Moon Regardless

by Nick Manzolillo

  The grand tour gets no farther than the first floor, as Luke shows Hap the kitchen, introducing him to a gang of four men in white aprons and one heavyset woman who could pass for one of the guys. Unless you’ve got long blonde hair, uniforms steal your identity. They are the ultimate mask.

  Next is the bar attached to the main lobby. The cryptic decorations go a step further in here; there’s a painting behind the bar of what looks to be a peaceful seaside town with mountains ridging along its borders. Descending down over it is a vague, black orb that’s nearly lost in the shadowy slopes of the mountains. Luke introduces Hap to the bartender, Randal, whom Hap hardly registers because he’s so focused on the painting. Then he comes to and realizes the tall, dark-skinned man is standing right in front of him with an outstretched hand.

  He’s bald, and his forehead slants back so that his complete lack of hair is hardly noticeable. His face is smooth, shiny, as if it’s unfamiliar with the idea of a beard. When his hands clasp Hap’s, they are cold and void of any softness. “He’s an Egyptian storyteller and half a fuckin’ wizard,” Luke explains, and Randal’s laugh is deep but ends sharply as he enthusiastically shakes Hap’s hand up and down, looking through him.

  “Only with my drinks, I swear,” Randal sports a wise grin that says he is a guy to trust. Hap wants to believe he’s a master of mixology, and by working here, he’s doing what he loves. This desire to believe is so strong that Hap finds himself speechless as Luke leads him away from the bartender in all black. Randal’s the guy with the answers. For reasons he can’t quite understand, Hap is sure of this.

  A large woman with her hands clasped over her face is sobbing through the lobby as she heads toward the elevators, and a calm man in a Hawaiian shirt walks after her. “Oh, you see weird shit all the time here,” Luke tells Hap. Finally, the cracks in the Miskatonic’s veneer that he’s been looking for.

  “Yeah? What kind of shit we talking?” Hap asks. The crazier, the better.

  Luke then proceeds to tell him a story about a really proper businessman who checked out, paying in cash, and when the maid went to his room, she discovered both the floor and walls smeared with shit. After Luke tells him this, Hap is pretty sure he read that same story on some website’s “Top Ten Worst Jobs” listicle, but he doesn’t mention that to Luke. Hap’s fellow bellhop might just be a liar. He has that cocky “I know everything” undergraduate sort of swagger to him. Hap can’t trust what he says, even if Luke outs the Miskatonic as a front for the mob.

  “What about the ghosts? I keep hearing this place is haunted.” Hap tries to turn it his way as they face the lobby doors and the incoming guests, the customers. He didn’t need to get a job to ask a question like that, but it has to be a start, right?

  “Man, those stories are just to give this place publicity. Scariest thing I ever saw was a weird doll one of the guests left in their room. I’m talking Chucky shit, dude, with black thread all over it like somebody was trying to practice giving stitches. But the ghost stories are, like, there’s this fat ghost that rattles empty room service trays, and apparently people from when alcohol was illegal partied so hard here you can still hear them running around getting freaky late at night.” Luke laughs like a goon. “You know, boring stuff like that. No women in black or hallways full of blood. All right, see this guy here? Help him for me.” Luke is pushing Hap toward, what, work? Bag slinging? Hap needs more stories, more information…did he really sign up to be a freaking bellhop?

  Thoughts of Tiff are pushed away for a mechanical onslaught of Yes sir; no sir; of course, sir, and, most importantly, I’ve got that, sir. After getting caught up in the constant whirlwind of greeting a guest, taking their bag, and hauling it up to their room, Hap’s back starts hurting, and he keeps getting the wheels on the luggage cart mixed up, causing the thing to come grinding to a halt until he gets it realigned. In an hour, he goes back and forth down those elevators at least fifteen times. After that point, the number becomes murky, and the sheer scope of the Miskatonic Hotel dawns on him, especially when other bellhops keep running by him busy with their own guests.

  Luke tells Hap that he usually tucks his tip money under his watch, given that their pants have no pockets, and he advises that Hap tuck his tips into his shoes. It’s great advice until Hap starts getting blisters along his feet; he needs to invest in a watch. When running back and forth up the elevator, Hap doesn’t check to see if cash is leaking out of him with every step. He’s not here to make money.

  This place is eleven floors of business with a small town’s worth of employees. He’s not just looking for Tiff in some building. The scope is beyond that, more than a needle in a haystack, more than a diamond in the sewers. Riding that elevator up and down, he is travelling the arteries of something vast, old, and alive.

  After dropping off his luggage, one hairy man in business attire and a pair of flip-flops asks Hap to get him a “highball” from the bar, and Hap doesn’t even know what that is.

  “Guy wants something called a highball?” Hap calls to Randal, relieved to find the bar mostly empty.

  “Whiskey and ginger ale, for a man who thinks too highly of himself,” Randal says, rapidly mixing the drink and placing the glass in front of Hap. “Just call me a reader of fortunes,” Randal says, and is he kidding?

  “Really?” Maybe Hap’s face is too serious when he asks because Randal cracks into a grin. For all his smiling and laughing, there’s no warmth to him. It’s like he’s older than he looks, playing a part. This is what it’s like, working for tips. You play your role. You trick everybody until you get what’s yours.

  “That’s what you have to tell everyone.” Randal’s small eyes dart past Hap to the open doors leading to the lobby. “Want something to commemorate your first day?” He shrugs toward the bottles. Hap doesn’t know how to tell a professional bartender that he can only stomach hard ciders, lemonades, and small volumes of red wine.

  “I’m all set, too much running.” Hap holds his stomach, and call him a racist, but he feels like he’s talking to one of the bartenders on one of his parents’ Caribbean vacations. Randal is more than staff. He is the guy. “Hey, uh,” Hap says, leaning in over the bar. “What do you know about this place being haunted?”

  Randal’s ensuing grin becomes something more than delight. It puts something weird in Hap’s mostly empty stomach that’s already gnawing at itself. Is Randal ridiculing him? Is that a sneer? No….

  “This place….” Randal looks up, his eyes turning near white as his pupils disappear to the ceiling. “…it’s never empty, yet you can become lonesome rather quickly.”

  That’s a riddle if Hap has ever heard one, but he nods like he gets it, like it makes sense.

  “Every hotel has a ghost,” Randal continues, peering at the corners of the ceiling as if he’s seeing something Hap can’t perceive. “Do you know why?”

  “You have enough people come through somewhere, eventually one of them is going to die somehow?” Hap has heard of people dying at the mall, on campus, in the backs of ambulances wailing through the night.

  “Yes, that’s why people believe hotels are haunted but do you want to know the real reason?” When Randal lowers his eyes, they fall like weights that force Hap to stare at his glossy reflection in the polished wood of the counter.

  Like slipping a key into an old, neglected lock, Hap swallows back his desperation and then says, “Yes.”

  “You walk on the fourth, the seventh floors, and you know the difference? Besides the numbers on the doors?” Randal asks, and Hap shakes his head. Randal is starting to seem like a dud of a scratch ticket with just one little corner left to scrape away. “Nothing. The modern American hotel is a maze. You’re familiar with labyrinths? You know why there are patterns and spirals everywhere? Just because they look pretty? Spirits get lost easily because they aren’t all the way here, and they aren’t all the way there, like the last b
reath of a corpse. They become stuck, in circles, trapped in loops and shapes and hallways that look the same.” Randal shrugs. “You won’t see any ghosts here. When a place gets old enough, they must find their way out eventually, right?”

  “Can’t say that doesn’t sort of make sense, except if you put it like that, I don’t see why a ghost wouldn’t just jump out a window, get out of the maze.”

  “Maybe they’re afraid.” Randal is smiling like he wants the joke, if there is one, to be funnier than it actually is.

  “So you’ve never seen anything?” Hap asks.

  “It’s not about what you can see; it’s what you know,” Randal says.

  “And what do you know?” Hap asks.

  “Every hotel has a ghost.” Randal gestures to a pair of guests strolling through the lobby, and the bartender is only as serious as Hap desperately wants him to be. This is just an old man joking around. Hap tells Randal he’ll keep his ears open anyway and then goes to bring the asshole upstairs his drink.

  He’s so exhausted by the end of the day that the urge to pull open the Miskatonic’s secrets is muddied. Between the ache in his knees and his own stink that’s accumulating worse than the times he’s gone hiking with Tiff at Furnace State Park, today was exhausting and pointless, but it was a genuine start. Maybe the most he can hope for is that someone sneaks up behind him, slips something over his eyes, and abducts him to where Tiff has gone. She doesn’t deserve to be alone.

  Before the end of the shift at around eight, Luke pulls Hap aside and shows him yet another unthinkable room through the kitchen: an employee lounge complete with a soda machine, a microwave, a fridge, and a glass-paneled freezer full of Hot Pockets and tacos. Moving around as much as he has in his stifling and bulky clothing has knocked down the membranous wall of Hap’s appetite, and he’s soon digging into piles of microwaveable meat.

  Hours later, as midnight approaches, there’s a frenzied urge to take a dump as Luke’s telling him about how the front desk girls usually punch them in and out each shift. Hap’s mind is instead occupied by whether or not the maids actually clean the employee restrooms. The pain in his stomach stabs into an unbearable cramp just as he slips into a stall. All of his public phobias about people hearing him shit from outside the locker room become fully realized, and he has never pitied himself more.

  He nearly presses his weary head against the wall, not minding the hordes of likely fecal bacteria hungry for his cells. He sees an odd little poem. It’s scratched along the stall. No, the words are too neat. Somebody must have used a knife.

  the Moon Shack dreams.

  lo, fire and corporeal doom.

  lo, The Old Ones, Those Who Loom.

  else?

  what else?

  Else?

  what Else!?

  Hap rereads it and then laughs, the remainder of his tears scattering over the tucked-up shirt of his stuffy uniform. The only thing he’ll find here at the Miskatonic is delirium.

  Chapter 6: The Festivities

  It’s one of those big white mansions by the sea in Westerly. It’s called The Palace of the Komodo, according to the card Paul found slipped under the hidden door to his office. The surrounding neighborhood is probably the wealthiest in the whole state, which isn’t much when you think of all Connecticut has right next door. The house lies at the end of its own forest-clenched drive, overlooking a slight rise of dunes and an empty, secluded beach. Protruding from the far side of the beach is a dock. Paul isn’t sure who owns the place. Johan, maybe. The Newport mansions may showcase the century-old colonial wealth and excess that began in Rhode Island, but Westerly is all about the modern-day millionaires.

  The driver pulls out all the stops, opening Paul’s door for him as he steps into the glow of an old antique streetlight. A gleaming, pebble-sprinkled path winds up to a manor with more windows than eyes on a fly. How many hurricanes have toppled this place? How can its wood still seem so old? The home’s foundation lurches as if its roots are uneven. Paul’s never understood the practicality of having a beach house, especially in New England. A storm could come along at any moment and swallow it all up.

  Paul can hear a dull roar of voices from inside the mansion, but it doesn’t sound like a party, not exactly. Are people singing? The clouds above are clotting out the stars alongside a nearly ripe full moon. Some kind of pipe drones around a disjointed, rather irritating melody and Paul feels as if he’s slinking backward in time.

  The driver, unfriendly as ever, disappears back into the car before Paul can so much as thank him. The men waiting by the pebble-and-seashell-lined walkway leading to a front porch framed by white columns aren’t cut from the same cloth as the bouncers or doormen Paul would expect at a gathering of the elite. The men, one on either side of the walkway, are dressed colorfully and casually, in khakis and Hawaiian shirts? These two guys look like they spent all day working out and fixing cars. They would be better suited at some dive bar in Warwick, splitting pitchers of Pabst, playing pool, and courting cheap dates with thick, spray-painted tans.

  “Paul Jones, right?” One of them waves a finger his way, and Paul feels awkward in his stuffy suit and sports jacket. In truth, all he did was toss on the jacket and polish his shoes without changing out of his work uniform. He’s even still wearing the Miskatonic tie, but given that this is Johan’s event, it seems appropriate.

  “You know it,” Paul smiles and, ah, a handshake. He goes for one of his trademark, potentially finger-crushing grips. With this kind of stranger, it seems more appropriate than any sort of hesitancy. Of all the banquets and fundraisers he’s been to since he was a little, chubby boy in a suit waddling around at his father’s side, he’s never been this uneasy.

  This is a cult; Paul is under no illusions. Johan thinks there’s something special to Paul, and as much as Paul doesn’t believe that, he won’t argue. Who would? These people, this organization of Candle Lighters, are all freaks with a mile-high list of fetishes. They need someone to defend them, perhaps. They need a sane voice to even out their mad chattering, and Paul gets it, kind of. To their lunacy, he is a dose of reality, and beyond that, could he be a leader? He’d be Johan’s puppet, all the same, but to the Candle Lighters? To the people of the world when they finally come out? Paul has always been one to smell an opportunity wherever it may lead him.

  “So, what kind of party is this?” Paul says, trying not to imply that the Hawaiian shirts make the two men suspect.

  “Oh, you’ll see, man. Nights like this are when we come together like a family; you feel that? You get to be how you really want to be, no shame, no lying, no playing pretend.” The man in an orange sun-splattered Hawaiian shirt talks like a hippie or somebody on vacation and his breath smells like pungent garlic. Despite the darkness, Paul can make out strange little scars scattered all over his face, as if he were gently dipped into a pool of glass.

  “Well, I’m here to finally see what it’s all about,” Paul says, as they begin to walk the almost too cutesy seashell-lined path to the main house. The other, silent greeter with shadowy palm trees along his tropical shirt, spits out something against the walkway that makes an unexpected, metallic clink. He has a weasel face, congested with wet rashes. They aren’t rich men dressing down, and Paul wouldn’t be surprised if these guys were from a trailer park somewhere. He figures he should have left the sports jacket at home, but maybe there are women here who will appreciate his taste. Nothing justifies the strange like some strange. Beyond whiskey, it may be the only way Paul can wrap his head around any of this.

  Incense-filled air creeps down Paul’s lungs the moment he steps through the mansion’s double doors. Down the gullet of the Komodo he goes, having the same feeling he gets when he wakes up from a dream he can’t remember. The guy in the orange shirt brushes past him, and he told Paul his name, he literally just mentioned it, yet Paul’s already forgotten. He’s already failed the fi
rst lesson his dad ever taught him: show up in a crowded room, shake everybody’s hand, and remember everybody’s goddamn name, right down to the host’s pimply son ‘cause you never know, he could grow up to be a senator one day. Paul is slacking.

  The front hallway is low ceilinged and formed by shadowy, cavernous plaster as it funnels out to a grand wide room full of light and people. It’s grander than the Miskatonic’s front lobby, as Paul makes out a second-floor balcony stemming from a great staircase. The living room or front hallway or whatever it would properly be called is more museum than a home. Every stretch of wall displays some strange artifact or oddity. There’s an Egyptian coffin propped under the dual staircases that wrap around to the second floor. Adorning the walls are display cases featuring rusty medieval swords and wrinkled, leathery books that appear to have survived a fire or three. The walls are covered in portraits, yet, unlike any portrait Paul’s seen, each face is grinning from ear to ear. He’s suddenly aware that he’s never before seen teeth in professional portraits.

  The guests wave around everything from glasses of wine to fading cans of Narragansett beer. There are jeans and flowery dresses beside bathing suits and bikinis, tuxedos and the latest Gucci vests. Apparently, there is no wrong way to dress for these affairs.

  A tall, young girl with jet-black hair wearing a slender, hip-hugging black dress approaches Paul and slips into his embrace. “Mr. Jones, you can call me Lacy. Mr. Weissebokf has assigned me to you tonight. I’m to answer your every question and keep you safe.” She pulls away from Paul, and in his stirring mind, he’s thinking for a moment that she’s hospitable enough to be an escort. This wouldn’t be the first time he’s been sent a girl; after that day Johan showed him the hidden rooms of the Miskatonic, all manner of women have been coming up to him.