The Ninth Nightmare (6 page)

There was another sharp hiss of white noise, and then the line returned to its monotonous crackling. Lincoln said, ‘Damn,' and then, ‘
damn
,' and hung up. He thought maybe he should try his cellphone just once more. If he couldn't manage to talk to Grace then at least he should be able to send her a text message.

He looked around the room. Where the hell had he left his cell? Then he remembered. He had put it down beside the hand basin in the bathroom, and forgotten to pick it up.

He went back to the bathroom and opened the door. He had opened it only two or three inches, however, before he stopped himself. He had made a point of leaving the light on, but now the bathroom was dark again. Not only that, he could smell that appalling stench of blocked drains and ageing urine and whatever that terrible sweetness was.

He hesitated for a very long time. Then he reached his hand inside the door and groped around for the light cord. He found it and tugged it but it didn't work. The fluorescent tube must have burned out.

He opened the door wider and stepped inside. But there was no cellphone lying beside the hand basin because there was no hand basin, only that old-fashioned bathtub with all of its splashes and drips and its dozens of handprints. He hunkered down to see if his cell might have dropped on the floor, but there was no sign of it.
It must be here in this bathroom in
some
reality, he thought, but it sure isn't here in
this
reality.

He stood up. He didn't have any choice now. He would have go to the reception desk, not only to see if he could get through to Grace, but to ask them if he could change rooms. There was no way he was going to sleep next to
this
bathroom, not in a million years. It was not only filthy, it was scary, too. How could it be daylight in here when it was dark outside? How could it be raining when he knew for sure that it wasn't?

He turned back toward his bedroom, but now this had changed, too. The bedside lamps had disappeared, and the room was lit only by a single bare bulb hanging by a frayed cord from the ceiling. The queen-sized bed with its green tapestry throw had been replaced by an iron-framed bed with only a soiled striped mattress on it. The thick green carpet had vanished, and now there was only dirty beige linoleum covering the floor. The walls no longer had pictures on them, and there were no drapes hanging at the window. There was a strong musty smell of rats' urine.

Outside the window, he could see gleaming wet rooftops, with gray clouds hurrying over them, and iron fire escapes. This was Room 104, on the first floor, and yet it looked as if it were three stories up, at the very least. It could even be higher. He could hear the soft patter of rain, and police sirens wailing in the distance.

Lincoln thought:
You got to get out of here,
now.
You're going crazy
. He crossed over to the door and tried to open it, but it was locked. He jiggled the handle up and down, and pulled at it, but still the door refused to open. He hammered on it with both fists and shouted out, ‘
Help! Let me out of here! Help!
'

He paused, and listened, and he was sure that he could hear telephones ringing and people laughing. He banged on the door even harder and screamed, ‘
Help! I'm trapped in here!
' until his throat felt raw, but still nobody came to let him out.

He stepped away from the door, panting. He gave it a hard kick, and then another. He cracked one of the lower panels but the door was much too solid for him to break down. He knew better than to take his shoulder to it. He had done that, years ago, after an argument with Grace, and he had dislocated his left arm.

Agitated, breathing hard, he paced backward and forward up and down the room. He couldn't understand how or why it could have altered like this. It was not as if he recognized it. The apartment in Brightmoor in which he had been brought up as a boy had been damp and scabby, too, but nothing like as derelict as this. He had hung out with his friends in abandoned houses in Hamtramck and Highland Park, but he had never seen a room that resembled this one in any way, so he doubted if he was reliving some kind of childhood trauma.

He went to the window and looked out, his forehead pressed against the chilly glass. He didn't recognize the neighborhood at all, but wherever it was, it certainly wasn't University Circle, Cleveland, where the Griffin House Hotel was located. It didn't look like any part of Cleveland that he had ever seen; nor any part of downtown Detroit, either.

He had lost his cellphone, and there was no phone beside the bed, so there was no way that he could call the reception desk for help. He thought of climbing out of the window on to the fire escape, and then down to the ground, but what would happen if he did that? In reality, this room was on the first floor. If he accepted an alternative reality, maybe he would become trapped in that alternative reality forever, and never be able to come back.

He was still staring out of the window when he heard a woman's voice calling out. It was so weak that it was barely audible, and it sounded bubbly, as if she had a mouthful of water. ‘
Please. Please don't leave me here. Please
.'

Lincoln felt a crawling sensation all the way down his back. He turned around and saw that a woman was lying diagonally on the bed, half covered by a stained pink satin quilt. She was dark-skinned, with a plump heart-shaped face and thick wavy black hair – Hispanic, or mixed race. There were plum-colored circles under her eyes, or they could have been bruises. On her left cheek she had a large black beauty-spot, or maybe a mole. Her lips were scarlet and shiny, as if she had thickly applied too bright a shade of lipstick.

‘Please don't leave me,' the woman whispered. She had a strong Spanish accent.

‘OK, lady,' said Lincoln, trying to sound reassuring. ‘I'll try to get you some help.'

‘No use doing that,' the woman told him.

‘What happened? How did you get in here?'

‘
He
brought me here.
El prestidigitator
. He caught me, and he brought me here.'

‘Who did?'

‘I don't know his name. Don't leave me, please. I'm dying.'

‘Are you sick? Did this guy beat up on you? What?'

The woman closed her eyes and didn't answer him. Lincoln hesitated, not knowing if he should try to shake her awake. Probably best not to touch her, he thought. She might have a neck or a spinal injury, and shaking could prove fatal.

He went back over to the door and gave it another kick. ‘Open this door!' he screamed. ‘Open this fucking door! There's a woman dying in here! Help me!'

There was no response. Lincoln looked back at the bed and the woman still had her eyes closed. What the hell was he going to do now? He could go on kicking at the door but if nobody could hear him what was the point? He could wait until morning, for the hotel housekeepers to do their rounds, but quite apart from the fact that the woman on the bed was close to dying, it was already daylight outside, so when
would
it be morning? And how would the housekeepers get in here, if this was a different reality?

He was still standing by the door when his decision was made for him. He saw nobody and heard nothing, but suddenly he caught the strong raw smell of gasoline, as if somebody had splashed it all around the room. He sniffed, and sniffed again. The smell was so strong that it burned his throat and made his eyes water.

Then – without any warning at all, the woman on the bed exploded into flames. A wave of heat seared Lincoln's face and he stumbled backward, lifting up his hand to shield his eyes. Within seconds, the whole mattress was blazing like a bonfire. Lincoln tried to edge closer, but the heat was so intense that he couldn't get anywhere near enough to drag the woman off the bed. Lurid orange flames licked right up to the ceiling and the bedroom rapidly began to fill up with whirling sparks and billowing brown smoke.

Although she was burning from head to foot, the woman didn't move, or cry out, so Lincoln guessed that she must have died a few minutes before when she had closed her eyes. But in any case there was no time to think of trying to save her. The linoleum flooring was ablaze, spitting and shriveling as it burned, and he knew that he had to get out of the bedroom somehow or
he
was going to die, too – and in only a few seconds. Fifteen years ago, his uncle and his aunt and his four cousins had all died in a house fire in Brightmoor. They had been overwhelmed by toxic smoke in less than two minutes, huddled together behind a front door that they hadn't had the strength to open.

Lincoln pulled out his handkerchief, folded it into a pad, and pressed it against his nose and his mouth. Then – keeping as low as he could – he crouched his way toward the bathroom. In spite of the fire, he was still reluctant to climb out of the window, in case he could never climb back. He reasoned that he could break open the bathroom window if he needed ventilation, and there was plenty of water there, too.

He pushed his way through the bathroom door and quickly slammed it shut behind him. Then he dragged the soggy towel across the floor and wedged it underneath the door to keep the smoke out. He stood for a while with both hands pressed against the wall, coughing and wheezing. He was still shocked and bewildered by the way in which the Hispanic-looking woman had appeared as if from nowhere, and the way in which she had abruptly caught fire. He had smelled gasoline in the seconds before the bed had exploded, for sure, but where had it come from?

He turned around, with his back to the wall, trying to suppress his coughing. If smoke started to seep into the bathroom, he guessed that he could balance on the edge of the bath, break open the window and squeeze his way out. The window frame was just about wide enough. But for all he knew it was a sheer three-story drop out there, and even if he managed to escape uninjured, would he ever be able to climb back in again?

Maybe this is nothing but a nightmare
, he thought.
Maybe I was overtired and I went to bed and I'm simply dreaming all this. It can't be happening. It's impossible
.

He reached out cautiously and touched the brass door-handle. It was already too hot for him to hold, and the door panels were growing warmer, as well. He began to think that he had made the wrong decision, shutting himself in the bathroom. At least there had been a fire escape outside the bedroom window, no matter what reality it might have led him into.

He was sweating now, and he wiped his forehead with his shirtsleeve. As he did so, he heard a shuffling noise inside the shower stall. He had seen a dark shape inside it before, but he had assumed that it was nothing but a combination of dirt and shadows. Now he could see that it was moving. Something inside the shower stall was alive.

‘Who's that?' he called out. ‘Come out here where I can see you!'

There was no answer, and he felt too foolish to call out a second time, in case it was nothing but an optical illusion, or maybe an animal that had gotten itself trapped – a dog or a cat or a raccoon. But then the shower stall door was pushed open with a reverberating shudder, and a man stepped out of it. Lincoln opened and closed his mouth, and coughed, but he couldn't find the breath inside him to speak.

The man was tall – at least as tall as Lincoln, and maybe an inch or two more – but he was also very thin, with arms and legs that were disproportionately long. He was wearing a black tuxedo with a black silk vest underneath it, and a black shirt with a black bow-tie. His hair was white and ragged and almost shoulder length. What alarmed Lincoln about him the most, however, was his face. It was very pale gray, like a face in a black-and-white photograph, and it was
blurred
, as if he had moved when he was having his photograph taken. Lincoln could make out the dark smudges of his eyes, and the upward-sloping curve of his lips, but that was all. The rest of his features seemed to be permanently out of focus.

‘I warned you not to come, now, didn't I?' the man told him, hoarsely. ‘You would not listen to me, though, would you? You out-and-out refused to listen.'

‘Who are you?' Lincoln demanded. ‘What the hell is going on here?'

‘Things that are no concern of yours, Lincoln. Things that you would have been wiser to stay ignorant of. But of course it is much too late now, isn't it? You have come here, in spite of the fact that I specifically asked you not to, and you have witnessed what you have witnessed. And I cannot risk
anybody
interfering in what I am doing here. Not you. Nobody.'

‘But there's a woman dead out there!' Lincoln protested. ‘There's a woman dead out there and the whole goddamned bedroom is on fire! It isn't even my bedroom! And this sure as hell isn't my bathroom, either!'

The gray-faced man tapped his forehead. ‘It is the power of the mind, Lincoln, that is what it is. It is the power of the human imagination, unbridled by consciousness. The power of dreams.'

‘I don't understand one goddamned word of what you're talking about,' Lincoln told him. ‘I don't
want
to know, either. All's I know is, I want to be back in my real hotel room, back in my real reality.'

The gray-faced man shook his head so that his ratty white hair swung from side to side. ‘Not possible, Lincoln. You would speak to people and those people would not necessarily understand what I am doing here, but
they
could well speak to other people who
do
understand, and then it would be mayhem.' He paused, and then he said, ‘“
Mayhem
,” from the Anglo-Saxon word meaning to
maim
, or to seriously injure.'