The Follower

by Nicholas Bowling

  CEDAR LODGE was deserted when Vivian got back. The lobby was dark apart from a single lamp on the reception desk. The receptionist had abandoned her post and Mr Blucas had left and taken his many bags of scavenged treasure with him. Vivian checked the clock on the wall. It was only just gone eight p.m. and she apparently had the whole place to herself.

  She was delirious with hunger by now and knew if she didn’t eat something she’d be listening to her stomach complaining all night, thanks to a combination of jet lag and the insomnia she’d had on and off for as long as she could remember. She found the dining area at the back of the reception, chairs upended on top of the tables, and from there discovered the kitchen through a pair of flimsy double doors. It was as clean and well-kept as the rest of the motel and smelled of drains and days-old bacon fat. In the cupboards she found some tiny packets of breakfast cereal she thought she could trust, took two, and returned to her room in almost total darkness.

  Inside, she lay on the bed and started reading The Violet Path. She ate the cereal dry, straight from the box. It was sweetened beyond recognition, and in the circumstances was the most delicious thing she’d ever eaten.

  The book opened with a story. Telos, it turned out, was not a person but a place. A city, like Atlantis, that had been swallowed up by the sea and now existed alternately beneath the two icecaps. The city of Telos was populated by an ancient, super-intelligent race of beings, or Beings, who may or may not have been from outer space (Vivian never resolved this). Some of these Beings happened to have got stranded in California before Telos had returned to the sea, and had revealed their wisdom to one man only, John of Telos, waiting, for some reason, until the late 1970s to do so. The stranded Telurians had then retreated to the inside of Mount Hookey, where they’d set up a new civilisation, a Crystal City, that could only be perceived by an Ascended Master of Telos. John of Telos was the first Ascended Master. There were others, men and women who he taught, up until his mysterious disappearance in the late eighties. It was generally agreed that he had returned to the mountain. Apparently, lots of people had met him since, while they were hiking or meditating in the woods around Mount Hookey. He appeared, it was said, in a great flash of violet light.

  Vivian thought the story was idiotic, and it troubled her to think that Jesse might have swallowed the whole thing in earnest. It wasn’t like him. As the foundation for a religion, or whatever the Violet Path was, it hardly stood up to interrogation, and Jesse interrogated absolutely everything.

  The rest of the book was less compelling than the introduction. It was a kind of manual, written in that same highly abstract, metaphorical language that Shelley had slipped in and out of. Vivian supposed it had to be written like that. Anything too concrete and the mystery would disappear, and along with it the whole appeal of the Telos mythology. It seemed like pretty straightforward New Age flimflam. There were lots of diagrams – mostly circles and pyramids – and references to “being”, and “presence”, and “spirit”, and “vibrations”, occasionally capitalised. A chapter on “Manifesting”. A chapter on “Telos and the Endless Now”. A shaded box that dealt with the question of whether John of Telos and Jesus were the same person. The whole thing was seasoned with encouraging quotations from initiates, all of whom seemed to have PhDs, assuring the reader that the Violet Path was the only true way to happiness. The actual word “happiness” was almost never used, but Vivian knew that was what they meant. All these other words – oneness, wellness, peace, harmony – were just stand-ins for the big “H”.

  Was she happy? She banished the thought as soon as it arose. She was better; that was all that mattered. Better than she had been. Jesse’s disappearance had, in a perverse way, been a shot in the arm. After the bleak and colourless months that followed the business with their father, it had brought Vivian back into focus, or at the very least it had given her a reason to get out of bed.

  Vivian was brought out of deep rumination by the sound of feet beneath her window. She threw the book onto the bed and got up, jittering from all the sugar she’d eaten. When she opened the curtains she saw someone with a torch making their way around the swimming pool. The globe of the receptionist’s hair was unmistakable.

  It was later than Vivian had thought and the moon was full and high. The whole mountain glowed. There was a perfect ring of cloud over its summit, pale and rainbowed by the moonlight. The receptionist was wearing a robe like the man who had stared at Vivian outside the Crystal Visions shop. There was something tied to her back, too. Some kind of musical instrument. She was still wearing her pink jacket – Vivian could see the outlines of her shoulder pads beneath the robe’s loose fabric. Vivian watched her navigate the edge of the swimming pool and then awkwardly scale the wire fence at the back of the motel. She fell over the other side and it sounded like the instrument broke. She got up and brushed leaves and pine needles from her robes, looking embarrassed. She glanced back at the motel. Vivian ducked behind the curtain. When she peered out again, the receptionist had disappeared into the dense forest at the rear of the motel, though Vivian could still see the beam of her torch flitting among the trunks and the branches.

  Vivian was still fully dressed and nowhere near falling asleep. Whether it was the sugar or the caffeine or the anxiety talking, following the receptionist seemed a good idea.

  She got up, left her room without locking it, and came down the fire escape to the pool’s edge. It stank. Up close she saw almost all of the surface of the water was covered with detritus, like an icefloe, with a few gaps that reflected the moon clearly. Insects hopped and skated crazily across it. She made her way around the edge to the section of fence that the receptionist had vaulted, and found it bowed and easily climbable. It wasn’t the first time someone had been this way.

  Vivian clasped the cold mesh with her fingers and looked up the mountain. The receptionist’s torch beam had disappeared. The weirdly geometric clouds were settling on the peak, and the interior of the forest was pure black, and she could well believe, after her talk with Shelley, that there was no coming back once you ventured up those slopes.

  A wailing came from somewhere among the trees. More screaming than wailing. Several voices, male and female, screaming over and over again. It was wild at first, then found some kind of rhythm. The sound, Vivian thought, of a dozen people being brutally murdered, or perhaps just singing very, very badly, to the primitive beat of a drum.

  She let go of the fence and ran back into the motel. Even after she’d got inside, the screaming seemed no quieter.

  In the lobby there was a shadow over the desk. A night porter, perhaps? She came around the corner and saw a figure silhouetted against the lamp, feet up, reading a paperback. Vivian couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Their limbs were long and seemed to have too many joints.

  They turned when they saw Vivian coming. It was a young man. His legs uncurled like a spider’s and he took his feet off the desk. He looked at her and then at his phone, and didn’t bother taking out his earphones.

  “What?” he said, scrolling through something. “You didn’t want to join in?”

  It was Shelley’s son. His face was cadaverous in his phone’s blue light, a look that wasn’t helped by the length and straightness and blackness of his hair. He was grinning.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “This is my job.”

  “Can you hear that?” said Vivian. The screams sounded like they were in the next room. He finally plucked out a single earphone.

  “And they wonder why no one stays here anymore,” he said.

  “Sounds like someone’s getting hurt.”

  He laughed.

  “Hurt?” he said. “Man, they’re having the time of their lives up there!”

  “Who is? What are they doing?”

  “I don’t know. Communing with the earth spirit. Summoning the angels of Telos. That kind of thing.”

  “I saw the receptionist—”

  “Judy. She’ll
be gone for a few days. That’s why I’m on shift.”

  “A few days?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What is it? It sounds like a… ritual or something.”

  “Sure, you can call it that. She took her drum, right?”

  “I think so.”

  “Makes sense.”

  It didn’t.

  Vivian listened again. The screaming had stopped abruptly. She waited a while in silence while Troy continued to fiddle with his phone.

  “Aren’t you a bit young to be working here?”

  “I’m nineteen. And this is basically the only job I can get up here. Assuming I don’t want to get into Mom’s line of work.”

  She looked at him, and thought of Shelley and Chason, and frowned involuntarily.

  “Nineteen? But your brother…”

  “You trying to do the math?” he said. He took a roll-up cigarette from a little tin he had behind the desk and lit it. “I know, it doesn’t add up.” He laughed as he exhaled. “I’m a good old cult baby.”

  “Cult baby?”

  “Mom had me in one of the Telos communes. She was about my age. Dad was, like, in his fifties at the time. Assuming Dad was actually my dad. Apparently one of the ways to achieve eternal peace is just to go around fucking absolutely everybody.” He let that hang in the air along with his damp cigarette smoke. “You’re not into all this hippy shit though, are you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Vivian.

  He took another drag.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “I mean, no. I’m not into it. I don’t think it’s bad. It just doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “Of course it’s bad. It’s fucking poison. Look what it did to your brother.”

  She gripped the edge of the reception desk until her fingernails hurt.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you mean, what do I mean? He’s disappeared, right? You wouldn’t even be here if there was nothing wrong with it. All the Telos stuff – it gets in here.” He tapped his head with a very long finger. “Even if you don’t believe any of it now, it’s hard to stick to your guns when everyone else is telling you otherwise. In this town, you and me, we’re the anomalies. You need to find your brother and get out, because the longer you stay here, the more this place will do things to you. Before you know it, you’ll be meeting aliens in the forest and drinking mushroom tea and learning the tabla.” He blew another cloud of smoke into his lap and shook his head. “There’s a reason I stay in my bedroom the whole time. Just trying to limit my exposure to the contagion.”

  “You met him, though?” she asked. “You met Jesse?”

  Troy had gone back to looking for a new song to play on his phone.

  “Sure,” he said, without looking up. “We talked a bit. I say we. He did most of the talking. Bleak stuff, too, none of the happy-clappy stuff my mom’s into. Seemed like the guy needed therapy – I mean, proper therapy, not vibrational healing or whatever.”

  They had tried that. Jesse had been to two therapists, both of whom had told his parents that he “wasn’t a good fit for them”. Vivian didn’t know therapists could discontinue treatment on those grounds. As often happened, her frustration had been mixed in with a glimmer of pride in the fact that her brother had somehow managed to out-think a certified psychoanalyst.

  “When did you last see him?” she asked.

  “Couple of weeks ago.”

  “Where?”

  “Right here. He had a room. Mom wanted him to move in with us and pay rent but—”

  “He stayed here?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What the hell!”

  “What?”

  “The woman said she hadn’t seen him. She took a poster and everything. Said she didn’t recognise his picture.”

  “What woman?”

  “Your colleague. The other receptionist.”

  Troy laughed. “My colleague? You mean Judy?”

  “Why would she say she hadn’t seen Jesse if he was staying here?”

  “I mean, in theory they could have missed each other. Pretty unlikely, though.”

  Vivian chewed her lower lip.

  “When’s she coming back?” she said.

  “Judy? Search me. Not for a few days, hopefully.”

  “Why hopefully?”

  “I need the hours, or I’ll never save up enough to get out of here.” Troy took a final drag on his cigarette. “See, Judy’s a case in point. She came here about six months ago. Normal, straightforward. She went feet-first into Telos and then… Well, you heard how she likes to spend her evening off.”

  Vivian found herself looking upon the low-lit drabness of the motel with fresh eyes. As if some clue of Jesse’s whereabouts might be hanging from the wall or have fallen behind one of the sofas.

  “When did you say he checked out?”

  “Uh,” said Troy. “We’re not great at the paperwork here. Last time I saw him was about two weeks ago, I guess.”

  “Can you remember what room he was in?”

  “Why would I remember a thing like that?”

  “You obviously don’t get many guests here.”

  He shrugged.

  “I want to look in his room,” said Vivian.

  “I just said, I don’t know which room he was in.”

  “Then we try all of them.”

  “We?”

  “Do you have better things to do?”

  She fixed him with a stare. He popped a bit of gum in his mouth and chewed and gave a loud, menthol-flavoured sigh.

  “Fine.”

  He pulled a drawer fully out of the desk and upended its contents in front of her. It was all keys. Vivian thought that hotels were meant to keep the keys to the rooms on a system of little hooks, but apparently Cedar Lodge had a different way of doing things.

  “You’re the only guest in tonight,” he said. “Go nuts.”

  Vivian filled all the huge pockets of her coat and left him to his book and his phone. The keys were at least numbered, and she went methodically from room to room. There were only thirty-two suites in the whole place, but there were three times that many keys. As it turned out, she’d done well on the room lottery. Most of them smelled a good deal worse than hers, especially those near the kitchen. And Troy hadn’t been entirely honest about her being the only guest – the cockroaches had made themselves quite at home in several of the ground floor rooms.

  The only room she didn’t check was number 29, next door to hers. However much she raked through her pockets, she couldn’t find the key.

  “There’s no key for 29,” she told Troy when she got back.

  “Must be.”

  “There isn’t.”

  “We can’t have lost all of them. There’s three for every room. Two for the guests and one for reception.”

  “Well, it isn’t here.”

  He sighed again.

  “Let me have a look. Maybe Judy has them. Or Mr Blucas.”

  “Blucas?”

  “Have you met him yet?”

  “I think I did. Is he actually a guest here?”

  “Spends half his life lurking around here, but no, he’s not a paying customer. And he’s pretty light-fingered.”

  He pushed his chair back and opened several more drawers under the desk. He began taking out handfuls of pens and rubber bands and crumpled compliments slips. He opened another, then another, building a mountain of old detritus on the leather tabletop. Decades of the stuff, it looked like. A guestbook from 1996, the year of Jesse and Vivian’s birth. An antique calculator. A manual credit card imprinter. Rolls and rolls of receipt paper.

  “Nope,” he said. “Nothing.” He poked around one last time in the bottom drawer. “Well, this is interesting.”

  Vivian leaned over the desk.

  “What is it?”

  Troy took a sheaf of paper out of the drawer and placed it on the desk, between Vivian’s elbow and the reception bell.

  “I take it th
ese are yours?”

  It was Vivian’s posters. The ones she’d already put up around town, a dozen or so. She could tell by how creased they were. Some were missing corners, or still had scraps of Sellotape attached to them. Someone had torn them down. Not only that, but the central photograph of Jesse had been decorated somehow, in black marker pen, with glyphs and symbols. Illuminated, almost, like a medieval manuscript.

  “See what I mean? She’s gone.”

  Vivian thumbed through them.

  “You think it was her? The receptionist?”

  “Who else would it have been?”

  He went back to rummaging in the bowels of the desk. Vivian continued staring at her brother’s face, a mirror image, embellished with astrological symbols and pictograms, and the same pick ’n’ mix of religious iconography she’d seen at the House of Telos. Judy had a lot of questions to answer when she came back from her trip up the mountain. If she came back.

  “No, definitely no room 29 here,” said Troy. “But what do you think you’ll find, anyway? He checked out.”

  Vivian was still looking at the poster, and only half listening to him.

  “You’re right,” she said. “Thanks anyway.”

  s“Welcome.”

  She left the mound of keys with him and headed out of the lobby.

  “So, I’ve got to just clear all these away, have I?”

  She didn’t reply. “Swell meeting you, Vivian,” he shouted, when she was already at the door that led outside. “Same time tomorrow?”

  On the way back she tried the handle of room 29, not sure why it might have magically unlocked itself in her absence. It hadn’t. She passed along to room 30, went inside, and stared out of the window. She thought she saw tiny flickers of light among the trees on the mountain, but the kind of lights that were only visible when she wasn’t looking directly at them. Maybe it was her concussion.

  She put the posters on her bedside table and returned to The Violet Path. She read the book until the letters themselves drifted and merged and stopped making sense. It was six a.m., and the silhouette of the mountain was visible through the thin curtains, when Vivian finally fell asleep. Only then did the sounds of drumming and wailing return, and by that point she had no idea whether they were real or imagined.