The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (28 page)

Everett said, ‘Sissy? I can’t ask you to risk your life, just for me and T-Yon.’

Sissy gave him a smile. ‘I’m not doing it because you’re asking me, Everett. I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do.’

‘But from what you said about that Shem—’

‘Shem? He scares the crap out of me. But if you never face up to the people who scare you, you might just as well lie down in your casket and close the lid and wait for the day you die.’

‘I have a gun in my office,’ said Everett. ‘I’ll go get it.’

‘No,’ Aunt Epiphany told him. ‘If you go down there with any kind of a weapon, this spirit-woman will know at once. This is a spirit matter. You cannot solve spirit matters with bullets.’

Before they went up to the second floor, Everett took them through to the bar so that Aunt Epiphany could mix up some of the powders that she was carrying in her bag. She had three small glass jars of them, one gray powder, one dull red like paprika, and one white. She poured them in roughly equal amounts into another glass jar and shook them up.

‘It has to be fresh, this mixture,’ she explained. ‘One is ashes; one is dry blood; the other is bone from the cemetery. I call it walking powder. The houngans, the priests, they call it
baka
.
Ba
for the superior soul, which rises to heaven when you die.
Ka
for the inferior soul, which stays in the cemetery with the body.’

She also took out a necklace of bones and gunja beads, and a head on a stick.

The head was about the size of a man’s fist. It was fashioned out of black leather, roughly stitched together, with wild gray woolen hair and bulging amber eyes made of glass. Its mouth gaped open to reveal varnished wooden teeth and a rough gray suede tongue.

‘This is an effigy of Adjassou-Linguetor, who is one of the most bad-tempered of all spirits. He never tolerate injustice, of any kind. He will support us with his holy rage.’

‘I still think I ought to take my thirty-eight,’ said Everett.

Aunt Epiphany shook her head emphatically, so that her necklace jangled. ‘When we go down there, we must appear at first to have agreed completely to this spirit-woman’s wishes. Otherwise she may not produce your sister, and everything will be lost. If she cannot kill you together, she will kill your sister anyhow, believe me.’

‘OK, you’re the boss,’ said Everett. ‘But if things go wrong, I swear to God I’m going to come back here and fetch that gun and take those people out, whether they’re flesh and blood or spirits or whatever the hell they are.’

Aunt Epiphany didn’t reply to that. She finished mixing her walking powder and gathering together all the beads and amulets she needed, and then she said, ‘Very well. Now we are ready to go. May the seven powers protect us.’

They went across to the elevators and Everett pressed the button.

Aunt Epiphany looked around and said, ‘When you remodel this hotel, did you seal off any other doorways?’

‘At least two or three on every level. We blocked off all of the old service corridors.’

‘It is probably possible to step through any one of those doorways to the old hotel. But at least you know for certain where this portal is, and that it possible for us to pass through it in both directions. I have known people before who have gone through to the spirit world to visit their dead relatives and never found a way to return. The last thing I want is for you to be trapped in the old hotel when you and your sister make your escape.’

‘You and me both.’

They walked along the second-floor corridor until they reached the place in the wall where they would step through.

‘Remember,’ said Aunt Epiphany, ‘you have acceded to the spirit-woman’s demands. You are humble. You do not show aggression. You beg for her to be merciful. Do not say anything to anger her. Meanwhile, take no notice of what I do. Do not look at me or pay me any attention. When your sister is brought out, do not seize her immediately. Wait for me to give you the word.’

Sissy and Everett glanced at each other. Sissy was silently praying that this wasn’t all madness, and that Aunt Epiphany’s voodoo magic would really work. She could tell by the look on Everett’s face that he was thinking exactly the same. Maybe they ought to forget this altogether and tell the police where T-Yon was. Even if the police couldn’t walk through the wall, they could always break through it with jackhammers.

If they did that, however, Sissy suspected that they wouldn’t find the Hotel Rouge on the other side, from twenty years ago. It would be today’s Red Hotel, and T-Yon would be lost forever, God alone knew where.

‘You are ready?’ asked Aunt Epiphany.

Sissy and Everett both nodded.

‘Then may the Savior take care of us,’ she said, and without any hesitation she stepped straight into the wall, and vanished.

‘She’s gone,’ said Everett. ‘I saw it happen and I still can’t believe it. What if
you
can go through but I can’t – what then?’

‘You can, I promise you,’ Sissy told him. ‘It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not. You go first, see for yourself.’

Everett walked right up to the wall but then he stopped.

‘Go,’ Sissy urged him.

He lifted both hands up in front of his face and squeezed his eyes tight shut. He took a step forward, and then another, and the wall swallowed him up as if it were made of nothing more substantial than thick fog.

Sissy immediately followed him, and almost bumped into him as she emerged in the service corridor on the other side. He was standing there with his hands still raised, but now his eyes were open.

‘That was
incredible
,’ he said. He turned around and looked back at the wall as if he still couldn’t accept that he had passed right through it. ‘Imagine what it would be like if you could do that all the time – if you could walk through any wall you wanted to.’

‘Unfortunately, you would never know what was on the other side,’ said Sissy. ‘We’re inside Vanessa Slider’s memory now, and that’s bad enough. Places only come into phase because somebody has died without getting everything they thought they deserved. Love, or appreciation. But mostly revenge. You’d be surprised how many of the dead still have a burning need to get their own back.’

Aunt Epiphany was holding up the black leather head of Adjassou-Linguetor as if it were a torch and she was about to enter a dark tunnel. ‘You know the way to the kitchen, Sissy. Please to guide us there.’

Sissy led them along the green-carpeted service corridor until they reached the door to the main staircase. As soon as she eased the door open, she heard music. It was faint but distinctive – some quick-tempo jazz number, with a warbling clarinet and a strutting banjo. When she opened the door wider, she could hear voices, too – people laughing and shouting and singing.

‘Place is packed, by the sound of it,’ said Everett.

‘You know what I think?’ said Sissy. ‘I think that Vanessa is so confident that I’m bringing you here and that she’s soon going to get her revenge, she’s celebrating. She’s recalling some night when she had a really good time.’

Everett listened for a while and then he shook his head. ‘This is scarier than silence. She thinks she’s going to cut us both open so she’s throwing a party?’

‘That just goes to show you how vengeful she is. God knows how much venom she must have in her spirit to be able to recreate all of this. They talk about the power of love, don’t they? But that’s nothing compared to the power of hatred.’

They crossed the rubbish-cluttered landing and opened the door to the second-floor corridor. Out here, the jazz music was even louder, and as they walked along to the elevators, they could hear a couple arguing in one of the bedrooms.

Sissy said, ‘We went down in the service elevator the last time, Luther and me. But I think it may be safer if we use the guest elevators. Also, I’d like to see what kind of a shindig Vanessa Slider has dreamed up.’

As they reached the elevators, four people appeared around the corner – three young men in tuxedos and a young blonde woman in a shiny silver evening dress. They were all smoking and laughing and talking about some movie that one of them had been to see.

‘He’s always coming out with some really cynical line or other. Like, “Bury the dead . . . they stink up the joint.” What a character!’

None of them acknowledged Sissy or Everett or Aunt Epiphany. When the elevator arrived and the doors opened, they walked straight in, right in front of them, and stood in the middle of the car so that the three of them were forced to press themselves against the doors. They carried on smoking, too, blowing smoke directly into their faces.

‘Do you know something?’ said Aunt Epiphany, leaning toward Sissy and half-covering her mouth with her hand. ‘I do not think these people are aware that we are here. I do not think they can even
see
us.’ She said this very quietly, just in case they
were
aware, and they
could
see them, and were simply being ill-mannered.

When they reached the lobby, however, the four young people brushed their way past them without a word, and it was obvious that Aunt Epiphany was right. To the people in Vanessa Slider’s Hotel Rouge, Sissy and Everett and Aunt Epiphany were invisible.

The lobby was crowded, just as it had been for The Red Hotel’s gala opening, and the noise was overwhelming. Most of the men were wearing tuxedos of varying colors – whites and blues and maroons – and the women’s evening dresses all had deep décolletages and boxy shoulders.

‘Jesus,’ said Everett. ‘It’s just like an episode of
Dynasty
.’

‘Not surprising,’ said Sissy. ‘Vanessa Slider’s heyday was in the mid nineteen eighties.’ She pressed the button, and the elevator doors closed again, and the crowd disappeared from sight.

‘I think I’m a little scared,’ said Everett, as the elevator sank down to the basement. ‘In fact I think I’m crapping myself.’

‘If you do everything exactly like I say, you will be fine,’ Aunt Epiphany reassured him. ‘This spirit-woman is very strong, but we have even stronger spirits on our side. Not only that, we have righteousness.’

‘If you say so,’ said Everett. ‘I still wish I’d brought my thirty-eight.’

The elevator doors opened again, and they found themselves in the gray cinder-block corridor outside the kitchen, about fifty feet farther along than the service elevator. This time, there was no grinding noise, but from out of the kitchen came a deafening cacophony of rattling saucepans and clattering skillets, with the chef and his assistants shouting at each other to make themselves heard. ‘Where’s that blackened redfish for table twenty?’ ‘Did you finish off that hot sauce yet?’ ‘Fried oysters, chef!’ ‘What the fuck do you call that? That’s not a gumbo, it’s a swamp!’ ‘Go easy on the shrimp, will you?’ ‘Four burgers for table five!’

Aunt Epiphany held up the black leather head of Adjassou-Linguetor with its bulging eyes and said to Sissy and Everett, ‘You two go in first. Hand in hand, Everett, as if Sissy is leading you. And remember. You are meek. You are submissive.’

Sissy and Everett held hands and entered the kitchen. It was ferociously hot in there, and so smoky that they could barely see to the end of the counters. The head chef was a hugely fat man with a black beard and fiery cheeks. He was waddling up and down, peering over the shoulders of his four assistants, occasionally dipping his finger into the stews and sauces they were cooking and constantly yelling into their ears. Now and again he cuffed one of them across the back of the head.

On top of the stoves, large cast-iron pots of chowder and shellfish stew and jambalaya were being stirred by a spotty young redhead with her hair tied back, while dozens of hamburger patties were being flipped on a hotplate by the same lanky African-American who had been grinding raw meat when Sissy and Luther had first come down to the kitchen. It was the hamburgers that were causing most of the smoke, and they had a sweet, cloying smell to them, like no hamburgers that Sissy had ever smelled before. It reminded her of the time that a riding stables in Marble Dale had caught fire, and three palominos had been trapped inside. It was just like the sweet, cloying smell of burning straw and cremated pony.

Sissy wondered if they were going to be invisible to these people, too, but as she and Everett ventured further into the kitchen, the head chef caught sight of them, and immediately slapped one of his assistants on the shoulder. Sissy realized then that the revelers they had seen in the elevator and in the lobby were only the background to Vanessa Slider’s recreated Hotel Rouge, like extras in a movie, whereas the head chef and his assistants in the kitchen were her witnesses, and her accomplices.

The head chef bent over and said something in his assistant’s ear. His assistant nodded, twice, and then hurriedly wove his way to the far end of the kitchen, wiping his hands on his apron as he went. In the left-hand corner there was a large white enamel door, half ajar. Sissy couldn’t see what was behind it, because there was too much smoke. But the assistant banged on it with his fist, and after a few moments Shem Slider stepped out of it, wearing a gory butcher’s apron and red rubber gloves.

He slammed the metal door behind him and walked through the smoke toward them. He was wearing white rubber boots, also spattered with blood, which made a wobbling sound as he walked. He was grinning widely, so that they could see his broken, mahogany-colored teeth.

‘Well, well, who’d have thunk it?’ he said, as he approached. ‘
La pauvre defante mom
, she’s going to be delighted. And me too, I’m delighted. This is going to tie up all of the loose ends real neat, so to speak. Justice at long last!’

He turned toward the wall and called out, ‘Momma! Come on out, Momma! Your dream is finally come true!’

There was a long pause during which nothing happened but Shem didn’t call out again. He must have known that his mother had heard him. He stood patiently in front of Sissy and Everett in his bloodstained apron, his muscular forearms entwined together like the roots of a swamp cypress, still grinning. Sissy clutched Everett’s hand tightly and hoped that Aunt Epiphany knew what she was doing. She hadn’t appeared yet, and Sissy couldn’t even begin to think what her plan could be. How do you fend off a sadistic brute like Shem Slider with a bottle of colored powder and a black leather head on the end of a stick?