Supernatural Noir (12 page)

This girl now, lying with her pale back to him, dozy from sex . . . no way he felt about her as he had about Chess. That is, if what he recalled wasn’t total bullshit. But this girl . . . What was her fucking name? Tammy, Trudy . . . something like that. Tracy. He couldn’t deny she had a certain appeal. Maybe it was her ignorance, the sheer doggedness of it—maybe that bespoke a measure of innocence. Innocence was a quality he could use to delude himself into believing there was more to the relationship. He ran a hand along the curve of her waist and hip, and she stirred to the touch. No, he decided. He didn’t need any complications.

“Hey, Tracy.”

He nudged her and she made a complaining noise. He flicked on the bedside lamp and said again, “Tracy!”

“Oh, Lord! I forgot.” She squinted up at him. “When I hitchhike I never use my real name. It makes me feel safer out there. I know it’s silly. I meant to tell you, but . . .” She flashed a lopsided grin. “We got a little busy.”

She scooted up to a sitting position and gave him a peck on the cheek and said, “Sorry.”

He caught a whiff of Elfland Hospitality Pak Shampoo.

“My name’s Carole,” she said. “Carole with
e
on the end.”

For some reason it seemed harder to dump a Carole than a Tracy, and he was tempted to relent. Then she began to prattle like she had in the car, wondering if there was a place open where they could get some food, probably not, it must be two o’clock already, and she couldn’t hardly wait to hit Seattle, she bet the seafood there was awesome . . .

“Listen, Carole,” he said. “I don’t think we should travel together.”

Uncomprehending, she gaped at him.

“I’ll give you money for the bus,” he said. “And enough so you can get situated in Seattle. But that’s it.”

She made a weak, half-completed gesture toward her brow. “What do you mean?” she asked. “I thought . . .”

“I don’t want to argue,” he said.

She seemed prettier than she had earlier, the sharpness of her face less evident. “But we were . . .”

“And don’t be telling me how wonderful it can be,” he went on. “If we stay together, all that’ll happen is one of us will rip the other off.”

She started to object and he said, “I’ll give you a thousand dollars,” seeing this as a stroke of moral genius, charity abolishing the sin of theft, saving himself grief and at the same time giving the girl a shot. He would still have six thousand left.

“I don’t give a damn about your money!” she said tearfully. “I want to be with you!”

“It’s not going to happen.”

She let out a thin cry and clasped her hands to the side of her head.

“It’s for the best,” he said. “If you stay calm and think about it, you’ll see that.”

She hugged her knees, rocking back and forth, doing her mad-girl impression, singing tunelessly, breathily, the song of a fly buzzing in an asylum window, drunk on sunlight.

“Stop that!” he said.

Her keening rose in pitch.

“What are you . . . fucking nuts? Talk to me.”

He expected her to start blubbering, but she didn’t leak a single tear and kept on with her broken-teakettle noise.

“That’s not going to get it,” he said. “Acting all crazy and shit. I’ve seen crazy, I
know
crazy. You can’t sell that shit here.”

Her eyelids drooped so that slits of white were visible beneath them.

Fed up with her, he pulled on his pants, shrugged into his shirt and stepped out into the breezeway, slamming the door behind him. The Dodge minivan he had parked beside was gone. He wished that he hadn’t left his car keys in the room. He could have booked. A thousand dollars? Christ, what was he thinking? She was likely used to selling her ass for fifty, a hundred tops. The cool air soothed him, tuned his anger lower. He dug the loose change from his pocket and went padding barefoot along the breezeway toward the vending machines next to the office. If he got her something to eat, that might placate her. It might be worth driving somewhere—that pancake house back on the interstate might still be serving. Once she was loaded with carbs and sugar he could talk her down from hysteria, open a dialogue, reason with her, and in the end they would share a hug, a semichaste kiss, alas, alack, adios, adieu, we’ll always have the Elfland.

He selected a bag of chips and a Snickers from the vending machines, and then noticed particles of glass on the sidewalk in front of the office—the door had been blown inward and glass shards strewn across the carpeting, as if something had struck it with explosive force. The lights were on, but the night man was nowhere in sight.

Michael stuck his head inside and called out. No reply. He picked his way across the carpet, walking on his toes, and peered behind the desk, half expecting to find the night man’s bullet-riddled corpse, but saw only an overturned office chair and what might have been a dusting of Doritos crumbs on the counter. Going back outside, he surveyed the parking lot, an acreage of blacktop divided by concrete islands and the occasional patch of shrubbery, slots demarked by diagonal white lines, luminous under the arc lights. His sense of unease spiked. There had been at least six or seven cars in the lot, not counting the minivan, and now there were none. What were the odds that their owners had all checked out between midnight and two a.m.? Not inconceivable, he told himself. The Elfland might be a no-tell motel. He scanned the façade of the building. Yellow lights sprayed from the open door of a second-floor room, silhouetting a short, squat figure no larger than a child. Whoever it was didn’t move a muscle. Michael waved, but the wave was not returned. The figure might have been stone . . . or wood. It looked to be wearing some sort of hat. Like a Santa hat.

Oh, no you don’t, he said to himself.

You’re not going there, you are definitely not buying into the Carole-induced premise that magical Nazi elves have taken over a motel in Bumfuck, Oregon.

“Hey!” he shouted at the motionless figure. “What’s going on?”

Silence.

“Somebody broke into the office! Did you see anything?”

A clattering sounded behind him—like someone running in wooden shoes.

He spun about. Something darted behind a shrub about fifty feet away. Something quick and approximately elf sized. He couldn’t be certain of it—he would have liked third-party corroboration. He was exhausted, coming down from a coke binge, and his eyes were playing tricks.

“Is anybody there?” he called in a shaky voice.

The shrub quivered, as if being shaken. He shot a glance toward the second-floor room. The figure in the doorway was gone.

Michael’s balls tightened. He eased toward the parking-lot exit, choosing a path that led well away from the suspicious shrub, intending to put some distance between himself and the motel, cross the road to the Boron station and take stock. Let his nerves settle and then head back to 120, because it had become clear he was under the influence of the coke and of that nut bag Carole-with-an-
e
-on-the-end, and he needed to gain perspective. That was all. He’d pull it together, return to the room, grab his keys, and drive. Thinking this made him feel steadier. He’d go as far as Portland and find a motel not named the Elfland, a Comfort Inn, a Travelodge or Best Western, a good old American franchise free of Black Forest statuary and street meat . . .

The lights went out.

Not just the lights of the motel and the parking lot, but also those of the Boron station, the shops, and the winking traffic signal. The darkness was unrelieved. It was as if a dense black cloud had lowered over the town, reducing visibility to almost zero. Power failure. He waited for the lights to come back. When they did not, he moved forward, groping, shuffling along, making for the exit, determined to follow through on his plan of taking stock, pulling it together.

He heard the clattering again. It was louder, closer, issuing from every direction—lots of diminutive wooden feet darting near. As he turned this way and that, tracking the noise, something snagged his shirttail and nearly succeeded in dragging him down. Panic put a charge in him and he ran blindly, his arms pumping. Pieces of gravel stuck in the soles of his feet. He ignored the discomfort and kept running until he crashed into the hedge bordering the lot. Twigs tore at his sides, dug into his chest. He fought to break through the hedge, tearing away handfuls of leaves, but it was impenetrable—he hung there, supported by the bushes. The clattering had stopped, and, but for the wheezing of his breath, the silence was absolute. No semis grinding on the interstate, no barking dogs, no ambient noise whatsoever. He pictured the town cut off from the universe of light and life, adrift on an infinite ocean of nothingness, monsters with mile-wide mouths rising toward the surface, lured by this tasty morsel, and panic took him a second time. He struggled free of the hedge, lost his balance, and fell backward, smacking his head on the asphalt. Splinters of white light lanced through his skull. Dazed, he rolled over onto his side, preparing to sit up.

Overhead, the Elfland’s sign switched on, humming, buzzing, painting on the asphalt a ragged island of illumination upon which he was marooned. The leprechaun on the sign mocked him with a knowing leer. Michael’s instincts prompted him to flee, but he was too enfeebled to do anything other than scrabble at the pavement. He waited for the leprechaun to leap down from the sign, for whatever form the next shock might take.

“Who’s there?” he shouted, and then: “Quit fucking with me!”

Darkness swallowed his words.

He remained lying there, alert for the least sound and hearing none. Moths came to whirl whitely like windblown snowflakes about the sign, and this emblem of normalcy helped restore his capacity for thought. No other lights showed, either in the motel or the town, and that did not make sense, that the sign was the sole source of radiance, unless he were to believe in a reality he wanted to reject . . . And yet he couldn’t reject it. The girl, Carole, she’d never denied being a witch. She must be orchestrating this somehow. That funky singing she did now and again, it could be part of a spell, a retarded Tennessee mantra that helped her focus. She was the only person who had reason to screw with him. Except for Charlie, maybe. Except for Chess. Except for damn near every fucking person he had ever met, everyone he had used and abused while working out his parental issues. Perhaps that’s what was happening here: karmic retribution.

He laughed off the possibility and then had the urge to cry out for help; but even if things were normal, if everyone was safe in their beds and the town was not the empty, abandoned-by-God place he envisioned, there was nobody within earshot. And if help arrived, what would he say then? This redneck bitch I picked up hitchhiking, goes about a hundred five, hundred ten pounds, IQ of a snail, she’s a freak, man, she’s tripping me out, animating the elf population of Whidby Bay. Sure, son, the cops would say. Let’s put you into the nice holding tank where you’ll be protected from her unnatural power. Hey, where’d you get the seven grand? You suppose this white powder might be an illegal substance? Got a pink slip for the Caddy?

At length he got to his feet, feeling stronger for the effort, and began walking toward the motel, its unlit façade melting up from the dark. He was in rotten shape, his head throbbing, vision fluttering, feet and torso bleeding, but bottom line, he had to get the keys. Arguments occurred to him as he went. Explanations. The Elfland’s sign must be on some weird separate circuit. The night man had blundered into the door, shattered the glass, and run away. Vandals had set the elf in the second-floor doorway, or else it was a kid wearing a funny hat. He had been unsteady on his feet and imagined the tug on his shirttail. The clattering . . . Well, he’d have to work on that one. None of this held water, but neither did any less-rational explanation, and he allowed it to satisfy a need for some logical ground, however flimsy, on which to stand.

On reaching the rear of the motel he was blind again, and virtually deaf. The breezeway lights had not come back on, and the crash of the surf drowned out lesser sounds. He moved out onto the grass, cool, dewy, and easier on his feet, and shuffled along, waving an arm before him to feel for obstructions. His instep came down on some hard, sharp thing. He yelped and sprawled on the ground, squeezing his foot to stifle the pain. Once the pain had subsided, he groped about in the grass and found a sprinkler head. He twisted the thing angrily, trying in vain to uproot it, and then clutched at his foot again, rubbing away the soreness. Suddenly weary, he hung his head and closed his eyes. He could have nodded off, no problem, but he remembered that this sort of sleepiness was a symptom of concussion and forced himself to stand. His thoughts narrowed to keys, car, drive.

He must have gotten turned around, because after a couple of steps he came up against the wall at the edge of the cliff. He clung to it for an instant, getting his bearings, and made a beeline for the breezeway—he estimated that no more than fifteen or twenty steps would carry him there. But he took twenty-five steps, then thirty, and still was walking on grass. Thinking he might have gone off on a diagonal, he altered his path by a few degrees and continued. He went another twenty steps. The lawn hadn’t been this extensive—he should have hit concrete by now. He decided to return to the wall, get his bearings again, and start over; but he walked until, by his reckoning, he was somewhere out over the Pacific and did not encounter the wall. He tamped down his anxiety, telling himself to stay calm . . . And then he saw that the character of the darkness had changed. Whereas before it had been dead black, now the air had acquired a distinct shine, a gloss that reminded him of obsidian or polished ebony, and appeared to be circulating around him, as if he were at the center of a slow whirlpool. Behind the currents of the whirlpool he could see the elves. Not clearly and not for long, but they were gathered around him, cutting off every avenue of escape, fading out and reappearing closer to hand and in different postures—like watching a streaming video with gaps in the continuity. Fear seeped into the corners of his mind, but did not flood and overflow it. It was fear tempered by doubt and disbelief, by a degree of acceptance, and by one thing more. He wanted the elves to be real. Death at their hands would be preferable to the ignominy of an overdose, hepatitis, any of the protracted stand-ins for suicide toward which he was inexorably bound. This would be death by punch line. Suicide by elf.