bathhouse spies at the country store

2021-01-09

Before this, I was in some seedy underground bathhouse. The kind with stonework built up around natural hot springs which heated the steaming pools. It was dim, shadowy, and labyrinthine, with long halls and too many little alcoves, nooks, and private rooms. Intrigue clings to and permeates through the walls even more than the dampness. Every time you enter a room, you seem to catch the back of someone’s head or the white flash of the side of their eye as they surreptitiously duck away from you through a door, behind a curtain, or into yet another hall.

But that was before. Now I’ve somehow been displaced and misplaced in, based on packaging of the items on the shelves and also the packaging in which the customers clothe themselves, what looks like a early 1960s Mississippi gas station convenience store.

The fact that everything and everyone seems to be wrapped up in browns and beiges gives the world a sepia tone. The store is oddly packed and the clerk at the counter is hurriedly checking out customers as fast as they can, glancing up every couple of seconds with wide eyes and thin mouth as the queue snakes through the aisles.

I’m not the only one displaced here. I know I’m surrounded by bathhouse spies. Some of them are good. They’re discreet. They blend in. Others stand in place gulping air and rolling their eyes to look all around while standing still. They are the reason that “like a fish out of water” is a saying. Patchwork looking, with their jackets too big, one leg of their trousers well tailored while the other one swallows their leg and pools over their shoe.

I don’t enter the queue, but the queue forms around me. The man behind me is one of the patchwork spies, holding his pants up with one hand, a fuzzy mustache hastily grown across his lip at an odd angle. In his other hand he holds few odd items, a matchbook and some canned goods, and he’s doing arithmetic out loud under his breath, eyes cast down and brow furrowed in concentration. It sounds as though he’s trying to use some kind of mnemonic device to remember a string of numbers based on what year he thinks it is.

He snaps his mouth shut and stands up straight and beams at me with crooked teeth. He rattles off the numbers rapid fire now, confident. A credit card number? I crane my neck to try to catch a glimpse of the counter. Do they even accept credit cards here? Does this man have stored in his brain, ready for retrieval, a credit card number for multiple spacetime coordinates? We must be in a predetermined destination. One of a set of possible locations. Otherwise the odds are far too slim for him to know information about this one particular grain out of an infinite pile of sand.

I take a gamble on my own assessment of where and when we are, and figure that a young version of my grandfather must be nearby. When I get to the counter, I ask to use the phone, and dial him. It goes to the answering machine. I leave a vague message, not identifying myself, but asking him to call me back at the store. In the meantime, I go browse the aisles and try to spy some more on the bathhouse spies.

I hear a clatter and turn around to see one of the patchwork spies staggering, clawing his way along one of the shelves, dragging his leg behind him, blood pouring from a wound in the front of his thigh. I’m startled and step back as two young women dart forward to his sides and hold him up and support him, walking him to the back of the store. They look exactly the same, dressed in the same black and white floral print dress with a lacy color. Black curly chin length hair. Pale white skin, dark eyes, and painted red lips.

A hallmark of the bathhouse master assassins is that they come in twos. I don’t know if the bathhouse collects twins from out in the world, or if they raise them in house from their own stock. But their best and deadliest operatives are always identical twosomes.

The women almost have him to the back door when the bell above the front door rings. A strange version of my grandfather hesitates at the threshold. He’s not the old man I know now, nor is he the young dashing man I know from photographs. But rather a blend of the two. Not young, not old, but at that strangely, desperately mundane point in his life where he is neither. He has a few days of stubble on his face, and eyes that are tired but wired. He wears a ball cap and thick shaded glasses on his face like a disguise.

His eyes dart all around the room, looking for what I don’t know. He doesn’t even come all the way in, just leans in, drops a thick, sealed envelope on the counter, and then quickly turns his back and leaves.

The women are met at the back of the store–dear god!–not by one, but by two more sets of twins! One pair, short pudgy red headed teenage boys. And the second pair, huge strapping men, well over six feet tall, their t-shirts straining and stretched over their muscles.

I snatch up the envelope as I lunge for the phone again. My fingers feel layers of clear tape wrapped around it. My eyes scan the front as I call 911. It’s not addressed to anybody as I thought it would be. Rather the front is covered in a scrawl of stream-of-consciousness writing in tight penmanship. It’s mad, paranoid, and nonsensical.

The operator picks up. I toss the envelope back down onto the counter at my side and ask for assistance at the country store. Somebody has been hurt badly and might be being kidnapped, and we might all be in danger.

They say they’ll send the sheriff.

I hang up and turn around just in time to see one of the pudgy teenagers, less than an arm’s length away, walking away from me with my grandfather’s envelope clutched in his meaty fist, and I flinch. He was close enough to touch me!

He carries it into the middle of the store where his twin is waiting, along with the two goliath twins. He tears into the envelope and pulls out a single folded sheet of paper. He holds it up to his face, unfolds it, and his eyes scan over it. Then he goes rigid and grins horribly. His eyes roll back in his head, and then he goes limp, slumping to the floor. His twin catches him and lets him down gently, then grabs the paper, and repeats the same process.

By the time the big ones begin reading the paper and passing out, the redheads are waking back up. They stand and immediately walk toward the back while still shaking off the fog of whatever just happened, as though driven by some kind of compulsion that they don’t fully understand, but don’t even consider questioning. As though they had received some kind of programming from the paper.

The women appear as the last goliath is going down, and they also program themselves. The last one, after waking back up, pauses only long enough to gather up the envelope and paper, and to glance briefly at me, her eyes boring into mine, before hurrying to catch up with the others.

Once they all pass through the back door, I become unstuck, and I run to look through the door. I see the six of them packing the wounded patchwork man into a white van. In the distance, near the front of the store, I can hear the approaching sirens of the sheriff’s patrol car as they pile in, pull out, and drive away.