Capt Tony's Saloon

With a dramatic wave of his black cape, the man in the natty top hat turned and walked away into the night. He seemed to get swallowed up by the growing crowd spilling out of bars and filling the streets of old town Key West. Their ghost tour guide had deposited them in front of the same dive bar he had collected them at two hours ago, although the place was much rowdier and busier than it had been earlier. The bar was a ramshackle structure lemon yellow wood siding and a grimy-looking sign hanging above the door that proclaimed, Capt. Tony’s Saloon. Perched above the sign was a large, black and white mottled grouper and its eyes were dead black pools.

Shady as it may have appeared, the guide had told them this was the oldest bar in all of the keys and a frequent and favored watering hole for famous visitors like Jimmy Buffet, Hemingway and various other celebrities.
Roman checked his watch. It was only 10pm, and the party was just beginning in this part of the Key West. The raucous female busker inside had just started her set and the infectious funk flowed out through the open windows. Her throaty lyrics drifted across his ears like a siren song and the thoughts of an icy beer enticed him. He looked at Mina hopefully.

“Nightcap?”, she asked to her brother’s obvious delight.

Two minutes later Mina was several sips into a delightful, rum-filled cocktail when she noticed the bar’s odd feature. She pointed to a large tree that seemed to be growing right up through the center of the bar.

She thought back to what the tour guide had told them about this place. He said it had once been the old ice house and had, for a time, doubled as the town morgue. He never mentioned the tree though, and given its prominence, Mina found that strange. She wanted to ask Roman, but he was deeply engaged in conversation with a caramel-skinned beauty with trailing blonde dreadlocks and sea green crop top. Her exposed abs made Mina cringe with envy, as did the perfect little black pearl piercing in her naval. Roman loved this type of girl, island hotties with tribal tattoos who always smelled like sunscreen and orchids.

Mina took her cocktail and shifted to through the throng of dancing bodies to get a closer look at the tree. The bark looked petrified. She reached out and ran her fingertips down a section of trunk, surprised to find it cold to the touch.

“Be careful there”, a voice materialized in her ear. Mina turned to see an woman sitting at a table to her right. She wasn’t old, but had the weathered look of one of those women. Mina had met a few of them since she’d been in the keys. Women of a certain age who, for whatever reason, had abandoned life on the mainland to resettle in a place where the good jobs were scarce but the water was the color of paradise and the weather hovered around a balmy 72 degrees all year long. Mina smiled and raised her eyebrows. The woman beckoned Mina to the empty stool across from her.

“That’s the hanging tree,” she pointed, “Years ago that’s where they hung pirates and other criminals. You don’t want to be rubbing on it, lots of bad juju there.”

“Why is it in a bar?” Mina asked.

“It was already here, bar got built around it.” The woman drained her beer.

“They said seventeen people swung from that tree, not just pirates neither. They even hung some lady who murdered her husband and baby boy. Lots of places around here with bad juju,” she continued as she slipped of her stool.

“Best be mindful of what you touch around here honey,” she called out over her shoulder, the music stealing the words just as they reached Mina’s ears.

Mina wandered back over to the tree. The busker had taken a break and the music yielded to the loud hum of conversations and clinking glasses. She reached out once more, and her fingertips encountered a wall of cold. The ambient sounds suddenly muted around her.

There was a sudden, white hot pain in her back. It seemed to move and spark across her shoulders, then move to the back of her thighs, then lighting again in the center of her back. She tried to cry out but her throat constricted, and the lack of air made her eyes dance and burn. She tried to fail her arms, move toward the bar but she was stuck, as if riveted in place. A wave of despair washed over her, deep and dark. Vision of bloated bodies swinging from limbs assaulted her and she registered the pressure on her throat as long fingers, squeezing and crushing that tender skin and the delicate bones beneath.

Somewhere outside the terror she was frozen in, the female busker took to the stage and cried out, “A one, two three,” kicking off her set. On three, whatever had a hold of Mina, let go. Her legs gave out underneath her and she dropped to the sticky floor, breathing in ragged gasps. When she could stand again, she fled Capt. Tony's Saloon, out to the safety of the street outside.

Roman watched his sister run past him, her face a mask of terror. He went to rush out after her but took notice of a grave stone affixed to the wall by the exit. Roman stopped, compelled to read the little plague mounted alongside it. It told the story of Reba Wilson, a woman who had fallen in love with a pirate. In a desperate attempt to free herself and be with him, she had stabbed her husband over twenty times and strangled her own baby boy. She had been the last person to hang at the tree.

Written for the Grim Reaper Contest 10/18/24
word count: 997