One of the women scraping plates in the kitchen called to the freezer in the gypsy’s foreign language.
“Know what meddling means?” Cliantha asked Ed, ignoring the other woman.
“No, I don’t.” Ed rubbed her arms with pink fingers.
“Best way to learn is a lesson.”
Ed spun around at the heavy steel on steel clack of the freezer door closing, followed by what she guessed was the lock being set. She stared and shouted in outrage and anger and growing fear.
“You sperm holes, let me out!”
“Gypsy claptraps!”
“Open that door, you dog suckers.”
Her words cast a hollow cold echo. She paused and chose a different tact.
“You’re a great bunch of gals,” she yelled, the fear expanding.
Silence.
“I’m really sorry. Just wanted a snack. I’ll call room service from now on. Forever.”
Silence.
She didn’t pound on the door, but screamed at it instead, “I apologize!”
In the following stillness, she found a pair of thick rubber gloves with fur lining in a wall cubby and pulled on a stained man’s coat from a hook.
Ignoring dead Patricia, she walked deeper into the freezer, her teeth chattering, her exposed legs stinging cold. The back wall had a doorway with hanging strips of clear plastic. Passing through, she swept her heavy gloved hand along the inside. Lights came on. Ed gasped, releasing a breathy cloud and stepped back.
The second room was narrower than the first. The walls were barren of shelves, and a dead body lay on steel rollers before a box-like opening in the rear wall.
The head and shoulders of another corpse extended out from the square hole.
Keeping her hands at her side, Ed peered into the square of darkness. A slight draft of warm air brushed her red wig back from her lovely face. The rollers ran downward steeply to the source of the jungle-fragrant air current.
On the worktable alongside the rolling track were neatly folded stacks of clothing with folders of documents atop each. The sign above the table read, ‘Pensioner Processing’ in English. Below was a list of numbered instructions. She read some but left off halfway, noting the black marker writing in what must be the gypsy’s language under each line.
Taking to heart that warmish flowing air, Ed searched both freezer rooms for a flashlight. She returned to the opening with a dead body half in and half out, empty-handed.
Keeping her hands back from the dead person, she pressed her chilled face inside the chute with its faint draft of jungle air. To get closer, she reluctantly placed her gloves on the body’s distasteful abdomen and chest—it was frozen rock hard. This made the following touches not as disturbing as she climbed up on the body, her stinging legs to the corpse’s sides. She climbed down into the opening face first.
Needing more of the warmth and scents from somewhere outside, she crawled deeper into the tunnel with her rear above the neck of the body that was half inside. The passing air was a touch warmer, and she saw a few flickers of silver lines like moonlight snakes on water. She kept her chin up and eyes forward and crawled deeper.
The electric lines on the black water inched closer. She crawled over the ankles and raised toes of another dead body. The next corpse lay in the same direction as the prior one, going down the chute head first. Placing her hands on its chest, she felt the pliant give of partial thawing. She worked forward into the warm and fragrant air that was taking the edge off the freezing cold. The air of her next breathed was rich with ripe jungle and foul water tastes.
She saw why the rolling tracks were backed up with the bodies. The third corpse lay legs first and had stiffened with its hands and arms elevated, They were wedged against the steel frame at the end of the tunnel. The body was half in, half out of the square opening, the lower section submerged in the shimmering black water.
Ed crawled until her face was outside. She breathed deeply, repeatedly, looking across the narrow channel of water to the black outline of the jungle where the leaves were shiny with light from the moon.
Gripping the outside of the tunnel, her thick gloves out on the rough stone, she pulled herself forward, the body underneath her knees deflating and squishing. The crack of a bone came to her ears as one of the arms broke. The body slid deeper into the water, dragging her forward, to where her face was inches from the surface. As the corpse’s upper thighs slid from the chute, the water right before her eyes began to boil.
Ed recoiled back, clouting the top of her head. She screamed in fear and disgust, staring wide-eyed in primal revulsion. Dozens of hand-sized, bone-colored fish were boiling and flipping this way and that, all chewing. Many more were racing to the feast, flicking the surface, their spiny teeth already clicking. The fish were fighting and jumping up out over the body just under the surface, flecks of meat in their gripping mouths. The attack on the body became a madness of bites and chews as hundreds more of the fish closed in from all directions.
Ed gave the opposite shore one last sad look before beginning her backward crawl up over the dead between her and the freezer room. She was on top of the second dead body when a second bone cracked, releasing the row of cadavers, which began to slide down the rollers under her. Ed went manic with effort, frantically climbing back up the chute as the bodies slid down to the splashing, snapping water.
She clambered out into the icy lights and air and off the rollers and stood, chattering cold, watching the top of a head of uncombed gray hair disappear into the darkness.
Turning away, she saw that she was no longer alone with dead Patricia on her steel table. Just inside the dangling plastic doorway stood an Eskimo. Heavy boots, shiny rubber work pants and a thick, dirty parka with a drawn fur-lined hood. The faceless Eskimo raised one thick arm and beckoned with a thick glove, four fingers bending in rhythm.
Ed followed the person through the plastic sheets into the front room of the freezer where she watched the door to the kitchen open.
Ed ran, ran with stinging skin and muscles, passing the Eskimo shoving her or him aside. She stopped and began sucking heat into her lungs. The steel door closed at her back. She spotted a heater vent low on the wall under a filthy worktable and jammed her body in around it.
Her head was twitching. She pulled off her gloves and pressed her hands to the draft of heat from the grating. She raised her knees and pressed them to the side of the vent, inflating her dress with the delicious, hot current. Behind her were the voices of the kitchen staff chattering in their odd-angled language. She ignored them even when it sounded like they were questioning her. The skin of her face, thighs, and fingers thawed with a thousand needles of heat. Her body was racked with sudden bursts of clenching and rattling.
Minutes passed before she interrupted the many voices yakking at her back.
“Lesson learned, you maggot suckers,” she snarled, not turning around.
The gypsy women went silent and remained mute during the next five minutes while Ed embraced the warm air vent.
Ed rose to her feet and looked at the women. They stood in a semi-circle a few feet away. As one, their expressions were smug with approval. Only their bird-like heads and eyes turned as she walked past silently, moving through the warm and sweet and dizzying cooking smells to the hallway door.
Suspecting it would be painful, Ed still chose to run a warm bath as soon as she was back inside her suite. Sliding down onto the tiled lounge in the tub and submerging, her suspicions were confirmed as the skin of her naked body lit up. The stinging was welcome. She pulled off the red wig, feeling its strands crackle in her fingers before she tossed it aside. Lowering her head underwater, she rubbed her bristled scalp with stupid-feeling hands, her eyes closed, her lungs full of delicious warm air.
Wearing a robe from the heated cabinet and a warm towel draping her head, Ed padded out to the front room. She figured out how to light the fireplace quickly and sat before the fire with her knees up and her arms across them.
A glance at the clock told her it was well past midnight. While the flames massaged her limbs and added a glow to her lovely face, Ed turned to visualizing the puzzle board that was partially constructed. There were new pieces scattered around the unfinished image. Not enough to decipher the mysteries of the Hotel Or.
Leaving off those thoughts, she felt her tummy grumble and her vision soften toward sleep.
“Heads or tails? Sleep or food?”
She chose both, rising and taking the nice chair beside the telephone table.
“Room Service,” the call was answered.
“Please send up a salad with thousand island dressing. A cup of cocoa with marshmallows, and a couple of bottled waters.”
“Anything else? A dessert? Entree?”
“An entree?” Ed mused, considering an imagined menu.
“You know, like a dinner,” the tone clearly suggesting that Ed was running on stupid.
“I’m thinking,” Ed delayed, holding the phone away and glaring at it.
“Bowl of beef stew? A deli platter? A French dip?” the server suggested.
Ed visualized and considered each.
“You know, send me up the salad and a plate of steamed carrots and whatnot. Any kind, I don’t care. But no meats. I’m now a vegetarian.”
While waiting for her meal, she stood on a chair and peeled back the plastic from an air vent. She breathed deeply until the idea of groggy sleep was making her giddy.
7
Eleven showed on Ed’s silver clock. She stared at it, waking slowly in a tangle of a towel and her robe laying on the couch. She sat up and looked at the remains of the late-night meal on the room service cart she had pushed aside after dining.
“I’m gonna go with that being eleven in the morning,” she told the room, glancing from the couch to her bedroom and the balcony, confirming daylight.
She left off showering and chose a pair of black shorts and a black polo shirt from the closet shelves. Pulling on a stringy black wig and changing her eye lenses to a burnt chocolate color, she left the suite.
“Let’s explore. Find a few more puzzle pieces.”
The rectangle of unique suite faces on the third floor reminded her of a colorful, odd village with a great big open-air plaza, the atrium a hole with the top of the Christmas tree in the middle.
She headed out to her left, passing Jimmy’s southern trash yard and troubled, worn out house front. Walking the lawn past the stairway alcove, she came to the last suite on her side of the atrium.
Music swept outward from the open, battered door that hung unevenly on its hinges. The exterior facade was exposed bricks except where the surfaces were painted in sweeps of sky blue, red, orange, and green. Her first impression of the exterior was the single word, ‘tropical.’ There were two palm trees to the sides of the door, rising from the white beach sand. The windows had no glass and were framed with brown bamboo stalks. Like the Thorngarten’s funeral home suite, there was a front door awning—this one thatched with palm leaves.
Ed crossed the white sand to the palm-board front porch and peered in through the open front door. There was a small, single sized unmade bed, a kitchen chair, and an amplifier on the boards and a record player on a simple table. She noticed that her suite was far and away smaller than these others.
“Three times smaller,” she mused.
A style of music she had never heard before was playing.
“Caribbean blues?” she wondered if such a description existed.
Movement to her left drew her closer. She leaned in through the door. A man in his forties was off to the side of the room, playing a dark wood bass guitar with his eyes closed. He was accompanying the record player. His added notes were sparse and fluid, deep and low under the higher, crisp melody. He wore blue and green floral pajama pants on his thin-limbed spider-like body with an unfortunate pot belly. As his head bobbed, his beaded cornrows swept and fell across his face. When his head titled back, she saw his once handsome, weasel-like face. He appeared unhappy and lost, confused or sad, and definitely lonely.
The song ended, and he played through the silence before another album dropped and began. He circled slowly and played his bass to the introduction of a distantly familiar commercial jazz tune. Ed noted the row of room service trays just inside the door. Largely untouched as though he ordered a lot of food and forgot. She walked backward across the sand to the lawn and continued up the landing.
Rounding the turn at the end, she stepped to the front of the next suite. It resembled an old-time gift shop. A painted sign over the door read, ‘Welcome to Monkeyville.’ A path of cobblestones led up past a gray picket fence that surrounded the yard of white aspen trees. From the branches and in the boughs, taxidermy jungle critters—mostly monkeys—were posed and dangled among wind chimes. Each of the animals and chimes had a price tag on a length of twine. The front door was a deep forest green and its upper half was open.
“Hello?” Ed called through, looking into the front room that looked like a small scaled village. An elevated toy-size choo-choo train rode the tracks between shops and houses the size of travel trunks.
“Hello, are you open?” she called and tried the knob.
Stepping in, she had to press her tummy against the elevated backside of red brick buildings. Easing deeper inside, she watched the train parallel a knoll covered with headstones and pass the entrance of an expensive-looking restaurant. She ignored the buildings as the train engineer rolled into view. He or she was an all-black, white-chested monkey. It wore striped overalls and a gray cap and leaned out into the wind. The monkey was the size of a child’s doll, and its black marble eyes were very dead. The train passed by and entered a curving tunnel carved into a hill of wild red-berry bushes. With the train out of view, Ed looked the town over. The track turned this way and that past a movie theatre, a second restaurant and bar, a nightclub, police station, a hardware and grocery store. There were more, but from where she stood, the angle didn’t reveal what kind of businesses they were.
The town, Monkeyville, was populated by casually dressed shoppers and workers, some out on a stroll and others at labor, all glass-eyed monkeys of varying but finalized expressions.
“Good day, love,” lilted from beyond where the train was chug-a-chug breathing and starting another endless lap.
Ed looked to the far end of the town, to the edge of the large room, at the smiling hawk-faced elderly woman who stood back from the unfinished new section of the town. Unpainted buildings were half constructed of wood blocks and cardboard.
The woman was bone thin, nearly skeletal. She wore painter’s coveralls that hung limply on her slight frame and a tight-cinched toolbelt with an assortment of hand tools.
“Hello, I knocked, I think,” Ed called across the village between them.
“Please come in further,” the hawkish woman offered.
Ed started along a tightly twisting path to the woman, having to duck under a rail bridge over the concrete floor. Making her way to the backside of Monkeyville, Ed sniffed and crinkled her nose. The further she went, the stronger was the disturbing scents of animal excrement and urine, solvents, glues, and paint. There was also an eye-stinging, burning smell of charred fur.
“My name is Mrs. Collins, Katie if you would. How may I address you?” the British accent was formal, civilized.
“I’m Ed ‘Never Ever Eddie.’ This is a very interesting store.”
“Thank you, love. It’s not really a shop as much as a work of love. My fascination with…” She didn’t finish that thought, left the words hanging there, elevated like the train tracks and the village and its dead citizens.
“I like it. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. Must have taken years to build.”
“Yes, that. It has been. And there is a lot more to come.”
Ed walked the curve of a river constructed with plaster of Paris where a young monkey couple was enjoying a sailboat outing. Beyond the water was a short strand
of oak trees with three cottages, each having a front porch, potted flowers, and easy chairs.
Mrs. Katie Collins waited patiently for Ed to make her way to the unfinished edge of town, her eyes appearing way too large in her thin, bony face. She was smiling at Ed, her tissue-thin eyelids blinking at a relentless pace. Those eyes studied Ed’s passing of the last section of Monkeyville, the seedy area of shanties populated by derelict monkeys smoking and drinking. Litter and refuse and spilling garbage cans lay on the narrow road of homes in grave disrepair.
When Ed stood before her, Mrs. Katie Collins extended her pale, fragile hand and gave Ed a clawish, strong shaking.
“Thank you for stopping by. We don’t get many customers. Truth be told, I prefer their absence.”
“Oh? I’m sorry. I can go.”
“No, no, love. I think I like you. Please, join me in the design room. Tea if you like? Or some of your country’s dreadful coffee?”
“I’m fine with tea, thank you.”
Mrs. Katie Collins parted a curtain of woven lace, and Ed stepped through. The curtain, while thin, had contained the more pungent smells from the rear area of the suite.
Eyes watering, Ed raised the back of her hand to her nose and mouth, looking past a set of chairs and a tea table, to the workshop. Dead monkeys were held upright by vices and clasps along the rear wall workbench before a wall of small knives and tools. Several buildings were under construction on the worktable to the left, alongside shelves of clothing, furniture, and town decorations.
“Please have a seat, and I’ll brew our tea,” Mrs. Katie Collins offered.
Ed took the chair to the right which allowed her to keep an eye on the scarecrow woman in her narrow kitchenette. Breathing shallow of the foul air, she examined the wire cages on the left side of the workshop. Each of the cages was draped in black cloth and from underneath came insistent scratching and banging, along with on and off screeches and barks.
The Girl in the Hotel Page 4