Finally, Jacob had convinced him of the environmental security of the Deadfall’s cellar. “It has become traditional, in fact, for incoming managers to store pieces of their old lives in this place. The things from my own former life are stored here as well. And as you can see, the managers never seem to retrieve all of their possessions upon their departures, which makes this cellar, I suppose, a kind of museum of the Deadfall’s managerial staff.”
The three of them had spent half a day emptying the trailer and carrying everything through an outside entrance into those dark, subterranean chambers.
Now he needed to retrieve a piece of that hoard: a rather primitive painting of fat grazing sheep, with purple mountains in the background. It had been Serena’s favorite picture as a small child – gazing at it had always helped put her to sleep – and now she wanted it to hang on her bedroom wall, hoping it would have the same effect.
The problem was that Richard hadn’t paid much attention to the way they had arranged things in the cellar. It was a crowded, chaotic place, and finding one small painting in all that had become an onerous task.
The cellar confirmed Richard’s impression that none of the Deadfall’s long succession of managers had bothered to throw anything away. But relative to the Deadfall’s history, yours was only a temporary responsibility. Every manager had left a mark, and none had known everything there was to know about this hotel. Throwing away what another manager had put into place would have seemed arrogant, perhaps even dangerous.
Rickety stacks of boxes and crates made floor-to-ceiling columns throughout the vast room. The containers at the bottom were likely to be more ornate, with elaborate hinge and lock devices, and apparently dated back to the time of the original building. Personal possessions from all eras hung from walls and hand-hewn beams. Richard could see a number of antique bicycles, household appliances, dress forms and bundled curtains, lamps and end tables, dress coats and uniforms, toys and canoes and skis and ancient school books, television cabinets with the tubes removed, hoop skirts alongside jumper cables alongside rolls of barbed wire and an entire stuffed menagerie – from beavers to yak heads.
Many of the items were indecipherable. There was a long metal rod with spikes radiating out like spokes from its entire length. A metal bar which might have been a handle was attached to one end. Richard assumed it was some kind of weapon, but he couldn’t imagine the sort of creature it was meant to control.
There were several squat glass containers filled with foam, miniature ladders protruding from their tops like novelty straws. In one corner stood a dead potted palm with dials and knobs on the surface of the clay pot. Hanging from much of the ceiling was a huge, continuous fishnet. Jittering shadows danced on the other side of its thick strands.
Their furniture appeared undamaged, although the dampness in the air caused concern. Parts of the wall had disintegrated, exposing the dirt it. There was, in fact, a general sense of sponginess here, of bits missing, of hidden gaps. Richard looked into an antique, green-stained mirror, saw bits of his face falling away.
He stumbled back with a tight, childish cry, arms flailing into stacks of dusty boxes. The towering stacks wobbled, held, but a fall of thick, ashy dust covered his face. He bolted upright, choking and sneezing uncontrollably. Dizziness made him drop to one knee. The room wobbled left and right. He reached up and held his burning nose, blew hard, frantic to clear his nasal passages.
He stifled another cry – Jacob had come down to help look, then been distracted by one item or another. Richard could hear him rummaging through the items at the other end of the basement, muttering to himself. Of course, Jacob was likely to understand these nervous outbursts, but it embarrassed Richard that he still had such moments. Finally he found the little painting inside a collapsing cardboard box tucked under some old bookcases.
“Richard! I have something I think you’d like to see!”
Metal and wood squeaked and rattled as something rolled across the floor. He came out from under the collapsing bookcases, made his way around two red mahogany wardrobes, and found Jacob standing in the middle of a cleared aisle beside a complicated box-like device mounted on a four-legged wooden stand with large wooden wheels attached at the bottom of each leg. A chain belt ran from the left front wheel to a cog under the cabinet, which turned a flywheel and a rod contraption attached to the telescopic lens on the front of the cabinet. The cabinet itself was decorated with scroll work and inlaid veneers, and a small door in the side bore the carved face of a devil in the center. A three-inch stove pipe with a conical lid rose out of a hole in the top of the cabinet.
“Very impressive,” Richard said. “Or, ‘neat,’ as Serena might say. But what is it?”
“They called them fantascopes. They were used before the invention of film to project images onto a screen. They were used in the production of phantasmagoria; ‘horror shows,’ you might say. The operator would project a series of spooky images onto the back of a screen. Since the screen was between the operator and the audience, the people watching did not see the source of the images. The story goes that a Frenchman showed up with it one day at the Deadfall, a year or so after the hotel opened. He offered to entertain the guests for a small fee.”
“A horror show?”
“A phantasmagoria, yes.”
“That would have been quite interesting, given our clientele.”
“Actually, it was rather successful here. So much so that the manager at the time – I think it must have been during Clarence Peabody’s tenure – paid the man a large sum of money for it, so that he could put on a phantasmagoria for the guests whenever he felt like it.” Jacob patted the cabinet affectionately and opened the small door to reveal some sort of lantern and a metal framework. “It is really quite clever. There’s an oil lantern inside, and a series of hand-painted slides or mechanicals create the images. The belt attached to the wheel controls the distance between the movable front lens and the fixed condenser, so that the proper focus is maintained when you move the fantascope forward or back. But it wasn’t a perfect focus, of course, which only added to the effect.”
“People found this clever?”
“Oh, people were terrified.”
“Really?”
“Indeed. They screamed, fainted, some ran out of the room. This entertainment, you see, was intended to generate fear and panic. More than a few deaths were attributed to it, due to weak hearts.”
“It seems so primitive. Surely they didn’t react that way here?”
Jacob laughed. “Oh, you’d be surprised. It would have thrilled our guests, I imagine, simply because they didn’t understand it. But they would have believed the images, in any case, and now and then a particular image would resonate with a guest, I imagine, and prove too much to bear. And for the normal audience member, well, they believed in ghosts and demons and monsters, so imagine them seeing one, with no other explanation for its manifestation other than it must be real.”
“And today, when you go to a horror movie, you don’t really believe what you’re seeing, but it’s entertaining anyway. At least for some people.”
“Because it’s safe. It reminds you of what really frightens you, but you don’t believe in it; you understand it’s only a movie.”
“But the people experiencing the phantasmagoria, they had no such understanding,” Richard said, nodding. “They must have been completely overwhelmed.”
“They believed,” Jacob said, “that Hell had come up to claim them.”
RICHARD DIDN’T REALLY want to sit through this, but Jacob had seemed so eager and insistent, and Jacob had insisted on very little since they’d moved in. Richard sat in a rickety wooden folding chair, his feet planted firmly so as to minimize the wobble. Approximately twelve feet away from him, Jacob had stretched a gauzy curtain. Richard would have helped, but he’d been so repelled by the look and feel of the cloth – it reminded him of the dreams he’d been having, of Abby, and death, and transitioning flesh – he h
ad avoided Jacob’s preparations. That end of the basement was pitch black. Jacob had left a low-wattage bulb on at Richard’s end. In some ways the dim light was worse than none – around him, the shadows transformed in sympathy with his unease. He kept Serena’s painting on his lap, gripping it tightly, reluctant to lay it down on the floor.
The soft sound of tinny bells floated through the darkness. Richard supposed it was meant to signal that the show was about to begin. The light dimmed a little more. He fixed his attention forward, but he really couldn’t see the curtain anymore.
A ghostly image of Napoleon Bonaparte suddenly floated in the air in front of him.
“Napoleon Bonaparte!” Jacob intoned in a false, deep voice from the end of the basement.
Napoleon dissolved, replaced by the classical image of a naked man collapsing in a woman’s arms. “The Education of Achilles,” Jacob announced, still in that low voice.
The show proceeded through a number of slides – ‘The Winged Devil,’ ‘Skeleton with Scythe,’ ‘Medusa’ – each announced solemnly and over-dramatically in Jacob’s false voice. Despite the fact that they were nicely painted, and of just the right degree of blurriness to be eerily convincing, Richard was beginning to wonder how many slides Jacob had back there.
A robed woman carrying a bloody dagger loomed ahead, so close she appeared to be actually in front of the screen, unless the screen had been moved in the darkness. She looked as if she was right on him – it was disorienting. “La Nonne Sanglante!” Jacob announced. “The Bleeding Nun!” And then, in his own, somewhat excited voice, Jacob said, “Interesting. Inspired by Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, I believe. We have a copy in the library. Have you read it?”
“Um, Jacob, perhaps it would be better if you didn’t speak.”
There was a long pause as The Bleeding Nun stayed up far longer than the other images. Then, Jacob’s voice, “Oh. Of course. You are absolutely right.”
The Bleeding Nun went to black. Another long pause made Richard worry he’d dampened Jacob’s enthusiasm for the performance. But then there was a sound as of clanking chains, beginning as if at some distance and rapidly increasing in volume. A shimmering pale figure came out of a corner of the dark basement, glowing red as it approached, finally manifesting as a demon in chains, quivering in rage, yet speechless, fading in and out until it disappeared entirely.
Richard knew, of course, that this was simply a painted slide, and he’d even heard the whistle and creak as Jacob wheeled the fantascope around to achieve the zooming effect. But it thrilled him just the same, and made him realize just how devastating this display would be for someone who actually believed in such things.
Another long pause, a soft whispering, and a glowing, half-transparent figure moved swiftly through the air, garment and remnants of flesh trailing in eerie slow-motion. Her head tilted, eyes rolled back. More terrified than terrifying, she gazed at Richard, screaming as fire raced across the darkness in pursuit. Her face was an emotional puzzle, reminiscent of Serena, his mother, every beautiful thing he’d known in women. Richard was brought to tears, convinced this was Abby, even though he could see that it was obviously a painted image. Fading in and out, his memory of her, as insubstantial as reflected smoke.
RICHARD STRUGGLED AWAKE with a powerful shudder, his heart and lungs tearing themselves from the nightmare’s grip. He held onto the bed with both hands, shaking his head as if to dislodge the images that had settled there. Jacob had introduced him to the phantasmagoria, that had been no dream, but no doubt his natural anxieties had magnified its effects.
For the first few seconds of wakefulness, he thought he was still in the cellars, having fallen asleep on the floor, but the cellar clutter slowly dissolved, the clutter of his own bedroom replacing it. He looked at the clock: 3:00 am. He was reluctant to try sleep again just yet, not desiring to revisit either the cellar or the morgue. So he did as had become his habit on sleep-interrupted nights; he pulled on robe and slippers for a trip to the library, where he would read until sleep became appealing once more.
With his first few steps out his bedroom door, Richard realized he wasn’t entirely awake. Scattered brain cells, apparently, were still sleeping, and he found himself moving with a kind of pleasant drowsiness. This alerted him that he probably should take his perceptions with a grain of salt. He was sure that was unhealthy in some way, but necessary if you wanted to maintain your equilibrium within the Deadfall environs.
Almost immediately he was impressed by the air of decay in the corridor. Oftentimes, during the day, the walls and furnishings of the hotel appeared worn, well-used, but nothing so bad as this. Tonight, he could not help but notice the fraying edges of the carpet, the places where designs had faded, become obscured by some wear or stain, how the wallpaper had begun to peel at the seams, to separate from the borders near the ceiling, to bubble in places where the windows had allowed decades of sunlight in. The vast patchwork hotel appeared to be separating into its composite pieces, its additions and planned additions, its rooms of dream and its fevered spaces.
The few pieces of upholstered furniture in the hall, and the delicately-turned occasional tables, also appeared less impressive than he remembered: fabric worn thin at the corners, threads snagged near the floor as if by feline mischief, veneers flaking away from some sudden atmospheric change.
Peering up at the ceiling was almost alarming: bulbs were blown or missing from fixtures (was Jacob actually shirking his duties?), plaster had begun to threateningly bow.
And beyond the deterioration, Richard felt a certain uncleanliness walking here. He could sense it adhering to his slippers, slipping through the air into his lungs. He felt an urge to spit it out. He was careful with his hands, not wanting to touch anything.
A drifting beside him. A breath, a frown. He turned his head slowly, caught Abby’s eye. He found himself breathing in, searching for her smell, some indication beyond the visual that this was indeed her. She looked at him, and yet she didn’t look at him. Something about her transparent eyes suggested she was seeing him, but there was much more to it than that. She might be his memory of her, but he also suspected that he was somehow her memory of him.
In many ways, this had been the strangest part of the Deadfall experience. Abby had no business being here, and yet here she was, looking both like and unlike herself, both as if she’d never died and as if she’d never lived and had simply been his hallucination. He wanted to touch and hold her and say how terribly, terribly sorry he felt, but at the same time he wanted never to see her again. He couldn’t grieve her, really, as long as she was still present. His wife had become a ghost, and yet his relationship with her was still quite real.
A soft sigh and a rush of air, vertiginous apprehension. At first he thought Abby had transported herself and was now approaching him from the other end of the hall. Then that there were two, three Abbys, coming at him in a line, their ghostly hair and limbs and clothing fluttering, as if blown by a spectral wind. But the posture of the figures distinguished them: slumped, depressed, bony shoulders, and their ghostly substance of a different, bluer shade.
One of the figures glided past him, the smoky blue orb of her right eye rotating in his direction as she apparently noticed him, then her mouth unfolded, blue glass tongue tasting the air in surprise, although he had no idea how he might have come to that conclusion. But just as quickly she went away, ignoring him, and he watched her as she glided up to one of the walls, with its associated chair, framed pictures, antique lighting sconce, and raised her dress slightly with both almost-invisible hands, whereupon dozens of gray, millipede-like things, a couple of feet long, at least six inches across, glided out from under her phantom petticoats and swarmed over the chair, over the wall, thousands of thin legs churning, and everything they passed over became a lighter shade, cleaned and renewed.
The fabled housekeepers! so excited to have finally witnessed them in the act, he looked to Abby to tell her who they were and discovered that Ab
by was no longer there. Of course. He felt foolish and sad.
Then he was aware of a soft weeping. The spectral housekeeper had been joined by the other two, and all three now stared at the recently cleaned wall, which appeared to be rapidly filling in with dirt, handprints, deterioration. The millipedal cleaners swarmed the wall several more times, and each time the dirt and wear came back more quickly than the time before, and the housekeepers sighed, and the housekeepers wept, and eventually they floated away with heads bowed.
Obviously the system had broken down. Richard’s alarm was padded by drowsiness and a buzzing incoherence. He needed to inform Jacob about all this, but knew that, at least at that moment, he would be unable to frame the right sentences. Maybe after he’d read a little, gotten a bit more sleep. He continued on to the library.
At first glance, there was never anything particularly outré or strange about the Deadfall library, other than the fact that it was an unusually fine and impressive example of bibliotheca to be found in a hotel. The room itself, unlike most of the spaces in the Deadfall, had never given Richard an uneasy moment, and he’d always found that a relaxing read was easily achieved. The books housed here, of course, were unusual in and of themselves. There were a few standards of American and European literature, limited and first editions for the most part, and a nice selection of fairy tales, folklore, geography, philosophy, religion, and home repair. But the bulk of the volumes in the library were items Richard – who considered himself well-read – had never heard of before. Shelf after shelf of ‘scientific’ treatises examining, literally, everything from ants to zebras. Memoirs by people he’d never heard of, many of them having little labels on their spines inscribed ‘ex-resident,’ including a small volume full of nonsense syllables titled Memories of a Frog. A dozen or so histories of the Deadfall, most of them completely bogus, according to Jacob, who said the hotel’s “true” history “has yet to be recorded.” Shelved in this section was a slim volume entitled The Autobiography of Clarence Peabody, which Richard quickly skimmed, seeking some mention of the fantoscope. There was none – beyond a few basic statistics, the pamphlet focused almost entirely on missed opportunities and complaints about the few opportunities actually obtained.
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