Jacaranda (10 page)

Hours passed in the lobby and very little was said, very little was done.

From time to time, someone would borrow a candle to visit the water closet; once in a while, a window would crack somewhere off in the hotel’s distant corners, and a new shriek of wind would let itself inside, cutting itself on the glass and feeling around for some deeper entrance.

Every place where one small thing broke, the wind and the water got a greater foothold, and they picked, poked, and prodded at all the other seams in case there was more ground to be gained.

Once a broken window, then a broken door—banging back and forth against its shattered jamb, at the end of one wing on one floor. Then another door, and another window, the structural integrity failing a tiny piece at a time, one floor, one wing at a time. The rain prying open cracks, forcing itself between bricks, loosening stones and yanking at the drain-pipes.

One brick here, knocked from one corner and thrown into the maelstrom…two bricks behind it, and part of the east wing’s overhang—gone. Shutters ripped from their hinges, joining the clattering percussion of things half-affixed, and flailing, and slamming themselves against the hotel until they broke and blew away.

But the fire doors held.

The center held, and the men and women in the lobby held their breath with every new half-heard strike of lightning, and every rushing, train-like roar as the storm surge pushed past them—tearing up trees, scooping up fences, sloughing away roads. Swiping it all across the island, and into the ocean.

But for three hours the hotel held its ground.

Someone produced a pack of cards, and a game broke out between the McCoy brothers and Mr. Anderson. Frederick Vaughn was invited to join, but he only swigged from his bottle and declined to share or participate. Mrs. Alvarez comforted her daughter Valeria, though Violetta remained at her post—taking some strange peace from the position.

She, at least, was right where she was supposed to be.

“The hotel will stand,” Mrs. Anderson kept telling herself.

And the nun replied, with a friendly hand on her shoulder, “It will stand, yes. It doesn’t have to hold forever—just through the storm. It’ll pass over us before morning, or that’ll be the worst of it, I’m sure.”

“We only have to survive the night,” agreed Mr. Anderson. “And we can be on our way tomorrow. We can leave this miserable place behind, once the sun rises.”

A round of agreement rose and fell, for now it was accepted that whatever spell had kept them there, it was surely broken by the hurricane—and no one wanted anything more than to run away, and never look back.

Around eleven at night, according to the Ranger’s watch, the rain abruptly lessened and the thunder withdrew. The wind ceased its screaming and settled down to a moan, then a hum.

Then a breeze, barely enough to ruffle a curtain.

“It’s…it’s
done
. We did it…we weathered the goddamn storm!” cried Frederick Vaughn, setting his bottle aside. He didn’t need it anymore. It was empty, and he was only holding it like a child holds a doll.

But the nun warned him, “Patience, Mr. Vaughn. This isn’t the end—not yet.”

“But it’s stopped! Look, listen—all of you: no more rain, no more wind…”

“
Patience
,” she commanded. “At the center of these storms there is always an eye—a quiet place in the middle, but it will not last. The rest of the squall awaits on the other side. This is only a temporary respite.”

“Listen to the woman,” the Ranger urged, but Frederick did not sit down.

He stumbled, nearly knocked over a candle, and rallied himself to a standing position. “This is horseshit. It’s finished, and I’m leaving.”

The padre tried, “No, you can’t. Give it another hour and see if she’s right. We’ve lasted this long, another hour won’t be the end of us.”

“Speak for yourself. I can’t stand it in here, not another minute.” He rubbed at his eyes, and wiped his nose on the back of his shirt-sleeve. “I can’t do this anymore. Hell, I’m out of whiskey.”

“What if I got you some more?” Mrs. Alvarez asked. “There’s a bar, in the dining hall. I have the keys, and I can give you another bottle. Just stay here,” she begged him. “The sister is right, and I’ve been in storms like these. We’re not finished. We’re only halfway through, and we mustn’t open the hotel, not yet.”

He wavered, frowning around the room, glancing toward the dining hall—which had been locked since shortly after his arrival.

The padre looked at the main doors, with their oversized beam bracing them shut from within; and he looked at Frederick Vaughn, surely too weak to do much more than complain. Then he said to Mrs. Alvarez, “That’s a good idea. Bring in some spirits, and we can share. It will calm our nerves, and give us all a little distraction.”

He thought that Valeria and Mrs. Anderson in particular could use the distraction, but if Vaughn would drink enough to floor himself, that was fine too. A glass in moderation for everyone else, and then they would wait for the rest of the storm with a greater sense of calm, or at least a dulled sense of care.

Mrs. Alvarez took a set of keys from a pocket in her skirt. “Padre, could you bring a candle? I’ll push the cart out, if you’ll mind the light, and the door.” She knew he was aware of what waited behind that door, and she didn’t care for anyone else to see it. Maybe the darkness would hide the carnage, and maybe not—but it was best to keep it out of view, regardless. The mood was tense enough without any reminder that the hotel was every bit as bad as the weather outside it.

“Of course,” he said, and when Violetta protested at the thought of losing her light, Sister Eileen said, “Take ours. It’s half gone by now, but so is everyone else’s.”

Mrs. Alvarez thanked her, and said, “There might be more candles in the buffets. I’ll look.”

Juan Rios led the way with his thick stub of wax, now barely as long as his index finger. He hoped there was more to be found in the dining area, and he wished they’d thought to collect more before they’d secured themselves in the central portion of the hotel, but there was nothing to be done about it now. Either they’d find more, or they’d find darkness.

Either way, dawn would find them in a few hours.

With one eye on the lobby, Mrs. Alvarez unlocked the dining hall and ushered the padre inside it. Their candle was only bright enough to give them a small bubble of vision…and it was blessedly too dim to show any of the blood stains left on the curtains, on the floors, or anywhere else.

All the details blended into the background, and for that, the padre was thankful.

He did not listen for ghosts. He did not look for phantoms. He did not see or hear anything, except the woman with the keys jingling in her hands, and her footsteps as she led him deeper into the great hall.

“This way,” she told him, and she guided him to a place where two sideboards and a buffet cabinet were stationed. One had been knocked over; it was close to the nearest window—which had not been secured any better than the ones in the great hall. The window had broken, and part of a tree had collapsed inside, tearing down a curtain, breaking a table, and disrupting everything else within its reach.

Glass crunched beneath their shoes as Mrs. Alvarez opened the drawers and cabinets, collecting bottles in her arms, and then in her apron. “I don’t see the carts, do you?” she asked. “There is one for tea, and one for spirits. I’d take either one of them, right now.”

The padre didn’t see them. They might have been beneath the curtain, or they may have been sucked outside. Without better light, it was hard to say. “Give me some bottles, I can help carry them,” he said, crooking his elbow and offering his free arm.

She held up some brandy in a crystal decanter, still intact despite the tree and the tempest, and reached inside for whatever was next—anything that hadn’t broken, and might keep people gently drunk and quiet.

But then they heard a heavy
thunk
.

And then they heard voices back in the lobby.

Forgetting the brandy, and forgetting even that he was holding the only light source, the padre darted to the dining hall’s entrance, where a fresh breeze on his face told him something was wrong, and yes—back in the lobby the main doors were wide ajar…their heavy bracing beam discarded like a matchstick on the ground.

“What happened?” he called.

“Vaughn!” the Ranger snarled. “I’m going after him!”

“How did he…?” he meant the brace, lying on its side. Too heavy for one man to lift.

Sister Eileen said, “No one knows. No one saw it. It was there, and then it wasn’t—and Vaughn was gone!”

In the dining area, Mrs. Alvarez called anxiously for help. “Don’t leave me alone! I can’t see!” she cried.

The padre looked at the open doors, and the calm, featureless dark beyond them. He came to a decision.

Handing his candle to the Ranger, he said, “I’ll get Vaughn. You see to Mrs. Alvarez—and
watch these people
. Do not let them leave, not for any reason. If I’m not back when the storm begins again, help them close the doors.”

Sister Eileen began to object, but he interrupted before she could mount her protest. “You knew when you brought me here. This is what I’m for.”

He tossed a nod of his head at the Ranger, who took a deep breath but didn’t fight him on it. The old man said, “You’re younger and faster. Go get that son of a bitch and bring him back so I can pistol-whip him.”

Out the door the padre ran—straight into the cool, calm nothing of almost-midnight.

The padre opened his eyes, and he looked.

Instead of nothing, brightened only by flashes of distant lightning for instants at a time, he saw outlines…shapes…motion.

The broken, dangling limbs of trees; the hulking shadow of the Jacaranda with its front doors open behind him, and faint candlelight burning within; drag-marks on the ground where the storm-surge had pushed timber, glass, rocks, bricks, fences, fish, shells, sand, crabs, railroad ties, doors, shingles, and God-alone-knew-what-else onto the shore and over it.

The road was gone, nothing left but a muddy mess where not even ruts remained. The walkways around the hotel were likewise washed over with muck, or broken and carried away. But there were footprints, squished into the wet and treacherous ground.

And there was a breathless rushing noise, the sound of someone running in the dark—fumbling, tripping, and climbing up to run again.

Frederick Vaughn was drunk as hell and not running very fast, so he was almost easy to catch—almost simple to approach, to seize, and to drag to the ground. The padre caught him like a wolf on a deer, bringing him to his knees in the mud and rolling him onto his back.

“Let me go!” the fugitive demanded, thrashing his head back and forth.

“No! This is madness!”

“Staying
inside
that place is madness!
Actual
madness!” Vaughn objected. “I’m going mad as a hatter…madder than that, listening to that godawful voice, in that godawful lobby. You trapped us in there with it—it was all your idea!”

“It is our only chance to survive the storm! And what do you mean, the voice in the lobby?”

Vaughn writhed feebly on the ground, pinned there by the padre’s knees. “You know good and well what I mean! Everyone knows, now.
Everyone
can hear it…that’s what it told me.” He gave up and collapsed back into the mud. “Maybe everyone else can stand it, maybe it doesn’t make their skull itch, like it makes mine itch. Maybe it doesn’t bother them, and if that’s so, I’m happy for them,” he said, without sounding happy at all. “Why did you follow me…how did you even…how did you
see
me? How did you…did you find me?”

Before the padre could respond, Vaughn turned his face aside and vomited whiskey, bile, and water.

The padre sighed, and climbed up—offering Vaughn his hand. “Come, I’ll help you. I know the hotel is speaking, but we must get back inside. Only for another few hours,” he promised, having no idea how much longer the storm would last, but he would’ve said anything to hurry the drunk man along. “If we all stay together, and if we can keep the hotel secured, the storm will pass over us soon enough. I’ll help you leave, in the morning. Please, come with me.”

“I don’t know…if I…if I can. I’m sorry, it was stupid…it was so stupid,” Vaughn mumbled, staggering to his feet with the padre’s help. “I’m sorry. I’ve been so goddamn
stupid
.”

“You’re not stupid; you’re afraid, like everyone else. No one wants to stay, but do you feel it?” the padre asked, turning his head up to the sky. The stars were out, clear and bright, but to the south a blanket of clouds was drawing up fast—and the breeze was getting its momentum back. “Look, over there: It’s the other side of the storm, and it’s coming for us. Out here, you’ll be dead in an hour. Inside the hotel, you have a chance.”

“Do I? Do any of us?” he shook his head, and leaned against the padre as they walked. “I think we used up all our chances. I think we’re done for, now. Same as this whole island, and everyone on it.”

Juan Rios kept his eyes open, and kept looking. The stars were very bright, and he had the ridiculous idea that they were flaring in protest—determined to burn through the coming clouds and shine on regardless. But the eye was passing over them, and every minute that went by, every step they took, the leaves rustled harder in the trees and the seabirds called out to one another with greater and greater alarm.

“None of us will see the morning,” the drunk man mumbled.

The padre adjusted his grip on Vaughn, who kept trying to slide to the ground. “Did the hotel say that?”

“It said a lot of things.”

“Then tell me about them,” he urged. He wanted to know, and he wanted to keep Frederick Vaughn awake and walking; he wasn’t sure if he had the strength to carry him, should he pass out. Besides, it might mean something—did the gaping maw on the lobby floor have the same message for each listener? Or did it craft a new lie for every ear?

“The hotel says…it says that it wants to be free. It will destroy itself to free itself…and it wants to open the windows and doors. It wants the storm to take it.”

The padre frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s…concentrated, Father. Don’t you see? It’s…it’s collected enough evil, enough filthy souls like ours…it wants to be swept off its foundations, and scattered to the four winds. Like…like a goddamn dandelion puff,” he concluded, then he wretched, and rallied. “Like a goddamn dandelion puff with a thousand seeds, spinning in the air. Blown loose by the storm.”

The sick feeling in the pit of the padre’s stomach suggested that there was something true to the man’s inebriated ramblings. There was something right about it, maybe not
exactly
right, but right enough that he needed to pay attention.

He needed to think about it.

He wanted a word with Sister Eileen and Ranger Korman, and he intended to have one when they returned to the lobby.

But back at the hotel, he sensed more trouble before he saw it.

When he looked, he caught the flicker of candles being moved, carried from place to place in a frantic hunt—or an effort to preserve them. When he listened he heard shouts—threats and warnings, and an appeal from the nun that he couldn’t quite hear.

“Hurry,” he told Vaughn, but Vaughn stumbled and fell—so he picked him up under one arm and half dragged him, half encouraged him, back to the landing where the doors gaped wide and there was pandemonium on the other side.

The padre was exhausted from the run and from lugging Frederick Vaughn, so he flung the drunk man into the lobby and yanked the doors shut. Finished with him for the moment, Juan Rios stepped over the fellow’s moaning form and asked the room at large: “What has happened here?”

Valeria Alvarez was in hysterics, cowering away from the nun while her mother swore and prayed in Spanish—“She’s a monster, she’s a monster. You didn’t tell us she was a monster, you should’ve said something!” She made the sign of the cross again and again, but the nun did not seem impressed.

Meanwhile, Violetta screamed her own set of unrelated horrors: “I saw Sarah, I saw her! She was here, and she said that I should come! She said to open the doors—she told me she needs me! You have to let me go, let me help her!”

Sister Eileen, coolly apathetic toward the Alvarez women, said only, “Sarah is dead, and you’ll stay here…unless you want to follow her into the grave.”

“I don’t care!” Violetta shrieked. “I have to do what she says—I have to do what they tell me!”

“They?” the padre asked, but no one answered him.

Mrs. Alvarez kept praying, Valeria kept crying, and the McCoy brothers were increasingly agitated by the whole thing—George even called for someone to shut her up.

“I tried,” said the nun. “It didn’t work.”

The Ranger held up his hands and spoke with the loud, low voice of authority. “We’re all at our wits end, but we’ve got to behave ourselves like civilized men! All of you, calm down, for Christ’s sake! Listen, can’t you hear it out there? The storm is kicking up again—Sister Eileen was right, and now we’re in for the second act!”

While he spoke, the padre looked more closely at Mrs. Alvarez and Valeria, and he saw that they were bleeding. The girl’s hand was badly torn, and so was her mother’s forearm. He thought at first that it was an injury from the beam, falling from the door—or some new trick played by the hotel—which injured whoever it could, whenever it could, however it chose. But the injuries had the ragged, vicious look of a big dog’s bite…something with the jaws of a wolf. Something that didn’t just bite, but chomped and pulled, and tore flesh away in chunks.

The padre looked at the nun, still facing down the other women—daring them to challenge her again. They were cowed, or at least the mother was. Valeria was out of her mind with something…grief? Despair? Confusion?

He scanned the rest of the lobby, wondering if anyone there had any medical training, but the nun’s touch on his arm startled his attention back to her. “She’ll be fine,” she told him. “It looks worse than it is. Her mother will wrap it up, when she calms down.”

“If you’re certain…”

“Oh, I am. But she’s positive she heard Sarah calling out, so she opened the east wing fire door.”

“Has anyone else gone through it?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. The Ranger watched it, while I watched everyone else. Go close it, if you would. The storm isn’t upon us yet—but it will be soon. I don’t know if the place can withstand another round or not; but if the fire doors fail us, it will all come down around our ears.”

“And we’ll all be swept out to sea, scattered like the seeds of a dandelion.”

She regarded him with curiosity. “Something’s given you an idea?”

“A bad idea,” he told her. “It was Vaughn, something he said out there. But I’ll go…I’ll take a look around the east wing. I’ll see if there’s anything left of Sarah to wander.”

“You think there might be?”

He did not mention that he’d seen Constance Fields, or that the whirlpool spiral on the lobby floor had spoken—to him, and to others. He almost asked if it’d spoken to the nun, too, but there wasn’t time. The breeze was no longer a breeze; it had become wind once more. Its strength was growing, and the distant thunder was less distant with every tick of the wall clock, closer and more forceful. It was rolling in on top of them.

All the padre said was, “Yes, there might be something left of Sarah. If so, I will shut her out. I won’t be long.”

The Ranger asked if he needed any help.

“Yes, I need someone to stay here, and make sure those doors stay shut, this time. David, George—put the beam back against them. I don’t think Vaughn will try to escape again,” he said of the now-unconscious man on the floor, lying in a puddle of his own vomit. “But someone else might.” His eyes narrowed toward the Alvarez mother and daughter—and then to Violetta, who had not joined them, but she still stared with awe and a touch of horror at the nun, who declined to address their fears.

“Go on, if you’re going,” Sister Eileen said.

So he went—the same admonition as before: “If I’m not back when the storm sets in again, you must shut the fire door and leave me out there.”

Down a short corridor that led to the east wing, the fire door lever had been drawn down—and the door was hanging open. Not widely open, but ajar by about a foot…that was as far as the girl had cranked it back, before the nun had caught up to her.

(Did Sister Eileen bite her? Had she left those awful injuries on the Alvarez women? Perhaps he did not want to know. Maybe he would not ask.)

He slipped inside, into the darkened hallway without a hint of light. He hadn’t brought a candle. He had a feeling he wouldn’t need it—not when he could still look, and still listen. Besides, if Sarah was there, he trusted her to come and find him, just like Constance Fields.

He closed his eyes. Exhaled. Opened them again.

“Sarah?” he called quietly. His voice bounced back and forth between the walls, the ceiling, and all the closed doors. Again he could see outlines and shapes, not quite glowing around the edges, but discernable all the same. Behind him, there was still a little faint light from the lobby, peeking around the edge of the fire barrier…but it wasn’t enough to help him.

Only God could help him now, or the Mother, if she chose to.

“Sarah, are you here?”

Beside him, sharp and sad:
Yes
.

She was very close, and so he could see her a little, mostly in shades of gray and white, the contrast muddled in the dark, and in her death. Her eyes were empty and black, and her neck was crooked—her head held off to the right, and the sight of her was all the more jarring because of the angle.

He couldn’t meet her gaze, not really. Not like that.

He wanted to jump back away from her, but he planted his feet on the rug and tried to steady his breathing, to keep the fear tamped down. But if he’d ever been
tempted
to run screaming away in fright, surely this was the time—when the yellow-haired dead thing in a night dress lolled its head to one side, and then the other, loose as a wheel on a broken axle.

He swallowed hard, forcing himself to hold his ground. “Sarah, you stayed.”

I should have left, because I
could
have left. But I was so afraid, Father. And when I did this,
she gestured toward her neck with one long, white hand.
I broke the only vow I’d ever made. The only one that meant anything.

“But…between us, the sister and I…we thought the hotel had killed you—like it killed Constance Fields, and the people before her.”

She shook her head sadly, or she tried. It swayed back and forth, her neck rolling around her shoulder and back again.

Until I took my own life, the hotel had nothing to keep me with. Now it makes me stay. Now it has that power. Look at me. Look at my choices, and look at what I’ve done. Look at what I’ve undone.

“You left Tim…” he said thoughtfully. And then, with a sudden shock of absolute panic. “Oh God, where
is
Tim? Is he dead too? I haven’t seen him since he gave you the doll!”

Nor have I
, she said, sounding as sad and confused as when she was alive.
But he is not dead, or else, I think…I think I would know. I think he’d come to me. The hotel doesn’t need for us to be alone, it just needs for us to serve.

At the back of the hall, toward the rear exit all barricaded shut, he heard something click, shift, and pop.

“What was that?”

We can only serve.

“We?”

Emily is here too. She never left—I don’t know how, or why.