A Skeleton's Handshake

In the interim, The Hanging Tree enjoyed a brief season of success as The Voodoo. Notably, for the peculiarity of a whisky glass that could never be removed from the far end of the bar. Then again, the north was known for dubious advertising chicanery to swing a buck.

Tonite, there was a huge crowd gathered there, generated by some new interest about a legend. The usual congregation played the pool table made from human bones and stretched out skin. And on this particular rainy evening, a traveling salesman from the south made his way into what he thought was a northern oasis.

Sam,  a blameless, debtless, childless widower who had also made his way up north, sat down on the bar stool next to the prosperous personage and placed a cloth sack on the bar with a thud. Sensitive to the sounds, it wiggled and rustled against the coarse grains in the enveloping darkness. "Wanna trade?" he offered. "I don't care what you're sellin'." A living shrunken head, charred by hellfire, rolled from the small sack across the bar top its long hair full of skulls winding around its wrinkled visage.

The salesman reached into his portmanteau and gently placed a shiny, black oblong box with a raised slot near the feet nearby. "Go on, somebody put in a two pence."

"I wish there was more whiskey moving my way along this bar." Cigarette-burn rested the coin in the narrow opening.

"Not the most observant bunch." The bartender nervously scrubbed away at the cloudy insides of a beer mug, over and over, with a white and red checkered rag from a dress like she was polishing fine silver, nervously eyeing the legendary, empty whisky glass at the other end of the bar from afar and muttering, "a nightmare within a dream, a nightmare within a dream, I tell you."

Hinged in the middle from the inside, the top flap of the oblong box began to slowly rise without any sound from working gears.

"I've seen one of them novelties before." the bartender said. "Too bad it wasn't full of useful coinage."

"Not like this kinda one, I'll see your Tennessee whiskey and raise you fields of Texan tobacco." Although well known for standing his ground, Sam wisely wrapped up the necromancer's shrunken head, dismounted backwards from the bar stool, tipped his cowboy hat and bolted for the door. As soon as it slammed, all energy of warmth dissipated from the room, and the insistent rain in which he had arrived began to turn to snow.

The top hinged lid continued to slowly rise without making a sound.

Cigarette-burn looked back and forth between the two pence piece and the peddler of oddities and wondered if she'd ever get her money back.

The bartender kept trying to wipe the beer mug clean while expecting a little, green, phosphorescent hand or some kind of crazy, god-like bronze fist to emerge and snatch up the coin.

The top half of the oblong box had now flipped completely skyward.

A naked, drunken Indian, another of the regulars, becoming suddenly thirsty and curious as well, stumbled up to the bar for a refill with his pool cue in hand and draped his arm on the shoulder of cigarette-burn.

"Nothing's happening?" Cigarette-burn complained. "It must be broke." She reached out to take back her two pence.

"Don't do that, unwise, unwise!" the southern traveler shouted.

Though young from a distance with an emaciated figure, the bar whore's fishy, shriveled fingers deftly snatched away the two pence from the raised slot of the oblong box. Instead of a small, mechanical hand reaching out to intercept hers, she received a skeleton's handshake.

A hammer sounded. Slats of wood were arranged and nails driven hard and deep by the incorporeal hands of an invisible demoness as upright coffins were crafted along the walls of the bar.

Thick, visceral mounds oozed from the opening of the oblong box and flowed like bumpy, brown lava across the bar top. The overwhelming putrid odor of decadence and decay stirred, staggered and stained with an indelible stench all those inbred, isolated northern peninsula dupes that had gathered together for a celebration of something beyond their snail-like comprehension. As the plague of pox expanded and dripped down on to the chessboard floorboards, the patrons were cemented firmly into place, and as the muck rose higher and higher they all descended into the nether realm of the beyond.

Though their ghosts had gone, the structure remained and the legend of the empty whiskey glass that could not be removed from the end of the bar continued with the addition of the shade of an enchantress whose disbelief in demons had fixed her there for all eternity, slowly aging in place while the snow outside rose higher and higher until all her earthly beauty and ambition had vanished.







©2019 by L.P. Van Ness. All rights reserved.

[genre: satanic fiction]