Rose Clair’s bone-pale scalp had some remaining hair—short tufts like corn stalks of raven black.
Seeing the direction of Ed’s gaze, Rose Clair said, “Palsy and stage four flipping everything. I’m pretty much okay with all of it. The Or is providing strong narcotics. The Or… feeding on the wealthy terminal and recluses.”
“And the strange.”
“Yes. I was, I am a bit of all three,” her voice warbled gently. “Let me see what’s in the pillowcase. Cozies by chance?”
“I brought you quite a few.”
“You’ll bring me more another time, I hope?”
“Yes, sure.”
“Smashing. Thank you in advance.”
Rose’s face would be lovely if she hadn’t errantly applied her rouge, eyeshadow, and lipstick with a shaky hand and no mirror.
“So, you are the newest resident?” she asked.
“No, I’m an employee. Got here a few days ago. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to your message earlier.”
“No matter. What is your employment?”
“I’m hostess and office worker.”
“And a lovely one.”
Ed’s mischievous smile and twinkling eyes radiated with the compliment. After a moment of basking, she broke the spell by taking out the collection of cozy mysteries and lining them up on Rose’s night table.
“How did you get here?” Ed tapped the books into a neat row.
“Like all, I suppose. By choice. I met the proprietress, Ms. Constance Snapp, in London. She has an office there and discreetly solicits the well-to-do recluses. I was, I am, both. Sent around a card of invitation, and we met sometime later. All sparkling and fun, she was. And the allure of the tropics, I was dazzled. Have you met her? I suggest not. A truly evil soul.”
“But at first?”
“Yes. Flattering, colorful, bubbling. A bit tipsy, but it was all so seductive.”
“And then.”
“Yes, that. She’s a megalomaniac. The shining star on her own bent and dramatic stage. Director, star, scriptwriter, trying to control it all, including everyone else who she sees as supporting cast members.”
“I’ve had a couple of employers like that.”
“I’m sure. An unfortunate and common sickness. You stick around long enough, and you’ll have the pleasure.” Rose’s smile waned, and the following racking cough was painful.
When it cleared, Ed said, “I’m not sticking around. Soon as I can get to the gas station, I’m out of here.”
“I wish you success. Been here two years. Never heard of anyone leaving. By choice.”
A second coughing spell overtook Rose. When it had passed, she continued, “Most leave via this dreadful second floor.”
“What is this floor? All the small rooms. The black walls and all?”
“It’s what I call the thawing floor.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There must be others like me who haven’t quite yet crossed over. I’ve overheard Doctor Malcom. The deceased are chilled… frozen, to be precise. In the rare case where family or estate lawyers and the like are heard to be coming to visit, the bodies are thawed and made presentable. Suspect that the visitors are greeted with the sad news of their loved one’s recent death.”
“Why?”
“The thaw floor is a money-making machine. Long as the dead are not under the soil, their investments and pensions and whatnot continue to pay out to the Or.”
“You know this, and you’re okay with it?”
“Yes, I am. All I ever wanted was to be left alone. And I am that. The illnesses were unexpected, but I’m… content with the quiet and calm days and nights. And if my brother, my only living relative, should ever show any interest, I’ll be made available for his comforting viewing.”
Ed took Rose’s hand and held it softly.
“Now to your plan of escape. Care to share?” Rose asked.
“It’s hazy. I don’t have all the pieces I need. Try and steal a basement door key? Find another door? Just need to find my way to the gas station and restaurant.”
“Never saw those,” Rose pondered, the words trembling from her troubled lungs. She raised one finger. A coughing fit overwhelmed her entire upper body and reddened her neck and cheeks.
Ed brushed the soft skin of Rose’s palm.
The attack went on for several minutes.
When the painful fit had run its course, Rose’s eyes were tearing and her nose was running, her teeth chattering.
“I suggest…” she sucked in a rattling breath, “The basement. Must be how Constance gets here when she visits. Might be wrong.” She raised a soiled bath cloth from the bedding and spit into it—a yellowish gob streaked with tendrils of blood.
“Please don’t talk,” Ed offered. “Just nod. Can I get you a med?”
Rose shook her head. She looked at the assorted hanging drip bags and the many medicinal devices on both sides of the narrow bed.
“More cozies?” Ed asked.
Rose’s eyes widened a touch, and a smile crinkled her chapped, painted lips. “I must look… a bag of ugly. You’re a beautiful cupcake…”
“Please don’t talk.”
“I was once one also. Now run along and scheme. And get away.”
Rose turned her head away stifling another spell of coughs, considering the darkness of the other end of the room.
Ed left quietly and returned to her suite where she found a brilliant yellow card waiting for her inside the door. She picked it up.
Your failure to attend the midday meal is noted with displeasure. Failure to attend is unacceptable. Do not let that happen again.
You will be working this evening. Dress accordingly.
The handwriting was awkward as though done in the writer’s second hand.
Ed dropped the card on the room service cart and selected two slices of honeydew melon from a plate.
She found Puppy laying on his side in a hot pool of direct sunlight. Sitting down beside him, she said, “Bro, try the shade.”
Puppy chittered weakly with his head and eyes raised to her. She set the melon slice on the concrete and reached out to him. His upper body and legs and tail twitched and, as she gathered him up, she watched him depart from the living.
15
Ed cried, tears running down her cheeks as she lowered Puppy to the cool concrete in the shade. The tearful sadness was an emotion thought lost years before.
Wiping them away with the back of her hand, the sadness changed, the crying no longer assuaging but fueling a fire. For vengeance. For escape.
She spoke to Puppy’s prone, dead body.
“I’m gonna get away and get to a television station or a newspaper. Raise a shit storm on this place.”
After laying Puppy comfortably in the center of his bed, Ed showered and changed into Rose Clair’s clothing for what she believed was the last time. She went with black shorts and blouse, and black stockings and boots. She placed her wigs, airbrush gun, and other belongings in the carryall and carried it to the front door.
From the first-floor alcove, she scanned the lobby knowing that the suitcase was a giveaway to her plans. The front desk was unstaffed. Lendall was either in a pile on the floor or taking a break. Off to the left, seven or so residents were having themselves a mid-afternoon swim.
Moving swiftly along the corridor to her left, she hunched low, hoping the residents wouldn’t see her. She kept her eyes forward until she had the door to the basement steps open. Closing it behind herself, she stood still briefly, listening for voices. Hearing none, she descended the stairs to the parking garage. Rattling and blowing machines were running in the shadows.
A group of men began shouting at each other over by the big door to the bridge. Ed squatted low alongside a line of garbage dumpsters. The men were on a ramp at the back of a cargo truck. The inside of the truck was filled with crates and containers, The men were disagreeing and pointing to the remaining barrels to be loaded.
One of the
men jumped down from the landing and tapped some keys on a security pad on the wall. Below the keypad another motor started, a clanging engine struggling to pull the chains attached to pulleys to the side of the door.
Instead of raising the door as Ed expected, the steel and wood began to angle out, and she saw that the door was also the bridge. As the chains and spool and gears struggled, beautiful daylight and heat washed in. Another man climbed up in behind the wheel of the truck. A third man rolled the cargo door down and locked it. With a pounded fist on the side, the truck rolled out, the barrels left behind. The other men stood around continuing to argue, there between Ed and the bridge across the water to freedom.
The man at the wall entered more security numbers, hit a large button, and the bridge began to rise. Ed watched the large truck roll away across the lawn.
“If I had the code,” she whispered, watching darkness fill the cavernous basement.
The men as a group entered a side building along the right wall and its windows warmed. Their voices were still entangled in conflict. She looked to the far-left wall in the weak light to the door to the walking bridge and gypsy camp.
“If I had the key,” she said, standing up and extending the handle of her carryall. She shook her head, uncertain.
Across the basement to the right of the hut with its lit windows was another door, barely showing between tall stacked crates on pallets. She walked softly over to it, her eyes sweeping back and forth from the new door to the windows of the side building. The wood door had a glass window with embedded bars crisscrossing it. Its handle and plate were pitted brass and it leaned to the left as though damaged by an earthquake or the setting of the old stone hotel.
To her surprise and relief, it was unlocked—unlocked, but wedged tight. Ed pulled hard a number of times, struggling to get it to budge. When she had it open enough to slip through, she did so trailing the suitcase and turned around quickly. Hearing the voices of the angry men rising, she slid the two crossing lock bars and set the deadbolt.
Her fingertip found a light switch beside the door. Yellowed bulbs warmed and flickered from above.
“Some kind of old shipping office,” she said to the view. There was thick dust and spider webs everywhere. “Abandoned,” she added, “Like in the movies, a hundred years old.”
Along an uneven row of wood desks, there were six chairs. Empty wood nooks ran along the back wall. The flooring was old gouged planks brown with dirt. A boulder the size of an automobile had smashed down into the room and destroyed the right side of the office. Like the hole from a tooth extraction, the chipped, rocky ceiling showed where the boulder had fallen from.
Ed crossed the buckled boards, gazing at the end of the room where a metal device hung on the wall with rows of browned timecards under a busted clock. A wood sign hung on the wall above the next door.
La Elección De La Mina. The Choice Mine.
Establecida en septiembre de 1928. Established September 1928.
Se benefician en primer lugar. Proteger a su pareja. Profit First. Protect your partner.
She pulled on the right handle of the double kick doors and stepped out onto a plank landing. The walls were dull gray stone cut square with heavy chiseling. Two sections of planked walkways extended out forming a U-shape. On both sides of the ‘U,’ heavy hand and machine tools leaned against the stone walls. She walked forward to the edge of the landing.
A foot from her boot tip was a twelve-foot-long cart on steel tracks. Low wood sides and benches lined the interior of the vehicle. In the center was another reminder of movies about long ago, a working of gears and cables with rusted supports below a seesaw pumping arm. A heavy steel wheel was bolted on the ride side of the pumping arm, nicked with age and use. Like everything she had seen since entering the mining office, the cart was brown with dust and its floorboards covered with boot dirt. There was a thin swept spot on the bench at the rear, a space cleared for a single occupant. A closed umbrella with mold-dotted fabric lay on the left side bench. At the knees of the seat was a modern motor—a practical modification to the hand-driven cart. It looked like a small car engine and was held in place by steel mounts. A bar rose from the engine and supported handlebars.
“One for throttle and the other for the brakes.”
Out beyond, the tracks narrowed before disappearing into the carved mouth of a tunnel.
“Get me to the gas station?” Ed climbed down inside, placing her carryall forward.
After three arm-straining pulls on the starter cord, she let go of the hard-plastic handle. She waited a minute before trying some more, until her shoulder was torqued. She pulled the choke knob out and tried three more pulls. Not even a sputter of life. She recognized the engine’s gas cap and twisted it off. She also rapped the side of the fuel tank. No sloshing.
She glared at the motor, seeing how the transmission on the side of the engine fed a chain into a rough sawed hole in the floor planks.
Climbing back up on the platform, she scanned the tools lining both sides of the mine entrance. Not a fuel can anywhere.
“Where would you take me?” she asked, looking up the tracks.
“To a surfer with a car I can buddy up? Or the bottom of this mountain?”
After searching the dusty office, she peered out through the grimy door to what she could see of the big bridge door.
“Could be days.” She frowned and returned to the mining cart.
16
The first downward pull on the steel seesaw arm was the hardest. Straining her shoulders and arm muscles, she grunted until it was all the way down to her knees. The cart rolled forward a few inches. Turning her wrists, she pulled up on the pump arm, groaning at the resistance but continuing to try. When the bar was raised to her chin, the cart rolled a couple of feet along the tracks.
The second down plunge was slightly easier. Her muscles screamed as she pumped down again.
Three more pulls and pushes had her twenty feet along the tracks where the cart passed under timbers supporting the rock ceiling and walls. The rails tilted the cart to the right, perhaps earthquake damaged. Out front, the darkness was closing in. She stepped aside from the seesaw arm and eased along the left-hand bench to a cigar box of wood matches on the floor. Striking one, she held the flame to the oil lantern that hung on a rusted metal hook. The glass belly under the neck of the lamp was almost empty. Not knowing how far the tracks would go, Ed gave it no mind.
“Nothing I can do about that.”
Back to work at the pumping arms, the cart complied with her efforts with creaks and groans as its steel wheels rolled on down the leaning tracks.
The wavering lamp light painted and illuminated the stone-chiseled walls ten feet forward. The tracked leveled and ran flat and the pumping became a bit easier.
Forty yards in, the rails began a slight downward run, and the cart rolled a little quicker but no quieter. The steel wheels cried along the rails as Ed grunted, panted, and worked the arm. The tunnel made a tight turn before leveling off.
The lantern flame flickered.
“Don’t you dare,” she continued working the steel pumping bar all the quicker.
A second roof support of timbers passed overhead. Twenty yards on, the cart crossed a wood bridge that the lamp hadn’t had time to reveal. The foul smell of sulfur in the trickling creek bed filled her next four breaths. The bridge beams moaned and shifted but supported the cart’s crossing.
As though beckoned by the crossing of the bridge or the light from the lantern, a lengthy cloud of bats came out of the darkness.
“Flying rats!” she screamed, swinging her hands balled into fists.
Ed’s hair and shoulders were flicked and snagged.
“Don’t you f’in bite me,” she hollered, ducking low, nearly clouting her chin on the rising steel pump handle.
An injured or stunned bat landed in a sideways heap on the right-hand bench. Its black papyrus wings were working frantically. Ed raised her boot, not yet decidi
ng to stomp it or not when the sound of falling water drew her eyes to the rocks above. A sheet of water blasted her face and soaked her upper body.
The sheet was a foot deep and passed quickly. Staring first at the closed-up umbrella on the bench, her eyes turned to the faltering lantern.
She clambered forward as the cart rolled along. Taking two matches from the cigar box, she watched the flame hiss and die. Striking both at once, she slid them in over the cloth wick.
The cart turned sharp as the track spurred off from a second set into a tunnel to the right. Ed kept the match flames in place even as her ribs barked against the steel bench edge. The lantern lit. She tossed the burning matches to the floorboards and looked forward.
The tracks were aimed into the closing darkness as before. Turning around, she saw the switching stand and controls just before the darkness consumed them. The tracks leveled out, running straight. Back at the seesaw arm, Ed worked her strained shoulders and arms, her lower back aching.
Fifty yards further, the stone walls angled away to both sides before disappearing into darkness. A dust-mottled, angled wedge of falling daylight exposed the cavern the cart was entering. A mining work yard, long abandoned.
Two short, crudely built workshops were pressed into the rust brown walls thirty feet to her left. Ed gulped a breath of air that wasn’t tainted by sulfur and dust. Taking a second breath, she scanned the two workshops for any hint of people or movement as the cart began to slow.
“Jump off? A way out?”
The work yard was dead and forgotten. To the right was a steel tower, perhaps an elevator structure, but there was no car or lift platform that she could see. It rose a hundred feet and disappeared into a square black mouth.
She began pumping again and rolled across the cavern and entered another tunnel entrance framed with timbers. A second set of rails appeared from the right and paralleled those she was on. Her cart picked up some speed as the tracks headed downhill. The lantern shined on a yellow warning sign bolted into the rock face:
The Girl in the Hotel Page 9