Salt

By Olivia Murphy-Major

In the foyer, the early evening light stretched out across the carpet. The door had thin cracks in it which let the air in. A gust came and the wind sifted through, smelling of pine and woodsmoke.

“Will you hurry and unlock the door?” David’s voice echoed. “It's five past six. There are people waiting.”

I lifted the latch and slid it to the right. I knelt beside the wooden chest and opened it, taking out the box of salt and pepper shakers. A cloud of pepper drifted into the air, blooming in the shaft of light.

Footsteps thumped on the stairs. A lady’s shoes, a clacking sound.

I stood, tucking a salt shaker into my apron, and placed the others back in the chest. I walked into the manager’s office, closing the door behind me. The room smelled of David’s mints, which he kept in a tin beside the reservation books. He ate them like popcorn. When I passed his door I often heard him crunching, and he came out during service with a fine blue-white dust gathered at the corners of his mouth.

I heard David greet the first guests. Mounted on the wall of the office in front of me was a wooden slab adorned with brass elephants, their trunks made to be hooks. Their outspread ears made it look as though they were leaping from the wood.

Knuckles rapped on the glass, and the door opened.

“A customer requested you,” David said.

His hand gripped the door frame as he stuck his face into the room. David had large eyes the colour of sea glass.

“Requested me? I thought you wanted the first table.”

“They said we will have Lucy as our waitress tonight, Lucy only.”

I followed him out, and peered into the dining room. They sat beside the fireplace; a man in a powder blue suit and a woman wearing a black silk dress. The man held a cane across his lap. I walked to their table.

“Hello, dear,” the woman said, evenly, as if I were a third, expected guest about to join them. I smelled the kerosene from the candle on the table and watched the flame wave on the wick. The man lowered his cane to the floor, and the handle—a silver horse’s head—glinted in the light.

“Hi,” I said, “Can I get you started with something to drink?”

The top of the man’s head gleamed under combed-back strands of hair.

“Oh, yes, a bottle of red, same one as last time,” the woman said, bending the menu in her hands.

“Could you remind me—which bottle was that?”

The woman looked up at me, her mouth small and her eyes narrowed, and then at her husband, who sighed.

“Give us your second most expensive,” the man said.

“Alright, sir.”

I took a step back and turned to walk away.

“Not so fast!” he said, so loudly that the sound reverberated through the room. I faced him again as he rubbed his hands along his powder blue pants.

“Darling,” he said, bringing up a hand and gesturing to the woman.

“Yes, I’ll have the sea bass with the roast parsnips. It sounds spectacular.”

I nodded and scrawled SEA BASS on my notepad.

“I’ll have the strip steak. Rare,” the man said, leaning forward in his seat.

“Excellent choice, sir.”

He leaned further, his arm bumping the candle, but I felt his eyes fixed on me and he made no motion to steady it.

“Bloody, but not mooing,” he said.

The woman laughed, tilting her head back so her earrings jangled and her teeth shone, wet and sparkling.

When I returned from the cellar with their wine, more guests sat in the dining area and the air in the room felt easier; laughter and sounds of the silverware clinking together and the smells of the women’s perfumes mixed with the woodsmoke from the fire. The sky beyond the warped window glass was violet and stretching out toward the barbed silhouette of mountains. I carried the bottle on a small tray along with two polished wine glasses, and as I walked I readied the corkscrew in my fingers, feeling the cool twist of metal. I smiled as I set down each glass so gently that they made no sound. Gripping the bottle by the neck, I tucked the tray under one arm and held the wine out for them to see. The man’s face, a wide pink moon, pitched forward, close to the label. He nodded. The woman looked beyond him, her gaze tracing the diagonal support beams, the ladders. I was positioned so my body faced the same direction she looked. Something small and dark swooped low, then up again, disappearing.

“What was that?” the woman asked, looking around the room.

“What on earth was that?” she demanded, her eyes settling on me again, almost black besides the reflection of the firelight. The man looked around him, jerking his head this way and that until the carefully combed strands of hair fell around his scalp and came to the front of his face. He pushed them back, flattening his palm on his head.

I looked up into the beams, which were arranged like latticework on a pie. The chandelier hung there, a carousel of yellow lights above us.

“That was just the chandelier. We need to replace the bulbs.” I finished uncorking the wine and poured a taste into the woman’s glass.

“That was no light. That was a thing,” she stuck her tongue past her teeth at the th sound. “A creature,” she said, and adjusted herself in her chair, lifting herself slightly and smoothing the dress beneath her legs.

I shrugged. “It looks that way sometimes, with the shadows.”

The woman swirled her wine and tipped it to the back of her throat.

“Just as I remember it,” she smiled.

I went outside to taste the air. The restaurant was stuffy with the humid smell of buttered scallops, and it was the time of night when it got so hot from the stoves that the wood began to release a scent like tar and candied grapes and old upholstery. I stood with my back against the door, the draft through the fissures in the wood sucking at the backs of my legs. Before me was a long set of stairs, snaking down into pitch black. The restaurant sat high up on a hill. Light from the windows cast long pools of orange down the grassy slope, moths flickering from one illumination to the other. Moss-covered rocks lined the stairs. I tried to count them, following their fuzzy heads down and straining my eyes until the stones were swallowed by dark.

A cluster of figures were visible, climbing the stairs.

I squinted and saw that they were elderly women, six of them, each with a grey head of hair.

“I’m sorry!” I yelled, “We aren’t seating anymore. You’ll have to turn around.”

They stopped and peered up at me, their faraway eyes glittering like stars. Then they kept on, shuffling one after the other like stubborn cattle.

“No!” I yelled, “Come back tomorrow. The kitchen stops taking orders after nine o’ clock.”

Still, the women drew closer.

I sighed and opened the door to go inside. Warm air cloaked my face.

“Lucy!” David yelled, walking toward me, his shiny black shoes thudding on the floor. “I’ve been calling for you. Where have you been?”

“Outside. David, there are some—”

“No, Lucy, we have a problem in the dining room.”

The room appeared taller, the darkness from the rafters seeping down. The only light came from the chandelier and the dying fire. The man stood beside his wife’s chair, one arm stretched before her as the other wagged his cane in the air. There were no other customers.

“He’s hysterical,” David said.

A small black-winged thing careened down, fluttering around the man.

“Ah-HA!” he yelled, swinging his cane like a baseball bat. The creature flew back up into the beams.

“You see that?” he asked, breathless, pointing at me with the cane, “a red-winged black bird. I’ve read about these. She built a nest up there, I’d put money on that.”

I looked at their table, where the plates sat, empty except for the man’s on which there was a pool of steak juice, pinkish red liquid with beads of fat floating in it. I walked forward.

“These things won’t stop until you’re as good as dead,” the man continued, “they’ll pluck your eyes out.”

I glanced behind me. David was gone. I took their wine glasses and nestled the stems in the webbing of my fingers, and then I stacked the plates and tucked them into the crook of my elbow. The woman craned her neck to bring her face closer to mine. She squinted up at me. Her teeth showed, each one outlined with the stain of red wine.

“What are you doing?”

“Are you ready for the bill?” I asked her.

Her face was wet with perspiration and her eyes were smudged with makeup, her foundation gone in patches.

The man whistled up at the rafters.

“Stop it,” the woman spat.

The man sat down, his face resting in his hands, the cane across his lap once more.

“What’s happening to me?” he asked. I set down the plates and wine glasses on a nearby table. The man was sweating too, the suit dark under his arms and in a stripe down his back. The woman leaned against the back of her chair and tilted her pallid face up toward the ceiling.

Their complexions grew slick. The woman touched her hand to the man’s cheek, pressing her fingers there. He closed his eyes to savour her touch. When she pulled away, a thin mucus stuck to her fingers in strands. I laced my fingers together and waited. The man and the woman got smaller and smaller. Their cheekbones softened and the definition of the woman’s collarbone receded beneath her skin. They disappeared into their clothes. I took the salt shaker from inside my apron and placed it on the table. First, I looked through the folds of the man’s suit, and found the first slug. I clasped my hand around it. I took the other slug out of the woman’s dress. I glanced at the salt shaker, then at my hand. The slugs extended their tentacles toward one another. With my free hand, I gathered the suit, the dress, and the cane. I walked to the fireplace and set them on top of the glowing embers.

When I opened the foyer door, a group of horses stood facing me. They twitched their ears and swayed their cornsilk tails. There were six of them, the closest one a gleaming grey, nearly silver in the moonlight. One horse was deep brown with a white star between its eyes. The others were reddish with various spots and speckles of white.

“I told you to turn back,” I said gently. I stroked the first horse’s face. Its deep, glossy eyes blinked closed as my hand traced the muzzle down to the velvet nostrils, where my palm stayed, feeling its whiskers move against my fingertips. The horse let out a huff of warm air.

“Just a minute,” I told them, and walked past their shivering flanks, partway down the stairs. I bent close to one of the mossy rocks and unfurled my hand. The slugs descended the ramp my fingers made, the horses’ patient breathing behind me. The slugs stretched and felt around before settling side by side at the centre of the stone.

Standing, I leaned toward the horses.

“Let’s go home.”

They shook their manes and turned, following me down the winding steps into the dark.