Johnson looked out at the glistening white expanse, glad for the barrier between him and the snow covered ice. He noted the research ship’s position and speed in the log book – along with the calm emptiness of the Antarctic wasteland – and turned to Ivers, the man at the radar.
“Still no sign of Dr. Fenton?” Johnson asked.
“Nope. Nothing from Saunders – how much longer are we waiting out here?”
Johnson shrugged. “Captain says another day.”
Hotel rooms are, in essence, purgatory charged at a nightly rate. They exist in that same curious hinterland as the departure lounge at airports, not quite in one country and yet not quite at the destination. They are, in essence, neutral spaces, transient environments which are defined, which exist, only for as long as it takes you to check out.
They’re also prime horror real estate, this very transience allowing for the things on the other side of the door, the wet things, the singing things with impossible claws and the voices of children to break through. From the hotel in The Shining to the Bates Motel in Psycho and the snuff palace in the recent Vacancy, hotels have provided fertile ground for horror writers for years and one in particular. Stephen King has survived stays in Hotel Horror before with two versions of The Shining and last year returned to the field again, when Lasse Hafstrom adapted his short story, 1408.
So join us as we pay a visit to the Dolphin Hotel, home to the most evil hotel room in the world and the crucible which will either destroy Mike Enslin, or rebuild him. Welcome to 1408, room service is suspended. Forever.
Music by love is nothing. (featuring Bill Abdale and Lee Bartow)
Samuel found the secret of the death of the universe in a box. The box was small and plain, with a corked opening, like a jack in the box without a handle. Samuel forgot how he’d gotten the box before he even got home, the facts smothered and dismantled in a haze. All he thinks he knows is that there was a tree involved, sun-bleached to a moth-white with gnarled branches, fruit with eggshell skin that burst and bled crimson at the touch, a man who had misplaced his heart, and something very painfully white or made of light. But he could have picked it up at Jericho’s. Much more likely, some knickknack impulse buy that’ll prompt his roommate to ask for Samuel’s half of the rent, again.
Across the street lives a woman with snakes in her hair. She watches me from between the rotting drapes that keep the sun from melting her living room furniture. Her eyes glow in the dark, and she thinks I can’t see her, but I am not as stupid as she thinks.
I sit at the breakfast table and wonder if she has to feed each snake head individually, or if they’re just like hair, and just need a shampooing, now and then. I imagine her dipping her entire head into a cage full of frightened rats, the snakes in her hair darting this way and that, tangling around each other in their haste to catch the fat ones, the ones with the least demented testicles. Tiny bones crunch in my head as I close my own teeth on a spoonful of raw bran, orange juice instead of milk because milk always makes me sleepy.
She wasn’t nervous. She didn’t have a gun. Just a smile.
“You want the book, right?”
“Yup.”
“You won’t get it.” She waved a tantalizing finger at me. I tried to ignore the digit but for some reason it wouldn’t leave my eyes.
“I’ve heard that one before,” I said, pretending to be all ice.
“You think you’re a great sorcerer, a mage of the ancient knowledge, but it won’t make any difference.”
“Why not?” I should have thrown the glass dagger that was up my sleeve. Then and there. And there was that damned “Burning Desert Glyph” I never quite got around to.
“Because you are a man.”
For further adventures of THE WHITE STREET SOCIETY, please check out:
“The Yellow Curse” in THE TRIO OF TERROR.
A creak of the flooring caught my attention and I turned sharply, expecting to find my guide creeping up behind me with a jackblack in her hand and murder in her Irish eyes. Instead, I beheld a waif with a waxen pallor, protruding bones and papery skin, crouching just inside the doorway. Her furtive creeping was arrested when she saw me. Rising up to her full height she fixed her watery eyes on me and said:
“Harry don’t like you.”
Just as I was about to strike her for her insolence, her face slackened and she swooned. I stepped forward to catch her, then noticed spittle running from her mouth, and stepped back so as to avoid soiling my clothes.
A musky scent drifts lazily on stale, moonlit air. Alara knows this scent—fear—it holds little meaning to her. Her hawk’s eyes narrow as she circles above the cemetery searching for her dinner. Focusing on a small, brown mouse huddled against a piece of stone, she dives to strike. The mouse spots her and freezes.
Something hot hisses and sparks, burning her dinner to a blackened crisp. Alara leaps to the night air, squawking in alarm. She lifts higher, caught by the smell of pungent, moldy earth and burning candle fat. Faint sounds penetrate the smells; a harsh voice interrupts the monotonous droning. Alara knows the voice—it belongs to her master.
Breathless from climbing, Iwan crested the hill and looked down on his village and its fields of yellow and green. He tried to blot out the mill beside the river but the dark stone building gnawed at him, just as in his dreams.
Again he remembered the words trickling from his father’s ruined face: “A little blood, son, a little pain…”
Iwan spun away from the edge and ran to the pool under the arching trees. As forbidden as mirrors and polished metal, the pool threw back Iwan’s pale reflection. He stared at his features in the clear water as if concentration alone could seal them there forever, make them indestructible. But now a breeze rippled the water and imagination dissolved his face; he saw the mill’s grindstones descending, lower, lower, felt the altar vibrating under his body, smelled powdered grit as the whirling stones inched closer. Closer.