Tiny Shifts (Part II)

--- Continuing From Here ---

An ancient Wurlitzer stood against the wall directly in front of them providing a song Paul had never heard before. The wall was festooned with animal heads, beer signs, and old playbills. A pool table with stained green felt silently begged someone to try their luck at its banks and holes, and a pinball machine that appeared to pre-date electricity slept in the corner. Beyond the poolroom was a hallway that emptied menacingly into darkness. To the right, the place opened into a larger room with half-lights and candlelit tables surrounding a large circular, mahogany bar.

The door closed behind them, and they stepped slowly across the warped hardwood floor.

“Where is everyone?” Dana said, looking around.

“They’re right there,” Paul answered, pointing to the dozen or so dimly lit faces seated at the tables and on barstools.

A little whimpering noise escaped Dana, and her knees buckled and she fell to the floor.

Some of the patrons heard the thump as her body crumpled to the hardwood, and they quickly looked to another one of the patrons. A man that had been sitting with his back to them at the end of the bar rose to his feet and walked toward them.

“Dana,” Paul said, kneeling. “What’s wrong?”

“Just a little dizzy. Help me up,” she said, and she looked a little embarrassed for fainting.

Paul grasped her hands and pulled her to her feet as the man from the end of the bar reached them. He was tall and thin, his limbs like those of a spider, and his features looked as though someone had grabbed his chin and his forehead and stretched his face out. A crop of coarse-looking hair bristled atop his head, a tiny iron gray pasture. His clothes hung on him, the plain white, button-up shirt like a bed sheet, the brown trousers like a tent.

“Paul, they weren’t there,” Dana said, ignoring the man, but Paul couldn’t take his eyes off him. “Just like the cars. I don’t feel good. Let’s get out of here.”

The thin man cocked his head at Dana, and Paul noticed something else strange about him. His ears flopped over as though he were using them to wave at her. They were large, floppy pieces of skin. And the man’s nose was extremely long. When he turned his head to look at Dana, it swung loosely in front of his mouth. To Paul, the man looked like a skinny, emaciated elephant!

Dana apparently noticed the man’s abnormalities, too, as she looked at him with curiosity and disgust.

“Can’t go just yet,” the man said, still looking at Dana. His voice was deep and nasal. “You folks come in and make yourselves at home.” He pointed back at the bar, and the length of his arm was extraordinary.

When he walked back toward his barstool, his hands reached easily down to his knees. And Paul saw that the man wore no shoes, revealing feet the length of a baguette and toes as long as a man’s fingers. Someone has crossed a man, an elephant, and a spider, Paul thought.

The song that had been playing ended.

“Let’s get out of here,” Dana said again, and the other patrons exchanged a looked that to Paul seemed conspiratorial.

“Said you can’t just yet,” the thin man repeated, not turning back to face them. “Come have a drink.”

Paul started to follow.

“Paul?”

“He wants us to have a drink with him. I’m just being polite,” he said, and walked to the bar. Dana walked beside him.

“What’ll it be?” asked the thin man when they reached him.

“Beer.”

He motioned for the bartender. “Two beers for these folks.”

The bartender looked normal enough. He was height and weight proportionate. He had a flat but nice face, and he was dressed in jeans, a collared shirt, and sneakers. “Two beers.” He set them in front of Paul and Dana.

Paul took a sip of the cold beer, and watched as a woman with a flattop rose from her table and went to the jukebox. She wore army fatigue trousers, boots, and a green tank top with a full patch of hair peaking out from under each arm.

“This is an unusual place,” Paul said to the thin man. “We didn’t even know it was here until tonight.”

“Everyone says that,” the man replied.

“Are you the owner?” Dana asked. If she was feeling timid, she had stuffed the feeling away for the moment.

“Tiny’s the owner. My name is Mr. Fisk.”

“Where’s Tiny?”

“He’ll be around,” Mr. Fisk said.

“Does he own all those cars out front?” Paul asked.

Mr. Fisk turned to face him. His gray eyes appeared steady within a crimson-threaded field of white. “In a way he does,” he said. “But in a way, they’re ours.”

“What does that mean?” Dana asked, her earlier apprehension becoming even more invisible.

“We all arrived here somehow, didn’t we?” Mr. Fisk responded with a chuckle.

Paul looked around at the rest of the cast in the bar. The lights were low, so he couldn’t see them all very well, but something told him they were all watching and listening.

A song erupted from the Wurlitzer, and a group of people jumped up and sauntered into the poolroom to dance. A man wearing a cowboy hat, denim trousers, boots, and a face like leather danced with a stocky one-armed woman in a flannel shirt, shorts, and hiking boots. Another member of their group, a man in a loose-fitting yellow suit and a matching yellow fedora, produced a video camera and began experimenting with angles as the couple danced a decrepit version of a tango.

The videographer finally found his angle and began to tape the dancers.

Before long a man wearing the heavy wool coat and full beard of a whaler approached the pool table, setting the balls in the rack for a game. His opponent joined him, and the light in the game room revealed another grotesque figure.

The man set to play pool against the whaler was bare-chested and, like Mr. Fisk, wore no shoes. He was angular, with actual lines and points where his joints transitioned into other body parts. The straight lines of his shoulders shot at a right angle from his neck and gave way harshly to the descension of his arms. His elbows and forearms were similarly squared off. The exposed skin of his chest and head was a light blue color and appeared to reflect the dim light, like the scales of a fish. His head was as devoid of hair as the rest of his torso, and his eyes and mouth were set at eerily beautiful, upward angles. Two vertical slit that spread and contracted with each breath comprised his nose.

Selecting a cue stick, the whaler broke the rack of pool balls to begin the game.

The woman in army fatigues that had played the music came over and sat on the barstool next to Dana. She looked Dana up and down, then called the bartender over and ordered a drink. The bartender delivered her drink, and the woman spun around on the stool to face the crowd.

“Relic. Come over here,” she barked.

A dark lump appeared from one of the tables in the corner and waddled toward them. When it got closer, Paul thought Dana was going to scream. The thing was a little taller than the barstools, and had a head like a toad. Its skin was the texture of a pineapple, and appeared to be bathed in mucus or an oil of some kind. It had stumpy little arms and legs with folds of skin at the knees and elbows, and it squished each time it took a step.

Dana was frozen in place, and Paul wasn’t sure of what he was seeing either.

“What do you think?” the woman in fatigues asked it, indicating Dana.

“Tasty,” it said, its fat gray tongue lolling over its meaty, wet lips.

This response brought gales of cackling laughter from the woman in fatigues, and it instilled further paralysis in Dana. Paul put his arm around her, ready to defend her if it came to that. But Mr. Fisk stepped in like a teacher breaking up a fight.

“Cut the crap, Lizzy,” he said to the woman in fatigues. Then to the lumpy creature, “Hungry, Relic?”

“Yes. Hungry,” it grunted, bouncing and squishing up and down.

Mr. Fisk tossed it some peanuts with his snake-like arm. It swallowed the treat, shells and all. After another handful of peanuts, it waddled off down the dark hallway.

“What the hell was that?” Dana said, finding her tongue.

“Just another fugitive,” Mr. Fisk said. “Same as the rest of us.”

“Mr. Fisk,” Paul said. “I think we’re going to be on our way. How much do I owe for the beers?”

Suddenly the dancers stopped dancing and the videographer stopped taping. The men playing pool stopped their game abruptly, sliding the cues onto the stained green felt. They all scattered back to where they had been sitting. The music on the jukebox stopped. Lizzy jumped up from the barstool, and rejoined some other patrons at a table.

“Not just yet,” Mr. Fisk said. “Looks like Tiny wants to see you.”

Out of the darkened hallway where Relic had just disappeared came Tiny. Walking past the dead pinball machine, he entered the bar area where the others all waited amid a cloud of murmurs.

--- To Be Continued ---