The Grim Keepers

by CW Publishing House

  “Just give me the biggest glass of the coldest thing you got on tap,” Steven said. “Jack on vacation or something?” he pried.

  “Oh, no, he just needed me to come in tonight is all. You need him for something?” said the bartender as he placed a frosty glass of beer in front of Steven. There was something familiar about this man, but he couldn’t put a finger on it.

  “No, just figured he would be in on a Friday. He always is. Can I see the after-hours menu, please?”

  “Do you want the regular menu? We still have a full kitchen. Anything you want.”

  “What? When did that happen? Is something special going on tonight?”

  “New cook and new menu. He’s real good on that grill back there. He can whip up damn near anything.”

  Steven thought hard for a moment. It seemed like something had smiled on him, and his night was rapidly becoming a memorable occasion. He took a long sip of the glass in front of him and then had to take another sip immediately. It was some of the best-tasting beer he had had in a long time. “Anything you say. Well, you know, I have a hankering for a cheesesteak sandwich and some steak fries. All-time favorite meal, right there. Can your boy do that?” Steven asked.

  “Cheesesteak and fries, no problem. Out in the quick for you, sir.”

  Steven was sure he knew the bartender from somewhere. He knew it was bad form, but his curiosity could not wait any longer. “Sorry there, but I have to ask, have we met before?” he blurted out as the bartender turned to leave.

  “No need to be sorry, buddy. I’d tell you if we had met before. I’m sure you would remember me. I’m just that kind of person,” he said with an enormous smile. He turned and went to put in Steven’s order with the kitchen.

  Steven sat sipping the earth-shatteringly good beverage in his hand and searched his memory. He must just have one of those faces, I suppose, he thought to himself.

  “Is there anything you would like to say to me, son?” came a voice from over Steven’s shoulder. He turned to look at the speaker and was dumbfounded to see a priest standing behind him.

  “Excuse me, sir. Not to be rude, but I think you might be in the wrong place,” Steven said after the initial shock wore off.

  “Not to be rude, either, but I think I’m right where God needs me to be. Now, was there anything you wanted to say to me?”

  “What makes you think I have anything to say to you?”

  “You just look like you have a lot on your mind.”

  “I think I’ll be fine on my own.”

  “You sure about that, son?”

  “Yes, I’m sure about that.”

  “Order’s up. Here’s your food, buddy,” came the voice of the bartender. Steven turned to look as the man put down a savory, creamy, steaming-hot cheesesteak sandwich, a side of perfectly golden steak fries, and a fresh glass of whatever that amazing brew was.

  “Thank you,” Steven said. He was about to dig into his food when he got the sense that he knew the priest from somewhere as well. He looked back at where the other man had been standing, but he was no longer there. Steven returned his attention to his meal and ate. It was amazing; the food tasted not of this earth. Steven took his time and relished each bite down to the very last crumb. He swore it was not possible for food to taste this good. He had to stop himself from nearly licking the plate.

  After he was done he sat and reveled in the pleasure of a full belly. He was interrupted when the bartender placed yet another towering glass of that divine drink in front of him. “Oh, I think I’m at my limit here. I already had two tall ones,” Steven said.

  “Oh, I thought I heard you say just one more. I must have misunderstood,” said the bartender with an apologetic look in his eyes.

  Steven had not realized he’d been speaking. Have I been saying that the whole time? he thought, feeling a little surge of panic creep into his mind. He looked at the glass and craved to drink it down. He had driven farther and in worse shape before. Steven knew that a third drink might put him over the legal limit but it would not put him over his tolerance. “What the hell. I won’t tell if you don’t,” he said with a devilish grin.

  “Lips are sealed, buddy.”

  Steven enjoyed nursing his drink along. About halfway down he waved the bartender back over. “I’d like to settle up, now.”

  The bartender looked Steven up and down before he spoke. “Jack said you would be in tonight and that your tab would be on the house.”

  Steven was taken aback. He knew Jack had always taken care of his regulars but this was never something he would have expected. Before Steven could say anything else, the bartender spoke again.

  “He also said strawberry shortcake was your favorite and that you could use a piece.” He quickly produced a plate from behind the bar with a picture-perfect piece of strawberry shortcake on it.

  “Thank you. And tell Jack thank you,” was all Steven could say.

  “You can thank ol’ Jack yourself when you see him next.” The bartender nodded and left.

  Steven finished his drink and the scrumptious dessert in front of him and then made his way to his jeep. The ride home from the Lone Star was quick. Steven could feel his eyes growing heavy and his body beginning to shut down for the night. If ever there was a chance for a peaceful sleep it would be tonight. “Just one more,” Steven said as he slipped the key into the lock of his front door. He moved through his darkened house up to his bedroom as fast as his weary feet would carry him. He opened the door and walked inside.

  A blast of light hit him as he entered his bedroom. After his eyes adjusted to the brightness, he struggled to reconcile with what he saw before him. He did not stand in his bedroom. He was in the prison—the Death Room, but it was much bigger than he remembered. It had to be, because it was filled with every inmate he had ever executed. They all looked at him, their skin cold and grey, but their eyes burned with hatred and anger. In the middle of the room where the execution table was supposed to be, Steven saw his bed.

  He wanted to scream. This was impossible. This could not be real. It had to be a bad dream—it had to be. He looked at the dead men assembled in the room and felt like his mind had come unraveled. To Steven’s right was the bartender. His name was George Tubal. Steven had put a needle in his arm six years ago for eight counts of first degree murder. On his left was the priest. His name was Father Patrick Murdock. He was one of the last inmates sentenced to the electric chair at the prison before it was decommissioned. He had been found guilty of abusing and molesting more than a dozen children. Right in front of Steven was Jack. He had been the first man Steven had ever killed. Jack had set his wife on fire as well as the man with whom she’d had an affair.

  In perfect unison, every one of the dead men in the room spoke. “Just one more.” They chanted it over and over again. Steven shook with fright. He felt a hand touch him on the shoulder. He turned and what he saw nearly made him catatonic. The man who had placed a hand on his shoulder was himself, dressed in a perfectly pressed and cleaned uniform. Steven looked into his own eyes. The version of him that had just appeared in the room brought his face within mere inches of his terrified doppelganger and spoke. “Just one more.” The Steven dressed in uniform forced the cowering man onto the bed in the middle of the room. When the horrified Steven finally lay flat, he looked to see that he did not lay on his bed but on the execution table. He felt the hands of many long-dead men strap him down and the needle pierce the skin of his arm. Steven screamed until his eyes finally closed. He never had bad dreams again.

  About Jason Pere

  Jason self-published his first novel ‘Modern Knighthood: Diary of a Warrior Poet’ in 2012, and has continued to pursue self-publishing with his sophomore novel ‘Calling the Reaper: First Book of Purgatory’. Jason discovered CWC early on in 2015 and has been a passionate member since, diving into multiple collaborative fiction projects with other CWC authors. When not writing or enduring his “Real World Job” Jason enjoys Netflix time with his
family, breaking out obscure board games and dorking out with friends, firing up the his game console and surviving a Zombie Apocalypse, or indulging in baked goods and sleep.

  Remus

  By Tony Stark

  It was always two days before the first frost of the season that I arose.

  When the sun was high and children played on the beaches near Blackpool, I hid away in my lassitude, buried deep under the old, brick storm drains of the ancient city. I had lived in Lancashire for nearly six-hundred years, lingering in many of the abandoned mines or the deepest, wildest forests while the summer of the year raged above me. Once the days finally began to wane and the nights grew chill and cold, I could finally bear to leave the shelter of the cold earth and its gnarled trees and walk by night amongst the meadows.

  It had been so very long since I had seen the trees, green and fresh with leaf and life. I could not bear to even look outside when the summer raged, so fierce and impressive. To me, ever since the Incident, trees had been robed in gold and scarlet, brown and beige, wearing their fading green leaves as ornaments of the yang time of year fading away. The frosts came, and I would emerge in time to see the flats and shops adorned with decorations for All Hallow's Eve and Guy Fawkes Day. This was my morning, these spooky days of mystery. This was my first real glimpse of the year, the time of revels, bonfires, and celebration of the death of a traitor. It was fitting.

  I settled in the Angel Isle, as it was called back then, in the time of the first Roman settlement of London. I had lived a wretched existence, hiding in the catacombs under the city which bore my brother's name, lurking for all but the very heel of the year in darkness. When the Christians came and supplanted the older worshippers whose caves I shared, they welcomed me as yet another of their shabby, destitute poor—another friend of their crucified Lord, Jeshua. Needing as little sustenance as I did after the Incident, their shared meals of bread, fish, and wine were more than I had eaten since the time I once laughed too often, too merrily, at my brother's lazy ways. When the Romans, with their massive roads and intensive control, took the wildlands of the Island of England, they brought back fine, warm wool and tales of a hyperborean world so far to the north that the summer days stretched wildly long. The winter days squished so thin and pale, the sun barely penetrated through the mists and fogs and snows.

  It sounded like absolute heaven to me. I implored my Christian colleagues to assist me in my journey, and they readily did, so eager were they to bring the message of their resurrected Lord to the isle. I hid under blankets and skins and travelled in the heel of the year, just as the festival of Saturnalia was beginning in the streets my brother had laid out so many ages ago. It was a long journey and a dangerous one. But the Alps in the north of Italia masked the sun into blissfully short days and long, shadowed twilights—the first relief I had felt from the wild dance of the sun since my killer had murdered me on the hills of Rome. Beyond the line of the mountains, as the rumor had said, the sun grew fainter and weaker. The snows—the glorious, cold, stately snows—grew deeper, and for the first time since I had been murdered I actually felt strong.

  When my feet first touched the jagged, limestone rocks along the shore of England, I felt a strong, magical presence comfort my wasted bones and flesh. I took in a breath of air—chill and cold, damp and filled with the eternal, quiet strength of yin. My companion, a preacher from the people of the Fish, turned and looked at me with wonder.

  “Why, Remus,” he had said, “your cheeks bear the bloom of life in them!”

  At first, I was grateful to be farther north than I had ever been, far away from the constant tumult of the city my brother Romulus had founded with his aggressive, implacably hungry energy. But as the years wound on, I noticed that the suns of summer would burn and drive me deep into the limestone caverns cut out by the sea of the coast. I moved ever northward, first through the deep forests of the Danelaw in East Anglia and then, finally, to the coalfields of Lancashire, which even then were being worked for their black ores. There I found equilibrium, a bearable state of hiding from the height of summer without being wasted by it and living amongst my fellow man without being exhausted by it. Perhaps it was the vast fields of coal, so cold and still and yin like me, with a great potential lying dormant through death. Or perhaps I just found the right latitude at last. But the rolling hills and rivers of Lancashire became my home. I came to know every cave, every deep wood, every dark place in the countryside.

  During the dark half of the year, I grew to know the people of the country as well. I walked amongst them and took odd jobs as a teacher and a tutor. I passed from generation to generation amongst them, coming to know their ways and their customs. A great fondness for these plain-spoken, hard-working folk grew in me. In their toils in the coalmines and the fields, I saw a certain similarity to my own harsh, bitter, and lonely existence. Perhaps it was because this happened at my first real emergence for the year, but the joyful cries and petitioning for gifts at All Hallows’ Eve seemed to me the best time of all for these simple people. Their house-to-house begging for victuals, clad in strange and disguising garb, was again so similar to my own story.

  I had come to call this place my home, wandering the streets in the excitement-filled days before the end of October, watching the families I had observed for centuries preparing for autumn with faces and hands so similar to those of their forebears. I had found peace here, albeit an outsider's peace.

  I was excited to find, that year, that the turning of the leaves came earlier, the frosts sooner and harsher, than in many a year. I could enter the world of men before October even came, so I could visit with my friends who had grown another year older and more tired but were still joyous and happy people in spite of it. I was grateful for the auspicious early yin; the summer had been late in coming as well and I faced an ability to spend more days in the world than I had in centuries.

  I had forgotten completely about my brother, the manic despot who had founded the martial city of Rome.

  It therefore came as some surprise when, one night not long before Hallows’ Eve, I saw my brother on the television. I sat in a pub with some coalminers when the evening news announced several ancient, closed coal seams had been purchased by an American Tycoon. I didn't pay the story much heed—those matters were not for the likes of the dead—but one of my friends pointed at the map of Lancashire on the screen, exposing the dangers of the sale.

  “Those seams were closed for a reason!” he called out to the pub at large, met by a chorus of agreement. “They run too deep. They cut too far into England. No matter what 'new-fangled technology' that rich bastard Flush might be bringing, if they cut any more coal out of those seams, it'll spell subduction and collapse for most of Lancashire!”

  “Oh, aye,” came the general reply.

  “My great-grandfather worked those seams,” another man said. “He told me the same thing. They went too deep as it was. That's why no one can make new construction in the northern end of town.”

  “There's the smug bastard now!” Another pointed at the television as a chorus of boos and a few wadded-up napkins launched toward the screen.

  I looked up and beheld my brother's face. I had not considered the possibility Romulus was still alive. Having had such a violent life that he stole my own to add to his bursting coffer, I realized I had come to think that at some point it must have run out. I thought he must have died at some point and passed out of the world. Yet here he was, his effulgently solid bulk crammed into a very expensive businessman's suit, his corpulent neck spilling over his white collar. His eyes were black as they always had been, but had shrunk and lay sunken now against a mass of flesh, blotchy and livid with the stains of too much life crammed into a single vessel. He spoke and it was English, but his voice still had the same arrogant, harsh grating it had had as he laughed over my corpse that day so long ago. His words puffed out of him, steaming on the screen, while he wrapped his immense woolen coat closer around him to keep away th
e slender fingers of chill.

  I watched the broadcast, shivering in my bereft body, seized by waves of deathly yin energy striving imperceptibly against my brother, my killer. I looked around at the faces of my friends, the great-great-great-grandchildren of the friends I had had long before. I thought about the heedless way Romulus had always conducted his affairs, wanting what he wanted no matter the cost to others—or to nature. He must have heard about the probable result of resuming this coalmining, and continued regardless. After all this time, he still thought he was immune.

  Perhaps he was not immune any longer. I wondered, as I watched my long-estranged brother shivering with the damp drizzle that fell on the screen, if the past year with its weak summer had weakened him. I wondered, as I looked at his blotchy and crapulent face, if the long years of excess living had weakened him further, making him susceptible to the creeping hand of cold, wintry death. I watched him turn on his heel as a reporter quizzed him about the dangers of the mining scheme. He walked into the Savoy Hotel, a Lancashire landmark. I knew he would be lurking in the penthouse suite; he always liked to be the highest, so long as he didn't have to work for it personally.

  “How long is Mr. Flush supposed to be in town?” I asked the room in general.

  “I hear he's here until Christmas, at least,” one of the men said. Another agreed, citing gossip his sister-in-law had revealed from her work at the Savoy.

  I nodded, smiled at another friend who proffered me a packet of American Halloween candy. I turned the wrapper over and over in my long, thin, cold fingers, thinking about America, the place that had, until lately, been my brother's home. Thinking about the way he shivered as he proclaimed his intention of laying waste to my home and to the lives of my friends. Thinking about how there were large access tunnels that opened into the basement of the Savoy, ones I had used in the bright time of the year to raid their kitchens and dustbins for the scraps of food I needed to live.