The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (25 page)

Luther said, ‘Are you
kidding
me, Ms Sissy? The way you screaming, they going to hear you way over in the Sweet Olive Cemetery. My Uncle Elijah going to be rolling over in his casket, saying “who’s that disturbing my well-deserved rest?”’

They reached the corner at the end of the corridor, and they had just turned around it when they both stumbled to an abrupt stop, and retreated. Halfway along the corridor, the door to one of the rooms was wedged open, and a man in a black T-shirt and jeans was backing out of it.

‘Do you think he saw us?’ hissed Sissy, as they pressed themselves close to the wall.

Luther peeked around the corner again. ‘I don’t think so. Couldn’t have heard us, either, or even if he did he’s not paying us any mind.’

Sissy peeked around the corner, too. The man was carefully maneuvering a wheelchair out of the door and into the corridor. Lolling in the seat was a girl with her head completely covered by a green hand-towel. One skinny-wristed arm rested in her lap while the other hung down by the wheel. She was wearing a very short black dress and only one sandal.

‘Is that T-Yon?’ breathed Luther.

‘I don’t know. I can’t see her face at all. I don’t know what she was wearing, either.’

The man started to push the wheelchair along the corridor toward them. As he did so, a small figure emerged from the room behind him – a figure no taller than a child of six or seven, or maybe a dwarf. It was completely covered by a black sheet and so it was impossible for them to tell.

From the way that T-Yon had described the two black-sheeted figures that had appeared in her room, however, Sissy guessed that it was the smaller one of those two.

The man pushing the wheelchair passed close by, but, instead of turning the corner, in which case he would have caught sight of them immediately, he kept on going straight ahead, in the direction of the service elevator. Sissy caught only a glimpse of him, but he had a blocky head, with acne-pitted skin, and a protuberant, clown-like nose.

He wore a sleeveless black T-shirt, and his upper arms were so grotesquely overdeveloped that they looked as if they had been turned inside out, all muscles and sinews. His forearms and his chest were a writhing mass of tattoos, and he had a tattooed necklace that looked like razor wire.

Sissy tried to see if the girl in the wheelchair was wearing the same kind of bracelets as T-Yon, but the diminutive figure in the black sheets came dancing up alongside the wheelchair and obstructed her view. Underneath its sheets the figure was walking with a repetitive one-two-three
skip
, and it was singing
Jolie Blonde
, in the same strangled voice that Sissy had heard before.

‘
Jolie blonde, regardez donc quoi t’as fait!

Tu m’as quitté pour t’en aller avec un autre . . . oui, que moi!
’

Sissy and Luther waited until they heard the door to the service elevator open and then close, and then the distinctive whine as it began to move.

‘
Quick!
’ urged Sissy, and Luther went waddling off as fast as he could along the corridor. He came back panting, with one of his shirt tails untucked, but with a thumbs-up gesture. ‘They stopped at the first basement level. That’s where the kitchens used to be, before the hotel was all changed around.’

‘I couldn’t tell if that was T-Yon he was pushing in that wheelchair or not,’ said Sissy. ‘Whoever it was, we need to get down to the kitchens right now.’

Luther frowned at her. ‘You’re not saying what I think you’re saying?’

‘I don’t actually know what I’m saying. But let’s get down there.’

‘I’ll say something for you, Ms Sissy. You one feisty woman.’

‘You think so? Very nice of you to say so, but to tell you the God’s honest truth I’m scared shitless.’

T
he service elevator was dirty and battered inside, with dented metal panels on the walls, and it smelled as bad as the rest of the Hotel Rouge, with the added stench of long-dead fish.

As it creaked and clanked its way down to the basement, Sissy and Luther heard the sound of grinding grow progressively louder, punctuated by an occasional screech. The radio music grew louder too: Larry Gatlin singing
I’ve Done Enough Dyin’ Today
, which Sissy coincidentally used to play after Frank died, and which always used to reduce her to tears. She looked up at Luther and gave him a puckered little smile.

The elevator stopped at the basement with a bang and a shudder. Luther pushed open the door and they stepped out into a shadowy corridor with grimy gray cinder-block walls. The grinding was so relentless that Sissy was sure that whoever was working in the kitchen couldn’t have heard the elevator arrive. Apart from that, that high strangled voice was singing along with the radio.

‘
And how will we live now? You tell me

With parts of our hearts torn away
. . .’

Sissy and Luther made their way along the corridor until they reached the open doorway to the kitchen. Sissy hesitated for a moment and then she quickly looked in.

The kitchen was at least forty feet long and thirty feet wide, with two long metal-topped counters running almost the whole length of it. Four stoves were set into the counters at intervals, and on one of them three large aluminum pots were furiously boiling. Hanging from the ceiling above the counters were dozens more aluminum pots, as well as skillets and colanders and ladles and whisks.

On the left-hand side, with his back to Sissy, his arms folded, stood the tattooed man. Close beside him, almost touching him, was the small figure draped in its black sheet, swaying from side to side in time to the music from the radio and singing along.

‘
Just existin’ makes dyin’ look easy

But I’ve done enough dyin’ today
.’

They were both watching as a lanky young African-American in a bloodstained chef’s apron was picking up large red pieces of raw meat from a metal table and pushing them into the feeder pan of a meat grinder. The table was heaped up with meat – Sissy guessed nearly a hundred pounds of it – but even though the grinder was so old and so noisy he was getting through it very fast. A large aluminum tray underneath the grinder was already piled up with coarsely-ground meat, like a wriggling mass of scarlet worms, and more were dropping down to join them all the time.

The kitchen was lit by fluorescent lights, one of which kept flickering, which gave the whole scene the appearance of a silent movie, even though the grinding was so loud.

Sissy drew back a little. Luther said, ‘Any sign of T-Yon in there?’

‘She might be. But I can’t see the whole kitchen from here. I can’t see that girl in the wheelchair, either.’

‘Maybe we should just walk straight on in.’

‘I think you’re probably right. We can’t stay out here all night.’

‘Risk it?’ said Luther, raising his right hand.

‘Risk it,’ said Sissy, and gave him a high five.

The two of them entered the kitchen. At first, neither the tattooed man nor the figure in the black sheet nor the young chef noticed them. Sissy looked to the left, to the part of the kitchen which she had been unable to see when she was standing outside in the corridor. She didn’t know what she had been expecting to see there, but she was so shocked that she couldn’t speak, and she could only reach out and pull at Luther’s sleeve.

‘Lord have
mercy
,’ said Luther.

Five hospital gurneys were lined up along the left-hand wall of the kitchen, and on each gurney lay a female body, three white girls and two black. Three of them had been decapitated, although their heads were still lying between their shoulders. Not only that, these three had all been disemboweled and the flesh scraped away from their bones, so that they were held together with little more than tendons and strings of fat and connective tissue. They looked more like smashed musical instruments than human beings.

Sissy looked at the grinder, aghast, and then at Luther.

Luther was slowly shaking his head from side to side and mouthing, ‘This ain’t right. This ain’t right at all. If the Lord God find out about this . . . He going to be so full of wrath, He going to bring this whole place down on top of us.’

Sissy turned back to the bodies. One of the two women who had not yet been butchered appeared to be staring at her. It was a pretty black girl with cornrow braids. Her lips were parted as if she were just about to say something, as if she recognized that Sissy could speak to the dead, and was desperate to tell her what she knew.

But it was then that the tattooed man turned around and saw them standing there, and came right over.

‘
What the fuck?
’ he shouted, over the noise of the meat grinder and the country and western music on the radio.

Sissy pointed stiffly to the bodies on the gurneys. ‘
What have you done?
’ she screamed at him. ‘
What in God’s name have you done?
’

‘
None of your fucking business!
How the fuck did you get in here, anyways?
’

‘
Where’s T-Yon?
’ screamed Sissy. ‘
What have you done with her?
She’s not one of
these bodies, is she?
’

‘
I told you! None of your fucking business!
’

At that instant, the meat grinder groaned into silence, and the radio was switched off, too. Apart from the persistent rattling of saucepan lids on the stove, the kitchen was deathly silent.

Out of the shadows behind the gurneys, or maybe out of nowhere at all, stepped Vanessa Slider. Sissy knew that Vanessa Slider was dead, and that this was nothing more than a presence, but she still
appeared
to be real.

‘So, you old fool, you followed me,’ she said, in that voice that was thick with white noise.

‘Of course I did. You still have T-Yon and I need to take T-Yon back where she belongs.’

‘You should have brought her brother. Then I could have settled the score, couldn’t I, once and for all.’

‘What
score
?’ Sissy demanded. ‘What kind of a grudge could you possibly have against Everett and T-Yon? They never even knew who you were until Everett bought The Red Hotel.’

‘They took away everything, that family. They took away my happiness. They stole away my dreams.’

‘Well, that’s what you told me before. But you didn’t explain
how
. If they didn’t even know you, how could they have taken away your happiness? You lost the Hotel Rouge in nineteen ninety-one, didn’t you, when you were sent to prison? Everett was only thirteen years old in nineteen ninety-one, and T-Yon was no more than six.’

‘You don’t understand anything, do you?’ said Vanessa Slider. Her eyes were even darker and blurrier than the last time Sissy had seen her. ‘It wasn’t the hotel they took. I
hated
this hotel. I hated everything about it.’

‘Vanessa, listen to me,’ said Sissy, as firmly as she could, although she was having to make a conscious effort not to look at the bone-and-gristle bodies on the gurneys. ‘You have to let me take T-Yon back with me. You can’t keep her here. Whatever misfortune happened to you, T-Yon couldn’t have had anything to do with it.’

‘Oh, she surely did, you mark my words, and she stays here,’ said Vanessa Slider. ‘You bring Everett back with you, and then we’ll see.’

‘T-Yon told me about her nightmares. I know what you want to do to them. Look at what you’ve done to these people here.’

‘
Bring Everett back with you
,’ Vanessa Slider spat back at her.

‘And what if I say that I won’t?’

‘Then Shem here will have to do what Shem’s always been good at.’

Sissy turned to look at the tattooed man. In return he gave her a contemptuous lip-curling snarl, like a pantomime character.

‘So this is young Shem,’ said Sissy. ‘Well, I declare. Hasn’t he grown? But who’s the little fellow in the sheet?’

‘Don’t you try to mock me, you witch,’ said Vanessa Slider.

‘Don’t you understand?’ Sissy retorted. ‘I’m not mocking you, I’m afraid of you! I’m
very
afraid. I’m afraid of Shem here, too, and what you’re doing here, and I don’t know what I can do to stop you. I can’t let you keep T-Yon, and I can’t bring Everett here, either.’

Vanessa Slider came closer. She had no smell, no fragrance at all, but she was so strongly charged with static that Sissy felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickling up.

‘Let me tell you this, witch. Whatever the worst possible thing is that you can possibly imagine, I can do worse. Now you go back for me, if you please, and bring me T-Yon’s brother.’

‘No,’ said Sissy.

Vanessa Slider turned to Shem and gave him a one-shouldered shrug. Shem went across to one of the kitchen counters and picked up a ten-inch knife. He came back, grinning, and waving it around in circles, around and around, so that it softly whistled.

‘If you knew a
half
of what I can do to you with this knife before you die,
vieille
, you would be down on your bended knees right now and promising my maw everything she axe you for. I been cutting and trimming and boning since I was knee high to a high knee, and believe me, I can slice your liver like a fan dancer’s fan, right in front of your eyes.’

‘I can vouch for that,’ said Vanessa Slider. ‘And of course, Shem is still in the land of the living. Maybe
I
can’t hurt you any, but my Shem can.’

Sissy looked up at Luther. Luther’s eyes were darting from side to side as if he were trying to think of a way to escape. She could see that he was just as frightened as she was.

‘I need to understand,’ she insisted, even though she couldn’t stop her voice from wavering. ‘I can’t just go get Everett without you telling me
why
, because that’s the first thing that he’s going to ask me.
He
knows all about T-Yon’s nightmares, too, and he won’t be willing to follow me back here if he thinks you’re going to cut him up the same as these poor people. Who are they, anyhow? Why have you done
this
to them?’