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Chapter Six: Courtesy Call - Part Two
Rowan
Lord above, it was hot. Hot and uncomfortably dry in the desert outside the Elysium Hotel. Muttering under his breath, Rowan picked at the vicious cactus spine wedged, deep and stinging, in the tip of his forefinger. Gritting his teeth against the hurt, he dug his nails into the bleeding skin and pulled the sliver out by the pointed end. All afternoon, Rowan had wanted nothing more than to head to the bar and the drink Flax had offered days before.
But instead of a cushy bar stool and whiskey, he’d spent the afternoon hunched by an oasis in a rather prickly, cacti-ish bush, watching Mei mess about a smallish garden in the back end of the hotel. He’d sat, overheated and far too cramped, as she’d peacefully knelt, barefoot and pretty as you please, in the rich land in the middle of nothing, weeding and watering and whatever else one did to tend to such things.
She’d spent hours there—so long that he’d been sure that his stiff, burning muscles would fuse sore and crunched like the twisted gargoyles that hung tortured from the rooftops of the Drury castle.
When finally she’d finished fiddling with her flowers, she’d taken tea by the nearby pool—taking only a few sips before abandoning the tiny, china cup. And, still she’d stayed there a long time too, staring off into the shimmering water, deep in thought. Though he’d been quiet, watching her without a word, he was fairly certain that no matter what ruckus he would make, she’d never have noticed.
He must have fallen asleep, lulled by the afternoon heat and the tranquility of the rippling water, because when next he looked up, she’d been gone—her still fairly full tea cup sitting lonely on the latticed edge of the water pool.
He really was bad at this detective business.
Feeling low and useless, Rowan leaned against a tall palm, the ridged trunk uncomfortable against his back but the shade feeling nice after the long afternoon under the hot desert sun.
He didn’t know what he was doing here. Mei didn’t seem to need him. She’d been fine all day. Just as she’d been fine every time he’d followed her.
So what if she paused to rest a lot; people were allowed to be tired. And so she stopped sometimes, forgetting the wheres and whos and whats of her everyday; she was a busy woman and it happened—more to some than others.
It all just looked like the makings of a bad sort of week, not this checking out business—whatever it was. He couldn’t understand why Olive and Calla were so wrapped up in it. Even Flax; he’d made it all sound so grave and ominous.
Rowan gave an involuntary shiver as a Faceless servant passed carrying a tall and heavy stack of large, thick books, many weathered and old mixed in with others that shone slick with newness. Rowan stared at the suited servant and found it difficult to believe that it had ever once been a person.
They didn’t even look real; something like living dolls walking around whose rubbery plastic faces had been rubbed smooth from decades of the careless and uncaring fingers of children too preoccupied in their games to notice the features fade.
Rowan watched the man who seemed less than human walk stolidly down the hallway, his stiff arms not seeming to recognize the incredible weight they held. Rowan walked up to it and followed it step by plodding, robotic step through the arid sand. Tentatively, he reached out a hand and tapped the servant on the shoulder—just to see what it would do.
It stopped so suddenly, like a toy soldier whose battery had given out. Astonished and startled, Rowan tripped and crashed into its solid and unyielding back with a choked gasp.
The servant turned, the stack of texts still balanced perfectly in one of its arms, as the other limb reached out to steady him.
Rowan stiffened against the awkward arm that had wrapped itself around him. The embrace felt wrong somehow—like the approximation of what one would think such a touch ought to feel like without any of the actual depth or warmth. Rowan might have been held by a statue, for all the life he felt from the servant.
He extricated himself from its grasp, mumbling an uncomfortable thanks before the Faceless man gave a rigid nod and turned to again make his way into the hotel. Rowan turned away and swallowed hard, thinking it impossible that the thing now lumbering through the hotel halls had ever once been human.
Still feeling a wee bit leery, Rowan turned at a quick flash out of the corner of his eye. There in the window he saw something. Stepping closer to the bay window, Rowan peered through the glass.
Inside was a library with long, tall shelves filled with books, making a winding maze about the room. Rowan couldn’t help it, his mouth gaped open. Even the library in the Drury castle—that was filled with so many tomes and texts that had been handed down from century to century that a single man could never hope to read all of it in a single lifetime—Rowan had never seen so many books.
Pressing his nose up to sun-warmed, bayed glass in awe, he was shocked when a man suddenly appeared in front of his face.
Staggering back with a yelp, Rowan blinked at him, the slender guy's loose mop of stunningly platinum hair falling into his glitteringly icy, gray eyes. The stranger blinked back coyly.
Mouthing hi, he pressed his hand against the glass.
Rowan stepped forward, his breathing suddenly and oddly heavy. With his lips slightly parted, Rowan placed his hand tentatively over the other man's, only the warm glass between them. Rowan's other hand clutched at his chest over his heart—feeling it pounding fast—as the stranger leaned in and tilted his head, nuzzling the glass. He peeked up at Rowan and licked his pale peach lips invitingly.
Suddenly, Rowan jerked back, his hand still hot from the touch. He blinked furiously and squinted hard, sure that the teeth he’d revealed were pointed and sharp.
But, as the guy lazily leaned back again, his smiling mouth closed too swiftly, laughter barely hiding behind it.
The Drury Widdershins clutched both hands close, swallowing hard, and glared warily at the glass. The fair-haired guy inside winked at him and blew him a kiss that Rowan swore he could feel burn against his skin.
His attention jolted away with a sharp yelp at the creaking sound of a door opening behind him. Rowan turned to see the same servant exit the hotel again, his arms now empty.
Even without looking, he could feel the sting of the man's giddy laughter from behind the glass.
Feeling a sheepishness still tinged with fear, Rowan swiftly slipped into the hotel behind the servant before leaning against the cool hotel wall. Letting the air-conditioned climate soothe him, he tilted his head back with a soft thud as he steadied his breathing and his heart.
“Hello?” a voice said, startling Rowan.
He jumped, bumping into the potted plant behind him and sending the fern and its ceramic home tumbling to the carpet. Rowan sighed as its dark, wet dirt insides spilled out across the Oriental floor.
“Hello?” the same bubbly sort of voice called out before her blond, sweet-faced head popped out from around the hallway wall. “Oh, no.” She stared at Rowan and the shrubbery remains at his feet. ”What a mess! Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Rowan assured as he resignedly studied the dirt now sprinkling the legs of his jeans, “I’m fine.” He shook his legs, dislodging most of the soil from his clothes and shoes. “Sorry.”
“For what?” she asked quizzically. “It wasn’t my plant.”
“If I scared you,” Rowan clarified. “Sorry if you were startled.”
“Oh,” the woman said, “well, I wasn’t really scared. Just curious.” She walked to him, her tall, high-heeled shoes clicking together loudly as she side-stepped the clumps of spilled soil. “You sure you’re all right?”
“Yeah.” Rowan stared at her feather-trimmed dress that was such a shockingly loud shade of blue that he thought it best not to look directly at it.
“So,” she said, looking at him expectantly, “you’re one of the new people, huh?”
“Um.” He shrugged. “yeah.”
She put her hand out. “I’m Juniper, by the way. Juniper Emmer. Suite 315.”
Rowan paused. Wait. That sounded familiar. “315?” Rowan racked his brain. “Suite 315. You’ve the talking closet?”
“Yeah!” She bounced, excitedly. “Yeah, that’s me. It used to make all these weird noises, but no one believed me, not until lately when it started to talk. Flax thinks it’s, like, some kind of rip between the worlds. Some lingering connection between the hotel and the real world. Or something.”
She ducked her head a bit, ashamed. She gave a small shrug, her over-made face still smiling somehow despite her frown. “Sometimes when he talks, he’s kind of hard to follow.”
Rowan wondered what the pretty woman would look like without her pageantry paint. As she tucked an imaginary errant strand of hair back into her perfectly coifed do, Rowan couldn't quite imagine it
About to agree with her—if only to be nice—Rowan shut his mouth when she shook her head and straightened, again happy and eager. “But, anyway, I can hear people talking and stuff. From the real world! It’s so weird. Lenten doesn’t want me going in there anymore, on account that he thinks the gap might work both ways—you know, maybe they can hear us too and stuff. But I never had that problem after that one time with Mei and the little Lenten girl. And I don’t see what the big deal is anyway. If anything, it’s what my old manager would have called a ticket seller.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “So do you want to see it?”
He ought to say no.
He’d promised Calla and Olive that he would watch Mei.
He ought to go looking for her.
He should pay better attention this time, have something vital to report back to them.
He shouldn’t go back to them with nothing.
Rowan looked back up at Juniper, biting his lip and crinkling his nose.
“You coming?” she asked him.
A rip between the worlds. Voices from the real world. And, perhaps, a way home. Rowan nodded. “Yes, please.”
So he followed her up the stairs as they made their way back to her suite.
“Why are all the rooms in this hotel suites?” Rowan asked idly they walked past rows of rooms.
“Hmm?” she asked as they rounded a corner.
“Well,” Rowan mused, “normally, hotels have rooms and, if they’re fairly fancy sort of places, they’ve suites too.” He shrugged. “But in this place, every room’s a suite. I just thought it was odd.”
Juniper thought about it for a moment. Not just thought, really pondered. She was quiet and deep in thought for so long that Rowan almost regretted bringing the idle topic up in the first place.
They stopped in front of Suite 315 and she fiddled around with her keys. “Well,” she finally said slowly, carefully choosing her words, “in Vegas, the suites are the best digs in the house. You pay through the nose to book ’em, yet everybody always wants one. So, I guess, if you made an imaginary hotel that could look and be any way you wanted, wouldn’t you fill it full with the best suites in the joint?”
She turned to saunter into her closet, her full hips swaying in a showy yet habitual sort of manner that left Rowan staring at her swinging derriere even as his mind was still trying to wrap itself around the absolute sense of her answer. With a shrug and a nod that gave the blond woman her due, he followed her into the closet.
He stood in the doorway as she flicked on the closet’s lights before flouncing down onto the carpet, cuddled up next to several fluffy, shiny fabric-covered cushions. Grabbing his own shimmery blue pillow, he knelt down onto the black carpet and listened.
“Listen, you great, stupid horse’s ass,” a deep voice yelled from under the thick carpeting, the lilt of home almost hidden beneath the growling anger, “you’ll keep your fucking mouth shut or I’ll bloody well shut it for you.”
“But you never said anything about murder,” another man whined, his voice containing the sound of Cork. “I never agreed to that. And now I’ve got the authorities up my arse with all these questions.”
Rowan glanced at Juniper as she started to quietly clap her hands excitedly. “Oh,” she exclaimed in a stage whisper, “this is the one. The one the Lenten girl and Mei were listening to. The one they said could hear them.” She stood up. “I should get Lenten. I bet he’d want to know.”
Rowan sat up, uncomfortable. “Do you want me to come with you?” He hoped she didn’t. He didn’t want to leave.
“Nah.” Juniper dismissed with a wave. “I’m good. I’m just going to make a phone call. Maybe call up some food too while I’m at it. You might as well stay. I’ll just be a minute.”
Rowan sank back down close to the corner and listened.
At first, he thought that something had gone wrong. That fate, or whatever controlled the rip, had flipped the station, because all he heard was a soft and steady tapping, like a leaky faucet or drips from a wet patch after a heavy rain. He could hear the creaks of old pipes and thought of the dark, dank tunnels beneath the Drury castle.
Rowan had never liked those tunnels. His cousin Jack, when they’d both been eight, had told Rowan that the cavernous maze was haunted by the ghost of some old Drury ancestor, who lay in wait to switch his soul with any young Drury foolish enough to disturb his eternal rest. To this day, Rowan had almost convinced himself that it wasn’t true.
“I swear to Christ something strange is going on here,” yet another man beneath the closet carpet said, his gravely voice both angry and self-satisfied startling Rowan into a choked gasp. “I’ve been hearing strange shit all week.”
“Check it out,” the first man, obviously the leader, ordered. “I’ll deal with Quinn here. He won’t be talking one way or another.”
Rowan held his breath and peered forward. Had the men heard Juniper and him talking? Did the rip really work?
Rowan had to bite his tongue to stop himself from calling out. They were Irish and, while he and his family weren’t national celebrities or anything, anyone with a computer and an internet connection could find them.
Rowan was so close—a cry away from home—but he hesitated, keeping cautiously quiet.
Though he’d be willing to bet that these men could help him find his family, he’d also bet he didn’t want his family found by them.
“Now, Quinn,” the leader said, sounding almost sorry, “you were our man on the inside. And you did a right good job. No one’s faulting the work you did. But seems to me that, now that the job’s all but done, we don’t need to be inside anymore.” Rowan thought that he recognized that voice from somewhere, the low timbre of it scratching at the frayed edges of his memory. Its clipped sharpness cut into his thoughts, digging through the jumbled mess of his mind.
Where had he heard that voice? Was it one of the whispers he’d heard in the woods that night? Or did its hushed harshness simply remind him of the nightmare sounds that plagued his dreams?
Rowan swallowed hard and shivered as he listened to the cold, hard voice grin. “Do you know what that makes you?”
Rowan imagined he could hear the other man, Quinn, whimpering softly, pleadingly. There was a tense pause and a shuffling of feet as Rowan unconsciously scooted back.
“Unnecessary, Quinn. You’re unnecessary. More than that,” the leader continued on, “it makes you a liability. A loose end, as it were.”
Now Rowan could clearly hear Quinn beg and yelp wildly, setting his teeth on edge. Rowan stood and backed up toward the door unable to take his eyes from the corner even as he longed to shut up his ears. But, if anything, the sounds from the closet seemed to be getting louder as if the rip in the worlds was tearing and rending.
“I do this,” the leader said, eerily calm over Quinn’s incoherent screams, “because you did such good work for us. For anyone else, I’d have let you bleed out on the floor and not given it a thought past which of my men cleans it up.” Rowan heard the ominous strike of metal against metal—a small sound, to be sure, but deafening. “I do this for you, my friend. To always remind you where your loyalties lie.”
At the gunshot, Rowan jumped, screaming as he stumbled back—his arms sprawled wide—smacking hard and awkward against the closet’s walls. “Dear God in heaven!”
Still, howling and panicked, Rowan tried to remain upright, but, as his arms flailed in an attempt to find balance, he knocked the rack of hangers to the floor with a cluttered crash. Slipping on the shining, slippery fabrics, Rowan fell to the carpet, hoarse and panting.
“Fuck,” the leader muttered as Quinn wept and yelped uncontrollably in the background. “Kenny!” he called out. “Kenny, that better have been you mucking about over there.”
“No, sir,” Kenny called out. “But I think I know where it’s coming from.”
Rowan heard footsteps rushing closer. He ground his hands over his mouth in an effort to choke back his hysteria. He’d never heard a gun fired outside of a movie or the telly. He didn’t know that the sound—so much quieter than he thought it ought to be—would muffle as it sunk into soft, now wet flesh. That he could hear the impact’s subtle sound a second before wretched cries roared.
Rowan unconsciously, morbidly, wondered where the man—Quinn—was shot. He wasn’t dead, Rowan knew that as he listened to the man’s yowling, gurgling pain—more animalistic wails than words. Rowan felt hot, angry, fearful tears fall fat down his cheeks even. He forced the rising bile back down his burning throat.
Rowan listened to things scrape and drop as someone—Kenny, he’d guess—rummaged and dug. “Sir, you’d better come take a look at this.”
Scrambling, painfully aware of how loud each struggling step was, Rowan pulled himself back up and away from the cursed corner.
“What the hell am I looking at?” the leader grumbled as more things were pushed aside.
“Oi!” Rowan heard Kenny yell into the rip. “Who the fuck is out there?”
“I thought you said this place was abandoned,” the leader yelled, his anger clear in his voice.
“It is,” Kenny insisted, his quick retort defensive and somewhat fearful. “It was.” There was a pause. “It ought to be. The only thing on the other side of that wall is an alley. And there ain’t no light like that in that alley. I checked.”
Light? Rowan turned and stared at the brightly lit closet. It couldn’t be. Could it?
If they could hear him, could they see him too?
Quickly, he lunged out to flick off the lights.
But that damned pillow!
Just as his fingers brushed the switch, plunging the room in darkness, his foot caught on the fluffed-up bit of furnishing, slipped, and brought him down hard onto the carpet with an loud crash.
Trying to right himself again, he felt something grab at his ankle, pulling hard at his pant leg.
“Hey, sir, I’ve got something,” Rowan heard Kenny shout.
Rowan looked back to see a shadowed, scarred, cracked ham of a hand gripping his leg as it dragged him down beneath the carpet. Rowan opened his mouth to scream.
“Rowan?” he heard Juniper ask casually from the other room. “Are you okay?”
Rowan tried to yell, tried to call out for help, tried to do anything at all, but he couldn’t—shock and fear strangling all sound from his throat. He gaped helplessly. His fingers dug into the black shag, burning as their tips were dragged through the rug.
Dry, soundless whimpers sputtered up from his useless throat. His finger’s skin cracked and began to bleed as he was pulled further down.
He turned to see his ankle disappear into the darkness—leaving the denim-clad limb looking severed.
Wildly, Rowan kicked out with his other leg, the heel of his boot smashing viciously into his own knee, his own thigh, his own ankle. But it hit the hand too.
Rowan let out a stuttered sigh as he heard Kenny cry out in pain. Again, he slammed his boot down hard onto the thick, meaty wrist before the hand freed him.
Crying with relief, Rowan tucked his leg into himself only to jump and scream as the gun fired again, a bullet whizzing through the closet. Rowan curled fetally in on himself, covering his head, as the bullet lodged with a vicious crack into the closet’s wood door.
“What the heck—” Juniper thrust open the door.
Quickly and without thinking, Rowan hurled himself at her, tackling the woman to the floor of her suite and kicking the closet door shut.
“Hey!” she shrieked indignantly. “Get off—”
He did only to pull her up with him. “Run!” he told her before deciding it best not to let her question or argue and yanking her out of the suite with him.
Slamming the door behind them, he tore down the hall and down the stairs back the way they came.
Again—like it had that night at the castle—it seemed as if this huge, surging danger loomed just behind, chasing him. Surrounding him. He didn’t know what to do. The only thing he knew was that he had to get away. He had to run.
So dragging Juniper behind him, he leapt down the last few steps and rounded the corner—his mind focused on nothing but escape. He turned to tell Juniper to run faster when—with a shocked winded wheeze—he roughly rammed into Lenten.
Rowan flinched as the man reached out and grabbed him by the elbows, attempting to steady him. “What’s going on?” His gaze flicked between Rowan—still rasping shakily in his grasp—and Juniper who indignantly huffed as she wrenched her arm back from Rowan. “Juniper, Rowan, are you all right?”
Before the annoyed woman could answer, Rowan grabbed Lenten by the front of his suit coat—the once crisp lapels now crushed in his hands. “The closet,” he panted, his panic still riding him, “something—someone—a hand…it tried to pull me under.”
“Under?”
“Through the rip,” Rowan squeaked, pushing his face into the man’s, even as his buckled knees dragged them both down onto the soil-covered carpet. Rowan felt a bit of cracked pottery cut and slice through his jeans, lodging itself into his shin.
“I don’t understand.” The confused, unsettled look on Lenten’s face seemed awkward and uncomfortable on his usually composed face. Shaking his head, Lenten laid his hands, warm and soothing, over Rowan’s, trying to coax them to let go of the balled-up fabric in his fists. “Calm down, Rowan. Take a deep breath,” he ordered in a gentle tone, “and tell me everything.”
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