Kill Baxter (16 page)

‘OK,’ I say. ‘Here goes.’

We jump out from behind the rock brandishing the flaming sticks in front of us like swords. It seemed like a sound plan at the time, but close up to six of these hyena beasts, I realise that I might have overestimated its efficacy.

They turn towards us, snarling. One of them lunges forward and I bring my stick down in a flaming arc on to its snout. It yelps and jumps back, then immediately springs forward again. I vault off one of the rocks out of the way. The Boer’s teaching comes so naturally to me that I don’t even have to think about it. All those hours punching bags, hauling logs and practising moves makes my body respond as if it’s on automatic.

Out of the corner of my eye I see Nom firing off spells. Gigli is locked in mortal combat with two of the Kholomodumo and the mother leopard is stalking back and forth in front of her babies as two more slink towards her.

I charge towards them and catch one with a well-timed shot to the neck. It goes down, and without thinking about it I jump as high as I can and plant both of my feet on one of its legs. It snaps like firewood and the thing yelps and twists out of the way. I swipe at the other one and then stumble backwards as it lunges. It misses me, but carries on and smashes into Gigli’s side. He’s thrown against a rock and spins around hissing at the three beasts that now surround him.

I run towards him and stab one of them in the side with my stick. It’s a glancing blow but it draws blood and the thing turns towards me. In a heartbeat Gigli lurches forward and rips its throat out. Blood gushes on to the dirt and the thing drops to the ground. Gigli gulps down a mouthful of oesophagus and gives me a lopsided bloody grin.

And just like that it happens. The mind-meld that the Boer was talking about, that special connection between man and Draken, snaps together like a completed Rubik’s cube, and like a whirling dervish of pain and destruction we plough into the Kholomodumo. Gigli wraps and unwraps his body around me like a pink mammalian nunchaku, ripping into flesh and bone with glee. I slip into the gaps that he leaves and jab with my flaming stick like it’s a spear until it shatters and all I’m left with is a bloody shard of wood.

Three of the Kholomodumo are dead and the remaining three decide that the pickings aren’t as easy as they’d hoped. They lope off into the night, chased by a nasty fire spell from Nom.

I drop to my knees, breathing hard. There’s blood all over me and I’m not sure how much of it is mine. I touch my side gingerly. There are a couple of lacerations but I think I’m OK. Gigli walks up to me and presses his head against mine. His breath smells like blood and decaying food, but I don’t mind. He hisses something.

Nom is lying back against a rock, wiping blood from his face.

‘He says you’re his brother,’ he translates. ‘And that if the Great Draken himself came down from the sky and ordered him to abandon you, he would rather defy his own deity than not be linked to you.’

Gigli nuzzles his nose against my hand and then retreats back to the cave to his lady love and their fugly little cubs.

Nom helps me up and we walk slowly away from the cave.

‘What the fuck were those things doing here?’ I ask.

‘No idea,’ Nom says. ‘But they’ve gone past the Hexpoort perimeter, so we can’t follow them.’

‘Oh damn,’ I say.

We stand and look at the hole that the Kholomodumo ripped in the perimeter fence.

‘Come on.’ Nom puts a hand on my shoulder.

I carry on looking at the fence.

He sighs. ‘Don’t. You’re already in enough pain.’

I hold up my hands. ‘Perfect time, then,’ I say.

He shrugs. ‘Go ahead. Everyone has to test it once.’

I look at the hole. I could get out of here. If I could find a road and if there’s somebody driving along it and if that somebody is not a murderer, then maybe I could make it to a town and then buy a bus ticket back to Cape Town. I duck through the hole and stand on the other side of the fence, looking back at Nom.

Just as I thought. The whole ‘magical tattoo’ thing is a ruse, a way of keeping us in line. They don’t even need to police us, because we’re policing ourselves. It’s so fucking indicative of our culture that we have internalised that kind of—UUHHHRGH, JESUS!

The pain is like nothing I’ve ever felt before. I’m simultaneously on fire and drowning, having my tongue ripped out while tasting hydrochloric acid. My skin sloughs off my body and I’m a bleached skeleton bare to the thousand icy knives of the semi-desert air.

I stumble backwards, gasping, choking, whimpering. Nom grabs my arm and pulls me back through the hole. The pain disappears instantly. I look down at my arms to make sure the skin is still there.

‘Told you,’ a voice says from behind us. I turn to see Faith and Chastity watching me, a towel slung over their shoulder. Chastity blows a bubble with her gum. ‘What the fuck happened to you two suckers?’

We tell her about the Kholomodumo but leave out the part about Gigli and his cubs. He’s my friend now and he deserves a little privacy.

‘We’re going to the dam to swim,’ Faith says. ‘You want to come?’

‘Yeah,’ Chastity adds. ‘You tried to escape, you felt the pain. It’s like a rite of passage. You’re one of us now.’

I’m so hopped up on adrenalin that I feel I can do anything.

‘Sure,’ I say.

We walk slowly up to the dam. We find Stevo rolling a joint on the bank. ‘You get tatburn?’ he asks as we approach.

I rub my arms and shudder at the memory. ‘Yeah.’

He shakes his head. ‘Hurts like a motherfucker, doesn’t it?’

‘Got something to take the edge off for the newbie, Stevo?’ Chastity says.

Stevo grins. ‘When do I not have something to take the edge off? Mumblerock.’ He opens his palm to show us a handful of purplish crystals. One of his rats runs down his arm and stands on his hind legs, little paws waving and nose sniffing the air. ‘Quit it, Hunter,’ Stevo says. ‘You’re such a goddamn junkie.

‘There are these weeds that grow around the boundary fence of the Poort. I found out that if you put them through an intense alchemical process you get these resinous crystals that you can smoke.’

‘Why’s it called Mumblerock?’

‘You’ll see.’

He pulls out a glass pipe, puts some of the crystals inside. Chastity produces a Zippo with a flourish and holds it under the bulb. Stevo takes a couple of hits and then passes it to Faith.

‘I don’t do drugs,’ Faith says, pursing her lips.

‘Pity we share the same bloodstream,’ Chastity says, grabbing the pipe and taking a hit.

Faith rolls her eyes. ‘Teen angst is so unattractive on you.’

I look at them. It must be tough. Two such individual people sharing the same body.

‘Is that pity I see in your eyes, Baxter? Because if it is, cut it the fuck out,’ Chastity says.

‘For once we agree,’ Faith says.

‘Bad move,’ Nom says shaking his head. ‘Especially because she’s high. You’re going to get it now.’

They stand up unsteadily.

‘Together we’re the cheerleader and the goth,’ Chastity says. ‘The popular and the unpopular. She writes in her fluffy pink diary about boys, while I cut myself. We’re the top and bottom of the social hierarchy, the yin-yang, the alpha and omega of high school.’ She hands me the pipe. ‘So fuck your pity.’

‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘It won’t happen again.’

‘Just smoke the damn drugs, Zevcenko,’ Chastity says.

I take a hit. It tastes vile, like burning plastic.

‘Good, eh?’ Stevo says.

‘No,’ I reply. ‘Not good at all.’

He laughs. ‘You’ll come to love it, trust me.’

A pleasant buzzing starts in my temples, like wasps flying in formation through my frontal lobes.

‘Let’s swim,’ Chastity says.

My head is thudding and everything looks weird. Weirder than usual. The stars are splattered across the sky and the cool night air fills my lungs like they’re helium balloons. I feel elated, inflated, and I’m pretty sure my pupils are heavily dilated.

I strip down without thinking and follow the procession of naked bodies into the tea-coloured water of the dam. I dive in and the coldness punches me in the sternum, but I don’t care. It soothes the lacerations on my side and the water is filled with glorious streaming fractals pulsing to the thudding of my heart.

I break through the surface of the water and watch as Faith and Chastity stand waist-deep in the water like a beautiful dual mermaid. They simultaneously scoop water in their hands and splash it at me. I watch it falling in slow motion like multifaceted jewels that have been suspended in the jelly-like substance of time.

We lie back on the grass and watch the stars dance. I feel like I’ve been holding my breath since I got to Hexpoort. I finally let it out and watch it spiralling up into the galaxy.

‘Why did you want to escape?’ asks Faith. Her blonde hair looks silvery in the moonlight.

‘There’s this girl …’ I start, but my mouth feels rubbery. ‘There’s this …’ I start again, but my mouth is seriously hanging open now and I can’t shut it. An involuntary purring comes from my throat. I begin to splutter and mumble like I’m insane. I shoot Nom a panicked look and try to speak again, but he holds his hand up and makes a circular motion with it.

‘Just ride it out.’

The others start to mumble and chatter too, and it’s like we’re some kind of insane congregation on the hill, speaking in tongues, muttering incoherently. It lasts for about five minutes before I regain some measure of control over my organs of articulation.

‘And that, kids,’ Stevo says in a slurred monotone, ‘is why it’s called Mumblerock.’

We burst out in hysterical laughter. It’s another five minutes before any of us can actually talk.

Hey man

Yeah, thanks for cat gifs, douche. If King sees them he’ll probably scratch me to death. So here’s another article from the Journal since you liked the other one so much. #dreamwalking #yolo

Don’t miss me too much

Bax

Dreamwalking is the term for a cluster of skills and abilities that have largely been lost in the modern practice of magic. Simply put, dreamwalking is the ability to consciously travel into one’s own psyche and into the psyches of others at will.

It is the purpose of this article to explore the little we know of dreamwalking with the aim of helping to preserve the theoretical understanding of this fascinating art for future generations.

Sigmund Freud called dreams the ‘royal road to the unconscious’. The Freudian theory of psychosexual development, being the theory of how the human libido develops in five stages, is integral to how we understand repression and expression in dreaming.

According to Freud, dreams are a way of symbolically projecting desire, acting out repressed urges, and facing fears in a way that makes sense to the dreamer. So however crazy, bizarre or incoherent the dream seems, the pattern is there and the dreamer need only look deeper in order to discern what it means.

Occult interpretations of Freud’s (and his student Jung’s) work take further this idea of the meaning of the symbols of the psyche. According to occultists, the main task the dreamer undertakes in dreamwalking is the defeat of the False Ego and the connection to one’s True Self, an act that can unlock a dreamer’s true potential.

The False Ego is depicted in many mythologies as a beast – the dragon that St George slays or the snake in the Garden of Eden – that the Conscious Self (the hero) must defeat in order to progress to the True Self. This can only be done through achieving holism or unity in the psyche.

Those who, thanks to their genetic heritage, are predisposed to the skill of dreamwalking are often able to slip naturally into the dreamworld with little help. Drugs, alcohol or repetitive sensory experiences such as long drives will often catapult them into the dreamworld, although practices such as the Mongolian use of bird entrails, the European use of throwing sticks and the African way of weaving beads were traditionally used as a conscious interface between a dreamwalker and his psyche.

The dreamworld, however, can be a confusing and dangerous place, and the psyche of the dreamwalker often provides guides to ferry the conscious mind safely through the dream. Call them spirit guides, totem animals or guardian angels, these guides often take on a strange, ridiculous or terrifying form to shock the conscious mind out of complacency.

We are psychologically more vulnerable when we dream. Most dreams happen at a shallow level and expose the dreamer to very little danger, but the deeper one travels the more dangerous it becomes.

Records exist from the golden age of dreamwalking (AD 1000–1115) when much was gained from the dreamworld but many dreamwalkers were also lost. In fact, more dreamwalkers died during this period than during any other period in history Entire dream-wars were fought by dreamwalkers from the comfort of their own beds, and dream espionage and assassinations were rife.

Even more politically dangerous were dream kidnappings. Capturing the True Self of somebody allows direct control of that person, and there are records of extreme acts of political control perpetrated by dreamwalkers.

Thankfully, the only way to access another’s True Will is to be invited in by an aspect of the psyche. (There are instances where the psyche of a recently deceased dreamwalker can be invited into the psyche of another person but these are rarely a happy union and most often result in the rejection of the host psyche, and hostility or even destructive behaviour by the psyche in limbo.)

The excesses of this so-called golden age resulted in the Church purges of the Middle Ages whereby dreamwalking was restricted to elite members of the clergy, and most of the accumulated knowledge of dreamwalking was destroyed in an effort to keep its power out of the hands of the common people.