Here Be Monsters - By M T Murphy Page 0,35

poetry. I was beginning to wonder if this guy, John, wasn’t your typical chronic drunk at all, but something more…tragic.

I made a show of glancing around, brows raised. There were plenty of shadow-draped edges and corners in the dump where I worked. Not a one of them seemed to be harboring a seven-foot-tall giant hooded man with a cowl over his face.

“You can’t see them,” he told me.

“Because I’m sober.”

“Yeah. But they’re hideous.” He shuddered, though whether from this admittance or the drink, I wasn’t sure. “Their faces are flat. There’s nothing there—no eyes, no nose. Only a mouth. Round and gaping, taking up almost the whole front side. Ringed with teeth. God, lots and lots of teeth—rows of them going backward down their throats, just like a shark.”

The color drained somewhat from his face, leaving him with a sort of putty-colored pallor. “They like to eat, you see.”

Maybe it was the unspoken body language that seemed to suggest this poor son of a bitch was really buying the snow cone machine he was selling to the Eskimos. Whatever the reason, I found myself simply staring at him. And fighting the urge to shiver.

“Eat what?” I asked, my voice uncharacteristically small.

His expression shifted, growing grim, his eyes round and earnest. He whispered one word in reply to me: “Souls.”

I’d expected him to say “human flesh.” Maybe even “brains,” or perhaps spleen, appendix, right little toe. This, however, caught me by surprise.

“Souls?” I asked.

“They latch on to the back of your head with their teeth. Then they wrap themselves around you, make you carry them around like that while they glut themselves. Sometimes they take a little. Sometimes they take a lot. Depends on how hungry they are.”

The cracked vinyl seat cover beneath his ass creaked as he shifted his weight, pivoting to glance behind them. With a nod, he pointed out the ménage-a-trois-in-situ playing pool. “You see that girl over there?”

“Yeah.”

Turning in the seat again, he leaned across the bar toward me, close enough for me to smell the vodka in his breath. “One of them’s feeding on her right now.”

I took another look, but saw only the blonde laughing, slapping away one of the guy’s hands as he tried clumsily, vainly to grope the generous outward swell of her ass.

“She looks okay to me,” I said.

“Because you can’t see it. And she can’t feel it. Not yet anyway.”

“But she will?”

John nodded. “One day, yeah. She’ll find out she has cancer. Or AIDS. Or maybe she’ll step off the curb at the wrong time and get plowed into by a bus. Or have a psychotic break and shove a seven-inch-long butcher knife through her husband’s sternum while he’s sleeping one night. But not at first. That comes later. I’ve seen it. No, at first…she’ll just be sad.”

“Sad.” I repeated this, brow raised.

“You ever feel like everything in the world’s gone wrong? Like you can’t do anything right? Like the world is nothing but a big pile of dog shit, and you’re just a smear in the fecal matter taking up space? That kind of sadness, that sort of despair—that’s what they leave you with once they’ve eaten enough of your soul. From there, it only gets worse. Because that sorrow…that unhappiness, it must smell good to them, draw them somehow. They’re always with you after that, like a pack of wolves, fighting over you, for their chance to latch onto your skull and drain you dry.”

I’ve been tending bar for a long time—for seven years, starting about the time my mother had died and my dad had first sworn on her deathbed that he’d go clean, and then had shocked the glorious ever-living shit out of me by sticking to that. I’ve heard a lot of stories, yarns woven by a lot of guys far more wasted and crazy and pathetic than John. But for some reason, I couldn’t just bob my head and cock that condescending smirk that I usually reserve for someone shitfaced and rambling. The in-one-ear-and-out-the-other look, I call it.

“They’ve fed from you, you know,” he told me pointedly.

I felt a chill steal down my spine, slithering and unnerving, like a live eel dropped down the back of my T-shirt. Managing a hoarse bark of laughter, trying my damndest to sound dubious, I said, “What?”

He nodded.

“How can you tell?”

His eyes found mine—round, sorrowful, nearly sheepish. “You knew the poem. You haven’t always been a bar maid.”

Normally, that antiquated and decidedly misogynistic term—bar maid—might have made me bristle.