by Ronald Malfi
“The great Tom Holland,” said a man’s voice from behind me. A second later, a heavy hand dropped on my shoulder. I swiveled around to find Scott Smith, the proprietor of The Fulcrum, standing behind me, sporting an ear-to-ear grin. He was short, stocky, balding, and had the cherubic babyface of a dwarf.
“Hey, Scott. How ya been?” I shook his hand.
“Same old. How ’bout you? I hear the group is kicking some ass and taking some names, is that right?”
“I guess. We’ve had some pretty good shows.”
“Friends of mine saw you play up in Philly at the Roadrunner last month. I was telling ’em how you used to play piano right here.” He jerked his chin toward that darkened barroom corner where the upright had once been, much like Tori had done. “Told ’em I knew you when.”
“He doesn’t want to be reminded of that, Scott,” Tori said, leaning back down on the bar again. “He’s a big star now.”
“Come on,” I told her. “Cut it out.”
“You like it, Tom Holland.” There was a girlish chiding to her tone which, despite her age—Tori Lubbock was pushing forty—fit her quite suitably. “You like it just fine.”
I smiled…though it faded as I saw headlights pull up alongside the curb outside the bar. Lauren. I felt my sphincter clench and then, on the heels of that, I silently chastised myself for being such a goddamned coward. It’s for the best, I told myself. Neither one of us wants to keep doing this. It’s gone on for far longer that it needed to.
It was wrong. I shouldn’t have told her to meet me here. This place was my place—I’d been coming here to drink before I was even legally allowed to do so—and it felt like cowardice to blindside this girl, whom I cared about, while I held home field advantage.
“How long you in town for?” Scott asked.
“A couple of days. We’ve got some dates starting up in Maine next week. We’ll work out way down the coast from there. We’re scheduled to end the year in Louisiana at some music fest.”
Lauren came through the door, pausing in the semidarkness of the threshold as she surveyed the bar. She wore a pink knit cap and a red pea coat, jeans and knee-high black leather boots with sizeable heels. I hadn’t seen her in about a month but already I could tell she had gained some weight: her face looked full and flushed, her lips reddened from the cold.
I raised one hand at her and her face lit up into a smile. “Excuse me for a bit,” I told both Scott and Victor, grabbing my drink and my cell phone and sliding off the bar stool. “I’m gonna grab a table at the back.”
“Sure thing,” Scott said.
“As you were,” Victor grumbled, already bringing his beer to his quivering lips.
Lauren joined me midway across the barroom, kissing me squarely on the lips while one of her hands pressed firmly against the small of my back. “You shaved,” she said. “I love you all smooth like that.”
“Let’s go sit down. Do you want a drink?”
Lauren waved at Tori and ordered a rum and Coke. We went over to an empty table beside the old abandoned bandstand and I sat down. Lauren stripped off her coat. I could smell her wildflower perfume waft up at me on a flap of cold air. We’d been dating just under a year, but that smell had become as familiar as everything else in my life.
“How’d it go?” she asked, sitting down at the table with me. “Was it great?”
“Everything went great,” I said.
“One of the shows had a live feed on the internet—I can’t remember which show—and I caught the second half of your set. You guys were great.”
“Thanks. I’m glad you saw it.”
Tori came over with Lauren’s drink. She smiled at Lauren then looked at me with something akin to resentment before walking away. Had she some idea what I was about to do? Did she disapprove for some reason?
“Cheers,” I said, clinking glasses with her just as I had with Victor moments before.
Lauren sipped her rum and Coke. I watched her from over the rim of my own drink, and was accosted by a despicable thought—namely, that there was nothing preventing me from taking this girl back to my apartment and spending one last night with her before I dumped her. Yet I hadn’t even completed the thought before I was loathing myself. A burning ember ignited at the center of my belly and I downed the remainder of my scotch without taking a breath.
“You look good,” I said, setting the empty rocks glass on the table.
“You do, too.”
“Work going okay?”
It was then that she knew something was off; her eyes sharpened the slightest bit and a determined firmness came to her lips. “Yeah,” she said. “It is. But…Tom…what? What is it?”
I grimaced, fingering the rim of my empty rocks glass.
“Something’s wrong,” she said. “What is it?”
Over Lauren’s shoulder, I saw a young woman enter the bar. She remained beneath the shadow of the unlit passageway than connected the vestibule with the barroom, her whitish form wavering in the half-light like a ghost.
Lauren put a hand atop one of my own. “Tom, what is it? Tell me.”
“I think…” I began, my mouth suddenly dry.
Loudly and clearly from behind the bar, Tori Lubbock said, “Oh my God.”
I jerked my eyes back toward the front of the bar just as Lauren spun around in her seat. The young woman had taken a few steps farther into the barroom, the garish ceiling lights bleaching her face a cadaverous white, as if all the blood had been leeched from her body. She wore a dark blue Naval Academy sweatshirt, the sleeves coming down past her fingertips, and black leggings that shimmered with a hint of iridescence. Something was wrong with her face…
Tori leaned across the bar and addressed the woman, whose eyes were as wide and as sightless as a pair of searchlights with busted bulbs. “Hon, you okay?”
“That’s blood,” Lauren said to me in a partial whisper.
It was: a single thread of dark blood ran from her right nostril down over her pale lips. As I stared at her—as the whole bar now stared at her—she slowly pivoted her head until she looked directly at Tori, who was still attempting to talk to her.
“Hon, you’re bleeding. Are you okay?” Tori grabbed a handful of cocktail napkins and hurried down the length of the bar. She passed through the open hatch in the bar top and headed toward the young woman…but stopped short in her tracks. I couldn’t tell why.
The woman shuffled another two steps toward the bar, her gait like that of a car crash victim. The look of shocked horror on her face made me feel queasy. I stood up from the table, my flesh suddenly crawling and moist with perspiration.
Tori dropped the napkins to the floor in a flutter. Then she took one automatic step backward. All the color quickly drained from her face. Victor Peebles slid quietly from his stool and, like a shadow, crept along the bar until he was planted firmly in one darkened corner of the room.
“That’s Wendy Pratchett,” I said, suddenly recognizing the woman. We had both gone to Annapolis High School together, though she had been a few grades ahead of me. I hadn’t seen her in years, and in her current state she was anything but how I remembered her…yet once I recognized her I couldn’t deny who she was: the slim, attractive cheerleader with the golden hair and the perfectly tanned legs.
I slid out from behind the table and headed across the barroom. The couple at the table by the windows pulled their eyes from Wendy Pratchett just long enough to shoot me a pair of inquisitive glances before turning back to her.
“Hey,” I said, approaching her slowly and with my hands out in front of me, like someone trying to calm a wild dog or a man with a gun. “Hey, Wendy. It’s Tom Holland. Do you—”
“Tom!” Tori Lubbock barked, breaking her stupor. She jerked her head in my direction. “Don’t go near her!”
“I just want to—”
Wendy Pratchett’s colorless cheeks began to quiver. Her irises seemed to shrink until they were mere pinpoints…and then her eyes rolled bac
k into her head. Somewhere in the ether behind me, Derrick Ulmstead shouted that she was having a seizure, and I was pretty much in agreement with him until Wendy’s left nostril also began bleeding. But not just bleeding: the son of a bitch was leaking like a sieve.
Much like Tori and Victor had done, I felt myself take an instinctual step backward until the small of my back struck the corner of the bar.
“Help her!” said the woman in the floral dress and shawl. Her voice was shrill and taut, like a tightly wound guitar string. “What’s the matter with her?”
“Wendy,” I said in a breathy whisper as my heartbeat accelerated behind the wall of my chest.
Wendy Pratchett swayed unsteadily, like a drunkard preparing to go lights out, and I swore I could hear the tendons in her ankles creaking like an old rocking chair. Or maybe it was the ancient floorboards groaning beneath her feet. It seemed I anticipated the fall—that I actually saw it happen in my mind’s eye a moment before it did—as I found myself bracing for it just before Wendy’s knees gave out. Her legs buckled beneath her and she went straight down, tipping forward midway through the fall so that she slammed the front of her face down on the scuffed wooden floorboards. I heard her bones rattle and her teeth vibrating in her skull—a horrific, stomach-churning culmination of sound.
Chair legs barked across the floor and I felt rather than saw people rising up behind me. But I wasn’t interested in them; my gaze was firmly fixed on Wendy Pratchett’s body as it trembled on the barroom floor, as if someone were firing jolts of electrical current through her musculature. More specifically, my eyes rested on the back of Wendy Pratchett’s head. Suddenly, I understood what Tori had seen that had caused her to warn me from getting too close to Wendy…
Someone rushed up beside me. Somehow I possessed the wherewithal to grab the person by the forearm and prevent them from getting too close to Wendy, too. I glanced up. It was the man in the cream-colored knit sweater, his face a hardened scowl. He opened his mouth to say something but I shut him up quickly enough.
“Look,” I said, and pointed to the thing affixed to the back of Wendy’s head.
The thing’s tubular body was perhaps eight inches in length, a chitinous, metallic green, and roughly the diameter of a standard garden hose. It curled like a fancy tapered door handle down the back of Wendy’s head, its body narrowing to a pointed spike from which protruded a hooked stinger that reminded me of a bear’s claw. Even from where I stood, which was a good few feet away, I could make out spiny black hairs sprouting from the segmented carapace. Two sets of semitransparent wings, like those of a dragonfly, lay flat and perpendicular to its body, as big as banana peels. Its head, which was halfway nestled in the blondish tangles of Wendy’s hair, was like something out of a horror movie: a fleshy ovoid knob just smaller than a plum crowned with two multifaceted eyes that resembled shimmering daubs of liquid mercury. Feathery antennae curled like quotation marks just above the eyes, and something about them—perhaps their luminous aquamarine sheen—reminded me of peacock feathers.
“What…” the guy in the sweater said very close to my face. He did not complete the thought.
I didn’t notice it had legs until they actually moved: six segmented twig-like protuberances, pale yellow in color and rimmed in thorny spikes. They moved like hydraulic pistons, a mechanical sluggishness that for some reason made me ill. It was horrifying to see Wendy’s hair tangled around one of the stalk-like legs…
Someone else shoved against my right shoulder. I thought it was Lauren until I recognized Derrick Ulmstead’s throaty voice. “Holy fuck. That’s a…is that a bug?”
As if having understood Derrick’s comment, the insect lifted its bulbous head, its domelike eyes glittering. A slender, translucent proboscis withdrew from the back of Wendy’s skull. The tip of the proboscis was barbed and I could see clotted blood retreating up the stem of the slender transparent tube and toward the creature’s head. A patch of Wendy’s hair was black with blood. I glimpsed a perfect dime-sized hole drilled into the back of Wendy’s skull.
“Oh Christ,” Derrick groaned beside me while my own gorge threatened to rise.
Scott materialized beside Tori, his face grim. He pulled a damp dishtowel from off his shoulder and began wringing it in both hands. As he took a few steps closer to Wendy Pratchett’s body, Tori started to whimper.
The thing’s antennae twitched. There was something horrifically dog-like in the way it cocked its fleshy, ovoid head in Scott’s immediate direction. Scott froze in a partial crouch. The hand holding the dishtowel was cocked back above his head, ready to strike. It seemed the entire world had been paused and no one was able to move.
Scott whipped the back of Wendy’s head with the dishtowel. Blood arced across the floor and someone cried out, sounding very much like a tortured cat. Scott withdrew the dishtowel, revealing the enormous insect looking disturbingly unharmed, and poised for a second blow. Before he could strike again, however, the thing’s wings began to vibrate and blur. Like a helicopter, it rose up off Wendy’s head and hovered there, strands of blood-streaked blonde hair still tethered to its stick-like legs. Then it darted with the efficiency of a predatory bat across the barroom. Patrons cried out and scattered while Scott’s towel whapped uselessly against the back of Wendy’s head a second time.
I spun around and immediately saw the thing clinging to the decorative wooden bunting that hung from the bar’s canopy. Its tine-like legs dug for purchase along the woodwork, the legs themselves so impossibly oversized and solid I could hear them scraping along the bunting.
Scott twirled the damp dishtowel into a whip and again swatted at the thing. He struck it and knocked it off the canopy. It struck the bar with an audible pop. Upside-down, all six of its grotesquely long legs cycled in the air. Its wings reverberated against the bar top, a sound not dissimilar to a vibrating cell phone. As I stared at it, the thing made an inverted V-shape of its four wings, hefting its shimmering cylindrical body up off the bar.
One of the women sobbed, “No.”
Jake Probie leaned over the bar and grabbed one of the circular delivery trays. He shoved Derrick and me aside and lifted the tray above his head with two hands. He exhaled a shuddery breath…then swung the tray downward, crushing the insect beneath it. The sound it made was like stepping on a bag of potato chips.
No one moved. No one made a sound. After a bit, Jake’s hands released the tray and seemed to float unanchored in the air, trembling. The tray sat cockeyed, like an unbalanced seesaw. I waited for the thing beneath the tray to begin moving at any second. Waited, waited…
“It’s dead,” Scott said with grave finality. He was breathing heavily and great droplets of sweat had burst out across his forehead. He went to the bar…hesitated…then lifted the tray off the bar top. What I glimpsed beneath reminded me of the time I accidentally stepped on a partially melted Snickers bar someone had dropped on the sidewalk in the sweltering heat of late summer. Scott stared at the mess with disbelief etched clearly across his face. A tic appeared at the left corner of his mouth. He blinked the sweat out of his eyes then said, “There’s blood in it.”
I turned my attention back to Wendy. Her body remained in the same position it had fallen. Her hair was clotted with blood and again I caught a glimpse of that horrid black dime-sized hole through the hair—a hole that looked like it went straight through her skull and into her brain…
Derrick Ulmstead elbowed the guy in the sweater aside and dropped to his knees beside Wendy. I followed suit, settling down across from Derrick. Briefly, our eyes met over the girl’s body. I wondered if the fear I saw in his eyes was copied in my own.
One of Derrick’s hands slid beneath the tangle of bloody hair. At first I thought he was trying to turn her head so that she could breathe, so I reached down to help him, but he shook his head and said, “Don’t.”
I froze, watching.
Derrick Ulmstead was in his early thirties. He worked as a lineman for BGE and was in pretty
good shape. Normally, he had what girls referred to as boyish good looks, but right now, as I watched him, his boyish good-looking face was contorted into a mask of fearful concentration. From where I knelt, I could see the large black pores in his flesh, the faint crop of blackheads at the sides of his nose, the bruise-colored panels of flesh saddled beneath his gray, tired eyes.
After a moment, those tired eyes looked back up at me. “No pulse,” he said. “She’s dead.”
“That can’t be,” Scott said as he came up behind me. I looked up and was troubled by the look on his face. Behind him, Tori stood with her hands cupped over her nose and mouth. Her eyes were like burnt fuses.
“Wait. Just wait a minute.” It was the man in the cream-colored sweater. He had his hands out in front of him, much in the same fashion as I had approached poor Wendy just moments before. The woman with whom he had been eating stood slightly behind him, her eyes bouncing between the man and Wendy’s body on the floor with the frantic unrest of a small dog. “Let’s just all calm down for a minute. She can’t be dead.”
“You can check for yourself,” Derrick offered.
“What was that thing?” Tori asked.
“Help me roll her over,” Derrick said to me.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Why not?”
I looked over the bar and saw Lauren standing on the other side of it, half masked in shadows. Her face floated like the moon. Her eyes gaped fearfully at me.
I sighed. “Okay. Count of three.”
Derrick said, “One…two…three,” and we rolled Wendy’s body onto her back with little difficulty. Her head rocked onto its side, the skin already a pallid, doughy color, except for where the streamers of blood had run from her nostrils and spilled down over her lips and chin. There was blood smeared across one cheek, too. Her eyes were still rolled back in their sockets, exposing nothing by white orbs like poached eggs threaded with tiny red blood vessels.