His arm came out of the shadow and pointed to one of the tall metal spires that girded each side of the walk. Kendra pictured a shish kebab of writhing arms and legs, red sauce spurting out like a busted ketchup pack at a greasy roadside diner. The image would have been gross if it weren’t so comical. Compared to the modern teenybopper slasher movies, Dad’s attempts at shock were like Casper the Friendly Ghost on a sugar high.
But he’d been polite on the drive up the mountain, even letting her pick the music, and she’d been working him for a new graphics program, so she could spare a little feigned affection.
“Nothing like a suicide chump to get the Groovy Ghoulies riled up,” she called to him.
“That’s my girl,” he said, stepping back inside the inn.
If Digger Wilson actually believed in evil spirits, he had no problem leaving her to deal with them on her own. Then again, she’d learned at an early age that everyone had to face their demons alone.
Whether the demons are real or just drawn that way.
Kendra continued her work superimposing a set of human features over the entryway, not realizing until she was nearly done that the eyes she’d drawn in the glass were her mother’s.
She got busy with the eraser.
Chapter 3
J.C. hated the goddamned basement.
The rusted cast-iron pipes that hung suspended from the floor joists dribbled black goo, and old fiberglass insulation hung down like rotted cobwebs. The dirt floor was cluttered with broken chunks of concrete, dusty bottles, short lengths of pipe and copper wire, and a clutch of three-legged chairs. A brass bed was set up along one cinder-block wall, no doubt erected as some sort of joke, because the mattress was fuzzy with mildew. A plastic red rose lay where the pillow would have been, the kind of punch line his dick-headed supervisor Wally Reams would think was hilarious.
The breaker box for the hot water heaters had been on the blink, and Reams had filled out a work order and put J.C.’s name on it. J.C. always got the crap jobs, but since the White Horse maintenance staff consisted of three other guys, one with a V.A.-approved wooden leg compliments of Saddam’s little poke in George Bush’s eye, then the odds were against J.C. anyway. Besides, every fix-it call was a crap job in a place as ancient as this.
The place smelled of rotted newspapers and mouse turds, and the dirt floor was packed to mud. The coal-burning boilers that had once heated the inn were now corroded shut, miles of pipes carrying their filthy air.
J.C pulled a flashlight from a loop on his overalls and flicked it on. The breaker box was on the far side of the room, and screw-in glass fuses were scattered across the dirt, glinting in the flashlight’s beam. He could be across, check the fuses, and be done in less than a minute. If the problem lay with the main circuits, then Reams would have to call in a real electrician. J.C. was a licensed plumber but he could barely twist a bread tie, much less mess with 220 volts of juice.
It was probably the goddamned Mexicans’ fault. They’d punch the buttons on every washer and dryer at the same time, speeding things up with nary a thought to the power drain. Most people, all they wanted was to flip a switch and have the light come on. Not many cared about the complex science of electrons. J.C. didn’t blame them. All he wanted was a fast paycheck, so maybe he wasn’t that different from the Mexicans after all.
But the job wasn’t as simple as the work order made it sound. For one thing, the breaker box was in the darkest part of the basement, behind a row of support beams and a couple hundred feet from the rickety wooden stairs. For another, the basement always gave him the willies.
He’d heard the stories, and once in a while a shadow shifted out of the corner of his eye, but nobody in his right mind paid attention to the corners of his eyes. Pegleg had sworn to an encounter with The Jilted Bride, a woman supposedly abandoned at the altar a hundred years back and killing herself as a result. Of course, in Pegleg’s version, he’d done her seven ways to Sunday on the rotted mattress, adding a few more stains to the canvas and leaving her with a smile on her face as she vanished. The vision of Pegleg in the buff, flashing all his nubs, was more frightening than any ghost. But alone in the basement, with the pipes groaning, the wood creaking, and the raw sewage plop plop plopping, the blood ran a little faster and the short hairs tingled a little.
He flipped the switch to trigger the set of bare bulbs that dangled from the floor joists. Dead.
Shit fire, Miss Mays. Somebody better call maintenance.
He tried to laugh but the dusty air clogged his throat.
Despite the flashlight, he was reluctant to leave the foot of the stairs, where light leaked from the doorway above. The darkness had a border, and stepping over it would mean hostile territory. The laws over there were unknown, and you could break them without even knowing you had trespassed. But the laws on this side, with that bitch Janey Mays holding the purse strings and his parole officer marking time, were just as cruel.
Life was full of choices. Walk through shit and black hell and check the goddamned breaker box or stand in the unemployment line with the rest of the garbage Janey had tossed over the past year.
He put one toe to the edge of the darkness. He could have sworn the line of blackness oozed forward a couple of inches, and his leg shivered as if a frosty mouth had exhaled over his Wolverine work boot. The basement was always 10 degrees colder than the building’s interior, but the place was so drafty the temperature fluctuated anyway, no matter the season. That’s why guests were always bitching about the ventilation, which caused Janey Mays to chew J.C. a new asshole, and he’d run around with duct tape, weather stripping, and nails, but all the patchwork did was send the drafts to new locations and start the merry-go-round all over again.
The air in the basement, though, was still and dead. J.C. had failed science in the seventh grade, but he remembered the teacher droning on about the moon and how you couldn’t breathe there, and in the pictures of astronauts they all had on those bozo helmets with the black masks and lots of tubes running into different parts of the white suit. J.C. had never wondered about their breathing. He’d been more curious about where all the piss and shit went, and the teacher said they ran their piss through a filter and drank it again. And people called them “heroes.” J.C. called them “dumbasses.”
“A small step for man and a big step for mankind,” he whispered, mangling the astronautic catchphrase.
He thrust the flashlight in front of him and entered the darkness. The dirt floor was as slick as a plastic sheet covered with Crisco, but he didn’t look down at it. His focus was on the breaker box, which seemed to have moved farther away from him. Something rustled to his left, and he flicked the light over to the boiler.
The damned thing grinned at him with those rusty metal teeth, the old valves glittering like eyes that had been snapped open from a long sleep. The blacker darkness inside it quivered, a tongue of coal ash and cinders. Decades ago, men like J.C. stood down here half-naked, shoveling coal into that beast’s belly as it spit glowing embers onto their sweaty flesh. Compared to that kind of work, J.C.’s little mission was a tiptoe through the tulips.
And if he didn’t get the hot water going soon, Janey Mays would blow her smoke in his face and flash that wrinkled, mummified grin.
As he crossed the room, stubbing his boot on a busted cinder block, he fished in his tool belt for a screwdriver. He would need it for the breaker box, he told himself, though he held it like a weapon and the job would more likely require pliers than a sharp blade.