by Layton Green
Caleb grinned as he poured a line of shot glasses. “Slay any dragons tonight?”
Will slapped his elbows on a wooden bar stained with decades of cigarette smoke and spilled drinks. “Encourage anyone to drink and drive?”
“Didn’t you read the sign above the door? ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter.’” Caleb gathered empty shot glasses on a tray. “What’re the benefits like, anyway? Two weeks vacation in Sunnydale? Do you get your 401k in gold coins?”
“That’s hilarious, Mr. Career Bartender. Had any weekends off lately? Maybe one day you’ll make it to Senior Bar Manager and get a free plate of wings and a new liver.”
A slim brunette, a regular of both the bar and Caleb’s bedroom, began giggling. “You should come in costume sometime,” she said to Will. “Chicks dig knights.”
Caleb snapped his fingers at the brunette. “I’m the only one licensed to give my little brother hell around here. Trust me, as soon as he decides to use that brain of his, we’ll all be working for him. He’s wizard smart.”
“No,” Will said, “that’s Val.”
“No, Val just has more drive and ambition in one pinky than both of us combined. So when are you going to start using that brain of yours?”
“As soon as you stop getting drunk and sleeping around.”
Caleb’s easy grin spread wide.
Will let his eyes sink to his beer, already dreading the workday. College had bored him even more than high school, and he had dropped out during his sophomore year. It wasn’t that he couldn’t hack it—he had always scored in the top percentile on achievement tests—it was that he didn’t want to hack it. Doing things because society said he was supposed to was not his strong suit.
Unfortunately, professional jousting was not a viable career plan.
He had the odd sensation that someone was watching him. He glanced at the far end of the bar, where a scrawny older man was staring him down. Wisps of gray hair sprouted above a sloping forehead, and his eyebrows corkscrewed like broken springs.
The old man nodded a single time, his expression grave, as if giving Will a sign. Then the man looked away and gestured to Caleb for a drink.
Will’s self-deprecating cackle caused the people beside him to turn and stare. Giving him a sign? Grave expression? The old goat had probably been leering at a girl by the Atari.
Intentional or not, maybe the old man’s nod had been a sign from the universe that it was time for Will to take a long hard look at his life.
Back at the decrepit apartment on Magazine Street he shared with Caleb, Will finished a Coke on his balcony, watching as tourists and college kids stumbled from bar to bar.
He crushed his soda can and went inside, wide-awake after the excitement of the night. He went online and played a few games of chess, whipping some upstart from Latvia named RigaRockStar1. After that, Will worked on repairing the bookshelves he had salvaged from goodwill, and then slumped on his Papasan chair, gazing at his beloved collection of fantasy memorabilia.
Fantasy, he knew, wasn’t just about being antisocial or having an overactive imagination. The popularity of the genre came from a lack of real-life adventure in today’s society. A primal need to take part in the ancient dance between good and evil, no matter where on the spectrum one fell.
Ever since Will could remember, he had possessed a deep, unfulfilled longing to be a hero. Thwarted by the limitations of reality, he had turned elsewhere.
But that was all his life had turned out to be: one big messy fantasy world.
When Will showed up at the House of Spirits the next night, Lance was sitting at the bar with a satisfied smirk.
“I checked with Animal Control,” Lance said. “They picked up a dead dog in Laveau Cemetery this morning and confirmed it was a Rottweiler. Probably with a severe case of mange.”
“What do you mean, probably?”
“You think we’re gonna autopsy an ownerless dog?”
“Did they check for blood?” Will said. “Did you even ask?”
“C’mon now, buddy. Back to reality.”
“It didn’t bleed, Lance!”
“It was dark and chaotic. It probably bled out after running off.” Lance’s smirk returned. “You really thought it was a zombie dog, didn’t you?”
“I was thinking more like a hellhound,” Will muttered, “summoned by an evil cleric.”
Caleb set a beer in front of Will. “Haven’t we discussed talking like that in public?”
Lance chortled, and Will pushed away from the bar. He couldn’t take another night of listening to Lance talk about what an exciting day he had.
“Where’re you going?” Caleb asked.
Instead of explaining, Will started for the door. He knew it was juvenile, but he had to do something, anything, to break the routine. He also knew that dog hadn’t bled when Lance had shot it.
And that golden object hanging from the man’s chain had been a dog whistle.
Will stopped at his apartment for his folding knife, a baseball bat, a can of pepper spray he kept beside his bed, and a pair of binoculars. He parked alongside the cemetery and hesitated, remembering the cold eyes of the homeowner. Gooseflesh prickled his arms, and it wasn’t from the late October chill.
Right before Will left the car, his cell buzzed with a call from Charlie Zalinski, a retired professor of Medieval Studies at Tulane who had been his father’s best friend, as well as godfather to all three brothers. Charlie and Val had carried the Blackwoods through the tough years after Dad died and Mom had her breakdown.
Though all the brothers loved him, Charlie and Will were especially close.
“Can you talk?” Charlie asked.
Will glanced at the cemetery. “I’m a little busy. Call you later?”
Charlie took a long time to respond, and when he did, there was a weird note of concern in his voice. “I’d prefer to speak in person. Tomorrow should be fine. But don’t forget.”
“Okay,” Will said slowly. Had Charlie been hitting the Scotch again?
Will silenced the ringer just before he hopped the low wall fronting the fog-enshrouded cemetery. The stippled tops of the tombs rose out of quadrants divided by stone walkways, a true city of the dead. His heart pitter-pattered from the irrational fear of being alone at night, and when the wind stirred, something brushed his shoulder. He scrambled to the side and took a wild swing with the baseball bat, cursing when he saw the low-hanging branch, its undulations in the breeze like mocking laughter.
He found a vine-wrapped oak at the edge of the cemetery, near the old Queen Anne. The lower windows were shuttered. A soft light emanated from the tower.
He leaned his bat against the tree and reached for a branch. He hadn’t climbed a tree since he was a kid. Except for a lingering sense of unease, he enjoyed every second of it.
Ten feet up, he found a solid perch and tried the binoculars again. The cracked shutters still blocked his view. Using a branch above his head for support, he scooted to the middle of the limb. Now it was too blurry to make anything out. He was going to have to use both hands to focus.
Squeezing his legs like pliers against the branch, he adjusted the lens and felt a tingle of excitement when he saw the man from last night sitting at a desk near the tower window, head bowed over a thick tome. The excitement morphed into unease as Will noticed the décor: the walls were lined with built-in bookshelves which were filled, end to end and in meticulous arrangement, with skulls.
They sat in grim repose, an assortment of empty sockets staring back at Will: human skulls, animal skulls, and a few strangely-shaped craniums all the more disturbing because Will couldn’t identify them.
Something scuttled at the periphery of Will’s vision, and he whisked the binoculars around. Two more people, each wearing some type of skin-tight white clothing, had entered the room.
Will again risked his balance to focus. He finally got a clear look at one of the figures, but they weren’t people in tight white clothing. They were livin
g skeletons moving busily about the room, dusting bookshelves and sweeping the floor like some twisted version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. One of them took a break from cleaning a suit of armor to lift a bottle of wine and refill the man’s glass.
Will lowered the binoculars with shaking hands. This can’t be real.
But when he took another look, he was certain he wasn’t seeing people in costume, because the skeletons looked impossibly thin in comparison to the man. Will could see the fleshless skulls, the knobby ends of the bones poking outward.
Were they marionettes, he wondered? Will swallowed and retrained the binoculars, and that last thought evaporated as one of the skeletons turned its head towards the window, a movement far too fluid for any puppet. Its leering skull was not oval and white like fake skeletons, but irregular and covered in gray splotches from the grave. As with the skeletons he remembered from high school biology, the bottom half of the skull looked obscenely narrow without flesh, its rotting teeth spread wide in a sinister grin.
Will reared in shock, and a loud crack split the silence as the branch gave way. Just before he fell, he saw the man at the desk leap to his feet and look out the window, flanked by two skeletons with fleshless necks stretching at unnatural angles.
-3-
Will lay flat on his back, his breath knocked out from the fall. Worse, he could feel a panic attack rushing towards him like a freight train.
He grasped at the empty night air, fighting hard to regain his wind. At last his breath training kicked in, but then he thought of what he had seen through that window. The memory enveloped him, and Will knew that if he didn’t get to his feet in the next few seconds he might end up like one of those skeletons, bringing coffee to his master as his soul screamed in denial.
To stave off the attack, Will poured every ounce of his mental energy into thinking of something else. He needed something fast and he fled to a place he never let himself go: the memory of his father, an archaeologist who had died on a dig when Will was ten, shattering his young world. His father’s handsome face and warm eyes came floating out of the void, calming Will’s spirit but also taking him to someplace lost in time and removed from reality, a dangerous fugue state. Will fell into his father’s embrace, a trusting child once again, oblivious to the worries of the world and wanting only to stay by his father’s side forever.
A howl sounded, somewhere distant in Will’s mind. Then came another and another, long and ragged like the howl from the previous night. One of them snapped him back to the present.
Alone at night in a cemetery.
Skeletons.
Zombie dogs.
His breathing ragged but under control, Will grabbed his backpack, stumbled to his feet, and ran like he had never run before.
He abandoned the path, cutting through long grass and hopping low slabs on a direct path to his car, right through the middle of the cemetery. He had his knife and pepper spray in hand, but he knew they would be useless against those things.
God, what had he just seen?
He embraced the fear-laced adrenaline, getting a burst of hope when he saw his car. He might be outgunned, but Will was fast, and nothing in the lore suggested skeletons had supernatural speed.
The problem was, the lore was make believe, and this was all too real.
He careened through weeds and grasping branches, terror welling up inside him like a pressurized canister. When he was almost to the wall, deep in a scruffy corner of the cemetery, he tripped over a headstone and fell. His arms sank to his shoulders in a mound of loose soil, and Will scrambled off the grave as if it were filled with scorpions.
He realized the grave was too short to be human. The area around it was scattered with small, makeshift wooden headstones. A pet cemetery. He climbed out and glanced at the grave marker, which looked much newer than the surrounding, weed-choked placards.
Max and Darlene, our beloved Rotties, 2003-2015.
With a shudder, Will leapt to his feet and sprinted the final few yards, leaping over the cemetery wall. He fumbled with his keys as another howl keened behind him, much closer this time. He threw himself into his car, yanked it into gear, and ramped the curb.
Just before he sped away, he risked a backward glance into the rearview, where he saw a tall man in a black cloak, the man who owned the dog whistle, standing at the edge of the cemetery. Beside him was the bulk of a rotting Rottweiler, its front paws resting atop the cemetery wall, howling its frustration into the night.
Will stumbled into his apartment. First things first: breathing exercises and a cold Mountain Dew to calm the nerves.
Then he did some research.
He scoured the Internet and his extensive fantasy collection. Was the man in the cloak a vampire, a lich, a diabolical priest bound in homage to an evil god? The last option made the most sense, given his command of the undead.
That was, if Will accepted the fact that magic and the undead were real and not figments of his imagination. Which led him to the final, uncomfortable option: he was going insane.
Lance had seen the dog and the man. Or were those normal encounters, twisted and fantasized by Will’s unbalanced mind?
He drew his arms in tight, disturbed by the thought.
Had he inherited his mother’s genes?
Will perused every edition of the Monster Manual ever issued, pored through books on mythology, searched the places on the Web where fans of speculative fiction congregated. He found more information than he could possibly consume, but none of it described the terror of standing face to face with a Rottweiler so fresh from the grave it still had bits of flesh hanging off, or the shock of seeing the sickly gray of a skeleton’s animated skull, or the fluttering in Will’s gut when the skeletons glided across the room.
Will spent the remaining hours of darkness huddled on his balcony, afraid not to be within eyesight of the real world. Caleb must have shacked up with someone again. He spent more nights away than home.
Not until a shaft of purple morning light breached the horizon did Will manage to fall asleep, though his last troubled thought was that he had left his baseball bat lying by the tree in the cemetery.
A bat his father had given him on his eighth birthday—and onto which Will had carved his name.
The next day was Saturday. Will slept until noon, then made coffee and shuffled around his apartment. He saw the dirt on his clothes, the backpack by the corner.
It had happened. The question was what to do about it.
He slumped into his Papasan. Was he crazy, or did things exist in this world that had previously lived only in Will’s imagination?
His entire life seemed to hang in the balance of that question.
Deep breaths, Will.
He had a Pop Tart for breakfast, soaked in a hot shower for half an hour, spent the afternoon doing more fruitless research, then decided to go to Caleb’s bar.
He needed to be with his people.
Caleb didn’t show until seven p.m. for his closing shift. Will had already worked his way through a Cajun Burger, gator fries, and a scoop of bread pudding. “You look like you just got drafted,” Caleb said, tying on his apron as he slid behind the bar. He was wearing a wool cap, ripped jeans, and a Bob Marley T-shirt. “Or did Joss Whedon have a skiing accident?”
Will cupped his mug between his palms. “Listen Beanpole, I know you’re an atheist, but have you ever wondered what else might be out there? Buried underneath a glacier in Antarctica, lurking in a cave system in the Ukraine, traveling through the dimensions,” Will wriggled his hands in the air, “up there playing dice with God?”
Caleb washed his hands and started prepping the garnish tray. “That’s sort of the point of being an atheist. I only have to worry about the rent.”
A willowy girl with a striking narrow face, her hair and skin the color of a light roast coffee bean, entered the bar from a swinging door that led to the back office.
Yasmina. Caleb’s on-again, off-again Brazilian girlfriend
of half a decade, PhD student in zoology, and part-time day shifter at the bar.
“Hi, Will!”
Will liked Yasmina. Everyone liked Yasmina. She was brilliant, beautiful, interesting, and one of those rare, naturally benign people. Even she, however, had failed to tame Caleb’s profligate ways. It was obvious she still loved him, but she had left him when he refused to change his lifestyle.
Will gave her a tired wave.
“That’s all I get?” she said.
Yasmina spoke English with a lilting accent that drove men crazy. She wasn’t Will’s type, however, and not just because she was still in love with his brother. He preferred his women less elegant and perfect, more athletic and earthy. He wanted the tomboy with the attitude and the killer smile.
When Will didn’t answer, she said, “You had a long day?” Her eyes slipped towards Caleb, who had moved to the other end of the bar to chat up two girls.
“Something like that.”
“Hey, I have something for you. A man stopped by earlier and returned your baseball bat.”
Will’s beer stopped halfway to his mouth. “What’d he look like?”
“Tall, older, aristocratic. He was dressed weird, and I have to tell you, he was sort of arrogant. But you know him, no? He said to tell you he’d see you soon.”
“Yeah,” Will mumbled, a series of chills sweeping down his spine. “What time did he come?”
“Around noon, I think,” Yasmina said.
“You saw him leave in broad daylight?”
Her laugh was musical, suggestive. “Sure. Is there something you need to tell me about your love life?”
That ruled out the vampire angle, he thought.
“Anyway,” she continued, “I just came to pick up my check. Stop in and see me some day.”
Will didn’t respond, because he didn’t want Yasmina to hear the fear in his voice.
At least he wasn’t crazy.
