Shadows & Tall Trees

by Shadows

  It all happened so slowly in the quiet room that it had the same blurred quality as his dreams. The urn rolled to its side, silently tumbling toward the ground, knocking against the piano lid on its way down and releasing an enormous cloud of ash.

  The particles swirled into the air, caught in a whirlwind, and for a brief moment Prue stood before them. She looked at Terry and opened her mouth into an exaggerated smile.

  The house, he realized, created the silence for other sounds. Sounds suppressed or obscured, dormant or tacit. Sounds long dead, buried deep in the heart, called back again to speak out, amplified by the vacuous silence of the room.

  Ava had tried to warn him, though she’d been bound to silence in her role as dutiful daughter. She’d always been caught between two parents and Terry felt a sudden overwhelming sense of sadness for his daughter.

  Prue stopped smiling. Her mouth opened wider and wider, her face collapsing into a yawning, swirling hole. Terry stared into the hollow and saw only the darkness at the heart. A low rumbling like distant thunder emerged from the pit of it, then a cacophonous melancholy strung out into the room. He’d been the author of those sounds he’d realized, of her anguish and grief. But it wasn’t too late—

  “Prue,” he tried to say, but the words couldn’t compete with the piercing discord. He placed his hands to his ears. The notes became louder and louder, starting to come together, flowing into the familiar melody. Climbing higher and higher, as if to the gods.

  The crescendo surged into the room from her mouth, spiralling around as if in flight. The music broke against him like a wave, and in awe he opened his mouth dumbfounded and swallowed it all down.

  The dead have no choice but to listen, but Prue always answered back. He should have known she’d want to have the last word.

  The sound of the urn shattering broke Ava from her trance. She glanced at the shattered remains on the floor then looked toward her father.

  “Dad? Dad?”

  Terry could feel the ash in his throat, silted around his larynx. A cloud of ash and dust rested in his gullet. He reached for his voice but felt only his absence. Yet in his mind all he could hear was music.

  NIGHT PORTER

  R. B. RUSSELL

  Marianne had no choice but to take the position of night porter at the St. Denis Hotel; it was either that or have her job-seeker’s allowance cut because she had already turned down too many other offers of work. She tried to tell herself that if she didn’t think too much about the unsociable hours it really wasn’t such a bad situation. Her shifts were from ten in the evening to seven in the morning, six days a week, and she reasoned that for several hours each day, especially those towards the end of her shift, she would be left alone to read; nobody would be looking over her shoulder.

  Reading was what Marianne liked to do. Most of the jobs she had been offered would have reduced the time she could spend with her nose in a book (as her mother always said). Working as a night porter was a compromise she was willing to attempt, even if the manager, Mr. Lane, had been very uncertain about hiring a woman for the job. His fears appeared to be justified during her very first shift; at three in the morning a group of eight men, all drunk, tried to return to two rooms that had been booked for four people, and they became abusive when Marianne refused to let them all stay. She had been told by Mr. Lane to use her initiative, but she had also been warned not to do anything to put herself, or other guests, in danger. Marianne told the drunks that she would telephone for permission to let them in, but instead, she called the police. As the local station was just around the corner in Dern Street, the incident was cleared up surprisingly quickly. Quite where the men were taken away to didn’t concern her; everything was in order once more.

  On her second night Marianne booked an elderly couple into a double room just after midnight, only to have the woman appear an hour later to report that her husband had died. It was a heart attack, apparently, and entirely natural, but it still shook Marianne.

  And on her third night working at the St. Denis, a guest set light to their bedding at two in the morning. More damage was caused by the Fire Brigade than by the fire itself, and evacuating the other guests caused chaos. Marianne stayed on after her shift to help to clean up, and for the following week there seemed to be no end to the work required to set everything straight again. She had to admit to herself that she had certain obsessive-compulsive tendencies; she hated disorganization and mess.

  Marianne couldn’t help wondering what might happen next, having called out the emergency services three times in her first three nights, but after those incidents everything seemed to go quiet. For the following few weeks the guests were all well-behaved and there were no dramas. A number of odd characters passed through the hotel, but after a while she failed to notice or even remember the more eccentric guests; they became simply names that she would enter into the register, faces she would never see again. The job was a compromise, but one that she could live with because every night she managed to find several uninterrupted hours to read. The only time she had to put her book down was when, once an hour, she was expected to walk up and down the corridors, on the three floors, just to make sure that everything was in order. She dutifully padded around the small hotel seeing nothing untoward, and hearing, at worst, the muted sounds of sexual activity, loud snoring, or the television playing quietly in the room of an insomniac. She would return to the book she had left at the front desk, and would continue to read, undisturbed, for another fifty-five minutes, until she would have to walk around the corridors once again.

  And then, two months into her job, at about half past one in the morning, while she was reading a Ruth Rendell novel, a large and expensive silver Mercedes pulled into the small car park in front of the hotel. A woman got out of the front of the vehicle and helped a young man from one of the back doors. She almost carried him across the car park and into the reception.

  “A room for the night,” said the woman, who was rather too well-presented in her sharply-pressed grey trouser suit, and too perfectly groomed for that time of the morning. Marianne had noticed that all of their usual guests would look rather uncared-for by the early hours.

  “Just the one bed,” the woman added. “My friend is rather tired and a little emotional. He won’t be able to go home until the morning.”

  “Don’t you think he ought to go to a hospital?” asked Marianne. There was nothing obviously wrong with him, but he appeared to be confused. He was not necessarily drunk, but it struck Marianne that he might be on drugs. He also looked a great deal younger than his companion, which seemed odd. His “supporter” had to be in her fifties, if not older.

  “No, he’s fine,” said the woman. “Nothing that a decent night’s sleep won’t cure. How much is a room?”

  “£60, with breakfast.”

  “I really do just want to go to bed,” said the young man suddenly. “I feel a little wobbly on my feet.”

  “Look, here’s a nice round £100 in cash,” said the woman. “I’ll happily pay the extra because there’s a chance he might sleep in tomorrow and I don’t want any fuss if he does. He’ll miss breakfast, I’m sure, but he’s bound to wake up and clear out before anyone needs to clean the room.”

  Marianne wanted to say no, sensing trouble, but didn’t feel confident enough to turn them away.

  “Is there a problem?” asked the woman.

  “No, that will be fine,” replied Marianne, deciding that the risk was worth taking. However, she insisted on seeing identification for the guest, and from the woman who was paying.

  Marianne told Miss Fisher that she could take Mr. Charles up to 34. It was the room that Mr. Lane said should be used by guests who looked likely to make any kind of disturbance. It was the only bedroom in the hotel without any immediate neighbours, and was one of the few that had not been recently refurbished. The young man was helped up the stairs by his unlikely companion, and Mariann
e resolved that she would give them only a couple of minutes before going to check that nothing untoward was taking place. In her mind she uncomfortably played out scenarios involving Rohypnol and rape, but just as she was about to go up, Miss Fisher came back downstairs. Marianne was assured that Mr. Charles was fine, and the woman left.

  Marianne returned to her Ruth Rendell novel, but found it hard to concentrate. She wondered whether she hadn’t read too much modern detective fiction. Miss Fisher and her friend had worried Marianne, but she couldn’t really explain why. She remembered that the extra £40 in the till needed to be either accounted for or taken as a tip, and in the end she decided to have it for herself. She had earned it in those two minutes when she had worried what might be happening in room 34.

  The incident of the “tired and emotional” guest and her “friend” vaguely troubled Marianne all day. When she arrived at work the following evening, she asked the manager:

  “Was everything alright after last night?”

  “Fine. Any reason it shouldn’t be?”

  “A young man was brought in by a friend and he seemed the worse for wear... I nearly said ‘no’, but in the end I put him in room 34.”

  “I’ve not heard of any problems.”

  And so began an ordinary, uneventful evening. Marianne was steadily busy until one o’clock but there had been nothing demanding to attend to; in between guests coming and going she had tidied up the reception area and the office. Once it was quiet she returned to her Ruth Rendell paperback and the rest of her shift slipped by without her really noticing it.

  Marianne had the following night off work. She kept to her usual routine, going to bed at seven in the morning and getting up again at two in the afternoon. Over the past few months she had become increasingly frustrated by living with her mother, and had considered moving out. She was finally earning some money and could probably pay rent for a room somewhere, or even a small flat. However, now that her hours didn’t coincide so frequently with her mother’s, she was more content with the present arrangement.

  She read during the afternoon, and went out just before her mother returned from work. Marianne had an hour to browse in a local bookshop before it closed, and finding a Henning Mankell paperback she hadn’t read before, she decided to treat herself to dinner in a local pub. A regular wage was still a novelty, and it felt wrong to pay for a meal when her mother would have been happy to cook for her. However, it felt good to be out, and she started to read her book as she waited for her food, and then as she ate.

  Marianne was interrupted just as she was finishing her meal; some old school friends had arrived to celebrate a birthday, and she stayed drinking with them until after closing time. Before she had taken her job as night porter she would have declined the invitation to go on to a club, but she was still wide awake, and they spent the rest of the evening in The Milky Way on Mill Street. Marianne would have liked to have found somebody to take home, and once again regretted not having a place of her own. However, relationships were going to be even harder to find now that she kept the hours she did.

  At work the next night it was very quiet, with very few guests booked into the hotel, and all of them back quietly in their rooms by eleven, which was how Marianne liked it. She tidied up the reception area and wiped down the tables and the insides of the windows. It had turned cold and there were occasional snow-flurries outside, which seemed to keep people off the streets. When everything was tidy, Marianne sat at the counter and continued reading her Henning Mankell paperback.

  She had walked the corridors twice that evening, and was back at the reception desk with her book when she happened to look up and stare out of the glazed front door. She was wondering whether the settled snow really amounted to even a centimetre when the Mercedes drove into the car park. She recognized it as the expensive silver model that had brought Mr. Charles as an overnight guest only the week before. Once again, the older woman got out of the driving seat and helped somebody else out of the car. As had happened the previous week, she had to support this second person as they made their way to the front door.

  “Miss Fisher,” said Marianne in her most neutral, professional voice.

  “Good evening. You were on the desk last week, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, when you paid for a room for Mr. Charles.”

  “That’s right, and I can’t believe that I’m in a similar situation tonight. . . My friend’s name is Fitzpatrick. He’s had a very, very long day. I made the same mistake as with Mr. Charles of taking him out to a restaurant rather than bringing him straight here. . . He really will be no trouble.”

  “I would rather not book him in, not in this state.”

  “But you let my other friend stay.”

  “I did, but I shouldn’t have done.”

  “Was he any trouble?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then. Mr. Fitzpatrick is just the same; tired and a little drunk.”

  Marianne could not make up her mind what to do. During her job interview Mr. Lane had put various awkward scenarios before Marianne and he had obviously been pleased by her common-sense replies. This wasn’t as clear-cut a situation as any she had been asked about, though, and she hesitated.

  Miss Fisher had to prompt her again for a decision.

  “Room 34 is available,” Marianne agreed reluctantly. “That will be £60. I will need to see identification, as before.”

  “Of course.”

  Miss Fisher smiled, but Marianne did not feel able to trust the woman. She recognized her own prejudice against this self-confident older woman, with her heavy make-up and expensive clothes. And she hated herself for agreeing to do as the woman asked. While Miss Fisher took Mr. Fitzpatrick up to his room, Marianne went to put the cash in the till and found that she had, again, been paid £100 in notes. This time she put the difference into the charity box.

  As before, Miss Fisher was back down again in less than a couple of minutes. Once the Mercedes had driven away Marianne went upstairs and stood outside the door of number 34, listening, but she could not hear a sound. The young man was probably asleep, or trying to get to sleep, but this time Marianne knocked. She had decided that she would have to be honest and say that she was concerned; worried because he had looked so ill. It might get her into trouble, disturbing a guest, but her conscience insisted that she had to take the risk.

  There was no answer. Marianne knocked once more. It was still strangely quiet, so she went down to the office and made a new electronic card key. After knocking again at the door of room 34 and still receiving no reply, she unlocked it and walked inside.

  Marianne was immediately hit by an icy cold. Her first thought was that Fisher had left the window open to help the young man sober up, but in the streetlight that flooded into the room Marianne could see the window was closed. The room was empty. Nor was Fitzpatrick in the en suite bathroom.

  Marianne checked the window, wondering if the young man had climbed out of it, but it was firmly locked from the inside. Anyway, there was quite a drop to the street below, and down on the pavement there were no footprints in the snow.

  Fitzpatrick couldn’t have passed Marianne on the stairs, and the lift hadn’t been used. The disconcerted night porter went back down and looked at the security tapes in the office. They showed that the young man had not come back through the lobby at any time; he had simply disappeared.

  She couldn’t decide what to do. She considered calling the police, but where was the evidence of foul play? The guest was free to leave whenever and however he chose to, and the fact that she had not seen him go could always have been her mistake.

  While she tried to decide what to do, Marianne made sure that her note of the name and address of Miss Stephanie Fisher was recorded legibly, and as an afterthought she made a separate note for herself. She told herself that she was being unreasonably over-careful, but in the office she played back the digi
tal recording from the security camera in the car park and took down the registration number of the silver Mercedes. Just to be sure, she copied the file containing the footage from the front desk camera into a new folder on the computer; she did not want it to be erased after a couple of days.

  Marianne found it impossible to get back to her Henning Mankell book. It suddenly grated on her that the novel was set in Sweden during a heat-wave, while in Britain it was snowing. She was also annoyed to discover that she had previously been reading the Mankell books “out of sequence”. But the cause of her discontentment wasn’t really the book.

  “I don’t know,” said Mr. Lane simply. “I asked the cleaner and she doesn’t remember having had to do anything in room 34 for weeks. To be honest, I’m not going to worry. Your Miss Fisher has paid the bills and nobody’s done anything wrong. Although we can’t think of an explanation for a disappearing guest, that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”

  “If she comes in again, wanting a room for another young man, I’ll refuse to book them in. And I’ll call the police.”

  “If you really think there’s something illegal going on, by all means tell them to try another hotel.”

  And that is exactly what Marianne suggested when Miss Fisher arrived the following week. Once more it was a young man she brought with her. They had all been the same kind of pretty-boy that annoyed her; she preferred her men a little more, well, masculine. They had all been under the influence of drink or drugs, and Marianne had read enough crime novels to be able to imagine all manner of reasons for Fisher dumping them at the hotel. They could well have been robbed or abused. Prostitution was possible. The only part of the whole story that Marianne did not understand was how the previous guest had managed to disappear from his room, and why.

  “Which hotel do you suggest?” Miss Fisher asked, pleasantly enough.

  It was three in the morning and, although it wasn’t snowing this time, it was bitterly cold outside. The man was even younger than the previous two, perhaps even younger than Marianne herself. She was uncomfortable when she realized that she actually felt something maternal or protective towards him, and Marianne asked herself if turning him away was the best thing for his safety. If she booked him in, then at least she would make sure that this time she kept a close eye on him. She would put him into a different room from where the only other way out would be though a window into an inner courtyard.