He’d been holding his head stiffly to one side. He stared at the wall, trying to force his eyes to acclimate to the light. Now, as slowly as possible, he moved, turning his head and looking at the creature perched on the thin sheets that separated the darkness of the thing from the tender flesh of his belly. It opened its mouth and revealed rows of teeth; it was one of those things Jacob had removed from inside the foundation stones. It doubled up its neck and hissed at him, its teeth extending even farther into the dim light from the window.
Then a baseball bat came out of the darkness and swatted the beast off the covers. Jacob materialized out of the dark and stood by the bed. “I do apologize. There’s no excuse really, although I’m sure you’d rather not share your bed with such an ungrateful guest. I’ve been chasing this nasty bit of fur and claw the breadth and length of the hotel. I believe this is the last one. So sorry.”
Then the creature was scrabbling at the door, its teeth prying at the frame. Then the door was open, the mad ball of animal rocketing into the hall.
“What ho!” Jacob shouted, jumping onto Richard’s bed. “Again, I beg your pardon,” he said, then bounded after the animal.
Somewhat incoherently, Richard thought of Serena, asleep in her room with this beastie roaming the halls, and how Jacob seemed to be making a game of the whole thing, and it made him furious, more so because he didn’t exactly know what to do about it all. And it seemed strange to be worrying over this small creature, however ferocious it might be, when there were other things, his guests, who might be far worse. And he felt a rage toward himself, for bringing his young daughter into this terrible place, where there were things with teeth and things with claws, and worse.
He jerked himself out of bed and ran after Jacob and the small aggressive intruder.
He could hear, somewhere in the darkness ahead of him, the rhythmic pound of Jacob’s shoes on the carpeted hallway. And beyond that, the fading but still nerve-tickling scrape of claw and tooth against walls and baseboards.
Richard followed the sound to the staircase, over the landing, and to the rear hallways of the second floor. Here, the electricity was rationed. Two of the rooms in this section were more or less permanently occupied, but Richard hadn’t yet met those occupants. Jacob had told him he might never meet them, that he himself had caught only a brief glimpse of a single member of the pair, and that years ago. “I hear them, now and then, one of them crying occasionally, the other tapping the bed with something metal,” was all he could say. There were only nightlights protruding here and there, like glowing tumors from the baseboards to light the way. “Those two are quite intolerant of the light,” Jacob had said.
Richard’s bare feet appeared to float from shadow to pooled light to shadow again – each reappearance was almost a surprise. They might have been someone else’s feet, and he just an anxious head drifting through the dark.
You just don’t think, Richard, she whispered inside his head.
He concentrated on the audible trail of pounds and scrapes.
What did you think you were trying to do, Richard, bringing her here? Look at the danger you’ve put her in.
He tried not to speak it, but softly he was saying, “No, dear. Not now.” He tried not to plead, but even more softly he found himself saying, “please.”
The air around him shimmered. You’ve no sense anymore, she said, and the voice was sad now. You’ll get the both of you killed.
“I’m her parent,” he said, straining to hear what might be ahead of him. “The only one she has now.”
The air was suddenly ice that adhered to his skin. His boxers became slightly abrasive. A cold wind caressed his numb face.
He was in the red corridor on the third floor now, the walls a dark burgundy, the long crimson rug glowing. He didn’t understand how he could have gotten here – he hadn’t climbed any more stairs. But he had to listen for the trail. Serena depended on him, perhaps more than he could manage. But he was all she had.
The burgundy walls lightened and ran. The ice evaporated from his skin.
Bathed in sweat, he ran around a bend in the corridor he did not recognize. He could hear a dry scrambling in the walls.
Dust spread like lace over his cheeks and forehead. Debris carpeted the hall. He stumbled. Something warm and wet smeared across the bottoms of his feet, collecting grit as he ran. He realized he’d never been in this part of the hotel before.
He passed under a low arch into a night cool and wet with earth. The flavor of it filled his lungs, then became candy-sweet, burning up his sinuses.
He paced through rooms and corridors burned into a pale, geometric skeleton, and clamped his lips against the flying ash. He passed indistinct sleepwalkers, clothed and bare.
It was only when he found himself in a great emptiness, when he had lost the very walls of the Deadfall, and the sound of the trail, that he stopped to consider. Where was Serena?
He had left her back there alone in their suite of rooms while he chased shadows through the multitudinous intersections of the Deadfall’s skewed geometry. He had run off half-crazed in his underwear, he had ignored his dead wife’s prodding and thereby proved her doubts correct. Where was Lovelace?
Richard had begun to turn, crouching, seeking the clearest way back.
“Got you, you devil!” It was Jacob’s shout, close by. Richard moved to the left and strained forward. An inestimable distance away, he could see a vague rectangular outline in the darkness. He walked toward it. The floor felt seamless and without texture under his feet. He encountered no furniture, no obstacles of any kind.
Richard ran his fingers along the vertical edges of the outline. His hand found an irregularly-shaped lump of metal – he clutched it in both hands and yanked. The door scraped and whined. He yanked it again.
The door jerked opened with the sound of breaking rust. Jacob sat on the floor with his back against the blue-papered wall, stoking his pipe. At his feet lay a grass sack decorated with spreading bright red spots. Some of the red had dripped out and stained the indigo rug. The baseball bat lay a short distance away, several inches missing from the business end.
Jacob slipped the pipe from his mouth and sighed. “I do hope this last one didn’t have offspring.” They were back on the second floor, the wing above his quarters. Jacob stared at the ancient door behind Richard and nodded. “Myself, I haven’t used that way in years.” He looked down at Richard’s bleeding feet. “Where’s your daughter, Richard? Where’s Serena?”
“I – I was following you.” His own voice sounded ragged to him, with an edge of hysteria.
He’d barely gotten it out before Jacob was on his feet. “This way!” The sudden quickness frightened him.
This section of the hotel was familiar, but after only a couple of turns he felt confused. He wondered if he would ever feel at ease again, even in the most used sections of the Deadfall. In minutes, they were standing in front of one of the closets. Jacob dragged him inside. The closet appeared to be empty. Jacob felt the wallpaper on one side. “I do not like doing this, mind you. But it is necessary.” A horizontal split of gray light opened in the dark wall. Jacob put one eye to it. “Come here,” he whispered.
Richard awkwardly pushed his head alongside Jacob’s. On the other side was one of the better rooms. A dark form had spread itself over the bed. The head of the dark form fell slowly to the side. Richard felt his breath swell in his throat. “Lovelace.”
In sleep, he looked like an old man. His long red hair had been pulled back from his face and lay trapped under his head and shoulders. What little of it Richard could see appeared pale, a silver color. The many lines of the face were thin and long, and fell together into a sharp bundle when he snored. It was an old man’s snore – congested and throaty – and it made the man’s narrow chest tremble.
“Not so threatening now, is he? Not the broad-chested, flame-haired terror?” Jacob whispered.
“He hardly looks like the same person.”
> Jacob snorted softly. “Our residents seldom do. They are so like children, asleep. Until they dream. They may hunt safely in their dreams. They may howl at the darkness in their dreams without betraying themselves. And most of them carry those dreams down into their days, I think, where they may seem no different from you or me. And, indeed, perhaps in their days they are not that different from you or me.”
Richard didn’t really buy that, but he didn’t have the words to argue with Jacob. And something was happening to Lovelace now, which made it impossible to see any such resemblance.
Arthur Lovelace was apparently dreaming. His head moved slowly from side to side, as if in denial. His hands clutched and unclutched. His brow gleamed. A low moan stirred in his throat. His bare feet made small kicking motions, as if running in some other world. And his hair had begun to redden again, transitioning back to its familiar daylight color of flame, like blood oozing out of the scalp, out of the brain.
“The old tales have it wrong,” Jacob said.
Richard pressed his eyes against the slit. Lovelace’s motions of denial had grown more vigorous; the fine red hair filled the air above his head like a mist of exploded blood. The lines of his face blurred and doubled.
“Richard, behind the bed.”
Richard looked beyond Lovelace’s thrashing form to the far wall. A vague oval stared at him: a pale face, with patches of skin missing from cheeks and forehead. A wide red mouth. Dark, obscured eyes. And the tatters of uniform. “The chauffeur.”
Richard felt a flash of anger. “Isn’t that enough, Jacob?”
“No, my friend, not necessarily. As distasteful as it certainly is, there is always the possibility the driver knew exactly what she was getting into, that some sort of bargain had been made. I’ve known Arthur to make such arrangements before.”
Lovelace’s mouth had fallen back, and now it filled with an odd combination of sounds, guttural background accented by occasional high-pitched notes. His skin broke out into a heavy, syrupy sweat that made his flesh appear to melt. His long, crooked fingers pulled at collar, at sleeves. His ears fell back. His face fell back. And something like a ghost of skin, like flesh turned to vapor, began to separate out of him, began to spread like wings from shoulders and head and hips, wrapping him in mist, all his secret fluids suddenly taken flight, fleeing the body.
Richard felt his own back straighten, his shoulders curl forward, as if he had suddenly lost control of his body. His tongue was dry; anxiety wracked him. Distantly, he could feel Jacob’s fingers wrapping around his arm, steadying him.
The white vapor floating over Lovelace began to congeal. The lines of the form grew more distinct. Jagged edges rose out of the mist. The lines appeared luminous, electrified.
The white form twisted its head. Eyes burned like dark coals in hollows of ice. The pale wolf raked its claws derisively across the old man’s puny, laboring chest. Shallow rivulets of blood welled. Then the wolf was leaping in slow motion out of Lovelace’s body, pulling a film of blood out of the flesh, splattering walls and sheets, the lines of the room distorting with its passage.
Richard couldn’t make himself turn away, but Jacob was already pulling him from the closet and across to another door. “We have to beat it to Serena’s room!”
He dragged Richard down a narrow spiral staircase, through a room empty of furniture except for hundreds of glass bottles filled with a murky green liquid, and, suddenly, into Serena’s room. She was sound asleep, two rag dolls tucked against her chin. She always tried to hide them when he was in the room – he wasn’t supposed to know she still slept with them.
A fierce scratching came from the door. Jacob moved quickly and grabbed the knob. “Jacob?” Richard moved in front of Serena’s bed. Jacob began to open the door. “Jacob! Are you crazy?”
But he had already flung it open. The wolf crouched there, back rising like a white, foamy wave. Jacob clapped his hands together sharply in front of its face.
The clouded face of the wolf appeared to separate slightly. The wolf howled – not from its mouth but from somewhere inside its head – a cry something between a baby’s scream and an electronic whine. The wolf twisted up into the air like the tail of a tornado and then was gone.
Serena cried softly in her sleep. Richard stroked her hair. “It’s gone, then?”
“He is a creature of dreams, do you understand? Such things are essentially cowards when surprised by those of us in the waking world. But that does not mean they are harmless. Once you fall asleep you are vulnerable to them. And of course you cannot stay awake all the time.”
Richard gathered his daughter closer to him. “So what do we do?”
Jacob looked at him as if the answer should be obvious. “Tomorrow is Serena’s birthday. We will have a party.”
THE PARTY WAS to be held at twilight. Serena said the sky behind the gazebo was prettiest then, the light just the way she wanted it. She had her mother’s eye for the small details.
That timing, of course, made Richard anxious. The Deadfall was at its most ethereal then, its most ambiguous. At that time of day, it might look most like a normal hotel, but only because the gray shadows obscured it. But it also made it easier to lose your way. Walls suddenly became new passages. Passages suddenly became solid walls.
In the shadows under the trees, long hair waved, flapped. Abby’s face flashed suddenly from beneath the hair, her eyes fixed on him. What did she want him to do? Did she miss him? Sometimes it seemed all he could think of washer, how it had been like to make love to her, and he wondered how it could be possible to make love to another woman ever again.
Sometimes, in bed, she’d been a huge, beautiful monster to him. Her body had seemed to fill the bed, to stretch as far as he could touch, and he had been a little boy struggling to explore it, to discover all the forbidden places, the secret regions that had filled him with both dread and longing. He had felt enslaved by her, consumed by her, his monster, draining him of thought, tucking it away inside her vastness.
ALL THAT DAY Richard had tried to find out more of what Jacob knew, if indeed he knew anything concrete at all, about what to do about Lovelace.
“We must watch him, Richard. I am still weighing our options. This is a delicate matter, given our mission here. Act, if it seems absolutely necessary, but only at the appropriate time.”
“Then you have some sort of plan?”
“I assure you I am always making plans. You will learn that habit as well, running the Deadfall.”
Richard thought then that running the Deadfall was the last thing he wanted to do. They would pack a few belongings, then they would get in the car and leave. Jacob could keep the rest of their things. Serena would be safe.
But what to do with Abby? They’d be leaving her behind as well. How could they do that? Jacob had been here for many years – he seemed to know what he was doing. Couldn’t Richard just trust him? Because he certainly couldn’t trust himself.
Richard watched for any trace of the wolf, but Lovelace had proved difficult to find, most of that day. Richard had used his passkey to enter Lovelace’s room, and been relieved to find the chauffeur’s body gone, but there had been no signs of Lovelace, except for small threads of bloodstain on the quilt. Then, at lunch, Lovelace suddenly appeared in the dining room as if nothing unusual were going on. The old man ate a hearty meal.
“You realize, he may remember little, if anything, of last night,” Jacob said, as they watched Lovelace devour his food. Richard wasn’t comforted by Jacob’s information – it made Lovelace seem even more out of control. And he himself felt increasingly impotent.
He sometimes wondered if Jacob had seen a certain passivity, a certain pliancy in his character that had led to his choice as successor. Certainly he treated him like a child much of the time, withholding information as if it were gold and he a miser, as if he couldn’t trust Richard with the responsibility of knowing. Someone with backbone might have left a long time ago. Someone with backbone pro
bably wouldn’t have taken the job in the first place. Not with all the restrictions.
“There are certain rooms, certain locks, where you’ll find your passkey useless,” Jacob had said. “In due time you’ll receive the keys to some of those locks, but perhaps never for others.”
He had come into the hotel assuming that he was to be part of management, with privileged access. But they hadn’t signed anything, and no money actually changed hands. It was a ridiculous way to do business, but then Richard had never been much of a businessman.
And how could he live with the madness of the night before? He desperately, desperately needed to trust Jacob. He could not do this himself; he couldn’t even run his own life. He needed someone to tell him what he should do.
For all his anxiety, Serena’s party was actually a pleasant affair. Serena and Enid had baked several platters full of cookies, far more than the small party of staff and a few locals (all of them related to Enid, apparently) could possibly eat. Serena kept pushing the cookies on Richard, and he ate far too many, enough to make him even more jittery than before. She wore a rather grownup dress Enid had made for her. She looked gorgeous. And sometimes when she looked at him, his heart seized, because they were Abby’s eyes. Richard had felt somewhat self-conscious about the meager gifts he had selected – a small flute and a stuffed giraffe – but she was enthusiastic about both. Her delight seemed genuine – she was a joy to give things to. He was very proud of her.
Jacob’s gift wasan intricately-carved wooden necklace, primitive looking, with highly-stylized fruits and animals. He also provided the musical entertainment: an ancient accordion he hauled out of a trunk that had been hidden in one of the storage closets under the stairs. It possessed a strange, tinny sound. When Jacob squeezed it, great dark clouds of dust blew out. Serena laughed until she cried, and after a moment of false consternation, Jacob laughed with her.
The clouds were dark that evening. The final rays of sunlight left a liquid crimson rim around them that gradually blackened, blending with the night.
Deadfall Hotel Page 7
