Бентли Литтл - The Disappearance

The next day, they took Stacy’s advice and just wandered around, exploring. In one village, Gary actually finger painted for the first time since grammar school, the distinctive smell of the thick paint bringing on a wave of nostalgia that left him feeling almost giddy. A Mad Max –looking Winnebago was tricked out as a lunch wagon, its occupants giving out free veggie burgers, and all five of them ate until they were full before setting off once again across the playa.

That night, the Man was burned, set ablaze to cheers and dancing and revelry. They could have gone over with most of the crowd to where it was actually happening, but they could see the event fine from where they were, and the truth was that all of the heat and walking had pretty much worn them out. Joan drank water, the rest of them beer, and they remained in their camp, enjoying the sight and the sounds and one another’s company.

It was shortly after the Man fell that Gary noticed something was wrong.

Very wrong.

He was sitting in place, unmoving, but everything seemed off balance, as though he were on the deck of a seriously yawing ship. He reached for Joan’s hand, and it felt hairy , like the hand of an ape. As he turned his head to look at her, Gary was suddenly struck with a headache so severe that it felt as though a nail had been jammed through the back of his skull. He cried out in pain and grabbed the sides of his head.

As quickly as it had arrived, the headache was gone.

The lurching, off-balance feeling remained, however, and Gary tried to stand but found that he couldn’t; his legs would not listen to his brain. He’d been drugged. He was sure of it, though he did not know how or by whom. An instinct of self-preservation was telling him to get over to the car and crawl into the backseat, to remain somewhere safe until this wore off, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not get his legs to work.

“Joan,” he said, but he didn’t really say it. No sound came out of his mouth. He wanted to make sure she was okay, wanted to help her if she wasn’t, wanted her to help him if she was. For all he knew, she’d been drugged as well. But his muscles remained rigid, frozen, and he sat there, unable to move.

Whatever this was, he didn’t think it was ecstasy. Ecstasy was supposed to make you mellow and relaxed, to heighten the sensual component of everything. This was…

This was rough.

With a tremendous effort of will, he managed to turn to the side.

Joan was no longer Joan. She was a button-eyed, life-sized rag doll lying unmoving amid the bloody bodies of his slaughtered friends. Two bansheelike shapes emerged from the fog enveloping the outskirts of the scene and picked up the huge doll. Her arms and legs flopped limply as the cloaked and hooded figures lifted her over Brian. His neck had been slit, and both his eyes and his mouth were wide open. Next to Brian, the bodies of Reyn and Stacy were little more than pulped meat.

Gary tried to scream, but only a tiny puff of air was expelled from his mouth. The air became visible, a round, vibrating sphere. It darkened, lengthened, grew wings, then turned and attacked him, a chubby vampiric bat with sharp fangs and cold pinprick eyes. He tried to scream again, and the bat flew into his mouth, forcing its way down his throat, the rubbery winged body disgustingly tactile.

Though he was gagging and choking, he saw through teary eyes that Joan was no longer a rag doll but a little girl, and she was crying and struggling, trying to get away from her mysterious kidnappers. In the background, in the fog, the Burning Man was walking, its limbs, body and head ablaze as it moved in herky-jerky, stop-motion animation away from the carnage that was Black Rock City.

Then all was white.

Then all was black.

Awakening was hard and painful, like being pushed through lava into sunlight after spending weeks in a cold, dark cave. His head felt as though his skull was too small and was pressing in on his brain, and every muscle in his body was throbbing. He was flat on the ground, in the dirt, and he rose to a sitting position. The first thing he noticed was that the sun was high in the western sky. It was noon or just after, although he had no idea what day it was. The next thing he noticed was that Burning Man was winding down. The Joe Strummer cube was gone, as was the temporary structure behind it, and though he could hear the sounds of people moving about, there were a lot fewer of them than there had been before.

Brian was already awake. “What. The. Fuck. Was. That?”

If pressed, Gary would have guessed that Brian was the one who had dosed him. His friend was a good guy and usually respectful of boundaries, but it wasn’t too much of a stretch to assume that his judgment might have been impaired under the influence. Obviously, though, Brian had undergone the same sort of trial he had and, as he looked around, Gary saw that his other friends were similarly affected. Reyn was on the ground and moaning, listing slightly from side to side. Stacy was still out like a light.

But where was Joan?

He crawled over to their tent and looked inside. Her sleeping bag was gone, he saw. As was her little knapsack of personal effects. Frowning, he stood, lurching to his feet and holding out his arms to keep from wobbling too much. A great deal of the city had already been broken down, and the rest of it was in the process of being taken apart. The ethos of Burning Man was that the community would be temporary, a piece of performance art, vanishing after its vibrant week in the sun as though it had never existed. Already most of the people were gone, and by tonight the playa would appear as empty and untouched as it had been before their arrival.

Gary’s head hurt, and his sense of balance was still shaky, but he staggered over to the car and looked inside. No Joan. He walked around the car, using the door handles, trunk and hood as guides, but there was still no sign of her.

“Joan!” he called. His voice wasn’t up to full strength, but it was still strong enough to be heard in and around the immediate area. He coughed, tried again. “Joan!”

The only answer was from Brian. “She’s around,” he said. “Somewhere.”

Gary didn’t believe that. Something was not right. He could sense it, and a feeling of panic grew within him as he scanned the desert nearby and saw no sign of her. If she had been drugged as the rest of them had, she should have still been here. If she had not been drugged, she would have gone to get help. But she seemed to have disappeared. He recalled his vision or hallucination or whatever it was, where he’d seen two hooded figures carrying off the rag doll that Joan had become, and he was suddenly certain that there was truth in it. Beneath the delusional trappings, an essential core of reality remained, and he was convinced now that she had been abducted.

Reyn was up and awake, and Stacy was stirring to life.

He didn’t like that, either, the fact that they were all coming out of drug-induced stupors at approximately the same time. It suggested a plot, a plan, a premeditated effort to render them unconscious for a specific period of time so that certain actions could be taken during their absence, and he hurried as fast as his acclimatizing legs would carry him to the nearest still-occupied site, where he learned that it was Monday. They had been out for more than a day.

Frantically he searched one disbanding village after another, joined shortly afterward by his recovering friends. No one they encountered had seen Joan or noticed anything unusual, but then, they hadn’t been paying much attention, either. That was what happened when something such as this occurred in such a setting: the natural chaos of the crowd made it virtually impossible for individual events to be noticed.