“Drink, Maddox.”She pushes the glass to my lips.“Drink.”
I look at Rouge.Her eyebrows are raised.I think I can hear them giggling at me.
“Drink, Maddox.Drink, in remembrance of me.”
I obey.My throat is dry.Probably a side effect from the shrooms.
The liquid is thick.Viscous.
This isn’t tomato juice.
It has a metallic taste… Like…
Like blood.
I stare at the glass, and it slips from my grip.Falls to the floor.Breaks into a million pieces.Creates a giant red puddle.
Wild laughter bounces off the walls of the room, penetrates my body, blurs my vision…
And I’m on a canoe, paddling upstream through it.Through a river of thickest blood.I look behind me.I’m about to go down a waterfall.
A bloodfall.
But no matter how hard I paddle, I can’t stop the boat.
I finally relent, fall down the scarlet cascade.
The static returns.Tiny little gnats buzzing in my ear.Entering my skull.Flying in and out of my eyes, my nose, my mouth.
It isn’t real.None of this is real.
Or is it?
* * *
To this day,I don’t know the answer.
What happened with Rouge that night… I don’t know what was real and what was fabricated by the mind-altering mushrooms.
I mean… The swarm of gnats, the desert of diamonds, the blinding snowstorm.Those weren’t real.
I know we fucked.That part was pretty damned good.
But the goblet of blood that Rouge commanded me to drink…
That I was never sure of.
For years I dismissed it as part of the trip brought on by the shrooms.
All I know is that I kept Rouge at arm’s length after that night.
What if it actually happened?Itfeltreal in the moment, but then I started hallucinating again right after.The waterfall of blood.
Hell, I was hallucinatingwhileit was going on.I saw her eyes light on fire, her eyebrows laugh, her pussy wink at me.
Now that I know what Rouge is capable of doing, that particular vision doesn’t seem that farfetched.
I kept going back to the club because I thought it wasn’t real.I enjoyed going to the club, and I just avoided Rouge when I could.
