The Hangover

"What the fuck happened last night" Doom asked over the phone. His head was splitting and sweat was oozing out of every pore.

On the other end Maniacal drew a blank and answered in silence. Such were the layers of disbelief, lost in the forest wide eyed with fear. He stared at the characters arranged on the piece of paper as if they were hieroglyphs or Sanskrit, or something he just didn't want to or couldn't possibly want to understand.

It started to come back to him in flashes of colour and twitches of shapes, scenes and people. Did they go out with him? What the hell would happen if they went out with a troll? Would it matter? Maniacal didn't like people asking him a lot of questions, and going out drinking in town with a mythological troll was a sure way to get that.

He stared at the phone for a little bit more and then slowly put it down on the table next to his bed. He looked down at himself and at the women's underwear he was wearing. He looked at the blank wall next to his bed and hoisted himself with care and precision up off the side of his bed to his feet and then proceeded to dash to the bathroom down the hallway to puke.

He thought about the hate that Curtis welled up inside of him. Then retched again. It was a funny but very real hate. Not like the hate towards religious leaders and politicians or the conformist sheep of society, but more like the hate of a younger, annoying and especially bratty neighbour. It should have been a lot different from this he should be there to help them do unholy stuff. Instead he was just a dickhead.

There was much Doom could not figure out. Why the scene turned into what it did, where the llama or the credit card came from, much less how they managed to yet again unwittingly summon this troll. But the thing that made even less sense was why he didn’t like their music. He should like this stuff. It was evil. They were Cold Forest and that’s where he was from one would imagine. It was almost a homage. But instead they have this ingrate little dickhead hanging out and talking shit.

Curtis the troll was just a pain in the ass, which according to lore was what he was supposed to be. But with this came a lot of disappointment. He was a pain in the ass not to some horrible child in a story, but a pain in the ass to their band, and their band already had enough issues and Doom could not handle any more disappointment.

It had been now three weeks in a row and he still kept on showing up. They could not figure which song, if any, summoned him, or how he would know they even had practice. They even changed the day of practice each time hoping to throw him off, but it would never work. He would still show up.

Usually it was up to Doom to do research for the band. Since he didn’t work or anything, he went to the library to look up things about trolls and Norse mythology to see how they could get rid of him or to stop him showing up at their band practice.

They tried the lightning and church bells thing. They tried riddles, as he read that could get rid of trolls. Curtis figured out two out of five of them but still didn’t disappear and they were left wondering if they had to be special kinds of riddles or they gave him too many tries. It was all so unclear.