The Night the Veil Slipped

Image by Kellan Olchik

THE NIGHT THE VEIL SLIPPED

A Halloween tale from the Grand Cafe

The Grand Cafe was the sort of bar that was always open for people who’d already given up on tomorrow. The walls were a mosaic of old flyers and spilled secrets, the air thick with ghosts of bad jukebox songs.

It was well past midnight on Halloween when she came in — the nurse.

Her scrubs were wrinkled and blood-specked, her ID badge turned backward, as if ashamed of what it had seen. She dropped onto a stool between a man who smelled of gasoline and a woman knitting what appeared to be a scarf for an octopus.

“Vodka,” she said. “No ice. Maybe make it holy water, if you’ve got any.”

Bo, the bartender — a man with tattoos of playing cards creeping up his arms, and a bushy black mustache — poured her a double. “Long night?” he asked.

She laughed once. It sounded like a heart monitor flatlining.

“You could say that,” she said. “You really could.”

They leaned in, the regulars. The kind of people who lived for stories that tasted like other people’s nightmares.

She took a breath, the kind you take before a confession or a scream.

“So, the ER was a carnival tonight. You expect that on Halloween — the drunks, the kids with firecrackers, the usual stupidity. But this was different. It started with the man who came in claiming his reflection was following him.”

She sipped, the vodka biting.

“He said it wouldn’t stay put. He’d shave, look up, and the reflection would still be shaving — after he’d put the razor down. Said it winked at him once. We thought drugs, naturally. We ran tox screens, did a psych eval. Nothing. Then he died in the waiting room — heart just stopped. Only problem? His reflection didn’t.”

The woman knitting stopped, her needles clacking in midair. “Didn’t?”

The nurse smiled, slow and small. “Didn’t. There was a mirror by the vending machines. We all saw it. The reflection stayed standing a few seconds longer, like it hadn’t noticed the body was gone. Then it… turned. Looked right at us.”

The bar had gone quiet, the way a room does when the dark is listening.

“After that,” she went on, “the doors wouldn’t stay closed. Ambulances brought in… things.”

“People with masks that wouldn’t come off. A kid who swore his mother’s voice was coming from under his bed. And a woman who—” she stopped. Shuddered. “—who walked in carrying her own head, like she’d just come from a costume contest. She kept apologizing for the blood on the floor.”

“Christ,” muttered Wavy Davy Gray, former divinity professor up at Holy Cross.

“Oh, He wasn’t there tonight,” she said. “Trust me. I looked.”

Someone snorted — the man with the gasoline smell. “You’re pulling our legs, nurse. Halloween hallucinations, that’s all.”

She didn’t look at him. “Tell that to the janitor who mopped up the shadows.”

The clock above the bar ticked wrong — too slow, then too fast — as she stared into her empty glass. “The weirdest part?” she said softly. “At three A.M., everything just… stopped. Like someone hit pause. Every patient gone. Every bed empty. Even the monitors — flatlined all at once, like a synchronized heartbeat giving up. Then the power flickered, and…”

She trailed off, blinking. “And I woke up in the staff lounge. Alone. No bodies, no records. Just one chart on the counter with my name on it.”

“What did it say?” the bartender asked.

She looked at him. “Time of death: 2:59 A.M.”

The silence that followed was heavy enough to drink.

Then the man with the gasoline smell chuckled, too loudly. “Alright. Good story, sweetheart. Real spooky. You’re wasted on medicine — you should write horror novels.”

Wavy Davy said nothing. Just stared at her, eyes narrow.

The nurse frowned. “What?”

He nodded toward the mirror behind the bar.

“Because, lady,” he said, voice thin, “you’ve been sitting there talking for ten minutes… and there’s no reflection behind you.”

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©2025 Christopher Reilley 

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