“Miss?” he called from behind her. “Miss? Over here?”
She slowed. She’d never checked in: of course he needed to talk to her.
She returned to the counter.
“You must be Miss Rognund.” He had an accent she couldn’t place. Somewhere in Eastern Europe, maybe.
She nodded.
“And where is the other Miss Rognund?” he asked.
“Sick,” he said. “She can’t come.”
“I see,” he said. “No bags?” he said. “Perhaps they are in the car?”
“They’re in my room,” she said.
He looked mildly affronted. “But I have given you no room.”
“I came late. There was only the one key. I figured it must be for me.”
He frowned, held up an envelope with her name on it.
“I…” she started to say, then stopped.
“Did you not follow the procedure for late arrival that was emailed to you with your confirmation?” he asked. And then, almost as if to himself. “No, you must not have. Where, might I ask, did you spend last night?”
“In number nine.”
A strange look briefly crossed his face, before being quickly mastered and hidden away. He held out a hand. “Give me the key,” he said. She fumbled it out of her pocket. He took it. He started to hand over the envelope, then drew it back.
“How did you find it?” he asked.
“It was just behind the small door,” she said. “Not exactly hidden.”
“No,” he said, “you misunderstand. How did you find your stay?”
“My stay?”
“In nine.”
“I… it was fine,” she said. And then added. “Any reason why it shouldn’t have been?”
Instead of answering he now gave her the envelope. “Here is your key,” he said. “Room five.”
“But my things,” she said. “They’re in the other room.”
“I will move your things from room number nine,” he said.
“I need to repack them,” she said.
He shook his head firmly. “I will move them. I will note where they are placed and will do my best to replicate their placement in the proper room, the room you should have been in all along.”
“But—” she said.
“You must go. You are late for your workshop.”
“But—” she said again.
“Go,” he said, shooing her with the tips of his fingers. “Go now. They await.”
*
But they did not await, or at least they had not awaited for her. They were already nearly done with breakfast, the dishes on the table in disarray, the food in the chafing dishes all but gone.
There was no plate left for her: someone had taken two. It was a florid-faced man with watery eyes, wheezingly overweight, with a beard that seemed to have spread too far up his cheeks, as if threatening to consume his entire face. When he saw her take in the two dirtied plates before him, he gave a half-shrug of indifference.
She removed two cups from their saucers and then loaded the saucers with the bits and scraps she could find in the chafing dishes—overcooked hunks of scrambled eggs, limp and greasy ends of bacon, hash browns whose latticework had become mush, a soggy toast point. She poured a cup of tepid coffee and then juggled the two saucers and the cup over to an unoccupied corner of the table.
“And you are?” said the florid-faced man, once she was seated.
She introduced herself, apologized for being late.
“You missed yesterday evening’s session as well,” noted the man, apparently the workshop leader. “A critical session. You are already so far behind,” he said, shaking his head. “I am not sure you will manage to catch up.” And then, shrugging, he added, “But since the workshop fee is non-refundable, you might as well stay.”
She felt a dull, irrational rage rising bile-like within her, but swallowed it back down. Instead she slightly inclined her head toward him.
For a long time there was silence, and then the man gave a wheeze and spoke.
“As I was saying before I was interrupted,” he began, “the quality most needed is a peculiar attentiveness, an ability to tune the soul to a frequency where its vibrations fall slightly below the surface of appearances. A whole world lies beneath this world, comprised of the unheard, the unseen. With attentiveness, you shall begin to learn to hear this world, to see it.”
Hekla glanced around the room. Everyone except her seemed to pay this man rapt attention. There was a woman with limp blond hair, obviously and poorly dyed; a man whose face so resembled that of a bulldog that he must own one; a woman, obviously wealthy, wrapped in the tie-dyed scarves of a seeker (Hekla’s sister had an array of similar scarves); and four seemingly interchangeable men wearing red ties and white shirts.
“How does one do so?” the leader asked. “How does one go from seeing merely the surface of things to seeing what lies beneath? It is a long and arduous process, full of missteps. In a workshop like this one, we can only accomplish so much, but still perhaps we can lead you there quicker than you might arrive on your own…”
She stopped listening. This, she suspected, was a sign that she was on the surface of things, but how could she see this gasping fat man who had stolen her plate and her share of breakfast as a spiritual guru? Listening to her sister read to her the vague description of the workshop over the phone, as she sat in her cubicle surrounded by accountants and actuaries and with her awful middle manager lurking nearby, she had felt that the workshop was probably harmless and worth tolerating for her sister’s sake, and to get a vacation. But now, sitting among the participants, it felt like the same set of people as in her office, with an even more awful middle manager.
And then, abruptly, people were standing, breaking into groups of two, leaving her on her own. She approached the leader, who had paired up with the scarved seeker.
“Mr…” she said.
“Szabo,” the leader said.
“I don’t have a group, Mr. Szabo,” said Hekla.
The leader sighed. “Just Szabo will do. You’ll have to join one of the other groups. One group will have to have three.”
“All right,” said Helka, and sat down next to the leader.
“One of the other groups,” said Szabo. “Not ours.” He pointed to the two suited men closest to them, who looked startled to be singled out. “That one.”
She pulled up a chair beside the two men, who involuntarily drew closer together, as if slightly afraid of her. Eventually they gave her a partial explanation of what they were meant to be doing. Tuning, one of them described it as. It involved, so she gathered, exchanging a series of maxims and then, interrogating them and thereby puncturing the surface of the world and catching a glimpse of the other world hidden beneath. What was meant by interrogating was initially unclear, and remained so. She sighed. It was, she supposed, one way of passing the morning.
*
By lunch the group had grudgingly accepted her, or at very least the leader had. Though he had claimed his name was Szabo, she suspected he had been christened something like Rupert or Stephen. By accepted she meant that he did not steal her lunch plate, though the way he glumly stared at his now empty plate suggested that he probably would if she left the room. Licking his lips, he delivered a lecture, the same sort of meandering obscurantist mysticism as at breakfast. She secretly checked her phone under the table, hoping to text her sister, but she still had no signal.
Attunement, he told them was, in a matter of speaking At-one-ment, the state of being at one with the world. Wouldn’t that be atonement? wondered Hekla. It was a question, Szabo told them, of seeping through the world’s surface to permeate its entire being. And then, perhaps because it was clear that she, Hekla, was the one paying the least attention, he turned to face her and looked at her in a different way than before. For the first time, he fixed her in the spotlight of his attention, his attunement, and she began to glimpse what it might be that the others found so i
ntriguing about him.
“Hekla,” he said. “Curious name. It means ‘cloak,’ does it not?” And before she could bring herself to respond, “What is it you are cloaking, cloak? What do you hide?” And then his gaze left her and he turned away and her skepticism was free to rise again.
*
After lunch, Szabo said, “For the afternoon we shall do something different.” He stood. “Have you wondered why I hold this workshop here and no place else?” he asked.
He moved toward the door and went out.
For a moment they all sat there, and then with a great scraping of chair legs the four interchangeable men stood and rushed after him. The two other women were close behind, then the man who resembled a bulldog, and finally Hekla. Does my name really mean cloak? she wondered. If so, why had her parents named her that? And more importantly, why hadn’t her sister, who scrutinized the names of everyone around her searching for meaning, informed her?
She turned it over in her head, half-distracted as she followed the others into the entrance hall. She was still considering her name, what it said about her, when Szabo turned down the other hall. But she stopped thinking about it entirely as soon as she realized where he was going.
He halted at the narrow door at the end of the hall. “When they were modernizing Verglas lodge,” Szabo said, “there was one room they left just as it was. Behind this door lies a fragment of the lodge that used to be.”
Hekla felt her arms grow suddenly heavy.
“Is it haunted?” asked the bulldog.
“Haunted?” said Szabo. “What does haunted mean? Shall we say rather that this is a special place, a passage back in time?” He turned the handle and entered the narrow passageway behind it, the others filing after him until the narrow space was too full to contain anyone else. Hekla was tempted to turn on her heel and leave, but when Szabo opened the door marked with a nine and entered, and the others trickled in after him, she found herself powerless to do anything but follow.
*
“What do you see?” asked Szabo, his voice hushed. “What do you feel?” He paused, his gaze sweeping slowly around the circle. “Breathe in the air. It is the air of the past. Be attuned. Something happened in this room that made them leave it as it was when the rest of the house was remodeled. What happened here?”
“Someone killed himself!” said the woman with limp hair excitedly.
“A ceremony took place,” said one of the identical men. “A dark one.”
A flicker of irritation passed over Szabo’s face. “No,” he said. He slapped his hands together sharply. “No! Do not guess! Feel!”
The people around Hekla closed their eyes, breathed in deeply. Hekla kept her eyes wide open.
“Reach,” Szabo was saying, sonorously. His eyes, she noticed, were not closed either. He was staring at her, curious. Her effort to make her face reveal nothing made it feel stiff, almost dead. Does he notice? she wondered.
“Let the words come to you from the room itself,” he said. “Then inhale them, hold them within your lungs, and let them slip through your lips.”
He waited, staring at Hekla. She was not going to speak. There was no fucking way she was going to speak.
“No one?” Szabo said. “Then be attuned to me as a start. Watch and learn.”
He held his face in one hand, extending the other hand before him, almost brushing the shirts of the interchangeable men.
“A woman came here,” he said. “She hoped to escape her life, but she found someone waiting for her—or something, rather. Here in this room. We know from what was pieced together by doctors later that she awoke in the middle of the night, the room deeply dark around her, and felt someone there with her. Or perhaps something. She could not move, she could hardly breathe. She felt as if something heavy had been placed atop her, a great weight, so heavy that she found herself unable to get enough air. Eventually she lost consciousness.
“When she awoke, it was with a start, gasping, as if coming back to life.” Szabo lifted his face from his hand. “She went about her day, a perfectly ordinary day, then packed her things and drove back home. Only later did she realize that part of her had been taken by whatever had come in the night. That part of her remained in this very room, and she had no way to get it back.”
He was silent, letting his gaze wander from face to face. “Attunement,” he said. “I feel the vibrations the events have left. You will too once you are properly attuned.”
Perhaps I knew about this woman, thought Hekla. Perhaps I glimpsed the story years ago in some newspaper or other and subconsciously remembered when I came to the lodge, and then I dreamed it.
She hoped that was it. She told herself that it was, but didn’t completely believe it.
And then a spasm flickered across Szabo’s face, as if he were in pain.
“Something else,” he said. “Something…” Abruptly he fell silent. His eyes moved frantically, his gaze refusing to settle anywhere. A spasm rippled over his face again.
A good performance, thought Hekla. An impressive—
“Strange,” Szabo said, and his voice was different now, less theatrical. “My attunement seems to have shifted to a deeper level. I am being told that the woman in question was missing her leg, though I know for a fact that she was not missing a leg. And, even stranger, they tell me the prosthetic she wore looked just like an artificial leg but was also something else. Or, rather, someone else. What can this mean? Perhaps this is a metaphor for something real, the room telling us what it can tell us with the language it has at its disposal? It is up to us to properly interpret what it means to say…
“And now I see this ‘leg’… unfurling? Yes, unfurling, and becoming a being of glass and steel. It stands beside her bed staring down at her. Slowly it takes on her form and her appearance—catch her!”
But nobody was quick enough to stop Hekla’s fall before she struck the floor.
*
She woke up lying on the bed. For a moment she panicked, thinking she was still in nine. But no, it was a different room, the furnishings upgraded, with an actual bathroom instead of a commode behind an odd half-wall. Number five, her new room. A glass of water stood on the bedside table in a puddle of condensation. The clerk from reception was stationed a few steps back from the bed, his hands clasped in front of him, like a funeral director. The door of the room had been left ajar.
“Here you are, then,” said the clerk. “Back among us.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“According to Szabo, you fainted. I took charge of you so the workshop could proceed.”
“Thank you,” she said. She tried to sit up, found herself dizzy. He moved forward and pushed her shoulders gently back down.
“Perhaps you shouldn’t go back to the workshop,” he said. “At least not until they are finished with what they are doing in that room.”
“Why?”
But the clerk did not respond.
“I don’t want to go back,” she told him. “I want to leave.”
“Leave?” the clerk said. He shook his head. “It is a little late for that.”
*
After a while the clerk left and she was alone. She tried to stand but the dizziness was still strong and one of her legs refused to support her. She fell onto the floor, had to claw her way panting back up onto the bed. She could not leave, not yet. But she would stay here and rest until she could.
She closed her eyes. Even though it was still early afternoon, she soon fell asleep.
*
Her dreams, the few she had, were at first vague and indistinct, as if being glimpsed from too great a distance. They seemed vaguely familiar and not at the same time: more as if someone was telling her about their dream than that she was experiencing a dream herself. There were bits and pieces of the hotel in it—a version of the clerk with a different accent, the stag’s head now topped with a profusion of antlers instead of the two it had, a much longer and more meandering gravel path l
eading up to the lodge—but all as if seen through a dirty pane of glass.
And then, suddenly, it all came into focus. She imagined herself walking down the hall, a hitch in her step. She came to the door with the number five burned on it, tried the knob, found it unlocked. She opened it and looked inside.
The room was empty. She stayed, hesitating for a long moment, then went out and continued down the hall.
She walked past room six, then seven, then eight, then opened the door at the very end of the hall, then the door beyond that, the one with a nine burned at the level of her forehead.
Inside, lying on the bed, was a woman who looked exactly like her. She approached slowly, careful not to wake her. She bent over the bed and stared down, but no matter how closely she scrutinized the woman she was unable to say which one of them was the real her.
*
When she awoke, she was in a different place. Someone was shaking her. It took her more time than it should have to realize that that someone was Szabo, and that he was sitting beside the bed, staring at her.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. Szabo ignored this. “Where am I?” she asked, and when Szabo ignored this as well, she suddenly knew she was in number nine.
But how had she gotten here? Had he carried her? Had she, asleep, wandered back here herself? Why would she ever want to come back here?
“I knew you would come,” said Szabo. “I suspected when you fainted, and so I kept vigil and now I know for certain. I hardly dared hope for this. I sat and watched the bed and for a long, long while there was nothing, and then I watched you slowly come into existence here. I have been waiting for you, for someone like you, for years!”
Shadows & Tall Trees, Volume 8 Page 2