles and years stretching out between them, abyssal, not one bridge to cross, much less burn. He thought about finding a paper bag too so he could take this beer to go. Kai pointed to the drawers.

“Everything’s in there.”

James opened a junk drawer. Batteries, receipts, rubber bands, rubbers… A wet dish rag. His housemates didn’t seem to know where rags went. 

“Oh, where are your housemates by the way? You said you were in here with, like, four other dudes?”

“They’re in the other room.”

James indeed heard a murmur from upstairs, presuming it to be the goings of Kai’s housemates. He opened another junk drawer. Phone chargers, sauce packets, prescription meds, two stacked plates, an overripe banana, a spoon. He was looking at a gross and depressing iSpy book. He opened a third junk drawer, filled with more miscellaneous crap, a grey, moldy odor reaching out from somewhere within this pile. 

“Dude, who the hell is taking care of your kitchen?” 

Kai grimaced, and James assumed he was hiding embarrassment underneath the long hair. Good job lightening the mood you idiot, he scolded himself. There was probably just a party recently that trashed the house anyways. His ears picked up a shrill hum from the living room, and there he saw the origin of the mess. It was a house-show setup; a small stage thrown together with plywood, Christmas lights stretching across the ceiling, and amps, one of which was still on and discreetly humming. The closer James stepped towards the tube amp, the more the hum focused into a voice. An ensemble of voices, speaking on top of each other, although they were not in conversation. 

See you tomorrow you tomorrow see you tomorrow see you see you to/

In there in there in there in there in there in there in there/

What are you doing what what are you doing what are you doing what/

James recalled a time his own amp picked up a radio frequency and treated him to a Spanish-language talk show. What are the chances of an amp picking up a numbers-station? He wondered what defunct KGB station was beaming out this signal across many miles, only to be picked up by the amp. He stepped back over pieces of a drum kit and empty beer cans only to find Kai creeping slowly up the stairs, seemingly forgetting he invited his own friend here. He nearly blended into the dimness of the unlit house, but a sliver of light shown on his ankles as the cuff of his jeans rolled up a little. White spots. Little, white freckles infesting his dark skin like the Milky Way. James remembered the dog, and his chest tightened. He felt glad for never bringing it up. He set down the bottle and followed Kai quietly into his room. 

He didn’t want to sound too worried, but he couldn’t help it as he met his friend’s sullen and shallow face. 

“Kai… Is everything ok?”

“Everything is fine. Just wanted to catch up.” 

“No, K. I feel like you’re in something and you’re not telling me. You can tell me. You know I love you, man. Right?” 

James knew that was no longer true, to a certain degree, but this thought was interrupted. Posters of K’s favorite bands plastered the entire wall, with each human face stamped out, obscured with black blots that bled like ink, down the walls and pooling on the carpet. Kai stepped closer to James, placing his hard hands on his shoulders, strict and straight, cold, and they met eyes for the first time. His pupils were simply the most enlarged and vacuous black holes that James had ever seen.

“Everything is fine.” 

James retracted from whatever in fresh Hell this was and said nothing as he swiftly carried himself out of the room and towards the stairs. It was time to say goodbye for good. Wait, the letter, the stupid letter. He was going to let him have it. He turned to make his last offering to his dead friend, when he met with the door across from Kai’s. 

CONDUIT

scrawled across the door in thick, pungent, black sludge, followed by symbols unable to be comprehended by any culture with a human mind

**** ** *** *

The low frequency of voices trickled underneath the door. He tasted bile. What was he dragged into by this empty vessel masquerading as his friend? And what was he going to see if he could take one more step towards this door and open it, if only to catch a glimpse of whatever fresh hellhole-heroin den this shell of a man had fallen into? He had to know. He managed to suppress his want to pull K out of this, but he had to know himself. His hand, of its own mind, had turned the knob already, and James erupted into dry heaves as he struggled to even stand. The smell… God, the smell… Like roaches had consumed and procreated and died in a cycle for weeks on end, like stagnant mop-water was allowed to sit and grow a biome. 

Everything is fine everything is fine everything everything is fine everything is/

You know I love you right you know I love/

They’re in the other room other room other room other room they’re in/

He heard the sheer volume of bodies in the room before he could even look. The voices of dozens of people lapping over their words like broken records now played in stereo. They couldn’t be bothered to look at the new arrival, the terrified new inhabitant who had just puked on the floor. A blond girl who looked no older than eighteen, a frat boy built like a brick house, a metalhead like James’ friend adorned in his black skinny jeans and band T-shirt, a geriatric patient in his hospital gown and countless wrinkles, and so many others…

Just wanted to catch just wanted just wanted to catch up wanted to catch up/

Everything is fine is fine everything/

I want out I want I want out no let me I want out/

One of them decided she was ready to go out into the world now, and looked down at James as she passed him coldly, her ankles adorned with the milky-white bumps, her bare feet black as coal in their necrotic state. The room was painted wall-to-wall, the pitch, thick residue creeping up the walls and descending a few inches from the ceiling in snotty ropes. The collective warmth of that many bodies, alive but lifeless, still as statues, produced an unbearable, stinking sauna, the condensate clinging to the walls and being sucked up by the organic matter that infested every conceivable surface of the room, the hub, the conduit. The girl towering over James, now in the fetal position, bent down and marked his cheek with the filth before struggling down the stairs and disappearing into the night. The white, static fuzz filled James’ ears and he slipped out of the plane. 

What’s happening to me, please God, someone tell me anything right now, please…

He was locked just behind his field of vision, unable to move, simply an observer. His warden spoke.

** **** ** *** ** * ***** **

He didn’t hear a word, but he understood. He comprehended so much more than he ever wanted to. His body was here, but lightyears stretched thin between it and himself, abyssal. No bridge. His body was still, but he himself was falling, pulled into orbit by something that wasn’t quite gravity. He was in a realm of unmistakable, horrifying, ever-comprehensive truth. 

What’s happening to me?

** **** ** **** * *ORLD NOW. YOU ARE NOWHERE.

But I can’t just be nowhere, can I? How can I be nowhere? 

THIS IS NOT FOR YOU TO KNOW. THE CONDUIT HAS TAKEN YOU. THE SPORES ARE IN YOUR MIND NOW.

Is this what happened to… Who? Why can’t I remember?

WHOEVER YOU SPEAK OF NO LONGER EXISTS. THEY ARE LOST TO INFINITI. MEMORY IS FUTILE HERE. YOU ARE FUTILE.

Take me back, put me back, I want to go back. Please.

TO WHERE? CAN YOU REMEMBER? NAME THE PLANE WHERE YOU WERE BEFORE AND I SHALL TAKE YOU BACK TO YOUR VESSEL.

I… I don’t know… I don’t understand. 

I WILL KNOW. I WILL UNDERSTAND FOR YOU. LET GO. I WILL INHABIT YOUR VESSEL SOON. BE NOT AFRAID. 

I’m not afraid… I just don’t understand… I just don’t und*** *** ***** ** * ** *

---

Jacob Smith is a freshman at the University of North Texas who enjoys the scary things. He also enjoys playing with his rock band, Dinosaur Data Book (@dinosaur_data_band). As of March 16th, Jacob’s other short story “The Trick” will have been published on the website 7th Circle Pyrite. Enjoy!