by Cesare, Adam
“What are you doing?” Davey asked with real panic in his voice. If anxiousness had made him a different person, then fear had made him a different, pitiful species.
“Tell me that you had nothing to do with this,” Claire said. “Tell me that you didn’t kill them.”
“Of course,” Davey said. He placed his free hand in front of the barrel. It would not be an effective shield for his face. “It was her! She did it because this is what she does! I’m sorry, please put the gun down.”
She did.
There was no proof that he was lying, not even a hint of evidence that she could think of. Putting the gun on him had just felt like the thing to do, so she did. Claire recognized that she was running on impulse now, sometimes with Silverfish pushing the buttons. It felt good to give up a bit of control in one area to take more back in another.
“Can you tell me how to fire this thing,” Claire said and smiled.
Davey huffed, looked like he was regaining some amount of his former composure, and showed her how to click off the safety.
“Why were you so afraid? The safety was on.”
“You looked like you knew what you were doing.”
She laughed at this and then started off back towards Mission.
Chapter Thirty-One
The sky had already started to perceptibly lighten as she walked up the front path of The Brant.
Claire must have spent more time asleep at the shack than she thought. If the time was at all important, she would have checked her phone, but it wasn’t so she had no desire to.
It was early enough that the sun would be up in an hour or two. That was enough information.
The grip of the gun was heavy against her breasts. She had no other safe place to hold it but her front apron pocket. To be safe, she moved her phone and baton to the elastic of her stockings. As she walked she hoped that they wouldn’t slip down the band and become bulges against her legs.
She took a deep breath and pushed open the glass door. The sleigh bells chimed. They wouldn’t have been a problem if she’d gone around back, but it was too late now.
At first it appeared that there was no one in the lobby, but then Daisy picked her head up from the front desk, hair tousled.
“Are you okay?” Daisy said. There was a thin stream of drool running over her chin and a red indentation where she’d fallen asleep on one of the guestbook’s golden pens.
“I’m fine,” Claire said. She wasn’t, of course. Even the dull, half-asleep Daisy would be able to see that. Her stockings were torn and dotted with blood, her knees stained with dirt and vomit. She didn’t need a mirror to know that her eyes were sunken and bloodshot. All over her body and face it felt as though the oily grime on her skin was a centimeter thick.
She kept moving forward, headed for the stairs. To get to the service stairwell she’d have to walk one flight up, head all the way down the hallway and then begin her descent down to the basement.
“Go back to sleep,” Claire said, not bothering to speak to Daisy anymore and taking the first step up the stairs. Daisy was the only person left in Mission that Claire no longer felt intimidated by. She was comfortable enough to turn her back on her, but still took the steps two at a time.
She turned the corner at the top of the stairs and could hear the front desk phone being picked up off of its cradle.
“She just walked right in. I think something is wrong with her,” Daisy said into the phone.
Et tu, Daisy?
It hurt to run, but she padded down the hallway carpet in double time.
At the top of the service stairwell she stopped and listened. It was unclear what she was supposed to be listening for but she’d know it if she heard it.
There was silence. The Brant had all the activity she’d become accustom to when she first woke up for work: none.
At the basement door, she drew the gun out from her pocket and clicked off the safety like Davey had shown her. He hadn’t shown her the rest, but she hoped that it was as simple as pulling back the hammer to point and shoot.
She wondered what Davey had done after she left him in the woods. Had he gone back to his camp to join the party that was probably still in progress? Had he stayed the night in the shack, ashamed that Claire had seen another side of him, the side he tried so hard to hide from his young fan club?
Her fatigue was catching up to her. She’d lost a minute daydreaming about Davey when what she needed to be was flying high on adrenaline.
It was possible that a few yards from where she was standing, Tobin’s lifeblood was spiraling down the drain of Brant’s kill room.
That was the image she needed to see to spur her on and she thanked Silverfish for presenting it to her.
Don’t mention it, her teenage persona said in a voice made small with the weight of high school anxiety.
Claire’s hand went so tight on the grip that she was worried she was going to inadvertently pull the trigger and send a bullet into a guest’s room above her.
She opened the first door, undoing the latch before swinging it open as quickly as she could.
Even in the lowlight coming from the stairwell, she could tell that there was nothing in the basement but surplus tables, pool chairs and umbrellas covered with tarps. She propped open the door for its light and then walked into the basement.
This was the first time she was seeing this room sober and it felt at once foreign and familiar. It was the same sensation she had when she woke up after dreaming of Tokyo. Claire had never been to Tokyo, but there still felt like there was a certain authenticity to the dreams.
She moved through the room, careful to mind the chair legs, remembering the bruised shins she ended up with after tripping last time.
The sliding doors that last time had emanated that blue fluorescent light stood open, nothing but gloom and emptiness inside them. The tile kill room was empty. Not even Father Hayden’s chair there to furnish it.
Claire stepped into the room, looked to all four corners, knelt down and nudged the drain with the muzzle of the pistol. Rust-red flakes flew up as steel scrapped iron, but they were just that: rust, not blood.
Where is he? she asked herself, keeping the words in her mind, confident that if she spoke aloud someone or something would materialize to answer.
Tiled to look like a high school locker-room or not, the space had a power to it that Claire couldn’t deny.
She asked herself if Christine and Jane had died here, and if they hadn’t, whether they would still be dead if Claire hadn’t interfered.
No, there’s no time for that.
The guilt could crush her later, now she had to do the best she could to stop anyone else from dying.
“What do you think it is you’re doing down here?”
For an older woman, Victoria Brant moved with frightening stealth.
Claire was not a violent person, but she’d never had occasion. Ms. Brant’s caught you with your hand in the cookie jar tone made her want to plug the self-righteous old lady then and there.
Turning, Claire leveled the pistol at Brant’s chest.
The woman was silhouetted in the doorway, backlit so that her shadowed face was unreadable.
Claire wanted to believe that Brant’s nostrils were flared in surprise and that her lower lip trembled in abject fear, but she knew that Victoria Brant was stone-faced, implacable.
Would bullets even harm her, or would she spit them out like watermelon seeds before lifting up Claire’s skirt and giving her the spanking of a lifetime?
Claire thumbed back the hammer, hoping that that was how it was done.
“We’re going to room thirty-one,” she said. “Now.”
“Whatever Davey’s put you up to, convinced you that I’m responsible for…”
“Did I say that we were holding a conversation before we went?” Claire interrupted her. She had to stop the words from coming out of Brant’s mouth. Short of shooting her, yelling at her like a TV bank robber seemed like
the second-best plan.
“He sent you to kill Father Hayden?” Brant said and then added a word, lower, for herself, “Coward.”
“No, I sent myself to kill you. Now where’s Tobin?”
“So that’s it,” Brant said, there was no fear in her voice, only moderate amusement. “Do you want to check every room on the way to thirty-one? Or should we start there and work our way down?”
“Let’s start there, check out your priest first.”
“We don’t have your boy. You do know that, don’t you? Why would we take him?”
Claire was done talking, she stepped forward, gun outstretched and Brant matched her steps backwards.
She wasn’t completely unafraid, that was good.
“You take out your keycard,” Claire said. “Slowly! And have it ready for when we get up there.”
*
Room thirty-one was identical to every other guest room only it smelled of shit and Lysol.
Brant entered the room in front of Claire.
To reduce the risk of a guest seeing the owner of the hotel being led upstairs at gunpoint, Claire had put the gun under her apron, keeping it trained on Brant’s back. The result was a peculiar resemblance to Napoleon, but better than keeping the gun in the open.
She took her right hand out from behind the apron and switched the pistol to her left. Her right wrist was sore from keeping it cocked at such an awkward angle under the fabric.
“Here you go,” Brant said. She lifted both hands. “Just an invalid man of God and an empty room, are you satisfied?”
Claire checked the closet and then moved on to the bathroom, taking one step in to make sure that there was nothing in the tub. Except for Father Hayden, the room was empty.
In the full light, Hayden looked even worse than he had in her drunken stupor. He was pitiful only up to the point where it was still possible for him to be unbearably grotesque.
Claire felt the conflicting impulses to both protect him and never lay eyes on him again.
His milk eyes seemed to fix on her as she studied him, his head tilted to the side as if to hear them better.
“What’s he doing?” Claire asked. Brant looked over to the bed where Hayden lay propped up on a mound of pillows. Father Hayden pushed both of his hands flat against the top sheet and pushed himself up with what looked like incredible effort.
“Stay,” Brant yelled. Her command went unheeded as Hayden disentangled one leg from the comforter and placed it flat on the carpet. “Can you hear me?” She was screaming, as if trying to be heard in a windstorm. “What are you doing? Don’t get up. Stay!”
His knee shook as he tried to get up from the bed.
Brant crossed to his side of the bed and pushed him back down with two fingers from each hand. He crumpled back down onto the mattress as if she’d hit with a crowbar.
He must have been so weak.
That sympathy she felt towards Hayden rose up again, only to be quashed by the burnt man’s high-pitched keening noise. The yelp lasted for only a second and sounded like a wordless attempt to dress down Ms. Brant for pushing him. He stopped for a coughing fit that ended after producing several brown globs into the fresh-looking bed sheet, using it like a tissue.
“Don’t do that,” Brant said, smacking Hayden’s ruined hands.
He latched on to her as she came closer, one hand on each of her wrists. His melted fingers looked like tentacles wrapped around her liver-spotted skin. He must have had more strength in his hand than in his arms or legs because Brant struggled to detach him.
“What is he doing?” Claire asked, suddenly unsure where her sympathies were supposed to lie in this struggle. Was Hayden dangerous?
“He’s never been like this,” Brant said, dislodging one hand only to have it reattach itself to her throat.
“Get off of her!”
Hayden ignored Claire’s shouts.
She stepped to the edge of the bed, far enough away from Brant that she wasn’t going to be tackled by the bigger woman.
Brant’s face was red, her cheeks puffed out. Hayden had her by the throat, but not firmly enough. She was able to inhale as he repositioned his hand, trying to fight off her defenses with his other one.
“Hey,” Claire said and pressed the cool muzzle into Hayden’s neck. The shiny, scarred flesh there wrinkled and grew taught around the end of the gun.
He stopped for a moment before turning to face Claire. Can he see and hear me? The question was irrelevant as he released Brant’s throat and lunged forward towards Claire.
The gunshot echoed throughout the room, the sound waves seeming to punch Claire in the sides of the head. Her hand ached from where the recoil had jolted her and the smell of cordite reached her nose.
She hadn’t meant to pull the trigger, it just happened.
Hayden was propelled back into his tower of pillows. The band of flesh that connected his neck and his shoulder was now incomplete and he was gushing blood onto the quilted comforter.
“No!” Brant shouted and dived to Hayden, applying pressure to the wound and hugging him to her in the same motion.
Rage, stress,stoicism and feigned sweetness were the only modes Claire had ever seen Brant in, but now she witnessed the woman in panicked grief. “Please,” she whispered into Hayden’s hairless head.
There was the sound like the backfiring of a car from the street outside the hotel.
Brant looked up at Claire, her hands trying to staunch the flow of blood as Hayden flailed against her grip, not wanting to be held.
“What have you done to us?” Brant asked, tears in her eyes. The old woman jumped as another bang sounded, this one inside the hotel itself.
The gunshot was followed by another and another. They echoed through the hills of Mission, Massachusetts, Claire entirely unsure of their meaning.
Chapter Thirty-Two
From the woods on the opposite side of Main Street, Eden watched Claire walk into The Brant Hotel.
Once the sleigh bells had tinkled and she watched the door close and stay closed, she walked out of the woods and into the gas station parking lot.
She wore her new gown, the shoulders tied and the corners sewed just enough to keep the dress on. As she walked she could feel the breeze against her naked body, the white gown fluttering up and then floating back down to rest against her bare skin. Her scar felt cold like drying putty, but the rest of her was warm enough.
Behind and in front of her, more white figures exited the tree line. Some of them were so far away that their gowns were just white specks that seemed to levitate above the ground, approaching the few houses that rested on the hills.
They had planned for this for weeks and no one would dare miss their cue.
Everyone wore their gown as they had been instructed.
Everyone except Jeb, who’d ripped his trying it on and would not let her fix it. He’d torn off a corner of the sheet and wrapped it around his waist.
The loincloth did little to hide his manhood. It bobbed and jumped in time as he walked.
Jeb was making a mockery of the ceremony. She knew that she was supposed to love him, but if someone had to die because something went wrong, she hoped it was him.
Most of the figures who made their way down Main Street carried some kind of firearm. The majority of them were hunting equipment, rifles and shotguns, but there was the occasional handgun as well. Rarer still were the cutting weapons, the machetes and the hatchets, but they were there too.
Jeb carried an ax and a gun. He held the rifle aloft by its stock, useless as anything but a cudgel. His arms flexed as he swung at the air with his ax, letting out a growl as he did so.
She shushed him.
Eden and Jeb broke from the flow of the group, approaching the back door of the general store while the four others continued onto the rest of Main.
Pat Dwyer and his wife lived in the apartment above the store. The plan was to wait for the signal before Jeb broke down the door and they both rushe
d inside.
Eden knew that convincing Jeb to wait for the signal would be the most difficult part of the operation, but she had a plan for that, too.
They stood facing each other on opposite sides of the door, Jeb’s enthusiasm apparent in the twitch of his muscles. His scars danced and jumped with every small, excitable movement he made.
Eden allowed the shoulder of her gown to slip, felt the cool pre-morning air on her nipple.
Jeb laughed and then used the end of his ax to put the strap back in place.
She let it fall again. This time was her turn to giggle. She watched the loincloth rise as Jeb became excited. She knew that she would have no problem getting him to wait for the signal.
Jeb propped both his weapons against the brick wall.
Eden began to peel off her gown.
Before she could lift it up over her head, there was movement behind the door of the general store. She let the fabric drop back down and listened.
Without warning, the door swung outward, Pat Dwyer propping it open while holding a bushel of groceries. They must have caught him making an early morning delivery to the kitchen across the street.
The old man gasped, but that was the only sound he was able to get out before Jeb had both hands wrapped around his mouth.
Eden picked up the gun from against the wall and leveled it against Dwyer’s heart.
She looked at Jeb, hearing teeth crack as he tightened his grip. Jeb bumped Dwyer’s head against the wall with a soft smack.
“Don’t,” Eden said with a hiss. “You’ve got to wait!”
Before she could get the words out, there was the unmistakable sound of a gunshot from inside the hotel.
Jeb smiled and nodded at her.
Dwyer’s eyes went wild like he knew what came next.
Eden pulled the trigger.
*
Allison was going to be a queen and a queen needed a crown with crown jewels to accompany it.
While Davey was off preparing for the morning, she’d assembled her crown and garland. She’d worked so hard to make her accessories that her fingers had bled.