The Almost Rock Star (A Ghost Story) (DRAFT)

The Almost Rock Star (A Ghost Story) 21, Daith

Chapter Twenty One

Daith

The Leader of the Pack? We were going to see the guy who looked like The Leader of the Pack? My dreamboat of a possible soul mate? 

There are times in one’s life when you should pause. There are times in one’s life when you should just go. This was one of those times when, to keep living and not wallowing in a life that was going nowhere, you act. I went right into the dark portal. 

The dark purplish interior gave way to screeching lights. It was like I was doing something I shouldn’t, and there was a sound to it. A music. I had always wondered if every action of every person made a sound. Or a melody. Or even a symphony. Sometimes, especially when I was writing songs, I thought I heard it. A distant musical movement, somehow about my life. It was sometimes beautiful, and sometimes haunting. I had written down some of the pieces in my pink notebooks. I thought if I put them together, I had quite a few symphonies already. But I preferred pop music, and I was following my dream. Classical sounds, even though I heard them in my head all the time, were not my star. I was following something brighter. 

The movement in the portal gave me a sickening feeling. In the pit of my stomach, I felt nauseated. It spread all the way through my body. If I had eaten, I would have thrown up. This was worse than a bad roller coaster. Then the portal movement stopped as suddenly as it began, and I nearly fell on my face. I stumbled into a modern style living room, almost hitting Eduardo, who didn’t move. I think that’s why I didn’t fall. I didn’t want to touch anyone who had no eyes. 

I was so repulsed by almost touching the evil boy that I jerked back; I caught myself, stopping just inches from him. A smell of burning rubber hit my nostrils, adding to my nausea. It was overwhelming. I looked around, thinking such a massive smell couldn’t come from this little person. He was like a huge portal to evil itself, and the smell was coming straight from the beast.

We were in a beautiful, enormous apartment. I saw that the rooms were probably a penthouse or some rooms very high up. There were floor to ceiling windows, and the room we were in was two or three stories high. I could see an ocean out the windows, but I didn’t know if it was the familiar Atlantic Ocean, off Palm Beach, or if I was somewhere else. The view looked like I was in a penthouse in a high rise in West Palm Beach. 

It was furnished in the most modern tradition of male elegance, as if it were a penthouse in “Luxe,” the upscale modern furnishings and home style magazine. Enormous black and gray abstract paintings were on every wall. Tall lighting sculptures were in the corners and there wasn’t an ounce of clutter anywhere. Not even a blanket tossed over the sleek black sofa.

The smell hit me again, and I quickly gained some sort of understanding that it came from the entity boy, and not from anywhere else in this clean, mostly black room. An evil grin grew wider on the entity’s face. His perfect little white teeth seemed out of place in the midst of the burning tire smell. 

“Here we go,” his high pitched voice reminded me of some of the more terrifying movies I had seen, like “Gremlins.” Eduardo’s voice wasn’t twittery, but its complete lack of resonance was somehow wrong for this world.

“All you have to do now is this. We hate the man who lives here. We want you to haunt him for a while. Here are some nasty little things you can set on him,” Eduardo said, reaching out with two small squares of white, one in each hand. 

I stared at the white squares. They looked like white Rubik’s cubes without the extra squares. Or sugar cubes, without the texture. The sides were smooth. The cubes seemed to have an internal light, like a child’s night light.