Real life does not follow literary or theatrical conventions. In a play, one would seldom remove the lead from the stage in the fourth act, if a fifth was left to run, because the other characters would very likely find themselves lost on stage, wondering what to do. But this was exactly what was about to happen, five months after Sam started dating Dawn.
Remember, Bloodaxe has joined the small mob of people spreading rumors at Sam's expense, stabbing a one time friend in the back by lying about what the friend said in a conversation, and then tirelessly spreading that lie around, becoming an enemy in the proicess. What is the least appropriate thing that a girlfriend ... er, friendling ... er, significant other could have done at that point?
"Sleep with her significant other's enemy?", you ask - wrong, but on the right track. Try, "pay the significant other's enemy to do something sexual with her that involved whips, and then asking Sam to inspect the welts afterwards".
Sunset. Off in the distance, you can hear church bells ringing, but you're not going to mass. You get up to the door, and ever so gently rap on it. It opens slowly. You see a massive figure inside, slightly indistinct in the gloom. You can just barely hear the sound of bedcoils squeaking. "Sam, what are you doing here ...", he starts to say, eyes opening wide as he sees the axe coming down and ...
"Sam, are you going to look at those welts or aren't you? I think they're starting to infect". Sam snapped back to reality, and Bloodaxe was still very much in one piece. "No", Dawn, they aren't infecting", he said, as he began to gather his things and started to leave. "Will any of this matter in a hundred years?" So goes the cliched question, but this time around one could just as well said "a hundred weeks". Dawn was good for Sam, in a lot of ways, for a while, but when he discovered that she had been with Bloodaxe ... No, that was a little too much. But soon afterwards, he was dating a woman to whom he would eventually be engaged. To this day, he still has warm feelings for Dawn, but as for the rest? He could only shrug.
Sam obviously couldn't stick around after such an insult, and thinking about the people he had met, found that he had little reason to want to stay. This left the community in a difficult position: it no longer had a scapegoat. This left its membership with nobody to turn their aggressions on, but each other.
Mary the tree hugger, who tended to follow the more aggessive members of the group around like a loyal pit bull puppy, eagerly turning mean on command, started spreading rumors about Lisa. This knocked her out of the picture, as she was soon asked not to return. Mabel rarely was seen without Mary nearby, and, indeed, seemed uncomfortable without her trusty pet nearby, at her beck and call. With Mary gone, she apparently declined to return, and soon faded from the memories of those who continued to attend. This left Kitty in the position of having to face people who weren't being ganged up on. At last report, she was looking quite upset about this.
Actually, much more than a little. When Bloodaxe's story reached her, she took it at face value, as she had the other stories that had been created to support her position - and found herself too frightened to return. This theme would be repeated over and over, as each member of her clique believed, not his own lies, but the lies told by his fellows. By the time Sam was being given Mafia connections by the rumor mill and the story about his being in league with the powers of darkness came out, those telling the tales were so horrified by them, that they could no longer find the courage to attend the coffeehouses any more. Sam almost regretted their disappearance. He had been attaining near mythic stature.
Lucy stopped attending, about the time that she found out that Rachel, John Bohac's former girlfriend, had started lighting black candles in her honor. Rachel had heard that John was spreading the rumor that she had joined the ranks of the undead. Telling people that this was why he had dumped the woman he had asked to skip Med School and relocate with him, as he went from adjunct position to adjunct position. He had gone on to persuade Rachel's roommate to toss her out on the street, when he found out that Lucy was looking for a new place to live and that she liked Rachel's neighborhood. In fact, that she liked Rachel's apartment, and wanted it - NOW! John persuaded Patty to oblige her.
Appreciating John's rich and well developed imagination, Rachel decided to indulge it. Apparently, she had found some sort of dentist who could reconstruct one's teeth in ways that nature had never intended, and decided to go for the vampire look. After she started talking about taking a chomp out of Lucy or John, Lucy started deciding that partying at home was a greatly underestimated weekend option. Sure, we did convince Rachel that a mouthful of Lucy's blood was something that she might not want to swallow, at least until certain vaccines were perfected, but it didn't seem to help. And where Lucy is, there would be John Bohac, trying to get his girlfriend's attention. That was the end of them for a while, especially because John has admitted to being scared of Rachel and who knew when his former Mistress of the night might come sliding in out of the shadows. But he and Lucy did manage to keep themselves amused for a while, in their cozy little nest. One pictures them together on a warm, summer night, shades drawn and door bolted, quenching their thirst with a fountain glass full of Lucy's lithium and a pair of straws. How romantic. We'll almost miss them. As, perhaps, Lucy was to end up missing John.
The coffeehouse group itself relocated out of Cafe Buzz, to a chain coffeehouse, and Lucy's crowd had not returned, for the most part. John Bohac had returned - with a companion. Patty, Rachel's former roommate. Now that she and Lucy were living together, in spending a lot of time with Lucy, John found himself spending a lot of time with Patty, who he found himself more than a little fond of. The last I saw the two of them, they were locked in an embrace so passionate, in the middle of the coffeehouse, where all could see, that people were asking when they would be applying for the marraige license. This, without the formality of a breakup with Lucy, for love couldn't wait. Lucy was barely been seen in group, afterwards. Her friends, if that's the right word, weren't coming, anyway.
That's how it went. People scattered off onto the net, as the fight left the real world for cyberspace, and interest faded out. Dawn, before she and Sam parted company, talked with a few of the people that Kitty had recruited, and reluctantly, they admitted that this was all very, very silly, and noted that Lucy was more than a little bizarre. "Too little, too late", Sam thought, noticing that even as the old excuses for hostility were discarded, new ones always seemed to be found. He walked away, into the calmer and warmer atmosphere of a neighborhood in which nobody spoke of psychic attacks or premonitions, and few seemed to believe that their prejudices and neuroses defined reality. A bad era was already starting to fade, even if some were holding onto it for dear life.
A year and a day after Sam walked out on Dawn, he looked into the Reader and saw that a Pagan social was meeting that night. Out of curiosity, he boarded the Red Line, and dropped by.
Only four people were present. Bloodaxe was ranting on and on about how the police had learned to leave him alone, while the person sitting across from him tried to break in a varying degrees of success, as the next hald hour passed. We almost called the man "Bloodaxe's conversational partner" but, no, that wouldn't be right. What Sam was witnessing was, as he put it, more a pair of monologues battling for control of the air than a real discussion; they weren't even on related subjects. At another tiny, two person coffeehouse table, shoved right next to the one Bloodaxe and his one-man would-be audience were sitting at, Sam found Ron, the organizer, who Dawn had referred to when she had urged him to go to that Autumnal Equinox celebration. Satting down near somebody who he had once regarded as a friend, he could quickly see the hostility in the man's face. No more than a pair of sentences passed between them - about what, Sam can't remember, until Ron returned to his own monologue, to which a much younger member of the community was listening with rapt and dutiful attention.
"So close that their knees must be knocking each other under the table, and yet they are all alone", thought Sam. That was the last event the community ever held, that Sam attended. There was no reason for him to return, not even curiosity, for he knew that the story was over, that nothing that he would ever see out of it would ever bring another surprise, and that there would be little left to see. He shrugged and rose to his feet to find the 36 Broadway Bus waiting for him, and in a flash, was gone.
Where did you enter this story from? Choose the right answer, and you should end up in the right place.