Travelers Rest (19 page)

A
fter they'd warmed up back at the diner over cups of hot chocolate, and while Hugh and Lorraine were feeling good about having gotten everything out in the open, which from Dewey's perspective seemed to have taken maybe a little too long for them to be congratulating themselves about, since it seemed important to tell someone who was in imminent danger of disappearing (according to Hugh) that fact
immediately,
the two of them had finally invited Dewey to leave the hotel and come to their house to stay. It was important not to waste any more time, they said, if they were going to try to figure out a way to help Dewey and his mom and dad—
which they were committed to doing, right?
(At this point they had looked very seriously into each other's eyes and their hands had shot out almost by magic and clasped at the center of the table, like a really dramatic scene in a movie, one performed quite effectively, Dewey had to admit.) When they said these things it was like they were making a secret pact that no one else in the diner (three people, including the teenage cook) could know about, which was really confusing and frustrating and not very confidence-inspiring, because even a ten-year-old kid knew that this type of situation, one that involved disappearing persons and violation of the laws of the entire physical universe, if Hugh was to be believed, didn't require secrecy so much as it required a buttload of scientists and federal law enforcement officials and search dogs and possibly a SWAT team. Again Dewey was left with the question: What was wrong with these people? But who else was he going to trust? Uncle Robbie was gone for good, apparently, and of course he might not have been much help anyway, so who was there? Hugh and Lorraine. It was like a movie called
The Two Stooges.

So Dewey had been dispatched to the hotel to round up his things and come back in a half hour. As he walked across the street, he looked back at Lorraine waving happily in the window, and then turned to face the hotel and wondered what it might feel like to vanish. He suspected it would be a lot like one of his “states” or “episodes,” as his parents referred to them when they talked to his therapist or school counselor (or as his mom referred to them, really, because his dad just kind of sat there in a bored way during these sessions and winked at Dewey every once in a while). You would just fade off into someplace and not know you'd gone there, only you wouldn't come back. Or maybe when “the little kids disappeared,” as Hugh so delicately put it to one of these little kids who was, supposedly, on the verge of disappearing himself, they simply went to wherever it was that their parents had gone to, and everyone was reunited. Maybe he, his mom, and his dad would magically reappear in the living room in Mount Pleasant, watching a basketball game on TV and eating popcorn—they had never actually done this, since Dewey was the only one who liked (a) basketball and (b) popcorn, but it was nice to think about, anyway—and this whole thing would have been like a long, bad, awful dream, or maybe even one of his “states” for real. This was a possibility almost too good to start considering, and Dewey resisted the urge to lose himself in the idea because, as Hugh and Lorraine said, there was no time to waste.

He opened the heavy door to the hotel and fought his way successfully past the snow that had built up around the doorway, then made his way up the creaky old stairs and into his musty old room and looked around at all the clothes and stuff. His father's things were still packed, so it was mostly a matter of packing his mother's clothes and the items of his own that he had scattered around the room, which was going to take some time when all he had to work with was the streetlight outside the window. This was going to be a lot like the tedious task of cleaning his room at home.

He changed out of his wet pants and his coat and he managed to pick up some clothes for a while and then he sat on the bed to think about how he was going to get the heavy suitcases out of the hotel and ended up deciding he would just wheel them out and shove them down the stairs. The image of the suitcases smashing their way to the lobby got him back up and packing again for a minute, but then he sat back down because the phrase “a boy on the point of vanishing” started going through his head and he couldn't make it quit.
A boy on the point of vanishing.
He could hear it as a voice-over narration by that guy who played the part of the snowman in
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,
which Dewey had watched on TV a few weeks before:
Ten-year-old David “Dewey” Addison, a boy on the point of vanishing, had a very shiny nose.
He sat on the edge of the bed marveling at this voice and at the story that it told him about himself: that he was in danger of not being Dewey anymore, that he could vanish, cease to exist, that he could—say it—
die
here. It seemed totally unfair to Dewey that all this could have happened as the result of one tiny decision like getting off the interstate during a snowstorm, which after all was the responsible thing to do. He didn't even have a driver's license and he knew that much.

A lot of what Hugh said seemed pretty hard to believe. He didn't think that Hugh and Lorraine had any kind of bad intentions—they had been too nice to him and were obviously too concerned for his well-being for him to doubt their sincerity—but maybe they were just stupid. Maybe everyone around here was stupid, like it was a whole town that had gotten cut off from the modern world (where were the cell phones? The iPads? The flat-screen TVs?) and kept reproducing out of the same gene pool—Dewey knew from his father that a situation like that could, over time, produce truly mind-boggling results, such as all the weird animals of Madagascar. And in fact that creepy hotel owner with his big crooked nose had looked a lot like a proboscis monkey, which might actually
be
from Madagascar.

The hotel owner. Dewey had forgotten about him entirely. Where
was
that guy when you needed him? Or not even when you needed him—just where
was
he?

It was dark and wet-looking outside. The snow came down in fluffy clumps that stuck to the windowpane almost like big raindrops, and the wind had died down to a sigh. For the first time it seemed that the storm might be letting up. Maybe if it really stopped snowing for, like, five minutes, his parents would emerge from some shelter they'd been hiding in, possibly, and come back to get him.

It had been over half an hour. The Dooze Man didn't care. Either Hugh or Lorraine would be at the diner till ten o'clock, so he wasn't really in a hurry, and it wasn't like they could punish him or anything. Plus he knew neither one of them would dare set foot in the hotel. They might stand down on the street and shout up at the windows, but that was about it.

He was going deep into a particular line of thinking, yes he was, and he wasn't about to let anything interrupt it this time—daydreaming was bad for him, or so everyone said, but this was different, this was
thinking.
He had been here by himself for four days and he had been scared by a lot of things during that time but he wasn't scared now of disappearing—why not? Because he wasn't. Disappearing. Everything was just the same as always—here he was, he was Dewey, the same curly hair on his head, wearing the same ugly sweater. He didn't feel at all like a person in danger of vanishing. Hugh and Lorraine weren't responsible for their superstitions—they were just like members of some primitive culture that worshipped the sun or believed in human sacrifices or thought that Jesus would come back soon. Hugh's mother had disappeared and he had seen a mirage of her walking through the park, so he believed that the town was a “magnet” that sucked people in and turned them into ghosts. Dewey's mother and father had disappeared, and he had seen mirages of them in the hotel or on the street, so he believed what Hugh said. But what if none of that was true at all? What if the whole thing had a much more regular, human explanation? His dad would be disappointed in him for not having thought of this before, for having been tricked by all the stuff about vanishing people and black holes disguised as mine shafts.

Hugh himself even said that all the bad stuff happened now at the hotel and not the mine. And nobody in the town, except the Dooze Man himself and one other person, was brave enough to even set foot in the hotel—and that one other person was the creepy owner, who had been there to check them in. So what was the greater probability, as his dad would say—that the physical laws of the universe would somehow be different in some little town called Good Night, Idaho, or that the creepy owner was messing with people's heads? How hard would it be to create some sort of hologram out of a digital image you'd taken of Dewey's mother, for instance? And how hard would it be to make up some tall guy to look like his dad and send him out to lurch around in the snow like a freak? It reminded him of an episode of
Scooby-Doo.
He couldn't believe people had fallen for it all these years. The real thing that must be going on, it seemed to the Dooze Man, was that the adults were all being kidnapped, and sometimes the kids, too, unless the owner decided he didn't want them for some reason, in which case, like Hugh, they were left to fend for themselves. (It wouldn't be fair to speculate, Dewey thought, about why Hugh hadn't been an enticing kidnap victim, though he did recall, for a moment, Hugh's smoldering bald head once he'd taken off his hat.)

Obviously, there had to be a logical explanation. Obviously, his mother and father had not actually vanished, nor had they left him on purpose, and chances were heavily in favor of their still being here somewhere and trying to reach him but being kept from it by someone, the hotel owner, most likely. Obviously, Dewey was not about to “disappear.” The thing to do now was…

That was a problem. In fact, after just a minute or two of confronting this problem, sitting in the dark and staring out the window, Dewey became more frightened of the hotel than he had ever been before, because if all these things he'd thought of were true, it meant the creepy owner
was still in here somewhere
and would no doubt like to get his hands on Dewey, who had so far managed to avoid attracting his attention somehow.

The whole place was so absolutely quiet and still that Dewey could hear only three things—the wind, the buzzing streetlight, and his own breath. He sat like that for a long time listening for some fourth noise, something that might tell him where his parents were or where the owner was, but he didn't hear anything. He thought about turning on the TV, but that wouldn't help. He knew that facts came with obligations—once you recognized something was true, you were bound in some way to act on it. So there was only one thing to do, which was to get on with the business of searching the hotel from top to bottom for his parents, or at least some clues—but he was held back because, for the first time, he was really afraid to leave the room.

Then he started thinking of his father again and what his father would tell him to do:
Doozer, a good rule of thumb in a situation like this would be…
what? If you're going to begin an investigation, you have to start with clues—that seemed logical enough. And where had he found the most clues so far? Room 306, which also had the advantage of being the only other place in the hotel where he felt marginally at ease, since he'd been in there several times.

The door to 306 was open like it always was. He peered nervously into the room but his mother wasn't there. When his mother wasn't there, the room was bare and dark and dusty and old. When his mother was seated there on the bed, the room looked entirely different, lit by the flickering wall lamps, all the colors bright, a nice smell in the air. Did the creepy owner have some way of lighting the room when someone peeked in? Of magically cleaning and straightening everything? There was no doubt that the room was, in fact, neat, clean, and well lit when his mother was in it, whether day or night. The only thing he could deduce from this was that the creepy owner must be pretty smart. He also might be crazy, because it was still unclear to Dewey what any of this was supposed to accomplish. Who but a crazy person would torture a little kid by making him think his mother was there when she wasn't?

It was definitely
not
his mother. He needed to decide that once and for all, so that he could stop being fooled by the same illusion over and over again. His mother was okay, she was fine, but she was somewhere else, probably trying to get back to him right now. The mother who appeared in this room, room 306, could not be his actual mother because she did not behave like his mother at all. If you tried talking to this mother, you got no response. If you tried yelling, crying, screaming, even possibly raging and breaking things, Dewey suspected, you would still get no response from this mother. When you stepped into the room, you got the icy feeling under your skin, like cold water trickling along your nerves, and your vision went white and you felt like you were going to faint, and then your eyes opened and you were standing there in an empty, old, crappy, cold, musty, nasty room, and you got no response from this mother, who was no longer there. It had happened more times than he could count.

Right now the room was empty and especially gray and dreary-looking what with the snow continuing to fall there out the window and the night getting fully dark as the earth spun away from another day here in the middle of nowhere. It made Dewey think of the life he had on the other side of the country, or the one he had had just a couple of weeks ago, where he could do things like spend the day at the gym while his mom worked out in the fitness center, or decide which invitation to spend the night at which friend's house he should accept, or ride his bike to the soccer field, or go eat barbecue with his dad. It was possible that none of those things would ever happen again, not in this lifetime, that he wouldn't go to Folly Beach or gaze out the car window at the Intracoastal Waterway and the palmetto trees. But he couldn't believe that, not really. The entire time since they'd pulled off the road in the snowstorm had the quality of being one long, bad dream, and even though Dewey knew he was wide awake, he still believed there had to be a point at which all this would end suddenly, in a flash of recognition, the way dreams ended, and everything would go back to the way it was before.