Aunt Epiphany shook her head emphatically, so that her necklace jangled. ‘When we go down there, we must appear at first to have agreed completely to this spirit-woman’s wishes. Otherwise she may not produce your sister, and everything will be lost. If she cannot kill you together, she will kill your sister anyhow, believe me.’
‘OK, you’re the boss,’ said Everett. ‘But if things go wrong, I swear to God I’m going to come back here and fetch that gun and take those people out, whether they’re flesh and blood or spirits or whatever the hell they are.’
Aunt Epiphany didn’t reply to that. She finished mixing her walking powder and gathering together all the beads and amulets she needed, and then she said, ‘Very well. Now we are ready to go. May the seven powers protect us.’
They went across to the elevators and Everett pressed the button.
Aunt Epiphany looked around and said, ‘When you remodel this hotel, did you seal off any other doorways?’
‘At least two or three on every level. We blocked off all of the old service corridors.’
‘It is probably possible to step through any one of those doorways to the old hotel. But at least you know for certain where this portal is, and that it possible for us to pass through it in both directions. I have known people before who have gone through to the spirit world to visit their dead relatives and never found a way to return. The last thing I want is for you to be trapped in the old hotel when you and your sister make your escape.’
‘You and me both.’
They walked along the second-floor corridor until they reached the place in the wall where they would step through.
‘Remember,’ said Aunt Epiphany, ‘you have acceded to the spirit-woman’s demands. You are humble. You do not show aggression. You beg for her to be merciful. Do not say anything to anger her. Meanwhile, take no notice of what I do. Do not look at me or pay me any attention. When your sister is brought out, do not seize her immediately. Wait for me to give you the word.’
Sissy and Everett glanced at each other. Sissy was silently praying that this wasn’t all madness, and that Aunt Epiphany’s voodoo magic would really work. She could tell by the look on Everett’s face that he was thinking exactly the same. Maybe they ought to forget this altogether and tell the police where T-Yon was. Even if the police couldn’t walk through the wall, they could always break through it with jackhammers.
If they did that, however, Sissy suspected that they wouldn’t find the Hotel Rouge on the other side, from twenty years ago. It would be today’s Red Hotel, and T-Yon would be lost forever, God alone knew where.
‘You are ready?’ asked Aunt Epiphany.
Sissy and Everett both nodded.
‘Then may the Savior take care of us,’ she said, and without any hesitation she stepped straight into the wall, and vanished.
‘She’s gone,’ said Everett. ‘I saw it happen and I still can’t believe it. What if you can go through but I can’t – what then?’
‘You can, I promise you,’ Sissy told him. ‘It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not. You go first, see for yourself.’
Everett walked right up to the wall but then he stopped.
‘Go,’ Sissy urged him.
He lifted both hands up in front of his face and squeezed his eyes tight shut. He took a step forward, and then another, and the wall swallowed him up as if it were made of nothing more substantial than thick fog.
Sissy immediately followed him, and almost bumped into him as she emerged in the service corridor on the other side. He was standing there with his hands still raised, but now his eyes were open.
‘That was incredible,’ he said. He turned around and looked back at the wall as if he still couldn’t accept that he had passed right through it. ‘Imagine what it would be like if you could do that all the time – if you could walk through any wall you wanted to.’
‘Unfortunately, you would never know what was on the other side,’ said Sissy. ‘We’re inside Vanessa Slider’s memory now, and that’s bad enough. Places only come into phase because somebody has died without getting everything they thought they deserved. Love, or appreciation. But mostly revenge. You’d be surprised how many of the dead still have a burning need to get their own back.’
Aunt Epiphany was holding up the black leather head of Adjassou-Linguetor as if it were a torch and she was about to enter a dark tunnel. ‘You know the way to the kitchen, Sissy. Please to guide us there.’
Sissy led them along the green-carpeted service corridor until they reached the door to the main staircase. As soon as she eased the door open, she heard music. It was faint but distinctive – some quick-tempo jazz number, with a warbling clarinet and a strutting banjo. When she opened the door wider, she could hear voices, too – people laughing and shouting and singing.
‘Place is packed, by the sound of it,’ said Everett.
‘You know what I think?’ said Sissy. ‘I think that Vanessa is so confident that I’m bringing you here and that she’s soon going to get her revenge, she’s celebrating. She’s recalling some night when she had a really good time.’
Everett listened for a while and then he shook his head. ‘This is scarier than silence. She thinks she’s going to cut us both open so she’s throwing a party?’
‘That just goes to show you how vengeful she is. God knows how much venom she must have in her spirit to be able to recreate all of this. They talk about the power of love, don’t they? But that’s nothing compared to the power of hatred.’
They crossed the rubbish-cluttered landing and opened the door to the second-floor corridor. Out here, the jazz music was even louder, and as they walked along to the elevators, they could hear a couple arguing in one of the bedrooms.
Sissy said, ‘We went down in the service elevator the last time, Luther and me. But I think it may be safer if we use the guest elevators. Also, I’d like to see what kind of a shindig Vanessa Slider has dreamed up.’
As they reached the elevators, four people appeared around the corner – three young men in tuxedos and a young blonde woman in a shiny silver evening dress. They were all smoking and laughing and talking about some movie that one of them had been to see.
‘He’s always coming out with some really cynical line or other. Like, “Bury the dead . . . they stink up the joint.” What a character!’
None of them acknowledged Sissy or Everett or Aunt Epiphany. When the elevator arrived and the doors opened, they walked straight in, right in front of them, and stood in the middle of the car so that the three of them were forced to press themselves against the doors. They carried on smoking, too, blowing smoke directly into their faces.
‘Do you know something?’ said Aunt Epiphany, leaning toward Sissy and half-covering her mouth with her hand. ‘I do not think these people are aware that we are here. I do not think they can even see us.’ She said this very quietly, just in case they were aware, and they could see them, and were simply being ill-mannered.
When they reached the lobby, however, the four young people brushed their way past them without a word, and it was obvious that Aunt Epiphany was right. To the people in Vanessa Slider’s Hotel Rouge, Sissy and Everett and Aunt Epiphany were invisible.
The lobby was crowded, just as it had been for The Red Hotel’s gala opening, and the noise was overwhelming. Most of the men were wearing tuxedos of varying colors – whites and blues and maroons – and the women’s evening dresses all had deep décolletages and boxy shoulders.
‘Jesus,’ said Everett. ‘It’s just like an episode of Dynasty.’
‘Not surprising,’ said Sissy. ‘Vanessa Slider’s heyday was in the mid nineteen eighties.’ She pressed the button, and the elevator doors closed again, and the crowd disappeared from sight.
‘I think I’m a little scared,’ said Everett, as the elevator sank down to the basement. ‘In fact I think I’m crapping myself.’
‘If you do everything exactly like I say, you will be fine,’ Aunt Epiphany reassured him. �
��This spirit-woman is very strong, but we have even stronger spirits on our side. Not only that, we have righteousness.’
‘If you say so,’ said Everett. ‘I still wish I’d brought my thirty-eight.’
The elevator doors opened again, and they found themselves in the gray cinder-block corridor outside the kitchen, about fifty feet farther along than the service elevator. This time, there was no grinding noise, but from out of the kitchen came a deafening cacophony of rattling saucepans and clattering skillets, with the chef and his assistants shouting at each other to make themselves heard. ‘Where’s that blackened redfish for table twenty?’ ‘Did you finish off that hot sauce yet?’ ‘Fried oysters, chef!’ ‘What the fuck do you call that? That’s not a gumbo, it’s a swamp!’ ‘Go easy on the shrimp, will you?’ ‘Four burgers for table five!’
Aunt Epiphany held up the black leather head of Adjassou-Linguetor with its bulging eyes and said to Sissy and Everett, ‘You two go in first. Hand in hand, Everett, as if Sissy is leading you. And remember. You are meek. You are submissive.’
Sissy and Everett held hands and entered the kitchen. It was ferociously hot in there, and so smoky that they could barely see to the end of the counters. The head chef was a hugely fat man with a black beard and fiery cheeks. He was waddling up and down, peering over the shoulders of his four assistants, occasionally dipping his finger into the stews and sauces they were cooking and constantly yelling into their ears. Now and again he cuffed one of them across the back of the head.
On top of the stoves, large cast-iron pots of chowder and shellfish stew and jambalaya were being stirred by a spotty young redhead with her hair tied back, while dozens of hamburger patties were being flipped on a hotplate by the same lanky African-American who had been grinding raw meat when Sissy and Luther had first come down to the kitchen. It was the hamburgers that were causing most of the smoke, and they had a sweet, cloying smell to them, like no hamburgers that Sissy had ever smelled before. It reminded her of the time that a riding stables in Marble Dale had caught fire, and three palominos had been trapped inside. It was just like the sweet, cloying smell of burning straw and cremated pony.
Sissy wondered if they were going to be invisible to these people, too, but as she and Everett ventured further into the kitchen, the head chef caught sight of them, and immediately slapped one of his assistants on the shoulder. Sissy realized then that the revelers they had seen in the elevator and in the lobby were only the background to Vanessa Slider’s recreated Hotel Rouge, like extras in a movie, whereas the head chef and his assistants in the kitchen were her witnesses, and her accomplices.
The head chef bent over and said something in his assistant’s ear. His assistant nodded, twice, and then hurriedly wove his way to the far end of the kitchen, wiping his hands on his apron as he went. In the left-hand corner there was a large white enamel door, half ajar. Sissy couldn’t see what was behind it, because there was too much smoke. But the assistant banged on it with his fist, and after a few moments Shem Slider stepped out of it, wearing a gory butcher’s apron and red rubber gloves.
He slammed the metal door behind him and walked through the smoke toward them. He was wearing white rubber boots, also spattered with blood, which made a wobbling sound as he walked. He was grinning widely, so that they could see his broken, mahogany-colored teeth.
‘Well, well, who’d have thunk it?’ he said, as he approached. ‘La pauvre defante mom, she’s going to be delighted. And me too, I’m delighted. This is going to tie up all of the loose ends real neat, so to speak. Justice at long last!’
He turned toward the wall and called out, ‘Momma! Come on out, Momma! Your dream is finally come true!’
There was a long pause during which nothing happened but Shem didn’t call out again. He must have known that his mother had heard him. He stood patiently in front of Sissy and Everett in his bloodstained apron, his muscular forearms entwined together like the roots of a swamp cypress, still grinning. Sissy clutched Everett’s hand tightly and hoped that Aunt Epiphany knew what she was doing. She hadn’t appeared yet, and Sissy couldn’t even begin to think what her plan could be. How do you fend off a sadistic brute like Shem Slider with a bottle of colored powder and a black leather head on the end of a stick?
Another cloud of hamburger smoke drifted between them. Sissy tried not to breathe it in. She saw that all of the gurneys were gone, and she made an educated guess that behind that white enamel door there was a cold store, and what was left of the five bodies that had been lying on the gurneys had been wheeled in there, to prevent them from rotting too quickly.
After more than a minute, she heard a sharp shushing sound, the same as the noise she had heard when she passed through the wall upstairs. Vanessa Slider materialized out of the shadows, wearing a pale green evening gown of crumpled satin. The gown was scooped low, but she was flat-chested, and she had hardly any cleavage at all, only a bony freckled ribcage. Everett gripped Sissy’s hand even tighter, and she knew that he had seen what she had seen: resting on Vanessa’s ribcage was T-Yon’s silver pendant of a woman’s face, sleeping. Now that Sissy had seen a photograph of T-Yon’s and Everett’s mother, she recognized the woman for who she was, and she realized that she probably wasn’t sleeping, but dead. It was a miniature death mask, which T-Yon had worn to remember her mother, and which Vanessa Slider was now wearing as a trophy.
Vanessa Slider couldn’t help smiling as she came out of the shadows. Before she came any nearer, however, she turned and called, ‘Come on, bebette!’ and from the gloom behind her emerged the small figure covered with a black sheet, snuffling and skipping.
She came up close to Sissy, leaning forward a little as if she were finding it difficult to focus. Her eye sockets were filled with nothing but blurry darkness, as if an artist had sketched her eyes in thick black charcoal and then smudged them with his thumb. Her face was deathly pale, even paler than the last time.
‘So you decided to see sense,’ she said, in that soft, crackly voice of hers.
Sissy said nothing, although she could think of plenty of things she would have liked to have said. Be meek. Be submissive. That’s what Aunt Epiphany had warned her.
Vanessa Slider smiled again, and looked up at Everett. ‘There always comes a time when our sins catch up with us, even if we have to wait for a generation or two. “For the sins of your fathers you, even if you ain’t yourself guilty, must suffer.” But that goes for mothers, too.’
‘My mother did nothing except kill herself to look after her children,’ said Everett.
‘Oh, she didn’t just kill herself, young Everett. She killed my Gerard. And who knows how many other men? I’m not trying to tell you that my Gerard wasn’t to blame for going with her, nor that any of those other men were pure in heart. But she killed me, too. She killed my dreams. When my Gerard passed away, that was the end of my life. I was still breathing and walking around and my heart was still beating but I was as dead as he was.’
Sissy said, ‘But you and your son . . . you’ve been killing all these other girls, too.’
‘Aha, but that’s retribution! That’s what sinners get for sinning, and what else can they expect? We end their sinful lives and we cut up their sinful bodies and we feed them to the men who they’ve been sinning with. It’s the perfect circle of justice. Nobody never misses them, these girls. Nobody never asks where they are or what happened to them. Maybe once or twice a man might say, “Where’s that Cherie? I really used to like her.” And that’s when you’re tempted to say, “You and your greedy friends, you came to our restaurant a couple of weeks ago and between you, you ate most of her, and you even told me how delicious she tasted, if only you’d known . . .”’
‘My God,’ said Sissy. ‘What kind of justice is that?’
‘It’s justice for good lives taken away, before they’ve had the chance to be lived.’
The small figure in the black sheet let out a strange, goat-like baaaaah! Vanessa Slider laid her hand on t
op of its head and said, ‘Yes, bebette, you too.’
Sissy said, as firmly as she could manage, ‘Is T-Yon here? Can we see that she’s safe?’
The banging and clashing of saucepans and spoons and skillets rose to a crescendo, as if the head chef and his assistants were deliberately trying to drown Sissy out. It was surrealistic, like the kitchen scene in Alice Through The Looking-Glass. The smoke that was rolling across the kitchen from the hamburger grill was becoming denser and increasingly pungent, and Sissy had to cup her hand over her nose and her mouth to stop herself from coughing. Her eyes were watering and her tears made Vanessa Slider’s face appeared to jerk and twitch.
‘Oh, for sure your precious T-Yon is safe for now, not hurt at all. Bring her out, Shem! We may not be forgiving, but we’re civilized.’
Shem went back to the white enamel door, opened it up and disappeared inside. A few seconds later he came back out again, and this time he was pulling T-Yon behind him, by the wrist.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Everett. ‘You call this civilized? What the hell have you done to her?’
Shem dragged T-Yon closer, but stayed just far enough away so that Everett wouldn’t be able to reach out and snatch her. T-Yon looked shocked, as if she couldn’t understand where she was or what was happening to her. Her face was white and her eyes were swollen and her blonde hair was all messed up. She was bundled up in a grubby brown blanket, which she was clutching with her free right hand. Her feet were bare and her teeth were chattering uncontrollably.
‘There, not a mark on her,’ grinned Shem. ‘Just like la pauvre defante mom told you. You want to see for yourself?’
With that, he wrenched the blanket out of T-Yon’s grip and swung it wide open, to reveal that, underneath it, T-Yon was completely naked. She wasn’t cut or bruised, but she was covered in scores of grubby black fingermarks, especially her breasts and her thighs.
Everett tried to wrench himself forward, but Sissy gripped his hand as tightly as she could.
‘Don’t,’ she whispered, and then coughed. ‘Humble, remember. Submissive.’
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