Luci’s Magic 8 Ball
Ordeal Encounter #1
I grew up in a small, shitty Texas town. Around my sophomore year, a couple of my friends and I decided to start a pop-punk band, as kids of the Myspace generation oft did. I played guitar, my friend Barrett was a decent singer, and Aaron played bass. We would meet up at Barrett’s house after school and on weekends to write songs acoustically, cover Blink 182 songs and just be dumb teenagers; smoke weed, make edgy videos, watch horror movies.
After a few months, we had written a good 5 or 6 songs, and we all agreed we wanted to get serious about our music. We came up with the name “Newport” and began looking for a drummer since we couldn’t play shows or record “the greatest EP of all time” without one. One day at school, a friend of ours who’d heard we were looking for a drummer told us about her new boyfriend, Cayden. He was homeschooled and was, according to her, an amazing drummer who loved The Used. With little opportunity to find a capable punk drummer at the school in our little hick town, we figured Cayden was our best bet.
She told him we wanted to have him audition, and it turned out his dad played in a local country band, so he had a whole shed built specifically for his own band’s practice. We ended up driving to his house that weekend and used his dad’s equipment for his audition. Super professional, I know. Well, turns out he was better at drums than all of our talent with our instruments combined. Of course, he got the job! We took to being friends immediately, and his house became our new hangout. He lived a ways out of town, on about 5 acres of land off the highway with no other houses close by in any direction, so it was perfect for us to play as loud as we wanted without bothering anyone.
After our first gig at a local bar (we had to go in, play, and get out as we were all underage, but the owner knew Cayden’s dad), we were on top of the world. In our minds, we may as well have opened up for Blink themselves with how hyped we were. Anyway, we took our excitement back to Cayden’s house and celebrated by stealing liquor from his dad’s stash and smoking the overpriced schwag Barrett bought from one of the 3 people who watched our show before we left the bar.
We hung out in the band shed for a while and were all just reenacting our favorite parts of our time in the limelight together when Cayden told us about a trail in the woods behind his house. He said he was so used to it being there, he never thought to tell us about it, but the thought of smoking out in nature reminded him, and he thought it would be a great idea. We were pumped for anything back then, so we all hopped up and headed for the door.
As we entered the trail, a forest closely lining either side of us in the dark, Cayden told us how it was one giant horseshoe-shaped path that went around behind his house and came out on the other side. We started our journey through, smoking, picking up walking sticks and talking shit, when Aaron suddenly tripped over something. This was before smartphones were all that common, so we didn’t have phone lights to see what it was, but our eyes had adjusted enough to the dark by this point that we were able to see a ball-shaped object lying on the ground near Aaron’s leg.
He sat up and grabbed it. “Dude, it’s a fucking Magic 8 Ball!” It was too dark to see it completely, but Aaron could tell from holding it up close what it was. Cayden told us he never owned one and had no idea where it could have come from as we were on their isolated, private property. We didn’t really care where it came from, though. We were high and just wanted to go back in to play with the new toy.
When we got back inside the shed, we could finally see the eight ball in all its dusty glory. Aaron wiped it off with his shirt, and when he did, I noticed there was a name scratched into it. It was deep, like it was done with something sharp. The crudely carved name read, “Luci.” Cayden chalked it up to some kids possibly sneaking on to the property somehow and leaving it behind. We weren’t all too concerned with its origins (I wish we would’ve been); we just wanted to see what it had to say.
Aaron asked if we should smoke more weed:
“It is decidedly so.”
Our stoned teenage minds couldn’t handle the hilarity of this answer. We laughed for hours on end, asking it immature questions (Did Barrett make out with Sarah? Should I eat another one of Cayden’s dad’s Popeyes biscuits from the fridge? Will our EP be a hit?) and losing it when it would answer the way we had hoped.
After a while, the novelty wore off, and exhaustion from being up till four in the morning started to creep on. We turned out the lights and went to sleep on the pallets we laid out. We had planned to wake up the next day and run through a couple of our songs again before heading home to get ready for school the next day.
But when I woke up, Barrett and Aaron were looking kind of annoyed. I thought I had slept in too late or something, so I tried to ease the tension.
“What’s up, guys? Sorry if I slept in a little too late. We should’ve went to bed earlier. That 8 ball shit was hilarious, though!”
They didn’t seem amused.
“I can stay later so we can get our full practice in if we need to. My mom’s not gonna care,” I added.
“That’s the problem. Cayden doesn’t want to practice today,” Barrett hissed. “He’s still playing with that fucking thing.”
I gave Aaron a questioning look, thinking Barrett was just in a bad mood.
“I think he’s starting to lose it or something, man. Oh well. I’m riding with Barrett, and we’re gonna head out. We’ll see you at school tomorrow. We can figure out our next band practice then. Let us know if you get anything out of Cayden.”
I said bye and wanted to see the crazed Cayden for myself, so I meandered up to the front door of his house and walked in. I said his name loud enough for anyone in the house to hear it, but he didn’t reply. I went to his room, and the door was wide open, and he was sitting on the edge of his bed, holding the Magic 8 Ball, staring at it. He was maybe six feet from me, but he seemed so far away.
“Yo, what’s going on? I thought we were practicing today?” I asked him cautiously.
He didn’t answer.
“CAYDEN… Hellooooo…”
He didn’t look up but replied, “We can’t. I already asked Luci if we should practice today, and he said, ‘My reply is no.’”
I chuckled. Clearly, he was playing around. In the month we’d known each other, we had become fast friends. We all loved to joke around about everything and never took anything seriously. In my mind, he was trying to play the long game—make us think he was losing it, then he would look up slyly, and we’d all burst out laughing.
“All right, bro, well, I’ll text you tomorrow with the plans for next practice. You gonna hop on RuneScape tonight?”
He never looked up, just kept staring at the die floating in the dark blue inside the 8 Ball.
“I’ll ask and see later,” Cayden replied blankly.
I left without another word, starting to question if it really was a joke. Maybe he is starting to lose it. Would he miss practice over a laugh? Honestly, with how immature we were, I wouldn’t have put it past one of us. I texted him to see if he was going to game with me, but his only text back was just: “Don’t count on it.”
The next day when I saw Barrett and Aaron in the school cafeteria, Barrett told me how he got a text from Cayden saying that he could practice that weekend. But what should have been good news came in the form of a text that only said:
“Signs point to yes.”
Though we were weirded out, we went to Cayden’s after school that Friday and had an awkward band practice where Cayden didn’t say a word. He just played along. He played as amazing as ever, but he wasn’t himself. He didn’t joke around with us, he didn’t help us when we tried to think of lyrics for a song we were working on—he just sat on his drum throne and played our songs, and that was it.
When practice was over, Aaron and Barrett were so over the whole 8 Ball situation they just left without saying a thing to Cayden. It didn’t look like he noticed either. I decided to stay and see if I could find out how much longer he was going to act like a psycho.
“Hey, man. You mind if I hang out for a little tonight?” I asked him.
He looked over at the ball, which it seems had been seated on a wrapped towel on the floor all practice with the die facing him. He reached down, picked it up, and shook it.
“Don’t count on it,” he said, standing up and walking past me without taking his eyes off of the ball.
As he reached for the handle on the lited door to the shed, I grabbed his shoulder to try to turn him toward me, but something felt strange when I touched him. He stopped moving, and I felt a creeping feeling of overwhelming hatred arc up my arm and into my head like a bolt of electricity.
I yanked my hand away and stared in horror as he stayed facing away from me, not moving, but the reflection in the door showed more than just me and Cayden. A suited man stood behind me. He had to have been about seven or eight feet tall. He was smiling like a kid with a new toy.
“Ca-Cayden… you have to get rid of that thing… NOW! This isn’t a fucking joke, okay!?”
I wanted to grab the 8 Ball, but every cell in my body screamed out to me to get out of that room and as far away from that thing as possible. I don’t know if there was anywhere in the world far enough. Cayden opened the door to the shed without a word and went into his house. I stood frozen, waiting for the man behind me to break my neck or something worse.
But as the shed door closed and I could see my reflection in the lite, I was alone. I slammed through the door. I ran to my car and tore out of the driveway, watching his house shrink in the rearview mirror the whole way as if expecting it to grow legs and teeth and chase me down the highway.
When I made it home, I couldn’t relax. I still felt that evil, haunting entity. Everything seemed so much darker. I slept with my lights on that night. I dreamed that the Magic 8 Ball had made its way into my car somehow and the man was creeping through my house and up the stairs to my room when I woke up to my mom telling me that she needed to talk to me downstairs.
I wasn’t used to her waking me up on a Saturday, even if it was almost 1:00 PM. I bumbled my way down the steps to the kitchen where my mom was sitting at the table. She asked me when I had left Cayden’s the day before. I told her around 6:15 because I had made it home at 6:40ish. She looked grave. I asked her if everything was okay.
“The police came by this morning, baby… you may want to sit down.”
I don’t even remember sitting, but I must have because I remember being in a seat when the cops came back to question me later. According to the investigator, Cayden had killed his dad within 15 minutes of me leaving that shed. I wouldn’t find out until way later that his dad had been found with his eyes removed and his tongue split three ways. Cayden had turned the weapon on himself afterward and had chopped off all of his own fingers on his left hand before using a guitar string to cut his throat.
When the cops questioned me that day, none of them mentioned the Magic 8 Ball. When they asked me if he had been acting differently or strange, I mentioned the ball and how he had been only doing things that the ball would tell him to do. They didn’t seem amused, and because I dressed like an emo kid, they thought I wasn’t taking the whole thing seriously.
I pleaded with them to believe me. I even begged them to let me see if the 8 Ball was at the scene, but they told me there was no such Magic 8 Ball as they had searched the whole place for evidence and found nothing.
I often think of what our band could have been, the life Cayden could have lived—would he have gotten married? Would his dad still be playing in the local country band? Would we all still be friends?
His house was demolished soon after the incident. I have no idea what happened to that dark entity, Luci, or the Magic 8 Ball it came in, but I pray every day that it was somehow destroyed with their home. But something deep down inside tells me:
“Don’t count on it.”
Lucifer's 8 Ball?
This was such a fun story to read. Well done