by Jason Arnopp
CHAPTER NINE
Bad things happened since I last wrote.
Blood all over these sheets.
Blood all over me.
I need help.
I keep expecting to hear the grunts of LAPD officers out in the corridor. Expecting the door to burst inwards.
It took so much focus to call Sherilyn Chastain on the phone. My hands have this Parkinson’s quake, and when she picked up I could barely talk properly.
In the back of my mind, those infected words kept going round and round. Those words that wanted to splurge out through my mouth. Out through my fingertips on to the keyboard, then on to the screen.
The thing wants me to let go and just type those words forever. This is worse than drug addiction. Surely you can only carry such a weight for so long before your knees buckle. But I must not bend.
I won’t get the better of myself! I won’t.
Sherilyn stayed calm on the phone, which really helped. She kept her voice all steady and told me to breathe deep.
She knew all this would happen. She must have, because she tried to warn me. Why didn’t I listen when she told me to abandon the Mimi Experiment? Because I’m a fucking idiot and I’ve brought all this on myself. And others. Oh God, oh God.
Between some of these keys – between the Q and the W, and the K and the L – there are these little canals of blood. Beneath them all runs a lake. This whole thing may as well be written in blood, ha ha! Laughing feels good, feels important, got to play it down, got to stay fucking calm here.
I cannot let me get the better of myself.
Sherilyn said she’d take the next plane over. I was so pathetically grateful I cried.
And while I wait, I’m going to write exactly what went down. Because no matter what happens to me now, there has to be a record. And I’m afraid this thing inside will regain full control, this time forever. If that happens, I’ll have no objectivity left. I’ll be a big bag of meat writhing around in a secure facility, screaming those words and nothing else.
Up until now, I’ve described real events while distorting certain truths.
I’ve played down the drugs.
I’ve made no mention of the fear, the tears, all that slow-boil nausea in my guts.
I haven’t told you the real reason I’m writing Jack Sparks on the Supernatural.
Let me go back to what happened after I found the boiler room. Three, maybe four nights ago? Since then, I haven’t been able to write anything up because it’s been Mimi during the day, Bex at night.
I have to relive exactly how I felt and thought at the time, no matter how stupid and blinkered it now seems. But now I can be honest, both with you and with myself. There’s been so much I haven’t been willing to admit even to myself. Bravado may feel like a shield, but when you’re telling yourself lies, it becomes a prison.
I really hope this writing focus keeps me stable for the next twenty-four hours, until Sherilyn gets here. It may also help me process all that has happened.
And the thing inside had better stay hidden, or I won’t hesitate to use the blade again.
‘Tell me why I shouldn’t dial 911, you little cock-sucker.’
Marc Howitz is sharp and angular, from his attitude to those potato-peeler cheekbones. This room is power drunk, even for a hotel manager’s office. Marble desk, cold marble floor, everything else varnished and polished to within an inch of its life. Sitting there in his Versace, the guy thinks he’s Scarface.
Dawn light bleaches its way across soulless wallpaper. That jobsworth Brandon brought me straight here after finding me in the basement, so I’ve had no time to dream up any bullshit to feed Howitz. I’m still utterly stunned by the video’s boiler room just so happening to be tucked away in the bowels of this hotel. I feel afraid and confused, just like Tony Bonelli.
Was that really him on the phone last night? Of course not. Yeah, just keep telling yourself that.
I exaggerate to Howitz how I’ve spent months trying to track down the origin of the YouTube video, then lie about how ‘sheer gut instinct’ led me to the Castle’s basement tonight. When Howitz realises I’ve hit the end of the story, he leans back in his brown leather manager’s chair and chews it over. His mouth literally chews. He’s drawing this out, enjoying it.
‘I’m disturbed,’ he says, his voice made of ice, ‘that somebody filmed in an extremely private area of our hotel without permission. And you say it’s some kind of . . . ghost deal. Do I look like I believe in ghosts?’
I tell him I don’t believe in them either. I rub tiny pieces of basement grit out from between my toes, hoping he doesn’t notice my grey footprints on his nice floor. I also hope he can’t smell my booze-pickled breath or see coke flakes in my nose hair. You didn’t really believe I’d shunned cocaine since rehab, right? Since Italy it’s been every day, getting worse and worse. This week, I’ve been starting before lunch.
When he asks to see the video, I feed him the Google keywords. He sags and rotates ninety degrees to his monitor, aggrieved that there’s no aide present to do this tiresome manual work on his behalf.
Just before he clicks ‘Play’, I ask him to tell me if he hears any words on the soundtrack. Because that’s something else I didn’t tell you, reader – no one else can hear those three words. Just me. I didn’t tell you, because I thought I was going mad. I could hardly avoid telling you about Maria Corvi in Hong Kong because it was such a pivotal moment, but somehow those three demonic words were worse. More unnerving. Insidious. And now that I’ve gone mad and everything’s gone so badly wrong, it really doesn’t matter any more. (Eleanor: please forget what I said earlier about deleting those three words from the book. I’m sorry. And for the record, I’m really very sorry for the way I’ve treated you.)
‘Adramelech,’ says the voice on the video, loud and clear. The voice that sounds like Maria Corvi.
Howitz says nothing about ‘Adramelech’ or ‘Mephistopheles’ or ‘Baphomet’, because of course he doesn’t hear them.
‘“Oh God, this is it”,’ he announces at one point. ‘I heard someone say, “Oh God, this is it”.’
‘Yeah,’ I say, downcast.
Howitz talks at me, but I’m too busy wondering yet again how it’s possible for audio on a video to only be heard by me. I’m wondering if there might be any other people on the planet who could hear this. Maybe people with the same rare blood type? What bullshit. I don’t even know what my blood type is.
‘Open your fuckin’ ears, Mr Sparks. I said that this most certainly is our boiler room area on the video.’
‘Thank you for confirming that,’ I say, trying to sound patient. Yearning for another line, just to keep me awake. A busy day lies ahead.
‘So you don’t know who shot it?’ says Howitz. ‘Because it would have involved trespassing, just as you did tonight.’
‘Let’s build on our common goals: we both want to find out who shot this thing. But I’ll need your help.’
Howitz smacks the flat of his palm against the desk. ‘Trespassing is a felony. For all I know, you could have intended to blow up my hotel.’
My brain stalls, searching for a way to reroute his power-trip hysteria. ‘What if one of your staff shot the video? You must have at least one budding film-maker. Maybe an actor? Someone who would break your rules in a heartbeat if it meant raising their profile.’
He scowls, but something dawns behind his eyes. Discomfort with the idea of one or more of his super-obedient, fawning staff members going rogue and filming dumb spooky shit in the basement. I doubt it’s true, but I’ve planted the seed.
‘Let me interview your staff,’ I say, ‘and see if I can dig anything up.’
‘You’re testing my fuckin’ patience, Sparks. I never even heard of you.’
‘Ghosts are great for business. I found this video and sent it viral – two million hits since Halloween. Tom Cruise and Kim Kardashian posted about it. Jay Leno joked about it! So if the Sunset Castle becomes connec
ted with this thing . . .’
Howitz scratches at his designer stubble, annoyed by his own temptation. An internal phone rings so loud it jumps an inch off his desk. To this guy, I’m no longer a potential terrorist, just an irritating distraction from the day’s workload. He holds both hands up. ‘Fuck it, whatever. Johnson and Gonzalez just clocked on: go bother them instead. You retards were made for each other.’
As I leave, verbal gunfire blasts out after me. ‘Just stay out of that damn basement, or I’ll have your nuts on my wall.’
Walk far enough around the Sunset Castle’s perimeter and you discover the dark side of the moon.
Unlatch the gate marked ‘Staff Only’ next to the swimming pool, then walk through and keep walking until you reach the hotel’s glamour-free side, hidden from the Sunset Strip and most of the rooms. Huge rusty pipes worm out of the ground and plug into the brickwork. Waste bins the size of Sherman tanks exude foul fumes.
This is where Johnson and I sit, halfway up some pockmarked steps. I didn’t know how many Castle staffers I really wanted to interview, but when Johnson turned out to be the boiler room engineer, I made a beeline for him. He was easy to find, what with the faded brown maintenance uniform and callused, grubby hands ready for any job on earth.
Johnson accesses the boiler room from here, using the ancient, grime-caked service door. ‘Wow, this is crazy,’ he says, pouring me some bitter coffee from a flask. ‘Being interviewed – and by a Brit! I love the British. Do you write about boilers for a living or what?’
He’s pushing fifty, but his eyes are new and alive. It’s hard to tell whether this is because, finally, someone wants to listen to him. Before I can even sip my coffee, he surprises me with a light-bulb moment. ‘Ever write about ghosts?’
Wary of leading the witness, I smother my surprise. ‘Why’s that?’
And pleased as punch, he says, ‘Do I got a ghost story for you.’
I’m wondering if he’ll tell me a tale set in Albuquerque or somewhere equally random, but no. Dialling his voice down to a whisper, he says, ‘There’s a ghost. A ghost right there in the boiler room.’
I remember the shadow I half saw last night, and quiver. My aim with this chat was just to verify that no ghosts had been witnessed down there. Yet here’s Johnson, defying expectation.
‘I’ve been contracted to work that boiler room for five years now. I also do the Standard, the Best Western along the way . . . and lately things have changed here at the Castle. I’ve seen stuff. A shadow that moves by itself, without being linked to nothin’.’
I twirl a forefinger around, urging him on. He taps a couple of cigarettes from a pack of Lucky Strikes and hands me one, then lights us up.
‘When I’m down there, it’s just me. While I’m regulatin’ those boiler levels, everything else is still. But lately, if you’ll excuse the profanity, I see shit in the corner of my eye, y’know? I see movement. I see the black move. And when I turn to look, there’s this blur of activity, real fast. Shit goes back to normal, as still as . . . as still as . . .’
He grasps for a suitable simile for very still things. I have no interest in waiting for the result, so jump in: ‘Could it be rats?’
‘They’d have to be fuckin’ giants, man!’ His laugh turns into a tobacco cough and he thumps his chest. ‘Excuse the profanity. I’d hear those suckers, for sure. Besides, I’m good with the traps and the poison. Always have been.’
‘How about human intruders? Kids?’ I nod over at the service door. ‘That doesn’t look too secure to me.’
He blows smoke out through both nostrils. ‘It’s secure enough, man. And when I go down there, I always lock the door behind me. Before you ask, whenever I’ve seen this shadow thing . . . the other door, the one that leads up to reception? That’s been locked too.’
‘When did you first see these shadow movements?’
His brows furrow. ‘What’s the date now? November fifteen? I wanna say . . . first time I noticed this stuff was two weeks back. If you wanna know the truth, having a ghost here is pretty cool. Spices the job up some.’
I walk away, thinking Johnson an untrustworthy imbecile. His testimony doesn’t fit the narrative growing in my head, so I discount it. Journalism at its finest, oh yeah.
Bex, beautiful Bex, is all bunched up in bed, watching Good Morning America in the dark, with water and a half-empty strip of painkillers. ‘No more JD, ever,’ she says, from a Medusa mass of red curls. ‘Ever.’
Straight away there’s a weirdness between us. I can’t tell whether she remembers us kissing last night, or whether only I remember it and I’m behaving differently, which is in turn confusing her. So I play it safe and make out nothing happened, while coaxing her down to breakfast.
Out on the rear terrace, beneath a maroon marquee, she marvels at the view south across the city. I don’t tell her that the further south you go from here, the more likely you are to get ripped apart by gang crossfire.
‘That was a good effort for a first night,’ she says, over bacon, eggs and black coffee.
‘Remember much?’ I ask, keeping it breezy.
She forgot her shades, but sadly her eyes give nothing away. ‘More the first part of the night. After that . . . not so much.’
Our moments of public indiscretion went straight to her brain’s trash folder. Damn it. Still, Bex forgetting is better than her remembering and waking up horrified.
Once she’s had coffee and laughed at me pocketing miniature Tabasco bottles from our table’s ramekin (we have a whole basket of these things at home, from US hotels), I decide she’s ready for the big video news.
For a while, her mouth just sticks in an ‘O’ shape.
‘You came to Hollywood,’ she says, ‘where the video turned out to be made. And you stayed in this hotel . . . where the video turned out to be made.’
I watch her thoughts race as she tries to figure this out, spearing thin, dark bacon strips with her fork.
‘So,’ she says. ‘Did you choose this hotel yourself?’
‘Ah,’ I say. ‘Ah. Now that’s the thing.’
CHAPTER TEN
Seven floors up in Culver City, Professor Spence uses a handkerchief to dab his shiny forehead as he finally speaks his mind.
‘I had no idea this whole experiment would only last the two weeks I’m here! My group meditated for twelve months. And . . . y’know what, I gotta say, can nothing be done about this damn AC?’
‘There were no direct results from your period of meditation, sir,’ says Astral across the table. ‘Reading your book, it really strikes me as a misstep. The good stuff came afterwards, when you changed your approach.’
‘But the meditation,’ says Spence, ‘was valuable groundwork for what happened later. I strongly suggest the group doesn’t skip it. At least give it a try.’
Elisandro, the one I used to call Dragon Lord, clucks his tongue. ‘I really don’t know what we’d get out of that.’
Attitudes towards Professor Spence are divided. Most of the Paranormals reserve a basic level of respect for what the man did in the seventies, while believing the Mimi Experiment needs to take a far more contemporary approach. Only Ellie (formerly Hot Mama) and Pascal hang on his every word. And me, I couldn’t care less whether Spence is here or not. The guy’s doomed.
‘One of the reasons we spent so long meditating,’ Spence persists, ‘was to think about Harold. About his character. We focused strongly on him for that whole year. I gotta say, I have strong reservations as to whether you’ve got this Mimi character clear in your heads. You’re rushing into this thing.’
The professor’s words may as well hang in the air in wobbly Comic Sans before tumbling into a big broken pile. He sighs, purses his lips. I suppress a chuckle, glad that the old fart’s attempts to pointlessly elongate our experiment are being shot down. (Looking back now, of course, I know I was idiotic, just like almost everyone else around the table. We were the architects of disaster.)
With Spen
ce rudely overruled, the group plunge straight into what was the second phase of the seventies experiment: Waiting For Our Ghost To Show Up.
After Spence and Co. spent a year meditating and trying to get their Harold spook to appear, with no tangible results, they considered giving up. They then became inspired by British parapsychologists who had explored psychokinesis (or PK, as it’s known). Those Brits, who had in turn been influenced by the atmosphere of Victorian séances, suggested elements that would encourage PK phenomena. Belief was vital, they said. But at the same time, an easy-going, relaxed atmosphere would be much more likely to produce results than intense meditation.
‘So we’ll just hang,’ says Astral. ‘Professor Spence, could you remind us of a few things you used to do?’
Spence raises his eyebrows: oh, so now we want to listen. ‘Well,’ he says cautiously, ‘we told jokes, we sang songs, we chatted to each other. Sometimes about Harold, but not always. We kept it varied. Sometimes we recited poetry.’
‘Thanks, Professor,’ nods Astral, mashing nachos on spin cycle 6. ‘So we’ll do all those things from today.’
‘Maybe lose the poetry,’ mutters Elisandro.
‘Hey,’ says Ellie, giving him a playful elbow jab. ‘I write damn fine poetry.’
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Is that what that stuff is.’ He slaps an arm around her back. ‘Kiddin’, babe.’ I stare at the guy, thinking how sick he makes me.
Spence notes that his seventies group placed objects and pictures related to their Harold character around the room. Fencing foils, sweets, antique cushions. It was, he says, all in the name of ‘helping us picture the character with the utmost clarity’.
His words barely sink in, because no one really listens any more. People only care about what they’re going to say next. Our default mode: broadcast.
Lisa-Jane (Obligatory Goth) asks Professor Spence for three words that describe the atmosphere fostered by his seventies group. He ponders this, as if holding a non-existent smoking pipe in one hand, then says, ‘Convivial. Carefree. And gay.’
