‘For Christ’s sake, Sissy, that’s crazy. For one thing, how are you going to go through a solid wall? For another thing, that detective got chopped into hamburger meat and it could be that Ella-mae did too and who knows that the same thing won’t happen to you? Even if it’s possible, which I don’t believe it is, I can’t let you do it.’
‘How else can we get T-Yon back, Everett? The police won’t help us. Detective Garrity doesn’t even believe that she’s still here. I’ll try to go through the wall but I won’t go alone. I’ll take somebody big and strong, like Luther, if he’ll agree to come with me. Besides, I don’t think Vanessa Slider will hurt me. She doesn’t bear me any ill will personally. She just wants me to go away and mind my own business.’
‘I still think I should come. T-Yon’s my sister, Sissy. It’s my hotel. If I hadn’t bought it, this never would have happened.’
‘You don’t know that, Everett. But I honestly believe that if you come too, you’ll be putting T-Yon in even greater danger. And yourself, too.’
They went back over to the pool table, still strewn with blueprints and schematics. Luther could tell that they had been talking about him, and he said, ‘What?’
The Door to Yesterday
Detective Garrity was deeply unamused, and his voice was dry-throated and even less expressionless than it usually was.
‘I’ll tell you, we’ve just finished another search, and I can categorically guarantee to you that Ms Savoie is not in this hotel, and neither is this Slider woman nor anybody else. The tracker dogs traced Ms Savoie’s scent halfway along the second-floor corridor but then they lost it. According to the dog handlers, that means she went halfway along the corridor and then turned around and retraced her steps.’
‘So where did she go from there?’ Sissy asked him. ‘Why didn’t she come back down to the lobby? Mr Savoie was waiting for her, she knew that. He was going to take her back home.’
‘I can’t tell you what went on inside Ms Savoie’s mind, Ms Sawyer. All I know for sure is that she is not on the premises. Period.’
‘How about you accompany me up to the second floor, Detective, to see if I can get through the wall? You can always stand there and say “I told you so, you batty old psychic” if I can’t do it.’
Detective Garrity closed his eyes for a moment, as if he were looking inside himself for any remaining reserves of patience. ‘Ms Sawyer, ma’am, I have been up and down to every single floor in this hotel all day, again and again. I have initiated three full searches, two with bloodhounds. Right now I have to go back and report to my captain so that he can make a statement to the media. After that I am going to go home and get myself something to eat and two or three hours’ sleep. I suggest you do the same.’
With that, he walked away across the lobby.
Sissy looked at Luther and said, ‘I thought, from what he said earlier, that maybe he half believed me.’
‘He’s a cop,’ said Luther. ‘Cops only believe what they can persuade a public prosecutor to believe. Don’t matter if it’s true or not.’
‘How about you, Luther? Do you believe me?’
‘Me? I always keep an open mind, Ms Sissy. If we try to walk through that wall and all we succeed in doing is flattening our faces, then I won’t believe you. But if we do go through it, then what can I say? The Lord works in all kinds of miraculous ways that we can’t understand, but just because we can’t understand them, that don’t mean they ain’t true. I can’t understand nuclear physics, but that don’t mean it don’t work.’
‘You’re a good man, Luther,’ said Sissy, laying her hand on his arm. ‘A good man and a clever one, too.’
The two of them took the elevator to the second floor. As they went up, Luther smiled and shook his head and said, ‘There’s one thing I can’t believe. I can’t believe I’m even thinking of doing this. If Shatoya could see me now.’
‘If your Aunt Epiphany could see you now, I think she’d be proud of you.’
They walked along the corridor until they reached the place where Sissy had seen Vanessa Slider. Sissy had brought the 1986 blueprint with her, tucked in her bag, so that she could precisely pinpoint the place where there had once been a doorway.
‘OK . . .’ she said. ‘This should be it. The wallpaper and the skirting board don’t look any different from the rest of the corridor, do they? I mean, you couldn’t tell that there used to be a door here.’
‘Oh, when they remodeled, they stripped this place right back to the bare brick. They replastered, they replaced all of the moldings. All of the doors is original, but they burned them right down to the bare wood and repainted them.’
Sissy looked up and down the corridor. Through the window at the end, she could see the twinkling lights of Lafayette Street. She couldn’t pretend to herself that she wasn’t frightened. She almost found herself wishing that the wall would prove to be solid, and impenetrable, even though she had seen Vanessa Slider walk through it with her own eyes.
‘Are you ready for this?’ she asked Luther.
‘Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess. There’s only one question I’m axing myself, and that’s what happens if we go through but we can’t get back. I don’t want to spend the rest of my days in nineteen eighty-six. I been there, when I was eleven years old, and I hated every minute of it.’
‘Vanessa Slider came through to this side, and she managed to go back. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to do the same.’
‘This is sheer craziness, isn’t it?’ said Luther. ‘Here we are discussing something downright impossible. I mean – look.’
With that, without waiting for Sissy, he took three steps across the corridor, swinging his arms with an exaggerated swagger.
Even Sissy expected him to collide with the wall with a thud, and she let out a high-pitched ‘ha!’ of amusement. But he vanished through the patterned wallpaper as if it were mist, and he was gone.
My good God, thought Sissy. My good God you actually can walk through it. Oh my God he’s disappeared.
Her heart was beating like a panicky canary in a cage, but she knew that she had to follow him. Who knows what Vanessa Slider would do to him if he appeared without warning and without explanation in the Hotel Rouge, the way that Detective Mullard must have done? Now that Sissy came to think of it, Vanessa Slider and her son, Shem, had probably killed Detective Mullard out of self-preservation, especially if he had told them that he was a cop.
She squeezed her eyes tight shut, held her arms out in front of her, and walked toward the wall.
It was the most extraordinary sensation that she had ever felt in her life. It was like walking through a sharp blast of icy-cold wind, thick with fine, abrasive granules of sand. There was a sound like sshhhhhhhh! and then she was through.
She opened her eyes. She was standing in a dingy corridor lit only by a single naked light bulb. The walls were papered with maroon-and-gold stripes, but the paper was very faded and peeling with damp in places. The carpet was green and worn through to the string. The first thing that struck her was the smell. Stale cigar smoke, mingled with mildew, and bleach, and burned cooking fat.
Luther was standing halfway along the corridor, peering into a closet. He turned around as she appeared and said, ‘There you are, Ms Sissy! Welcome to the Hotel Rouge!’
‘My God,’ said Sissy. ‘We actually came through! Even I didn’t believe that we could really do it for real.’
‘You and me both. It’s like a dream, ain’t it? And not like the one that Martin Luther King had, neither.’
‘What’s in the closet?’ Sissy asked him.
‘Laundry, mostly. Sheets, pillowslips. No Ms T-Yon.’
‘Well, we’d better see if we can find her.’
‘How exactly we going to do that? We can’t search the whole damn hotel. We don’t have no keys, for a start, so that we can access the rooms.’
‘We call her. We walk up and down the corridors, one after the other, and we shout out
, T-Yon! Are you there, T-Yon? Teeeeee-Yon!’
‘Holy shit, Ms Sissy! That Vanessa Slider’s going to hear you, if you screech like that! Fact she probably heard you loud and clear already!’
Sissy hefted her shoulder bag. ‘That’s the idea, Luther. If there’s one person who knows where T-Yon is, it’s her.’
She led the way along to the end of the service corridor. Luther cautiously pushed open the door to the main staircase, and it gave a soft, squeaky groan. Compared to the same staircase in The Red Hotel it was airless and humid and badly lit and it reeked of dried urine. They could hear echoing voices from below them, and the sound of radio music, and a constant grinding noise, like the grinding that Sissy and Detective Garrity had heard in Room 511.
‘Sounds like a kid, as well as a woman,’ said Luther. ‘That Vanessa Slider ain’t on her own here and that’s for sure. Not unless she’s some kind of ventriloquist.’
They negotiated the landing, which was cluttered with stacking metal chairs and empty cardboard boxes and brooms and a broken vacuum cleaner, and opened the door which led to the main second-floor corridor.
It was hard to believe that this was the same corridor along which they had walked after they had stepped out of the elevator. The walls were papered in the same maroon-and-gold stripes as the service corridor, and the floors were carpeted in the same grass green, disfigured with stains and black spots of discarded chewing gum and threadbare in places.
Luther looked around as he padded along the corridor and shook his head in disbelief. ‘Can’t believe how she could have allowed the place get so run down.’
‘I know. Especially when she said that Everett and T-Yon had taken her dream. If I ever had dreams like this I’d be afraid to go to sleep.’
She lifted her bag from her shoulder and took out her witch compass. Even if shouting out T-Yon’s name brought no response, there was at least a chance that the cobalt needle would sense where she was.
‘T-Yon!’ she called out. ‘Are you here, T-Yon? Teeee-yon! It’s Sissy! Can you hear me, T-Yon?’
Luther said, ‘Are you kidding me, Ms Sissy? The way you screaming, they going to hear you way over in the Sweet Olive Cemetery. My Uncle Elijah going to be rolling over in his casket, saying “who’s that disturbing my well-deserved rest?”’
They reached the corner at the end of the corridor, and they had just turned around it when they both stumbled to an abrupt stop, and retreated. Halfway along the corridor, the door to one of the rooms was wedged open, and a man in a black T-shirt and jeans was backing out of it.
‘Do you think he saw us?’ hissed Sissy, as they pressed themselves close to the wall.
Luther peeked around the corner again. ‘I don’t think so. Couldn’t have heard us, either, or even if he did he’s not paying us any mind.’
Sissy peeked around the corner, too. The man was carefully maneuvering a wheelchair out of the door and into the corridor. Lolling in the seat was a girl with her head completely covered by a green hand-towel. One skinny-wristed arm rested in her lap while the other hung down by the wheel. She was wearing a very short black dress and only one sandal.
‘Is that T-Yon?’ breathed Luther.
‘I don’t know. I can’t see her face at all. I don’t know what she was wearing, either.’
The man started to push the wheelchair along the corridor toward them. As he did so, a small figure emerged from the room behind him – a figure no taller than a child of six or seven, or maybe a dwarf. It was completely covered by a black sheet and so it was impossible for them to tell.
From the way that T-Yon had described the two black-sheeted figures that had appeared in her room, however, Sissy guessed that it was the smaller one of those two.
The man pushing the wheelchair passed close by, but, instead of turning the corner, in which case he would have caught sight of them immediately, he kept on going straight ahead, in the direction of the service elevator. Sissy caught only a glimpse of him, but he had a blocky head, with acne-pitted skin, and a protuberant, clown-like nose.
He wore a sleeveless black T-shirt, and his upper arms were so grotesquely overdeveloped that they looked as if they had been turned inside out, all muscles and sinews. His forearms and his chest were a writhing mass of tattoos, and he had a tattooed necklace that looked like razor wire.
Sissy tried to see if the girl in the wheelchair was wearing the same kind of bracelets as T-Yon, but the diminutive figure in the black sheets came dancing up alongside the wheelchair and obstructed her view. Underneath its sheets the figure was walking with a repetitive one-two-three skip, and it was singing Jolie Blonde, in the same strangled voice that Sissy had heard before.
‘Jolie blonde, regardez donc quoi t’as fait!
Tu m’as quitté pour t’en aller avec un autre . . . oui, que moi!’
Sissy and Luther waited until they heard the door to the service elevator open and then close, and then the distinctive whine as it began to move.
‘Quick!’ urged Sissy, and Luther went waddling off as fast as he could along the corridor. He came back panting, with one of his shirt tails untucked, but with a thumbs-up gesture. ‘They stopped at the first basement level. That’s where the kitchens used to be, before the hotel was all changed around.’
‘I couldn’t tell if that was T-Yon he was pushing in that wheelchair or not,’ said Sissy. ‘Whoever it was, we need to get down to the kitchens right now.’
Luther frowned at her. ‘You’re not saying what I think you’re saying?’
‘I don’t actually know what I’m saying. But let’s get down there.’
‘I’ll say something for you, Ms Sissy. You one feisty woman.’
‘You think so? Very nice of you to say so, but to tell you the God’s honest truth I’m scared shitless.’
Body Count
The service elevator was dirty and battered inside, with dented metal panels on the walls, and it smelled as bad as the rest of the Hotel Rouge, with the added stench of long-dead fish.
As it creaked and clanked its way down to the basement, Sissy and Luther heard the sound of grinding grow progressively louder, punctuated by an occasional screech. The radio music grew louder too: Larry Gatlin singing I’ve Done Enough Dyin’ Today, which Sissy coincidentally used to play after Frank died, and which always used to reduce her to tears. She looked up at Luther and gave him a puckered little smile.
The elevator stopped at the basement with a bang and a shudder. Luther pushed open the door and they stepped out into a shadowy corridor with grimy gray cinder-block walls. The grinding was so relentless that Sissy was sure that whoever was working in the kitchen couldn’t have heard the elevator arrive. Apart from that, that high strangled voice was singing along with the radio.
‘And how will we live now? You tell me
With parts of our hearts torn away . . .’
Sissy and Luther made their way along the corridor until they reached the open doorway to the kitchen. Sissy hesitated for a moment and then she quickly looked in.
The kitchen was at least forty feet long and thirty feet wide, with two long metal-topped counters running almost the whole length of it. Four stoves were set into the counters at intervals, and on one of them three large aluminum pots were furiously boiling. Hanging from the ceiling above the counters were dozens more aluminum pots, as well as skillets and colanders and ladles and whisks.
On the left-hand side, with his back to Sissy, his arms folded, stood the tattooed man. Close beside him, almost touching him, was the small figure draped in its black sheet, swaying from side to side in time to the music from the radio and singing along.
‘Just existin’ makes dyin’ look easy
But I’ve done enough dyin’ today.’
They were both watching as a lanky young African-American in a bloodstained chef’s apron was picking up large red pieces of raw meat from a metal table and pushing them into the feeder pan of a meat grinder. The table was heaped up with meat – Sissy guess
ed nearly a hundred pounds of it – but even though the grinder was so old and so noisy he was getting through it very fast. A large aluminum tray underneath the grinder was already piled up with coarsely-ground meat, like a wriggling mass of scarlet worms, and more were dropping down to join them all the time.
The kitchen was lit by fluorescent lights, one of which kept flickering, which gave the whole scene the appearance of a silent movie, even though the grinding was so loud.
Sissy drew back a little. Luther said, ‘Any sign of T-Yon in there?’
‘She might be. But I can’t see the whole kitchen from here. I can’t see that girl in the wheelchair, either.’
‘Maybe we should just walk straight on in.’
‘I think you’re probably right. We can’t stay out here all night.’
‘Risk it?’ said Luther, raising his right hand.
‘Risk it,’ said Sissy, and gave him a high five.
The two of them entered the kitchen. At first, neither the tattooed man nor the figure in the black sheet nor the young chef noticed them. Sissy looked to the left, to the part of the kitchen which she had been unable to see when she was standing outside in the corridor. She didn’t know what she had been expecting to see there, but she was so shocked that she couldn’t speak, and she could only reach out and pull at Luther’s sleeve.
‘Lord have mercy,’ said Luther.
Five hospital gurneys were lined up along the left-hand wall of the kitchen, and on each gurney lay a female body, three white girls and two black. Three of them had been decapitated, although their heads were still lying between their shoulders. Not only that, these three had all been disemboweled and the flesh scraped away from their bones, so that they were held together with little more than tendons and strings of fat and connective tissue. They looked more like smashed musical instruments than human beings.
Sissy looked at the grinder, aghast, and then at Luther.
The Red Hotel Page 19
