Deadfall Hotel

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Richard moved quickly to pursue.

  “Careful!” Jacob whispered, grabbing Richard’s shoulder. “You don’t want to startle the cat!”

  So the two of them eased through the narrow space between boxes and furniture, coming around the end to discover Serena facing them, her head outlined by the dark square window behind her. Dragon had his back to them, facing her, his body looking swollen as every muscle expanded and the fur stood away from his flesh. He hissed and appeared to grow some more, rocking back on his haunches, ready to strike.

  Richard clutched the floor lamp a foot or so from his right hand, began lifting it from the floor.

  “Daddy, no!” she screamed. She looked directly into Dragon’s eyes, raised her shoulders and arms, dropped her mouth open and screeched as loud as she could.

  “No!” Richard howled with helplessness as the cat leapt into the air, front legs out and reaching for his precious daughter’s head.

  At the last second, Serena jerked sideways as if shot, the same moment as the cat disappeared through the black window. Serena recovered her balance, and pushed the heavy iron hatch of the ancient Deadfall furnace closed.

  Richard stood dumbfounded. The furnace was so huge – six times larger, at least, than any furnace he had ever seen – that he’d always thought of it as essentially filling the basement, with no specific location, no specific door.

  Jacob walked up beside her. She’d looked so large a moment ago, making faces at the monster cat. Now she seemed improbably tiny, even beside the shrunken old caretaker.

  Jacob put his hand on a large red button mounted on a metal box above the furnace door. He looked down at Serena.

  Serena looked over at Richard, an ineffably sad expression on her face. She stared up at Jacob. And nodded.

  Jacob pushed the heel of his palm into the button and the furnace exploded into life. It made a terrible, anguished, almost organic sound.

  At one time a sign by the front door of the Deadfall stated “NO PETS ALLOWED.” It has been missing since before my time here. If I cannot find the original, I will make my own.

  I do not believe that any of the three members of the Carter family now residing here will object when I post it.

  – from the diary of Jacob Ascher,

  proprietor, Deadfall Hotel, 1969-2000

  Chapter Four

  THE CRAVING

  This evening I ate a leisurely meal in the Deadfall’s kitchen, without doubt my favorite location in the hotel. My guest for this repast was Ms. Abigail Carter, deceased wife of Richard Carter, the current proprietor. And Serena’s mother. I understand that there are those who might perceive some impropriety in such a meeting, and I accept their concerns, declining to use the argument that the bonds of matrimony end with the grave (or, in her case, the scattering of one’s ashes).

  Ours is not a romantic relationship. Ms. Carter prefers the environs of the kitchen because Enid keeps it spotlessly clean. This is not meant to imply that other areas of the Deadfall are less clean, but they are cluttered, they map the affects of numerous encounters both human and non-human, and so could hardly be called ‘antiseptic.’ For souls of some sensitivity, such as Ms. Carter, antiseptic matters.

  I’m not sure how Ms. Carter would react if she were to step into one of our giant freezers, however, stocked as they are with foodstuffs meeting the rather specific requirements of our many visitors. In the freezers, she would find virtually every meat known to man, including several human cadavers (legally obtained, of course). There are also a variety of insects and parasitic organisms preserved on those frosted shelves, as well as a number of animal and vegetable combinations frozen at specific stages of decomposition. Need I say more? What whets one appetite destroys the appetite of another. It has always been so.

  Fortunately Enid is not required to prepare the bulk of these foods. The culinary knowledge required to successfully execute such a range of cuisines would be quite beyond the capabilities of a room full of top chefs, not to mention the, let us say, stubborn tastes of one middle-aged cook. Residents have free access to the kitchen to prepare their own meals if that is what they desire, although schedules must be submitted to avoid unfortunate conflicts. A few years ago I made a serious error, which resulted in a resident entering the kitchen before the previous occupant had completed his dietary needs, whereupon said occupant abandoned the evening’s menu for something new and hopefully tastier. This change in courses resulted in dire consequences for all parties involved.

  There is a formal dining room at the back of the third of the four sub-kitchens attached to the central food preparation area. But since all staff and residents eat at the chef’s table located here, or in their individual rooms, the dining room is used for the storage of supplies and additional furniture (essential, when the furnishings of some rooms are destroyed during, or after, a resident’s stay). But the fact that this unused dining room exists at all reminds me that the Deadfall was originally constructed for other, more ‘normal’ commerce. It was only upon the deaths of the original owner’s wife and children, and after the series of stressful transformations following, that the original business plan of the Deadfall Hotel was changed.

  Of course, death changes most things, but not everything. It does not change the need for companionship. That is why I take my meals with Ms. Abigail Carter. It assuages a need for companionship I have felt for many years now – she is well-versed in a number of subjects, and as is the case in many marriages, felt able to share only a small portion of that knowledge with her husband. And it provides her with the opportunity to talk: of her fiercely-loved Serena, of the dead infant, of the regrets over a premature death (and although there is, really, no such thing, I do not correct her), of the longing, the terrible longing all the dead feel.

  The summer left us some time ago, destroyed by its own heat. Fall is but a whisper, in these environs. With so much death and decay on display year round we hardly notice the autumn, and so it truncates, crawling off sullen and insulted by our lack of attention. Winter normally arrives with a week’s snow, oftentimes more, already on the ground. You can feel the frost forming in the blood, but we keep the liquor pantry well-stocked with a large selection of basic and exotic liqueurs.

  Christmas at the Deadfall would seem, perhaps, irrelevant, although a few of our residents do observe the holiday in their own manner. In times past, some of the proprietors have even attempted some sort of decoration scheme – and the storage areas contain a variety of peeling and rotting Santas and reindeer, and the occasional moldering angel. Crates full of lights representing a century’s changing electrical standards, and all manner of ornamentation from the Victorian through art deco and ’sixties kitsch crowd the corners of out-of-the-way closets. This year Richard Carter chose – wisely, I believe – to keep Christmas confined to the warmth and safety of his family’s quarters, where I’m sure he did his best to provide Serena with the traditional holiday niceties.

  I did see the occasional, odd, referential gesture toward the holiday in other parts of the hotel this year, however. Outside a door on the third floor, someone had constructed a rather abstract representation of a tree out of yellowing fish bones, which made me wonder, despite myself, if we might still have a stray, too-intelligent cat or two about. And at one point I heard what I could only surmise were Christmas carols sung faintly in unidentifiable tongue in the northeast second floor corridor. There was also a moment out on the snow-packed tennis courts which one might have interpreted as a gift exchange among three hooded figures and a three-legged canine, if one were inclined to whimsical speculations.

  Personally, I never celebrate the holiday, but I have chosen to mark its arrival in the same manner every year: sitting quietly in my small room at the back of the hotel, the panes of my one tiny window glowing in opal brilliance from the snow-reflected light, reading the largest, oldest book I can get my hands on. The next day, I know, will be colder, and I have little hope of warmth until spring.


  – from the diary of Jacob Ascher,

  proprietor, Deadfall Hotel, 1969-2000

  IT WAS ONLY a frozen flower, a few curves of red tissue fixed in the white ice spread below the window of his private study. But it bothered Richard to distraction. The flower had lost none of its color.

  He didn’t know what kind of flower it was; there were a number of them around the grounds of the Deadfall, always singly, never a group of them, a little like a rose, but the color cooler, the edges of the petals ragged, and more open, the insides moist and pale until they darkened into shadow toward the center, where they resembled hungry mouths.

  The flower should have been brown, or black. Rotted away, even. The weather had been so wet and cold, the ground frozen solid for over a month now, the snow piling higher each day. But this one flower had retained all its original color, the entirety of its original form. As if the ice had preserved it. Not that it looked life-like at all, not at all. It looked plastic and artificial and nothing you’d like to smell or give to anyone you loved.

  Winter had always struck him the same way. There was always something a little artificial about the season, something unreal. Snow had never looked natural: it was too white, too brilliant. Ice was worse, the way it pretended to preserve everything, while preserving very little. The way it cracked if you tried to bend it. Too rigid. Too cold. Winter was someone’s dream. Too many of the shadows had gone away. The dream had stripped the trees of their leaves so you could see all too plainly what lay beneath them. The dream made you see your own breath in front of you, made you want to gather it back quickly before too much escaped.

  Abby used to fret over the plants outside in the cold. Every year they would have a bush or a young tree that did not make it through. Sometimes you would know even before the snows had melted which ones would make it and which ones would not. There would be a certain way they looked under the ice, a certain way they bent beneath the weight of the snow. They would be dead, and you would know they were dead, and there was nothing you could do. And yet you had to look at them all winter. Every day you had to check on them, even knowing they were dead.

  The dream preserved the dead. The dead were always there, frozen in place, and the unnatural ice made their eyes shine with a trapped consciousness.

  In places, snow had drifted as much as four feet up the sides of the hotel. Stiff, cold paws had left a tangled scrawl of trails over the otherwise smooth embankments, recording the anxious activity of small animal brains. Sometimes, squirrels or rabbits would climb the embankments to a hotel window and press themselves into the glass, creating brief artificial nights of teeth and quivering fur.

  The grove which gave the Deadfall its name was at its starkest, its clearest definition, branches poking in all directions into the clouded fluid of the sky. At the highest, thickest point, the denuded branches were sharpened bundles of sticks. Farther toward the perimeter, certain patterns of limbs became apparent: twisted hands and feet, cartilage strung with filaments of muscle and nerve, narrow-hipped dancers leaping into the sky.

  Early in the season, something had disturbed the ever-widening scatter of deadfall, pulling the fallen branches out and dragging them toward the hotel until now they made a huge, deformed backbone half-submerged in the snow. The last scrawny vertebrae wavered in the high winds that came at dusk, claws of wind now and again scratching at Richard’s study window. One of the tenants – a bushy-headed man with no cap and split trousers – came each day and took a single piece of the backbone for himself, holding it up to the sky in admiration, exclaiming something unintelligible when some new shape or pattern suddenly revealed itself in the light, then went away with the piece tucked inside his coat, to whatever room he now resided in. Maybe to burn it, or maybe to assemble it with other such found pieces. Maybe to love it, or maybe to worship. Richard should have stopped hima long time ago, but he had never ceased wondering and dreaming about the secret lives of his tenants.

  Every day since the snow began, Richard had slipped into fur-lined boots and fur coat – he didn’t know who they’d belonged to, but they were hung up at the front of the study closet as if he were expected to use them – and gone out for a half-hour’s inspection of the grounds. Jacob said it was important, “just to keep an eye on things,” and sometimes joined him.

  With the surrounding vegetation dead or diminished, the naked face of the Deadfall had been revealed, its borders unsoftened, its details unblurred. Now he stood examining it, wondering what repairs he might be expected to make, if any. Where the vines along the north corners had receded with the season, great saw-toothed gashes and streaks had been revealed. The stone appeared gnawed, savaged, the broad-leaf vines a bandage. Richard thought he could see large pale ovals in some of the dark cavities, like sucker prints.

  “Big Foot did that one,” the old man said behind him.

  Richard gaped. Jacob was actually attempting a joke.

  “He and his friends were unruly. I had to evict the lot.”

  Richard stared at him. “Thanks a lot. I do appreciate the straight information, Jacob.” He thrust his hands into his pockets, suddenly colder.

  “It’s unlikely to be any warmer for awhile,” Jacob said, his voice softer. “From here on out it will be a slow, leisurely slide into a dream of white ice.” Then, “You’re not sorry you took the job?”

  Richard didn’t say anything for a while, thinking of Serena, what was or was not good for Serena, thinking of the cats and everything else to be afraid of when you had a child, then he surprised himself by saying, “No. I guess I know this is where I belong.”

  “For the time being.”

  “For the time being,” Richard agreed.

  “Some have said that the Deadfall is a state of mind. You do not have to stay. But you know that already, don’t you?”

  There was a grace in the slow blink of those pale eyes. “I know. But I feel uncomfortable about dragging Serena into it. She hasn’t been outside in a month. All this.” He gestured vaguely. “Change. It’s scary for her.”

  “You are her father, so her place is wherever you are. I do not believe she truly wants anything different. And I do not think she really dislikes it here. Children have a way of accepting this place on its own terms. Far more easily than most adults, I would say.” Something greenish flew out of the twisted grove and tumbled through the air before slamming into the stone above them. There was no follow-up sound. Jacob paused, quiet with his own thoughts, but appeared unfazed. “The deadness of the winter here,” he continued, “it makes everyone nervous at first, even our long-term residents. The sudden… nakedness, I suppose.”

  Jacob faded back into his own company then, and Richard kept his peace. At the Deadfall, reticence was acceptable, even required.

  The air around him bristled. He knew that wasn’t just his own anxiety, but so often he felt ‘over-sensitive.’ Even as a child, he’d been saddened by events others weren’t saddened by. The skeletal lines and criss-crossings of the naked trees appeared to expand, extending their fissures into the white sky. There was movement in the dying leaves and trees, but he saw nothing. He tried to focus on Jacob. “You’re not going to tell me about what’s happened here.” He gestured toward the ruined stone wall. “You’re not going to tell me what all that deterioration is about.”

  Finally, when Richard’s patience had about run out, Jacob said “No. Deadfall is complex. There are layers of history, layers of experience here. I cannot simply jump around, educating you at random.”

  “So, why am I even here?”

  Jacob’s voice was a whisper. “I cannot answer that for you.”

  Richard could see Serena’s face in one of the front windows. She didn’t want to be near the trees. Funny how it should come to him that way.

  Late that afternoon Jacob requested Richard’s assistance with a new chore: The Checklist. “I like to do this every winter. You can do as you like, but I would encourage you to continue this tradition.” The Ch
ecklist was a booklet of several sheets clipped together, a list of current residents copied out of the hotel register.

  “At this stage, all we do is knock on doors,” Jacob said. “We don’t unlock doors without permission. We certainly don’t break in. If more dramatic steps are required, well, we’ll make those decisions in the spring.”

  Richard followed Jacob up and down the corridors with the list, as Jacob knocked on doors, making checkmarks and comments as requested. The vigor Jacob used varied from a gentle tapping with a few fingers to serious fists pounding on wood until Richard wondered if splintering wasn’t inevitable. But he had no idea what criteria Jacob was using to justify this difference.

  Most of the knocking brought answering murmurs, an occasional yes, in several different languages. To each indication of a presence Jacob replied, simply, “Winter survey.”

  Sometimes a response was more dramatic: an angry shout, a scream, a low, rumbling growl. Once the resident behind the door burst into song.

  Periodically, however, there was no response from a room, and Jacob would pause, consider, and instruct Richard to note ‘check back later,’ ‘probably out hunting,’ or simply, ‘absent.’ Sometimes he seemed saddened.

  At the end of the day, Richard had made notations by seventeen room designations on the list. Jacob studied them and nodded solemnly. “I’ll let you know later in the season if we need to do anything,” he said, and walked away.