Here Be Monsters - By M T Murphy Page 0,34

my eyes and turned away, grabbing beer mugs off a drying rack by the sink beneath the bar and mopping beads of residual water away with a hand towel. “Forget it,” I muttered. Why try to carry on an intelligent conversation—much less a literary one—with someone who’d pretty much polished off a fifth of vodka all on his own, all in less than two hours?

“What’s your name?” he said.

“Mel,” I replied. “Short for Melanie. No one calls me that except my dad.”

He’d asked me this before and I’d answered him the same. I waited to see if there was any dawn of recognition in his face at the words, wasn’t the least bit surprised when there wasn’t.

“You drink, Meg?” he asked.

He’d called me Meg every time, too.

I held up the mug in one hand, the towel in the other, gave both demonstrative little shakes. “Not while I’m on duty.”

I didn’t tell him I never drank because my old man was a drunk, and even though he’d been clean and sober for seven years now, once upon a time, he’d liked to get into the Pabst Blue Ribbon and then slap me and my mother around for shits and grins. I had never tasted alcohol. I worked in the bar so I would never forget it—the hot stink of booze on his breath—and how much I hated him still for that.

John nodded once, fingered his glass again, and tossed back the entire dollop in a solitary swallow. “That’s good,” he told me, his gaze wandering distantly toward a nearby pale water ring stained into the top of the bar. “I wish I’d never started. Maybe then they’d leave me alone.”

I glanced around the pub. It was a Tuesday, almost midnight—almost closing time. Besides John on his bar stool perch before me, the place was pretty much empty. A couple of kids with greasy hair and too many crude tattoos to have earned them anyplace but prison loafed in a far corner, shooting pool and drinking beer. They had one girl between them, a bleach blonde in a too-tight denim miniskirt who didn’t seem to mind the two-to-one odds.

Figuring what the fuck, I had nothing better to do, I took the bait and walked back over to John. He had that cast in his eyes, a tone in his voice that my chronic drunks sometimes affect when they want to get nostalgic or wax rhapsodical.

“Maybe who would leave you alone?” I asked. Probably his family—his old lady and kids. He was wearing a wedding ring. Old ladies, kids and chronic alcoholism seldom mixed company amicably.

He looked at me. “The periphery people.”

I blinked at him, wondering if I’d heard him right. “The who?”

Still he studied me, his gaze unwavering—surprisingly steady, in fact, given the amount of booze he’d been knocking back that night.

“Periphery people,” he said again, pronouncing the words slowly, carefully, as if each was a delicate crystal vase he was trying to swaddle in newspaper before packing away in a box in the attic. “Although they’re not really people. Not like you and me. I don’t know what the hell they are.” He blinked, his eyes growing cloudy again, and he looked away. “Never mind. You can’t see them.”

Again because I had nothing better to do—and because I was actually caught off-guard by both his poem quotation and his use of a functional vocabulary word not typical of the common lexicon—I leaned comfortably across the bar. “Why can’t I see them?”

“You have to be drunk,” he replied. “Or at least I do anymore. Didn’t use to. I could see them just fine on my own when I was a kid. I think kids are more receptive to seeing them. They believe in things, you know? Like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.”

“Or periphery people,” I supplied and he nodded. “The periphery of what?”

John flapped his hand, indicating the room. “Here. There. Everywhere. Everything. They’re always around, standing in the shadows. All along the edges.”

“The periphery,” I said.

“Yeah.” He lifted his glass to his lips, then realized he had no more vodka.

“So they’re here right now?” As he set the glass down, I reached for the Ketel bottle and topped him off.

“Yeah.” Nodding to me in thanks, he took a small sip, smacked his lips appreciatively and drank again.

“You said they weren’t human. What do they look like?”

He shrugged. “They’re tall. Really tall. Like seven or eight feet high. They wear cloaks, hooded cloaks. The cowls cover their heads.”

Cloaks. Cowls. Periphery and