Authors: Keith Lee Morris
They could see well enough to get up the stairs, and he pushed Dewey up ahead of him. But then there was nothing left in the world except heat, and the ground convulsed beneath Tonio's feet like a live thing shaking itself from slumber, and he hurried Dewey on as he heard the sound from below again, stronger this time, an extended moan. He fumbled the key from his pocket to open the door but there was Diamond on the stairs, as if he had been forged in the flashlight beam.
“Hurry, hurry, boy,” Diamond said, and boosted Dewey up with a hand to the back. The door opened to a rush of cold air and the sound of it went screaming down the shaft, and from far below came a rumble of expanding air, as if the cold air were being taken in, and then the rumble grew and the wind roared back up, burning hot.
Tonio clung to Dewey's sweater and peeked carefully out the doorway. Outside was the snow and the cloudy night sky and one streetlight and, just across the alleyway, the side door leading into the hotel, the door that he had so often disappeared through. He pushed Dewey ahead of him out into the alley and handed him the flashlight and then mounted the top step, preparing to go out himself, still feeling the heat at his back and the earsplitting noise, but then an arm crossed his chest and barred his way, Diamond grappling with him there on the top step so that he almost lost his balance and tumbled down.
“No,” Diamond shouted. “No, sir, you can't now, you can't! Just the boy! Just the boy!”
He wrenched Diamond's hand away and surveyed the street and right there, behind Dewey, fitting a key into the lock of the door across the alleyway, was Julia.
They were going to be all right. They would be all right after all, just as he had said. Within an hour they would be gone from here, even if they had to walk all the way to the interstate. They could do it together, they could make it. Things would be different, there would not be so much distance between him and his wife, there never should have been, they had known they would be together since the day they met on that bus, they had known it even before then, it had been in the air forever. Dewey saw her, too, his mother, and he slipped and scrambled through the snow calling her name but she seemed not to hear. She opened the door, and she stepped inside, and at the last moment she turned. Tonio saw her clearly in the streetlight. She wore a puzzled expression, as if she was trying hard to remember something that barely eluded her, like peering through a curtain at a light, and for a moment he thought their eyes locked, and he wanted to convey something to her, he wanted to let her know something important, but he didn't know the words, it was only a feelingâhe smiled at her. He smiled, he hoped, in the same way he had smiled that day when they met on the bus, when he held out his hand to show where he'd written her number. He smiled for all he was worth, but he didn't know if she smiled back at him, because his eyes were clouded with tears.
The door across the street slammed shut and Dewey called out and ran to his mother and Tonio stepped out into the street himself, and he had the strangest feeling. He saw Diamond standing there to the side of the door, Diamond with that tragic look on his face,
Please stop, Mr. Addison, you can't,
and he called out to Dewey and Dewey turned, and now he was coming out the door to his son and he could see him there in his sweater standing forlornly in the street, but he felt the crystal in his veins, the ice contracting. He was being pulled, harder this time than ever, through the cold passage. He could feel himself shattering like iceâhis bones, his skinâand with what was left of him, of Tonio, of Mr. Addison, of Julia's husband and Dewey's father, he reached out his arm, and he opened his hand, and he tossed Dewey the key.
O
utside in the snow it was cold but it was also quiet, the party long since ended, the guests all gone to bed, only she out here alone. Gradually her thoughts began to come around her and the brandy haze cleared some and she knew where she was and what she was doing there. She had arrived once again where she knew she would be arriving, and she was aware that she had been arriving there over and over, it was the same place she always arrived, and yet as many times as she had arrived there she could never see it in her head beforehand, couldn't make the discovery until after the scene had played itself out, as if she were facing a mirror and wearing a mask, but each time the mask was removed to reveal her secret identity the mirror went dark.
The first thing to do was get back inside, and for that she had the key, she always had the key. It seemed the simplest, most obvious thing now to turn it in the lock. As she did, and as the snow blew down a white screen against the world, she thought for a moment that she saw Dewey in the snow, but the ground shook beneath her and the vision faded to nothing and she stepped inside the door. There was nothing out there but the snow.
Inside, the wooden steps dropped down into the dark cavern Rose Blanchard had led her through. The cavern was warm and there was an orange glow in the air and from somewhere she heard movement. All this felt natural, as if it were part of a story that she had been told before. Cautiously she made her way down the steps, enough light there in the underground passage to spot rotted boards, broken railingsâit had been entirely black when she and Rose Blanchard passed through earlier.
She reached the bottom and the underground room widened, and she could see at what seemed like a vast distance the small figure of a man working by lantern light, bent over a space where the light disappeared. Her feet carried her forward over the uneven earth floor as if she already knew the way, and she held the man steady in her gaze. She could see now that it was Mr. Tiffany, dressed in jeans and a work shirt, and at first, by the stertorous rasp she could hear coming from his direction, and the movement of the air against her face, she guessed he was pumping a giant bellows. And indeed the space near him was uncomfortably warm as she drew near, and she felt now as if she were being pulled in by a great vacuum. Mr. Tiffany's face ran with sweat, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up to reveal arms streaked with dirt. He appeared to be turning the crank of a long iron door or hatchway that extended almost across the expanse of the cavern floor, yanking on the handle as he tried to pry the hatch all the way back, and with each turn of the handle, the hole beneath widened, the heat and the orange glow became more intense, the rush and suck of air more unbearable, and the noise more like a vast groan or snore.
Mr. Tiffany turned toward her, unsurprised, as if he'd known all along that she was there above the noise and the heat. He continued at his task, but he acknowledged her with a nod of his head. She remained perfectly still, watching the orange light from below dance in Tiffany's eyes as he turned the handle with all his might, drops of sweat falling from his chin.
He paused for a moment in his labors. “This is where the earth breathes in and out,” he said, and forced his weight onto the handle again. The maw opened wider, and the light seemed to be approaching full intensity far below. “I apologize for all of this, Mrs. Addison,” Mr. Tiffany gasped in between turns. “If it were left up to me, it wouldn't necessarily turn out this way.”
“What do you mean?” Sweat broke out on her face and under her collar, and she breathed hard and shielded her eyes from the light with one arm.
“Things need tending to, so I tend them,” Mr. Tiffany said. “I don't judge or make decisions.”
“Who does make decisions?” she asked him.
He turned his gaze toward her but kept at the handle, his muscles tight beneath the rolled-up shirtsleeves. “You do, Mrs. Addison,” he told her.
Grunting loudly, he gave the handle one final hard turn and the door locked into place. He stepped aside and shook out his arms and surveyed the results of his labor. He took a pipe and a packet of tobacco from his jeans pocket and struck a match.
“You'll want to move along now,” he said. He bent his head to the flame and puffed once and raised his head. “Quickly. The stairs you're looking for are over there.” He nodded toward a passageway that she knew led toward the pantry, the same passageway she had come down with Rose Blanchard. She glided toward the stairs, felt as if she were dreaming. Mr. Tiffany stood below, a figure in the depths of the earth, his face glowing red, his cheeks puffing in and out. “I always felt a great deal of admiration for you and your husband. What happened never changed my mind, at least not in your case.” Her face was burning now, the air almost crackling. She saw Mr. Tiffany's face through waves of heat. “Now you'd best move along.” In the weird light, rippling black and orange, she saw his shirt catch fire, and she watched the flames spread upward to his face. He stepped back calmly and disappeared into the shadows.
She had almost reached the stairs when from behind her the air shuddered in a long roar and she was yanked backwardâthe hair pulling back on her head, the skin pulling back against her cheeksâand then propelled forward to the foot of the stairs, and there was a simultaneous explosion and implosion, a sucking in and out, so that everything popped but she could not tell whether it was in the air or in her ears, the entire atmosphere at once cracking open and simply disappearing.
Without turning back, she hurried up the stairs and opened the door and found herself in the small pantry as she knew she would. As she stepped through, her shoe hit the brandy bottle and sent it skittering across the floor. On through the kitchen and the ballroom and the lobby, seeing everything as she had on the night when she and Tonio and Robbie and Dewey checked in, the ladders and the sawhorses and the faded wallpaper, and also on the night when she had first seen the hotel, in 1886, in all its opulence and self-conscious glory. Two sets of stairs, a palimpsest, layered over each other so that she could see them both, the fresh woodwork and the new gas lamps, the faded wallpaper and the broken banister, knowing that above her in the rooms lay all the people fast asleep on the night the hotel opened, sleepy and satisfied with the sumptuous meal and the drinking and dancing, as well as her son, Dewey, all alone, and her husband, Tonio, all alone, and Robbie out there somewhere, all alone, all of them, in the cold, in the night, everyone alone. She thought of Dewey, and inside her she felt the new child, or the child from long ago, the one she would bear for Mr. Addison way back across time. She climbed the last of the stairs, headed down the corridor to room 306, where she knew that, as if she were an actress preparing for her time to come on stage, she would wait outside the door.
As she took her place along the wall, listening to the voices of her husband and Rose Blanchard in the room, the smell of smoke hung, quite distinctly, in the air. The photographs in the lobbyâthere had been no mistake at all.
H
e had known what would happen from the time his father said the word “illusion.” He had known it, he had seen it coming, he had understood that it wasn't real, or at least not in the way he had conceived of that word in his lifetime prior to his arrival in Good Night, Idaho. And yet for Dewey, that short time he had been able to spend with his dad, even in a nasty dark mine shaft deeper and more evil than the deepest pit in hell if there had been a hell, which his father had assured him there wasn't, had been so peaceful, so safe and secure in a dreamlike way, that he had allowed himself to go along with it until the bitter end, and he couldn't say he regretted it, illusion or no illusion. He understood, he thought, what his father was trying to tell him about the sign. He meant that any time you imagined something, that imagined thing took its place in the world, in the mind of the person who imagined it, which was as real a place as Kalamazoo, Michigan, or Schenectady, New York, or maybe even more real, maybe the
only
real place. What had happened was that the two of them, Dewey and his dad, wanted to find each other so much that they had dreamed of seeing each other in the mine, and when both of them dreamed it together it was real. Out of their best imaginings, they had constructed each other and brought each other to the same place. But then the ground had started to rumble and he couldn't get his breath and he had been thrust through a door and out into the snow, in a dark alleyway, where he had seen the strange old man from the mine shaft and then once again his mother, and then the old man disappeared and of course his mother, too, although this time through the doorway like a “normal” person, whatever that meant anymore.
So here he was, alone again in the snow. There was one thing he wished he had thought to tell his fatherâhe wished he had told his father that, even though he was only ten years old, and even though it had been less than a week, he had learned to take care of himself. His father would have liked to hear him say that.
And what it meant to take care of himself right now was to go through that door and follow his mother. He knew well enough by this time that opening the door in the alleyway and going inside wouldn't necessarily lead him to herâdoors could lead to a lot of different thingsâbut this door at this moment was the best hope he had, so he tried the door, he shoved and pulled and turned and twisted, but it was locked. He slumped down with his back against the brick wall of the hotel and considered his surroundings. The alley stretched forever in either direction, and he was tired. This had been the longest night of his life. In fact, it might be getting close to morning. And it was as cold outside as always. If there was one thing he was really tired of, it was being cold.
He would have to walk out of the long alley to the hotel entrance. It seemed like a monumental endeavor. Wouldn't it be nice to just wait right here. When Hugh and Lorraine came in the morning to open the diner, he could get them to bring him to their house so he could take a shower. He would be so cold by then. He could just lie around and wait to disappear like Hector Jones. He was, he realized, on the verge of giving up. His father wasn't there and his mother wasn't there and none of the coaches he ever had were there to tell him he had to keep trying. How easy it was to sit in the snow, his pants and sweater getting wet again, the pellet gun propped against his shoulder, simply fading away. Easiest thing ever. He was about to fall asleep.
Drifting off, he thought of his mother floating through the hallways like a ghost, how she sat on the bed in room 306, composed and calm, as if trying to impart to him this peaceful feeling he felt right now, and he thought of his father and how they had walked together through the mine, and how his father had clung to him even then, in a dream, in the same hard way he had clung to him during his whole life, so that he felt himself raveling and unraveling, his mother setting him loose, smiling at him in that way she had, telling him Dewey, you're all right, I love you and you're all right, and his father keeping him close, always watching, always saying there's danger, Dewey, there's danger, and then he saw his father in those final moments as they came out of the mine shaft and into the alley, his father behind him, and he, Dewey, had turned, and it was as if his father were evaporating, as if the snow had been too hot instead of cold, but at the last second he had raised his hand andâ¦he had raised his hand. He had opened it and let go of something. At the edge of sleep, Dewey had the physical memory of reaching out, of trying to catch something his father had thrown to him.
His arm jerked. He opened his eyes and turned on the flashlight. The beam was sluggish but still strong enough to cast some light on the snow of the alleyway. He got to his feet and moved step-by-step toward the doorway on the other side of the alley, the one they had come out of, and he inspected the freshly fallen snow. Thereâ¦right there. A little oblong cavity, the slightest residue of disturbance. He put his hand into the snow and felt around until it settled on an actual object, which he removed with his numb fingersâa key. It was a real key, a key his father had thrown to him. His father had, after all, really been there. He had hugged Dewey and told him he loved him. In some way it was not a dream. Dewey squeezed the key, cold and tight in his palm. There had to be a reason his father had thrown it to himâit meant something, his father wanted him to do something with it. But there were so many levels to things. You could never know what was actually happening. He was reminded of Cleo, his cat, back in South Carolina, how Cleo would sometimes twitch in her sleep, imagining enemies, coyotes chasing her, snakes in tall grass, while the actual Cleo lay safely on the rug. Who knew what the truth was? How could you say? Right now, he had a key.
Sure enough, it turned in the lock. Dewey balanced the pellet gun and flashlight across his knees and pushed the door open and placed the key back in his pocket. He looked up at the falling snow, the flakes settling on his cheeks. He went through the doorway, and a warm wind hit him full in the face, and there was a loud pop and a flash of light, and he tumbled partway down the stairs and stopped himself by clinging to the rickety banister.
The strange air came at him in waves, puffing him up and then suffocating him. He pulled himself to his feet, stood on the stairs, and looked down to see a fire pouring from the earth. Out of the fire strode the dark figure of the creepy hotel owner, face covered in soot, thin hair singed and smoking around his head. “This is not where you belong,” the hotel owner said. And he started up the stairway toward Dewey.
Dewey's aim wasn't goodâno doubt Hector Jones, who'd had training from his dad, would have done betterâbut he squinted through one eye and raised the Winchester etc. etc. to his shoulder, pulled the trigger, and hit his target in the left ear.
“Goddamn,” the hotel owner said, reeling back down the stairs and holding his blistered hand against his head. “Goddamn it.”
Dewey bolted back up the stairs and out into the cold again, making sure the door was closed behind him, and he staggered as fast as he could through the snow. Surprisingly, in such a short time, the sky had begun to lighten, and as Dewey neared the corner of the alleyway, he hoped to God that Hugh and Lorraine would be opening the diner soon. But when he turned the corner and stood before the hotel in the faint morning light, he saw that the building was burning, and he felt his skin begin to crackleânot like fire, but like electricity, like ice, like the last moment before something shatters.