Jack and Mr. Grin (16 page)

Then the pain was gone, like that, and the lightning bugs flew back off into the night. They pulled the duct tape off, lifted it into the air, and he thought he could actually see one of them clasping the .22 bullet between its eyelash legs.

He lay there in the meadow, looking up at a black, starless sky, the gun digging into his back, wondering if he would be able to move.

It wasn’t just their stinging pain that was gone. It was all of the pain.

He put his hand on his left side, just below the ribs, where the bullet had gone in. He fingered the hole in his shirt but felt nothing but smooth, uninterrupted flesh below that. He poked the spot. No pain at all. Amazing. The same with the stab wound. He couldn’t believe it. He ran his hand down to his left calf. Again, he felt the tiny holes the buckshot had made in his jeans but the only thing he felt on his leg was hair.

Five keys left.

No pain.

Things were looking good.

He stood up, feeling reborn. He ran toward the structure in the distance, his heart pounding fresh and renewed in his chest. Soon, he was at the structure.

It sat low to the ground, a blocky cinderblock building with a silver corrugated tin roof. It was little more than a shed.

He walked around it until he found an ugly brown door with a shiny stainless steel knob. Written on the door in runny yellow spray paint were the words “Utility Shed.”

He pulled the gun from his pants with his left hand.

The door opened on the third key.

Twenty-eight

Harsh fluorescent lighting stung his eyes.

He put a hand above his brow and squinted into the room.

John Briggs was there.

John Briggs was the foreman at The Tent. Jack had probably never exchanged more than five words that were not work related with him on any given day.

He hung upside down. Jack shook his head in confusion, a dreadful realization creeping up on him.

A metal bar ran across the small interior of the Utility Shed. A piece of rope wrapped around Briggs’ ankles, hanging him from the bar. He looked like a dead piece of meat. His shirt had slid up his ample stomach. His arms were extended, fingertips mere inches from the cement floor. His thin hair hung from his scalp. And his face muscles were slack, eyes open but staring straight ahead, the corners of his mouth curving toward the floor. Jack didn’t see what part he could possibly play in this.

Unless John Briggs was Mr. Grin. Jack moved closer to the suspended body, studying it. Was it possible?

He couldn’t think of ever having seen John Briggs smile. In fact, he didn’t know if he had ever seen Briggs’ mouth, buried, as it usually was, behind the painter’s mask. Briggs was all business. There to work. There to make sure others were working. Not a grinning type of person. But he was smiling now. He was smiling because he was hanging upside down.

Jack thought about the voice on the phone. It was entirely possible. The more he studied him, the more he was certain John Briggs was Mr. Grin. That’s why the voice had sounded vaguely familiar. It was John Briggs but it was a
smiling
John Briggs, someone Jack had never heard before.

Jack contemplated shooting him but he seemed... restrained. And unconscious.
 

Had Gina somehow managed to escape his clutches? Had Gina managed to do this? Jack didn’t think it was possible. Briggs had to be close to 300 pounds and he just couldn’t see Gina being able to string him up.

It was just too simple.

This couldn’t be it. He couldn’t just aim the gun and fire it at this hanging thing and think he had caught Gina’s captor.

The man you’re looking for is not who you think he is. He smiles because he’s out of his skin.

That seemed simple to Jack. Mr. Grin was not in John Briggs. If he was looking for Mr. Grin and he now
thought
it was John Briggs that meant it couldn’t be John Briggs. What he saw in front of him was a husk. The skin. Whatever was once inside that skin was now out of it. Happily out of it. Smiling because he was out of his skin.

Suddenly, he found himself thinking about the dirt at The Tent. Where
did
that dirt come from? Where did it go? Grisnos? He had been a stellar geography student and didn’t recall any country called Grisnos. Could The Tent have anything to do with this? He wondered what he had been doing the past three years. Would Mr. Thick, the strange flickering man at the front counter, know where Grisnos was? Jack thought maybe he would.

He had a revelation. It came upon him in a rush and he didn’t have the time to question it. He didn’t
want
to question it.

There was something in the dirt. Something... otherworldly. It came from one world and went to another. Something in the dirt. Something that made some people sniff it. Something that made some people forget. Something that, over time, rotted people’s insides. And it had rotted the insides of John Briggs. Rotted them so much they couldn’t stand to be in his body anymore. Maybe he was so rotten inside he didn’t have any idea what he was doing. But why Gina? Why Jack?

He put the gun in the back of his pants.

He thought maybe it was time for him to come out of his skin, too.

He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out the piece of paper with the stick figure drawings on it.

Now that he had seen Briggs hanging in front of him, the meaning of those drawings seemed obvious. It was an instruction sheet telling him how to suspend himself like Briggs. He didn’t know if it would help. He desperately wanted things to work out. This was one sick mindfuck of a puzzle but he was beginning to understand it for the puzzle it was.

Another rope hung from the metal bar. There was a loop at the end of it. All he had to do was place both feet in the loop, grab the other end of the rope dangling above him, and pull.

He didn’t know how he was going to stay up there. He imagined the second he let go of the rope he would just go plummeting head first onto the cement. Stepping into the loop, he put the instruction sheet to use.

Once he was upside down, everything fell out of his pockets. All the keys clattered to the floor. The gun hit the floor with a smack and he was thankful it didn’t discharge.

Hesitantly, he took his hands away from the rope.

He didn’t go plummeting to the floor. He stayed just where he was. He felt his muscles slacken. He felt his mouth open into a grin. He didn’t like the feeling at all. Now was not a time to be smiling.

He thought of Gina as he closed his eyes.

He thought of the dirt smudged picture of Gina he kept in his work area at The Tent. Was it possible Briggs had seen that picture and thought he absolutely had to have Gina? Was it possible everything had spiraled out of control from there? Was it even possible that Gina may have at one time slept with Briggs? Maybe he was one of her scorned lovers and this was his attempt to get back at her. And not just her but the most important person in her life.

Or...

Or maybe it went beyond this world. Maybe it went all the way to that other world that smacked into Earth when two worlds collided. Maybe Gina couldn’t cross through the freight car because she didn’t want to go home. Maybe she had been born in another world. Maybe she was adopted because someone helped her escape. Maybe someone wanted to take her back. Maybe Briggs had something to do with that. Maybe whatever had gotten
inside
Briggs had something to do with that. And if Briggs’ body was here but his rotten insides were somewhere else then where was Gina’s body? And which part of her was being tortured? Her insides or her real body?

And then there were the brands. The brands were definitely supernatural. The brands were definitely not normal. Something had inflicted those brands on all those people. Something had tried to stop Jack from making it to the Hotel Eternity. But once Jack made it, those brands had turned into keys. And the keys would take him where he needed to go. Was that Jack’s first victory? Were the keys his reward?

Maybe Jack was going crazy.

He wondered what time it was.

Then he went out.

Twenty-nine

The next thing he remembered, Jack was standing there in the Utility Shed looking at his own upside down body, feeling that stupid, irremovable grin straining at his lips and cheeks. He didn’t like the look of his body under those harsh fluorescent lights, next to Mr. Grin, next to John Briggs. He thought he looked unreal. Waxy. Dead.

He looked down at the ground.

The gun was there and, although all of the keys had fallen out of his pockets when he suspended himself, there were now only the four unused keys. He scooped the keys and the gun up. He opened the door of the Utility Shed to the outside, not bothering to close it. What if he closed it and he wasn’t able to get back in? He didn’t know which was the real him. Was it the guy hanging up in the Utility Shed or was it the body he now inhabited. He felt like himself. From what he could see of himself it seemed like this body was just the same as his old body.

What a weird thought. A new body and an old body. But today had been a day of weird thoughts.

Or was yesterday a day of weird thoughts?

He noticed that the sun was out over the meadow and felt a wave of fear.

It had to be coming up on the 24 hour mark. How long had he spent in that shed? Was that the wrong thing to do? Had he blown everything?

As quickly as possible, he began walking through the meadow, toward the East, toward the rising sun.

The morning was warm and humid. But he wasn’t sweating. Didn’t even really feel hot. He felt cool. Detached. He couldn’t explain it. He had dropped acid exactly once. He felt a lot like that now. Like he was very much locked inside this new body and everything he saw was with some kind of near geometric clarity, sharper and crisper, hyperfocused. It was so real and so perfect it was dreamlike.

Eventually, he came to the hotel again. It didn’t surprise him, even though he had been walking in the opposite direction.

In this light, the hotel looked even more decrepit and run down. Or maybe it was just because he was coming up from behind it. He didn’t really remember much about it from before, maybe because it had been dark. There were strange gaps in his memory. He thought about Gina. He thought about Mr. Grin. And he couldn’t really seem to think about anything else.

He couldn’t remember which door he had opened last. He remembered it was the one he was supposed to open, or so he thought. It was the one the squat man with the hairpiece had told him about. He went around the corner of the hotel. It seemed to be shaped in kind of a blocky horseshoe shape. The first door he came to was, unbelievably, Room 6004.

That couldn’t have been right. There was no way this place had over 6000 rooms...
 
but questioning was useless. The answers were probably more ridiculous than the questions themselves.

The first key he tried worked. Three more keys. He opened the door onto a perfectly normal-looking room. It was perfectly normal-looking but it didn’t really fit the general decor of the other rooms he had seen in the hotel. The walls were all white. He didn’t know if he had ever seen a hotel room with white walls. Most things in the room were white. There was a nightstand that was a lighter wood color. That was on the left side of the bed. Over the bed was a large painting or photograph, he couldn’t be sure, of a large meadow, more rolling than the one he was just in, with some murderous black clouds. To the right of the bed was a ficus tree.

Hm. It didn’t seem like there was anything in this room to see at all.

Then the room started to move.

He felt it pull away from the rest of the motel.

That was when he realized the ficus was not a tree at all. It was a man dressed like a tree. Rather, the tree was kind of attached to his back and the man was completely white. He operated some controls set in the wall. The controls were white also and Jack knew it would have been easy to miss, with them being concealed, as they were, behind the tree.

The disguised man turned to look at Jack and Jack saw that his eyes were completely black. No whites whatsoever and a shiver ran up his spine, tremoring out into his viscera.

“So where are we going?” Jack asked.

The man looked away, back at the controls, and Jack knew he wasn’t going to get an answer.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and said, “I really need to find Gina. I don’t know if you can help me or not. I’m not even completely sure I’m still alive but, if you know where she is, I would really appreciate you taking me to her. You see, I only have three keys left and I think I’m running out of time. I don’t know if I’ll even get to use all three keys.”

The man turned to look at Jack again, saying nothing. When the man turned his head back around to stare at the wall, Jack saw that the whiteness of the wall had darkened, becoming more like a window.

“Are we on a train?” Jack asked.

The man said nothing.

Now from the window, Jack could see that, indeed, there were tracks spread out before him. He thought about the absurdity of entering a motel room and ending up on a train and then he thought about those two trains serving as something like a gateway to the Wilds and, therefore, the Hotel Eternity itself. Gina had called the train wreck “When Two Worlds Collide.” Jack felt the sense of two worlds colliding. He felt it very strongly.