The piano playing became discordant, or was he just hearing it better … or worse? On his stool against the wall, beer in hand, he contemplated that. Contemplated the way people’s voices were getting confused, as if they’d become mixed up, and the thrum rising under his skin, the thrum and hum and the ringing in his ears. It felt like something was coming toward him from very far away—toward and into him. His throat was dry and chalky. His beer tasted funny. He put it down, looked around the room.

Old Jim couldn’t stop playing the piano, although he did it so badly, fingers too hard against the keys, the keys smudged with his red blood as he now began to roar out a song Saul had never heard before, with lyrics that were incomprehensible. The other musicians, most of them seated around Old Jim, let their instruments fall from slack hands, and stared at one another as if shocked by something. What were they shocked by? Sadi was weeping and Brad was saying, “Why would you do that? Why in the hell would you be doing that?” But Brad’s voice was coming out of Sadi’s body, and blood was dripping out of Brad’s left ear, and the people slumped at the bar proper … had they been slumped that way a moment before? Were they drunk or dead?

Old Jim erupted out of his seat to stand, still playing. He was reaching a chaotic crescendo on his shouting, shrieking, yowling song, his fingers destroyed joint by joint as blood smashed out from the piano onto his lap and down onto the floor.

Something was hovering above Saul. Something was emanating out of him, was broadcasting through him, on frequencies too high to hear.

“What are you doing to me?”

“Why are you staring at me?”

“Stop doing that.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

Someone was crawling across the floor, or pulling themselves across the floor because their legs didn’t work. Someone was bashing their head against the dark glass near the front door. Sadi spun and twitched and twisted on the floor, slamming into chairs and table legs, beginning to come to pieces.

Outside, utter night reigned. There was no light. There was no light. Saul got up. Saul walked to the door, the spray of Old Jim’s incomprehensible song less a roar than a trickling scream.

What lay beyond the door he did not know, mistrusted the utter darkness as much as what lay behind him, but he could not stay there in the bar, whether it was all real or something he was hallucinating. He had to leave.

He turned the knob, went out into the cooling nighttime air of the parking lot.

Everything was in its rightful place, as normal as it could be, with no one in sight. But everything behind him, in there, was awry, wrong, too irrevocable to be fixed by anyone. The din had become worse, and now others were screaming, too, making sounds not capable of being made by human mouths. He managed to find his pickup truck. He managed to get his key in the ignition, put it in reverse, then drive out of the parking lot. The sanctuary of the lighthouse was only half a mile away.