Excerpt: Cabaret

The man appeared to have been dozing off, but jerked his head up in what seemed to be an anticipatory manner when Jack creaked the old, heavy wooden door open. “Come in, lad!” He shouted jovially.

“Er…” Jack fretted a bit but he didn’t give in to his first impulse, which would have been to slam the door and run back down the street (not to make the old man seem frightening or anything, he’d been fighting that impulse since he locked his apartment). Slowly he opened the door enough to walk in. Holding the door slightly ajar behind him, he thought he’d first ask the simple and most painfully obvious question, “Where is everybody?”

The old man chuckled under his long beard. His eyes didn’t even seem to be open under his long, bushy eyebrows. He reminded Jack of a scrawny old wizard in a storybook, or a piece of older fantasy fiction. “Where is everybody? Now why would anybody have come when there’s no sign of the place being open? Not many people try the door, you know.”