Phantom Effect

by Michael Aronovitz

  From Deseronto’s years in the trades he knew that what he was looking at was not just some haphazard placement of machines and disposal equipment, but a running dispute between two demolition companies, the first hired by the closers the Motel 6 brass had appointed to save every scrap that they could from inside, and the second hired by the larger corporation, most likely paid by the state, to tear down the bare walls and rip up the foundation. That crane and ball in the background was costing company B something like $50,000 a day to rent, thousands in union pay with men standing around, and the hoarders from company A had screwed the schedule, combing the joint and filling those Rubbermaids with every little piece and parcel they could salvage and recycle. One of the bins was filled with sections of mock granite countertop, another with squares of wood-effect flooring, another with laminate panel-board. There was even a dolly-bin filled with rolled-up black floor mats, and Deseronto wondered if they just turned ’em upside down for the next motel in the chain.

  There was a wet hiss behind him, and he dodged around the first dumpster. Of course it blocked the path to the main building because company B had put it here, making a statement, slowing company A’s progress to the point of a near-stall. The expression “biting off your nose to spite your face” came up in Deseronto’s mind, but then it was joined by the image of what he did to Marissa Madison right after snapping her neck earlier.

  Not now.

  Time and place, right? He moved past the waste containers, shimmied between stacks of disassembled luggage rollers, and then stalked over to the entrance walkway. Instead of a set of revolving doors there was a black void with thick cables dangling down. For some reason it looked to Deseronto like those creepy long plastic strip shields they had at the supermarket, hanging from the top jamb dividing the warehouse from the meat room, and he didn’t want to go in there, not as the visitor.

  Normally, he was the one who lurked.

  That reminded him of that show with the guy who had cancer and cooked meth, and for the life of him he couldn’t remember the series name, but he remembered that line,

  I am the one who knocks.

  He liked that line, liked that series, liked the idea that a “nobody” could own something in this country as long as he had perspective and was willing to sacrifice.

  I am the one who waits in the shadows.

  And who wouldn’t want that advantage? Who wouldn’t want to have cased the joint first and gotten to know all the dark corners, hard angles, and “runaways”? So what if you had to go crawling through the maintenance portal to lurk in the pipenest behind the wall once in awhile, maybe reach up under some old moldy drop ceiling to fuck with the electrical, or shimmy in behind the water boiler where the dust webs would stick to the sweat on your face like gauze. Sacrifices, right?

  I am the one who jumps from the shadows.

  Not now, he didn’t. And even though Batman was dead in the mud back there, whoever said Spider-Woman didn’t have a sidekick? New rules, right? It was best to be ready for anything.

  Deseronto stood there at the dark opening, running reaction scenarios through his mind, defensive strategies he could employ for those itchy antagonists who might try bursting out and nailing him just inside the entrance gate. Personally, he preferred for his own victims to enjoy a taste of the “walk and shiver” for the sake of atmospheric foreplay, but you could never count out those eager beavers, could you?

  He bent forward hands to knees, squinted, and tilted his head around. Absolute black velvet in there, and from behind, the girl-thing knocked into the luggage racks. Deseronto reached for one of the cables, thick and black, and he prayed that there weren’t any slits in the insulating sheathing. He pushed the tip of it up toward the frayed end of a red cable hanging an inch out of the steel channeling, and had to go up on his toes to connect them.

  There was a thick pop and a shower of sparks, and Deseronto forced himself to keep his eyes open so he could focus on the foyer area lit up before him. A wavelet of rodents burst off toward the darker periphery of the space, which was ravaged and skeletal, seeming to grin hideously at the bright intrusion imposed upon it. The rough foundation was a cement base with machine-sized trowel curves raked across it and interrupted by a hopscotch of stubborn pieces of the remaining subflooring. The walls were a patchwork of corner posts and curls of fiberglass, the ceiling a nest of exposed pipes, steel strips, and dangling wires. More importantly, there were no holes to fall through and no equipment to trip over.

  The flash only lasted a moment, but on the dying end of it Deseronto saw two important things. The first was a big flashlight lying on top of the counter-block twenty feet in to the left where customers would have gone for check-in. The second was the figure standing behind the counter, facing away, turning toward him ever so slowly.

  Everything darkened, leaving spots on Deseronto’s eyes.

  From directly behind he heard the wet splat of feet on the brick pavers of the entrance walkway.

  He ducked under the cables and stalked into the darkness.

  BRUSHSTROKES

  The pitch dark is like having a bag over your head, asshole. Everything gets close, the way a prisoner might feel right before the hemp circles his neck or the firing-squad sergeant presses the red reflective tape in an X on his chest. And at the same time it seems everything gets long, like infinity in a bottle, only you just got reduced to the size of a germ, floating in it, losing your starting point. Oh, and then there’s the third dimension, the weird depth, ’cause it feels like there’s a lot more space between my sneaker soles and the floor than there actually is, and I keep surprising myself, slapping down my feet before they’re ready as if I’m tripping and staggering upwards or something.

  I bark my knee against what has to be that check-in structure that they stripped of its laminate, and I fumble out my hands, palm-down, to cop a quick feel of the countertop. My search takes me over the rough grains and hardened bead-lines of wood epoxy covered with a film of what feels like WD-40 and tiny metal shavings that misted down when they were cutting the ceiling track with their abrasive wheels and their chop saws.

  A hand comes over mine.

  It is soft. A brushstroke.

  I don’t move. Then a whisper comes across the counter like dead-breeze.

  “You’re pure stone now, ain’t you, Johnny? No quakes or quivers. Well, keep staying still. I’m gonna show you how you got that way.”

  The flashlight comes on.

  And it takes all that I have inside not to scream.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  There was a boy behind the light the Coleman funneled between them, and for a split second Deseronto thought the kid was wearing some strange hairy bathing cap shrinkwrapped around the back of the skull and covering his face down to the nostrils.

  Then it moved.

  It was just a fraction, and now it wasn’t a bathing cap, but rather some furry black hand making a slight adjustment in its grip on the boy’s head with delicate, knobby fingers bending at the joints and resettling.

  It was a huge black tarantula.

  Deseronto yanked his hand from under the boy’s dry palm and backpedaled hard, eyes rolling in his head. He crashed into a forest of drywall studs, knocking them out of their tracks, crimping and kinking the ones at his elbows, and the hard landing made his teeth clack and his jaw sing. The figure before him came slowly from behind the rough counter-block and took a position in front of it, the spider pivoting with him in order to eye Deseronto spot-on, first and third legs maneuvering in simultaneous rhythm with the second and fourth. Now it wasn’t a bathing cap, but rather a stubbly doo-rag, hanging down the back of his neck, exposing the boy’s calm, emotionless face.

  It was Jonathan Martin Delaware Deseronto at age twelve. He was in his clothes reflecting the short phase he’d gone through rebelling against the Grunge assholes and the preppy bastards, getting back to his roots with his dirty moccasins, carpenter pants, and long plains Indian war s
hirt covered with rosettes and sewn from the hides of wolves and coyotes that had roamed the Missouri river territory.

  The kid let his arm come up ever so carefully, and his index finger was pointing toward the opening where the revolving doors had once stood. Deseronto looked over and saw Marissa Madison positioned there in the archway, hunched over and jagged, rough breath bursting against the hair hanging in front of her face.

  “You picked the wrong little hottie this time,” the kid said, “and maybe it wasn’t fate that you found her, but rather that she found you. She had gifts in life you didn’t know about, and you had certain skills she didn’t expect.” He gave a slight grin. “And now you’re caught in transition, like a pothole in the road between now and beyond. But you can’t just pop out of the abyss and head back the way you just came, Johnny-boy. Not yet, anyway. It’s payback time. This place, this whole jobsite, is Marissa Madison’s funhouse.”

  Deseronto felt his jaw tighten.

  “So she’s a killer-hunter setting traps?”

  “Not all killers, Johnny, just you. She ain’t God; be reasonable.” The kid reached up and gently moved one of the spider’s legs off his left eye. “And she’s no hunter. That’s your game. See, in life she could . . . read people. All sides of them, all the pathways, even the buried ones. Here, she makes picture shows. Your past is hidden somewhere in this motel. Hers is waiting for you there in the doorway. Choose.”

  “But you got it wrong,” Deseronto said. “That thing on your head ain’t right, it ain’t accurate. This is a freakshow. It wasn’t . . .”

  His voice faltered as the kid was already moving off into the darkness of the hall leading to what looked in the receding spot-point of the Coleman like a stairway to a mezzanine, a stripped-down elevator shaft, and some emptied storage areas behind it.

  The foyer was left in blackness. To the left in the dull slant of the moon Marissa Madison’s crude silhouette loomed in the archway, rain dripping off all her points and hard edges.

  Deseronto scrambled to his feet and followed the fading beam of the flashlight into the darkened bowels of the gutted motel.

  BRUSHSTROKES:

  AN ENCORE

  Only I ain’t following the walking beam up ahead, because I’m the one holding the flashlight now, shaking it, whacking it, trying to coax up a wink for a reference point.

  I’d been keeping up pretty good, gaining ground on the long straightaway that cut to the back side of the structure where they had a generator room and the laundry facility, the bobbing light up ahead leaving fading traces along the rows of stationary machinery and steel chutes coming down over the curved railtrack where they’d pushed their wheel carts filled with canvas bags of sheets and pillowcases.

  But then he pulled a couple of quick rights, or what I thought were two rights . . . I couldn’t be sure of the second one because I had a moment where I’d run into a nest of hanging conduit and I was elbowing and forearming through the loops and danglers like Tarzan caught in the vines.

  After my duck and weave I made that quick second right on instinct, and I knew it was wrong the second I did it, the same way you feel when you hit that area the GPS can’t read, and what’s supposed to be a turn-off to the Interstate suddenly becomes a dirt road with grass growing between the tire marks and a wooden sign on an angle advertising a glass crafters or a winery.

  I was in a restaurant, tables still bolted down probably because they used epoxy anchors instead of the removable sleeve type, and I only saw the checkerboard of tables in the first place because there was a beam of light that momentarily flashed across a low opening on the other side of the far wall where the bar had been. It was the hatch they brought their kegs through.

  I scrambled for the floor-level cutout before I could forget where it was, thinking at the same time that this was all wrong, ’cause if he’d made a left where I’d taken a right he’d be behind me on the other side of the hallway, not deeper in where there hadn’t been enough time for him to circle back in the first place, but I ignored my common sense and followed the last of the light.

  I was lucky there in the dark, hitting my knees at the right moment, doggie-walking and finding the cutout, only off by an inch or two, and while I didn’t hit my head or scrape my back going in, there was a moment where I caught a shoulder and had to adjust, pitching myself up in a kind of diagonal, pulling myself through from the other side.

  It was cramped. I could tell because the sound of my breathing was heavy and close, and this didn’t make sense because when I saw the beam cross the plane of the low opening from the restaurant side it had seemed like a walking beam, as if this would be a hallway and not just a crawlspace.

  I felt back to where I’d come from, expecting my hand to pass through the void, but there was no cutout there anymore, just solid wall.

  And I’m not lying on my side, soaked and sooty and desperate and pissed, but instead I’m sitting Indian-style, head bent because of the low ceiling.

  I am the one with the flashlight now, and I’m whacking it because the batteries are half-dead and I’m having trouble with the buttons. My face is wet and it smells in here, smells like pickle preserves, and I’m ashamed because boys ain’t supposed to cry, and I just turned six a week ago Tuesday.

  I stop and I freeze because I think I hear a creak on the floorboards outside to my left. Then there’s a clanking by my ear, and I jerk and moan because it sounds like the ghost captain I’m scared of, dropping anchor so he can limp across the splintered deck with his tattered pirate rags blowing back in the sea-wind.

  It’s Mama testing the padlock.

  “Johnny,” she says softly through the crack the trapdoor makes with the wall. It sounds like she’s right next to me here in the dark, and I wipe my eyes with the heel of my hand. I drop the flashlight and it tumbles off my knees, hitting the floor.

  “That’s my Rayovac, isn’t it, Johnny?”

  “No.”

  “Really now? The darkness is the world’s most ancient poison, and if you let it in your heart you have to be man enough to wear it on your back. Are you man enough, Johnny? You a big boy?”

  I nod my head up and down, and she gives a whispery little laugh out there.

  “God hates a liar.”

  “I ain’t lying!”

  “Aren’t you? Where’s my twelfth jar of apricot-pineapple marmalade?”

  My bottom lip pushes out, and I feel a moan coming up like a siren. I stop it right there in my nose, but I know she heard it and, worse, I know for sure now that she knows that I climbed up on the stove yesterday while she was taking one of her migraine headache naps upstairs with the fan on and the window open that faces the Mackenzies’. But I’d been so careful! I reached up on my tippie-toes and got out the jar and didn’t even eat any until I got back down to the floor, and I didn’t use no utensils or nothing, I just popped the snap-ring cover and dug with my fingers, and then I buried the empty out back behind the shed and washed myself off with the hose!

  There’s the anchor chain sound again, and the hatch door to the low pantry opens, pouring light across my knees. I want to crawl out, but Mama’s feet are right there, green beach sandals she bought at the dollar store, blue tribal ankle-band tattoo, and that thin white scar running up her left shin all the way to the knee.

  “Come out of there, Johnny,” she says, backing off half a step.

  I crawl out slow and from above me I can tell she’s got her hands on her hips and I stand up and while she taught me real good not to put my chin on my chest and cry into my shirt I can’t look at her neither, so I fold my arms like a big boy and face away toward the kitchen where she’s got all her batches going, windows covered with flypaper, jars on the stove dinging around in the boiling water, cheesecloth sack sagging down into the dented steel washtub and bleeding out pulp for the chokecherry jelly she’s gonna sell to the farmer’s market out in Devon or the trading post they got out on Route 3 with the totem pole at the front of the dirt parking lot
and the big wooden Indian head on the roof smiling big and stupid like the baseball logo they use in Cleveland.

  “Johnny.”

  I don’t say nothing.

  “Johnny, do you know how I know you took the marmalade?”

  I shrug.

  “You were careless, Johnny, look at me.”

  She reaches her smooth fingers under my chin and pulls my head back toward her, and I turn with it even though I don’t want to, and I scrunch up my mouth like one of her dried prunes and squeeze shut my eyes. Her voice is close now and her breath makes a hot little oval on my forehead.

  “It’s bad enough that you don’t figure I keep a running count of my own jars, Johnny. It’s worse that you use one of the dishrags I always keep in the handle of the fridge to wipe up after yourself and then go packing it under the dirt out back thinking I’m not going to miss it. But the real sin is the sign you left in the great wide open, your trail of breadcrumbs.”

  She presses her dry lips to my eyebrow, and I do my best not to jump through the roof.

  “That’s a girl-kiss for you, Johnny. For the sneaker print you left on the back right burner.”

  Now she’s leading me past the archway into the kitchen, holding my hand up high enough that she’s half dragging me along, and when I get through I see there’s something different in the near corner there by the sink, something out of place. It’s the basement laundry hamper with its canvas bag and steel X-frame, and it don’t look right so near to the clean squeaky china drying out on the bottom rack of the opened dishwasher, because it’s the old sack we keep between the washer and the dryer down there and it’s got worn-in grime stains leopard-spotted along the bottom and dust webs creeping up the sides with specs of dirt floating in them.

  “I know,” she says, yanking on my hand, making my shoulder feel like its gonna pop the socket. “It don’t look right, does it, Johnny? Everything is supposed to be in its place, and when you turn the world inside out you’d better be ready to see what’s been left in the dark, that’s all I’m saying.”