The Street

I had walked down this particular street hundreds, or perhaps thousands of times. This was the way I walked to get to work, and numerous generations of worn converse sneakers had padded up and down this stretch of road. Like everything else in my life, it was unremarkable; a filthy city street with cracked pavement and a long wall of abandoned brick warehouses. The street was indicative of the city as a whole; the world had moved on and it had forgotten this place and the people who lived there. This street was a footnote in a long history of decay and neglect.

Five mornings a week for many years I had walked a mile-long stretch of this street, learning each blade of dead, yellow grass that crept up from the gaps in the broken sidewalk. And five nights a week I had walked back against the setting sun, long shadows cast from the shells of empty buildings, the only sound to be heard the slap, slap, slap of my rubber soles against the street and the distant moan of cars on the highway.

Yes, I knew the street quite well, or at least well enough to say that there was nothing remarkable about it; until one humid summer evening that all changed.

I had been asked by coworkers why I never took the bus home; why a single woman would walk alone through such a creepy part of the city. My answer was quite simple; public transit cut around this area, and it was quicker to walk the mile than it was to board the sticky bus of wailing children and chattering strangers. 

Furthermore, just as no bus routes utilized this particular street, neither did many drivers or pedestrians. While it was not condemned from the public, it was seemingly avoided, and in my years of making this walk I had only seen a handful of passing cars, perhaps a few cyclists, and never another pedestrian. I wouldn’t venture to say the road felt safe, but I did feel fairly certain that there was nobody around to cause any trouble, and so I never worried about rapists or pickpockets or murderers. I did sometimes worry about the things that shifted in the shadows; the things that make your hair stand on end and seem to creep into your peripheral vision but never fully expose themselves.

I was so used to my solitude that when the man in the black cap appeared it caught my attention immediately. He was standing at the curb, smoking a cigarette and staring out at nothing in particular, because as I have mentioned, this was a place with nothing to see. As soon as I noticed him my heart skipped a beat and there was a sinking feeling in my gut. I fixed my eyes to the pavement and hurried my steps. I thought, this is how it all begins in movies… the drug-crazed stranger pulls the unsuspecting female into the building and chops her to bits. And everyone will say “why, oh why did she walk alone in such a terrible part of town?”.

My heart hammered in my ears but I told it to shut up. People don’t normally just grab each other off the sidewalk, but just in case I slipped my hand into the pocket of my leather jacket and flipped out the blade of the knife concealed there. I steeled my nerve and looked up again with the intention of making eye contact; I read somewhere that the best defense against becoming a victim is to convey confidence.

But when I looked up the man was gone. Baffled, I looked around to see where he had disappeared to and realized that a peeling green door to one of the abandoned buildings was wide open. I stumbled and then I stopped walking entirely as I stared into the blackness of the open door with slack jawed surprise. It wasn’t just the fact that I had never seen a door left open on this street, but in the thousands of times I had passed this building, I had never once noticed this green metal door. To further confuse matters, a flickering neon sign was turned on above the opening, reading “The Crow’s Nest”.

Missing a door hidden by the recess of a concrete entryway was one thing, but there was no way I had failed to notice an entire sign, lit up or not. My logical mind scrambled for a suitable conclusion. Perhaps it’s new to the block? I tried to convince myself. But besides the obvious fact that this was hardly a profitable location for a new business, the sign also had a look of decay and it was notably old, with thick neon tubes that harkened back to the 1920s creating a sort of blocky font that leapt straight from a film noir classic. 

The letters of the sign stuttered and flickered, and from inside music played, laughter echoed, and the faint scent of tobacco smoke lingered in the cooling evening air.

What logical parts of me remained knew that I shouldn’t go inside, and I tilted my head back and stared at the darkening night sky as though some answer might be there. The sky was still a dusky grey, but the moon already hung full on the horizon, a pale promise of what the night had to offer. I thought about walking on, I really did, but something stronger possessed me, an urge I cannot describe. It was like the strange compulsion one has to jump when standing on the edge of a cliff; it was the same exhilarating feeling of adrenaline one gets in a near-death experience. And so, I walked through the peeling green door and entered The Crow’s Nest.

The first sensation that struck me was a coldness that initially seemed shocking, but sent an almost erotic chill down my spine. The air smelled of stale cigars and spilled beer, but it also felt deeply familiar. A bar ran along the entire length of the narrow but impossibly long room. It was a dark place, and at the far end my vision was obscured by shadow. But I wasn’t concerned in that moment about what lurked in the dark, my attention instead was diverted to the strange folk that filled the place.

Nearly every barstool was occupied, a long row of faceless backs turned to me. Behind the bar, several very busy bartenders were dressed in a classic depiction of their profession; fitted grey vests, pressed white button ups, and perfectly adjusted bow ties. The servers rushed about, shaking martinis, pouring pints, and trading words with patrons. The nearly black eyes of one of the bartenders drifted up and met my gaze. He gave me a smile so white that it was reminiscent of sun bleached bones, and in a deep baritone he called out, “what can I get you ma’am?”.

As soon as he spoke, nearly a dozen of the patrons closest to me turned and I thought instantly that I had stumbled into a costume party. One woman wore an ankle-length skirt, a primly buttoned up blouse, and looked like she might have just ended a shift at the textiles mills, had the year been 1852 and all the surrounding mills not long ago closed. Another man had a sprawling white beard and wore a captain’s hat and a two button jacket that barely stretched over an impressive gut. One girl had long flowing blonde hair and mascara so dark that her eyes could barely be seen. She wore bell bottoms and a straw hat. I thought to make a joke about Halloween, but they all stared at me with an unsettling emptiness to their gaze, and so I simply said “I’ll take a whiskey on the rocks please”.

They turned back to their drinks without a word and I approached the bar with a feeling of distinct discomfort. “How much do I owe you?” I asked the bartender, and at a closer proximity I realized that his eyes were nearly entirely black pupils, and I presumed this was the result of costume contacts, but the result was certainly unsettling.

“It’s been taken care of” he replied, and the pitch of his voice seemed impossibly deep. He pointed to the shadowy end of the bar and said, “they would like to speak with you.”

Before I could gain any further clarity he was off, back to his routine of shaking martinis and pouring foamy draughts of beer. I sipped the drink and it tasted normal enough, so I swigged the rest for liquid courage and headed to the end of the bar where he had pointed. 

As I walked along the row of turned backs everything seemed to grow darker and darker, and the music and laughter faded away to complete silence. I realized I now stood in immersed in total darkness, not a sound to be heard, and that realization wrought me with an indescribable sense of horror.

“Don’t fret” chided a voice from the darkness, and slowly my eyes adjusted to make out the silhouette of a stranger sitting hunched at the bar.

“T-t-thank you for the drink” I stammered, not sure what else to say.

“It was the least I could do, you’ve been walking up and down that road for a long time now, you must be thirsty.”

“You’ve been watching me?” I asked, and as my vision became clearer I realized that there was something wrong about the person I was addressing. The stranger’s back was clad in some sort of tarnished cloth and beneath the thin fabric were uneven lumps. It looked more like the body of a scarecrow than that of a human being.

“I watch everyone who walks this road” the stranger responded. “How long would you say you’ve been walking that street?”

“Well, it’s how I get to work. I started my job back in ‘82 so…” I paused, fumbling at the mental math.

“Yes, it’s been a while” the voice chuckled, and in that laughter was something wretched, a scratching sound like some thousands of bugs crawling across a rusty tin roof. “Most people stop in for a drink long before you did.”

“I don’t know what year it is” I blurted out, and I had a sense of drowning in that moment, as though all reality had slipped away and I was in a deep darkness with no life line to pull me back to the surface. I gasped for air and found there was none to be had.

“There, there now” the stranger soothed. “Years don’t matter in a place like this. Neither does air.”  The stranger turned and had I the air to speak I would have screamed in terror. The stranger’s face was that of a skeleton; thin yellow skin stretched across bone, wiggling maggots squirmed between exposed teeth, and empty eye sockets stared at me.

“Yes” the stranger said, “you were walking that road even before you died, and you’ve been walking it for a long while since. It’s good you finally stopped in; everyone who walks that road ends up here eventually.”