by Ronald Malfi
On the other end of the line, the phone rang at least a dozen times before Dominic Maggio picked up. “H’lo,” Maggio growled in his typical disinterested tone.
“It’s Collie.”
“Where you at?”
“A hotel.” He knew better than to give Maggio anything more specific. Not that Collie was afraid of Dominic Maggio, the fat little fuck. Collie towered over the son of a bitch by a good fourteen inches, and he could probably bench-press the bastard one-handed. Still, he’d learned quickly in this business that the less anyone knew about you—or your whereabouts—the better.
“How’d it go?” Maggio said. He was eating something, his voice garbled, and Collie could hear car horns bleating in the background.
“It’s done.”
“Any difficulties?”
“None.”
“And the car?”
“Traded it in outside the county line. Switched the plates.”
“Yeah?” Maggio seemed impressed by Collie’s ingenuity. “Good deal, man. You need anything else?”
“The money?”
“It’s being delivered as we speak,” Maggio said. “As promised.”
Collie glanced at his wristwatch. It was 4:52 p.m. “I’m gonna call Leo in ten minutes.”
Maggio chuckled—a pathetic, wheezing sound that concluded in a series of sputtering coughs. “What’s the matter, Collie? You don’t trust me no more?”
“That would imply that I’ve trusted you in the past.” His fingers were filthy, black crescents of dirt under each fingernail. “Nothing personal.”
Collie hung up. He sat for several moments, drumming his dirty fingers on the tabletop, before picking up the telephone again and dialing zero.
“Front desk.” A woman’s voice, annoyingly nasal.
“Yeah,” Collie said, “this is Room 218. My TV ain’t working.”
“Is it plugged in, sir?”
From where he sat he could see the plug snaking out from behind the credenza where it fit into the wall socket.
“Of course,” he said. “Also, the lights don’t work.”
“What lights?”
“The room lights.”
“All of them?” The woman sounded distant and uninterested.
Collie glanced around. Other than the frosted dome ceiling fixture, he couldn’t see any other lights. Not even a lamp on the nightstand beside the bed.
“Yeah,” he said. “All of them.” He had no interest in dragging this conversation on any longer than it needed to be.
“We’ll send someone up in the next ten minutes, sir.”
Again, he glanced at his watch. It would give him enough time to grab a shower and clean up, then call Leo to make sure Maggio kept his word about the money.
Hanging up the phone, he scooted the chair away from the table—it banged against the wall at his back—and eased open the bathroom door. Ironically, the bathroom light worked just fine, although the bathroom itself was so egregiously filthy and unattended that he wished it hadn’t. The shower head was angry with rust and it looked like someone had recently whipped up a chocolate cake in the toilet. Collie turned on the water, which came chugging through the pipes and resounded in the walls, and let the tub clean itself out before he stripped from his clothes and crawled beneath the lukewarm spray.
While he washed, he thought about the man named Tom Browning, whom he’d murdered no longer than two hours ago. Tom Browning, who’d cried like a baby near the end. The whole drive out beyond the city, bound by ropes in the backseat of the car, the bastard had insisted he knew nothing about Maggio’s money. It wasn’t until Collie pulled off onto a dirt roadway that cut first through a swath of trees then alongside a field of overgrown bluegrass did Browning start peppering him with questions. Trembling, his voice screechy like a poorly tuned violin, Tom Browning began talking too fast from the backseat—where were they, what was going on, and for the love of God didn’t Collie believe him about the money?
“We’re getting out,” was all Collie had said. He climbed out of the car—one of Maggio’s Lincolns—and popped open the rear door. Browning slid out and collapsed onto the ground, his hands and ankles still lashed together.
“Collie—Collie, man—please—please—”
“Stop fucking whining, Tom.”
When he produced a boning knife from his boot, Tom Browning made a wet, choking sound in the back of his throat. And when Collie bent down toward him, Browning cringed. Collie merely cut away the ropes from Browning’s wrists and ankles.
“Up,” Collie said, replacing the knife with his Glock, which he directed down at the trembling, blubbering man on the ground.
“Collie, please—”
“Get up, Tom. I’m through fucking around.”
It wasn’t until Collie started walking the man across the field, the gun at his back, did Tom Browning admit he still had Maggio’s money. Like Niagara Falls, it poured out of him between sobs and hitching shoulders. And by the time they reached the excavated hole in the ground, Browning was crying freely.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have tried to rip him off,” Browning managed through his tears. “Tell Maggio, man. Tell him for me. Let him know. Let him know just how—”
Collie shot him in the left thigh. Tom Browning’s cries caused a great cloud of birds to burst from a distant tree and take off into the gunmetal sky.
Disgusted, Collie had driven one boot into Browning’s haunches. The man crumpled into the hole in the ground with a sickening, hollow thump.
“Collie!”
He tucked the gun back into his waistband and fished a shovel out from under the dense underbrush, where he had hidden it earlier that afternoon, after digging the grave.
While Tom Browning screamed and writhed in the hole, Collie began shoveling dirt onto him.
“Collie, man—please—no! No!”
Soon enough, Tom Browning’s screams died off.
Now, beneath the shuddering stream of the shower, Collie rinsed the dirt and grime out of his hair and off his flesh.
Then the lights went out.
Collie froze. Was it the hotel’s maintenance guy fooling with the circuitry?
“Hello?” he called. No one answered.
He shut off the water and wrapped a towel around his waist. Back out in the room, Collie expected to find someone in a tool belt fiddling with the electrical outlets, but the room was empty. And dark.
Collie dressed quickly in his clean clothes, pulling his wet hair back and tying it in a ponytail. Then he scooped the TV remote off the table and hammered the power button with his thumb over and over again, to no avail.
Suddenly feeling like an idiot, he realized it could just be the remote. He went to the TV itself and hit the power button. The TV did not turn on. Again, Collie struck the button, more forceful this time.
“What the hell…?”
The plastic panel beneath the screen now held the impression of his thumb. Reaching out, Collie pushed his index finger against the plastic housing of the TV set…and it indented like cheap plastic under the pressure. He tapped the screen to find it made not of a solid glass, vacuum-sealed tube, but of flimsy plastic coated in a sheen of reflective solvent so that it resembled glass.
The fucking thing was fake.
Reaching into the credenza, he grabbed the fake TV on either side and yanked it out of the unit. It withdrew without resistance, the plug popping right out of the wall. Practically weightless, Collie flung the hollow plastic box onto the bed. It was no different than the cardboard appliances used as set dressing in department stores.
He couldn’t help it. Collie uttered a laugh.
He went to the phone, first to call the front desk and commend them on their little practical joke, then—more importantly—to phone Leo and make sure Maggio delivered the money. But unlike before, this time when he brought the telephone to his ear, he heard no dial tone. Perplexed, Collie jabbed at the cradle but could not locate a dial tone. Chewing at hi
s lower lip, he gradually pushed down against the cradle with more and more force. The thing bent under his finger, creasing. It was made of the same cheap plastic as the phony television set.
But how is that possible? I’ve already used the phone…
He lifted the phone—it was practically weightless—and turned it upside down to examine the guts.
There were no guts.
The telephone was a hollow shell.
Okay, he thought, setting the phone back down. What is this bullshit going on? Somebody fucking with me?
This was no longer funny.
He dropped down onto the edge of the bed and climbed into his boots. He’d go back down to the lobby and demand to know just what the hell was going on. If it was some sort of elaborate joke, they’d picked the wrong son of a bitch. And he’d already used the phone, so someone must have crept in here while he was showering to replace it with the fake one…
Collie froze. He felt his bowels clench. For several seconds he couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing…or, more specifically, what he was not seeing.
The hotel room door was gone.
No, not just removed, pried from the hinges, leaving in its absence a rectangular portal that looked out onto the second-floor hallway. No—the door was gone, and there was nothing left behind but an unmarred panel of drywall. As if the doorway had never existed.
Motionless, Collie sat and stared at the wall for what seemed like an eternity. His mind was blank with confusion. Minutes or hours could have passed.
Beginning to sweat, Collie eventually eased up off the bed. The fake TV rolled soundlessly onto the floor. He went to the blank spot on the wall where the doorway had been—where it should have been—and stared at it in disbelief. He reached up and touched the wall, feeling for seams that were not there, searching for evidence of trickery in the sheetrock. But nothing…nothing…
Can’t be. No way.
He stepped away from the wall, scrutinizing the wainscoting, the trim along the floor. The TV and phone were one thing—items easily manipulated—but the fucking door…?
“Hey!” His voice echoed in the small room. “Hey! Hello?” He banged a fist on the wall—the spot where the doorway had been and should have been.
Temper rising, he turned away from the wall, running his hands over his hair, trying desperately to shake reality back into place.
Across the room, the bathroom had vanished. He stood facing another plain, blank wall.
No fucking way. I was just in there.
“Okay, okay, okay.” He dropped back down on the bed. The springs squealed. “Get a grip, man. Get a hold of yourself.”
Panic strummed freely through him now. He kept trying to think of the simplest explanation, the simple little thing he had so obviously overlooked, the thing that would explain away this whole mess. Drugs? Hallucinatory flashbacks? Truth was, he hadn’t smoked a joint in over a month, and hadn’t done anything harder than pot in seven or eight years.
“Help!” He lashed his foot out and kicked the credenza. “Anyone hear me? Hello? Any—”
He jerked his head to the window. The curtain was drawn but he could still see a glimpse of fading daylight through the purse in the fabric. Launching himself off the bed, he nearly flung himself at the window, swiping away the curtains…only to discover, with unfathomable horror, that the window was no longer there. Taped to the wall behind the curtain was a poster of a tropical island beach, crystal clear waters and palm trees bowing across the flaming disc of the sun. Visit Hawaii, it said in neon script at the bottom.
“What…the…” The words stuck to the roof of his mouth. He slammed both hands against the poster, hoping without faith that it would tear away and his hands would break through the glass on the other side. But there was nothing but solid wall on the other side of the poster. Frantically, Collie tore down the poster, balling it up in his fists, revealing more and more wall with each strip he tore away, his horror mounting with each exposed section of wall.
Shuddering, he dropped the crumpled bits of poster to the floor. “Think this through, think this through…there’s gotta be some…some explanation…”
But what was it?
He took a step backward then, only to trip over the corner of the bed and topple to the floor. Rolling over, he noticed the bed had shifted away from the wall…as if to creep up on him, as if to attack…
But no—not only was that utterly absurd, it wasn’t even true, because the far side of the bed was still against the wall. Which meant the bed hadn’t moved.
Which meant the walls were closing in.
Okay. Stop. Wait. His thoughts coming in Morse code. Let’s not lose it completely. Let’s not start thinking the fucking walls are closing in. You’ve just been stressed lately. That’s all this is. Stress. Overworked. What you need is to get a good night’s sleep then think about taking a vacation. A cruise, maybe. Ten days in the Caribbean.
But thinking of the Caribbean made him think of the Visit Hawaii poster, which caused fresh panic to rise up in him. He found it suddenly difficult to breathe, the air claustrophobic and unventilated, stagnant—
Ventilation, he thought. Air vents.
There was a narrow iron grate in the ceiling. Trembling, Collie fished around in his duffel bag until he located his knife. Then he dragged the desk chair directly beneath the vent, and stood on it. Holding one hand over the grate, he could feel no air—hot nor cold—coming through.
“Hey!” he shouted into it. “Anyone!” His voice was flat, toneless. There was no echo.
No. Please, no…
Hand shaking, it took him several attempts to fumble the screws out of the vent plate with the knife blade. Finally, the iron covering fell away, rebounding off the chair and thumping solidly to the carpet. What he hoped to find, of course, was a darkened, insulated channel of ductwork. But what he found was simply a rectangle recessed about an inch and a half into the ceiling, the inlaid portion painted black.
Defeated, Collie practically melted off the chair. To his increasing horror, he found that the room had become even smaller in the minute or so he’d been up on the chair: the foot of the bed was nearly touching the credenza now, and there was no more room between the wall and the table for Collie to slide the desk chair back from where he got it. Even the ceiling seemed closer to the top of his head, as if it had lowered itself a couple of inches…or perhaps the floor had risen beneath him?
Damn it, if only he had—
He had a gun.
“Shit, yeah,” he nearly growled. The hint of a smirk overtook his features. “Fucking blow my way out.”
Somehow, they’d managed to fuck with him and seal up the door and the window. But the goddamn hallway was still there, just on the other side of the wall. Surely—
Not wasting any more time, he pulled the handgun and the magazine from the duffel bag. He slammed the mag into the hilt then chambered a round. Clasping the gun with both hands, he stood directly opposite the spot on the wall where the door had been and leveled the gun.
He fired one hesitant round. In the close quarters, the sound was nearly deafening. Tasting cordite on the roof of his mouth, he squinted at the dime-sized hole in the drywall. A colorless tendril of smoke unfurled from it, wafting toward the ceiling. He’d hoped to see a beam of hallway light pierce through the bullet hole. But that was not the case. Leaning forward, still squinting, Collie could see only darkness. With one finger, he chipped away bits of plaster until a perfect square inch of what was—impossibly—a wall of steel revealed itself to him. Embedded in it was the bullet.
A sinking resignation overtook him. Suddenly, the handgun weighed a thousand pounds, drawing Collie’s arm down toward the floor.
“Fuck it,” he muttered, tossing the gun onto the bed. The bed, of course, was closer to him than before. In fact, the foot of the bed was pressed firmly against the credenza now; Collie would have to crawl over the bed to get to the other side of the room now, if he’d wanted—
Shaking, bleary-eyed, Collie glanced up. The ceiling had drawn even closer. Haltingly, Collie brought up one hand and, without even having to fully extend his arm, was able to touch the ceiling. As if shocked by electrical current, he recoiled and buried his hand under one sweaty armpit.
A sound erupted from him—a strangled “Uh!”—and his legs suddenly gave out. He collapsed to the floor, the wall shoving against his back and shoulders, the bed encroaching on his knees. He pulled his legs up under him, suddenly able to feel the walls creeping closer and closer, closing in on him, suffocating him. He did not have to lean forward much at all to grab hold of the handgun on the bed. With a shaking hand, he brought the gun to his temple and squeezed his eyes shut. Hot tears slid down his cheeks. Eyes closed, he imagined he could actually hear the walls closing in—a vague shushing susurration, like sandpaper grazing along a deck railing.
Collie pulled the trigger…and the gun’s handle crumpled under the force, another fake plastic prop.
He startled himself by laughing, and chucked the useless gun only a few feet until it struck the far wall and dropped down behind the bed.
None of this is real, none of this is real, none of this is real—
He climbed up onto the bed, having to stoop slightly so that he wouldn’t graze his head on the ceiling. He crawled to the center of the bed and, folding his hands atop his chest, blinked the tears from his eyes. The ceiling was a mere two feet from pressing down on his nose. Every corner of the bed was buckling now, the walls drawing in all around it, the bedsprings creaking and groaning and sounding like the inner workings of some giant clock coming undone. Directly above, the ceiling descended in almost imperceptible increments. Then it grew too dark for him to see anything at all.
Collie Burgess began to laugh. He brought his hands up and pressed both palms flat against the ceiling. The wall at the foot of the bed came up to greet the soles of Collie’s boots while the bed’s headboard put pressure on the crown of his skull. Still laughing uncontrollably, tears spilling hotly down his face, he pounded his fists against the ceiling and kicked his boots against the wall. A second later, he could no longer keep his legs straight…but the ceiling was too low now for him to bend them at the knees. A reverse pushup, the ceiling pressed his elbows down into the mattress, the plaster pressing down against the tip of his nose. The headboard began to splinter…then, distantly, something else cracked.
