Altered Gate

by Altered Gate (retail) (epub)

  There were plenty of things off, things I will never be able to forget.

  I watched a man shovel a dozen donuts into his mouth while drinking an unusually large cup of coffee. I saw a group of women eating inhuman stacks of pancakes, and then ordering more. I looked on as a couple ordered a full chicken each, with sides, and then devoured them in less than five minutes. It felt like everyone in each of the restaurants ate more food than I’d ever seen anyone consume in my life. I wasn’t sure if it was a sign of something wrong here, or if Niagara Falls was just a city of gluttony. When I ended up going to the Chinese buffet Chance owned, I knew it must be the city, not some demon influence. I think even demons would be shocked by the sheer ravenousness lust directed towards food in these places.

  By the end of it, four hours in all, I wasn’t sure I could take any more for the day, so I called it quits. I knew I’d need to see these places after hours as well, but for the time being, I’d had all I could take. I didn’t see or sense a single thing to hint at something unearthly or monstrous close by. No smells to let me know there was a monster or demon there. I saw no twitching shadows, felt no goosebumps as a demon crept around unnoticed. There was nothing aside from greasy chins and greedy mouths to make me want to run out of there.

  I called Rouge to tell her I was on my way back to the hotel, but got her voicemail. I figured she must’ve been relaxing in the room or was touring the hotel even. When I got back to the room, I found a note on the table by the beds. I picked it up and read it. She wanted to let me know she’d headed to the casino to try her luck on games of fancy chance. I dropped off the files from Chance’s office, and left my weapons in the room in case security at the casino were doing checks on people going in. I figured my Tincher, my gloves and the three vials of Hellion blood I brought with me might raise some eyebrows.

  Even at the entrance, I felt my senses overloaded. The lights, the noise, and the din of people trying to talk over the bells and chimes, and over each other, was terrible. I’d never been to Vegas, but I imagined Niagara Casino was probably a slightly less flashy version—but only by a small margin.

  At the main door leading from the hotel to the casino, there was a security guard conducting searches. In fact, there were five of them: huge men and women in black pants, black t-shirts, with more muscles than smiles. They ran metal detectors over people and checked all their I.D.s. I passed them by after a few minutes. The woman checking me grunted when she looked at my driver’s licence before she flicked it back at me and called out for her next victim.

  Once inside, I began to scan the crowd. I figured it would be easy to spot Rouge the way she looks, especially with her bright red hair. Turns out I was wrong. After fifteen minutes of moving through the village of the damned—people cursing at inanimate objects that refused to spill forth the fortune they held—I found her. I looked at her, did a double-take and had to wait until I was up close to make sure it was her.

  She was sitting at a card table, playing a round of Texas Hold ’Em. She was wearing a dark green tracksuit with white stripes running down the arms and legs. There was a baseball cap on her head, the same colour as the tracksuit. She wore little to no makeup and was even wearing flip-flops. The look was something you’d expect to see at a retirement community as people sat outside and did chair aerobics. I could almost imagine her playing lawn bowls, or making small-talk about how humid it’s been lately.

  Who was this alien and what had she done with Rouge?

  “What are you wearing?”

  She spun in her chair and smiled brightly when she saw me. She jumped up and gave me a hug before she stepped back and turned around in a circle to give me the worst fashion show ever. She looked like a retired woman at a lawn bowling league game in Florida.

  “You don’t like it?” she asked, clearly seeing a look on my face that I had no control over.

  “It’s just so…uh…I don’t even know what it is just so, but it is.”

  “It’s so bad, right?” She laughed and sat back down to enjoy her game. “This was some of the free stuff in the room. They knew my colour and everything. It’s so tacky, I thought where better to wear it than here? You should go change into yours. I want to see what you’d look like as my grampa.”

  “I’m not sure that stuff is actually free, but even if it is, I think I’ll take a hard pass on it,” I told her. There was no way I was stepping into anything that looked like that. I mean, what if it was so comfortable that I wanted to wear it all the time? That’s what happened with me and hiking shoes. I used to think they looked ridiculous, but now it’s all I buy. There was no way I was running the risk of looking like a member of a geriatric hip hop group.

  “Your loss, sweet cheeks,” she said, and folded her hand.

  “How are you doing? Winning us a fortune?”

  “Not a fortune, but I started with two hundred bucks, and now I’m up to a thousand. So, not too shabby. How about you? Rid the world of any baddies today?”

  Quietly, in case anyone was listening, I told her about my day with Chance, but left out my voyage to glutton town. There are some things that just need to be kept secret and hidden. Food mountain eater, bowel movements, and dreams involving Jell-O are just a few I can think of off the top of my head.

  “That all sounds terrible,” she said and took a sip of her drink—I guessed cola, since she’s not much of a booze drinker lately. “You do know there are very few things in this world I hate more than maggots and worms, right?”

  “How do you think I felt? Have you ever seen me around bugs? The idea of it was something I did my best not to picture. I’ll take poop-eating monsters over a centipede any day.”

  “Want to head back to the room and we’ll watch some Superman 2 and Canadian Bacon, which by the way, are my two favorite movies that feature one of the world’s great wonders.”

  “Don’t you want to finish your game?”

  “I think I’ve won enough. Now we can go upstairs and I can claim my prize.” She reached over and grabbed my ass and I took that as a not so subtle hint as to the prize she was going to get.

  Saturday

  After breakfast, I drove Rouge to the Falls so she could go up to the tower, ride the giant Ferris wheel, and head over to the tourist centre where she said she wanted to peruse the never-ending aisles of stuffed beavers, items with Canadian flags stamped on them, and maple syrup. Apparently those are three of the main things people think of when they hear Canada.

  “Do you know all the different ways maple syrup is sold in places like this? It boggles the mind,” she told me as we pulled up. “You stay safe and call if you need me to swing in and save you like before. Just don’t be afraid to admit you need me.”

  I laughed and she kissed me goodbye. I drove off and headed towards the next series of places I hoped would lead me to an answer of what was haunting Chance. I would prefer it not to be a mental thing after all. I have an easier time dealing with monsters and beasts than ruined psyches.

  My first stop was a motel close to where I’d dropped Rouge off. I parked in the nearly- barren lot, and then moved along the outside of each unit on the first and second floor. I didn’t linger too long in front of any of them, just to avoid looking like some weird creeper. My hope was to get some sort of sensation, catch a strange smell, or even hear something off in one of the units. After twenty minutes, the only thing I noticed was that it had gotten slightly cooler than when I first started. I went to the office near the parking entrance and spoke to a middle-aged woman named Marg, behind the counter. She had been working there for the last seven years, both behind the desk and as a cleaner. If anyone knew of anything strange going on here, I figured it would be her.

  “This place is full of weird shit,” she told me as she looked out the window. “Over there in room nine there’s a couple who I’m pretty sure never eat real food. They just smoke meth all day and sc
am tourists. I’d throw them out, but they always pay on time for the month, so, you know, the whole money talks thing.”

  “They live here?”

  “Oh sure. Half the rooms are full of monthly renters. It’s the only way we can manage to stay afloat ever since the bigger hotels closer to the Falls opened. You mind if I smoke?” she asked, and I told her I didn’t, even though I kind of did. “We’re not supposed to smoke in here, but as long as you won’t tell, I won’t either.”

  “You have my word.”

  She pulled out a battered steel cigarette tin, took a home-rolled cigarette out and lit it with a scented candle on the front desk. I doubted the Spiced Pumpkin Dream candle would cover the smell up for long. She took a long drag, coughed one of the worst-sounding coughs I’d ever heard, and then went on.

  “There’s another guy, over in room twenty-one, likes to dress up like Batman, but without the pants, and then flashes the curtains open now and then. Some of the non-regulars complain about him, but what can you do? In this day and age, if I throw him out for that people will lose their mind on social media, saying I’m discriminating against his sexual kink or whatnot. I called the cops on him, but they just laugh and say with a dick as small as he has, it’s not indecent, it’s a free comedy show.”

  Marg went on to tell me about a woman who eats her weight in bagel bites every day, a man who spends all day playing video games in the nude, a couple who cruise bars on weekends and bring people back for threesomes, and a single dad who stays there with his son, and makes some of the worst-smelling food on a hot plate.

  “Sometimes I think I’m in India with the reek of onions and curry I smell coming out of there. Not that I’m judging or anything. Just saying it’s no way for a kid to live.”

  She continued to “not judge” for another ten minutes before I decided it was a dead end. I wished I had gotten out of there before she’d started smoking, because when I got back to the car, the smell had clung on to my clothes. I took out some cologne I had in the glove compartment and doused myself. I only managed to make myself smell like cigarettes and cologne, so despite the chilly air I drove with my windows down to avoid having to deal with the stench.

  I hit eight places after that, and found nothing even slightly useful. One of them I was almost sure was the place. There was a smell like old, rancid meat and eggs, but as it turned out the store had a faulty septic system and for the last two weeks the smell of old bathroom fun times had been lingering there. The clerk working the front counter of the Money Mart looked embarrassed when I asked about it, as though it was all her former lunches and dinners responsible for the nearly eye-watering smell bleeding through the walls and floor. I told her that some of it was probably a year old and that only made her feel worse as she admitted to have been working there for over two years. As I left there, I reminded her we all shit, but like that comment, my day was a flush.

  I sat in my car after, crossed off yet another property and thought of calling it quits. I checked my phone, saw fifty-two missed calls from unknown numbers—more cranks, no doubt—but nothing from Rouge. I guessed she was still busy, so I went through the remaining five properties on the page and tried to see if there was one close by. After a quick check with Google Maps, I saw there was one less than two minutes away. It was the church being converted into a condo. If any of the properties had potential to be the one place where I’d find something otherworldly, you’d think it was a church. It really should’ve been my first stop, but after what happened with Father Ted, I really didn’t want to be visiting any church, not even one that was being changed into something hideous and over-priced.

  I checked the list again, saw nothing else very close to where I was, so I decided to suck it up and head to the church, but I made myself a promise that it’d be the last stop of the day. By then it was already close to three in the afternoon. There’s only so much work I can do in a day. Once I finished there, I’d check in with Chance or his secretary, let them know where things stood, and then get my romance on.

  I already assumed it was going to be nothing before I got there.

  I pulled up shortly after and checked the address again. At first glance, I was sure I’d gotten the street number or name wrong. The church looked strange. It was not really like any religious structure I’d ever seen before. There was no stained glass, no tall steeple or cross decked out on the front of it. I thought there was a possibility it wasn’t a Catholic or Christian church, but since it said former church on the paper, not mosque, synagogue or other, I’d made an assumption. There’d been the chance it was already under construction, but to me, the church looked more like the burnt out husk of an industrial building. It was a flat-roofed, very boring rectangle made of off-white brick with the doors and windows boarded up, but there were signs of a fire. Black soot marks kissed the painted bricks at the top of each window and door frame until it simply faded back into the colour of the paint. I stood on the brown grass out front, looking at it, and wondered about the cause of the fire. Had Chance been inside here before or after it?

  “Not much to look at, is it?” a female voice said from behind me. I turned around and saw her: a heavy-set woman in her late fifties, maybe. Huge sunglasses nearly swallowed her whole red, blotched face, and she coughed hoarsely as she pushed her wheeled walker toward me. “Can you believe they’re going to tear this place down and build a condo here? Who the hell is going to buy a condo in Niagara Falls, especially here? There’s something not right with that place.”

  Bingo. I guessed I should’ve started there after all, and wanted to kick myself in the ass for bothering with all the other places. What a waste of time.

  “I’m kind of new here. Someone told me they were building apartments here and I should check it out,” I lied, and hoped to get something informative out of her. “A real estate guy named Chance Anderson said it would be a prime place to move, so close to Lundy’s Lane and the Falls. I take it it’s not?”

  “Are you kidding me? You’d be better off moving in to some sleazy motel close to the bus terminal than whatever they build here. This wasn’t a real church, it was evil.” My interest was sparked. Churches are notorious with weak spots to other planes and dimensions. Creatures, especially demons, are drawn to them. It’s as though a strong belief and faith in something somehow draws these monsters forth. One day I will really need to look into it. I keep saying that every time I have an incident at a church, but I really should.

  Add that to my to-do list, I guess.

  “So if it wasn’t a real church, what was it? Satanists? Molesters?”

  “Not even. This preacher, a shady-looking guy who called himself Pastor Herb, bought the building off Mary and Bob Grieves. When they owned it, it was a pottery store, and then Pastor Herb comes along and makes it a so-called church. Only the whole thing is a front for damn potheads. Instead of preaching the word of God, they talked all kinds of nature and Mother Earth bullshit. Instead of hymns, they sang songs by Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. And, instead of consuming the holy sacrament, they smoked that awful-smelling devil’s grass. You could smell it all up and down the street. Pastor Herb would lurk in there, corrupting the youth all day long, while good Christians wanted to save them. We all started a petition to get it shut down, complaining to the police, but nothing came of it. They just stayed in there, a false house of God, and smoked and sinned. That is, until someone with some good sense and high morals burnt the place out. During the night, a Good Samaritan, a warrior of the Lord, threw a Molotov cocktail right through one of those windows and we rid our city of his pestilence.”

  “He died?” I asked. I was shocked by the cavalier way she talked about it. But if he did die, it would explain a lot. A place where someone passes in such a horrible way might not even mean a demon or an otherworldly creature had passed through the barrier into this world. Humans can become earthbound, menacing spirits if they die in the right condit
ions.

  Being murdered, burnt to death, would be just the right set of them.

  “Oh no, he didn’t die. He was barely even burned. Just a spot on his arm from what I heard people say. But when the fire department and the police came out, they found he had one of those grow-ops in the basement. The whole city would’ve been higher than Denver if the fire department hadn’t shown up so quick and put the fire out before it torched it all. Guess Pastor Herb was worried about getting charged so he ran and nobody has seen him since. Still can’t believe anyone wants to build something on such a disgusting hole. A false house of worship is a cursed place. I wouldn’t suggest moving in there if I were you.”

  I nodded and realized this was all another bust. Maybe I had it all wrong. There was a chance none of this had to do with any of these properties on the list. Most of them, aside from this and a few others, were open to the public, but nobody else seemed to be affected the way Chance was. I could go back to his house and try there again, but there was a part of me starting to lean heavily towards this being some sort of mental strain. At this point, it seemed more likely than not. I planned to meet with him tomorrow if I could, and would find a way to try and set his mind at ease. My idea was to hold some sort of made-up ritual, an act that would give Chance the idea I was warding off the ghosts causing him to see the nightmare visions. It was the best thing I could come up with. I’d give him a good deal so I would feel better about it. I had to charge him something for all this, but maybe just enough to cover expenses.

  I thanked the woman for her information, telling her she just saved me a bad investment, and went back to my car. She smiled and slowly walked away. I felt frustrated at the case and was about to leave, but I looked back at the church and decided to go peek in anyway. I’d come all that way, I figured I might as well look inside, just in case Chance had been in there, and something had found a weak spot in. Just because nobody had died inside didn’t mean I could just cross it off my list.