The Ninth Nightmare (5 page)

‘
You need to listen to me, Lincoln. You'll regret it if you don't. Tonight, I need my privacy, you got that? I don't want any witnesses. Not you, not anybody
.'

Lincoln took a deep breath, and held it for a moment. Then he said, ‘If this is you, Bennie, this isn't funny any more. If this
isn't
Bennie, then all I can say is go screw yourself.'

There was a sudden blurt of white noise, and then a thick, persistent crackle, but that was all. Lincoln tried to see who had called him, but the only number that showed up was his own home number, in Ann Arbor. He tried calling Grace again, but he couldn't get a ring tone. He edged his way out of the booth, stood up and started to walk toward the restaurant door.

One of the waiters intercepted him. ‘Sir? You finish up already, sir? The
caldeirada
– it was not to your like?'

‘The
caldeirada's
terrific. I have to make a phone call, that's all.'

‘You don't go back to your room?'

‘Excuse me?'

‘I said, “Do you want me to keep it warm?”'

Lincoln stared at him. The waiter looked back at him, unblinking. Lincoln was sure that he had said, “
You don't go back to your room?
” but maybe he had genuinely misheard him. The restaurant was noisy, after all, with talking and laughter and clattering cutlery and piped salsa music in the background.

‘No . . . you're OK,' he said slowly, and walked toward the restaurant entrance. The maître d' was standing behind his lectern by the doorway, with polished black hair and a little black moustache and a maroon tuxedo. As Lincoln approached he bowed his head and said, ‘Good evening, sir. I hope you enjoyed your meal.'

‘I'm only stepping out to use my cell. I'm coming back in a minute.'

‘You are not returning to your room?'

‘Why? What's it to you?'

‘Excuse me, sir, I don't follow you.'

‘Why should you care whether I'm returning to my room or not?'

‘I'm sorry, sir. I still don't understand.' The maître d' looked totally baffled. ‘I made no mention of your room.'

Lincoln opened his mouth. He was about to tell the maître d' that he was either a deuce hole or an idiot, but he decided that it was pointless. Instead he gave him a dismissive flap of his hand and walked off.

He was still unable to get a cellphone signal out in the hotel lobby, so he went outside and stood on the front steps of the hotel. A strong gusty wind was blowing from the north-west, off the lake, and dead leaves were skipping across the hotel driveway with a clatter like dancing skeletons. He tried calling Grace again, but all he could hear was the same thick crackling that he had heard before. Maybe his phone was on the fritz. The best thing he could do was go back to his room and call her from there.

He went back into the hotel lobby and took a left at the reception desk. There was a gilt-framed mirror at the end of the corridor and he could see himself walking toward it – a tall, lithe African-American in a black suit and a black silk shirt. His head was shaved which emphasized the Nubian looks that he had inherited from his mother – a thin face with high cheekbones and a straight narrow nose. In fact his features were so sharp that his friends at school had nicknamed him Icepick.

He reached Room 104. As he took out his key card, a hotel chambermaid in a frilly white apron came out of Room 106 next door with clean green towels over her arm. She stopped and stared at him as if she couldn't believe what she was seeing.

‘Good evening,' he said, giving her a smile.

‘Yes, sir,' she replied, still staring at him. She walked off, turning her head around twice as she made her way along the corridor, as if she were afraid that he was going to come after her. Lincoln watched her until she reached the lobby and disappeared out of sight. He thought:
what the hell was
that
all about
? But then he shrugged and inserted his key card into the lock. She could have mistaken him for somebody famous. Grace maintained that he bore a strong resemblance to the murdered rapper Tupac Shakur, so maybe it was no surprise that the housekeeper had looked at him with such anxiety. He guessed that
he
would be anxious, too, if he met a man who had been shot dead in 1996.

He entered his room and switched on the light. Everything appeared to be normal. The chambermaid had closed the drapes and switched on the bedside lamps, as well as turning down the bed and leaving two chocolate mints in the pillows. Lincoln went across to the desk, picked up the phone and dialed nine for an outside line. While he waited, he rotated his head to ease his neck muscles. It had been a long, punishing day and he couldn't wait to finish his dinner, take a shower and climb into bed.

Instead of an outside line, however, he heard that sharp blurt of white noise again, followed by the soft crackling of static.

Shit
, he thought. Maybe there was something wrong with his home phone line. But he hadn't even dialed his number yet, so how could that be? And how come he couldn't get a line either on his cellphone or this regular landline? It didn't make any technical sense.

He dialed zero for the hotel operator. This time, he got a response.

‘Operator, how can I help you?'

‘I'm trying to get an outside line from Room One-Oh-Four, but all I'm getting is this crackling sound.'

‘Hold on, Mr Walker. I'll see what I can do.'

There was a moment's pause, and then he heard the crackling noise again. He dialed the operator again and said, ‘I'm still getting it.'

‘I'm sorry, sir, you're still getting
what
, exactly?'

‘The crackling sound, just like before.'

‘I'm sorry, sir. I don't hear it. All I can hear is a regular dialing tone.'

‘There's no dialing tone. There's only this crackling sound.'

There was another pause, and then he heard the crackling again. He tried the operator's number again, and it rang, but this time nobody answered.

‘This is fucking unbelievable,' he said to his reflection in the mirror. He would have to go to the front desk and see if they could dial his home number for him. He was growing increasingly annoyed now. His dinner was getting cold, he couldn't get through to Grace, and everybody in this five-star hotel was talking five-star bullshit. He was beginning to agree with his late lookalike Tupac, who had once said, ‘
Reality is wrong. Only dreams are for real
.'

He thought it would be a good idea to take a leak before he went to reception, so he made his way around the bed and headed for the bathroom door. His hand was already on the doorknob when there was a thunderous crash from inside the bathroom and the whole door shook as if somebody had thrown themselves against it. He jumped back, startled, and he almost lost his balance and fell over backward on to the bed.

There was another crash, and then another, and then a tumbling, squeaking noise like somebody falling into the bathtub.

‘Who's there?' he shouted. ‘What the hell are you doing?'

He took hold of the doorknob again and twisted it, but the door was either locked or jammed. He heard more squeaking and more knocking, and then, suddenly, a woman moaning. Her moan started off quite shivery and low,
ohhhhhhhhhh
, as if she were calling out in dread; but then it grew increasingly shrill and panicky, and then she started screaming at the top of her voice, and begging ‘
No! No! Please don't do that
!
No! Please don't do that!
'

Lincoln rattled the doorknob and beat on the door panel with his fist.

‘Who's in there? Open up! What the hell are you doing? If you don't open up I'm going to call for security!'

The woman's screaming went on for four or five more seconds, accompanied by what sounded like bare heels drumming against an empty bathtub. Then, just as suddenly as the noise had begun, it stopped, and there was silence.

Lincoln waited, his ear close to the door. He tried the doorknob again, and this time the door unlatched, and opened. Inside the bathroom it was completely dark.

‘Who's in there?' he repeated.

There was no reply, so he pushed the door open a little further. He could make out the edge of the bathtub now, but it wasn't the shiny white-tiled bathtub that he had been expecting to see. It was an old-fashioned high-sided tub, on four lion's-claw feet, with two large old-fashioned faucets, both of them dripping. By the light that was shining into the bathroom from the bedroom, he saw that the tub was filthy. The sides were streaked with runnels of black and gray dirt, and the enamel inside was decorated with dark brown spatters and diagonal runs and dozens of handprints, as well as a thick greasy tidemark.

There was nobody lying in the tub, however. He must have imagined all that screaming and thumping. Nobody could have jumped out of the tub that quick – and where would they have hidden themselves, even if they had?

In the far corner of the bathroom, high up on the wall, there was a small grimy window, but even though the window was so dirty Lincoln could see that it was daylight outside, even though it was almost quarter of eight in the evening. He could hear a very faint pattering, too, which sounded like rain. He frowned. It had been very windy when he went outside to try and talk to Grace, but it had been totally dry.

He pushed the door open all the way. It met with some resistance; there was a sodden stained bath-towel lying twisted on the floor, as if somebody had been unsuccessfully trying to clean the tiles with it. The tiles themselves were mottled green, with brown splashes across them, and a complicated pattern of bare footprints, pointing every which way, as if somebody had been dancing around the bathroom without their shoes on. They were small and narrow, like a woman's feet, or maybe a child's.

Lincoln took a cautious step forward, and as he did so he saw that there was a shower stall on the opposite side of the room – a shower stall whose glass door was so filthy and fogged up that it was impossible to tell if there was anybody in there. He strained his eyes in the gloom, however, and he thought he could make out a dark hunched shape inside it, but he guessed it was probably nothing but a shadow. There was a toilet beside it, with its mahogany seat raised.

The smell in the bathroom was sickening – like drains clogged up with slimy gray human hair and unflushed urine that had turned dark amber, and something else, too – a horrible thick sweetness that filled up his nose and his throat and made him feel like gagging. It reminded him of the bathroom in his boyhood home in the Brightmoor ghetto – the bathroom in which his older brother Nelson had died on the toilet of a heroin overdose.

The question was: how had his pristine white-tiled hotel bathroom turned into
this
? There was only one door to the bathroom, so he couldn't have chosen the wrong door by mistake. And even if he had, he couldn't imagine the Griffin House Hotel leaving
any
bathroom in such a disgusting condition.

He pulled the light-switch cord. As he did so, and the fluorescent lights popped on, he saw that he must have been suffering from some kind of an optical illusion. The bathroom
was
pristine. The bathtub was shiny and white, with gold-plated faucets. The hand basin was sunk into black streaky marble, and next to it there was a guest amenity tray with complimentary bottles of shampoo and body lotion and aftershave. The shower stall was sparkling clean, with an engraving of seagulls on its frosted glass door. There were towels, but they were all fluffy and dark green and neatly arranged on a heated towel-rail.

Lincoln stared at himself in the mirror. He was surprised by his own lack of expression. He placed his left hand on the marble surround of the hand basin and it was cool and polished and indisputably real. With his right hand he turned on one of the faucets, and that was real, too. The filthy, old-fashioned bathroom had completely disappeared – if it had ever existed at all. This bathroom even smelled good, like green tea bath oil.

‘You're losing it, Linc,' he told himself. He went over to the toilet, lifted the seat and relieved himself. He kept on staring at himself as he washed his hands. ‘You're really losing it. You're working too hard, that's what's wrong with you. You're always living on the edge. You got to chill, bro.'

He left the bathroom and closed the door behind him, although he didn't turn the light off. He stood for a while at the end of his bed, his head bowed, trying to untangle his thoughts. Then he went over to the phone and pressed nine again. It could be that when he had tried to get an outside line before, he had been suffering from the same delusion that had made him believe that his bathroom was so slummy.

This time, he managed to get a dial tone. He punched out his home number and waited while it rang. It rang and it rang and he had almost given up hope that Grace was going to answer when the phone was picked up.

He said, ‘Grace honey, it's me! Sorry I took so long to call you back.'

There was a long silence, and then he heard the same man's voice that he had heard before. ‘
What did I tell you, Lincoln? What did I specifically tell you? Were you not listening to me, or what?
'

‘Who the hell are you?' Lincoln demanded. ‘What the hell are you doing in my house? Where's my wife?'

‘
I'm not in your house, Lincoln. I'm much closer than that. But I specifically told you not to go back to your room, didn't I?
'

‘You listen to me, if you think you can bump my dome you got yourself another think coming. I'm going to track you down, dog, and I'm going to come looking for you and believe me you're going to wish you never got on to my phone line ever.'