“Not lately. I can’t speak for Mirella.”
“If I may, Mr. Adam,” Paul said, “the problem is not that there is no body, it’s that there is nobody.”
This was an effort at a joke. It should be noted that satyrs are probably the most humorless people on the planet, aside perhaps from the Germans.
Paul opened the door to the room and stepped inside. I took a look at Esteban before going anywhere.
“Is this a crime scene?” I asked.
“We haven’t decided yet.”
“So I shouldn’t touch anything.”
“Touch what you like. Do you imagine we have a crime lab?”
What I imagined was that Doc Cambridge would fall over himself trying to use his laboratory to solve a crime if asked to do so. Of course, he’d also end up proving leprechauns did it or something.
Leprechauns aren’t real, by the way.
Mirella and I stepped into the hotel room, and Esteban followed. Paul stayed in the hallway.
As I think I’ve made clear, the island hotel was pretty high-end. You had to be worth a lot of money to even consider a room, and worth even more to make it to the island in the first place.
The rooms were always a shock, then, because of how small most of them were.
Every room had wood paneling, a small terrace with a view, a big-screen TV and an above average bed (or two), springy carpeting, good air conditioning, a coffee maker, and… well, everything was all there like you’d expect it to be. They even had a live plant in the corner, which was a nice touch.
It was just small. I had a rough idea how much a room like this cost, and for the expense I’d have expected a hot tub, a sauna, and a bowling alley.
Room four twenty-two had two twin beds and precious little room for much else. I imagine it was an especially tight fit for some of the larger species. I mean, in fairness if you come to an exclusive beach resort and spend all of your time in the room you’re vacationing wrong, but still.
The beds were unmade, but I couldn’t see any personal items to indicate the people who’d been staying in the room were still there.
Then I saw the writing on the wall, and I understood why Esteban asked for me.
“What is that smell?” Mirella asked. I couldn’t smell anything.
“Sulfur, I think,” her cousin answered. You can’t imagine what it’s like to cook in the same house as someone with that kind of nose sensitivity. She thinks I burn everything.
“I can’t smell it,” I said. “But sulfur is interesting.”
“It’s the writing that’s interesting,” Esteban said. “Sulfur could be a dietary curiosity.”
I looked past him to the counter that doubled as a kitchenette. There was no proper stove, but the room came with a microwave.
“Any restaurants featuring brimstone on the menu?”
“Don’t worry about the sulfur, what’s the writing?”
The text was scrawled on the wall above the bed nearest the window: three neat rows of letters in a highly unlikely script.
“What’s it written in?” I asked.
“That’s blood, Adam,” Mirella said.
“I was hoping it was blood-colored ink. Nice penmanship, though. They didn’t use a finger. Fountain pen?”
“Blood in a fountain pen would be terribly inefficient,” she said. “It would clog.”
“I love you for having already thought that through, you know that right?”
“Yes.”
“If you would please,” Esteban said, rather loudly. Perhaps he wasn’t enjoying the moment as much as we were. “What is the language? What does it say?”
“I think it might be Proto-Elamite. But I don’t know what it says right now.”
“What do you mean, right now?”
“It’s not that simple. I need a little time with it. Mirella, do you have your phone?”
She nodded, and took a picture of the text, and didn’t even give me a hard time about having found a circumstance in which I needed a cell phone.
“So you can’t read it?”
“Stubby, there’s a lot more questions in need of answering than just what this says. Finding Proto-Elamite graffiti on a hotel room wall is more or less completely impossible, for starters.”
Mirella’s eyes lit up, while Esteban growled. She loved the idea of a legitimate mystery, while he mostly just hated the fact that I called him Stubby. Everyone on the island called him that, but not to his face. It was a play on his name, obviously, but also a dig on his stature.
“Educate me, Adam, why is it impossible?” he asked.
“Because as far as I know this is the only written example of Proto-Elamite in the world. Nobody’s spoken it for more than five thousand years.”
“But you did.”
“I did, yes.”
“So why can’t you read this?”
“I’m not sure if you understand how wildly different those skillsets are.”
This is one of those things modern people don’t even think about, but writing was once revolutionary. The process of creating a series of marks (on stone, in clay, on papyrus, whatever) which stood for words, or the syllables making up words, was something that had to be invented a hundred times over by different cultures, and the fact that so many of them did remains extraordinary.
“You spoke it but can’t read it.”
“It happens. The Elamites weren’t super pleasant, and I wasn’t in a position to pursue scholarship at the time.”
“How do you know it’s Proto-Elamite?” Mirella asked. “If you don’t know the written language.”
“I’m not one hundred percent sure it is, but it looks a lot like Linear Elamite.”
“You’re giving me a headache,” Esteban said.
“That will happen with him,” Mirella said.
“There are examples of Linear Elamite, which came after Proto-Elamite, and I know what Linear looks like because I’m curious about these things. But if you’re about to ask if I can read Linear Elamite, no, nobody can. What examples exist haven’t been translated, because nobody knows how. It’s kind of a standalone language, so there’s no descendant tongue to help out, and no one has uncovered an equivalent Rosetta stone.”
I have a list of things I’d like to do at some point. The list helps keep me alive, in a way, because it’s a periodic reminder that I haven’t done everything there is to do just yet. On the list is, attempting to read Linear Elamite. As the only person on the planet who can still speak the language of the people of Elam (again, possibly except for a certain redheaded woman) I’m uniquely qualified to do this.
I expect I will someday, and I expect in doing so I will be disappointed. Every time I translate an old document it ends up being a recipe, a shopping list, or a rental agreement of some kind. Humans have always been sort of dull.
I didn’t expect the writing on the wall to be dull, though, both because of the circumstance and the fact that it was in blood. People don’t write recipes in blood. Vampires do, but vampires spend too much time listening to their own hype sometimes.
“I’m wondering, cousin,” Mirella said, “when you are going to get to the part where you tell us why the occupants of this room can’t translate it for you.”
“They would be the first to ask,” he agreed. “Unfortunately, nobody in the hotel appears to know who they were, or where they went.”
“Where they went?” I said. “We’re on an island. How far could they have gotten?”
“I agree, conditionally, but we have a jungle you’re perhaps aware of. You’ve arrived at the core concern for my office. People were staying in this room and then they weren’t, and nobody appears to know if they are missing, since to report someone missing one first has to know who was here.”
* * *
A little while later, we were sitting in the hotel’s manager office—I’d call it Paul’s office, and for the moment it was, but there were five managers—and going over how it was possible for a hot
el to not know who was in one of their rooms.
“This is incredibly embarrassing,” he said, for the third time by my count. He was behind his desk running through the registration records on his computer.
The office was on the second floor, above the front desk, and had windows facing both the parking lot and the ocean, which gave it a sort of gateway-to-the-island feel. It had been a while since I’d watched one of the planes land, but I was pretty sure the windows also afforded a view of the inbound flight path.
Since the runway’s existence depended on the tides, it was possible, in theory, to have a flight arrive and depart almost every day. That was never going to happen, though, because every full-time resident on the island despised everything about the plane, from the fact that it obscured the view of the sky to the part where it brought in people who couldn’t afford to live on the island full time. (It also brought in cargo—food and so on—but not all that often. Most of the commodities on the island arrived by freighter.) The compromise was one flight a week.
This put a serious constraint on the hotel, because the plane wasn’t big enough to carry a sufficient number of guests to fill up all the rooms. To solve this, the owners bought a cruise ship to ferry people from a nearby island that was large enough to land a jumbo jet. This was a great solution, except the ship was louder than the planes, and an even bigger eyesore. There was a proposal in the town council to limit the size of ships allowed to dock at the island. It was going to be an entertaining argument.
“The hotel’s full?” Mirella asked.
“The hotel is always full,” Esteban answered. “Or so I’m told.”
“Yes, always full,” Paul said. “Here we are. Seven days ago, the room was assigned to a Mr. and Mrs. Callaway. The Callaways requested a different assignment for unspecified reasons. They left on the last flight.”
“Four days ago?” I asked, for clarification. Everyone on the island knew the schedule of the plane.
“Yes.”
“So who else checked into the room?”
“According to our records, nobody.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but maybe you and I have a different definition of the word full.”
“Yes, I’m certain we do. Every hotel maintains a number of blocked out rooms that are considered filled while yet unoccupied. This is in the event of something unforeseen, such as a toilet backing up. At capacity is actually a variable number.”
“All right. So you didn’t have anyone in that room according to the computer. But someone was in the room, so how did nobody know who they were?”
“There was a breakdown in communication, which will have to be dealt with internally. After the Callaways declined the room, it went back into the available pool, and was assigned to another party… A Mr. Jenkins. But when he attempted to enter the room he reported someone was already there. This, mind, was at the height of the changeover, so when he went down and notified the desk that four twenty-two was already taken, we took care of him first, then blocked off the room. What should have happened next was that a note was logged so someone could follow up after the rush and determine where the error was, and who had that room. This didn’t happen.”
“Do these errors happen frequently?” Mirella asked.
“Oh yes. Any time you have twenty different people maintaining a constantly-changing set of records, there are going to be mistakes. That’s why we have a protocol for resolving them, and why it wasn’t impossible for there to have been a person assigned to four twenty-two that we had no record of.”
“All right,” I said. “How about the maids?”
“The maids were the ones who found the room in the state in which you saw it,” Esteban said. “I’ve already spoken with them and went over their records. The room was marked as do not disturb for at least the past three days. I’m told the cutoff here is seven days before security is notified.”
“What if the occupant is dead?”
“Nobody knocked until after the second day, and the maid who did that stated she received a reply from someone inside,” Esteban said. “A woman’s voice, but that’s all she could say.”
“What about keys?” Mirella asked. “They’re electronic.”
“Yes, there were no valid keycards for four twenty-two,” Paul said. “But assuming someone was left behind to open the door from the inside, they would have needed no key.”
“So they knew they weren’t supposed to be there,” I said.
“Yes that would follow,” Paul said. “In these matter, usually, it gets resolved within 24 hours, which is how long it takes for an active key to become disabled programmatically. The occupant returns to the room, find the key doesn’t open the door, and goes to the front desk. That didn’t happen in this instance, so I’m assuming we’re dealing with squatters.”
I laughed. Squatting was something one didn’t often see in an exclusive, private, super-secret five-star resort hotel. Probably.
“All right, so, they were here, and then they left, and the maids cracked open the room and found the note on the wall, and now you’ve got vandalism in a dead language.”
“They left the room,” Esteban said. “We don’t know that they left the island, or necessarily the hotel. We’re reviewing the manifests, but there’s an excellent chance they are still here, and we have to treat them that way right now.”
It wasn’t until this moment that I understood why Stubby was involved, and why it was so important that the graffiti was translated.
What seemed at times like a miracle—that no violence ever broke out on the island despite the nature of some of its inhabitants—was at least partly carefully curated reality. Everyone, from residents to guests, had to be vetted thoroughly before being allowed to set foot on the shore. When Mirella and I moved in, we had to provide multiple references and survive several interviews with the residency board, which I promise you was a tremendous challenge for an immortal man who was supposed to be dead and had no references. Tourists had to survive a background review from the tourism board too. And everyone had to make it through a customs check regardless of their means of arrival.
This wasn’t only a hotel record-keeping error; the island itself had a stowaway.
This was scary for a couple of reasons. First, it wasn’t supposed to happen. Second, assuming it did, this was a secret island full of secret creatures who had their own closely-guarded secrets. An unauthorized guest could be anything from a conspiracist looking to prove a pet theory, to an assassin hired to eliminate one of the more important residents at the top of the hill.
“What about the blood on the wall?” Mirella asked.
Her cousin shrugged. “What about it? As I said, we don’t have a crime lab.”
“Doctor Cambridge at the hospital can probably type it for you,” I said. “At least tell you what species donated it. Although… I can think of a short-cut.”
“I’m in favor of all short cuts, Adam,” Esteban said.
“Good, so am I. Any vampires in the hotel right now?”
* * *
There did happen to be a vampire staying at the hotel, but it took an extra half an hour to get that information out of Paul. First, he claimed the hotel didn’t track species and sub-species (vampires are considered a subspecies of humans) because it was illegal. This obviously wasn’t going to fly, because there is no such law, and everyone knew it. Then he said it was rude to ask, and this was undoubtedly true, but since everyone there was pre-screened someone knew who was who and what was what, and surely this was shared with the hotel.
Finally, he said it would be irresponsible to share the information, at which point I asked him where the vampire rooms were.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Sure you do. Look, you don’t have to tell us if there’s a vampire in the hotel, or how many succubi are on the premises, or if you’ve got a rakshasa or a gremlin or an ogre. We all know a vampire would require different accommodations, and we’ve all s
een them around the island at one time or another, so you must have a special setup. Just give us a room number and we can go knock ourselves. You won’t even have to be there.”
A few more minutes of hemming and hawing and he surrendered a room number.
The vampire room—there was only one—was beneath the front desk, in what could more accurately be described as a vault. It was also huge, which I guess made sense. It was the only part of the hotel where the room was the main attraction and not the beach.
The vampire was a Brit named Calvin. He wasn’t happy to see us, because we woke him. It being late in the afternoon, this was to be expected.
“You want me to what?” he asked, rubbing his eyes. He was in white cotton pajamas that had their heyday sometime around world war one.
“Examine some blood for us, sir,” Esteban said, using his ultra-polite voice. He was being ultra-polite because that’s what you do around rich people. It’s also what you do around vampires.
“Is this something that can wait until later? Night-time would be really ideal.”
“It’s sort of an emergency,” I said. “Sort of.”
He focused on me for the first time, then sniffed. “Oh, hello. I think we’ve met. Apollo, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes, yes.” I had no memory of encountering him, but: alcohol.
“Sure, it was at that thing, wasn’t it though? That Marie… Marie something. She was there.”
“The… French Revolution?”
“No, no, no. In London. The late Eighteens sometime. Ahh, anyway. It’s good to see you’re still knocking around. Let me get my coat and my umbrella and I’ll be along.”
Soon enough, Calvin was dressed in a long overcoat with a high collar, a wide-brimmed hat, gloves, sunglasses and an umbrella. The poor man looked a little ridiculous, but the sun was definitely not going to reach him. There was a decent chance someone might conclude he was an incognito rock star—I could think of at least four famous musicians who weren’t human—but that was only a little likely. Mostly, the get-up said vampire, especially the coat, which looked like it was last worn by Bela Lugosi.
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 8
