Louis pulled Flash Freddy to one side and said, “Let’s just go to another hotel.” He glanced beyond Santosa and Tiffany through the revolving door to The Tower. He could feel the uncomfortable tingle of pins and needles coursing down his spine to the tip of his tail. “It’s a little too close to the piazza.”
“Precisely why you need to stay here,” Flash Freddy said. Smiggins sniggered and punched numbers into his calculator. “Your office is on the twenty-first floor of The Tower. Besides, there is no other hotel.”
Louis hitched his toga, not too comfortable with the idea of working within the walls of the one place that really gave him the goddamn creeps. Sleeping across the piazza beneath the staring gaze of the alpha-omega logo was unnerving enough. Stepping through The Tower doors was bordering on absolute-total-undeniable insanity. “You sure there’s nowhere else I can go?” he asked. “I’ll even stay in a goddamn bed and breakfast on the other side of the city. I don’t need to be so close to where I’m going to work.”
“It’s either here or on the streets.” Flash Freddy rummaged in his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash thick with single dollar bills. Gray notes too, by the look of them, not greenbacks. Flash Freddy then winked and went to have a word with the manager. A minute later he was back, all smiles and holding a scroll tied with a purple ribbon. “Well whaddya know? He found your original booking. You’ve got the honeymoon suite. Oh, and this is for you. You’ve got mail.”
Louis took the scroll and began to untie the ribbon, wondering who in hell could have known he was checking in today. When he read it, he grunted and handed it back. He thought it had looked familiar. “Just another goddamn invite to the Mansion of Many Rooms.” Tiffany’s big brown eyes widened, briefly met his, then looked away. Santosa just burped and Smiggins sniggered. “Did the manager say who’d delivered it?”
Flash Freddy glanced at the scroll beneath hooded eyelids. “Didn’t say. It was left at reception marked to your attention. Do you mind?” Removing the Zippo from his pocket, he held it beneath the scroll. Louis shrugged and nodded. The scroll was soon alight with gray flames and dropped into a trash bin at the reception desk. “Okay. Let’s get to the honeymoon suite,” he said. “Seventh floor.”
To Louis’ mounting disbelief, the only goddamn elevator in the building was out of order. It meant they had to trudge up seven flights of stairs, all of them lifting Santosa in his wheelchair. At the top, to make matters worse, Flash Freddy led them the wrong way down the corridor. Finally, on Smiggins’ advice, they trekked back and found the room. Above a set of double doors was a plaque with fading letters: SEVENTH HEAVEN. Flash Freddy slotted the key into the lock and ushered everyone inside. Tiffany pushed Santosa straight to the mini-bar and removed a bottle of LeMont Imperial Brut. Punching numbers into his calculator, Smiggins went to sit on the modular couch beneath a charcoaled sketch of the Money Tree. Louis, though, hesitated at the entrance while Flash Freddy crossed the room to open the balcony doors. “This is the life,” the lizard said, stepping onto the balcony. “You can see the whole piazza.”
Santosa wheeled himself over to take in the view. “You better believe it. I know toads who’d crucify their grandmother to get a room like this. And all of it on The Boss’s tab.”
Struggling to keep his eyelids from sagging, Louis was more interested in other things at the moment. He went to a door next to the mini-bar where Tiffany was pouring champagne into five flutes, the en-suite bathroom, to his disappointment. “Where’s the bedroom?” he asked, hitching his toga. “I thought this was supposed to be the honeymoon suite.”
Everyone suddenly burst into laughter. Even the edges of Tiffany’s mouth turned up into a smile. Santosa slapped his thigh and Smiggins sniggered so hard he was snorting like a goddamn pig. Flash Freddy came in from the balcony and shut the doors, smiling and chuckling to himself. Louis demanded to know what was so goddamn funny.
Flash Freddy put his briefcase on top of the vanity table in the corner. “Why do you need a bed?” he asked. “You’re dead. You don’t need one anymore.”
“Are you telling me nobody sleeps in this goddamn city?”
“Not so much as a catnap. We’re awake 24/24.”
“You mean 24/7.”
Flash Freddy removed the heavy contract from the briefcase and laid it on top of the vanity table. “No. I meant what I said, 24/24.”
“What if I feel tired? What if I need to just lie down and close my eyes for a little while?”
Flash Freddy nodded to the flat gray screen on the wall above the mini-bar. “That’s what television’s for. Or pills. Everyone takes something to keep them awake.” He turned to Tiffany, Santosa and Smiggins. They nodded in affirmation. “It’s normal. In fact, The Boss encourages the use of anything that’ll increase productivity.”
Tiffany began handing out the champagne flutes, Louis first. “What does everyone do with the time they don’t spend sleeping,” he asked.
“Work, of course.” Flash Freddy accepted his glass from Tiffany. “LeMont International Enterprises is the ultimate 24-hour corporation. Seven days a week. No holidays. No weekends.” He flicked his head toward the wad of papers. “It’s all in the contract.”
Louis hitched his toga and took a sip of bubbly cow juice. “You mean to tell me I’m expected to be on the game every goddamn minute of the day, for eternity?”
“Could be worse. Look around you,” Santosa said, and burped. “It’s all about lifestyle. If that’s the price you have to pay for a room overlooking the piazza, to pedal a little faster, then isn’t it worth it?”
A room without a bed, he might add. It was goddamn ludicrous. “Beds aren’t just for sleeping in, especially in a honeymoon suite. If you catch my drift.”
“Ha! Louis, you’re a scream,” Santosa said. Smiggins sniggered and Tiffany’s smile dropped from her face. “You really should be a standup.”
Flash Freddy read the confusion on Louis’ face. “Sex is forbidden between co-workers. And because every citizen is an employee of LeMont International Enterprises, that means no sex at all. It’s in the contract.”
“Then I just won’t sign the goddamn thing. You can’t expect me to go without sex for eternity. It’s outrageous.”
Smiggins sniggered and Flash Freddy went on, “As your advocate, I seriously advise you to reconsider. Besides, what’s the big deal? You don’t have the equipment for sex anymore. None of us do.”
Louis stared at him, momentarily lost for words.
“Have you checked what’s beneath your toga yet?” Flash Freddy nodded to Louis’ groin. “Go on, have a look if you don’t believe me.”
With laughing and sniggering in his ears, Louis hurried into the en-suite bathroom and slammed the door. Oddly, there was no toilet, only a washbasin and shower cubicle. He lifted the hem of his toga and grunted in shock; there was nothing dangling between his thighs. He felt around in case it was hidden somewhere in the fur, but no, it was his worst nightmare. He wasn’t just a weasel; he was a goddamn eunuch. Shoulders slumped, he returned to the main room and told everyone he was going to kill himself. Throw himself into the Fires of Oblivion, or something. The After Life just wasn’t worth living anymore.
“You’ll get used to it,” Flash Freddy said. “You’ll also get used to a lot of other things. Notice something else missing in the bathroom? You can now eat and drink as much as you like without having to use a toilet. What could be better?”
Louis had wondered about that. One of his greatest fears when he had been alive was the thought of dying with a full bladder. For some bizarre reason he had always believed that if there was such a thing as life after death, then he would take with him the feeling of urgency for eternity; hell for him would be getting stuck in a place with no public urinals. Now, it seemed, he had worried himself for nothing. He had had god-knows how many glasses of champagne in the Limo and hadn’t felt so much as a goddamn twinge from his bladder. Probably didn’t even have a bladder, if what Flash Freddy wa
s saying was true. Probably didn’t have a goddamn heart, or lungs, or liver, or any internal organs for that matter. Which only confused the issue even more. Why could he still swallow and smell and taste and feel pain?
Again the feeling this was all a dream washed over him. He reached up and tweaked one of his whiskers. Pain shot up his elongated snout. This was no dream. This was the After Life. He couldn’t have sex. He couldn’t use the toilet. And he couldn’t take a nap.
He was beginning to wish he had read the goddamn contract more thoroughly.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Mind-Hold
SMIGGINS, Flash Freddy, Santosa and his little helper hung around the honeymoon suite for a little while longer, finishing off the second bottle of LeMont Imperial Brut from the mini-bar before going their separate ways. Smiggins said he had some unfinished business with the Country Club, not that Louis cared where he went or what he did, providing it was as far from him and the hotel as possible. Santosa and Tiffany finally went to the meeting, albeit several hours late, and Flash Freddy went to visit another client on some ‘private business’ he wouldn’t elaborate on. Before he left, he had a quick word of advice for Louis.
“I wouldn’t leave signing the contract for too much longer.” From his briefcase he removed a pen with his personalized logo and put it on top of the wad of papers. “The Boss likes to tidy up loose ends as quickly as he can. It wouldn’t be a good idea to make him wait if you can help it. He’s known to have a bit of a short temper, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure that I do,” Louis said. “He headhunted me, didn’t he? I certainly didn’t come looking for this job.”
Flash Freddy smiled his salesman’s smile and closed his briefcase. “How can I put it?” he said, licking his lips. “The Boss is as loyal to you as you are to him. If you don’t sign soon, someone else with the credentials for the job might die and take your place. I’ve seen it happen before. You wouldn’t want to end up jobless, would you?”
Louis hitched his toga. He wasn’t going to be fast tracked into signing something he wasn’t ready to sign. He was too old at this game to fall for that. “And what, exactly, would happen if it did?”
Flash Freddy ambled to the door, his eyes hooded. “Let’s just say The Boss controls everything and everybody in LeMont. It isn’t wise to disappoint him.” He stepped into the corridor. “Remember, Mr. DeVille, eternity is an awfully long time.”
Louis watched him leave, straining against the heaviness in his eyes. His brain was like cement: nothing was getting through. He reckoned how he felt gave new meaning to being “dead tired.” Admittedly, there had been times when he had felt a hell of a lot worse; and as an ex-CEO who had regularly worked fourteen hours a day, he reckoned he knew a thing or two how to handle fatigue. His second wind would come and he would be as right as goddamn rain. It always did. Granted, he had never been in quite the same situation as he was now, but if he wanted to taste the fruits of success in his new career then feeling like a bucket of horseshit was just one more thing he would have to come to terms with. Then again, there was always the couch. There might not be any goddamn beds in this hotel (it got more ludicrous the more you thought about it), but there was nothing to stop him lying on the cushions and having a bit of shuteye.
Except that was not what he was going to do. There was a degree of edginess underlying his need for sleep, something he could only put down to the aftereffects of the pills he had taken. He knew he wouldn’t be able to drift off – there was no point in even trying – so he hunted for the remote to see what was on the television. Between the wall and the sofa he found a book by Miles N. Boon, Secrets Of A Chambermaid, the kind of crappy love story – girl meets boy, boy can’t commit, girl gets heartbroken – Lady Di used to devour by the dozens. Tossing it to one side, he eventually found the remote in the crack between two sofa cushions, along with a lidless pen that didn’t work and a union card belonging to Aldo Fiddler, complete with a passport-sized headshot of a weasel in a suit and tie. The resemblance was uncanny.
He went to the vanity table and shoved the pen and identity card in the drawer for safekeeping. He then pointed the remote control at the flat gray screen above the mini-bar and pushed the power button. The screen flashed on to the Home Shopping Channel, where a rat was urging him to invest in a pair of fur clippers at two-for-the-price-of-one. Unfortunately, the screen was in black and white and he couldn’t seem to find the color button to change it. Worse, he couldn’t seem to tune into any other channel.
“Goddamn it!” he yelled, banging the remote on the vanity table.
The channel still wouldn’t change, so he checked the batteries. That didn’t help either. He tried to turn it off, but the rat remained on screen, now telling him to get on the phone and quote his union number before the deal ran out. Louis chucked the remote onto the sofa and pushed STANDBY on the TV screen. The image of the rat and his clippers remained. Even the volume couldn’t be muted. “Inbuilt goddamn obsolescence,” he muttered, and went to the balcony to clear his head.
The moment he stepped outside, the full force of the alpha-omega logo ambushed him from the top of The Tower. Its magnetic pull was incredible. He tried not to be drawn to it – some kind of instinctive fear told him it wouldn’t be the best thing he ever did – yet despite his best efforts not to, his gaze crept up the fifty or so stories and locked into the logo’s Big Brother stare.
What struck him was the speed and ease with which it pried into his skull, as though he was being infected with one of those Internet viruses that hacked into your computer and stole all your highly classified documents. He knew what it was doing. It certainly made no attempt to hide or cover its tracks; a smiling cat burglar going through his filing cabinet in broad daylight was the image that came to mind. It didn’t care whether it was caught in the act or not. It wanted him to know it could do whatever it goddamn liked.
That was the worst thing, the feeling of utter powerlessness. All his secrets were being read. All his private thoughts revealed like an open diary. It was searching through every idea and notion he had ever had. Searching for a weakness. Searching for treachery. It seemed to have him in some kind of mental half-nelson, an unrelenting and disabling mind-hold. The more he struggled, the more it tightened. Nevertheless, he had to do something before the logo turned him into a mindless zombie. He had to stop it siphoning off his thoughts. What he reckoned he needed was some kind of mental anti-virus, a password or something that would break the contact, or at least delay the download and give him some time. He grabbed the handrail to steady himself, and almost at once the password he was looking for spilled out of his lips. “White… Rabbit,” he said, gasping.
He didn’t know why or where the thought had come from. He had the surreal feeling that someone else had used his mouth to speak or planted the idea in his mind. Maybe it was another PTDS hallucination. He didn’t care. It worked. The link between him and The Tower blinked off the moment he said it.
But then, after a second of mental clarity, it restarted again, searching through his mind, tightening its hold. He fought back, this time with more intent. “White Rabbit!”
The intrusion into his mind dropped out and the searching through his mental filing cabinet came to an abrupt halt. It was like a fresh breeze had blown away the stench of horseshit. He could suddenly think clearly again.
To his horror, as before, it was only momentary. Like an emergency generator kicking in when all the lights had gone off, the connection with The Tower was restored. He gasped, then cursed. Obviously just saying the word wasn’t enough. He needed a… a what? He didn’t know, and all the while, every second he stood there trying to work out what to do, his thoughts were being stolen from his mind. He felt like screaming and tugging his whiskers out. It was impossible to think straight when someone, or something, was rummaging though his goddamn head.
At that moment, just when he thought he was going to completely surrender to the will of The Tower,
the connection was broken. Something had flown between it and him, allowing him that split second he needed to avert his gaze to something else. He couldn’t tell exactly what it had been. It was though he had been staring into the sun and a bird or plane had flown in front of him, just a shadowy blur. But it had been enough.
While he latched onto the first thing he saw, the petrified limbs of the Money Tree, The Tower clawed at his mind, trying to reconnect. He could sense its frenzied intent. It hadn’t finished. It hadn’t got what it wanted, but there was no way in hell he was going to be drawn back to the logo. He might not have been the smartest cookie in the cookie jar, as his mother used to say, but he had figured that much out: The Tower could only connect when direct eye contact was made. Its power was also greatest at close proximity. When he had first seen the logo at the archway to Conduit Number 1, though still incredibly seductive, it was nowhere near as powerful as right here at the piazza. Back at the archway its power was weaker and he had been able to pry his gaze away (he had also been a lot less goddamn tired), but here in its immediate vicinity he had to fight with every scrap of energy to keep his attention to the Money Tree and the worshipping crowd around it.
Looking down from this height reminded him of the Chambers of Eternity, and once again he had the feeling that there was something odd about the crowd. He followed the stem of the tree, scanning for the bird or whatever that had flown in front of his eyes and broken the mind-hold. As with most of the buildings around the piazza, the topmost branches reached to roughly the same level as the balcony, but there was nothing there, not even so much as a leaf. There was no goddamn way he was going to look any higher, so he glanced back at the crowd, and that’s when he saw it. A goddamn rabbit with wings, hopping across the piazza toward the hotel. None of the worshippers seemed to notice it weaving in and around them. He watched it dodge the slow moving Limos across the street to the sidewalk, then hop beneath the balcony and into the hotel entrance, out of sight.
DeVille's Contract Page 13
