Deadfall Hotel

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  A large collection of cookbooks exploring cuisines Richard had no interest at all in sampling filled an entire bookcase. Partially completed novels which for some reason had been bound and distributed anyway. A book of transparent pages. Several large volumes of photographs of feet. First aid manuals for ‘Species of Dubious Existence.’ And a one-hundred-and-twenty-three-volume set of The Recorded Dreams of Ruth M. Gammetier.

  When they’d first arrived, Serena had been convinced the Deadfall library must hold every book ever written, but quickly found that it did not include any fiction written in the last fifty years or so, and certainly none of the young adult series she’d come to love. It did, however, provide tantalizing glimpses into the unknown and the unimaginable, to the extent that Richard insisted that she show him any book that interested her before delving into it too deeply. That was no doubt an unenforceable restriction, but he at least wanted to alert her to possible dangers that might be found in these pages. Happily, she’d been content so far to restrict her reading to the numerous volumes of fairytale and folklore.

  It had become Richard’s habit to peruse the shelves, focusing primarily on the more out of the way cases, selecting books to read at random or by hunch, sit, and read. Sometimes he was pleasantly surprised, as with The Monkey’s Final Haircut, by Wilma G. Crawford, which he concluded was the best novel he’d ever read. Other times he wasted hours on indecipherable prose which he honestly suspected might have shortened his life.

  Tonight he climbed the staircases to the third level, walked nonchalantly in front of the shelves, intent on pulling a book out with unstudied impulse. But his eye was drawn by a thin sheaf of papers bound under a clip, pulled halfway out from between two huge medical texts: Maladies of the Invisible, Vols. 1 and 2. It must have been recently disturbed – he would have noticed it before, otherwise. He spread the volumes apart with both hands and slipped the papers out.

  The Crooked House, A Story for Children, by M.M. Malachiuk. A crude cartoon of a house with enormous red eyes had been hand-drawn under the title. He thumbed through it: more crude drawings, a minimal use of words. Some sort of handmade picture book. He took it down to the ground floor and began to read.

  ELAINE COULDN’T BELIEVE a thing the squirrel was saying. She’d always heard that squirrels were notorious liars.

  “Your house has eaten all my food!” the squirrel declared in a high-pitched, whiny voice. “It popped its top and a great tongue came out of the attic, and licked my food right out of the hole in the oak tree! Now what will I do this winter?”

  “Oh, bosh and bother,” Elaine replied, pulled out a butcher knife and cut off the squirrel’s full, glorious tail. The squirrel jumped up and down, furious with Elaine because of the insult and furious with himself because he’d let his guard down. The squirrel tried to bite Elaine on her knees, but a swift kick put him in his place, across the road and into a ditch half-filled with raw sewage. The squirrel crawled out of the foul ditch and lay gasping on the edge of the pavement, shaking with the vibrations but blind to the traffic’s merciless approach.

  In the meantime, Elaine skipped onto the porch and nailed the severed tail to the door. After an appropriate period of admiration, she went inside for cookies and cream.

  That night, while Elaine slept, the squirrel stood up on the first stone of the long walkway that wound its way through the huge yard and up to the front porch. The shades in the two large front windows were about half-closed, the left one noticeably lower than the right, giving the house a drowsy, drunken look. The roof that hid the house’s evil, greedy tongue lay relaxed and sunken, conveying a deformed, feeble air to the house’s posture, and the way the porch sagged, lopsided and collapsing at its most extreme before the front door, reminded the squirrel of the ugly, drooling lips most human beings possessed.

  The squirrel made a tight, tiny fist and raised it into the air.

  From her bed, Elaine gazed out the window (which had a flaw in the glass, just like her astigmatic eye) at the recalcitrant squirrel. She knew her house looked drowsy, comatose, but that was simply a ruse. It was every bit as awake and prepared as she was.

  She had her butcher knife beneath her pillow, along with cudgel and cat’s claw. Her house was ready with splinters and nails and dry-rotted planks. Squirrels, never having lived in houses, did not understand them.

  Elaine had not only lived in this house since she was born, but the house, once basic and small, had grown with her, had grown up around her, so that now they resembled one another, they were sister and sister. The house had her eyes in its windows. The house opened its front door and her mouth yawned in its place. The house’s furnace was her heart, and it was her blood that ran through its plumbing. Squirrels have no chance when house and sister work as one.

  RICHARD READ TO the end of the book, through much murder and mayhem and clouds of extracted fur, then skipped back to previous passages, seeking some semblance of understanding. The book, finally, was a hymn to the mean-spirited, illustrated in the scrawl of a psychotic child. He supposed it had served some cathartic purpose for its author, but he could not imagine permitting any child of his to read such a disturbed screed. He was fascinated, however, by the way the house had come to resemble the child who lived inside it, and toward the end, how the old woman who had been the child slowly deteriorated in the manner of an ill-maintained home.

  The reading did little to encourage sleep, and despite the heavy exhaustion in most of his body, his head was aflutter with anxiety. As he shuffled back to his quarters, his eyes wide, attention scattered, he made note of new peels in the wallpaper, heavier layers – he was sure – of dust on lamps and upholstered backs.

  He made a couple of wrong turns – nothing new for him, particularly at this time of night. What was new was the dead end. He couldn’t even be sure what floor he was on, but he knew he’d never seen this before: a dead-end hall with a tall door. The top half of the door was green glass, and beaded with moisture. Painted on the wall above the door in deteriorated lettering: POOL.

  The pool room appeared to have been designed to suggest an underwater cavern. The walls were rough and warped, here and there, by fake stalactite and stalagmite columns. The lighting was dim and greenish, recessed near the tops of these columns and behind outcroppings along the ceiling’s edge. The illumination had that reflected pool look, although he hadn’t yet seen the pool. He did hear the dripping. His footsteps echoed, but not as loudly as he would have thought. He wondered if there was something spongy about the walls that absorbed sound. Scattered about the floor were slimy gray and black bars of soap, shampoo bottle empties, stiff, moldy towels, several torn pairs of men’s swimming trunks.

  Somewhere beyond the entry, Richard heard a splash. He walked carefully, watching his feet, listening for more. The pool’s edge began abruptly, a three-inch border of white stone, followed by a foot-high drop into the inkiest water he’d ever seen.

  His eyes adjusted to the brighter illumination here, its source an ovoid of blue in the ceiling to match the size of the pool itself. Tides moved through the black water, revealing ridges of black silt. The pool was thick with pollution, and things moved slowly through it, feeding. Now and then an eye expanded open, oil dripping across the whites and milky iris, then closed.

  “I’m afraid we… have no… lifeguard today. Frankly… I… think he’s… been eaten.”

  The man was thin and naked except for his tiny black swim trunks, the sides of which appeared to be strings merely painted onto his bony thighs. He lounged on the edge of a deck chair, its webbing frayed and drooping. His huge hands almost covered his knees. He was bald. His throat had been cut, but apparently some time ago, as no blood issued. The wound appeared slightly infected, the edges puffed up like lips. He was somewhat difficult to understand, as everything he said with his mouth was preceded by a split second with the same words from his flapping wound.

  “I’m sorry,” Richard said. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”


  “No… intrusion. It is… your job… or not? You’re… the new… one, I believe.”

  “Yes. But I’ve been here several months. I’m sorry. I didn’t know we had a swimming pool.”

  The skinny man laughed. It was confusing to hear, terrible to see. “Not much… for swimming… these days. As you can… see… hasn’t been… cleaned… in years.”

  Something pushed its way through the dark sludge just beneath the surface. He thought it might be a hand.

  He looked up. The skinny man with the cut throat was gone.

  RICHARD WAS UP early the next day. In fact, he hadn’t even tried to get back to sleep. He hoped, at least, exhaustion would take care of the problem that evening. He found the right staircase with the narrow door tucked underneath. No number, but he knew it to be Jacob’s quarters. He’d never bothered him here before, although he hadn’t been cautioned not to. He knocked lightly and a weary voice told him to come in.

  It was a single room, not very grand, but interesting, unpredictable. It appeared to have been carved out of an empty cavity in the structure: behind and underneath a stairway, in the seam where two sections of the hotel met, around passages for pipes and wiring. It consisted of a number of crannies and loft-spaces, accessible via ladders from platforms above the smallish floor. Paintings hung everywhere, as did oddly-shaped bookcases, masks, unidentifiable pieces of taxidermy, photo collages, signs, and an assortment of orphaned architectural elements – papal, Celtic, and Maltese crosses, linen fold and tracing details, Spanish and ionic capitals, beak-head and cat’s-head molding, nailed or screwed or cemented to the walls. A couple of tall, narrow windows near the ceiling let the light in, augmented by lamps everywhere. This surprised him – was it possible Jacob was scared of the dark?

  Jacob sat at a battered Mission-style desk, alongside a narrow cot. As Richard came closer he could see that Jacob was mounting stamps in a book. “You’re a stamp collector,” he said.

  “You sound surprised. I imagine you expected to see me pinning butterflies to a board – living ones, preferably.”

  “Well, no.”

  Jacob looked up. “Sorry. That was supposed to be a joke. I keep forgetting that my sense of humor is… questionable.” He paused, closed the book. “So you’re up early – is there a problem?”

  “Jacob, do we have a pool?”

  He stopped what he was doing. He appeared to be searching his mind for something. Could this be such a difficult question? “Well, occasionally.”

  Richard sighed. “What does that mean?”

  “It’s only there, occasionally, when we need it to be. It’s a time share, you might call it. The rest of the time it’s at some other, similar hotel. Haiti, perhaps, or the Black Forest.”

  “Okay, assuming that makes sense, what determines its location?”

  “I don’t know, actually. Need, I suppose. I take it you have stumbled upon it?”

  “Last night. I couldn’t sleep again.”

  “I am sorry to hear that. Were any of our residents using the pool?”

  “There was one fellow in trunks, his throat was slit. He wasn’t swimming – I don’t know if he could, the pool was full of black, oily sludge. But there was a hand – someone might have been in the pool.”

  “I’m searching my memory, but I don’t think I know him,” Jacob said. “He may have been from one of the other hotels. Not a very secure system, is it?”

  Richard shrugged. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Yes. Well, I’ll make some calls. By the way, I’m glad you dropped by. I have to travel for a few days, talk to our contributors.”

  Richard hadn’t felt stupid here in the hotel in some time, but today the feeling was back. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Oh? Sorry. The financial base of our operation relies on some key donations. Every year I must visit those donors and, well, express our appreciation.”

  “I see.”

  “You’ll be making this trip next year.”

  “I will? Oh.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Have you noticed the deterioration in the hotel lately?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m studying the problem.”

  “So nothing to worry about?”

  “I won’t know that until I have completed the study.”

  “But it’s okay for you to leave?”

  “A building is much like a living thing. It grows ill. Sometimes it dies, but usually there is something you can do before that happens. The Deadfall has been ill before, but still, it survives.”

  RICHARD SHUDDERED AWAKE, his chest wet and cold. He could not move his head. He blinked his eyes to clear the fog, and saw Abby stretched out on the metal table with him, her eyes open and empty. Overhead, the dingy bulb flickered and buzzed. He sensed the figure moving around him, glimpsed the shadow of its arm, held his breath as the cold spray rinsed him, rinsed Abby. In the blur beyond, he sensed the other table, and although he could not see, knew that his little girl was on it, and if he hadn’t already been dead that knowledge would have killed him.

  Richard shuddered awake, gazing at the destruction of the ornate green and gold wallpaper: a pastoral scene, sheep wrapped in clouds, the woman in the ball gown with her long slender neck, the man bowed, caressing her hand, kissing it, and Richard was pretty sure the man was weeping, his heart was breaking, and this scene, repeated hundreds of times in this Deadfall hall, this oh-so public display, was a humiliation beyond bearing.

  How had he gotten himself out into the hall? Had he fallen asleep here, unable to make it into his bedroom?

  He tilted his head back, stared into the brilliant ceiling lights, bright suns in the cerulean ceiling. He could feel the floral carpeting beneath him, drying up and dying. And everywhere on the walls, this idyllic scene of courting lovers, complete with sheep and pastel pastures, was decaying, dissolving into the horsehair plaster, into the rotting lathe beneath the surface, stating oh-so-frankly that love was a lie and could not survive.

  He examined his hands and forearms, fully expecting to see this same decay, this inescapable plague of nonexistence, but although his flesh was pale, and his hands trembled, he appeared to be whole. He willed himself to get on hands and knees and crawl into the bedroom. If Serena found him like this, whatever would she think? If he died, what would happen to her? But he could not move. He was weak and a coward, and he could not make himself move.

  A clarity rose like fever from his extremities, into his belly and spreading into his chest, irritating the skin of his shoulders and neck before rushing to fill his head. He considered the possibility – no, he was sure of the reality – that this was just some ordinary hotel. Rundown, sparsely populated, poorly managed, but ordinary. These guests were ordinary people, with jobs to go to, and families and relations at home. A furious man, a desperate widow, an abandoned pet, a damaged soul, a troubled heart. Figments. Simply because these creatures were lost and unattractive, as most people were lost and unattractive, as he, himself, was lost and unattractive, had led him to imagine them monsters. Most ordinary people, certainly, were monsters. Their skin was scarred, their recesses stank, they hid their motivations behind tired, pain-stained eyes. When they looked at themselves in mirrors what they saw was strange and unpredictable, and yet nothing unfamiliar at all.

  They dreamed all their lives, and in almost every instance they settled for something less than what they dreamed. They took the job they could get, they married the person who would have them, they did the things they knew they could do without pain or humiliation. They lived haunted by the ends to come. They did not recognize their own lives, which seemed pale and without passion. They could not hear what their children were saying. They were in terrible trouble, and ordinary, banal trouble. They could not imagine how, they could not imagine when. They settled. Most of them could not even achieve a fanciful, horrible death.

  He sobbed. He was sure that when he opened his eyes Serena would be sixteen, seventeen, unabl
e or unwilling to put up with his madness anymore. She’d leave him lying in bed, the television groaning on in excited complaint, and as terrible as he found its sound, it would still comfort him.

  “Mr. Carter, Mr. Carter, you okay? Mr. Carter, stop crying. Are you hurt? Mr. Carter, open your eyes.”

  He did, and saw the monster rushing out of the darkness to float above him, looming over him, sadness gripping the monster’s eyes. Not Enid, although he looked like Enid. Enid’s son. Richard shuddered, and closed his eyes again, and shuddered himself asleep.

  THE TELEVISION WAS on, and for a brief happy moment Richard thought he was home again, home being somewhere in the past, with Abby in the kitchen and some mindless show embarrassing itself in the living room. And embarrassing him, because he really wanted to watch it. He knew Serena would already be there, sitting on a pillow a few feet away, snacking on something. Abby wouldn’t be pleased about it, but also wouldn’t want to make it a big issue.

  But happiness quickly passed as he realized this couldn’t be. He rose from the cot where they had placed him, supporting himself with a sore arm. Enid was at the small stove, cooking something. He still felt a little disoriented, because he could still hear the television set, and as far as he knew there were no televisions at the Deadfall – certainly he hadn’t seen one before now.

  Then he heard Serena’s laugh coming from another room. He looked through a nearby doorway, saw Enid’s son standing there, looking the other way, and heard Serena’s laugh again, over the television, coming from that same room.

  “You may sit up, I think. And in another five minutes, but no less, you may come over to this table and eat some food.”

  He pulled himself up, struggled to his feet.