If I Had A Heart, The Storyteller [read aloud books .txt] 📗

to leave the bar. All of them. I watched with incredulity how they left in silence, one by one, without a glance toward Nat or Billy. There's nothing like a ghost story to feed people's superstitions, but this I thought to be embarrassingly weird .
The last person in the bar, a short man in his sixties, approached Billy and patted him on the shoulder, whispering something that sounded like: "I'm sorry for your loss", but I couldn't be sure. Then he also disappeared, swept by the harsh night.
Unaware or indifferent to what was going on around, old Billy never raised his eyes from the bar in front of him. His stare seemed locked on something more daunting than an empty pub on a stormy night.

"You shouldn't have come here tonight, Billy", said Nat finally with his slow rolling voice, and the words fell like stones in the creepy silence of the room. Aware of it, Nat bent for a long moment under the bar and the cheap music started playing again, weird and totally out of the place.
"Are you afraid too, Nat?" Billy's voice sound tired, more an affirmation than a question.
"Is not about fear, Billy. I know it is a hard time for you, and I'm sorry for your loss. But you shouldn't have come here. Not tonight."
Billy Cavanaugh laughed, a dry laugh so fake that my nerves tensed, and he finally raised his eyes to look at Nat.
"Are you afraid he will come to take me in, now when there's nothing to stop him?"
I knew from my mother's gossips that Billy's wife has been suffering with cancer for a long time; she was probably the loss everyone was sorry for. Or at least they said so.
"People are talking, you know. They always do." Nat spoke while polishing his glasses with a white rag. "People are afraid, and I can't blame them for that. It's not like I've had too many clients around here lately."
I gulped another sip of scotch without blinking. The storm seemed to concentrate all its hate on pub's modest building, barking and howling through every crack it found, shaking it from the ground.But it seemed secondary to the dreadful tension inside.

Billy lowered his glance again.
"Don't worry, then," he said slowly. "If the rumours are true, this is the last night I will ever bother anyone."
A shiver ran through my spine at the calm tone with which he said that.
"I don't like when you talk that way, Billy", replied Nat. "I don't like it at all."
"I'm ready, Nat, for whatever is there for me. I don't even care now." The old man seated himself better on the high chair. "I just figured that if I'm going to leave, at least I'll have a good drink before I go. What do you say, is that okay with you? A drink with an old friend?"
Nat shrugged at his bottles, then prepared a drink and placed it with a heavy sigh in front of Billy. He threw a look at me, the undesirable witness of their unnerving conversation.
"Hey, Jamie. Didn't you finish your drink yet? I bet Marry-Lou's dinner is long cold since waiting for you", he said to me.
My glass was almost empty, all right, yet no one will send me home like a kid at the bedtime. I swallowed the harsh words on the tip of my tongue, and I only said:
"It's all right. I'm not in a hurry, and I'm definitely not superstitious."

A half-second smile flickered on old Billy's lips, and he continued to stare at his glass. I don't know why I always thought of him so old; he couldn't be much older than my own parents. Probably because he was already legend when I only was a kid, or maybe because of his prematurely white hair. Or maybe because of that mysterious aura he was surrounded by.

"What about you, Nat?" he asked with the same low voice, like Nat's conversation with me never happened. "Won't you pour a drink for yourself too?"
The bartender hesitated; he was visibly unhappy with me, but the night was way to spooky too worry about that now.

Without a warning, a devastating thunder shook the building so forcefully that the rows of bottles above the bar clinked in protest, trembling in their places. The pale lights flickered, the TV turned blank and for a moment I was sure we'd be left in the dark. All three of us looked above, up at the bulbs' hopeless struggle. It felt like the storm's fury suddenly penetrated through the thin walls; the wind's howling was deafeningly coming from all directions, while his chilling blow crept above the floor. Instinctively we glanced at the door; it was closed.
And a big, black shadow stood in front of it, looking at us.


The time stopped frozen, and so did the heart. Like in a slow motion movie I registered a thousand details within a blink of the eye. The wide opened eyes of Nat, petrified too with a hand on a brown bottle; the final flicker of the lights above him, stabilizing in a pale glow. The last clicks of the bottles and glasses, as a dull silence fell in the room. I noticed a gray fog creeping slowly toward the strange form in front of the door, and I felt its foul, unbearable smell. The shadow's form was not completely defined, its dark edges continually moving like the edges of a flame in the wind. It was a human form standing there, but that fascinating play of shadows, constantly concealing and revealing it in the same time, was the most frightening thing I'd ever experienced. I watched his facial features coming in and out of sight, and two wide, black holes, that impossibly stared at us the same way that only human eyes could stare.

I noticed Billy's intense, defiant look.

Then I allowed the air to fill my lungs, causing my heart to painfully beat again; I realized that I was looking into the hollow eye sockets of Darren Collins' ghost.


The End of Part 1


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Publication Date: 02-02-2011

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