“Please,” she moaned.
He came back to her. She rubbed angrily at her face with the edge of her pale gown. Redness spread into the delicate fibers. It occurred to him how careful she had seemed before, how meticulous. He thought of her cleaning her teeth in the mornings, her sour breath the only indication. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Who do you think you are?” Her face was cat-like. He expected her to spit at him at any moment. “You are dying, just as I. Wouldn’t you do almost anything to stay alive?”
“Not anything,” he said.
She stared at him, some of her fire gone. “And neither have I,” she finally said. “I have never murdered a child. Although I cannot say I could not, someday.” Richard chilled. “But to stay alive? To breathe one more day? Your Abby is dead – but secretly, deep down, are you not glad it was not you?”
“I wouldn’t be human otherwise,” he said. “But I’m still not the same as you.”
“Oh? What difference is there between the living who is dead and the dead who is living? We come out of our mothers’ wombs already looking for our graves.”
“I’m not dead,” he said.
“And neither am I!” she shouted. “There is no beauty in death. No noble mouth. The mouth flaps open, Richard. It gapes. The cloudy eyeballs grow distorted from the pressure. There is no aging like the aging of death. The skin wrinkles as the body loses water. The skin begins to bruise, the muscles in the eyelids, neck, and jaw go rigid. No beauty there, Richard. Your Abby, do you really think she is the lovely apparition who haunts these halls? Do you think she still reposes so peacefully, even more beautiful, younger than when she was alive? You should have dug her up, Richard. You’d find a greenish tinge over the belly, a stink as the intestines break down, the skin blistering and bloating – I love him, Richard. Just as I’d love you. You need not be alone!”
Her voice fell to a whisper, punctuated by hysteria. But Richard had stopped listening. She’d gone too far. He wanted to tell her she knew nothing about him, or his life. He wanted to tell her there was no body – Abby had been cremated. He wanted to tell her she knew nothing, but he held his tongue. He left her ranting in the hallway outside her door.
THE PHONE HAD rung for a very long time before Richard realized what it was. Few people called the Deadfall.
“Daddy?” Serena’s voice sounded strange and far away, a memory.
“Hi, honey. How are you?”
“I’m okay. Enid has been taking me places and I’ve been helping out in her sister’s weaving shop.”
“That’s nice.” Her normalcy stirred him. He wondered, again, how he could ever have dragged her into such a setting.
“Daddy, when can I come home?”
“Home?”
“Daddy, I want to come home.”
She meant the hotel. She meant him. “Soon, honey. I promise. I just have to take care of a few things first.”
“Is that lady still there?”
He gripped the phone. He was acutely aware of the cool bite of the receiver into his ear, the static like a fevered whisper, the faint stench of old, heated wiring. “No,” he lied. “She’s gone now.”
“I’m glad, Daddy. I’m real glad. I’ll see you soon. Love you.”
“Love you, too, sweetheart.”
The hallway still smelled faintly of blood. He wondered if they’d ever get the coppery smell out of the walls, the carpet.
“When it rains,” Marie had told him one evening, just before drifting off to sleep, “I imagine that it is raining blood. The full, dark clouds tear, and disintegrate. And no matter what I do, I cannot stop the dripping.”
Her door opened, and the cold wind rushed past, leaving a dead quiet. He imagined a panicked flight of souls. She’s left the window open, he thought. He tasted copper.
She drifted out as if sleepwalking. She went to the window at the end of the corridor and opened that one as well. For a moment, he imagined her drifting out into the storm.
“It’s cold,” he said.
She said nothing. He looked into her room. John lay on the yellow rug, his eyes open and staring. A drop of brilliant red hung from his chin, then fell as if in slow motion to join the spreading stain beneath his head.
“You’ve killed him,” he said.
She opened her mouth to deny it and John’s blood ran out at the corners. “He was so ill.” Her voice sounded choked with fluid, as if she had a bad cold.
Richard went into her room and bent over the body. She followed him. The hem of her gown was torn and ragged, the tattered end like long fingers soaked in blood. John’s dead hand clutched a torn bit of gown.
“You took too much,” Richard said.
“Perhaps. He was so ill. He was dying.”
Richard found the metal that had been ripped out of John’s arm. He examined the neck where sharp teeth had worried open a rough flap of skin for lapping. He looked up at her. She licked her lips.
“You took too much. But that was no accident.”
Her eyes flashed. “I love you, Richard.”
“You need me. Now. You thought you’d found a substitute for him.”
“I love you!” She opened her mouth too wide. More blood drooled to the carpet. Her nostrils spread grotesquely. He could hear her smelling the room, smelling him.
“You’ve mistaken the smell of blood for the smell of love.”
“Love?” She laughed. She raised her hands, her gown opening like spreading wings. She was naked underneath. A streak of dried blood soiled the perfect paleness of her belly. Richard was aroused; he stepped back, frightened and disgusted with himself. “This world of yours, it’s a world of impersonal loves. You have your media personalities to fall in love with – it’s only surfaces you need to know. You do not know your lovers, only the lovers you dream of. What better time to return to basic truths? Mine is, at least, an honest affection. For my own life, my own passion. My main purpose is to continue.”
“You haven’t escaped death,” he said softly. “You’ve embraced it.”
What came from her was something between a sob and a hiss. She stepped toward him, closing in. He got his hands onto her shoulders and pushed her toward the window. “But I cared about you,” he said. “I thought I could help you. Someday I might have loved you.” She fell against the window sill. When she rose, he picked up a ladder-back chair and broke off a leg. He held it in front of him, a screw protruding from its end. “Don’t make me, please,” he said, on the verge of tears.
She stared at him, then climbed up into the window. She let the storm take her.
Off and on after she left the Deadfall, I followed Marie Rosenow around in the storm. It was almost unbearably cold, even in my heavy parka, fur-lined boots and gloves, so I could do this only in spurts, but it was a duty I felt obligated to perform. Marie Rosenow wore fewer clothes each day, finally reduced to searching the snow drifts for her small animal meals wearing no more than a few silken threads roughly the color of her whitening head and pubic hair. Periodically a tear would open on buttock or belly, but she bled very little.
I watched as she wandered the Deadfall grove, tracing the convoluted limbs with her fingertips. I sought her out on the cliffs behind the hotel, where she moaned her barely articulated laments to the still and unfeeling lake. I stood by silently while she devoured mice, squirrels, and small birds, fewer each day until she stopped eating at all.
Serena came back to the hotel, and I did my best to make sure she never saw Marie, even when Marie watched from beneath a window, or wandered aimlessly the pathways surrounding the hotel. I could have done something sooner, and I wonder now if maybe I should have.
One day I found her body lying face down in the snow beneath one of the twisted trees. It had been difficult to see at first – the skin had gone from white to something almost transparent. Her hair had gone the same straw color as the winter weeds. The body had emptied itself when she had finally given up, the blood seeping down into the snow. T
he ice underneath her body had melted into a muddy, reddish brown gel.
I won’t be telling Richard about this. There are some things he does not need to know.
The body was gone by the end of the next day. The gel liquefied, filtering down through the snow and ice. Perhaps the flowers will be healthier next spring.
– from the diary of Jacob Ascher,
proprietor, Deadfall Hotel, 1969-2000
Chapter Five
IN MEMORY OF HEAVEN
Spring in most parts of the world is considered a time of hope and renewal. The snows have disappeared, the sun comes out, the seemingly dead limbs sprout green buds. Young men’s fancies turn to thoughts of love, and all that. Spring at the Deadfall, at least during my time here, has always been late to arrive, a matter of gradual warming trends, subtle shifts in color, a slow struggle out of death and decay.
Tons of vegetation expire here during the winter months. Seemingly healthy trees a hundred or more years old die through to their hearts, and collapse as if felled by invisible axmen. If not for the fact that we have many hundreds of such trees, our woods here would be a thin veil of new growth instead of the dense wall they have become. But even a few trees dying each year in this manner make a dramatic impression. Once one witnesses such a failure, the surprising breadth and depth of the Deadfall grove becomes much more understandable. If anything, one wonders why the elaborate tangle of dead branches has not completely consumed the property.
The thoroughness of this demise extends to all other plant life in the area as well: grass and flowers and all sizes of bush and weed. And when the new, aggressive growth finally does come in, it comes as a kind of scavenging, feeding on the corpse of the old. We labor to haul away as much of the dead as possible, thereby starving the new plants into a reasonable balance.
This year my successor Richard Carter discovered conclusively that my description of this process was without exaggeration as he helped me haul away truckload after truckload of dead plant matter. This was a time-consuming process, not only because of the volume, but because of the care that must be taken in separating the living from the dead. New trunks grow out of the fallen trunks of the old, and if one is to preserve the freshman growth, the senior must be trimmed away without disturbing the new roots. In many areas of the grounds, the dead matter outweighs the new growth by a factor of ten or more, so we shovel and scrape for hours until the fresh, solitary shoots may find their own scope without interference. If we did not take our task seriously, the limbs of the dead would block and strangle these young plants, and we would be left with nothing but a pile of steaming rot by mid-season.
Serena observed our labors for the first week until, bored, she took herself off to invent some new game. Until her departure, I must say I was vaguely discomfited by her attitude. “Get rid of all that ugly old dead stuff,” she’d say. “I want to see the new flowers.” There’s nothing wrong with such a sentiment, of course, but I couldn’t help ruminating on just how relatively soon I, and her father, would become “ugly old dead stuff.” Am I over-thinking this? Obviously. It seems to be in the nature of adulthood that we venerate the past, grieve its obsolescence, and even live there in the mind far more than could possibly be healthy. Perhaps our sympathy is because we feel life slipping away. The very young, on the other hand, appear to worship every new thing.
There is one spring ritual at the hotel, however, in which Richard is not yet prepared to participate. My predecessor at the Deadfall, Ms. Malachiuk (no first name that I’m aware of), involved me in this particular task only after I had been here for three years. Ms. Malachiuk had been in charge here since the early ’thirties. At the time I arrived, her proprietorship was in its third decade. Her tenure might be considered a quiet one, having experienced few of the dramatic events which spice the hotel’s history. This might in part have been due to the times – it would be hard to imagine any resident as monstrous as some of our world leaders during that period, and in fact, many Nazi and Stalin-era uniforms were discovered abandoned in closets during subsequent sweeps of vacated rooms. But I also like to think her very demeanor may have contributed to the placidity of her tenure. A short, quiet woman, she projected more the attitude of a servant than that of management personnel. Clearly she saw herself as in a service role, and behaved accordingly.
She came to my room just before dawn on an early Spring day, her hands folded together, her head slightly bowed in the religious posture I would always associate with her. “Regretfully, I must introduce you today to an unpleasant new task. We commonly refer to it as the annual ‘Removal.’ You will be responsible for its smooth operation every year at this time. Some years, the Removal lasts only a day or so, but there have been years, I’m afraid, when the task has required several weeks of diligent effort.”
With such a formidable introduction, I imagined a task of great danger, and fatalist as I was at the time I readied myself for a potentially life-threatening endeavor. Instead, she instructed me to obtain a shovel, a heavy hammer, crowbar and sacks from the tool shed and join her in front of a room on the second floor. She pulled out a key, unlocked and slowly opened the door.
There was very little smell, but the body lying on the ornate rug had predominantly liquefied, with a more or less solid right hand and incredibly long, multiply-hinged left leg still wrapped in the rotting clothes. The head was an abstraction of not completely unappealing arrangement.
“We have twelve more to deal with this season,” she said. “Most years there are far more, each dead in their own way, as befitting their type. We must have had an unusually healthy clientele this year.”
In fact, there were thirteen more. I found a small form curled inside a wall sconce at the end of the third floor hall. His tiny tuxedo was streaked with dark brown scorch marks from repeatedly, convulsively embracing the white-hot bulb.
Compared to many who have come here, I must say that Marie Rosenow’s demise was a relatively wholesome one.
– from the diary of Jacob Ascher,
proprietor, Deadfall Hotel, 1969-2000
SOMETHING WAS LOOSE in the room. Richard was still too groggy to address the issue, still too enthralled with his dream to take action. He’d been up late with Jacob the night before, unsuccessfully trying to trace an electrical problem in the hotel that had been going on for weeks – a random power outage hitting individual rooms or clusters of rooms with no apparent logic or pattern, traveling through the structure like some darkness fairy. He’d been dreaming of this fairy, riding its crisped wings as it soared through the halls, tightly clutching its insect-like shoulders, feeling the arbitrariness of its havoc, worried that it might approach Serena’s room and find harm to do there.
There was also something nagging about the dream, some realization he knew he was very close to, but which remained just out of his grasp. It had to do with Abby, he thought, seeing Abby again, their family being together again, and not being confident if she would be happy to be with him again.
Sometimes in dreams the secret way to happiness seems right on the other side of a door you cannot quite get open, falling off the lips of a stranger you cannot quite hear, resting in a dim shadow your eyes cannot quite penetrate. Sometimes you actually do find the way in the dream, but then promptly forget it, finding in its place an all-too-imperfect memory.
Now he was very close to that memory of heaven, this dark sprite taking him right to its threshold, but something was loose in his room, something was flapping, something was shaking him out of his dream.
A bird was loose in the Deadfall. The flapping in his sleep had awakened him, becoming a loud, rhythmic sound that shook him and made him cold, blood throbbing in his ears, so that at first he thought it was the anxious beat of his own pulse that had awakened him, his heart ripping itself apart. That kind of thing had happened to him all the time as a child – sometimes he couldn’t fall asleep for hours because of the thundering of his pulse. In adolescence, he’d thought the pulse might be
in his arm, so he tried not to sleep on it, and at first that seemed to work, but it eventually came back, now throbbing in his ears. So then he thought his ears must be the culprits, particularly the left one, which was the side he always slept on. So he’d fashioned ear muffs out of heavy socks and the metal reinforcing band from an old winter cap. But then the annoying pulse moved into his head, where it had lived all this time.
As he grew older, the pulsing faded away, and he had no theories as to why. Once it had gone he found he’d missed it, for at least it had been his constant reminder of life, however frightening, late at night when death arrived for so many. His own grandfather had died sometime after midnight, his uncles between the hours of one a.m. and five, and when his father died it had been right after retiring for the night.
Richard pulled away the covers and permitted the night air of the Deadfall into his bed, until the flap, flap, flap of a wing finally reached him. He slipped out of his bed, pulled on his robe and shoes, stepped out into the yellow-lit hall that ran along the back of the manager’s quarters.
Bug-shaped baseboard lights placed every few yards illuminated the bottom quarter of the hall. In the distance they flickered as if choking. Sparser ceiling fixtures – shell-shaped, spaced a good twenty feet apart – pulsed. A short, perhaps, no doubt related to the other electrical issues.
Flap, flap, flap.
He stepped more quickly. Soon he was almost running.
Darkness broke and turned away from him. Richard imagined, of course, all manner of apparitions: a rare species of bat, an animated coat, a doll with wings. This was the Deadfall Hotel, after all – the sound wasn’t likely to come from a sparrow the cat had chased in.
He couldn’t stop himself from grinning then, as terrible as that thought might have been. There were no more cats in the Deadfall and, he suspected, it might be some time before they were allowed back in.
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