I Heard They're Beautiful This Time Of Year
By P. Henry
Lucy spent her summer watching television. All her friends had gone off to work at secluded camps in New Hampshire and western Massachusetts where they would discover new relationships and sacred rituals of an ending youth deep in the night. Lucy never held the lustful desires of her friends and had trouble even thinking of what it was that she wanted to remember about her life during high school. Her desire was under the skin. It squirmed around and begged to be let free, to taste the open air. Lucy couldn’t tell whether this yearning was of the physical or mental sensation, but she had spent long nights withering in discomfort next to the toilet waiting for it to pass. There were times when she thought her stomach would burst out of her chest, and whatever was inside would escape into the night to be free again.
One night, after her brother and mother had eaten their meatloaf-soaked-in-ketchup, Lucy spread herself across the blue and white tiles of their bathroom and braced herself for the incoming wave of something that wanted to break free. In an instant where her body jerked against her own inhibitions like a clockwork automaton, she sat up at an exact 90-degree angle, turned her head directly above the toilet bowl, and threw up red. It was too thin to be blood but did not taste like bile or any food she had recently eaten. At first, the strangest thing about the contents she spewed was the taste that lingered in her mouth. It was smokey and left her tongue with the slightest burn, a sensation she last felt when she had eaten a hot dog right off the grill on the Fourth of July. The toilet liquid had smoothed out and Lucy was able to view a perfect reflection of herself staring back outward towards her. The features of her reflection were even more perfect than Lucy had ever thought to envision herself. Her cheekbones had been raised, her nose protruded out of her face the slightest inch, and her eyebrows were slanted at an angle that gave the reflection power in its stare. This was not the face of Lucy, but of something older. It was the something that hid in her organs and ruled her dreams.
Lucy went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water. She felt the water dribble down her throat and cleanse her insides of whatever it was that emerged from within. With the clarity of hydration came the memories of her recurring dream. A dream of an old forest and an ancient ritual.
Downstairs, her brother and his little gang of friends were yelling about vanquishing a demon-spirit back to the realm of the damned. It was a part of a game called Dungeons & Dragons they had been playing all summer, and based on their screams a powerful force had been defeated. Lucy had attempted playing with the boys once before, but she became too immersed in the role of a holy paladin. After an hour of playing, she couldn’t tell where Lucy ended and Celeste of the Moon began, and she ended up committing the ancient Japanese art of Seppuku to save a soul caught between two worlds. The group loved her commitment to the role and always wanted her to play a full campaign with them, but Lucy was afraid of what would happen if their fantasies bled into her reality.
As the sun disappeared from the sky in a purple haze, she laid on the couch with a pint of mint-chip ice cream and turned on the television. The developing story was on the possible ties Dungeons & Dragons shared with Pagan religions and featured an interview with an elderly woman with thick-rimmed glasses that made her eyes look like mugs of black coffee. Her and the news anchor sat in brown corduroy chairs in a brown office with spotlights that enhanced the cracks among the dry skin which matched their voices. Lucy wriggled her body to find a way to ease out the discomfort the newscasters gave her, and even though she would’ve liked to change the channel, the remote had vanished. The elderly woman was saying something about the ties between violent crime and media that produced satanic imagery.
“Last Friday I had to lock my daughter in her room to keep her from going to see a band called Judas Priest! Do you know what Judas Priest is known for Ken? They promote sinners! They have a song calllllled Blood Rain! Bllllood Rain! Blllllllllllooooooooooooo-” The television began to crackle with interference and after a moment of static returned to the same picture. “-ooooohhhHello Lucy. Are yooou feeling better?” The old woman was staring directly at Lucy through the television. She wasn’t blinking, the studio lights had gotten darker, and the image was frozen besides the movement of the woman’s mouth.
“Follow the mushrooms, Lucy. They guide us throoough the soil, they guide the dead underground, but weee have been known to slip above,” said the voice. At this point, Lucy knew that something was speaking through the image on the television from somewhere beyond her own reality.
The television shut off and left no sound but the lingering static while the screen cooled. There was a glass door across the hall from the living room that led to the backyard, where the moon cast a silver glow over the grass and the edge of the Pine Barrens. Lucy walked over, slid the door back, and peered out towards the trees as a glint caught her eye. It was ruby red, reflected in the light of the moon, but it was something else calling out from below the Earth that drew Lucy towards the light. She walked out the door without stopping to put shoes on.
The source of the light was a mushroom cap slick with moisture and a set of maroon gills underneath. Unlike many fungi that grew together in clusters, these mushrooms grew in a trail that led deeper into the woods. Even when the moon was blocked by the trees the red glow stood out in the darkness. The ground was soft and cool and smooth despite the absence of an official trail path. Lucy was so naturally comfortable that she never stopped to think of this geographical oddity. The trail of mushrooms culminated in a patch where the fungus had overtaken the ground, spread up a circle of pine trees in an alcove, and the whole area sent a glow towards the sky and up the tree trunks. In the middle of the alcove was a portable radio blasting static into the night. Lucy approached the radio and picked it up. She stared at the tuning needle which began to veer to the left, adjusting itself automatically until all static had disappeared and a deep voice came into focus.
“There are stories of a devil in these woods…” the voice said to Lucy. The glowing patch of fungus that she stood upon began to sink, sending a thick gas into the air that shrouded Lucy’s vision. She began to lose consciousness as she stepped onto the soft caps, passing out completely when she heard thick wings flapping through the air. Sharp talons gently curved themselves around her body and lifted her off the ground, although she didn’t feel a thing. The devil flew high above the forests holding her in its grasp.
Lucy did not perceive much of the journey from Pemberton Township, New Jersey, to the Blue Mountains of Oregon. The devil held her close to its chest for warmth. At their altitude the flight was only six hours, but the devil still had to stop somewhere around Salt Lake City so it could feed on a herd of sheep before they reached the destination. The devil arrived at an open maw of a cave by sunrise where it laid Lucy down at the entrance and crawled inside. The Mistress and the Fisherman were already awake by the time the devil arrived, and the Sage was in a meditative state next to the others, communicating with the spirit beneath the mountains. The cave marked the edge of a small meadow with a stream on the other side. No trees grew for a considerable distance around the meadow, and those that marked at the edge of the old growth forest were dead and weathered to husks of their former selves. Sunlight poured onto the meadow, made more intense by the presence of an intense shade in the woods. The forests of the Pacific Northwest were ancient beings, standing unopposed for millennia until discovered by the world of man, but the trees were not the only gods that breathed among these flowers.
Lucy began to stir just as the Fisherman left to gather ingredients for the ceremony. She was drowsy, still under the effect of the spores but the Mistress soothed her with herbal tea made with local mugwort and chamomile, and when she felt famished after her initial anxiety subsided she was given a meal of spongy Morel mushrooms that tasted smokey and lingered comfortably on her tongue. In the cave, the devil snored. Lucy heard the rumbling from the outside and at that moment knew she was no longer in a state of dreaming. What Lucy could not understand was that where she was at her present moment of reality was identical to a recurring dream she had all summer. Even the details of budding lilacs on the ground gave her a sense of deja vu, and the only difference was the body in which she inhabited within her dream was taller and upright. Her dream self moved with a sense of royal grace and when she spoke (although she could not remember what she said) her voice was deeper but so gentle each word landed on the ears of her subjects like a kiss.
Lucy knew that she should be worried about her safety, and while part of her continued to doubt her own sense of reality, all she could think of was the body in her dream. She wanted nothing less than to step into this new skin, and nothing more than to return to the dream so she could inhabit this form. The Mistress caught her eyes wandering off and knew they had her.
“If it makes you feel any better, none of us were brought here consensually,” said the Mistress to Lucy. “Now that you’re here, we only have to make it to the ceremony and we’re free to go.”
“You were talking to me last night, weren’t you? You were the voice on the TV telling me to follow the mushrooms.”
“Nooo, tHat woould Beee me,” answered the Sage. His eyes had now opened and a milky film covered them. He was still cross-legged on the ground. “I apologizZzZze if I frighteeeened youu, I sooought oNly to LEeeead You innnn the RighT direcction,” he spat out before his eyes closed once again.
“Whatever your scheme is, I would rather just go. I’m sure my family is looking for me right now!”
“I wouldn’t be too sure,” said the Mistress. “Last week you spent two full days in your room. You left only twice to go to the bathroom and ate in the night to purposefully minimize interaction.” It was true. Lucy’s family may have been concerned about her mental health, but they would not confront her. “As for this scheme you think we’re putting into motion, we want nothing more than to retrieve our original bodies. We seek freedom, not malice. If you want proof, talk to your neighbor in the cave. He was born in his original body two hundred years ago, yet he hasn’t killed a soul that meant him no harm. We want the same thing you do, I can see it in your eyes. You don’t stare at the flowers or the clouds in the sky. You stare at the image in your mind's eye, feel the sensation you know is your true self. I’ve seen it too, and every second I’m not in that form burns me. I want to rip my skin off just to break free of this suffocation.” Lucy may not have liked the Mistress, but she couldn’t deny the chance to see her ideal body realized.
The rest of the day was uneventful with the exception of cuddling next to a creature the size of a bear with the body and wings of a bat and the head of a horse. Lucy and the devil played presidents, she spoke to the Sage a bit more, but generally let the people work. When the Fisherman returned it was finally time to begin the ritual of transformation. There actually wasn’t much to do, the Mistress explained to Lucy, as the Sage had been communicating with the god beneath the Earth for several months now. The god, a network of mycelium running a hundred miles in every direction, would rapidly decompose their current bodies in order to release their true forms in exchange for the followers of the gods evolving to control the earth in the next millennia. “As if there’ll even be an Earth in a millennium,” she laughed.
They gathered in a circle and ingested another mushroom. Lucy felt it sink to the bottom of her stomach, and the sensation that she had to pee immediately came to her mind. She did not look down, but it was as if she was releasing her bladder. Looking across the circle she could see the skin of the Sage begin to dry out, crumble away, turn grey, then wrinkle and break apart. From the tears in the skin emerged hundreds of flies that swarmed into a thick cloud in the air. The Fisherman started to run away from the circle towards the cave where a stream was located underground. He tore the ground up with the last of his strength before his chest exploded in a mess of gore, and the form of a snake slithered outward into the water as the husk of his former body collapsed on the ground. The Mistress smiled at Lucy before horns burst from her forehead. Her hair fell off in clumps as tufts of fur emerged from the raw hide, and as she grew three feet in height the skin simply fell off her body like a discarded bed sheet. She turned towards the woods and walked into the darkness. Lucy was alone once again. She thought it was fortunate that she did not have such an extreme transformation, but looked down and realized that her old skin had fallen off as well, although it didn’t resemble skin so much as a rumpled coat on the ground.
They were covered in blood. The devil emerged from the cave once more and bowed to his prince of darkness. Lucy climbed atop his back as he spread his wings. They flew off into the night once again, passing through a rainstorm that washed the blood right off of them. They rose above to bask in a waning moon before diving back towards the woods they had left just one day ago. Lucy knew the way back and didn’t question how, and soon they were home once again, returning through the screen door at around sunrise.
They found an old Slayer t-shirt that used to be big on their old body, but now fit just right, as well as an old pair of baggy sweatpants that complimented their form. They walked downstairs where their brother and his gang of misfits were just starting a new campaign. The group of boys stared in amazement at the transformation but didn’t speak up out of politeness. This pause was broken moments later when the gang dove into adventure once again.
P. Henry (they/them) is a 24-year-old living in Brooklyn, NY. They have an affinity for mycology, collage art, graphic novels, and the films of Céline Sciamma.