Unless John Briggs was Mr. Grin. Jack moved closer to the suspended body, studying it. Was it possible?
He couldn’t think of ever having seen John Briggs smile. In fact, he didn’t know if he had ever seen Briggs’ mouth, buried, as it usually was, behind the painter’s mask. Briggs was all business. There to work. There to make sure others were working. Not a grinning type of person. But he was smiling now. He was smiling because he was hanging upside down.
Jack thought about the voice on the phone. It was entirely possible. The more he studied him, the more he was certain John Briggs was Mr. Grin. That’s why the voice had sounded vaguely familiar. It was John Briggs but it was a smiling John Briggs, someone Jack had never heard before.
Jack contemplated shooting him but he seemed... restrained. And unconscious.
Had Gina somehow managed to escape his clutches? Had Gina managed to do this? Jack didn’t think it was possible. Briggs had to be close to 300 pounds and he just couldn’t see Gina being able to string him up.
It was just too simple.
This couldn’t be it. He couldn’t just aim the gun and fire it at this hanging thing and think he had caught Gina’s captor.
The man you’re looking for is not who you think he is. He smiles because he’s out of his skin.
That seemed simple to Jack. Mr. Grin was not in John Briggs. If he was looking for Mr. Grin and he now thought it was John Briggs that meant it couldn’t be John Briggs. What he saw in front of him was a husk. The skin. Whatever was once inside that skin was now out of it. Happily out of it. Smiling because he was out of his skin.
Suddenly, he found himself thinking about the dirt at The Tent. Where did that dirt come from? Where did it go? Grisnos? He had been a stellar geography student and didn’t recall any country called Grisnos. Could The Tent have anything to do with this? He wondered what he had been doing the past three years. Would Mr. Thick, the strange flickering man at the front counter, know where Grisnos was? Jack thought maybe he would.
He had a revelation. It came upon him in a rush and he didn’t have the time to question it. He didn’t want to question it.
There was something in the dirt. Something... otherworldly. It came from one world and went to another. Something in the dirt. Something that made some people sniff it. Something that made some people forget. Something that, over time, rotted people’s insides. And it had rotted the insides of John Briggs. Rotted them so much they couldn’t stand to be in his body anymore. Maybe he was so rotten inside he didn’t have any idea what he was doing. But why Gina? Why Jack?
He put the gun in the back of his pants.
He thought maybe it was time for him to come out of his skin, too.
He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out the piece of paper with the stick figure drawings on it.
Now that he had seen Briggs hanging in front of him, the meaning of those drawings seemed obvious. It was an instruction sheet telling him how to suspend himself like Briggs. He didn’t know if it would help. He desperately wanted things to work out. This was one sick mindfuck of a puzzle but he was beginning to understand it for the puzzle it was.
Another rope hung from the metal bar. There was a loop at the end of it. All he had to do was place both feet in the loop, grab the other end of the rope dangling above him, and pull.
He didn’t know how he was going to stay up there. He imagined the second he let go of the rope he would just go plummeting head first onto the cement. Stepping into the loop, he put the instruction sheet to use.
Once he was upside down, everything fell out of his pockets. All the keys clattered to the floor. The gun hit the floor with a smack and he was thankful it didn’t discharge.
Hesitantly, he took his hands away from the rope.
He didn’t go plummeting to the floor. He stayed just where he was. He felt his muscles slacken. He felt his mouth open into a grin. He didn’t like the feeling at all. Now was not a time to be smiling.
He thought of Gina as he closed his eyes.
He thought of the dirt smudged picture of Gina he kept in his work area at The Tent. Was it possible Briggs had seen that picture and thought he absolutely had to have Gina? Was it possible everything had spiraled out of control from there? Was it even possible that Gina may have at one time slept with Briggs? Maybe he was one of her scorned lovers and this was his attempt to get back at her. And not just her but the most important person in her life.
Or...
Or maybe it went beyond this world. Maybe it went all the way to that other world that smacked into Earth when two worlds collided. Maybe Gina couldn’t cross through the freight car because she didn’t want to go home. Maybe she had been born in another world. Maybe she was adopted because someone helped her escape. Maybe someone wanted to take her back. Maybe Briggs had something to do with that. Maybe whatever had gotten inside Briggs had something to do with that. And if Briggs’ body was here but his rotten insides were somewhere else then where was Gina’s body? And which part of her was being tortured? Her insides or her real body?
And then there were the brands. The brands were definitely supernatural. The brands were definitely not normal. Something had inflicted those brands on all those people. Something had tried to stop Jack from making it to the Hotel Eternity. But once Jack made it, those brands had turned into keys. And the keys would take him where he needed to go. Was that Jack’s first victory? Were the keys his reward?
Maybe Jack was going crazy.
He wondered what time it was.
Then he went out.
Twenty-nine
The next thing he remembered, Jack was standing there in the Utility Shed looking at his own upside down body, feeling that stupid, irremovable grin straining at his lips and cheeks. He didn’t like the look of his body under those harsh fluorescent lights, next to Mr. Grin, next to John Briggs. He thought he looked unreal. Waxy. Dead.
He looked down at the ground.
The gun was there and, although all of the keys had fallen out of his pockets when he suspended himself, there were now only the four unused keys. He scooped the keys and the gun up. He opened the door of the Utility Shed to the outside, not bothering to close it. What if he closed it and he wasn’t able to get back in? He didn’t know which was the real him. Was it the guy hanging up in the Utility Shed or was it the body he now inhabited. He felt like himself. From what he could see of himself it seemed like this body was just the same as his old body.
What a weird thought. A new body and an old body. But today had been a day of weird thoughts.
Or was yesterday a day of weird thoughts?
He noticed that the sun was out over the meadow and felt a wave of fear.
It had to be coming up on the 24 hour mark. How long had he spent in that shed? Was that the wrong thing to do? Had he blown everything?
As quickly as possible, he began walking through the meadow, toward the East, toward the rising sun.
The morning was warm and humid. But he wasn’t sweating. Didn’t even really feel hot. He felt cool. Detached. He couldn’t explain it. He had dropped acid exactly once. He felt a lot like that now. Like he was very much locked inside this new body and everything he saw was with some kind of near geometric clarity, sharper and crisper, hyperfocused. It was so real and so perfect it was dreamlike.
Eventually, he came to the hotel again. It didn’t surprise him, even though he had been walking in the opposite direction.
In this light, the hotel looked even more decrepit and run down. Or maybe it was just because he was coming up from behind it. He didn’t really remember much about it from before, maybe because it had been dark. There were strange gaps in his memory. He thought about Gina. He thought about Mr. Grin. And he couldn’t really seem to think about anything else.
He couldn’t remember which door he had opened last. He remembered it was the one he was supposed to open, or so he thought. It was the one the squat man with the hairpiece had told him about. He went around the corne
r of the hotel. It seemed to be shaped in kind of a blocky horseshoe shape. The first door he came to was, unbelievably, Room 6004.
That couldn’t have been right. There was no way this place had over 6000 rooms... but questioning was useless. The answers were probably more ridiculous than the questions themselves.
The first key he tried worked. Three more keys. He opened the door onto a perfectly normal-looking room. It was perfectly normal-looking but it didn’t really fit the general decor of the other rooms he had seen in the hotel. The walls were all white. He didn’t know if he had ever seen a hotel room with white walls. Most things in the room were white. There was a nightstand that was a lighter wood color. That was on the left side of the bed. Over the bed was a large painting or photograph, he couldn’t be sure, of a large meadow, more rolling than the one he was just in, with some murderous black clouds. To the right of the bed was a ficus tree.
Hm. It didn’t seem like there was anything in this room to see at all.
Then the room started to move.
He felt it pull away from the rest of the motel.
That was when he realized the ficus was not a tree at all. It was a man dressed like a tree. Rather, the tree was kind of attached to his back and the man was completely white. He operated some controls set in the wall. The controls were white also and Jack knew it would have been easy to miss, with them being concealed, as they were, behind the tree.
The disguised man turned to look at Jack and Jack saw that his eyes were completely black. No whites whatsoever and a shiver ran up his spine, tremoring out into his viscera.
“So where are we going?” Jack asked.
The man looked away, back at the controls, and Jack knew he wasn’t going to get an answer.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and said, “I really need to find Gina. I don’t know if you can help me or not. I’m not even completely sure I’m still alive but, if you know where she is, I would really appreciate you taking me to her. You see, I only have three keys left and I think I’m running out of time. I don’t know if I’ll even get to use all three keys.”
The man turned to look at Jack again, saying nothing. When the man turned his head back around to stare at the wall, Jack saw that the whiteness of the wall had darkened, becoming more like a window.
“Are we on a train?” Jack asked.
The man said nothing.
Now from the window, Jack could see that, indeed, there were tracks spread out before him. He thought about the absurdity of entering a motel room and ending up on a train and then he thought about those two trains serving as something like a gateway to the Wilds and, therefore, the Hotel Eternity itself. Gina had called the train wreck “When Two Worlds Collide.” Jack felt the sense of two worlds colliding. He felt it very strongly.
The man, the conductor, turned to look at him again. He couldn’t help but think of how creepy the man looked. Painted all white like that and those eyes...
The conductor removed his left hand from a lever and held it out to Jack. Jack didn’t know what he wanted.
He had three keys left.
He gave one of them to the conductor.
The conductor turned and tried to stick the key into a small hole in front of him. The key didn’t fit. He handed the key back to Jack and Jack gave him another key. The conductor fit this key into the hole and turned...
Screeching deafened Jack.
He felt the collision, like something immense, engulf his body.
Pain scoured him.
Everything went black.
He screamed himself out and thought about the two keys he now had left.
When he came to he was aware of other screams, not his own and, horrified, realized he had found Gina.
Thirty
He was in a hotel room. Not surprisingly, it looked a lot like the one he had envisioned. A lot like the one he had seen earlier. Only a lot messier.
He saw Mr. Grin, standing there, grinning.
The next thing he noticed was the smell. It reminded him of a butcher’s shop or a hospital. Blood, come, shit and sex— all the smells crashed into him. Frantically, he scanned the room, knowing he wasn’t going to like what he found.
Jack stood on one side of the bed, still reeling from the train ride. Mr. Grin stood on the other. He was covered in blood. Otherwise, he looked the way Jack felt. Somehow different. Like a shiny, newer version of the John Briggs he knew from work. It made him think of a puffy balloon.
“Where is she?” Jack asked.
“She put up a good fight, shitcrawler,” Mr. Grin said.
“Where is she?”
Mr. Grin reached down to the bed and threw back the covers. Finally, after all the searching, Jack saw Gina.
She was splayed supine on the bed, naked. It looked like she was still breathing but her eyes were closed. She too was covered in blood. Numerous abrasions and bruises were painted across her flesh. Her sex, which she normally kept shaved, looked mutilated. A pool of blood spread around her on the white sheets of the bed.
There were so many questions Jack wanted to ask. So many questions shooting through his mind. But now was not the time. The questions were all secondary. What he really wanted to do was destroy Mr. Grin.
He came around the bed.
Mr. Grin waited, perhaps eagerly, for him.
Mr. Grin was roughly twice the size of Jack but that didn’t stop him. It couldn’t stop him. The man had told him on the phone that one of them would have to die. This was the end. One way or the other, this had to be the end. Jack wasn’t going to die and he wasn’t leaving here without Gina. He wasn’t going to let Sam’s death be for nothing. He wasn’t going to lose everything close to him in one day.
He slid the gun from the waistband of his pants, thankful for this leverage. It didn’t look like Mr. Grin had any weapons whatsoever.
Two keys left. A gun in my hand. When he thought that, it all felt so close.
Then he had another thought. This will make you a murderer. And he thought that maybe he could have meditated on that. Like maybe he could have found a philosophic way around it. Which Briggs would he be murdering? Which man was the real man? For that matter, which Jack was the real Jack? Was it murder if the other Jack, this Jack, killed someone? He didn’t know. Didn’t really have any time to think about it. Didn’t even know if he really wanted to think about it.
“You know you’re gonna die, right?” Mr. Grin said.
Jack aimed at Mr. Grin’s head, trying to remember how many shells were in the gun. Three, he thought. Three shells and two keys.
The first bullet tore Mr. Grin’s left ear off.
Jack wanted to immediately fire the other two bullets at him but then, he thought, that would be it. He might never know the answer to anything. What if Gina died? What if she died before she could tell him anything? What if she didn’t know anything?
“I know you,” Jack said. “Why would you do this?”
Mr. Grin backed up from Jack, held his hand up to his ear and looked down at his bloody palm.
“You’d love to know, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “I really would like to know why you decided to single-handedly destroy my life.”
“Put the gun down.”
“What?”
“You heard me, shitcrawler. Put the gun down and I’ll tell you. We’ll have us a little pow-wow.”
“How ‘bout you tell me and I won’t shoot you right away.”
“This was supposed to be about two men going at each other hand to hand. Fightin over a lady. Just like men have did for years.”
“I’ve never fancied myself much of a traditional man.”
“Put the fucking gun down or I’ll jump on this bed and snap her fucking neck!”
Could Jack live with not knowing any of the answers to this mystery? Would he live at all if he put the gun down?
He didn’t know if he would. There was no way he could go hand-to-hand with Briggs. He didn’t even reall
y know if Briggs was just a man or if he was something more, something supernatural, capable of inflicting people with brands and forcing them to do his bidding.
Jack faked tossing the gun on the bed and watched Mr. Grin feint toward it. In that split-second he realized the giant man had no intention of telling him anything anyway.
He aimed and fired.
A hole blossomed in the middle of Mr. Grin’s forehead.
He took a step back, shook his head, blood flowing freely out of the hole until it collected on the tip of his nose and dripped off.
Jack wished he could quit smiling. This didn’t feel like a smiling activity.
“Fucker!” Mr. Grin shouted, now shambling toward him.
The hotel room was small. Jack didn’t have anywhere to run or to retreat to. Nervous, he fired off the final shot.
This one caught Mr. Grin in the left eye. It turned to black pulp. Jack kept waiting for him to stop and just drop dead onto the floor because that was what people who had been shot twice in the head were supposed to do, wasn’t it? They weren’t supposed to just keep coming like there wasn’t anything wrong with them at all.
Before he could even think of what to do next, Mr. Grin had him in his grip, stripping the gun from his hand and throwing it onto the carpet.
Mr. Grin threw him easily into the end table. While Jack’s previous pains had all been healed, this reassured him he was not immune.
Mr. Grin grabbed a large butcher knife from the bed. The knife’s blade and handle were already sticky with blood. Jack hadn’t seen the knife until now. If he had seen that before, he would have grabbed it while he still had the gun. Then he would have had all the weapons.
Mr. Grin approached him. Bent down over him. Jack smelled the stench like sweaty rotting meat.
He tried to kick him away, feeling helpless, but it was like kicking a stone.
Mr. Grin grabbed the back of Jack’s head with his left hand, holding it steady.
“How bout we make that grin permanent, shitcrawler.”
Jack and Mr. Grin Page 12