The Red Hotel Read online

  She glanced at the bedside clock. It said 6.25 a.m. ‘Go look in the mirror,’ she told T-Yon.

  T-Yon got out of bed and went to the bathroom. ‘That’s so scary. I actually have a handprint on my cheek.’

  Sissy said, ‘I need to talk to your brother, Everett, T-Yon – and urgently. Those two people you saw in your room last night, and that argument you just had with your mother. They’re both signs, T-Yon, like a weathervane swings around when there’s a storm coming. Something’s brewing in this hotel, something that could be disastrous, or even fatal, and believe me it’s going to happen real soon.’

  She came up to T-Yon and gently touched her cheek. ‘These fingermarks on your face, they’re what we call psychostigmata.’

  ‘Psycho-what? What are they when they’re at home?’

  ‘Psychostigmata are the impressions that a psychic experience can make on your physical body. Like people who have puncture wounds in the palms of their hands after they dream about the crucifixion, or even bleed. Or people who dream that they’re fighting with demons, and wake up covered all over with bruises.

  ‘The marks on your face – that’s all the proof I need that something is about to happen here. To misquote Sherlock Holmes, if you eliminate the improbable and the highly unlikely and the plain insane, whatever remains must be the answer, even if you think it’s totally crackers.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sissy,’ said T-Yon. ‘I really don’t understand what you’re talking about.’

  Sissy was rummaging in one of the drawers in the closet, trying to find herself a pair of knee-length nylon socks.

  ‘What I’m saying to you is that my gut instinct about you and your brother and The Red Hotel has been right all along. There’s a very powerful presence somewhere in this building, and it’s angry about you being here, for whatever reason, and it means to do you and your brother considerable harm. I believe it gave you those nightmares about Everett, and I believe it did it for the sole purpose of making sure you came here to Baton Rouge, where its influence is much stronger. It wants you and Everett together – close together, intertangled just like you saw in your nightmares – so that it can take its revenge on both of you. Maybe simultaneously, just like it happens in your nightmare.’

  ‘So what can we do? Can we, like, exorcize it?’

  Sissy found a sock, took it out of the drawer and stretched it. ‘If you mean is it worth us bringing in a priest and asking him to sprinkle the hotel with holy water, then the answer is categorically no. Waste of holy water, especially at five dollars the four-ounce bottle. This isn’t a religious possession, T-Yon. Nothing to do with Satan, or demons.’

  She paused, and looked at T-Yon with a serious expression on her face, like a mother warning her daughter about all the evil in the world. ‘I’m almost sure from what we saw in your cards that Vanessa Slider and her son, Shem, are behind all of this. In fact my feeling is that those two people you saw in your room last night, that’s who they were. Not them in person, of course, but their resonance. Or their spirits, if you prefer.’

  ‘This is really creeping me out,’ said T-Yon.

  ‘Well, let’s go downstairs and find ourselves some coffee and some breakfast and let’s go talk to Everett about my searching the hotel for whatever it is that’s hiding here. I need to go on a spirit-hunt, T-Yon, or the Lord alone knows what shit is going to come raining down on us, and I mean it.’

  Spirit Hunt

  Everett was still looking puffy eyed, but he had showered and shaved and changed into a fresh white shirt and fresh-pressed cream-colored pants, and after he had sat down with Sissy and T-Yon at their breakfast table, and drunk a large black coffee with molasses and nutmeg, he began to talk with much more confidence.

  ‘I truly believe we can get past this,’ he said. ‘OK, yes, we’ve had the worst publicity that you could ever imagine. But nobody’s found any dead bodies yet, and, most important, nobody’s found any dead bodies here inside the hotel. That would have done for us, period.’

  ‘How about the opening gala?’ asked Sissy. ‘Is that still going to go ahead?’

  Everett tapped the table to show that he was touching wood. ‘I’m still waiting for Detective Garrity to give me the final word, but I haven’t canceled anything yet, and we’re still taking new bookings. In fact, bookings have been really brisk, under the circumstances.’

  ‘That doesn’t altogether surprise me. You know how ghoulish some people can be.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Sissy, I don’t think they’re coming here because of that. They’re coming here because we’ve had such good reviews. We had a terrific report in the Louisiana Hotel Guide, just posted online this morning. They said that we had really raised the bar.’

  Sissy cut the last of her maple pancakes with her fork. ‘You’re still amenable to my taking a look around?’

  ‘I guess so. A little reluctantly, I have to admit – but so long as you don’t advertise what you’re doing to all and sundry. I’ll fix you up with an identity badge, you’ll need it.’ He paused, and then he said, ‘I still don’t really get what it is you’re looking for.’

  ‘T-Yon had a very eerie experience last night.’

  Everett reached across the table and squeezed T-Yon’s hand. ‘Yes, I know. Samuel told me about it, first thing this morning.’

  ‘That’s the kind of thing I’m looking for.’

  ‘Samuel said that two people came into T-Yon’s room while she was asleep. Or at least she thought they did.’

  ‘You sound a little skeptical.’

  Everett put down his coffee mug and spread his arms wide, as if he were embracing the world. ‘Like I told you, I don’t disrespect anybody who believes in the supernatural. I don’t disrespect anybody for what they believe in. Muslim, Mormon, Seventh Day Adventist. Tea Party. I honestly don’t care. But Samuel searched every empty room on the second floor, and there was nobody there who shouldn’t have been, and as soon as everybody came down for breakfast, he also checked the rest of the rooms. He didn’t find anybody, Sissy, and whatever spirits or spooks you believe in, to me that means that T-Yon must have imagined those people, whether she was asleep or whether she was awake.’ He turned to T-Yon and said, ‘Sorry, sis. No offense, really.’

  Sissy shrugged in surrender. ‘OK, Everett. Fine. But all I can say is, for your own sake, try to keep a very open mind. Whatever you care to call it, there is some spook in this hotel, and it’s making no secret of the fact that it doesn’t like you being here.’

  Everett stood up, took hold of Sissy’s hand and kissed her wrist. ‘Good luck,’ he grinned, and winked at her. ‘I’m afraid you’re really going to need it.’

  Sissy took her purple loose-weave shoulder bag with her, so that she could carry her DeVane cards, as well as her Alphabet Cards, her witch compass, her gunja beads, her rosary, and a selection of herbs which she had begged from the chef in the kitchen – fresh cilantro, fresh broad-leaf parsley, fresh oregano, filé, black pepper and chili powder. She also took a crucifix and a bottle of holy water from Lourdes, but she didn’t tell T-Yon about these. She had no intention of trying to carry out an exorcism, even if she had known how, but they would help her to trace any spirits who might have held strong religious beliefs when they were alive. From experience, Sissy knew that in death, or in the afterlife, religious people were often deeply resentful that their faith hadn’t brought them peace. Instead, they were furious that they had left behind them so much unfinished business, so many scores to settle, and that they had lost forever the people they loved. Occasionally they reacted with such hostility to religious artifacts that crosses would glow red hot and holy water would boil in its bottle – but that, of course, was a sure way of knowing that they were still around.

  T-Yon wanted to come with her on her spirit-hunt, but Sissy said, ‘No, sweetheart. Absolutely not. Not this time, anyhow – not until I have a much clearer idea what we’re up against. The way I understand it, you’re a potential victim, and I wouldn’t ta
ke an antelope along with me if I was out hunting for lions. You’d be a distraction and a liability. I’m sorry. Why don’t you spend some time helping your brother with this gala opening of his – that’s if the police allow him to hold it.’

  T-Yon gave Sissy a hug, and said, ‘OK.’

  Sissy was really beginning to warm to her. Apart from being very pretty, she had a beguiling mixture of innocence and determination that reminded Sissy of what she had been like when she was in her early twenties. She also felt that T-Yon might have some psychic sensitivity of her own, which she should nurture. One day, she would have to pass the DeVane cards on to somebody younger; and if she couldn’t do that, she would probably have no choice but to shred them. That would be a criminal shame, but safer. In the wrong hands, the DeVane cards’ predictions could be catastrophic.

  She took the elevator to the seventh story, and then walked along the corridor until she found the door to the staircase. The door was wedged open and she found two hotel cleaners in bright red housecoats, scrubbing the concrete landing.

  ‘Can I get up on to the roof this way?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure you can, ma’am. Right up them stairs. Far as I know the door ain’t locked.’

  She looked at the wall, which was still patterned with reddish-brown bloodstains, those bloodstains that had looked to Everett like seven or eight squashed moths. To Sissy, they resembled Rorschach prints, those inky splodges that psychiatrists use to see what their patients read into them.

  Sissy could see a face like a troll, and another face that was furtively smiling, as if it knew something that she didn’t, but wasn’t going to tell her. She saw two eyes wide with bewilderment. She could see what looked like a woman with her arms and her legs wide apart and her head covered by a hood. Also, strangely, she could see one stain that could have been an animal – some ugly breed of dog, by the look of it, like a pit bull terrier.

  One of the cleaners was spraying the wall with an anti-graffiti solvent and scrubbing it hard with a scrubbing brush, but it was obvious from her grunting that the stains were proving very hard to clean off.

  ‘Having trouble?’ Sissy asked her.

  The cleaner wiped the perspiration from her forehead with the back of her hand. ‘Never known anything so darn hard to get off. It’s worser than that marker pen.’

  ‘It’s supposed to be blood, isn’t it?’ said Sissy. ‘That shouldn’t be so hard.’

  ‘Whatever it is, it ain’t choosing to budge, not one bit. I reckon we’ll have to paint over it.’

  ‘OK,’ said Sissy. ‘Good luck.’

  Adjusting her bag on her shoulder, she climbed the steps to the door that led to the roof. She pushed open the bar, and the door opened, and she stepped outside.

  It was already warm out here, eighty degrees at least, with seventy-percent humidity. The sky was hazy, and only the faintest westerly wind was blowing, just enough to stir the flag on The Red Hotel’s flagpole. Sissy walked across the roof to the east-facing parapet, overlooking Third Street. From here, she could see all the way across the city, from the gray artdeco tower of the State Capitol building in the north to the campanile of Louisiana State University to the south. Traffic sparkled on the interstate.

  When she turned around, she could see the mud-brown Mississippi, almost a mile wide, gleaming in the morning sun, and Port Allen on the other side, with its riverside promenade.

  In spite of the heat, she shivered, in the same way that she had shivered when she first walked across the lobby of The Red Hotel. Maybe it hadn’t been the chilly air conditioning after all, because she had the same sensation up here on the roof. There was something icy in the heart of this building, something so cold that it seemed to be draining all the warmth out of everything around it. She could feel it, right through the soles of her spotty purple Keds.

  ‘Vanessa?’ she said, out loud. ‘Vanessa Slider? It’s you, isn’t it, Vanessa? You’ve come back, haven’t you? Or maybe you never went away.’ She waited, and listened, although she didn’t seriously expect a reply. All she heard was the sound of traffic and the mournful hooting of an Exxon petroleum tanker as it left its mooring by the intracoastal waterway.

  She crossed over to a rusting metal box that covered one of the vents from the hotel’s air conditioning. She took her DeVane cards out of her bag and opened them up. She didn’t much like the way the clown on the front was looking at her today, not that she ever did. His eyes seemed to be narrower than usual, with a slight squint, as if he were saying: You be very careful what you ask us for, Sissy Sawyer.

  She held up the picture of the clown in front of her face and said, ‘Oh, yes? And why exactly is that, Monsieur Le Pitre?’

  We cards – we see the future, as it was seen from the past. We know everything.

  ‘Oh, really?’

  You know us better than anybody. You know what we can see. We can tell which loves are going to flourish, long before the lovers are aware of each other’s existence. We can see murder, years before the killer or the killed are even born.

  ‘So? What are you trying to say to me, monsieur?’

  I am reminding you that we are not your obedient servants, Sissy Sawyer. We were not devised and drawn simply to back up your hunches, you withered old flower-child. Don’t you forget that, ever, or you might get more than you bargained for.

  Sissy lowered the picture of the clown and shook her head. ‘Shit and a bit,’ she said. ‘I’m talking to a pack of cards. No, I’m not. I’m talking to myself. I’m even insulting myself.’

  She knew that the clown wasn’t really saying any of that, but his face had been so artfully drawn that he was not only sly, and knowing, and disapproving, but he appeared to be able to change expression. Looking at that face, anybody who was tempted to use the DeVane cards to answer any frivolous questions would think twice about it.

  In spite of that, Sissy shuffled the cards and then laid them out in the Cross of Lorraine pattern on top of the ventilation box. Then she took the card which was her own Predictor card, La Fille Qui Regarde Fixement Les Étoiles, The Star-Gazer. It showed a beautiful naked girl with wavy red hair that reached all the way down to her bottom. She was reclining on a chaise longue in the middle of a rose garden, even though it was night-time, and the moon was out, and the sky was crowded with stars. She was staring upward with a dreamy look on her face.

  The very first time she had looked at this card, Sissy hadn’t seen them, because the background was so dark, but, behind the stone balustrade which surrounded the rose garden, it was just possible to make out that six or seven wolves were gathered – wolves with shaggy black fur and poisonous yellow eyes and their dark red tongues hanging out. Sissy had always taken this card to mean that if she took it upon herself to try and predict the future, she did so at her own peril. The stars spoke to her, yes; but the wolves were always waiting.

  She turned over the first card. Again, it was La Châtelaine, the thin, disapproving woman in gray – or rather, nine identical, thin, disapproving women in gray – each with their bunches of nine keys around their waists.

  ‘So, you are here, Vanessa,’ said Sissy, under her breath. ‘Now let’s see if we can find out where you are exactly, and what you’re so angry about.’

  She turned over the next card, and it was L’Asile De Mon Frère, My Brother’s Asylum, which T-Yon had taken to represent The Red Hotel. So far, the cards were giving Sissy the same warnings that they had given T-Yon, only in a different sequence. But Sissy had no illusions about it. The fact that her first card had been La Châtelaine had shown her that Vanessa Slider was aware that she was here, and that she probably knew why.

  The third card surprised her, and it surprised her because she couldn’t remember ever having seen it before. She was sure that she knew every single DeVane card intimately, and all of the myriad meanings that their pictures symbolized, from the stampeding black horses which could predict either a catastrophic failure in business or else a huge breakthrough in somebo
dy’s career, to the coy lovers hiding naked in a forest, which predicted either a secret affair or else a newly flourishing adventurousness in a long-lasting relationship.

  This card was simply called Le Mur, The Wall. It showed a woman in a black floor-length robe standing in a corridor in front of a whitewashed wall. She had her left hand pressed flat against it and her right hand held to her heart. A small sepia portrait was hanging on the wall, in the top-left corner. It showed a handsome man in a felt hat, looking at the woman with a sad expression on his face.

  ‘Now what in the name of heck are you trying to tell me?’ said Sissy. She couldn’t believe that she had never seen this card before. She must have done, but how she could have forgotten it she couldn’t imagine. She was tempted to pick up all the cards and count them, just to make sure that she hadn’t mysteriously acquired one extra.

  ‘The wall . . .’ she whispered. But which wall? Was it a real wall or a metaphorical wall, some obstruction that was preventing somebody from getting where they wanted to go? And who was the woman? Was it Vanessa Slider, or some other woman, and why was she pressing her hand against the wall like that?

  The man appeared only as a portrait, and Sissy knew what this signified: that he had left the woman, and was now far away. Either that, or he was dead.

  The petroleum tanker hooted again as it began to make its way southward down the river. Sissy looked up, and as she did so, a woman appeared.

  Sissy couldn’t stop herself from letting out an ‘ah!’ of sheer surprise. The woman had stepped out from behind the square concrete elevator housing, where she must have been standing ever since Sissy came out on to the roof, but how Sissy had failed to see her when she had crossed from one side of the roof to the other, she couldn’t think.