The Gathering

It was finally the weekend. Emil got up late. For once he took good care of his appearance. He even brushed his hair. Today he had a date. He left for the café wearing his nicest clothes. He never quite understood what it was that made some girls so attached to him so quickly despite his silent disposition and he didn’t bother finding out, though his looks when he tried hard enough were possibly a great boon.

He was a couple of minutes early but she was already waiting for him.

“Hi Barbara.”

“Hey there Emil!” She was smiling ear to ear and Emil smiled back. He had many opportunities to practise this smile. It took no real effort from him.

“Let’s go inside.” They sat in a quiet secluded corner on the second floor and ordered coffee.

“So guess what the other day my friend …” She immediately started chattering away. It took very little input from Emil to keep the conversation going. He only needed to smile and make small talk and some meaningless comments. His mind was in its own place thinking of recent events. He already knew the evening would end at her place. It always did. Despite his charms no woman had ever interested him in any capacity. After the night was spent together he never saw any of them again. Some of them proved persistent so he took care never to expose his address and even kept a second prepaid phone to keep his solitude untarnished.

He didn’t understand why he did this in the first place and kept it even from his two friends, yet even after he would decide not to do it anymore he inevitably ended up smiling at a new girl and got asked out anyway. This day however, even more than usually, he felt languid and had enough.

“Hey I think we should stop for today,” he started saying, somewhat happy to be rid of her soon.

“Great idea, let’s move this over to my place,” responded Barbara.

“Wait I meant,” but it was no use. She no longer listened to him and practically pulled him along by his hand. Emil considered fighting back, but in his lethargy he gave up and went along with the flow.

They walked along the old cobbles of the old city. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the store where he bought the trap. It made his body shiver and his blood felt like it was freezing. By the time he was aware they were already in a different part of the city. It looked like a fairly run down street, somewhat shady in the late evening darkness. His listlessness was beginning to get shrouded in faint shades of nervous tension.

“Here we are.” Barbara stopped in front of a small apartment. She fished a key out of her pocket and gestured Emil to enter. The doubts vanished from his head and without a second thought he went and entered the small place. It was fairly clean, yet also seemed somehow not really lived in.

“Just take a seat over there,” she pointed towards a sofa. Emil sat. It was hard and smelled dusty. “What do you want to drink?”

“You have any beer?”

“Sure.”

She brought over two glasses and sat next to Emil. He drank and continued the performance of smiles and small talk. Before long they were in each other’s arms and began exchanging kisses. Emil felt empty but kept up his smile and let Barbara take control of everything. His mind was wandering and he looked around and saw that most of the furniture was old and dusty. She was undressing them both and smiled seductively. He couldn’t help but feel as if there was a faint sound coming through the window.

In his concealed disinterest Emil attempted to make at least a minor attempt at responding to her, but he began feeling somewhat tired. He felt the mask start to slip off his face, but even with further effort he could do nothing to rectify it. When even his vision began blurring a deep part of his conscious mind started screaming at the rest of him that something was wrong, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He suddenly recognized the sound that kept bothering him. It was the barely audible screaming of a cat. He tried speaking, yet his tongue remained flat. Even his arms and legs paid no heed to his commands. He felt nothing.

Barbara brought her face directly in front of his own, bearing a huge grin.

“Don’t tell me you can’t remember …”

The rest of her words were drowned out as Emil consciousness faded. The last thing he could see as his head tipped backwards were the red glowing numbers on a digital clock in the corner of the room. It was exactly midnight. The last thing he heard was just another pained meow.

There was only darkness. He tried running but the air felt too thick to move through. It was like running underwater or in low gravity. All he knew was that he had to get away. He looked up and two great orbs of green light shone down on him, each slashed by a black vertical line. There was a low pitched rumbling noise that seemed to shake his insides. He screamed.

He hit his head on the ceiling as he jerked awake. There was very little room in the complete darkness. He felt around with arms and legs but there was nowhere to go. He began breathing fast in an attack of panic and started scratching at the low ceiling above. It didn’t give. He couldn’t even feel his fingers bleeding. Very soon the breathing became more laboured and he gasped for air that wasn’t there anymore. In panic he screamed and clawed at the ceiling but that just made him lose air at a higher rate. He could no longer lift his hands high enough to reach the ceiling and became very light-headed and disoriented. His vision blurred and soon darkness took over. There were no dreams this time, only blackness.

It was night-time and the forest bathed in the glow of the large Moon. There was very little undergrowth save for a couple of groups of mushrooms and small bushes sparsely covered with leaves that swayed in the warm and gentle wind. Emil lifted his hand and used it to brace himself and lift his head. He had been lying on the dead leaves covering the forest ground. He was covered in dirt and his clothes were torn. He groaned and realised that since waking up he had not taken a breath. Even then he felt no compulsion to even try. He finally stood up and as he tried to move forward he noticed that one of his feet was still partly buried in the ground. He tasted dirt and proceeded to remove it from his mouth, ears and nose with at best moderate success. Next he tried to beat it out of his clothes and hair.

He finally looked around.

“What, where?” Was all he was able to get out of himself with a croaking voice. He was aware that he was most likely in the forest next to the park since it was the only one in the vicinity.

“The river, I should be able find my bearings.” He listened carefully for any noise that would betray the proximity of the river. There was nothing. He decided to walk in the opposite direction of the Moon. As he moved he could hear the stirring of various birds, bats and rodents. He would normally be fairly distraught by the prospect of wandering the dark forest alone, despite his affinity towards it. This time however his mind kept returning to what happened before and why he even is alive at all. It was at that moment that he realised something that had been bothering him all the while. His field of vision had been unnaturally narrow. He couldn’t see his right arm unless it was right in front of him. He let out a pained noise. His right eye was pale and blind. There was a scar running across the eye.

He moved through the trees and undergrowth, eventually ending up at the stream. He decided to follow the current upstream and all the while flashes of what had happened kept appearing before his eyes. The café, the streets, smiles, run down apartment, the drink. Yes, that was probably it.

As he continued, enveloped in his thoughts he became aware of a distinct rhythmic sound. He stopped and listened carefully. He could distinguish occasional cheers. It alleviated some of his stress.

“Must be some party, the city should be near,” he said as he made his way towards the sound. Pushing branches out of the way and getting hit by them regardless and getting his jeans stuck in thorns he slowly made progress. More and more he could discern the music as he was approaching.

“That’s weird, it sounds nothing like what they play at the clubs.” He recognized the sounds of some woodwind and stringed instruments. Yet some others eluded his memory, though he was fairly sure they were all acoustic and probably folk instruments. They were also accompanied by singing, cheering and toasting, whistling and clapping. He was furthermore bewildered by the fact that he could hear the festivity so clearly despite not yet even making it to the park that separated the city from the forest.

In the distance he was able to see lights shining through the trees. They flickered and shadows danced all around the forest. He felt as if he were surrounded by jovial spirits of the woods making merry, dancing with the trees themselves. Emil gulped and approached the gathering. He was fairly sure that he was near his salvation, yet he decided in favour of caution and proceeded stealthily towards the radiant party.

His surreptitious advance seemed to be going well enough, that was until he tripped over an extruding root once he had been fairly close to his objective. In dread he looked up and saw that his inept attempt at stealth was noticed by some who were stood at the edge of the festivity. He prayed they would not decide to come after him. They only waved him to come closer and the music never stopped. That signalled to Emil that his presence was insignificant and nobody would bother to do him any harm. He dropped his stealthy act and walked towards the others.

They were situated in a glade of the forest, multiple bonfires alight in the middle and people dancing around, singing and laughing and playing instruments. There were extraordinarily many people performing the music in concert yet they never seemed to lose one another despite the playing not being completely in time. The music seemed to flow naturally and unending, as if it was both improvised and at the same time very well rehearsed. The lyrics seemed to concern nature and the passing of seasons, the hunt and death, love and tragedy, tricks and drinking.

On entering the glade Emil was finally able to take a closer look at the attendants of the party. They all seemed human enough, yet all their faces were covered by wooden masks. Some simple, some intricately carved and painted in beautiful colours and even covered in patterns. There were ones that were ornamented with horns all differently curved or twisted. Some horns even seemed not to be connected to the mask at all.

With an uneasy feeling Emil looked around and saw a pile of such masks lying around on the ground. He moved there and examined them, then looked around to see whether he could ask someone about them, yet no one seemed to notice or care that he was there at all. He picked the first mask that he could get his hands on and put it on immediately. It was a mask of a merry fat man with a long red nose and even redder cheeks.

He moved on and came upon another pile. This one was of instruments. There were flutes, recorders, horns, bagpipes, tambourines, guitars, dulcimers, violins, sukas and even the three stringed mazanki. The most surprising find was a lone balalaika. Emil was more reluctant since he knew that nobody likes having a random stranger handle their instrument. Yet as time went on he felt more and more compelled by the music. In the end he opted to take a violin and a bow.

Despite his somewhat rigorous practice, that is as much as being a not incredibly bright mathematics student allowed, he was still a fairly inexperienced player. He had only started playing after enrolling at the university. To make matters worse he never really bothered to learn how to improvise, since he followed a fairly classical curriculum. He couldn’t even tell the key of the music being played. He was well acquainted with the anxiety that came for him when performing in front of even a single person. Despite of all this the music urged him to join in.

He lifted the bow and chuckled as he realised that because of his defective eye he could not even see his bowing hand when he watched the fingerboard. He started with a glissando that started very quietly and then grew ever louder in a crescendo as he hit the tonic of the current harmony.

At that point he was able to surrender himself to the music and he played as if with an orchestra that he spent years practising with. There was no longer any thinking, just allowing the sound to come of its own volition from the union of his body and the violin.

For a while he played the melody and later he would accompany others. The voices and instruments were in an intense dialogue, asking and responding to each other. Being harmonious and then contradicting the other’s statements. Despite the large number of participants, the music was not a cacophony, but instead pleasant to the ear and lively. He moved among the masked figures, sometimes skipping and spinning to the rhythm. Following the flow of music he ended up near the centre of the glade. There was an old great willow. Its slender branches were swaying in the wind. After Emil did another spin the place of the tree was occupied instead by a giant winged serpent. It was writhing and spinning and let out terrible roars into the sky. Emil gaped in awe at the terrifying yet somewhat wondrous creature, covered in autumn forest coloured scales.

Another spin and Emil’s gaze was met by a wolf headed man strumming a balalaika. It howled into the night sky in tune with the music and was met by loud cheering from the others, present at the festivity. Emil joined in without really meaning to, while never ceasing playing the violin. The weird being then turned and faced Emil, its large amber eyes felt as if they pierced the wooden mask and the other mask behind it as well. Emil shuddered, yet felt nothing malicious about those eyes.

The party continued for a while longer and Emil smiled heartily as he had not in many years and the joy left him in tears. He jumped and spun one more time and as he landed he was alone in the forest. Both the glade and the people gathered there were gone and left no trace behind. The only proof that it had ever happened at all was the mask on Emil’s face and the violin and bow in his hands. He was again by the river and this time he even knew where exactly he was. He turned around and was met by the first light of dawn. He looked around again to make sure if everything truly disappeared and if there was a pile where he could return the mask and the instrument that he had borrowed. There was nothing.

“Well I suppose I will keep these for a while and return them the next time,” he muttered and nodded to reinforce the idea in his mind. He hummed a song, stuck in his head from the peculiar revelry and made his way back home. He was glad that in the early morning there were no people outside to see him in the park and the streets.

He reached his apartment, threw his ruined clothes on the floor, gently put down the mask and violin and stood under a hot shower. Emil thought about the fact that he made the long walk and didn’t feel out of breath at all. In fact he didn’t feel much need for breathing anyway. He checked the time and realised that it was already 6 o’clock in the morning and it was already Monday. He let out an irritated noise.

“No, not this time, I will go to bed and skip lectures today. One time will not hurt.” He went to the bed and collapsed into the soft embrace of the blanket, not even bothering to put on anything.