by Megan Auffart
His foot had bled for twenty minutes before it'd stopped.
Jim rolled the vial that the man had given him between his fingers, watching as the crystallized dust glittered in the moonlight.
"What is this shit?" Jim had asked when the man had shown it to him. That had been earlier in the day.
The man, who was dressed in the strangest outfit Jim had seen outside of Mardi Gras, just shook his head and smiled widely…too widely, Jim thought and cringed at the sight. The man's teeth were too long and too square and they were as yellow as his cracked fingernails. His outfit, consisting of maroon pants with a matching suit coat and a dusty, old top hat, was torn at the edges, and the man's long hair hung down over both sides of his bony face.
Still, Jim couldn't keep himself from staring at the little plugged vial that the man held out, the fine silver powder inside of it winking at him in the sunlight. ...It was so shiny, and Jim hadn't gotten a fix in a week.
"Is magic," the man explained, still grinning his horrible grin. "Is to transport you to fairyland." His accent was foreign, but Jim would be damned if he knew what it was.
"Sure, mister," Jim said, still trying to comprehend what was going on. The man had appeared to him a half an hour after Jim had stepped on the needle and so he'd still been too dazed with the possible implications of his accident to notice anyone approaching. Plus, there'd been the thudding headache brought about by yesterday's six-pack that hadn't helped the situation any. Cheap beer always did that to him, but Jim drank it anyway, when he could. A bit of a headache wasn't reason enough to stop.
The man had let the vial drop into Jim's lap and it had landed next to his aching foot. Jim picked it up with a dirty hand and stared at it, mouth agape, before looking back up at the man in puzzlement.
"You selling this or something?"
The man laughed and shook his head. "Is too expensive for bum like you."
A year ago, Jim wouldn't have taken that insult sitting down, but that was a year ago and, besides, he'd heard worse. Instead, he shrugged and asked, "Then why'd you throw it at me?"
"Swallow it," the man said, and Jim watched, fascinated, as a long string of saliva spilled out from between the man's skinny lips. "Take only when moon is bright. Is magic."
Jim figured that the man had to have been waiting for the right moment to make his exit, because just then a particularly vicious blast of wind blew sand into Jim's eyes and, by the time he had managed to blink most of it away, the man had disappeared.
Now it was night and the moon was nearly full. Although his foot hadn't bled since that morning, Jim had been thinking about it enough so that it was hurting far more than it should have been. He'd have to get an AIDS test, probably. Jim wasn't sure how he could afford it, though. He didn't have any money. He'd been getting his food from a free clinic since he'd arrived at the big city.
"Should have chosen a better part of the beach," Jim muttered to himself and then gave a short, bark-like laugh. There was nothing funny about it, except maybe his own stupidity for having chosen a relatively isolated place in favor of a safer, more crowded one that wasn't cluttered with discarded junkie needles. That was the one thing he wouldn't try: heroin. Jim was scared of it; he'd seen what it'd done to his mom and he'd suffered what she did to get the money to get more. That's why he left home. That's why he was here.
Jim had been staring at the vial since the man had left. He'd been tempted to swallow it then, but he'd hesitated. Jim had made mistakes in the past with not following directions. He'd ended up twice in the hospital because he hadn't been listening to the instructions on how to take the drug, how to make sure it was cut right, shit like that. So Jim had decided to wait. Now it was night and the moon was out, bright as anything. So why was he hesitating to try it?
"Could be poison," Jim said aloud, but when he thought about it, he realized that he didn't much care if it would kill him or not. If he had AIDS, if the needle had been contaminated, then there wasn't much of a point to living, anyway.
He shook his head and looked up into the sky, as if acknowledging it for the first time. He opened the vial, throwing the piece of cork into the sand with the rest of the city's refuse. Carefully holding it in his hand, Jim toasted to the moon, "Here's to you," and then spilled the powder onto his tongue.
Even as he felt his entire face go numb, Jim still had time to admire the taste of the powder on his tongue; it was like blackberries. Jim had gone blackberry picking with his father, before the final stages of disease had ravaged their way through his dad's body. Jim could still remember the taste of them, fresh from the bucket. Jim's dad would have had half of them eaten by the time they'd gotten home, and Jim could still remember his father's face, mouth smeared purple from the blackberry juice, exiting the family pickup with the bucket in his hands...
Falling onto his back, Jim blacked out, his face only four inches away from the deadly silver tip of another unseen syringe.
The sun was out and the man was back again. This time, though, his suit didn't seem nearly so ragged. Instead, the maroon cloth was finely cut and seemed to fit him perfectly. His face was not nearly so bony as Jim remembered, but when the man smiled at him as he approached, Jim couldn't help but grimace. The teeth were larger than ever and covered with a gross, cake-y yellow.
"I know I see you again," the man said, tilting his top hat in greetings. "How you like this place?"
Jim looked around – they were still on the beach and the tide was coming in. No one was around, though, which was weird, because even though his section of the beach was isolated, there'd still be the occasional junkie hanging out along the edges. Nothing else had changed, it was exactly the same – and then Jim blinked and looked again and realized...nothing was the same at all.
The sand look scribbled, like God had been too lazy to actually create the beach and had instead taken a giant crayon and drawn in the shoreline. The waves had a distinctive 3-D quality, reminding Jim of the bad fantasy movies that he sometimes watched, with their CGI landscapes. He glanced at his hand, momentarily worried that he also wasn't real in this fake beach, but his hand was the same as always. The man was also real, or as real as possible as a person could be in whatever the hell this world was.
"Where the f-," Jim began to say, and then a hacking cough arose from his throat and he couldn't stop coughing until he felt something climb up his esophagus. Round and soft, it entered his mouth, tasting like bile, and he spit it out onto the sand between his feet. It was a blackberry and suddenly, blackberries were all that Jim could taste.
The man began to laugh, a vibrating cackle that seemed to echo along the beach. "Is fun?" the man inquired in between giggles, "Is enjoyable?"
"Shit!" Jim choked out, backing away as quickly as he could on top of the sand that was, somehow, horribly wrong. "What was that? What did you do?"
He blinked and then the man was behind him, one of his claw-like hands clasping Jim's shoulder in a way that suggested that his hand had always been there and that the fact that, just a second ago, the man had been in front of Jim was obviously not true. Jim shrugged angrily, trying to get the man to loosen his grip, but he couldn't do it. Then he felt the man's moist, hot breath on his ear.
"We didn't bring you here to hurt you," the man said, and this time his accent was gone and he sounded like one of those British guys on TV instead. "We just wanted to get your attention. Will you pay attention?"
"Who are you?" Jim demanded as he broke free of the man's grip and backed away, accidentally stepping on the disgorged blackberry in the process. It squished beneath his foot – his bare foot – and Jim realized that his shoes had disappeared in this messed-up world. He lifted his foot and saw that the squashed remains of the blackberry had pasted themselves to the exact spot of his foot where the needle had penetrated.
"We have many names," the man said, "but call us Oberon." Oberon examined his fingernails, which had changed from being cracked and yellowed to manicured and perfect. Jim saw it as it happened. The nails seemed to shimmer for a minute, going in and out of existence only to come to a rest again as well-trimmed and healthy.
"Okay, whatever, man," Jim said, "but what do you want?"
Oberon smiled a tight-lipped smile and gestured over to his left. On top of the fake sand, right before where the CGI-looking waves pounded the shoreline, a man materialized in a blink, literally. Jim's eyes had closed in their automatic reflex for less than a second and, when they were opened again, someone was there.
"This," said Oberon, "was you."
Jim opened his mouth to object, because obviously the man looked nothing at all like him – his hair was red and he was wearing this bizarre renaissance festival outfit – but then Oberon quieted him with a look. Jim squinted harder at the figure and realized that he wasn't quite solid and that he could see the pounded waves through the man's translucent shoulders.
Oberon stifled a yawn with one languid fist before continuing, the brim of his top hat shading his clever, small eyes from the brightness of the fake sun. "It was you in spirit, at least," he explained and Jim found himself preferring the old accent to this new, almost aristocratic drawl.
"A thousand years ago," said Oberon, "you spied upon my wife as she bathed and then attempted to ravish her."
"Hell, no!" Jim protested, "I never did nothing like that!"
"You did," Oberon said coldly, "In a different body, in a different time, long before you were born into this incarnation. But you did. And so we cursed you."
"Cursed me with what?"
At this, Oberon grinned so cruelly that Jim found himself automatically backing away. Although Oberon's other grotesque bodily flaws had fixed themselves, the teeth were still huge and square and yellowed. As he stared, Jim somehow found himself understanding that Oberon couldn't fix them, the same way that Jim couldn't fix the scars upon his own body from where his mom had attacked him during one of her bad trips.
"Would you like to see the other bodies you have resided in during your many lifetimes?"
"No," Jim shook his head, his heart beating faster than it normally did upon hearing the sinister tone that Oberon had voiced his question with. "No, I just wanna get back."
Oberon ignored him and waved his hand once and the image of Renaissance Festival Guy disappeared to be replaced with a smirking man in his twenties, wearing overalls and carrying a shotgun. "This was your previous body," Oberon said, "and in it, you were a would-be trickster who darkened the lives of anyone you could get your hands on. This was," he added casually, "until revenge was finally served. No one cared enough to even investigate your demise."
"That wasn't me."
Oberon slightly tilted his head. "Wasn't it?"
He waved his hand again and the image of the overall'd man disappeared, to be replaced with a figure who was hidden beneath a robe and hood fashioned out of white sheets. Jim recognized the outfit. There'd been a group of Klansmen in his hometown who would occasionally stir things up, with rallies or whatever, but Jim had never wanted to join, even though he'd been invited to. His home life had been bad enough as it was; he hadn't needed his social life to be centered around hate as well.
"You killed seven men in this lifetime," Oberon said softly, his voice carrying over the sound of the wind and waves, "and you would have killed more, had a heart-attack not stopped you."
Jim stared at the figure, who took off his hood and smoothed back his thinning blond hair, his piggish face drawn together in a look of perpetual puzzlement. "I would never do that," he said, finding nothing familiar in the Klansman's face. "I would never hurt anybody."
"Only yourself so far, in this incarnation," Oberon answered, nodding towards Jim's dirty, emaciated figure. "But you'll soon die from infection brought about by the needle you stepped on, and then you'll be reborn into another body, just as likely to hurt and harm and destroy as all of your predecessors have done."
"Bullshit."
"No? Then let's look at the others."
And Jim watched as another ten figures successively flickered into and out of existence on the beach, each one a different redefinition of the word "scum". According to Oberon, Jim had been born as a rapist, a thief, a kidnapper, a serial killer, an arsonist, a mercenary, a brothel-owner, a wife beater, and, Oberon had smugly announced at two different times, he'd been a pedophile twice.
Jim shook his head at every one, denied it both to himself and to Oberon for each time that a new figure appeared, but during that long procession, he couldn't help but wonder if maybe it was true. Jim didn't believe in karma, but he had learned about it when he'd gone to high school, and if anybody deserved his shitty life, it would have been the men that Oberon had shown him.
"So why are you telling me this?" Jim finally demanded after the last figure had faded into nothingness. Oberon had been looking more and more pleased with every sordid story – he'd even told Jim tales about some of the victims when the second pedophile had appeared – and Jim had just been feeling increasingly worse.
"Haven't you figured it out yet?" Oberon asked him rhetorically and then his appearance switched back into the way that Jim had first saw him, bony face and frayed clothing and cracked fingernails. "Is too hard for bum like you?" the figure chuckled and then melted back into the cleaner, more aristocratic version.
Something clicked inside Jim's brain and he looked up at Oberon, startled by the theory. "You said something about a curse," Jim said and Oberon nodded, satisfied.
"Did you think I'd allow such an insult towards my wife to go unpunished? To think, a mere mortal would try and attack Titania, queen of Faerie, and then expect to get away with it unscathed?"
"That wasn't me!" Jim protested.
"Not in body," Oberon shot back and Jim was startled to see heavy storm clouds gathering from the horizon. "The spirit was the same, though, even if the body was different, and so our curse was made. For every reincarnation that your spirit underwent, your life would bring nothing but misery to yourself and others. You would be hated and despised wherever you went, whatever you tried to do to make amends." Oberon paused and smiled smugly, cruelly, at Jim's confused face. "We had never cast a curse so fine."
Jim glared at the man in front of him as splattering raindrops began to fall, "But your curse....shit, man! Even if you're not playing me and you really did curse me, you ended up hurting other people! You did it to punish me for trying to rape your woman or whatever. But if your curse isn't something you're making up, then it caused me to end up raping, hurting, and killing a bunch of innocent people! What the hell kinda revenge is that?"
"Our revenge," Oberon glowered, "for we are Oberon, King of Faerie, and mortal lives are of no consequence to us."
Jim shook his head, pissed off. This made no sense. None of this made any sense and Jim had never done anything to actually hurt anyone. He'd stolen shit, hell yeah. But it'd always been small change, just enough to get a quick fix, and he'd never hurt anyone when he'd done it. And the stuff that this guy was accusing him of? Jim knew that he'd remember if he'd ever done anything like it. He'd sworn to himself, when he'd still lived at home and his momma had beat him for not selling his ass to get her some drug money, that he'd never hurt anyone like she'd hurt him. Ever.
Like Oberon had said, the only person that he'd ever ended up truly hurting was himself.
"So why are you telling me this?" Jim asked him, feeling strangely pissed off over the fact that while he was getting soaked by the rain, Oberon was still as dry as when he'd gotten there. The rain didn't even seem to hit him at all and the absurd part of Jim's brain kept on insisting that that was unfair.
"Because," Oberon said, ignoring the rain, "we tire of the curse, of making certain that it is enforced throughout every generation of your spirit. And so we are here to offer you a deal."
Jim's eyes narrowed. He knew about deals. He'd lived on the street long enough to learn that most deals ended up screwing a person over in more ways than they'd ever come to expect. So Jim didn't respond and, instead, waited for Oberon to speak.
After a moment, Oberon continued, "We are prepared, for our own reasons, to lift the curse and keep you from hurting any of your fellow mortals again...for a price."
"What price?" Jim asked, in spite of himself.
Oberon cupped his hands together in front of his face and blew into them. A flat, TV-like rectangle bloomed into life over his hands and Jim saw that it was a moving picture of himself. The tiny little Jim took a knife and cut two quick red lines across his wrists before looking up and smiling at his life-size counterpart. The miniature Jim had had Oberon's horrible teeth.
Oberon's voice startled Jim out of the illusion. "The price is your own life."
Jim was starting to feel ill and he closed his eyes, concentrating on controlling the wave of nausea that had settled into his stomach. The picture had been so realistic. Jim had sometimes fantasized about killing himself, but he'd always, for some reason, strongly believed that someone else would do it for him. Given all the situations that he'd found himself in during his life, Jim had no reason to believe otherwise. And now some guy was telling him to kill himself? It seemed like a waste of energy, since someone was bound to murder him any day now.
Oberon must have sensed his reluctance, so he continued, "That is the price of ending the curse. None of your previous incarnations were allowed the dignity of suicide. Instead, they were killed either by natural means or violent endings, but never by their own hand." Here, Oberon waved his hand and Jim could see clearly through the rain another image of one of his predecessors. It was the "would-be trickster" man from before, sitting in a translucent boat with another, better dressed man standing behind semi-transparent cattails, holding a shotgun that was aimed at the first man's head.
"Okay," Jim said, and the image went away. "I get what you're saying. I kill myself and then there's never gonna be another me in the future to kill anyone else. Right?"
"Correct."
"But here's the thing," Jim said, "I've dealt with guys like you before and there's always a catch. So what is it?"
Oberon looked grimly amused. "We were hoping you wouldn't ask."
Jim waited, impatient, and finally Oberon went on, "The "catch", as you say, is that once you kill yourself, the curse will ensure that you'll never be born into another body. Instead of reincarnating into the body of a sociopath or a rapist, you'll be in oblivion. You'll be nothing at all, existing nowhere and have no impact on anyone else's life, ever."
"No way, man," Jim stammered, overwhelmed by what Oberon was saying. "This is…no way. I don't believe you."
"The choice is yours," Oberon said, "and don't fool yourself into believing that I'd prefer one way over the other." He paused for a moment and the rain turned to hail, sharp bits of ice hitting Jim's body with merciless direction. "It's either oblivion or constant suffering, boy. That's the curse, which I would not undo even if every power on earth tried to force me to. That is the vengeance of Oberon."
And then the entire beach slammed into blackness.
Jim gaped as he tried to figure out where the sun had gone, but it was like someone had ripped away the fake beach environment like a kid would tear a drawing off of a tablet of paper. Now there was only darkness, only pitch-blackness without any hint of light. Jim tried to turn around, but he found that the ground had also disappeared and so he nothing to turn around on.
From the blackness, coming from all directions, Oberon's voice rang out. "How much suffering can you let others undergo because of your own selfishness? Just how far are you willing to go to make the hurting stop? Remember, in the end, it will be your choice and your choice alone."
And then Jim woke up.
Waking up, he decided, was a generous term for it. It was actually more like coming out of a sticky, sucking fog. Eventually, though, Jim forced his eyes open and he was amazed at how difficult that was. Somehow, pus had hardened his eyelids together while he'd been unconscious and so Jim had to rub at his eyes hard enough to get them to open again. When he'd finally managed to rub most of the stuff away, the first thing he realized was that it was still night. The moon was still up. And when he turned over on his side, his body still aching enough to warrant lying down a few more minutes, Jim's eye had ended up nearly two inches from the raised point of an abandoned needle.
"Shit!"
Jim leapt up, ignoring the stretched feeling in his muscles, and stared at the needle as the tip glinted silver in the moonlight. It wasn't the same syringe, but that'd been a close one – too close for him, that was for sure. That was it. He'd have to find somewhere else to sleep. Staying on this section of the beach was going to kill him.
Jim froze where he was as the memory of the dream...vision...hallucination came flooding back to him. Oberon, the fake beach, the curse and the suicide sacrifice into oblivion...? Jim rubbed at his head and tried to tell himself that it'd just been the weird ass powder that the foreign guy had given him. It was a bad trip. That was all. A hallucination that had merely told him straight out what he'd been thinking for the past couple of months – that maybe it was better to kill himself instead of living as he was.
His foot hurt. Jim lifted up his foot, took off his worn-out shoe, and examined the wound. In the moonlight, the wet blood looked a little like blackberry juice... Jim shuddered and forced his attention onto his wound. It wasn't bleeding that bad, but it really should have scabbed up by now. Jim gave himself a mental reminder to get an AIDS test as soon as possible.
"Can't stay here tonight," Jim said to himself and picked up his stuff – only an old backpack that had traveled with him since he'd run away from home – before walking up towards the parking lot next to the beach. The city was only a five-minute walk away and Jim was determined to keep on moving and not think about what he'd just seen. There was no Oberon. There was no curse. And no matter how vivid and how real the hallucination had been, it'd just been a bad trip. That was all. It'd just been a bad trip...
"Is good, yes?" a voice asked him. Jim spun around and the man was there, bony face and top hat and yellow caked teeth grinning at him in the moonlight. "Is nice? You like trip to fairyland? Want more?" The man – Oberon? – held out a few more of the small vials in his hand, the silver powder inside sparkling like the stars in the sky.
Jim stared at the man, unable to say anything. He looked as he had before – ugly teeth and weird outfit and long, straggly hair. Jim felt dizzy just looking at him, and closed his eyes, trying not to faint. The man just stood there and watched him as Jim swooned. When Jim opened his eyes, he saw the man shake his head in disgust.
"Stupid bum," the man said and turned around, the powder inside of the vials held in the man's hands glinting at him as if saying goodbye.
Jim watched him disappear before turning around and heading again towards the big city. The blackberry taste of the powder was still with him, reminding him of his daddy and of the vision and of all the other things that he didn't want to think about, but had to. Maybe it hadn't really happened. Maybe Jim had just had a bad trip and Oberon had just been a dream, a hallucination. Maybe everything really was okay and Jim had never hurt anyone and would never hurt anyone. It was probably a dream. It had to have been a dream.
...But what if it was true? Jim closed his eyes and remembered everything; the way the other Jims had looked, the way the beach had appeared scribbled, Oberon's cruel enjoyment of Jim's confused denial. Then he imagined what it must be like to be a rapist, a pedophile, a murderer. And then he imagined all the people he would hurt.
And so Jim opened his eyes and walked into the city, wondering just how long it would take to work up the courage to die.
...Please, even if you hated the story, review! I live for the reviews and would really appreciate your input! Thanks!