I‘d heard that many people loathe their alarm clock, and I can certainly understand why. The shrieking penetration of electric bells into a perfectly good dream featuring the girl from two apartments and one floor down is a terrible way to start the day. That’s why I made sure the speaker was broken when I bought my clock from a garage sale in the suburbs. I would set the alarm for 7:30 a.m. every night (or morning, technically) before I passed out. It was just a ritual, the little lie I told myself sometime between climbing into bed and rolling out when the sun is peeking over the wrong horizon.

That’s where I was when Chris called me on a fine Thursday night, asking when I would be ready to head out to the club. I couldn’t help smiling.

“Alright,” I said. “But give me two hours. I need to iron the collar on my polo shirt so it stays up all night.”

Chris laughed and said, “fuck you,” before hanging up. I grabbed the cleanest sweater in my apartment and smoked two cigarettes. Fifteen minutes later we were on our way to “the club.”

The club is what Chris and I call Mikies, a run-down dive bar far removed from the trendy dance floors a few blocks further downtown. The patrons were surly drunks for the most part and were rarely in the mood to dance. One would have difficulty cutting a rug on the crud-encrusted floorboards anyways.

So when Chris and I talked about “rolling up to the club,” it was always a secretive jest. We were not the sort who enjoyed mingling with throngs of underage college students. Mikies, while admittedly a dump, was more familiar and comfortable than a line in the freezing cold, eight-dollar drinks, and rotating colored lighting. The grammatical faux pas emblazoned in flashing neon that shone through a dirty window only added to the charm.

But we found Mikies far from charming that night. There must have been a party with nowhere to go because the bar was crowded with hip twenty-somethings dialing up the meager selection of hip-hop music residing in the flickering jukebox. Rather than striding up to the bar, Chris and I had to shoulder our way forward to start our usual Thursday night routine: vodka-based drinks.

The guy who bartended Mikies was named Paul, curiously enough, and he knew our style: start a tab and keep ‘em coming. The result was a mountain of cheap plastic cups piled before us.

That might have been the reason Chris abandoned my side, brushing cigarette ash off his sweater, to stumble towards the bathroom. I was left with nothing to do but attack the drinks that arrived in front of me and stare at the huge, pockmarked metal clock that sat on the far side of the bar.

It was the only decoration in Mikies that didn’t offend the senses immediately; one might even consider it artistically attractive. The face was a huge, bent metal tube that spiraled into the center of the hands. In the proper mindset with a few drinks in you, the whole clock seemed to spin like a top. I had been staring at it for a while, avoiding contact with the two leather jacket-clad patrons on either side of me, who undoubtedly would be waking up to their alarms bright and early in the morning. Then I realized the second hand had frozen. I followed the cord along the wall with my eyes, looking for a dangling plug, and I saw him looking right at me.

I couldn’t believe I didn’t see the stranger before, seeing how close he was to the clock. The tall head was moving through the crowd the instant I locked eyes with him. Despite the bass-laden track crackling through the speakers, I could hear the click, click of his expensive dress shoes as he strode across the floor deliberately, somehow finding an open path through the sea of highlighted hair. His shoes were still hidden, but the rest of his clothes matched the crisp and authoritative sound of his steps. He wore a black suit, an expensive-looking double-breast, with a red tie that leaped from the crystal white background of his dress shirt. The cape that spilled from his shoulders and the top hat perched atop his head did not give me an impression of authority; they conveyed a more foreboding feeling. At any rate, he was too well-dressed for Mikies.

He was finally upon me and still meeting my gaze, which was becoming a bit uncomfortable by this point. Whether it was the empty cups sitting before me or my natural mean streak, I don’t know, but I snapped—no, snarled—at him.

“The hell are you?”

At that moment something happened. I still hadn’t broken eye contact with the stranger, but somehow his eyes changed. As if something was behind them, peering into me. He spoke through barely parted lips in a strangely soothing voice: “It’s past your bedtime…”

For some reason I couldn’t reply. The eyes were still on mine, and they were still changing. I saw his pupils expand and the white left his eyes to be replaced by red. It was as if his tie had crawled up through his chest to see things from his perspective. I knew I should have been alarmed, but I was held in place on my barstool, unable to look away from the stranger. His eyes were burning crimson with an intensity that splashed a blood-red glow over his pasty face. He smiled devilishly, revealing perfect rows of tiny white teeth.

Then he nonchalantly leaned over the bar, took hold of two full bottles of vodka, and broke them over the bar’s surface, spreading liquor everywhere. The stranger’s eyes grew wider as he reached into the pocket of his jacket, and a smile broke over his face when he retrieved a matchbook. Then there was only light.

The room I was in had no boundaries that I could see, but for some reason the white expanse made me feel claustrophobic. Like when you wake up tangled in blankets, sweaty and choking for breath, and realize you can’t move. He was still watching me, the sick smile attached to his lips.

I couldn’t move or breathe for what seemed for a long time before he finally spoke to me. But he didn’t move his lips; his voice seemed to project from all directions at once. His words were short and measured:

“You’ll have to find the door.”

Then he walked past me and was gone. The floor unhinged beneath me and I fell through.

To be continued…