The Eaton

by John K. Addis

  “I suspect the fear of seeing me killed before giving you the answer must have forced it into your mind,” Janet suggested.

  Sam smiled. Sarah always had a knack for saying just the right thing to diffuse a situation. He turned back to the elevator.

  “So what's making this car stuck?” Sam started to walk toward it, but Vaughn stopped him with his arm, preventing his approach.

  “Hey, don't get too close,” he said. “It doesn't seem stable.”

  As if on cue, the elevator car shifted, falling an inch or two and shimmying, accompanied by a disconcerting screech of metal.

  “Besides,” Vaughn added, “we need to help Janet, and find Al.”

  “And we need to get out of here,” Sarah added.

  “All in time,” Vaughn said.

  Sam nodded. “Right, okay.” He turned to Janet. “What do you think? Is your leg broken?”

  Janet shook her head. “No, but I don’t think I can walk on this ankle. Can you check in there?” She gestured a hand across the hallway to the Apothecary. “There might be a splint, and,” she winced, “painkillers.”

  “Century-old morphine should do the trick, eh Janet?” Sam teased.

  Janet moaned, but recovered with a chuckle. “Sounds perfect.”

  “Alright then.” Sam looked to Sarah. “Want to check in here with me?”

  Sarah was unsure. She was still distrustful of Vaughn, so she didn't want to leave him alone with Janet. But she didn't want Sam to go alone, either. “Will you be okay here?” she asked Janet.

  “Of course.”

  “I’m sorry I took your last Advil,” Sarah said.

  Janet smiled. “Oh, I think a sliced nipple beats a sprained ankle any day, dear.”

  “Alright.” Sarah walked with Sam across the hall to the Apothecary, where they began to search through the shelves.

  “I bet the good stuff is behind the counter,” Sam reasoned, and hopped over the locked half-gate separating the back from the general store.

  Sam was surprised at the relative emptiness of the store shelves. Some areas appeared rummaged through, and there were a few empty containers whose contents appeared to have been drained on the spot. Still, he and Sarah were able to find bandages, a splint, and an amber glass bottle of liquid pain medication, and brought the items out into the hall. Sarah braced herself for the possibility that Vaughn and Janet would be missing, but they hadn't moved.

  “Excellent,” Janet exclaimed as she eyed the bandages. Vaughn helped hold her still as Sam and Sarah braced and wrapped her injured right ankle. The pain medication contained a glass eyedropper but no instructions for use, so Sarah reasoned one dropper full would be the adult dose. Janet winced at the bitter taste, but was grateful, and sighed peacefully, leaning her head against the hallway wall, closing her eyes a moment to allow the medicine to kick in.

  Sarah took a dose of the medicine as well, her mutilated breast never being far from her thoughts, then knelt beside Janet and held her hand. “We all saw the elevator,” she said.

  “There's a big difference between an imaginary elevator and an imaginary person,” Janet responded warily, perhaps reconsidering her earlier defiance.

  “Yes there is,” Sarah agreed. “We have to be on guard.” She turned her head to glare at Vaughn.

  “What did I do?” Vaughn shrugged.

  Sam shot an irritated glance at his girlfriend. “We're all real here.”

  “What about Al,” Janet asked.

  Sam furrowed his brow. “Al, I think, freaked out. But remember, all of us, except for Kedzie, were here from the beginning, before we entered The Eaton.”

  This made sense to Janet, who became thoughtful. Then her face took on a look of concern. “Sam, what if Al found a way out, from the journal, and escaped without us? What if it's something we couldn't find for ourselves?”

  “Al wouldn't do that,” Sam assured her.

  “Really? How well do you know him?”

  Sarah turned to Sam as well, also curious about this man she had never met before today.

  “Well enough,” was Sam's weak reply.

  “Well enough,” Janet responded with derision. “Well enough to entrust your life to him?”

  “Not when you put it like that,” Sam admitted. “But well enough to believe he wouldn't put our lives at risk by abandoning us.”

  “No one's lives are at risk,” protested Sarah. “The only person we saw get killed wasn't a real person to begin with.”

  “Excuse me honey,” Janet said, “but what if the elevator had been five floors down instead of five feet? I could have been killed.”

  “Either way, we need a plan,” said Sam. “Vaughn, you and I should see if we can get this elevator unstuck. It's blocked by something.”

  “I don't think I want to try that elevator again, Sam,” Vaughn argued.

  “Well we can't get out any other way,” Sam said.

  Sarah stood up, offering her hand to Janet. “We need to find Al first,” she said. “He has the journal. And the gun.”

  “Down is the wrong direction,” Janet moped, though she grudgingly agreed with the logic of finding the only person who may have answers. “And I'm not sure I can stand yet.”

  “Let's try,” Sarah insisted, her hand still extended.

  With Sarah and Sam's help, Janet managed to get to her feet. “Were there any canes in the pharmacy there?”

  “I don't think so,” said Sam. He went in again to look, but came out empty-handed.

  “There might be a pool cue in the Gameroom,” Sarah reasoned.

  Janet leaned on Sam and they limped together to the Gameroom, followed by Sarah and Vaughn. The walls were rich and wooden, and attractive amber chandeliers hung from the ceiling. A dozen or so leather-backed chairs were paired up with end tables and ashtrays. And, there were indeed two billiard tables and a cabinet of pool cues. The cues all seemed the same size and level of sturdiness, so Janet selected one that complemented the color of her burgundy blazer. She experimented with which side of the cue should serve as the bottom of the impromptu cane, and practiced walking with it.

  Sarah noticed a small latched door, about the size of a pizza box, on the far wall near an attendant's podium. To the side of the door was a call button, and three other buttons labeled “Bar,” “Laundry,” and “Mastersuite.” She slid open the door revealing an empty serving tray.

  “Dumbwaiter,” explained Sam as he approached her. “Maybe so people in the Gameroom could order cocktails from the lounge bar, or towels perhaps for the Mastersuite.”

  “I'll take a beer,” called Vaughn.

  “I don't think anyone's down there to take our order, Vaughn.”

  “Al might be,” Janet said. “Maybe that's where he went, to get a drink. I know I could use one.”

  Sam thought about this. Al certainly loved alcohol, but Sam couldn't believe he'd race down ten flights of stairs to get a drink without explanation. Was there another reason he might have returned to the lounge? What had he read in the journal that affected him so? He looked at Janet.

  “How do you think stairs will be for you?”

  “I may need a little help,” Janet admitted. “Just, go slowly.”

  “Okay.”

  The four left the Gameroom and entered the stairwell from the hall. Janet limped along with surprising efficiency, using the handrails and her makeshift cane. They descended three levels before they began to hear the sound of sloshing liquid. By the time they had reached level five, they could go no further, as the stairwell was flooded, filled with brown, stinking water.

  eighteen

  “I'm telling you, it was Danny!” Niamh was in tears, but her voice and her grasp on Jon’s arm were firm and unyielding.

  “Niamh,” Jon said softly, “your brother died when you were kids. He isn't in this hotel with us. Do you understand?”

  “You didn't see him, Jon,” she cried. “He looked exactly the
same as I remember. He was even wearing the same shirt I last saw him in.”

  “Yes, Niamh. But that was twenty years ago. He wouldn't be the same age, would he.”

  Niamh's expression turned cold, her Irish temper simmering below the surface. “I'm not saying he survived. I'm saying his ghost is in this hotel.”

  “But that makes even less sense than him surviving,” Jon explained.

  “Does it? Does it Jon? Do you know everything? With all your world travels and exploring, can you tell me there's not one damned thing you've ever seen that you can't understand?”

  Jonathan said nothing. He had not told Niamh about the content of the petroglyphs on the cave walls yesterday, nor the whispered comments he overheard at breakfast this morning about the strange claims of a construction worker named Tim, who swore he saw the pneumatic train car immersed in a sea of flames, which turned out to be false. Jon did not want to worry his wife, who suffered from anxiety and depression, and he certainly didn't believe she saw a ghost. He began to wonder, however, if there was some sort of hallucinatory effect from the deep magnetic mineral water which surrounded them. It might even explain the wall carvings and the empty cave room covered by a boulder. If the natives had been exploring the caves and succumbed to a similar psychosis, perhaps one had seen a monster, and others had seen unexplained people and animals, and they convinced themselves that a shapeshifter lived among them, to be captured and detained.

  “I'm not saying I don't believe you,” Jon said, taking one of her hands in his. “I just want you to think logically. Your brother is dead, and there's no such thing as ghosts.” As she seemed unmoved, he continued. “I suppose it's possible that there's an unanticipated effect of being this far below ground. We're a full 24 hours without sunlight now, and,” he smiled, “we barely slept last night.”

  Niamh smiled back at him, the first smile since she had seen her brother. The night before, there had been a party in the lounge hall, and they had eaten imported cheeses and mingled with a few of the county's most elite residents. Wine had flowed for hours, and they both had indulged themselves. They had danced together for the first time since their wedding, falling into a comfortable groove as if they attended such lavish affairs with regularity. By the time they had returned to their room, his hands were all over her, caressing her neck and arms and breasts, helping her to remove her gown, furtively kissing her collarbone and shoulders, until they made love with an intensity that rivaled anything in their first year together. As they held each other afterwards, Jon could smell the sweet wine on his wife's breath, and her perfume-bathed sweat, and felt lucky for the first time in ages. This morning, he had helped her dress, which somehow seemed more intimate than removing her clothes had been the night before. He kissed her with sweetness before he left to meet again with Oliver, but she had been a different person when he had returned. At least now her tears had begun to dry, and there was still a trace of a smile from the memory of making love.

  “Oh Jon,” she said. “He was so real. He even spoke. He knew my name. The name only he called me—Neevie.”

  “What did he say?”

  Niamh paused. “He said he was thirsty. He said he was dying of thirst, and wouldn't I help him get something to drink.” She burst into tears again, burying her head in Jon's chest.

  “What is it, my sweet?”

  Niamh looked up into her husband's confused eyes, but shook her head. “I can't,” she whispered.

  “You don't have to,” Jon assured her. “But you can tell me anything.”

  Niamh remembered back to the afternoon Danny died, drowned in the freshwater lake half a mile behind their house. It had been a beautiful but uncharacteristically hot Autumn day, and Danny had indeed been thirsty. He had asked his older sister to get him something to drink from the house, or from the well beside it, for he had twisted his ankle falling out of a tree the day before, and knew she could run the distance easier than he could. But Niamh was consumed with picking wildflowers, and instead suggested that Danny drink from the lake. He agreed, and that was the last she saw him alive.

  Jon knew that Niamh hated flowers. He found that out early, when he arrived with flowers for their second date and her older sister, who had answered the door, shook her head in a panic and instructed Jon to hide or destroy the bouquet before Niamh could come down the stairs. Months later, when he had asked her about this unusual aversion, she had admitted to him that she had been picking flowers when her brother had died, and so forever after they had an unpleasant association. But she had not described the manner of Danny's death, nor her years of guilt for having suggested her injured brother drink from a lake rather than running to the house for him.

  Now, in Jon’s arms, she was about to reveal the whole story, when they heard a woman scream.

  Jonathan ran to the door and into the hallway, though he motioned for his wife to stay inside their room. At first he saw only a man and woman staring ahead at the black door to the stairwell, but as he looked closer he could see the flies. There were thousands upon thousands of them, covering every square inch of the door, and bleeding into the surrounding woodwork.

  Before he could act, Jon heard the elevator open behind him at the other end of the hall. It was his assistant Clem.

  “I heard a scream while coming up,” Clem said, exiting the elevator. “Is everyone okay?”

  “The flies!” Jon shouted, gesturing toward the far door. The number appeared to have grown, and the insects were starting to buzz, or maybe it was just the flapping of so many small wings in such a tight space.

  “What flies?” asked Clem, continuing forward down the hallway. He was so close that Jon could smell the whiskey on his breath.

  “Right there,” shrieked the only woman in the hallway, whom Jon assumed had been the source of the scream. But as she pointed, and they all looked, the flies seemed to melt away, some seeming to fly into unseen crevices, others dissolving into the air without a trace. All that was left was a wooden door, which had never been black at all.

  No one said a word, until Jon confronted Clem. “You didn't see that? You didn't see them disappear?”

  “Jon, there was nothing there,” Clem said. “Honestly nothing.” In truth, Clem thought that he had seen something, a strange black mass pushing against the door, but he didn’t want to admit it, attributing it to the fog of alcohol.

  “But we all saw it,” Jon retorted. “All the rest of us, right?” He turned to the other three guests, who each voiced their agreement. “Thousands of them!”

  “We need to leave this place,” a soft voice intoned behind them. It was Niamh, standing at the doorway to the suite.

  “Now hang on,” Clem said, with a touch of belligerence. “I don't know what you thought you saw, but it appears to have been an illusion.”

  Jon scoffed at this. “An identical illusion shared by three different people?”

  “But nothing was there,” Clem protested. He took a step back and bumped against the wall.

  “Well,” Jon deduced, “maybe you had so much to drink it affected your eyesight.”

  “My eyes are fine,” Clem snapped. “And we're not leaving. Tonight's the big dinner.” Jon observed that Clem slurred the word “dinner.”

  The door to the stairwell opened.

  “Hey,” said Oliver, entering the hall. “Someone said they heard a scream a floor below. Is everything okay?”

  Over the next few minutes, Oliver heard a competing narrative from the three who saw the flies and Clem who did not. Niamh also spoke up, describing but somewhat downplaying the vision of her brother she “thought” she saw. She seemed embarrassed and uncertain to share her story, and was torn between wanting to support her husband and wanting her usual privacy. Worse, she wasn't sure if the look Jon was giving her was one of thanks or one of consternation.

  “Alright,” Oliver said at last, throwing his hands up and appealing for a truce. “The truth is, I saw something too. B
ut it wasn't an illusion. I saw the banquet our chef is preparing tonight, and it's amazing. Is it possible that the proximity to the magnetic fields and mineral springs can cause harmless, mild hallucinations? Seems doubtful to me. But I don't know. Luckily, someone who might know is here with us: Alexander Winchell. I invited him here to study the water composition, the same way I invited you, Jon, to study the…rocks.” Jon smirked at Oliver's avoidance of mentioning the actual carvings, which were the only reason the rocks were of any interest. “We'll have an excellent dinner, and we'll all talk. Lobster, steak, and an octopus salad served in a clam shell. Have you all had octopus? No? You'll love it. Look, we'll figure this out, I promise.” He offered what seemed to Jon a sincere smile. “Alright?”

  There were reserved nods of approval from all in the hallway, although Jon could see Niamh was unimpressed.

  They said their goodbyes, and people returned to their rooms and to the elevator. When Jon and Niamh were alone in their suite, Niamh grabbed his arm.

  “It was Danny. He was right in front of me. I could smell him, Jon.” Her face fell. “I know there aren't ghosts. The Lord would never allow it. But if it was an hallucination, then I don't care for hallucinations.”

  “I know, dear,” Jon said. “And, remember, I did see the flies. I did. But Clem didn't. Which means they weren't real. And that's all that matters.”

  Niamh nodded gravely. “We should talk to the scientist or water expert or whatever he his, and if there's a rational explanation, or some sort of antidote tonic, I'll support you if you want us to stay. And in the meantime, I'll keep away from the baths. But Jon, if it happens again, I don't think I can stay here.”

  “I agree,” said Jon. “There's a train back to Lansing every afternoon. We've missed today's, of course, but we can take tomorrow's if anything else happens.”

  Niamh smiled. “I suppose I should dress for dinner. Though, in truth, I’m not particularly excited about the octopus.”