NO VACANCY
Bonnie Randall
Copyright 2015 by Bonnie Randall
Cover by Janice Hardy
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events in this book either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. And resemblance to actual events, places, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
All Rights Reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form whatsoever
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
People ask if the things I write about scare me, and I always respond by saying no. I write so things no longer scare me.
For the publication of No Vacancy, I owe a debt of gratitude to…
Alex Hughes, whose marketing direction and uncompromising encouragement positioned me into publishing this piece.
Janice Hardy, whose artistic prowess has now crafted two beautiful covers for each of my pieces of fiction, both of which unerringly capture the spirit of each story. She crafted this cover—literally—in a hurricane. She leaves me in awe.
Fred Campagnoli, who responded immediately, and thoroughly, to my call for “Help!” and whose advice (and sense of humor) I hold in the highest esteem.
Dario Ciriello, whose formatting skills are undaunted by my pitiable bad habits on Word, and whose willingness to beta-read everything I crank out—be it a novelette or a full-length book— takes time, energy, and thought I am always so very grateful for.
And Thank You to everybody everywhere who, like me, wishes Halloween happened once a month instead of once a year. Should you ever visit The Cecil of my nightmares, I sincerely wish you No Vacancy there….
NO VACANCY
Luke leaned against Della’s door. “You never told me you were psychic.”
She jerked ’round, the velocity whishing the plants on her desk and making their leaves wave in the sunlight, casting shadows that crept on the floor. Luke edged back, feeling childish for doing so—yet also somehow safer for having moved out of their reach.
“Who told you that?” she asked.
Her tone, like cracking ice, made guilt squirm in his belly. Lovely Della. His dear friend. She looked so…caught. Still—“Does it matter?” All these years they’d been colleagues, Luke had never been able to pinpoint what was different about her, only that something was. He’d never met another therapist who could, with such immediacy, peel back the nuances of a patient’s years-long pathology. Or nail, with unerring accuracy, the origin of problems as proficiently, or as rapidly, as Dell. The word unnatural had occurred more than once yet always he’d ushered it away, rebuking himself as uncharitable (not to mention melodramatic), and as most certainly shameful; to label Della ‘unnatural’ was nothing more than professional envy he could not deny.
Or at least it had been until his sister got sick. Then stayed sick. Now, as desperation and confusion grew daily, Luke found that he clung to the word unnatural. Clung and hoped. Because whatever had happened—and was still happening—to Mich…? It was unnatural too. So if Della could help, if what he’d always darkly guessed at was true….?
Finding out had been easier than he’d thought. One night (and a few whispered promises) with her estranged sister confirmed what he’d always suspected.
Unnatural. Psychic.
“You…you slept with my sister?” She stared.
He blushed, yet what she said still struck him odd; he’d expected denial. Indignation. Not a display of abilities.
Instead—“When?” she asked hotly.
“I’d really rather not go into details.” He plucked lint from one cuff, an attempt at nonchalant that in no way made him less aware of the incredulity—and hostility—on her face.
“You don’t want to go into details,” she echoed. “Right. I’m quite sure you don’t.”
His gaze bopped, looking everywhere, anywhere, to avoid the serrated chill in her eyes. It landed upon a notepad at her elbow, one she’d been writing on as he’d approached.
700. Seven-hundred. Numerically, and in script, the number seven-hundred covered the page, at the bottom becoming mere scrawls with what appeared to be frantic question marks tacked behind them. Reading it—Seven-hundred!?—Luke edged back like he had when the plant shadows had bit at his feet.
Della rasped “H-how? How did you meet my sister?”
“I…” He pulled his gaze from seven hundred, surprised by how unwilling he was to look away. Something about it…He shook himself back to the question. “She came to me,” he said, and childishly yearned to cross his fingers, dilute the lie. Della’s sister had not exactly come to see him; she’d merely shown up here, at the clinic, and had been so waif-like and willing to please that, as he’d considered his own broken sister, the opportunity (unnatural!)had been too great to pass by.
Yet now guilt kept gnawing at his belly and he wondered what all Della could ‘see’.
“It’s a shame about your birthmark,” she said, dry.
His face lit, heat that felt high school. He shook his red cheeks away. “I…I need help, Dell. My sister, my Mich. She—”
“Michelle is still struggling?” Instant thaw; at once Della became the therapist, the friend, he knew. Luke unwound, yet…‘struggling’? As far as euphemisms went it was a big one: Mich had been fine—better than fine—when she’d jetted off to LA “For the stars, Luke! I’ve been commissioned to paint for the stars!”
A lifelong dream realized; recognition from the Hollywood icons she’d worshipped ever since they’d been kids. But then…psychosis. Catatonia. Ever since she’d come home she was unable to paint anything except for one startling picture, a canvas that froze him from inside out. “Whatcha painting, Mich?” he would ask, and if she responded at all it was with the only word she’d said ever since he’d brought her home from downtown LA.
“Razor.” Grated out because her speech had become so sporadic it was now only growls emitted amid small sprays of spittle: “Razor, razor, rayyyyyzzzuuurrrr….”
Post-traumatic stress disorder. That’s what he’d told Della and the rest of his team during their monthly self-care conference. But PTSD…that was a weak euphemism too. “She paints,” he whispered. “But…not like this—” He pointed to a piece on Della’s office wall. “Not anymore.”
Della regarded the painting. He did too, and the old familiar swell of pride in his chest made his heart ache. Only Mich could make dust motes (of all things!) look beautiful. Here she’d captured them sailing up, transfiguring into stars in the sky.
One look at that painting and Della had been smitten; to her it was a depiction of healing—broken people transcending from dust into stardust.
Mich, however, had been fantastically wounded by this interpretation. “It’s supposed to be movie stars, Luke,” she’d told him privately. “People who go from bland to…to royalty.”
Royalty? He’d rolled his eyes. Sometimes Mich’s Hollywood obsession was more than a little much. “A sale is a sale, isn’t it?” he’d replied.
Her shrug had been dismal.
Now he wondered if she’d ever paint anything as whimsical as dust motes again. Razor. The word zinged in his ear. “She…she paints the same images over and over,” he murmured. “Dirty water. Bloody towels. A straight razor—”
“—that looks like it belongs in an old-fashioned barber shop.”
It was startling to have the image plucked from his head, yet also a strange sort of relief to be heard. ‘Heard’. Whatever the hell she was doing.
Della reached back, hand blindly settling on that sheet of seven-hundreds she’d written. “T-time,” she said, raspy. “Therapy.”
“It’s been nearly a year.” Almost to the day since he’d caught that flight after receiving a phone call from a
volunteer in a soup kitchen (a soup kitchen? What the hell?): “We have someone here who says she’s your sister. She keeps screaming your name.’
When he’d arrived Mich had been fully psychotic, yet the staff in that skid-row soup kitchen, used to whackos and derelicts, had barely shrugged at her wild ravings of “Razor! There’s a razor! I made a razor! Oh no!”
Luke, however, had been shocked beyond speechless. “Wh-where are her clothes?” he’d finally managed to ask, as his sister, his lovely, appearance-conscious sister, had shoved fingers into a rat’s nest of hair, shivering in nothing but a sleep shirt, ankle socks, and, he’d hoped, underwear.
“This is how she showed up,” murmured shelter staff.
He’d struggled to keep his game face on as Mich unraveled before him. He recalled crouching before her. “Should we go back to where you were staying? Get your things?”
She’d screamed as though dipped in boiling oil, and the staff member, compassionate, placed a hand on his shoulder. “Her things probably aren’t even there anymore, Doctor. Where she was….” His face screwed up, easy to decode: wherever Mich had been staying was a fleabag.
And this baffled Luke still. Mich had means—and expensive tastes to go with them. What the hell had she been doing in a place that looked, when the cab he’d then hired rolled past it, like a once-worldly hotel now gone hostel? A 1920’s relic coughed up on skid row?
And why had Mich screamed and clung to him, tears soaking his shirt, until the place became a mere pinprick, obscured by palm trees and a clutter of street signs in their rear window? “She had—has—a white streak in her hair now,” he told Della, a bare whisper.
“Lucas, you know sometimes trauma imparts leavings on the body—”
“Really, Dell? Would it also leave a damn scar from the base of her neck to her buttcrack?” This he’d observed, in utter shock, when he’d examined her, not like a brother, but like the doctor he was.
“What did she say happened?”
He looked her in the eye. “That she got cut up when she tried hiding the razor.”
Della swallowed, audible. “Y-yet there was no blood on her sleep shirt or underpants.”
It stunned him, again, how accurate she was. A psychic. Good God. In med school, and certainly during his psychiatric rotation, he’d routinely assessed psychic claims as schizophrenia, or some other Cluster A disorder.
And now look at him, considering the ethics of it. The integrity, or lack thereof, of a counselor who practiced therapy upon clients all while knowing she could read their damn minds.
“I have never hurt a soul with what I can—and sometimes can’t—do,” Della said starkly, and unmistakably hurt.
Luke swallowed, rough.
“And you need to understand: psychic ability, it…it’s a talent. And like any talent, there are limits. For example, an impressionist painter who tries art deco—”
The old hotel he and Mich had passed splashed up in his mind and as it did he swore he could hear the pretentious clink! of champagne flutes. The breathlessness of affluent, ambitious chatter.
“—and fails spectacularly,” Della went on. “Or the classic pianist who just can’t play boogie-woogie. Talent has limits, Lucas. Even a great vocalist can’t sing every song.”
He digested this silently, worried and wondering—did she know why he’d really approached her? Hell, outted her?
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
He held his breath and she, gazing beyond him, spoke. “Black and white portraits,” she announced tonelessly. “Glamor shots. Glamor queens.”
This came out free-association, as though she was looking at a Rorschach inkblot he couldn’t see. Nonetheless, what she was ‘seeing’ made sense. The place he wanted to take her, its doors had opened in 1924 right next to old Hollywood, and in its hey-day class and beauty had strolled its corridors wearing fur wraps and pearls.
Glamor queens, she had said, and on the surface this impression was accurate, but….
But Luke had always sensed something more, something sinister. It was as if darkness crept within all that old-school Hollywood glamor. As if shadows seeped beneath sophistication, and that the beauty was all bruised by secrets, teeming just below the flawless complexions in the portraits Della had ‘seen’. The therapist in him speculated that all the secrets he sensed were the costs of every soul sold for fame—all that innocence and dignity cast into a bottomless wishing well of degradation. Deep depravity.
‘You’re only as sick as your secrets’ was an old therapy maxim, and it made Luke’s skin crawl whenever anything vintage Hollywood appeared in magazines or upon a screen. The secrets in the shadows of all that glam beauty….he got the feeling they were very dark, and very sick indeed. And that was partly why he now believed—“Something happened there, Dell. Where Mich was. And now…” Now that razor in her painting. The blood-stained towels. That murky, discolored water…
“Lucas,” Della imparted softly. “Would Mich want you to pursue this?”
No. This came viscerally. But that old hotel, its affluent chatter, it said “Yes.”
Della frowned. “I can’t tell if you’re lying.”
Nor could he.
“I want to tell you no.”
Hope flared. Want to didn’t mean would. “Then…why don’t you?”
“Because—” She flashed a look over her shoulder.
Seven-hundred.
A shiver cut through him and he glanced to see if she had an open window.
“B-because, Lucas, I care about—”
Their eyes caught, and for a heartbeat it seemed that everything he’d never had the courage to say was at last spoken between them.
“—because we’ve been friends a long time,” she whispered, and looked at the floor.
Yes. They had.
“And…” she raised her head.“And because of your hair.”
He frowned.
“That white streak you say Mich has. You’ve got one too. Right down at your scalp. Your hair…it’s bone white.”
†
He waited for her at the airport, half-convinced she wouldn’t show. When she appeared with an overnight bag in one hand and an iPod in the other, his knees turned to water.
“How’s Mich?” she asked briskly.
Painting. Always painting. And now she’d added a new element to the canvas. Two words that sent screams through his skin.
No Vacancy.
“I-uh-I hired a homecare nurse for the weekend.”
She nodded. “Your streak is whiter.”
“Yeah.” He knew.
Her lips tightened. “And you’re ready to be my guide?”
“Yes,” he answered, for this had been Della’s only, yet unyielding request: that their travel was to be done without revealing destination nor any other geographical detail. “Because this will be hard enough without wading through any confirmation bias prior knowledge will instill in me.” Hence the iPod and earbuds looped through the strap of her carry-on. The contact case and solution she now wrestled out of her bag. “I’m going to the washroom to pop my eyes out,” she said, grinning at her own joke.
He couldn’t.
“Wait for me outside the door. Without lenses, I’m blind.”
Blind. An inexplicable chill skittered up his spine yet he said nothing, just waited then led her, noting that she did not so much as glance at her boarding pass when they passed the clerk at their gate. And when she took her seat on the plane, she pooled the wires for her earbuds on her lap alongside a tidily folded black blindfold. “For when we land,” she said, then opened her purse, extracted an elasticized eye-mask too. “For here on the plane,” she said primly.
He grinned and she scowled but he didn’t care; the eye-mask had ruffled frou-frou on its hem, so not Della, and it had been so long since he’d laughed, the sound was both foreign and—“Vacant,” he said.
Her gaze quickened. “Pardon?”
He shrugged, a little embarrassed. “
I-uh-I was just thinking how anything funny—it’s been vacant.”
She said nothing but her hands trembled as she fitted her eye-mask on. “This way I’ll just look like I’m sleeping instead of flying blind.”
Blind. He cast the word away again. “And you plan to wear a blindfold when we land? How do I explain that to a cabbie?”
“You don’t. You rent a car, cheapskate. And as for the blindfold—do you want accurate answers or not?”
No. You do not. Luke stiffened. That thought, its voice—it sounded like Mich, the rational Mich, the one he’d known and loved before the west coast made her crazy. I miss you, he thought bleakly, and when tears welled he was glad Della was wearing her ridiculous frou-frou, could not see. “I do,” he whispered. “I do want answers. Mich needs them.”
He kept telling himself that as the plane rolled down the runway.
†
Della arrowed straight up as they began their descent. “Lost?” Her hands fisted on the armrests. “Lost?” she asked again, and her face, locked and listening beneath her frou-frou, was tense. Then—“No,” she breathed. “You’re not lost.”
“I’m here, Dell,” he said, and a chill met his flesh when he took her hand.
“Yes.” She nodded. “I’m cold ’cause it touched me. Where-ever we’re going…it just rested its hand on my shoulder.”
And did it hold a bloody towel? Wash with dirty water? The thoughts jittered wildly and he held fast to her hand. “Did…did it say anything?” God. It was humiliating to even entertain such lunacy. Could a building really say something?
“Yes,” she said and, still masked, looked in the direction of his face. “No Vacancy. Do…do you know what that means?”
The title of Mich’s strange picture. That’s all it could be. ’Cause really—No Vacancy? That dump hadn’t celebrated a night of No Vacancy in years. Although… He pursed his lips. “Maybe it’s threatened,” he said. Maybe it was trying to suggest there was no room for them if they came. He smiled. You will give me back my sister, you hellhole.
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