I turned the small dark brown vial between my fingers. I don’t remember when it was slipped into my hand, only that a fleeing shadow lost itself into the surrounding crowd before I could register that I had been touched, much less that I had gained a thing.
Another reason I hate public markets. Someone is always up to some shit.
Once upon a city code, it was a proper indoor mall. Now it was an unregulated bazaar. Unauthorized storefronts were setup between legitimate midstream stalls. Flammable objects hung from every possible anchor point, including each other, all for abusive prices to those that don’t know how to haggle. Hold the dummy wallets tight for the pickpockets to be deceived with and count the hour by how many times your watch has been replaced without you feeling.
I remember I came here to wander. No set purchase in mind, no set person to bother. I thought if I were to become lost in the crowd, I would find some peace of mind. Instead, I was harassed twice as much because an unaccompanied woman had to be an easy mark. Or so the errant thought before shattered counterfeits and deep tissue bruises taught fools and beginners otherwise.
The bottle was perfectly imperfect. It wasn’t trying to be a reproduction of an antique, authorized or not. It would be considered crudely made by today’s standards, but one of many rightly done for the time it was made. An anachronism, stopped up with cork and sealed with simple wax.
Okay, fine. I’ll take the fucking bait.
The smell of properly cooked meat (but we won’t ask what species of meat) led me under a series of flags and snares. By the time the code inspector worked his way through the maze, the cooks and the money would be long gone. A bit of cash and a request for a simple meal provides me with some corn tortillas and a few spoons of meat to fill them with. It will do.
“So what’s in the bottle, this time?”
I looked up at the now past youth. He reminded me of someone else I could not remember right then but knew should not be here with me. He started to take a chair at the table with me, but my stinkeye informed him the cost of my company and he chose to keep his extremities intact.
“This time?”
“Yea, they reuse the bottles, you know. Old glass is hardier than it appears. I’ve seen bottles like that a dozen times today, and each time they contain something different.”
I know he’s bullshitting me, but I don’t know how or why just yet. Maybe the bottles are reused. But this bottle is here right now. I have the feeling that whatever the former uses were, it won’t matter to me.
The small vial is barely thicker than my finger and shorter just the same. There is no identifier, no label, no symbol or sigil, and nothing distinctive about it except that it is very old glass. The seal could have been made this morning, this century, or this aeon.
In this bazaar, you never know what you have until you test it.
Speaking of which, the meat and tortillas really hit the spot, so I tipped the solitary rat-catcher cook with what I would have expected to pay in a sanctioned restaurant. He accepted the money with silent hubris and smiled leeringly at me.
When I did not react, he spoke plain. “Want a private place? Where no one will fuck with you?”
I looked back at the nearing middle-age man who remained uncomfortably close to me. He was staring at the cook with a masculine challenge of unspoken dominance.
“I have no interest in fucking anyone, neither you nor him.”
The cook snorted in agreement. “No, but you don’t wanna open that vial just anywhere, now do you? You paid for more than food. I give you privacy. Take it or not.”
Privacy. Damn. Maybe I did overpay a bit.
“Okay. I’ll take the privacy.”
The cook leads me past the crates that pose as kitchen wall and dry goods storage. At the end of a tunnel of hanging cloths is a hole broken into what once was a business office. Now repurposed into a single room dwelling space, it was spacious enough for one but claustrophobic for two.
The cook peeled off a layer of filthy cloths to reveal a layer of dingy cloths. He turned around with intent to tell me that I may stay as long as I wished in his room but a string of expletives teased between his teeth instead.
The uncomfortably familiar man had followed us.
The cook started to move forward in physical aggression. He stopped suddenly and cocked his head slightly to the side as if hearing fairy whispers. Leering now at the tolerated intruder, the cook bowed to me in strangely sincere deference and exited his domain.
I sat down on the pallet and turned over the vial in my hands once more. The color of the glass reminded me of wet mud from a fertile field. Somehow I knew it to be older than verified history, but I still could not identify from where.
The unwelcome companion crouched down beside me. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“You gonna open it?”
“Why are you so eager to know what’s in it?”
“Because it’s not often you get [static]!”
I didn’t hear what he said. Fuck. I’m dreaming. “Get what, now?”
“[Static].” He squints at me. “You didn’t hear me, did you. The words escaped you.” When I neither confirmed nor denied, he nodded in agreement for me. “All the more important that you open it.”
“And what is your part in this?”
“I’m the reason you have it in the first place.”
A deep hostility began to rise. Who the fuck does he think he is? I feel like he is claiming authority over me that was never his to take. As if he is preparing me for sacrifice to his benefit.
I glared at him and held the vial closer to my chest. A small flutter of sound outside the door informed me despite the cook’s offer of “privacy”, I was not alone. If I needed assistance, assistance would be available. I made a mental note to check the currency in my wallet while I broke the seal on the vial.
The sound reminded me of the feel of a knife across my throat and I fainted in the shock of a memory I was not sure was not mine.
The lack of awareness was only for the blink of an eye. The immobility lasted longer. My hand gripped the still unopened vial tight as I bounced off the pallet and twisted onto the filthy floor. My unasked for companion instinctively reached to catch me, but pulled back at the last moment as if I would burn him by touch alone.
“SHIT! Nonononono! They’ll think I did it! Fuck!”
My open eyes did not betray my cognition as he wavered in indecision. His jaw suddenly sets. “Fuck it. I can’t leave her like this or they’ll think I did it!” He starts pulling on my clothes in a herculean effort to get me onto the pallet.
If I had assistance at the ready, why didn’t the assistance come? Oh. Because he’s not trying to hurt me. This time.
This time?
I recognized him.
My anger flared but I was still unable to move of my own accord. The rage helped to recover control of my body, but I lost control of my cognition just as fast.
I meant to scream a statement of indignance at him. The words emerged as a series of growls instead. My speed and strength surprising him, he was helpless in my grip as I threw him out of the room the way one throws a bale of hay from the loft.
Without the door, I heard a series of scuffles, a muffled shout, then the sound of something large being dragged away.
I rubbed my hands in satisfaction then realized I had lost the vial. Looking around, I found it cushioned from the aggression by a layer of dingy cloths. I tucked the unsealed but still closed vial in a coat pocket, then exited the room myself.
I emerged into a different part of the mall. Less bootleg and more hipster, the costs of everything for sale was still the same unless you knew someone who could cut you a break.
There was no sign of the rat-catcher cook nor the unwelcome companion. I wasn’t complaining.
A dark themed booth offered custom-made soaps, candles, and incense for sale. “The Witch’s Larder”, was burned into a piece of scrap wood that hung over the supposed-to-be rustic display. It made me happy to see it, cheesy it may be.
“You there! Miss! I have comforting scents to banish whatever has troubled you so obviously!” I laughed at the hard sell. For some reason it was welcome. “Come now! Perhaps something sharp smelling to scrub away whatever asshole you just kicked?”
Okay, fine. I’ll take this bait as well.
Everything was handmade in small batches by the proprietor. Of course, all items were made in well-timed rituals to impart the maximum amount of non-guaranteed mysticism to the product. The items were being bought briskly by those that loved the scents but otherwise avoided by shoppers put off by the heavy witchery in the descriptions.
“Hey, [Keri]! I didn’t know you shop here!” A short woman waved at me. Her appearance kept wavering between late middle age and early adolescence. But now I knew I was dreaming anyway, so appearances meant nothing.
I knew she was a follower of my Tumblr blog, but otherwise she was just another person to me.
“Eh. Just looking really. I already have a scent to tangle myself with, and I’d rather not add to it.”
She made a purchase of incense and oil blends, then pulled me towards a nearby table at the edge of a legitimate and sanctioned food court. ‘Show me!”
Heh. Why the fuck not.
I showed her the vial. Her fingers turned red where she touched the glass. “Not meant for me, I guess. What does it smell like?”
Good question.
I took a deep sniff of the tightly wedged cork, but no scent teased at me. The only way to know what it smells like is to open it completely. I twisted the cork and braced for another visceral reaction.
The cork turned. And nothing else.
She looked at me expectantly. I shrugged and squeezed the cork stopper out entirely. Raising the small glass to my nose, I took a deliberate smell of the vial.
The scent stunned me into stiff silence. I was reminded of something, but as fast as I was reminded, I found I forced myself to forget.
Challenge accepted, bitch. What am I hiding from?
“What does it smell like?”
“It smells…” I took a another whiff of the small vial. Just enough to get the overtones of the contents, but not so much that the scent immobilizes me again. “It smells like petrichor. And loudly orange leaves stiffly falling under a heavily obscured sky.”
“Wow. That’s very specific.” She was leaning over the glass, trying to smell for herself. She felt and sounded like she was across the room and receding.
It reminded me of a place. I took another sniff, less cautious than the one before. “It smells of thin bark that won’t be fully dry for another six months. Of greedy earth that covets everything that walks across it. There is a low musk, almost a memory of it. The rutting season… the wild season… has passed. And topping it is a shrill sweetness of overlooked berries fermenting on the bush or rotting under it.”
She said something to me then. Immediately after I heard other voices in sharp tones and alarmed loudness. But I didn’t hear them. I closed my eyes in an effort to identify the last note of fragrance from the unmarked bottle. I shuddered as a strange chill seized me. The bottle escaped from my unfeeling hand as the chill loosened all of my joints.
I opened my eyes, and found myself standing in the place I had just identified by scent alone.
Across the empty expanse of the white birch grove, the Antler Crowned and Green Masked Figure stood facing away from me. He held his green face mask in his right hand. Something was glowing where his face should be, and glowing with such brilliance that the light reflected off the damp birch trees on the far side. But because he continued to face away from me, I could not identify it.
My senses were overwhelmed and I fainted, falling to my left as my eyes tracked up while my sight failed. The fallen leaves announced my surrender as loudly as they are orange while the soft earth underneath us all cushioned my failure to adapt.
When I opened my eyes again, I was still on the ground of the grove. The Antler Crowned and Green Masked Figure had donned his face once more before leaning over me in humored vigil.
“Why are you here?”
“Why did you summon me?”
He smiled and all strength fled from me. I struggled to breathe before reminding myself that I was dreaming and didn’t need to breathe.
He stared at me, and my [dead] eye became stone. I could only groan as the cold of it pierced everything still living about me and the weight pinned me to what felt like an open grave under me.
“Why are you here?”
Okay. Time to face that question. Why am I here, anyway. I was supposed to be…
… elsewhere …
… at the ocean …
… where I had originally been summoned.
I closed my eyes in pain and exhaustion. “I don’t know.” My answer was more grunt than parsable words, but among his domain are the utterances of the mad. I was sure he knew what I meant.
“Find out.”
He placed his hand on my face gently. The action mimicked closing the eyes of the dead. He lifted his hand, then placed it over my face with an even softer gesture.
I was not surprised then, when he crushed my skull into the thirsty dirt under me, ejecting me from the dream.