He arrived at the seaside town half blind with fatigue and disoriented. There were no taxis waiting at the train station, and Miss Pickaver wasn’t willing to wait while they figure out how to call one, and so they walked along the road and into town, he pulling both bags while she turned the map over and about, trying to figure out where they were heading.
“But I thought you’d been here before,” complained Hovell.
“I have been,” said Miss Pickaver. “With that German gentleman I used to know. But he was the one knew the place. I just followed along in his tracks.”
“German gentleman?” he asked. “I’m staying in a house you stayed at with some previous lover?”
“Surely I told you about him,” she said. “It was years before we met. Well, months anyway.” She frowned, smoothed the map over her belly. “And I can’t imagine what objection you could possibly have to me taking you to a place that I’ve been to before and can vouch for,” she added, as if the whole reason for her taking a German lover had been entirely for his benefit here, now.
Sighing, he trudged on.
###
The place was part of a gated community, a little triangle of buildings full of apartments, some of which had motorized metal shutters that could be brought down at night, sealing you in like a tin of preserved meat. The courtyard between buildings seemed deserted—no sign of habitation visible through the windows, and no people out walking on the compound grounds.
Miss Pickaver found the right building, managed to extract a key from the concierge despite she having no French and the concierge having no English. They were on the third floor, room 306. The tiny elevator was too small for him to ride in with the suitcases, and so she went up first, and he sent the bags up one at a time to her. When, finally, he climbed in, he found it to be even smaller on the inside than it looked from the outside, a kind of lacquered wooden box with a sliding grate for a door. He felt as if he were riding in a coffin.
As the elevator slowly trundled up, creaking, he felt panic beginning to rise. By the time he reached the third floor, he was a nervous wreck.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” she said. “It’s just an elevator.”
And true, yes, it was just an elevator, but he had lived fifty years of his life to this point never having to ride in such an elevator as this. Why should he have to ride in one now?
She had already turned away, was looking for their apartment. There was one long, dingy hallway stretching away, apartment doors dotted to either side of it, odd on one side, even on the other. They ran out at 305. There was no 306.
“Are you sure the concierge said 306?” he asked.
But the look she threw him made him wish he hadn’t asked. Yes, of course she was sure—she was always sure. Even though there was no number on the key fob, she still claimed to be sure.
“It’s simply not here,” he said.
Stubbornly she went down the hall again, scrutinizing each door in turn with such intensity that Hovell wouldn’t have been surprised if 306 did suddenly appear. But, of course, it didn’t.
“There must be another third floor,” she said.
“Another third floor,” he repeated dully.“Sure,” she said. “That you can’t get to from this elevator. That you have to get to from another elevator.”
He was dispatched to question the concierge, but he refused to take the elevator this time, trudging instead down the tight winding stairs that circled the elevator shaft. The light in the stairwell was dim, and he had to grope, but it was better, even if just a little, than the elevator.
He reached the bottom to find the concierge’s lodge locked, and nobody answered when he rang the buzzer. He waited as long as he dared, then trudged back up to deliver the bad news to Miss Pickaver. Miss Pickaver, he knew from experience, did not take bad news well. But when he arrived on the third floor he found only the pile of their bags; Miss Pickaver was nowhere to be seen.
###
He trudged nervously up the hall and back. He opened the elevator and looked in. And then, quietly, and somewhat hesitantly, he called her name. There was no answer. Maybe she had gotten tired of waiting and taken the elevator down to find him. But surely, if that had been the case, he would have heard the elevator, would likely have even seen her in it when he crossed the first or second floor landing on his way back up. Or at least seen the cable moving.
He knocked again on the concierge’s door for good measure. Still no answer. He poked his head out of the building, but it was still just as deserted outside the building as it had been before.
When he finally headed back upstairs, she was there, arms crossed, waiting.
“Where have you been?” she said. “I’ve been calling for you.”
“I was just...” he started, and then took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He didn’t want to fight. But he wasn’t sure he could help himself. “Where were you?” he asked, trying not to sound accusatory.
“I,” she said, drawing herself up, “was busy finding our place.” And then she led him up the dim stairs, up halfway between the third floor and the fourth, where, in the round wall of the stairwell, off one tread, was a small door.
He leaned in close, peered at it in the dim light. He had to squint to read the numbers.
“It says 309,” Hovell said.
“That’s a mistake,” Miss Pickaver said. “It has to be. You saw the hall only went to 305, and there are no other halls.”
“I thought you said there had to be another elevator,” he said. “Another third floor.”
“Don’t be difficult, James,” said Miss Pickaver. “This is the right room.”
But there had been no rooms in the stairwell between the first and second floor, or in the stairwell between the second and third floor. Why would there be a room here? Maybe it was just that he was tired, but it didn’t seem right to him.
“It says 309,” he insisted.
“Someone must have taken the 6 out and put it in upside down, as a joke.”
“What kind of joke is that?” he asked.
She ignored this. Instead she pushed past him, jostling so that he almost slipped and tumbled down the stairs. A moment later the door swung open.
“The key works,” she said. “It has to be the right place.”
But even after that, as he hauled the suitcases one by one up the stairs and inside, as he ducked down and made his own way in, as he watched Miss Pickaver opening the windows and airing out the apartment, he still wondered if they were in the right place.
2.
From the window, the courtyard looked not busy exactly, but at least not deserted like it had when they had come in. At a distance, he could hear the sound of the waves. He watched people come and go.
He had slept for hours, had awoken up disoriented with no clear idea of what time it was. Miss Pickaver looked refreshed and relaxed, the exact opposite, he supposed, of how he looked. She had been out to purchase some groceries: olives in a reddish goo, strange tubs of pureed meat, cheese pastes, drinkable yogurts, boxed milk, tins depicting sauerkraut and tiny sausages, dried packets that apparently could be reconstituted into soup or, at least, broth. He stared at it all, as if stunned.
“Feeling better?” she asked brightly.
He nodded weakly. She had done her hair, he noticed now, and had applied a thick unnaturally dark shade of lipstick. “Are we going out?” he asked.
She gave a peal of laughter. “I’ve been out, darling. There’s no point in your going out, especially not now. It’s nearly night again. You slept the sleep of the dead.”
The sleep of the dead, he thought now, nursing a bowl of tepid tea as he sat at the window, staring out. The other apartments, the ones on the real third floor, all had balconies, but all theirs had was the window. On one of the balconies below, he watched the backs of a man and a woman, the man holding the woman around the waist as they stared out across the courtyard and through the gap in the buildings to the sea beyond.
H
e followed their gaze. The light, he had to admit, was beautiful, just as Miss Pickaver had suggested it would be, and if he sat at just the right angle he had a glimpse of the beach. It was littered with bodies. Mostly Eastern Europeans or Germans, he guessed, based on the gold chains they wore and on the fact that the women were blond and seemingly topless. The men, he noticed now, mostly wore nothing at all, lying baking nude in the sun, their flesh leathery, as if being cured.
“Is it a nude beach?” he asked.
But Miss Pickaver, in front of the bathroom mirror plucking her eyebrows, humming softly to herself, didn’t seem to hear. He couldn’t bring himself to repeat the question. He did not want to be accused by Miss Pickaver of staring at the nudes on the beach. That seemed a humiliation.
When he looked back down at the balcony, the couple were no longer there. He shifted his chair. In the courtyard below, a couple crossed back and forth, their heads bent toward one another. Was it the same couple? He didn’t know. The man was about his age, the woman, roughly, the age of Miss Pickaver. There was, now that he thought about it, a physical resemblance as well, both to him and to Miss Pickaver, but they were in the long shadow cast by the building and their faces were turned away, so perhaps that was partly imagined. But when he realized from the cloying smell of her perfume that Miss Pickaver had left the mirror and was standing behind him, he pointed them out to her.
“Like us, no?” he said, and smiled.
She leaned forward and squinted, then drew slowly back. “I don’t see the resemblance,” she said. Then she kissed him on the top of his head. He imagined the dark stain the lipstick must have left there. “Will you help me carry down my bag?” she asked.
“Your bag?”
“I catch the train in an hour,” she said. “For my little tour.”
“You’re leaving already?” he said, beginning to panic a little.
She crossed her arms, stared at him. “This is what you wanted,” she said in a clipped voice. “You wanted to stay put. This is what we agreed on.”
But had it been? They’d barely arrived and already she was going. He didn’t know the place, he hardly knew how to get to town, but when he voiced these complaints she opened the fridge and gestured at its contents.
“You needn’t go to town,” she said. “You have everything you need right here.” She patiently batted away all his objections until, fifteen minutes later, an ordinary white car pulled into the courtyard below, honked.
“There’s my ride,” she said.
“But it’s not a taxi,” he said. “It’s just someone’s car.”
“That’s how taxis are here,” she claimed.
“But—”
“Who’s been here before?” she asked. “You or I?”
Confused, he hauled her bag down the stairs and to the elevator and sent it down. “No point in you coming down. I’ll have the driver come in and get it,” she said. “You don’t need to bother.”
###
He lingered at the window until darkness, and then lingered a little longer. Long after dark there was the noise of the couple walking around below, the gentle murmur of their voices. Though, over time, that murmur became less and less gentle, finally concluding in a shriek from one or the other of them. He kept listening, wondering if he should go down and check on them, but there was only silence. After a while, he closed the window and went to bed.
But he couldn’t sleep. His body had no idea what time it was, and he had slept too long during the day, and so he lay in the dark staring up at the ceiling. Perhaps he should have gone with Miss Pickaver. Perhaps he should have done 12 countries in 10 days or whatever it was, expanded his horizons a little—no, this was only nervousness about being left alone. He did not want to see twelve countries. He did not want to see even one country, but now that he was here in this one there was little he could do.
He lay in bed, obsessing, tossing and turning until quite late, one or two in the morning, and then got up and found a book. He tried to read, but the words weren’t sticking with him, and after a few pages he had no idea what he’d read. So he turned off the light and went back to the window, resting his elbows on the sill.
There was a moon out now, pale and bitten into, but still casting a fair amount of grayish light. If he leaned far enough out, he could see, below and to the left, the pale white glow of the balcony for the room on the real third floor that was closest to him. There was a dark shape on it, large, though difficult to say whether it was the man or the woman. From time to time it moved a little, or settled in a different way
Down below, on paving of the courtyard, a dark blotch of some sort, largish, much bigger than a man. Hard to say exactly what it was, however, and it was in any case motionless. Maybe it wasn’t anything at all, a trick of the light. But if it wasn’t a trick of the light, what could it be?
He stayed there, staring down, eyes flicking from the shape in the courtyard to the shape on the balcony, until, after a while, close to morning, he began to feel sleepy and went to bed.
3.
When he stumbled awake it was well past noon. He poured out something pink from a jug in the fridge, found it to be slightly sour, but whether it was supposed to be like that he was at a loss to determine. He put it away, poured himself a glass of rusty water from the tap.
Before he knew it he was back at the window, looking down. Whatever had been in the courtyard the night before had left no sign of its presence. When he leaned out he could see the balcony below, but it was bare, no drink glasses or shoes or bits of clothing to indicate who had been there.
What would he do today? He could find the town, wander through it, just to expend a few hours. Or he could stay here, up in the apartment, read a little, relax, stare out the window.
There was a buzzing sound, unfamiliar but insistent. At first he thought it must be the door, but then it continued and he realized it wasn’t coming from the door but from the kitchen, from the telephone on the wall there. Why bother to answer it? he wondered. It wouldn’t be for him—nobody knew he was here, at least nobody who mattered. He would just ignore it.
But it was hard to ignore. It just kept ringing and ringing. After a while he got up and went into the kitchen and stayed there, staring at it. Each time it rang, it shook slightly in its cradle. No, he wouldn’t answer it. But it was all he could do not to answer it
It rang perhaps thirty more times and then stopped. He took a deep breath and slowly let it out and then headed back to the window. By the time he arrived there, the phone had started ringing again.
It might be Miss Pickaver, he told himself this time, less because he believed it and more because of the idea of hearing the phone ring over and over again seemed impossible. Maybe it is for me after all.
But when he picked the phone up the connection was odd, thick with static. “Hello?” he said. When he had no response, he added, “Miss Pickaver?”
A voice that sounded very distant said something in another language, maybe French, maybe not. Or maybe it was just the distorted echo of what Hovell had said. He waited a long moment for the voice to say something else. When nothing was forthcoming he hung up the telephone.
###
Late in the afternoon, he managed to make it downstairs. The concierge was there now, sitting in the lodge just beside the door. It wasn’t the same man as yesterday, or at least didn’t look like the same. Maybe it was a job shared by two different people, or maybe it was just one person who, depending on what he wore and his mood, could look very different.
Hovell tried to make the man understand what he wanted. Town he repeated, again and again, then the actual name of the town, with both pronunciations he had heard, but the concierge just looked blank. The concierge said something back in French, a question judging by the intonation, but Hovell couldn’t understand a word of it.
After a while he gave up and went towards the front door. But quickly the concierge was in front of him, between him and the door, gesticulating, push
ing him back.
“What’s wrong?” asked Hovell. “I just want to go outside.”
But when he reached for the door again, the concierge knocked his hand away.
Under normal circumstances this would have been enough to turn Hovell around, send him back up the stairs, but with everything else that had gone on, he was not himself. He reached out and grasped the concierge by both shoulders and moved him out of the way, and then went out the door. This time, the man did not try to stop him.
###
He crossed the courtyard to find the gate he had originally come through locked, so circled around the edges of the compound until he found a place where the fence met a wall and he was able to climb up and over. Nothing on the other side looked familiar. Immediately he was lost, and when he started out in what he thought might be the direction of the town center he found himself squirreling around small little streets which gradually became larger and emptier, the houses sparser and sparser. He hadn’t paid any attention when Miss Pickaver had led them from the train station, he’d been too tired. He should have paid attention. He tried to work his way back to the complex but the streets seemed different going the other way on them, and quickly he was off course. There were streets and houses, but no town center. And then, suddenly, he was at the beach.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three Page 10
