It was only after he'd finished sucking the last dregs of cider from his glass that he realised everyone was watching him. Their eyes looked fake, like they'd been drawn on and the artist had run out of colour somewhere in the process but released the drawing nonetheless.
He had several brief flickers of thought all at once - where they human when he arrived, had they ever been human in their lives, where they even alive and if so was he? There was nothing in his alcohol-blurred brain that could have helped him get out of his current predicament so he did what drunkards did best - he bluffed.
"THIS ROUND'S ON ME, LADS!" He cried, trying not to vomit as the creatures all around him seemed to shed their guises all at once in their shrieking joy. It was like watching a spider shed its skin - too full of legs and odd writhing motions, jerky and fluid all at once and ending in something slightly bigger coming out after what felt like a lifetime.
As a formerly regular old man (now nine-armed old man with skin like mossy vines and rotting meat) handed him a pint of something that was Not Cider he knew somewhere in the back of his crumbling sanity that he was past the point of return.
He met the old man's eyes and, with that slowly spreading smile of a man who's two drinks too many, tossed back his drink and tossed out his humanity.
He had several brief flickers of thought all at once - where they human when he arrived, had they ever been human in their lives, where they even alive and if so was he? There was nothing in his alcohol-blurred brain that could have helped him get out of his current predicament so he did what drunkards did best - he bluffed.
"THIS ROUND'S ON ME, LADS!" He cried, trying not to vomit as the creatures all around him seemed to shed their guises all at once in their shrieking joy. It was like watching a spider shed its skin - too full of legs and odd writhing motions, jerky and fluid all at once and ending in something slightly bigger coming out after what felt like a lifetime.
As a formerly regular old man (now nine-armed old man with skin like mossy vines and rotting meat) handed him a pint of something that was Not Cider he knew somewhere in the back of his crumbling sanity that he was past the point of return.
He met the old man's eyes and, with that slowly spreading smile of a man who's two drinks too many, tossed back his drink and tossed out his humanity.
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