flap of the tent, staggering off into the woods looking for Abe. “And bring back a pizza!” shouted Carly jokingly.
“Yeah! Pepperoni!” Stacy giggled. Carly laughed along with her. Then, not wanting to look at the creepy, misty darkness outside the tent any longer, Stacy hurriedly zipped the front flap back up.
“These guys are losers,” whispered Carly sharply, beneath her breath.
“Shut up.” Stacy smiled. “Dallas is cute.”
“Yeah, but his friend is a night-mare.”
“I know. But you still owe me for the cabin. I got stuck with your brother all week. You can deal with a creepy little dork leering at you for two days.”
DISCOMBOBULATED FROM A head full of high, Dallas stumbled through bramble patches, his footfalls heavy and uneven; his senses disconnecting further and further from reality. Where am I going? he mumbled incoherently. He had no idea where Abe had wandered off to and it was dawning on him that sometime between entering the tent and hearing Abe’s cry, a thick, dewy fog had set in. It swirled through the dim wood, rivers of elegant mist pouring down the sides of knobby mounds like swift, wispy waterfalls, spilling a thick pea-soup miasmic sea across mossy earth, ankle high and impenetrable by the naked eye. The air was thick with the humid nighttime sweat of Texas spring, tendrils of misty haze reaching up waist high, swallowing entire sections of the forest whole.
This was a very, very bad idea, thought Dallas, now sure that his friend had taken a nasty spill off the side of some cliff. “ABE!” he bellowed. “AAAAAAAABRAHAAAAAAAM!” There was no reply—not from crickets or cicadas, or Abe in distress. Then Dallas felt it. Despite the heat, there was something about the air that held the cold, damp chill of death upon it. It wasn’t a smell, it was a feeling, a creeping doom; a bleak, barren, soulless hollow that the light of the moon couldn’t pierce.
All the light had fallen away from the world, with only the fog illuminated now. Even the stars struggled against the black, managing only the slightest pinpricks of twinkles through a gloom that was both everywhere and nowhere at once. It wasn’t the dark of night; it was the tenebrous shadow of bad omens. Dallas had done a lot of things to score a night with a girl like Stacy in the past, and he would easily have done a lot more to score a night with both Stacy and Carly at the same time. But suddenly, ingesting hallucinogenic mushrooms and stumbling through the middle of fucking nowhere didn’t seem worth it.
He’d been walking for at least ten minutes, his legs growing heavy, his head wobbling a bit on his neck. It was time to turn around; he’d done his part for Abe. He spun on his heel, gazing across nebulous fog, only to see the flicker of a campfire and the tent not fifty paces away. What? But I . . . ? “Shit.” He hadn’t been out there ten minutes. He hadn’t been out there five. Time was fucking with him. And no matter how little he cared for Abe’s predicament compared to his own, there was no way the girls would let him back in the tent so soon after leaving. So he turned back into the night, calling out to Abe once more.
THE GIRLS EACH drifted off into a deep sleep. Carly slipped immediately into a colorful dream fueled by afterglow, laced with Dallas’s musky scent. Stacy wasn’t so lucky; she sank into a grim, dusky void, vacant of restful peace. There was something dark and lonely here, something unnatural. She wasn’t alone in her dreamless sleep, unsure what it was that loitered in the empty black of her subconscious, leering at her thoughts, sifting through her memories with filthy, perverted fingers.
Perched above her, in plain view, stooped a skeleton of a man, an ancient, drooling Methuselah, with hollow, sunken sockets surrounding lifeless black orbs; an unfettered beard speckled with wood chips and slivers of cedar; and a flare of wild, untamed white hair exploding out of his skull like a dying dandelion. Nibbling Nils. The Buber.
Stacy was a feast of shame, brimming with insecurity, lashed together with frayed strands of delusion. Nibbling Nils ran his slobbering tongue over his shriveled, cracking lips. He stroked Stacy’s cheek with a bony hand, pinching both sides of her face, forming a gaping pucker. Then he leaned in, kissed her deeply, his enthusiastic tongue flitting around the inside of her mouth.