All control was gone. Sean looked this thing in the eyes, held his glass up high and toasted it.

"To My Secret, to Our Secret, to our dear Miss Carrie Anne Garrett."

To all on the outside, this was a simple toast, one that took mere moments and was even cordial, an amicable toast between old friends. Yet even as Sean raised his tumbler to his lips, his insides loosed and a warm stream of urine coated his thighs, wetting his jeans. All the while that gaze in this thing's eyes continued on and on for what seemed to him to be his entire lifetime and that of his father and his mother and their fathers and mothers and on back down to the evolution of the first man and woman, and then on back further until life was nothing but a slug crawling from the primordial ooze.

"There now, Sean," the thing spoke after this instant eternity, "isn't that better."

"Yes," Sean said; only Sean didn't say it. The voice was his, the throat from which it sprang his again, but that word was not his. That word belonged to this thing speaking through him and it tasted of rank sewage slipping through his lips. He could feel his stomach tighten and the vomit and bile rise, but he swallowed back, and this too was an act of the thing before him.

In that moment, Sean knew this is how sister had felt on that stage. He had thrown a tantrum and she had left to see her show, and this thing had smelled her out. It knew her and it knew she was alone the moment she entered that crowd and then it brought her to that stage and it took her and spoke through her and it made her a part of it. She had no control and she tasted that vile god awful surge of sin – and that is what it was – pouring down her throat, drowning her even as she could not lift a single word in protest.

Sean looked to the other patrons – to the waitress slipping a tray of empty glasses over the counter to the bartender, then adjusting her top once more; to the man in the polo, his lustful eyes salivating over the waitress; to the jackass in the jacket half carrying his young companion out the door as she stumbled four sheets to the wind beside him. Sean looked to each of them and knew they saw only two men sharing a toast at the end of the bar.

'Was it the same for Carrie?' he thought. 'Did she look out on that crowd hoping for help? Did she see me climbing up on the back of that bench and did she hear me shouting her name? Did she try to scream back, finding that her voice was no longer her own?'

"It is best you not trouble yourself with the past." The thing smiled at him, and this time he began to see its true self, those long teeth, longer, so long, and jagged. They were not sharp like canines, but rough and pointed like stalactites hanging down from a vast endless cavern, a gaping maw ready to swallow him whole.

"You want to leave, now," it said.

"I want to leave, now," it said again, but this time through Sean's throat. Then, the thing-Sean stood, slammed back the rest of his Maker's Mark, and left that bar. Inside, Sean was screaming.

As he stepped outside, the night air hit him, a cold slap in the face and for a moment, he took a step and it was his step. That fresh air had woken him and he had wrested back some semblance of control. That unnatural thing was inside, and he was here under the natural moon and the light of the city. Perhaps this was its warning – a warning to leave it alone.

Sean thought so. He was removed from that thing and he could leave and live out the rest of his life. But first, Sean vomited. He vomited for what must have been a half hour. He heaved and he wretched until there was nothing left and then he started again. He vomited until it ran red – and was that tissue, was that chunks of his throat – and then finally he felt that some minimal fraction of the liquid sin in which that thing had drowned him was gone.

Then he straightened himself out, hobbled to the curb and, leaning against a parking meter, he caught his breath and looked back at that bar. He could live out his life, only he would have to live it knowing that thing was out there; knowing that at any moment it could come back for him. What had it said to him in there?

'You've been following me your whole damn life, even here to Los Angeles.'

Did he even have any control? He saw inside the bar's front window, and that thing was gone. Yet at the counter sat the paper, the report on his sister. It needed to know. He had lived with this secret for too long. He took a step towards the bar, then stopped.

Better to live in fear. Better to have some hope, than none.

And he did. The pounding dread was gone. That glimmer of hope he had felt when the tattooed man had told him about the show, that faint spark, was back.

He turned, and the thing was there smiling at him with its dark eyes and yellow jagged teeth.

"Yes, Sean. It is always better when they have hope."

Sean tried to move, but once more it had control.

It reached under its blazer, its hands knotted and elongated, its skin paler than he remembered, and tighter even, and it pulled out that red cloth. Sean tried to speak and this time he found that he could.

"You took her," he whispered. He didn't know why he whispered, but he did have a secret and you didn't tell a secret in normal tone. Someone might hear.

"And doesn't it feel better to let that secret go," it said, as it whipped out the cloth like it were straightening out a bed sheet.

Funny thing was, it did feel better. Having the secret uttered, it felt as if a large weight had been not just lifted, but completely obliterated. 'Yes,' Sean thought. 'This is better.' He wanted to tell it so, but when he tried he found that his voice was once more gone. Only this time, he knew, his voice would never be his again.

The thing shook the cloth again, and this time it straightened out perfectly smooth forming a curtain in the air, and when the thing let go, the cloth stayed there. On one side of the cloth was the bar. On the other there was Sean, the thing, and the empty street.

And behind that cloth the veil was lifted.

The thing's skin was as white as its eyes were black, and stretched tight and thin, thinner than a sheet of vellum. Its jagged cheek bones poked out of that skin, like the straw spokes jutting from the mud of Carrie's footprints that day at the fair. Then there were those jagged teeth, protruding like stalactites from dark and bloody gums. The thing opened its mouth what must have been two feet wide, wider than its jaws and yet somehow wider still.

This was its true face, a face you only saw when you were under its spell. All the pain and the sin and guilt rushed back down his gullet filling his stomach and his intestines and all of him until he felt that he was nothing but a giant gelatinous bag of wrong. Tears poured down his cheeks and dribbled from his chin like the whiskey he had shared with this thing and Sean knew the end had come.

Yet he would face it his way. Using the last of his strength, Sean fought against the thing's control, and - whether it decided to let him or if Sean in the years that had brought him here had truly gained some connection with this thing, some brotherhood - he managed to move himself. This small victory brought him hope, and he knew it wanted that hope but he didn't care. Sean looked up and met its eyes once more. He would know it before the end. He met those eyes and then he looked inside the thing that once had been his magician.

Deep down within that cavernous mouth, down a throat that stretched back ages to the earliest sins of man, Sean thought he saw a mud-stained Strawberry Shortcake doll.

Then, after twenty-two years, finally Sean was sorry. He was sorry not for his loss of Carrie but for Carrie's loss; not for his pain in keeping his secret, but for her pain of which he was only now experiencing himself. He was sorry, sorry for keeping his secret, sorry for the many souls, night after night, that he let this thing claim, sorry that his sister had suffered at the maw of this devourer of life and spirit and eternity. Sean Garret was sorry, and it was meaningless.

The cloth dropped and Sean Garrett vanished never to be seen again.

The thing, once his magician, Dan Lot, and before that the performer Eric Solomon, and many names before even that, a thing that had no true name, licked its lips. Anyone looking out that bar would have only seen the night's performer and nothing more. It, now he, leaned over, picked up his red cloth and tucked it away under his jacket. Then he turned and walked away.

Tomorrow, he had a show to perform.