Here Be Monsters - an Anthology of Monster Tales (13 page)

“Just terrible to hear about all the devastation in town though, the ritzier buildings all got ate up pretty bad, lots of people gots to spend their money to rebuild now.” He rambled on and I let him talk. His accent wasn’t native to
Louisiana
in the slightest, but I couldn’t quite place it either. He had a big heart, and I figured it was why he hid behind the long, black hair and tattoos.

“I heard about the Wilburn Facility. Gas main blew just as the storm hit. They’d evacuated it the day before though. Only time they’d ever did that though, lucky they done it though I guess. It’s just odd though that nothing else on that whole street got damaged by that, no fires, nothing. And only one half of that there building blew out, left their inner garden untouched. Just real odd.”

I grinned at his words as he wiped off my back and handed me a mirror again. My back had a large blue bird rising up out of flames and ashes with a red-eyed black dog in its talons on it now. A phoenix was fitting I thought, considering.

“Can you add just one more thing?” I asked. “Right under the flames in script: ‘
Two of four, three of three, five of one
’.”

He looked at me oddly for a moment but complied, handing me the mirror once more. I nodded my approval and paid him generously for his time and work.

Stepping outside the shop, I realized the street was much like those I was most familiar with. I glanced back at the shop window to see my reflection. My eyes flashed red as I pulled my sunglasses down over them and grinned.

My phone started buzzing in my purse and I picked it up, looking at the display before opening it.

“Good afternoon Levi,” I said sweetly as I left the shop front ready to start the next chapter of my new life
.

Sara Reinke

©2011

All rights reserved.

“Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there,” the man at the bar said to me, nursing a fresh two-fingers worth of Ketel vodka in a tumbler he cradled between his thick, calloused fingers.

“‘He wasn’t there again today. Oh how I wish he’d go away,’” I answered, drawing his sleepy but surprised gaze from the basin of his drink.
“Antogonish
by William Hughes Mearns. That’s what you were quoting right?”

He studied me for a moment as if seeing me for the first time and trying to size me up. Most of the terminal drunks who typically dragged their sorry carcasses into the tavern this time of the night amused themselves by ogling my tits or hitting me with slurred promises of unimaginable sexual pleasure. Not this guy—John was his name. His first name anyway, or at least that’s what he’d told me. I didn’t know his last one, didn’t really care.

When he said nothing, I rolled my eyes and turned away, grabbing beer mugs off a drying rack by the sink beneath the bar and mopping beads of residual water away with a hand towel. “Forget it,” I muttered. Why try to carry on an intelligent conversation—much less a literary one—with someone who’d pretty much polished off a fifth of vodka all on his own, all in less than two hours?

“What’s your name?” he said.

“Mel,” I replied. “Short for Melanie. No one calls me that except my dad.”

He’d asked me this before and I’d answered him the same. I waited to see if there was any dawn of recognition in his face at the words, wasn’t the least bit surprised when there wasn’t.

“You drink, Meg?” he asked.

He’d called me Meg every time, too.

I held up the mug in one hand, the towel in the other, gave both demonstrative little shakes. “Not while I’m on duty.”

I didn’t tell him I never drank because my old man was a drunk, and even though he’d been clean and sober for seven years now, once upon a time, he’d liked to get into the Pabst Blue Ribbon and then slap me and my mother around for shits and grins. I had never tasted alcohol. I worked in the bar so I would never forget it—the hot stink of booze on his breath—and how much I hated him still for that.

John nodded once, fingered his glass again, and tossed back the entire dollop in a solitary swallow. “That’s good,” he told me, his gaze wandering distantly toward a nearby pale water ring stained into the top of the bar. “I wish I’d never started. Maybe then they’d leave me alone.”

I glanced around the pub. It was a Tuesday, almost midnight—almost closing time. Besides John on his bar stool perch before me, the place was pretty much empty. A couple of kids with greasy hair and too many crude tattoos to have earned them anyplace but prison loafed in a far corner, shooting pool and drinking beer. They had one girl between them, a bleach blonde in a too-tight denim miniskirt who didn’t seem to mind the two-to-one odds.

Figuring what the fuck, I had nothing better to do, I took the bait and walked back over to John. He had that cast in his eyes, a tone in his voice that my chronic drunks sometimes affect when they want to get nostalgic or wax rhapsodical.

“Maybe who would leave you alone?” I asked. Probably his family—his old lady and kids. He was wearing a wedding ring. Old ladies, kids and chronic alcoholism seldom mixed company amicably.

He looked at me. “The periphery people.”

I blinked at him, wondering if I’d heard him right. “The who?”

Still he studied me, his gaze unwavering—surprisingly steady, in fact, given the amount of booze he’d been knocking back that night.

“Periphery people,” he said again, pronouncing the words slowly, carefully, as if each was a delicate crystal vase he was trying to swaddle in newspaper before packing away in a box in the attic. “Although they’re not really people. Not like you and me. I don’t know what the hell they are.” He blinked, his eyes growing cloudy again, and he looked away. “Never mind. You can’t see them.”

Again because I had nothing better to do—and because I was actually caught off-guard by both his poem quotation and his use of a functional vocabulary word not typical of the common lexicon—I leaned comfortably across the bar. “Why can’t I see them?”

“You have to be drunk,” he replied. “Or at least I do anymore. Didn’t use to. I could see them just fine on my own when I was a kid. I think kids are more receptive to seeing them. They believe in things, you know? Like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.”

“Or periphery people,” I supplied and he nodded. “The periphery of what?”

John flapped his hand, indicating the room. “Here. There. Everywhere. Everything. They’re always around, standing in the shadows. All along the edges.”

“The periphery,” I said.

“Yeah.” He lifted his glass to his lips, then realized he had no more vodka.

“So they’re here right now?” As he set the glass down, I reached for the Ketel bottle and topped him off.

“Yeah.” Nodding to me in thanks, he took a small sip, smacked his lips appreciatively and drank again.

“You said they weren’t human. What do they look like?”

He shrugged. “They’re tall. Really tall. Like seven or eight feet high. They wear cloaks, hooded cloaks. The cowls cover their heads.”

Cloaks. Cowls. Periphery and poetry. I was beginning to wonder if this guy, John, wasn’t your typical chronic drunk at all, but something more…tragic.

I made a show of glancing around, brows raised. There were plenty of shadow-draped edges and corners in the dump where I worked. Not a one of them seemed to be harboring a seven-foot-tall giant hooded man with a cowl over his face.

“You can’t see them,” he told me.

“Because I’m sober.”

“Yeah. But they’re hideous.” He shuddered, though whether from this admittance or the drink, I wasn’t sure. “Their faces are flat. There’s nothing there—no eyes, no nose. Only a mouth. Round and gaping, taking up almost the whole front side. Ringed with teeth. God, lots and lots of teeth—rows of them going backward down their throats, just like a shark.”

The color drained somewhat from his face, leaving him with a sort of putty-colored pallor. “They like to eat, you see.”

Maybe it was the unspoken body language that seemed to suggest this poor son of a bitch was really buying the snow cone machine he was selling to the Eskimos. Whatever the reason, I found myself simply staring at him. And fighting the urge to shiver.

“Eat what?” I asked, my voice uncharacteristically small.

His expression shifted, growing grim, his eyes round and earnest. He whispered one word in reply to me: “Souls.”

I’d expected him to say “human flesh.” Maybe even “brains,” or perhaps
spleen, appendix, right little toe.
This, however, caught me by surprise.

“Souls?” I asked.

“They latch on to the back of your head with their teeth. Then they wrap themselves around you, make you carry them around like that while they glut themselves. Sometimes they take a little. Sometimes they take a lot. Depends on how hungry they are.”

The cracked vinyl seat cover beneath his ass creaked as he shifted his weight, pivoting to glance behind them. With a nod, he pointed out the ménage-a-trois-in-situ playing pool. “You see that girl over there?”

“Yeah.”

Turning in the seat again, he leaned across the bar toward me, close enough for me to smell the vodka in his breath. “One of them’s feeding on her right now.”

I took another look, but saw only the blonde laughing, slapping away one of the guy’s hands as he tried clumsily, vainly to grope the generous outward swell of her ass.

“She looks okay to me,” I said.

“Because you can’t see it. And she can’t feel it. Not yet anyway.”

“But she will?”

John nodded. “One day, yeah. She’ll find out she has cancer. Or AIDS. Or maybe she’ll step off the curb at the wrong time and get plowed into by a bus. Or have a psychotic break and shove a seven-inch-long butcher knife through her husband’s sternum while he’s sleeping one night. But not at first. That comes later. I’ve seen it. No, at first…she’ll just be sad.”

“Sad.” I repeated this, brow raised.

“You ever feel like everything in the world’s gone wrong? Like you can’t do anything right? Like the world is nothing but a big pile of dog shit, and you’re just a smear in the fecal matter taking up space? That kind of sadness, that sort of despair—that’s what they leave you with once they’ve eaten enough of your soul. From there, it only gets worse. Because that sorrow…that unhappiness, it must smell good to them, draw them somehow. They’re always with you after that, like a pack of wolves, fighting over you, for their chance to latch onto your skull and drain you dry.”

I’ve been tending bar for a long time—for seven years, starting about the time my mother had died and my dad had first sworn on her deathbed that he’d go clean, and then had shocked the glorious ever-living shit out of me by sticking to that. I’ve heard a lot of stories, yarns woven by a lot of guys far more wasted and crazy and pathetic than John. But for some reason, I couldn’t just bob my head and cock that condescending smirk that I usually reserve for someone shitfaced and rambling. The
in-one-ear-and-out-the-other
look, I call it.

“They’ve fed from you, you know,” he told me pointedly.

I felt a chill steal down my spine, slithering and unnerving, like a live eel dropped down the back of my T-shirt. Managing a hoarse bark of laughter, trying my damndest to sound dubious, I said, “What?”

He nodded.

“How can you tell?”

His eyes found mine—round, sorrowful, nearly sheepish. “You knew the poem. You haven’t always been a bar maid.”

Normally, that antiquated and decidedly misogynistic term—
bar maid
—might have made me bristle. But this time, instead, it only sent another of those unpleasant little tremors racing down from the nape of my neck toward my ass.

“No,” I said in slow admittance. “I was a teacher. English literature. High school.”

“World civilization,” he said by way of introducing himself in ex-career fellowship. “At the university. Had tenure and everything.”

We studied each other for a long, quiet moment.

“Something happened,” he said. “Something that changed you. Maybe a moment you can’t quite put your finger on or remember, but it’s there. And in that moment, whether you knew it or not, a part of your soul was gone.”