THE HIGHSCHOOL
PSYCHIC VAMPIRE
ON AN ISLAND STORY
by Kevin Fine and Company
Lizzie could guess that she had been dreaming when the sound of the music box floated into the darkened hall. She wandered toward the faint glow at the end of the two doorways. Tea-saucer slices of moonlight patterned the solid door to her left. The door on her right side was paneled with beveled glass disks. The hexagon pattern they were set in reminded Lizzie of the score of honeycomb that she had found in the beginning of this semester. That had netted her self some sweet points with the ultra-popular ASB president Kaylee Marshall.
What about this dream? Lizzie tensed as she again realized she was dreaming. She was exhausted. All her free time after school was devoted to her ceaseless homework assignments, studying roots and names of angels or laboring as a custodian for her father, Gunny. She places her hand on the polished brass plate and looks into the reflection that it rests upon. Her eyes flickered with an orange glow, like a pair of spinning glowsticks.
Having become accustomed to seeing bizarre things in her dream, Lizzie closed her eyes shut tight. She tried to relax and ground herself to prevent the tumultuous struggle that accompanies awakening. With her eyes closed, she clearly imagined that she could see a large white ball of light, like a headlight of a motorcycle in the center of the room behind her. She opened her eyes and turned around. She checked the space under the wooden door for light and saw none. Her hand slowly dropped from the reflective brass plate and she faced the wooden door. Lizzie placed her fingertips on the temporalis muscles and gently closed her eyes.
A man was standing in the room on the other side of the door. He was barely discernible with the invisible light flowing out from all around him. He almost looked to Lizzie like a snowman that she had made when she was little and she lived in Washington on the military base with Gunny.
“You shouldn’t be in here. You don’t belong in this place.” The voice was uncertain. The man stood perfectly still.
“Who are you, Eggman?” Lizzie retorted confidently.
“I’m a happy old man who minds his own business.”
He shifted forward and extended his hand, tapping it on the black void in front of him. Lizzie couldn’t put her finger on it, but she became aware that the acoustics of the hallway didn’t allow the eggman’s voice to behave the same as hers. She seemed to be quite a bit louder. She tried to speak more softly this time.
“What was that? What did you do just there?” Lizzie asked in a whisper.
“It was time to ash.” He gave a little chuckle and looked down at his empty, luminous hands.
“Are you smoking?” She whispered. It dawned on her that the mysterious person wasn’t speaking by sending out sound waves. The voice was in her head!
“Bad habit, I know. So is B n’ E. What the hell are you doing in my house? Who sent you?” The glowing man crossed his arms.
“I’m having a dream. I’ve seen this building from the beach and I wanted to have a look inside. I thought I’d take a walk through.” Lizzie briefly opened her eyes. The room on the other side of the door was still dark. When she again shut her eyes and tried to focus on the eggman, the light-ball was at her nose. She flinched and jumped back.
“It’s getting early. You should probably be headin’ on down the road. I don’t really appreciate you barging in at this hour of the day. We all need our sleep.” Putting his hand toward his mouth, He took a pull on his fingertips and loosed a cloud of shimmering smoke that cast strange shadows amidst the glow. He stretched his arms out to his sides at shoulder height. The ball of light crackled and started to hum a deep note.
It started off sounding like a tuba to Lizzie. She could feel the vibration in her chest and bones. The pitch of the tuba raised steadily to a throbbing feedback. Lizzie’s eyes shot open. The hallway was flooded with an incandescent orange. She brought her hands to her front and examined them. They glowed like embers. It didn’t hurt, but there was a sensation of a growing pressure up her arms to her chest and back.
“What’s happening to me eggman?” She started to grow uneasy. Should she wake up? How do you wake yourself up?
“You were just leaving, HA HA HA!” The man put his hands out in front of him with his palms facing out. He gave a gentle push.
The pressure increased. Now it was all over her body. She tried to take in a breath, but she could only gasp.
She closed her eyes see if she could see the light-ball one more time. Instead, she saw a bird’s eye view of her room. Her cat, Sheba was sprawled over her pillow. In the darkness, Lizzie looked over her textbooks, crumpled and folded papers and the jacket she always wore to school. She sighed and stole a peek at her alarm clock. Damn, awake forty minutes too soon. She was having trouble breathing.
Sheba looked up at her girl. She half masted her eyelids and flicked her tail. Sheba didn’t approve of Lizzie suspending herself from the ceiling. Lizzie was not playing fair, taking all the high ground. A cat could get pounced on that way. Irritated, Sheba began grooming herself.
Lizzie noticed the two, dark hands resting on the quilt. They were her hands! She hadn’t made it all the way back yet!
“Hissat cat! Get your butt offa my face!” Lizzie swam in the air frantically. Her cat abandoned grooming to follow Lizzie’s left hand. That’s the fun one. The girl never fails to have chunky amber beads or little silver bells dangling from them. Some of their best battles had begun with an innocent chase and some light pawing.
Lizzie understood why she was having respiratory troubles. Her darn cat was smothering her body. Concentrating, she raised her unconscious arm. It didn’t work. She rolled over, the cat jumped to the floor and ran out of the white door covered with stickers and little notes.
Back in her body, Lizzie sat up. She was fatigued, but grateful to be able to catch her breath.
“Damn it Elizabeth! Would you secure this dirt wad stinking pet of yours?”
A voice exploded from the room across the hall.
“Coming Gunny. You want coffee?”
———————————————————————————————————
Lizzie Bertrand.
Gunny Bertrand.
Alfonzo Gurrero: Mexican American Ceremonial Magician amateur, seldom encouraged except by Lizzie.
Komotel: demon as in, fallen angel who had a writ crafted by a summoner who lived some four hundred years ago. The summoner would make a contract with the being and use his field to get high off his thoughts and write poetry and plays.
Alel: Due to the spell scroll backfire, Komotel and Alfonzo merge into one being. He is strong and has some inherent magical abilities, but Alfonzo is able to mostly control Alel. Komotel is thrilled to be out of hell and in a new world. Komotel’ presence exists as a voice that only Alfonzo can hear and his magical powers and strength.
Alfonzo believes in spirits. Though superstitious, he wouldn’t exactly call himself religious. Unless he was in the presence of his Tia Isabel. His favorite class is chemistry. He enjoys mathematics for its beauty, but only as a means of explaining the fundamentals of the intricacies in the physics of chemistry. His role model is Gene Morales, an avid reader of Ray Bradbury and Douglas Adams. Mr. Morales hated Lewis Carroll and Ann Rand but for different reasons. Nobody ever knew that Mr. Morales sometimes read Oscar Wilde.
Alfonzo Gurrero Tried to run away from home when he was in fifth grade. He He had friends, but they were always too entrenched in card collecting and playing out their favorite comic book characters. They would violate trademark and copyright laws at least once a minute. They could make superheroes do the most ridiculous things with their imaginations. Alfonzo was spotted by his Tia Isabel on her way to Wednesday night church and made him get into her car. She took him with her to church. He got hot in the pews beneath the incandescent lights at the front of the chapel and checked out peoples feet and hairstyles. He ignored the Pastor and his sermon, instead flipping through Genesis, back to Revelation and finally stopping on a passage of Solomon the king.
Alfonso was obsessed. He read legends and lore about magical rings and enchanted worms that could cleave rock at a touch. He was interested that the Greater Key possessed the power to command elemental spirits, giants, to a lesser extent faeries, and of course celestial beings. The lesser key read more like a reference manual for mimicking the causative frequency of space-time. It described the actual happenings of objects and experiences. It read cold though, ambiguous. Corrected, changed and in some instances “improved upon”, the facts stare back at the reader through a gap infinitely wide. That of course is measured exactly. It would need to be to bind an angel, demon (formerly known as angel), imp, ancestral spirit, elemental or visitor from another plane. The book had a few lamb hide pages done in blue ink. Alfonzo wasn’t an FBI handwriting forensic special agent, but he could discern that the last six plates were penned with a ball point forty-nine cent pen.
These entries contained side notes and recommendations of local restaurants, breweries and of course Gentelmen’s clubs. Striphouses.
The new voice focuses on the symmetry and elegance of the plates featured. Complex timing, ingredients, measured amounts of these ingredients (in metric)
More on Alfie G. : He had a friend in junior high named Tran Loc Duong who possessed a grimorie that was all in german except for the hebrew in the seals and some notes in the back of the book. Some entries from someone named Zamphyr. They are written in English, but coded in some kind of shorthand. Alfonzo enlists the aid of some hackers at the school to decode an incantation. He had to wait until a Mayday or Halloween to perform the ritual effectively. After a bad breakup in his junior year he gets an opportunity to try to change things. One of the entries explains how to summon Komotel for sixty heartbeats. Something goes horribly wrong within that time and Alfonzo and Komotel blink out of existence.
Through the void, Komotel and Alfonzo merge into one being. They reappear in another world, Kay Seif. They appear in a blinding fury and are soon surrounded by villagers looking over him. He introduces himself as “Alel” shit himself and passes out.
He awakens a few hours later in the care of an apothecary. She cannot find anything wrong with Alel, but notices that he has stretch marks all over his body. Alfonzo feels bigger and stronger than before, Komotel realizes two things. One is that he is in a plane of existence where he is not imprisoned, but also that he is just a voice inside Alfozo’s head.
The villagers help by giving some rations and walking sticks. They advise Alel to go south for a two day walk to the City of Rayew. If anyone knew anything about how they came to be in the realm of Kay Seif, they would surely be known in the city of Rayew. Being situated on the rolling plains, Rayew is a mecca for astronomers, wizards and venture capitalists.
Some of the translations i