No Vacancy

by Bonnie Randall

  Capable of making identity, geography—even time—shift.

  The detective, a woman, read her face. “You don’t remember him tying you up?”

  “N-no.” ’Cause he didn’t.

  “He never talked about suicide?”

  “Never.” Not out of the confines of discussions regarding their patients.

  “Had he been depressed?”

  Depressed? No. But sad…? Yes. Despairing, to be precise. His sister, his best friend, had been ripped away. Then dangled here, a carrot on a stick.

  Or, more aptly, projected here like a damsel in distress upon a glam silver screen.

  And had she too not played a role in this movie from Hell? Revulsion scurried on her arms, made the skin feel like it bunched. “W-where…what’s this place called, anyway?”

  The detective’s brows hopped. “You don’t know?”

  Della shook her head, so cold she was sure the movement might make her crack.

  “It’s The Cecil on Main, Della. Do…do you know it?”

  Yes. And no. She knew it the way a rape victim knew her assailant—intimately, yet unwillingly. Obscenely. “I do now,” she whispered and her sixth sense prickled, drew her gaze to the hall.

  A crowd hung there, both visible and not visible. Among them a killer leered, a pentagram scrawled upon one of his palms. The little Asian woman who’d been hiding in the elevator quivered there too, and when their eyes met she gave Della a small, melancholy sort of wave.

  Della returned it and saw, to the Asian woman’s right, a circa 1940’s beauty, her lovely face marred by a macabre smile carved, ear-to-ear.

  Black Dahlia whispered her psychic voice, and as that wrecked face nodded, Della noted others, dozens of others, some bodies stabbed or strangled, others wrecked and ruined by the crush of velocity upon pavement. Lost angels. Hunting dreams and finding nightmares. Despairing then hurling themselves from some of The Cecil’s seven hundred hungry windows.

  Hours ago Luke had asked himself a question she’d heard: What are the odds of so much violence and hatred and tragedy to have happened in one distinct spot?

  Normally, Della knew the chances would be mathematically absurd. But here… “Dead dreams are delicious,” she whispered. And this place, like so many others on a fault, at fault—“It soaks itself in despair,” she said, and was not unaware that the Detective beside her did not disagree. “And the desperate, the hungriest—they have the most succulent souls.”

  The hall crowd nodded gravely—some even sadly—then began drifting away.

  The detective had kind, knowing eyes in a gentle black face. “Della,” she said. “Is there anywhere we can take you? You…you really shouldn’t stay here.”

  But part of me will. For as much as this place devoured dead dreams, she knew it delivered them too. She could traverse the globe and The Cecil would stay with her—just as it had stayed with Mich in that painting.

  The painting! She wrenched around, looking for the canvas, and “That?” she burst.

  At best, the picture was a nonsensical still-life: a towel, some white feathers, and a white glob of—ugh. Was that supposed to be whipped cream? Was this picture some sort of hat-tip to a sex game? Could that be why Luke had imagined her all tied up and wearing that bizarre old full slip with its pointy-breasted brassiere? Repulsed, she looked away, past a vase of dead roses, and said “There’s a soup kitchen, a shelter. It’s just a few blocks awa—”

  “I’m familiar.” The detective nodded. “But surely you don’t want to go there?”

  And be surrounded by sleepless people, noise, and chaos to carry her through this dark night? God, yes. She nodded.

  The detective, clearly reluctant, nonetheless guided her toward the hall, raising an arm as they passed the bathroom where tomato-bright splashes startled the walls and seemed to be an homage to the red strokes of color painted out in the hall. “No need to see that,” the Detective murmured, yet as Della shuffled past she looked anyway.

  A bright glint, a stainless-steel razor, winked from atop grimy grout, and alongside it more feathers, like the ones in the painting, drifted slightly as she and the Detective passed by. Wait. She halted. Those weren’t feathers. “Your hair, Lucas,” she had said, and he’d lifted a self-conscious hand, covered the white streak she’d first noticed when he’d recruited her for this horror.

  And now here was his white hair on the floor. And in that picture. Not feathers, but hair. A piece of him this place had laid claim to…then immortalized upon canvas as if it laughed up its sleeve; its own stylized version of a voodoo doll.

  “Told you this place was already immortal.”

  The whisper, wry, seemed to come from Luke’s mouth, slack and shocked there on the floor. Della’s feet froze adjacent to his—stiff, twisted, and still encased in their stupid-expensive five hundred dollar shoes. Because I don’t know anyone with champagne tastes quite like you, Lucas. Tears rushed to her eyes.

  “Never mind, Dell. Just go. ’Cause it’s blind the same way the angels are lost. So hurry now. Go.”

  She listened, locking his voice with her all the way to the soup kitchen shelter down on skid row, then gratefully accepting a cot from a volunteer who scrambled to make her feel welcome.

  Welcome home.

  Shuddering, she sank to her little threadbare mattress, its shabby bedclothes having been placed in her hands and smelling strongly of bleach and fabric softener. Cuddling them, she called up a search on her phone, Luke’s voice a gentle guide in her ear. “Blind, Dell. You told me to remember that it was important.” Shaking, her fingers stroked keys. CECIL she typed + BLIND

  The search kicked back immediately: Cecil (male name), meaning: Blind

  A course of cold tided through her and again she heard Luke, his voice sounding the way it did when he was moved by his most wounded patients. “It’s blind the same way the angels are lost, Dell.”

  “Yes,” she breathed. “Meaning it’s blind by choice.” The Cecil…blind by choice to every abhorrence and perversion and crime ever committed in its endless rooms, for in exchange for all the despair and broken dreams it inhaled it in turn gave carte blanche to each eternal resident, allowing all the sin and debauchery and murder they could gorge on—thus creating an endless feedback loop of destruction and pain to devour.

  The Lost Angels are all blind by choice.

  She wasn’t sure if that was still Lucas, or just her own psychic mind and, shivering, she pulled her legs up, tucked them close, grateful beyond reason for this little threadbare island here in a buzzing shelter bathed by a glare of fluorescent lights beneath which nothing could hide and no shadows could rise up to become people.

  “Hey lady.”

  A skinny black man approached with a smile, his narrow face like a ferret’s. A couple cold, beaded bottles of water dangled between his callused fingers and he offered one over. “Looks like you can use this.”

  Della took it, croaked “Thanks”, and he plopped down beside her, a tiny cloud of dust puffing up from his clothes.

  “You just came from The Cecil,” he said.

  Her gaze sharpened.

  He shrugged. “I hear things.” He chugged water.

  She watched him, her own bottle sliding down to dangle next to her crossed ankles.

  “That place is baaadd, baby. Evil bad.”

  “You’ve been there,” she said, neither statement nor question, and her hands grasped the water, gauged its temperature.

  Liquid nitrogen cold.

  “I have,” he agreed.

  She glanced at him. “H-how’d you get out?”

  A hunted look briefly flitted through his eyes and “I run,” he whispered, cocky grin crumbling. “I run but I…I always go back.”

  She nodded, working hard not to shiver.

  “Don’t go back, baby.” He rose. “No matter who calls, and no matter what it is they might say—don’t go back.”

  “I want to,” she whispered starkly, a confession she’d bare
ly allowed herself as she’d run over that compass rose in The Cecil’s grand lobby and felt it spinning beneath her, direction out of control.

  “Uh-huh,” he said again. “I know you do. We all know you do. Just like we all know that if I was talking to you there and not here…” He found her eyes. “Then you’d stay.” He turned then, started walking.

  Her gorge rose. Clots, blood and brain, were matted in his hair. The back of his skull was all shattered.

  And he was wearing an old-fashioned bellhop’s uniform.

  “Keep runnin’ baby.” He did not look back. “Keep runnin’ till there’s no rooms left.”

  No rooms? She frowned, then…700 Rooms.

  A puzzle piece clicked into place.

  “What does it want?” Luke had asked.

  “Immortality,” she’d answered, so sure.

  Yet—“It already has it,” he’d replied and…he’d been right. The Cecil was already immortal.

  But…“It’s also greedy.” She had told him this, but now…now she married it to 700 Rooms, to No Vacancy, and when she did she at last knew—“It wants—”

  “Honey?” A shelter employee crouched before her, did an immediate double take. “Oh! Someone’s already been here with water. But—” He frowned, slid the bottle from between her lax fingers.

  It was no longer bone-chill cold but instead tepid. Slightly warm.

  “Let’s trade,” he said brightly, but his face was a wash of distaste. “Yours…you haven’t drank any of this, have you?”

  Della looked. The water in the bottle was murky. Tinted brown.

  She paints dirty water.

  A stench she could smell permeated through plastic and she inched back. Capable of making identity, geography—even time—shift.

  Yes, ’cause that water had been clear and cold when it had been offered. Snake oil, she thought, and searched through the crowd.

  The black bellhop raised a rotting hand from where he stood beneath a glowing red EXIT. “Still rooms, baby.” He smiled. “Still vacancy.”

  Nodding, she again could hear Luke “What does it want?”

  A flash of 700, first seen psychically, then seen whole as she’d rushed from The Cecil.

  700 ROOMS

  “No Vacancy,” she whispered. No Vacancy like the angels who weren’t really lost and the eyes that had been blinded by choice. The Cecil had told Luke No Vacancy, but it hadn’t been to warn him away.

  “It was an invitation,” she announced, and wondered—which room was he in right now? Still 1013? Or visiting the killer way up on the 14th floor? Maybe playing hide and seek in the elevator? Or…or perhaps he was counseling that sad little junkie down on the 5th floor. The Cecil, after all, was home to so many.

  And blind to all the dark things they liked to do.

  Della shuddered, wrapping her bleach-leavened blanket about her and curling up tightly on her little cot. How long would it take the hungry Cecil to at last fill all 700 Rooms? How many more years would pass, and how many desperate LA generations would bury broken dreams before The Cecil would at last be sincere when it whispered, in a compelled visitor’s ear, No Vacancy?

  † † †

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Thank you for venturing into The Cecil with Lucas and Della. I’m glad you made it out unscathed.

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