CHAPTER THREE [sativa]
They were taken to the shed behind the main barn, shackled with rusty chains to a metal table that was bolted to the floor in the middle of the chamber. The table was piled high with steaming platters of food—pastries mostly, buttery brownies and cookies, cheese-infused scones and chocolate-filled croissants. Eclairs, galettes, knishes.
“No fuckin’ way,” Nell growled.
Matt locked them in the shed. It was gloomy inside: the windows were boarded up, but narrow blades of sunlight came slicing in through gaps in the walls. For a while Ozzy, Byron and Nell struggled in vain against their shackles, while Matt’s words echoed cruelly in their ears. The final hours of your short, miserable little lives.
Was the smell of the baked goods getting stronger?
“Don’t eat anything,” Nell warned.
“It smells like…” Ozzy trailed off. What is that? It reminded him of the chewy chocolate chip cookies his mother had used to make. Byron, on the other hand, recalled the cake he’d received from his long-lost sister on his tenth birthday. And in spite of herself, Nell let her mind wander into the past, to that one summer when she and several friends holed up in an abandoned school, and survived solely on pastries stolen from the bakery across the street.
Their mouths were watering and the mortal fear in their stomachs had vanished, replaced with a twisted, gnawing hunger. They dug in. For several minutes there was no speaking, just ravenous chewing, gluttonous lip-smacking and swallowing as they shovelled pastry after pastry into their mouths. It tasted as delicious as it smelled—
“Guys, stop!”
Byron and Ozzy looked up. Nell was holding a cookie with both hands and staring at it in dawning comprehension.
“You guys…”
You’re a strange person, Nell. Ozzy couldn’t tell why exactly, but for some reason the sight of her was impossibly funny to him. He started laughing. Once he’d started he couldn’t stop. More. He wanted to eat more. He crammed two more biscuits into his mouth, made eye contact with Byron—
Byron burst into a fit of giggles, spewing bits of half-chewed brownie everywhere.
“Guys, don’t you see?”
“See what?” demanded Byron, grabbing a hot, gooey cinnamon roll. “Shut up, Nell.”
“Yeah, shut up, Nell.”
“They’re stuffing us for fucksakes!”
Ozzy and Byron fixed her with glazed, hollowed-out stares.
“They’re stuffing us to eat us! And all this food—all of it—is infused with marijuana. It’s fuckin’ saturated.”
“I dunno what you’re talking about,” said Ozzy, experimentally breaking apart a giant muffin so he could fit a hunk of cornbread inside it. “It’s a muffin sandwich, obviously.”
“Can’t you taste it?”
“Maybe you’re just being paranoid,” said Byron contemptuously. “You are a pothead, after all.” He shoved three strudels into his mouth at once.
Pothead. That caught Nell off guard. “Oh yeah?” she growled. “Why don’t you look at the floor, then?”
But Byron and Ozzy were too busy eating to acknowledge Nell any further.
“STOP STUFFING YOUR SHITTY FACES AND LISTEN TO ME!”
Finally they looked up at her, alarmed. Their eyes were squinty and bloodshot.
“Byron,” Nell hissed. “Look at the floor. Ozzy, look at the ceiling.”
Stunned, they did as instructed. Byron looked down and spotted the dark streaks staining the floorboards. Ozzy looked up at the butcher’s knives and meat cleavers hanging from the rafters, at least a half-dozen of them.
“Blood?” Byron gasped.
“A slaughterhouse?” Ozzy croaked.
Nell sighed deeply. Then she reached into her jacket pocket, pulled out another joint. She sparked it with her silver Zippo.
“What are you doing?” demanded Byron.
“If I’m going to die a teenager,” Nell growled, “then I refuse to be sober.”
“That’s an irrational line of thinking.”
With a sudden crash the barn door opened again, and the man named Matt returned, accompanied by a withered goblin of an old lady. “The foundling,” he said. “That one. She’s got vigour. She’ll make an ideal appetizer.”
The gobliness undid Nell’s shackles and dragged her to her feet by her jacket collar. With the joint still sticking out of her mouth, Nell let the gobliness push her towards Matt, who smiled a slick smile. “I have a feeling you’re going to be flavoured just right,” he said, his mouth splitting into a grin that was far too wide, revealing teeth that were far too sharp.
He and the gobliness dragged Nell out the door, slamming and locking it behind them.
“Shit!” Ozzy hissed. “Oh, shit! What do we do now?”
But Byron didn’t have any ideas, and they lapsed into silence. And it wasn’t because they wanted to, or because they were anywhere remotely close to hungry… but the pastries were right in front of them. They really didn’t have a choice.
They started eating again.
* * *
After a couple of hours—or it might’ve only been a few minutes—or several torturous days—something caught Byron’s eye. A shadow in the corner of the room, pinned between gleaming blades of sunlight…
But it couldn’t have been a shadow. It was far too tall to be a shadow.
A familiar smell filled the shed. Ozzy’s lips moved but no sound emerged. Summer Haze?
The shadow in the corner of the room exhaled a plume of smoke. Ozzy and Byron stared at it. No—not it, it was definitely a him. He had a thick flowing grey beard and a purple-and-orange turban, and long pointed elfin ears, and hooved goat legs. His voice sounded as though the words had been spoken in a vast underground cave several hundred years earlier.
“You’ve wandered into a strange, strange neck of the woods, my friends.”
The tall turbaned satyr approached the two captives slowly, a smile playing on his ancient face. “My name is Myrddin,” he continued, “and I will help you if you help me in return.”
J. Herrera Kamin 