Images slid across the TV screen, generic stills supposed to convey how deeply cool it is to be here wherever you are, while not actually making it clear where that is. Street cafés, museums, boutiques, theatres, close-ups of expensive food, happy couples laughing in bars – until you spotted a recognizable landmark you could be anywhere: Paris, Chicago, Sydney.
But … in fact, she did recognize these images.
Twin Lakes Beach. Pacific Avenue downtown. The boardwalk?
The screen was showing images of Santa Cruz. In London? Why the hell would they be doing that?
She reached for the phone. Stabbed the button to be put through to reception and waited, still watching the images on the screen. The harbour. The lighthouse. Big Sur.
The phone rang and rang.
Kristen put it down and strode to the door. Took off the chain and flipped the lock. Opened it, hoping the corridor beyond would help her remember where the hell she was.
It was dark out there. Not completely. A light flickered down the end. But too dark, nonetheless. Hotel corridors are always lit even in the dead of night, so weary travellers can find their way. Their light is eternal. Not this one.
She stepped cautiously out of the room.
The carpet felt thick and clammy under her bare feet. It was very quiet. The air was stifling, as always in hotel corridors, with their dead connective space. The hallways of nowhere. An environment no one ever lingers in. A place where you see strangers or no one at all.
She gently drew the door closed, letting it rest on the latch, remembering she hadn’t brought her key. She turned towards the flickering light at the far-right end of the corridor.
It said ‘EXIT’.
But that wasn’t right, was it? She was sure the elevator was in the other direction. Though that was in the London hotel, of course, her usual one – and she wasn’t even sure yet if that’s where she was.
She headed for the light, passing closed doors. None had numbers on them. The carpet was covered in strange, intricate designs in gold and silver: cogs and wheels, like the insides of a weird machine. It didn’t look familiar. None of it did.
Soon she was jogging, past door after door after door. She realized that part of her was expecting the corridor to suddenly stretch out, double or treble in length, but it did not. That only made it worse. That meant this wasn’t a dream.
When she got to the end the ‘EXIT’ sign still flickered silently, but it was a lie. There was no door here. There was no way out. So why would you put up a sign? Why would you make it look like this was an escape, if all it did was trap you?
But it wasn’t anybody else’s fault, was it? She’d chosen to come this way. It was her fault.
All of this was her own stupid fault.
She could hear something now. It was quiet at first, then louder. She turned slowly towards the nearest room door. Like the others it was featureless, flat, dark wood. She reached out and touched it. It was smooth, cold. The sensation of the grain beneath her fingertips was absolutely real.
That confirmed this wasn’t a dream, and so what she was hearing was probably real, too.
The sound of claws, scrabbling against the other side of the door. A dog? It’d have to be a big one.
A very big one. Or a …
Kristen backed away from the door – then turned and hurried down the corridor towards the darkness at the other end. Metal doors suddenly opened at the end, a sideways mouth leaking a sickly yellow glow. The elevator.
The way out. Thank God.
She ran in and reached out for the panel. There was only one button. It had a cross on it, upside down. She slapped at it and the doors immediately slammed shut.
The elevator dropped like a stone, flipping her stomach over. Then it stopped – so violently that she was almost thrown over. The doors opened.
She poked her head out cautiously. ‘What the …’
She stepped out into a cold, grey space. The flat echo of her voice told her it was low-ceilinged, large, though she could only see a small portion of it. It smelled of concrete.
Then she recognized where she was, and finally knew this was her London hotel after all. That this parking lot was, anyway. Because over there was the spot where, standing by his car after a long meeting that had turned into drinks and then that first dinner in the Bella Mare, she’d first kissed someone.
The man for whom she’d upturned her life.
There was no car there now. No cars anywhere. The garage was empty. Cold and dead and silent. Except for …
Two figures were standing right at the point where the light faded into shadow. One tall, the other shorter. A woman and a child, their backs to her, holding hands.
Kristen took a faltering step towards them. ‘Hannah?’
Her daughter turned her head. Her face was sad but resigned.
‘What did you think was going to happen, Mom?’
They stepped forward into the darkness and disappeared.
Chapter 35
Everywhere has an underside, and Santa Cruz has dark notes in its past. The city tends to keep quiet on the subject, naturally, focusing upon more cheerful things like surfing and the wharf and the fact that the town would make a super-convenient place for rich folks from Silicon Valley to come and live, and so they should do that, now, and bring all their money. Such locales attract darkness like a sticky thing attracts dust, however, like a former hotel on Beach Hill, a Victorian mansion where at least one murder has taken place and which also provided a home to one of two serial killers operating in the area in the early 1970s. The hotel has now been converted to an assisted-living facility, and while nothing notably appalling has happened there for many years a peep inside the dreams of its residents would confirm that the shadows there remain liquid and strong. It’s the kind of place where the Devil himself would stay.
Nash found himself led elsewhere, however.
The town first came into being because a bunch of Spanish soldiers happened upon the San Lorenzo River and thought it looked nice. Mission Santa Cruz was established on a bluff a mile back from the ocean. The mission then immediately got on with doing what missions did, namely encouraging the local Indians to work for the church and become Christians, primarily through destroying everything they had previously valued. Many died in the process, and the rest suffered terribly. All missions have dark stains within them but Santa Cruz’s was worse than most – so very bad that the Indians eventually rose up and slew the padre in charge: for which, naturally, they were then slain in turn.
Most of their bodies were unceremoniously buried in a patch of land on the other side of the area where they were forced to work the land, right at the edge of the bluff. This area is now a park, though not a popular one, as though people can sense what happened there.
And that was the place to which Nash found himself drawn.
They left the truck in front of the reconstruction of the mission building, and Nash carried the battered old suitcase. It was very heavy, but Nash was strong – and stronger tonight than ever before. Jesse and the others had long ago stopped trying to understand what was going on, and were simply doing whatever their boss told them.
Nash walked out into the middle of the park, which was cold and dark. He put down the suitcase, backed away a few steps, and lit a cigarette. The others did the same.
After a few minutes they noticed that as it drifted out across the park, their smoke was swirling around shapes, revealing where things stood.
Invisible things. Creeping towards them.
‘Who’s there?’
There was no audible response to Nash’s question, but the temperature was dropping. It was getting noticeably colder. Eduardo shivered.
‘Boss,’ Jesse said. ‘I’m not—’
‘Quiet.’
Then suddenly something was in front of them, about ten feet away, on the other side of the suitcase.
Nash frowned. To him, the figure looked like Jesse’s grandmother. The random wo
man he’d killed during his first robbery, when he’d been young and very scared but trying to look tough and do what was expected by the older guys who’d broken him into the life. He didn’t know how the others saw it, but he heard sharp intakes of breath, as if they were also seeing something that cut them to the quick – reflections of events in their own lives that had changed or ashamed them.
Then it morphed into a figure in a dark cloak.
Nash dimly understood this wasn’t its true form either, but an averaging out of all the ways it had been seen over thousands of years. Humans need something to look at, a direction to speak in. That’s all it was. It wasn’t alone. Nash could dimly glimpse more of them now, standing in a wide circle around them. There was an odd smell, like a pack of wild animals.
The one closest spoke. Its voice was deep and unpleasant. ‘Who are you?’
‘Nash.’
‘That’s your name, which is immaterial to us. I asked who you are.’
‘You know who. You called. I came right the way across the country because you chose me.’
‘No. Our thoughts went out across the land in every direction. I wonder why you heard us more clearly than most?’
Nash shrugged. So far as he was concerned the answer was obvious. He was badass. ‘I—’
‘No,’ it said. ‘Prior misdeeds will not have been enough.’
Suddenly it was closer to him. The other guys flinched. Nash managed to keep still, and stared back at where there should have been a face.
‘I smell angel on you.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Nash said.
‘It is so. You have been in the presence recently.’
‘Trust me, there are no angels where I’m from. The …’ Nash hesitated. ‘Though something weird did happen. A few days ago. An old guy. Wearing a black suit. He said …’
‘… that he was the Devil.’
‘How do you know that?’
The being appeared to turn its head towards the others. Jesse – who, like the other guys, was so scared that he was having trouble breathing – understood that this action was an illusion, that he was merely seeing what he expected to see, interpreting something utterly inhuman in human ways.
The other beings nodded.
The one close to Nash, the angel named Zhakq – who had always known what the Devil had taunted him with in Big Sur, that he regarded him as least amongst the Fallen, a terrible cut to his pride that had curdled and twisted inside him for millennia – turned its face or attention back to him.
‘You work for us now.’
Nash didn’t generally work for people. People worked for Nash. On this occasion, however, he didn’t bother to disagree. ‘OK. But this thing.’ He gestured towards the suitcase. ‘What is it?’
‘A machine. We have done what we can from a distance – preventing the device from channelling power from here into Hell, so that instead it pools here on Earth. That has weakened the Devil, and doubtless even you will have felt how in the last few years this planet has become a darker place. That much we have already achieved. Now we desire to take the final step, reversing the direction of its flow entirely.’
‘And filling the world with shit.’
‘Precisely. I’m glad the symbolism of that event during your journey was not lost upon you. Humans always benefit from being given simple images to comprehend.’
‘OK, well, it’s here. Knock yourself out.’
‘It is not that simple.’
Suddenly the being was right next to the suitcase. Its arm moved, so that its hand – if there had been one – should have touched the top of it. That didn’t happen, however. It passed straight through as though the suitcase wasn’t there.
‘The dark one is cunning,’ the Fallen Angel said. ‘He engaged a human hand in the design and construction of the device, tainting it with the rigours of the flesh. Because of that, its workings are obscured to us. We in turn require a human hand in order to pervert it. That hand shall be yours.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Break it.’
Nash smiled, slowly. This he could do.
Except he couldn’t.
Half an hour later, he and the other men were standing around the suitcase. All were sweating from exertion. Most had aches in their hands and feet. But whatever they’d tried – from attempting to open the case, to punching and kicking and banging it with rocks, up to throwing it off the roof of the mission building – had achieved nothing.
They couldn’t get the thing open, much less destroy it.
The Fallen Angels had stood silent and motionless during this process. Eventually Zhakq spoke.
‘The protection is strong,’ it said. ‘The human who built this did his work even better than we feared. Until it’s open, it cannot be reversed, that is clear.’
‘So now what?’
‘We require that Engineer. Either him, or someone of the same blood, a person whose flesh tastes the same.’
‘You want us to go back to that house and wait?’
‘No. They are not there now. We sense the location of the Devil, and they will be where he is.’
‘Where’s that?’
The being slowly raised one arm.
Nash looked in the direction it was pointing. From this high elevation you could see right out across the town that had grown up on the river plain below, the lights of human habitation. And at the far extent, where the land met the sea, the looming bulk of a funfair at the beach.
‘We will go into the Behind,’ the being said. ‘In case they try to escape there from us. Meanwhile you will find the Engineer and cause him to open the machine.’
‘And what if he won’t?’
‘Break him. But destroy those he loves first.’
Chapter 36
They all went in Steve’s car. It was after midnight and the streets were empty apart from those people who are always walking or driving somewhere, who knew where, who knew why. Hannah had wondered sometimes – when she’d glimpsed them sleepily while being driven home from a grown-ups’ party – if they were forever in motion, wandering the streets on feet or wheels, tracing some dark and uncertain web only they could see; wondered too what they did in the daytime, or if they only ever came out in darkness – if they were in fact in some way part of the night. She realized that the person (or being, or thing) sitting silently in the passenger seat of her father’s car might know, but she didn’t ask. Never ask questions if you might not want to know the answers, lest you are pulled into those stories and the truths they reveal. Sometimes ignorance is better. It would probably not be so popular otherwise.
Her father drove quickly through downtown and to the front. If Santa Cruz is an island, the boardwalk is an island within an island. It stretches almost the entire width of a beach between two headlands, half a mile long, with a gap at the northern end yielding access to the wharf, which stretches out into the bay. In front of this had once been a motley spread of cheap motels and vacation bungalows, but most of these are gone, razed into a vast parking lot to hold the summer crowds. Behind the lot is a big hill, with houses, which cuts all this off from downtown.
The boardwalk stood dark.
The parking lot was closed, so Hannah’s father found a spot up a road nearby. ‘I still don’t get why we’re here,’ he said as they all got out.
Nobody answered. The Devil and Granddad set off quickly, Vaneclaw trotting after. They were the people who understood things (with the likely exception of the imp). Dad and Aunt Zo followed – the people who did not.
Hannah found herself somewhere in between.
The boardwalk is anchored at one end by a large building that was a casino and swimming baths and now holds slot machines and laser tag and conference rooms. Spaced along the landward side are structures holding the rides and attractions. There are fences between these, and entry gates. These were locked, of course, but Granddad was able to rapidly overcome this. There were signs all over the fences saying
that the place was guarded by security.
‘Won’t someone hear?’
‘No,’ the Devil said. He did not elaborate.
They slipped inside and headed out into the promenade. On a summer’s afternoon this would be packed with families from San Jose and Watsonville and Gilroy, stuffing themselves with corn dogs and garlic fries, about as cheerful and boisterous a scene as you could imagine. Hannah thought that as it was now, after midnight in October and deserted, it was like creeping into the body of someone who was so deeply asleep you’d need a doctor to tell you they hadn’t actually died.
They walked the entire length, right to the end where there was a section of rides for smaller kids.
‘What’s that?’ Zo hissed suddenly.
A man was lying on the ground near the mini-golf, flat on his back, arms outstretched. He was wearing a dark blue uniform. ‘Security,’ the Devil said.
‘Is he …’
‘Sleeping.’ He turned to Granddad. ‘Are you confident this mechanism will take us to the Behind?’
‘I believe it was actually built for the role, by someone whose name and purpose is now lost. Whether it’s still capable of performing it … that’s a totally different question.’
‘Lead on, Engineer. Quickly.’
Granddad took them back along the promenade, and before long Hannah realized where he was taking them.
The rollercoaster.
The Giant Dipper on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk was built in 1924, making it the fifth oldest in the United States. Its tangled half-mile of track is constructed predominantly of wood, and tolerates – barely – speeds of up to fifty-five miles an hour along the fastest stretches.
Hannah knew all this (and she’d once known how many rivets it had too, but had forgotten, though she thought it was about twenty-one billion) because while you stood in line there was a video telling you. She remembered Granddad muttering that being informed it was the fifth youngest in the country might be more appealing at this stage. They’d climbed on when their turn came, nonetheless, side by side in one of its six blue carriages, each of which held four passengers. The two ladies in front had been nearly as old as Granddad, and said they’d been riding the Dipper every year since they were kids of Hannah’s age. This was mildly reassuring, but then as they’d been ratcheted up to the top of the first drop, Hannah experienced an abrupt change of heart, blurting that she’d changed her mind and would like to get off, immediately, like, urgently, totally right now.
Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence Page 21