The Danger of Being Me (35 page)

But the ambulance fascinated me most of all.  Parked in the center lane of the Interstate to keep traffic to the left, its rear doors standing open.  An older man in an unbuttoned shirt sat on the step with a breathing mask over his face, an EMT nearby with a hand on the man's back.  The medical tech wore rimless eyeglasses.  Had an untidy nest of hair that fell across his forehead.  A shaggy soul patch beneath his lower lip.  And he glanced up as I rolled past.

I caught Hank's eyes, and I didn't look away.  I just nodded to him, gave him a short two-fingered wave.

He nodded back, but didn't return the salute.

That was fine.  He was busy.  I passed the accident, and the highway opened up again.  I pushed the gas.

Not long after, I crossed Ben Franklin's bridge and paid my toll, and slipped across the water back into the eastern edge of Philadelphia.  George Webber was wrong.

Because I was going home again.

3.

An hour later, I twisted the steering wheel to the left.

The Jeep Wagoneer rolled across two opposing lanes, up the incline of a driveway, onto the cracked tarmac of the parking lot off Route 119.  I steered the SUV down the row of cars along the front of the building, and pulled into an open space at the curb facing the highway.  I turned off the engine.  Silence swirled through the cab.

I watched the traffic on Route 119 for a few moments.  Then I turned toward the passenger window, and looked down the length of the parking lot.  Down to the sign at the far end with its white neon letters glowing against a rusted rectangle and its three white arrows.

At no point had I decided to come back here.  I had just taken the Vine Street Expressway until it merged into the Schuylkill Expressway, then I followed the curve of the River through Fairmount Park before crossing the water and merging onto the Roosevelt Expressway.  Two miles later, I had turned onto Route 119 and drove north.

I hadn't even thought about this place since the night that the March issue of the
Creek Reader
had gone to press.  But now that I sat at the curb on the cracked tarmac of its parking lot, I couldn't be surprised.  Not even a little.

Because the long and curving path of my life had bent so subtly that I had never even noticed, and it had brought me back to the first place that I had ever been.  Back to my own beginning.  The one place I could never, ever escape.  Because no matter how far I went or how fast I drove to get there, I would always carry it with me.

The Gateway Motel.  It was as much a part of me as this blood, these bones, these brushed-chrome eyes.  And looking at the rusted rectangle of that sign from across the lot, I heard my own giddy laughter rattling in the silence of the Jeep like pebbles in a coffee can.  I couldn't help it.

My story had started in this roadside motel hunched alongside a barren stretch of Route 119 inside the eastern border of Prophecy Creek.  It was inevitable that I should have returned here now, after all that had happened.  This was the only way that it could be.  From the moment that an aircraft mechanic from Urbana had spotted an eighteen-year-old girl at the Serenity Tavern in downtown Prophecy Creek, such as it were, this day had been ordained.  I had convinced myself for one glorious moment that I could become the author of my own life.  Now I knew the truth.  My truth.  The only truth that had ever mattered.

That I was a walking shadow.  A poor player strutting and fretting his way through the pages of a book that had been written in a time before memory.  So I laughed, and I thought of the little snubnosed revolver tucked into a side pocket of my bookbag.  And I made my decision.

It was surprisingly easy.

The sun hovered on the horizon above the hill on the other side of the highway, igniting the sky like the bowels of a kiln.  The night would overtake the world again soon enough, and reclaim what had always belonged to the darkness.  That creeping, intoxicating darkness.

And then all bets were off.

I grabbed up my bookbag and emptied out of the Jeep.

Brimstone and cordite burned the back of my throat.  I turned to the building. Took a long, cool breath. There was only one way to do this, and that was to do it.  I pulled the straps of the bookbag over my shoulders, hiked across the cracked tarmac to the office at the center of the complex.  Pushed through the glass door.  A bell chimed.

A placard on the counter advertised HOURLY RATES.  A scruffy man hunched behind the counter.  He looked away from the small television on the counter, glanced at me.  "Thirty-five bucks a night," he told me, turning back to his talk-show.  "Check-out's at ten."

I had expected Steven Arendell to be working the counter.  He owned and managed the Motel, and lived in the room above the office.  I had interviewed him in the middle of February for the Gateway article, and he had told me that if I ever had a reason to stay at the Motel, he'd give me a discount.  The man behind the counter now had two weeks of growth darkening the bottom half of his face and greasy hair that nearly reached his shoulders, but I could see the family resemblance.  He had the same deep-set eyes, the same nose, the same high forehead.

I reached into my pocket, felt the wad of bills, decided against pulling out the entire roll.  I thumbed through the cash, dug out two twenties.  "I only need one night."

The guy looked at me again, saw me for the first time.  His eyes flicked up to mine, and he squinted at me for a moment.  Whatever he saw made him catch his breath.  He might have seen a ghost in my brushed-chrome eyes.

He huffed a dry laugh when he saw the cash, turned to the board nailed to the wall behind the counter.  The keys hung on thumbtacks, a few more than two-dozen missing.  I leaned onto the counter.  "And I need Room Sixteen."

His hand hovered in front of the keys.  He didn't quite look back at me, but his head tilted a little in my direction.  "Sixteen," he said, turning the question into a statement.

"Yeah," I said.  From the television on the counter, I heard Maury reveal that in the case of baby Amaya, Stefan was not the father.  Chanel seemed unpleased by that.

"You sure about that?"  His grungy hair hid his face, but I could hear the humorless smirk in his words.

I just nodded.  "Absolutely."  I considered telling him that I had unfinished business there, but decided against it.  Such melodrama was unbecoming at this late hour.

He hesitated for one more second, then reached across the board.  He picked a key attached to the rust-colored rhombus marked with the digits 16.  Then he turned back to me, reached under the counter, came up with a three-ring binder that he laid out on the desk.  He held onto the key as he flipped pages to a half-empty sheet.

"Room's got a two-hundred-dollar security deposit," he said without looking up.  Even upside-down, I could make out the list of names of former renters.  Steven had told me that he only ever rented out Room 16 by request.  He had said nothing about a two-hundred-dollar security deposit, and I thought that his younger brother might be trying to supplement his own income.  I couldn't blame him.  People generally only rented Room 16 for one reason.

Now I smirked.  "Two hundred bucks?"

"You'll get it back," he told me.  Then he looked up at me.  "Tomorrow morning.  When you check out."

I smiled at that.  I couldn't help it.

"Fair enough," I agreed as I dug my roll of cash out of my pocket.  I counted out an additional ten twenties, laid the stack down on the counter, and watched the man from across the desk.  He must have seen something unexpected in my face.  He huffed out another dry laugh and picked up the twelve bills, counted them.  He slipped two into the cash register, pulled out a grimy five and laid it on the counter, then tucked the remaining ten bills into the pocket at the front of the three-ring binder.

I picked up the grimy five, stuffed it into my pocket, almost wondered about its previous transactions, owners, histories.  Its story.  Then the man spun the binder toward me.  He handed me a pen.  I took it and scribbled my name into the ledger in the next open line, halfway down the left-hand page.  I jotted the date next to my name.

I handed the pen back, and the man traded me the key.  "Room's on the second floor," he told me.  He spun the binder, slapped it shut, placed it beneath the counter.

"Second from the west end," I said.

He glanced at me one more time before turning back to his television. I couldn't read his expression. "Ice machine's at the bottom of the stairs."

I thanked him, pushed the straps of my bookbag higher up my shoulders, pulled the door open and emptied back into the sunset.  I spotted the Jeep from across the parking lot, and refused to consider the idea that this might be the closest I ever got to it again.  I turned the corner around the office, climbed the metal switchback staircase to the second floor, and headed down the concrete concourse.  I passed three doors before I found the one matching my key.

I reached the door too soon, and slipped the key home.  The tumblers clicked into place.  I twisted a quarterturn clockwise, and for one insane moment I expected the door to open onto a deserted speaking ring with a flaming purple sky, or perhaps a concrete city park in the middle of a digital reality.  I pushed the door in, flipped the light switch, and found nothing but a plain motel room.

A narrow table huddled in one corner to the right.  A squat bureau butted against the wall at my left with a television perched on it.  A door in the corner beyond led to a small bathroom.  A twin bed faced the television from the opposite wall, with a night table beside it.  Catercorner from the front door stood a pair of sliding glass doors.  Thick blackout curtains had been drawn aside to reveal a scenic panorama of downtown Prophecy Creek.

Such as it were.

The room felt ashamed of itself.  Twenty-nine lives had ended here, and at least one that I knew of had begun here.  But the bed was made, and that was enough for tonight.

But none of that really registered just then.  Standing in the doorway, all I saw was the painting hung on the wall over the twin-sized bed.  Not just a print, but an actual painting, in an intricate wooden frame that must be worth more than everything else in this room.  It was no Gothic masterpiece, but it had its own dark brilliance.

It depicted an ordinary urban sidewalk in downtown Philadelphia.  The soaring statue of Billy Penn loomed in the background, deliberately out of proportion to its place in the skyline and facing in the wrong direction.

Painted into the scene stood a subway entrance that was no modern work of glass and steel.  This was a single block of rough-hewn marble, like nothing that had ever been built on any urban sidewalk.  It was the gasping maw of a cave.  Two steps led down into a crack in the Earth.  Then the passage descended into creeping darkness.

A feverish burst of vertigo rushed up my spine, twirled like a duststorm through my brain, then receded.  A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature ran down my arms.  My imagination had finally jumped its tracks.

I had to believe that.  This was all my hypermanic mind running off the psychedelic fumes of its own exhaustion, hurtling itself through an urban streetscape with a full head of steam.  I had been awake for too long, running a marathon around the perimeter of madness.  But I still had one more job to do before this night was through.

Cool jasper laid against my breastbone.  My heartbeat slowed inside my throat.  I drew in a long breath.  I tasted cigarette smoke and disinfectant and the unmistakable musk of the past.  I tasted brimstone and cordite.  I tasted silence, and I tasted the delicate incense of death.

I blinked, hard, and looked into that yawning throat of stone as it looked back into me.  Whoever had created this streetscape had been, or gone, insane.  He had painted untold horrors onto the canvas, then painted that subway entrance over top.  I couldn't see them, but I could hear the relentless thumping of their dark pulse from beneath the brushstrokes.  And standing in the doorway, I thought that maybe I understood a little bit about this room.

I couldn't imagine what kind of grinning madman had envisioned this nightmare.  And I had no urge to get close enough to its surface to hunt for a signature.  I probably wouldn't even find one.  That would be just the sort of joke that a gibbering lunatic who would paint a thing like this would enjoy.  I'd spend the night searching until I tripped on a crack in that urban sidewalk and tumbled down that marmoreal flight into the creeping darkness below.

Or I just might hear some faint breathing down in those infinite shadows.  I would lean a little too close to the wall.  And in the final moment before my sanity flaked away like paint peeling from the desiccated slats of a skewed fence, some unimaginable dæmon would reach up out of that darkness, close its serrated talons around my throat, drag me down a marmoreal flight of seventy steps to a cavern of flame, and another seven hundred steps to an unspeakable forest where it would feed me alive to its young.

Or maybe my feet would just tangle themselves up in the sheets as I clamored toward the painting, and I would fall off the bed, and snap my neck.  The scruffy man with Steven Arendell's deep-set eyes and high forehead would find me.  He would keep my two-hundred dollars.

Blue jasper felt cool against my chest, and I looked into the gasping maw of that subway entrance.  Inexpressible creatures lurked just out of sight in that passage.  Peering out into the incomprehensible world of this motel room.  I felt them there, watching me with unblinking eyes.  I was as sure of that as I was of the weight of my bookbag.

They were there, and I knew just as surely that they wouldn't come for me.  Not this night.  They had come for others, slithering up out of that creeping darkness to claim the newlyweds from Montreal and the preacher's wife from Sylvan Springs and the soldier from Innsmouth.

But they would not come for me.  They knew that I had come back to this place with one last job to do. They would wait for me down in the darkness.  And they would greet me cautiously if I should find my way into those infinite shadows.  Because secretly, they feared me.