Jacaranda (9 page)

The afternoon meal was hasty and tense, parceled out in a serve-yourself fashion that required minimal intervention from Mrs. Alvarez or her daughters. There was gumbo in a large tureen, fresh fruit, fried plantains, and corn muffins with butter for anyone who wanted them—though no one had much of an appetite. It was too hard to eat with the giant windows showing off the great chaos that billowed outside; or even after their hostess gave up and closed the curtains. Then the rain began to fall. Rather, it did not fall, so much as it flung itself at the building in droplets as big as marbles, propelled by the heavy wind. The clatter it made upon hitting the glass was worse than the scraping of tree limbs, or the rustling patter of leaves scratching upon it.

The storm would not be ignored. If the guests of the Jacaranda refused to look at it, they would surely hear it anyway.

When it was clear that everyone was finished pretending to eat, Mrs. Alvarez called out, “I need help. The rain has come, and worse will come later. This hotel is our presidio now, and we must make it strong.”

“As if it matters,” grumbled Frederick Vaughn, who was still drunk from his afternoon of evading the Ranger’s questions. If anything, he was drunker now—having finished the bottle of whiskey and perhaps found another to chase it.

“It
matters
,” the woman snapped. “The hotel is built strong, but it has cracks. It has weak places, where the storm might find a way inside. It will surely
try
.”

Mrs. Anderson sighed hugely, and gestured at the enormous windows. “What do we do about these? Close the curtains, that’s all. Hope it keeps out the worst of the glass and debris, when the things begin to shatter.”

“Yes, we close the curtains, and we close the doors behind ourselves, and we fasten them.” Mrs. Alvarez folded her arms. “We will lock ourselves as deep inside as we can. We close off all the side doors, and block them with heavy furniture. We shut every window, every door, in every room—and bolt them up tight. Then we close the fire doors, to shut down the hallways.”

“And the front doors?” asked the Ranger. “They’re big and heavy, but…”

“There is a brace for them, a beam. I will need help to move it, but it will hold. Come now, we must work together—before the last of the light has left us.”

The padre rose from his chair. “Let us divide into groups, and secure the wings floor by floor. I’ll begin with the first floor’s east wing,” he declared, meaning the place where Sarah was still laid out, still broken-necked with a ragdoll lying on the bed beside her. “Ranger, perhaps you can take the third floor, of the same wing.” For that was where Constance Fields had died, and the room was closed without being secured. They’d discussed her death already; the Ranger knew what to expect, should he peek inside her quarters.

The remaining guests chose their stations and departed, leaving their plates and cutlery on the tables without a second thought. Mrs. Alvarez left them too, pausing only to tie the curtains shut at each great window. She looked back and forth between the tables and the chairs, as if she considered how useful they might be…but she discarded any thoughts of securing the space any further.

She threw her hands up in surrender, and when she saw the padre watching her, she told him in Spanish, “The glass will break and the room will be in ruins. We can’t save the whole building, and we shouldn’t fool ourselves about it; damage will occur, by the will of God. But we should preserve what we can. Sacrifice the one room to save the one wing. Come with me, we should close this door, and forget this room—it is already lost. Let the storm come inside and clean it out, I don’t care and neither does the Jacaranda.”

He joined her in drawing the big double doors shut in their wake, and then he asked about sheets of wood, and nails. “We can cover some of the small windows, like the ones in these doors—and the front doors. We can keep the glass from blowing around inside, should it break.”

“You can find those things out in the shed,” she said, then withdrew the statement as ridiculous, almost immediately. “But you should not attempt it. No one should leave anymore, this must be our fortress now.”

“I agree, but what about—”

With a snap of her fingers, she cut him off. “Wait—there are scraps by the back entrance. Tim was building a covered porch. We brought the wood and the tools inside this morning, and stacked them in the laundry room.”

“Thank you. That is most helpful.”

He excused himself with a small bow, and checked the laundry room. He remembered it well, and yes, now there were piles of scrap and tools tossed into the mix of machines, sinks, and lines. He rifled through the building materials and, finding promising pieces and a heavy hammer, he went to the lobby to begin with the main doors.

They were solid as stone, except for those small decorative windows—and through the colored bits of glass he saw terrible motion outside, drawn in hasty strokes that suggested violence and mayhem without any details. He shuddered and held up a scrap of wood, then drove nails through either end, on each side of the glass. Four more such scraps were enough to cover both panes, though he lingered over the last few inches, hesitating before covering the last small gap.

It was only a sliver, and not even a sliver of light; between the hour and the clouds it might as well have been midnight beyond the little windows…but it felt very final, and very futile.

It felt like he was walling up a tomb, with himself and everyone else inside.

He pounded the last two nails in deep, and he told himself to have faith—because there was no one else to remind him.

The nun might’ve reminded him, but she was absent. She hadn’t joined them for supper, and she wasn’t in Sarah’s room when the padre went to check on the pair of them. He heard nothing inside, even when he listened for all he was worth, and the door had been locked firmly enough that he didn’t care to try it. Sister Eileen was somewhere else, then, and no one would stumble upon Sarah’s body. It seemed like insufficient preparation, but it would have to be enough.

He stood still and listened hard.

All around him, the cavernous hotel rattled and pattered with the rushing thuds of feet, running from room to room, door to door. Windows were tested, and curtains were drawn; mattresses were lifted and pressed against them, in case the weight would preserve the room somehow.

A silly effort, yes, but all of these efforts were silly. The hotel would stand, or it would not. A mattress here, a pair of curtains there, the occasional boarded-up portal…in the end, none of it would matter if the storm wanted badly enough to find its way inside.

But the fire doors. They might stand sentinel, a last line of defense.

He regarded the door at the end of the first floor’s east wing: a massive contraption of metal and wood too heavy to be moved by the hands of any lone man…or even the hands of several men. Thus there was a handle on a crank, and using the simple mechanics of a wheel the thing could be drawn and positioned, and locked with an enormous seal that spiraled and clicked…and then would not be moved without the help of a release lever.

These doors were essentially air tight, designed to protect the premises in case of an inferno. Should a fire begin in one room, and spread to others, the wing could be closed off and left to burn. The rest of the hotel ought to be salvageable. Or that was the idea.

Maybe it would work against water, just as well.

Under his breath, the padre mumbled, “If it doesn’t, we really
are
sealing our own tomb.”

He was surprised to hear a response, faint and very nearby.

At least you’ll have one.

Confused and a little alarmed—had he shut someone into the wing? He would’ve sworn it was empty—he whirled around, saw no one, and then leaned his ear against the fire door. He heard nothing on the other side.

Then he understood.

He closed his eyes. Exhaled. Opened them again, and
looked
.

Ah, there she was. More solid than ghosts tended to be, in his experience. She might have been standing before him, flesh and blood and a sour expression. He might have reached out to touch her, but he did not. He only stared at Constance Fields, or what was left of her memory.

She wore the same dress, clean in the front except for the blood that came from her nose, dripping even now—in whatever weird afterlife had snared her. She looked calm and bored, and when the padre asked, “Why are you still here?” she shrugged.

Couldn’t leave before, and I still can’t.

“Why were you here in the first place?” he asked, on the off chance that it mattered. “What shall we tell your husband?”

She ignored the first question, or maybe she didn’t.
My husband’s been dead for years.

“He has? Is…is he here?”

She didn’t answer that, either.
Maybe the storm will wash us all away. Maybe it will clean this place from the face of the earth, and us with it.

“You’re thinking of fire. That’s how you cleanse a place of evil, with smoke and flame, not a flood.” He’d done it before, sometimes ceremonially—with incense and ash, or sage and an eagle’s wing to smudge the fumes into every corner. Sometimes he’d done it more literally with a torch, and left nothing standing.

This place won’t burn.

She turned away from him, pivoting like she stood on a wheel. Her feet never moved, they only hovered half an inch above the floor, and she only glided slowly away. Her back was the same horror it’d been when last the padre had seen her, and her spine gleamed white in places where there should have been skin or muscle.

Even if it weren’t for the storm, there’s no flame hot enough,
she said.
I always thought hell was hot and dry. But hell is hot and wet, and we who remain here forever gasp, but never drown
.

When the hotel was ready, or as near to ready as possible, they regrouped in the main lobby: the Ranger, the padre, Mrs. Alvarez with her daughters Valeria and Violetta, Frederick Vaughn, William Brewer, the Andersons, the McCoy brothers George and David, and Sister Eileen—who’d reappeared after whatever personal errand she’d disappeared to perform.

The hotel had been searched, and there was no one else inside to gather.

The rain fell in earnest then, drops now as big as plums battering the building like so many fists. The sound was not quite deafening, not quite so loud that it could not be spoken over, but it was ever-present and frightful all the same. It was impossible not to hear it. It never faded into the background, but clamored every moment for every ounce of everyone’s attention.

Now twelve people stood in the sizzling gaslights, below the dull spinning of the ceiling fans on their infinite loop, the rattle of their chains no longer audible. The lobby was all black shadows and white-orange glow, cast too sharply now that the windows were covered and there was no more sky showing through—not anyplace, even the little leaded windows on the big front doors, with nothing on the other side but storm and night.

The men and women inside couldn’t even see the lightning now—they couldn’t count on the intermittent flashes to give them a second’s extra glow between the rumbles of thunder. They pealed with the sound of boulders, tumbling down a mountain.

Mrs. Anderson couldn’t bear the water, the rocks, and the rest of the silence, so she nervously told herself the same fairy tale they all recited, when they weren’t too busy praying. “The hotel will stand,” she declared. “Of course it will. It’s the strongest thing on the island, I’m sure.”

“I don’t know about that,” Sister Eileen countered. “There’s a convent a few miles from here, built of stone from the ground up. If anything remains when the storm is passed, it’ll be
that
.”

“I don’t know,” said the Ranger. “There’s a prison here, built to keep people inside at all cost. Walls thicker than these, and fewer windows. It’s a proper fort, and if anything’s left when the rain has finished, that’s my guess. That’s where I’d put my money.”

The padre listened to them argue, but then he listened to the rest of the room, in case of ghosts who wished to be heard. He was rewarded by a soft, garbled sigh—coming from the space between the great staircases, where the twisting mosaic of colored tiles darkened a wide spot on the floor.

It will not be the rain. It will not be the wind.

He did not see anyone or anything speaking. He did not think anyone else could hear it, either.

It will be the ocean, that takes you all.

“Who said that?” he asked in a whisper. No one responded, except for the Ranger—who gave him a strange look.

He still didn’t see anything. Or did he? Was he looking for the wrong things?

He closed his eyes again, exhaled every trace of air. Opened his eyes.

Yes.

Something flickered around the edges of the room, something dark and unfriendly, but unfocused. He tried his mantra again, and combined it with a small prayer—he only asked for clarity—and this time when he opened his eyes, the vision was clearer indeed: a throbbing set of shadows, cluttering the corners like cobwebs or tumbleweeds…each tendril too thin and brittle to measure, but collected together the bits and pieces showed themselves a shape…a puddle, no—more like a snowdrift that shifted and slithered. Not one thing, but many things that gathered up to make a whole.

All of it dribbled in weird, trailing, tumbling rivulets toward the center of the hotel where the pattern on the floor was not just a circle, not just a spiral, but a thing that
moved
when he looked away.

His breath caught in his throat; his eyelids flickered, trying to chase the image out of his head. It worked, more or less. The sinister shadows and their edges, being drawn down that inexorable drain…they faded back into the corners to mix with the ordinary shadows, cast by the ordinary lamplight.

Never before had the padre wished so badly to see the sun.

“We aren’t safe here!” cried William Brewer, his plump, pink face flushing fever-hot.

Sister Eileen did not much comfort him, when she said, “We aren’t safe anywhere, my dear. There’s a hurricane outside, and there’s no pretending otherwise. It’s a bad one, a huge one—with wind that could drive a pencil through your skull, if it caught you just right.”

David McCoy dropped himself onto one of the couches that populated the public space. “That’s awfully
specific
.”

“I’ve seen these things before; I’ve even lived through them, once or twice. Storms like this, and worse ones besides.”

“Worse ones?” Mrs. Anderson broached, almost hopefully. “You’ve survived worse?”

“Yes, and so can anyone, if you’re smart.” She climbed up on top of a small coffee table—in order to give herself some height. She was a small woman, for all her unexpected strength; but the storm was loud and the crowd was uncertain and muttering. “Listen to me, we’ve been as smart as we can. We’ve sealed up the hotel, we’ve covered up the windows—and closed up spaces where the windows can’t be covered. We’ve checked all the rooms, and gathered together in the center. The center is…” she faltered, but finished the thought anyway. “It’s always safest in the center.”

She was wrong, just this once.

The padre knew it, and maybe the Ranger knew it too—but the Texan kept his mouth shut when Juan Rios added his lie to the nun’s. “She’s right, and you all know it. If one room should fall, then the center will hold. If one wing should be pulled down by the wind, then the center will stand its ground. If the roof above us is torn free by the rain, then the floors above us will still remain. We
must
stay together, and watch out for one another. The fire doors are closed, anyway,” he concluded. “We are secure, and we will stay that way.”

Frederick Vaughn had a bottle in hand. The padre wasn’t sure where it’d come from, but he would’ve liked a drink himself—and he almost said so, but Vaughn griped, “What if we don’t? What if the walls blow down, and
then
what?”

“Then…” the nun threw her hands up, exasperated. “Then we all wash out to sea, and that’s the last anyone will ever hear from us. But it won’t come to that.”

It will not be the wind. It will not be the rain.

That whisper again, that menacing voice that came from the dark place on the floor—the dark place that moved, that gyred ever so slightly when the padre’s eyes were elsewhere. “I know,” he breathed. “You already told me.”

He might have said more, and there might have been more arguing, but then there was a crack—a pop, and a loud crash that came from somewhere at the far end of the northern wing.

The lights sputtered, and went out.

Up above, the ceiling fans ground to a stop.

Outside, there was nothing but the rain, louder than an orchestra.

Valeria started to cry—or it might have been Violetta, as the sisters sounded much alike. It was purely, perfectly dark, and the padre knew where the girls had been standing, and that the soft weeping he heard came from their direction, surely from one of them—over by the reception desk.

“Everyone stay calm!” shouted the Ranger.

“I can do something…” It was Violetta, so yes, her sister was the one crying. “Please, let me pass,” she urged as she struggled through the press of frightened people. “Please, move—let me feel my way…there are candles in the office.”

“I have some matches, sweetheart,” Korman told her.

“Save them. I don’t need them, yet. There are some in the manager’s drawer.”

He struck one anyway, and for a brilliant white flare of a moment, there was light around his face. He held it aloft, and it showed a little more. But only a little. Only more frightened faces, outlined against the blackness of the hotel lobby.

Violetta tripped over something or someone, scrambled on the floor, and kept moving. The padre tracked her with his ears, wishing he could hear her movements better over the rain, and wishing he could be helpful, but he didn’t know what to do—and the girl knew her way around better than he did.

The match went out, and the Ranger struck another one.

The padre counted four faces, five faces, six. All eyes wide, every pupil as large as the face on a watch. There were twelve men and women, all together. Wasn’t that right? Twelve in all, now that Emily Nowell was gone.

Heaven seemed to like that number. Maybe hell did, too.

The girl’s hands slapped against the front of the counter; she drew herself up it, then along it, then behind it. “I’m almost there,” she relayed.

The match went out.

The Ranger withdrew another one, but the padre told him, “Don’t. She’s right, you should save them. We may need them tonight.”

“We have a few back here at least, but we can always use more! Keep them, do not waste them!” Violetta agreed.

The padre followed the sound of her voice, and let it lead him to the counter in her wake. He followed her voice, because it made him feel like he knew where he was, despite the blackout. She was at the counter. She was behind the counter. She was entering the office on the far side of it.

So when he trailed behind her, he could believe that he was far from the spiral mosaic on the floor, as far as he could get—even though it wasn’t true, and he was still well within its reach. It might have been some irrational, human instinct, the idea that he could scale the counter and escape the floor—maybe escape its carnivorous design. If he could get up higher, remove his feet from the tiles and the designs, it might not be able to touch him.

It was a stupid notion, but still he clung to the counter’s edge, and took some slight reassurance from the cool marble top so hard and unyielding beneath his fingers. But he did not climb atop it.

Violetta reached the office door, and found it locked. She swore in Spanish, something about her mother and the keys, but with a few shoves of her shoulder and one solid kick, she’d knocked the knob free and let herself inside. It was only a little crash, when the door snapped back and beat itself against the office wall. It was barely a thing worth mentioning, in that hall where the rain and the rumbling sky were the only constants, and the wind came and went, screaming obscenities.

A minute or two of fumbling—the padre could hear it, between the rise and fall of the weather—and Violetta emerged, bringing a lit candle. She also brought four others unlit, gathered up in her free hand. “This was all I could find,” she said with a note of apology. “But it’s better than nothing.”

“Very good, thank you,” the padre told her. “We should’ve done this at the start, but I guess we ran out of time, didn’t we?”

She handed one to him, and he held it still while she shared her fluttering spark. Then he passed it off to the Ranger, and eventually all five candles burned brightly, spread throughout the lobby so that there was light enough to see by—even if there wasn’t much to see.

One by one, and sometimes two by two, the men and women chose seats around the lobby, as near to any given candle as possible. The padre, the nun, and the Ranger shared a candle with Violetta—who remained behind the counter with the inertia of duty.

She rubbed her hands together like they were cold, and paced back and forth along the counter’s length, never quite leaving the edge. She let the tether of the candle keep her there with them, and sometimes she prayed quietly in Spanish. Sometimes she only stared from corner to corner, from candle to candle, and back to the spiral design on the floor.

Finally she looked up at the padre, meeting his eyes directly. She blurted out, quietly enough to sound like a private request: “Tell me, Father—does it talk to you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The hole in the floor, in the tiles, you know what I mean. It’s supposed to be a design, like a whirlpool…but it’s not. It’s a mouth, and the devil uses it to speak from below.” She withdrew then, the look on her face implying she wished she could take her question back. “Sometimes…when it thinks I’m not watching…sometimes I think it moves. Does
that
sound crazy, too?”

He shook his head. “Not at all.”

“And it’s no trick of the light, either,” she added.

“No, no trick of the light.”

The nun and the Ranger both glared toward the dark spot on the floor as if they dared it to budge, but Violetta told them, “It only shifts when you’re not paying attention. I only noticed it after a week or two, after taking these jobs at the counter, and standing here with the books—staring at it, and looking away. The shape changes, like it’s…like it’s…
spinning
. Like when you pull the plug of a drain,” she added brightly, not because it was a lovely image, but because she’d found the perfect comparison. “The way the water goes, as it falls down the hole in the middle. That’s what it does, very slowly.”

“When no one is looking,” the padre added, agreeing with her in every way. And now, of course, he could neither look at the pattern nor look away from it—he could only watch, and not watch, and pretend that it wasn’t true.

Knowing it was true—and that whatever it was, it was hungry, and it had a voice.