The Eaton

by John K. Addis

  Jon's eyes followed her body as she entered the bathroom. He then sat beside the bed, took his journal off the end table, and began to write a brief description of what had just taken place, including the imaginary flies. It was his tenth entry of the trip so far, counting the six entries he had composed before their first day here. After he had finished, and since Niamh had not yet emerged from the other room, Jon went back and reviewed some of the sketches and rubbings he had made of the strange carvings. As he studied them, it sure didn't seem like the Indians were describing “harmless, mild hallucinations.” These petroglyphs depicted a tangible threat. And Jon was beginning to feel, at the back of his neck, the first real rustling of fear.

  nineteen

  “Oh my God,” Sam said as they stared at the water in the stairwell. “What if Al was down there?”

  “What the hell could have happened,” demanded Sarah. “How could five floors have flooded so quickly? This doesn't make any sense.”

  “It smells terrible,” Janet observed. “Maybe a sewer line broke?” She was remembering a horrible moment from childhood, when their own sewer had backed up and flooded the basement almost a full foot and a half high, past the lowest step, so it looked like you were about to step down into a wading pool filled with sludge.

  “A hundred years without use,” Vaughn laughed. “Did anyone use a toilet since we've been here?”

  Sam was irritated at Vaughn's insensitivity. “You want to make jokes when Al might have been down there?”

  “Well hang on,” Janet interjected. “Sarah's right. This type of flooding takes time. Even if Al had gone all the way down, he would have seen the water pour in. He would have climbed or swam up as fast as he could. So maybe it means he's on one of the higher levels.”

  Sarah was shaking her head. “No, something isn't right. It's just too much.” She began to approach the water, kneeling down to the edge.

  “Stay back, Sarah,” Vaughn advised. “That shit is nasty.”

  Sarah winced as she inhaled the pungent odor. It smelled worse than it had just moments earlier, like dog excrement combined with the mushroomy semen stench that had accosted her an hour ago. Every instinct in her body told her to get away from it, to run up the staircase to vomit. But she couldn't. Though her body was convinced, her mind told her something was wrong. And now that she was certain about the fake Kedzie, she no longer trusted anything she saw, especially if it was unusual.

  Sarah slowly reached out her hand to touch the water, despite Sam and Vaughn's shouted protestations, but she snapped her arm back when she saw a creature move below the surface. It looked like a long, slender fish, but then it lifted its head out of the water and snapped its teeth.

  “A piranha!” exclaimed Vaughn. “Sarah, get away from there!”

  Sarah's fears subsided, and she laughed. “A piranha? Ten stories below the surface? In Eaton fucking Rapids?” Without thinking twice, Sarah turned and stepped down into the water.

  “No!” Sam exclaimed. But in an instant they could see she was right. It had been an illusion. As soon as her foot broke the plane of the water, the liquid flickered and vanished, as if a bubble had popped.

  Sarah turned to her friends defiantly. “The sooner you start to understand that we can't trust everything we see, the sooner we have a chance to get out of here.”

  “But how did you know,” Sam asked, incredulous.

  “Because,” Sarah replied, irritated at her boyfriend's dimness on the matter. “It didn't make any sense. It had to be an illusion.”

  “What about Kedzie,” Sam protested. “She may not have been real, but she wasn't an illusion. We touched her. She touched us back. You bandaged her wound. You can't have physical contact with a damned hallucination.”

  Sarah shook her head. “Look, I have no idea. Really, I don't have any answers at all. I just know that if there had been an actual water break, I'd be soaked to my knees right now. And I'm not. Which means maybe something doesn’t want us to go down there. Which means that we should. So let's keep going.”

  “No, wait a minute,” said Sam, holding his hands out. “We need a plan. What if Al's not down there? What, we just go floor to floor again like we did with Kedzie? What if the next hallucination convinces us to fall down a flight of stairs? Or worse, what if we do see Al again, and it's not Al, and we have no way of knowing because he was out of our sight? Then what the fuck do we do?”

  Sarah recognized the tone in Sam's voice. He was starting to panic. She had heard this only twice before, both times when he had lost complete control of a situation and saw no way out. It was different than his momentary spasms of fear, like he had with the imagined mouse in the back room of the hotel lobby. Everyone had those. But panic was different. She loved Sam's strength in a crisis, and he had been great through this, but she knew his strength lasted only as long as Sam felt he could make decisions that could conceivably improve the situation. Once all appeared lost, or when no decent options were left, Sam crumpled, and became as helpless as a child. In those moments, he leaned on Sarah. Now was not the time to admit she didn’t have all the answers. Like she had earlier with the gun, she would need to take charge.

  “Alright,” Sarah decided. “We’re going to go floor by floor, peek our heads in each hallway, shout for Al, and if we find him, we ask where the hell he went, and take the journal and see what’s in there. We ignore anything out of the ordinary and we stick together.”

  Sam nodded at Sarah. “And if the journal doesn’t tell us how to get out, should we try the transit level again?”

  “That’s a dead end,” said Vaughn, shaking his head. “The tunnel just stopped, remember?”

  Sarah frowned at this, but said nothing.

  Janet, however, seemed more shaken than she had earlier. She kept tilting her head to listen to imagined sounds, or felt spider webs across her face that weren’t there. Even with the illusions of the elevator and the water, she had trouble accepting the idea that Kedzie hadn’t been real. It seemed much more logical that Sarah had been mistaken about the tattoo, and that Kedzie had been killed and taken. Or what if Sarah hadn’t been mistaken, and had instead been lying? Maybe the reason Sarah knew about her roasting marshmallows on her stove had been because she could read her mind. Maybe Sarah was the monster. And now she was leading them deeper into the bowels of the hotel. Into a trap.

  “No,” Janet squeaked. The others looked at her with surprise.

  “No what?” demanded Sarah.

  “We don’t go down,” Janet insisted. “We try to fix the elevator first and get out of here. Maybe get help. Let someone else track down Al.”

  Sam took a step toward his friend and agent. “Janet, we need to find him. Even if the journal doesn’t tell us anything, Al’s still the only one of us who would have any idea how to repair a century-old elevator. Sarah’s plan makes sense. And we shouldn’t split up.”

  They argued for a few moments, before Janet began to cry.

  “Guys,” she said, tears streaming down both cheeks. “I can’t take this. I’m trying to be strong, I am. But I can’t keep going.”

  “We’re going to help,” Sam assured her. “It’s going to be alright.”

  Sam looked up at Vaughn, and the two friends shared a brief, sad smile. They had been through a lot together, and Sam wondered if Vaughn was having the same specific memory from several years prior. They had known each other casually at the time, through mutual friends, and hadn’t yet hung out one-on-one, but somehow at a party they came up with the idea to have a double-date. Sam had been getting serious with a girl named Katherine, and Vaughn had hung out once with Katherine’s new roommate Brooke, with whom there seemed to be a mutual connection.

  A hot new club had opened in the city of Pontiac, an outer ring suburb of Detroit about ninety minutes from Lansing. Pontiac’s nightlife district had flourished in the previous decade, and it seemed every former church and warehouse within three city blocks had a li
quor license and a dance floor. One small block by itself contained a jazz and swing joint, a dueling piano bar, a country line-dancing bar, an industrial metal club, a gay disco, a douchey frat bar, and an R&B club with rap battles on Fridays. The new club, Venue A, was on the corner of this legendary block, in the former location of NozzleZ, a firefighter-themed hangout whose male bartenders went shirtless, serving sweet drinks such as the “Abs-Salute” and the “Massive Cock-tail.” Venue A was trying to stand out in the city by having no defined theme at all, to the point that house DJs were instructed to deliberately choose music in contrast to the newest arrivals. If a large group of people sauntered over from the country bar, the music would morph into hip-hop. If twenty people poked their heads in from the R&B club, they were treated with back-to-back hits by Dave Matthews. Even the aesthetics of Venue A were painstakingly neutral, espousing no particular point-of-view at all. The club’s proprietors, if their interview with The Oakland Press was to be believed, were trying to create an environment “foreign yet approachable,” under the assumption that a “melting pot” could “bridge the disparate populations on the strip,” becoming everyone’s “starting bar” and “last call spot.” At least for now, it seemed to be working; in its first two months, business was solid and crowds were common. As a double-date location for a white couple and a black couple with few mutual interests, Venue A was an obvious choice.

  Neither Vaughn nor Sam had appreciated how long a ninety minute drive would feel among relative strangers. Sam had volunteered to drive, and so Katherine sat in the passenger seat, meaning Vaughn and Brooke had to sit in the back, which made Sam feel a touch uncomfortable for perceived racial concerns, and Vaughn feel uncomfortable for reasons of his physical height and leg length. Conversation between Sam and Katherine was necessarily stunted, as they could only talk about trivialities among company, and conversation between Vaughn and Brooke was equally artificial, as they felt the standard “getting to know you” chatter was unbalanced in the presence of an established couple. They had each imbibed in a beer beforehand to loosen up, but full sobriety had kicked in after thirty miles on the road, and the artifice of the double date proved too obvious to ignore. The four had no musical tastes in common, so even the CD and radio selections were awkward. By the time they arrived at the common parking lot, paying a toothless gentleman the rather outrageous sum of $10 to park in an unlit, unmonitored concrete slab which was a private lot during business hours, each couple couldn't wait to ditch the other pair and start their own quality time.

  There wasn't a line at Venue A this evening, though a decent crowd greeted them with indifferent nods as they entered. It was just after 11:00 p.m., so Sam reasoned that they were too late for the groups starting their evening and far too early for those ending it, thereby stuck between the two time periods the bar was best known for. As a way of finding a private spot and getting to have some actual date time, it was perfect. Each couple found a two-person table along the same wall, not adjacent but not so far apart that anyone felt they were being rude, and the double date transitioned into two single dates.

  A half hour later, a group of young Latino men walked in, and so in keeping with the club's theme of counter-programming, the DJ spun a Middle Eastern techno hip-hop fusion song which was unknown to everyone in attendance. For some reason, however, the sparsely-attended dance floor began to fill in, and Katherine grabbed Sam's hand to dance at the same time Vaughn grabbed Brooke's. The four swapped knowing smiles as they began to strut their stuff and grind their bodies to the bizarre beat, and by the end of the song, the whole dance floor was applauding and laughing. The DJ took the hint, and played another unknown track Sam guessed was in Korean, and the crowd ate it up. Sam and Vaughn exchanged an amused and curious look across the floor, as neither had ever witnessed a DJ increasing the number of dancers through obscure song selection, rather than relying on popular standbys.

  As the drinks flowed, the two pairs mingled back into a foursome, albeit a closer and more giggle-prone foursome than they had been in the car. A passerby would have likely concluded the four had been friends for years, as their conversation had developed an intimate quality of asides and in-jokes.

  At one point, Katherine and Brooke excused themselves to the restroom, and Sam and Vaughn were able to talk one-on-one. At first they commented on the beer they were drinking, and the short, tight skirt of a tattooed woman who passed before them, but then Sam looked around and said:

  “Ya know, someday I’d love to own a place like this.”

  Vaughn’s interest was piqued. “Really? Do you mean ‘it would be cool to,’ or ‘I actually want to’?”

  Sam took a long swig of beer. “I’m not sure,” he said. “But I think maybe I actually want to. Though not this big…maybe more of a cool cocktail bar than a dance club.”

  “You’d still have dancing, though, right?”

  Sam nodded. “Yeah, sure. I’d want it to be fun. Look at all these little crowds here.” Sam gestured across from them to a standing cocktail table, where six people of varying ages and skin tones were laughing so hard they couldn’t catch their collective breath. “I bet those guys and girls didn’t even come in together, and now they’re having the time of their lives.”

  Vaughn smiled. “Alcohol’s pretty amazing, right?”

  “Right,” Sam laughed. “But it’s also atmosphere, and music, and fun waiters, and all of that. It’s why some places can seem dead even when packed, and others seem alive when they’re half-empty.”

  “Spent a lot of time studying bar life, Sam? Getting a degree in clubbin’? This all research to you? Wanna cover my tab so you can write it off at tax time?”

  “I’m just an observer,” Sam laughed, shaking his head and downing the last of his beer. “I like observering.”

  “And drinkering,” Vaughn chuckled.

  “I know, I know, you think this is just drunk talk. But you shouldn’t be surprised if you’re walking downtown Lansing or somewhere someday, and see me hanging a neon sign on some beautiful old building, and getting all jealous of my name in lights.”

  “Yeah, well you just let me know if you need a DJ.”

  “You know someone?”

  “I am someone,” Vaughn said, with an exaggerated air of sophistication. “Well, or I will be. I got a couple Numark’s tied into an old Behringer that’s pretty decent. My cousin hooked me up. He does a few clubs in Ann Arbor and some private parties. Nice little supplemental income, ya know what I’m saying? And it’s fun as hell.”

  “Well alright then,” Sam agreed. “Let’s do it.” He clinked his empty glass against Vaughn’s half-full one with a flourish.

  “What was that about,” asked Brooke, approaching the table with Katherine. “That better not have been the ‘I’m getting laid tonight’ toast.”

  “Nope,” said Sam brightly. “Just business.”

  “Okay, good,” teased Brooke.

  “Wait,” Vaughn interjected with a serious, pained expression. “You mean I’m not getting laid?”

  No one had time to laugh before a gunshot exploded behind them. Sounds of breaking glass and screaming drowned out the music, and most of the hundred people in the club instinctively ducked down, crouching and looking around for the shooter.

  Sam motioned to the others to follow his gaze. The person with a gun was a short, tattooed white guy in his early twenties, standing on the other side of the dance floor from where the four had crouched. The man had apparently fired his weapon high, on purpose, to scare the target of his rage, but now had aimed it at her, staring the woman down with an intensity approaching madness.

  “Everyone here is a witness!” the man shrieked, and then a nervous look of discomfort flooded his face, as if he registered how unhinged his voice had sounded. He took a breath and repeated the phrase with more authority, gaining strength from the mass of eyes upon him.

  The man turned to the DJ, who had also crouched down, and ordered him to
“shut that shit off.” The DJ complied, and the thumping beats were replaced by a soft chorus of sobs and whimpers from the frightened crowd.

  Then, in a flash, the man turned his gun toward the front door and fired another shot, blasting a large hole in the safety glass on the door itself, showering glass pellets onto the couple who had been trying to slip out unnoticed.

  “The next fucking person who tries to leave is dead! Am I being clear enough for you?” The man sounded even more unhinged than before, screaming and spitting the words in a sort of broken-sobbed cackle, but he no longer seemed distressed by his own tone. “No one gets out of here until this diseased bitch has confessed to whoring around on me!”

  The woman he was referring to, a pretty tattooed girl with short dyed-red hair and a tight black tank, fell to her knees, sobbing in a panic. Sam and Vaughn had noticed her earlier. “Jimmy!” she croaked between gasps. “Oh, Jesus, Jimmy. Jesus!”

  Jimmy kicked her in the gut.

  “Get up!” he barked. When she resisted, he made a motion threatening to pistol-whip her face. She stood, trembling, and seemed to be mouthing his name inaudibly, over and over, almost in prayer. “Will whoever has had their cock inside my girl please raise their hands, right now! Raise them high, so I can see them, and don’t fucking lie to me!”

  No one seemed to be raising their hand, and the few that still had their hands raised in surrender before the request lowered them safely to their sides.

  “Oh really?” Jimmy laughed. He turned to a young dark-skinned man in a white dress shirt who, Sam remembered, had been dancing with the attractive woman earlier. “Not even you?” Without waiting for a response, Jimmy fired a round into the man’s shoulder. The man was thrown back by the force of the bullet, his body flailing and crashing into a cocktail table, sending him, the table, and its drinks to the ground. People screamed, including the tattooed girl, but no one moved to help the fallen man, who was in an obvious amount of pain, making agonized, guttural cries as blood pooled beside his collapsed body. Jimmy raised the gun back into the air, waving it around indiscriminately as if shooing away a mosquito. “Who’s next to testify? Or do I have to start shooting anyone who I caught looking at her tonight?”