No Vacancy

by Bonnie Randall

  Della scarcely seemed to breathe in her seat. “Yes.” She nodded faintly. “Maybe.”

  †

  With her hand in the crook of his elbow, Luke led her down to the belly of the airport, where the rental agencies lived. “I got us a Lexus,” he said, once he’d filled out the forms and attained the key.

  “Huh,” she replied, as he tucked her into the passenger seat. “I’ve never ridden in a Lexus and now I can’t even see.”

  He grinned a bit. “You’ll see it on the way back.”

  She didn’t reply, fiddled instead with her seat belt. “Sure you don’t want me to drive?”

  He wondered if she knew he rolled his eyes at this droll little joke.

  “Yes,” she said. “But only ’cause I know you, Lucas, not because I’m a psychic.” She bounced one leg and it hit him then; the jokes, the twitching—she was nervous. “And isn’t it just like you to drop extra for a Lexus?” she prattled. “I’ve never known anyone with more champagne tastes.”

  Right. Just wait till she ‘saw’ where they were going. He hit the gas over LA’s labyrinth of freeways, and alongside the glut of traffic headed downtown, hands growing greasier and greasier on the wheel.

  “You’re keyed up,” she said as he emerged into the downtown core.

  He glanced sideways. “And you’re not?”

  Blocks ticked by. “I’m wary,” she said finally, and as the streets became thick with wanderers, the homeless and addicts, she said “Lucas? Are we lost?”

  Lost. That word again. A siren bawled past, and up ahead Mich’s soup kitchen squatted on the right like a shabby promise.

  “Are we stopping here?” Della asked, and sounded so hopeful he nearly did stop, call this entire quest off.

  “Not yet,” he said tightly, and his hands curled on the wheel, muscle tension answering and becoming stiff in his shoulders. A parkade butted off on their left, and he turned into it, paid and pulled into a stall. “We’ll have to walk a couple blocks,” he said, grimacing at the warzone of dead coffee cups and fast food wraps strewn over the pavement. At rags that once had been clothing, scattered hither and yon.

  “Spent glamor,” Della said quietly, then climbed out of the car. “Elbow?” she asked.

  God knew she needed one here, blindfolded or not. He squired her down a bruised sidewalk where more garbage, rank smells, and people milled, several catcalling upon seeing her blindfold: “Hey, man! What’s your game?” Others, though, were interested only in scoring a sale: “Up? Down? What’s your fix, bro? How ’bout the lady?” Tiny glimpses of product were flashed by quick hands, little bundles, brown and white.

  Luke kept walking. Della murmured, “Street people.”

  “Yes,” he said and guilt chewed him, bringing someone like her somewhere like here, drifting through clouds of cigarette smoke, weed skunk, and blasts of sour body odor, stains on the air. “Hey!” One street person pointed, mouth gaping in toothless wonder. “You guys making a movie? You filming a movie?”

  Luke picked up the pace, Della’s phrase confirmation bias buzzing in his ear. Movies. Stars. Mich. His head hurt. Why here? He tried wiping his new shoes clean of the filth from the sidewalk then froze, a scatter of yards from their destination, unable to tread even into the shadow the old structure cast.

  It’s just a building. Yet his feet still cringed like on that day when Della’s plants had cast those strange, creeping shadows.

  She, at his elbow, said “Lucas? What’s wrong?”

  No Vacancy, was the answer he longed to give, the haunting title of Mich’s strange canvas. There’s no vacancy here. We need to go.

  “Lucas?” she repeated, but he ignored her, caught instead by the old hotel looming in wait, light winking from a few of its windows, and old wrought-iron fire escapes twisting up each of its sides.

  Luke’s gaze climbed those treads, reached the height of the building where a sun-beaten sign blared off one side:

  LOW DAILY WEEKLY RATES.

  The advert, now vintage, was once a boast of affordable decadence for the intrepid cosmopolite. Now…now it was nothing more than a sleazy come-on.

  His eyes tracked back down. Surely this old place had once been elegant—but now its handsome red canopies were mere pock-marks over windows which…some lit, most dark, reminded him of that street person’s toothless smile.

  Still and in spite of it all, a sign o’er the front entrance gleamed in shiny defiance, the once-golden glitz of old Hollywood.

  THE CECIL HOTEL

  Luke shuddered and “Seven hundred,” Della’s voice wobbled as it broke in. “Lucas? What’s that number from?”

  Seven-hundred. As in her handwritten, ever frantic, seven-hundred? Or…his gaze raced back up to that vintage sign. Below LOW DAILY WEEKLY RATES…

  700 ROOMS.

  His shoulders twitched, imagining that many empty, waiting dwellings, and as he pulled his eyes from the sign he felt as if he’d somehow been threatened.

  “Lucas?”

  “It…it’s just a number on a sign,” he lied, mouth chalky and feet forcing them forward, shuffling up the scabbed sidewalk to The Cecil’s front door.

  Brass shone on the other side of the window, and when they crossed the threshold chandeliers glittered while marble gleamed at their feet. Art deco. Retro decadence dialed straight out of somewhere like The Great Gatsby.

  “I taste champagne on my tongue,” said Della.

  Luke considered this. Had that been what had seduced his champagne-tastes sister? The illusion of opulence? But…how could her artist’s eye have not seen that it was all merely façade? This lobby, a false front like the myriad movie sets in this town, did nothing to belie that outside the bricks were all crumbling. Didn’t erase those iron fire escapes, snaking up fifteen floors—surely their very existence revealed the hotel’s past-due status? Even that beaten sign on its side—weekly rates, for God’s sake! How could Mich have missed all the…what had Della called it earlier?

  “Spent glamor,” she said.

  Yes. Faded glory. So…Why here? Mich, of all places you could have stayed…why here?

  And its appearance didn’t even account for the history of the place. He shuddered, glancing beside him. Della had become as still as the building itself. Was she attuning to its history?

  “There are bodies,” she whispered, and tilted her head back as though she could see over their shoulders, back out the front windows. “They’re falling out of the sky.”

  A chill seized him and so did a word, her word from the plane: Lost. Los Angeles. Lost Angels because suicides here, scores of them, had indeed sent bodies swan-diving from these old canopied windows, appearing to fall out of the sky.

  “A-are you okay, Lucas?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” He kept his hand on her elbow, led them further inside. “Mindful,” he said. “The floor’s slippery.”

  “With blood?” she recoiled and he glanced at her sharply. Joking again?

  No. She wore no smile. No expression at all.

  “N-no,” he said faintly. “Polished marble.”

  “Yes. And blood,” she whispered.

  He looked down. The floor, clean and gleaming, had a compass rose laid into the marble at the center of the atrium. Just in case you’re a Lost Angel, he thought wildly, and deposited Della in the center of it.

  “Wait here,” he said, then hurried to check in.

  The front desk was yet another tribute to yester-year: brass columns, a marble counter, and a bank of old-school pigeonholes, glossy black and holding bona-fide retro lock-and-tumbler keys. “I have a reservation,” he said to the desk clerk.

  “We know.”

  He gaped, yet the clerk, a California blonde tricked out in a vintage bellhop’s uniform—brass buttons, pillbox hat—regarded him blandly. “When you called you said you’d be traveling with a blindfolded woman.”

  Ah. Right. He felt his face flush as he glanced back to where he’d left Della.

  She
stood immobile mid-compass, like a lovely wax sculpture, blindly waiting.

  Blind. His insides blanched and when the clerk said “You also said that you wanted our resident artist’s room”, he whipped back around.

  “Pardon?”

  “Room 1013—that is what you requested, right?” Her flawless face folded, betraying confusion.

  He felt his brow fold too, yet “Yes” he nodded, heart hammering. Mich had been an Artist-in-Residence here? This had been the ‘commissioned by the stars’ contract she’d boasted of?

  “Your key,” said the clerk, and passed him a small, narrow envelope, 1013 written in pencil on one side. “And the elevator.” She directed him, two practiced, pointed fingers. “Welcome home,” she said then, and beamed.

  Luke quelled a shudder, yet cast member, he reminded himself. Everyone in LA—hell, even employees in the kiddie theme parks—considered themselves ‘cast members’. So none of what they said was real dialogue, they simply spoke off a ‘script’.

  “Sir?” A young black man, face like a rat’s, was tricked out in the same vintage bellhop get-up as the clerk. “Help with your luggage? Easy to get lost in this grand, old place.”

  ‘Grand’? And seriously? Bellhop or not, this guy’s face was pitted with meth sores. The skin on his hands had faded to a dead sort of gray. Might want to stop using, friend. Luke wondered if The Cecil routinely recruited staff from the denizens of street folk outside. “I can manage,” he said.

  “As you wish.” The bellhop beamed, but his grin struck Luke as sad. God, what a terrible gig this must be. “Welcome home,” the young hire tacked on.

  And what an abhorrent tag line. This place truly had no clue. Reclaiming Della off the compass, and eased by the warmth of her elbow in his palm, Luke turned them in the direction of the elevator, just down the hall.

  “Film projectors,” she said suddenly.

  He fell still and, down the wainscoted hall, the lone elevator opened, a mouth for no one.

  “There are film projectors here, aren’t there?” Della’s gestures were vague. “They…they look old.” Her mouth made a moue, then—“Olivia de Havilland?” she said. “Judy Garland?”

  “They’ve been here?” Although…why doubt it? This place once genuinely was what it masqueraded as now.

  “N-no.” She shook her head slowly. “Well…maybe. It’s their era—it’s been here.” She paused. “It still is.”

  No. This, stubbornly. My sister’s here. “The elevator,” he muttered, and tried steering her.

  Her feet cooperated, but barely. Her steps were hesitant then halted altogether beside a Greek revival bust, all seductive curves and blank eyes. “Blind,” she blurted.

  He jolted, half horrified by her accuracy, half fascinated.

  She looked troubled. “The word blind—it’s like 700. Do…Lucas, do you know what it means?”

  He had a guess, spun from research he’d done on this place, yet even as he debated how to say it, he looked into the statue’s blank eyes and “If I tell you what you’re next to it might clear it up,” he said instead.

  “O-kay,” she agreed, but sounded unsure.

  “There’s a bust—well, a whole statue, really. Between you and the elevator, a Greek revival relief and her eyes—”

  “No.” She flicked an impatient hand. “It—she’s—lying.”

  He gaped and reflexively edged back.

  “She’s only a symbol. Blind,” Della repeated, and her mouth worked. “Remember ‘blind’, Luke. It’s important. Real important.”

  Nodding, and mindful of the statue that now seemed to smile, he jabbed the elevator button to rise.

  The door slid open like an awakening eye. Blind, he thought, shuddering, and led them inside. Did The Cecil have eyes that he, even without a blindfold, could not see?

  “Yes,” said Della.

  He flinched.

  “I don’t know what question you just asked, but whatever it was—the answer is ‘Yes’.”

  No Vacancy!

  He leapt. Where the hell had that come from?

  No Vacancy! Again, this time plaintive and fully recognizable. Get out!

  But, Mich, he tried calling back, and the elevator shut them in, swept them up.

  †

  The numbers over the door glowed and dimmed, floor-to-floor as they climbed, and at Four they lurched to a halt. The door stuttered open to a wall, robin’s egg blue, white wainscot in glossy contrast. Luke blinked. Downstairs the same style had been apparent—the wide wainscot, wide baseboards, and regal crown molding—but in the lobby everything had been black with gold. So now, with the colors—perhaps each floor in this place was some sort of quaint nod to the bold geometry and garish colors of the art deco age.

  “Yes, sort of,” Della answered and before he could be taken aback by her unsolicited response, a young man, sniffling and in pseudo army fatigues, slunk into the elevator with them.

  “Which button?” Luke asked, but the kid waved him away and as he selected his floor his cuff rode up, revealed track marks, blister red, staggering up the inside of his arm.

  Luke’s brow hopped and the kid jerked his arm down, face awash with pink shame. Yet when their gazes clashed his mouth still jerked, a cautious little smile that reminded Luke of the way a leery dog would lick the hand of a stranger, uncertain whether it was about to be cuddled or kicked. “Hey,” he began, but ‘are you all right?’ was lost as the door coughed open on five (canary yellow this time, same glaring white wainscot) and the youth scurried out, steps somehow in consort with his track marks, crooked and lacking direction.

  They re-ascended and Della said “What floor did we just leave?”

  “Five.”

  “Five,” she whispered. “There was an overdose in the hallway there once. In the ’60’s. A man—well, a boy, really.”

  Gooseflesh broke out beneath Luke’s dress coat. That kid who’d just left. Had he been flesh and blood? Or—

  The elevator schunked to a stop as ‘10’ lit above, and the door burst open to tomato bright walls. “Oh!” Della jerked back as if she could see the red shock.

  “Del—” he began, but she lifted her chin.

  “Well, don’t you look like you just opened an artery?” she said.

  A flood of cold filled Luke’s chest, an internal bath of chipped ice.

  “Let the games begin,” she said softly and kept her chin up, offered her elbow. But then—“Wait!” She fell still, head cocked.

  Luke’s breath locked somewhere mid-throat as a sliver of smile found her face. “Are you…are you playing peek-a-boo?” she asked.

  A cold draft assaulted his spine.

  “No.” She shook her head. “Not peek-a-boo. Hide and seek, right?”

  The elevator door, still gaping (how the hell was it still open and gaping?) allowed Della to peer blindly inside, to the front left corner where battered floor buttons were all so faded that some were rendered to just indentions. “Look,” she said. “She’s hiding there, in the corner.”

  The crawling cold crept on his backbone. There was no one in the corner.

  “Stay away from the water.” Della spoke into the sanctum. “Run far, far away from the water.” She paused then, like she waited. “She won’t listen,” she said quietly, then lifted her face, peered blindly toward his. “What floor are we on?”

  “Ten,” he answered and pulled the key with its old diamond-shaped key ring from the envelope that read 1013.

  The Artist-in-Residence’s Room.

  Della remained on the cusp of the still-open elevator, and Luke stared at it. What was wrong with the damn delay on the door? Unless…a slinking certainty crept into his mind. The old place was reading Della’s inertia, it knew she had second thoughts. Beads of sweat popped upon his upper lip. She couldn’t back out. Not now. He needed her. Mich needed her. “Y-you said this place was trapped in another era,” he said lightly, the first thing he thought of. “Incredible, how you know that.”

&nbs
p; “How I feel that, you mean.” She paused. “And you feel it too.”

  He glanced at the décor. Reproduction? Or….

  “No,” she said. “Not reproduced. It…it’s like a transparency. The past overtop of the present, the present overtop of the past. Both are here, Lucas. Past and present.”

  Future too. The thought popped quickly, another stark startle of certainty.

  He kicked it away. This was no unworldly time warp. The décor was just a cheap hustle, an effort to sell effect. All one had to do was just look close at all this supposed opulence and see it was all only cheap, bright mat colors. And the glossy white trim, it was all chipped and blackened from countless fingers—

  “No, Lucas. Not from fingers. From shadows.”

  Shadows? Her word—transparency—licked his ear. Shadows who used to be people? People who should be mere shadows…? He shook himself, angered by a play on words that felt…well, like trickery. What the hell was this old dump, anyway? Better yet, what was it still trying to be?

  An old riff of Bible verse slithered forth as an answer. From the Book of Matthew: ‘A tomb beautiful on the outside, but inside filled with dead men’s bones and wickedness.’ A bolt of fear wracked him, made him want to dive back into that still open, waiting elevator. Yet—“Mich.” Her name left his lips for the hundredth time. The thousandth. Why were you here?

  Della spoke. “Champagne flutes. Cigarette holders. Martinis with iced gin.”

  More stream of consciousness free-association. None of those things were really here. And yet….

  Oh, hell, who was he kidding? All of those things were here. He closed his eyes and could smell the pungent juniper of gin. Clenched his hand and could feel a cig, rolling between index and middle finger.

  Della kept on, monotone. “Beautiful, big-eyed women,” she said. “They wear drop-waist dresses. Have feather plumes in their hair. And the men—” Her breath caught. “Black tuxes. Skinny bowties. Mustaches and Brillo cream and…and dreams.” She moved in a slow circle. “They’re hoping here. Dreaming…no.” She broke off and the cast of characters she’d seemed to pull out of that yawping elevator disappeared, yet as they evaporated Luke clung, half enchanted, to the image of flappers in dresses dripping with beads. To wise guys with fedoras and wide collars.