Free Servants of Darkness by Mark Hall

Mr. Sanchez, is it?” the man said with a wry smile. “My name is Raul. Duncan Raul.” He smiled again.
      “But how did you know . . .?”
      “No need to get into that. They’re expecting you.”
      “What? Who?”
      “Why, Mr. Lennon and the ladies, of course. That’s why you’re here isn’t it?”
      “I just wanted to talk.”
      “I see, sir. You weren’t sure of your . . . instincts. You needed to know if it was . . . real.”
      “Yes, I guess so,” whispered Sanchez.
      “Well, now’s your chance to find out,” said Duncan Raul. “Just down the hall, sir.” He gestured. “Room Number 9.”
      Sanchez turned and made his way in the direction the old man had indicated. Although he understood how ridiculous this all seemed, he could not stop his feet from moving.
      “No need to knock,” the old man called after him. “When you get to the door just go on in.”
      Sanchez found the door to Room Number 9 ajar. There was music from within. A vaguely familiar melody . “Well here’s another place you can go, where everything flows... ” When he pushed the door open the room was in semi-darkness. Then he saw the impression of a man on his back in a bed, long brown hair, the contour of a familiar nose on the well-known face, and several naked young women above and on him, gauzy, convolutions, shimmering, alive, but somehow not alive.
      He moved a few steps into the room, straining to see; guitars on stands; notebooks; scrawled lyrics. A bouquet of luscious red roses. An errant eye catching his, recognition, the gossamer convolutions intensifying, animal-like, plumped mouths, red, hungry, devouring.
      The errant eye winking, a lascivious tongue licking, wet, plump, too large to be human. Predatory life in the probing eye;
      “Too late,” said a voice that might have been Deb Stiles. “They found me. It’s really not so bad after all. Why don’t you come over here and join us.”
      Crying out in an unknown language; distinct but meaningless, a snaffle of sound; snapping, contorted movements of bodies. Bending, jerking whiplash movements of hair.
      Sanchez plucked one of the roses from the vase, stumbled back falling, picked himself up and ran.
      There was a wheezing breath behind him and a kind of chocking sob; then that voice again, crying out. “For God’s sake! For the sake of your soul, get out! Get out before it’s too—”
      He did not hear anymore. He ran past the desk, threw the door open and stumbled out into the snow, retching, falling to his knees. Black soot from his lungs. Firemen standing over him. Oxygen mask.
      “You saved those kids.”
      “What?”
      “We thought we’d lost you. No pulse. No heartbeat. You ran into that burning building and brought those three kids out alive.”
      “No,” Sanchez said, but his voice was weak, muffled by the mask.
      “What’d he say?”
      “Take the mask off.”
      The mask was lifted from Sanchez’s face. He tried to say something else but they put it back on.
      “He was talking about John Lennon.”
      “Must be the smoke. He’s delirious. The paramedic noticed the beautiful red rose lying in the snow beside the stretcher. Where the hell did that come from?
      Lennon’s alive. I know where he is, Sanchez thought but he never got the chance to speak the words.  It was then that he realized he was on a stretcher and several paramedics were working on him. He felt his heart failing and thought about the dead city. He seemed to be floating above it, looking down. It was then that he heard the music again, that vaguely familiar melody from so long ago. “I told you about strawberry fields, you know the place where nothing is real . . .”
     
     

The Kindred
     
    “The guests should have started arriving by now,” I told my wife Megan. I looked nervously at the clock. It was eight PM, Halloween night, and our annual masquerade party was officially underway. Well, at least we were