by Cesare, Adam
Tonight was different. Tonight she’d been ascending steps, bringing herself closer to heaven, as it were.
Out of habit, she knocked softly on the door to Room Thirty-one. She didn’t need to. Father Hayden couldn’t hear her, would never be able to hear her. Daisy insisted on talking to him when it was feeding time, but the girl also talked to the flowerbeds. It didn’t mean they could hear her.
Taking the keycard out of the front pocket of her dress, she unlocked the door to the room and shut it softly behind her.
The blinds were completely drawn and they were on the third floor, far above the one light over the parking lot, so no light entered the room.
She stood there in the darkness and tried to slow her breathing so she couldn’t hear the rise and fall of her own dress. She let the nothingness wash over her and imagined that this was what the world must be like for him all the time.
Complete emptiness.
It only took a moment for the illusion to be shattered by her own need to breathe. She exhaled and flipped the light switch that she knew was three feet to her right.
Victoria had designed the layout of the rooms herself. It may have been years ago that she’d told the electricians how to run the wiring and told the movers where to put the furniture, but the years had been kind to The Brant.
The switch connected to both the foyer lights and the overhead bulbs in the bedroom. Guests had to click the bedside lamps on themselves if they wanted extra light to read by, reducing electricity costs and providing effective mood lighting when couples were returning to their rooms.
Father Hayden was on his back in the bed, folded neatly between the sheets. Victoria wondered for a moment whether he’d tucked himself in like that or if Daisy had done it.
His eyes were half open, but he was asleep.
He snored, a thin line of drool running down one of the scars at the side of his mouth, a tiny river in the fleshy crags of his face.
Every morning Daisy would put in his eye drops to keep his eyes from drying up and falling out of his head. Victoria walked over to his nightstand, not trying to soften her tread because she knew that he wouldn’t wake anyway.
Unscrewing the cap to the Visine bottle, she aimed the end over Hayden’s left eye and gave it a light squirt. She could hear the stream of solution leave the bottle, bouncing off Father Hayden’s dry, dead eye and spattering beads onto the smooth flesh where his eyebrows used to lay.
It wasn’t until she’d put the drops into his right eye that he awoke, sucking in air like a drowning man. She wondered if she’d woken him from a dream or nightmare, if he was capable of having either.
*
The old woman didn’t think he could hear, but he could. Not well, but well enough to make out words when they were being whispered to him in the hole where his ear used to be.
“Hello, Father,” the old woman said.
The old woman was the worst.
Even though she spoke to him like an infant, he took an odd kind of enjoyment in being visited by Daisy. In many ways she was right, he was an infant, but her daily routines kept him fed and comfortable. When she touched him it was gently, with the hands of a mother or nurse.
The old woman was there to do the opposite. She touched him like a lover, and not a particularly caring one.
She didn’t speak for a long time, so he remained still and listened to the sounds of the room.
He couldn’t hear much beyond the bubble that covered about a foot from his left ear. The rest was muffled by an inch of molten skin.
Conscious that he didn’t want to appear frightened, he focused on lying still and disinterested. They believed him to be one step from catatonic and he wasn’t going to let them think any differently.
Acting out brought swift punishment. He’d learned to stop thinking about it.
The surface of the mattress sank in as she climbed into bed next to him. It was going to be one of those nights. He wondered what time it was. It could have been late night or early morning. The world around him had dimmed when the sun stopped entering the room.
He could tell light from darkness. The world around him was either a soft shade of yellow gray or total blackness. Other than gradations of light, his blindness was complete.
The old woman lifted up his shirt and placed her hand on his abdomen. She chose to caress the grapefruit-sized patch of skin above his belly button that had remained untouched by the fire. He still had hair there and she picked at the wiry strands of lower chest hair that his wife, Hannah, had called his “happy trail”.
He tried not to think about his wife as the old woman touched him.
They’d brought him at least two pairs of silk pajamas. He may have had more, but it was impossible and trivial to tell the difference.
The soft fabric allowed him mobility with minimal chaffing, not that he went many places.
The feel of the silk had been unnerving at first. Against his fire-smoothed skin it seemed cool and damp, so much so that he could never tell when he was wet in actuality. But he got used to it, learned to enjoy rubbing it between his fingers.
“What do you think about all day, Father?” the old woman whispered. “Do you think about protecting us or ruining us?”
She called him Father even when there was no one else around to hear her. She knew that he wasn’t a priest, but she was the only one besides the strong man that knew.
She’d never called him Hugh, Mayland or even Mr. Mayland (like she had after he’d checked into her hotel), so in return he never thought of her as anything other than the old woman. She wasn’t Victoria Brant: she was his jailer and abuser.
The old woman styled herself as his savior. She’d not only saved his life, becoming an overnight expert on caring for burn victims, but she also let him live in her hotel for free.
The nature of the hotel and of the separatist group that had killed his wife and burnt him to a cinder was hard to follow, but he’d picked up enough to have a rough understanding of it. Davey led a group of young people who got their kicks from undermining the leaders of the town at every turn. When they weren’t performing sacrificial murders of their own, the kids were ripping off the general store, placing phone calls to local police and trampling the farmers’ crops with their meaningless rituals.
None of that was particularly harmful to the hotel or her people. Brant had cops in her congregation who dealt with most of these problems, but somehow over the last twenty-four hours the cold war had gone hot.
Most of this information came from comparing what Daisy said to him during the day to what the old woman whispered in his non-ear at night.
The intel he gathered from Daisy not only had to be parsed from the never-ending stream of seeming bullshit that flowed from her mouth, but also had to be fact-checked against what little her boss let him know.
Although he was a prisoner, he was also a confidant for both of them.
The two women had different reasons as to why Hugh Mayland was now called Father Hayden. Daisy used this moniker unironically, although she knew that Brant’s cover story of the old church fire was fabricated (there had never been a church in Mission). She and the rest of the town were under the impression that he was a powerful dark priest, outsourced from a small town in South England to help protect the people of Mission.
Why she kept the fact that he was from England, Hugh didn’t know. His mouth was badly burned. He’d never be understood if he tried to speak, never mind his accent.
The old woman used the name to try to convince herself of the lie. It had been the strong man who’d found him crawling through the woods, Mayland’s skin charred and peeling as he tried to escape the monsters that had drugged and killed his wife.
Later, from Daisy, he’d learned that the strong man’s name was Roy, but, like the old woman, he would remain the strong man to Hugh.
“You wouldn’t believe the night that I’ve just had,” the old woman said. He could not smell wine on her breath, which he took as
a good sign. She would often get violent afterwards if she was drunk. “I’ve just had a meeting with an old acquaintance of yours, if you can remember Davey. Things are not looking good.”
The old woman tugged at the drawstring of his pajama bottoms. He tried to ignore what her hands were doing, focus on the implications of what she was saying.
The top half of his body had gotten the worst of the flames, leaving his privates still functioning. This was cause for celebration when he considered how lucky he was to be able to use his bedpan to go to the bathroom himself, but when the old woman slid down his silk bottoms it made him embarrassed to be a man.
Embarrassed not only in the sense that he was too cowardly to fight back against her advances, but also that his body responded to them. It would sound selfish, but the old woman’s visits to his room were worse for Hugh than his nights in the basement.
There he was surrounded by murderous lunatics but nothing happened to him. Those were the nights that he was thankful for his blindness and his inability to hear most things. He sat in his throne and was occasionally smeared with blood, but other than that the ceremonies were rather mundane. On good nights he didn’t even hear the pleading screams of the offerings.
Objectively, within his conscious mind, Hugh knew that he had suffered a psychotic break to be able to remain unfazed by the horrors he endured on a daily basis, but he welcomed the numbness.
“Don’t you have a hex or a blood rite that can destroy him?” the old woman asked. She’d said jokes like this before, but this time it didn’t sound like she was mocking his lack of magical powers, but instead imploring him to develop some. “The rest of them would wither and die without him. I should have done it myself or at least I should have had Roy do it.”
Her voice sounded different tonight, not the husky tone laden with innuendo that she usually took. She sounded sadder, two minutes away from either screaming or tears. Maybe both.
Sad or not, she kept on massaging his member. He felt the blood begin to flow, his body responding without his mind, and he felt the hollowness inside him fill to the brim with shame.
He tried to focus on understanding what she was saying. When his jailers spoke to him, they did so under the impression that he couldn’t understand what they were saying, so they talked about people he’d never met and events he’d never witnessed without the courtesy of exposition.
“I can’t order him around anymore, because Roy’s dead,” she said. She sounded more frustrated and angry about this than mournful. Hugh guessed that Roy was the strong man, as there didn’t seem to be many more male staffers at The Brant. From what Daisy had said, Roy also prepared a wonderful Salisbury steak.
She didn’t say anything more, but busied herself with undoing the buttons on his shirt.
Considering what he knew about the state of the town, Hugh doubted that Roy died peacefully in his sleep of natural causes.
He toyed with possible scenarios for Roy’s death, imagining everything from dramatic Hollywood shootouts to a familiar bonfire that gave him an involuntary chill. While he passed the time with these scenes, he tried to ignore the dampness of his skin and the lewd sucking sounds that filled the room.
There were tears on his chest, left from when Brant had run her mouth across the lines of his scar tissue. It was good to know that, tonight at least, she wasn’t enjoying this either.
Hugh tried to preoccupy himself with what Roy had looked like. He couldn’t remember seeing him during his stay at the hotel. The implications of his death were what he needed to focus on, though.
Even blind and near-deaf, Hugh Mayland understood that there was a war coming to Mission. He also understood that he had a part to play in it.
He was not a firm believer in the hetero-normative view of manhood.
In his life before the hotel, he had enjoyed books and plays, not hunting, fighting or fishing, but his time at The Brant had caused him to value the idea of revenge. Not just an English revenge, not the plots and schemes of Hamlet, but an American revenge.
The Bard could be a fount of inspiration too, but not now. What Hugh craved now was the justice of the gun, the cold American iron of Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson.
Coward or not, numb or not, Hugh Mayland knew that he needed to kill someone before he allowed himself to die.
His body filled with sickly warmth for a moment, then went cold as the sweat evaporated off of his smooth body and silken pajamas.
“Thank you for that, Father,” the old woman said.
He wanted to speak so badly then, but settled for screaming the words in his mind instead. It was the same thought he had every night that she came to his room.
My name is Hugh Mayland and I’m going to kill you.
Part Three
The Great Beast
Chapter Twenty-Three
Claire looked into his eyes, his little skinless neck bobbling up and down like it was a spring, and screamed.
She’d found Bert.
To prepare for the dinner rush, Claire had hunted down a Phillips screwdriver to take the lock off the second refrigerator. She’d been surprised how easy it had been to pry off. The metal hinge had ripped up through the screws holding it in place, the leverage allowing her to bend it like Supergirl.
She’d felt pretty good about herself and her handiwork before opening up the fridge.
It was inside that she found Bert, his skin removed and most of the meat cleaned off his two hind legs. He’d been split lengthwise from neck to tail, his legs flattened under him against the cutting board.
The civilized part of Claire wanted to retch, but couldn’t because the chef inside of her could only see meat. She’d gotten so used to working with Roy and chopping up raw meat that the cleaned and prepped dog didn’t look like a dog. Bert was completely alien from any pet she’d ever known. He looked more like an overgrown chicken.
The thought that she could see Bert as meat horrified her more than his corpse did.
She closed the refrigerator and leaned against it for support.
Claire tried fitting the pieces together in ways that didn’t mesh. She started with the prime suspect in Bert’s murder: Roy. Then she worked backwards to the question on everyone else’s lips: Where was Roy?
For that matter, why the fuck is he chopping up dogs and stashing them next to the cold cuts?
It was as if she were working on a jigsaw puzzle but had pieces from ten separate pictures.
After a moment, she looked at the screwdriver she’d tossed to the floor while screaming, then back at the lock that she’d felt so proud of breaking off just a minute earlier.
Had anyone heard her scream? Was someone coming to her rescue right now? Should she try to pretend like she didn’t see Bert, especially if Roy was planning to come back in time for the dinner service? Too many questions, none them helping to put skin back over Christine’s dog.
What little she’d known of Christine, Claire had liked. She was funny and sarcastic in a way that the people here didn’t seem to get.
As hot and sweet as he was, Tobin was still a country boy at heart. He wasn’t synced up with her city-girl cynicism, probably never would be. The older lesbian had been. Cosmopolitism and acerbic humor seemed to go hand in hand.
Now Christine would have to tell her wife that Bert wasn’t coming back for belly rubs. The thought made her sad, but not sad enough to push away the swirl of questions and connections being tried, broken and reformed in her mind.
She thought all the way back to that first night.
Not her first night sleeping at The Brant, her first night partying. The night that she’d seen things—or thought she’d seen things—that she couldn’t explain. Horror movie images of ritual sacrifice or at least the aftermath of a murder scene.
Then she heard Tobin’s words echo in her head, about how Davey had long suspected the hotel was a front for some kind of sinister activities.
As soon as the connections were made, she stepped back
to see that they weren’t connections at all, merely similarities in tone. They were tenuous, circumstantial links at best. They came from a place of fear and confusion, not facts.
She’d worked with Roy. Aside from some regrettable facial hair and a wax-agnostic worldview, he was an all right guy.
One half of the lock was still attached to the fridge, so she pressed the broken part down and hammered at it with the end of the screwdriver. She cut the edge of her hand on the frayed raised metal, but the result was worth it. It wasn’t going to hold up to heavy scrutiny (or a light tug), but the lock was back on the refrigerator, sealing Bert up in his tomb.
“What now?” Claire asked. What should have been a thought became words spoken to the empty kitchen.
She needed help but she was still hours away from her normal hook-up time with Tobin. “Hook-up” here had two meanings.
The discovery of Bert seemed to grant her a clarity she hadn’t felt in days (or was it weeks?). She had to count on her fingers the number of days she’d been seeing Tobin. When she got to her second pinky, she stopped counting. How had the two of them become so close without her noticing?
If she hadn’t just found the mutilated corpse of a house pet, she would have been alarmed at how quickly she’d become dependent on Tobin, but now she was glad to have him.
How could she have him and still have no way of contacting him right now?
“Cell phones give you brain tumors,” he’d said one morning while putting on his pants. Putting on his pants seemed to be when he did most of his talking, at least most of the talking that Claire could remember.
The shack didn’t have a landline, either. Calling him was not happening.
Claire would either have to walk out to the shack, a place she wasn’t sure he’d be or that she could find on foot, or wait until his truck pulled into the gas station parking lot.