An hour after dark, they all gathered the things from the party and went inside. Serena seemed mildly disappointed, but when Enid suggested tea in the formal parlor her mood quickly picked up again.
“I’m going to go change for the parlor, Father.”
Richard looked at her, amused. “Father, eh?”
Serena laughed. “I’ll just be a minute. Enid made me two dresses! Can you believe it?” She could barely contain herself.
“Well, Lord knows a woman needs to look her best on important occasions like this. But don’t be too long.”
“I won’t. Promise.” She went around the front desk at a dead run.
Richard settled into a chair in the lobby to wait. The dim light over the lobby reddened. Richard was already out of his chair when he heard Serena’s scream.
When he got to her room, Serena was standing behind her bed. Jacob was standing beside her, whispering to her, apparently trying to calm her by stroking the side of her head.
Richard was furious, as much with himself as with Jacob. “I thought you were going to be watching her?”
“I was,” Jacob said softly. “I was right here.” He nodded toward her closet.
Richard could feel the thing before he actually saw it. Standing inside the closet door, its back drifting upward like an arch of smoke, was the wolf. Its jaws drifted apart. The mist inside them was burning. Richard raised his hands stiffly and clapped them together with as much force as he could muster.
The wolf’s eyes burned a brighter red. Its head twisted on its neck like a snake, whining and snarling. The edges of its form grew firmer as it began to slice the rug apart with its claws.
“That won’t work, Richard. How can I explain this? It is deep in thrall. Arthur must have deteriorated rapidly for this to occur.”
The wolf crept forward, leaving a trail of mist that settled into the floor like a stain.
“Pull back with us, Richard. Behind the bed.”
Richard did as he was told.
The wolf raked its ghost teeth against the steel bedpost. Sparks flew. Richard began to worry about a fire, when Jacob pulled all three of them down to the floor and forced them to roll. The power in the move astonished Richard. Suddenly they were under Serena’s bed, staring up at the springs.
“Jacob?” He could hear Serena whimpering, but he couldn’t see her. A white muzzle suddenly gaped open a few inches from his face at the side of the bed. “Jacob!”
White fire roasted his face. He began to scream.
And then he was falling through darkness. He could feel Serena next to him. He grabbed her and waited for the fall to end. It seemed to go on for a very long time.
At the bottom there was light. And a hallway. Before he could think about the implications, Jacob had them running again, down a snakework of tangled passages and stairs.
And into the room of Arthur Lovelace.
“Daddy! That poor man.”
Lovelace was spread-eagle on the bed, head back, mouth peeled open. His skin appeared shrunken, pulled tight enough to break the underlying bone.
“Grab his feet!”
Richard hesitated. He imagined touching the man’s paper-thin flesh, the skin breaking open, and… things… coming out.
“Richard! Do it now!”
Together they pulled the old man off the bed. He was stiff, and he spasmed as they moved him, almost bringing them down. Serena helped where she could. Jacob led the way down the corridor. Again, Richard was amazed by Jacob’s strength: he practically dragged the rest of them with him.
They followed two bends of the corridor, and at the third bend Jacob stopped and backed through a solid wall. Richard and Serena slowed, confused, but Jacob pulled them through as well.
They were suddenly within a passageway lined with ornate doors, with elaborate carvings over each doorway. It was too dark to make out many of the details, but Richard had the sensation of being stared upon by hundreds of tiny faces. Jacob opened one of the doors and they entered.
The room was empty except for a rough plank laid across two ancient sawhorses. Jacob guided them as they laid Lovelace’s body on its length. Richard and Serena stood holding each other, exhausted, unable to move. Jacob pushed them back toward the door, and they stumbled awkwardly in that direction.
The wolf drifted through the doorway. Its face howled and vibrated, the misty contours of its head breaking apart, then drifting back together again. Jacob tried to push Richard and Serena back, but they couldn’t keep their eyes off the thing.
The wolf’s teeth grew like fast-forming icicles. Its head spun madly around. It reached back with teeth grown too long for its mouth and began ripping pieces out of its own torso. Luminescent blood filmed the room. The wolf’s head stared at them; it stopped, statue-like, and stared at them.
Then the wolf began its leap.
Suddenly Arthur Lovelace’s emaciated arm reached out and grabbed the thing, pulling it to him. The wolf thrashed and bit. Blood flooded Lovelace’s face. “Go.”
Jacob was the last one out. He slammed the ornate door and locked it. In the shadows, the elaborate carvings writhed. Sculptured eyes blinked. He pushed Richard and Serena through several more doors before they could no longer hear the wolf’s frenzy, the snap and splash of Lovelace’s embrace.
“THAT MAN,” SERENA said later. “Mr. Lovelace. He still isn’t dead, is he?”
Richard stared at Jacob.
“No, he isn’t, my dear,” Jacob replied. “But as terrible as that might seem, he is where he wanted to be. In that room, where he cannot leave. I suspect he had that half in mind when he came, this season.”
Richard held his daughter in his arms. He looked down at her: she seemed noticeably older.
“She has changed, but you did not lose her,” Jacob said softly.
But Richard wasn’t listening to him. There were other sounds to hear. There was the soft inner breath that drifted through the Deadfall, higher pitched through the halls, dropping lower in the stairs and secret passages. There was the light tapping of guests who never left their rooms, their frenetic thoughts in tune with that breath. There was the distant crying of a white wolf with dying eyes. And there was the nearly inaudible laughter of his wife, his beautiful wife Abby, growing madder with every passing day of her death.
I never imagined that training a replacement would prove to be so difficult. I find I have increased respect for what my own predecessor must have gone through. It is a delicate balance, managing a new member of our family – we want him to be able to act independently, and yet we also want him to do what we want. Prospective managers are selected from a pool of the traumatized, the wounded and damaged. And yet we expect them to be brave. We expect them to protect themselves and their families and yet be brave, to do what needs to be done.
Sometimes when I look at Richard Carter I see a frozen man, stilled by grief and impossible dilemma. How can he protect his daughter? How can he leave his wife behind a second time? My heart goes out to him. I will do what I can to protect him and his daughter.
Perhaps we expect too much.
– from the diary of Jacob Ascher,
proprietor, Deadfall Hotel, 1969-2000
Chapter Three
THE KING OF THE CATS
“And death shall have no dominion,” at least that was his hope, that Dylan Thomas who drank and sang and insulted and roared and made immortal poetry. We write, we sing, we have our children and have our way, all in an attempt to defeat that fatal king. Perhaps the famous succeed – I can’t really say. But certainly it isn’t their true selves the people remember, but rather the great and interesting lies they told about themselves. And whose children remember them as they really were? Your children remember you too harshly, too well, or seemingly not at all.
The dead should be grateful that we live our lives so poorly, that we have so much trouble actually being where we are and when we are. It is the dead who fill in the blanks, who occupy the empty spaces in our mind
s and hearts. If you see someone living their life as if their life were living them, if the most remarkable aspect of their day is their lack of participation in it, then I wager if you look closely enough you will find one or more of the dead buried waist-deep in that life, gazing about in wonder as the poor soul wanders from event to event.
It is the dead who benefit from our lack of care. And they fully understand on what side of the bread their butter lies. I must admit that I was so taken by Richard Carter’s daughter Serena that I was compelled to discuss their situation with Abigail Carter, the dead wife and mother who tagged along for the ride. I attempted to explain to her that a dead mother was no help for such a child, and that whatever she might be feeling about her recent demise (and, yes, the dead have feelings – in fact emotion is the sum total of most of them), she was doing her daughter no favors by lingering about.
Mine was a futile endeavor, of course, as the dead are remarkably self-centered and narrow-minded.
My own dead wife and children have never appeared here. I cannot honestly say whether I am relieved or disappointed. I wonder if I may have so expunged them from my growing list of heartbreaks that they feel no need to make an appearance. Does that make me a terrible husband and father? I have no answer for that.
We carry our fears with us wherever we go. We pack them neatly, holding them close because if we lost them, where would we be? Lost in some foreign land without proper clothing, I suppose. Our current and past guests have brought their fears to the Deadfall, and so many of them have left theirs behind. I sometimes wonder if these missing items are mourned, or if the visitors are aware of an unburdening, a lightening of attitude due to a mysterious cause they cannot quite put their finger on. This hotel has become a warehouse of such items, and we take our duties as conservators quite seriously. From time to time some group which does not understand attempts to rent the Deadfall for parties, particularly around the season of Halloween, as if this establishment might function as some sort of funhouse. Such applications are, without exception, denied.
The strongest presence is so often an absence. Life here underscores this point almost daily. Yesterday I was up on the third floor when I became aware of the odor coming from #302. I had almost forgotten – it has been almost a decade since I thought of the tenant residing there. I stood outside the door and breathed in the stray wisps of perfume, that particular tobacco-and-fried-food aroma. No actual physical being resides in that room, but it has long been occupied by a lingering aftersmell of the man who lived there in the ’forties and ’fifties. The room is sealed so that a sufficient quantity of the smell may be preserved. We do not rent the room, nor do we enter to clean.
After the summer break I intend to intensify Serena’s home-schooling. I had originally been reluctant to take on the job, hoping eventually to replace myself with a tutor lured away from some institute of higher learning. But I have been surprised to discover an unexpected enthusiasm in myself for the project. Since the beginning of the summer I have read a number of volumes of educational theory, and made hundreds of pages of notes concerning strategies and exercises I intend to try out in the fall. I believe there is much I can teach her in a relatively short span of time. In the meantime I have filled her summer with books taken from our magnificent Deadfall library. I feel confident that Richard Carter will be satisfied with the richness this educational mixture has to offer.
There is a seasonal aspect to learning, I believe, and we do our best when we respect this. Now is her season to explore, to let her fancies guide her to whatever knowledge she might find.
This spring, the Deadfall revived from its long winter sleep. By the end of summer we will see exactly what has been awakened.
– from the diary of Jacob Ascher,
proprietor, Deadfall Hotel, 1969-2000
LIFE IN THE hotel was a bumpy ride. Each arrival brought some new story. Each checkout left yet another narrative incomplete, demanding that Richard’s imagination supply some sort of conclusion or at least a few seconds of summation. His and Serena’s time here felt splintered, jiggered by rising and falling excitements and stray, inconclusive climaxes. Only their consistent presence, and that of the hotel, with its minimal staff, provided some sort of stability. But that was human life, wasn’t it? The sadness and the thrill of it. If people did their jobs properly, they would never outlive their own homes, the places they met and studied in, made love in, sculpted their destinies in. It was all a collection of incomplete, yet meaningful tales.
Abby, of course, would have loved it here. It was an attitude and an interpretation so much in sympathy with her own. She would have loved the excitement and the anticipation, even the strangeness of it all. Richard thought she belonged in this setting much more than he.
Not that she wasn’t here, of course. There was this remnant, this reminder, a pale simulacrum of what his wife had been, walking these halls, peering into things, taking the air.
Perhaps he had no business thinking that way. Even the living changed, went their separate ways, disappointed. And what bigger change than that turning from life into death? It wasn’t her fault. But still, he found that he harbored resentment. He saw her often in the halls, particularly around bedtime, looking under and around things, testing chairs, sometimes lying down on a step or underneath a table as if to test the comfort of a rug, measuring windows and doors with her pale, nearly-transparent hands. Always smiling. Always using those intelligent eyes which seemed to burn with their own, independent light. There was a sadness in it, but there had always been a beautiful sadness in Abby. Death seemed not to have changed her that much, in this regard.
What he felt when he saw her, besides his own sadness, was a certain irretrievable disconnection. It must be the way divorced couples view each other, he thought, if the divorce has been relatively amicable. She was no longer part of his life, really. He might wave to her in the hall; she might smile his way. But she was no longer part of his life. She had moved on. He needed to move on as well.
If only there hadn’t been Serena to consider. As far as he could tell, Abby made little contact with their daughter. Maybe Abby thought that best; maybe it was for Serena’s benefit. Did Abby think, now? Richard understood none of it.
THE HOTEL AND surrounding wood had baked for two months. Each day the heat built without leveling, before night or the rare downpour discouraged it until the following morning, when the climb started all over again. Guests and the occasional delivery driver sat with their heads lowered. Small animals made noises like babies calling for their lost mothers, and Richard stayed awake nights, trying to make sure in his own mind that they were not, indeed, babies. Insects danced madly in silence. Richard spent his days worrying over Serena, who filled her mornings with imaginary playmates – but wasn’t she too old for that sort of thing? – and in any case who might say that an invisible Deadfall playmate was truly, unquestionably imaginary?
“Here, we’ll provide these gentlemen with some lemonade and send them on their way,” Jacob said, gesturing to the row of uniformed men sitting on chairs on the Deadfall porch. Bus drivers: staring out at the wide lawn, their faces dripping sweat. Jacob had told him how large numbers of these bus drivers had shown up at the Deadfall over the years, in uniform, with their empty buses, having just walked off – or driven off – their jobs. “This year, well, I believe this year will be a good year for bus drivers,” Jacob had said, a few weeks earlier. And he had been right. They’d been showing up all week.
There’d been fewer official checkins than usual, however. Jacob didn’t appear surprised. A few guests had shipped themselves to the hotel in crates and barrels, and Jacob had wheeled the containers up to their reserved rooms without fuss. A family had checked in: short people in tight brown coats, the parents no bigger than the small children. And then there was the naked man covered in bite marks and sutures, who’d wandered in from the woods without baggage, and Jacob had taken him up to a room immediately. Richard was glad Serena ha
dn’t been down in the lobby for that one.
During the afternoons, Serena spoke obsessively of babies and of more than babies – of embryos and fetuses and how there might be hundreds of thousands of them hidden in the world around us, so tiny we can’t see them, floating into our open mouths and gathering into our soup spoons and crushing under our bodies when we rolled sleepless in bed, and how angry they all must be at not having a chance to be born. Of course, it made him uneasy. She was his baby, after all. She asked her father if maybe the Deadfall and its grounds contained more of these invisible lives than most places, and he had no idea how to answer her.
Then, after dark, there was the Serena of mercurial mood. She’d suddenly be angry at him with no reason, talking so loudly, so rapidly she was spitting. Over nothing. Over things Richard couldn’t even recall having said. Over things Serena said he would have said, if she’d only given him half a chance.
And still the heat intensified. What had begun as a warm welcome to the sunniest part of the year had exaggerated itself without relief, until the sun was an eye in flames and breathing became a miserable chore. Then came an afternoon when the season collapsed suddenly, parched and exhausted, falling hard into what Richard’s grandmother had always inexplicably called the dog days of summer.
“The expression comes from Sirius, the dog star,” Jacob offered. Providing explanations was second nature to him. Whether his explanations actually explained anything was another matter entirely. “The brightest star in the night sky. The Romans thought Sirius rose with the sun this time of year and added its heat to the sun’s heat. Thereby making the dog days the hottest time of the year.”
From the sound of it, you might think this was supposed to be the best time for dogs. But mid-July through August had always been unbearably, impossibly hot where he’d grown up, and he remembered rarely seeing dogs during this time, and wondering if maybe they’d retreated below ground, into vast underground dog runs and chambers where they had their own government, queens, dukes, and kings.
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