by Landon Wark
He rubbed his exhausted eyes with the heels of his palms and looked over at the bills sitting beside him on the bed.
He needed help. Both vocationally and psychologically.
Sandy Jenkins sat in her car, an old, but still serviceable, box shaped hunk of fibreglass and steel sometimes called a Buick. It got horrible mileage and with the rising price of gas stayed in the overpriced parking lot of her building more and more often while she took the bus.
The hotel was semi-clean. That was the most that could be said for it. It had the look of a bare bones establishment, the kind that didn’t even have cable in the post-streaming universe. No coffee, no free breakfast, certainly no pool and in a part of the small city that was hardly ever frequented by anyone due to location. It was, from her encounter with the young man in the diner, pretty much what she would have expected.
She had made up her mind not to come for the rest of the promised money a dozen times over. She didn’t need it, not really anyway. But, her curiosity kept drawing her back to the problem until finally she relented and now sat in the parking lot of the respectably frill-less operation.
Where would someone staying in a hotel like this get that much money? Why had he been afraid of the police?
The idea that she had stumbled onto a mystery, like one in the books lining her shelves at home prodded her into investigating further. The persona of one of the women detectives within settled over her and her vision became sharp, her hearing acute. Every detail of the parking lot jumped out at her as she opened the door, determined to go inside and find out as much as she could. She imagined herself alert, svelte and ready for action… Maybe not svelte.
Maybe she would go to the police later that evening if she found anything out.
The car rocked as she stepped out; the suspension complaining at the large shift in weight.
She took note of the flaking paint along the open door as she walked into the cramped office.
Pinup calendars lined the walls around the desk, some as old as twenty years, flipped open to the month of choice, each with half a dozen sticky notes posted all over. She averted her eyes after reading the first one. A pot of stale coffee sat on a beaten folding table that had to be at least as old as the calendars. A single, grungy Styrofoam cup sat beside it. Several flies that had taken advantage of the open door flocked towards it, playing gleefully in the dinge of sugar and sweetener on the table.
A grey man (not just in hair, but in skin!) sat behind the counter, absently reading a two-day-old newspaper, the kind that was usually lying around a service station for waiting customers.
“’Scuse me,” Sandy said, softly at first.
The man continued reading.
“’Scuse me!” She wagered that if she looked like one of the pinup girls on the calendars he would have put down the paper as soon as she walked in the door.
The man motioned to the bell on the counter with a nod of his head.
Disgusted, Sandy tapped on the bell and at the dull thudding ring the man raised his head from the paper, folded it neatly and stood up from the chair.
“Can I help you?”
She exhaled, making sure to record the man’s reaction as she spoke.
“I’m lookin’ for a package from...”
"From who?"
"Uh," she stumbled for a moment. "I don't know his name."
"Then you got yourself a problem." The man picked his newspaper back up.
"Uh, squirrely looking guy."
"Lady, tha's half the people who come in here."
"And the other half?"
"You the other half."
Sandy bit her lip and wrung her hands to keep from reaching over the counter and shoving the newspaper up his nose.
"He was a kid, maybe six foot and a little bit. Biggish nose. Oh, would likely be muttering about something."
"The weird Ichabod Crane lookin' kid? Yeah, he left something here." The wrinkling face twisted up into a scowl and turned down to the desk as Sandy marvelled that he would know who Ichabod Crane was. His hands rummaged through a few papers and receipts that littered the office. Two more calendars made an appearance before disappearing into the mess again. The newspaper was cast to the floor as he pulled a thin white envelope from a box covered with debris.
Sandy's heart fluttered for a moment at the thought that there might be eight hundred dollars inside that envelope. It fluttered twice more on the thought that it, and the two hundred she had already spent might have been stolen in some kind of bank heist.
Most likely, it was drugs. Most of the local money was.
The man behind the counter passed the envelope and immediately picked up the phone, dialing a three-digit number.
“What are you doing?” Sandy asked, her voice cracking a little.
The man rolled his eyes up at her. “He tol’ me to let ‘im know when someone picked up the envelope. So that’s what I’m doin’.”
“Oh.” The blood in Sandy’s veins turned to ice and her leg started twitching, sending a ripple up the flesh of her right side. She turned with surprising agility for someone of her size and slipped toward the door as the desk clerk began to speak into the receiver. Before he could object she had waddle through the door and into the heat outside.
She was halfway to her car when one of the room doors facing the parking lot opened and the man hobbled out. He was twisting his foot, trying to wedge it into a shoe. His hands were groping at a collection of notebooks, trying to keep them from falling. He had the look of a high-school student who was late for gym class.
Sandy began to walk faster, painfully aware of the rippling sensation the faster movement produced over her body. But it seemed now more important to escape this 'weird Ichabod Crane mother' than it was to save any face.
She managed to slip the key into the old door lock on the driver’s side when he called out.
“Hey! Wait!”
The suspension again groaned as she wedged herself in behind the steering wheel and shoved the key in the ignition. His hand came down on the roof of the car with a bang and Sandy felt a sharp pang of anxiety. She tried to pull the door closed behind her, but his long arm reached out and stopped it. She pulled harder, overcoming her fear of crushing his fingers. He held fast.
The spinning of the wheels on gravel muted the roar of the engine and the grinding of the gears as the car flew into reverse. His hand came away from the door in time to keep from being ripped off. Ichabod was left standing with his arm outstretched and his mouth hanging open as the Buick accelerated toward the main road. It had closed half the distance to the turn when, with a loud cough, a splutter of the engine and the sudden fearful gaffe of the wheels, there was a stop in forward momentum. The car slowed and then, with the anticlimactic grinding of the gravel, came to a complete stop.
He was marching towards her as she frantically turned the key in the ignition, begging the car to start. He grabbed the door, swung it open and she screamed.
“Look!” he hissed, voice sounding more annoyed than malevolent. “I just want to talk to you.”
“I’ll call the police,” she threatened with a tone that sounded none-too-threatening.
He yanked the white envelope out of her hand and opened it, producing eight hundred dollar bills. He shoved the bills at her and slipped a pen out of one of the notebooks. When he handed the envelope back to her there was something written on it. It’s spelling was strange, like something written after the bold word in a dictionary, but she had no time to look it over fully before he spoke.
“Use it only when you’re alone. Don’t tell anyone. If you want to know more, you know where to find me.” He looked over at the desk clerk hanging out the door, glaring at them. “Although it looks like I might have to move now.”
He turned on his heel, scraping the gravel under his shoe, and marched back to the open hotel room, muttering something. Sandy watched for a moment and when she saw the door open she turned the key in the ignition again, this tim
e the Buick started as it had the first day she owned it.
From out of the hotel a hand shoved a woman dressed in a maid’s uniform into the light of day. The door slammed and something was yelled that she couldn’t make out.
Her hands shook as she drove away, the envelope still clutched tightly against the steering wheel, the eight hundred dollars rustled peacefully on the seat next to her.
Sandy Jenkins Has Trouble Concentrating
Her hands shook all the next day too.
There was an orange splotch on her wall where there hadn’t been one before.
Her nerves felt frayed as she sat, calling up the good people of the tri-county area, asking if they would like to change their long distance carrier. The backspace key on her keyboard was starting to wear out because she couldn’t keep her fingers straight enough to type, and she did not dare look down to correct them. Her eyes were fastened to the word on the envelope.
Her brain was a mess. Part of it, most of it, knew exactly what had caused the orange spot to appear on the wall, because it had appeared the exact moment she had tried, for the third time, to say the mangled excuse for a word on the envelope. She had thrown it across the room where it landed, half under a chair in the corner. Immediately she had scrambled after it, pulling it out and staring at it the way someone might stare at a winning lottery ticket. She thought of trying to say the word again, but found herself unwilling to do so; in case it didn’t work or in case it did she couldn’t say.
The spot had not come off when she tried to clean it up, it had not even lightened.
Now the envelope was sitting on her desk, staring back at her like a rattlesnake, begging to be let out, just to see if it was as deadly as she thought.
She disconnected her last call carefully so as not to draw attention to herself and leaned as far into her bench as her flesh would allow, looking to make sure no one was listening in. Her hands trembled as they grasped the paper, pulling it close to eyes that scanned the word, as if trying to decode it. For a moment she wanted to ball up the paper and throw it into the garbage can beside her bench, but knew she would not be able.
She felt like she was on the edge of a precipice and that, if she wanted to or not, she was going to jump.
The air pulled moisture away from her lips, forcing her tongue across them. They parted and slowly her vocal chords hummed. She tried to remember exactly how she had spoken the word the night before and closed her eyes. The envelope came up next to her mouth as she whispered the word into it. She felt the world move a little as it came out.
After several seconds she opened her eyes.
The bottom half of the envelope had turned orange.
So had her thumb.
She had to bite down on her lip to keep from crying out. It didn’t hurt, but the shock of it was immense. Both the fact that it had worked and seeing what it had done to her hand nearly caused her to pass out. She rose shakily to her feet and walked, as calmly as possible to the women’s lavatory, fingers clenched around the thumb. After checking under the stalls to make sure no one else was in the room she ran the faucet as hot as she could stand it over her hand, heaping on liquid soap by the handful.
After a scrub and a rinse it was still orange.
She looked around in a panic. After nearly five minutes of staring, dazed into the mirror (the longest she had ever stared into one) she shoved the hand into her pocket and marched out of the bathroom back into the call centre. She did not stop at her bench, nor at the water cooler, but just kept right on marching toward the front door, announcing loudly to anyone who cared that she was going home sick.
No one replied.
Jonah McAllister was shaving, something he only did at times his facial hair became long enough to become irritating, when a loud knock on the door caused him to nick the side of his neck.
He winced and pulled a square from the roll of toilet paper he had plucked off the maid’s cart when she wasn’t looking. He finished the little bit that remained under his nose before towelling off his face quickly as the banging continued and answering the door.
The woman looked like she had just been the only one to survive a plane crash. Her eyes were red potholes in her wide face, either from crying or having been awake all night, or both. If he had not known this was coming he would have told her she had the wrong room. But he imagined he had looked the same way after he had found out.
“How did you do it?” she demanded.
He imagined a more charismatic man would have played coy or maybe closed the door for a moment, but he was nervous. His first thought was that he had just made a huge mistake. He had chosen the wrong person; let the cat out of the bag too early. If she panicked and told anyone about this, there was no telling what he had just unleashed on the world.
“It worked?”
She shoved her hand under his face. Most of the fingers appeared normal, if swollen, but there was a large orange splotch over the thumb, all the way down to the knuckle where the stain traced a semi-circle.
His eyes widened. “It’s not supposed to work on skin.”
In an instant he was pawing through the notebooks, rummaging absently for a pen in the folds of the unmade bed.
“Am I going to get cancer?” she bawled.
“No, of—” Jonah stopped in mid-sentence. Was she going to get cancer? “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?”
“I don’t know. It’s not supposed to work on skin.”
“You don’t know?!”
Jonah marched over to a desk drawer and pulled out a small sound recorder. “Here. Say it exactly like you did before.”
She shoved the recorder away. “Not on your life!”
Tears started to run down her fat, blubbering cheeks. Jonah shied away and went back to pawing through the notebooks. He knew he had a way to counteract this. He had written it down along with the original words a month and a half ago on the bus down from Chicago. He could remember writing it down… he just couldn’t remember exactly where.
Did that one work on skin too?
“I know how to handle this,” he said with all the confidence he could muster.
She sat down on one of the chairs filled with paper, hand to her temple and began to cry. The legs of the chair groaned under her weight.
“Get up!” he yelled.
Shakily she complied and he tore the papers down from the chair, rummaging through them at break-wrist speed. Within his mind’s eye he could see the exact paper he had written it on, but couldn’t remember where he had put it.
“I have to go to the hospital,” she muttered through sobs.
“No you don’t,” he replied frantically.
He was livid. If ever there was a reason why he should not have given her that word, this was it. He had trusted the wrong person and now he was going to pay for it. If she went to the hospital, if she told them what had happened, if the police got wind of it and came looking for him…
He threw half the papers across the room.
If he could just find the one he was looking for.
The sound of the door opening tore him from his search and he held out a hand as the woman set one of her timber-sized legs out onto the concrete walk outside.
“Close that door!” he shouted.
She looked back at him with terrified eyes. He could not honestly say that he was any less terrified, but he knew he could not let her out of that door and let her compromise that which he had worked on for so long, that he had given up his life for. And no one, no matter how large, or how scared was going to destroy it.
“Under no circumstances are you going out that door!”
The hospital was a bad cliché.
Its waiting room was clogged to overflowing with outdated magazines, dripping off the plastic tables with all the zeal of a molasses water park. It didn’t really matter. All the waiting patients were staring at phones anyway. A child scooped wooden beads on a toy in the corner from their resting pla
ce, spun them around the thick wires of the device and returned them to rest on the other side. The boy had been at it for about fifteen minutes, never seeming to tire of revolving the small coloured orbs and cubes around the wires. He seemed to prefer the longer wires, looping their convoluted path around the toy. The child pushed them up and smiled as they slid down a curve in the wire, coming to rest in a limbo between ends. Every few minutes or so a bleary announcement would sound over the PA about a car that was parked in the ambulance area.
The receptionist at the front desk leafed through a magazine and yawned.
It had all the urgency of a small town hospital.
Jonah leaned back in his chair and stared blankly at the ceiling, his eye drifting towards the outdated security camera in the corner. Every so often a thin glimmer of hope would make him blink his eyes, the sharp idea that perhaps nothing would happen, that he would be allowed to continue on with his work uninterrupted, only the thinnest sliver of it reaching the light of day, a smoke and mirrors trick of the smallest order. Alternating with that was the idea that he should just run. It was a brash cudgel of a notion that nearly knocked him out of his seat and sent him toward the exit. But each of these ideas was lost in the knowledge that he had failed, that he had always failed and that he would keep failing now matter what he did. He was relegated to knowing he had discovered the most spectacular force in the universe and would never be able to see it be used.
He looked over at the sound of the child clapping; one of the beads had fallen into place at the end of the wire track.
A large form moved down at the end of the hall, blocking out enough light to attract his attention. For a moment he reconsidered running out the sliding doors and into the hot spring air, but there didn’t seem to be anyone with her, no doctor, no cop, just her. He struggled out of the chair and rose to meet her.
