The Reincarnation

John wandered the streets. He was looking for an answer – something to solve the condition he was in – and couldn’t justify staying home and waiting for it to come to him. He thought he had to go out and find it.

He crept into a bar and sat down on one of its many empty stools. The red plastic cover on the stool barked embarrassingly under even his slight weight. John felt filthy just sitting in the place. There appeared to be more shadows in the room than could be accounted for. The acrid scent of urine and stale cigar smoke haunted the milieu, which didn’t improve the dismal atmosphere.

John hailed the bartender, who paused a little awkwardly at the sight of John. Having seen worse, he walked over. As the bartender drew closer, John realized that he was the source of the terrible smell, overpowering even John’s.

“What’ll it be?” the bartender barked, slamming his open palms on the bar and hunching his shoulders.

“Double tequila – the best you have.” He dropped a fifty dollar bill on the bar. “And could you turn that TV up?”

“Okay, and yes sir,” the bartender answered, mock saluting John.

The bartender weaved drunkenly over to the television hanging on a shelf in the corner of the barroom. He turned up the volume of the machine, the sound escaping it chasing the shadows around the room. The news was replaying the day’s events.

The announcer introduced a segment called “Corpsicle Conscious,” and John watched a guy who had been frozen for the past twenty-five years ham it up with the press corps. The bartender stood fascinated.

Near the end of the broadcast, when John looked down at his drink, wondering why he had ordered it when he had no appetite for anything, let alone tequila, the man on the television held up a cat and said the cat’s name. John raised his head just in time.

The bartender broke his gaze at the television only when he heard the door bang shut. His drink untouched, the bar’s only patron was gone.

The bartender walked over, pocketed the fifty, and slurped back the tequila.

David revisited the theater in his dream. In this incarnation there was someone sitting in the rows; in the middle of the third row from the front, to be precise. Walking up to the solitary patron, he peered through the darkness at the man’s face. He had none – at least not a human one.

Stirred awake, the man’s slitted lizard eyes turned in David’s direction. A forked, snakelike tongue slipped out from between the man’s reptilian jaws, smacking David’s face. His face burned where the tongue struck.

David woke up screaming.

Hannibal nearly flew off the bed. When Peggy looked in a moment later, he cried out to her.