by Gaby Triana
What? NO.
I reached out with one leg and clocked him in the knee. He buckled, restrained a cry, then reached out and yanked a good chunk of my hair.
“Watch my stuff,” he breathed into my face, indicating a pile of stuff on the floor.
He left, closing the door.
I sat in pitch darkness, breathing through my nose, hearing the police officers calling throughout the building. I couldn’t tell if they’d found any of us or not, if anyone was hiding or coming clean. In my mind’s eye, I watched them creep with their flashlights, as they stepped through puddles. Deep in my heart, I knew the cops were here because of Cami. She had reported us. She was trying to “save me from myself.”
I heard talking.
What would Crow tell the police? Probably how the rest of us were squatters, and he was here on assignment. I could hear it now. Would they notice his changing appearance?
As I sat in complete darkness, I heard the officers giving each other orders, directing to search different areas. The hotel was so sprawling, it would take a while. As footsteps scrambled past the office I was locked in, I screamed against my gag, working myself up to the point I could barely breathe.
How had I gotten into this situation? From the moment I first arrived, I knew this place—I knew Crow—was bad news and still, I delved deeper into it every day. Was I so desperate to feel anything at all that I’d risked injury, even death, to know what living was like?
Yes.
Closing my eyes, I focused on trying to settle down before I choked on tears. I breathed evenly, calmly. I worked to clear my mind, envision that I wasn’t in danger; I was safe inside this room. In the distance, I heard more radio calls, more orders being given.
But in this room, I was safe.
In this room.
I sank into deep meditation.
His shadow entered my mind before I saw his face, my Lobo of deep pewter fur, my lupine spirit guide. He filtered into the room quietly and circled the chair, his tongue lolling. In front of me, he sat on his haunches and stared. What did you get yourself into?
Hey, I wouldn’t be here if not for you.
Snarky wolf.
Through the darkness, another shape emerged, a dark cloud blending through the wall. I couldn’t deal with another ghost right now, not when I was the one who needed the help. Quickly, it took the shape of a woman with long hair and curvy shape. Her cheekbones were high; her smile told me everything would be okay. I couldn’t see her eyes. Half her face was missing. Half her hair. Around her waist was a charred apron.
Kitchen ghost?
When she reached out and touched my cheek, I felt a love that transcended time and space. My grandmother. Though we’d never met, I’d only seen her in that one photo of her wearing hippie clothing, I knew she loved me. The seed of her adoration had been planted inside my father’s heart, then passed on to mine, waiting for the right moment to germinate.
My little starshine, sleep, oh, so tight
My little moonshine, dream with the night
Only it was her melodious voice, the same song she’d sang to her little boy night after night before she’d perished in the fire, a song he’d kept in his heart and passed onto me many years later. My grandmother sank to her knees, transformed into a column of twinkling blue lights, and pushed something toward me.
When you awaken, Love you will be
My little sunshine Heaven gave me
In the light she emanated, I could see what she’d pushed Crow’s laptop bag. Papers slid out. It could’ve been my imagination—all of it—a vision borne from distress. I couldn’t be sure, but the next thing that happened I would remember clearly as long as I lived. A leather laptop bag that toppled from the top of a pile of Crow’s stuff, was explainable. My chair rising off the floor, however, was not. I rose a few inches before my grandmother’s column of light disappeared. The chair tumbled onto its side with me in it.
The fall loosened my bound wrists, enough so I could wriggle my hands out of the knots. Once a hand was free, I was able to pull the hemp cord out from between my teeth. I lifted the papers to my face, adjusting my vision as much as I could in the darkness. I smelled phosphorus, and a flame sprouted out of thin air. Blue-green orange at moments, the light hovered, flickered, a ghostly ball of fire to illuminate the papers.
Code enforcement forms.
As a child, my father had given me blank or used ones to play with, to keep me busy while he worked. I’d pretend I was a code enforcer for the county, like him. On the forms, I saw words penned in my father’s handwriting—stress cracks, uneven settling of foundation, copper pipe breakage, floors sinking, etc. Words to decree this building condemned.
“How long?” I looked at the spot I’d seen my grandmother, now empty. “How long until it collapses?”
The ball of flame grew wider, flew straight at me, as if hurled by human hands, catching the edges of the papers, eating its way inward, erasing my father’s writing, his memory and hard work, no matter how hard I tried to blow out the flames. The survey was charred, blackened, gray ashes flittering out like dead confetti.
A reply echoed from another place and time—my father’s voice: Now.
TWENTY-SIX
Outsider voices carried through the corridor, as I slipped into the shadows. Police officers talking to Crow, Crow fielding police officers’ questions, mumbles, blips of walkie-talkies, reports of their findings.
“Squatters at the old Sunlake. They’ve been here a while,” one of them said on a radio call, as flashlight beams swiveled through the hotel. “Yes, the old sanatorium.”
I melted into the shadows, thought of the farthest place I could get without being seen, and dropped into the south stairwell near the dining room toward the sound of rushing water. The basement was flooded. My feet sank through two feet of rainwater, and my flip-flop dislodged and floated away. I held onto the wall.
Great minds think alike, because Mori and Wilky were here, too, huddled halfway inside the body chute. “Are you going to stay or escape?” I asked.
“Wilky is going to check the bottom grate in a minute to see if it’s unlocked,” Mori said, pointing through the chute.
“That goes down, though. It’s probably flooded at the end.”
“Better than climbing out a window where the cops will see us.”
I wasn’t concerned about the cops as much as I was about the lower levels of this building, especially after the vision I’d had down here and the papers I’d found in the storage room. “Where’s Fae?”
They both pointed. It was then I realized she was below them, deep in the foundation’s crevice, and they were in the body chute waiting for her.
“Guys, no. She shouldn’t be down there.”
“Tell that to Fae,” Wilky murmured. “We’re just here making sure she’s safe.”
“But she’s not safe.” I sloshed through water halfway up my thighs, feeling the ground uneven beneath my bare feet. The room felt off-kilter, as though the walls themselves were angling inward. Water seeped in thin, trickling mini-falls from every corner of the ceiling. I waded up to the platform and climbed up.
“She only needs a minute,” Mori said.
I reached Mori and Wilky and peered down Wilky’s flashlight beam. The foundation of the basement where it met the platform on which the tunnel was built had ripped apart to expose layers of brick underneath. At the bottom of this spontaneous ravine was Fae opening bags of gold coins in a pool of fetid water.
“Vale, you were right!” she cried, holding up a gold piece—an actual gold doubloon. “Ha! My great-grandfather really was a rumrunner. Holy shit! Behold ye treasure, mateys!”
“Get her out of there,” I said, holding onto what was left of the rim of the brick foundation. My earlier vision of Fae deep in the ravine barreled full-force into my head, and I had to forcibly shake my head to dislodge it. “Now!” I screamed.
Mori caught the panic in my eyes. “Fae—out. Now, let’s go.
” They splayed on their stomach, reaching down into the crevice which was quickly filling with groundwater. Anything could’ve been down there, from old sewage to dangerous debris from the building itself.
“Hold on, I’m making sure this is the only one,” Fae replied, feeling around with her hands.
“Fae, get up here!” I was fuming. How could she come back to the basement when I specifically warned her not to?
“I’ll get her,” Wilky said, handing Mori his flashlight. He climbed into the ravine, using the exposed bricks for foot anchors, like an inverted rock-climbing wall. He reached down as far as he could for Fae’s hand.
“Okay, I’m coming.” Fae wrapped the canvas folds of the bag around her wrist and stretched her skinny arm up to meet Wilky’s. Wet strands of long hair plastered to her face, she looked like a trapped cave diver emerging for the first time in days.
I backed away to give them space to hoist her out, still angry that Mori had allowed her to go down there. There was such a thing as too much empathy. Now we had to wait while she climbed out of this godforsaken hole before we could run out to safety.
But then, the basement floor began shaking. It took me two seconds to realize there’d be no way out of this if we didn’t act quickly. “Hurry!” I screamed, as the entire tunnel began to crumble, a loud sickening crash filling my ears.
Without much foundation left to support the curved passageway, the center arch began to fall away slowly, brick by brick plummeting to the ravine below. The flashlight fell into the earth’s crack. Wilky used his one free arm to protect his head from the falling bricks, while his back and feet pressed against the ravine wall, holding him in place by tension. His other arm continued to reach down. “Come on!” he screamed.
“I’m trying!”
I covered my head, too, and winced when a brick hit me square in the shoulder. Wilky managed to grab Fae’s arm with one hand and tugged as she screamed.
“Get her out!” Mori screamed.
Fae’s foot slipped from underneath her, however, and she fell a few feet, unable to get a footing on the wall, now slick with cascading water. Wilky couldn’t lift her out, no matter how differently he positioned his feet or knees for better leverage. He would have to let go, drop to the bottom to reach her, risk being trapped himself.
I struggled with the idea of leaving them all here to die while I saved myself, but there was no way I could, not even to keep my promise to Macy.
As the bricks continued to fall, Mori screamed and scooted back on the platform, allowing space for the bricks of the death tunnel and its surrounding wall to land around them. The collapse caused the floor to tilt, as all the water that had pooled in the basement rushed into the gorge, filling it to the brim. The floor began to cave.
“Get out!” I screamed and scrambled out of the tunnel, reaching back to offer my hands to Mori and Wilky.
There was nothing we could do for Fae. Though my heart longed to help her, as I was sure Mori longed to die with Fae, she was gone. We knew it. If the bricks hadn’t gotten her, the rushing water filling in air spaces would. Her only chance at this point was to swim upwards.
Mori and Wilky made it out of the collapsing tunnel, and we waited a moment in the hopes that Fae had found her way out. But the bricks began to pile atop the ravine break, the ceiling began to cave, and plaster and concrete rained down in chunks.
Mori reluctantly ran toward me, pulling me along, as Wilky ran to catch up, the three of us glancing back to confirm the worst—she wasn’t coming out. We reached the stairs and waited another second. When the rest of the tunnel collapsed, my entire soul did, too.
“We have to keep moving,” I said.
“Fae, my Fae,” Mori cried in the stairwell, their wails consuming them entirely. I felt their pain as if it were my own, deep in my chest where the heart chakra exploded with black, roiling fire. Here, Mori had found someone who so completely accepted them for who they were, and now she was dead.
I tugged them by the hand. “Come on. Please, or the same will happen to us.”
“No, no, no…” they cried.
“Yes, we have to.” Between Wilky and me, we managed to get Mori to climb up to the ground floor where the landscape had changed. Because of the collapse in the basement, the dining room had caved as well. I tried to push away the images of Fae being crushed by tons of brick and concrete.
The moment we stepped into the main hall, a beam of flashlight shone into our faces. “Hey,” someone said. “Hold it.”
“The basement is collapsing,” I breathed.
In front of us were four police officers, one of them holding Crow by the arm, and what looked like two county inspectors.
The vein in Crow’s temple pulsed with contempt. “Nothing is collapsing.”
“No?” I was aghast at the lengths he’d go to deny the inevitable. “You want to go down there and check for yourself? We just watched Fae die.” Then I saw his sallow skin in the dim light and knew it wasn’t him doing the talking anymore.
An officer used his radio to call an ambulance. In my mind’s eye, all I could see was Fae, pathetically clutching her gold coins inside of that gorge, as an avalanche of bricks collapsed on her, head cracked open like a pumpkin.
Mori fell apart against Wilky’s shoulder. “No, no…”
“Where? In here?” One of the cops, a female, peered into the depths of the stairwell, as the others began giving orders to evacuate the building.
“Yes, the death tunnel’s already gone. That’s why this floor is collapsing,” I explained.
“Death tunnel?” she asked.
One of the other cops explained. “She means the body chute of the hotel from the hospital days. Alvarez, ambulance and backup.”
“When was the last survey on this place?” an officer asked.
“Last one was filed six years ago,” the inspector flipped through his clipboard.
“Wrong. My father completed one just four years ago condemning the hotel,” I interjected.
The inspector shook his head. “Last one filed was six.”
“He never got to turn it in.” I seethed at Crow, taking slow steps up to him. The officer holding his arm jutted out his hand to keep me at a distance. “He died here. Killed by something who didn’t want the report filed. I saw the report myself inside a storage room down the hall.”
“Show me,” one of the officers said, leading me away.
“There’s no time,” I replied. “My father said the building would collapse now.”
“I thought you said your father died.” Crow laughed, and the cop looked at me sideways, as if I were the liar.
“Excuse me.” I brushed past them all to leave, but the officer reached out and told a solid hold of my arm.
“Nope. You can’t go just yet. None of you. Alvarez?” The cop gave a secretive nod to his partner. “Trespassing.”
“For real?” I said. “You’re going to detain us for trespassing when we’re warning you about the building? This is ridiculous. Let go of me.” I yanked my arm, but Alvarez had a firm grip.
“Hey, my guys. Can we answer questions after we get out of the building?” Wilky pleaded. “You all are making a huge mistake by keeping us standing around.”
“Kaspian, we’ll be outside,” Alvarez said to the rest of the team. He and his partner began leading me, Mori, Wilky, and Crow down the hall when one of their walkie-talkies crackled on.
“Wait in the hall,” the woman officer said. “On our way.”
We all had to stop and wait for the rest of the team to catch up, while two officers held four of our arms. Wilky, busy holding Mori up, gave no resistance, and Crow, towering over all of us, watched my concerned face with amusement. He was shirtless still, and his arms and chest had changed into a deeper blue-green. His face was dry, crackled like alligator skin, and his neck had what looked like flaky scales growing on it.
“Buddy, you okay?” Alvarez said.
“Oh, I’m perfect,” he chuckle
d.
Wilky and I exchanged looks. “Let me go,” I said quietly to the officer. “I’d rather resist arrest than die here with all of you. Please.”
“Don’t let her go.” Crow chuckled. “I need her.”
“That’s enough,” Wilky cut Crow off. “I’m tired of your shit.”
“Nobody cares about you, Wil,” Crow replied. “The only one with any real power here is Valentina. Hers is the gift we need. Hers is the anger—”
“Who the fuck is ‘we,’ asshole?” Wilky asked. “You, only you.”
“Crow and I,” Crow replied.
Mori looked at him curiously.
“Hey,” a cop tried intervening. “Save it for the station.”
The obvious finally dawned on Mori, Wilky, and me—Crow wasn’t himself anymore. I tugged on my cross. Heavenly Father, please help us.
Crow’s filmy gaze fell on the cross, as it always did. “God keeps so many secrets from us, doesn’t He? For a deity who claims to love His children so much, He’s pretty stingy.” About me, he told Alvarez, “This one’s the most deluded of all. Been driving us insane since she arrived a year ago.”
“What?” I yanked on the officer’s arm. He pushed my elbow behind my back and reached for my other wrist. “Crow’s the one who’s been here a year, working on a stupid portfolio. He thinks he can bring this hotel back to life so his demon girlfriend can give him secrets from the underworld. He’s a pet.”
Crow laughed to himself.
“Vale, don’t,” Wilky murmured.
“Crow, you’re the one who dragged us here,” Mori said in a grief-stricken voice. “Telling us this place needed us. Telling us we would all get something out of it. What this place needed was more death! All so your Lady could grow in strength. Because of you, Fae is dead!”
“Fae is dead, because she was greedy,” Crow hissed.
Mori ripped out of the officer’s stronghold and plunged into Crow, knocking him against the wall, pounding their fists into his cracked cheeks. Crow took each punch, but with each strike, Mori grew weaker until they were sobbing, and Alvarez pulled them apart.
