by The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares- The Haunted City (retail) (epub)
“You will tell me?”
“I was on tour with a band.”
“And you aren’t on this tour now?”
“I was asked to leave.”
“What does that mean, ‘asked to leave’?”
“In my case, that I was drunk and making too many mistakes.”
She looked closely at me, studied me. She saw something. Came to a conclusion. Then she said, “I think then maybe you wanted to be asked to leave.”
“You may be right.”
“You were not happy to be playing music? That is something that gives most people joy.”
It was a lot to explain. How I’d had dreams, written songs, recorded demos, come to Europe, to England, to try to get a deal with a company there. How it hadn’t gone well and I’d wound up playing in someone else’s band. I had another sip of her beer and we were quiet while she waited for me to go on.
“I guess,” I said finally, “that working someone else’s dreams got to be more than I could stand.”
That was true, but it wasn’t all of it. It didn’t show how it was to be with people for whom life came easily. People for whom nothing was hard and everything was fun. The ones who never had a problem talking to the girl at the end of the bar.
She watched me, and while she certainly couldn’t have known all of this, she nodded, and I thought that somehow she did know.
“I will tell you about my scar,” she said. “It is hard for you not to look at it.”
I made a small, embarrassed laugh.
“I don’t mind,” she said. She looked back at the merry-go-round and then at me. “I killed myself,” she said.
“But you’re still here.”
“Well, yes, but what I mean is that I jumped.”
“Oh.”
“From that hotel there.” She pointed to my hotel. “It is where everyone is jumping.”
“I’m staying there,” I said.
She nodded. She didn’t seem surprised. “Of course,” she said.
“Why did you jump?” I asked her.
“It was last year in this weather. You know, the Foehn wind is blowing, eating the winter in a day. Sometimes when the wind blows, the world is opening up and you see the bottom of all things. Maybe this is like when you drink too much and make mistakes.” She nodded again, and again it felt to me as if she understood the things about me that I hadn’t yet shown her.
“I think that it probably is,” I said, “but I’ve never been brave enough to jump.”
“I was brave to jump.”
“From the nineteenth floor?” I asked, stupidly. “Where everybody jumps?”
“You walk through the clinic that is there and out onto the balcony.”
“And you didn’t die.”
“What?”
“That’s too high up to jump.”
She looked at me blankly for a moment. “I was broken,” she said after a moment. “They came with an ambulance. I could hear them, but I did not care what they said. I was broken, and now I am back together. Only I am not brave to do it again.”
I couldn’t find anything to say, so I nodded.
“It is a sad story for your first time talking,” she said.
“It’s a good story and I’m glad you told me.”
She ran her hand up to where the scar split her face and touched it. I ate another radish and had another sip of beer. She watched me. She smiled a little.
Next to us there was a scream and the sound of a table being turned over. We looked to see what had happened.
The large man in the Bavarian suit was on the ground. Another man was standing over him, shouting in German and waving his beer stein. A crowd had gathered. Several people tried to calm the standing man and to help the other back to his feet. The standing man’s face was blood red from screaming.
The others straightened the table and chairs and said a few things and the man in the Bavarian suit got to his feet and the other man reluctantly shook his hand. They both sat back down.
“It is the wind,” the girl said. “That’s what it does.”
The angry man’s face was still red. He held tightly to his stein. The steins are made of very thick glass here and they hold a liter of beer. His was nearly full. He picked it up now and swung it with all his force into the other man’s face. There was an awful spitting sound and for a moment, nothing moved. Then blood began to leak from the man’s cheek and forehead. The angry man took his stein and broke it against the table. The others at the table stepped back as he dove onto the man, holding the broken stein by its handle and smashing it again and again into the other man’s face, the jagged glass weapon coming away from the flesh sticky each time the man brought it back to smash it down again.
A ring of people had formed around the fighters. A policeman in the green leather suit of the motorcycle police made his way through the crowd. He drew his gun and aimed it at the man who held the broken stein. He yelled something. The man stopped, the stein held in the air, ready for another thrust. Blood dripped from it onto the dirt. There was silence. The crowd waited to see if he would drop the stein.
The wounded man lay on the ground. He groaned. The other man looked at him and spat. The wounded man’s eyes were closed, but now he opened them and saw the girl. Pain and anger were replaced for a moment by some sort of recognition and by fear. He said something quietly that sounded like a prayer.
The man holding the stein followed his gaze and saw the girl. He took in her scar. Then he turned to the policeman, shrugged, and dropped the stein.
The policeman said something and the crowd began to move off. He took the man who had held the stein, the man who had been angry, by the arm and he led him away. Others in the crowd straightened up the chairs and table and waited by the hurt man. Someone ran off, I suppose to call an ambulance.
The policeman led the man past the spot where I stood with the girl. When they were almost to us, the man looked up at the girl and then at me. His face was still red from his recent fury, but in place of his scowl, there was a sad, resigned look. I felt a hand come over mine and I looked over at the girl. Her hand rested on mine now, and she was smiling at the man as the policeman led him away.
When they were gone, the girl turned to look up at me. She handed me her beer. “Finish this for me,” she said. “Then, if you like, we will go.”
I drank the rest of the beer quickly and we started off. As we started away from the Chinesischer Turm, we heard the ambulance siren.
We walked through the park toward the lake. We didn’t say much. I was tired from the beer and the excitement. We walked around the lake and saw a few people out in little boats. The park was surprisingly empty. The wind had left litter everywhere.
“I have lived here all my life,” she said, “and still I am surprised when the people disappear. I do not know where they go.”
Another wind had started to blow now and the sky was filling with clouds. The first rain started just as we turned back into the park from the lake. Then it was raining hard.
I said, “We should get inside.”
“I do not mind to go to the hotel,” she said, and then she smiled and it was the same smile she had given the man as the policeman had led him away.
We ran back to the hotel but it was far away and we were very wet when we got there. As we came across the patio, she stopped and pointed to a spot on the concrete.
“It is here that I am landing,” she said.
We went inside and took the elevator up to the room. For the first time since I had stayed there, it didn’t stop on the nineteenth floor.
I unlocked the door and held it for her. She went into the room and I followed her. She shivered from the wetness. I got a towel from the bathroom and I dried her hair. When I kissed her, her mouth was just like a part of the rain.
“We should get undressed,” I said. “We’re very wet.”
When she took her clothes off, I could see that her body was a jigsaw puzzle of scars. She didn�
�t try at all to hide them, and, if she had wanted to, she would not have been able to do it.
We got underneath the warm comforter on the bed. There was a chill to her that I couldn’t seem to rub away. Then we were making love and I forgot about the chill.
The storm outside grew loud and angry. The wind shook against the windows and then whistled off across the river.
We were careful with each other and it seemed as if we could go on moving together for a long time without anything else happening. Her eyes were open. Her caresses were simple. She hardly moved. I wanted to do something else with her but I didn’t know what that was.
Then I kissed her and I moved my lips up to kiss her scar. She sighed.
I pulled myself out of her and began to follow her scars down her body with my tongue, licking every inch of the hard, shiny flesh. She began to move now, to writhe. Soon she was shaking violently. The blood came into her body and the scars stood out white against it. I thought that she would explode along those lines and collapse there on the bed as if she had dropped again to the cement below.
I kept licking. I turned her over, following the line of one scar around from behind her navel onto her back. She gave out a shrill whistling sound, a sound like a slow leak of air from an inflatable toy. She shook and trembled and seemed to rise completely off the bed, and then she collapsed, panting, onto the mattress.
We lay for a few moments. As her breath slowed, I could hear that she was crying. The storm still screamed outside. Then we slept.
—
We rode the elevator to the lobby together and it didn’t stop on the nineteenth floor on the way down either. The storm had stopped now and she went out of the hotel and she was gone. When I looked out the hotel windows at the road, I couldn’t see her among the crowd of people walking to the bus stop. I sat in the lobby for a while. I might have been hoping that she’d come back. Two models came in. They were speaking English. I looked up at them from where I was sitting. Their skin was very pale and very smooth, like cream poured gently into a saucer for a favorite cat to drink.
—
The next day was cold and gray and I ate some cereal that my host had in a box in his cupboard and I didn’t leave the room. I could not get the girl out of my head. I looked out the window, down to the spot where she had smashed into the pavement. I watched German TV. I turned the pages of books written in a language I couldn’t read.
For the first time, I found myself wondering about Friedrich. I’d gone through his clothes, but only looking for money. Now I looked around the apartment for him, for who he was, what he did, why he was the sort of person who would hand a total stranger the key to his home. There really was nothing that told me much. No family pictures, no photo of a girlfriend. There were several prints on the walls, but they were generic, no doubt put up by the staff from a selection of unobtrusive landscapes that I would find in any room in the hotel. His apartment told me nothing.
The day that followed was a little warmer and I went back to the park. I sat there all day, watching, hoping that the girl would come back. I didn’t know a thing about her. Not where she lived or her phone number. I didn’t even know her name. I got it into my head that I had to find her. I had no idea how I would do that. Around me, having their beers, were a few men in Bavarian shorts. But it was not a Foehn day. No one was hit with a beer stein.
I went back to the hotel. I had never talked to anyone who worked there. They knew that I was Friedrich’s guest. They nodded to me when I crossed the lobby. That was all. Now I went up to the desk. A middle-aged man was on duty.
“Do you speak English?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“I’m wondering if you can help me. I’m looking for a girl.”
He gave me a hard look. “We don’t arrange that sort of thing. There are newspapers you can find in town. There are advertisements there.”
“You misunderstand. I am trying to find someone. Someone I met the other day.”
“And how would I be able to help you with that?”
“She is someone who jumped from this hotel, sometime last year.”
His manner grew even more officious. “We do not discuss any incidents that may or may not have happened here,” he said. “I’m sure you can understand.”
“This is important to me,” I said. “And it’s not as if everyone doesn’t know that you’re the suicide hotel.”
He stiffened even more at that. “Was there anything else?” he said, daring me to ask another question.
I walked across the lobby, nearly tripping into one of the fashion models. She was coming across the lobby from the elevators carrying her portfolio. I left the hotel with no idea what I would do next, how I would find the girl I was thinking of now as the Foehn Girl.
“Hey,” someone said behind me. I turned. It was the model I’d nearly bumped into in the lobby.
“That guy is a total dick,” she said. “You wanted to know about the jumpers?”
“I’m looking for someone. A girl I met in the park. She jumped off sometime last year.”
She looked surprised. “I’ve lived here since last year,” she said. “Longer than that, really.”
“You must remember then. Someone jumping who lived, that must have been even bigger news than just someone jumping.”
“It would have been,” she said, “if it had happened. But everybody knows that no one has ever jumped from the hotel and lived. It’s a nineteen-floor jump, you know. Twenty, the way they count floors here.”
I told her that I’d met this girl, spent time with her, and seen her scars. “I can show you the spot where she landed,” I said.
“If that had happened, it would have been in the papers. You could look.”
“I can’t read German,” I said.
“I can,” she answered.
We went into the café there at the hotel. Her name was Lee. She was from Florida. She had her laptop with her. We went online and searched the database of the local papers, and the nationals. Each suicide was reported, but there were no stories anywhere about an unsuccessful attempt. We looked at The Local, the English-language paper, too. There was nothing there either.
“Did she say when this happened?” Lee asked. “I mean, she could have gotten the scars some other way. This could all be just a story she tells. More dramatic, spectacular than the truth.”
“She said it was this time last year. On one of those wind days.”
“A Foehn day. That could explain it. You know that wind makes people crazy.”
“I saw some people acting crazy, but I don’t think she was one of them.”
“Foehn Geist,” she said then, her voice playful. “A Foehn ghost. That’s what we’re dealing with here.”
“A Foehn Geist?”
“Ask the gypsies in park, if you ever see any gypsies in the park. My boyfriend for the first six months I was here, Paco—he was half Romany. Gypsy. He told me all about the Foehn Geister. They say the wind’s so strong it can blow spirits from their graves. They say they ride the wind, looking for some poor soul who’s hanging by a thread. Someone they can take back with them when they go.”
“Are you making this up?” I asked.
“Are you hanging by a thread?” She took a moment. “I’m not making it up, but Paco might have been.” She smiled. She made her living with that smile. It was easy to see why.
She found the date when a Foehn wind had come up exactly a year ago. She cross-referenced that and found something. That smile went away and her face hardened. “Bullshit,” she said angrily. I looked at her, confused. “You know what?” she said. “You’re a fucking weirdo and I’m so tired of fucking weirdos. Did you think this was going to get you somewhere with me? ‘Hook up with me, I talked to dead people.’ ”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
One year ago. A Foehn wind. There was a jumper. “Her name was Karla Engel. She was twenty-eight when she jumped.”
“Yo
u found her,” I said.
“You are so full of shit,” Lee said.
“Just tell me,” I said. “I swear I wasn’t trying anything like that.”
“Sure,” she said. “Well, as I’m sure you already know, weirdo, Karla Engel didn’t make it.”
—
“Foehn Geist.” Lee’d said that her boyfriend, Paco, had made that up. A ghost who came out on a Foehn day to suck someone back to the grave with her. Someone who was hanging by a thread. I wasn’t ready to believe, based on the secondhand retelling of a gypsy legend, that I had made love to some sort of ghost. If Karla Engel had died a year ago after throwing herself from the hotel, then who had I met? Who had I been with? I wanted, I needed to know. And more than that, I wanted to see her—to see Karla, the Foehn Girl, whoever she was—again.
I saw Lee only once after that. It was in the lobby, and when she saw me she turned the other way and started talking to a group of other models and their dates, guys who laughed easily and never thought about the lives they could have been living.
Mostly, I haunted the park—I sat there every day. I ate radishes. I waited. Nothing happened. There were always the men in the Bavarian shorts. There were families. Old people. Gay couples. But there was never a beautiful girl with a long, sad scar across her face. It was the men in the shorts who gave me the idea. The man who had been hit in the face with the beer stein. He had looked at the girl with an expression of both recognition and terror. I wanted to ask him about that expression. Did he know her? Was she somehow Karla Engel? Is that what had frightened him? He had been hurt badly and they had taken him to a hospital. He might still be there, or at least someone at the hospital might be able to tell me where he was.
By now I had ordered so many radishes from the older woman who sold them at the little stand here in the park that she knew me. I went up to her window and asked if she knew any English.
“Some,” she said. “I had a boyfriend who was in your army and stationed here.”
“What I want to know,” I said. “The man who was hurt the other day. When the man hit him in the face with the stein.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “On the Foehn day?”
“Yes,” I said. “I was wondering if you knew what hospital he might have been taken to. I wanted to see how he was doing.”
