Joe didn’t feel like talking anymore, so he held his face in his hands, while the club spun around him, and the trendy, thumping beats of the dancer’s song hammered him unceasingly. When Joe opened his eyes he saw that Amy had brought Roy another drink. He was really setting the pace, with an almost reckless zeal. She chatted with him again, her hand parked lightly on his shoulder, her body perfectly oriented to him. Each time she visited she seemed to get closer and closer to him. Even as he thought that, he saw her sit on his lap, her tight, hip-hugger shorts in such perfect contrast to his downtrodden business suit.

A thought dug at him, while watching Roy and Amy together. For it was clear from the beginning that their relationship was far beyond transactional. They had a real history. They were lovers, and they had been for some time. This led to an obvious indiscretion though, an elephant in the room that he couldn’t dismiss. Although Joe had never met Roy’s wife, he had seen photos of her on a few of his untended social media pages. And Amy was, definitively, not her.

The arm Amy had on Roy’s shoulder nestled around his neck as she whispered things into his ear, words that brought an eager smile to his face. The straps of the lingerie on her hips rising out of her shorts glowed like beacons in the darkness. When she finally slipped off of him and walked away, those beacons marked her clearly wherever she went. They actually left orange trails in the air.

Joe spoke, almost in a grave tone. “So you gave me all these warnings about not giving in to temptation. Yet here you are, rolling over for it.”

His words didn’t appear to make any mark on Roy, who replied rather matter-of-factly. “I told you, Joe. I’m done. My run is over. So it doesn’t really matter what I do, not anymore.”

“It’s all on me then, is it?” Joe muttered, with an air of frustration. It was implicit yet again, but clear enough.

Roy nodded.

“How long have you actually known her?” Joe asked curiously, still watching the glowing orange beacons in the distance, as she moved about the club.

“Oh… Amy and I go way back.”

“That doesn’t totally add up, Roy.”

“Why do you say?”

“You look decades older than she does.”

Roy scoffed. “I already told you, Joe. Time is not an obstacle to us. Not anymore.”

It sounded wrong, even though Joe knew he’d meant it in a science fiction sense, and not in a way that had anything to do with impropriety. He didn’t bother to inquire any further. It just didn’t matter. Roy had his own complex set of problems and desires. Joe didn’t need to know the details. He watched Roy as he sipped from his drink, with an empty, dead-eyed stare. He had to wonder if Roy had already been defeated. If his words were true, it seems that he had been to the End of the World Party, and he’d met his shadow there. It was inside of him now, and it drove him. Its black hand was on the steering wheel, and it sped with reckless abandon, crashing through the house of his marriage, leaving it in tatters, in favor of an endless stream of alcohol, and those crisp, hypnotic beacons that glowed in the darkness, marking the points of her wide hips.

Joe rubbed his eyes again. When he opened them he happened to lock eyes with his waitress. Her hair ties and her garter straps were an almost cosmic green, and they shone like little chartreuse comets as she passed by. She smiled at him too, and when she did it felt like his mind was a cluttered dry erase board and she was a swiftly-moving rag, wiping it all clean.

“I’m getting out of here,” Joe spouted out suddenly. The comets and the beacons, spinning around him, all together composed the goddess constellations that had gravity as strong as any black hole. It was only a matter of time before he got sucked in.

“Good luck, kid,” Roy said to him. The seriousness he’d had in past conversations was completely gone. “Where are you going, anyway?” he asked mildly.

“My nightmare is over, Roy. I can feel that it ended. For now, anyway. So I’m going home. I’m going home, and I’m going to sleep.” And I’m finding Jennifer, was the last part, which he’d left unsaid.

“Smart,” Roy replied, as if he’d heard that last part anyway.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m staying here.”

Joe was quiet.

“What?” Roy asked.

“I’m worried about you, man.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I sense that you’re going on a bender.” Or worse, Joe thought.

“Look, don’t worry about me, alright?” Roy replied. “I served my time, and I’m done. So it doesn’t matter what I do anymore.”

Joe refused to believe it. “None of this makes any sense,” he said. “That we’re here, and that this is happening.”

“Well… what did you expect?” Roy answered soullessly, not even anticipating an answer. His eyes had already returned to Amy again, from where she stood across the club, stray drifts of cigarette smoke in the air between them glowing like cosmic nebulas.

Joe turned and walked away. He used the restroom on his way out. It was as much a graffiti showcase as it was anything else. In the moment of solitude, with the music booming through the walls, actually shaking them, he stared into the mirror at his reflection. He didn’t even recognize the guy looking back at him. It was someone else. The backdrop of graffiti framing his reflection heightened the effect. Soon he realized he’d been looking for far too long, as his eyes turned black, and like burning vomit upwelling in his throat, he sensed the shadow wanting to come out and say hello. Joe looked quickly away from the mirror, breaking his gaze. It worked, and the feeling subsided. Nevertheless this let him know he was drunk enough to be on the cusp of bad things happening. He had to get away. More specifically—he had to get to bed.

Joe pushed his way through the bathroom door and walked toward the exit. As he left the club, he looked back and saw that Amy had returned to Roy’s side once more. Neither of them noticed as Joe departed.

Outside, it was dawn. Joe winced at the light of the incoming day, while he marched away from the club in a stupor. It was a situation he knew too well and it was never a fun one. Even after all that had happened—mystical events, unexplained phenomena—he’d still ended up playing the exact same role he always did, as the drunken creature of the night, shielding his eyes from the coming day. Why did that never change?

He turned back around to look at the club. He thought it might turn back into an old defunct building, the same way Cinderella’s stage coach turned back into a pumpkin at midnight. He even willed it to happen. But it didn’t. Rather, the place looked like it had been there for decades. The parking lot was littered with gravel and what looked like several years’ worth of old cigarette butts. He saw a woman—a dancer who had just gotten off work—exit from a backdoor. She had herself covered in a long flannel throw-over and she took no notice of Joe whatsoever as she got into her car, which was a small Nissan with chipped paint and a passenger door that was a different color from the rest of it.

He didn’t know what to make of it all, nor did he wish to waste any more time trying to. Thus he resumed his march down the street, watching for a cab that he could flag down. He was eager to get home so he could get inside his room, draw all the blinds, and make it into an apt hideout for the nocturnal creature that he was.