Yuletide Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles Book 4) by Gene Doucette Read Free Book Online

a lack of surprise.  I expect tragedy, in the same way Santa expects his good story with a happy ending.  When I’m right—and I often am—I’m the least surprised person in the room.
    *   *   *
    When in a gloomy mood it usually helps to be around other people who also happen to be gloomy, which is one of the appeals of dive bars like this particular pub, but since Santa was livening up the place I had little in the way of like moods to latch onto, so I mostly stayed in the corner and watched the room.
    Watching humanity at a remove is a normal state of being for me as well, and probably began as a survival technique.  It was what I was doing when I noticed something peculiar about O’Shea.
    It was a Saturday night, so the taps were busy all evening.  A few ran dry on O’Shea, and when that happened he did this weird thing where he stomped his foot hard, twice.  A few minutes later he’d lean down beneath the bar as if talking to it, and maybe he was, because a minute or two after that , the tap wasn’t dry any more.
    He had a few people working for him—two barmaids and a guy who dealt with dirty dishes—but nobody else went behind the bar that I could see.  He also never addressed anybody regarding the dry taps.  I was assuming the kegs were in the basement since he didn’t roll anything out under the bar, and the stomping was an obvious attempt to communicate to someone beneath our feet, but a foot-stomp didn’t really convey all of the necessary information, such as which keg needed work.  So that had to have been what he was doing when he leaned over and spoke to someone small enough to fit in the cabinet.
    I leaned over the bar and took a peek at the underside of it, but the only interesting thing was that there was nothing interesting to see: stored boxes and glassware and the closed cabinet door, but that was all.
    So when O’Shea was on the other side of the bar, I stomped on the floor myself.
    A few seconds later the cabinet door opened, from the inside.  This O’Shea did notice.  He leaned over and whispered something I couldn’t hear over the racket in the barroom, and then slid the door closed again.
    I didn’t get a look at who was on the other side of that door, but I had a good idea who it might be.
    *   *   *
    “Tell me again why we’re standing out here?”
    Santa was confused.  We’d gone from opening the bar to closing it, and now instead of wandering off to our respective beds we were standing in an alley.
    This was, for wont of a better term, the bar’s piss alley.  There was a bathroom to be found inside O’Shea’s, but it was a terrifying place with only one toilet that few had seen.  It was difficult to tell, on most nights, if it was occupied or if the owner had just never unlocked the door.  Either way, it made more sense to continue past the bathroom door to the rear exit and take a leak in the alley instead.  This worked fine for everyone, by which I mean basically no women went to the pub on anything like a regular basis.
    It was not where one lingered, and certainly not at the end of a day of drinking when one’s body is very much interested in shutting down.
    “I told you,” I said, “we’re ghost-hunting.  Now keep your voice down or this won’t work.”
    We were in the shadows.  Other than the bulb above the bar’s exit the only light came from the streetlamps, and those had a diminished impact in the narrow alley, so there were plenty of shadows to choose from.  We were halfway down the wall, could see the back door clearly, and were pretty sure we couldn’t also be seen from that door.  It was actually only the second-best hiding place, with the best being behind a Dumpster.  But the trash really smelled.
    “Are you practicing divination?” he asked.  “I’m growing concerned that madness might be an aspect of your extreme age, Stanley.”
    “No, this isn’t madness.  Trust me.  It is a guess, but a decent one.”  Not that