FICTION BY BAILEY BURCK

Originally from the sensible Midwest, Bailey Burck now lives in New Mexico where she lobbies to have the state nickname changed from “Land of Enchantment” to “Land of the Weird.” Although still waiting to see a UFO, ghost or chupacabra, she has found plenty of hiking, biking, and excellent craft beer. Her blog reviewing local bars (the divier the better) can be found HERE

Bailey writes speculative shorts and humorous essays, and is working on her first novel. Her work has appeared in two local anthologies: Ramblings & Reflections: Winning Words from SouthWest Writers 2021 Contest and Lost Echoes Found: An Anthology of Speculations and Memories.

GHOST IN THE BREW
by Bailey Burck

 
If mind-control existed, Steve Brinkman would be alone already. But no such luck. The last of his well-meaning but sometimes nitwit crew lingered in the brewery’s doorway.

“Are you sure you don’t need a hand, boss? Because I don’t mind. I could, you know, lend a hand.” Logan, a lank, twenty-something with a shaggy haircut reminiscent of the seventies, glanced at the wheelchair that had become an extension of Steve’s body since the accident three years ago.

Steve shook his head, forcing a small smile. “You guys did a good job. Go on home. I like to do the mix alone.”

Logan nodded. “Oh yeah, that’s your thing. The big secret recipe and all.”

“Right. Big secret.”

Logan stayed put, grinning and nodding like a bobble-head doll.

This is what came of hiring groupies. At the time, Steve hadn’t even known brewers could have groupies. But in a town as beer-happy and competitive as Albuquerque, a couple of regional brewing awards equaled celebrity.

“Good night, Logan.” Steve raised his eyebrows, hoping to nudge the young man along. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Okay, cool. See you tomorrow, bossman.”

Bossman. Steve sighed as he wheeled to the door that had shut with a clang in Logan’s wake. He twisted the lock.

He couldn’t blame the kid; the interesting part of the brew process was just starting. The drudgery—barley milling, mash cooking, separating out the sweet wort—was all finished. Finally, tonight, the hops, which shaped the beer’s character, would go in. A few hours later the magic maker would join the party—the yeast.

With a push on the chair’s wheels from arms corded with muscle, Steve toured his small domain. Before his accident, this had been Steve Brinkman’s Metal Fabrication, a modestly successful one-man shop in the I-25 Industrial Corridor. Funny how one second could change things.

Sometimes, when it was quiet, he could still hear the scrape of metal, the sound of a 300-pound steel bar slipping. Twenty years of handling heavy material, wrangling it through machines the size of Humvees without so much as a lost pinky, and he got hit with something falling off a shelf. It should have never happened. Maybe one of his part-time forklift drivers had loaded the piece askew. But even so, why hadn’t he noticed?

That was the problem with quiet—questions like that always seemed to emerge when it was quiet. Questions that would never have answers. They ricocheted around in his brain like ball-bearings in a tin can.

“Well,” he said, and his voice rose to dispel the old ghosts. “Let’s get at it.”

He wheeled over to one of his low, wheel-chair friendly benches. When released from the rehab facility, the first things he made (cursing the whole time) were tools to help him work while confined to the chair. With the help of those tools, he made a brewing vat, because life was too short to spend in a job that could kill him when he could be chasing true love. Now he had the only handicap-friendly brewing operation in the southwest. Or perhaps the world. Did he have the talent to go with it? Maybe.

“C’mere, you bastard.” Steve pushed aside a pair of one-gallon growlers made of dark brown glass to reveal what was hidden behind—an old-fashioned beer stein, the porcelain kind with a cone-shaped pewter top.

The sight roiled up an uncomfortable mixture of excitement, revulsion and fear in Steve’s gut. He had bought the stein at an estate sale of an older gent who committed suicide with poison of all things. Died twitching and foaming in a fancy, high-backed library chair, just like in the old spy movies. The family speculated the man had gotten a capsule at some point during his avid collecting of unusual and macabre antiquities. Steve had gone to the sale shortly after his accident. At that dark time in his life, a souvenir from such a ghoulish tragedy seemed apropos.

He palmed the stein and pulled it out. It felt lumpy, the relief gleaming with a design as garish as it was grotesque. A Bavarian hunting scene played out around its surface—a stag shot through the neck with an arrow. The stag’s tongue lolled against blood-soaked fur while dogs barked and tore at its flesh. A dark forest crowded the vignette, leering down at the unfortunate animal while an archer stood passively by, his empty bow by his side, his face turned away and obscured.

Steve looked away from the questionable art, but he could still feel the thin ridges of tree branches and the curved, bloody body of the stag. A warm, wet sensation seeped between his fingers. He jerked his hand partly open, almost dropping the stein, half-expecting to see blood. But of course there was nothing there.

“Stupid nerves,” he muttered. Too much riding on tonight’s batch—that was the problem. Fucking West Coast IPAs. No self-respecting beer should have that much carbonation, or be bitter like rat poison. He didn’t like them, didn’t brew them, but he neededone. Without a notable IPA, his brand was strictly niche, strictly small-time.

The last write-up in the Alibi had outright abused him over his “lack of rounded offerings.” If he could launch an IPA—a winning IPA—at the last and biggest beer fest of the summer, doors would open. Without it, he would have to hold out through the winter for the next opportunity, if the brewery survived that long.

Steve hadn’t touched the stein since making his second and most recent winner, the Down and Dirty Stout. After that, he had wanted to throw the devilish thing into a landfill, or bury it six feet under. Instead he had kept it. In case he needed it. Again.

He wheeled himself and the stein to the brewery’s fridge and pulled out a bottle of beer, an award-winning IPA from a craft brewery in California. Even he had to admit the balance was pleasing, the hop notes genius. He had tried three times to brew something of similar quality, but with no luck. With less than four weeks of brewing time left in the summer, he had one more chance to get it right.

He opened the bottle and poured it into the stein. The heavily carbonated beer bubbled in an obscene, exaggerated way, like boiling piss. His stomach did a backflip at the thought of drinking it.

“I need to brew one like this. Or better.”

Steve chugged the whole thing.

It was the last thing he remembered that evening.

*****

At five in the morning, Steve woke up on the floor with pain in his head and his left arm full of pins and needles. He felt hungover and beat up, like he had been out Kung-Fu street fighting all night. Pretty funny, given the non-functioning state of his legs.

His brewing notebook lay sprawled on the floor. He elbow-crawled over to it. A new page of notes had been added, which was good because otherwise he would never be able to repeat the process.

But something was wrong.

The sight of the blocky capital letters, so obviously not his handwriting, made the hair on his arms stand on end.

Of course he had written it; he must have. He was alone and the doors were locked. He had done everything—boiled the hops in the wort, whirlpooled to cool and clean it up, and pitched the yeast. He could smell the progress in the fermenter.

His wheelchair was parked in a nearby corner. Wriggling across the floor, he hauled himself back in, still clutching the notebook. He rubbed his eyes—one blue and one brown, a mismatched combination that had attracted quite a few women in his youth—and shook his head to loosen the fog. A flicker of memory, terrifying in its vagueness, lurked at the edge of his mind.

You did something.

“Of course I did something,” he said out loud in direct defiance to that little voice in his head. “I brewed a great beer!”

His bravado had little effect. The anxiety was worse than before. Each time was worse. The first time, in the brewery’s startup year, he had drunk from the stein on a dark whim. And then blacked out.

Assuming some toxin had leached from the glaze, he had thrown the thing away. But the beer he had completed during that blackout, the Ponytail Pilsner, came out of the vat clear, crisp and singing to the heavens. It won him his first award, and he had searched the dumpster area for the stein. Despite two trash pickups, he found it lying on the ground nearby. It would be his good luck charm. He stuck a piece of masking tape to the stein with a hand-drawn skull and cross bones with the words “Do not drink from this.”

But drink from it he did, possible toxic glaze be damned. Maybe it was the pressure to follow up the Ponytail’s success. Or superstition, or just plain old madness. Madness that birthed his second award winner, the Down and Dirty Stout.

The notes for this latest batch were careful and complete, even if some of the writing was hard to read. The first hop entry, Cascade, was a classic IPA hop. The second entry looked like KON CRYSTAL. The “KON” part made no sense, although he supposed it meant crystal hops, which he also stocked. Not a great choice, though, since crystal was better suited to a lager or Kölsch than an IPA.

Steve grimaced and searched for the stein, but found no trace of it until he looked up. Way up. The damned thing was sitting upright on a pipe way above the barley hopper, leaning against the outer wall.

“How the hell did you get up there?” Steve wheeled to where he kept his collection of robo-reachers—rods with a squeeze-grip mechanism on one end and a rubberized pincher on the other. He selected the longest one and tried for the stein, but it wasn’t even close. There was no other way to reach it, short of climbing a ladder. Maybe he had tossed the stein into a lucky, upright landing.

Right.

There was no other explanation.

*****

The stein clung to its lofty seat on the pipe for two weeks while the batch fermented. Steve could feel it watching him, taunting his inability to do something as simple as use a ladder. He would catch himself staring at the stein in odd moments—when he was between tasks or momentarily forgot what he was about to do. If he looked too long, he could swear something moved on the surface. The hunter shifted. The stag struggled to rise. A dog lunged.

On some of those days, waiting the two weeks for the IPA to finish with no way to speed it along, his old darkness returned. For a long time after his accident, he had been angry with everyone—his estranged family, his friends who were initially supportive but couldn’t weather his long rehab, and his contemporaries in the Corridor—machinists, body shop guys, custom builders—who all avoided him because they didn’t want to face the fact that it could happen to any one of them. He had hated the whole world back then.

He’d have been happy to let them all burn.

He thought he had banished those demons, but watching his crew move around with such physical ease rekindled that resentment. He grew ill-tempered, found fault in their work, lost patience with their spoiled, non-handicapped existence. It stopped him from asking for help to retrieve the stein that he wanted so desperately to put back into its hiding place.

His crew never even noticed the stein looming over their heads, or if they did, said nothing. They did notice the new batch brewing. It was Steve’s mystery beer, already registered for the upcoming competition and giving off a pleasing, nutty aroma. They wanted him to name it Almond IPA.

Idiotic chatter, all of it. “Nutty” was a fine element for a brown or a stout, but not for an IPA. Nonetheless, he invited his whole crew—three guys and a gal—for a noon First Taste. He had filtered the yeast that morning, and the result was a gorgeous, clear, light gold. The hydrometer read a respectable 7.8% alcohol. He back-carbonated a keg’s worth to a level twice what any sane person would put in a European style ale, because this was, after all, West Coast IPA. “Blow-your-head-off bubbles” was in order.

Yet he worried. It took all his willpower to make it to First Taste without cracking the tap open and sneaking a swallow. The anxiety from the brewing night had never fully left, and now it was a constant whisper inside his head.

You did something.

Guilt. That’s what it had to be. Deep down, he was afraid he was cheating somehow, using expertise not his own.

As his team gathered expectantly, the stein smirked down at him from its perch on high. He forced himself not to look.

“I’m not going to make a speech. So I’ll just say that this is my new batch.” Steve laid his hand on the keg. A drop of sweat tickled his eye. He could feel the stein judging him from above. “Let’s drink.”

Steve poured full pints for everyone, using the nice glasses with the brewery label. If it sucked, he would chuck it all down the drain and forget about it. He took a sip, a small one that danced over his tongue.

Good. Lord.

It was fantastic. Even though he was an IPA hater, even though it was over-carbonated and bitter as chewed aspirin, he loved it. It had the quintessential essence of a West Coast IPA but was unique in a way that made him think there were flavors unknown to beer that should have always been in beer. Sort of where-have-you-been-all-my-life beer flavors.

Steve nodded, unable to speak. The crew all took big swigs that either showed their utter faith in Steve or an unsophisticated tasting habit. The room erupted in happy cheers. Logan swooped his long bangs aside and ran over to high-five his boss. Everyone took another big swallow. Then another.

Steve grinned. If this beer didn’t win, it sure as hell would be a contender, would definitely attract some sort of press. He took another sip, thinking, dreaming…savoring. Logan’s glass was already half-empty. At this rate the whole gang would be drunk in a jiffy, but that was okay. That’s what Uber was for.

He socialized for the polite amount of time, then wheeled to the back of the brewery, a quieter area where he’d adapted a small part of his machine shop for working on brewing equipment. Way in the back, stacked tightly in a corner, were left over machines that he’d hadn’t yet managed to sell.

He sipped his beer and contemplated the future. Optimism swelled inside him, quieting the voices in his head. The brewery would make it through the winter. Next spring he would get the loan to build out a tap room.

He raised his glass to the unused machines in the corner, the remnants of his old life. “Here’s to the future.”

A change in the happy sounds from the other end of the building jarred him out of his reverie. Laughter transformed into shrieks of alarm. A wet, choking sound punctured the air.
Steve spun his chair. His half-full glass shattered on the floor. He pushed himself back to the brewing area.

Logan lay on the floor, seizing. The others tried to hold him still, but the young man’s head banged repeatedly in wet thuds against the concrete. Blood, mixed with spilled beer, ran in rivulets towards the floor drain. His eyes rolled, exposing only the whites as his flop of hair tossed on and off his baby-smooth face. Everybody was shouting. More beer spilled. Glasses broke.

Then another of the team crumpled, knees hitting the floor, followed by shoulder and head, twitching the whole way. Then another went down.

Steve stared at the scene open-mouthed. The beer—it had to be, but how? It wasn’t like distilling hard alcohol, with its mean habit of producing toxins like methanol. There was nothing in the brewing process that could morph into a poison. Unless…there was something in it to begin with that shouldn’t be.

You did something.

Steve snatched up his brewing notebook and re-read the strange handwriting: KON CRYSTAL. What did that mean, KON?

He dropped the notebook and wheeled to the back of his shop. Dizziness gripped him. How much had he had? Less than the others. But his withered legs meant less body weight. He didn’t have much time.

He banged his numb feet into the pile of unused machines and yanked aside a piece of sheet metal. Behind it sat an electroplater, used to deposit metal coatings. About five years ago, he had done some silver plating. The silver compound solution hadn’t given him the result he needed, so he had resorted to a recommended additive.

After slogging through a ton of government red tape, he had bought the smallest box available—something the size of a milk crate—much, much more than he needed. The box was still there, labeled in bold letters. Not KON CRYSTALS, but KCN CRYSTALS! KCN! Potassium cyanide crystals. He bent over to grab the box and bumped it instead. The light, empty box fell over easily. A few white crystals, like spilled table salt, bounced onto the floor.

“Shit, shit, shit!” He patted his pockets for his phone, remembered he had left it next to the mash vat, and wheeled like a madman back to the brewing area. He would call 911, tell them it was cyanide poisoning. They would come; they would help.

You did something.

You did this.

His narrow brewery elongated. The walls and floor distorted into smears. He saw his hand reach for his phone, his arm impossibly stretched, fingers fading into soft brushes of foamy color. He tumbled out of his chair, still reaching, twitching.

The world spun. He searched for the stein above the hopper. It was gone. A scrape against concrete, barely audible, caught his attention.

The stein stood on the floor, just out of reach. On it, the scene moved: the stag twitched, dying, its mouth open in an animal scream of pain. The archer turned slowly until he looked out from his dark forest. His features were cold yet familiar—the curve of the jaw, a rounded nose, the mismatched eyes. Steve’s face. A smile, knowing and cruel, spread slowly as the archer mouthed something that Steve could hear inside his head.

Let them all burn.

As Steve’s vision faded, his focus narrowed. Darkness encroached until only a small circle remained—the archer’s bow, arrow freshly notched.