by Sara Reinke
It looks like some kind of worm.
With a disgusted shout, Nemamiah stomped the heel of his shoe heavily down onto the creature, crushing it in a quick splatter.
Was that thing inside my ear? Jason thought wildly. What the hell was it? What’s going on?
Nemamiah shoved the point of his sword against Jason’s sternum, digging into his flesh, the blade poised to punch through him. “That’s one of you down,” he said. “Now to send this meat sack of yours and that misbegotten demon back where you both belong.”
Demon? Did he say something about a demon?
Jason thought he was hallucinating, that Nemamiah had rapped his head hard enough against the bricks to leave him hearing things—and seeing them, too, because the other man now appeared to be on fire, surrounded with a corona of light, pale but bright, his skin and clothes suddenly brilliantly aglow. As if statically charged, the air around him crackled and hissed. His irises had vanished and his pupils too. There was nothing left distinguishable of his corneas, nothing between his eyelids but that dazzling, blinding fire.
This can’t be real, Jason thought. This can’t be happening! What the fuck is going on?
“Please,” he begged, pawing helplessly at the blade. “Please don’t kill me.”
The illusion of Nemamiah being on fire, of his eyes having dissolved into white light, abruptly vanished, and he blinked at Jason, looking surprised.
“Please…” Jason croaked again. “Take my wallet, whatever you want…please.”
Nemamiah reached up, shoving Jason’s hair back out of his face, or more specifically, away from his forehead. Then, grasping Jason firmly by the jaw, he tilted his head this way and that, turning him toward the light, as if trying to see him better.
“You’re unmarked,” he said at length, his voice quiet, incredulous, as the sword point moved away from Jason’s chest.
Jason fell to the ground, clutching at his shoulder. For the first time, he realized he was inexplicably naked, as if he’d somehow come to lose his clothing in between being shot and being stabbed. His mind was swimming, the world around him spinning, and he could feel his consciousness waning, his body growing cold and weightless. As he watched, his hands began to melt, dissolving into rivulets like molasses, seeping into cracks in the pavement.
Oh, good, he thought dimly as he blacked out, finding peculiar comfort in the notion that his body was disappearing right before his eyes. I’m dreaming, then. That’s why none of this makes any sense. I’m only dreaming.
****
When he came to again, he found himself lying in a puddle, his body pelted with an icy downpour. His eyes fluttered open to a bleary half-mast and he groaned softly.
Wincing, he managed to lift his head from the ground. Sharp pain lanced through his left side, and he twisted with a breathless cry, clutching at his shoulder. Though he was cold, almost deathly so, beneath his hand he felt raw warmth. He glanced down and saw his shoulder ripped open with a gory, gaping wound.
“Oh, God,” he gasped, bleeding profusely, the dark stain of blood smeared down the length of his torso, standing out momentarily in stark and gruesome contrast to his ashen skin before being washed away by the rain. He shoved his hand over the wound as firmly as he could manage and staggered to his feet. Stumbling dizzily, he looked around, bewildered, trying to get his bearings.
I went to get something out of Sam’s car, he remembered dimly. I was going to propose to her when I went back inside. There was someone out here in the alley…a man, waiting.
He remembered the man’s face vaguely and his name—Nemamiah—the sound of his voice: Now to send this meat sack of yours and that misbegotten demon back where you both belong.
He was still outside the bar, but Sam’s car was gone and so were any signs of his clothes. Everything around him was dark and empty and silent, save for the pelting cadence of rainfall against the pavement, the heavy patter as it struck the top of the nearby Dumpster.
He stole her car, Jason thought, shambling toward the back door of the tavern. That son of a bitch stabbed me, stole my clothes, then took Sam’s car.
He’d left the back door unlocked when he’d ducked outside and it opened easily for him now, and he stumbled across the threshold and into the dark corridor beyond. The bar had been closed when he’d left, but his staff had still been there cleaning up. There had been lights on overhead and a discernablediscernible din as they’d moved furniture, swept floors and washed dishes. But now there was silence, eerie and heavy. He pawed blindly in the blackness for the light switch, but when he flipped it up and down, nothing happened.
“Hey,” he called out hoarsely, leaning heavily against the wall. How long had he been lying in the alley? There was no way to know, no way to gauge how much blood he’d lost. He felt light-headed and weak and used the wall as much to support as guide him as he limped forward. “Hey, anyone there?”
Surely to God someone would have come looking for me, he thought. They would have seen me.
“Sam?” he called, his voice strained. “Eddie? Somebody, please, I…I need…”
He reached the end of the hallway, his eyes somewhat adjusted to the gloom, and his voice abruptly faded into stunned, surprised silence.
What the…?
The bar was empty. Not just of patrons or staff, not just closed for the night—it was literally empty, stripped to the bare walls of furniture and furnishings. The tables, chairs and bar stools were all gone. The booths and benches were missing and the pool tables and cue racks had all disappeared without a trace. The shelves behind the bar were empty and cobwebs draped in dimly lit diaphanous strands where rows of Maker’s Mark, Grey Goose, Captain Morgan and Bloodhorse bourbon had once stood. The overhead racks, where phalanxes of beer steins and pint glasses had once been stored, were conspicuously vacant. The enormous diamond-dust mirror was missing too. More than a hundred years old and original to the building, it was, as Jason’s father had liked to say, “worth more than the entire place and everything in it, all put together.” The wall it had once graced was now dark and bare. Dust blanketed the floor, thick enough in places so that as he limped across the room in stupefied, bewildered shock, he left a trail of footprints clumsily behind him.
“What the…?” he whispered aloud. He turned to the far end of the room where what was surely no more than an hour ago, he and Samantha had been sitting together in a corner booth.
“A regular pair of turtledoves,” Eddie the bartender had teased them good-naturedly from across the room as he’d towel-dried beer mugs. Sam had laughed as Jason had smiled at him, affectionately flipping him the bird.
What happened? he thought, his confusion shifting rapidly to anxiety and out-and-out fear. Where did everything—and everyone—go? What happened to me out there?
You’re unmarked, Nemamiah had told him. It hadn’t made any sense. Nothing made sense to Jason all of a sudden. He stumbled about in a clumsy, bewildered semicircle, staring at the vacant shell of what had, only earlier that night, been his bar.
When he heard a dog growling, a low and menacing sound, guttural and close at hand, he froze, his eyes flying wide. He heard a quick scrabbling of claws against the dusty wooden floors and saw a blur of movement darting out of the shadows to his left. He threw up his arms just as a large dog, heavy and shaggy coated, leaped at him, sinking its teeth just above his elbow and sending him crashing to the floor.
“Barton,” a woman cried, but the dog, unfazed, snarled around its greedy mouthful of Jason’s arm and began to shake its head, furiously embedding its teeth all the more deeply. Jason tried to cover his head, to use his arms as a shield to protect his face, and drew his knees up to guard his vulnerable groin.
“Barton, get off him. Let go!” Jason felt the dog’s jaws slacken, then slip away as the woman hauled it backward by the collar. It began to bark now, a thick, ferocious sound as it strained against her grasp, struggling to reach him again.
“This is private property,” t
he woman cried. “You get out of here right now, mister, I mean it. Or I’ll sic my dog on you again!”
Her voice was shrill, warbling with fright, but still he recognized it. Jason lowered his hands hesitantly, squinting against a bright flashlight beam aimed directly at his face. “Sam?”
Oh, thank God, he thought, shuddering with sudden, indescribable relief. Maybe I’m not going crazy after all.
“Sam…it…it’s me,” he said, holding out his hand, trying vainly to block the glare.
He heard a clunk! as the flashlight clattered to the ground, leaving him blinking against little dancing pinpoints of residual glow. The beam now cut a diagonal across the floor, as if deliberately following his footsteps in the dust, illuminating his path from the corridor.
“Jason?” Sam said, her voice tremulous and barely audible over the insistent, incessant barking.
Where did that dog come from? he wondered dazedly.
“Oh my God,” Sam said, and when she leaned over and picked up the flashlight, her hand was shaking. Her entire body was shaking, as a matter of fact, and the light bobbed and bounced off the floor, the wall, off Jason and the ceiling. “It’s not possible,” she said over and over again, nearly a moan. “It…oh my God, it can’t be…it’s not possible!”
When he moved, sitting up, pain stabbed through his shoulder, and he grimaced, clutching the bloody wound in his chest. Now blood streamed from his forearm too, the deep incisions where the dog’s teeth had hit their marks.
She sounds like she’s seen a ghost, he thought, and when the flashlight beam swept momentarily across her face, he could see that her dark eyes were enormous and round, her mouth ajar, her skin ashen as if with shock.
“Sam?” he whispered, frightened now, because she looked frightened to see him, terrified in fact, something he had no accounting for. None whatsoever.
“It’s not possible,” she whimpered again, shaking her head. “Oh…oh, my God, you…Jason, you’re dead!”
CHAPTER TWO
They’d met in the bar. Sam had come in one night with a large bachelorette party, a group of boisterous young women who had crowded into that very corner of the room, laughing and singing and downing round after round of mixed drinks and celebratory cocktails.
Sam had ordered the first of these, having waded through the typical Saturday night throng to approach the bar. Jason had been working on one end, his regular bartender, Eddie, had been hustling on the other, and even together, they’d had a hard time keeping up with the busy demand for drinks and draughts. And then he’d seen her, a stunning brunette with brown eyes and a gauzy cream-colored peasant blouse cut low enough to provide a demure yet provocative peek at her cleavage.
As a career bartender, Jason had seen more than his fair share of beautiful women. Women liked bartenders, or more specifically, they liked to fuck bartenders. He’d pretty much had his pick of young, nubile hotties who’d packed into Sully’s on any given weekend, and pick them he had. But all at once, when he’d seen Samantha, he’d immediately forgotten them all. He’d forgotten how busy the bar was, how loud the overlapping din of live music and raucous conversation had been, never mind the running litany of pending drink orders in his mind that had yet to be filled, and the half dozen more besides that were currently being shouted out at him from patrons crowding the bar.
He’d stared in dumbstruck amazement at Sam, flustered for what was likely the first time in his entire life. “I’d like to get some drinks, please,” she’d called out to him, teetering on her tiptoes as she balanced on the bar’s brass foot rail and leaned over.
Blinking to snap out of his reverie, he’d managed a smile. “Well, then, you’ve come to the right place,” he’d said, holding up the bottle of Bloodhorse bourbon that had, to that moment, been dangling impotently in his hand. “I happen to make them.”
Her mouth had unfurled in the breathtakingly beautiful smile that was now quite familiar to him, that still stole his breath whenever he saw it as much as it had that first time.
She’d given him her credit card to run a tab, but he hadn’t charged her, not for that first round or any of the subsequent ones. The bachelorette party had been large, and even with his overhead, he’d wound up losing several hundred dollars by giving them their drinks for free, but it hadn’t mattered. Sam had a good time. But when the sizeable charge she’d thought she’d incurred still hadn’t shown up on her bank account two weeks after the party, she’d returned to Sully’s on a Monday afternoon, statement in hand, and a quizzical expression on her face.
“I’d like to speak to the manager, please,” she’d said. Jason had been unloading an order of beer, heavy boxes in which bottles clattered and clanged together as he stacked them against a dolly for transit to his walk-in cooler. He’d blinked at her, dumbstruck all over again, and she smiled, recognizing him. “Oh, hey. I don’t know if you’ll remember me or not, but I was in here a couple of weeks ago, a Saturday night, with a bunch of—”
“No, I remember,” he said, adding to himself, How could I forget you?
She hadn’t been wearing any makeup that day, and her hair had been drawn back loosely in a ponytail. No fancy clothes or jewelry for a night on the town, she’d worn a plain old sweatshirt and blue jeans.
She’d been stunning.
“You know, nothing ever showed up on my credit card,” she said, giving the paper in her hand a little demonstrative flap. “For the drinks, I mean. I know sometimes it takes a while for stuff to go through, but I called the bank and they said there wasn’t even anything pending.”
Jason shook his head. “Don’t worry about it.”
“But I…I thought…” She blinked at him in bewildered if not somewhat suspicious surprise. “I want to make sure the drinks were paid for.”
Jason shook his head again. “Don’t worry about it,” he said again. “Consider them on the house.”
Again, she sputtered. “But we drank a lot. There were twenty of us.”
“I know.”
“But we drank a lot,” she said again, helplessly.
Fifteen hundred dollars worth of a lot, to the best of his recollection. Sam and her twenty friends had liked top-shelf brands and plenty of them.
“It’s all right,” he told her.
Again, her expression grew wary. “Won’t you get in trouble if your boss finds out?”
“Oh, sure,” said the bartender, Eddie, as he passed by, wheeling a large dolly full of beer crates. He’d overheard this last, and to judge by his smirk, found it amusing, and cut Jason a sideways glance. “He’s a real asshole, the boss.”
Jason laughed, but Sam grew anxious. “I don’t want to get you in trouble,” she said, reaching for her pocket, pulling out a small change purse. “Here.” She unzipped the purse and pulled out her credit card. “Run it again. You can do that, can’t—”
“It’s okay.” Jason caught her hand. “I won’t get in trouble, I mean. I know the owner.”
“Yeah,” Eddie called, as he ducked into the kitchen. “He’s a real prick, too.”
“Really,” Jason told her. “It’s all right.”
He’d walked her out to her car. They stood on the sidewalk beside her Jeep, facing each other in a comfortable proximity that had suggested the attraction he felt for her was reciprocated.
“This is your bar, isn’t it?” she asked, with a quick glance at Sully’s, then back up at him again. Her brow arched slightly, in tandem with the uplift of the corner of her mouth. “You’re the asshole owner.”
He laughed. “I prefer to be called the prick manager myself.”
When she’d laughed along with him, he’d fallen in love with her, hook, line, sinker and all that other bullshit. There had been no doubt at all, not in his mind or his heart. I’m going to marry this girl someday, he’d thought.
“Thank you, then,” Sam had told him, reaching out and hooking his hand with her fingertips. “For the drinks that night. I wish you’d let me pay you.”
&n
bsp; “Not necessary,” he interjected.
A small, aggravated crease formed between her brows, yet she continued to smile. “I wasn’t finished.” He laughed, holding up his hands in concession and she went on, “I meant, I wish you’d let me pay you back for the drinks. Buy you dinner or something.”
Jason had cocked his brow. “Are you asking me on a date?”
Still that wry smile, her lips pressed together, a soft seam he’d longed to lean down and kiss. “I guess maybe I am. Are you accepting?”
Loose strands of her dark hair had worked loose of her ponytail in the light breeze, flapping into her face. He’d reached out with his free hand to brush that wayward hair back behind her ear. I’m going to marry this girl someday, he’d thought again.
“I guess maybe I am,” he’d told her out loud.
****
This has to be a joke, Jason thought, leaning heavily against Sam as he shuffled through the front door of the upstairs apartment above the bar. It was his apartment, but like the tavern below, nothing but the floor plan was remotely recognizable to him. His hand-me-down furniture was gone—the metal-framed futon with faded black upholstery, the ugly standing chrome lamp that Sam had always teased about being “circa 1980s chic.” The oversized wooden crates he’d stacked for a TV stand, arranged horizontally for a coffee table and upturned vertically on either end of the futon were gone, along with his bookshelves and stereo, his drafting table and computer, the faded and threadbare Oriental rug that had covered the hardwood floor.
“Here,” Sam murmured, easing him down against a stack of cardboard boxes that had been stacked everywhere, as if someone was either in the process of moving in or moving out. She cut a glance down his torso toward his groin, because he was naked and bleeding. “I’ll…uh…get you something…”