from Obsidian Magazine's "Blacklight"

The evening air was crisp and smoldering sweet, just edging into the October chill in Michigan, and the sharpening scent of burning oak and locust leaves could make you feel a thousand years old. But I wasn’t a thousand years old, I was twelve and yet the turning of the year towards the autumn awoke a special sensibility in me that was as compelling as it was difficult to articulate. I loved the fall, loved Hallowe’en, felt the whisperings of ancient ways stir and rustle within me, begging for some kind of expression. I would feel this calling many times throughout my young life, always growing more pervasive and more insistent. I started having a lot of flying dreams. Wild, high-speed flights where I was acutely aware of the cool night air around me, hyper sensitive to the vertigo and elation of my elevation, and direly certain that my power of flight was an act of steady concentration and will. I would whoosh past the nighttime silhouettes of trees and feel this crazy anxiety that I could crash or that I would loose my altitude and feel the ground rush up terrifyingly fast. But then, as I got a little more nerve, I would sail high above the trees, looking down on the lights of the town below. This sense of being carried up into the sky would happen in my waking life as well. Almost as if it were a subtle layer of experience laid almost imperceptibly over my mundane life, I would glimpse the shadow movements of events through a diaphanous veil. Often these events would include another, more feral version of myself having experiences just beyond my capacity to perceive them. It was excruciating. I would take long walks late at night to court this sense of otherworldly sight. I just knew there was a great deal going on a psychic centimeter away and wanted desperately to awaken to it. Now that I reflect on this 23 years later, I am surprised at the depth and breadth of the shamanic states I experienced all through those years. The autumn had a special mythos to it. A kind of dread clarity and power that would bang hard and insistent upon the door of my mundanity and demand that I partake in an ancient rite. It’s a story that I just don’t talk about and yet, it reads like a page out of the medieval history of witchcraft. It was as if there was a Grand Sabbat in the night sky, just like a scene scored to Saint Seans’ Dance Macabre or Night on Bald Mountain by Rimsky Korsakov. I was called. Powerfully called. Whirling through the air, flying maniacally across the face of the crone mother moon. Insanely ecstatic, a creature of pure sensation and speed, I soared in a black ballet with many other beings ripping through the ethers. The blue lunar light cast it’s spectral glow down on the glades and glens of the rolling world below. Tiny flickering fires dotted the tops of the harvest hills. And the presence of dark forces was very much a part of the proceedings, in fact, it was at the center of them. Wicked it was. But what does this mean? My present life is not about dabbling with dark entities in any way. In fact, I am rather boring in comparison. It’s not as if I actually rode a black goat off into the air to commit such historically heinous acts as dancing back to back, trampling the cross and blaspheming. Whilst it certainly carried a flavor of that old Nightshade-induced witches’ ride, it seemed more pervasively elemental than anything else. I would be very interested to know if other people have heard the lure to enter this shadow convocation in the sky, to ride as a witch across the face of the moon and to partake in a terrifying, unfathomable mystery. Anybody remember me from the party? written in October 1999

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Scott Fray
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