Vacancy & Ariel

by Lucius Shepard

  He flirts with the notion of calling the police, but what would be the point? If they’re alive, all it would achieve is to attract more attention to him and that he doesn’t need. If they’re dead and he calls, he’ll instantly become a suspect in multiple murders and they’d most likely pick him up. But he still has an out. He calls Marley. Voicemail. He leaves an urgent message for her to call him back. If he knew where her mother lived, the street address, he’d drive to Deland and pick her up, and they’d get the hell out of Dodge. Where they would go, that’s a whole other question, but at least they’d be away from Shalin and Bazit. That’s okay, that’s all right. Tomorrow will be soon enough.

  He tries Ashford a third time, to no avail, and lies down again. He doesn’t think he can sleep, but he does, straight through to morning, a sleep that seems an eventless dream of a dark, airless confine in which insubstantial monsters are crawling, breeding, killing, speaking in a language indistinguishable from a heavy, fitful wind, coming close enough to touch.

  Chapter 11

  IT’S NOT UNREASONABLE to think, Cliff tells himself, that Marley’s still into it with her mother and that’s why she hasn’t called; but it’s nine AM and he’s growing edgy. He calls the police, asks to speak with Sgt. Ashford, and is put through to a detective named Levetto who says that Ashford’s always late, he should be in soon, do you want to leave a message?

  “No, thanks,” says Cliff.

  Screwing up his courage, he does something he should have done last night—call the motel.

  “Celeste Motel,” says Bazit. “How may I be of service?”

  Cliff rasps up his voice to disguise it. “Number Eleven, please.”

  “Number Eleven is vacant, sir.”

  “I’m looking for some friends, the Ashfords. I could have sworn they were in Eleven.”

  A pause. “I’m afraid we have no one of that name with us. A Mister Larry Lawless and his wife occupied Number Eleven last night.” Cliff thinks he detects a hint of amusement in Bazit’s voice as he says, “They checked out quite early.”

  After trying Marley again, Cliff sits in his underwear, eating toast and jam, drinking coffee, avoiding thought by watching Fox News, when an idea strikes. He throws on shorts and a shirt, and heads for the arcade where he met Ashford the previous morning; he stakes out a stool at the counter, orders an orange juice from Kerman, and waits for Mary Beth to appear.

  Last night’s deluge has diminished to this morning’s drizzle, but the wind is gusting hard. It’s a nasty day. Churning surf ploughs the beach, massive, ugly slate-colored waves larded with white, like the liquidinous flesh of some monstrosity spilling onto shore, strands of umber seaweed lifting on its muddy humps. The bruised clouds bulge downward, dragging tendrils of rain over the land. A mere scatter of senior citizens are braving the weather; in the arcade, a handful of debased souls, none of them kids, are feeding coin slots with the regularity of casino habitués. If she’s alive, the chances of Mary Beth putting in an appearance are poor, but Cliff sticks it out for more than an hour, scanning every approaching figure, prospecting the gray backdrop for a glint of whitish gold with black roots. His thoughts grab and stick like busted gears, grinding against each other, and the low music of the arcade, a muttering rap song, seems to be issuing from inside his head.

  He reaches for his cell phone, thinking to try Marley, and realizes he has left it on the kitchen counter. He hurries back to the apartment and finds a message from Marley. “Hi, Cliffie,” she says. “I’ll be home soon. Mom’s no longer threatening suicide. Of course, there could always be a relapse.” A sigh. “I miss you. Hope you’re missing me.”

  The message was left five minutes ago, so he calls her back, but gets her voicemail. It’s twenty-three miles to Deland, a twenty-minute drive at Marley’s usual rate of speed. At worst, he expects her to walk through the door in a couple of hours. But two o’clock comes and she’s not yet back. He calls obsessively for the better part of an hour, punching in her number every few minutes. At three o’clock, he calls the police again and asks for Ashford. A different detective says, “I don’t see him. You want to leave a message?”

  “Is he in today?”

  “I don’t know,” says the detective impatiently. “I just got here myself.”

  Cliff is astonished by how thoroughly the circumstance has neutralized him. He knows nothing for certain. There’s no proof positive that Stacey is dead, no proof at all concerning the fates of Mary Beth and Ashford. There is some evidence that Jerry is involved in criminal activity, perhaps with the Palaniappans, but nothing you can hang your hat on. He has every expectation that Marley is safe, yet he’s begun to worry. He can’t raise the alarm, because no one will believe him and the police think he’s a murderer. If truth be told, he’s not sure he believes Shalin’s story—events have gone a long way toward convincing him, but it’s perfectly possible that she’s playing mind games with him and that’s all there is to it. When the DNA results come back, as they could any minute, at least according to Ashford, then there may be some proof, but if the DNA doesn’t match Stacey’s…Nada. Yet it’s the very nebulousness of the situation that persuades him that his life has gone and is going horribly wrong, that he’s perched atop a mountain of air and, once he recognizes that nothing is supporting him, his fall will be calamitous. He should do something, he tells himself. He should leave before the DNA comes back, pack a few things and put some miles between him and the Palaniappans whom—irrationally—he fears more than the police. He can call Marley from the road, though God knows what he’ll say to her.

  In the end, he takes a half-measure and drives to the cottage, deciding that he’ll pack and wait there for Marley to call. The surf in Port Orange is as unlovely as that in Daytona, the sky as sullen. Wind flattens the dune grass, and the cottage looks vacant, derelict, sand drifted up onto the steps and porch. When he unlocks the inside door, a strong smell rushes out, a stale, sweet scent compounded of spoilage and deodorizers. Eau de Cliff. He tiptoes about nervously, peering into rooms, and, once assured that no one is lying in wait, he grabs a suitcase and begins tossing clothes into it. In a bottom drawer, underneath folded jeans, he finds his old army .45 and a box of shotgun shells. The shotgun has long since been sold, but the .45 might come in handy. He inspects the clip, making certain it’s full, and puts it in the suitcase. Headlines run past on an imaginary crawl. Actor Slain In Deadly Shoot-out—details at eleven. He finishes packing, goes into the living room, and sits on the couch. A cloud seems to settle over him, a depressive fog. He can’t hold a thought in his head. It’s been years since he felt so unsound, as if the fluttering of a feather duster could disperse him.

  The overcast turns into dusk, and for Cliff it’s an eternal moment, a single, seamless drop of time in which he’s embedded like an ancient insect, suspended throughout the millennia. He feels ancient; his bones are dry sticks, his skin papery and brittle. The phone rings. Not his cell, but his landline. He reacts to it sluggishly—he doubts Marley would call him at this number—but the phone rings and rings, a piercing note that reverberates through the house, disruptive and jarring. He picks up, listens, yet does not speak.

  “Mister Coria? Hello?”

  Cliff remains silent.

  “This is Bazit Palaniappan, the owner of the Celeste Motel. How are you today?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I have someone here who wishes to speak with you.”

  Marley’s voice comes on the line, saying, “Cliff? Is that you?”

  “Marley?”

  “I’m afraid she’s too upset to talk further. I’ve arranged for her to have a lie-down in one of our bungalows.”

  “You fuck! You hurt her, I swear to God I’ll kill you!”

  Unperturbed, Bazit says, “Perhaps you could come and get her. Shall we say, within the next half-hour?”

  “You bet your ass I’m coming! You’d better not hurt her!”

  “Within the next half-hour, if you please. I can
’t tie up the room longer than that. And do come alone. She’s very upset. I don’t know what will happen if you should bring people with you. It might be too much for her.”

  His cloud of depression dissolved, Cliff slings the receiver across the room. He’s furious, his thoughts flurry; he doesn’t know where to turn, what to do, but gradually his fury matures into a cold, fatalistic resolve. He’s fucked. The trap that the Palaniappans set has been sprung, but Marley…He removes the .45 from the suitcase, sticks it in his waist, under his shirt, and thinks, no, that won’t be enough. They’ll be watching for him, they’ll expect a gun or a knife. His mind muddies. Then, abruptly, it clears and he remembers a trick he learned in blow-it-up school. He goes to the drawer in which he found the .45; he takes out two shotgun shells, hustles back to the living room, rummages through his desk and finds thumbtacks, strapping tape, and scotch tape. He makes a package of the shells, the scotch tape, a few thumbtacks, and a length of string; he drops his shorts and tapes the package under his balls. He’s clumsy with the tape—his hands shake and it sticks to his fingers. The package is unstable. One wrong move and everything will spill onto the ground. He adds more tape. It’s uncomfortable; it feels as if he shit his pants. He stands at the center of the room, and the room seems to shrink around him, to fit tightly to his skin like plastic wrap. He’s hot and cold at the same time. A breath of wind could topple him, yet when he squeezes his hand into a fist, he knows how strong he is. “I love you,” he says to the shadows, and the shadows tremble. “I love you.”

  Chapter 12

  CLIFF BURNS ACROSS the Port Orange Bridge. It’s not yet full dark when he reaches the Celeste, but the Vacancy sign has been lit. Across the way, with its strings of lights bobbing in the wind and clusters of balloons and people milling everywhere, the used car lot might be a tourist attraction, a carnival without rides. He pulls up to the motel office and spots Bazit standing at the window, his arms folded. Bazit must see him, but he remains motionless, secure—Cliff thinks—with his hole card. He jumps out, heads for the door and, as he’s about to open it, feels something hard prod his back.

  “You stop there,” says Au Yong, stepping back from him. She’s training a small silver handgun on him and scowling fiercely. Cliff’s right hand sneaks toward the .45, but Bazit emerges from the office and steers him into the shadows, where he pats him down. On discovering the .45, he makes a disapproving noise.

  “I want to see Marley,” Cliff says.

  “You will see her,” Bazit says. “In due course.”

  Au Young says something in Cantonese; Bazit responds in kind, then addresses Cliff in English. “My wife says for such a negligible man, you have a very powerful weapon.”

  “Fuck your wife,” Cliff says. “I want to see Marley now.”

  Bazit continues patting him down, but does not check under his balls. “You will see her,” he says. “And when you do, let me assure you, she will be unharmed. She is resting. Shalin is with her.”

  “You tell that bitch, if she…”

  Bazit slaps him across the face. “I apologize, sir, for striking you. But you mustn’t call my daughter a bitch or say anything abusive to my wife.”

  Again, he speaks to Au Yong in Cantonese—she looks at Cliff, spits on the grass, and goes into the office.

  “This way, please.” Bazit gestures with the .45, indicating that Cliff should precede him toward the rear of the motel, toward Bungalow Eleven. “Don’t worry about your car. It will be taken care of.”

  As he moves along the overgrown path that winds back among palmettos, Number Eleven swelling in his vision, Cliff’s throat goes dry and he feels a weakness in his knees, as might a condemned prisoner on first glimpsing the execution chamber. “Come on, man,” he says. “Let me see Marley.”

  “I hope you will find your accommodations suitable,” says Bazit. “At the Celeste, we encourage criticism. If you have any to offer, you’ll find a card for that purpose on the night table. Please feel free to write down your thoughts.”

  At the entrance to Number Eleven, he unlocks the door and urges Cliff inside. “There’s a light switch on the wall to your left. Is there anything else I can do before I bid you goodnight?”

  Cliff opens the door and steps in. Of the hundred questions he needs answered, only one occurs to him. “Was it your father who did the special effects for Sword Of The Black Demon?”

  “No, sir. It was not.” Bazit smiles and closes the door.

  Cliff switches on the overhead and discovers that the lights of Bungalow Eleven are blue. It doesn’t look as bad as he imagined. No dried blood, no spikes on the walls. No bone fragments or ceilings that open to reveal enormous teeth. He tries the door. Locked from without—it appears to be reinforced. He fends off panic and goes straight to work, dropping his shorts and unpeeling the tape that holds the package. The entrance to the room is a narrow alcove, perfect for his purposes. He tapes a shotgun shell to the back of the door, the ignition button facing out. Then he tapes a thumbtack to the wall slightly less than head-high, the point sticking through the tape, aligning it so that the door will strike it when opened. He has to use the string to sight the job, but he’s confident that he’s managed it. The bathroom door slides back into the wall, so it’s no good to him. He searches for a hidden entrance. Discovering none, he tapes the second shell to the front door, a foot-and-a-half lower than the first, and lines it up with a second thumbtack.

  An easy chair occupies one corner of the room. He drags it around, angles it so that it faces the door, and sits down. Booby-trapping the door has taken it out of him. He thinks that the adrenaline rush wearing off is partly to blame for his fatigue, but he’s surprised how calm he feels. He’s afraid—he can almost touch his fear, it’s so palpable—but overlying it, suppressing it, is a veneer of tranquility that’s equally palpable. He supposes that this is what some men feel in combat, a calmness that permits them to function at a high level.

  The blue light, which annoyed him at first, has come to be soothing, so much so that he finds himself getting sleepy, and he thinks that the Vacancy sign may have had a similar effect when he stared at it from the used car lot. He wants to stay alert and he looks around the room, hoping to see something that will divert him. The windows are covered by sheets of hard plastic dyed to resemble shades. Except for them, everything in Number Eleven is blue. The toilet, the rugs, the bed table coated in blue paint. The sheets on the bed are blue satin, like the witch queen’s sheets in the movie. That bothers him, but not sufficiently to worry about it. He tries to estimate how long he’s been here. Maybe thirty, forty minutes…The sheets seem to ripple with the reflected light, gleams flowing along them as if they’re gently rippling, and he passes the time by watching them course the length of the bed.

  He thinks this could be it, the sum of the Palaniappans’ vengeance—they’ve finished with their games, and in the morning they’ll reunite him and Marley. They appear to know everything about him, where he is at any given moment…all that. Perhaps they know he’s basically decent and that he didn’t intend to injure Isabel. That thought planes into others about Isabel, and those in turn plane into memories of the movie they made together. He can’t recall its name, but it’s right on the tip of his tongue. Devil Something. Something Sword. She flirted brazenly with him on the set, but there was an untutored quality to her brazenness, as if she didn’t have much experience with men and knew no other way to achieve her ends. He recalls seeing her off the set, in a Manila hotel, room service on white linen, high windows that opened onto a balcony, how she danced so erotically he thought his cock would explode, but once he was inside her, that part of him calmed down and he could go all night. It’s a wonder he didn’t notice she loved him, because all these years later he sees it with absolute clarity. She would lie beside him, stroking his chest, gazing into his eyes, waiting for him to reciprocate. He thought she was trying to impress him with her devotion, to trap a rich American for her husband, and, while that might hav
e been true, he failed to recognize the deeper truth that underscored her actions. It’s the same with Marley, and he understands that, at least in the beginning, he treated her with equal deference, dealing with her as one might a sexy puppy that was eager to bounce and play. It was convenient to feel that way, because it absolved him of responsibility for her feelings.

  Other memories obtain from that initial one, and he becomes lost, living in a dream of Isabel, and when a point of blue light begins to expand in midair, right in front of him, he thinks it’s part of the movie he’s replaying, part of the dream, and watches from a dreamlike distance as it expands further, unfolds and grows plump in all the right places, evolving into the spitting image of Isabel as she was in The Black Devil’s Sword or whatever, blue skin, black nipples, lithe and curvy, her secret hair barbered into exotic shapes, and she’s dancing for him, only this dance is different from the one she used to do, more aggressive, almost angry, though he knows Isabel didn’t have an angry bone in her body…it’s as though she has no bones at all, her movements are so sinuous and supple, bending backwards to trail her hair along the floor, then straightening with a weaving motion, hips and breasts swaying, a sheen of sweat upon her body as she flings her fingers out at him, like the queen…in the movie…when she danced…

  Cliff feels pain, not an awful pain, but pain like he’s never felt before, as if an organ of which he has been unaware, a special organ tucked away beneath the tightly packed fruits of heart, liver, spleen, kidneys, and intestines, insulated by their flesh, has been opened and is spilling its substance. It’s not a stabbing pain, neither an ache nor a twinge, not the raw pain that comes from an open wound or a burning such as eventuates from an ulcer; but though comparably mild, not yet severe enough to combat his arousal, it’s the worst pain he has known. A sick, emptying feeling is the closest he can come to articulating it, but not even that says it. He understands now that this is no movie and that something vital is leaking out, being drawn from his body in surges, in trickles and sudden gushes, conjured forth by blue fingers that tease, tempt, and coax. He tries to relieve the pain by twisting in the chair, by screaming, but he’s denied the consolation of movement—he cannot convulse or writhe or kick, and when he attempts to scream, a scratchy whisper is all he can muster. It’s not that he’s being restrained, but rather it seems that as the level of that vital essence lowers, he’s become immobilized, his will shriveled to the point that he no longer desires to move, he no longer cares to do anything other than to suffer in silence, to stare helplessly at the beautiful blue witch with full breasts and half-moon hips, sweat glistening on her thighs and belly, who is both the emblem and purveyor of his pain.