The Ninth Nightmare

by Graham Masterton

  She pushed the door open and stepped back into her bedroom, gasping with fright. For a split second, the bedroom was just as it had been before, Room 717 at the Griffin House Hotel. But then, with a sharp pop, the bulb in the bedside lamp went off, and the room was drowned in darkness again.

  Katie stayed where she was, still panting, with her back against the door. She could see the gray light that strained in through the window, and hear the rain pattering. She could smell that bleachy-fishy smell, too, and that greasy odor from the bed linen, except that there were some fresh smells that were even stronger than both of them. A metallic smell, like blood, and another appalling smell that made Katie’s gorge rise.

  She could still faintly hear the Amos’n’Andy show behind the door. But then a voice much nearer, a woman’s voice, said, ‘Help me.’

  Katie pressed her hand over her nose and her mouth. She stepped toward the bed and as she came closer she could see that there was a red-haired woman lying in it, a red-haired woman with a very white face, almost as if she had made herself up to look like a Venetian carnival mask.

  ‘Help me,’ she repeated, and held out one hand.

  Katie came around the end of the bed and stood beside her, but not too close. The woman looked about twenty-seven or twenty-eight, although her white pancake make-up was cracked and fissured, and her eyes were smudged black with mascara, so it was difficult to tell for sure.

  ‘Who are you?’ Katie asked her. ‘What is this place? Where are we?’

  ‘Please,’ the woman begged her, and suddenly a dark runnel of blood slid out of the side of her mouth and on to the pillow.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ asked Katie. She was afraid to approach any nearer in case the woman was suffering from some kind of infectious disease.

  The woman took hold of the corner of the quilt with one hand and tried to pull it off her, but she obviously didn’t have the strength. Katie hesitated for a moment and then she reached across and drew it back herself.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘What happened to you?’

  Beneath the quilt, the woman was covered with a sheet, but the sheet was sodden and shiny and dark. That was the metallic smell that had overwhelmed Katie when she first came back into the room – the smell of blood.

  ‘I couldn’t stop him,’ said the woman, so quietly now that Katie could hardly hear her. ‘I tried, but he was much too strong for me.’

  She tried to raise her head from the pillow, but she couldn’t. Katie said, ‘Don’t try to move. I’ll call nine-one-one.’

  She looked around. There was no nightstand beside the bed, no lamp, and no phone. She dug in the front pocket of her jeans and took out her cellphone, but when she flipped it open the screen was blank. Wherever this bedroom was, it was a dead area, out of range of any cellphone signals.

  ‘Look,’ she said, trying to keep herself calm, ‘I’ve had a little training in first aid. Let me try to stop the bleeding. Then I can go find somebody to help you.’

  ‘It’s no use,’ the woman told her. More blood welled out of the side of her mouth and the stain on the pillow grew wider.

  ‘I can try,’ Katie insisted. ‘Look – I can tear up this other sheet and use it as a bandage.’

  ‘It’s no use,’ the woman repeated.

  ‘Just let me take a look,’ said Katie. ‘I promise I’ll try not to hurt you.’

  The woman shook her head as if she couldn’t understand what language she was speaking in. Katie pinched the blood-soaked sheet between finger and thumb and tugged at it. It felt cold, and wet, and sticky.

  ‘No,’ the woman whispered.

  ‘I’m so sorry, but I have to. If I can’t stop the bleeding, you may not make it.’

  The woman didn’t argue any more. She just lay on the pillow, staring unblinkingly at Katie with her green filmy eyes, like somebody who wants to remember a friend they are never likely to see again.

  Katie pulled the sheet right off her, and folded it back. At first she couldn’t understand what she was looking at. But even when she realized what the red-haired woman’s assailant had done to her, she could still barely believe it, and she stood by the side of the bed, utterly stunned, unable to think what she could possibly do next.

  ‘I tried to stop him,’ the woman murmured. Her eyes closed and for a moment Katie thought that she might have died, but when she leaned over her, she could see that she was still breathing, with a sticky catch in her throat. Katie couldn’t imagine how she had survived at all, let alone managed to speak.

  She waited for almost five minutes, biting the joint of her left thumb as if to reassure herself that she was still real, and that she hadn’t lost her mind, and occasionally letting out a breathy little unh, like a sob. After a while she couldn’t hear the woman breathing any longer, but she couldn’t summon up the nerve to feel her pulse to make sure that she was dead.

  She turned around and walked stiffly across to the laundry-room door. The light was still shining inside it, and she prayed that it was still her hotel bathroom. She looked back at the woman lying on the bed. She didn’t know who she was or what she had suffered, but she felt as if she had let her down, even though she had been powerless to save her. Her only consolation was that nobody could have saved her.

  She opened the door. Inside, the bathroom was so bright and shiny that she raised her hand to shield her eyes. She closed the door behind her and locked it. She washed her hands in the basin and rinsed the swirl of blood down the drain. She kept her eyes lowered so that she wouldn’t have to look at her reflection in the mirror, in case her reflection was doing something else. Once she had dried her hands she climbed into the empty bathtub and sat there, hugging her knees, her eyes tight shut, rocking backward and forward and waiting for morning, if it ever came.

  TWO

  Room 309

  It was less than a half mile to the Griffin House Hotel but John and his passenger had now been sitting at the same intersection for nearly ten minutes, next to a scabby plane tree on which somebody had thumb-tacked a flyer for a missing black-and-white cat.

  ‘Maybe you want to walk,’ John suggested, looking at the woman in his rear-view mirror. ‘I can bring your bags along as soon as this traffic gets moving.’

  ‘In these shoes?’ the woman retorted.

  John hadn’t noticed the woman’s shoes when he had picked her up at the airport, but judging by the rest of what she was wearing, he had a pretty good idea what they must be like. Although it was a gloomy October afternoon, with winter just around the corner, her eyes were hidden behind enormous beetle-like sunglasses with sparkly diamanté frames. She wore a short leopard-print jacket with a high furry collar, on top of a tight purple satin dress with a cleavage that probably would have sent back multiple echoes if you had shouted down it. She smelled very strongly of Boss Intense. Since he had started driving taxis, John had become something of a connoisseur of women’s perfumes, especially industrial-strength women’s perfumes like this one.

  ‘OK, it was only a thought,’ John told her. He looked up at his rear-view mirror again. ‘First time in Cleveland?’ he asked her.

  ‘Oh, no way,’ she told him. ‘I was born and raised in Brunswick. A fully-fledged graduate of B-wick High. My sister still lives in Shaker Heights.’

  ‘Hey, that’s a nice district, Shaker Heights.’

  ‘I guess, if you like boredom and trees. Personally I hate being bored and who needs frigging trees?’

  John raised his eyebrows and thought: Who needs frigging trees? That’s classy. Not the usual caliber of guest he would have expected to take to the Griffin House Hotel.

  He adjusted his seat belt around his belly. It was way past two thirty and he still hadn’t had lunch yet. He had been planning to go to Quizno’s on Euclid Avenue when he had dropped this fare off, to pick up a bourbon grille steak sub. He could almost taste it now: prime rib, mozzarella, Cheddar, mushrooms, sauté onions, all covered with grille steak sauce and served up on rosemary Parmesan b
read. His mouth watered so much that he had to swallow.

  ‘Staying here long?’ he asked, in a quacky, saliva-filled voice.

  ‘Not if I can help it. I’m only going to my grandma’s funeral.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. My condolences.’

  ‘Thanks, but I don’t need condoling. I never liked her and neither would you, if you’d ever known her. What a witch. She had a face like somebody looking at themselves in the back of a spoon.’

  The traffic began to inch forward. The woman said, ‘At last. Thank you, Lord Jesus.’

  As they neared the Griffin House Hotel, John could see three black-and-white police cars lined up outside, their lights flashing, and two uniformed officers directing the traffic. The hotel itself was an imposing brown-brick building with Gothic windows and elaborate spires and a gray slate roof. It was surrounded by tall ivy-wrapped oaks, their leaves already turned rusty and yellow. A crowd of people were milling around the wide stone porch – police officers and TV cameramen and hotel staff, as well as rubbernecking bystanders.

  ‘Looks like we’ve got ourselves a little excitement,’ said John. He signaled to turn into the curving driveway in front of the hotel and a police officer flagged him down and made a winding gesture for him to lower his window.

  ‘Just dropping off a hotel guest, officer. What’s all the flap-doodle for?’

  ‘Nothing serious, sir. If you want to pull over to the left side there.’

  John parked his yellow Crown Victoria close to the left-hand verge, and heaved himself out of the driver’s seat. He opened the door for his passenger to step out, and this time he made a point of looking at her shoes. They were purple suede, the same color as her dress, with gold studs all around them, and very high heels. Her dress was so short that he couldn’t help noticing that she was wearing purple nylon panties, too. He gallantly turned his head away and looked up at the sky.

  It seemed as if all of the hotel’s front-of-house staff were busy talking to the police, so John popped the taxicab’s trunk and lifted out the woman’s pigskin suitcase. It wasn’t Louis Vuitton, but it wasn’t cheap. She may have started life in Brunswick (or ‘Brunstucky’ as some disparaging Clevelanders called it, an elision of ‘Brunswick’ and ‘Kentucky’) but she appeared to have money – either made it or married it.

  For the first time she took off her sunglasses and she was unexpectedly pretty, even if she did have the slightly battered look of a woman who has struggled to make her way in life and had her fair share of fights. She had bright blonde hair, expensively cut in a feathery bell-shape, wide-apart eyes and a short straight nose, and lips that looked as if they were just about to pout. She had a faint scar on the left side of her chin, as if somebody had punched her, a long time ago, somebody wearing a signet ring.

  As John began to walk across the driveway, carrying the woman’s case, a skinny young black bellhop in a green uniform came loping up to them. ‘It’s OK, junior,’ John told him. ‘I got it.’

  ‘Please, sir, let me help you,’ the bellhop begged him, trying to take hold of the handle.

  John yanked the case away from him. ‘Oho, so that’s your game! You’re trying to stiff me out of my tip, is that it?’

  ‘Of course not, sir. It’s my job.’

  ‘I know, junior. I know it’s your job. But exactly what part of “I got it” do you find so incomprehensible?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘That’s OK, junior. You’re excused.’

  John carried the suitcase into the reception area, changing hands every three or four steps because the goddamned thing was so heavy. How come women who wore practically nothing always had suitcases that weighed so much? He followed the woman up to the front desk and pinged the bell for her, because there was nobody there.

  ‘Pretty plushy joint, on the whole,’ he said, looking around. The reception area had high vaulted ceilings with decorative plasterwork, thick red floral-patterned carpeting, and leather wing chairs gathered around a crackling log fire. On the wall above the fireplace hung a large oil portrait of a severe-looking man in a formal black suit with black silk facings. His face was so pallid that it was almost white, and his eyes were as dead as stones. The only touches of color were his hair, which was gingery-red, and the ring on his right hand, which had a dark red stone set in it.

  Close to this portrait hung another smaller portrait, in an oval frame, of a pretty young woman with wild blonde curls. She had her head tilted to one side, as if she were flirting with the artist who was painting her picture.

  John pinged the bell again and this time a receptionist came in from the porch, where she had been talking to a police officer.

  ‘So sorry to have kept you waiting, sir. Are you checking in today?’

  ‘Not me – her,’ said John, jerking his thumb toward the woman.

  ‘Ms Rhodajane Berry,’ said the woman, resting one elbow on the marble-topped counter. ‘I booked a queen-sized room for tonight and tomorrow night.’

  ‘Hey,’ John put in, ‘you’re not related to that Halle Berry, are you, by any chance?’

  The woman turned and stared at him. ‘Do I look like I’m related to Halle Berry? I mean, I’m not being racist here.’

  ‘Well, you never can tell. It’s a funny thing, genetics. And Halle Berry, she’s from Cleveland, too, did you know that?’

  Rhodajane Berry was still filling in her name and address and credit card details when a bulky man in a flappy gray suit came puffing and panting into the reception area. He was just about the same height as John, about five feet eight, and he probably weighed about the same, too, somewhere in excess of three hundred pounds. He was purple faced, with protuberant blue eyes, and a small curved nose that looked as if it had been stuck on as an afterthought. His eyebrows seemed to be raised in permanent surprise, like two arched-up caterpillars.

  He was sporting a wide silk necktie with scarlet and yellow diagonal stripes, and his shirt must have been at least a twenty-two-inch collar, but it still curled upward because it was too tight around his neck.

  ‘Pardon me, people,’ he asked, in a hoarse, strangulated voice. ‘Did you talk to any of my officers yet?’ He reached into his pocket and tugged out a notebook, licking his thumb and turning over the pages. ‘What room are you in?’

  ‘I’m not in any room,’ said John. ‘I’m a cabbie and this lady is my fare.’

  The detective peered at Rhodajane Berry with his pencil raised in his hand as if he half recognized her. ‘OK . . . what cab company?’

  ‘Alphabet Cabs. My vehicle’s parked right outside. You can call them and check if you want to. You want their number? John Dauphin’s the name. John Benjamin Franklin Dauphin. The third. From Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Still trying to get back there, one way or the other.’

  The detective gave a quick shake of his jowls to indicate that it wouldn’t be necessary to check John’s credentials. But then he turned to Rhodajane Berry and said, ‘How about you, ma’am, what room will you be staying in?’

  ‘She’s three-oh-nine,’ said the receptionist.

  ‘Three-oh-nine. OK.’ He wrote down 309 and sniffed. Then he said, ‘Have a good stay, won’t you? But if you do hear anything or see anything, here’s my card. Give me a call anytime.’

  Rhodajane Berry looked taken aback. ‘What do you mean, if I hear anything or see anything? What kind of things do you mean?’

  The detective hesitated. ‘You know, anything out of the ordinary.’

  ‘Anything out of the ordinary like what, for instance?’

  John had to give it to her, Rhodajane Berry had a voice like a braided-wire whip. It could cut through anything.

  The detective shrugged. ‘Anything out of the ordinary like the room maybe changing in appearance.’

  ‘Excah-use me? The room changing in appearance? I don’t get it. How does a room change in appearance? You mean like I’m going to be lying in bed and somebody’s going to come in and start to strip off the wallpaper?’


  ‘Well, to be honest, ma’am. I don’t know any more than you do. But if it does change, in any way at all, call me, please. Likewise if you hear shouting or crying or if you find anybody in your room who isn’t supposed to be there.’

  Rhodajane Berry said, ‘Wait up a second. I seriously do not like the sound of this. Shouting or crying? People in my room who aren’t supposed to be there? I’m supposed to be staying here tonight. I’m paying one hundred sixty dollars per night. What the hell kind of crap is this?’

  ‘There’s no need for that language, ma’am. I’m just asking you to be vigilant tonight which isn’t a whole lot to ask, is it?’

  ‘What happened here?’ John demanded, ‘What’s this all about?’

  The detective said, ‘You don’t have anything to worry about, sir. You won’t be staying here. I suggest you get right back in your taxicab now and leave.’

  ‘I won’t be staying here but this lady will and right now she’s still my fare and that makes her my personal responsibility. So what went down here?’

  The detective took a deep breath. Then he said, ‘There’s nothing for you to get yourself worried about. One of the guests suffered an episode, that’s all.’

  ‘An episode? An episode of what? Days Of Our Lives?’

  ‘No, sir. She had what you might call a hallucination. She thought her room had altered in some way and she thought she saw a strange person in her bed. When the housekeeping staff found her she was in a state of some distress, but there was nothing in her room to indicate that what she had experienced was real.

  ‘All the same, we’ve been taking the precaution of asking all of the hotel’s guests to call me personally at any time of the night if they think they see or hear anything unusual.’

  John dragged out his handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘Sounds to me like for no good reason at all you’re causing this good lady here a whole lot of unnecessary anxiety for nothing.’

  ‘You’re entitled to your opinion, Mr Dolphin,’ the detective snapped back at him. ‘I’m simply erring on the side of caution. Now, please, if you don’t mind, I have to go talk to some sane people.’