In This Skin (23 page)

    ”We've seen no one else here,”Noel said quickly ”I don't doubt you,”Benedict replied. ”She disappeared ten years ago.”

    ”Ten years!”

    ”Yeah, I know. The trail's going to be pretty cold after all that time.”He shrugged. ”It got under my skin. I can't stop looking.”

    Robyn shivered. ”Lucky you did.”

    ”I guess so.”

    Noel shook his head. ”But what made you go down there, Robyn? You knew that anyone could have been wandering around the building.”

    ”Not just anyone.”A tremor sounded in her voice. She took a deep swallow of the hot beverage. ”Sit down, Noel. Here beside me.” She wriggled herself into a sitting position beneath the comforter, her legs straight out on the sofa. Then she nodded at the armchair. ”Take a seat, Benedict. I want you to hear this, too.”After taking another grateful swallow of hot chocolate, she began to relate events from the moment she had climbed out of bed at midnight.

    

    

    Robyn explained what had happened. How she'd heard the baby's cry and how she'd found no sign of an infant in the dance hall. Now she realized that it must have been a trick to lure her down there. As plainly as she could, she then described losing her sense of direction in the dance hall when the candle blew out. Then came the weird sensation of passing through some boundary into a forest where-just as she'd dreamt many times before-she'd encountered monstrous figures in a clearing. As she'd fled, the creature with a great crimson eruption of a mouth had pounced on her. That's all she remembered. ”I must have passed out,”she added.

    ”Then I woke up on the dance floor with Benedict helping me.”

    ”But you never went outside the building?”Noel was still struggling with what he'd been told.

    ”No. The forest was inside, but…”She struggled with the explanation.

    ”But not inside, if you see what I mean? I saw streams and open sky.

    There were hundreds of trees. Thousands.”

    ”Take it easy, honey,” Noel said gently. ”I guess you must have dreamt the trees when you fainted.”

    ”No, it was real-”

    ”But how can there have been trees inside this building?”

    Robyn looked at the man called Benedict. He nodded. ”There's leaves in her hair. Moss stains and mud on her nightdress-”

    ”That proves she went outside. There're trees and a river back there.”

    ”But look at the leaves… this one here.”Carefully Benedict untangled one from her hair. ”It's red but still supple; it's come from a tree in the fall.” He nodded at the billowing trees beyond the window, revealed as humpy silhouette shapes by starlight. ”This is spring.

    All the leaves are green. Besides…”He studied the star-pointed leaf.

    ”I reckon I've never seen a leaf like this before.”

    ”I don't know about that.”Noel began running his fingers through his hair again. ”But these people Robyn thought she saw. Obviously, she dreamt it… or it's the shock making her imagine she saw-”

    Robyn clenched her fists. She willed him to believe. ”I did see them.

    One attacked me.”

    ”And don't forget,”Benedict added. ”I saw him, too. And he wasn't what I'd describe as human.”

    

    

    They talked for another hour. Robyn had to repeatedly reassure Noel that she felt fine, that all she'd done was suffer from shock, which was true. A symptomatic effect of shock is that it affects the senses. Robyn found that the colors of her surroundings had almost faded to black and white, while objects on the periphery of her vision were fuzzy Benedict had no problem with her story From what he said, he'd been learning that the Luxor was a place with one hell of a mystery at its heart. Robyn watched the man talk. He had a pleasant crinkling smile but there was sadness in his eyes. He spoke more about Mariah Lee. Clearly she'd been the great love of his life; it pained him that he'd lost her.

    He also still loved her. He'd devoted his life to searching for the woman. He'd even moved from Atlantic City to be close to the place where she'd disappeared. Every few weeks the Luxor had drawn him back to sit in the lot and watch the door as if she'd magically reappear.

    At last, understanding emerged like sunrise on the horizon. Robyn's fingers tingled, shooting flashes of electricity up her arms. ”Benedict. You haven't said what you're really thinking,” she told him.

    ”Thinking about what?”

    She looked into those sad eyes. ”You figure what happened to Mariah nearly happened to me. Mariah Lee walked out onto the dance floor, where she found herself in that forest. Only for some reason she could never find her way back.”

    His cheek tremored as he spoke. ”In all honesty? That's the conclusion I've been reaching. She went in. She didn't come out.”

    Robyn glanced at Noel, who said nothing. She could see that two forces tore him. One made him want to cry out, ”Stop talking this nonsense!” The other, well, belief in what she'd told him was snaking its way into his brain.

    ”So you're looking for evidence of what happened to Mariah?” she asked.

    ”That's about the size of it. But I'm no great shakes as a detective. After all, I'm a freelance web designer by profession.” He gave a sad smile. ”The best I've got is a collection of old videotapes. The previous owner of the Luxor, one Benjamin Isiah Lockram, made a series of documentaries about the place. He shot them himself on a domestic video system.”

    ”So you do know what's been happening here?”

    ”Let's say I've had some tantalizing glimpses and mysterious clues, if that doesn't sound overly melodramatic.”He knitted his fingers together. ”But the problem is I have six videos, numbered one through seven, but-”

    Noel made the mental jump. ”But one's missing?”

    Benedict nodded. ”Volume five. I figure that's the one that contains one god-almighty revelation.”

    ”Videotapes?”Robyn echoed.

    ”Yeah, that's all I could find. They're the obsolete Betamax cassettes that are about-”

    Robyn guessed what he was going to say. ”So big.”She held her fingers apart, showing the span.

    ”That's it. Big clunky old things, they are… hey,

    Robyn you should be sitting down. You've suffered a-”

    ”No… I'm fine.”Robyn stepped away from the couch.

    ”Take it easy, you're-”

    ”Noel. Let go. I'm fine.”She felt a burst of triumph. ”I found a box of old videotapes in the larder yesterday I put them through…”

    This time a wave of vertigo pulled her back. Both Noel and Benedict caught her as she crumpled.

    

    

    Robyn understood the moment she saw Noel. He laid the revolver down on the bedside table and began to untie his sneakers. She glanced at the little travel clock she'd brought with her from home. The time was four a.m. Beyond the windows it was still dark. Her eyes were drawn to the handgun. In the candlelight it gleamed a blue-black, reminding her strangely of bat skin. She shivered.

    ”Noel?”

    ”It's OK, honey Go back to sleep.”

    ”You've been down to the dance floor, haven't you?”

    He blew out the candle. ”I didn't mean to wake you, sorry.”She heard him slide under the comforter beside her. ”How are you feeling now?”

    ”I'm fine.”She felt his lips find and kiss the side of her face in the darkness. ”Noel?”

    ”Hmm?”

    ”You went looking for the man… that thing… that attacked me?”

    ”After what happened tonight, I thought it best to check that there was no one around.”

    She tried to make a joke of what she said next but her voice came as a nervous laugh. ”You didn't shoot anyone, did you?”

    ”No. I saw nothing.”

    ”You do believe me, don't you?”

    ”Yes.”

    ”Because there was this guy, or-or thing with a mouth that was huge and red; its head was misshapen, and the arms? I'm sure there was something-”

    ”Robyn, hey Robyn,”he hushed her. ”Take it easy. You're trembling.”

    ”I'm not frightened. I just want you to believe what-”

    ”I do believe… that guy Benedict saw it, too.”

    ”What do you think it is?”

    Noel hugged her in the dark. ”Robyn. It's four in the morning. It's not the time to speculate on… you know, weird guys. The main thing is he didn't hurt you.”

    ”You should have seen the eyes. The way they stared at me; they were so cold. You could have-”

    He shushed her softly. ”Please, Robyn. Try to sleep. You need rest now; you've had a hell of a shock tonight.”

    ”Okay.”She turned over so her back was to him. But it wasn't in anger; she needed to feel his muscular presence form a protective barrier close to her. ”I'll stop talking,”she murmured. ”But hold me, will you?”

    ”My pleasure.”

    He put his arms around her and rested his face against the nape of her neck.

    ”Noel?”

    ”Hmm…” He sounded half asleep.

    ”Promise me you won't go hunting anyone with that gun again?”

    

    

    At the same time Noel and Robyn were drifting into sleep with the handgun squatting darkly on the bedside table, Benedict sat in his apartment with the box of videotapes beside him on the couch.

    By the time he'd kicked off his shoes, poured himself a stiff one, and started to sort through the twenty or so Betamax tapes, his heart had begun to pound. After Robyn had shown him the tapes she'd found in the Luxor's apartment (she'd been pretty unsteady on her pins after being attacked by that thing on the dance floor), he'd left the building by the hole in the rear door of the building, then driven home faster than was legal or safe. But he sensed he was so close now to learning about what had happened to Mariah Lee. He was certain the key to the mystery lay somewhere in this pile of old videotapes.

    Now that the moment to search through the cassettes had come, unease twitched his gut. Because at the back of his mind he'd always anticipated a reunion with Mariah. And that she'd be as lovely and as fresh faced as he remembered her. Now, after hearing Robyn Vincent's account of what had befallen her in the Luxor, Benedict began to doubt that he'd ever see Mariah again. Benedict recalled Robyn's description of what happened to her. How she'd become disoriented on the dance floor in the dark. How she'd found herself running not on timbers but over leaves. How she'd stumbled into a damp, dripping forest peopled by monsters.

    It should have been easy for him to down those shots of whisky, then dismiss Robyn's statement about encountering hideous, malformed figures in some alien forest. Only he couldn't. For he'd seen the monster, too.

    

    

    In his dream, Ellery Hann stood beneath gray skies. All around him ran a vast forest. The coming winter had stripped branches of their leaves.

    The scene wasn't unlike the scenes he conjured into his imagination as he sat in the armchair in the Luxor. Beyond the forest, mountains rose.

    On one mountain stood a city that shone so brightly it could have had a chunk of the sun embedded there. Ellery smiled. That distant citadel called to him. In his bones he knew that was the place he truly called ”home.” It was a city of Persian-style domes and ancient spires.

    Clustered below dreaming spires were thousands of houses, each with its garden where grape vines clung to walls, where rose-lined pathways led to orchards of lemon, orange and pomegranate.

    Deep down, the sleeping Ellery Hann knew he was dreaming. Even so, he thought, If I could only reach the city before morning, I might actually wake and find myself there.

    Ellery began to run. If only he could run fast enough before he woke.

    Then he might open his eyes in the shining city instead of waking in an apartment that stank of sweat and stale beer, and the spiky odor that proved both his father and brothers were none-too-accurate when they relieved themselves in the bathroom. Ellery ran harder through wet grass. He plunged into the belt of trees, wove in and out of tree trunks and leapt over root clusters.

    If only I can keep running for an hour. I'll leave the forest behind me.

    I'll be in the foothills. The city can't be much farther thanMusic jarred him out of his sleep. A lavatory flushed in the next apartment. Bacon smells seeped beneath the door. His father's snore droned through the thin wall. One of his brothers cussed over some irritation or other. Ellery groaned with disappointment. For a second, even though his eyes were open, he could still see the shining city in front of him.

    Then, as a baby began its thin cry on the landing, the beautiful vision faded.

    Ellery groaned again. This time the groan formed a name: ”Logan.”

    

    

    Ellery turned left onto Fairfax, a quiet street. There were a few stores selling secondhand furniture, a couple of derelict commercial buildings, not much else. The sun burned hot against his back as he walked. On TV that morning the weatherman had said he'd never seen a Chicago April as warm as this one. ”So toasty it proves the world's gone weird,”he'd added.

    Not that the state of the climate concerned Ellery Hann on that Tuesday morning at a little after eight-thirty.

    You can never tell with Logan, he thought. At school he wasn't your typical bully. He'd explode some guy's nose one day, then talk to him the next as if nothing had happened. Logan'd work himself into a rage, then threaten to mutilate you, but then he'd get distracted (short attention span for sure) and go kick some other guy instead.