My first order of business was finding a phone. I hadn’t grabbed my cell phone from the truck when I ran for the house, and it was either still there, or bagged and tagged on a shelf in an evidence locker somewhere. If the cops didn’t have it, I was sure they’d be monitoring for activity on that line, now that I’d busted out and was on the run. At least, they would be, once the proper calls were made and warrants were issued.

That last thought sparked an idea. It would probably take somewhere north of an hour or two for them to get everything set up to monitor for me to make calls to people, which meant I actually had a narrow window to get some conversations in. I didn’t just need to find a phone to use; I needed to find one as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the days of a pay phone on every street corner were long gone.

I exited the alley and walked as quickly as I could without drawing too much attention to myself. I needed to find a business that was open and ask to use their phone, provided it was in a semi-private environment. Gas stations were probably out of the question—I hadn’t seen a public phone in one for ages, and there was no way in hell they were going to let some stranger behind the security glass—but if I could find a corner store or a bar, I might just get lucky. Unfortunately, the area they’d taken me to looked rough as hell, and my eyes found nothing but rundown houses and boarded up businesses.

I looked at the position of the sun and judged I was headed south. Without a clue where I was, I didn’t know which way to go. Still, I had to assume I was in the greater Detroit area. As long as that was the case, I should be able to turn east and run into civilization, eventually; the city got nicer and more built up, the closer you got to the water. So, I hooked a left at the next intersection and kept walking.

The next block was more of the same, but the following one looked promising. There was a small grocery store on the corner, but the closed sign on the front door shot my hopes down. They didn’t open until 10 A.M., so I walked on by. The other side of the street was home to a single-story building that appeared to have been long since abandoned, which wasn’t helpful, either. I continued down the sidewalk, picking up my pace as I closed in on the next block. I was running low on time, if I wanted to make a call and have any hope it wouldn’t be recorded.

The pressure was starting to get to me—I had to find a phone now—and my thumb reflexively rubbed the underside of my ring finger…

I came to a screeching halt and looked down at my left hand. Why did that action seem so significant?

Then, something grabbed my attention out of the corner of my eye, and my brain practically screamed at me to snap out of it. I jerked my head up.

Directly across from me was a featureless black door; the paint weathered by decades of neglect. It wasn’t the door that had grabbed my attention though. It was the cat sitting in front of it, golden eyes staring directly at me.

Something like recognition tingled the back of my mind, scratching at the edges of my consciousness with an insistent message that I needed to follow the animal. It was the same kind of out-of-body experience that I’d had during both the ride with Tim and after telling his parents of his death, and by this point, that meant something.

I turned my body and stepped off the curb, making a beeline for the cat. When it saw me turn, it stood, spun, and vanished through the solid door. I don’t mean it opened the door and went inside. I mean, it straight up walked right through the damn thing, like some kind of ghost.

My mind reeled, but something deep in my chest urged me to follow. I burst into a sprint for the last few paces, every fiber of my being tingling with anticipation of going through the door and insisting that what I needed was on the other side. I reached for the worn metal handle and tore the door open, then jumped across the threshold.

A smiling face greeted me from behind the beat up and time-worn surface of a bar.

“Hey, Del. Glad you finally found the place. I was starting to wonder if maybe you were lost for good.”

It’s difficult for me to describe the exact sensation I experienced next. It was like, somehow, I’d been going through life fully sober, but also completely shitfaced. Suddenly everything that had happened to me was sparkling clear in my mind, and I mean everything. Old memories flooded back, mingling with the others already in my head. Getting fired, nearly freezing to death in the snow, the cat and that weird-ass old dude, Bob. The coin, the jukebox, and being sucked into a black hole of chaos.

One minute I was a man flailing desperately to understand a situation that made little sense, and the next… Well, I was a man, desperately seeking to understand a situation that made little sense. Except, the new situation was different.

“Give it a minute,” Bob said, looking down and returning to the dirty rag and pint glass in his hands. He began polishing the glass, and didn’t look up when he next spoke. “Your mind has been put through the wringer, and it’ll take a few minutes for you to fully put your thoughts back in order.”

I got hit with a splitting headache then–like someone was driving a railroad spike between the two hemispheres of my brain. I doubled over, clutching my head in my hands and groaning. My brain was struggling to put all the pieces back in their correct places, like some of my true memories had been ripped out and replaced with fake ones, and now my gray matter was sifting through it all and trying to figure out which ones went with what puzzles. After thirty seconds or so, the stabbing pain subsided to a low-level throbbing.

“Take a seat and have a drink, Del. Kettle One and Tonic, right?”

I stood back up, massaging my temples and squinting in the dim light of the dive bar. “Yeah. Lemon, not lime.”

“I remember,” Bob said, waving a dismissive hand. Then he turned and went to work putting my drink together.

I approached the bar and slid a stool back from the counter—the same cracked vinyl barstool I’d sat on when I first found Bob’s Dive Bar, which seemed like another lifetime ago. As I sat down, I stole a glance over my shoulder at the jukebox, which was sitting silently along the back wall, throwing off its faded neon light. What was weird, though, was this time I didn’t sense any sort of power or intent from the ancient record player.

“It’s not the real thing,” Bob said, setting my VT on the bar and sliding it down the lacquered surface to stop directly in front of me. He jerked his head toward the jukebox. “That one’s a re-creation.”

My brow furrowed, and I turned to the old man with an unspoken question written on my face.

“Take a minute to think about everything you know, and then walk me through your thoughts,” he replied.

I closed my eyes and did as he said, thinking about how everything I thought I remembered fit together. “It’s like I have two sets of memories,” I began. “But they’re all jumbled up, like someone cut up two pictures and shook all the pieces together in a coffee can. Now, everything is mixed up, and I’m struggling to figure out what’s real.”

“Mhmm,” Bob grunted. “And what do you think really happened?”

“Honestly? What I think really happened is different from what I feel really happened.” I took a sip of my drink, and one eye twitched a little when I tasted the lime Bob had garnished it with. But I quickly got over it and sighed in relief. The cool mix of alcohol and effervescent tonic was refreshing and helped clarify my thoughts even more.

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“What I think is that everything I’ve been going through over the past couple of months is real, because it’s at least plausible. It’s unbelievably shitty, but it’s feasible- Well, at least until you get to the creepy cops-having-red-eyes-and-turning-into-flesh-blobs and some-kind-of-specter-haunting-me things. But I can think of rational explanations for those—a psychotic break, a gas leak that fucked my brain up… At least it’s plausible. But a crazy old man, some kind of magic jukebox, and a portal to, where? Some kind of alternate reality? That’s a hell of a lot harder to swallow than me just having my life fall apart spectacularly and going crazy as a result.

“And yet, that’s what I feel is true.” I stopped to take another sip of my drink, staring into the bubbles working their way up through the ice cubes in the hopes that they’d somehow lay bare the true story for me. But it wasn’t to be.

“Tell me, Del… What’s worked out for you so far? Trusting your head, or your gut?”

My brow furrowed again as I took a moment to ruminate on his question. To date, every time I’d fought against my gut instinct that something was off, I’d ended up experiencing some horrible, traumatic event. But as soon as I started listening to my gut, I’d been able to see the specter and escape from custody. And then there was the cat outside. If I hadn’t listened to the little voice in the back of my head, insisting that I needed to follow the animal, I’d still be walking down the street, hope of getting out of my situation dwindling with each passing minute.

I looked up at the old barkeep and fixed him with a piercing stare. “So, just say for a minute that everything I’ve experienced since Tim’s death isn’t real, and that I’m actually trapped in some kind of parallel dimension or something. What does that make this place? Am I really here, or is this all happening in my head? For that matter, was the cat and bar real, the first time, or has this whole thing been a nightmare I’ve been experiencing while my brain shuts down from hypothermia? Or am I dead, and you’re the fucking devil or something?”

“You’ve stopped listening to your gut, Del. What does it tell you?”

What it told me was insane; that’s what it told me. My gut was screaming that I’d been down on my luck after my wife had left with the kids, I’d run into a crazy old bartender, and he’d tricked me into isakaiing myself off to another dimension. But I was having a damn hard time accepting that. Still, my gut was insistent that if I just go along with its insane story and accept it as a hard truth, then I could begin the part where I find my way out of this hell.

Bob smiled. I wasn’t exactly sure how the man seemed to know the instant I gave in and believed my gut was telling me the truth, but he did.

“Now, Del, think about the song you selected. Think about what Tim told you about it, what you remember of the lyrics and, finally, think about the very last thing I said to you before I pushed you into the portal.”

Damn… He had said something in that final moment, hadn’t he?

There’s always a way to win, no matter what it may seem like.

I processed that for a few moments, thinking through the implications.

“So I’m in some kind of game?”

The old bartender shrugged, noncommittally. “I can’t really tell you that just yet.”

A disbelieving laugh burst past my lips. “What the fuck do you mean you can’t tell me yet?”

“Del,” Bob said, placing his hands on the counter and leaning toward me. “Let’s say for a minute this is some kind of game. Given what you know, what kind of game would you say it is?”

I thought about that. Every game I’d ever played had some kind of underlying system, by which the actions of the players and NPCs were governed. But there was also almost always some way to actually tell you were playing a game. As far as I was concerned, though, I was living in reality. Well, at least something that did a great job of imitating reality. Given that, plus everything that I’d experienced, I supposed this was some kind of mind game.

Then I reflected on the track I’d selected from the jukebox: Spectre, by Judas Priest. The song was about a malevolent entity—the specter—which…

“Holy shit!” I hissed. “The fucking song… I’m living the fucking song!” I bolted to my feet, ignoring the bar stool as it toppled over behind me. My hand shot forward and grabbed the old barkeep by the front of his shirt, and I jerked him toward me until his feet came off the ground and he was half-laying across the bar. “What the fuck did you do to me?” I roared.

Bob didn’t struggle. He didn’t act shocked, gasp for breath at the shirt collar that was pulled so tight it was constricting his airway, or in any way seem inconvenienced by my outburst. “You wanted a path to redemption, Del. That’s what I offered you, and you accepted,” he said calmly. “This is the first step on your path, Del,” he continued, echoing his words from back in the bar. “It’s up to you to figure out how to get yourself out of here. I can’t give you any more information than that, because I don’t have it, at this time.”

I released him and emitted an irritated growl that quickly built into an incoherent scream of frustration. I wanted to break something, but breaking shit is what landed me in my current predicament.

“And just why the hell not?” I growled. “You haven’t actually told me anything of substance in the entire time I’ve known you.”

Bob took a moment to straighten up his disheveled shirt, then picked up another pint glass and went back to polishing. “Del, if you’re stuck in some kind of mind game, then what does that make me?” he said, completely unflustered by my manhandling him a moment ago.

I opened my mouth, a scorching reply ready on the tip of my tongue, but then I took a moment to calm down and really think through what the old bastard was trying to tell me. If there was one thing I’d learned about the barkeep, it was that he frequently spoke in riddles or said other infuriating bullshit that, when you looked beneath the surface, actually had some significance.

So, I wargamed his question in my head. Assuming for a moment that I was stuck in some alternate dimension, or whatever, and this was a mind game, that probably meant…

“You’re not real, are you?” I asked.

One corner of the old man’s mouth quirked up into a grin. “What else?”

“If you’re not real, then this place isn’t real either, is it?” I said, gesturing to the empty space around me.

And that’s when I noticed the bar was completely empty. No cat, no crusty locals, nobody else. Just me and Bob, chilling in an empty bar somewhere inside my mind.

The wheels started turning in my head, then. Everything I’d experienced up until this point had been–I assumed–created by the specter, or whatever the hell it was that I was facing off against in this little “game.” But if that was the case, then why would it give me a safe haven like Bob’s Dive Bar?

“Why indeed?” Bob queried.

I shot the old man an annoyed look. “You’re goddamn infuriating, you know that? Ach!” I cut him off when he opened his mouth to respond. “Don’t bother, Bob. I already know you can’t give me any information I don’t already have, because you’re a creation of my mind. That’s it, isn’t it? Now that I know I’m up against something supernatural, my subconscious is fighting back, or some bullshit. Right? That’s how you and the bar came to exist in this world?”

The old barkeep just smiled and shrugged, then turned his attention back to his glass polishing.

I sighed, rapidly coming to the conclusion I wasn’t going to get anything else useful out of him.

“So what?” I asked, reaching for my vodka and tonic and downing the rest of it. “I just wander back out that door and go find some way to confront the specter?”

“Well, you can’t very well find your way out if you just sit around here, drinking all day, can you?”

I slammed my empty glass down on the bar, but kept the force just light enough to avoid shattering it. “Fuck you, Bob,” I said, but the words just didn’t have much heat behind them. Turning for the door, I called, “Put it on my tab,” over my shoulder.

Then I headed for the door. If I was trapped in a mental death match, then I needed to figure out a way to even the odds. The real Bob said there would be a way to win. Unfortunately, I was up against a pro, and I was playing without knowing all the rules. Realistically, the best I could hope for was to at least make the fight a little more interesting, before my inevitable demise.

Then again, maybe not.