An Aversion to Ladders 14

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE, Part Two

The lawyer’s penthouse apartment in the crumbling hotel was his home-away-from-home when he was in Chicago, although Michael, with his fear of heights, was always reluctant to visit him there. This time at least they would not only be on the same floor but also in neighboring rooms. Omar had his guest’s charges removed from the register before the two braved the elevator together. The hotel’s resident was a late sleeper, so on splitting up in the hallway he reiterated to his under-siege friend that he would be by Stonesthrow in a few days to clear up his troubles.

By the time the woozy guest put his key in the room door, he could scarcely string together the evening’s events that led him to it. He latched onto the doorknob with the thought of turning it, but on hearing a squeak glanced up to see the shapely form of a woman going into his friend’s apartment. He could only presume she was a room maid by the pushcart left in the hall.

With fading steps, Michael toddled over the dark threshold to knock a videocassette box off the top of a television. A throbbing blue light ebbing back and forth over the windowsill illuminated the film’s unpromising title in the floor: Invasion of the Bodily Snatch. He stepped over it and into the bathroom to flush out some of the libation he had cavalierly consumed over the course of the evening. After a few turnarounds between the towel bar and sink, he and his jacket parted company, whereupon his attention turned agreeably to the bed. It appeared solid enough, so he promptly fell on it to arrest things still spinning in the dark. The delayed effect of the alcohol was laying bare the true object of his unsettled state. Perhaps he had only driven away to miss her—to feel her like nails in his chest.

A pair of beady eyes emerged out of the shadows to intrude on his self-pity. Grasping they were attached to a stuffed horse head mounted on the wall, a crinkle worked its way down his spine. Michael pried himself from the bed and stripped off the bedspread, draping it over the offending beast. Having rectified the problem, his body wasted little time in burrowing down into the lowest spot in the mattress. After a minute or two it would neither budge nor descend further. It was not like sleep, however. It was eerily something else: something raw and closer to the surface of his anxiousness. He cracked an eye on hearing more muffled squeaking rising out of the hallway. It was probably the maid’s cart once more on the move, although it seemed to be echoing up out of the bowels of a catacomb. It grew gradually louder in his ear until, finally, it stopped short of the bed.

THUMP!

Michael propped open another leaden lid. The inconstant bar light across the street revealed that the heavy spread had brought the horse head down off the wall. It was now lying covered in a heap on the floor. The man wanted to leave it where it was, but the creature’s snout was sticking out in a threat. With grudging effort he got up to not only re-cover the odious monster but also to use the occasion to scoot as much of it under the high bed as he could. The light in the window surged with the last nudge, illuminating the bare wall where the head had hung. An impression was already full in his mind before the outline was half-seen. He turned to face the discolored wallpaper, and noted how the ghost image of the pulled-down mounting mirrored what he had found in the corridors of Nadir Hall.

Before venturing another pass at the mattress, a blanket was stripped away to blot out the annoying light. Darkness, Michael reasoned, would surely be conducive to sleep. He returned to bed and closed his eyes with greater resolve, but the noisy cart was soon on the move again. Its last few inches to the bedside were excruciating to endure. He clinched his eyes even tighter, refusing to relinquish, if only in theory, he was asleep. The squeaking abruptly stopped, although the silence that followed was even pricklier than the noise. Michael was regardless dead to the world, or as dead as he could make himself…

He was back in the restroom at the filling station, fussing with the busted tap where he could get no water to wash his hands. His gaze shot down along the row of out-of-order urinals, and then, across from them, at seven enigmatic paintings hanging on the wall. Why artwork should be put in a men’s room was questionable, but it was presumably to cover the faded spot where the horse head had been. He glanced under the stall doors to see where the creature had got to, yet could find it nowhere. Regardless, he made a discovery. From a distance (and perhaps only from a distance), he could at last piece together the thread that connected the canvases. A bright streak of light, painted into the reflective windowpanes of a building, ran transversely through each image like the blade of a guillotine. Those framed in the windows appeared to be watching either a comet or meteor, but in the seventh painting the sliver of light fanned out into a silvery color more reflecting the sky than being a part of it. Giving up on the sink, the patron moved over to the hand blower. Its enamel-painted surface looked new, but surely something had been carved in the top of it. Lifting his eyes, he read instead an inscription hanging next to the first painting on the wall:

In Commemoration of Nine/Eleven.

It was an airplane wing depicted in the series of paintings, one so close it was difficult to comprehend.

The traveler returned to the front of the station, though something more was missing from his recollection. He proceeded out onto the lot, yet did not know which way to go on the rural highway. The well-lit interstate beckoned on the left, but it was the darker way that pulled him right. He drove a quarter of a mile, and thinking he had made a mistake looked for a place to turn around. Pale buttocks were immediately picked up in the headlights along the dark shoulder opposite his lane. The nude woman’s pace was slow and steady, and she showed no reaction to being caught in the glare. He eased off the gas as he neared her and rolled down his window.

“Do you need a ride somewhere?”

She did not look over, and there was no seeing her face from the angle.

“It’s not safe for you to be out at night in your state,” he explained.

Still, no reaction.

Unsure what to do, Michael pulled on ahead. He drove slowly to maintain visual contact with the woman in the rearview mirror. On reaching a mailbox reflector he swung the car around to face her.

She was gone.

Rolling his window back up, the man crossed over his tracks on the woman’s side of the highway. He kept glimpsing in the mirror thinking she might be hunkered down in the weeds. An unearthly hush pushed under the car, leading him to reach for the radio. Instantly, a dark Cadillac ambulance overtook him in the opposite lane with flashing lights. It too made no noise. The driver watched in horror as the emergency vehicle tore away in a long, dripping line; the carcass of a headless horse was being dragged behind it. The shadowy form scuffed and tumbled indignantly over hard pavement. Chunks of cartilage and bone flew off to roll under his tires; they rapped like knuckles on the floorboard wanting to be let in.

Thump. Thump… Thump. Thump…

With sudden elucidation, the dozing man realized the disturbance was rising up from underneath the bed. He bolted off the mattress and staggered over to slap at the knob on the room door; the suffocating Victorian wallpaper in the hallway all but wrapped around him. An exit ripped through it with a way out. He barreled down the first half-flight of stairs to smack into a window at the turn. Two slithering nipples peeked in through frosted glass—a watercolor overrunning the margins of its paper with animal bluntness. They could hardly catch up with him as he flew down the second, darker half-flight. Another turn and another window—blacker nipples watched him trip and bang down the next flight of cement steps. His limbs, yanked from their sockets by centrifugal force, were little more than flightless wings. The vertigo and stinging blows persisted long after he came to rest on his back. He gazed up at the dark stairs above him, assuming it was his falling body, like a pair of second grade scissors, that made the tears of light separating one flight from another.

A voice echoed down the stairwell. “If you would like to make a call, please hang up and try again.”

There was a pause, as if waiting for a response. Michael’s eyes navigated the twist of handrails to spy a woman’s bleary face peering down from the top of the stairs. Her expression seemed unnaturally wide.

“If you would like to make a call, please hang up and try again,” she repeated.

The address was clearly directed at him, but the words were creeping down the steps with spidery mischief…

It was the voice of a man mockingly imitating a woman.

The injured man focused his sights on several strange lines running parallel with the woman’s mouth. They were fingers—fingers of another person making her lower jaw open and shut. She appeared to have no body.

Michael managed to sit up. But it must have been minutes later. A fierce headache followed him to his feet. He trudged back up the steps to retrace his out-of-time fall and found the maid’s cart was still in the hallway; Omar’s door was ajar. His friend, almost lost in his dark library-of-a-room, was sitting in a chair drinking coffee and reading Parmenides by a small, insufficient lamp. He looked up only half-surprised to see his friend swaying in the doorway.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I fell.”

A woman emerged halfway out of a dark passageway. She hugged the shadow on the wall, but even still Michael could tell she was wearing a skimpy maid’s uniform.

“My friend said you scared her half to death.” Omar gestured for the woman to come over, but she preferred to remain where she was. He was straight. “I told you I would send something by your room to help you sleep.”

The blushing hotel guest averted his gaze to the unraveling edge of a Persian carpet at his bare feet.

The friend sighed, “Don’t you remember her coming by?”

Michael’s hurt feelings were slow to emerge. “You shouldn’t have, Ommie.”

“You need help with your little problem.”

Michael shrank into the hallway. “Not that kind of help.”

Omar yelled out to his friend before he disappeared from view. “Lock the door, so you don’t go wandering off to tumble down stairs!”