The Bracelet: Part Three

Jamal's Tale

    Today, a stone's throw north of Lockwood Hall, you will find a charming little gazebo, a volleyball court, several picnic tables and two barbecue pits. You will also find several young elm trees. What you won't find is a three-story soil and water contamination research laboratory. The building was already condemned when Jamal first discovered it. I do not know if the university had plans to renovate it before the tragedy, but the unfortunate events of that dreadful night no doubt led to its demolition.

    Having transferred from a different school, Jamal was late in applying for student housing. As a result, he ended up like so many other late registrants moving into Lockwood. The dorm itself was quite nice, but its location left a lot to be desired for students whose classes were mostly on the western campus, which amounted to roughly two-thirds of its residents, Jamal included. Despite the university's excellent transit service, Jamal and many other students in his situation tended to stay in East campus after classes were done for the day. Now, I do not wish to sound condescending, but there is not much in terms of entertainment there, at least in comparison to West campus. With that in mind, Jamal's addiction to marihuana is more understandable; when one is surrounded by farm animals at what is ostensibly a cosmopolitan institution, the escape afforded by narcotics would be welcome indeed!

    His habit being, of course, illegal, Jamal was forced to seek out places away from prying eyes and sensitive nostrils to indulge himself. This task became doubly difficult in winter, the weather here discouraging any sort of prolonged outdoor activity. Fortunately, or so he thought at the time, he and his friends discovered an entrance to the aforementioned condemned laboratory. Apparently, you could access the building's main heating duct connected to the labyrinthine steam tunnels that wormed their way underneath the entire university via a manhole in the adjacent parking lot. What possessed them to explore the sewers is beyond me, though I imagine such strange behavior was partly due to the influence of the drug.

    After a brief tour of the abandoned complex, they found a windowless room on the third floor that suited their purpose. For some odd reason, the building had not been completed stripped of its furnishings, and so they managed to scrounge up a few chairs from adjoining rooms. On subsequent visits, they brought candles to serve for light as the electricity had long since been cut off. These they left behind, foolishly in my opinion, along with the chairs making it all too obvious that the room was still in use to anyone who might happen by. In particular was a large red candle that sat in the middle of a circle of five chairs they arranged in a fashion suggesting a primitive tribal counsel. As I understand it, the smoking of marihuana is modeled after the Native American tradition of the peace pipe, though the natives used red willow bark if memory serves.

    According to Jamal, it was on one such occasion when the trouble began. He was entertaining friends from out of town who, like himself and apparently the vast majority of college students, smoked copious amounts of the demon weed. They were very excited about the prospect of adding trespassing to their list of illegal activities and with little difficulty convinced Jamal to take them to his secret hideaway.

    All told, there were five present that night so each seat was filled. By midnight they were all "ripped out of their minds," as Jamal described.

    I should take a moment to address any concerns the reader may have with the credibility of any testimony given by those under the influence of psychotropic drugs. While I wholly agree that supernatural events witnessed by persons so afflicted can easily be explained as hallucinations, later, sober observations of similar phenomena lend credence to the veracity of the following sequence of events:

    It began with Jamal leaning over in his chair and igniting his lighter off of the red candle. He then offered the flame to the companion on his right, who in turn offered it to the next person and so on and so forth until all five of them carried a flame. At some unspoken cue, they extinguished the five miniature torches simultaneously. A moment passed wherein no sound was made until Jamal noted, "that was pretty weird."

    He further explained to me that his actions at the time felt automatic, suggesting a compulsion of some sort rather than a purposeful action. As some readers have undoubtedly noted already, the five-pointed circle in which they sat, that is the pentagram, has especial significance concerning the barriers separating the two worlds, of which the enigmatic Frater P. spoke, "fatherhood is unity disguised as duality."

    I said nothing of the number's significance in the Qabalah.

    Jamal's voice lowered as he continued his tale. The room itself seemed to grow quieter and my eyes began to wander over the veiled windows in search of shadows that might reveal the presence of an unknown interloper. Such was my growing discomfort with the very walls that shielded us from prying eyes, or perhaps blinded us to some danger without. I forced myself to look away, lest my anxious demeanor disturb my wary storyteller.

    For some time after the bizarre ritual took place, none of the five accidental participants said much, lost in their own dark imaginings. It happened when one of them made motion to sit up that the red candle's flame blew out. Outside the circle, the other candles still burned so they were not left in darkness, but fear took them nonetheless. Before any could speak, the silence was broken by a great crash as though a dumpster was carelessly dropped in the adjoining hallway. This terror was too great for their intoxicated minds and they quickly ran into a nearby closet and shut the door, neglecting the candles that still burned outside.

    There they sat, bereft of the simple comfort of light, while the initial shock turned to horror as they listened to the hideous music of metal grating along the linoleum floor. Jamal's hands shook as he traced out on the table the path the monstrous noise took relative to their hiding place. Were it not for what happened later, I scarcely could have imagined the depths of fear and madness they descended when they realized the sound was moving closer to them. By the time that awful din had reached the door of their windowless room, three of them passed out from fright, Jamal included. When they finally came to, the nightmare had ended. After waiting in the closet for an hour hearing nothing but their own breathing, they quickly fled back to Lockwood and safety.

    Of the two who remained conscious throughout the ordeal, one no longer speaks to his former friends and the other is a permanent resident of the Mendota Asylum. According to the one who did not lose his mind, whatever it was passed the door to their room and continued down the hallway until suddenly the noise ceased. Before leaving, he added that along with the scraping, he swore he heard the rattle of chains.

    With that, Jamal grew silent and spoke no more. I knew it was pointless to try and goad him for further detail, so I wrote down my telephone number for him to call me later and discuss what could be done. He took it and merely nodded goodbye before hurriedly leaving the library. During the remainder of my shift, I compiled notes on the important details of the story for review later. Walking back to my dormitory, something caught my eye as I crossed the river. It may have been the late hour, or a phantasm of my sleep-deprived brain, or even simply the play of the city lights off the water, but for a brief moment I saw black things dancing along the far riverbank.

    I do not care to recall my dreams that night.

Continued