The Eaton

by John K. Addis

  twenty-five

  Once the creature was out of view as the car descended, Sam whirled around on Al. “What the fuck, man?”

  Al held up a defensive hand. “Now wait a minute, Sam,” he argued, voice slurred with intoxication but attempting a commanding tone. “We both know there was no saving Janet after she tried to make it up those stairs. Our best chance of survival was to go back down.”

  “You didn't even try to save her,” cried Sam. “You have a gun. You could have shot the thing.”

  “I would have,” Al snapped. “But I was waiting. Then it was too late. We only have a few bullets left, and it didn't seem to hurt it much in the stairwell…”

  “Damn it, Al,” Sam said, his voice breaking with emotion. “That might have been our only chance to leave! Why the hell are we going back down? Why ‘5’?”

  “You saw how it reacted to the water,” said Al. “It became stunned, and weak. Think, too, of the place we think it was trapped.”

  Sam took a breath and considered Al’s argument. The cave they had found, behind the boulder which seemed to have been moved, contained nothing but a trickle of an underground stream. Perhaps those who had once captured the creature had also realized this weakness, and tried to keep it in a weakened state.

  “The fifth floor,” Al continued, “is also a floor with two locked doors. There’s the lockable stairwell door, and the door to the small waiting area with the elevator. It gives us a defendable space, with a weapon—water—which we know can slow it down, and when it finds its way back inside, through whatever its second exit is that he used to get out, and starts breaking through the stair door, we hurt it as best we can, then leave in the elevator.”

  Sam did not respond for several moments. He was impressed with Al’s ability to reason in a crisis, particularly in what appeared to be a rather tipsy state. “Okay, Al,” he said at last, as the car passed the ninth floor. “I understand that if we slow it down, we could get out the elevator side and hope, if it’s weak, that it can’t beat us to the surface again. And I’m assuming you’re saying we would lock the elevator somehow so the fucker can’t use it.” Sam shuddered as he thought of the last thing which had blocked the car from being able to move: his best friend’s corpse. “But why can’t we just find the other way out ourselves? It’s gotta be through the Mastersuite, right? That’s the only floor we haven’t seen, and it’s closest to the surface.”

  “I think so too,” said Al. “But that’s probably how the creature is trying to get back in right now. I don’t want to go that way, do you?”

  Sam shook his head. He turned to Sarah for her opinion, but she was still silent, looking at the floor of the elevator car. He had seen her like this before, when she was too angry to speak, or when she was close to vomiting and needed to concentrate on a fixed spot. Sam realized her current state of shock could be both, and empathized. The images of Kedzie’s death, and Janet’s, flashed in his mind each time he blinked, as if he had stared into the sun.

  He was about to express support of Al’s plan, when the elevator car experienced a violent jolt, shifting the three off balance and knocking Sarah’s head against the back wall.

  “What the…?” Sam regained his footing, and instinctively looked up, realizing that the creature must have forced open the gate and jumped down the elevator shaft, landing on top of their car. He looked over at Al in a panic, and Al had no answers, his own plan having been dependent on the damned thing taking the stairs. Sam wondered how powerful the creature’s ability to read their thoughts really was, and if the mere act of strategizing about the fifth floor plan made such a plan doomed to failure. If that was the case, there was no chance for them at all, as anything they strategized would become known, and therefore fail.

  There was another jolt, and the sound of metal scraping against metal, and Sarah snapped out of her hypnosis. “Where are we,” she demanded.

  Sam understood what she was asking. “Sixth floor’s coming up,” he said. “Do we try and make it to five?”

  Nobody said a word, though they all were thinking the same thing. If the creature above them kept trying to disrupt the elevator, perhaps severing the cables, the entire car could plummet, killing them all. But if they stopped at the sixth floor, they might not be able to make it to the fifth floor before the thing could catch them.

  “Keep going,” Al said at last, his voice cracking. “We’re almost there.”

  The car jerked again as they saw the sixth floor hallway pass slowly before them. What was it doing up there? Even though it had been imposing in its true form, Sam reasoned that it couldn’t be any heavier now than it had been when assuming the role of Kedzie or Vaughn. It must be jumping with its full weight, perhaps grabbing the cables or interfering with the mechanism, either trying to actively disrupt their descent or trying to scare them into stopping early. If its intent was to scare, then maybe they were doing something right, and Al’s plan was correct.

  The fifth floor came into view. Sam opened the internal gate early and reached out to the external, yanking it backward before the car came to a complete stop. The three leapt from the car to the small waiting area, throwing open the left of the double doors to the baths with such force that it flipped around and slammed into the wall. Sam was grateful they hadn’t locked it, but knew they had to lock it now. He called to Sarah for the keys, but she was racing toward the other side, the stairwell door.

  “Sarah, wait!” called Sam, then stared back at the empty elevator car through the open door. It was lurching now, as if the creature was jumping up and down on its roof with as much force as it could muster.

  “Stair door first!” she cried back in response, arriving at the opposite door and fumbling with the keys to lock it. Sam understood. If the creature was on the roof of the elevator car, it might choose to jump into the sixth floor hallway instead, run down a flight to the fifth floor stairwell entrance, and be upon them just as they had sealed their fate by sealing the other exit. But this plan was risky, too, as it seemed the car was inching downward with each thump of the creature’s feet. Sam and Al stood inside the opulent room, staring through the one open double door at the shuddering elevator, waiting for Sarah’s return to their side.

  Then, something snapped. There was a cry of pain, or perhaps triumph, from the creature, and the car began to fall. Sam could see the creature falling too, still in its full, black unfiltered form, standing on the roof of the car just as they had believed, but thrusting its arms out toward them, as if trying to leap onto their floor. It couldn’t get the right leverage, however, and its body fell out of view, giving Sam a momentary hope that perhaps it would fall to its death. But then he could see the claw, and then an arm, and then two arms, the creature forcing itself upward, pulling its body through the open gate and glaring at them in fury.

  Sarah raced beside them, saw the creature’s progress climbing out of the shaft, and helped the stunned Sam and Al close and lock the double doors securely before it could advance further. Within seconds, they knew the creature had completed its ascent, and had reached the entrance. It began pounding against the wood doors.

  “The water,” whispered Al as he counted the rounds in his revolver, and Sarah and Sam ran to the back shelves to search for cups or tubs they could use. Al stepped back from the locked double doors but stared them down like a sheriff at high noon. He adopted a shooter’s stance, and raised the weapon toward the direction of the pounding. He considered shooting through the wood, then dismissed the notion, realizing the solid heavy construction of these doors might act as Kevlar to the creature, wasting Al’s three remaining bullets and accomplishing nothing.

  Sarah had found a small metal wash tub, and Sam a ceramic mug, and the two filled their containers with water from the nearest mineral bath. Within moments, they were back at Al’s side, as uncertain what to do with their weapons as Al was with his.

  The pounding had grown louder, more forceful, and the first cra
ck in the center of the left door appeared as a jagged yellow line before their eyes.

  Sam motioned to Al and Sarah for their attention. “We should take the stairs,” he mouthed in silence. “We can get out.”

  Al shook his head. “We don’t know that for sure,” he replied in the same silent whisper. “We should fight first.”

  Sarah had the same thought, but chose to act rather than join the muted debate. She had observed a gap of about an inch between the doors and the tile floor, and so heaved her tub to expel the water towards it. The water splashed on the floor and on the doors themselves, much of it bouncing back at them in a wave, but at least some found its way through the gap and into the small waiting area. There was a harsh cry from the creature, and the pounding stopped.

  Sam stared at Sarah with a look of wonder and respect, before he too splashed the contents of his cup toward the gap, and they ran to the nearest bath for refills. When they returned to the doors, they instinctively waited, listening for any hint that the creature was still fighting. But the only noise coming from beyond the doors was the faint, hollow sound of water draining into the empty elevator shaft.

  “Do you think it’s dead?” asked Sam.

  “No,” said Sarah dryly. But a horrible thought occurred to her. What if the creature had jumped away from the water, climbed back into the elevator shaft, and hoisted itself up to the sixth floor, or lowered itself down to the fourth? It wouldn’t be too difficult, and it would explain the silence.

  Sarah backed away from the main doors, and sprinted to the door to the stairwell on the other side of the room. Here, too, she listened, but heard nothing. As a precaution, she poured some of the water under this door as well, but the only sound that followed was a gentle trickle of water down the empty stairs beyond.

  From across the room, she telegraphed a “what now” message to Sam and Al, who responded with their own confused shrugs. The thing didn’t seem to be anywhere. Cautiously, Sarah walked back to the main doors, refilling her metal tub with water on the way. The three stood in silence upon her return, listening, waiting, holding a collective breath.

  Sam broke the tension. “We don’t even know for sure if the water makes it weak,” he said. “This is crazy.” Then, again, with emphasis. “This is fucking crazy!” In a flash of anger, he hurled the full mug across the room. It shattered against the wall tile, exploding in a shower of wet shards, and Sam felt water on his cheeks. He first thought the drops had been from the splash, but was surprised to discover they were tears. He hadn’t even realized he had been crying.

  A dark, soft chuckle bubbled up from the other side of the large wooden doors. It was a man’s chuckle, filled with age and anger, and Sam knew the creature had put on a new human face, one they couldn’t yet see. The laugh didn’t sound familiar to Sam, and he glanced at Sarah, who had a similar reaction. They turned to Al, who had lowered his gun and was stepping closer to the doors, transfixed on the muffled sound.

  “Hello?” Al asked.

  “Hello,” the voice responded.

  “What’s so funny,” Sarah deadpanned.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” the voice replied weakly. “I suppose it’s all quite amusing, on some level. You found a weakness that I never found, but others had, long ago.” There was something peculiar in the way the voice emphasized the word “I,” and Sarah got the feeling the “I” might be referring to the person it was pretending to be, not the creature itself.

  “You?” she asked. “Who are you now?”

  “Begging your pardon, madam, but you and I are not acquainted. I’m afraid I passed on long before you were born. Before any of you, in fact.”

  Sam and Sarah were confused. Al, however, seemed to be trembling with excitement. Although it was true he had never met its owner, he did know the voice. He remembered it well.

  Al had first discovered the stack of old reel-to-reel recordings when he was ten. It was the summer, and his parents were both at their respective places of employment, leaving a very bored boy exploring the house. He found the reels nestled in an old wooden trunk hidden under blankets in a seldom-used closet, and all ten were unlabeled, still in their thin cardboard boxes. Al first assumed them to be blank, and wouldn't have given them much thought if they hadn't been so intriguingly hidden.

  His mom had a reel-to-reel recorder which she used for dictation and transcriptions in her capacity as a legal secretary, and he had seen her use it enough times to have an idea on its operation. He threaded the first reel, adjusted the volume, and sat on the rug with a bowl of crispy Better Made potato chips.

  Over the next few hours, he listened to an old man ramble about visits to other countries, exploring ancient temples, and researching lost civilizations. But more than half of the reels were devoted to a single impossible tale of visions, murders, and some sort of monster, though the narrative rarely made linear, logical sense. It occurred to Al that during the telling of this story, the man was getting progressively drunk, and in fact at one point he even began detailing and extolling the virtues of specific types of alcohol which might keep monsters at bay. Near the end of the final reel, the speech was so soft and slurred that it could barely be understood, and Al had to strain to hear the conclusion of the story, and its haunting descriptions of “absolute darkness.” As it finally unspooled to silence, Al sat still, fascinated and terrified. When he heard the back door open, his mom coming home from work, he jumped.

  Hurriedly, Al had packed up the reels and hidden them under his bed. Over the next few weeks, Al listened to them again and again, when the house was empty, never telling a soul about their existence. One day, though, he had been careless, and left the equipment out when he ran to play outside with a neighborhood friend. When he returned home for dinner, his mom had explained he should not have listened to those “mad rantings,” and to Al's horror, she had destroyed the recordings “to protect the good man's honor.” Tears streaming down his cheeks, Al had stormed down the hallway to his bedroom, and didn't speak to her for days. Though he eventually forgave his mother, he never forgot the strange, dark tale of the underground monster.

  Al never thought he'd hear this distinctive voice again. He stepped closer to the double doors, close enough to touch them, his shoes sloshing on the mineral water still puddled from the splash back of the emptied tub.

  “But even though I've never met you all,” the voice continued, “you do have something of mine. And so you do know a good part of my story.”

  “The journal?” asked Sam.

  “The journal,” the voice confirmed. “Yet, you see, it’s incomplete. I left it here. And so you don’t know how the story ended.”

  But Al knew. He took a final step toward the door, and placed his free hand against the dark wood, against the long, thin crack, as if trying to feel the life behind it. Sam and Sarah said nothing, and made no move to stop him, as Al swallowed hard, and addressed the door with a rough whisper.

  “Grandpa?”

  twenty-six

  Jonathan Wesley awoke in a fog. The smells of death, excrement, dried sweat and blood were overwhelming, and his eyes wouldn't focus for several minutes. Even before he could see, though, he knew where he was, and knew it hadn't been a dream. The creature who had massacred the men and woman around Jonathan had, for some reason, overlooked him. He searched his mind for his final memories of the horror, and realized he must have passed out. Perhaps the creature had assumed he was already dead.

  He sat up, a bit too quickly, and an ache gnawed through the back of his skull.

  The light in the room was mercifully dim, trickling in from the hallway and therefore obscuring the gore, but still Jonathan could sense that he was alone among the living. He tried to stand, but could not, at least not yet. His muscles were stiff and ached, and he realized he had no idea what time it was, or even what day. Based on the discomfort of his legs and back, he guessed he had been out for many hours, but being cut off from any light from the
outside world made an accurate assessment impossible. Out of habit, he reached across his chest, looking for the small watch which resided in his left vest pocket, but remembered it was in his suite, likely sitting on the dresser near his journal. He was overcome with nausea at the thought of ever returning to that room, again seeing his beloved wife dangling from the ceiling, and vomited to his right. The bile pooled and oozed its way to the lifeless corpse of the woman beside him, and Jonathan took several minutes to sob into his hands.

  After a quarter of an hour, he tried to stand again. His right leg had been punctured by some sort of shrapnel, but it had stopped bleeding, and was relatively numb. Once upright, he found he could walk, or at least limp, and so made his way toward the light coming from what was left of the Mastersuite's shattered front door. He tried his best to look past the broken bodies surrounding him, imagining them as long-mummified corpses, which allowed him to progress in the detached manner of the professional archaeologist he was. By the time he made it through the door and into the short hallway, however, he was trembling, and his breathing had developed the raspiness of a panicked child. He had to lean against the nearby wall for a long moment, closing his eyes and concentrating to get his heart rate under control.

  Jon stared at the buttons for several long seconds. Then he stepped forward and, holding his breath, pressed “up.”

  To his shock and great relief, the motor whirred to life. He could hear the muffled sound of the elevator car through the gates, traveling toward him from a considerable distance, perhaps as far down as the lobby. As he waited, a great concern crept into his relief, as the elevator seemed so loud in the absolute silence of the hotel, it seemed clear that the creature would hear it, too, and put a stop to his escape. Maybe the creature would shut it down. Jon imagined hearing the elevator grind to a halt before it reached him, leaving him trapped on the floor forever. But the whirring continued, and the car kept inching closer, and Jon allowed hope to enter his heart. He was going to get out after all, perhaps the only one of the doomed guests to do so.