A guttural cry consumed the traffickers’ high-pitched whistle. The bellow was so deep the ground shook. The roar then chopped in-and-out, like a large animal with the throat space to swallow a trombone.

Before I could come to grips, the animalistic thunder triggered a hazy memory in my mind. The outlines of my retrospection traced a familiar creature, but gave nothing more.

From a game?

A movie?

Neither made any sense. But whatever’s going on is beyond ‘human’ trafficking. Beyond performance.

Against the hot box of human sweat, my perspiration chilled to a halt.

Are we being sold to monsters?

This can’t be real…

The range of explanations dwindled, but the debt of bewilderment piled up.

My mind fractured under the competing stressors of internal and external distraction. I tried to cut each emerging sensory experience into refrigerated leftovers. Each new iota of information suggested the hardest conclusion of them all.

Somewhere, somehow, my life had gone terribly wrong.

Even if I was suffering from massive brain damage, even if it was the worst trip in human history. Either signaled a catastrophic issue with my health and wellbeing. A hallucination so dangerous it might just stop my tangible heart from beating.

A thudding gait woke me from my spiral. Whether it came from a single presence or several, the omen was ominous enough.

The caged chattel made noise at each pound of the ground. Worryingly, the slaves made no such noise up until now. Nerves were evidently in the air. They must’ve been terrified, and I was almost in their cohort.

Physically there with them, sure, but mentally… mentally I shifted my sense of awareness away from anamnesis and into bifurcation.

Phase 2.

I slowed my breath again, going as deep into myself as I could. I was finishing preparation for the weirdest magic trick of all. A Houdini to hoodwink the master himself.

The sleight of hand where I escape my own body.

When I said no prison could stop me, I meant it.

In the 3rd grade, I had my first heart attack in the dead of night. My chest turned to stone while my limbs experienced a biological electrocution. The terror of separation from my life, from my family, ripped me apart.

So I chose otherwise, to break free from it by any means.

I wished as hard as I could, and my wish came true. The agony ended. More accurately, I left the nightmare behind. I left my body to handle the pain while I went up, where it was safe.

Confused, I turned around to face the impossible.

From above, I was myself. From below, my body was another.

This condition, of course, doesn’t exist in the medical literature. Clinically speaking, I died. And perhaps, in some liminal DMT-infused state, I dreamed nonsense.

But truth is often stranger than any fiction.

This phantasmic separation was short-lived, but frequent. I didn’t die once, I had many nights like this growing up, all thanks to TC.

A heart attack and the ensuing near-death-experience would push me out of my physical form. And when I say me, I mean my consciousness, or maybe my frame of reference — a situation I can only describe as a bifurcation or an out-of-body experience.

There are others who do this, who have died yet lived to see it, but even they don’t know the whats or the whys. What’s important is how I conquered these impossible situations, these navigable NDEs. I managed to make them a practice, a skill — a collection of efforts more engaging than existential.

So long as I didn’t look at my body, I had this liberating leash of experience. Time or distance, I wasn’t sure, but I tested many things out of pure curiosity.

For instance, I could see whatever I wanted to see, hear whatever I wanted to hear. I became the eyes and ears of the neighborhood. Invisible, and instantly teleporting to wherever I wanted to be helped me find lost cats for my friends and a buried time capsule in the park. I even learned secrets about my parents that changed my relationship with them forever.

While dead, I was all-powerful and none were the wiser.

Unfortunately, I never quite got the full out-of-body experience to happen without mind-melting pain or clinical death.

Ten years later, my mastery of mind and body made the impossible a little more possible. I couldn’t induce a heart attack, and obviously I wouldn’t want to, but the base circumstances were more important than the recreation of a heartfelt injury. In other words, the pain was the door, and the desire for escape, the key. The trick was pain without panic. A fine line only I could navigate.

With the memory planted through visualization (my anamnesis), I began the ritual of exchange.

A mouthful of blood would suffice.

With a bit of finesse, I got my mouth to reach my shoulder. Resisting the urge to gag as I sunk my teeth in, I gurgled a few times before nausea came through. I had to persist against all urges to stop despite my tough rotator cuff muscles putting up a messy fight.

Without free hands, my options were limited. This was the only bite I could take.

But my sleight of shoulder was not the magician’s performance other’s would pay for. The sudden gagged reaction of a young voice almost distracted me. I had never done this standing up before, let alone surrounded by onlookers. I suspected my blood was drenching his head and he lost his lunch over it.

Whatever the case, I ignored those factors, made them unreal.

I kept biting until the pain was intolerable, until my teeth met each other again, but not far enough to send my heart into a desperate race. Trust me when I tell you, this can only be done after facing the distilled fear of death in the total comfort of your bed a hundred times over.

To any unblindfolded observer, it was definitely psychopathic, institutionalizing behavior — yet it was the sole way out of this physical prison.

As soon as your brain stem realizes your body is not experiencing life-threatening pain by natural circumstance, your consciousness starts to disassociate. From there, I can execute my escape by jumping through a doorway normally reserved for death.

Hopefully I’d get through the door without the death.

My blood kept running, I held a dim awareness of the substantial wounding I self-inflicted. I couldn’t think of the permanent damage I was doing to my muscles, or the arteries I may have teethed in two.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I let the irony feast add to my disgust and desire to leave this fleshsuit behind.

Another thump rose from the ground and forest fall cracked along with it. If that came from the demonic buyers, they were quickly getting closer.

Finally, an electric sensation cloaked me, the before and after of a prickly numbness known to few. This sensation signaled that the invisible, fuzzy coat that kept me in was unraveling.

If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

This will work. I was close enough to heart attack territory to remember all too well and my body accepted my forced NDE.

With a static release, my senses buzzed beyond my physical form into whatever field allowed this mystical insanity to occur. I never really knew what was real in this psychedelic state until I returned to my body. And that’s the key, to not return until your job is done.

I erased all thought of my fleshy body, and operated under the assumption the OBE — the bifurcation — was in full effect. The less you think about it, the easier it is to experience it. From here on out, I’d just drift and dream as an invisible ghost.

But I was rusty, and the flood of proximity distractions came to me first. My fellow slaves-to-be were acting unusual. Instead of continued panic, on the contrary, my ghostly sense registered calmness from them. Did they have tricks like I did?

Or did they resign their fate?

Or did they know something I didn’t?

They mumbled under their breath — a practiced chant. Some high-level hippie shit. I couldn’t judge, I was the level 100 hippie right now.

I moved on because this wasn’t my goal.

The targets of OBE were the beasts in the bush. My noisy followers and the creepypasta’s they left for me. They were the reason these traffickers feared the woods.

The ‘mardekkle’s.’

My consciousness blacked out and I awakened at my intended destination.

Whoa…

Immediately, I had perceived the mardekkle unambiguously. What could’ve been a shadow from a giant tree belonged to no such thing. The source of my earlier haunt stood in a bipedal magnificence. The beast was unaware of my presence, but mighty imposing by design, so I was careful to remind myself of my current condition and capability. Nothing can harm me in this ethereal form.

Mine was a spirited state where fear served no purpose.

Empowered, I studied the build of the beast in a slow pan up. My assessment was emotionless, clinical in its comprehension — no different from staring at a creature on the pages of a manga.

The mardekkle didn’t hide in bushes; it stuck dried bushes around its feet, like pompoms from the ugliest cheerleader imaginable.

The humanoid form was hugely familiar. Nevertheless, I refrained from all judgment as soon my rational mind crept up. If I started thinking too hard, the OBE would. It always did. So I had to go with the flow and accept this entity before me as real.

Standing twice as tall as any human, with black, brown, and reddish blots of fur, its presentation was the stuff of legend.

Yeah… exactly, I thoughtfully agreed with myself. It was a spitting image of popular culture’s favorite imaginary beast. A Bigfoot.

Again, I held judgment and logic at bay, to feel this being as if it was real and not ridiculous. It wasn’t easy, but it was the only way to complete the 3rd and final phase of my OBE.

Now, you might not believe this, but stay with me for my next act. I’m writing this recollection as accurately as possible.

Remember when I said I snooped on my neighborhood? How I found important things for people, like pets?

You know how I got those lost dogs to come home?

I didn’t chase them down, I walked into them. I became them. Their eyes and ears were my eyes and ears.

In my OBE state, I’m an observer without the rules of a familiar form. But if I observe from within a form — another’s mold… I get to drive. I get to chaperone the owner for a short period of time.

Its physicality becomes my costume.

And yes, it’s indescribably alien. But just because it’s alien, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. I don’t have great examples, or great ways to get this across. Sometimes you have to experience it yourself.

But in short, getting the hang of foreign bodies is like playing baseball without hands. Like being right-handed but writing backwards with your left. Or getting in a car with no pedals, in a vehicle designed for a different breed of driver.

So it was with the mardekkle I walked with. I became the driver of this lifted monstrosity — I had 12, 14, maybe even 16 feet of fur and muscle at my disposal. The poor vision challenged me, but the great hearing and my swinging, lengthy cantor made up for the rest.

But the way it all comes together…

Controlling this beast of a vehicle was more disorientating than being drunk. I wouldn’t be able to fight everyone and everything. I’d be thrown off first.

Eventually, the ‘driver’ the creature was born with would kick me out, so my time was limited.

I took a cautious step, and I got back forward motion and the reserved crunch of the bush below. The lack of a satisfying thump got me to stop and think. These creatures used bushes like hush puppies, as silencers of their heavy weight. How intelligent were they? As smart, or more than the brainiest monkey?

I silently stomped to the encampment, its location immediately perceptible from my lopsided sensory ability.

I wanted to break open the bars before the foreboding buyers, or other potential reinforcements, showed up. Half-naked and very stinky didn’t matter in a game of numbers. If I freed the slaves, we could overrun the three stooges and their lantern OCD.

And then I would free my own prisoner — my original vehicle.

As soon as I reached the familiar treeline, I noticed a cold mist where it shouldn’t be. My animal instincts, which meld slightly with my full consciousness, were highly concerned with this mist.

Was it the buyers?

My act of possession, or borrowing, took seconds to complete in real-time but minutes to return to camp. The buyers signaled their presence only a short time ago. I had no time to lure, trap, and disarm the traffickers. I wouldn’t be able to return Newsboy’s ‘favor.’

My fuzzy vision caught red-orange lights bouncing in the woods beyond. Whatever the buyers were, they’d make their appearance momentarily.

Now was the time to act.

I immediately burst through the shadow line, wrapped my huge monkey-extended hand around a lantern, and blew Newsboy up with a strike that a pinhead such as him wouldn’t walk away from.

Like a prized starter’s fastball, my briefcase-sized gaslamp reached its trafficker target instantly, and packed a metallic punch that no human body would withstand. A heavy ball of discomfort grew in my stomach, I knew what I had done. The creature did too, but I again had to refrain from any judgment. Facing this sense of self-disgust would come later.

Meanwhile, his two dirty partners stumbled around before making a peculiar gesture.

If it’s another magic trick…

I kicked lanterns in their general direction. My size 30 foot sent several green lamps their way, effectively suppressing whatever response they had planned. Upon contact, puffs of red mist signaled their permanent defeat.

I turned to the cages, making my way to the bars soon to be bent. Again I noted the females, particularly the purple-hair females, leading a chant.

Was the fog above the cage associated with this?

No matter. I began to wring the bars out with my super-simian strength, building a gateway for the oppressed to flood out of. Their faces were not thankful, but not as scared as I thought they’d be. The men in bronze-red skin appeared at peace. Through the bars and over their heads, I could see the lighting of the incoming buyers at a stone’s throw away. These mysterious degenerates would soon transition out of the shadowed realm and into the lightened camp.

My pace was too slow, and the bars were stronger than expected. Only one could crawl through at a time, and dozens needed freedom.

I’d have to fight.

But if my creature was wounded, I’d get kicked out. If I got scared, I’d get kicked out. If anything went south, I’d be back in the cage, a living product for another’s consumption.

I held two lanterns, not to swing like purses, but to throw like that titan monkey did. Don’t judge, I’m not a martial artist. I prefer to be as far away from pain as possible. In fact, I’ve played enough games and consumed enough televised violence to roleplay anyone’s favorite long-range damager dealer. So yeah, I am a pretty good shot, and my new arms were verifiable cannons.

The mist overhead grew as I took position by the bonfire. I wanted to be closer to the light. There was safety in this heated clarity, its light as warm as it was incorruptible. My shadow stretched far beyond the medieval shipping container, and I would protect everything within.

I also hoped my effort to make distance might give me the ranged advantage. But my hopes fell fast. The orange lights bounced in the woods, but they made no move forward.

I heard a petrifying screech, this time behind me. They circled around?

My elongated, prehensile hands almost lost their grip, their jitters out of my control.

Fuck me, even Bigfoot is scared.

His heart, my heart, raced around our shared chest. The call of the creepy buyers came again, and I remembered the origin — its prehistorical provenance. It was straight out of a movie.

I turned, expecting to be face to face with the ultimate impossibility. I only caught menacing glimpses through the flickering flames before my vision blacked out. My vehicle went dead, I lost possession. My judgment of the situation, or the death of the creature I inhabited, I didn’t know for sure.

Well. I tried.

My sense of smell returned first, reminding me of my place in this world — returning me to the cage I tried to escape.

Sixteen feet of monkey strength and of course a better beast showed up.

My numb arm and my violent vertigo said the rest, I was back and suffering the physical effects of blood loss — my payment for the trip to the beyond.

Still sufficiently sardined, I surmised that my hole through bent bars was too slow of a faucet for slaves in the back, like me.

Too woozy to get frustrated, I surrendered my fate to chance, but with one final recommendation to my future self.

Next time, I’ll get a bigger beast.