The Fading Page 22

  ‘I could, but maybe you want to wait for your husband? In the morning?’

  ‘My husband? He can’t unpack the boxes.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘He’s sleeping,’ Lucy said. Her eyes were flat. Her voice was flat. The bouncy energy was gone, her body had become still, rigid.

  The saliva in Noel’s mouth disappeared. He couldn’t speak. They stared at each other and Noel realized he had walked into an orchestrated situation with no idea who was conducting the music. Get out now, the voice of reason spoke in his head. And immediately after, Lucy’s blank expression darkened. She regarded him with an anger that could not be explained by whatever Julie had told her about him. She looked, in this moment, furious.

  Very softly she said, ‘You know.’

  Noel shook his head.

  ‘Yes. Yes, you do. You know everything.’

  ‘I don’t.’ Noel took a step back, toward the dining room and sliding glass door. He wanted to run but Julie was upstairs. These people were keeping her, he was sure.

  ‘You want to leave now?’ Lucy said. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘I don’t seem welcome.’

  ‘What about Julie? Don’t you want to see her?’

  ‘I said I did.’

  Her eyes never leaving his, Lucy raised her hands slowly and untied her hair. The bun unfurled and her brown tresses spilled around her shoulders. She shook her head gently, and the layers of her hair separated somewhat.

  ‘Then go find her, Noel. She’s upstairs, sleeping in the guest room. Because she is our guest, just like you.’

  Noel could not move.

  ‘Go on. Go tell her that you love her. She’s upstairs.’

  Lucy took one step toward him and Noel responded with half a dozen of his own toward the stairs, but hesitated. He looked back. Lucy had not attempted to follow him but was watching him eagerly. Now she wanted him to go up.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ His voice cracked.

  ‘You know that too, don’t you?’ Lucy said. ‘Nora told you what happened.’

  The producer and his family.

  ‘But you said you just recently …’ Oh, God. Oh, God.

  ‘We moved in a little more than four years ago, Noel. We’ve been here ever since. This is our home. It will always be our home, until you do your job.’

  That’s not possible, Noel thought. ‘Sapperstein,’ he said.

  ‘Is my maiden name,’ Lucy finished for him.

  Their real name was something else. Something to do with body bags.

  ‘Why are you doing this to us?’ he said.

  Lucy Bagley’s hair looked different now. It was darker, shiny. He realized it was dampening in places. As he watched her a drop of blood slid from the ends of her let-down hair and stained her blouse.

  ‘Don’t you love her, Noel? Don’t you want to be with Julie? We can help you. We can help you be with her, and do what you came here to do.’

  The kettle was not steaming because the stove was not on. Lucy couldn’t get it to work. He had never seen her touch the boxes or the kettle or move the food into the cupboards. He thought she had opened the sliding glass door, but now he wasn’t sure. He might have opened it and let himself in. Or it might have been left open.

  It was closed now. He was a full room-span away from the exit. Freedom. But what had they done to Julie?

  Lucy took a step toward him and another drop of blood fell onto her blouse.

  ‘It was you,’ he said. ‘Earlier, in the guest house.’

  ‘I’ve never been in the guest house, Noel. I thought that was where you and Julie lived.’

  ‘What did you do to her?’

  ‘Are you going to help me unpack all these boxes?’

  ‘Not until I see Julie. Is she even here?’

  Lucy smiled and took another step toward him. ‘I told you she’s upstairs.’

  ‘Julie!’ Noel shouted. ‘Julie, wake up!’

  ‘Be quiet!’ Lucy hissed. ‘You’re going to wake up my family.’ But saying this, she smiled, as if recalling a private joke. ‘Or maybe you already did.’

  Then he understood. ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want me to wake them up. Or see them. You want me to go upstairs and see them?’

  She smiled. Her lipstick was streaked in several places now and her hair was dripping steadily. Something was different in her eyes, too. They had receded, the color drained. Her face was turning the yellow-white of long-term illness.

  ‘She’s upstairs,’ Lucy said. ‘Waiting for you to become the man we all know you can be.’

  He wanted to run away, get out now and never look back. But what if this dead woman and her family had done something to Julie’s mind, lured her in here the way they had lured him?

  ‘If you hurt her,’ Noel said. But what would he do?

  ‘Yes,’ Lucy said. ‘Please stay and help us unpack the boxes. I’m making some tea. It’s peppermint. It helps me unwind.’

  He couldn’t stand this any longer. He had to choose. The door or the stairs. Flee into the night and risk the chance that Julie was stuck here, with them, in god knows what condition. Or go up and look for himself.

  ‘Yes, some tea,’ he said. ‘Could you make me some?’

  Lucy turned for the stove and Noel moved at a steady but hurried pace toward the stairs. He made it halfway there before hearing her footsteps behind him, coming with the sound of tennis shoes brushing carpet, the sound that had woken him earlier.

  Lucy’s footsteps, not Julie’s.

  Which meant Julie wasn’t here, she had never been here, this was all a game to get him into the house.

  He had to get out, now.

  He stopped at the base of the stairs and turned to break for the sliding glass door, but Lucy was standing in the foyer, blocking his path, and she had changed rapidly for the worse. Her eyes were jaundiced yellow, rolled back in their sockets, and her hair was soaked through with blood. Chips of white bone and small pieces of her brains from the gunshot flecked her blouse. Her mouth was open and her blackened tongue lay loose, the gases inside her coming forth with the breath of an opened coffin.

  Noel screamed and backed into the stairs. He tripped and fell as Lucy staggered toward him with renewed urgency, arms reaching for him.

  He yelled and kicked at her, connecting with a hip that was as solid as a fence post. Lucy staggered, lunged at him again. Her fingers, moist and bony, scratched at his chest and his throat. He had never believed the dead could touch him but Lucy was touching him now, tearing into his flesh with her nails. He twisted away, thrashing beneath her, and began to crawl up the stairs.

  Above him, waiting at the top, were the children. The girl with her abdominal stab wounds was standing beside her decapitated brother, Ezra, who held her hand as he swayed. The father joined them moments later, at the midway point on the stairs, where working as a family they showed him how they got to be this way.

  27

  Noel did not know if he woke up or simply got his mind back after spending the past four to eighteen hours without it. He remembered being in a snowstorm, walking through a gigantic field, running from someone or something that wanted to devour him at the same time he was pursuing another entity, this one warm and promising life and rescue from oblivion. Every time he seemed to get close to it, to her, the figure shrank into the horizon and his heart collapsed with the weight of distance he had yet to travel.

  This private mirage went on for what felt like days, maybe years, and then in a blink he returned to find himself crouched between a bathtub and toilet. He was on a slate tile floor, with golden rays of sunlight warming his feet from a window above a shower stall. The house was quiet. He did not know which house this was, nor how he got here. The bathroom door was shut and locked. There was blood on the floor, streaks of it, drops that had flung themselves up the wall. He wondered whose blood it was, and what instrument had been used to let it.

  He sat arms wrapped around his knees for what seemed like half a
day but could have been half an hour. Eventually he realized whatever he had been running from was either gone or waiting for him on the other side of the door, and the only way to find out was to open it.

  He stood, every muscle in his body tight with dull pain. Even his jaw muscles ached. He mumbled something and could tell that he had lost most of his voice. He went to the sink for water and seeing his reflection in the mirror thought, cat’s cradle. The childhood game played with string. There were dozens of patterns you made with the string, the lines criss-crossing in nets and tangles around your fingers.

  The face in the mirror looked like a game of cat’s cradle gone haywire, played with red twine. The scratches ran across his forehead, down his nose, at angles across his cheeks, to his chin. His ears were cut along the lobes, in the channels. His neck. Down under his shirt. Thin and shallow in places, deep and caked purple in others. When he leaned over to cup water to his mouth, more stinging lines cracked and itched up and down his back, pinched at his stomach. The shock of it all was such that he did not recall how or why this had happened.

  Then he was assaulted by flash memories, the sight of their faces, hissing and screaming above him, dragging him down the stairs, running back up to hide, only to find another in the hallway waiting for him, the little girl with her knife wounds, the boy with the ragged severed neck and no head, their rotting mouths and filmy eyes. The murdered family, swarming him, showing him things …

  He began to hyperventilate, turned for the door, grasped the knob, hesitated.

  What if they were still here? What if it started all over again?

  But no, staying was not an option.

  He yanked the bathroom door open. A large bedroom, must have been the master. The carpet was stained brown in places, old blood, except in the clean, dust-free square where the bed had been. He ran down the hall and found the stairs, moaning in terror as new memories from the night before – this morning – returned. The little girl biting his ankle. The father pinching the skin under his chin, twisting his head and screaming, Look at me, look at me! Noel ran past boxes that had not been unpacked, glanced at the yellow kettle, then he was ripping the sliding glass door open and springing into sunlight. No one chased him, but he ran as if the entire family had woken up again and were on his heels, swooping after him like rabid bat people.

  He kicked open the guest house door and rushed to collect his wallet, shoes and a change of clothes. He needed a shower and felt infected by them, but not here. He had to get away from this neighborhood as fast as possible.

  At the nearest Wells Fargo branch, the act of opening his wallet hurt his fingers. The joints were swollen stiff, the tips raw, as if he had been handling bricks all day without gloves. Two of his fingernails were cracked and peeled back, the cuticles of all ringed with dried blood. He wondered how they had done this to him, but his ragged fingernails, the soreness, suggested something far more disturbing. That they had worked on him, drove him to it, not as bodies or spirits in the world but as demons of the mind, manipulating him, flooding his brain and jerking his body like a marionette. A family of marionettes with the power to make him scratch himself out of his mind.

  ‘Next? Sir? I can help you down here.’

  Noel showed his ID to the teller, a bookish young woman who turned ashen and very quiet when she saw his face up close. With checking and savings, he had $441.29 to his name. The teller seemed relieved he was closing the accounts, taking his meager reserves elsewhere.

  Take me, he thought. Come on, you fucking glass egg bubble shield ultra-violet bitch curse. Take me outta here. I paid you in blood, now it’s time for you to wave the magic wand.

  Six blocks later he found the Desert Inn Motorcourt, which might have once been a clean family-friendly place to park your RV and splurge on a room but was now a skid row of impromptu gangbang movie sets and heroin cottages. For $19.99 plus tax he rented a room for one hour. It smelled of wet gerbil shavings. The bathroom had no soap or shampoo, so he returned to the front desk to complain.

  The clerk was a woman in the twilight of her middle years, with a purple birthmark stretching from her sun-scorched cleavage to her right ear, wearing a UNLV tank top and polarized sun-blockers. For the bargain rate of $6.00 she sold him a bar of soap the size of a breath mint and a bottle of shampoo made for a Smurf. At his croaking request she threw in a towel with the texture of sandpaper, no extra charge.

  The shower was only lukewarm even turned to its hottest setting, but Noel didn’t care. He used the towel as a washcloth, scrubbing his body from head to toe three times, until the soap and shampoo were gone and he felt raw. Some of the cuts continued to bleed, but most only turned puffy red. He shook himself as dry as possible, threw out his socks and underwear and put his clothes back on.

  The dead always found him, or he them, when he was out of the spectrum, or on his way to the departure gate. But here he was, after spending an entire day and night with them, a solid. He had been waiting four years. He was very hungry.

  For food, for an explanation, for his missing ghost.

  The morning sun warming him as he trekked west on Sahara Avenue, moving closer to the center of energy. Out here at the north end, just a few blocks off the Strip, there were no fancy hotels and casinos, no cinematic waterfalls or lush gardens. There was, however, among the gas stations and warehouses and low ugly industrial buildings and broken glass in the gutters, a sex museum. And a sex toy and video outlet the size of a grocery store. Around the bend were strip clubs, not much more than cinderblock huts, their open doors revealing the darkness of ocean trenches. Noel passed such pits of vice and their lurking denizens; he was after a vice of a different sort.

  There were other stragglers like him, a small but colorful class of shattered humanity limping along the wide dirty streets, digging in dumpsters, peeking around corners. In the past four years he’d seen the jet set, the celebrity cling-on set, the card shark set, the bachelor party and girls’ night out set. Here was a genus he had never been able to classify but did so now: the styrofoam coffee set. Even though it was well past noon, half the mutants on the prowl had a little cup of coffee.

  The terrycloth jumpsuit and rubber sandals lady was clutching hers with both hands, the little plastic lid flap scraping her witch nose at every sip. The shirtless but otherwise clean-cut college kid with the black eye had one in each hand, marching with the injured pride of a legendary debauch. At yet another strip mall, a stoic Vietnamese papasan fishing Marlboro butts from the Photo-Mat planters was lighting and enjoying his complete cigarette in increments, one butt and stale drag at a time, then doused each of his recovered treasures in his java receptacle. They were castaways, clinging to the steaming life rafts of sanity even the most offensively brewed coffee afforded.

  When he realized they were watching him with as much disdain and repulsion as he experienced in his regard of them, Noel understood, for the first time in many months and perhaps years, his place in the world. These were his brethren, this was his lot. He was this, like them, no better than that guy.

  To wit: at the next crosswalk a man with an IV cotton ball taped on the back of each hand, a Panama hat on his sweating melon head, was using a cane to lance imaginary cars passing by. Noel said, ‘Hello. Is there anything I can help you with?’ but the overture went unredeemed beyond the riposte ‘Go fuck yourself’.

  He stopped at a twenty-four-hour diner and ate six pancakes, three eggs, a rasher of bacon and three cups of coffee. The tab was $3.29 and in no way a bargain. While he was sitting in his booth, waiting for the caffeine to kick in, he noticed two men in dark suits at the counter, seated beside one another, each reading the newspaper with a slice of pie resting unmolested on the counter. They weren’t speaking but he knew they were together, members of some organization. He waited for them to turn and look at him, sure that they would glance his way at any moment, but nearly ten minutes passed and they never did. Eventually, the suit on the right forked the tip of his pie into his mout
h and began to chew slowly.

  Noel helped himself to a complimentary toothpick on his way out. It tasted of artificial mint.

  Calorie-soaked, excited now, he was ready for the tsunami to curl.

  *

  He crossed through a parking structure to the Strip and another mile or so to Caesars Palace. He walked past the front desk, the sundry store with its t-shirts and novelty ceramic Caesars busts, to the cashier windows. He converted his life’s savings, $400, into chips. The casino was slow, with a few early birds trying their luck.

  He found the nearest roulette table, empty and brushed clean. He was the only mark. The croupier at attention was a woman named Sable. She had a pleasing almond tan, clean white teeth and hay-colored hair swirled into a small Cleopatra braid. Noel had never met her. If she found his scratched-to-hell appearance disturbing, she didn’t show it, and he respected her professionalism. Her job was to keep patrons at the table long enough to empty their pockets, not make them feel like a freak show.

  Sable smiled and said, ‘Good afternoon.’

  He pretended to study the reader board atop the pole, but in truth it didn’t matter what had recently hit. He didn’t care about winning. He’d come only to ask a question and receive an answer. The question was, Should I stay in Vegas or go look for Julie? He pegged the possible answers this way:

  Red means get out now, find her, do whatever it takes to win her back.

  Black means stay in Vegas as long as it takes to disappear.

  He set $300 on black. Not because he wanted black or because he felt lucky with black, merely because he had to choose one or the other to play.

  Sable nodded and nudged the polished spokes atop the wheel’s axle. The wheel gained speed. The ball raced around and around. Sable waved her hand across the table – no more bets. Very quickly the ball got restless, dancing and pinging around the number grooves. It flirted with red 30 before dumping into black 8.

  ‘Black is a winner,’ Sable said, and doubled Noel’s chips to $600.