Creepy Pasta Stories~

The Periphery People

Credit~ Sara Reinke 

"Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there," the man at the bar said to me, nursing a fresh two-fingers' worth of Ketel vodka in a tumbler he cradled between his thick, calloused fingers.

"'He wasn't there again today. Oh how I wish he'd go away,'" I answered, drawing his sleepy but surprised gaze from the basin of his drink." Antogonish by William Hughes Mearns. That's what you were quoting right?"

He studied me for a moment as if seeing me for the first time and trying to size me up. Most of the terminal drunks who typically dragged their sorry carcasses into the tavern this time of the night amused themselves by ogling my tits or hitting me with slurred promises of unimaginable sexual pleasure. Not this guy—John was his name. His first name anyway, or at least that's what he'd told me. I didn't know his last one, didn't really care.

When he said nothing, I rolled my eyes and turned away, grabbing beer mugs off a drying rack by the sink beneath the bar and mopping beads of residual water away with a hand towel. "Forget it," I muttered. Why try to carry on an intelligent conversation—much less a literary one—with someone who'd pretty much polished off a fifth of vodka all on his own, all in less than two hours?

"What's your name?" he said.
"Mel," I replied. "Short for Melanie. No one calls me that except my dad."

He'd asked me this before and I'd answered him the same. I waited to see if there was any dawn of recognition in his face at the words, wasn't the least bit surprised when there wasn't.

"You drink, Meg?" he asked.

He'd called me Meg every time, too.

I held up the mug in one hand, the towel in the other, gave both demonstrative little shakes. "Not while I'm on duty."

I didn't tell him I never drank because my old man was a drunk, and even though he'd been clean and sober for seven years now, once upon a time, he'd liked to get into the Pabst Blue Ribbon and then slap me and my mother around for shits and grins. I had never tasted alcohol. I worked in the bar so I would never forget it—the hot stink of booze on his breath—and how much I hated him still for that.

John nodded once, fingered his glass again, and tossed back the entire dollop in a solitary swallow. "That's good," he told me, his gaze wandering distantly toward a nearby pale water ring stained into the top of the bar. "I wish I'd never started. Maybe then they'd leave me alone."

I glanced around the pub. It was a Tuesday, almost midnight—almost closing time. Besides John on his bar stool perch before me, the place was pretty much empty. A couple of kids with greasy hair and too many crude tattoos to have earned them anyplace but prison loafed in a far corner, shooting pool and drinking beer. They had one girl between them, a bleach blonde in a too-tight denim miniskirt who didn't seem to mind the two-to-one odds.

Figuring what the fuck, I had nothing better to do, I took the bait and walked back over to John. He had that cast in his eyes, a tone in his voice that my chronic drunks sometimes affect when they want to get nostalgic or wax rhapsodically.

"Maybe who would leave you alone?" I asked. Probably his family—his old lady and kids. He was wearing a wedding ring. Old ladies, kids and chronic alcoholism seldom mixed company amicably.

He looked at me. "The periphery people."

I blinked at him, wondering if I'd heard him right. "The who?"

Still he studied me, his gaze unwavering—surprisingly steady, in fact, given the amount of booze he'd been knocking back that night.

"Periphery people," he said again, pronouncing the words slowly, carefully, as if each was a delicate crystal vase he was trying to swaddle in newspaper before packing away in a box in the attic. "Although they're not really people. Not like you and me. I don't know what the hell they are." He blinked, his eyes growing cloudy again, and he looked away. "Never mind. You can't see them."