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. He was scared, but frightfully curious when the shapes began to splash together. The smell of lust grew unbearably strong and he felt a tightness in his crotch, a pain and power that he swore threatened to rip through his jeans. The women faded into waves of paint colors cascading down to the floor, into a puddle that gathered at Kyle’s feet. Two hands, shimmering, pale flesh colored hands emerged from the pool, moving up his legs. Like a picture painting itself, a shape began to appear. Arms, then shoulders, a neck, a head, a face. When he saw the face he became eager for the rest to appear.
“Marilyn,” he whispered, “the movies, the Playboy, I saw you…”
Her breasts came into focus, a phantom shape almost outside geometry for him, something between pearls and fruit. Her thighs were thick and delectable, her ass a kind of sun, vast, bright, gorgeous, pulsing with energy and potential. The divine body had come down from Heaven, slid out of dreams to greet him, hold him, kiss him.
“Not here,” she said and indicated the doors. Kyle nodded, opened them and passed the great gate into an elaborate bedchamber. Marilyn seemed to vanish for a moment, but then was there, waiting for him. She lay down, smiled and spread her legs . There was light between them, soft, but incendiary. It burned at first, squeezed a little, but molded into place around him as he entered her. The shadows on the wall were beautiful again, his sex symbols cheering him on as he merged himself with the legend. He was a legend now, he was a star, he was a real big man inside a sweet little miracle. She squealed in delight as he rubbed the mud on his hands onto her face, the few little clumps he had left. He didn’t want her to miss out on his discovery. He knew she’d love it. He knew she loved the drugs, like all the chicks he picked up. This was the newest and the best and the thing that would make him a star. This is what you get when you’re a star.
When he was done, he shambled to the shower to clean off. Marilyn came with him, giggling, touching him. When he got out, he saw that the trip had lasted three hours. Fuck. Don’t mix business with pleasure yet. Still got phone calls to make. He made them. He hated doing business with his folks home, but he could get a lot of money for this stuff and he wanted to get it fast. At first, his clients didn’t believe what they heard over the phone, but he had them curious enough to at least come over and try it out. Within ten minutes, five kids carrying a couple hundred bucks on them each were smearing the mystery mud on their faces and tripping like they never had before.
As usual, Noah’s evening was less fun than Kyle’s, although Noah wasn’t altogether unstimulated. He had been down in the cellar with the meager chemistry equipment he’d purchased over time and kept from his community college days. For hours, he sat there staring at the mud as if it had eyes to stare back, and secrets for those eyes to betray to him. He had already heated, cooled, poked and prodded the stuff and it seemed even less likely to respond than a regular clod of mud. He’d only learned two things about it: one, that it was immutable, though the patch outside had varying textures, there was no freezing or burning it. It remained as it was, an unsightly green muck that seeped in through the pores of skin it touched, and two, that it emitted a gas when water was added to it. Other than picking it up and moving it someplace else, there was no disposing of this stuff and if you got it wet then you’d end up with a whole room full of its side effects. He had a hard, icy feeling in his stomach and it didn’t warm up any when he went outside to check on the mud patch. It was about a foot longer and wider and had started to drip onto the compost heap.
“Jesus,” he said to himself, “you’re starting to see things. There’s not more mud here now. There couldn’t be…”
He took a deep breath, turned away from the mud and decided this was his imagination. This wasn’t the Blob or the Smog Monster or something from those drive-in classics he shared with his little brother back when they were too young to know they had no respect for each other. This was just a strange patch of psychoactive mud, and as strange as psychoactive mud was, it wasn’t a monster. He still didn’t know where it could have come from or why it was capable of doing what it was, but he decided he would dismiss it, though he knew, like the adults who deny the cries of “monster!” from screaming teenagers must have known that his dismissal could end up being a mistake. It was an odd position for him to be in, half scientist hero, and half doubting establishment. He went in and grabbed a beer from the fridge. It was the only drug he ever dealt with.
The next day Kyle woke Noah up around noon, an hour and a half earlier than he was used to getting up. He didn’t mind because Kyle had three hundred fifty dollars for him. He perked up almost instantly, counting the money to himself over and over again. It had been awhile since he’d gotten a chunk of cash like this. The part time jobs he’d held for weeks at a time left him with about half that much most of the time. He now understood why Kyle never got a job.
“You got all this from the mystery goo by the compost heap?” he couldn’t believe it. Seven hundred dollars for a few big clumps of something that was coming out of the ground. But then, wasn’t that how all the drugs were? Everything people smoke, every pill they take was something from somebody’s back yard. Maybe it wasn’t so strange. Maybe they just had the best back yard.
“I’ve been looking into this stuff,” Noah said, feeling like there was something useful he needed to do to deserve the cash, “I think you should know that this stuff is really unique among drugs. It has serious potential. I figured out that all you need to do is add water, and you can fill a whole room with this stuff, or, well, a diluted version of it. When you were washing the stuff off your face, I walked into the bathroom, and I was tripping on it too. Not as hard as you were, but pretty hard. So, we’ve potentially got a hell of a party brewing out back. Not to mention the fact that not a cop in the world would know you’re up to no good when it looks like you’re sitting just adding a few drops of water to a baggie of mud. It might confuse ‘em, but they won’t know it’s something illegal.”
“Couldn’t smoke it , could you?” Kyle asked .
“No, Kyle, you can’t smoke it. It doesn’t burn, melt or freeze. Can’t smoke it or freebase it. You can add water or you can smear it on yourself. I think people will take the water myself.”
Kyle nodded. “I’ve got calls to make and calls to take. See ya. Could you go out and do the compost and harvest the shit?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Noah went outside with a big bag of garbage, gloves and some freezer bags and got ready to bring in the drugs. He didn’t want to do it, but he wanted to prove two things. He wanted to prove that he could contribute, maybe not to science right away, but to something. And he wanted to prove to himself that he wasn’t scared of the stuff, that it was only dirt and water or clay and nothing more. He wanted to know that what he’d seen the previous night wasn’t true. Not growing, it wasn’t growing. And yet, it was. As he looked around for the compost heap to throw the trash on, he knew damn well he’d entered the Twilight Zone. Where the compost heap once was, was another massive lump, a small hillock of the green mud. If he’d known what to tell Kyle or who to actually tell about this, he would have run in screaming, but instead he just resigned himself to the mud. He took the clods and put them in the bags and without another thought he went inside . Five twentysomethings from the Community College were in Kyle’s room and they were each looking for a little bit of the new miracle mud.
“Hey, Noah, I don’t think that’s enough, you wanna go out and…”
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