Chapter 2: Portends, Promises, and Coffee

As the rain slacked off to nothing Grey thought of it as the last drops wrung from the oily rag the night sky had become. It was dangerous to simplify too much. Not knowing what might seep into his skin had driven him to seek refuge in the Surfside Diner, and for the sake of appearances he had no choice but to order something he'd never drink. He looked down at his cup of coffee, which was still full and steadily moving from hot to lukewarm. There were no odd looks from the waitress, who had gone somewhere private to singe her lungs in peace. No one suspected that disaster loomed over the diner.

It was late, and even with the rain the only others present in the diner were a couple whispering to each other from their lover's sanctuary a few booths away. Grey had more important things to do than eavesdrop, like the problem that had developed with the coffee cup.

He kept both hands wrapped firmly around the cup. At first it was to leach away some of the warmth, but as he watched the rain and thought about it he became certain that in reality he was the only thing holding the cup together. With the rain gone he came to realize that if he kept holding on to the cup then the cracks that had formed in its surface would spread to him until finally he crumbled to pieces all over the corner both he was sitting in.

Very slowly, going against everything his mind was telling him, he took his hands away from the cup. It was whole, it stayed whole, and so did he. Grey relaxed, relieved that his outside hadn't cracked to match the inside of his head. That was the last thing he needed, no matter how much a relief it might be. He slumped down in his seat until his head was level with the table.

"Deceiver," he whispered to the cup of coffee. "So full of lies and caffeine. You think you're so clever, but I won't fall for that again."

The coffee handled his accusations stoically and continued to grow cold in response. The sudden silence from beyond his table inspired Grey to risk looking away from the coffee and to the shirtless young man facing him from the other booth. He had the musculature and vacant-eyed stare of a surfer, but he was obviously from out of town, as all the local surf-kids had learned to ignore him ages ago. Grey had first won his attention several minutes ago when he had negotiated a peace treaty between his table's assembly of sugar packets and their arch enemies the artificial sweeteners. That was because he was bored, not because he was crazy. He knew that the moment he left the diner the alliance of artificial sweeteners, led by the traitorous sugar-based sweetener, would rise up and overthrow the sugar. It just couldn't be helped.

As surfer watched Grey lifted the cup of coffee and pretended to sip. A few seconds later and his companion, a red-haired girl in a tie-dye shirt whom Grey vaguely recognized, called his attention back to her. They resumed talking in low tones about nothing of any consequence. Grey put the cup down and wiped his mouth off with the back of his hand, visions of projectile vomiting danced in his head. So long as no one was looking he decided to retaliate against the coffee by defiling it with one container of non-dairy creamer after another.

He stopped at six containers, remembering that that was how he used to take his coffee back when he could swallow stuff like that without violently regurgitating it seconds later. The memory made him pause, and that was when he saw something was hidden in the swirls of cream spreading though the bitter dark He frowned, trying to concentrate on it, and as he looked it appeared the light and dark swirled and coalesced to form the vague image of a screaming face.

He looked up again, but his failure to make a spectacle of himself in the past few minutes meant everyone in the diner was now ignoring him, even the hag at the register. Good. Grey slid out from the booth and left a few crumpled bills on the table to pay for the wasted time and coffee. Feeling as though his purpose might be betrayed, Grey walked out of the diner as inconspicuously as he could. He made it as far as the couple before an odd feeling made him look over. The girl was tracing patterns in her full glass of water, while her shirtless companion was picking at the last of the fries on his plate.

"All good things will wilt away in time," Grey said, the words out of his mouth before he could stop him. The couple looked at him with the usual look of confusion and fear. Grey looked to the clock, which was beginning to melt like wax in agreement with what he'd said. He looked back to them, focusing on the girl, "And honey suckles… They never have as much juice as you think."

The hag at the register was about to move to chase him out. Grey preempted her with his voluntary exit. The couple was still staring at him as he left, dumbfounded. He couldn't save everyone, so he focused on what the coffee had told him.

Once outside he looked around. Pedestrians were timidly emerging now that the rain had gone, but he was fairly certain none of them had any idea about what he had seen. He was still safe, but he'd have to move quickly just be sure. It was just a matter of following the lead he'd been giving, moving from one source to the next. He found the answer half a block away, in a puddle that had formed on the sidewalk. While people were forced to move around him and mutter about Santa Monica freaks, Grey looked up to the windows of the building across the street.

"That's it!"

He didn't say it, but one of the voices in his head did. He decided, without any encouragement from them, that he ought to go tell someone about what he'd seen. The only viable option he could think off also happened to be across the street. The man stationed outside of the Asylum's doors nodded to Grey as he completely ignored the line wrapped around the building in favor of going right in. He paused long enough to soak in the assortment of envious gazes from the people in line before he stepped inside.

Behind the bar was the same obese, heavily tattooed bartended that had replaced the thin, squirrelly looking fellow who had disappeared completely for reasons Grey didn't care to think about. The new bartender, his attitude and body odor aside, appeared to be much more resilient. Grey didn't know his name, but he thought it best not to get too attached in any case.

"Oh, god, not you again." It was as much of a greeting as he ever received.

"I'm pretty sure it is," Grey agreed. A couple of the founts of angst gathered around forgot about their creed and looked curiously his way. They slid away to resume their carefully practiced disinterest with the world at large once they determined Grey was too normal looking to be anything special. That made him grin, which made the bartender nervous.

He recovered himself quickly. "I guess you're here to see one of the twins."

"I've seen both, and they're glorious," Grey said with a dreamy smile. Then he remembered himself. "But I'm not here for that. Tonight I'm here to see the lighter half. It's already too dark to deal with the other."

"Right, whatever the fuck that means." The bartender, ignoring the cries for drinks around him, withdrew a cigar from somewhere under the bar and lit it. Grey cringed along with the Beast, but it went unnoticed.

The bartender didn't speak again until he exhaled a plume of smoke. "Therese is in, that's it."

"Oh, damn," Grey frowned. "I always fumble in the dark. With. I mean with the dark."

"Uh, yeah, sure. Thing is, she's got her boy toy or whatever the hell he is up there."

"Her worshipper? Her moth?" Grey considered the situation for a moment. The music from the band on stage was loud enough to overwhelm even the voices in his head, which were insistent that he get on with it. A few had some other, totally unrelated suggestions, but he ignored them for his own sake. There just wasn't enough time.

He went against his better judgment and said, "I have an offering of my own. She may like it better."

"Christ, can't you ever just say what you mean?"

Grey looked at the bartender as if he were an idiot. This one was still clueless, but after what happened to the last it was probably for the better.

"Everything I say has meaning… Sometimes I'm not sure what it is, but I know there's always meaning."

The bartender shook his head and pressed the button hidden under the bar.

When Grey didn't immediately move away, he waved him off with the same hand holding the cigar. "Just go already."

Grey fought down the Beast and its clambering to flee even from something as innocuous as the cigar's smoldering tip, but he still moved quickly to the elevator. Once the metal doors slid closed the noise from the club was dulled slightly. The button marked '2' promised tolerable levels once he reached the second level. Grey took a moment to compose himself, the buzz in his head almost comforting after the cacophony and vague threat of fiery death outside. He was beginning to feel that he must be having one of his more lucid nights, whatever that amounted to. Once he pressed the button for the second floor he was proven wrong. As the car lurched upward, the tight space melted away.

Sometimes his visions happened in nice, controlled ways, like through cups of coffee and puddles. Then there were the times when they rose up and swallowed him whole, tearing away his feeble grip on reality to make themselves known. Pushing the button triggered one of the big, all-consuming ones.

He jerked his hand back from the panel as it pulled away with the rest of the walls to become a cavernous chamber of dark marble. The white veins in the rock throbbed and pulsed, leading like some twisted nervous system to the raised platform that stood in the center of the room. It was bathed in a shaft of bright light, which made it impossible to see the face of the woman in dark robes that stood in its center.

There was a man kneeling before the dark goddess, his face nearly pressed to the pulsing marble as he offered up a gilded chalice to her.

She accepted it graciously, but a second after she touched it to her lips she cried, "Idiot! It's cold!" and flung the offering away.

Her worshipper cringed away, but Grey knew he would not escape his goddess' wrath.

Ding.

Everything lurched to a halt, the vision included. Grey swayed unsteadily as reality reasserted it and the elevator became an elevator again. The doors in front of him slid open. Grey stepped out, trying to ignore the pitying look his reflection gave him. "Taking in someone else's delusions," his mirror-self chided. "That's not good, man."

"Shut up," Grey said.

His reflection pointed at the corner of its lip. "You've got something on your face."

Grey looked. It was right.

"Thanks." He brushed it away, and his reflection mirrored him.

He moved closer to the door, the only one in the cramped hallway off the elevator. He could hear muffled voices inside. Therese was yelling for her ghoul to clean up the mess he made. The ghoul was apologizing over and over again. He called her goddess, which made Grey smile.

He leaned over to steal once last look at the mirror to make sure his reflection was behaving. His eyes seemed a little sunken, which he didn't remember from the last time he looked. He told himself it was more mind games, but made a note to get sunglasses to hide it just in case. He stepped up and knocked tentatively on the door.

He heard three quick steps move closer, and the door opened a fraction. Therese's face, still twisted in anger, glared out at him. "What? I thought I said no visitors…"

"Do not blame the harried, hairless sentry," Grey said. "I have words that will please your ears."

"I'm in the middle of something."

"I am blind to what goes on here," Grey said earnestly. The single eye he saw in the door narrowed, and the door pulled back.

"For your sake I hope so," Therese said as she admitted him inside. Grey dutifully kept his eyes off the ghoul that was crouched nearby. By the scraping sound and the sweet smell Grey knew he was trying to scrub his ill-received offering of blood from the wall.

Therese moved back to stand by her desk and smoothed her skirt, which as far as Grey could tell was as immaculately in place as the rest of her suit. She folded her arms over her chest and looked at him, and suddenly Grey was the one with offerings to present to the goddess. He wondered what she'd do if she didn't care for what he had to say.

"Well?" Therese said. Her voice, like her gaze, like the rest of her, was frigid.

Grey opened his mouth, which was all the clearance the words trapped inside needed.

"There is pain," he said. "So much that it cannot be contained by the room it is held within. It has leaked outside, through closed windows and doors, to puddle on the street with the rain. The coffee was the first hint- and it often lies. Water doesn't lie. It knows that there's a rat that has bred without permission, a rat that makes its nest near here and nurses its whelp as it shrieks and writhes…"

Talking about it brought him closer to what he was speaking of. He could vaguely see the room. Dingy, ill-lit, filled with the refuse of the mortals that had overused it before. The smell of old debauchery and socks chased Grey back to the office over the club. He couldn't get a good look at what was handcuffed to the bed. He didn't want to.

Back in the office, Therese had moved within a foot of him. Her hands were on Grey's shoulders before he could stop her. Her eyes gleamed, and Grey looked away in a force of habit he couldn't remember picking up. The ghoul had stopped scrubbing and was staring.

"You're certain of this?" Therese said. "Some Nosferatu here in Santa Monica has embraced without permission?"

She dug her nails into Grey's shoulders as she spoke, making him wished he was in the habit of wearing a shirt.

"Not the rat you're hoping for," Grey said softly.

"Damn it!" She let go of him, and Grey took the opportunity to back against the door. "But you're absolutely sure…?"

"Water never lies, even with all the pollutants."

"I don't suppose you know where, then."

Grey nodded, steeling himself for the tricky part. "I only ask you weigh my words and pay for them accordingly… With a favor to be named later."

Therese's lip curled into a snarl, showing fangs that weren't extended a moment before. The gleam in her eyes shifted to something more dangerous, and Grey found his hand sliding towards the door knob. The voices, teasing him, said he'd never make in time. While they were describing what would happen Therese mastered herself, proving all of them wrong at least for the time being. She rubbed one temple as though she suddenly had a headache.

"Fine. But remember it's not a very significant boon, understand? I would have found this out sooner or later. Nothing goes on in Santa Monica that I don't hear about."

Grey bit back the first few retorts that wanted to crawl past his lips. "But maybe, in this case, not timely enough."

Therese's look spurred him to wrap things up with another flood. "The nest looks upon this very building with blinded eyes. That is all you need to know to find it. And, speaking of time, yours is precious, and I'm happy with what I've stolen. Thank you, good night." He opened the door enough to squeeze around it, catching the ghoul glaring at him through a fringe of lank brown hair just before he slid back into the hallway. He didn't know what Therese saw in him, at least until he remembered the blood.

On the ride back to the first floor the elevator remained an elevator. The pounding music obliterated anything that might be heard from upstairs. He tipped the bartender a salute as he walked back outside. His message delivered, Grey felt a little lighter.

It never lasted.