Jacaranda

by Cherie Priest

  All the padre said was, “Yes, there might be something left of Sarah. If so, I will shut her out. I won’t be long.”

  The Ranger asked if he needed any help.

  “Yes, I need someone to stay here, and make sure those doors stay shut, this time. David, George—put the beam back against them. I don’t think Vaughn will try to escape again,” he said of the now-unconscious man on the floor, lying in a puddle of his own vomit. “But someone else might.” His eyes narrowed toward the Alvarez mother and daughter—and then to Violetta, who had not joined them, but she still stared with awe and a touch of horror at the nun, who declined to address their fears.

  “Go on, if you’re going,” Sister Eileen said.

  So he went—the same admonition as before: “If I’m not back when the storm sets in again, you must shut the fire door and leave me out there.”

  Down a short corridor that led to the east wing, the fire door lever had been drawn down—and the door was hanging open. Not widely open, but ajar by about a foot…that was as far as the girl had cranked it back, before the nun had caught up to her.

  (Did Sister Eileen bite her? Had she left those awful injuries on the Alvarez women? Perhaps he did not want to know. Maybe he would not ask.)

  He slipped inside, into the darkened hallway without a hint of light. He hadn’t brought a candle. He had a feeling he wouldn’t need it—not when he could still look, and still listen. Besides, if Sarah was there, he trusted her to come and find him, just like Constance Fields.

  He closed his eyes. Exhaled. Opened them again.

  “Sarah?” he called quietly. His voice bounced back and forth between the walls, the ceiling, and all the closed doors. Again he could see outlines and shapes, not quite glowing around the edges, but discernable all the same. Behind him, there was still a little faint light from the lobby, peeking around the edge of the fire barrier…but it wasn’t enough to help him.

  Only God could help him now, or the Mother, if she chose to.

  “Sarah, are you here?”

  Beside him, sharp and sad: Yes.

  She was very close, and so he could see her a little, mostly in shades of gray and white, the contrast muddled in the dark, and in her death. Her eyes were empty and black, and her neck was crooked—her head held off to the right, and the sight of her was all the more jarring because of the angle.

  He couldn’t meet her gaze, not really. Not like that.

  He wanted to jump back away from her, but he planted his feet on the rug and tried to steady his breathing, to keep the fear tamped down. But if he’d ever been tempted to run screaming away in fright, surely this was the time—when the yellow-haired dead thing in a night dress lolled its head to one side, and then the other, loose as a wheel on a broken axle.

  He swallowed hard, forcing himself to hold his ground. “Sarah, you stayed.”

  I should have left, because I could have left. But I was so afraid, Father. And when I did this, she gestured toward her neck with one long, white hand. I broke the only vow I’d ever made. The only one that meant anything.

  “But…between us, the sister and I…we thought the hotel had killed you—like it killed Constance Fields, and the people before her.”

  She shook her head sadly, or she tried. It swayed back and forth, her neck rolling around her shoulder and back again.

  Until I took my own life, the hotel had nothing to keep me with. Now it makes me stay. Now it has that power. Look at me. Look at my choices, and look at what I’ve done. Look at what I’ve undone.

  “You left Tim…” he said thoughtfully. And then, with a sudden shock of absolute panic. “Oh God, where is Tim? Is he dead too? I haven’t seen him since he gave you the doll!”

  Nor have I, she said, sounding as sad and confused as when she was alive. But he is not dead, or else, I think…I think I would know. I think he’d come to me. The hotel doesn’t need for us to be alone, it just needs for us to serve.

  At the back of the hall, toward the rear exit all barricaded shut, he heard something click, shift, and pop.

  “What was that?”

  We can only serve.

  “We?”

  Emily is here too. She never left—I don’t know how, or why.

  “Miss Nowell is dead, too?”

  She also serves, yes.

  “You keep saying that—but what do you mean? What does the hotel want from you? Why does it collect you here, and keep you here even after death?”

  She sighed, long and low and slow. It was almost the sound of air leaving a corpse, a last breath drawn out for posterity. Behind her, another series of noises, in another room down the hall.

  We have to open it up. That’s what it wants—it wants to let the storm inside. The hotel and the storm…they’re working together. Two sides of the same penny, you understand? As above, so below. Isn’t that how they put it?

  “That is how the devil put it.” His voice was dry, and his ears still picked up the commotion, room by room. Outside, the wind was rising, and the rain was coming again—in fits and starts, but it’d be worse by a thousand-fold soon enough.

  I’m sorry, she said. Her broken, lopsided form retreated…skating slowly away, and growing fainter by the foot. You tried to help, and you couldn’t.

  “That’s not true,” he insisted. “I can still help—I can still stop this!”

  I’m sorry. But it’s coming around again.

  She was gone, vanished as if she’d never been there in the first place.

  “Wait, no!”

  The hotel replied with a shocking explosion—as every door on the floor flew open at once, smashing against the walls and letting in a dozen gusts of ocean-smelling air. The doors banged and flapped, and he knew without looking that likewise every window was open in every room. A sickening, rising pitch to the wind announced that his time was nearly up, as surely as the first-floor hallway was compromised…

  …and the floor above it, he was sure.

  Upstairs more doors yawned and smacked in the gusty hallway over his head, and he could only pray that the other fire doors had not been touched.

  And he could run.

  That was the other thing, and it was the only thing—before he was shut out in the lost corridor and the storm took him, too.

  The padre returned to the lobby, entering beneath the stairs just as the raindrops fell like hammers, battering the big doors and windows, rattling the nerves of everyone still trapped there, in the center. All eyes turned to him, and all candles flickered together in sympathy; but the lights held, and he told himself that it was a good sign—that if the light could hold, it might make a difference and the building might hold.

  Or at least the center.

  “I’ve closed the fire door,” he said, and he did not care for the shaky sound of his words. He cleared his throat and added, a little stronger, “But the east wing is probably lost. The doors and windows are open, and the storm has come inside.”

  The Ranger swore and nibbled at a cigarette. He picked up a candle, lit the edge of the papers, and sucked it until a hard red coal burned on the end. “Who the hell would do a thing like that?”

  “It was Sarah, and Emily Nowell. The hotel has taken them both, and now they serve it. I don’t know how much power they have—I don’t know how much help they need—but the Jacaranda wants them to fling it all open. The hotel wants to meet the storm, and be carried away by it.”

  “You don’t know that!” Mrs. Anderson shrieked, and when her husband tried to sooth her with a hand upon her arm, she turned to him and said, “He doesn’t know that! The hotel will stand, just fine!”

  “Not the east wing. But the north wing might, and the center is still sound. We must keep the faith, and keep the fire doors secured…and have faith that the hotel can stand. It will stand. And in the morning, we will be standing too.”

  No one questioned anything else he said, though he couldn’t imagine that anyone believed every word of it. If it was true, that everyone kne
w about all the deaths, and no one ever spoke of it…well, no one was speaking of it now, either. No one called him a maniac for suggesting that two dead women were trying to sabotage everyone else’s survival efforts; no one challenged his assertion that the hotel had a plan for itself.

  The room only fell into something like silence—as close to silence as it could fall, considering the pelting rain and the revival of the thunder outside.

  The storm cracked and rolled, shaking the lobby and threatening the candles, and the compromised east wing whistled like a flute. Glass broke and doors creaked, curtains flapped and were sucked out into the night. The building groaned, and another piece of roof peeled away with a hard, loud series of pops that let in more wind, more water.

  “This will be the worst of it,” the nun promised him. He hadn’t realized she was standing right beside him, having left the Alvarez women to collapse together, crying with or without her presence.

  “How do you mean?”

  “The eye of the storm—the walls around it, that’s where the storm is strongest. If we survive the next hour, we’ll survive the night. I’m sure of it.”

  “I’ll do my best to believe you. Tell me, Sister: do you know what became of Tim?”

  A look of horror crossed her face. “No!” she gasped quietly, taking him by the hand and drawing him closer, so that she might whisper the rest. “Good God, where could he have gone? I haven’t seen him since he left Sarah’s room, and he wasn’t anywhere in the hotel before we closed it. We searched! Everyone searched!”

  “Let us hope,” he whispered back to her, “that the boy evacuated with everyone else. No one has seen him, not even his cousin’s ghost. There’s nothing we can do for him now except pray for his safety, wherever he is.”

  She nodded and sighed, and the Ranger joined them, with a cigarette gripping the corner of his mouth.

  He reported, “No one’s turning on anybody, yet. That’s not much, but it’s something.”

  The nun gazed from face to face, taking stock of those who remained. She said, “Let us hope it remains that way. Tonight, the battles must all be waged against the hotel, and not against one another.”

  Juan Rios checked over his shoulder, where the lovely, terrible mosaic turned (or did not turn) on the floor between the staircase landings. “Vaughn said the hotel speaks to everyone, now, and Sarah’s spirit suggested the same thing. Has it spoken to either of you?”

  “I don’t know…” said the Texan slowly. “I’ve heard a voice, once or twice. Wasn’t sure what to make of it. Couldn’t understand it very well—something about the storm. Something about the ocean.”

  The nun agreed, “It has spoken to me, but…it’s as if someone is whispering on the other side of a closed door. I can’t understand what it says, or what it wants.”

  “Maybe it’s time to try speaking, rather than listening. We’ve asked our questions of everyone else; why not ask the hotel itself?”

  The nun and the Ranger looked at the padre with surprise, and no small bit of concern.

  “Do you really think that’s a good idea?” asked Korman. “In my experience, when something nasty starts talking…the best thing you can do is plug your ears. These things lie, padre.”

  “But even a lie is an answer,” he argued. “What else do we have, right now? Nothing but time, and apparently the hotel likes to talk. Let’s give it an audience, and see what it wants to say. Even if it’s nonsense, or some devious falsehood, it might be worth hearing.”

  They decided to speak with it together, just the three of them.

  The other men and women in the lobby were comfortably oblivious; they kept near the front of the large, lovely room, close to the doors and closer to the collection of candles—now burning lower, but augmented by the few Mrs. Alvarez had ultimately scavenged from the dining hall.

  If anyone heard what the trio was up to, no one paid attention.

  Perhaps no one cared.

  The nun, the padre, and the Ranger approached the mosaic on the floor.

  They stood at its edges and stared down at the swirled pattern, and now the padre thought that it did not merely spin, when he looked away. It also grew. The day he’d arrived, it’d been a patch between the staircase landings. Now it almost bridged the distance between them.

  He did not mention this to his companions. They’d probably noticed it already, and if they hadn’t, there was no sense in pointing it out. So the thing was growing, swelling in strength and size. Why shouldn’t it? The storm above was calling to it at least, and the dead were feeding it, at worst.

  One hungry vortex calling to another. One great evil feeding another.

  He shook those thoughts away. They weren’t helpful.

  Maybe the Jacaranda wouldn’t be helpful either, but it was worth trying. Anything was, when the storm’s eye-wall hammered the exposed east wing—tugging at the floors, picking them apart and whisking them away.

  So he stood at the edge as if it were a pool, and he might dip his toes in it.

  Looking down into the thing now, seeing it and knowing what it had done, and what it must be capable of…it did not seem like merely a pretty pattern on a lobby floor. It was so much more than a design made out of ceramic squares; it was a hole in the world, and he might fall in—should he lean too close. The vertigo shook him, left him with a dry mouth and a low, thrumming sense of anger that he couldn’t quite place. He didn’t know if the anger was his, or if it belonged to the hotel.

  So he asked it: “What do you want?” He cast the question into the hole, sending it all the way down to hell—if that’s where it went.

  He steeled himself and he Looked down into the spiral. He Listened for its response.

  The world shifted, the floor moved beneath him.

  I want what everything wants—to be free, and to be strong. I want to grow.

  The directness of the answer startled him, but almost any reply would have. He felt strange—off-kilter, drunk, or sick. It could have been simple proximity, or it could’ve been some change in the air pressure, brought about by the storm. It didn’t matter. He was dizzy, and his face was hot.

  “Did you hear that?” he asked the other two.

  Sister Eileen said, “I heard…something. But you caught it clearly?”

  He nodded, and wished he hadn’t. His head was full of springs, coiled too tightly. So he asked the vortex another question, the only other one he could think of. He asked it in Spanish, because neither of his companions understood the language—and if the hotel wished to speak to him alone, then he would speak alone to the hotel.

  “What are you?”

  To his surprise, it answered this one, too.

  It answered him at length, and with what felt like honesty, but might have been nothing more than a fairy tale.

  Like everything else, it began with a tree.

  Hundreds of years ago—but you’ve heard that part. A monument planted in sorrow, watered with tears, and it grew, and grew, and grew…its roots went down and its branches went up. While its branches reached only the sky, in time the roots reached someplace much farther away.

  Beneath your feet lies something very old, very vast. Something bigger than you can imagine, and more ancient than Christ, but your Bible does mention it, in passing. Your Good Book gave the old thing a name: It called the beast “Leviathan.”

  Now it sleeps beneath you—beneath the island, even beneath the ocean. It sleeps and it dreams, the old thing so great that its heart beats only once in a hundred years.

  The roots of the jacaranda tree reached all the way down to its resting place, drawn there by the tears and all the small griefs that were brought to it, over the ages. All the lovers ever parted by death came to this tree and told it their stories, and they fed it their tears; every mother who lost a baby; every father who lost a son in war; every orphan alone on the face of the earth, did bring his sadness to this tree. So in time, the roots went very deep indeed.

  For like calls t
o like, does it not? One small bit of sorrow finds other sorrow, and comforts itself. Feeds itself. And so it grows.

  Now imagine, if you can, the woe of the ages…of an exile coiled beneath the big round Gulf, dreaming of waking and seeing the stars again—watching them spin overhead, and seeing the other great spirals in the sky above, all of them spinning like the whirlpool, these distant places in heaven where everything spins and spins and spins.

  Heaven and earth both turn, Father. And so does hell.

  The padre’s mouth was very dry…he would’ve taken any drop of water, or any sip of spirits either—except that it would mean leaving the vortex, and not hearing the heavy, buzzing, humming low voice explain itself.

  (If indeed that’s what it was doing, when it might have only been spinning a lie.)

  As far as he could tell, the nun and the Ranger heard none of this—or if they did, they understood precious little. It was hurting him to listen so hard, but he couldn’t stop now, not when he had it talking. Not when it had him listening.

  “The deaths you’ve caused, they feed you like the tears fed the tree—is that right? You’re a carnivorous thing, at heart.”

  You also grow stronger when you consume. How is it different?

  “You’re feeding on…on lives. On people, and their souls.”

  No one here, who has ever come or gone, has been innocent. Grant that much, at least. Grant us that there is a pattern, and that it has been served by the very worst—by men and women who have cheated, lied, and broken holy vows. Like yourself, and like the Ranger.

  He flashed a quick look at the nun. Her eyes were closed.

  The hotel explained, Her vows were merely bent, not broken. She cannot be held here, but still she chooses to stay.

  Still in Spanish, still trusting that no one within earshot understood, he whispered: “What is she?”

  She is afflicted, it said, but offered nothing else.

  The padre thought about pressing the matter, but the storm was directly overhead—prying bricks loose and throwing them, pulling doors off hinges down in the open wing, and tossing them like skipping stones into the night. Time was not on his side.