It was a small skull. An animal skull. Its lower teeth curved high up over the nasal area, threatening the eye sockets. “I told him not to flush these things down the toilet anymore,” Jacob muttered, almost sadly, and dropped the skull into his sack.
They climbed out a way different from the one they’d come – Richard wanted to get to a bath as soon as possible. And after what should have been far too many steps up several staircases, they reached a row of narrow windows practically at ground level, the sills snow-packed to within six inches of their tops. Jacob peered through the glass over the high lip of snow. “I see Serena decided to play outside today after our lessons.”
Richard pushed into the window beside Jacob. “It’s too cold for her out there.”
“Please, Richard. Remember that she isn’t a toddler.”
Serena was out in the snow; he could see her red boots dancing between the stark charcoal trunks of the grove.
The wind was rising. Every now and then a gust would strike the white powder, pick it up like an invisible scoop, scatter it out again in a glistening cloud. Serena ran through it, kicking at the snow as if to force more of it into the air. Richard imagined she was having a wonderful time, but because of the angle and her closeness to the windows, he could not actually see her face.
Her red boots, her blue-jeaned legs, her new white coat disappeared into the brilliant white spray. He waited for her to reappear, and when she did not for several moments, he grew anxious. Then a shadow formed in the middle of the snow cloud. A slight shadow, snatches of red flashing as it whirled inside the cloud. The snow fell and the cloud separated. At first Richard thought the woman who finally emerged was some dream-vision of how Serena would look in twenty years. The lines of the face were so like hers, the posture, the way she moved her hands.
But then Serena appeared beside her. The woman had one arm across her shoulders, and his daughter suddenly seemed much smaller. He could now see Serena’s face; she looked happy. The woman bent over her, hair not quite blonde and not quite red spilling slowly down the side of her face, obscuring her mouth as she leaned forward to whisper something to his daughter, who laughed almost drunkenly, so hard she staggered briefly in the thick snow. The waves of blonde and red hair separated in the rising wind, the wind seeming to build up as the woman whispered, as Serena laughed, until Richard could hear it almost howling through the glass, more snow lifting into the brilliant air to obscure the two figures. He could not stop watching.
He and Abby had always told her not to talk to strangers. If she went off with a stranger, how could he protect her?
The wind died abruptly. The snow dropped into a scattered, ungraspable mist like a juggler’s bad dream. The woman’s form was revealed, closer to the window, looking down at him. Serena was nowhere to be seen.
Aquiline face and lean nose. Eyebrows a bit too heavy. The woman was ill-clothed for the weather: her dress was a dark blue, near-black, and almost gauzy. Over that, just a darker shawl to protect her. Her arms and lower legs were bare and anemic-looking, a mere shade or so darker than the snow, so that at times she appeared to have no arms or legs – making her just a vision of mutilated torso and head floating above the untroubled snow. Staring at him with dark, still eyes. He thought about the flashes of red he had seen in her shadow, but only her lips were red, too red, as if freshly painted.
Her hair – not quite red and not quite blonde – floated along the edge of her shawl. Somehow it bothered him that her hair had lost none of its color.
“I see Serena has met a new guest,” Jacob said, behind him.
“No,” Richard said wearily. “She’s met Abby. She’s met her mother.”
BUT HER NAME was Marie Rosenow, and even though her resemblance to his late wife had faded somewhat since she’d checked in, occasionally, in the right light, she looked so like her that Richard could not look at her for long. So he found himself apprehending her with sideways glances, and spying on her reflection, which made the resemblance all the more persistent and disturbing.
“What were you whispering about? Why were you laughing so?” he’d asked Serena, who’d just smiled shyly.
“Woman talk, Daddy,” she’d finally said, and laughed. He didn’t know what to make of her new giddiness, but he did not like it.
Marie Rosenow had checked in with very little: a couple of bags and a folded leather case more like a tool kit than a purse, which she held tightly under her arm.
And a tall, Nordic-looking man she called John, who stood in the background and carried her bags.
It may have been Richard’s simple unease in her presence that made him keep looking at the man: his lean height, bleached hair which appeared to be thinning, pale, downcast eyes. The man held himself like a servant, and no doubt that was his job, but Richard found his subservient manner still unaccountably irritating. Her man – Richard reminded himself to think of him with his name, John – leaned back against the wall, the bags propped awkwardly across his knees. Richard thought of a tired, overgrown child waiting impatiently while his mother dealt with another adult.
When Marie Rosenow smiled at him, her breath smelled, not exactly rank, but rich with food. And Richard thought of Abby after a late night steak dinner, whispering his name in bed as he explored the secret shadows of her body.
“Let me show you to your room,” he said.
The woman’s lips stretched, emphasizing the thinness of her face. She was remarkably beautiful. “That really won’t be necessary,” she said. “John can handle all that. Just give him the room number. I would like to look around a bit first – I always feel better in a new environment if I look around.”
“I should at least draw him a map.” Richard attempted a professional hotel manager’s apologetic smile. “It’s a big, complicated hotel.”
“I’m sure,” she said absently, not a part of the conversation anymore.
The tall, pale man lifted the bags, but hesitated when she tried to hand him the flat leather case. She jabbed it at him insistently and at last he took it in one hand, wedging it under his arm and still holding onto it with that hand, as if he were terrified of dropping it. Embarrassed, Richard gave him the scrawled map.
“Will you please show me around?” Her tone was just slightly imperious.
He looked at her nervously, feeling painfully shy. Finally he moved from behind the front desk. “We can start on this floor,” he said.
In the beginning, he felt like a little boy in her company, like a little boy with a mother he had not seen in years.
“There is so much room here! I had heard, but had no idea! It’s lovely. We have never stayed here before, Mister –”
“Richard is fine.”
“Very well. We have never stayed here before, Richard, but I am sure we will want to come again. We – John and I – are at our best –”
“John is your…?”
“He’s my” – she waved her hand – “my assistant. Of sorts. A male secretary of sorts.” Richard was embarrassed that he’d interrupted her. “I am at my best,” she began again, “in large places, with fewer people.”
“Then you’ll do fine here. There are few visitors during the winter, I’m told.”
“Oh, you are new here, to this job, as well?”
“A short time.”
“Then you – enjoy it here.”
“Enjoy” was not the word he would have used. “I think I do belong here, I suppose.” Saying the words made him feel pretentious, but he knew they were true. As if the Deadfall were his dream, and belonged to him. He wondered if he should warn her.
New or not, she moved through the corridors and rooms as if she, too, belonged there, had always been a part of the Deadfall. They paused in the music room because she wanted a view from the windows. “The sky is very white here,” she said. “Do the clouds always lie so low?
“Usually,” he said. “In fact, the cover is normally so thick you forget the sky is supposed to be blue. You start thinkin
g of the white sky; the birds, the outlines of the trees – they seem more like shadows against the white.”
“Yes, the trees,” staring out the window at the Deadfall grove, she raised her fingers to the glass, as if to trace the distant limbs.
“Winter’s the only time the grove really fits, I suppose. I mean, the deadfall, the dead limbs.” He felt awkward, unsure if he was saying too much, if he was being too personal. “The naked limbs always seem so incongruous in spring.”
“But death makes living possible.” She looked back at him. “Don’t you think? Of course, this is true scientifically: the process of decomposition supplying the elements necessary for future life. But I wonder if it isn’t true psychologically as well. The old die and leave a place for the young, the new ideas. The death of one close – our grief cleanses, allows us to see more clearly, don’t you think?”
He stared at her. “That hasn’t exactly been my experience.”
She looked back out the window. “I see. You find the two worlds to be very different? Incompatible?”
“They just aren’t the same. You can’t… so many things you can’t –”
As she moved into the shadowed areas of the music room, her eyes shifted toward yellow. “The only difference between the living and the dead is the blood they contain. In the dead, the blood is sour or absent. Their envy of the living is for that blood. The memories they inflict upon the grief-stricken are for that blood.”
“It seems… unnatural.” He wanted to leave the room. And yet he wanted to get to know this woman. He wanted to be with her.
“What could be more natural? Blood nourishes the fetus in its womb. Blood is the true mother of us all.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“The only true difference between a sleeping man and a dead man is the blood he contains.”
He thought what she was saying was ridiculous, but he found it fascinating just the same. Richard gestured toward the door. “Perhaps I should make sure that everything is all right with your room.”
Red hair, blonde hair, dropped slowly over one unmoving eye, which had fixed him like a gun sight. “Which one are you, Richard? Sleeping, or dead?”
ALONE IN HIS bed he could not manage to stay warm, even with piles of bedclothes, so every night of this winter had found Richard walking. In the empty rooms and closed corridors of the Deadfall, sudden apparitions of his wife would come to him, like an instant’s updraft of smoke, seen out of the corner of his eye. The seeing seemed to depend on the occurrence of just the right angle, the correct tilting of the head.
Other times, her presence was a less palpable thing. She came as a slight mistiness in the eye, fresh air on the lips, a breeze against his chest, abrading his nipples.
At each dawn her transparent form filled with the yellows and pinks of the morning light. The burning outline of her would bleed into the ornate Persian carpet runners, and she would be gone.
Richard’s night walks continued after the arrival of Marie Rosenow. More often than not he would find her pacing these dim-lit corridors as well, but she would always be ahead of him, or across a large room with her head averted, so that she did not seem to be aware of him. She looked lovelier in this light – during the day there always seemed something too faded, something disturbingly pale about her. He would follow her as closely as he could, although never for very long, as she was constantly disappearing into the unlit regions of the hotel.
She seemed troubled. There was something vaguely anxious or undecided about her movements. At times, he imagined her as a stray animal trapped inside the hotel, shocked into silence and hesitant to draw attention to itself.
One night, he heard a voice moving through the hallway toward him as he tracked her. But when he arrived where the source of the voice should have been, it was gone. The corridor here was very dark, the air heavy with dust.
“You’ve followed me.” She spoke from within a dark shadow by one of the doorways. Only her ruddy lips and a yellow sliver of face were visible.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry. I – well, I have no excuse, really.”
She laughed. At his awkwardness, he thought. “Do you make it a habit of following women around your hotel?”
“No. Just you.”
Her face rose out of shadow so rapidly he could have sworn the outer edges of her skin began to fray. Her hair was lusterless tendrils, testing his skin before her lips reached him. Again, her breath was rank, and he recognized her desire. Tooth and tongue to neck, to cheekbone, to nape, her mouth danced around him. “You’re so sweet,” she whispered.
As if from a distance, he saw himself flying down the corridor along the ceiling, his arms pressed to his sides with the speed. He saw his mouth fly open as if to scream. He tried to taste the shadows.
And then the appetite was back. He found hair in his mouth, and it tasted of cobweb. He licked his lips. “No, no,” he whispered, and pushed her as hard as he could.
She did not stumble, but merely stepped back on her own accord.
“I’m sorry,” he said foolishly.
She stared at him a moment, then strode back through shadow, her body now velvet, now dust.
AGAIN, RICHARD COULD not sleep. He began walking the great north-south corridor which, despite its many twists and off-center bends, still managed to run the entire length of the hotel. As he neared the northern end, he discovered that the power was off. According to Jacob, the cobbled-together wiring was plagued with shorts, one system running directly into another, much of the old wiring embedded deep within the complex ganglia of the new.
He drew out the candle and matches from his pocket, kept for such emergencies. After a time the candle flame became transparent, a mere shadow in the shape of a flame. So instead it was his memory lighting the way, as he passed through the night halls of his childhood.
He was in the upstairs hallway of the house he had grown up in, the hallway without a lamp, but he had to use a candle anyway because he didn’t want his parents to know he was up. He made his way down the stairs, terrified that he would stumble and fall in the dark, to the coat closet at the bottom where he had found his father’s secret treasure of books.
He put his candle down carefully beside the box. The books and magazines were full of pictures of dead women. The women in those pictures were dead. He could not imagine how else someone could have gotten such pictures. They had propped the dead women up in all kinds of strange and distasteful positions. What was worse, they had sewn the eyelids open, so that the dead eyes just stared at you, at whoever was looking at the pictures. It made him feel bad to be looking at the pictures, seeing those dead eyes. Sometimes he could see where the eyes had gone a little cloudy, or an insect had crawled up onto an exposed eyeball. He had seen it all. He could almost smell the stench of the dead flesh on the pages. Dead women had a glossy feel.
But still, he had gotten an erection, and it had frightened him. He went to the bathroom and had fantasies of eating himself, consuming himself one little piece and by-product at a time. He dreamed of nourishing himself with himself, with no more need of other food.
Before Richard returned to his bed after the long walk through the hotel, he went into his private bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. He looked for places where his skin might betray corruption. He looked for patches of dead skin where he might not have washed thoroughly enough. Perhaps there were pieces of skin he had not seen or washed in years – he didn’t know – and now perhaps he was vulnerable there. He looked for signs of cancer.
He thought of Marie Rosenow, and felt the appetite, the beginnings of arousal.
“I’VE SEEN YOU spending a great deal of time with Ms. Rosenow of late,” Jacob said. He’d stayed close all afternoon, so Richard figured he had something to say to him.
“Yes. I guess I have.” Richard went back to his newspaper. If the man had something to say, he’d just have to say it.
“I know you’ve been lonely a long time. But, f
or heaven’s sake, Richard! You know this is no ordinary hotel.”
Richard put down his paper. “Okay, I admit it. She somewhat resembles Abby – I know that. I know maybe that’s what the attraction’s all about. But I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that.”
Jacob scowled. “And I suppose you think that statement expresses a great deal of self-awareness?”
“What’s got into you?”
“I understand she resembles Abigail. The dead tend to resemble the dead.”
“Oh, come now. Maybe you’ve been in this hotel too long. Not everyone –”
“This is no ordinary hotel, Richard. That is the one essential fact you always have to keep in mind if you’re going to function within this environment. Ordinary people do not stay here!”
“I’m not ordinary? Serena’s not ordinary?”
“Don’t be obtuse. You know what I mean. Think about how you feel with her, the sensations, the things you see. I highly doubt it is an ordinary experience.” The old man left.
Marie Rosenow’s man John was sitting out in the lobby when Richard came out. The sun was high enough that morning to fill the lobby with a brilliant white glare, which so washed out John’s color that at first Richard didn’t see the man’s flesh at all. He thought Serena might have left one of his old suits out after playing with it. Then, when he went over to check it out, he’d seen the outlines of the man’s face, the hair so pale it resembled a cap of web spun around his skull.
“Good morning.”
The man didn’t say anything for a moment, and Richard began to wonder if he might be hard of hearing. Then the faded head slowly began to turn, the edges of the face becoming almost transparent as he edged into the morning light. John’s eyes were cotton balls, his mouth a thin wiggle of stitches. “Hello. Morning.”
Deadfall Hotel Page 17
