​                                                                        Chapter 1

 

“Closed for remodeling?!”

I stood there on the sidewalk, not believing what I was seeing. Tiny never, underlined, boldface font, never shut down The Snug, my oasis away from home. The palace of succulent steaks and beer that made the ambrosia of the gods jealous. It was there whenever I needed it.

But, against all logic, not this time. No, there was a sheet of plywood nailed over what used to be my entrance to Eden. I was… miffed, and I felt I had every right to be in a snit.

​Being of the investigative type… Yeah, me. I’m Tony Mandolin, Private Investigator. PI to the weird and horrifying and the bane of vamps and ghouls everywhere.

My last case did involve the burning down… can a ball of flame with a Norse fire elemental rising into the air be considered burning down? Regardless, the Bay Area’s organized crime syndicates lost about a billion dollars’ worth of booze and drugs in that case, and yes I managed to get out of it with my hide mostly intact.

Back to my snit.

​I decided to check out the backside of the bar. That meant ambling along the sidewalk and into the alley as if I had every right to be there, which was mostly right. I paid taxes, way too many taxes in my opinion so, in essence, I paid for the sidewalk and the alley.

In my snit, I forget that almost every nasty surprise I ever received was delivered in an alley.

​As I turned off the sidewalk and into the access to The Snug’s back door something struck me, it was clean. Not just free of trash and dead leaf clean, but that’s the way mom taught me to clean my room clean. If there was remodeling going on, you would expect to see bits and pieces of the stuff used in that job. Things like drywall, lumber, sawdust, maybe a bent nail or two. This alley had none of that. It made a hospital ward floor look a bit slovenly.

Then something else struck me.

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                                                                    Chapter 2

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​The first thought that went through my mind was, “Why did I walk into that damned alley?”

​The second thought was, “Where am I?”

​And the third was, “What’s wrong?”

​I was looking at a bare room with an odd red light coming through the single window way up near the ceiling. Too high to jump, even if I played for the Warriors as center. The floor, ceiling, and walls were all the same type of material, some kind of light reddish stone. There was nothing else, not even a door, at least from what I could see.

​As for what was wrong… I felt weird, not bad, just weird as if I’d been given an upper of some kind. It felt as if I could run a mile full tilt without tiring, but it didn't feel good. Something was off.

​As I was doing my inner inventory one of the walls slid down into the floor. Standing in the hallway was a guy, at least I think it was a guy. He looked like a basketball player someone had put on the rack and stretched. Think over seven feet in height and about a buck fifty soaking wet. His skin was an odd color, red, like the red of a racehorse, but a bit rosier. His hair was black, real black. It looked a bit coarse, like horsetail coarse and shiny. It grew high on his forehead and fell down his back. I couldn’t see what was behind him.

All he wore was a pair of straps in an x-shape across his chest which held an assortment of corded things, and a freaking loincloth right out of the old Tarzan movies.

My eyes shifted away from that region since it looked like I might suffer from extreme guy envy. He held a stick or a rod. I couldn’t tell if it was clay, metal, or wood, but it did have a couple of buttons on it near his hand, which looked large enough so he could have palmed two basketballs at once.

​He grunted something and waved. I didn’t understand the words if those were words, but I got the meaning. I was in a holding cell, and this fellow was a copper or guard of some kind. I just hoped the judge kept a desk between me and what was there for all to see when he sat down.

​The hallway was wide, about three times what you’d expect in most city jails. Like the inside of what had to be my cell, the hallway was bare, and I saw no sign of doors, not even a seam where they must have been, just a small glowing oblong, about the size of a stick of butter every ten feet or so. Some glowed white, some yellow and a few were a dark reddish. A couple were dull as if the power had been cut.

​The guard grunted again as we reached the end of the hallway where it intersected more of the same, and pointed to my left with his stick.

​I nodded and muttered, “Globlish,” which was about as close as I could come to what I’d heard.

​That got me a look but we continued down the other hallway to what looked like a dead end. Remembering how the wall of my cell was, in fact, a door, I wasn’t all that surprised to see this one drop into the floor as well.

But this time things were a bit different.

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