Dead Letters Anthology (14 page)

He’d revealed a pair of cards lying face down. No doubt leaning on the table had let him plant them unobserved. They must have been hidden in the sleeves of his black turtleneck or of his tweed jacket, which was even more voluminous than he seemed this close. “That’s a good trick,” I admitted. “You’re that kind of magician.”

“They were there all the time,” he said and unfolded his left hand above the cards. “You see, there’s magic underneath.”

I thought he meant on the backs of the cards, but now I wonder. Perhaps he was talking about the world. At this remove I’ve no idea whether the backs showed the sylph beneath the tree. I flipped them over, and I don’t need to tell you what I saw, Conrad. I didn’t know how useful they might have been to me in the final round of poker, but I said “If these are my cards they’re a bit late.”

“We aren’t playing that game any more. We’re concerned with your life.”

I found this unnervingly intrusive. “Who is?”

“I hope you are.” With a winning smile or rather a triumphant grin Malleson said “You could make your name.”

“How are these going to help?”

“They can point the way. They’ll be part of you. That’s why cards were made in the first place. Once they’ve been read to you they’ll direct you.”

Of course I didn’t believe any of this – I didn’t even think I could get a story out of it – which was why I said “So that’s what you’d like to do?”

“To read you? I already am.” He’d lowered his voice when he joined me, and now it grew so muted that it made me strain to grasp it. “Would you like to hear?” he said.

“If I can.”

“Oh, you will.” This sounded less promissory than ominous, not least since it seemed to have become more audible by creeping inside my head. “The deuce of wands,” he said and rested his left forefinger on the two of clubs. “I give you power and boldness and originality.”

“Well, thank you,” I said with some irony, since I imagined I already had them.

“The six of cups.” He transferred the finger to the other card, and I saw a moist print fade from the two like ripples sinking into a pond. “I take innocence and childhood,” he said. “I leave nostalgia and the influence of the past.”

I didn’t learn for years how unlike an ordinary tarot reading this was. Shouldn’t that have fixed it in my mind? I’m disturbed to think I could have forgotten all about it until that night in the Bournemouth hotel. Malleson lifted his finger from the six, leaving a second sweaty mark, and I couldn’t help asking “Is that all?”

“It will be all you need. It can be your life.”

At least this seemed to end the session. “Well, thank you,” I found myself repeating like a response in church.

As I pushed back my chair Malleson said “Don’t you want to hear the price?”

I felt I should have known there would be something of the sort. “You won all my money,” I tried protesting.

“It should never be that kind of price.” When he rose to his feet he might have been recoiling in distaste. “The price is no more than an acknowledgement,” he said, and the trembling of the floor receded as he moved towards the corridor. “Just remember.”

He must have raised his voice, because it didn’t grow distant as soon as he did. I felt as though it had taken root in my head, and in the Bournemouth hotel room I fancied I could hear its soft insinuating hiss: “the price…” I left the cards on the table in the lounge and didn’t follow Malleson until I was sure of not catching up with him. For fear of encountering him at a party I retreated to my room and went to bed. During the rest of the weekend I kept an eye out for him, but I never saw him again – not at an Easter gathering, at any rate.

Could he have meant that remembering was the acknowledgement – the price? In that case I’ve paid it here and am liable to carry on. Or if he was asking for an acknowledgement in my work, surely this account fits that bill too. I was already striving for originality and boldness, and I hope those lend my stuff some power, but it’s also founded on the traditions of my field; you could say I’m nostalgic for them. I haven’t been innocent for a long time, and I trust I’m not childish either. Mustn’t saying all this settle whatever debt I owed him? What else could he want of me?

It took me a while to recapture sleep in Bournemouth. I wakened just after six with several ideas in my head. This very often happens – sometimes it’s a stray phrase or image, more frequently material for the piece I’m writing – but these words seemed more pointed than usual.
Take what’s on offer, friends. Cards let us be shrewd. Symbolic images (“X”) offer foresight, however enigmatic and random they seem
. Perhaps you find all that as meaningful as I do, Conrad, or your readers would, though if you interpret an oracle it becomes part of you, just as employing any form of magic is said to do. I didn’t spend much time on the sentences, because I’d had another waking notion. I thought it might lead to a story, perhaps for your book. On my way home I could revisit the hotel where I’d met Malleson.

I won’t name it, though it isn’t listed online. I remembered where it had been, which looked as if it was about half an hour’s drive from the motorway. By the time I reached the junction I’d been delayed by several traffic queues, all of which seemed to be caused solely by signs warning of a queue ahead. I considered driving straight on, but it felt too much like cowardice. Perhaps I ought to have wondered why I should be nervous, instead of which I made for the hotel.

I didn’t recognise the road. It wound through a couple of elongated villages kept apart by miles of fields, and then it wandered between trees that added to the gloom beneath the sunless April sky. To begin with I drove past a side road, which didn’t appear to be signposted. Backing up, I saw there was a post after all, though its top was raggedly rotten. The long grass around the post came close to hiding several fragments of a wooden pointer, but I spotted the remains of a word,
OTEL
, and gave in to fancying that it sounded like an instruction as I turned along the road.

This wasn’t as wide as it used to be. The hedges on both sides had swelled up, stretching out thorny branches. Tufts of grass and weeds were well on the way to reclaiming the road for an older landscape. Beyond the hedges trees elaborately cabled with vines blocked most of the view until the road bent, revealing the hotel, a three-storey crescent composed of twin curves on either side of a straight midsection framing a wide pair of doors above six broad steps. At first I thought it was blackened just by the low unbroken clouds, but as I drove closer I saw that the building couldn’t have been cleaned for decades. By the time it hosted Eastercon the hotel had been dilapidated, offering discounts to conventions and the like in an attempt to prolong its life. This obviously hadn’t worked, since it was clear that the hotel had been boarded up years ago.

The curving drive in front of the hotel was deserted. The splintered concrete was strewn with rubble, shattered slates from the roof, fragments of brick, a board so rotten it had fallen from the window across which it had been nailed. None of the windows above the ground floor was boarded up, and all of them were encrusted with windblown grime. I parked in front of the main entrance, and as I climbed the cracked steps the ends of the building loomed at the edges of my vision like a claw poised to close around me. I nearly slipped on a patch of moss, and the claw lurched closer. I might have fancied that my approach had been greeted in another way – that the left-hand door had crept open to invite me in. I mustn’t have noticed it was ajar.

When I pushed the door it lumbered inwards, grinding debris into the carpet. I had to lean against it to make a gap I could fit through. Beyond it I saw the lobby, or rather a few sooty outlines – the reception counter, a dead chandelier. The flashlight on my phone gradually revealed section after section of the extravagantly large high-ceilinged room, where shadows dodged behind everything that stood in the dark. They brought to life the pale child perched on the end of a stone banister. I was crossing the threshold when I thought better of it; at least, I went back to the car to find the Malleson package in my overnight case. I slipped the cards into my pocket as I returned to the hotel. Perhaps I still thought I was creating a tale for you, Conrad.

The floor of the lobby gave as I trod on it, or at any rate the discoloured carpet did. The heavy fabric was sodden with however many years of rain had leaked through holes in the roof above the stairwell. As I advanced towards the counter I felt boards shift beneath the carpet, blundering sluggishly together like blind creatures under earth. That must have been why the rusty bell on the counter emitted a dull muffled note, and I needn’t have felt it was summoning anyone. In response to my approach all the denizens of the pigeonholes behind the counter stirred in unison – just shadows roused by the flashlight, which also made the grime on the counter seem to swarm. I halted under the chandelier, in which the blackened bulbs only served to solidify the dark, and swung the flashlight beam around me while I tried to recall the layout of the hotel.

As the stone child stretched its arms out to the light I saw its eyes were caked with grime. Beyond the wide stairs over which it was standing some kind of guard, a pair of lifts began to inch their doors open. The shadows of the bars were shifting, not the grilles themselves, but the beam also found a collapsed face on the floor of the lift, peering out at me with its crumpled eyes. I had to pace a good deal closer to be certain that the face was on an abandoned poster for some forgotten event at the hotel. At least I was heading in the right direction, because I’d remembered passing the lifts on my way to the poker game.

Are you beginning to wonder what I thought I was doing? I had the ill-defined notion that putting the cards back where I’d left them might bring some form of resolution, perhaps just to the tale I imagined I was in. As I stepped into the corridor beyond the lifts the walls appeared to lunge towards me, not least because whole sections of the wallpaper were drooping towards the floor, exposing their fungoid undersides. A board shivered underfoot, and I couldn’t tell whether its muffled clatter obscured a sound somewhere ahead, a whisper or a faint restlessness. It seemed likely that there would be mice or other vermin in the hotel, and I didn’t halt too long while I tried to hear. Staying still for any length of time made me feel as if the grime that constituted a good deal of the dark was settling on my skin.

The floor wasn’t holding up well. It felt like treading on planks in a marsh. A doorway gaped on my left, and I saw that both of the doors were held open by the carpet, which appeared to have burgeoned around their lowest edges. Beyond the doorway a cavernous darkness was emphasised more than relieved by glimmers of light through chinks in the boards over the windows, but I glimpsed a crouching shape that looked poised for a leap. It was a chair crippled by a broken leg and discarded in the empty dining-room, and I told myself it was the only reason why I felt awaited in the dark.

As I passed the bar I saw fragments of a figure keeping pace with me, my reflection dodging across a long mirror and visible only where the glass wasn’t black. Next to the bar the outer doors of both toilets were caught permanently open by the carpet and whatever had taken root in it. Through one doorway I thought I heard a whisper of water, but it fell silent the instant I paused, and so it could hardly have been the plumbing. Might it have been somewhere ahead, around the curve of the corridor? I did my best to assume I’d heard mice again, although now that I tried to grasp the sound, it seemed to have been unnecessarily surreptitious. In a story I might have made it suggest that the dark was taking on more substance – settling together into a more solid form.

I sent myself along the corridor, since otherwise my detour from the motorway would have been pointless. An oval mirror partly draped with sagging wallpaper blinded me with my own flashlight, and I had to halt again while my eyesight seeped back. My vision hadn’t entirely returned when the sensation of gathering grime urged me onwards, and so at first I didn’t notice the figure behind me in the mirror. Its face looked not merely black with dirt, as though it had just risen from the earth, but composed of it if not fattened by it. The flashlight beam swung around faster than I did, which meant that it took altogether too long to locate the occupant of the corridor. It was a portrait opposite the mirror, its face masked by a stain that had attracted a good deal of grit. Identifying it might have reassured me more if the beam hadn’t illuminated something else. The lounge where I’d encountered Malleson was just along the corridor.

It was on the left: a wide space without doors, where I could see a segment of the edge of the round table. By now I’d decided on my course, whether as an incident in the tale I planned to tell or simply to rid myself of the cards in the way that seemed most appropriate. I believed – still believe – that I’d worked out why they had been sent to Malleson. One of the poker players had found them where I’d left them and assumed they were evidence of cheating, which indeed they could have been; after all, what had Malleson been doing with them before he read them to me? Why the sender had waited so long, I couldn’t say. Perhaps, having failed to track Malleson down at the convention, they’d been frustrated all these years until they stumbled on his address or thought to search online. Now I proposed to leave the cards on the table once again. If anybody found them – if rubble hadn’t hidden them by the time the hotel was renovated or more likely demolished – they would mean nothing. This felt like a conclusion to me.

I took the cards out of my pocket as I advanced towards the lounge. I wasn’t intending to linger, especially since I’d heard the noise in the dark again. It was somewhere in the lounge beyond the table, which was scaly with scraps of fallen plaster. It might have been a furtive movement or a bid to whisper or even an attempt to draw a breath through some suffocating medium, if not a combination of them all. As I came abreast of the lounge I couldn’t help lowering the flashlight beam. It showed the near edge of the table, which had been divested of its chairs, unless one had been left on the far side, where part of the darkness seemed more solid. I kept the flashlight low while I made for the table, holding out the cards, which felt unpleasantly slippery and gritty into the bargain. As soon as I was close enough I dropped them on the table, where they landed like part of a poker hand, the club peeking out from behind the heart. The impact seemed too negligible to affect the other contents of the table, and the scraps of plaster didn’t stir. All the same, there was another movement in the dark.