Most people are good, but some are not.
As I sit in a booth in a corner of the café I can’t help but let my gaze wander to my surroundings. It’s instinctual, almost as if I had no idea I’m doing it. But others see. They notice the young man sitting alone near the front door, a cooling cup of coffee on the table before him and wearing an expression of unbridled fear on an otherwise blank face. They can sense that I sense something, or someone, who should not be here, and I don’t mean in the cafe. No, I mean should not be here as in not on Earth.
My cup of coffee jiggles on the worn Formica of my table. My hands surround it, occasionally nudging it this way or that, causing it to spill some of its contents. But I don’t notice. My attention is focused solely on the other people in the café. I stare at each one in turn, trying to gauge their behavior to see if anything is unusual, alarming… inhuman.
An elderly man looks back at me. His diminutive stature is accented by the poor health that undoubtedly afflicts him. I gaze deep into his rheumy eyes and see, amongst the pain, that he is nevertheless human.
I look away from him and study a young couple seated near the hallway leading to the bathrooms. The woman, a pretty girl with short-cropped black hair and a porcelain- like complexion, is snuggled up next to her spouse, or boyfriend, or date, or whatever the case may be. The man returns her affection in kind, wrapping his large arm around her and whispering sweet nothings into her ear.
Periodically, they look over at me.
I can see from the love they no doubt share for one another that they are indeed human.
And then my head turns toward a middle-aged woman seated not more than two booths over from me. Her bright red hair trails down past her shoulders, framing her bored expression like a poorly-lit portrait. She picks at a dish of food, and after a few minutes pass, notices me watching her. Her look of boredom slides into one of annoyance, and then anger. Her eyes widen and her mouth tightens as she cuts me down with her glare.
I look away, confident that she too is human.
Next I see a woman having a chat with someone I presume to be her daughter. They smile and giggle with each other over cups of coffee, and momentarily pause to glance over at me before resuming their conversation.
I know they are human. I can feel it in my bones. There is a bond between a parent and child that is unmistakable, and I could see it with them.
“Would you like another cup of coffee?”
Startled, I look up into the smile of the pretty waitress. A lock of silky blond hair falls over one of her eyes, making her look like a modern version of Veronica Lake. If I weren’t preoccupied with the task at hand I would ask her out.
Maybe.
I nod my head and she promptly pours more coffee into my cup, not stopping until it touches the rim. She then flashes me another smile and saunters away, disappearing into the kitchen area.
My attention swings back to the other people in the café. I know that one of them is not human, but which one? They all seem normal enough.
I feel something wet on my hand and look down at my coffee. The waitress had filled the cup too full, so much so that just a slight movement of my hand caused some of the hot liquid to spill over the rim. Thin plumes of steam drift upward from the cup and into my eyes, causing me to wince.
Then something unusual catches my attention: the coffee is not hot at all. In fact, it is rather cool, cold even, despite the steam coming from the cup. I stare at my hand and then back at the coffee, trying to find a connection between the two.
Suddenly I cannot move. My entire body is frozen in my seat, and no matter how hard I try, I cannot move anything except my eyes, which I blink furiously to attract attention to my plight.
But no one notices. The mother and daughter, the old man, the young couple, the redheaded woman, they all just continue on with their business, oblivious to the unnatural malady that has afflicted me.
“Oh my, are you all right?”
I manage to divert my eyes over toward the source of the words and see the waitress standing behind the front counter. She’s wearing the same smile she wore when she refilled my coffee, but there’s something else there. I can’t quite put my finger on it but it’s there, a mocking aspect to her expression that, if I could move, would cause me to bolt to my feet and run as far away from her as I could.
And worse still is the cook standing behind the waitress. He’s a burly man, possibly late 20s, and sports an ornate tattoo spread across his neck. It’s of a scantily-clad, buxom woman and flexes with each movement he makes.
I watch in horror as the tattoo turns its head toward me.
The cook raises a hairy arm and taps the waitress on the shoulder. No, taps would be the wrong word. He connects with her shoulder, like he was transferring something into her. The waitress and cook melt together then, their bodies fusing into one another. All the while their expressions don’t change, making what I’m seeing even more terrifying. I struggle with my own body as I try desperately to move, or at least shout a warning to the other people in the café, but can’t. I look down at my coffee then, mostly because I cannot bear to watch the pulsating mass behind counter anymore, and see that the liquid in the cup has coagulated into a syrupy black goo. I watch as it roils like a tiny tempest and forms pseudopods that thrash at their surroundings as if trying to escape from the cup.
I hear others around me then, and try to turn my head but can only move my eyes, which to my frustration doesn’t allow me to see who the voices belong to.
My confusion turns to outright terror when they step in front of me. I see the other people in the café (the young couple, the mother and daughter, the old man, the redheaded woman) standing next to my booth, vile expressions of hunger etched on their seemingly human faces. They simultaneously reach forward and lay a hand on the back of my head. I can feel their ice-cold fingers snake through my hair to get a better grip. Then I watch as the swirling muck in my cup comes closer and closer to my face. I’m being pushed down, face-first, into the mess, and I sense hunger in its depths.
The waitress and cook, by now a single, gelatinous creature, slithers up behind the others. There is still a hint of the waitresses’ pretty face smeared in the filth, but the visage of the cook is nowhere to be seen.
The thing blurts out some type of command (it sounds like a thousand mosquitoes buzzing in an enclosed space) and the others dutifully step back, temporarily giving me a reprieve from whatever unimaginable fate awaits me.
The waitress-cook thing raises an arm, although tentacle would be a better description, and swings it behind its bulk, procuring a large cooking pot, and slides it in front of my face, nudging the coffee cup aside. I can’t help but look down into the pot and see gallons of the coffee stuff glaring back at me. Then I look up again into the residual face of the waitress and notice she is smiling.
Most people are good, but some are not.
And some are not people at all.
—
Rick McQuiston is a fifty year old father of two who loves anything horror-related. He’s had over 400 publications so far, and written five novels, ten anthologies, one book of novellas, and edited an anthology of Michigan authors. He is also a guest author each year at Memphis Junior High School.
Image by Andrew Seaman
Effective combination of sci-fi and horror. A good read.