02 May Last Call

Posted at 11:00h in Strange and Unexplained by CreepypastaStories.com 0 Comments

📅 Published on May 2, 2022

“Last Call”

Written by Dale Thompson
Edited by Craig Groshek
Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek
Narrated by N/A

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🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available

⏰ ESTIMATED READING TIME — 11 minutes

Rating: 10.00/10. From 2 votes.

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Evan Burr found himself out late sauntering down the sidewalk on a night where the weather couldn’t make up its mind if it wanted to rain or not. A light drizzle just made being outside without an umbrella an unpleasant stroll. He spotted a bar just up ahead and proceeded to head in that direction. He wouldn’t mind a drink before going home. A group of people was just going in, so he entered with them, nodding at the staff member who held the door open for everyone as they piled inside. It was much better in here, he thought. Nice and dry. He went straight for the bar, found an empty barstool and made himself comfortable, shaking off the beads of water with a shivering shake from the cold. The bartender walked by, and Evan shouted out, “I’ll take anything you got on tap.” The bartender looked around at that point, did not acknowledge his request, but kept walking to the other end. Evan thought that was weird but had hoped that the bartender had heard him.

The room was noisy but not too loud. There was music coming from a jukebox and people playing pool. He checked out the room, the people laughing and socializing, then he turned back to the bar to see where that bartender went. There was a glass sitting there just out of reach, but he assumed it was his, and he retrieved it right away.

He was quite thirsty, so he knocked it back in one go and sat the mug on the bar. Again, he took notice of the room and spotted a couple of very attractive young women sitting together at a table, enjoying their drinks. One looked in his direction, and he politely smiled, not wanting to be presumptuous, and he thought he saw her smile back. Being shy, he turned back to the bar and found another beer was there, right where he had left the empty mug. ‘Well, that was quick. I didn’t even have to ask that time. That bartender is good,’ he thought. Though he didn’t order a second drink, he welcomed it.

It was later than Evan had thought when he came in; now the bartender yelled out, “20 minutes until closing. Drink’em down if you got ‘em and make your way to the door; we are closing up.” Evan was nursing his second drink and watching the ball game on the TV behind the bar. He loved his baseball, and his favorite team, the Cincinnati Reds, was playing the San Diego Padres in San Diego. He absolutely loved baseball and had forgotten that the game was going to be on. Now he wished he was home so he could get comfortable and watch the game. Living on the east coast, one had to stay up late to watch a nighttime west coast game. Evan got consumed in the game and fell into a bit of a daze. Suddenly without warning, the TV turned off. This snapped him out of his fixation. That was when he realized that not only had the TV been turned off, but the lights in the bar were off, the music was no longer playing, and everyone had gone. He was alone.

Evan rubbed his eyes in disbelief. He spun around 180 degrees on the barstool and stood up. Other than a couple of small neon signs glowing against the back of the bar, there was no other light. The place was like a tomb, silent and empty with the exception of Evan, who now stood to his feet. He thought, “Now this is odd. How did everyone manage to leave without me knowing? And how did the bartender not see me when he turned out the lights?”

Evan thought it was a long shot, but he headed for the door. He found it bolted shut, and iron bars had been slid over and locked in front of it. He headed to an exit sign that caught his eye, and there he found a solid steel door fastened tight as well. Without hesitation, he headed for the kitchen, which was dark except for an illuminated sign in the very back. Once again, any attempt to escape through the exits was futile.

“Well, Judas Priest, this is a fine mess.”

Evan had not gone into full panic mode yet, but he did feel out of sorts and a bit weak. He sat on a stool in the kitchen to gather his thoughts. “If I call the police, they will never believe I got locked in. They’ll think I am some ignorant thief who locked himself in. However, there is no break-in, so how could I be considered a robber? But what if they say I must have been hiding in the bathroom or something ridiculous to that degree? I am screwed.”

Regardless of the outcome, he opted to use the phone and call the police. However, there was no public phone in sight, and the room with the sign that read ‘Office’ was locked. What a predicament. “Maybe I could pick the lock to the office with a knife or something,” he thought out loud.

He returned to the kitchen and went for what he assumed was the knife drawer. He didn’t know what was wrong with him, but the drawer was a monstrous pull to open, and after he finally got it, he realized it wasn’t the knife drawer. “Maybe I’ll just get a drink? I can settle up the tab tomorrow.” Evan made his way to the bar area. All of the bottles sitting behind the bar were locked behind a sliding glass window now. “There went the idea for a stiff drink,” he spoke out loud again.

He reached under the bar to retrieve a glass mug, and the weakness that he felt earlier returned. The glass mug weighed a ton. He wrestled using both hands to drag it off the shelf, and through some labor, he managed to sit it under the tap. “My gracious,” he thought. “I feel drugged. Lightheaded, even. Maybe a drink is not the best thing right now.”

His eyes were going in and out of focus, and he swore the room was brighter than it was just moments ago. He brushed it off as just his eyes were tired and were adapting to the room. “But no,” he thought, “there is something more.” Evan felt lighter, as if his feet were barely touching the ground, and the room most certainly was glowing a faint hue of white. His vision was out of focus; he struggled, squinting to adjust his sight.

“This is remarkable. What the devil could this mean?” His panic had subsided, and he wasn’t as concerned about leaving as he was before. Being rescued or finding a way out of this detention did not seem as important or pressing. He could not justify in his mind why he suddenly reconciled his captivity, but he was feeling serene about the whole thing. He was quite intrigued with what was happening to him and around him. “Absolutely baffling.” He wandered around now as light as a feather, having a peek about the bar. He still felt uneasy, fragile, even squeamish, but he attempted to adapt to what was happening. As he acclimated himself, he analyzed and came up with several ‘what ifs’ and ‘maybes’ as to why he was feeling so remarkably out of sorts. “Maybe there is a gas leak?” he suddenly reasoned. More concern vexed his reasoning, and consternation crept back into his maudlin rumination.

Making his way to the men’s restroom, he found there was a narrow, shoebox-sized window about head height, far too small to squeeze through. But he imagined that if he were feeling the effects of some gas – worst-case scenario, carbon monoxide – he needed to get fresh air. “What is wrong with me?” The window was too tightly shut for him to open. He struggled with the latch for a few moments, unable to break it free from its locked position. He did not feel as though he had lost strength; it was that everything seemed ponderously heavy or shut tighter than usual. Everything that he attempted to do or try was met with grievous;y failed attempts. The night was turning into a night of cumbersome failures.

His thoughts of surviving had now kicked in, and he returned to the kitchen to find some sort of cloth to wrap around his face in order to protect his mouth and nose from any poisonous gases. He located a dishtowel, and even that managed to give him a struggle as he endeavored to wrap it around his head. He cloaked himself in the towel to cover his nose and mouth, leaving his eyes and the top of his head exposed. The mummifying experienced seemed to have drained his energy, and he was forced to take a seat. His legs had truly been affected by something foreign. They were abnormally light, cannular, void of mass.

After a short rest, knowing the importance of making that phone call to the police for help, with strenuous willpower he stood to his feet. His desperation led him to other drawers in search of a knife, and after great difficulty, he managed to slide open a drawer and procured a knife.

“Yes!”

He was forced to take another break. Attaining the knife was no easier for him than if he had climbed Mount Everest. There was no reason that he could ascertain as to why he was floundering about in such a pathetic way. His motor skills seemed to have a broken connection. He felt his head to make sure he did not have any lumps or bumps. He considered the possibility that he may have fallen at one point and did not remember causing a disconnect, a disruption to his cranial sensory nerves. He did not discover any abnormalities.

The job now was to have the ability to carry the knife back to the office and pry open the office door in hopes that a phone could be found. Swaying along, he found he moved better, with more ease, by using a bit of rhythm. He hoped the cameras – if there were cameras – didn’t pick up his odd walking. They would surely imagine that he was plastered.

Once at the door, he bent down and tried to pick the lock. The knife was obviously too large, and that was fruitless. He then attempted to stick the knife into the bolt itself, thinking it may not be latched super tight. He ended up using too much force, and the knife blade snapped off. “Rats!” He was in a quandary.

“Another attempt, maybe?” With the same agonized undertaking, he painstakingly returned to the kitchen and retrieved a second knife. This one was more formidable than the first. Straining and twisting with much exigency, he felt the deadbolt give a little, and his spirits brightened because he was now making headway. With copious soliloquy, the deadbolt eventually gave way, and the door creaked open.

The office had a desk. It was messy with papers and receipts. After a bit of rummaging, he found a phone – with a landline, he hoped. It was a mission to pick up the telephone receiver. The phone felt like a cast-iron weight in his hands. Wrestling the receiver to his ear, he endeavored to dial 911. Mission accomplished.

A voice on the other end, “911, what’s your emergency?” “Hello, this is Evan Burr. I am locked in a bar and can’t get out.”

The voice on the other end repeated, “911, what is your emergency?”

“For Heaven’s sakes, lady, I need help!”

The operator spoke for a third time. “Are you injured? Do you need an ambulance? What is your location?”

“I do not know the address. Can’t you trace this call?” Evan just couldn’t put a name on the bar. He had no clue where he was. In fact, as he thought back, he did not know why on this night he was walking down this particular street which he could not name. “How did I get here?” He reminisced about the events of the night.

He was unable to evocate any memories of the day except getting in his car and driving down the highway to work. “Where did I leave the car?”

“Think man, think!” He could not rationalize where he was, how he got here, or what put him on this street. He had no memory of driving to this place. His last clear memory was being in his car on the way to work. “How is this possible?” Nothing in his memory justified how he ended up in this place. This was the first time Evan felt afraid. It was the worst fear of all, ‘the sudden fear.’

He laid the phone on the desk and returned to the bar. He pulled the handle on the tap using both hands, and a frothy draft poured into the mug. With all of his might, he gripped the glass with both hands and put it to his mouth and guzzled it like a parched man in the desert. He returned the mug to the tap and watched it. Without pulling the tap himself, with no interference or effort from Evan whatsoever, magically, fantastically, the glass filled itself from the bottom of the glass up to the rim. Evan recoiled. “This isn’t right. Something is super spooky here,” he noticed, verbalizing the words robotically. He thought back to the street. Nothing seemed remarkable. He remembered walking in the drizzle and sprinkling rain and entering the bar. His thoughts stopped. He remembered nodding to the bar employee as he entered the bar, but the employee did not return the gesture.

“The bartender? Why didn’t he act like he saw me or heard me when I ordered a drink? But there was a drink? Yes, it wasn’t directly in front of me, but there was a drink? Did he hear me or not? Was that my drink, or was it intended for someone else? And that girl that smiled at me?”

Evan focused and thought hard. “Was it possible that she wasn’t returning the smile but was simply smiling at the conversation that she and her friend were having and just so happened to turn her head towards him at that precise moment? And the second beer that magically appeared. I didn’t order that, yet there it was. And this feeling of floating and my weakness?” Evan became more fearful. He pinched himself. He felt no sensation of a pinch or pain. He lacked sensation. He noted the numbness throughout his body, not just his legs, and detected an odd, unnatural, feather-like atmosphere that was all about him. This was not the sensation of the living. And since he had never experienced death, he had no idea what the dead perceived. “A mirror? Yes, a mirror to look in.’ He had not even noticed the mirror behind the bar. He stood directly in front of it, and all he saw was a faint light, like a large orb, where his reflection should be. He was nothing but backscatter. “Where the hell is my body?”

As fascinating as this all was, Evan was hardly impressed. He pushed the glass mug out from under the tap, hard. It connected with the floor in a shattering explosion of shards and splinters. He punched the window that had the liquor locked behind it, but it merely reverberated with a rattle. Evan rampaged for a bit, managing to flip a couple of bar stools and violently roll a few pool balls across the table. By this time, he was exhausted.

Now it came to him. He had been in the slow lane on the freeway when cars ahead were merging. He attempted to shift lanes, but when he did, he never saw the car in his blind spot. This caused him to spin out. Like flashes of bright images, the recall from the accident played before his eyes. Out of control memories swirled round and round, spiraling unmercifully before his eyes like a dream that had escaped his mind. There was a crash, a massive thud, the world spun, then there was a violent hit to the other side of his vehicle, and the airbag exploded, smashing his face. Glass flew in the air, and the car rolled. Broken, flying glass pelted his face. His car was being twisted and mangled by impact after impact. In every direction, there were shards of glass, and there was nothing Evan could do except hold tightly onto the steering wheel the best he could. He was wearing his seatbelt, and it pulled tight like a constrictor across his waist and chest. Something heavy, he could not be sure what, smashed into his head, and then at that precise moment, he was walking down an unknown street in the rain. He spotted a bar just up ahead and proceeded in that direction. The chaos and ferociousness of the car crash were gone, as if it had never happened.

The next day when the bar reopened, the owner found the place a mess. It appeared there was an attempted robbery. However, he could not ascertain how or where the intruder would have gotten into the building. The owner found the phone off the hook in the office. The office had been ransacked, leaving it in greater disarray than it was already in. Leaving things the way he found them so as not to disturb any evidence, he used his phone to call the police. When the police arrived, they wanted to view any surveillance footage that might have been captured.

Oddly on the video footage, they spotted a white glowing orb floating about the bar area. Wherever the orb drifted to, unexplained things were happening. Mugs were being moved without the aid of anyone. The pool balls rolled on their own across the table. Glass exploded, and barstools were flipped over.

Unable to explain such a supernatural phenomenon, the police joked that the bar owner needed “ghostbusters” for this case. Over time the rumors of paranormal activity in the bar spread, and the bar grew in popularity with people wanting to see some mystical, otherworldly happening, maybe an apparition or a transcendental occurrence. Most people admittedly never saw a thing. A few swore they saw the orb. A few “whack jobs,” as the bar owner called them, swore they experienced unearthly phenomena within the bar. The bar owner himself never admitted a thing, but in a newspaper article highlighting his establishment, he did say that every night there would be two glasses of draft beer he could not account for.