Man of Wax (2 page)

Kevin said, “Yes, you were alone. At least from what I could see. You checked in at three o’clock in the morning and you were alone. Now, do you want to sit down or something? You look pale.”

3

The Paradise Motel—the place I had presumably checked into late last night—was U-shaped, the bottom part of the U facing toward the ocean, the sides hugging the parking lot. The motel only offered ten rooms and judging by the parking lot, it looked like the majority was empty. There were only three vehicles: a rusted and paint-flaked Dodge, a pickup truck, and a van. All the plates showed they were owned and registered by citizens of California.
 

Walking slowly across the sand-spotted pavement, I didn’t know what bothered me more—the fact that my car was nowhere to be seen, or the fact that this was California, that I lived in Pennsylvania, where I knew I’d been just yesterday.
 

Smith River, Kevin had told me, just before the state line that would take me into Brookings, Oregon, and did I want a glass of water or a phone to call somebody?
 

Actually, yes, I did want to call somebody. I used his phone and dialed Jen’s cell but immediately got her voicemail. I listened to her voice and considered leaving a message, but then hung up. Jen always kept her cell phone on, in case someone at the firm or one of her clients needed to get in touch with her, and the fact that it was turned off just wasn’t right.
 

“No luck?” Kevin had asked, and I shook my head, handed him back the phone.
 

In the end I didn’t tell him about the dried blood on the back of the bathroom door. After everything I’d learned from him—and really, had I learned anything?—the last thing I wanted to do was mention blood and alarm him even more. I’d managed to play it off like I just didn’t remember checking in last night, that I must have really been exhausted. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. The fact that my wife and daughter were now somehow missing was my foremost thought, but I couldn’t say this to Kevin. He wouldn’t understand. Even I didn’t understand, though I was beginning to wonder if maybe it was me who was missing.
 

Kevin had put me in room six. As I hurried across the parking lot, listening to the ocean’s waves off past the dunes, to the seagulls careening through the air, I hoped the door hadn’t somehow locked when I left. If need be I could always return to the manager’s office, ask for a key, but at the moment looking at Kevin—and forcing the poor clerk to look at me in return—was almost too much to bear.
 

Stepping onto the walkway, I paused and glanced back toward the highway, what Kevin had said was Highway 101. Probably the most famous highway in California, traveled the length of the state from the top all the way near the bottom, stopped right in Los Angeles. He’d mentioned this as if I should already know it, seeing as how I was obviously familiar with the area (which I most certainly was not), and how I managed to find my way here last night to check in.
 

Oh yeah? I thought, glancing at the three vehicles in the lot. And what car did I use?
 

For a couple long seconds I watched traffic pass on 101. I was putting off the inevitable, which was to step back into room six and check the bathroom. I kept telling myself what I’d seen wasn’t real, that it had been an illusion. Maybe I was high on something, though I hadn’t smoked since college, that one lonely year I’d been there. Okay, there was that one time after Jen and I had been married, when a friend of ours dropped some off as a surprise, but that was it. The only thing I got high on nowadays were the fumes from painting, but that was on rare occasions, when I was working inside and for some reason the windows needed to be closed or the air wasn’t circulating enough, and I always took a break then, stepped outside.
 

What looked to be a delivery truck was approaching down the highway, its turn signal flashing. I thought maybe I’d stay to watch it make the turn, watch it come down the drive and park in front of the office, but I was being stupid. I was stalling.
 

I reached for the doorknob, knowing it would be locked. It turned easily in my hand. The next thing I knew the door had swung open, the bright morning sunlight suffusing across the carpet, and I found myself walking inside.

4

I checked the bedside table first, yanking open the drawer. Nothing there except a phonebook. I took it out, set it on the bed, and immediately put it back in. Slammed the drawer shut. I wasn’t sure yet what I was looking for but that hadn’t been it.
 

The air conditioner unit continued blowing cold air as I rushed over to the bolted-down television. I tried the drawers there, all four of them, but found nothing in any of them, and it wasn’t until then that I realized what I was really doing. Yes, I was looking for my wallet, my keys, even some goddamn cigarettes though I’d given them up years ago, when Casey was born, but the real reason was waiting in the bathroom.
 

“Come on,” I whispered, flexing my hands in and out of fists. I stood in front of the now closed bathroom door. I told myself that before I did anything else—like call Jen’s cell again, or call home, or do anything to try to track down my family—I needed to check the bathroom door, to ensure myself I wasn’t going crazy.
 

Opening the door, turning on the light, stepping inside—it all happened in one fluid motion that for a second I knew I was dreaming. Yes, that made perfect sense. This was all a dream. This entire thing was just a fantasy concocted by my mind, and at any moment I would wake to Jen nudging me or to that annoying spray of sunlight that fell right on my face when the blinds were up. There would be nothing on the other side of the door now, nothing at all except maybe a freshly folded towel. Having anything else—such as, say, four words spelled out in dried blood—would be a nightmare, and I never had nightmares. Jen and Casey did; I sometimes had to coax each of them out of their dreams when they tossed and turned in the middle of the night, and then had to hold them until they drifted back to sleep.
 

I don’t know if I was surprised to find the message still there: those four ominous words, glaring back at me from their place on the door.
 

At that moment somebody knocked. I jumped. Stood very still then, thinking that it had been nothing.
 

Maybe it’s Jen, I thought (and hoped), but for some reason I knew it wasn’t, that it couldn’t be.
 

Before I made my way across the small expanse of the motel room, I made sure to close the bathroom door. My new thought now was that it was Kevin, checking to see if I was really okay, and I didn’t want him to see the blood. Because if he saw what was there he’d become even more alarmed, might even call the police, and then what was I going to tell them? That while Kevin claimed I’d checked in early this morning, the last thing I remembered was being at home with my wife and daughter and watching the Eagles game?
 

The knock came once more, insistent.
 

I went to the window and peeked through the curtains. It was a young woman, dressed in a blue uniform. Her truck was parked just outside my room.
 

I glanced down at the bible on the table, its crusty pages still opened to the Book of Job, then went over and opened the door.
 

“Benjamin Anderson?” She was chewing something that smelled like strawberry bubblegum. She held a package in her hands, a plain brown box that looked as if it could hold a pair of my sneakers. Her face was plain but somehow pretty, marked by a smattering of freckles. “This is for you.”
 

“For me.”
 

She nodded, handed me the package, and grabbed an electronic device she’d been keeping underneath her arm. She extracted a black stylus from the device and handed both to me. I just stood there for a moment with the package in my hands, the box that didn’t feel as if had a pair of sneakers in it at all. No, it was much lighter, which for some reason felt wrong—shouldn’t it at least be heavy?
 

I set the package on the ground and grabbed the device, signed my name and handed it back.
 

“Thanks,” she said, the word clearly automatic, then punched a few buttons on the device and turned away.
 

I watched her go for a few seconds, walking down the steps to the parking lot, pulling herself up into the truck. When I finally felt strong enough to pick the box up off the ground and take it to the bed, where I set it down on top, I realized the door was still open. I went to it, peered outside again. I smelled the ocean, felt the salt in the air, then shut the door and turned back around.
 

The box just sat there, staring back at me.
 

Waiting.

5

I had no scissors, no knife, not even the jagged edge of one of my keys to open the tape that kept the box sealed. Instead I had to work one of the ends with my fingernail, working it back and forth, until I had enough to start tearing it away. Minutes passed. I was aware of the time, knew that I was again stalling, but I felt more inclined to do so now than before. The four words on the back of the bathroom door and what they’d been written in was enough to prove that this was no dream, no nightmare, which meant I had no reason to kid myself into thinking whatever was in this box wasn’t real as well.
 

The first thing I saw when I had the box open was that it was filled with Styrofoam peanuts. I reached in, hesitantly, imagining the angry tips of knives and syringes, the tiny mouths of spiders—but what I touched first was a leather wallet. Pieces of Styrofoam rained down around the box onto the comforter as I pulled it out.
 

I opened the wallet and found only money inside. No credit cards, no driver’s license, nothing else. It definitely wasn’t my wallet, though—the wallet my dad had given me for high school graduation, filled with a thousand dollars, a small fortune to a man who only made twenty thousand dollars a year and who had been saving this gift ever since I was in middle school.
 

The money in this wallet came to five hundred dollars. All of it twenties. I set them aside and reached back in the box, a little less hesitant now. I wasn’t expecting any insects or glass shards to bite me anytime soon.
 

Next thing I pulled out was a cell phone. It was a small simple black phone—half screen, half keypad. There was no company name on it, no provider logo. There was only one button on the top, presumably the power button, and that was it. No volume switch, no slot to plug in a power adapter, nothing. A note taped to its screen said in typed letters
TURN
ME
ON
.
 

I didn’t hesitate at all, pressing the power button and watching the phone light up.
 

The phone’s main screen was blank, offering no menu or contact list or even clock. Then, quite suddenly, the phone started vibrating. On the screen, the words
INCOMING
CALL
flashed on and off.
 

I immediately went to press the green send button and hesitated. Someone was calling me but I didn’t want to answer it. For all I knew it could be Jen, telling me that this was all just some joke, one big surprise, but a feeling in my gut told me that wasn’t the case, just as that same feeling kept telling me not to answer the phone.
 

But I knew I had no choice. I’d been sent this package for a reason. I’d followed the simple directions in turning the phone on for a reason. Now I had to answer it to find the sum of those reasons.
 

I hit the send button, placed the phone to my ear, and said, “Hello?”
 

“Benjamin Anderson,” said the voice on the other end, a cheerful yet somehow unctuous voice that I was already beginning to hate. “Greetings.”
 

“Who the hell is this?”
 

There was a pause, and though I had no reason to suspect this, I knew the speaker on the other end was grinning.
 

The voice said, “You can call me Simon. I’m sure you’ve played Simon Says before. Because that’s exactly what we’ll be playing now.”
 

“The fuck are you talking about?”
 

“Didn’t you already get the message? You know, the one on the back of the bathroom door?”
 

At that moment it was as if time had stopped. I even glanced at the clock on the bedside table, as if to confirm this fact, but it was digital and didn’t show the seconds so it was still stuck on 9:38. I could feel the bathroom door behind me, urging me to look at it, to maybe even walk over and open it so I could step inside, stare again at what had been placed there.
 

“What the fuck is going on here?”
 

My pulse had quickened; I could hear the blood pounding in my ears—then, just as fast, the low chuckling of the man on the other end of the line.
 

“Just like the message says, Ben. May I call you Ben? I hope so. It’ll make things easier if I do. Just think of me as a friend. That’s probably the only way you and your family are going to get out of this alive.”
 

I was staring at the alarm clock, at those red glowing numbers reading 9:38. They now changed to 9:39.
 

Simon said, “I know this is difficult for you, Ben,” and I hated to hear what sounded like sympathy in his voice. “It’s always difficult for a new player. But once you accept there’s nothing else you can do, it gets easier. Trust me, it does.”