by Eli Constant
I haven’t been to the bar since Jim died.
Kyle’s asked me to come over of course, but he’s understood my refusal. I still see Blackthorn in my dreams, the way he changed into the Snake Man, his toothy mouth turning to feast on Jim’s body. And Sausage Fingers, the man of clay with the spirit of a mentally challenged boy. I’m afraid if I walk into the bar, the nightmares—which have lessened to dark dreams—will once again resurge and send me screaming into the night.
Today though, with him there manning the taps and my home soon to become date central for Dean and Mei, I decide that maybe it’s time. Maybe I can handle it.
Donning sweat pants, because I’m a sexy beast, a fitted band shirt I’ve had for too many years to count, and a pair of purple Chucks, I pull my hair up into a quick high ponytail and grab my purse—which doesn’t match at all since it’s polished and sensible and my outfit is decidedly not. The only accessory I bother to wear is my dad’s watch. It’s been in a box for a long time, but I finally got around to replacing the battery and I like having the reminder of him around my wrist.
It’s four by the time I’m in the SUV and ready to drive.
When I pull into the bar, I notice that Kyle’s had it spruced up a little bit. The outside cedar siding has been treated so that the wood is a deep rich color again and the shutters have been painted a maroon shade that makes the whole establishment seem a bit too much like someone’s personal hunting lodge. The roof is new too, the color of the shingles almost matching the shutters.
Walking in, I’m hit with the not-so-pleasing sounds of pop music. Jim never played music. He didn’t care for it and he said he didn’t want people coming in thinking his place was some cheap dance hall where they could get sloppy drunk and get a few thrills while dancing poorly to twangy music. I search for the source of the sound—the singer almost sounds like Britney, but a bit more mature than her bubblegum and mini skirt days—and find a tall juke box in the corner of the main room adjacent to the bathroom doors.
I knew about the live music, the singers, and the karaoke night. I didn’t know about the metal box filled with CDs. I’m not sure why, but out of everything, the juke box bothered me. I know it’s totally stupid.
Jim must be rolling over in his grave, I think, striding towards the bar where Kyle is talking to a young blonde woman in crop top and too-tight shorts. It’s freaking winter. No one should be wearing such skimpy clothing... and looking that good in them... and flipping her hair as she talks to my boyfriend.
I find that I’m really, really regretting my choice of outfit.
I clear my throat as I approach and perch on one of the stools. They aren’t plain hard wood anymore. Kyle’s upgraded. The faux leather is plushy and black. A butt could get a little too comfy sitting on it ordering drinks. That’s probably the point.
Kyle looks away from the perky blond and finds my face. The smile that spreads his mouth warms my heart and puts me at ease instantly. The girl might be flirting, but she wasn’t taking Kyle in with it, not even a little bit.
Loyalty’s a damn hard thing to find—in family, in friends, in lovers. I’d take that over pulse-pounding passion any day. Of course... my nether-regions might disagree.
“Hey, babe.” He walks close enough to lean over the bar and kiss me. It’s deep and wet and the sensation spreads from my lips to... other regions. When he pulls away, it takes me a second or two to open my eyes. When I do, he’s no longer smiling, he’s grinning like a horny kid. “I’m glad you came by. You doing okay?”
I knew what he meant. Was I doing okay being back in the bar after what happened with Jim? Yeah, I think I’m okay. Although, I wouldn’t be peering too close at the spot where Jim fell, where Blackthorn attacked him, where... I shake my head, realizing quickly that saying ‘I’m okay’ would be a lie. I couldn’t lie to myself, much less lie to someone else.
“Yes and no.” An acceptable truth. “I didn’t even think about it when I first came in. I was distracted by the updates outside, the music inside and...” I didn’t finish the sentence the way I was going to, because the other thing would have made me seem like a jealous girlfriend. Which I was. “All the people.”
“If it’s too hard, don’t stay. I’ll understand.”
“No, I’m here now.”
He nods, his face slipping a little from happiness to deeply-buried grief. When he turns away, he notices the blonde is still standing in the same position. She looks annoyed, or at least, she does to me. “Cherry, we’ll have the kitchen up and running in the next week, but for now keep the tables cleared and you can help me bring stuff from the back.”
“That’s Mikey’s job.” She whines, literally, like a toddler. “I thought you hired me to help you behind the bar.”
“No, I hired you to be a Jane-of-all-trades. Mikey runs the bar for me and he does most of my errands and liquor restocking. You’re our first-ever waitress and I need you to keep the tables clean, help make sure the bathrooms stay tidy, and when the kitchen is operational, your main duty will be to the customers.” Kyle is speaking in a calm, soothing voice. He’s treating her way nicer than she deserves.
“I swear that’s not what you said in the interview.” She grumbles, putting her small hands on her hips and sticking out her bottom lip.
“I’m sorry if you misunderstood what I was expecting of you. It’s a big place and we’re expanding. Right now, there’s only three of us working. We all have to do things we might not like. If that’s not agreeable to you, then I can go to one of the other people that applied and I turned down to give you a chance.” Kyle picks up a cloth—one that’s a damn sight cleaner than the kind Jim used to use—and he swipes at the glossy surface of the freshly-varnished bar. It’s already clean enough to eat off of, but I think he need something to keep his hands from strangling the difficult girl.
“I need the job, Kyle.” She pleads, and his name is a little more heated with lust than I think I can stomach.
“Then do the job you were hired for.” Kyle stops moving the cloth, he closes his eyes and his fingers clench and unclench. My eyes are drawn to his forearms and how thick they are. Now that we’ve been dating a while, I don’t always notice how muscular he is. Honestly, he’s huge. “I don’t have time to keep arguing about it. You’ve got until the end of the week to shape up or ship out. Period.”
I fought back a smile. Jim used to say that to patrons that were getting a little too rowdy. “Shape up or ship out, boys. This isn’t a wrestling arena.” Normally, they’d shape up. The few times they didn’t shape up nor ship out, Jim would pull out his shotgun and go a little... unorthodox on them.
Cherry sighs and drops her hands from her hips to sway listlessly at her sides. “I thought because you were friends with my mom that you’d give me an easy go of it.”
“Sorry to disappoint.” Kyle opens his eyes and goes back to cleaning the counter. The stress in his arms and shoulders remains, as if the veins are threatening to burst under the pressure.
When Cherry has left, stamping all the way to the back room like a tantrum-throwing child, Kyle gives me a sorrowful stare. “Sorry about that. She’s a little...”
“Annoying? Childish? Lazy?” I hand out a few options like candy at Halloween. It’s not often that I instantly dislike someone.
“All of the above.”
“So you’re friends with her mother?”
Kyle seems a little sheepish then. “We dated a few years ago. We didn’t fit though, decided it mutually. Cherry wasn’t so prickly back then. Her mother was desperate for her to find a job instead of sitting around house.”
“She looks old enough to secure her own jobs.”
“Oh, she is. She had a lot of potential too. Graduated top in her class beginning of last year, but then something happened. She doesn’t like to talk about it and not even her mother knows what it was. Now, she’s what you saw today. Just generally hard to get along with.”
“I think she wants to get along with
you.” I tease, walking my index and middle finger across the bar and over to his hand that’s still holding the cleaning cloth.
“Don’t even joke about that.” Kyle pushes the cloth under the counter and turns around to fill me a glass with ice and water. He knows I don’t drink. Now that he runs the bar, I don’t have to pretend. I’d have never admitted to Jim that I didn’t care for alcohol. I really believe he would have taken some personal offense by it, even though what I put in my body has nothing to do with anyone else.
The cold water slips past my lips and over my tongue. It tastes clean and wonderful, but it also brings to mind when I came to the bar hunting for information on Donald Mayer. Vodka over ice. A simple, clear drink. Like the water.
A wave of nausea flows over me like a silky sheet. It settles down and is both weightless and crushing. I put the glass down and push it away from me.
“Something wrong?”
“Just not thirsty I guess.” I stretch my arms up and yawn. The shirt is just short enough that my midsection makes an appearance. I immediately drop my arms and yank the material down, self-conscious.
“You have to stop doing that.” Kyle murmurs, his hand reaching for me and cupping my face. “You’re beautiful, Tori.”
“It’s a hard habit to break.” I admit, playing with the sweating ice water glass and sort of sliding it back and forth from palm to palm like it’s a hockey puck. “I still feel really fat and uncomfortable in my own skin.” I give a little shrug. It’s pathetic. I’m pathetic.
“You don’t need to feel that way.” Kyle lowers his hand and then places both of his hands on top of mine to stop me from moving the glass nervously.
“Of course I don’t. I don’t need to and I don’t want to, but I can’t help it. I am trying.” I will not cry. I will not cry. I will not cry. Screw you, tears, I think as I feel the dampness building in my eyes anyways. “I think I need to take a walk.” I pull my hands out from underneath his. I don’t do it quickly so as to be unkind. His fingers grip the edge of the counter and he watches me stand.
“I’ll come with you.” It’s not a question, but I respond like it is.
“No, I’m okay. Really. I just think I need to be alone for a minute. It’s not so much me, I mean my feelings about my body, as just being here I think.” I look at him, hoping I’m making sense. “Do you mind?”
“Honestly, I’d rather go with you, so I mind a little, but I do understand.” Kyle’s fingers loose their grip and I’m surprised to see that the wood seems to have been bruised... no, indented by the pressure of his hands. But the indentations are so minor that they only look like new shadows on the curved lip of the countertop.
I stare a little too long and he looks down, surprise registering on his face.
“Maybe you should give the work outs a rest.” I joke, getting ready to turn around.
“Since I met you, I’ve only been to the gym a handful of times.” He’s still staring at the marks his fingers have left. “And I’ve gained at least ten pounds from all the Chinese Mei brings over.”
“Well, you don’t look it. I wish I could eat a million wontons and dumplings and it not register along my stomach by the next day.” I pat my stomach and the pooch that’s there—albeit significantly smaller than it was over a year ago when I’d started dieting and running.
Kyle looks up as my hand is leaving my belly, his eyes scrunch and he gives me a stern scowl.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m beautiful. Stop with the self-deprecation. Yada-yada.” I wave a hand at him and give him my back. “Just enjoy the rearview and forget I’m a body-conscious girlfriend who works with corpses for a living.” It feels icky to say corpses; I’m not sure why I use the word. That’s how other people see them. To me, they’re still living and breathing entities, their souls swimming in the ether.
“It is a good view.” His voice carries me and I can’t see the grin he’s wearing, but I can hear it in his words.
Pushing out into the cool early evening air, I find myself in a cold sweat. The heat of the bar is still running beneath my skin, but the winter is breathing on me and causing goosebumps to rise on the surface. The clash in temperatures affects me unpleasantly.
For some reason, I head over to the vacant lot next to Jim’s, the place where Terrance and I found Braeden’s car last year. I imagine that it’s still there as I walk forward. And then it disappears, of course, a figment of my mind destroyed by a quick touch.
I pass over the lot and find myself aimlessly reaching with my power into the soil. There’s so much life beneath our feet. So many fail to recognize it. I raise my hands, palms down, and I concentrate a bit harder. I reach a bit deeper. Towards the back corner of the empty property, the furthest point from the bar, I feel a nudge.
Something alive.
Something dead, but alive.
A soul.
I close my eyes. The tendrils of my power dig and dig until they find a skeleton. It is distinctly she. There is hair still matted along the skull. It was once long and black. I can see it flowing in my mind. It would be shiny in the sun and a dull charcoal in low lighting. I mentally rebuild her until I see who she was when she was alive. She reminds me of Mei. Her skin is pale and her chocolate brown eyes are warm and kind. She’s small like Mei too.
When I open my eyes the evening has darkened more and my eyes take longer than I’d like to adjust to my surroundings, the deceased woman is standing in front of me, looking whole and altogether alive. Although, when the sun, low in the sky, peeks out from between tiny gaps in the cloud cover, she becomes a translucent thing, something I could put my hand through. It would disturb someone else. Someone who wasn’t a necromancer.
“What’s your name?” I speak to her as if she is a real person. Because she is. She’s dressed in a cotton dress, a simple design with a low waist. It’s not modern, not something you’d find on a shelf nowadays or even on shelves five or ten years ago.
Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out. The speech is delayed, like when you are talking to someone on the phone and they’re within seeing distance. You see their mouth move and seconds later you hear the matching words. The effect is odd, like watching a dubbed movie.
“Maggie.” Her mouth is already closed, a tight line. It moves as if it is connected to a wire pulled by some invisible hand. “Maggie Elissa Smythe.”
“What happened to you, Maggie?”
“Killed.” She shakes her head roughly, as if she’s jerking free of something. She’s been here a while. Her soul has stayed behind because she has unfinished business. That is nearly always the case with murder victims, but then the longer they are attached to their brutalized body, the more and more they lose themselves. As I study her with my eyes, I continue to feel her out with my power. There is something about her, something about how her body was treated before she was sunk into the dark earth.
It leaves a taste in my mouth, chemical and strange. She doesn’t exactly feel like other bodies, not ones that have been untouched and left to die with blood flowing from their veins. She feels a bit... other. I recognize it, but I cannot place it at this moment. And I feel I should. I feel like, when I do put my finger on the difference between her and other victims I have helped, I will feel stupid. But that does not help me now.
The feel of her spirit is fading, the humanness seeping away.
My mind goes to Sausage Fingers, how I’d thought he was a wraith when he’d attacked me in the embalming room, but he had not been that. This woman though, she was on the precipice of a great fall from consciousness, right on the edge of deteriorating into only the basest of her personality, the beastly part, the part that a living human normally keeps hidden from the world.
It’s a sad truth that victims are more prone to become wraiths, as if they have not suffered enough in their lives already that the afterlife must also be a thing of pain.
“Who did it?”
“A man. Discolored hands. They were blue. His face...” She rais
es her fingers to motion around her cheeks, but she freezes when she sees them. The dying sun has once again found a sliver of a gap in the clouds. It has shined on her hands and she can see the ground through them. “I’m dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
She stares at me, her eyes no longer warm at all. They’re haunting. She drops her hands and her entire form shivers, vibrates, and begins to disappear.
“No, please stay. What else do you remember?” I take a step forward and my words bring her slightly back. She is an outline though, no longer a person at all.
“His face. Brown and White. Like someone had taken a paint brush to him. No. A mask. God. I just saw a mask. Did he have blue eyes?” She shakes her head again, more violently this time. “My head... it hurts.”
“I’m sorry. You’ve been here too long. What’s left of your mind is... dying too. Like your body.”
“Can you find my son for me? I had a son.” She shakes again, a head to toe jerking. She waves in and out of sight, like she is floating on a wave that continues to crest and fall. But she manages to speak, full sentences. Full words. I know it will not last, that this is just a last resurgence of her will to stay glued to the world. “His name is Jacob. He’s eight. He’s eight...”
“I’ll find him for you. I promise.”
“The world looks different.” Maggie turns in a circle, her head tilted to the sky. It’s not a smooth motion, as if she’s not in control of her own movements. “So different.” She does a 360, but doesn’t stop turning there. She continues to spin. She spins slowly and does not stop until she has dissolved back into the ground that holds her body captive. And then I feel it.
Her release, her movement into the ether. It causes my body to grow hot. When it is gone, I feel I will freeze and sweat beads along my forehead. The transfer is not normally like this. I can feel them, understand them, watch them, but it has never affected me so.
Another change in my gift? Another thing I can thank Liam for?
I look up at the sky. The world is falling into the dimness of twilight. The clouds are a bumpy greyscale sketch above my head. I know what I have to do, but I also know that it’s going to lead to questions. I’ll have answers. I won’t be able to explain where I got them. It’s always a choice I have to make, but really there is no choice. I cannot leave the body where it is, not now that I’ve found it and touched it with my gift.