Deadfall Hotel

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  “We’ve never really been introduced. I’m Richard, and I run this hotel.” He offered his hand.

  “Yes,” John said, pulling at the edge of Richard’s hand with a few loose, cold fingers. “I know that.”

  “I have talked a bit with Ms. Rosenow. Just a bit.” John’s eyes now looked pink. With nervous, almost palsied fingers, he kept pulling at his shirt and coat sleeves as if they were too short. “Have you served Ms. Rosenow long?”

  “She has been… very good to me.”

  “I’m sure,” he said, embarrassed. Perhaps the man had some sort of mental or emotional handicap. Richard wasn’t sure he even wanted to know. “Well, I suppose I’d better get back to my work.” He offered his hand again.

  At first John looked at it as if he’d never seen anything like it before. Then his own hand came up with a little jerk and he grabbed Richard’s hand with a convulsive squeeze.

  Metal gleamed on John’s wrist. Richard leaned closer. A brass affair, looking much like a small mouth organ, appeared to have been stapled to his skin. A small, capped tube protruded. The skin around the device was puckered an angry shade of red.

  Richard heard himself make a strained, half-laughing sound, and then he withdrew his hand. “So much to do in a place like this,” he said, and left the room.

  EVEN WHEN MARIE wasn’t in the room, Richard caught himself imagining her presence. He only had to look at any slightly complex pattern – the design of the wallpaper, the nap of the rug, an ornately painted vase – to find her dark, fixed eyes, her ruddy mouth, the fine curve of her pale cheeks. Although he felt slightly foolish, he could not stop himself from making these comparisons. She whispered sweet secrets into his ears with her souring, tantalizing breath.

  “What’s the matter with John?” he asked. “I saw the metal contraption on his wrist.”

  She looked at him, her lips pressed tightly together. “He is dying, I am afraid.”

  “Cancer?” The word fell out without consideration.

  She nodded. “He is dying,” she said again. “It is inevitable, now.” He wrapped his arms around her, pressing his cheek to the back of her cold neck.

  He spent an hour or so each morning shoveling snow from the front patios. The sky was amazingly white, the light so bright it made the shadows burn. The dark clouds, patterned like human X-rays, twisted slowly past. Eye sockets drifted, seeking eyes. The weathervanes high up along the roofline – crow and cock, cat and snake – turned their dark silhouettes southward.

  At night he would lie down but his fevered imagination continued to fire one image after another. Pictures of days past and days to come would scroll across the off-white ceiling, broken now and again by the sudden shadow of a tree limb or separated vine blown across the window. It was like lying in his grave, he thought, conscious through the generations, the world changing rapidly above him, the wind blowing the years ruthlessly past his headstone.

  But I’m alive.

  Don’t leave me, Abby whispered from under the pillow beside him. You made a promise. After all this time, don’t leave me, then she made a shallow gasping noise as if she were smothering. “I want to love again before I die,” he said, but not really to her. “I have a right. I’m still alive.”

  Marie stayed away from him night after night, running away down the dark corridors, teasing. Irritated at first, now he just wanted to be with her.

  One night he saw her coming out of the music room and attempted to follow her shadowed shape as it traveled from room to room, down every short and long corridor in the hotel. He stayed well back so she wouldn’t see him. She dragged her gray shadow behind her along the runner and baseboard, a peculiarly pale version of herself.

  She turned a sharp corner and left her shadow behind. Richard halted, stared at the shadow as it drifted along the floor independent of its owner. A trick of the light, he thought, and tried to ignore it. It was simply a gray shadow.

  But it darkened and fled as he approached. In some distant part of the hotel, a woman’s laughter burst and ran up and down the scale. The shadow raced ahead and around the next bend in the corridor, as if returning to her.

  Other silhouettes traveled the walls past him, angular and quick. His own shadow grew sluggish, as if sticking to the surface of the wallpaper, dragging one step behind his own movements. One dark shape after another moved across him, threatening his balance.

  Finally one latched on to him, pushing him faster and faster down the center of the corridor. He glanced down in panic, and thought it must be her runaway shadow, for it was about her height and bore the curve of her face, the light trace of her hair. He stumbled and fell, but could not feel the carpet beneath him, could not feel the walls, and was suddenly lying on his back, once again as if in his grave, all sensation suddenly ended as he could feel nothing supporting him.

  Her face floated above him. “It is time,” she said.

  The air had grown pale above her, as if she was lying on a pillow, her hair spread out into a nest for her skull, her face a mask of yellowing wax. Then he became confused, and did not know if she was in fact above him, or if she was lying in her own bed and he was above her, making ready to kiss her. The ceiling, or the bed, began to dissolve. He could see the pitch-colored sky above them, the clouds drifting over the hotel, the edges of darkness and cloud beginning to fray so that they might float up into it.

  Her face fell closer and she nipped at his lips, finally grasping a bit of tender skin expertly between two teeth and pulling. He tried to see what else awaited him in the dark cavern of her mouth, but again could see nothing but the night sky poised above the Deadfall.

  She nipped him again, this time taking more flesh from his lower lip. He tasted salt. He thought of Renfield, eating his flies and spiders, laughing that high-pitched, mad, girlish laugh. He tried to push away from her, but gravity wasn’t working for him. He only drifted closer into her stinking breath and teeth.

  “The kiss begins as a bite,” she said softly. “Don’t be alarmed. It’s not what people say – it can be very pleasurable. Very ordinary people do this.”

  “You’re not ordinary,” he managed, hearing the fear in his own voice.

  “And neither are you, my sweet,” she whispered into his ear. “My sugar,” she murmured, scraping her teeth across the lobe. He felt an unpleasant sensation along the skin over his spine, as if his flesh were wrinkling, peeling there. As if the snake of his backbone were finally freeing itself of its costume.

  His fear aroused him. He felt himself taken by her many mouths. He heard his skin rub.

  Her teeth raked lightly at him. “In places where the capillaries are close to the surface,” she whispered, “you do not even have to break the skin.”

  Making love to her, he sensed the beginnings of his own body’s decay. He was scared, and he embraced her more tightly because it was the only way he knew to seek comfort. He was terrified of the ecstasy of letting go.

  He did not know what might happen to his daughter if he were to let go.

  “Why did you choose me?” he asked. “I haven’t been chosen in a very long time.” Her smile descended on him slowly. “But I’m glad, you chose me. That’s, the best thing, the important thing.”

  “Yes,” she said, her lips brushing his shoulder, his chest. “I choose you, my sweet. From now on you will be the one.”

  Her teeth began to deepen the abrasion she had made on his chest. He could feel her tongue searching for entry beneath a small torn flap of his skin.

  His mind floated away rapidly and his body surrounded her. His windows, his doors, the silent passages of his empty corridors, all kept watch, and listened.

  THE NEXT MORNING in the lobby, he saw Serena and Marie Rosenow laughing like two madwomen. It reminded him so much of times when Abby had made this crazy laugh, and Serena, still a little girl who worshipped her mother, had tried to ape that laugh, with little success. Marie reached out to his daughter and touched her tentatively on the shoulder. Ser
ena hugged her, still laughing. Richard stared at the pair coldly. In a far-off part of his brain, he noted how happy Serena seemed with this new woman. But he could not help but think of an aged crone of a countess bathing in the blood of countless virgins, her wrinkled skin filling out, her color gradually bleaching to a shade of snow.

  After Serena had gone up to her room, Richard pulled Marie aside. “You’re never to touch her!” he whispered fiercely. “I don’t even want you to talk to her!” He shook her; he suddenly realized he was ready to strike her.

  Marie slipped away from him. As if she were oiled, he thought. “I may be a great many things, Richard.” She started to leave him. He was already reaching to pull her back, when she stopped and stared at him. “But I am no pedophile.” She was gone before he could say more.

  Richard believed her. And yet, that afternoon, he still sent Serena away.

  “It’s not fair!” she screamed, looking like a much younger child, her face red and puffy from an hour-long bout of crying.

  “Enid has invited you down to her sister’s house in Mad Devon,” he said. “And with so few tenants, she probably won’t be cooking up here for awhile. It’ll be good for you to spend some time with her. And her son – get to know him – he may be a little slow, but he might still make a good friend. I know you’ve always been fascinated by him. Find out what makes him tick, then you can tell me.”He laughed and she blushed. “You’re growing up. A young woman. Enid can help you more with that than I can.”

  “You just want to be alone with her! You’re afraid I’ll get in the way of your little romance!”

  He didn’t know what to say. He wanted to be truthful with her, but he didn’t know what to say. The taxi had come and gone and he still didn’t know what to say. He still didn’t know.

  He did not see Marie Rosenow the rest of that day; he wondered what she did with her afternoons – obviously the light didn’t bother her. He spent much of his own day in the lobby, gazing out the tall windows, watching the snow fill the sky in agitated flurries, drifting over the driveway and piling higher against the walls, the Deadfall grove a brooding, distant presence, glistening black through the gauzy whiteness.

  “You sent the wrong one away, but I think you already know that,” Jacob said behind him.

  Richard felt too weary to turn and look, or even to tell Jacob that he couldn’t talk about this right now. “I had to protect her – not that I’m positive that she really needs protection – but I don’t care to take that kind of chance. Besides, as you’ve told me so many times before, we don’t turn people away.”

  “That we do not. Perhaps we really should sometimes, but we do not. That is our custom.”

  “So what are you trying to tell me, Jacob?”

  “Simply that there needs to be a marked difference between whom you let into this hotel and whom you let into your heart. Think of this hotel as – forgive the metaphor – a model for your dreams, and it is perfectly acceptable – healthy perhaps, although I’m certainly no expert – to let anything and anyone into your dreams. But that does not mean you sit down and break bread with them. Or share the same bed.”

  “Hey, now, you’re going too far.”

  Jacob didn’t respond.

  “I’m sorry, Jacob,” Richard finally said.

  “No, perhaps you are correct. This is none of my business.”

  “My business has been your business ever since I got here.” Richard sighed. “And I must admit I have needed that. And I don’t think all that should change now. Not yet.”

  “Richard, my grandfather once told me that if you are denied a better love, you will settle for any love. Sometimes in our distress one looks as good as any other.”

  “Your grandfather was a wise man, Jacob.”

  “Then you should heed his advice.”

  “She has an illness,” Richard said. “I’m not sure of the details of it, but life isn’t a horror movie. I just can’t find any evil in her.”

  “I am not saying you should. Our residents, well, they are complicated. But compassion does not have to be a synonym for stupidity.”

  Richard chuckled. “I’ll try to remember that.”

  “In an earlier, let us say, less sophisticated time, they had ways of keeping the dead from coming back. They might feed them to animals or remove their arms and legs to curtail their travel, or simply tie them up. Gypsies would insert a hatpin through the heart. And some would, truth be told, simply eat them, which seemed to settle the issue.”

  “You’re not seriously suggesting that she’s dead, are you?”

  “I cannot say that with absolute certainty, no. It is always an error to jump to conclusions with our particular clientele. But as my beloved grandfather would say, ‘that is no way to live.’”

  “Maybe she has no choice.”

  Jacob walked over to the front windows and stared out at the rapidly building snowstorm. “There are choices and there are choices. We all feed off each other, Richard. That is not always such a terrible thing – perhaps a natural consequence of having a brain that can aspire, and yearn. But like anything else, some creatures take it a bit too far.” He stood still for a time as blown flakes began adhering to the panes. “But you should ask him,” he finally said. “He is the expert.”

  Richard came to the window and stood beside Jacob. He looked past the violent flurry of white, struggling to find what the old man was looking at. Finally, there at the edge of the grove, staring up at the twisted, convoluted branches as if admiring a work of art. It was Marie Rosenow’s companion, John.

  The white wind seemed capable of toppling him; his gaunt frame shook. His face and hair above the bright red scarf were the color of the snow.

  “He looks thinner, notably weaker, than when he first came. You look at him, Richard. Are you that lonely?”

  That night, her door was ajar. Peering around, he saw a figure almost the color of the sheets, flesh adhering to the sheets, melting into them like pale butter left too long. Marie bent over the figure like a nun in prayer. Richard glimpsed dark fluid running through a pallid yellow tube. The figure on the bed jerked once, as if in orgasm. Pale fists clenched in pain and a dollop of blood suddenly splattered the inside of the bottle. Marie leaned closer, whispering.

  “HE WAS AN addict, when I first met him,” Marie Rosenow was pacing. She kept her rooms dark, rugs over the windows, as much to keep out the violent sounds of the storm, she said, as to protect the growing sensitivity of her eyes, redder with each passing day. “I stopped all that. He got clean, through me. But he likes the feel of steel in his veins.”

  “You left your door open,” Richard said. “It has never been open before. That was no accident, Marie.”

  “Sometimes he scratches up his own chest, and rubs his blood on me,” she said, in a voice so like a shy young girl’s it embarrassed Richard. “Sometimes, during sex, I lap. I lick.”

  “He’s weak.”

  “Sometimes there is little difference between weakness and passion,” she said, coming closer to him. He found himself backing away. “If it wasn’t me, it would be someone else, do you understand? He enjoys having his blood taken.”

  “You could take… animal blood.”

  “I have a need to be loved.” She came into his arms. He thought of her body, the paleness of it, the almost inanimate beauty of it. He thought of her body as something separate from her, feeding on all the blood she’d taken in, consuming it, so that she’d become pale again, and needed more. He thought of the monster that was her body. He held her tightly, until his arms grew numb.

  A little before dawn the next morning a strange bird was driven out of the skies by the storm. It struggled to within a dozen yards of the hotel’s front door before finally collapsing. “Damn,” Jacob muttered, attempting to finish his morning coffee. “You stay here,” he said to Richard, then donned his heavy coat and gloves. He had to put his shoulder into the front door to wedge it open against the snow.

  Richar
d watched as Jacob pushed through the icy gales to reach the bird. Now and then a wing would jerk and flutter, but he couldn’t tell if that was the bird’s weakening struggles or the wind animating the body.

  As Jacob knelt into the snow by the bird, Richard thought he saw the bird’s head turn and stare at him. Feeling ice inside, a sudden wave of nausea, he went to get his jacket.

  Stroking the bird’s twitching wings, Jacob peered over his shoulder as Richard came up beside him. Richard stared. The bird’s dark wings were painted with its own blood. The head was featherless, a pale flesh color. And deformed, or unformed. There was no beak. It was as if the beak had been torn away, leaving a face much like a baby’s. The head lolled, mouth gaping; long red and yellow feathers floated away from the back of its nearly bald pate. It looked as if someone had sewn bloody wings onto the corpse of a huge fetus.

  Richard had the strange notion that it resembled him. The two men stood there until dawn made the storm red.

  HE AVOIDED HER as much as possible, but she continued to seek him out. When he said, “I can’t do this,” she became like a child he could not deny. But he would not let her nip him, or scratch. He would hold her, the storm of her, and let her tell him of things she remembered, long ago parties and boyfriends, the normal things. And the sadnesses, the things she could not have, the absent friendships, the imagined family.

  “No one’s denied me before,” she would say into his chest, in a voice both sad and petulant. “Imagine,” she would whisper, her face violet and vermillion in the shadows. At night, he would find animals lying on the sills outside his bedroom windows: dark bodies and too-bright eyes. Eventually he kept his shades drawn all the time.

  One afternoon he came across her outside her rooms. She was coughing, choking. When he approached her, she started to walk away. “Marie?”

  “He grows weaker,” she managed, her back to him. From inside he could hear the shifting of sheets, the slow fall of flesh against bed, the soft groans.

  He put his hand on her arm, and she looked at him. Her pupils darkened the whites of her eyes. Dried blood still caked her mouth and part of her chin. She resembled a child not old enough to eat cleanly. He started away.