So they know I'm back. Only the baby's wails continued. Abruptly, the door slammed, and the chandelier jangled. Reflexively, he glanced up at the trembling crystal daggers. Then he peered around the lobby, inspecting every corner.
From the moment he'd spied the padlocked doors of the elevator, he'd understood them to be permanently sealed and not merely shut for the season. This applied to much else here in Edgeharbor. Already the Arms seemed wretchedly familiar, like the setting for a recurrent dream, though he'd only been in town just over a week. With a sigh, he lumbered up the stairs.
Patches of carpet had worn down to bare boards. At the second-floor landing only an unshaded bulb in a ceiling fixture diluted the gloom. Need to lie down. Pressure swelled in his head, and it hurt to move his legs. Now.
When he'd checked in, the proprietor's wife had been furious about his demanding a room above the second floor, and she'd wailed in broken English about all the climbing she would have to do. But she'd relented when he paid two weeks in advance and threw in an extra twenty. Being the sole guest carried advantages, and he had his reasons for insisting on an upper level. Anything lower would have been useless for observation...and the windows would have been far too accessible from the ground.
Before he started down the freezing hallway, he contemplated the darkness. A draft fluttered at the back of his neck.
As he turned the key, he listened. Cautiously easing the door open, he groped for the light switch. The threadbare carpet exuded a clammy miasma of suntan lotion and sweat, seeming to emanate even from the few cheerless furnishings. He locked the door behind him, slapped out the light. In the dark, he strode across the room and parted the curtains.
Moisture beaded the glass like black perspiration, and a damp lattice of frost feathered the edges of the pane. Scarcely five o'clock, but darkness rose like floodwaters below. He touched the glass, his fingertips slipping through the haze of moisture, leaving marks like snail tracks. Turning away, he unzipped his leather jacket. Dingy gloom seeped through the curtains, and wind shivered the windowpane. He fumbled with a switch at the back of a sconce until it flickered, barely revealing the room.
The single chair had been painted white so thickly that strands of wicker seemed molded into a single lump. He sat heavily and checked his watch. The numerals gleamed faintly. Can't call for hours yet. Silence pooled in the low corners, stagnant and chilly.
Wearily, he got up again, pacing, his movements about the room growing disjointed, purposeless. Is this all there is now? Twice he opened and closed the same drawer; then he wandered into the bathroom. The clumsily rigged shower resembled a trap in which the claw-footed tub had been snared. So this is my life? He looked behind the shower curtain, then returned to the bedroom and checked the tight closet. It felt as though every cell in his body craved rest. Should do some work. He swayed for a moment before falling back into the chair as though shoved. He picked at knotted laces with dead fingers, then kicked off a shoe and watched it roll toward the bed. Pulling himself up with a grunt, he heaved himself onto the mattress just as the wall sconce buzzed and went out. Swell.
The bedside lamp had been manufactured to resemble something roughly crafted from a jug. He switched it on, even that slight movement causing the bedsprings to protest like angry crickets. The lamplight made a perfect circle on the ceiling where the dust-thickened remnant of a cobweb trailed. Have to stay awake. Again he scrutinized the room. Both the wooden nightstand and the dresser had been painted white too many summers ago, and even in this light, wide swathes of glossy red still showed through. He examined the only picture, a seascape with gulls that sailed stiffly over greenish waters. It squarely missed obscuring a stain on the wall. The lumpish waves and the wings of the birds achieved crude symmetry, and despite the mediocrity of execution, something threatening seemed to lurk in the swirling tide. Letting my imagination work overtime. With a shiver, he turned away. Don't need to invent monsters.
He still felt dizzy. Can't come down with something now. He covered his face with his hands and felt heat throb beneath his eyelids. Damn. Only gradually did something like warmth seep back into his arms and legs. Can't get sick. Not now. A cough shuddered though him. But it never gets warm in here. The day he'd arrived with his suitcases, D'Amato, the proprietor, had bled air from the radiator for over an hour, running up and down the stairs and shouting to his wife, who'd clanged on a pipe somewhere below. The siphoned-off end product had been a pint of evil-looking fluid that smelled like liquid dust. Fetid and catlike, the smell lingered still. Never warm. Tonight, his body ached for a hot shower, but he didn't feel up to enduring the pounding whistle of the pipes. Maybe I'll take a bath later. Generally, that involved slightly less racket.
He closed his eyes. Don't. He leaned his head back against the wall. Don't sleep now. Pulling his legs onto the bed, he stretched. Get the work out.
After a moment, he felt under the bed. Go on. Straightening with a grunt, he shifted his legs and set the case on the bed before him. Get on with it. Solemnly, he tapped on the lid, then fished a key out of his wallet.
In a clear plastic bag, the boy's backpack nearly filled the suitcase, but other things had been crammed in around it. Next to his camera case lay a stack of Polaroids, bound with a rubber band, and beneath them bulged two cardboard folders. He pulled out the thicker folder and adjusted the lamp shade so that light spilled onto the bed.
Opening the folder, he glanced at the first newspaper clipping....torso found...He set it aside, extracted another....evidence of sexual mutilation...He examined each yellowed clipping as though he'd never seen it before....police sources say they have no information regarding...Searching for any detail he might have missed, he scanned the words, feeling the muscles of his face stiffen and grow numb--an old and familiar sensation. He fumbled for his notepad. On the first page, the name "Stella" had been underlined twice.
If anything happens to me, so long as they find this, somebody else could take up the search. He found the notion oddly comforting. Leaning back against the wall, he paged through lists of names and dates, many crossed out or with check marks beside them. Some pages began with the names of towns in block letters at the top. Rock Harbor, Wildcrest, Leed's Point. Many towns he could barely remember, the names blurring together in his mind.
It seemed he'd spent his life in this realm, perhaps the strangest and most unnatural-seeming terrain ever to exist. The countless white sand trails of the Pine Barrens had at last given way to "construction." In just a few years, most of the old shanty towns had vanished, a whole way of life disappearing as residents packed up and headed south, some to settle in the Appalachians, others to join the migrant labor force. And the landscape of parking lots and strip malls verged always closer, merging one into the other, desperately drab, broken only by the dismally uniform "developments," encroaching on both the sad, shabby resort towns and on the affluent private beaches, on the ghettoed horror of Asbury Park to the north and on the ghettoed horror of Atlantic City to the south. A bizarre world. Different time lines seemed to overlap in this landscape, blanketing one another. He'd seen it everywhere--roadside stands sold homegrown produce beneath buzzing neon.