Sharing Nightmares

Yun Oe || Seraphim Seance

“Hey guys.”

“So uh, Camjam, how long have you been working on this...this thing?” Evan inquired cautiously, shoving his hands into his jeans pockets and nodding at the setup.

“Four days straight. There were a lot of preparations I had to make for the ceremony…” At this remark, an abrupt fluttering noise emerged behind Camille and jolted the four friends from their position. “Live doves,” she reassured them with a chuckle. “Had to find twelve of them for the ritual.”

“What else did you need to get?” Denise quipped, still on edge and clinging to Alex.

“The nice thing is that we’re in church town central, which helped with supply gathering. I had to grab some thuribles...candles…” she turned, laying her eyes on the dove cage that was covered with brocade fabric. “Old priest’s robes.”

“Eye of newt, claw of tiger, hair of virgin,” Alex joked, trying to humor Denise out of her anxious shell.

“Head of bishop?” Daphne suggested, sharing a smirk with Camille. The two of them had an equally twisted way of teasing everyone into an eerie silence-- planting horrible little notions into the darkness of people’s minds.

“Well, I just wanted to say hello to you before I head back to the car, y’know, to...to get it ready in case we have to speed away from the monster that y’all summon!” Denise giggled nervously, inching away from Alex’s arm.

“D’you want someone to come with you, Deni?” Alex asked.

“N-no...I can run pretty fast to the car.”

“Be careful of the glass on your way out, Den!” retorted Evan.

“And say hello to those forest goblins for us!” exclaimed Daphne, with eyes following Denise’s silhouette as she sped out of the chapel like the track star she was.

Once Denise was out of sight, Camille picked up three smoking thuribles, offering them to the remaining friends.

“Shall we get started, then?”

---

Denise didn’t bother to stop and enjoy the scenic church hallway, now illumined by the dying sun as it melted into the trees; streams of light escaped from the branches outside and twinkled through the glass wall of the corridor, coloring the walls a rustic orange color. Denise leapt over little piles of debris, arriving back at the lobby where she took a moment to catch her breath. A moment she immediately regretted, as her mind’s concoctions caught up to her heaving, hunched body. Rustling came from under the lobby desk, and Denise, with fragile constitution, bolted for the door and slammed it behind her, running and fidgeting with the car keys in her pocket to unlock the vehicle before securing herself inside it.

Her station wagon, a car from the late ‘90s with a speck of mileage on it, sputtered when she started the engine. She threw in a cassette tape of droning piano music, leaning back in her seat to catch her breath yet again. Denise didn’t understand what the charm was in invoking the supernatural: she had seen enough horror movies, read enough ghost stories and heard enough religious lectures to know that the others were likely going to get possessed by a demon...or fail miserably and end up with a vestigial tail. Whichever came first.

She was curious, sure, but her prudent nature sucked the fun out of everything. She never bothered to eat a spoonful of cinnamon or smoke a cigarette because she knew better, but her rational decisions made her the outcast of the teenage population. The “mom” of her group of friends. And Denise didn’t mind so much-- sitting in the comfort of her leather-seated car while her friends did goodness knew what was a far more appealing alternative than being in the heat of the action.