by Joey Ruff
“Tending bar, likely.”
“What time is it?”
“After ten.”
I thought about that. “Shit. I’ve been out for hours.”
“Slept right through the dinner rush. Just the local drunks and a couple out-of-towners out there now.”
I thought about the reporter. “Blonde man with glasses? You seen him?”
He shrugged. “I’m mostly in the kitchen. Name’s Tozer.”
“Austin,” I said. “I’m gonna…” I motioned to the other doorway which I figured would lead me further into the restaurant. “That okay?”
He nodded. “Danielle said to feed you. I guess you missed lunch. Dinner now, too. I’ll get something on.”
I felt hungover. “Something greasy.”
***
I stumbled out into the dining room, amid the loud rock music. Danielle was behind the bar with a guy that was maybe twenty-five and very charismatic with his spiked hair and upside-down sun visor. They were both mixing drinks and dispensing beers while every booth and some of the tables were occupied, men and women both. Four people sat at bar stools, and among them was the man I was looking for.
I sauntered up to the bar unnoticed and sat down beside the reporter. He regarded me casually as I sat. “You’re still around?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Still around.”
Danielle saw me and came closer. “Glad to see you moving,” she yelled over the music. “Feeling better?”
I nodded. “Once I get some food in me.”
“You passed out earlier.”
“Can I get a beer?”
She arched an eyebrow at me, like maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. I couldn’t help but think she looked adorable doing it. Then she nodded, grabbed a frosty glass, and slid me a cold one.
“Guess you’re back on speaking terms,” the reporter said.
“For now.” I turned to look at him. “Name’s Austin.”
“Charlie.” He took a sip of his beer. “What happened to your arm?”
“I got shot with an arrow.”
“Ouch.”
I stifled a laugh and sipped my beer.
“That’s a first,” he said. “Nobody’s been shot and lived to tell about it.”
“I’m a special guy.” I took another drink. “Can I ask you a question?”
He shrugged. “Shoot.”
“What’s your take on the other stuff happening around town?”
“Other stuff like what?”
“I thought you would have heard about the singing animals and cream eggs…”
“Oh, right.” He slapped his forehead with his palm. “Duh.” He laughed a little. “My favorite one is the cow hearts.”
“What do you think it all means?”
He shrugged. “I don’t think it means anything. Like I said before, kids doing stupid shit. I bet somewhere, someone’s filming it all. The video will go viral.”
His explanation didn’t sound right.
“How do you know it’s kids?” I asked.
“What else would it be?”
I thought of the Erote. Then, for the first time, I considered the way it just disappeared after I’d killed it. Erotes didn’t do that. “I don’t know,” I said. “What if it’s something else?”
Charlie nudged me on the shoulder and said, “No more work tonight.” He held his beer up to me, and when I didn’t return the gesture, he raised his eyebrows. “Come on.”
I shrugged and lifted my beer.
“To fucking Valentine and all the crazy shit that happens here,” the reporter said. We touched glasses and drank. After a few minutes, my burger arrived and I ate hungrily. Then I had another beer. Then Charlie ordered shots. We fed quarters into the juke box to hear Alabama, ate buffalo wings, and for the first time in a long time, I laughed.
The bar closed at midnight – not like life in the big city – and Charlie and I stumbled drunkenly into the parking lot. He’d parked over by a light post at the edge of the highway. As he moved to his car, the reporter said, “Ya know, for a Fed, you’re a damn decent guy.”
I shrugged. “I’m not really a Fed.”
He was turning the key in the door when he stopped and looked up at me. There was a blank, confused look in his eyes. “You tricked me?”
“I…”
He took a step back, away from me, toward the road. “I thought we were friends, man?” He kept backing up, moving further away from me.
Now, I was the confused one, but I didn’t say anything. I saw something he didn’t. Headlights speeding out of the dark. Charlie didn’t see it and was standing in the middle of the road.
“Charlie!” I called. “Get out of the road!”
I moved for him, but the headlights gave form to an eighteen-wheeler, and its horn sounded loud and hollow and low. The brakes hissed. The tires whined against the road. Charlie turned to look, swore, and exploded into ribbons of blood as the grill struck him going over fifty miles an hour.
***
Fifteen minutes later, the parking lot was crawling with police.
I’d recounted what happened in as much detail as I could. The trucker had stopped, of course, his rig parked on the shoulder about a quarter mile down. He was an overweight man with a flannel shirt and hat, long greasy hair and a beard that needed trimming. His story matched up with mine.
Danielle was heart-broken. It was her bar, her alcohol. As I told my story to a second officer with a tape recorder, she huddled into me, burying her face into my shoulder, and cried.
On the road, men in gloves took photos of the smears and collected samples in tubes and baggies. I watched them over the shoulder of the office with the tape recorder. When one of the men bent down and called the other to look at his findings, I found my curiosity piqued and moved closer to them.
As I neared, one man put something red, about the size of a baseball, into a Tupperware container. I pulled a badge out of my pocket as I came closer. The badge said FBI and wasn’t real, but it was real enough in the middle of the night in a town in the middle of nowhere.
“What did you find?” I asked.
One guy shrugged. “Looks like a heart.”
I didn’t say anything. Maybe I was hoping for something else, though I didn’t know what.
“Show him,” the other said.
“Show me what?”
“The heart,” the first said. “Never seen anything like it. It’s, well…a heart.”
I drew closer as he took the lid off, and sure enough, there was human heart in the plastic container, red and purple and fleshy, slick with blood. Although, it wasn’t shaped like a heart. Well, not an organ. It was shaped like a valentine.
And it was still beating.
***
Maybe I blacked out after that.
The next thing I remember, I was sitting on a concrete bumper two feet in front of the bar, my head in my hands. I was overwhelmed with the feeling that I really had no idea what was going on. First, the Erote vanished after I thought I’d killed it. Then, a newspaper reporter explodes and leaves a heart-shaped, still-beating heart like some kind of cartoon, despite the fact his body was liquefied. Then there were all the other strange sightings. None of it added up.
I had the distinct feeling that I was missing something.
I don’t know how long I sat there, staring into the gravel parking lot like a seer searching for a sign in a pile of bones, but I was almost sober. When I looked up, Danielle was seeing off the last of the officers and she came and sat beside me as the officer drove off.
“Well,” she said. “This is officially the most fucked-up day of my life.”
I stifled a laugh.
“Where are you staying?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t had much chance to explore my options yet.”
“Come home with me.”
I looked at her, surprised. “Not like that. I wouldn’t want you to break any vows, Austin. I just…I’d feel better having someone there
. After everything that’s happened…I just don’t want to be alone tonight.”
I was silent for a minute before saying, “Yeah. Okay.” I didn’t tell her that I didn’t want to be alone either.
She took a few minutes to close up the bar. We didn’t talk much. Maybe there was nothing to say. Or more likely, there weren’t words enough to use. Then I followed her on my motorcycle. We drove by a lake, past a sign for Smith Falls State Park, and after about twenty minutes, we pulled into her driveway.
She lived outside of the town proper in a modest ranch house with a big, wrap-around porch. There were barns in the distance, sweeping pastures rolling on into the darkness. “I thought you sold the ranch?”
“I sold the land and cattle to buy the bar. I couldn’t get rid of the house. It’s been in John’s family for generations.”
“I bet it gets lonely out here.”
She didn’t say anything, just unlocked the door and stepped inside. I followed.
The space was open, transitioning seamlessly from living room to kitchen to dining. And it was cozy, warm. There was a well-worn leather sofa draped with hand-woven afghans, an old wooden rocker, a kitchen table that looked hand-carved. Nothing was new or fancy, but everything had a place and a purpose. The old lamps, the boxy television set with rabbit ears. In the center of the room, a stairway led up the second floor.
“Nice place,” I said.
She gave me a half smile and moved to the kitchen. “I’m going to have a drink. Do you want one?”
I didn’t say anything at first, just moved around the living area, looking at photos of a guy that had to be John. He looked like a good guy with a good smile. He seemed to make Danielle happy. Part of me envied that and hated him. Part of me was thankful that he was there to pick up her pieces after I’d walked away.
“If you’re tired,” she said, “I can make up the spare room. Or you can have the sofa. Whatever you’re more comfortable with. If you need a shower, there’s towels in the hallway.”
“I’ll take a drink,” I said. “Whatever you’re having. I slept most of the day.” My head was spinning with the day’s events; even if I had been tired, sleep wasn’t likely.
I found a framed wedding photo sitting on a table and picked it up. In the picture, she looked almost like how I remembered her. So young. So happy. So beautiful it hurt.
I was still holding the frame when she came up beside me and handed me a glass of red wine. I took it absently and set the frame down.
“It’s weird, isn’t it?”
I wasn’t sure what she was specifically referring to, but the answer was yes. It was all too weird. Seeing her, especially.
“Do you look at that photo and think, that should’ve been me?”
I turned to her slowly and our eyes met. “Danielle, I’m so sorry. I know I hurt you. I…”
“I never stopped loving you,” she said. She was so close, and when I moved just a little, my arm brushed hers. “I waited for years. I hoped and prayed that you would come back, but then I stopped praying because I felt like God took you from me, and that just wasn’t fair. It wasn’t easy to move on. I led John on for years before I even considered settling down. I kept hoping you’d realize the mistake you made and come back.”
“Here I am.”
“Here you are.”
“Danielle, I…” They say our memory of smells is the most acute. Her scent – not her perfume, not her shampoo – just her natural scent flooded my senses, made me remember long-forgotten things, buried memories of actions and tastes. Of young lovers. She moved closer just a little, brushing her breasts against my arm, and all of the muddled, confused images and thoughts from the past day that danced through my head were suddenly gone. I set the wine glass on the table behind me and grabbed her shoulder.
“Austin,” she said. “No.” But she didn’t sound like she meant it, and in the next heartbeat, my lips were on hers, my tongue found hers, and she was warm and wet and tasted exactly like I remembered.
***
She kept the roadhouse closed the next day. Publicly, it was to honor Charlie’s memory. Privately, I wouldn’t let her out of bed. It was the only place my head was cleared. Unlike all the prostitutes, I felt better being with Danielle, like nothing else mattered. And for a while, it didn’t.
I told her what happened for the past twelve years, about that night on the bridge, about the Hand, about becoming a priest. I told her about the Midnight.
She told me about life on the ranch, her fears and hopes and ambitions. We didn’t leave the house. We barely left the bedroom. She cooked, we ate. For twenty-four hours, we were a normal couple. For twenty-four hours, things were exactly the way my life should have turned out.
***
Sometime after three, we lay entangled in her sheets together, my arm around her, her head on my chest. I’d been asleep, but had woken suddenly. Maybe a noise. Or a dream.
I lay completely still, listening to the house settling and the wind in the trees outside. I heard the old furnace rumbling. I got up to go to the bathroom. As I returned to bed, I heard a quiet beeping. It took me a minute to realize it was my cellphone. I hadn’t thought about it for an entire day.
I crept down the stairs to my backpack and found the phone in an outside pocket. There was a text message from an unknown number. It said, “I tricked you, too.”
Absently, I sat on the edge of the sofa, the leather cold and sticky against my skin. I felt violated, somehow, by the message. What did it mean? The only person I could think that would have sent it would be Charlie, but…I saw him.
As I watched the illuminated screen, another text message came through. “Dawn. The state park. You’ll get the answers you’re looking for.”
***
I didn’t go back to sleep. I was dressed and standing outside on the porch twenty minutes later, my phone to my ear, trying to dial Hunter. He didn’t answer, and he had no voicemail greeting, just a beep.
“You were wrong about the Erote,” I said. “There’s something big happening in this town. I’m not sure what it is yet, but I’ve got an in. If I make it through, I’ll call you after. If not, I guess I’ll see you in Hell.”
One of the first things Caleb Roden told me, twelve years ago, was that there are no coincidences. Everything is relative, but our minds, being human and not wanting to understand there’s a bigger picture, clings to coincidence in order to disregard what’s really happening.
I didn’t have much to go off, but I knew one thing. It was all related. The singing animals, the chocolates, the hearts, the arrow killings. And Cupid had nothing to do with it.
***
I didn’t wake Danielle. She’d want to come and wouldn’t understand why when I didn’t let her. So instead, I just took off. Sunrise was at 6:23 AM. I followed the signs to the State Park and slipped inside just before six.
It was dark in the parking area, so I pulled out a flashlight then checked to make sure my guns were in place and loaded. I pocketed a couple of extra magazines, just in case, and then I trekked down to the falls in the darkness.
It took about twenty minutes, and most of it downhill, before I came to a clearing near the falls. Unsure what I was walking into, I hovered just inside the tree line and turned off the flashlight. As the sun was beginning to rise and light was falling in refracted colors across the field, I kept in the darkness. For a minute, I didn’t see anything. Then a man with a large white beard stepped into the clearing.
He was wearing a brown robe with a shawl that looked like a lamb’s pelt. It took me a minute to realize who it was. He looked different in the garb of an ancient shepherd than the denim and flannel I’d seen him in before. It was the pharmacist. Or, then again, it wasn’t. While he physically looked the part, there was something – a kind of authority and power – that was missing before, and it changed the entire way he could be perceived. Not like a pharmacist, at all. More like a king.
When he stepped into the clearing, he
lifted his hands out in front of him, and after a few heartbeats, he was joined in the clearing by five others. They came from different directions, each of them standing at the point of a large, invisible star.
The first was a man that looked to be in his mid-thirties. He was tall, had dark hair, and his ears pointed just at the tips. A green cloak was draped over golden armor.
Next was a faun – human on top, goat on the bottom. The goat half was covered in thick brown fur and a little tail that bobbed back and forth with more of a twitch than a wag. The human half was middle-aged, hairy-chested, and a little out of shape. He had small, pointy horns that stuck out from amid the bramble of coarse brown hair on the top of his head. He wasn’t smiling, and despite being mostly naked, he seemed unaffected by the cold morning air.
In the middle was the black man from the roadhouse, still dressed in his three-piece suit.
The fourth figure was a leprechaun and stood just over a foot tall and was naked save for the wicked little scowl on its face. It was off-white with a head shaped like a crescent moon.
The final figure was a blonde man with glasses that I recognized right away as Charlie. Although I knew the texts had been from him, I was curious as to how he looked so…alive.
The pharmacist nodded to each of them in turn, and said, “This is the moment you have all been waiting for, no doubt, but before we begin, I must address the unwelcome party.”
He turned and looked straight at me. I was pretty sure in the shade of the trees I was hidden from sight, but it didn’t stop him from knowing I was there. “Please step forward, Mr. Finnegan.” And he knew my name.
I stood and tried to control the shaking in my hands. After taking a deep breath, I stepped out into the clearing.
All six sets of eyes stared directly at me, but before anyone could speak, Charlie stepped forward and said, “Oh, good. You came. I wasn’t sure if you would.” He turned to the bearded man and said, “This guy’s cool. He’s with me.”
The bearded man nodded and motioned for me to join Charlie. With more than a hint of confusion, I went to stand beside him. “What’s going on?” I whispered.
“Universal law, trick a trickster and he has to honor you. You beat me at my own game. I thought I’d let you in on the secret. My idea. Hope you like it.”