Brainworm Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
Dylan knew he was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be when the
doorman smiled blood when he smiled. It was a sick grin of someone that was
getting too much pleasure from something where there wasn’t normally any
pleasure to be had. It wasn’t a mouthful of blood as if he had an open wound or
if a tooth had been knocked out in a fight, but it was too much blood to be
totally healthy. The teeth were stained with it and his gums looked like raw
meat. The doorman didn’t act as if he felt it at all. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he
had no idea. Or maybe it was all for show, to scare people off or curb their
baser sides before they entered the club. Dylan could believe that was a
possibility. It certainly made him want to behave. He had no interest in a
confrontation of any sort with this man. Or maybe the bouncer was a vampire and
was a regular feeder. Dylan knew that was silly to believe, and yet, he had a
nagging feeling that something just wasn’t right with the doorman or the club.
The music was too slow. It was like everything inside the club was
moving in slow motion. The people, the dancing, the lights, the music.
Everything was off-kilter. There were people at the bar kissing and dancing and
dancing and kissing. They moved too slow and then suddenly too fast without skipping
a beat. People appeared and disappeared between the flashes of the strobe
light. If Dylan didn’t know any better, he would have assumed he was on some
sort of drug. He knew better and he knew he wasn’t. It was the club. The club
was out of touch with reality, like a skipping record at the wrong speed and
missing the grove one too many times. Dylan’s head felt loose as he rolled it
back and forth to the music. His body didn’t dance, but it sure felt the
rhythms. He had never wanted to get lost in the moment, but in this moment, he
suddenly understood the urge.
Someone somewhere was pumping the music and it bled out and
touched them all. The moment was intoxicating and everyone knew no one but knew
everyone all at once. They all existed in a moment of interconnected energy,
even if they didn’t know it.
The girl touched the back of his head and ran her fingers through
his hair. He could feel her fingernails against his scalp. He could feel the
rush of adrenaline and the tingle on his skin as his excitement rose. He hadn’t
seen her face yet and he was already turned on. He wanted to turn, but found
himself unable. There was a small pinch and a moment of pain and then he
realized something was in his skin. From under her fingernails the worms had
crawled out and now they were burrowing into his skull. He wondered what she
was exactly and if the worms were a part of her or if she was a part of them.
He wondered if the worms got through his skull if they would eat his brain and
kill him or if they would send him on a most pleasant trip. Either way, he
really had no desire to find out.
Dylan summoned the darkness that was his soul and used it to kick
the worms out. She wasn’t expecting that. Nobody ever judged Dylan as a
strange. He didn’t seem strange. He looked too ordinary. In a bar of stranges
it was an okay thing to seem normal.
He turned and looked at her and she looked at him. He must have
seemed menacing, but really she had already seen his toughest trick, even if
she didn’t know it yet. She could have been afraid and tried to run, but
instead she was turned on.
“Not tonight?” she asked.
“Not ever.”
Dylan liked his brains intact as they were, not matter how
appealing she might seem. He knew it was one thing to risk a bit of his soul
for a bit of fun, and it was another thing altogether to let someone have a
crack at bending something that was actually sacred and necessary.
She smiled a lizard’s smile and moved on. Dylan wasn’t her type of
meat after all.
Dylan knew something wasn’t right from the moment he had entered the
club. He knew there were other stranges out there, but he had never been in a
bar full of them before. It was turning out to be quite the adventure. He kind
of liked it, in a once-in-a-while playing-with-fire sort of way. He knew most
stranges touched other people. He was the only one he knew of that’s powers
were based on keeping them out. It sort of made him the most strange among the
stranges. He didn’t know what to do with that, so he kept it to himself. What
he found though, was that most stranges thought he must have some way to touch
them, and the fact that he kept it a secret made them keep their distance for
fear that he could do something bad. So in a way he was touching them and
giving them fear. He knew that wasn’t really his doing, but he didn’t mind
pretending sometimes. He knew the doorman was much scarier in reality than he
ever could be. But he was okay if he projected a strong illusion. He had to
have some secrets if he was going to make it in a place like this.
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