Hunters & Collectors

by M. Suddain

  I heard Woodbine say something quietly to Gladys. They followed just behind. ‘There are so many things here to take your mind off matters. There’s our Mirror Lounge, our Rainbow Danger Club. Or there’s the Skating Hollow. There’s our cinemas, our baths. Do you bathe? There’s the Bellworthy Baths, the Tropical Baths, the Ice Baths, the Salt Baths, the Kinderbaths. But you have no children.’ Was this man going to list every attraction in the place? ‘There’s our Grand Ballroom. Do you like to dance, Mr Tamberlain? Of course you must. You must get some natural inclination from your spindle side.’ We had made our way towards the elevators. ‘And of course there’s our famous audio-visual tour. I recommend it personally. Many of our restaurants and attractions are closed for refurbishments during Harvest, sadly.’

  ‘Closed?’

  ‘But there are nuts, seeds and figs behind the bar in your suite.’

  ‘Nuts and seeds.’

  ‘And figs. You have a hamper, too, I see.’

  ‘I see.’ To be honest, my appetite had vanished. But the Beast, I knew, would be ravenous. He is a man of appetites. Things happen when the Beast goes hungry. It was just another complication to deal with. I wouldn’t tell him we weren’t to be fed unless he asked.

  ‘There is just one more thing, Mr Tamberlain. It is tremendously embarrassing. I’m mortified.’ We had reached the elevators. Elevator 2 was open. It was filled with a greenish light, and I could see a hulking figure silhouetted there. ‘It’s just that, with it being Harvest, and the Wild Hunt only just concluding, and Spring Rounds yet to begin, upstairs is somewhat … out of order. What I mean is that you are likely to see some things on the way to the Meridian Baby that will seem disturbing.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You might see familiar faces up there. If you like, we can blindfold you and have our porters guide you to your suite.’

  ‘Gods no.’

  ‘Very well. It is a short walk from the elevator atrium to your room, and our staff have agreed to form “obscurement patrols” along the hall and use bed sheets to screen off the worst “tableaux”.’

  ‘Tableaux?’

  ‘You did come a week early.’

  ‘So you said.’

  ‘I just want to reassure you that despite what’s just happened down here, and despite what you might glimpse upstairs, everything at the hotel is under control. You are perfectly safe. So long as you and your friends stick to the lighted halls, follow instructions carefully, don’t stop to speak to anyone, and stay strictly in your room with the “DO NOT DISTURB” sign lit, no harm will come to you tonight.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘We’ll be away for three nychthemera.’

  ‘Three what?’

  ‘A complete cycle of day and night.’

  ‘That’s a strange word.’

  ‘It’s a strange thing.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘A complete cycle of day and night.’

  ‘A nychthemeron.’

  ‘Yes. Now I must move on. I will leave you in the capable hands of Sam, our elevator man.’ The shadow in the elevator car did not move.

  ‘I don’t use elevators, currently.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘It’s nothing, we’ll take the elevator.’

  ‘Very well. Our Raymon will take your luggage up.’ Another porter had arrived in the lobby, pushing a Winchester with a single hamper on it. It was a Winchester trolley, certainly. They don’t make them any more. At a nod from the concierge the boy pushed the trolley into the service elevator and vanished.

  …The intended effect of Terminal Annexe is to transmute the normally mundane experience of arrival into a series of architectural revelations which subvert a visitor’s expectations and remind them that they are not so much being ‘checked in’ as reborn into the ways of the establishment. We are inducted upward, away from the mundane world, and on to a higher plane. The spirit does not resist a curved space; it acquiesces and becomes compliant.

  – From Hotel Grand Skies: the Empyrean. A Guide for New Guests

  … From a wave state, to gases, to liquid and solids, the universe formed. And we solid forms have progressed from simple beasts, to hunter-gatherers, to a species which builds intergalactic spaceships and cities among the stars. Now we’ve reached the point where we can complete the cycle and return to the wave state. It begins in a place very close to where we are now: when most of a species’ communications are reduced to a remote electrical exchange of information. We no longer meet, our form is redundant. All life is information. It always has been. Energy is never extinguished. We live these stories again and again and again.

  – From Infinity Remastered: Engineering the Post-Human Species

  (And Why Our Great-Grandchildren Might Not Even Need Bodies), Dr Rubin Difflaydermaus, BBDSM

  8 ‘… chest pain or discomfort, confusion, convulsions, diarrhoea, difficulty breathing, difficulty with public speaking, difficulty with swallowing foreign or exotic food, lewd thoughts, dizziness, impolite gases, double vision, psyclopia, faintness, headache, inability to move the arms, legs, eyelids, tongue or facial muscles for extended periods.’

  9 ‘… faintness, headache, itching, inability to speak to strangers or strange pets, domination impulses, a love of pain or pain in others, convulsive laughter, joint or muscle pain, large, hive-like swelling on the face, eyelids, lips, tongue, throat, hands, legs, feet or sex organs, chronic nausea.’

  10 ‘… irritated eye sockets, slow speech, skin rash, rancid tongue, sore throat, sores, ulcers, or white spots in the mouth or on the lips, weeping after intercourse or heavy exercise, inordinately heavy menstrual flow, copious sweating, swelling of the hands, feet or eyeballs, testicular itching, tightness in the chest, uncontrollable vocal outbursts, social alienation, ideasthesia and murderous inclinations.’

  11 ‘… vomiting, wheezing, telepathy, false or unusual sense of well-being, profanity, sexual attraction to pets or minors, inability to maintain an erection, constant unwanted erections, infertility, the belief that you are a special individual blessed with abilities beyond those of ordinary people and so deserve special treatment, the belief that you have psychokinetic abilities, the feeling that you are a character in a cine-movie or teleplay.’

  12 ‘… loss of bladder control, muscle spasm or jerking of all extremities simultaneously, the hearing of phantom music, pain or discomfort in the arms, jaw, back or neck, red skin lesions, often with a purple centre, swollen or irritated eyes, seeing, hearing or feeling things that are not there, have never been there, will never exist, chronophobia (the feeling of panic associated with the idea of having not existed before you were born. We recommend Chronofirm™).’

  NOTES FROM THE DEEP

  From the Blue Mountain Horse and Pony Journal and Calendar of John Tamberlain

  In the oak-panelled elevator car the giant shadow resolved into a giant old man, very muscular, skin like a satellite map of a bronze world. He had long scratch marks down his face. His car was carpeted in blue. It had a little bench at the back. We stood. There was a lovely set of Glassenfort trunks in the car, a severed human head resting neatly on top, a sullen pout upon its jowlish face. It was Ott.

  ‘Evening, folks. Going up?’ The operator spoke deeply, quietly, in a bedtime-story voice.

  ‘Doesn’t exactly feel like it.’

  ‘We’re in 137,’ said Woodbine. The elevator man held his gaze while he pushed a small lever forward to ‘One’. The letters were painted in gold, the lever gave a pleasing click. Gladys gazed at the head as she fingered her scarf.

  ‘Looks as if you’ve been in a catfight there, friend,’ I said. ‘Had a run-in with the wife?’ and Sam the elevator man chuckled lowly. ‘Never been married. I’d sooner set my moustache alight.’

  ‘You have no moustache,’ I observed, and Sam chortled again, the laugh coming in fat bubbles from his knotty throat. ‘Not much gets past you, friend.’ He offered nothing more, and frankly I was not about to ask. The
lapels of his jacket were decorated with human eyeballs threaded onto tailor’s cotton.

  The old car seemed to take an age to reach the first floor. Its noises were the purring of a large contented creature. The elevator man sang in a low baritone as we went up. His voice made the walls of the car rumble.

  There were three men came out of the West,

  Their fortunes for to try.

  And these three men made a solemn vow,

  ‘John Barleycorn must die.’

  ‘Sam, is it?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘That a Harvest song, Sam? Not one I’ve heard.’

  ‘Well, there’s a lot of Harvest songs.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  They let him stand till Midsummer’s Day,

  Till he looked both pale and wan;

  And little Sir John he’s grown a beard,

  And so become a man.

  ‘I thought it was pronounced “wan”.’

  ‘Sure, but then it wouldn’t rhyme with “man”.’

  ‘Right. How long have you been working here, Sam?’

  ‘Funny. You’re a funny fellow. I’ve been working here longer than you can remember.’

  ‘Than I can remember?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Things seem a little strange around here, Sam.’

  ‘Tell me a place where things aren’t strange.’

  ‘Good point, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s the Wild Hunt. Things get a little rowdy.’

  ‘No kidding?’

  ‘Well, here we are, first floor. Stick to the lighted halls. They’ll have sheets up so you don’t have to see what your eyes don’t want to.’ He smiled down at us. The eyes on his jacket twinkled. ‘But maybe you do want to. Who knows? Take care of each other. I will be seeing you around and around.’ With a wrinkled finger he stirred the breathless air.

  They’ve hired men with sharp pitchforks,

  Who pricked him to the heart,

  And the loader served him worse than that,

  For he’s bound him to the cart.

  The huntsman he can’t hunt the fox,

  Nor so loudly to blow his horn.

  And the tinker can’t mend ale pots

  Without some Barleycorn.

  A long, lonely tunnel. Apple-green carpet humming like water in the low light. Purple-papered wall with pale blue seashells, smeared with comets of deep red, shining in patches under the eagle-wing sconces. Blackwood rectangles with silver numbers, a shoeshine seat outside each door. And silence. A food cart upturned, scattering bright fruit and golden pastries across the carpet. Scattered light from the silver cutlery. Flowers sagging in the vases. Wrinkled prepuces of cream and pink. Near the centre of the elevator atrium a sheet had been thrown over an object roughly the size of a Gladys. From beneath the clean white sheet a hand appeared, skin bullet-grey, nails purple. There was an open toolbox nearby, red and glowing. Certain tools lay around. A certain way beyond this tiny crime scene, at the edge of the circular atrium, another shrouded form leaned against a marble column. Blooms of red shone near its crown. We could see more glowing cocoons in the corridor from the atrium.

  ‘Someone is definitely fucking with me.’

  I took a step forward from the elevator car and stopped as I saw the boy, Raymon, waiting with our hamper. My shoes squelched into the sodden carpet where plum red meets apple green. From the far end of this opulent tributary we could be seen, I’m sure, as quivering blobs.

  ‘Definitely, definitely fucking with me.’

  Raymon and his Winchester set off into the labyrinth, the wheels playing the slicking music of a cycle on a rain-soaked street. The only sound in this silent palace. We left the light of the car and trailed the trolley towards our room, the air, sticky after battle, dilating around us. That fudgy, furry post-hunt odour so powerful it becomes a taste. We heard the elevator close behind us, extinguishing our hunched shadows.

  I’d had no morphiates, Colette. Just three Excocet.13 So everything I say I saw, I saw. There had been a massacre, and no small one. There were dozens of bodies along our corridor, all obscured, or mostly obscured, by white bed sheets. But we saw hands: pale and painted; coarse and brown; dressed in nuggets of precious metal set with extravagant stones. We saw watches. We saw shoes: black and shining and ready for the night ahead; or resting on the carpet like bright, dead birds. We saw fire axes. We saw sharpened brooms. We saw lengths of piano wire. A sheet had partly slipped from the body of a young woman whose face seemed familiar to me, but whose name I couldn’t place – except that I thought it might have been a kind of bird. Her shoes were pale violet.

  The halls branching off from ours were unlit, but we could get a sense of what lived in those shadows. In some places the staff had used rope to tie sheets across some of the more elaborate tableaux; in other places maids and porters held the sheets from each end, and shuffled along with us to obscure our view. These servants watched us as we hurried past. We heard far-away screams from time to time. We heard loud crashes. At one point we heard gunshots in the distance. But mostly we heard nothing.

  We saw a small girl. I can’t talk about the girl yet, Colette. Not until I’ve had at least two drinks.

  We reached our apartment, breathless from not daring to.

  13 ‘… For the proven relief of trauma, hypertension, myopia, radical thoughts, heightened anxiety in confined spaces, chronophobia, fear of death, and chest pains. Take only as directed, and if symptoms persist, try Cyclopazan™.’

  NOTES ON THE MERIDIAN BABY

  Our suite is well appointed, to be fair. Living room with cherrywood panelling and marble floor; furniture in lacquered and veneered wood, leather, brushed aluminium; an oak dining table; a handsome veneer cabinet containing a state-of-the-art Boschenform high-fidelity Exophonic music system with quadrangular, carbon-insulated phonic tubes; a centre table with a swivel top and scallop ashtray; a fine-looking bar of marble with brass inlays. Smaller rooms than I expected, but no blood – except the small amount we brought in to the foyer on our shoes. Let me show you the study. You’ll see it has a hardwood bookshelf; a brushed-chromium floor lamp; a mahogany desk with wrought-iron mounts. Very quiet in here. Let’s go back to the living room.

  Quiet in here, too. Beast fear-sulks. He has slung his bulk into a leather armchair and commenced staring at the wall opposite, seeing there some awful repeating reel projected on the cream paper. He is a sensitive soul, hardly suited to comprehend the mix of refinement and violence which typifies the rituals of the Sphere of High Culture. I’m not sure I understand them myself, currently.

  Have just mixed us all strong drinks. I made a round of Tomahawks: a cocktail a bartender in the legendary drinking arcades of Sordistat wrote specially for me.

  Ice.

  John Barleycorn.

  Le Havre rice spirit.

  Bombast bitters. (Cardinal if preferred.)

  A dash of red sugars.

  Lime to taste.

  Shake very well and serve in cold tumblers.

  Became aware that the rattle of the shaker was shattering an extraordinary silence. So perhaps I underbruised it. As I drink it, it tastes underbruised. Beast drained his immediately, while keeping his eyes fixed on the wall, handed me the empty glass, and when I asked, ‘Is it underbruised?’ he said nothing. Gladys has left hers standing untouched. I’m watching them now, because there’s little else to do. Now Gladys goes to the far end of the table, unlocks her case, slowly takes each tool out, languidly sniffs each to see when it was oiled, then puts all but two auto-pistols and a large hunting knife away. Our hamper sits untouched. Beast hasn’t even looked at it. Hasn’t looked at anything but the wall.

  One hour and thirty-eight minutes in silence. Imagine that. Not a noise through the walls. The proofing in these rooms is incredible.

  I can agree now that this is an extremely delicate situation. A large number of people have been murdered here, and it seems as if it’ll be a struggle to get them to open their re
staurants for me. They have my books and notes (except this Horse and Pony Journal I have with me), an irreplaceable set of luggage, and whether I see them again is entirely at the discretion of the establishment. What can I do? Call the police? The coastguard?

  Gladys hasn’t said a word. She knows I expect her to make a security report. Everything is a power game with her. The Franz situation has the potential to blow up. I knew I shouldn’t have brought her. I knew something exactly like this would happen. Well, not exactly like this. But I’m angry with her. Although it’s hard for me to express that anger right now because somehow, paradoxically, she’s angry with me, and a woman’s anger – even when measurably equal – is somehow more consequential. Will make more drinks. A conciliatory gesture. Be the bigger man.

  ‘Frankly I don’t see any sign of “filth” on these shoes at all. What do you think, Beast?’

  Nothing.

  A certain frequency of silence makes a man want to scream. Are they out there? They could be standing just outside the door and we wouldn’t know. I put G’s fresh drink next to her first three, untouched. Maddening. The predator was straightening the pin of a miniature stun-grenade the size of a cocktail onion. I said, ‘Well, what do you all think of this apartment? I think it’s too small.’ No one said anything. ‘Beast. I think this room is too small.’ He came from his trance, his eyes red from staring into space without blinking. He yawned. ‘You go tell them.’

  I went off to my room, to the dresser, found an emergency sewing kit, found the tape inside – ignored the book left on my bedside table – and began to measure our apartment. Under International Hotel Association rules a room must be a certain size to be officially considered a suite. I discovered that the main room is three and one-eighth inches shorter than the IHoA’s requirements. Tired from my labour, I made more Tomahawks.

  Finally couldn’t take it any more. ‘Gladys, report!’ She was checking the edge on the hunting knife with a hotel safety card.

  ‘Are you kidding me? You want a report?’