Her hand shot out and grabbed Solomon by the throat, cutting off his air, fingers curled in as though to crush his windpipe. He grabbed her wrist and tried to pry it away, but couldn’t, and he was much stronger than her. Dude drums, remember. And it’s not like she did barbell curls. Then that ghostly face smiled and a dry cackle came through even though the girl’s lips were closed.

“I cannot die,” it said. “You resurrect me. Bring me here through your emptiness.”

Solomon was close to passing out when she pulled him near so that their noses were almost touching. Her eyes opened then, the man’s like cataracts. When she spoke it was a discordant mix of her voice and the man’s. “I eat what you grow. I am your hate.”

Her mouth opened so wide the hinges popped and her lower jaw sagged down and her neck bulged and a buzzing sound began to build from the depths of her throat. And Solomon was stuck and couldn’t pull away as a swarm of locusts came flying from her gaping mouth, battering his face in a torrent rush of wings, knocking him back as she released him and the bus filled with the buzzing of locusts like a plague.

As you may imagine, mayhem ensued. Tankerson, our bus driver and stage manager – who was halfway sober and corroborated the story, at least the part about the locusts – came back and saw the bugs flying from that chick’s mouth and the Ouija board on the floor, and he’d had experiences of his own, though nothing like this, so he grabbed it and took it off the bus and ripped it up the best he could and burned it soon after. Just like I wish I’d done to this godforsaken book.

The chick’s jaw was all busted up. Her throat scratched to shit. Tankerson took her to the hospital and I’m not sure what happened to her from there. That was Solomon’s and her last date, and I say good riddance.

I wouldn’t have believed half of it if Tankerson wasn’t there to validate the story. Plus, there were a bunch of broken wings and stuff in the bus when we got back, and piles of husks where Tankerson had swept them out. At least, that’s what I was told. I don’t really remember. The guys and I got pretty lit at the bar dealing with spirits of a different kind and when I woke up we were in another town.

So let me just say I was less than enthused by the idea of fucking around with this Ouija board supplied, as far as I knew, by Professor Fucking O in a cabin out in some nowhere woods near a mirror on which runes had mysteriously appeared that invoked the voice of some stranger in my mind. No, thanks.