Any real details are bogged down by time and legend, but there were shootings, murders by police, and pedophile politicians. One poor prostitute was apparently drowned in a bathtub. Since the twenties, there have been numerous exciting reports of hauntings scattered throughout the hotel’s corridors. Typical New England stuff like weeping women in ancient dresses wandering down hallways and vanishing into a wall, ghosts knocking, smiling, flickering out of focus, and little children asking for help in finding their parents before disappearing around a corner. Hap took an October ghost tour of the city with Tiff once. While they didn’t set foot inside the actual hotel, they were given a briefing of its history. Back then, it was all a fine joke.
Providence is summed up by Broadway. There are colonial houses right next to gas stations. Pieces of the distant past and the mortar for the start of this country are scattered about the modern agenda like warts that never fade. The colonials all achieve a sense of alienation, loneliness. None of them really looks the same, though they can be summed up by their spiraling rooftops and pointed Victorian spliced windows. Many of them have been turned into law or government offices, masquerading as homes.
Hap’s hands grow clammy and, oh, those miserable roommates of Tiff’s—can’t he linger in the bed that still smells of her? He’s been huffing that for days, feeling her next to him when the rays of sunlight hit him. Sure, his name wasn’t on the lease, but he paid his share for groceries and toilet paper. He was always polite, always lifted the toilet seat in the bathroom, and shut all the lights off when he left the living room. Nobody asked anything more from him.
The slope of Federal Hill over downtown is a gradual one, almost unnoticeable depending on where you’re standing. Hap tries to imagine a time when there was grass instead of asphalt, but then he figures maybe the concept of there being a hill in the first place is artificial, and everything is built on manmade junk to begin with. The world gets taller as it builds upon the old and the fallen. Who will truly remember Tiffany in ten years?
The tears are coming now, which he considers good at first. Maybe crying will soothe this ache he can’t scratch. He passes a sign that says “Manzolillo Chiropractic,” and the overabundance of the letter L starts to seem like black vines emerging from the white backdrop of the sign. Hap starts to run, hefting his bags as hard as he can, leaking hot tears like fuel.
Downtown has always been a more petite scale model of something you’d find in New York. Being small, it has a fresh significance to it. How many meaningless corners and buildings are there in the bigger cities like New York and Philly? In Providence, each one of them matters.
A semicircle of broken unity forms the roundabout at the hotel’s drop off/pick up zone. Within its center, beside a copse of weedy plants and a gold lettered sign proclaiming Miskatonic, there is a great black orb carved of marble. Hap has seen such decorations in front of semi-important buildings before, but something about that ball of darkness draws his chest tight. Out of context, it’s sinister and haunting, like something from Lord of The Rings. It doesn’t belong here, out in the open, hiding as art.
The Miskatonic’s exterior brings to mind the reek of the stuffy, perfume-preserved walls of Hap’s grandmother’s house. Flat brick walls jut from the earth, and hundreds of black windows are symmetrically aligned like the many eyes of some microscopic insect. Completing its place outside of time’s decay, the hotel’s main iconic feature is a gold-tinged glass elevator. Hap rode it once with Tiff, and from the top, you get one of the best views of the entire city—aside from Prospect Park, that is.
Along the rooftop, the name Miskatonic continuously glows in dulled purple neon, reiterating its title, its dominance across the Providence skyline. Beneath the neon letters is an accompanying five-sided star, glowing with an orange center while its edges are black, as if from a creeping decay. Its dominance as what? Hap wonders. As a place for people to sleep, shit, and pop out of existence?
His sweat’s stinging his eyes. Eyeing the suspicious black orb behind the ground sign, Hap is startled by an abrupt crack at his feet, as if the cement is trembling back from his weight. Wiping his aching eyes clean, Hap lifts his four-month-old sneakers, and he’s stepped on the strangest little twig. It has five appendages like maybe it’s some kind of lightning bolt stuck across his shoe. As he scrapes it off, it cracks and shatters. How is he stepping on the waste of a tree downtown? Nausea rises from his gut, low and bubbling. Is this how the world collapses? One weird little moment at a time?
Avoiding the eyes of a couple of valet boys dressed like they’re from the sixties, Hap stumbles through the glass doors. He enters a realm of gold-embroidered walls reflecting what may as well be an Egyptian tomb. There are even sphinxes adorning the ceiling above the Miskatonic’s revolving doors. As Hap’s eyes adjust from all the maddening yellow, there are other amorphous, gold-flaked flowers that seep toward the center of the lobby, where a dangling stalactite of a chandelier hangs over a number of purple leather couches. Someone grabs Hap by the wrist, and he leaves the void of decoration and nonsensically placed art.
A bellhop gets in Hap’s face. “Is there any way I can help you?” the bellhop asks, his voice gravel. Hap can’t even come up with a good enough response. The sickness dancing in his stomach starts climbing up his esophagus.
“I’m looking for my girlfriend,” Hap mumbles.
“What’s her room number? How about we call up to her room, see if she’s expecting you?” The man’s pulling Hap toward the front desk, where there sits an elite, perky blonde woman with hair much more golden than that of his blonde girl. None of these people can help Hap. They are a part of this place.
“No, no, I can find her on my own.”
The only time Hap has struggled for breath in the past four years is from furious tickling matches with Tiffany and headlocks from his drunken older brother. Hap pulls away from the sentinel in a funny bellhop hat, craning to look across the lobby, as if Tiff could merely be sitting in one of the plush velvet chairs and reading a Home magazine off one of the coffee tables.
“Sir!” The bellhop snarls in Hap’s ears, and he pumps his arms, propelling himself into a run he only reserves for sudden rainstorms and pre-departing buses. He makes it halfway up a staircase with more flowery designs enmeshed into each step. His legs are grabbed, and he’s falling forward as his chin smacks across the itchy carpet. The flower designs are two near-symmetrical roses that look as if they could be eyes. Everything in this building is watching him.
Hap is dragged out of the hotel by men made of dead flesh and a hive mind as he thrashes and begs for someone to bring him his girlfriend. The encroaching sirens of a city’s disease-killing white blood cells beckon as the faintly flickering purple of the Miskatonic’s neon sign brands Hap’s eyes.
Chapter 2: The Prince of the Candle Lighters
Politician Paul traces his fingers over the fabric of the antique rolling chair, staring into his closed office door as if at any moment somebody important could come bursting through. As if. These Miskatonic guys, they aren’t one for front doors. That’s why that unspectacular side door pretending to be a part of the wall behind him is where a visitor is more likely to emerge. Next to a bookshelf riddled with random ink-dabbed word containers that were here before he moved in, there’s no way for him to open the side panel. They can only visit him from their little halls within the walls. It’s only on special occasions he gets a tap on the shoulder or, if he’s lucky, a polite knock on the wall.
It hasn’t gotten to the point where Paul’s having whiskey for breakfast and an OxyContin cocktail before bed. He’s got a more than modest apartment by the East Providence Bridge that overlooks a boat of his that most people can’t afford. Just last Tuesday, he showed a woman from Boston that he is on the right side of fifty. Regardless, when Paul lifts his head and gazes over his rounding belly, he can plainly see that he’s on a hill that’s as big as it’s ever goin
g to get, save for any untold seismic eruptions. He’s at his life’s crescendo, and all that’s left for him is to get so fat from his ninety-grand-a-year salary that he rolls off that sweet, prickly grass.
Feeling up for flirting with the front desk girls, Paul hears the confrontation before he leaves his office. Someone with an accent is complaining. A foreigner in Providence is more of an anomaly than in most cities. Paul rounds the hallway bend behind the front desk, and is this what he gets to look forward to for the rest of his life? The unknowable game of who will show up at your hotel next?
Cassandra’s hands form white knuckles as she grips the front desk, her eyebrows doing this cute little curling trick while she stares at the man, trying to digest what he’s saying. The guest is a bald fellow with a sloppy white beard and an icy blue halo tattooed around his skull, anywhere between thirty and sixty years old. It’s impossible to tell with eyes as worn as his. A strand of golden hair is cast over Cassandra’s cheek, surely irritating her eye. Paul wouldn’t mind brushing it back for her. If there’s one lesson he learned back when he was grooming himself for governor, it was that you can’t date anyone five years below your age and within two miles of where you do your business.
“Sir, there aren’t any events scheduled for tonight, and no animals are allowed in the hotel. For that matter, I—” Paul’s hand on Cassandra’s shoulder is a hushing of the teapot. He brushes past her, flicking a finger across the purple of his tie so as to signal to the man their mutual affiliation. Cassandra’s still standing astute by Paul’s side, and Lindsey, speaking with another guest on the far side of the reception stand, has her eye slanted his way as well. Now he has to choose his words carefully, and, on top of the other fuck ups, this is the last thing he wants to deal with. How hard is it for these people to follow the custom of secrecy?
“I’m sure you can figure out the mix-up when you get to your room. Maybe you’re looking for a private event going on somewhere else.” Paul shrugs. The guest doesn’t lack intelligence, but he is missing an aptitude for discretion, and that means he’ll state his intentions to attend “the honoring of the black goat” to the first inquisitor he comes across. This isn’t the first candle lighter to spout his nonsense in public. It’s as if these people think the threshold of the Miskatonic means they can drop their disguises of civility and normalcy.
“I’ve come a long way for unity. I don’t need a bed or walls. I’m here for the—,” the guest says, but Paul cuts him off.
“Listen.” Paul leans forward, flicking his tie. Purple is important to them, like the flashy skin of some poisonous beast. Paul disregards his trained professionalism and says, “Shack up here for the night, and you’ll find what you’re looking for.” His teeth are clenched as his words force their way through enamel.
The candle lighter’s face is unchanged save for the slightest wavering of his head. Paul twists to Cassandra and takes the key still dangling from her fingertips, her confusion rightfully plastered all over her face.
“Room six three one.” Paul places the keys on the counter, not wanting to touch the candle lighter’s hands. The man snatches the keys away with a jangle.
“Paul, he never paid!” Cassandra says. What an honest and naïve creature. It’s beyond her to even dream of peeking behind the curtain.
“We’ll get him on the way out. Hey.” Paul’s smile is his most loyal and effective weapon. His father’s ever-circulating rotation of girlfriends would always poke and prod at him, pinching his cheeks and telling him that, with a smile like that, he could get anything he wants. He once took one of them up on that offer. “Don’t worry about anything. I’ve got all your backs.” Cassandra and Lindsey smile at Paul like he’s their savior. Somebody ought to take a picture. He’s actually capable of making people happy.
The front desk phone rings, so why not answer it? “Paul, I never mistook you for the old-fashioned type, not with that Apple gadget in your pocket. Generals don’t stick to the frontlines anymore. I don’t believe they have since the North and South woke up and found themselves lost in the strange.” The voice is familiar. A big fish in a small pond is nothing when compared to the people who own that pond and keep the algae levels from turning that fish into a bacteria-ridden husk.
“Candle lighter was asking about a goat, out loud.” Paul clicks his teeth. “Shit, and now I am. One sec.” Paul clicks the phone down. Cassandra hasn’t heard him. She’s talking with Lindsey about a country concert at Lupo’s down the street, wondering out loud about where the lead singer is staying. Not here, honey, Paul thinks. Definitely not at the Miskatonic, with its fantastic sixty-inch box TVs that still have a channel for overpriced nineties porn. Paul will have to remember to tap his connection at the venue’s box office and get the girls tickets.
The office door is firmly closed, yet Paul clearly remembers leaving it half ajar. He debates knocking, but it’s supposed to be his office, isn’t it? From the crack at the bottom of the door, he notices that the lights are on, and only now does Paul realize he was sitting in the dark earlier. How hadn’t he noticed that?
Within, a hazy glow is cast over Johan Weissekopf, who is sitting at Paul’s desk, leafing through a book on ancient astronomy, taking an extra moment to turn a final page before looking up and smiling at Paul. The man is like a priest without a white collar. In addition to being upper management at the Miskatonic, he’s in charge of a certain group that often frequents the hotel, a group rife with its dim-eyed men of mumbling words and sudden outbursts of inarticulacy; the Candle Lighters.
Johan slides the textbook across the desk, and Paul wasn’t aware he even had such a thing on the bookshelf. He thinks of Johan as a priest because of the softness of his eyes. His face is round, not quite fat but thick as if he has extra layers of skin. His rosy cheeks and light brown hair cast him almost as a boy, but he’s only a few years younger than Paul at best. He is a priest because there is that gentle sluggishness to him that’s still ripe in Paul’s memory from his days in Catholic school. Unlike the witch-like nuns, the priests always seemed like less colorful Santa Clauses.
Johan’s hand extends, and you would think Paul wouldn’t be awkward about handshakes. By now, his political experience withstanding, it’s the one chip in his armor that no amount of refining can overcome. Paul’s grip never seems to fully join up with the other hand, and, of course, it’s all mental, all a result of fear. Knowing that doesn’t make life any easier. For Politician Paul, all he figures he needs in life are his words.
“I wanted you to hear this from me. There’s been a murder that you aren’t going to read about in the papers. It’s one of us.” The way Johan says “us” makes Paul start to feel the dampness of his armpits. He’s not going to wear that tinfoil hat, not just yet. Us. Wasn’t that his golden campaign word? Us and we and all of us, together, blah, blah, blah, Paul’s a liar. Don’t vote for him, ha-ha-ha; screw you, Paul.
“Who?” Paul knows everybody. Everybody in Providence, at least. He can make most of them smile, too. He was class president like nobody’s business. He wasn’t valedictorian or even always on the honor roll, but everybody liked him. He made sure of it.
“Boren Clementine.” Johan’s voice is like melted chocolate; he had to work for it to sound that way, Paul’s almost sure of that. Even the devil had to forge his silver tongue.
“And I’m not supposed to ask why you’re gonna leave it out of the papers?” Boren owned a restaurant on Broadway. They share the same black star insignia as the Miskatonic, except the restaurant’s insignia has a tinge of red bordering those five points.
“Ask, and I’ll tell.” Johan folds his hands.
“Yeah, I’ll leave it to the experts.” Paul taps a finger along the corner of his desk. He wouldn’t feel right sitting down while Johan’s in the room. He still doesn’t know how to really consider the man, but the guy commands more than a tone of respect. He’s a vacuum of attention, of hig
h-strung focus. Once you talk to Johan, you don’t ask him to repeat himself. You pick up what he’s saying, what he’s actually saying, in between the duality of his words, and, if you don’t fully understand, then you let him carry off any faith you’ve got. Now that—that’s what makes the man a priest.
“The killer is no man or woman that has any degree of…communion…with us. It’s strictly why I’m informing you. We don’t know who it is.” There’s something new to Johan’s lips, the way his precisely aligned teeth are showing.
“This isn’t like the last mix-up, is what you’re saying?” Paul asks. Somebody made a mistake not too long ago that brought cops to the hotel, however briefly.
“This is an outsider whose eye may have lingered over the right spot for too long. Settle yourself because you need to be aware of the kind of man we’re talking about,” Johan begins, looking Paul up and down, measuring him over and over. “Boren’s eyes were missing. A half-moon was carved into his forehead, but most importantly, he was tortured. With a lighter or a cigar, I’m not sure on the details. I doubt Boren talked. There is an outsider in Providence looking at us. What may be even more unsettling for us all to come to grips with, Paul, is that this man is sane. He has heard the word of the Moon Shack, and he not only covers his ears, but he speaks over it.” Johan leans over Paul’s desk, smiling like a doctor delivering a treatable diagnosis.
The sweat’s trying to change him into something else; Paul could use a seat, a fan blowing in his face and a gun against his temple. The hill is upside down; he’s been hanging by the thinnest strands of grass for how long now? What the hell has he done to himself? He should be mentoring a law school pup fresh from Roger Williams. Even if he has to be like one of those guys on Broadway with his billboards all over I-95, that would be just fine. He’d have none of what this is. None of these promises and half hopes. He’d be semi-retired, joking and bragging that he’s semi-retired or semi-retarded, living as he does with no worry other than the looming blackness of heart disease or ass cancer. Why is he here?
Moon Regardless Page 2