Deadfall Hotel

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  SOMETHING THUDDED AGAINST the study door. A muffled voice. “Serena?” he asked. The door opened and Jacob pushed his head around the jamb. For a moment, Richard had the uneasy impression that the old man’s neck had lengthened during the night.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, but are you about ready to tackle that plumbing chore?”

  “Sure.” Richard stood and walked toward the door, uneasy, wondering what would happen if he suddenly turned around and looked out the window, if the flower would be the same, shining against the backdrop of ice with an unnatural red light, or would it be black and shriveled.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to get something to eat first?” Jacob asked as they made their way down still another staircase Richard had never seen before. After this long operating the hotel, the experience had by now become as unremarkable as passing from one room to another. “You’re looking a little pale, I think.”

  “I’m eating enough. It seems like I’m eating all the time. I’m just not gaining any weight. Okay by me.” Richard smiled tightly.

  “Winter’s influence on the appetite is unpredictable, and highly variable,” Jacob said, leading them down into a still narrower corridor. “And the hotel amplifies the effect.”

  The air had grown progressively cooler as the corridors brought them below ground level. This coolness seemed to further quiet the virtually silent hotel. A month ago, when the snow had first begun to fall, and Richard had been filled with amazement over the sheer beauty of it – the flakes had been huge – Jacob had come up behind him and whispered, his breath alarmingly warm in these falling temperatures, “Few come in winter.”

  And that proved true. For as soon as the snow began to fall, tenants began to move out. “Warm weather beasties,” Jacob called them. In groups of twos and threes, some Richard had seen around the grounds, some he had never seen, moving out with no, few, or truckloads of belongings, early in the morning or late at night. Once he’d watched from a corner as nondescript moving men in uniform coveralls carried out a seemingly endless string of furniture and boxed and bagged belongings from a room he had always believed tiny, like clowns pouring from a painted Volkswagen at show time. He thought, once, of stopping them to make sure the things they were removing didn’t actually belong to the hotel, like any ordinarily cautious hotel manager. But “thievery is not usually among their repertoire of sins,” as Jacob had once said.

  And every one of these escaping residents had been bundled head to foot in furs and wools, blankets and burlaps, some wrapped so heavily the hired help had to lead them out by the arm. As if the slightest touch of the cold air might erode them.

  Many more remained than had left, if any of his estimates of the average hotel population were correct. But fewer and fewer showed up in the kitchen and lobby, and only one or two felt compelled to pace the hotel corridors at night. And only the bearded man made furtive ventures out into the artificial whiteness.

  “Winter at the Deadfall,” Jacob muttered to himself, for perhaps the hundredth time since the first snowfall.

  The permanent residents of the Deadfall settled almost ritualistically into winter. Now and then their soft chants, their too-loud escaped thoughts, drifted along the ceilings of the corridors. Or collected like hairballs in the corners, where they spun into arguments, grew garbled and confused, drifted into dust.

  “Winter at the Deadfall,” Jacob said once again, as he led Richard down a steep narrow staircase into the underground portion of the hotel. The steel door had stuck, and it required all the strength of the both of them to push it open. It made a sound as if it were ripping the floorboards apart.

  The brick around the staircase was warped and the mortar uneven, a combination that made the walls hard to look at for long, the corners difficult to find. The ceiling stretched far overhead into a cold, windy darkness. Richard heard a distant sound like wings splitting the air. The air here was damp, and it appeared that the wood had been coated and recoated with an oil preservative, never quite dry. He held fast to the greasy handrail, his eyes fixed on Jacob’s back. They began a slow descent – even the old man seemed to be taking his careful time.

  Now and then there would be dark, rectangular openings in the twisted brick. “Whoever built this place, and there were many, mind you, and over no short period of years,” Jacob began, “well, none of them, apparently, owned plumb bobs.” His chuckle echoed faintly. “They built by instinct, I suppose you’d say.”

  As the stair dropped lower, Richard became aware of a viscosity between steps and shoes that made walking more difficult, tiresome. The thick carpet of mushy dust sucked the strength from his legs.

  “These holes – they’re air passages. They permeate the hotel, inside the walls. This isn’t simply the cellar stairwell, I would say. It acts like the lungs of the hotel. That’s the reason for the cold, and the steel door keeps the lungs sealed, you see.” He pointed at one of the passages. “These help the hotel breathe in summer. It would be like an oven, otherwise, and a large number of our charges do not care for windows, so the hotel has relatively few for its size.” Jacob looked at him. “You’ve heard the joke about the would-be suicide who couldn’t stand the sight of an open window?” He paused. “No – I guessed as much.” He picked up the pace. “In any case, the richest man in the world couldn’t afford all the air conditioners it would take, or the electricity to run them.” Richard laid his hand on the brick surrounding one of the holes. “Please avoid reaching into any of them,” Jacob called back over his shoulder. “They weren’t included in this summer’s cleaning.” Richard tucked his wandering hand into his pocket.

  At the moment, Serena was no doubt up in the library, reading whatever looked interesting, even though most of the books were far over her head. But since they had moved here, his daughter had developed a curiosity about all the things she could not possibly understand, all those old books and paintings, all the slightly off-track aspects of the hotel. When he’d asked her about it, she’d pulled herself out of the book she was laboring over, a long, narrow volume with a plush red binding, A History of Dreams to Come stamped in faded gold on the cover. “I don’t really need to understand,” was all she’d said, before burrowing her way back into the text.

  Sometimes she wandered the halls for hours at a time, hands feeling the patterns of the flocked wallpaper like someone blind, as if trying to commit them to memory. She’d wandered through vacant, unlocked rooms, until Richard had discovered her and put a stop to that. “Too dangerous,” he told her, although admitting to himself he really wasn’t so sure. Every now and then, she’d play chess or work puzzles or simply sit with one of the residents – one or both of the dark, elderly twin sisters from the third floor, or the too-pale midget whose hands were always heavily gloved. None of whom he ever heard speak to her.

  “They don’t really need to,” she’d tell him, with a tone that betrayed her impatience. But sometimes he would hear her speaking to them, in the monologue voice she’d once used for her dolls. At times like those, he again thought he’d done the wrong thing, bringing her here. It hadn’t been for her, certainly.

  The situations some parents put their children in used to bother him. Unhealthy situations. Dangerous situations. They’d move them somewhere way out in the country to get away from the crime and pollution of the cities, and there wouldn’t be adequate medical or other emergency help available. Or they’d move their kids in to the city because they liked the lifestyle, and the kids would be walking past pimps and drug dealers to school every day. Or maybe a father’s grief had bent him a little too far, and he’d taken the kid to live in the original horror hotel. And the kid is almost eaten by a human wolf.

  No one was ever hurt here without a reason. But Richard didn’t know if he could believe that.

  “If you do not face the wolf sometime, it’s likely to circle around behind you.”

  Richard stared into the darkness, trying to see Jacob. The old man’s face floated up out of the bl
ack. “She doesn’t have to be here; I didn’t have to bring her,” Richard snapped.

  Jacob’s eyes flashed in the dim light. “You have to look at what scares you, Richard, if you don’t want it to control your life.”

  “My daughter was never scared of werewolves, Jacob. Not until she came here.”

  “A wolf isn’t always just a wolf. A human being isn’t always just a human being. And no one really knows what truly frightens another human being, even if it is your own daughter. Shape does not matter. If you stay here long enough, you will understand that. Shapes do not scare you; it is the shadows that move under them. Shapes never scared anyone, this hotel never scared anyone. It is finding your own face inside, being scared nearly half to death by your own face, and still not being too afraid to look into that mirror again. That’s what matters. And right now – plumbing. Plumbing is what matters. Serena is not likely to appreciate all your guilt and obsession over how to save her from some place she is feeling at home in if she does not have an appropriate place to go potty!”

  Jacob’s steps dropped him further into gray night. Richard followed, half-smiling, carrying the tools.

  The door at the bottom of the stairs was much older: black, oily wood, reinforced with iron. Pieces splintered off the bottom as the door scraped open.

  Jacob led him through a maze of rooms crammed with pipes. “Circulation!” he said. “Water, gas, sewer, electrical – it is all here. Blood, piss, and vinegar.” At one corner they came across a huge boiler-like device with a multitude of pipes and coils arranged around the top like an elaborate metal hairdo. “One of your predecessors thought he could power the hotel with this device. ‘Spirit Trap,’ he called it. But I suppose it made too much noise for him.”

  Jacob would stop now and then to examine the chalk markings on one of the pipes, and then with renewed energy maneuver through a series of sudden bends in the passageways. Once he stopped before a small rusted hatch set flush into the wall, not quite at his head height.

  “Here is something I would like to show you.” He wedged the end of a wrench under one corner of the hatch and pried it open. He stuck the flashlight in first, then cautiously followed with his head. “Okay. Come here.” As Jacob brought his head back out, Richard examined him for spider webs. Jacob handed him the flashlight. “Take a look,” he said. “Position your head just inside the door.”

  “Wait a minute.” Richard stared at the hatch. It was pitch black inside.

  “It is clean; you saw me check it. Nothing waiting to lay an egg in your head, I assure you.”

  Richard glared at the caretaker and grabbed the flashlight out of his hand. “Hold the hatch. Just so it doesn’t slam back or anything.” Jacob nodded, drumming his fingers irritatingly on the egg-shell metal. Richard stuck the flashlight end through first. Bright red brick lined the passage. Warm, circulating air left goosebumps on the back of his arm. Puzzled, he pushed his head through the opening. A breeze of near-hot air lifted his hair. But he could see very little. A vertical column of brilliant red brick, pitch dark on either end. “What is it?” he called back.

  “Heating system. That’s why the hotel isn’t nearly as cold as one might expect.”

  “Wait. What about that big furnace over in the auxiliary basement? We’re nowhere near there.” Richard trained the light on the shaft below him. No end in sight. He squinted for a long time, trying to see what might be there, sometimes thinking he saw bits of cloud or dark shapes in the air currents, sometimes thinking he heard a voice sighing, or music, or just the slightest trace of laughter, before Jacob finally answered.

  “What you saw was just the incinerator, for burning trash, like unfriendly kitties.” He paused, as if expecting Richard to laugh at the weak, grim joke. “We don’t use it for heating. There is no furnace here. No furnace anywhere.” Richard came out of the hatch and looked at Jacob. Jacob frowned. “I’ve looked for years. And in the summer that air’s ice cold. I’ve dropped stones into the shaft – they never make a sound. It’s the Deadfall Windpipe, or something like that.” He chuckled. “I don’t know who built it, but he or she was a genius, no doubt about that.” He took the light back. “We’d best hurry now. Our job’s waiting for us just a short distance down this passage, if I’ve calculated correctly.”

  They came to a tall room. It was like entering a chimney. A dozen or so pipes, jammed together tight as organ pipes, dropped straight out of the darkness above. At waist-height, they joined other pipes, which entered the crumbling brick and plaster walls at right angles. Each pipe had two valves, one on either side of the angle.

  “Here it is,” Jacob said. “At first glance, it looks like a random design, I know. I’m always surprised they don’t clog more often.” Rubbing the dust from the pipes, he tapped a small tube entering the upper valve from the rear. Richard could see now that all the valves had them. “It took me a while to figure it out,” Jacob began, “but it appears that these tubes add pressure inside each valve and help push the substance inside the pipe – fluid or gas or solids, whatever it might be – to wherever in the hotel it needs to go.” He flashed the light several feet above the valve. An oily, pus-like corrosion caked some of the metal. “These pipes are old.” A long, segmented bug with near-transparent head waved its greasy feelers at the intruding beam of light.

  “Disgusting,” Richard murmured. The air suddenly felt too wet, too old in his mouth. He wanted to spit it out. He was a little panicky. He felt like throwing up.

  “You’d never make a doctor,” Jacob said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I just mean if you were to put your hands inside these bodies of ours you’d find a state of affairs equally disgusting. The hotel has to breathe, heat up and cool down, get rid of its waste. The secret systems of anything, however wonderful, aren’t always pretty to look at.”

  Not for the first time, Richard wished the old man would just shut up. He had a headache, and realized he was hungry again. Starved.

  He’d always been easily disgusted by the ‘secret systems’ of things. His parents had had a great deal of illness between them: rheumatic fever and bad lungs, bad liver, bad kidneys, illnesses that had made them incontinent, ugly, and angry. He’d hated their bodies, and been suspicious of his own.

  But his own disgust had given him appetite, made him hungry. From the time he was a child – that was the funny thing, the terrible thing. Even as his parents were throwing up in the other room, their marriage having been reduced to a simple sharing of sickness and anger, Richard had been in the refrigerator, stuffing his face. By the time he entered high school he’d been vastly overweight. And his own disquiet over his physical body had driven him to eat even more.

  The only reason he’d lost the weight at the end of college had been a switch in appetites. Sex had disgusted him, in degrees ranging from the vague to the profound: the smell of another body, the look of it, the look in the woman’s eyes – desire, apprehension, defiance, an abandonment of self that seemed all too similar to suicide, all of it there together – he wondered if Abby had ever guessed. He didn’t think so. If anything, she might have thought him too obsessed with her body, too enamored of it. Because his disgust with sex, the repulsion he had felt in the presence of another body, had in turn given him a great appetite for it. Repulsion and excitement, a sourness and a quickening. A hunger for touching, for long nights of bodies alternately defiant and apprehensive.

  But maybe she would have guessed if they’d been together longer. He would have hated that. For, with all his confusion, his pitiful aversions, he knew he had loved her, and it would have killed him to hurt her like that. Before Serena, Abby had been all he had.

  Jacob’s hammer rang on the valve stems as he attempted to loosen them. The sound echoed over their heads, receded rapidly into the darkness above. An enormous white wing that was not a wing seemed to float down toward Richard out of the darkness. A woman’s pale gown. Abby’s gown. Her face floated just above the gown, lips pulli
ng back, lips pulling back so far they split her beautiful face open and emptied it over his head, the liquid streaming over his face, gathering in his eyes and into the corners of his mouth where he breathed her in, tasted her, gathered her in with his tongue.

  Jacob’s hammer exploded again. The room smelled of rot and sour decay. A few strands of reddish-blonde hair briefly caressed Richard’s face, and then were gone.

  “All of us live with the dead,” Jacob said. “All of us with memory.”

  “More than memory.” Richard tried to wipe away tears that were not there.

  “You see her every day? Some part of her?”

  “Pretty much. Sometimes more. And always, in my dreams.”

  Jacob had been using a huge wrench to loosen one of the valves. Now he pulled down on the bend that attached below it. The metal squealed. The joint held by a thread. He banged on it twice more. “Widowers in British New Guinea,” he panted, “Mekeo, I believe. They carry a tomahawk to protect themselves from their dead wives.”

  “She wouldn’t hurt me.”

  “Perhaps not. No, I’m sure not. But memory is a hungry thing, a craving thing. If you don’t carry your tomahawk it can eat up your time, consume your life. There we go. Come over here, Richard.” Jacob held the flashlight up to the open end of the valve. “Wrong one,” he said. “But listen.” A thin crying slipped out of the pipe. Richard felt it like a worm on the back of his neck. They tried several more pipes, found water, stale dusty air, laughter and lamentations. Then on the last one, Jacob said, “Got it,” his arm and a crowbar pushed halfway up the pipe. “Stuck tight, whatever it is.”

  Finally the thing came away with a cracking sound, and dark, mushy sewage gushed from the pipe and began pooling on the floor. Richard gasped, covered his mouth with his hand. Jacob struggled to reconnect the joint, his boots sliding a dance through the thick, lace-high goop. “There!” he shouted, tightening the retainer rings so far Richard thought the ancient metal would split. “This is some old crap, is the way a professional plumber would put it, I believe.” He grinned, slipped on rubber gloves and began fingering through the sludge. The surface of the gloves smoked when he brought them back up into air, the offending object held well away from him. He stroked it gently, like a baby’s head, cleaning it off.