As if the absence of streetlights and homes didn’t foster an already oppressive darkness, Toby had to contend with the glare of his phone, which rendered everything beyond the screen inky black by contrast.

The Pinpoint app was trying stoically to guide him to the customer’s location, but it had clearly been designed with residential neighbourhoods and main thoroughfares in mind.

This was always going to happen. As soon as you advertise GPS-tracked Pizza delivery, some joker is going to decide to have it delivered to the middle of nowhere.

A few more stumbling steps up the hillside and his patience expired. In defiance of his dwindling battery, Toby thumbed on the torch function, praying that he could find the drop-off point before his phone failed entirely.

Every footfall was a clear, unique sound, which made Toby terribly aware of the relative silence around him. He quickened his pace, squelching and crunching along the trail until a faint glow began to bloom in his line of sight.

The little campfire was, it transpired, at the very summit of the hill. A figure was perched there on an upturned crate, back turned to Toby as he approached, cloaked in some kind of animal pelt.

“Pinpoint Pizza!” Toby announced as he drew nearer, as much to banish the silence and his mounting anxiety as to alert his customer.

The figure half turned. “Oh, excellent. Just put it down over here.” It was a man, not much older than Toby himself, noticeably dishevelled. Toby wondered momentarily how the guy charged his phone, before becoming distracted.

“Wait,” he started, raising to gesture at the customer’s ostentatious headgear. “Is that a – ?”

“It’s an Alsation,” the customer confirmed. “Head and pelt.”

Toby laughed, without really knowing why. “It’s kind of… it makes you look like a Witch Doctor, or something.”

“Really? I’d describe myself as more of a… more of a Warlock, actually.”

“Oh, right. Yeah.”

Toby waited awkwardly for a while, as the customer leaned over the firelight, fiddling with something in his hands.

Eventually, he said: “Mate, you have to… I need you to confirm receipt on your phone, before I can go.”

“Oh, certainly – but I haven’t even looked at it yet. Give me a moment, I’m just finishing something.” He gestured to a second crate, on the far side of the fire. “Have a seat.”

Toby lowered himself gingerly onto the rough, wooden boards. “What is it? I mean, if you don’t mind me asking.”

The customer smiled, looking up. For a moment, both the man and the Alsation’s eyes gleamed with reflected flames.

“It’s a tool. Something I’m making to channel power in certain ways. It needs certain kinds of ingredients to make it effective, and they need to be bound together – ” (he paused to raise his hands, exposing a weaving motion) “- in just the right ways.”

“Right,” Toby responded, nodding but utterly lost. “What’s it supposed to do?”

“It affects the minds of the people it touches. It induces… memory loss, confusion, hallucinations… madness.”

Toby’s neck prickled. The tool was more clearly lit now, as the customer held it aloft; bones, hair and other unidentifiable substances made up its construction.

“I’m not being funny, mate, but why would you – why would anyone make something like that? I mean, not that I believe it. It just looks like hippy jewellery.”

The customer chuckled. “Perhaps. But it’s not completely finished yet. There are more things I need to acquire in order to make enhancements; perhaps it will seem more impressive once I have them.”

He rose to his feet and began to stroll casually around the fire. Toby tracked him, eyes locked on the bone wand; the customer swished it lightly through the air, this way and that.

“I can make do with the bones of a treasured pet for now, but I need something with a little more oomph in the long term. The more dreadful a creature’s end, the more appalling the act which precipitated it… well, the more easily it can help me to unravel another creature’s mind when the moment comes.”

“Bullshit.” Toby’s hands shook. The world beyond the circle of firelight was shrouded in featureless black.

“Well in that case, I’m sure you won’t mind if I…” the customer’s words tailed off as he passed out of sight.

Toby leapt up, whirling around. “Don’t you fucking touch me with that thing!”

The customer laughed, skipping over the crate toward him, swiping the wand back and forth like a rapier.

“Oh, Toby,” he sighed, as the deliveryman scrambled backward around the fire. “It’s a little late for that.”

“What do you mean?” A pause, then: “H-how do you know my name?”

“You first felt this object’s touch five days ago, my friend,” his tormentor smiled. “And many times since.”

“Please,” Toby wailed, scanning desperately for an escape route “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I just came to deliver a – ”

He froze, as his eyes alighted on the crate where the customer had been seated. From this angle, they were obvious: four identical boxes, slumped on the ground beside it, each bearing the Pinpoint brand.

“A Pizza?” the customer suggested. “Is that really what you think you’ve been bringing me all these nights?”

He stooped to grasp the box which Toby had recently set down, and offered it to him. “Here. Take a peek.”

An odd sensation came over Toby as he accepted the box; his arm moved of its own accord to lift the lid. Then he was shrieking in horror, hurling the box away from his body with as much force as he could muster.

“No! I didn’t… it wasn’t me…!”

“Oh, but it was,” came the hiss at his shoulder. The customer had slipped behind him somehow, and was now clasping a hand over his mouth, pulling him backward until his head was pinned against the man’s chest.

“Don’t worry, though,” he continued in soothing tones, as he slid the tip of the wand into Toby’s inner ear. “I can help you forget.”

***

This was a Story Generator entry, based on the formula: Hiking trail, pizza delivery guy, delirium, witch doctor