Deadfall Hotel

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  “Frederick!”

  Enid’s son came rushing in, put his massive hands on Richard’s shoulders, and pushed him back onto the cot before he pitched forward onto the floor which, he realized, he was about to do.

  “Mr. Carter, while you’re in my place, you’ll need to do what I say,” Enid called from the stove.

  “Thanks. Of course,” Richard said. “And thank you, Frederick. I’m still pretty weak.” He forced a smile.

  Half an hour later, Richard sat at the table eating stew and biscuits, while Enid worked on her knitting. Uncomfortable with her silence, he said, staring at his bowl, “I must have caught some kind of bug.”

  “I suppose you could call it that. A bug. Some kind of bug that’s going around.”

  “You sound skeptical.”

  “My Frederick almost died last month. I have a right to be skeptical. I just know that buildings get sick, just like people get sick. You don’t usually hear about people catching house diseases – dry rot, paint peel, loose foundation, flickering lights, brown out, short circuit, whatever – but we don’t live in Usual, USA, now do we?”

  “Jacob is looking into it.”

  “Hmpf,” was her reply.

  Her knitting might be the same garment she’d been working on for months. He heard Serena’s laughter from the other room, punctuated by a hoarse boom which he assumed must be Frederick’s own merriment.

  “She hasn’t watched TV since we’ve been here,” Richard said. “I know she’s missed it.”

  “I told her to stay in the other room,” Enid said. “I told her you needed to rest. She’d much rather be sitting here with you, I assure you.” She flashed the needles rapidly. “But it’s good for her to laugh. Jacob doesn’t appreciate that enough.”

  “I don’t expect you’ve told him that.”

  “I certainly have.” She waved a needle in his direction. “He tries. But he doesn’t know everything. Not even about this hotel. The Deadfall may be a grand, unusual place, but just like any other big hotel, the staff knows things management doesn’t know; this cook has seen things that old maintenance man wouldn’t believe.”

  “And the housekeepers?”

  She frowned. “Oh, I imagine they know plenty, most of it things the rest of us don’t want to know.”

  “Well, obviously I have a great deal to learn. For example, right now, where are we? Is this Mad Devon?”

  She laughed. “Heavens, no. Mad Devon is okay, you know my sister lives there. But we’re still in the hotel. Didn’t Jacob tell you Frederick and I live in the hotel?”

  “He may have – I wouldn’t swear. He tells me a lot of things.”

  She chuckled. “Where, exactly, we live in this big old hotel has always been my secret to share. Not all the managers, or staff, have been people I’d care to have in my home. After today, you’ll know how to get here. You and Serena are welcome at any time, and of course now you know I have the only television.”

  He laughed. “Maybe someday I’ll have secrets to share, or not share.”

  Enid looked at him coolly. “No secrets? That is hard to believe, Richard.”

  He dropped his eyes, unable to meet her gaze. “When I’m in the hotel longer, maybe I’ll see some things you haven’t seen.”

  “Oh, but you have. Jacob asked me to check in on you while he was gone, Frederick and I. We were alerted – that’s why we found you.”

  Richard grinned, feeling a little ridiculous. “He thought I needed babysitting?”

  “You met The Pool Man.”

  “Jacob said he was unfamiliar with the fellow.”

  She put down her knitting. “I doubt that, although anything’s possible, I suppose. Or maybe he just didn’t want to make you anxious. Too much anxiety in this place always works against you. The Pool Man, and that awful cesspool of his, has appeared from time to time, over decades I believe. I’ve heard his pool reaches deep. Let us say, much deeper than these rocky foundations. I’m thankful never to have encountered him.”

  When Richard walked into the other room, Serena yelled “Daddy!” and ran into his arms. She hugged him so hard it somewhat frightened him, and he found himself stroking and patting her hair the way he had when she’d been a small child.

  The teen comedy she and Frederick had been watching ended, then the news came on. They hadn’t heard any news since they’d moved. Richard had an immediate impulse to reach over and switch off the TV, but why? He didn’t want her to hear about those awful things – which made no sense to him, given the situation he had decided to bring her into.

  There had been terrible floods in Germany; hundreds of people had been killed. A mass grave had been uncovered in the Middle East. In Colorado, a man was accused of dragging his girlfriend behind his car and then dismembering the body. In Florida, a press conference ended with an on-air suicide. Horrors of the times, Richard thought, horrors of the moment.

  And then he thought of the dark and depthless Deadfall pool, and the Pool Man with his doubly misleading smile, and the faceless things that swam there.

  He had brought his daughter to live in the Funhouse, but hadn’t they always lived here? Serena loved scary movies, just like her mother – he’d hated those movies – they seemed to have nothing to do with him. As a child he’d fantasized disastrous things happening to him and his family: murderers breaking down the door, wolves dragging them out of their beds, lava flows sweeping the house away. But none of those things ever happened.

  In the Funhouse you work up terror for things that have nothing to do with you. You feel safe enough that none of this is going to touch you – it’s going to be a respite from your daily anxieties – it’s going to be fun. But instead you find it is a return to terror, to the fears that are always with us, whatever happens in the real world.

  Serena went to bed early, exhausted. He had done that – she had been worried about him. She asked him to stay with her until she fell asleep, which he did, and long after, holding her hand, whispering stories to her that she’d enjoyed when she was little, mixed in with adventures she’d had with Mom and Dad, remarkable things seen, mysteries wondered about, comical disasters. Finally, when she was grumbling in her sleep over his incessant noise, he let go of her hand and left the room.

  Exhausted himself, he could not sleep, could not bring himself to lie down and shut out the light. Dreams had too much to tell him, and he was tired of listening. He just wanted to move along with his life, to care for his daughter and raise her in peace, safe and away – for a time – from the horrors of the world. Illness and endings would descend upon her soon enough, couldn’t she just have this brief time away?

  The walls and rugs, ceilings and furnishings of the hotel did not appear so shabby to him right now. Not of brochure quality, certainly, but what is? All things wear. What is needed shows its age. The wear patterns in the wood grain – on the chair arms, on the upper edges of tables, along the carved details of leg ends, in the flat stretches of base board and wall panel and window and door frame – had the beauty of use, of encounters with living things. The gentle separations of wallpaper were memorials to the passage of cold and heat and seasonal revolution. Fighting time was futile and a waste.

  Residents he had not seen in months drifted down the hall, signaling greeting with a wave or raised eye. Some he had never interacted with even had words to share, and although he didn’t always understand, the effort pleased him.

  Two figures in tuxedos, their faces wrapped in coarse gray hair, played chess at a small table near the front windows. Ill-matched couples (she with the elongated torso and strange turns of hip, he with slanted face and never-ending fingers; she with the large eyes, he with no ears) strolled up and down the grand staircase. An elderly gentleman stood by the front desk, leaning low to the counter, laughing with multiple lips. Moving in and out of the crowd, a young man in a gray, homemade uniform practiced amateur pest control. Two women of remarkably short stature and incomplete hair lay curled in a corner in a c
omplicated embrace.

  Off to the side could be heard scattered shouts and cries, as someone operated the fantascope for a small seated group. Phantasmagoric imagery spilled into the surrounding crowd, climbing the steps, dropping off the vaulted ceiling of the great lobby.

  Richard suspected the hotel had recorded it all, had played it back hundreds of times over its lifetime. It didn’t much matter to these folk, now or then, so why should it matter to him?

  Someone had left a window open. A cold breeze moved slowly across the floor, wrapping around furniture, wrapping around legs, wrapping around his legs. He began to shiver.

  He recognized some of the furniture. Someone, Jacob perhaps, had moved his old furniture up from the cellars. He was pleased, such a pleasant surprise, everything he and Abby had worked for, everything remembered become real.

  Now if someone could just close off that draft, everything would be perfect. He began to shake.

  Jacob had once told him they used to offer room service. Then they had to stop because they kept losing staff.

  “Someone please shut that door!”

  But it was too late. He began to shudder.

  THAT NIGHT, RICHARD shuddered, and shuddered, and woke up in the pool. His arms and shoulders were covered with such weight he thought his bones would snap. Overhead, looming in a double grin, was the Pool Man.

  “How? How did I get here?” Richard shouted, struggling.

  The Pool Man bent his neck incorrectly, and impossibly swiveled his upper torso around for a better view, close enough to sniff Richard’s face. One of his mouths was rank, the other smelled sweet. Richard wasn’t sure which was which.

  “Sleep… walk, would be… my theory,” the Pool Man said. “Once… folks see… the pool… they can’t wait… to come back.”

  “No!” Richard wiggled his feet, kicking up. But it made him sink deeper. He gasped as sediment, fiber, blood lapped his lower lip.

  The Pool Man wagged his finger, No, No, No. “Think… quick… sand,” he double whispered.

  Richard closed his eyes, but could not contain his panic so easily. It burned the inside of his eyelids, its black claws scraped against his brain, it forced his eyes open, and he was gone.

  HE HAD WAITED a hundred years on this hillside, patience his only option, then a few years more, the people running in and out of his mouth, gazing out his eyes, rearranging everything inside him, all in their desperate, pitiful need to make a meaning of what happened to them, as if weather and rock and ground had a story and a plan. They wore him out from the inside, then they fled into the night, never to return. It happened this way, again and again.

  What is this? They hide in his rooms and they weep and he is sick to death of their crying. There is nothing he can do for them, so why do they stay? He has lasted two of their lifetimes, and with luck he will last many more. They cannot last. They cannot last. It is sad perhaps, but there is nothing to be done.

  But inside, there is a pain he cannot ignore. Inside, a human has latched to a wall, has opened its mouth and gullet and all, has howled out air older than its days, older than these walls or anything growing on this hill, such emptiness and loneliness that even walls must take notice.

  And he is there, looking at the thing, with eyes that cannot see beyond its own poor life, then back out again, into insects flying in the room, in spiders gathered in aimless make, in all creatures hungry and scurrying through this room, not knowing if this poor thing is predator or prey.

  And then to parts unknown, flying through his own veins, the air ripe from a hundred years’ humans’ breathing, furnished with things accumulated, paid and bled for: things to sit in, things to lie on, things to put things on, things to hold and look into and hope for a better return and a meaning that will not come, no matter how much they hold and look into and sit on and lie on and moan. Nothing comes, nothing comes, except the resignation of the barren.

  And he is gliding over the floor of his world, over the foundations, over the bottom line, over the feet. And there is nothing he can’t see, or feel, or hear. And it is not enough. He races away. He takes the broader view: these walls, this hill, this sky, this ground. These bones, this muscle, this flesh, these eyes peering out of an over-occupied skull.

  Inside the Deadfall grove, the dead things accumulate. Limb and torso, the natural castoffs of the world. Seeing becomes a complicated process of ignorance and simplification. The limbs mesh one into the other – you trace their paths round and round. Before you know, you are buried in it. Before you know, you are covered in dead things, and no ax in sight.

  The limbs grab him and lift him out. His name is called as if from a great height.

  RICHARD RAISED HIS head off the floor with a great, heaving gasp, choking on the invisible. He sat up dizzily, leaned on wobbly arms. He was back in his bedroom. Brilliant light made the window look on fire. He saw the drop glide across his hand and disappear into the phantasmagoric pattern of the rug, and realized he was crying. He leaned his head back and stared at the water-stained ceiling, the frayed wiring twisting into the tarnished brass neck of the ornately-winged light fixture, and took a deep, shuddering breath, as if he’d been holding it far too long.

  His vision blurred, and he was suddenly anxious about what might be creeping toward him out of the corners of the room. But then his eyes cleared, and there was nothing, and he loved the way the light filling the window spilled to make everything in this space glow.

  He wondered if Serena was in her room. They had a lot to pack, but there were certainly belongings they might leave behind. Now, and over the next few years, there would be much he would have to say to her. Once back in the real world, they would have to live with what had happened, and what might happen, as family.

  “So, how did it go with our investors?” Richard sipped at the tea in an antique, expensive-looking cup. He’d never been much of a tea drinker, but he hadn’t wanted to offend Jacob, especially after all he had done. Actually, he was surprised to find it quite tasty. He might have to take it up.

  “Patrons would be the more accurate term. They made the usual cautions about expenses, deteriorating standards and the like, just to make it sound as if they knew what they were doing, and that they might someday choose to withhold their funds, which they will never do, I can assure you. It would be like Catholics refusing to fund the Vatican. They made the one arbitrary demand. Every year there is always one arbitrary demand.”

  “What was this year’s?”

  “I have to put a bench outside against the wall by the front entrance. Never mind that there’s little shade there, that it’s going to be too hot to sit on about four months out of the year, and none of our residents would want to display themselves so openly in any case. But I will do as they instruct.”

  Richard nodded, putting the cup down on the small lacquer tray. Jacob’s quarters were really quite pleasant – he liked the way the light fell out of the upper windows and yellowed the shadows below. He wished he had been able to spend more time with Jacob like this. “It was kind of Enid to help Serena pack,” he said.

  “We’re all going to miss her, and you as well.”

  Richard nodded. “She cried when I told her.”

  “I’m sure she did, but didn’t you also detect, if I may say so, some glimmer of relief in her face?”

  “Yes. Yes, I certainly did.”

  “A difficult decision, but the correct one, I think.”

  Richard didn’t say anything for a time, and it wasn’t Jacob’s way to push him. Finally Richard did speak, the words coming surprisingly easily. “We were childhood sweethearts, Abby and I. For the longest time, I couldn’t even imagine myself with another girl. I imagined she felt exactly the same way; it was a key part of our story together. And maybe she did – I certainly have no reason to think she didn’t. Except for the fact that I came to understand people know much less about each other than they think they do.

  “We first started thinking about that house
when we were in high school. We’d draw pictures of how we thought it would be. She made a lot of collages, from magazines and cloth samples, that sort of thing, to represent how each of the rooms would be. She added rooms and took away rooms, she rearranged the elements until sometimes our dream house became a real mystery to me – I barely recognized it from one version to the next. There would be rooms whose functions were completely impenetrable to me, and the very next day they would be gone from the plan, and replaced by other, equally mysterious spaces. I think maybe she could have been a designer, if she’d only imagined herself that way.

  “I looked at all the home owner’s magazines I could find, House and What-Not. Of course I didn’t let on to any of my friends. I took a few vocational classes at school, carpentry and plumbing. The electrical class was always full. I could have taken a summer course, but we both loved the beach. Summer was our time.

  “We got married right out of high school and we started putting away money. We knew it would take awhile, a house like what we wanted. A house like that doesn’t come cheap. After a few years, Serena was born, and that was okay, that was what we wanted, but obviously our dream house would have to wait awhile.

  “But we couldn’t wait, not really. The idea of that house had ripened, you see. Our desire for that dream had peaked. If we waited any longer it would be overripe, if you know what I mean. It would never have been so good again. Abby had a little inheritance, and there was that money we saved, so we looked and looked and found a house of the right size, the right form, the right impression, but it was all torn up inside. A lot of damage. A lot of potential.”

  “A ‘fixer-upper,’” Jacob said.

  “What?”

  “Sorry. I believe they call them ‘fixer-uppers.’”

  “Exactly. That’s exactly what they call them. We didn’t have much money left after the purchase, hardly anything really. But we had all these books on construction and home repair, all those magazines and drawings and plans, and collages, all those dreams on paper. And I was a pretty good carpenter. And Abby, Abby was just inspired, you know?”