Vintage Memories

Chapter Eight "Dead Ends and Cheap Thrills"

Could it be that this dream was a projection of some message, like some note-in-a-bottle drifting through the great ocean of ether? The more he tossed it about his brain, the more ridiculous it sounded. It could have just been a two-way mirror into old memories, and further beneath, perhaps a sort of subconscious longing— good ol' Freudian rationality.

He looked again to the empty glass, consuming the soft lamp light and reflecting it back in glimmering, crystalline shine. Flavors of sweetness and bitterness, and a subjacent, herbal tang returned to his tongue, a combination likened to black licorice.

He settled with the logic of it being a oneiric reliving, like a well-loved, worn-in armchair. Rationality was the road best traveled for Alastor, and he rarely strayed from his dialectic principles, even when those around him treaded on the heels of their protean emotions.

The wight of a hot-blooded, boxed-blonde boy, his details beclouded, flared in Alastor's mind,

"Don't be such'a square, babe!" 

All at once, it came down with a burning crash, down into an entirely new prospect that lit a fire under his ass. He came away from his chair with such a jerk, that it toppled to the ground, and he leaned forward on his desk to steady himself.

Dreams and triggers.

Anthony! Unholy fucking Lucifer, Satan, Dee-Dee-Devil— Anthony!

His shadow emerged in devout concern, a dog worried by its master's physical outburst. It tugged at the right leg of his pinstripe slacks, but Alastor failed to notice.

Suddenly, the idea of the dream acting as a sort of uncanny tocsin didn't seem so pig-ignorant. Had Anthony been amongst him recently? Had he been a shop clerk, or a ruffian, or any other in the menagerie of passersby unbeknownst to him, and more than likely unbeknownst to Anthony just the same?

Had an abstruse familiarity, initially unnoticeable, like a summer breeze just barely beginning to deaden with the gentle decay of fall, triggered this sudden change? And, like the summer-to-fall shift, had he only noticed once the leaves browned and bombed the ground in flurries, that the winds had shifted long ago?

He stared down at his splayed hands as he reeled in the company of both an unnerving and exhilarating possibility; a psychogenic toxic-shock that bombinated from the tips of his ears, down to his soles.

He grappled to remember details, encounters. But there was nothing to compare it to when he could barely remember the attributes of the soul he was looking for. He remembered who, just no what's, and even the who flickered in his memory like a lightbulb rapidly burning out.

It could have been anyone. It could have been—

"Gotta keep smilin' through the bullshit."

His smile strained; his teeth clenched.

His shadow tugged twice more with the curtness of a petulant child demanding their mother's attention. Alastor gave it. He called for it with an inaudible command. He needn't say anything; his umbra was merely an extension of himself, with minimal free thought.

The charcoal apparition rose, first even with him, and then looming slightly above. Its nondescript mouth peeled back into crooked, serpentiform coils.

"You know what I want. Bring it to me," he ordered.

It appeared to giggle impishly, but the only noise that came from its trembling form sounded like dice rattling in a plastic cup. There was an undeniable quality of deceptiveness to it.