The Other Ring.

The Night Club

                            FRIDAY 10:30 P.M.

They spent most of the next morning at the local Kinko's, designing and copying flyers. The papers were straightforward, including only a description of Wind, their phone number at the hotel, and a cash reward for information leading to Wind's discovery, calculated by Daria out of what she projected would be left over after the hotel bill and food for the week was subtracted from her cabin fund.

She hated parting with the fruits of years of saving, but after the events of the day and night before, finding out what Wind might know was looking less and less like an option and more like an absolute necessity.

Jane hadn't said a word about her outburst since, but she had been more quiet than usual, and Daria could tell that it was weighing heavily on her.

She had tossed off a comment that it would have been nice to have a picture of Wind to include on the flyer, and had even managed to make it sound casual, but the bitter undercurrent was plain to Daria's ears.

After tossing down another large pile of cash for the flyers, Daria and Jane proceeded to spend the early afternoon plastering them up all over downtown.

Separating would have been quicker, but Jane said that the kind of places in which Wind might have ended up were not the sorts of environments two young women should be alone in, even during the day.

So they walked along together, taping up paper to poles already covered in a thick layer of it, and commenting on the contents of those older advertisements. Once, Jane even thought she saw a fragment of the Mystik Spiral logo, but after a little digging they discovered it was a flyer for some goth-metal band named Mystikal Warriors; Jane commented that Baltimore was a bit out of the Spiral's league anyway.

Altogether, the afternoon was the closest they had come to forgetting, for a little while, the horrors that were pursuing them.

When they got back to the hotel, late that afternoon, several messages were already waiting for them. Jane pressed the button next to the blinking red light, and routed the calls through to the speakerphone.

Caller: Hey, dude, I saw your guy, man. He was comin' out of a monkey's ass!

The caller dissolved into coarse laughter, or at least as far as they could tell. The rowdy bar noises behind him made his voice a bit difficult to make out. Jane hit the skip forward button with unnecessary force, and the next message played. Unfortunately, it was of the same sort, as were the three that followed it.

Daria: I'm beginning to think that there might be a downside to getting information from people hanging out in bars in the middle of the day.

Jane: It's just a good thing that we aren't both using video phones. These guys are asses enough without actually having to see theirs.

Even among all the dreck, though, there were a few gems; a few callers reported what sounded like legitimate sightings, and free of charge, while a few others left their own numbers for them to call, just to make sure that money would be paid if everything panned out.

Jane contacted them, and within the hour they had a list of locations where men who looked like Wind had been spotted; of course, they would have preferred some confirmation of the possibility, but most of the callers didn't know what the man was wanted for, and so were hesitant to approach him. Still, it was a start, and better than nothing.

They had a quick bite to eat, and were walking through the streets of downtown by nightfall. The sun was setting, and the streets were filling up with Friday night revelers;

Daria soon wearied of dodging back and forth to avoid enthusiastic and inebriated pedestrians, and wished that they had timed their search better, maybe come on a Monday night when people were too depressed by the workweek ahead to crowd the sidewalk so inconveniently.