by Cory Barclay
Steve’s stomach caught in his throat. He gasped. He’d heard that AA slogan before, “Keep Your Side of the Street Clean,” but never with the afterthought Aiden just added about the shadowy figures in the alleys . . . No, he didn’t get Aiden’s meaning.
And frankly, it scared the crap out of him. It was a little too close to home.
“Pancho?” he said out of the blue.
“Huh?”
Steve shook his head. “Never mind. I’ve got to go.”
“Aren’t gonna stay for the rest of the meeting?”
Steve turned around and ran for his car as nonchalantly as possible—which was pretty chalant since he never even said bye to the ginger man.
“Steer clear of the shadows, Steve Remington!” Aiden yelled.
Steve got in his Lexus and drove off. He thought he heard the little man cackling as he peeled away, but that could have just been his head playing tricks on him.
STEVE BARGED INTO THE studio and heard music playing in the background, down the hall. He went to the hallway and swung open the door where the music was coming from.
Dale was in the commander’s chair, twiddling with the song he and Annabel had recorded, while Annabel sat on a stool in the corner of the room, looking bored.
“Hi, Mister Steve,” Annabel said hopefully.
“What did you mean when you said you were sorry for killing my friend?” Steve demanded.
Dale pressed the STOP button on ProTools and spun around in his chair. “I can’t mix this thing with you yelling in the background, man.”
Steve ignored him. He pointed his finger at Annabel and repeated the question. “What did you mean?”
Annabel looked a bit frightened. She faced the ground.
“Steve, you’re scaring the poor—”
“Enough of that shit!” Steve shouted. He truly felt like he was losing his mind. “You’re not a little girl!”
His words pierced through the room and brought about a thick, stuffy silence.
“You’re right,” Annabel said at last, looking up from the floor. Her face was strangely becalmed. It was enough to unsettle Steve and to squash his outburst. He shrank back.
“I warned you; bad things happen when I sing.”
“What kind of bad things?” Steve asked meekly.
“Like people getting hit and killed in random alleyways.”
“Why?” Steve asked incredulously. “That makes no sense!”
“What part of me being a banshee didn’t you understand?” Annabel asked. Steve could tell by the dark look on her face she was being dead serious.
Dead maybe being the operative word?
“I-I thought you were joking . . . you know, like, ‘I don’t sing, I shriek.’ That sort of thing.”
“Well I wasn’t.”
“But what does that even mean?”
Annabel scoffed. “Look it up.”
She got up from the stool in a hurry and started to walk toward Steve, who was still standing in the doorway.
“And that means . . . your parents being vampires?”
Annabel squeezed by Steve but stopped in the doorway to look up at him. He noticed for the first time her eyes were dark and changing—they seemed to flash from purple to blue to orange in rapid succession.
“That was true, too.”
“B-but if you’re the daughter of vampires, why are you a ‘banshee’?”
“Because I was adopted, okay?”
Then she shoved past Steve and was storming down the hallway.
Steve scratched his cheek. “I guess that trippy dream makes a bit more sense now,” he muttered to himself.
“What trippy dream?” Annabel called back. Steve looked out into the hallway. There was no way she could have heard him from that distance.
Annabel came barging back into the room, forcing Steve to the side lest he be run over by a small woman and thus deeply, deeply embarrassed.
Steve opened his mouth to speak, but before he could a harsh sound cut him off.
It sounded like a mix between an ocean liner’s foghorn and the deep, guttural rumbling of an earthquake.
It was Dale laughing.
He had to hold his hands to his belly as if keeping his insides from spilling out, so hard was he laughing.
“Jesus Christ!” he shouted through ragged gasps. “You two are too much! Can we get back to finishing this song, please? I think we have a certified blockbuster here!”
CHAPTER SIX
That evening Steve was splayed across his bed with his computer on his lap. Across the small room on a little table was a tiny TV that his eyes kept flickering to. That’s when he saw the local news headline:
CAR CRASHES INTO PACIFIC BEACH DINER, ONE DEAD
Steve frowned at the headline. He hopped up from the bed and peeked out his single window. Downstairs, a news van was set up with a cameraman filming a reporter on the sidewalk. A small group of onlookers was crowded around the reporter and cameraman. The reporter was motioning to the yellow tape a police officer had set up earlier that afternoon, since the location was now considered a crime scene.
Steve went back to his bed and went on Google. He searched the term “banshee” and did a bit of research—his eyes widening as they scanned the screen.
According to Google, a banshee was a “fairy woman, a female spirit in Irish mythology who heralds the death of a family member, usually by wailing, shrieking, or keening. As other cultures believe, she hears voices, and predicts the death of a supernatural being.”
Steve was flabbergasted. Up until he’d met Annabel the day before, he had been struggling, dealing with loss, but his world was still quite clear. He wanted to record and manage musicians—that was the extent of his ambition. After his band had failed to make any traction in the past, he’d taken to the business side of music, which was where the money was.
But now everything was in turmoil. He didn’t know what to believe anymore. Could Annabel be telling the truth? Surely not. There was no such thing as fairies or spirits or banshees. He knew that.
Steve was a practical man. He was a realist. And this bizarre news and the strange things surrounding him were really throwing his realistic views for a spin.
At the very least, Steve believed he was starting to go mad. Perhaps he needed to see a shrink. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Maybe this was all just a bad dream.
But he knew that wasn’t true, as much as he wished it. He’d had bad dreams, and they’d involved vampires on the beach. Annabel’s parents, supposedly. No, this was real and terrifying.
Steve could hear the music coming from downstairs, through his floorboards. Dale had added a bass track, and now the continuous playback of the song thumped and vibrated his floor.
He decided he needed to find out more.
He listened to the rest of the news report, which correctly stated that a homeless man had been caught in the crossfire and killed on impact. The driver, one Shannon Barton, had been transported to Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, where she was undergoing intensive care. She was expected to make a full recovery.
On a sticky note, Steve jotted down “Shannon Barton, Scripps” for future use.
Then he got up from his bed and traveled downstairs to the studio.
Dale and Annabel were still hard at it.
“Song’s almost finished, I think,” Dale said upon Steve entering the room. While they had two other guitar tracks for songs, they’d foregone recording vocals after the eerie events of that day. They had this one track. So be it.
Remembering his Google research, Steve asked, “Annabel, where are you from?”
Annabel, who was sitting on the stool in the corner of the room, faced Steve. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Steve shrugged. “I don’t know what to believe, Bel. Nothing makes sense. Try me.”
Annabel cleared her throat. “I’m not part of this world. Well . . . I suppose that’s not true. I’m part of this wor
ld, but not of this plane . . .”
Growing frustrated, Steve said, “What the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know how to explain it to you, Mister Steve. I’m from a place called Mythicus. I suppose that would be the rough human translation.”
Dale tapped on his keyboard and tuned out Steve and Annabel, as if the extraterrestrial paranormal conversation wasn’t even happening. Steve had to admit, the big man had laser focus.
“And what are you doing here?” Steve asked, his voice edged with panic.
Annabel shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“You don’t know what brought you here?”
Shaking her head, Annabel said, “Like I said, I think it was you. How? I don’t know. But that would explain why my parents are trying to speak to you.”
“Yes . . . through my dreams,” Steve muttered. “Are you sure you don’t have me mixed up with someone else? How could I have brought you here? I’m just a regular guy.”
“I don’t know, Mister Steve.”
Steve sighed. “Are there others like you out there?”
“Sure, in my world.”
“What about in mine?”
“I don’t know. I suppose there might be.”
Steve felt no closer to finding out any answers. He expected Annabel to know a bit more about her own species and her own world, but that was too much to ask, apparently.
He turned to leave the room.
“Where are you going, dude?” Dale asked without looking away from the computer screen. “Don’t you want to hear the finished product?”
“I’ll hear it when I come back.”
“From where?” Annabel asked.
“The hospital.”
STEVE PARKED AND RAN into Scripps Memorial Hospital. He didn’t expect to learn much, if anything, from Shannon Barton, but it was worth a shot. Maybe she could explain away some of the craziness.
He didn’t know what brought him to Scripps, or why he thought the driver of the car crash would know anything, but it was like he was lured here by a nagging subconscious voice.
The thought of Pancho appearing and disappearing kept bothering him. And since Shannon had crashed into Pancho’s friend, maybe she’d seen Pancho, too.
If he could just get one person to tell him they’d seen the stocky homeless guy, maybe he wouldn’t feel so insane.
Steve went to the front-desk nurse and asked for directions to Shannon Barton’s room.
“What’s your relationship with the patient?” the Filipino nurse asked as she rapid-fire typed on her keyboard.
“Friend,” Steve lied.
“Mm-hm,” the nurse said, clearly seeing through his façade.
“Can you tell me what happened to her?”
The nurse’s eyeballs moved from left to right on the computer screen. Then she said, “It looks like Mrs. Barton was in a car crash, sir. She suffered a concussion and some minor bumps and bruises. Doesn’t sound like anything too serious.”
“Thank God,” Steve said, feigning surprise. In actuality, what was going on in the back of his mind was, Great, a concussion? She won’t remember a damn thing . . .
“And I’m afraid you can’t see the patient,” the nurse said.
Steve leaned forward on the counter. “Why not?”
“Because she was discharged nearly an hour ago.”
Steve tilted his chin forward. “Let go? Why? By whom?”
The nurse swiveled the computer so that Steve could see the screen. “It looks like she was signed out, willingly, by one Aiden O’Shaunessy.”
“And you let her leave—to be carted off by a stranger? With a concussion?”
The nurse leaned back, offended. “The decision was Mrs. Barton’s, sir. She said she knew the man who signed her out. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing more I can do for you.”
Steve pounded his fist lightly on the table, frustrated.
Then he realized he, too, knew the man who had signed her out. He ran the name over in his head a couple of times until it stuck.
Aiden O’Shaunessy, the freckled ginger from the AA meeting.
BACK AT THE STUDIO, Steve was downtrodden. His mind raced. It seemed like all these people were connected somehow, but he couldn’t put the pieces together. Aiden, Annabel, Tumbleweed, Pancho . . . and now even the driver of the deadly car crash, Shannon Barton.
But what was their relation to one another?
And now he thought about it . . . how the hell could Shannon Barton be released so quickly? For Christ’s sake, she’d killed a man just that afternoon!
There had to be laws about that . . .
It was like Mrs. Barton had simply slipped under the radar.
Now he had no leads and no one to look for—only Annabel to answer his questions, and she clearly didn’t know too much. He wondered why she wasn’t as disturbed about this whole thing as he was.
If she really was thrust into another world . . . realm . . . whatever, shouldn’t she be a little more distraught?
Dale told Steve the song was finished, and Steve said, “That’s great, I’ll get it to John tomorrow.” Dale seemed discouraged at Steve’s sudden lack of interest in their finished masterpiece.
Steve cozied up on his bed again and watched the TV for any developing news on the car crash. It didn’t take long for his eyelids to droop and for the snoring to begin.
It didn’t take long for the dreams to start soon after.
HE WAS IN A HOUSE. It was an old Victorian house, decrepit and musty smelling. Two figures sat around a table, peering at him through red eyes.
The vampires, husband and wife. Their pale, gaunt faces frightened Steve, because he didn’t yet know he was dreaming. Everything seemed so lucid. And the way they looked at him struck true fear into his heart.
“Where is our daughter?” the man asked in a thick accent, which Steve believed might have been Transylvanian or some other Dracula-related dialect.
“She’s safe with me.”
“She will never be safe with you. You must return her to us.”
“How?” Steve asked.
The husband joined his hands together on the table. He had long, sharp fingernails.
The wife spoke: “Seek the Druid.”
Steve furrowed his brow. “The Druid? Who the hell is that?”
“She’ll know what to do. She’ll inform you,” the wife said.
“How do I find her?
“Search.”
Steve sighed and threw his hands up wide. “Where, goddammit?!”
Then the husband was right in front of him. It was like he’d teleported from the table. Steve took a fearful step backward.
The vampire grabbed him with icy hands, around his neck.
“You will know when you’ve found her!” he shouted, then squeezed hard.
Steve felt himself turning blue. He couldn’t breathe. He gasped and clawed futilely at the vampire’s strong hands.
Just before he suffocated to death, he woke up.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Steve was convinced someone was trying to kill him. In his manic hysteria, it was the only thing that made sense. He tried to explain this to Dale and Annabel the following morning, after his second deadly dream.
“I don’t know why,” he explained in the recording room, “but that car crash was just too convenient . . .”
Dale scratched his head. “No offense, dude, and I’m not trying to deflate your ego or anything . . . but why would anyone want to kill you? You’re not that important.”
Steve said, “I know I’m not.”
“Except Julie, maybe,” Dale said with a snicker. “Though I think you would want to kill her more than the other way around.” He thought about that for a moment, the cogs in his head clearly working hard. “Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Want to kill Julie.”
Steve narrowed his brows and flung his head back. “Of course not! Jesus, Dale, how did we get to this? Stay on track!”
<
br /> “Right. Some mythological vampire family is trying to off you.”
“My parents aren’t trying to kill you,” Annabel said. “They just want me safely returned.”
“Then why do they attempt to murder me in my dreams? They’re always doing something terrible to my neck to wake me up.”
Annabel shrugged. “Maybe it’s the only way they know how to wake you. And to scare you. You must admit . . . it seems to be working.”
Steve ignored her comment, not wanting to agree with the accuracy of her response. “And how are they communicating with me in my dreams?”
“I believe it’s something all Mythics can do with people from Terrus. It seems to be a communal power.”
“Terrus?” Steve asked.
“It’s what we call your plane. Your world.”
Steve glanced at Dale, who was starting to swivel in his chair. For how much focus he had when it came to recording music, he was surprisingly ADD in every other aspect of life.
“Tell me about your world . . . about Mythicus,” Steve said.
“It’s like Terrus, only a bit . . . different,” Annabel replied, struggling. She put a pale finger to her pale chin and cocked her head to the side, staring up at the ceiling.
“A superbly detailed explanation, Bel,” Steve said, sighing.
After a momentary pause, Annabel continued. “Things work differently there. It’s like here, only upside-down.”
“I’ve seen Stranger Things. I understand the concept of the ‘upside-down.’ ”
Annabel shook her head, started over. “Everything—er, most everything is the same as it is here. There are people who inhabit the world, people I can interact with. The landscapes are the same . . .”
“But . . .” Steve coaxed.
“But you can interact with the landscapes differently. I can talk to the paintings, learn their histories and mysteries. If a mirror has a strange reflection, I can travel through it to where it’s reflecting. Same with reflections on the surfaces of water, or in the flames of campfires.”
“Damn, that sounds tight,” Dale said, his mouth partly open. “I wanna go.”