It all began early in June. We were released from jr. High and set free for three whole months of unrestricted frolic before the unyielding doors of Highschool and the adult world threatened to close forever behind us. The summer was a hot one and many lazy afternoons were spent laying about talking, or climbing the trees in the park just around the corner, and telling stories of meditation dreams and the past, present, and future. Our art and our stories were our outlets to the world and our connection to each other. Because of our near obsession with fantasy we were out casts at school, and thus had created a strong bond between us. Most often we spent all day together until the sun sank behind the rolling hills that surrounded our valley home, and we rushed to be in by dark.
It was in these times that the legacy of the seven would begin. Carol and Dee Dee were spending the night at my place, a small, none too tidy apartment on the corner of Maple and Greenwood. We had spent the day playing games suited only for those with extreme over active imaginations, and were now settling down to sleep—which in it’s self was fun, because in sleep you can dream. And from the elusive world of dreams come great stories and experiences that can not exist in the world of logic and day time activity. I lay in bed restless, listening to the soft sighs of breathing that came from my friends and sort of daydreaming (at night) as I always do when I can’t sleep, the kind of dream where it seems real but I am, and I know I am, making it up. Suddenly Carol sat up. It was so sudden that at first I thought she had been hurt in her sleep. She was looking at her hands as if they weren’t her’s and whispering over and over again, “…I did it…”
“Are you okay, Carol?” I asked, looking at her with a curious expression. She glared at me as if without recognition, and then laughed out loud.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” I said half-scarcasticly, and I lay back and closed my eyes, but didn’t drift into that daydreamy world of half sleep just in case. I wasn’t exactly credulous, I thought she was just playing around, but what had happened was so strange that it was worth looking into.
“Help me!” Her voice called out in a horse whisper. I turned to look at her, she was laying quite still and peaceful.
“Hey, hey Carol,” I whispered, “you okay?”
“The dark demon… in my mind… help me… please…”
I clasped my hands together excitedly, as I said I wasn’t exactly credulous and I believed that she was making it all up—but what did it matter? Fun is fun, and if these things only happened in the movies, or in our imaginations then so be it. I was willing to take part in it, and that I think, my willingness to believe, or pretend that I was willing to believe, is what set it off.
“What can I do?” I asked. In the darkness my eyes grew wide. I could see her silhouette trembling slightly, and knowing she couldn’t see my face, I smiled, I still thought it was a game.
“Look for help… search your mind…” She was saying. It was as if she were speaking a steady stream of consciousness, her voiced sounded distant and far away. She was speaking to me, but by the sound of her voice she didn’t know that I was listening.
I closed my eyes, lay my head back, and let everything wash over me like a title wave. Always in my mind, when I close my eyes, I see pictures. Sometimes they are things I have recently seen, or things I have been thinking about. Sometimes they’re things that I wish to see. I think that everyone see them, pictures in their mind, at night, when all of what has happened during the day swims around in your head waiting to be cataloged and filed away somewhere. Only I see them more vividly, as if my eyelids were a movie screen in 3D, with all the colors and sounds and everything. One image I liked, it fit with the situation. It was of an enormously tall figure, much like a gargoyle, all black with yellow eyes, it gave a voiceless roar, but my mind filled in the blank with music. Sharp clarinet music, the kind I had heard earlier that day in band practice.
I opened my eyes and explained to her what I had seen.
“Something’s happening!” She whispered. “Tonight, something’s beginning!”
I liked the sound of that. It had the air of some kind of revolution, the beginning of some kind of new age. Suddenly an idea came to mind. In the movies when someone was possessed they would have the host ‘bring the spirit out’ so that the hero could have a conversation with the ultimate evil that he would eventually thwart. “Lemme talk to ‘im.” I suggested.
“No, it’s too dangerous!” but she fell back onto the bed of blankets in something resembling epileptic convolutions. When they stopped she lay still, breathing quickly and shallowly, then she sat up, and in a voice a tone lower and full of malice said, “What?”
‘Oh boy!’ I thought, this is the part where they discover the creature’s inherently evil nature and what it wants with a couple of suburban kids.
“Who… am I talking to?” I asked, not wanting to make any assumptions, (but knowing it was supposed to be the demon) .
“Kragtek, master of the underworld.”
This was more excitement then I could take! What do I say? Even if it was my friend only pretending, the prospect was that something had to come next, and what ever it was it was more in my hands now then ever before! ‘Master of the under world’ he had said (she had said). So, this was a type of Mephistopheles, maybe? I decided that that should be my next question.
“So…. Yer like the devil, right?” I asked.
She (he, they) looked at me a moment, as if considering, then said in a soft, deadly voice, “not quite… I don’t cause people to do bad things, and all people, good and bad, come to my world.”
“You mean when we die.” let’s be perfectly clear on this.
“No,” was the reply that surprised me, “when they dream. When they have nightmares.”
Nightmares? Now that was certainly interesting, I would have to write all this down of corse. But I would have to make it all real, real demons taking over real people, demons that control nightmares. It was as if I was in one of my stories and I couldn’t wait to see it unfold, what would happen next?
“What do you want with us?” I asked, which seemed like the appropriate (and stereotypical) question for the situation.
“Want with you?” She repeated. My eyes had adjusted to the dim light and Carol had a strange look on her face, twisted, and unnatural. “Do you think that I did what I did out of want with you?”
“Then you were forced?”
Carol stretched her hand out in front of her a moment, then stood and walked around the room, her hands behind her back, with a slow, unnatural posture. As she paced I could see her silhouette, and in my mind’s eye I could see Kragtek. He was tall and thin, all black except for red, glowing eyes. From the top of his head two long, twisted horns curled behind him, and a forked tongue licked the air like that of a snake. His skin was reptilian, and a long, thin tale coiled and uncoiled as he walked.
“forced?” He repeated with disdain. “I can not be forced to do anything.”
“Then…” in the darkness I rolled my hand as if to say ‘go on’.
“You are too presumptuous.” He said, and then lay back down where Carol had been sleeping.
“Yer not gonna tell me?” I thought it was the rules. Didn’t evil demons always have to tell you their plans?
“You ask too many questions,” he said. “And I require rest. Do not disturb me.” He lay down in Carol’s blankets and closed his eyes.
A few moments later Carol sat up, breathing hard as if out of breath. “Wh- what happened?” She asked, between gulps of air. By now I had fallen so into my role that I told her the whole story. She listened intently, then asked, “why us?”
I shrugged, “said it wasn’t us he was interested in. He wouldn’t tell me much more.”
She thought a moment, “why me?” she asked, “why take over my body…” She was silent a moment then added, “he’s still there.”
Then she began to do something that both frighten and surprised me. She began to cry.
The rest of the night passed uneventfully. Carol eventually calmed down, and didn’t want to discuss what had happen earlier. She was frightened, or said that she was, and slept in bed with me for the remainder of the night. As I began to drift off I saw images of Kragtek, serpent like and hissing. I imagined his voice as being raspy and harsh, he was glowering, wrapped around a crystal and beckoning to me. Though it sounds frightening it was actually a good dream. The kind I enjoy, vivid and clear, and some how, to me, relevant.
Dee Dee woke up first. She sleeps like a rock and never stirred all threw that night. I hear she even slept threw the earth quake of ’94. I was awake second though, she saw to that. She grabbed me by the shoulder and shook me gently, when I chose to ignore that she made herself less discrete. She shook me violently and called out my name. “What?” I asked, rather annoyed.
She smiled a silly, lopsided smile and said, “Hee hee, hi!”
I rolled over. Had I gotten more sleep I would have been more apt to respond with enthusiasm and my perky morning behavior, as it was, however, I was hoping that she would go back to sleep. She didn’t. She asked me when I had fallen asleep, and why? And why I didn’t wake her, she’d have been glad to talk to me. In short, she wasn’t content until I had told her the whole story, and as I did her eyes grew wide and round.
“You think I could contact him?” She asked.
I shrugged, “Ask Carol.”
Carol was still asleep. She would have to wake up on her own because, though she was not hard to wake, up she extremely hard to rouse. She could be consciously awake but would not talk to you until she felt like waking up, and waking her early put her in a bad mood.
“I know what we could try.” I said suddenly, after pulling on some blue jeans and a neon pink top, “We can go into a room where it’s all dark and try to ‘contact somebody’ there.” My target was, of corse Kragtek, but anybody would do. Actually I had a secret incentive. I knew that in the dark your mind can play tricks on you, especially if it possesses an over active imagination as ours does. I thought that if we went into the bathroom and turned off the lights then it would be pitch black. Sometimes a thin stream of light escapes threw the crack beneath the door, but that isn’t enough to see. If we were to stair into the mirror at our reflections then maybe we would get lucky. Maybe we would see something, a trick of the mind, but some thing, something to talk about. Anyway, it was something to do, and worth a shot.
She agreed readily and we walked into the bathroom together and switch off the light. For a few seconds the room was still visible, in every detail, then the colors inverted and faded out. “What do we do?” Dee Dee asked.
I shrugged, in the darkness she couldn’t see me. “Ask for a sign?”
“If you’re there,” she said quietly, “give us a sign.”
“A non-violent, painless sign.” I added, trying to be funny.
We staired into the darkness for several seconds, but saw nothing but very dark, indiscernible silhouettes. The only thing I saw that was anything but darkness was a little red dot. It was the kind of floating dot you see if after you shut off the light or look into the sun. The kind that’s red and green and swims in front of your eyes for several second after words. It floated up between her and I, then disappeared into the wall. It re-appeared a few seconds later, drifted casually, then seemed to land on Dee Dee’s arm and disappeared. A few moments later and I switched on the lights.
“Did you see anything?” She asked.
“Naw, just darkness.”
She nodded in agreement, she was obviously disappointed.
“Oh yeah, an’ a red dot.” I added laughing. It wasn’t of consequence, but I thought it would be a funny thing to say.
“Red dot?” she asked, “where?”
I illustrated with my finger. “Right here, came up between us, then into the wall…”
“…and landed on my arm.” She finished.
I looked at her. “…yeah… how’d you know that?”
“I saw it too.” She confessed, “I thought it was one of those light burns.”
I nodded, “Let’s wake up Carol.”
And we did… eventually. It took several minuets to get her coherent, but when she was we explained the whole thing.
“In the bathroom?” she asked for verification.
“In the bathroom.” I confirmed.
She looked at me a moment. “I wanna see.” She said, walking towards the bathroom.
“Kragtek,” Dee Dee said, grabbing her sister by the arm, “I want to talk to Kregtek.”
Carol shook her head. “He’s gone.” She said. “He left last night.”
We went back to the bathroom but this time nothing happened. Carol said that she saw something in the darkness but neither I nor Dee Dee can claim to have seen anything, so we left it as a vague and inconsequential enigma. The shared experience between her and myself made me more hard set for proof. Last night it had been just a game but after seeing that small bit of mystery in the darkened bathroom I wanted something real to happen. I wanted there to be real ghosts, real dream demons, a real Kregtek.
You would think that I could just ask. I could say ‘you were just playing around last night, right?’ but she would never admit to it. That’s how Carol was. She was always the mystic in our group. She still believed in unicorns, and elves, and dragons, or so she said. She told me when I first met her that unicorns used to exist but had died out long ago. I found it much like believing in Santa clause or the Easter bunny, but said nothing, not wanting to insult a friend.
“Wish we could talk to ‘em.” I said. By ‘them’ I meant Kregtek and the glowing light from the bathroom. We had come to think of them as two separate entities.
“Maybe we can.” Carol said. She reached into her back pack and pulled out a misty white crystal attached to a gold chain. She held the crystal over a sheet of white paper and wrote on it ‘yes’ and ‘no’ twice each, with ‘yes’ on the vertical and ‘no’ on the horizontal. “Can you hear me?” she asked into the air. The crystal began to swing gently, along the ‘yes’ line.
“Like it would answer ‘no’.” I scoffed. I had always hated those ‘anybody there?’ or ‘can you hear me?’ questions, if the answer were ‘no’ then you wouldn’t get an answer at all, now would you.
“Would you be willing to talk to us?” Carol asked, ignoring my comment. Again, ‘yes’.
“Is this Kragtek?” Dee Dee asked. the crystal began to swing toward the horizontal, ‘no’.
“Would you tell us if you were?” I asked.
‘yes’
“Who are you, then?” Dee Dee asked. The crystal began to spin in a small circle.
“It can’t answer that.” Carol said.
I had been watching not the crystal but Carol’s hand. Was this for real? Or was she spinning it, ever so discreetly. She could conceivably even been spinning it unconsciously.
“Lemme hold it.” I said, nearly grabbing it out of Carol’s loose grip.
“Keep you hand steady.” She told me, which was harder then it seems, because you hand got tired rather quickly.
“Are you a girl or a boy?” I asked, and then remembering changed it to, “are you a girl?”
Very slowly the crystal began to rock. It rocked up and down along the ‘yes’ markers. I didn’t think I had influenced it.
“Are you nice?” Dee Dee asked.
Again ‘yes’.
It went on like this for several minuets. We found out that she was a girl, her name began with an F, that she liked chocolate, didn’t have a boyfriend, but did have a twin brother, he was also nice, who’s name started with an S. We had been laughing at the silly questions and answers, and we all took turns holding the crystal. It was almost as if we were talking to a real person. Suddenly Carol put up her hand as if she had something relevant to say. “Are you from the world of dreams?” She asked, very quietly, and very seriously. We all watched as slowly the crystal began to rock vertically, ‘yes’.
Threw use of Carol’s ‘magic’ crystal we learned that there were any number of these ‘dream people’. Some were nice, and naturally some were not so nice. Each ‘session’ we seemed to get a different person, or a different group of people. Their personalities were as different as people’s. Some were very serious, some were playful. Some were young and some were old. It was fun, but the big draw back was that they could only answer ‘yes’ and ‘no’ questions. In fact, the only one we had ever had a conversation with (I had ever had a conversation with) was Kragtek, and he never contacted us threw the crystal.
Eventually I got sick of only being able to ask yes or no questions. You could guess at a name by asking, “is the first letter of your name A? B? C? D?…” and so on, but that was dull and monotonous.
“Couldn’t we use a Ouiji board?” I asked. We had been talking about different ways of communicating with our new found ‘friends’. One, not the strangest of which, had been multi-faced dice with yes, no, and various letters painted on the faces.
“No.” Carol said. “Ouiji’s are tools of the devil.”
“They’re evil.” Dee Dee added, my friends were Christian, although I was not. I was, am, and have always been agnostic, which means I don’t know, and don’t pretend to.
“What if we made it Satan-proof?” I suggested.
“You can’t.” Dee Dee said, “it won’t move.”
But I was always the strongest willed in the group. And I usually got my way. We got out a large piece of construction paper and with pink magic marker wrote out ‘yes’, ‘no’, and ‘maybe’. Then the letters A-Z and the numbers 0-9. Then at the bottom we wrote ‘goodbye’. For Piece of mind for Dee Dee and Carol we wrote ‘no evil spirits allowed’ across the top, then decorated the border with various crosses and the like. We even made up a batch of holy water, water everyone prayed over, and sprinkled the board with it. Then I cut a hole in the middle of a baseball card and had to put crosses on it and dip it into holy water. Finally Carol brought two gold crosses from home and waring one around her neck taped the other to the board.
We went into Dee Dee’s room and locked the door. Then, at my prompting, we all placed a hand on the slider and I said out loud, “hi! You remember me, I was talking to you earlier via a crystal.”
The slider slowly moved toward the ‘h’ and then the ‘e’ then the ‘l’ and a large circle, then ‘l’ again, then ’o’, then it came to rest in the blank spot just bellow the ‘maybe’.
“Who are we speaking to?” Carol asked.
The board slowly spelled out ‘f-a-n-t-a-i-s-h-i-o-u-a’ then came to rest on ‘yes’. We had to have her repeat it so that we could write it down, and Dee Dee became the recorder for this ‘session.’ We found out that she had first contacted us threw the crystal, that she was female, and her twin brother’s name was Saih. They were the ‘greeters’ and they warned that talking to humans at all was ‘illegal’ and that she couldn’t tell us much more until she got an okay from the higher council.
While she was apparently gone we ‘chatted’ with Saih.
“How old are you?” I asked, “I mean, if you even age or grow at all.”
The slider circled the ‘h’ then the ‘a’ then repeated several times…. He was laughing at us. But eventually it came around in a big loop to the number ‘1’ then slowly to the ‘0’. There was a pause then he added, ‘i-n-y-o-u-r-y-e-a-r-s’.
“How much is that in your years?” Dee Dee asked. He didn’t answer at first, then it spelled out, ‘a lot. I dunno how much that is in terms of our years because we all age at different rates. Some of use grow from infancy to adulthood before you would have finished with one of your whole years. Others, like Fantaishioua and I age so slowly that in your whole life time you’d never notice a change.’
This was very hard to figure out because there were no spaced and no punctuation. We read it over and over again before we could brake it into words and sentences, then we decided to add to our board. We drew in a blank square and under it in tiny letters wrote the word, ‘space’. Then we added punctuation, ‘.’ ‘,’ ‘!’ ‘?’ and ‘’’. After making our additions we slipped it into my purple binder and hid it under the bed.
We spent the day drawing and writing, and playing various roll playing games, and after dinner we slipped into Dee Dee’s room to contact Fantaishioua or Saih. Carol and I placed a hand on the board and Dee Dee again took to recording.
“Is anyone there?” Carol asked. And the cursor slid to ‘yes’.
“Fantaishioua?” I asked.
‘no’
“Saih?”
‘no’
We found we were talking to an adult this time. One named ‘Thihen’. He was very serious and said that only because we were ‘different’ were we aloud to talk to the Aldahi. He, very willingly, explained to us that the Aldahi were a race of people, much like ourselves, with children, families, pets, and everything else. He explained that some Aldahi were responsible for the dreams we dream, both good and bad, and that to them the world of sleep was life. He said that some Aldahi were also muses. Some times one would show up on T.V or in a comic, that shouldn’t surprise anyone, but he asked us to please not ‘harass’ beloved fantasias characters. He also said that some Aldahi would be sent on missions, (to except or reject at their discretion) to befriend lonely children (under the age of eight). As a final rule he told us that were had to keep this a secret. That no one was to ever know about their existence, or we would be expelled from their world. We promised, and so began the adventure.