A young black man dressed in cutting-edge fashion ceaselessly fingered his silk shirt, his jacket, the jade pendant that hung from his neck, as though in death he was embarrassed to have been so fashion-conscious in life.
Counting the player at the blackjack table, seven appeared to me. I couldn’t know if all had perished in the casino or if some had died elsewhere in the hotel. Perhaps they were the only ghosts haunting the Panamint, perhaps not.
One hundred and eighty-two people had perished here. Most would have moved on the moment they expired. At least, for my sake, I hoped that was true.
Most commonly, spirits who have dwelled this long in a self-imposed state of purgatory will manifest in a mood of melancholy or anxiety. These seven conformed to that rule.
Yearning draws them to me. I am not always certain for what it is they yearn, though I think most of them desire resolution, the courage to let go of this world and to discover what comes next.
Fear inhibits them from doing what they must. Fear and regret, and love for those they leave behind.
Because I can see them, I bridge life and death, and they hope I can open for them the door they are afraid to open for themselves. Because I am who I am—a California boy who looks like surfers looked in Beach Blanket Bingo, half a century ago, less coiffed and even less threatening than Frankie Avalon—I inspire their trust.
I’m afraid that I have less to offer them than they believe I do. What counsel I give them is as shallow as Ozzie pretends his wisdom is.
That I will touch them, embrace them, seems always to be a comfort for which they’re grateful. They embrace me in return. And touch my face. And kiss my hands.
Their melancholy drains me. Their need exhausts me. I am wrung by pity. Sometimes it seems that to exit this world, they must go through my heart, leaving it scarred and sore.
Moving now from one to the other, I told each of them what I intuited he or she needed to hear.
I said, This world is lost forever. There’s nothing here for you but desire, frustration, sadness.
I said, You know now that part of you is immortal and that your life had meaning. To discover that meaning, embrace what comes next.
And to another, I said, You think you don’t deserve mercy, but mercy is yours if you’ll put aside your fear.
As one by one I spoke to the seven, an eighth spirit appeared. A tall, broad brick of a man, he had deep-set eyes, blunt features, and buzz-cut hair. He stared at me over the heads of the others, his gaze the color of bile and no less bitter.
To the young black man who fussed ceaselessly and with apparent embarrassment at his fine clothes, I said, Truly evil people aren’t given the license to linger. The fact that you’ve been here so long since death means you don’t have any reason to fear what comes next.
As I turned from one of the encircling dead to the next, the newcomer prowled beyond the perimeter of the group, keeping my face in sight. His mood appeared to darken as he listened to me.
You think what I’m telling you is bullshit. Maybe it is. I haven’t been across. How can I know what waits on the other side?
Their eyes were lustrous pools of longing, and I hoped they recognized in me not pity, but sympathy.
The grace and beauty of this world enchant me. But it’s all broken. I want to see the version we didn’t screw up. Don’t you?
Finally, I said, The girl I love…she thought we might have three lives, not two. She called this first life boot camp.
I paused. I had no choice. For a moment, I belonged more to their purgatory than I did to this world, in the sense that words failed me.
Eventually I continued: She said we’re in boot camp to learn, to fail or succeed of our own free will. Then we move on to a second life, which she called service.
The red-haired man, whose cheerful smile was belied by anguished eyes, came to me and put a hand on my shoulder.
Her name is Bronwen, but she prefers to be called Stormy. In service, Stormy said, we have fantastic adventures in some cosmic campaign, some wondrous undertaking. Our reward comes in our third life, and that one lasts forever.
Reduced to silence again, I could not meet their stares with the confidence I owed them, and so I closed my eyes and in memory saw Stormy, who gave me strength, as she had always done.
Eyes closed, I said, She is a kick-ass kind of girl, who not only knows what she wants, but what she should want, which makes all the difference. When you meet her in service, you’ll know her, sure enough. You’ll know her, and you’ll love her.
After a further silence, when I opened my eyes and turned in a circle, probing with my flashlight, four of the initial seven were gone: the young black man, the cocktail waitress, the pretty blonde, and the red-haired man.
I can’t be sure if they moved Beyond or merely elsewhere.
The big man with the buzz-cut looked angrier than ever. His shoulders were hunched, as if under a burden of rage, and his hands curled into fists.
He stalked away into the burned-out room, and though he had no physical substance that could affect this world, gray ashes rose in shimmering shapes around him, and settled to the floor again in his wake. Lightweight debris—scorched playing cards, splintery scraps of wood—trembled as he passed. A five-dollar casino chip stood on edge, spun, wobbled, fell flat once more, and heat-yellowed dice rattled on the floor.
He had poltergeist potential, and I was glad to see him go.
TWENTY-FIVE
A DAMAGED FIRE DOOR HUNG OPEN AND ASKEW ON two of three hinges. The stainless-steel threshold reflected the flashlight in those few places where it was not crusted with dark material.
If memory served me well, people had been trampled to death in this doorway when the crowd of gamblers stampeded for the exits. No horror came over me at that recollection, only a deeper sadness.
Beyond the door, patinaed by smoke and water, spalling from the effects of efflorescing lime, looking as if they had been transported from an ancient temple of a long-forgotten faith, thirty flights of wide concrete emergency stairs led to the north end of the sixteenth floor. Perhaps two additional flights ascended all the way to the roof of the hotel.
I climbed only halfway to the first landing before I halted, cocked my head, and listened. I don’t believe a sound had alarmed me. No tick, no click, no whisper stepped down to me from higher floors.
Perhaps a scent alerted me. Compared to other spaces in the devastated structure, the stairwell smelled less of chemicals and hardly at all of char. This cooler, limy air was clean enough to allow the recognition of an odor as exotic as—but different from—those of the fire’s aftermath.
The faint essence I could not identify was musky, mushroomy. But it also had a quality of fresh raw meat, by which I don’t mean a bloody stink, but that subtle smell you get from a butcher’s case, where ready flesh is presented.
For a reason I could not define, into my mind’s eye came the dead face of the man I had fished from the storm drain. Mottled gray skin. Eyes rolled back in a blind white gaze.
The fine hairs on the nape of my neck quivered as if the air had been charged by the advancing storm.
I switched off the flashlight and stood in absolute, monster’s-gonna-get-you blackness.
Because the stairs were enclosed by concrete walls, the sharp turn at each landing provided an effective baffle to light. A sentry one floor above, or at most two, might have noticed the radiant bloom below, but no light could have transferred, angle after angle, to any higher floors.
After a minute, when I hadn’t heard the rustle of clothing or the scrape of a shoe on concrete, when no scaly tongue had licked my face, I backed cautiously out of the stairwell, across the threshold. I retreated into the casino before switching on the flashlight.
A few minutes later, I located the south stairs. Here the door still hung from all its hinges, but it stood open like the first.
Shuttering the lens of the flash with my fingers, to reduce its reach, I ventured across the threshold.
This silence, like that in the north stairwell, had an expectant quality, as though I might not be the only listening presence. Here, too, after a moment, I detected that subtle and disturbing smell that had discouraged me from ascending at the other end of the building.
As before, into my mind came the dead face of the man who had Tasered me: eyes protuberant and white, mouth open wide and tongue swallowed.
On the basis of a bad feeling and a smell, real or imagined, I decided that the emergency stairs were under observation. I could not use them.
Yet my sixth sense told me that Danny lay imprisoned somewhere high above. He (the magnet) waited, and I (the magnetized), in some strange power’s employ, was drawn upward with an insistence that I could not ignore.
TWENTY-SIX
OFF THE MAIN LOBBY, I LOCATED AN ALCOVE WITH TEN elevators, five on each side. Eight sets of doors were closed, though I’m sure I could have pried them open.
The last two sets of doors on the right were fully retracted. In the first of these openings, an empty cab waited, its floor a foot below the floor of the alcove. The second offered only a void.
Leaning into the shaft, I played the flashlight up and down, over guide rails and cables. The missing cab lay two floors below, in the sub-basement.
To the right, the wall featured a service ladder. It receded to the very top of the building.
After raiding my backpack for a spelunker’s flashlight strap, I fitted the handle of the light in the tight collar, and secured the Velcro fastener around my right forearm. Like a telescopic sight on a shotgun barrel, the light surmounted my arm, the beam spearing across the back of my hand and out past my fingertips into the dark.
With both hands free, I was able to get a grip on a rung and swing off the alcove threshold. I mounted the ladder.
After ascending several rungs, I paused to savor the odors in the shaft. I didn’t detect the scent that had warned me off both the north and the south stairs.
The shaft was resonant, however; it would amplify every sound. If the wrong set of doors stood open above, and if someone was near that alcove, he would hear me coming.
I needed to climb as silently as possible, which meant not so fast that I began to breathe hard with the exertion.
The flashlight seemed problematic. Holding the ladder with my right hand, I used my left to switch off the beam.
How unsettling: to climb into perfect darkness. In the most primitive foundations of the mind, at the level of race memory or even deeper, lay the expectation that any ascent should be toward light. Rising higher, higher into unrelenting blackness proved to be disorienting.
I estimated eighteen feet of height for the first story, twelve feet per story thereafter. I guessed there were twenty-four rungs in twelve feet.
By that measure, I had climbed two stories when a protracted rumble passed through the shaft. I thought Earthquake, and I froze on the ladder, held fast, expecting plummeting masonry and further destruction.
When the shaft did not shake, when the cables did not sing with vibrations, I realized that the rumble was a long peal of thunder. Although still distant, it sounded closer than it had been earlier.
Hand over hand, foot after foot, climbing again, I wondered how I would get Danny down from his high prison, assuming that I would be able to free him. If armed sentries had been posted on the stairs, we could not escape the hotel by either of those routes. Considering his deformities and his physical uncertainty, he could not descend on this ladder.
One thing at a time. First, find him. Second, free him.
Thinking too far ahead might paralyze me, especially if every strategy that I considered led inevitably to the need to kill one or all of our adversaries. The determination to kill did not come easily to me, not even when survival depended on it, not even when my target was unarguably evil.
You don’t get James Bond with me. I’m even less bloodthirsty than Miss Moneypenny.
At what must have been the fifth floor, I encountered an open set of elevator doors, the first since I had entered the shaft on the lobby level. The gap revealed itself as a dark-gray rectangle in an otherwise pitch landscape.
The alcove beyond the retracted doors would open onto a fifth-floor hall. Along that corridor, the doors to some guest rooms would be standing open; others would have been broken down by firemen or would have burned away. The windows in those rooms, which had not been boarded over to keep out trespassers, as on the ground floor, admitted light to the public hall; and meager rays filtered from there into the alcove.
Intuition told me that I had not climbed high enough. The low voice of faraway thunder spoke again when I was between the seventh and eighth floors. Just past the ninth floor, I wondered how many bodachs had swarmed the hotel prior to the catastrophe.
A bodach is a mythical beast of the British Isles, a sly thing that comes down chimneys during the night to carry away naughty children.
In addition to the lingering dead, I occasionally see menacing spirits that I call bodachs. That’s not what they are, but I need to call them something, and that name seems to fit.
A young English boy, the only person I have known who shared my gift, called them bodachs in my presence. Minutes after he had used that word, he was crushed to death by a runaway truck.
I never speak of the bodachs when they are near. I pretend not to see them, do not react to them either with curiosity or fear. I suspect that if they knew I see them, there would be a runaway truck for me.
These creatures are utterly black and without features, so thin they can slip through a crack in a door, or enter by a keyhole. They have no more substance than shadows.
They are soundless in movement, often slinking like cats, though cats as big as men. Sometimes they run semi-erect and seem to be half man, half dog.
I have written about them before, in my first manuscript. I will not spend many words on them here.
They are not human spirits, and they do not belong here. Their natural realm, I suspect, is a place of eternal darkness and much screaming.
Their presence always signifies an oncoming event with a high body count—like the shootings at the mall last August. A single murder, like that of Dr. Jessup, does not draw them forth from wherever they dwell. They thrill only to natural disasters and to human violence on an operatic scale.
In the hours before the quake and the fire, they surely swarmed the casino and the hotel by the hundreds, in frenzied anticipation of the impending misery, pain, and death, which is their favorite three-course meal.
Two deaths in this case—Dr. Jessup and the snaky man—elicited no bodach interest. Their continued absence suggested that whatever showdown lay ahead might not result in a bloodbath.
Nevertheless, as I climbed, my churning imagination populated the lightless shaft with bodachs that, like cockroaches, crawled the walls, fleet and quivering.
TWENTY-SEVEN
AT THE NEXT SET OF RETRACTED ELEVATOR DOORS, ON the twelfth floor, I knew in a certain-to-the-bones way that I had climbed past the stairwell guards. In fact, I sensed that I had arrived at the level on which the kidnappers were holding Danny.