Forever Odd (10 page)

CHAPTER 23

I
NSIDE THE REAR DOORS OF THE HOTEL LAY what might have been a secondary lobby illuminated only by ashen light that sifted through the gap in the plywood barrier.

My shadow before me, a gray ghost, was visible from its legs to its neck. Its head became one with the murk, as though it were cast by a decapitated man.

I switched on a flashlight and swept the walls. The fire itself had not raged here, but smoke stains mottled everything.

At first the presence of furniture—sofas, armchairs—surprised me, as it seemed they should have been salvaged. Then I realized that their grungy condition resulted not simply from smoke and from five years of abandonment, but also from having been saturated by fire hoses, which had left their stuffing sodden and their frames badly warped.

Even five years after the tragedy, the air smelled of char, of scorched metal, of melted plastics, of fried insulation. Underlying that miasma were other smells less astringent but also less pleasing, which perhaps were best left unanalyzed.

Footprints patterned the carpet of soot, ashes, dust, and sand. Danny’s unique tracks were not among them.

On closer inspection, I saw that none of the tread patterns of the shoes appeared crisp. They had been smoothed by drafts, softened by later siftings of ashes and dust.

These prints had been made weeks if not months ago. My quarry had not entered by this route.

A set or perhaps two sets of paw prints looked fresh. Maybe the Panamints of a hundred years ago—close to nature and unfamiliar with the roulette wheel—could have read these impressions at a glance.

With nothing of the tracker in my heritage and nothing in my fry-cook training applicable to the problem, I had to rely not on knowledge but on imagination to summon a creature to fit those tracks. My mind leapt directly to an image of a saber-toothed tiger, though that species had been extinct over ten thousand years.

In the unlikely event that a single immortal saber-tooth had survived millennia beyond all others of his species, I supposed I could escape intact from a confrontation. After all, I had thus far survived Terrible Chester.

To the left of this lobby had been a coffee shop with a view of the hotel pool. A partial collapse of the ceiling, just beyond the entrance to the restaurant, presented extreme geometries of Sheetrock and two-by-fours.

To the right, a wide hallway led into darkness that a flashlight could not entirely relieve, into silence. Bronze letters fixed to the wall above the entrance to that passage promised
REST ROOMS, CONFERENCE ROOMS, LADY LUCK BALLROOM.

Luckless people had died in the ballroom. A massive chandelier, suspended not from a red-steel beam as the construction drawings had required, but from a wooden beam, had fallen on the crowd, crushing and skewering those under it, when the initial shock of the quake had cracked some four-by-sixes as though they were balsa wood.

I crossed the littered lobby, weaving through the sagging sofas and the overturned armchairs, and departed by a third route, another wide hall that evidently led toward the front of the hotel. The tracks of the saber-tooth also proceeded in that direction.

Belatedly, I thought of the satellite phone. I took it from my pocket, switched off the ringer, and set it to vibrate instead. If the seeker of miracles called me again, and if I happened to be close to her position in the hotel, I didn’t want the phone to reveal my presence.

I’d never visited this place during the years that it had been a thriving enterprise. When it is within my power to do so, when the dead are making no demands on me, I seek serenity, not excitement. The turn of the cards and the roll of the dice offer me no chance to win freedom from the destiny that my gift imposes upon me.

My unfamiliarity with the resort, combined with the damage wrought by the earthquake and the fire, presented me with a man-made wilderness: hallways and rooms no longer always clearly defined due to the collapse of partitions, a maze of passages and spaces, here barren and bleak, here chaotic and threatening, revealed only in wedges defined by the flashlight beam.

By a route that I could not have retraced, I entered the burned-out casino.

Casinos have no windows, no clocks. The masters of the games want their customers to forget the passage of time, to lay down just one more bet, and then one more. Cavernous, larger than a football field, the room was too long for my light to find the farther end.

One corner of the casino had suffered partial collapse. Otherwise, the immense chamber remained structurally intact.

Hundreds of broken slot machines were tumbled on the floor. Others stood in long rows, as they had before the quake, half-melted but at attention, like ranks of war machines, robot soldiers halted in their march when a blast of radiation had fried their circuits.

Most of the games and pit-boss stations had been reduced to charred debris. A couple of scorched craps tables remained, filled with blackened chunks of plaster ornamentation that had fallen from the ceiling.

Amidst the charred and splintered rubble, two damaged blackjack games stood upright. A pair of stools waited at one of those games, as though the devil and his date had been playing when the fire broke out, had wished not to be distracted from their cards, commanding respect from the flames.

Instead of the devil, a pleasant-looking man with receding hair perched on a stool. He had been sitting in the dark until my light found him. His arms rested on the padded rim of the crescent-shaped table, as if he were waiting for a dealer to shuffle the deck.

This did not appear to be the kind of man who would collaborate in murder and assist with a kidnapping. Fiftyish, pale, with a full mouth and a dimpled chin, he might have been a librarian or a small-town pharmacist.

As I approached and he looked up, I could not be certain of his status. I knew that he was a spirit only when I saw him register surprise as he realized that I could see him.

On the day of the disaster, perhaps he had been brained by falling debris. Or burned alive.

He did not reveal to me the true condition of his corpse at the time he died, a courtesy for which I was grateful.

Peripheral movement in the shadows snared my attention. From out of the darkness came the lingering dead.

CHAPTER 24

S
TEPPING INTO THE LIGHT BEFORE ME, A pretty young blonde in a blue-and-yellow cocktail dress revealed immodest decolletage. She smiled, but at once her smile faltered.

From my right came an old woman with a long face, eyes vacant of hope. She reached out to me, then frowned at her hand, withdrew it, lowered her head, as if she thought, for whatever reason, that I would find her repellent.

From my left appeared a short, red-headed, cheerful-looking man whose anguished eyes belied his amused smile.

I turned, revealing others with my flashlight. A cocktail waitress in her Indian-princess uniform. A casino guard with a gun on his hip.

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.

CHAPTER 25

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.