The Eaton

by John K. Addis

  Oliver studied the sketch, but didn’t seem to follow. “So?”

  “So,” said Jon, fighting to suppress a note of irritation, “the cause of the hallucinations was mobile. It traveled up the hotel in a simple pattern, floor by floor. If this were merely the effects of the mineral water, then people should have been affected at random. But instead, the visions were caused by something that moved.”

  “I see,” said Oliver, stiffening. “So that’s why you wanted to know if my hallucination story was true or false. Because I’ve been here for a long time, as has my construction crew. If it was the mineral water, we would have been affected. But we weren’t. So, instead, you’re trying to determine whether these anomalies are related to our moving of that cave boulder. Am I right?”

  “That’s right,” Jon replied, his voice hushed. “Now, I can’t claim to know much more than I can observe. I’m not saying there’s a demon, or a ghost, or anything specific at all. I am only pointing out to you that the cause of the hallucinations seems to be able to move. And if it can move, then it stands to reason that it might also once have been trapped, and has now been let out.”

  twenty-one

  “Come have a drink,” Al shouted with joviality from the bar at the other end of the lobby. Janet screamed, and Sam jumped three inches into the air, but Sarah took the distraction as an opportunity to place the keys back into Janet’s purse and postpone the argument over Vaughn. The look on Sam’s face had been severe, and she half-believed her boyfriend was preparing to overpower her and let the not-Vaughn through. But although they could still hear pounding from the other side of the thick wooden door, the urgency of the situation had passed, and confronting Al was the most important task at hand.

  “What the hell, Al,” Sam snapped. He took a step toward the open doors to the bar, then stopped, remembering Vaughn. Sam shot a look to Sarah to see if she had relented, but she shot him a strong look back. He huffed, then called through the door “Vaughn, hang in there, I’ll be just a second,” before turning back and jogging toward Al’s location.

  Seeing the ferocity in Sam’s gaze as he approached, Al raised both hands in surrender, as if expecting to be punched in the face.

  “Easy there, kid,” Al implored, his voice higher than normal and a bit slurred. “Lemme talk a second.”

  Sam stopped two feet before Al’s barstool and crossed his arms in defiance. “What’s going on, Al,” he demanded. “First Kedzie runs off, then Vaughn, and now you? What, is this just a game of hide and seek to everyone? Janet's right. We need to be working together to get out of here, not chasing each other around.”

  “Now wait a minute, champ,” Al responded. “You know as well as I do that your bimbo friend was never even here, and I’m sorry to break this to you…but your girl’s right, and that ain’t Vaughn.”

  “And how do you know that,” Sam demanded.

  “Cause unlike you, you dumb cluck, I actually listened to the chick.” Al picked up his drink again and took a quick gulp. “Think about it. You can’t trust anyone who haven’t had your eyes on this whole time, and I was there in the tunnel too.”

  “We haven’t had our eyes on you either,” Janet interrupted. “So why the hell should we listen to you?”

  “You shouldn’t listen to me,” Al chuckled. “You should knock back a few and see for yourself.”

  “Getting wasted isn’t going to help, Al,” groused Sarah.

  “Ohhh, excuse me,” Al responded with the sarcastic flourish of a practiced drunkard. “Well how about you read a little bit of this journal and tell me why not.” He motioned for the open book on the bar beside him. “Go on, girlie. Or let me spell it out for you. There’s a creature down here with us. He can look like anything he wants to, any person from our memories, from our experienthces…” Al paused for a moment, recognizing his slurred speech, and continued again at a more manageable pace. “It can read our minds, find people, find memories, and recreate them. But it’s not changing shape. It’s only our perception of his shape. It’s like a projection, like a hologram mask or some shit, I don’t know. And if he’s around, he can make you see other things, too, things that aren’t there, pulled from your memories like a fuckin’ plagiarist.”

  Sarah was listening to Al, but had also taken the book and was skimming the pages with trembling hands.

  “That’s what the writer of this journal said?” Sam was curt, but curious.

  Al and Sarah looked at each other and nodded.

  Sam was unconvinced. “And how could he be so sure?”

  Al laughed. “Because the fuckamotha tracked it.” He turned to Sarah. “Sweetie, show him the page with the…with the chart thing.”

  Sarah flipped back a few pages and held out the page to Sam and Janet. It did indeed show a cross-section of the hotel, complete with people’s names and sighting times.

  “There’s another one a few pages further,” Al advised. Sarah hadn’t seen that one yet, but when she flipped ahead to it, her face froze in terror.

  “Oh, shit,” she whispered.

  Sam looked over her shoulder to see another cross-section of the hotel, more hastily drawn than the first, that had many more times and a dozen people’s names written down beside different floors. But this time, two names were crossed out, the word “missing” scrawled beside each.

  While this sunk in, Sam became aware that he could hear Vaughn’s knocking once more, dull from the distance across the lobby but with an increased urgency. He looked back toward the stairs door, but made no move toward it. He could not believe his friend was an illusion. But he could not really believe Kedzie had been either. He whirled back to Al, finger raised in accusation, but trembling too much to inspire authority.

  “That doesn’t explain why the hell you ran off,” Sam said. “Or got wasted.”

  Sarah was back to reading the journal, and was about to come to Al’s defense, but he beat her to it.

  “Listen, son,” Al said. “There’s a way to see what’s real, and what ain’t, and this is it.” He raised his nearly-empty glass. “This thing uses the complex machinations of the brain to fool itself into seeing, hearing, feeling, even smelling something in your memory. But it needs the fleshy little computer to be fully operational. Alcohol interferes with the illusion.” Al turned to Janet. “I saw a split second of this with the elevator shaft, where it was both there, and…not there, at the same time. Like an old fluorescent light flicker. You understand?”

  Janet nodded, and the memory sent new pain up her injured leg. She leaned heavily on her burgundy pool cue.

  “And,” Sarah added, without looking up from the journal, “drinking might interfere with the creature being able to read your memory with total accuracy. Did you read the part about the flies?”

  Al nodded. “Right, for the same reason your own memory is slower and fuzzier when you’re drunk, apparently this thing reads slower, fuzzier memories from you too.” Then he glanced in his glass and added: “Slower, fuzzier, fluzzier.” He laughed in the form of a hiccup. “That should be a word, fluzzier.”

  “Al,” Sam protested, “even if I buy all of this, and even if this guy did figure it out, if we get wasted we don’t stand a chance against the thing. We need to be sharp, and fast, and you’re neither right now. So what if you can see it coming if you can’t move fast enough to get out of the way?”

  “Hey, man,” Al said, pouring more scotch into his glass. “I’d rather look my real killer in the eye than think I was being offed by my dear old Mom, know what I’m saying? My Grandpa…” But he didn’t finish the thought, downing his shot instead.

  Janet limped closer to Al. “I know what you’re saying,” she said. “And I agree. So pour me a double.”

  Sarah placed the unfinished journal down on the bar. She looked at her boyfriend with wet, pleading eyes. She wanted to get out of here, but her strength was wavering. The adrenaline that had given her swagger earlier had been replaced with a lo
w, dull dread, almost hopelessness. Sam walked over to Sarah and embraced her, her head nuzzled in his shoulder as she quietly sobbed. She would get her confidence back, they both knew, and her steely determination and will to survive would return. But she just needed a moment, one moment of weakness, to be held and comforted and told everything would be okay. And he was there for her.

  Al had uncorked another bottle of spirits and had poured three new glasses in addition to his own. Each of them downed the drinks like water, until half of the new fifth had been consumed. Sarah was particularly grateful for the drink, as the throbbing pain in her breast still occasionally threatened to overwhelm her. Janet held a hand to her mouth, ready to be sick, but held it in and belched instead, sweat dripping from her forehead as she hunched over, clutching the pool cue for support. Al skipped the last round, having been so far ahead of them to start, but Sam, who maintained his college-level tolerance, did a shot from the bottle as well.

  The four looked at each other in silence. In this quiet, foreign space, away from the panic and running around, the reality of the situation was finally, fully sinking in. They were being pursued by a creature of incredible power, who could trick them, make them see things from their deepest memories, and who, they believed, massacred dozens of people before them without a trace. They, too, were likely to die here, forgotten by history, unless they could figure something out that had eluded the victims a century before. And, they had to be drunk. It seemed so hopeless it was almost funny, and Sam couldn’t suppress a sick chuckle.

  “Well, this sucks,” Sam assessed. He had no idea what to do.

  Sarah straightened her posture. There were several issues demanding resolution. “First of all,” she said, “we have to agree on Vaughn. Sam, do you believe me now that he’s not there in the stairwell?”

  Sam nodded, but then froze.

  “It’s silent,” he observed after a beat.

  Janet shot him a confused look. “What’s silent?” But then she, too, understood. The dull sound of Vaughn’s pounding on the door was gone. How long had it been quiet? No one could say for sure.

  Sam looked around. His eyes darted behind Al to the pizza-box-sized door on the wall. “The dumbwaiter,” he said, pointing.

  Al spun in his seat and stared hard at the device. “No, I don’t think so Sam,” he said after a bit of drunken silence. “If they were right, it’s not a shapeshifter, not quite. It has a large physical form. It can make us think it’s something smaller, or project little things, but it can’t itself be little. None of us could fit in that thing, so neither can it. Otherwise, it couldn’t have been trapped behind that boulder hundreds of years ago, or trapped in that stairwell now. It’s not a ghost, Sam.”

  “Just a monster,” Sam added dryly. It occurred to Sam that, as a matter of fact, they couldn’t even be sure it had been trapped in the stairwell. If it was as powerful as Jonathan’s journal implied, it might have broken down the door, and was projecting an unbroken door into their collective minds. A sharp paranoia swept over him, and his eyes inventoried the room, looking for anything out of place, eventually staring at the far door, trying to see any hint of the “flicker” Al had described. But the door seemed as solid as ever, and nothing was attacking them.

  Sam left the bar area and walked to the center of the lobby, mentally cataloging the hopeless options before them. There was a back office area that could be locked, but to what end? They would hide in there until someone rescued them? Even if the door held, they could be trapped for days before someone discovered the hidden hotel, and even then, there was no guarantee they would be found. The kitchen would contain knives and other implements of self-defense, and they still had a gun as well, but what were the odds that the demonic creature could be injured by such things, especially when it could disguise its form and make an impossible, ever-shifting target?

  He felt Sarah’s hand take his. All four of them now walked together in the beautiful lobby, Al clutching the half-drunk fifth of whiskey, Janet leaning on her impromptu cane, and Sam and Sarah leaning on each other, trying to find peace in the panic, comfort in the futility of it all.

  “So if it can’t get through the dumbwaiter,” Sarah said, giving voice to the unspoken thought they all shared, “and it can’t get through the stairwell door, its only other option is that elevator.”

  “The elevator’s broken,” Janet reminded them.

  “Is it?” slurred Al.

  They stared in silence, transfixed on the elevator gate before them, and the curved brass floor indicator above it, waiting for something to move. Through the holes in the gate, Sam kept imagining fingers, claws, and watery shadows, but they all disappeared when he blinked. Everything was dimming around the edges from the alcohol, and he couldn’t trust his eyesight.

  After several long moments, the brass indicator arrow did indeed begin its slow, silent arc to the left, from “8” to “7” to “6,” causing Janet to burst into tears, and Al to curse under his breath.

  Like it had as Kedzie, the creature was traveling down in an elevator car to greet them in the lobby. Only this time, they all knew what it was.

  twenty-two

  Jon had been awakened by an insistent knock at his hotel room door. He called out asking for a minute, stumbled into yesterday’s clothes, and answered. Before him stood Clem, Oliver, and Oliver’s assistant Matthew, who seemed agitated, and looked like he hadn’t slept.

  “What time is it,” asked Jon, rubbing his eyes. It was impossible to have any natural sense of the time of day so deep underground.

  “Almost 5:00, I think,” said Clem.

  “This couldn’t wait until morning?”

  “It is morning,” Oliver interjected. “Morning enough, anyway. Get your journal.”

  Jon returned to his nightstand, retrieving the journal and pen. Niamh asked from the bed if anything was the matter, and Jon assured her everything was fine. He stepped out into the hallway as not to bother her further.

  “I’m listening,” Jon said.

  Oliver placed a gentle hand on Jon’s shoulder. “Let’s go down to the lobby.”

  They took the stairway down, rather than the elevator, which Oliver said was “still off for the night.” At the end of the flights, Jon’s tired body was quite alert. He observed that Oliver had to unlock the door to the lobby, and asked him about it.

  “The main level has to be locked after hours,” Oliver explained. “Wouldn’t want someone coming down at night to drink all my whiskey. That’s also one of the reasons the elevator shuts down from midnight to six.”

  “It’s automatic?” asked Jonathan as they entered walked across the lobby, curious about the elevator’s technology.

  “No,” Oliver admitted, “though that’s something we’re looking into. Right now, we have to hold the elevator gates open on one floor to prevent access from the others. That’s not ideal in terms of ease-of-use or guest safety, but it’s temporary. Most of the hotel’s moving parts, as you see, are run by pneumatics, which in turn are run by the pressurized steam. You’ve noticed the copper tubing along many of the hallways?”

  Jon nodded. “I assumed they weren’t decorative.”

  “No, though we tried to make them a bit prettier on the upper floors, with a little more molding and so forth. But they’re still there. We’d have built them into the walls, but frankly when the copper tubing is under that kind of pressure, the soldered and brazed joints need to have occasional monitoring and maintenance, like any standard steam boiler. Now, the elevator needed to be operational long before the steam and pneumatic system was functional, which is why it’s not on pneumatics itself. But when the transit system is in place by next year, we might have it swapped out then. Those types of enhancements will be easier to accomplish starting next week, of course, when the hotel has publicly been announced and we can work with more than a skeleton crew down here.”

  “Is that why the transit is delayed, too?”

&nb
sp; “Yes,” Oliver agreed. “It would take years to complete the ten-mile track if it was just the twelve-or-so of us, but we’ve gotten it in great shape so far for the starting stations and the general technology. We didn’t have to tunnel as much out as you might expect, given the existing cave system we’re taking advantage of. And we actually only need the tight pneumatic tunnel surrounding the first half a mile of each side, because once the car gets going, there’s no friction and no wind resistance, so it can virtually coast to Charlotte and back once it gets up to speed.”

  They sat down at a table, and Jon took out his notebook.

  “Alright,” said Oliver, wishing he could continue to delay this conversation by discussing The Eaton’s positive attributes. “Here’s what happened since you left the party.”

  Oliver and Matthew began to detail a number of strange occurrences they know of that happened through the night, as reported by several guests. Oliver had taken notes himself, showing Jon that he remembered to record the exact times, as Jon had done. Matthew had been the one fielding complaints from the beginning, which was why the poor chap looked so exhausted, soon enlisting Oliver’s help to talk to guests and contain the panic. Clem had joined them soon afterward, as one of the reported disturbances affected a neighbor in 402, whose screams had awoken several of the guests on that floor. Jon wrote down the narrative, making notes in the margins when someone remembered additional information, and eventually drawing another cross-section of the hotel and plugging in Oliver’s recorded names and times.

  “So, Jamie Biddle,” Jon asked, “wife of Clive Biddle, is the one who woke you up screaming, is that right Clem?”

  “Yes, she said there had been a knock on her door at night, and she heard the voice of her sister, so she answered.”

  “She answered the door herself? Not her husband?”