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Please note, this is a work in progress.
From Chapter Four...
After eating at the Cup of Stars Café, the group found a Red Roof Inn a little further down the road. They rented three rooms, two singles and a double for the Dans, who always bunked together. Jane unloaded her overnight bags and nested. Her room was clean and pleasantly decorated, lots of tans and golds, and there was cable TV and two small recliners. She cracked the window to air the room out—it was a bit stuffy from being closed up—and then she went to Raj’s room. The four of them often spent the evening together when they were on an overnighter. They were supposed to discuss the next day’s itinerary, but usually they just snacked on junk food and watched TV, and tonight was no different.
They ended up watching ‘Salems Lot on TBS, the original, not the remake starring Rob Lowe. It was a good movie to watch in a group. They laughed at the seventies fashions, made fun of the poor special effects and cheesy acting. When the little vampire kid floated out of the fog to scratch on his friend’s bedroom window, Little Dan pointed out the chair the young actor was sitting on, and the wires the whole contraption hung suspended from.
“Why does everyone in this movie have giant bedroom windows?” Jane asked. “Have you ever seen giant bedroom windows like that?”
Raj shrugged. He was lying on the bed beside her, his long skinny legs crossed at the ankles. “Not me,” he answered.
“I can’t believe this scared me when I was a kid,” Big Dan said. “I remember sneaking out of my bedroom and hiding behind the sofa to watch. It scared me so bad I went to the bathroom and stuffed toilet paper in my ears so I couldn’t hear any more. Poor Ma had to pick the tissue out of my ears with tweezers later that night, when I couldn’t get it out.”
“You know what the scariest movie I ever saw was?” Little Dan asked.
“What?”
“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Little Dan answered. “No, really!” he cried, as everyone voiced their disbelief. “Those fucking Oompa-Loompa’s freaked me out, and I thought Willie Wonka was murdering all those little kids… just for being disobedient. It was horrifying!”
“When I was a little boy in India,” Raj said mildly. “My father took us to a small village in West Bengal. He had gone there to work at a neighboring leper colony. One night, I woke to find that a tiger had stolen into my bedroom. The house our father had taken us to live in was little more than a shanty. The tiger simply pushed through the flimsy door and walked inside. I woke to find that great beast looking into my eyes, and then it took my younger sister, who was sleeping beside me. Sometimes I still wake in the middle of the night, hearing my sister screaming in the jungle. These films…” He flapped a hand at the TV. “They do not scare me.”
Everyone had fallen silent.
“Shit, man,” Little Dan murmured.
Raj smiled grimly and shrugged. “That is what we all fear, at the primal level, is it not? We fear being eaten, and all the rest—your vampires and werewolves, blobs and giant bugs—they’re just metaphors for that fear.”
“That’s deep,” Jane said, impressed.
“That’s what she said,” Big Dan said quickly, and all three men broke up laughing.
Jane rolled her eyes.
She was hoping the Dans would wear down and retire for the night, give her some privacy with Raj, but they’d had soda and chips and they were in rare form. Jane found herself nodding off before everyone else. When Little Dan poked her in the leg, she came to with a start. On TV, David Soul was pounding a stake into a vampire’s heart. Dispatching one of Raj’s metaphors. Jane swung her feet to the floor and stumbled toward the door. “Well, that’s it for me, guys. Time to turn in,” she mumbled.
The three men bid her good night, and she plodded down the hallway to her room.
Once she changed into her nightgown and slid beneath the covers, however, she found she could not return to sleep. She grabbed the remote and turned her television on and flipped through the channels for a while.
She didn’t want to watch vampires-- not alone, that was just asking for nightmares, especially with a belly full of cheese doodles—but there wasn’t anything else playing that even looked halfway interesting. She’d seen Tommy Boy about a dozen times already. She watched Chris Farley do his fat guy in a little coat dance, then flicked the remote, thinking, Dead.
Billy Mays was hawking laundry detergent on the next channel.
Flick.
Dead.
JohnWayne in True Grit.
Dead.
Ritter on Three’s Company.
Dead.
The Golden Girls.
Dead-dead-dead.
Disturbed, Jane turned the TV off. She got out of bed and dug a book from one of her overnight bags. Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Hemingway was dead, too, she thought, feeling a chill worm its way up her spine. Depressed and suffering from chronic pain, he’d gotten up in the middle of the night and stuck the barrel of his favorite shotgun in his mouth, a death as declarative as his sentence structures.
Trying to ignore a mounting sense of foreboding, Jane slipped back under the covers and read. Despite Hemingway’s concise prose, however, she found her mind wandering, unable to concentrate on the book in front of her.
Which of their group would be the first to die? she wondered. After the show had run its course and their fifteen minutes of fame was over? Would it be Allen? Allen was a big guy, and he was already taking blood pressure medicine. Billy, maybe? She knew he had a penchant for risky sex. He confided in her sometimes about his sexual escapades. Rough trade, he called it. Anonymous sex in public bathrooms, those little booths in adult bookstores, and he rarely used protection.
Maybe it would be an accident. A slippery road or a plane crash. A random act of senseless violence. A crazy fan. The world was a tiger, and it had sharp teeth and a pitiless appetite for human flesh.
Maybe she would be the first to check out. A little cancer of the brain, like her mum. A loathsome black rat of diseased tissue, gnawing through the stuffing in her skull. Beverly Rivers had had Janey and her husband for comfort when she’d withered and died, but who would sit at Jane’s bedside, hold her hand, when her time came around? Who would make sure she took her medicines, and fetch her blankets when she was cold? Her father was barely capable of caring for himself now. She had no husband, no children…
“That’s enough, Janey!” she said suddenly, and the crow-like sound of her voice sent a shiver of goosebumps up and down her body. She set her book on the nightstand, turned off the lamp and lay back on her pillows with a sigh.
Staring at the bar of light on the ceiling, the dread began to ease. She dozed without realizing it some time later, and dreamed she was lost inside a maze-like house.
The hallways were dark-paneled and winding in the dream, a ghost house if she ever saw one. She’d been inside countless haunted houses, but this dream labyrinth was the epitome of Bad Places, the apotheosis of cursed dwellings. Cobwebs, like coagulated spirits, hung lifeless from the corners of the ceiling. Strangers in period costume stared at her through a patina of dust from heavily framed portraits, their faces grim and reproachful. She turned left and then right as she ran down the passages, but she couldn’t find her way out. The layout of the house seemed to change every time she turned the corner, and even when she doubled back, the path behind her seemed subtly to have changed.
She didn’t know how long she’d been running through the hallways. It might have been five seconds, or five hundred years. She suspected it was a long time, but time had no meaning for those who dreamed, she knew.
Or the dead.
Was she dead? Was she a ghost now, racing mindless through the murky afterlife, like a smeared image in a photographic negative? When had she died? How had she died? She couldn’t remember, but maybe she wasn’t supposed to remember.
Finally, she came to a door. She could see bright light glimmering around its edges. Relieved, she pushed through and Raj was lying on a bed, waiting for her. The room was open and bright, with big bay windows full of blue sky and sunshine as yellow as egg yolk. He gestured to her, smiling, and she rushed to him.
Saved!
She climbed on the bed and embraced him, pressing her face to his chest, squeezing him in her arms, breathing in the good, familiar scent of his body, but he crackled when she hugged him, and she drew back in confusion, wondering why he was so stiff and light. She looked down at him, and had to clamp her hands over her mouth to cage a cry of horror. He wasn’t a living man at all, she saw, but a scarecrow made of sticks and burlap, an empty effigy, with button eyes and X’s stitched across his face for a mouth. She tore the front of his shirt open, her breath coming in harsh hot gasps, and dry leaves and dead flower petals spilled out of him. Beetles crawled among ribs of dead grape vine.
Jane didn’t wake, but she stirred in her sleep, moaning and clutching her spare pillow to her breast. Her fingers plucked at the pillowcase as she tore the Raj-scarecrow’s chest open in her dream, but the fabric didn’t rend like it did in her dream, and there were no dead petals in her bed when she awoke.
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