Deadfall Hotel

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  He wondered if this mass offering was meant for him – he’d had cats before, and except for the quantity and variety this was not unlike something they might have done – but then he heard the deep-throated purr, and turned to see Dragon perched, gargoyle-like, on the edge of the roof.

  Serena looked up at Dragon. She slumped to the ground and began to cry. A smallish white cat crept out of the shadows, walking around her in a circle, spraying the ground, claiming his daughter as its territory.

  Richard watched as two huge gray cats – each twice the size of the largest, fattest house cat he had ever seen – approached Serena from opposite sides of the field of carnage. He gasped and started toward her, even more alarmed when he heard Dragon growl menacingly behind him.

  Then the two cats appeared to look past Serena, seeing each other as if for the first time. They stared, fixated, fur bristling, bodies in slow expansion, tails fluffing out, until the king came into view – Dragon had moved so quickly Richard wondered if maybe this was a twin cat, but the way he held himself was all too unmistakable. The two huge cats shrank up inside themselves until they seemed practically nothing.

  “Daddy, I want to leave. Let’s get out of here.” It was the soft, broken voice of a little girl inside her bad dream. Dragon trotted over to her, purred, rubbed against her. She didn’t move, didn’t acknowledge the cat’s close proximity. The cat’s eyes went from black to steel. Then he turned his back on her and slipped into darkness with a rush as if the film of the world had suddenly speeded up. The two fat cats followed him at a more leisurely pace. And all was silent. Not even a murmur from the hordes of cats locked inside the Deadfall. Richard found himself waiting for the sound of broken glass, for the mass of cats to come crashing in a stream of blood and fur through the Deadfall’s many windows, but there was nothing. He and Serena might have been completely alone. He could almost laugh at that. He’d wanted a quiet place to recover, to raise his daughter. Jacob had essentially promised him as much.

  Something soft was at his waist, embracing him. The sweet smell of his little girl mixed with something else, a musky odor of cat, the charged scent of madness and terror. “Daddy, where’s Jacob? He should be here somewhere, shouldn’t he?”

  “I’m sure… he’s working on this, trying to figure a way to get rid of the cats. He’s been doing this a long time – he’s been at the Deadfall a lot of years, you know? I know it’s scary, sweetheart. But Jacob knows what he’s doing.” He pulled her closer, feeling like a fraud.

  “What will we do? Where will we go?” She turned her face into him.

  Richard stroked her hair, felt something wet, sticky. He looked at his hand: there was blood in her hair. He tilted her head: scratches across the forehead, down the cheeks like exaggerated tears. “We’re going to get into the car,” he said. “And then we’re going to drive away from here.” She looked relieved, but alarmed as well. “Hush now. Maybe we’ll come back later, after the problem’s been solved.”

  They slipped out of the light and into the shadows along the wall. It was ridiculous to feel any safer with that route, of course – cats stayed in the shadows, as did other terrible things. But it still seemed to make them both feel better; at least they weren’t tripping over the display of tiny corpses. The garage was recessed into the Deadfall behind a screen of small trees, twenty, twenty-five feet away – you couldn’t see it from the drive, you had to know where it was.

  Richard eased open one of the great slabs of weathered wood, Serena tucked behind him. The air was stale burlap, and scratchy in the nose. He didn’t think anyone had been in here since they moved in. Once at the Deadfall, you didn’t think of using an automobile except for leaving.

  He drew her a few feet inside, shutting the door but not all the way. He imagined breaking out at high speed, wood splintering everywhere, more easily accomplished if the door wasn’t latched. He was reluctant to turn on the dim bulb suspended high overhead; it might draw the cats’ attention. Birds fluttered up in the rafters – a good sign, he thought. He pulled Serena to one wall and flipped the switch there decisively.

  His station wagon appeared older than he remembered, a snapshot in silver, bathed in low-watt white from overhead. The old look of it made him nervous – he hoped it was still drivable.

  The balance of light and shadow changed with each hesitant step into the dim recesses of the garage. Bits of alien equipment hung from pegs on the high walls: fanciful grilles for car makes he had never heard of, hoses kinked into exotic designs, discarded fenders stained garishly, an assortment of pipes, struts, wires and baroque tools. Up in the rafters, the birds shifted in unison, then shifted back again with a synchronous rise and fall of tail feather and wing. The occupied territory of birds.

  As he approached his car he began experiencing a strange sort of vertigo. The station wagon seemed already to be moving, rolling slowly through the vague light as if in dreamy anticipation. Shadows boiled out from behind the tires and beneath the chrome bumper. They dropped bits of plug wire, small fragments of black plastic, and shreds of cloth and dingy yellow mats of upholstery pad. No, not shadows at all. Cats, dozens of black cats. Then all the black cats began to hiss, so softly at first it seemed the noise was some distance away, then growing in volume and harshness: tires losing air, steam kettles whistling, calm intention in screeching escape.

  A great black mass of muscle and fur leapt from the car’s roof and approached the motionless pair. It rose on its hind legs, swelling impossibly, until it seemed it would soon be Serena’s size. It opened its mouth to screech when a shaft suddenly entered its throat, pinning it to the side of the car, silencing it.

  “Out of here!” a voice rasped behind them. Richard turned to see Jacob standing half hidden by the double door, an ancient crossbow hanging from one hand. “Let’s go if you don’t want to end up like your car!”

  Jacob led them back into the Deadfall through doors and down narrow corridors which seemed vaguely familiar, but which Richard was sure he’d never seen before. Certainly he could have never repeated their steps. But suddenly they were in Serena’s bedroom, and there were no signs of cats, except for a few kitty posters on the walls which Serena ripped down immediately and without comment. Then, amazingly, she curled up on the bed and went fast asleep. Richard leaned over to kiss her head, felt himself sliding, and sat down on the floor by the bed instead. He stared up at Jacob, whose face in the darkness appeared elongated and feline. “What now?” he asked.

  “Now, we rest,” Jacob replied, and busied himself moving Serena’s furniture around, pushing it up against her doors.

  SOMETIME IN THE middle of the night, Richard heard the voices: low, musical murmurs, a blending of chirruping noises, punctuated by open-throated calls, cries, howls, screeches. Requests, demands, greetings, signals, the most elementary parts of a language. He wasn’t sure if he was awake or not, if he heard or had only dreamed he’d heard the cats speak and sing. Abby had been trying to awaken him for hours. The cat needed to be let out, the cat needed to be fed. His turn. He never took responsibility. He never did what he was supposed to. He wanted to clamp his hands over his wife’s mouth, shut her up. He was so tired; all he wanted to do was sleep. People murdered when they were denied their sleep – they couldn’t help themselves. Waking up a sleeping, dreaming man was a dangerous thing to do. You took your life in your hands. The sleeper was like a cat: basic, elemental, amoral. You couldn’t help yourself. Instinct took over. The beast was at home.

  He dreamed of hordes of cats being burned alive over great bonfires, and single cats turning black on a spit. An army of peasants at war with the cats, chasing them down and smashing their spines with iron bars. Sackloads of half-dead cats stinking up the courtyards. Mock trials with prosecutors and executioners, the guilty cats strung up on a makeshift gallows.

  In the middle of the night the cats howled, and it sounded like human screams, torn from some visceral old world in the back alleys of the brain.

  Ri
chard watched as Dragon brought a small fox into the midst of some kittens, and then let it loose. The fox backed away, but there was no place for it to go. One by one the kittens reached out tentatively to swat at the fox. Richard wondered why the fox – so much larger than the kittens – did not attack or fight its way through. But the confused look, the nervous weaving of the head, suggested the fox sensed something different about these kittens.

  A few of the kittens began hissing and spitting. Then, with an eruption of noise, they all bolted toward the fox, their forepaws raised. Suddenly the fox disappeared inside an explosion of red mist. Serena’s face appeared in its place, eyes wide, cheeks claw-torn and chewed.

  He jolted awake, rubbing at the fur collar around his neck, straining against the pressure at his throat, pushing the collar open, gasping for air. He opened his eyes and gazed at the cats piled high around him, sleeping contentedly, except for the one, Dragon, who crouched by his feet, staring at him unmoving.

  He knew it was Dragon from the way the cat tilted his head, the way he stared, licked his lips, and looked down at his paws: a kitten with a monster inside. But his physical appearance had changed some. At first, Richard thought the changes were subtle, but as he dared to raise his head for a better angle, more and more of Dragon’s transformation jelled from the shadows.

  Dragon had become scraggly, with wild long fur in such disarray it appeared randomly glued to his back. Richard followed the improbably long legs and saw that Dragon now had cloven hooves instead of paws. Bumps in the fur above his pink, glowing eyes suggested horns.

  “Pssst. Kitty!” Serena’s voice. Richard turned his head – too quickly, dizziness made his eyes swim and fill with cats he had to shake and shoo away – and saw Serena inside the doorway of her closet, Jacob’s pale old face right behind and above her, surrounded by little-girl party dresses Serena had outgrown but been reluctant to throw away. With a pang, Richard remembered that Abby had bought them all on ‘just us girls’ shopping trips with their daughter. That it had never occurred to him before why Serena might have kept them made him feel like a creep, not deserving the honor of being her dad.

  “Kitty, kitty!” she called out again. Dragon turned his head stiffly toward the closet. Serena held a ball of yarn in her upraised hand.

  Oh, come now, Richard thought. The ball of yarn left Serena’s hand as if in slow motion, lobbed through the air in a high arc, one end of the yarn freeing itself, trailing a tail. Dragon appeared mesmerized, following the yarn with his head, then suddenly he leapt, caught the ball in midair, tumbling over and over into the middle of the other cats – who scattered as if a burning coal had been cast into their midst – growling softly with the yarn clutched to his belly.

  “Daddy, come on!” Serena demanded, and Richard looked at the two of them squeezed into the closet, Jacob’s head haloed in little girl lace, and he wanted to laugh. But he surprised himself and climbed to his feet, stepping carefully over sleeping cats, watching as other cats slipped slowly from a hole that had been scratched and torn out of Serena’s bedroom wall, saw the cats pause, looking around, hissing irritably, apparently agitated by the rearranged furniture, until – seeing Dragon with the yarn – they bounded over to join in the king’s play. Richard chose that moment to leap over the remaining slumbering cats and into Serena’s closet like a character in a kid’s fantasy novel.

  He looked at Jacob with what he imagined to be a sleepy and crazy smile. “So now what? We pass into some other dimension from here?”

  Jacob glanced overhead. Richard looked up at an open trapdoor, into the darkness beyond. “I didn’t tell you about it because it wouldn’t be good for Serena to explore the hotel by herself,” Jacob explained. “Closed, it simply blends into the ceiling.”

  Dragon was still playing with the yarn, looking every bit the kitten, completely harmless. “Time to go now, Daddy.” There was pleading in her voice, as if her daddy had gone crazy and had to be brought back to his senses. Richard watched as Dragon’s ears moved, following the sound of Serena’s voice. He shut the closet door carefully.

  Jacob was up inside the trapdoor in seconds. The old man’s agility never ceased to amaze. He pulled Serena up and Richard followed, struggling even with their help. Jacob slipped the trapdoor back into place, bringing the darkness down on them completely. Then with a shush a match flame appeared, touched to a candle mounted in a wall sconce beside them. The dusty wall glowed, layered in cobwebs. “I completely forgot about this section while we were cleaning – I must be slipping. Now don’t straighten up all the way,” Jacob warned him. “The ceiling is quite low until we get to the sitting room.”

  They followed Jacob through the low, winding corridor, stopping to light more candles along the way. Richard thought these might be the oldest candles he had ever seen: thick as small tree trunks, made of a greasy, yellow wax. The floor sloped downward for a time, which made little sense architecturally, but then what about this ancient hotel pretended to logic? But even as Richard pondered the Escheresque perplexities of the place, the corridor made a sharp left, followed by a sharp right, and then the floor seemed to be on an incline. There were rustlings along the edges of the walls where the candlelight did not reach, but Jacob did not react, and even Serena seemed calm, no doubt taking her cue from him. At one point, Richard noticed faces painted for several yards on the ceiling: women with shapeless, earthworm lips expressing pain or ecstasy or both, and white crosses furiously carved into the wood to scratch out their painted eyes. Then the faces were gone, and there were large sections of black paint, the corridor widened, and Jacob led them into a large room.

  This had to be the sitting room. There were an assortment of benches and loungers and Adirondack chairs scattered about the odd, dusty space. A grimy glass with one withered straw perched on a TV tray beside one of the chairs – Richard imagined it filled with lemonade, or some other liquid he wouldn’t have cared to drink. In any case, he didn’t imagine the place had been utilized in some years, although in the Deadfall, signs of disuse and neglect weren’t always what they might seem.

  “This spot used to be quite popular,” Jacob said as if in answer, “although I won’t pretend to know why. You can see the front lawn from some of these peepholes over here.”

  Richard joined him by a row of white circles, and then realized the circles were painted around actual holes to the outside. He bent slightly and tried them: a number were clogged, and although they appeared to come in pairs, several of the pairs were too widely spaced for the eyes of anyone he had ever met. But finally he found a pair he felt comfortable with: he brought his hands up to the sides of his face and leaned forward. He thought of a peepshow he’d gone to with some friends back in college. You put in your two quarters and were shown things you had never seen before. Some of those things you really didn’t want to see, but you’d paid your fifty cents so you just had to look.

  Dawn was about a half hour past, and there were cats everywhere, their frenzy unabated even after a night’s revelries. Cats tearing at the shrubbery, climbing on each other’s backs, spitting and howling, fighting over the carcasses of small animals, dragging half-live creatures into the center of the front lawn to become the focal point of a new round of feline play. Richard was amazed that they were still able to discover prey anywhere in the surrounding fifty miles.

  A scrawny, ragged cat staggered back and forth near the hotel porch, its skin opened, internal organs on display as if it had crawled off the dissection table of a high school biology class.

  Watching the cats spread out over the lawn, foraging, hunting, Richard thought of meat, how this was all about meat, the hunger for it, the consumption of it, the rapid and efficient excretion of it. Limber cat bodies directly out of the Pliocene, with those prehistoric memories still intact. He watched as they lurked behind the bushes, as they leapt to consummate a kill.

  “Why do you think dogs eat cat feces? They can smell the meat inside.”

  Richard twisted aro
und. “Do you read minds, Jacob? It would be unfair not to tell us if you did.”

  Jacob smiled grimly. “No more than you, my friend. I simply have a dark turn of mind. It is one of the qualifications for working here. When I’m with other people with similar dark turns of mind, and when we’re looking at the same scenes, it’s not too difficult to guess what you’re thinking.”

  Back at the peephole, he watched as Dragon trotted out into the center of the Deadfall’s front acreage, a line of frisky kittens in tow. The other cats parted before the procession, dragging their victims with them. Within a few minutes they’d made a large, rough circle: Dragon at the hub of a wheel, the rest of the cats arranged around the rim. It was at that moment that Richard realized where this ‘sitting room’ was, where these peepholes were located.

  High above the Deadfall’s front entrance was a row of carved heads: a lion, a bear, a dragon, then several abstract-looking faces so fantastic they refused to stick in memory, leaving you only with the nagging question of whether they were based on life, or based on madness, and finally, a head that might have been a beautiful woman, or might have been a young child, depending on your mood and the time of day. The faces had always looked wide-eyed to Richard, intensely observant.

  His immediate thought was that whoever watched from here simply wanted to observe new visitors to the hotel. But this was more a lounge, a gathering place. Then he thought of how that front lawn with the activities that took place there was actually the most ‘normal’ location on the Deadfall grounds. On first arrival, new guests usually did not reveal their peculiarities. They waited until safely tucked inside the Deadfall’s plush, complicated interior (although a few came heavily hooded, wrapped in bandages, or masked). Normal deliveries from normal businesses came through the front entrance, as did the mail carrier and the rare salesman. And they had family picnics on this lawn. He’d played with his daughter on this lawn, and she’d played there by herself.