The Red Hotel

by Graham Masterton

  Before they left for the airport, Everett gave Sissy a squeeze and said, ‘Thank you, Sissy, for everything. Without you, T-Yon and me – well, that would’ve been the end of us. Here, why don’t you keep this? Let’s say it’s a souvenir of a hair-raising visit to BR?’

  He handed Sissy a yellow envelope. She opened it up and slid out the photograph that was inside it – the picture of Vanessa Slider and Gerard Slider and Everett and T-Yon’s mother, standing in front of the bar at the Hotel Rouge Mardi Gras festival, 1986.

  ‘I’m not sure how to thank you,’ she said, more than a little sarcastically. ‘I’ll frame it and hang it in my bathroom and scare myself shitless.’

  She was sliding it back into the envelope again when her eye was caught by something that she hadn’t seen before. The pretty black girl with the cornrows standing behind the bar had a tattoo on her right shoulder. She lifted up her spectacles and looked at it more closely. It was a tattoo of a serpent, swallowing its own tail. She knew that in mythology, it was called ouroboros, and that it symbolized the endless cycle of life. The eternal return.

  She said to Everett, ‘What time is our flight?’

  ‘Seven fifteen. Why? You have plenty of time.’

  ‘Is there a later flight?’

  ‘I guess there’s a red-eye. I’ll have to ask Bella.’

  ‘Please . . . see if you can book me on a later flight. There’s somebody I have to go see before I leave.’

  ‘Are you sure? Is there anything we can help you with?’

  ‘No, no. Just call me a taxi. I shouldn’t be too long, no more than an hour. I’ll get back here as soon as I can.’

  Sissy left the air-conditioned lobby and stepped out into the warmth of an amber afternoon. She told the taxi driver where she wanted to go, and as he drove her there he started up a long monolog about the LSU basketball team, and exactly what he thought of Trent Johnson. Sissy kept repeating ‘really?’ just to keep him talking, because her mind was completely fixed on where she was going and what she was going to say when she got there.

  ‘Wait for me, please,’ she told the taxi driver, when they reached the house on Drehr Avenue.

  She climbed the steps up on to the porch and rang the doorbell. Almost at once, Shatoya opened the door. She was dressed all in black and she looked as if she hadn’t been sleeping.

  ‘Why, Sissy! I thought you went back home to Connecticut! That’s what Epiphany told me, anyhow.’

  ‘I have a flight booked for this evening,’ Sissy told her. ‘I just needed to have a last word with Epiphany before I left.’

  ‘OK, come along in.’

  Sissy stepped into the house and gave Shatoya a hug. ‘How are you bearing up? I’m so sorry for your loss.’

  ‘If they could just tell me where he is . . . Nobody seems to know.’

  ‘I’ll ask Bella. Maybe she could contact the hospitals for you and find out where they’ve taken him.’

  ‘It’s such a bad, bad dream. I’ve even lost his dear remains.’

  They crossed the hallway and as they did so, Aunt Epiphany came down the stairs. She, too, was wearing black, a close-fitting crêpe dress with a glittering jet brooch.

  ‘Sissy! I thought you would be on your way home by now!’

  She came up to her and kissed her. She smelled of gardenias.

  Sissy said, ‘I would have been. But I wanted to see you before I left. Could we talk alone for just a minute? Shatoya, would you mind?’

  ‘No, not at all. Would you like a cold drink, maybe? Lemonade?’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ said Sissy. She walked into the living room and took the yellow envelope out of her bag. ‘Take a look at this,’ she said.

  Frowning, Aunt Epiphany opened the envelope and drew out the photograph. She studied it for a moment with her hand trembling. Then she handed it back with an expression on her face that was both pleading and tragic.

  ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’ said Sissy, trying hard to keep her voice steady. ‘And that was you I saw in the kitchen, when Luther and I first went down there. That was why I didn’t see the girl with the cornrows amongst all of those zombis – you couldn’t be in two places at the same time.’

  Aunt Epiphany said nothing, but her lips puckered up and her eyes filled with tears.

  Sissy saw the black leather head, which was still lying at the side of the couch. She nodded toward it and said, ‘Adjassou-Linguetor. You’re one of his children, too, aren’t you?’

  ‘It was my momma,’ sobbed Aunt Epiphany. ‘My momma came looking for me when I didn’t come home. She found me somehow and took me away without the Sliders knowing. She disapproved so much of what I was doing, because she was so religious. But I was her only child. She loved me so much, she didn’t want to lose me. She took me to the houngan.’

  Sissy didn’t know what to say. She thought of all the people that she had loved over the years, and lost, and who would never come back, no matter how much they smiled and danced and laughed in her memories. She took hold of Aunt Epiphany’s hands, and it was only then that she realized why they had always felt so cold.