“Less time for the drink. Right.”
Skinner hung around, but that’s because Skinner had no family and lived in a one-room shithole over on United Street. Skinner was all right except for some big bruises.
* * *
Later that night, as the wind picked up and a small storm splashed over Key West, I made my way back to the locked-up bar. I opened up the place with my keys and found nothing on but the Polybius machine.
I grabbed a quarter out of the register and began to play it again. I beat my own score over the course of an hour. The storm raged outside and thunder cracked, so I didn’t even hear the black-haired woman enter the bar. I didn’t know she was watching me play the game again, or that she saw me beat my own high score after the second hour.
“You have done well there, our friend,” she said, and I nearly jumped into the ceiling. I turned slowly. She had been sitting in the dark, and I could barely make out her features. The place was locked up tight; the only light came from the game’s screen and through the slats of the storm shutters from the street lights outside.
“How’d you get in?”
“The locks is—they are the primitive. The most primitive. The most primitive. Excuse me.” She touched the side of her neck, tapping it twice.
“The locks during this time are the most primitive,” she said.
I walked over to the wall and flipped a switch. It didn’t turn on all the lights, just the blue holiday lights we strung up all over the ceiling. I didn’t want any glow going to the outside world. I wasn’t sure why. I felt perhaps I should, you know, send out a call for help or something, but she was just a young woman. Pretty close to my age. She had on a tight-fitting black dress, making her look like a 1940s femme fatale.
I wandered over and stepped behind the bar, ready to grab the tire iron I had used to cave in King Crimson’s head.
“You shouldn’t be here. The place is closed,” I said.
“You beat the high score? And then you beat your own high score?” she said. There was a sort of odd inflection to her voice, I noticed. A sort of electronic feedback that I could hear under her words. A buzz, I guess.
“Yeah, do you give a shit?” I put the tire iron down. The woman there was wide-eyed and striking. I wouldn’t say fully beautiful. Just very unique and special-looking. Her eyes were something else. I was getting lost in those eyes.
“I care. I care very much,” the woman said.
She stood and took off her dress, and then she sat back down on the barstool nude, showcasing a thin but muscular body.
“Thank you for that,” I said.
She was comfortably naked and just sat there, staring at me, before speaking again.
“Why do you care so much for this game we put in?” she said.
“I—I couldn’t say. I don’t know.” My heart started to race. “You—your people, put the game in?”
“We did. The few of us. Trying to protect this time and this place from the others not from this time and not from this place.”
“Why—why are you naked?” I said, swallowing.
“Does it make you uncomfortable? Clothes make me uncomfortable. We do not wear them in our time for most of the day.” She looked at the rows of bottles behind me. “May I have something to drink? Preferably alcoholic. I am feeling nervous in this time.”
I poured her a beer, not thinking. I was just—well, I was staring right at her chest the whole time, and wondering what the hell was up.
“Yeah. That’s good. Budweiser is good for you,” I said, choking a little on my own spit.
“You care so much about the game being put in because you haven’t had much of a life here in Key West. You are just one of these… ordinary people living in very ordinary times. And yet, you have so much more to you that people do not even see. The failure of your education, the failure of your family, to bring out that important part of you… my people weep for such individuals living in such a time.”
I poured myself a rum and Coke and sipped at the drink, steadying myself. “You sound like you need help,” I said. “Look, I’ll call you a cab, you put on your dress. And that will be it.”
I was locked into those bright blue eyes of hers.
“I will go home. To my time and place. But your own ocean out there. Your Key West is in danger from the High Priests from our time.” She was whispering now.
“Look, I’m—deep down I’m a somewhat decent person so, you know, I’m gonna call the police here. And that’s okay. For all of us.” I swallowed twice. “Right?”
The naked black-haired woman laughed. “We have eyes everywhere, Miss White. Miss Sarah White. Your father is Glenn White; your mother, deceased, Kaitlin White. You have failed your education at Florida Keys College. You have been arrested twice for disorderly conduct. We know all, Miss White. All of it.”
I grabbed hold of the tire iron.
“What is this? Some sort of game?“I felt as if my chest was too heavy and too filled with water. I could barely breathe.
The woman held up a hand. “Please. It would not help you to do that.”
I saw from the corner of my eye a little bit of movement and realized that by focusing on and talking with this crazy naked woman I had allowed myself to be surrounded on all sides. There were men in black suits with black glasses on despite the fact that there was very little light in the bar. All of them were dark-skinned, Asian-looking. They seemed to glide out of the shadows.
“What is this?” I felt weak and overwhelmed. There were too many of them right now. Too many of these guys hanging around in the bar. Six of them, plus the woman, making it a lucky seven of strangers hanging around in The Smoker.
“Look, I—I just want to go home, guys. This is enough. I’m really, really scared, so please.”
The woman stood and grabbed me by the arm. “Please, sit down, Miss White. Please. We need your help. There are four High Priests here in the Keys. And the great machine is coming.”
I watched one of the Men in Black glide to the other side of the room, as if he wasn’t walking at all but rather slightly hovering over the floor. He inspected that mural of my dad’s boat, Medium Talent, that we had on the wall. It still had flecks of King Crimson’s vomit on it, the stuff that we couldn’t get out. He stared at the wall for a good moment before waving his hand back and forth in front of it.
“The great machine is coming,” I repeated.
The woman nodded with now very sad eyes. “We are from another time, Miss White. From beyond time. Our civilization has fallen, after we obtained eternal youth. We have fallen to depravity and sacrifice of those who could not defend themselves. Some of us went away from this dark path… and some did not. And they are coming here. You have seen the periodicals about the blood-drained human bodies?”
I took a long moment to respond, unsure if my voice was going to shake. “I—Monika said something about that. Yes.”
I made myself another rum and Coke, mostly rum this time.
“That is them. The Four High Priests. They need fresh human blood to survive, like your legend of the vampire. And they are paving the way for the great machine through rituals and preparations made out there in the dark of the night, in the open ocean.”
“The great machine? What will—what is that?” I chugged down the drink, keeping an eye on the Men in Black now wandering around in the dark like well-dressed ghosts.
The woman began to cry and put a hand to her mouth. “The great machine… the great machine will harvest all life in the Atlantic Ocean. All life will be sucked into the hold of the great machine and taken to our barren, broken, polluted time and place. They care only about saving themselves and nothing of your own world. Despite the alternatives…”
I took a deep breath. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you have the high score,” she said simply.
“Oh,” I said, as if that made sense.
“The machine—Polybius—trains your mind, opens it, and
expands it to see the real universe and the reality behind everything. The High Priests appear as men, but they are beyond our dimensions and have become creatures. They have ascended into a high darkness. For you to see their true form and to defeat them, you needed your mind to be trained. We apologize for those hurt, but the machine is a harsh trainer for your mind and body. We need a candidate very soon.”
I put the empty glass on the counter. “It ruined three people. Two guys died.”
She ignored me.
“We cannot intervene directly. The High Priests would know of our coming; they would sense us. And they can trick us and destroy us. But a human being such as you, your mind trained by the machine to see things as they are and to see the things that exist beyond our dimension… For this, they will not be prepared.” She smiled, her teeth even and white, though I thought I saw a little sharpness and a couple of fangs in her mouth now.
“You must destroy them. And the great machine when it arrives in two days. We will give you a device to destroy the great machine.”
“I—I don’t know if I can do it.”
“You must. If you wish to save millions of lives and perhaps the entire planet itself.”
She walked past one of her Men in Black bodyguards, or buddies, and went to the jukebox.
“You like your music, Miss White?” she said. She flipped through the catalog of the jukebox.
“What?”
“You like your music?” She pressed a button and suddenly Sniff ’n’ the Tears’s “Driver’s Seat” came on.
“Come here,” she said, and for whatever reason, I came out from behind the counter. More Men in Black drifted in, and I could see them with a dolly as they were taking out the Polybius machine and replacing it with a Ms. Pac-Man arcade cabinet.
I went over to her. She took me by the hands.
“You’re a woman who does not like men, am I correct?”
I blinked a few times, feeling sort of embarrassed and uncomfortable. I don’t know why.
She kissed me on the mouth, still holding my hands.
“I want to thank you. These people must be stopped and punished. They harm our world; they will kill yours.”
She let go of my hands and started to take off my shirt. We made love on the cold floor, with that Sniff ’n’ the Tears song replaying over and over again, the jukebox broken somehow. My mind spun and my eyes watered when we came together at the same time and we both screamed. She stood up slowly.
“I will see you again at seven tomorrow evening. I am leaving two items behind. You must take both. You must drink from the bottle. If you do not, they will sense who you are and devour you.”
She walked over to where her dress was and put it back on. Then, with her entourage of Men in Black, she left the bar. I was still laying on the floor, naked myself. The song stopped, and I could only hear the new sounds of the Ms. Pac-Man machine.
I pulled on my pants and put my shirt back on. I saw on the counter that she had left a gun behind. A perfect little weapon, a small sleek James Bond pistol with a glowing red LED light built into its side. A small, sleek bottle was left next to it.
I sat there listening to the wind rustle the storm shutters of the bar. I thought of just breaking the bottle and discarding it, but her warning and this whole experience made me think otherwise.
I blew out my breath, and just sat on the barstool for a while, thinking. Then I grabbed a towel from behind the counter and wrapped the pistol up in it. I took the bottle with me.
The world outside The Smoker looked different now, strange and uneven at first. The palm trees swayed in the wind, and a few sleeping chickens outside across the street started to stir and waken and move on. The streets were wet from the storm that had blown through.
I walked home, hearing only some far-off drunks laughing and screaming at each other. I never saw them, just heard them. Cars drove by on Duval Street, mostly cabs at this hour.
I was thinking about flagging one down, uncomfortable as I was to be alone and female in the dark alleys of my own hometown, when I saw four men in black cloaks with chalk-white skin scurry from one black alley, across the street, and into another black alley. I could only see their faces and their crooked and fang-filled smiles, their wide eyes looking and scanning everywhere but somehow missing me. And I could hear them, even from a couple of hundred feet away, the sound of them sniffing the air like dogs.
I hid behind a palm tree. I took out that small bottle and drank from it as fast as I could. I thought the four could smell me there, huddling behind an old palm tree next to a bunch of trashcans. I dropped the towel and took the gun out. I knew how to shoot; my dad, an ex-Navy man, had taught me a long time ago.
One of the men, in one of those all-black cloaks that shows only the face, came back, sniffing the air again before going back into the alley.
I clicked the hammer back on the gun, and I could hear sort of an electronic whine. I stayed behind that palm tree for a good five minutes before shoving the gun into my jeans and flagging down a yellow cab near Sloppy Joe’s just as the last customers of the evening were piling out.
Before and after 7 p.m.
I didn’t sleep that whole night. I had too much energy. I just sat in my room with the windows open, listening and watching for anything or anyone who would be coming down the side street we lived on, seeing nothing but cats and a couple of hens waddling through the puddles that had accumulated on the asphalt. Finally I skipped breakfast and just went out and wandered the streets. My dad said nothing about me leaving the house early. Monika didn’t either.
The bar, like a show, must go on, and so we opened the place back up as if nothing had happened and I did show up to my shift time after staring out at the ocean at Higgs Beach surrounded by tourists and locals. I just watched the waves crash and the clouds pass by and the sun blaze out over all and then got back to the bar, sandy and sunburned and thirsty.
At the bar, for a few hours, it seemed like no one would mention the violence and the shit that had been plopped into our place. It was like it had never occurred. The only comment was Monika thanking me for letting the replacement Ms. Pac-Man roll in in place of the game we’d never wanted.
Two dead in one day. Even for Key West this would be something for discussion, but the only thing discussed was the night’s festivities, as the city council had just announced the secession.
Until the Secret Service man, Steve Mezzanotte, wandered in. Balding, thin, good-looking, sunglasses. He wore a wide and ugly tie with pictures of Florida on it.
He asked for a gin and tonic. I was overtired and overstressed by what had happened the night before, so I barely paid attention at first when he identified himself as a Secret Service man. He said it twice before finally showing me his badge.
“Just wanted to talk over a few things, if you don’t mind.”
“What kind of government guy drinks on the job?” was my first question.
“I’m very stressed. My name is Steve. Steve Mezzanotte,” he said. “You were here when the sailor stabbed the other one?”
Harley Mark the writer raised an eyebrow.
“Sure was,” he said.
Mezzanotte stared at him. “Sure was, huh? Well that’s good. I’m—uh, investigating it. Checking it out. Feeling out if there was anything that our local police here may have missed. An honest serviceman with an exemplary record died and we want to make—can I help you?”
Harley Mark had leaned over closely, uninvited. “I could have been a Secret Service man if it wasn’t for this diarrhea.”
He made a tip of his invisible hat to the agent.
“That’s awesome,” Agent Mezzanotte said.
“Look,” I said, “I told, you know, the cops here, everything. I mean, playing the game, some back and forth, one got stabbed.” I washed a dirty glass. Monika was looking over, concerned.
Steve Mezzanotte stood up abruptly. “Playing a game, huh? And stabbing someone? That’s not very Christian.”
He slapped a fiver on the bar counter. “Keep the change. And what was the name of this game they were playing? Not pool, right? Not Pac-Man, right? What was it, girl?”
I took a deep breath. “Uh—Poly—Polybius. That was it.”
Steve Mezzanotte’s hand shook for a moment and his grin was a little too wide. I could sense he was maybe struggling with something. “Playing a game about a dead Greek historian? I’m sure all the kids were rushing out for that. Sounds like a runaway hit, like that Donkey Bong.”
“Kong,” Harley Mark said. “It’s Kong. You fuckin’ square.”
“Kong,” Steve said, annoyed. “Polybius. Well, that’s a new one. And I thought I knew whatever the kids were up to. Excuse me, I have to make a call. Realizing what time it is.”
He walked out with his drink in hand.
“Secret Service,” Harley Mark said. “Sure. They always check out murders of Navy men. What a weirdo.”
I swallowed. “I’m just gonna let that go. Probably a nut, you know, pretending to be a Service guy. I mean, come on, there’s enough weirdos in this town, right, Harley?”
Harley shrugged. “I really don’t know what you mean. People want to be different and you got to be a monster about it. Don’t be so like that just because you got the high score.”
My head felt strange for a moment and I shook it. Harley laughed at something.
* * *
I watched the clock tick away. It was five minutes to seven and for some reason I had convinced myself that it would just be another normal evening, that there would be nothing like what had happened with that woman. The drunks and the tourists rolled in like their own tide, drinking and celebrating us “leaving the union.” Fireworks and yelling and bullshitting was heard for miles around. Car horns and air horns bleated out constantly.
But at seven p.m., on the dot, just as the minute hand clicked over, I saw her arrive. One of her Men in Black bodyguards strolled in behind her and took a seat toward the back of the overfilled bar. The woman made a come-hither motion with her hand, and I walked out with her. Monika and my dad worked behind the counter not noticing a thing, but Skinner wished me a good night for whatever reason as he sat on his barstool next to the door on Whitehead Street.
Tales of Tinfoil: Stories of Paranoia and Conspiracy Page 10