The Eaton

by John K. Addis

  “Live one, eh?” said Al, turning the light so they could get a better look.

  Janet called out Kedzie’s name, then opened the door. They peered inside together, and cautiously entered.

  The double rooms were indeed larger than the singles, and seemed better appointed, with nicer headboards, armoires, and wood detailing, assuming this room was representative of its neighbors. The private bathroom was more spacious as well, with a clawfoot tub and a floor-length mirror. But Kedzie was nowhere to be found.

  There was evidence of past occupancy, however. Three glass wine bottles, all empty, lay beside one end table. The armoire contained several hanging men’s dress shirts and a pair of folded pants. Two large hardcover books sat on the edge of the bed, which seemed to have been made in haste.

  Al picked up one of the books with his free hand and read the spine. Love and Mr. Lewisham by H.G. Wells. He returned it to the bed and examined the second, which was Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Neither Al nor Janet had heard of either title. “Obscure is right,” noted Janet. But Al noticed that this second book seemed to weigh less than it should. He set down the DJ light and opened the novel with both hands, wherein he found a large L-shaped hole cut into the pages, hollowing out the insides. But the hidden compartment was empty.

  “Huh,” said Al.

  “Looks like the shape of a gun,” Janet remarked.

  This was plausible, observed Al. A revolver would fit quite well in this cut-out space, and would be just the sort of thing you might want to hide while traveling.

  Al frowned. “So this guy took his gun when he left, but not his books? Or his shirts and pants?”

  Janet said nothing. She was anxious and uneasy, and shuffled her feet a bit on the floor. “We should keep looking for Kedzie,” she suggested, and Al agreed. He picked up the light and the two made their way to the stairway once more.

  The two traveled up an additional flight to the suites level, one floor below the Apothecary where Vaughn had gone for a first aid kit before the lights went out. This time, the hallway contained just four doors, two on each side. The doors were wider and more ornate than the standard room doors they had seen so far, and the molding around each door boasted a more intricate design in a Victorian style. The hotel room numbers were large and brass, and to the left of each entrance, like a home address, rather than affixed to the doors themselves.

  “Oh, come on,” pleaded Al. “We have to go into one of these.”

  “Perhaps,” was Janet’s noncommittal reply.

  The first door Janet tried was locked. But the second door, room 802, was open. Janet called out “hello,” and as usual, no one responded. As Al did a sweep of his light across the room, however, the pair let out a gasp. This room looked like it had been trashed by rock stars. Most of the furniture was overturned, and clothes were strewn across the floor, as if someone had tossed them out of a suitcase in a frenzy. Al shined the light up near the ceiling, revealing a large gap in the crown molding over the bed, with clear evidence of damage to the surrounding wall, suggesting the missing piece had been ripped down with intent.

  “Jesus,” Al remarked.

  Al could tell the suite had been luxurious, and must have cost a fortune compared to the rooms they had seen so far. There were additional electric lights, and even a ceiling fan, though nothing had power at the moment. The room even had a window, framed by expensive fabric, looking out into an oil painting of a spring garden embedded a few inches into the brick. But it was hard to appreciate the beauty of the surroundings when they were covered in such destruction. Someone had either lost something vitally important and had to find it in a hurry, or this was the aftermath of a very, very bad domestic dispute.

  As Janet and Al explored the suite further, they found more than a dozen empty liquor bottles in the bathroom, a few of them broken, as well as a cracked mirror dangling above some unsettling dark red spots on the tile below. At the sight of the dried blood, Janet let out a choked sob, and pulled Al’s shirt, pleading with him to return to the hallway with her. Al complied, and Janet closed the suite door with a forceful flourish, determined to never set foot in there again.

  Instinctively, Janet started toward the stairs, but stopped when she realized Al wasn’t following.

  “Where are you going?” asked Al.

  Janet stopped. “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  “There are still two more rooms to check.”

  “Al, she’s not here,” Janet announced with authority. “Let’s try another floor.”

  “We should at least knock on the other two doors,” Al persisted.

  Janet said nothing, and the two stared at each other for a long moment. It was hard to gauge Al’s expression, for the light he was carrying, aimed outward, cast himself in dark shadows. But his resolve seemed to be holding, and Janet couldn’t very well go exploring on her own without their primary light source. She considered her pocketed cell phone, which had a flashlight application, but reasoned it would be no match for the uncompromising tomb-like blackness.

  She threw up her hands.

  “Fine, have it your way.” She stomped over to the nearest door on the other side of the hallway and tried to turn the knob. Locked. She pounded on the door and called to Kedzie to come out if she was in there. No answer. Janet shot a look back to Al, who remained silent. She traversed the hallway to the last suite, 804, and her light man followed. This doorknob did turn, which gave Janet pause, and she considered for a moment pretending that it was locked. Had Al seen the knob turn? Could she get away with faking it? She decided that would be silly. After all, Kedzie was indeed missing somewhere, and an unlocked room would be as good a place to hide as any.

  Fuck it, she told herself. I’ll open the damned thing.

  “Kedzie?”

  Janet pushed open the door. Al swept the light into the room.

  A body hung motionless from the ceiling.

  thirteen

  “Right here.” Vaughn tapped a specific fuse in an ancient fuse box. Sarah removed the fuse, which was the size and shape of a laboratory test tube, and held it up to Vaughn’s light. A metal filament inside was burned through.

  Sarah stepped back and looked around for a box of replacement fuses, which she reasoned should be close by. After some digging in a nearby cabinet, she found a dozen new fuses stacked in neat rows at the bottom of a shallow drawer. She picked one at random, examined it under the light to ensure it was intact, and walked back to the fuse box. Before she could put it in, Sam was shouting something down the hallway.

  “What’s that, Sam?” asked Sarah.

  Sam stepped into the hallway. “I think I heard a scream up the stairwell. It might have been Kedzie, or maybe Janet, but I’m going to check it out.”

  “Want us to come?”

  “No, stay here and get the lights on. I’ll be back!”

  Without waiting for an answer, he began racing up the stairs. Sam used the dim light of his cell to see where he was going, but it was difficult. He lost track of the number of flights he had climbed, but was sure he must be close. “Kedz?” he called out. Then, “Al? Janet? Where are you?” There was no response. He strained to listen for sounds, but if there was anything to hear, it was no match for his labored breaths and pounding heartbeat. He raced up another flight. “Anyone? Hello?”

  He was about to try another, when the dim light of his cell caught motion on the next step. Was Sam seeing things? He took another tentative step, and again saw movement. A mouse. No, two mice. No, five. Sam angled the light upward. He couldn’t hear them, but he knew they were there. One of the stairs looked like it was jiggling, like jelly. But as his eyes adjusted, it was clear that this time, the supposed creatures had just been a trick of the light, affected by the shake in his hands from his jackhammering heart.

  “In here, Sam!” It was Al’s voice, from below, muffled through the stairway door nearby. Sam snapped out of his panic, raced down the st
airs and burst through the door to find Al holding the portable light in one arm and a sobbing Janet in the other.

  “I heard a scream,” Sam gasped.

  Al chuckled. “Told you he’d hear you all the way down there,” he said, giving Janet an affectionate pat. She did not seem amused.

  “What happened?”

  Al turned the light toward the open suite door, nodding to Sam to see for himself. Sam looked into the dark room and cried out. A dark body hung by its neck, suspended from a ceiling fan. It seemed to be shivering, swaying a bit, though it might have been an optical illusion caused by the shadows of the hand-held light-source. Sam realized who it must be.

  “Kedz!” he choked, leaping forward toward the hanging form.

  “No, wait! It’s—” But Al was too late. Sam had reached the body and swung it toward him, just as Al moved the light further into the room, allowing Sam to face the frail skeleton now sagging in his arms. The bones crackled and snapped under the force of his embrace, and Sam leapt backward, stumbled and fell to the ground, eyes still transfixed on the crumbling creature before him. The skeleton had been held together by its last remnants of mummified flesh, and by the fabric of a dress, but now had lost any ability to retain a human form. Within seconds, the skeleton was nothing but bones and dust lying in a heap under a swinging rope.

  “Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ!” Sam tried to scoot backwards but hit the wall behind him, causing a painting to tumble off its nail and land with a crunchy thud to his left. “Fuck!” he screamed again, squeezing his eyes tight and trying to calm his nerves.

  “Sorry about that,” said Al. “I just thought…”

  “You could have fucking warned me, Al!”

  Janet stepped into the room to comfort Sam, though she avoided looking in the direction of the pile of bones. “Come on,” she said reassuringly. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  She helped him to his feet, and they stepped around the bones with caution as they exited the suite together, rejoining Al in the hallway.

  “Fuck,” said Sam again. “I thought it was Kedzie.”

  “I know,” said Janet. “It’s this awful light. Everything’s hiding in the shadows. You can’t get a grasp on anything.”

  “No luck with the power?” asked Al.

  “They’re working on it,” Sam barked. Then, to no one in particular, “What the hell is wrong with this place?”

  *

  Six floors below, Sarah had snapped the fuse into its socket, but nothing had changed. She removed the fuse, again examined it under the light to confirm it was intact, and put it back. Still nothing.

  “There must be some sort of reset button,” Sarah observed, running her hands along all four sides of the fuse box, then stepping back to examine the wall for a switch.

  “What about that big lever?”

  “What lever?”

  “The one Al used.”

  Sarah remembered. The one that activated the metal magnetic discs and choppers which destroyed Vaughn’s phone. Vaughn angled the light toward that side of the room and Sarah approached the lever, stepping on a few pieces of pulverized metal and plastic from the last encounter. “Here goes nothing,” she said.

  The machine was silent at first, and Sarah stepped toward the discs to examine them closer. Eventually, a deep subsonic hum filled the space, and the discs on the wall began to spin. Soon the lights faded in, at first imperceptibly, as slow as a sunrise, and just as welcome. Sarah flashed a relief-filled smile to Vaughn, who smiled back. The large discs were spinning faster now, much faster, and the first metal screech of the chomping guillotine made Sarah flinched. Being in close proximity to the magnets was making her whole body tingle, as if her blood was tickling her skin from the inside out. The sensation was not altogether unpleasant, and at first she was reminded of the soft vibrations felt in the afterglow of an orgasm. But when the second guillotine slashed down, just inches away, the tingles devolved into a shivering dread. Something was wrong.

  Sarah felt a new tingling sensation, this time concentrated on her right nipple. For a moment it felt quite good, and then rough, as if someone was trying to yank her nipple off with pliers. It took just a moment for her to logically put this sensation together with her surroundings, but by then it was too late. Against her will, she felt her breast being pulled the inches between her body and the nearest spinning circle. It felt like it took a long time, as if she could make choices and push and pull with free will, but by the force with which her body was slammed into the magnet, she knew it could only have been a fraction of a second. It felt not only as if she were being pulled toward the device, but pushed from behind as well. The steel and iron nipple piercing was now glued to the magnet, an attraction too powerful to resist the thin fabrics of her bra and tight t-shirt, and she couldn’t break away.

  “Vaughn!” she screamed. “Vaughn, help!” She tried to turn toward Vaughn, against the hard angle, but couldn’t see him clearly, except to know he hadn’t moved. She turned the other way, to try and reach the lever which would shut the thing off, but it was out of reach.

  How many seconds had it been since the last slice? Three? Four? In a panic, she tried to pull at her trapped breast with both hands, crying out in pain as she tried turning, twisting, and yanking the nipple free. It felt as if the steel bar was going to slice right through the front of the nipple flesh, and soon Sarah was hoping—praying—that that’s what would happen, because the alternative…

  “Vaughn!” Sarah screamed again. Why wasn’t he helping? He just needed to grab her and pull her back. Or reach the lever and shut it off. Or pull the fuse out of the box behind him. Anything other than just standing there. Was he even still in the room? Once again, it felt like something was pushing against her back, and Sarah became certain that a magnet by itself couldn’t be strong enough to pin her in place, but when she strained to look behind her, she saw the space was empty.

  Sarah felt isolated, helpless and bewildered. How many seconds had it been? She tried again to reach for the lever, stretching her body like silly putty, until the tips of the fingers of the right hand just grazed the top of the damned thing, still needing another inch. She cried out, giving it everything she had, knowing she was almost there, when she heard the guillotine come down, felt the tug against her skin, sending her flying, falling beside the lever, knocking her head on a nearby shelving unit and calling out again.

  Her first thought was that she had done it, she had hit the lever, euphoric in the blissful fractions of seconds before pain kicks in, and then she felt it, in a wave, like being stabbed in the breast with a knife, and she dared looking down. There was a hole in her shirt, and where her right nipple had been, there was barely more than a stump, squirting blood in time with her pounding heartbeat, into the room and onto her body. She looked up at the big spinning discs, her nipple bar and a large chunk of her nipple spinning along with the magnet, and she screamed and screamed and couldn’t stop for several seconds. Soon the logical need for medical attention brought her back to reality, and she stood up, still bleeding everywhere, and looked around the room. Where the hell was Vaughn?

  She knew she had to press a hand against her breast to stop the bleeding and did so, applying as much pressure as she could stand while still being able to walk. Staggering out into the hallway, she first headed for the stairwell, but then remembered the power was on and tried the elevator buttons instead. She left a bloody fingerprint on the call button, but nothing happened. The elevator was still not functioning. Maybe it had to warm up? Either way, that was time Sarah didn’t have. She needed medical attention.

  She turned and ran down the hallway toward the stairwell side, almost slipping on a trail of blood by the maintenance door. As she opened the door, she cried out for help, screaming Sam’s name up the stairway as loud as she could. She started to climb the stairs but was too nauseous to get more than halfway up a single flight. Her insides flipped, and she nearly vomited.
She collapsed on the stairs then, certain she was going to pass out, when she heard Sam’s voice calling down to her.

  *

  When the lights had come back on, Sam and Al had decided to re-enter the room with the skeletal remains. Janet stayed in the hallway, under the excuse that she needed to listen for signs of Kedzie.

  It was the first time Al had seen one of the suites in its fully lit glory, not swept by a DJ’s LED spotlight. The architecture, the furniture, the upholstery…everything was impeccable. In fact, if not for the pile of bones by the bed and the crude homemade noose hanging from the ceiling fan, it would make a hell of a resort photograph.

  Sam noticed a notebook sitting on the far end table. He approached it and picked it up. It appeared to be some sort of journal. He thumbed through the pages and found dates and details spanning several weeks, apparently a sort of travelogue. About halfway through the diary, the writer begins to describe the start of their stay at The Eaton. Sam turned back toward the suite room door, and was about to describe to Al what he had found, when Janet appeared in the doorway.

  “Hey, I think I hear something in the hallway,” she said. “I think it’s Sarah! Someone’s shouting ‘Sam.’”

  Sam dropped the diary on the bed as he raced out the room and into the stairwell. It was indeed Sarah, and she was calling for him, in a panicked voice he had never heard from her, not in his life. He began to race down the stairs, first stair-by-stair and then using the railings to leap whole half-flights at a time. When he found her, he cried out in shock, for her shirt was drenched in blood, and her eyes were closed. But when she heard his cry, she opened her eyes, looked up at him, and was so relieved she laughed aloud.

  “Sarah! What the hell?”

  “My nipple bar,” she explained with a dark chuckle. “The magnets.”

  Sam had no idea what she was talking about until Sarah mentioned Vaughn’s cell phone. Even though that had happened just hours earlier, the memory felt months old. “Oh, shit, Sarah,” Sam said in sympathy. “Oh my God. What do you need?”