“The Whispering Voice” was my first, full-price professional short story sale. It was originally written in 2017 and published in 2018 in an anthology called Second Round. It was the first time I’d gotten into a major anthology with fellow authors whose books I literally have in my library.
The anthology featured a common setting, the Ur-Bar, an establishment that magically appears in different times throughout history, with Gilgamesh cursed to be its eternal bartender. The legendary king managed to achieve immortality…but the cost is that he can never leave the premises of the bar. He can hear about what’s happening in the world, but he can never go out and experience it for himself.
After I got the rights back (anthologies typically demand exclusivity for a year), I published the The Whispering Voice in book and email form with a few extras (a coda to the story, as well as some background details on the heinous real-world crime that inspired it).
Here’s a blurb for the story…
Anna would never rob a bank…but now she has two hours or her family dies. Even the police can’t help her. When she stops at a bar for a shot of liquid courage and a little time to think through her options, she gets far more than she bargained for…
Because this isn’t just any bar.
It’s the Ur-Bar, a mysterious establishment that has appeared in different locations throughout history. A place where the walls between reality and fantasy are thinner than a scream.
And if there’s magic left in the world, this is where Anna will find it…
And without further ado, here’s a preview…
What she needed more than anything was a drink.
Anna Brodie knew it was wrong, knew that alcohol was the furthest thing from what she really needed, but old, old habits died hard. A drink, just one drink, and then she’d leave and do what needed to be done.
Liquid courage.
Driving down Frankford Avenue in her Toyota Camry, it was easy to convince herself that—she glanced over at the radio/clock to see the time—at 11:17 AM on a fine, sunny Monday morning, the best thing she could do in her situation was to walk into a bar. Yeah, right. And then reality obliged her; there was a new bar up ahead where Linda’s Cafe had been before it went out of business. The only thing that was odd was that it didn’t have a neon sign like most of the other businesses around it, just a wooden sign with a design that seemed vaguely Mesopotamian.
She slowed down, turned right and followed a narrow lane to the parking lot behind the bar.
Walking back down the lane to get to the bar’s front entrance, she had to move to one side as an old, battered sedan with more rust than paint rolled slowly past her toward the lot in back. The driver, a twenty-something man with long, lanky hair and a sallow face, gave her a lingering once-over as he went by. The way he looked at her made her feel dirty, like an object and not a woman. She was probably almost twice his age, with a daughter and a husband waiting for her back home.
Waiting for her…and here she was, about to walk into a bar for the first time in eighteen years. Anna almost turned around, but then she realized that she’d have to face the man in the car again. A moment later, she was around the corner and pushing her way into the bar. It was dim inside, with a few rough-hewn wooden tables scattered around and a bar with five or six mismatched stools directly opposite the entrance. The establishment was empty, except for a lone customer at the bar.
Approaching, she saw that her fellow customer was a man in what looked like a long, dark robe with the hood pulled up so that it obscured his face. That was weird, kind of gangsterish in a way, and not really something she recalled seeing in any bar except maybe around Halloween. Still, he didn’t worry her the way the man in the car had.
She took a seat a couple places down from the robed man. Then the bartender came out of the back and drove any thoughts of her fellow morning drinker out of her head. He was tall, a head taller even than her husband, who’d once played college football, and broad-shouldered like he could wrestle a bull to the ground with his bare hands. She shook her head. She had no idea why that image had popped into her head.
Coming over, he said, “Name’s Gil. What would you like?”
“Shot of tequila.”
“Don’t have tequila.”
She frowned. What kind of bar didn’t have tequila? “A shot of anything, then.”
He looked at her inscrutably. “All right.”
The bartender turned around and pulled what looked like a ceramic jar off a shelf. Not even a bottle, a jar. She didn’t know of any alcoholic beverages that came in ceramic packaging. Still, it looked clear and dangerous when he poured a measure into the shot glass he’d placed in front of her.
Behind her, she heard somebody come into the bar, though she was too busy contemplating the drink in front of her to turn and see who’d walked in. Besides, if it was the man from the parking lot, somehow she wasn’t the least bit worried with Gil here. She barely noticed as the bartender walked away.
“You going to drink that or just look at it?” The voice came from the man sitting a few seats down the bar from her. She glanced sideways, but still couldn’t see his face because of the hood.
“Drink it,” she answered. “At least, I think so.”
“Trying to work up your courage, eh?”
“Yeah.”
“I know how it is,” the man said. “You’ve got a problem you can’t figure out how to solve. So you reach for the thing that will at least make you feel better.” The man turned towards her and pulled back his hood. He had penetrating blue eyes, an olive complexion, a roughly trimmed red beard and what looked like an afro that was just as red as his beard. Whatever ethnicity he was, she’d never beheld the combination before. “Except that you know that it won’t really make you feel better. And it won’t solve your problem, either.”
Anna couldn’t help it. The tears started flowing. In a moment, she was hunched over her shot glass, shoulders shaking with the force of her sobs. As she cried, she was dimly aware that the man had moved to the stool next to her and was rubbing her back in a comfortable, fatherly way, while calmly telling her that everything was going to be fine.
She looked up at him through her tears. “You don’t know a thing about my situation.”
The man shrugged and gave her a quirky smile. “How long have you been sober?”
“What?”
“It’s a simple question. I know you know the answer.”
She sighed. “My last drink was eighteen years, ten months and twenty days ago.” Since she’d found out she was pregnant with her daughter and realized that her totally out-of-control lifestyle of parties, alcohol and nose candy had to end.
“You can call me Khalish,” the man said. “I’m afraid you’d find my full name terribly difficult to pronounce.” He looked down at her shot glass. “Offer me your drink.”
Anna tilted her head and looked at him for a moment. He had blue eyes in a weathered face that made it hard to guess his age, although he certainly wasn’t young. There was a strange intensity to his gaze, as if her offering the drink to him was somehow important in a way that she didn’t understand. She pushed the shot glass in his direction, though her emotions were in such a whirl that she couldn’t have said precisely why she did it. Except that, somehow, she trusted Khalish.
He smiled and reached up to gently cup her cheek in his hand. “Go clean yourself up, Anna. When you come back, you can tell me about your problem.”
Anna nodded, unable to speak, suddenly hopeful that maybe there was a way out of her situation. A way for her husband and daughter to survive the catastrophe that had befallen them. It didn’t occur to her to wonder how Khalish knew her name.
***
After Anna left to find the bar’s facilities, such as they were, Khalish crooked his finger and beckoned the bartender over.
“I see you tricked your way into getting a drink,” Gil said.
“It’s not trickery,” Khalish answered. “She gave me an offering. She needs our help.”
Gil raised his eyebrows. “Our help?”
“Yours, really,” Khalish admitted. ”At least right now.”
“How do they say it nowadays?” The bartender pretended to think for a moment. “Yes, I remember now. Screw you. I don’t do the bidding of the gods, not even a minor has-been like you.”
Khalish laughed. “Don’t get uppity with the gods, Gilgamesh. It didn’t work out so well for you last time.”
Gil leaned over the bar, which might have been intimidating to most people, but intimidation emphatically didn’t work on Khalish. As divine beings went, he was barely on the scale, but if intimidation had an opposite, opposing force, he basically embodied it.
“Gil,” he whispered. “The man at the table by the door has been trailing Anna to make sure she follows the instructions she’s been given. Since she hasn’t, he’s going to kill her as soon as she leaves. I admit, you don’t have to do anything I tell you, but if you don’t take him out, her blood will be on your hands, not mine.”
“Why don’t you do it, then?”
Khalish sighed. “I’d be happy to. The man’s a murderer, a rapist and robber. But I’m bound to influence, not to intervene directly. It’s better this way. We really don’t need another fiasco like Pompeii.” He shook his head. “Just help her, Gil. Please.”
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