Fire Devil

by J L Bryan

  “Okay, okay, no on OutKast,” he said. “I like Señor Trumpet and Los Trumpets, anyway.” He turned up the upbeat, cheerful Spanish-language music. It soon gave way to an upbeat, cheerful Spanish-language advertisement for, I think, used cars. Coches usados. Baratos.

  We left it there until the station crackled and hissed. Then he let the radio scan. We were getting out into the country a bit, so there weren't many options. The radio landed on a classic rock station, giving us Springsteen and The Doors as we crossed the cold, dry flatlands of Arkansas and Oklahoma.

  It was long after nightfall as we drove through downtown Ardmore. It had that familiar American decay look: a brick downtown that had once been a bustling center of commerce and local society, but now offered mostly empty storefronts with little odds-and-ends businesses scattered in between. A used-clothing boutique here, a used-furniture place there, a sandwich shop occupying a vast two-story space that looked like it had once been a department store.

  Mostly, though, it was quiet, the downtown business district having likely been sapped to near-death by strip malls and big-box stores out on the cheaper fringes of town.

  The Gatwich Inn appeared more sinister in person than the picture I'd seen via Google Maps. It looked like a three-story mansion, sagging with age, which created odd angles at the corners and eaves. The facade seemed riddled with shadows by night, its own external lights weak. A high wooden fence obscured most of the hotel's grounds, though some of the boards were cracked and a couple of the fence posts had begun to lean over the years.

  Empty buildings flanked it, making it a little more isolated, even more than most of the scattered shops. Those shops had almost all closed for the night, anyway. There might not have been anyone for blocks around. The area felt desolate.

  “Here we are, finally,” Michael said, looking weary as we approached the hotel.

  “Don't stop here,” I told him.

  “What?”

  “Keep driving and park somewhere out of sight. Like that alley.” I pointed, and Michael shrugged and turned down a narrow alleyway beyond the next empty building. He killed the engine, and we sat together in silence and darkness for a moment, while I considered our options.

  “So we're not going to the hotel?”

  “If Clay is still here, I don't want to alert him.”

  “So what do you want to do? Approach on foot? Peek in the hotel windows?”

  “Pretty much. Just walk lightly, and try not to be seen.” I opened the door.

  “Sure. Like ninjas,” he said. “We'll sneak up, scale the outer wall of the hotel, leap nimbly from window to window...”

  “Maybe just start with the first floor and go from there.”

  We took the long way around to the back of the old hotel. We peered through broken boards and knotholes in the fence. There were some old dry, weedy squares that might have once been garden plots. A park bench looked ready to collapse into a heap of rotten wood and rusty nails if anyone dared to sit on it.

  The majority of the hotel's windows were dark, and those that were lit had red curtains drawn together, blocking our view inside. If there were any guests on the second or third floor, they'd either already gone to sleep or were out soaking up the local nightlife, but there didn't seem to be much of that around here.

  The curtains in one window were about halfway open, so I tried to peer inside that one. It was dark, though.

  Something moved inside the darkness.

  “There's nothing happening here,” Michael whispered.

  “Shh,” I whispered back, pointing. “Look.”

  He watched the dark window with me.

  Again, something flickered in there.

  “Did the curtain just move?” he whispered.

  “Maybe. I wonder if that's the infamous Room 33.”

  We watched for a little longer. I thought I saw more little flickers of movement, shadows in the darkness.

  “Should we just go in or—” Michael began, and then I saw it.

  The face pressed against the glass, the way a kid might do when goofing around, squashing her features. The meat and skin looked like charred beef, the features mostly missing. Long, stringy hair framed the face.

  What I really noticed, though, were the eyes. They were tiny, burning red spots, seeming to stare right back at me.

  My guts turned to ice.

  Then the face was gone.

  “Ellie?” Michael said, touching my arm. “Are you okay? You look like you've seen a...” He fell silent, the last word of the well-worn cliché hanging unspoken in the chilly night air between us.

  “I think I did.” I held up my binoculars and zoomed in on the window, but I didn't see anything there anymore. I waited, hoping to get a close-up of the apparition, but it didn't appear again.

  “Should we go in now?” Michael asked, his breath forming small white clouds in the air.

  “Let's hang back and watch for a while. Like a stakeout.”

  “I'd rather be getting steak for take-out,” he said.

  “I'm glad to hear your appetite's back.”

  “It's really not, but I hate the idea of sitting and waiting. Those are two of my least favorite things.”

  “You can stand if you want.”

  We found a shadowy doorway across the street where we could, hopefully, go unnoticed while we kept an eye on the hotel, watching everyone who came and went.

  Not that anyone came, or went. The place was dead, and I'm not just talking about the possible haunting on the top floor. Michael's truck wasn't anywhere in sight; if Clay was here, he must have hidden it somewhere blocks away.

  “This must not be the busy season,” Michael whispered after a while.

  We huddled close, sitting in a narrow, cave-like recessed doorway of a long-shuttered VCR repair shop.

  Eventually, as our ears and noses began to freeze, we gave up on the “stakeout” portion of the evening.

  “Let's go in,” I finally said.

  We crossed the road. I was shivering, maybe from the cold, maybe from the strange face I thought I'd glimpsed in the window. Or maybe from fear of what Clay would do if we'd actually managed to track him down.

  Chapter Eleven

  The lobby of the Gatwich Inn was nothing to write home about, with some mismatched, worn furniture and light from small, dusty lamps. A few black and white photographs adorned the walls, most of them depicting oil rigs from decades earlier. Burly, grease-spattered workers smoked cigarettes and gave gruff smiles in the foreground of a few of these.

  An obese man sat behind the small counter, nibbling a pastry shaped like a four-leaf clover with green frosting. He placed it down on its cellophane wrapper next to his computer, which was covered with years of smudges.

  “How can I help you folks?” he asked, absently wiping green icing on the collar of his shirt. “If you need a room, we got the nicest in town. Or the cheapest in town. Whichever one's going to convince you to stay.”

  “We're looking for someone,” Michael said, not bothering to butter the guy up at all. He brought out his phone to show the clerk Melissa's picture. “Have you seen her?”

  His eyes went wide. “That crazy woman? You know her?”

  “She's my sister,” Michael said. “She's missing. When did you see her?”

  “If you're related to her, I might have to pull back on my offer to rent a room,” the clerk said. “As it is, I'm charging her credit card extra for damages.”

  “Damages?” I asked.

  “I told her to stay out of room 33.” The clerk shook his head. “I knew I shouldn't have let her in, anyway, after she started asking about it. But, heck, it's not like I can afford to turn away business.”

  “But you wish you had?” I asked.

  The man scowled. “I wouldn't say I made enough profit to justify the damage.”

  “What damage?”

  “And where is she now?” Michael asked, cutting in with his own question before the guy could even attempt to answe
r mine.

  “I couldn't tell you where she is. Disappeared this morning, sometime early. Couldn't tell you when, exactly, but she was gone by sunrise. Because that's when I found the mess.” He scratched his balding head. “What's her story? Runaway mental patient?”

  “Why would you say that?” I asked.

  “Because of the...” He gestured at the ceiling.

  “Can you show us?”

  “Well, I cleaned 'em all up, so you can't see how bad it was...but I can tell you, it was a real nightmare. All them little bones.” He shook his head, looking down and frowning. “And that smell.”

  “Bones?” I asked.

  “I don't even know how she got the lock open....”

  “We'd really appreciate if you could explain exactly what happened.”

  He sighed. “I guess it was that danged Haunted Crossroads show. That's how most of the weirdos find us. You see, there are old stories about this hotel...nothing real, you understand...just gossip. Some people seem to think we have ghosts here.”

  “But you've never seen anything like that?” I asked.

  “No, ma'am.”

  “How long have you worked here?”

  “Just about twelve years. Used to belong to my wife's folks, until she passed six years back. Now it's just me.”

  “I'm sorry to hear that,” I said.

  “It was her family's place. I guess I keep it running in memory of her. I sure don't do it for the money.” He blew out air, making a kind of derisive raspberry sound with his lips.

  “That's sweet of you,” I said, trying to butter him up and not show how annoyed I was at how unclear some of his answers were. “So you said she stayed in room 33?”

  “No, no, I don't rent that one out unless we're packed. Which hasn't happened since...” He stared off into space for a long moment, as if trying to remember a long-lost date, then shrugged. “Only the weirdos want to stay there, anyway.”

  “Can you explain what happened that upset you so much?” I asked.

  The man hesitated.

  “Or show us?” Michael said.

  After a minute, the man shrugged and heaved himself to his feet. “May as well. But I'll tell you, there's some weird junk up there. Not just from last night, either.”

  “It's no problem,” I said. “We're just trying to figure out where his sister went. And we don't have any idea what she's up to, honestly.”

  “Hm.” The clerk navigated around the desk, his immense stomach barely fitting through the narrow pass from behind the desk to the lobby. “I can tell you what she's up to, I'm afraid. Got into the occult. These teenagers, they can't resist the devil's temptations too well. Not this generation, anyway. Got their own computers, their own phones...the evil stuff comes right in. Infects their brains. We didn't have any of that when I was a kid. Just the radio and TV. And comic books. Kids today, though...”

  He led us up a dim, sagging staircase, the old wood creaking under each step. More faded photographs on the wall showed what I took to be crumbs of local history—trains, cowboys, cattle, and more oil derricks. Whoever had decorated this place had really liked old pictures of muscular, sweaty oil workers in stained t-shirts.

  Halfway to the third floor, I paused to look at a sepia-toned photograph of a couple of guys in frayed sack coats and felt hats. They looked similar to each other, probably related; they were somewhere in their twenties, age-wise. The taller one had a cocky smile on his face, a young man on the move, making his fortune, all that Great Gatsby stuff, only in Oklahoma instead of New York. The shorter one didn't smile; he had a grave look, like he was calculating something serious and miserable. Totaling up plague deaths, maybe.

  They stood in front of the original, pre-fire version of the hotel, which was a simple three-story box shape, not the shadowy sprawling-house version in which we stood. A large hand-painted wooden sign hung over the front porch: THE GATWICH INN & SALOON.

  “Who are these guys?” I asked the clerk, though I had a pretty good guess based on my background reading.

  The clerk, halfway up the final flight, sighed and looked back, like a kid who'd been given a pop quiz in a class he already hated.

  “That's Dorian and Hugh McClaskey,” the clerk said. “They built the original hotel.”

  “Which is which?” I asked.

  “Hugh's the one looks like he just bit a rotten lemon and swallowed the juice,” the clerk said. “He died in the fire, back in 1895. Dorian rebuilt the place, ended up selling it. Said he couldn't stop thinking about his poor dead brother. Took to drinking a great deal, you know. Spent more time down in the saloon than up in the office.”

  “He sold it?” I asked.

  “To his nephew. It stayed in the family, right up until now. I just wish Leslie and I had somebody to leave it to ourselves.” He climbed the last few steps and turned down the third-floor hall, out of sight for a moment. “Then again, business the way it is, this place would probably be more of a curse than anything. Can't sell it, because what fool would buy it? Rundown old place, attracts weirdos obsessed with ghosts...I tell you, I can't stand those ghost hunters...”

  I reached the third floor, decorated with a scattering of antique vases and urns. The third-floor hall was noticeably colder and dimmer, too, weakly lit by antique lamps. The window curtains at either end of the hall were tied open, but neither the moonlight nor the streetlamps did much to cut the shadows.

  “Here we go,” the clerk said. He used an old-fashioned metal key—no plastic cards here—and unlocked a door. Dusty brass numbers identified the room as number 33.

  Michael and I shared a glance. The room was located on the back side of the house, and unless my geometry was way off, it contained the window where I'd glimpsed that frightening face.

  The door creaked as the clerk pushed it open.

  The hallway may have been dim and cool, but the interior of room 33 was pitch black, and noticeably chillier than the hallway. I felt apprehensive just looking into it.

  “Are you...sure you've never seen anything spooky in this hotel?” I asked. “In twelve years?”

  “It's an old building,” the clerk said, stepping into room 33. He turned a knob on a desktop lamp. It took several clicks before it finally snapped to life, the bulb shedding some sickly yellow light on the situation. “There's electrical problems, old floors that creak, old ceiling fans that rattle. Pipes make weird noises here and there. But I don't believe in ghosts. If only I could make everyone understand there's just nothing here. Nothing but a lot of shadows and their own minds playing tricks.”

  While he spoke, I took in the room. The first thing I noticed was the smell: it was intensely, cloyingly floral, as though someone had sprayed a gallon of grandma-scented Renuzit in here.

  The room had an old double bed, the end table with the lamp, and a window with heavy curtains drawn tight. I gently parted the curtains with one finger and looked out. There, past neglected and overgrown garden plots, beyond the rickety old fence, I could see the back street where Michael and I had stood.

  Which meant that whatever we'd glimpsed had been standing right here.

  “This seems to attract the weirdos.” The clerk gestured to the small brick fireplace in the corner. “See what I mean?”

  “Did...my sister do that?” Michael asked.

  I turned to see what they were talking about.

  The fireplace may have been small, but every brick of it seemed to have been painted with weird shapes and symbols. There were pentagrams, but also less common things, odd twisted little shapes that made me think of the Key of Solomon, symbols usually meant for fun supernatural hobbies like summoning and controlling demons.

  I can't say I've ever encountered actual demons, to my knowledge, in the sense of fallen angels or horned spirits armed with pitchforks. But I've dealt with plenty of evil spirits in my time, and the sight of so many occult markings here didn't exactly fill me with delight.

  “So which part did she do?” I asked. “Whi
ch of these markings are hers?”

  “They all look the same to me, tell you the truth,” the clerk said. “What your sister did here was worse than that. I had to...had to...I better show you.” He brought out his phone. “I didn't like taking pictures, but I had to get some evidence before I cleaned it up.”

  “Evidence?” Michael asked. “Like for the police?”

  “For the credit card company,” he said. “Cause I had to lay on some charges for the added damages. And the...clean-up. You can't just let something like that slide.”

  “Something like what?” I asked.

  The clerk started to hold up his phone, then hesitated, keeping the screen turned toward him.

  “I hate to show you this. You won't forget it once you see,” he said.

  “I can handle it,” I said, though I certainly wasn't looking forward to whatever he had to show me.

  He sighed, then turned the screen outward so Michael and I could see it.

  The image on his phone was of the same little fireplace, only there was a heap of ashes at the center of it.

  Ashes, and tiny, fire-blackened bones.

  Chapter Twelve

  “What are those?” Michael asked. I was wondering the same thing.

  “Could be rat bones,” the clerk said. “All I can tell you is that when I came up here this morning, this place smelled awful, like burned hair, and those bones were in the fireplace. I went to knock on your sister's room, cause she asked all about the ghosts and room 33 when she checked in. She was long gone. So I ran her card, with some added charges.”

  “Where are the bones now?” I asked, feeling sick as I looked at the image.

  “Went out in today's trash,” the clerk said. “I didn't want to keep them around. Especially knowing they were probably sacrificed to the devil or some awful thing.”

  “My sister's not a devil worshiper,” Michael said. It was more of an automatic defense, I think; he probably wasn't thinking of Clay at all.

  “Well, she's got problems, I can tell you that. All those ghost hunter types do. Screwed up in the head. Danged Haunted Crossroads.”