The Fading Read online

The door’s two locks appeared intact, which meant Dalton had talked his way in, or that Hector chose the wrong moment to attempt an escape. Noel took the keys from Hector’s pocket, leaving the body as he had found it. He locked the main entrance and returned to the spa.

  The clock in the lounge read 6.52 a.m. In less than ten minutes the spa would be officially open for guests. They would linger for a few minutes, then pound on the door, then call the front desk to complain.

  Keeping himself in the bubble, which was no longer a bubble but a wide array of tentacles he visualized and used to snake the walls and doors in a thousand directions, until he had spun a web that would blind anyone who walked into it, at least to him, Noel showered in one of the stalls, using the body wash dispenser to fill his palms and rid himself of Theodore Dalton. He looked at his fingers, thought of prints, then remembered something important.

  He went back to the steam room and found what he was looking for on the blood-smeared floor. Dalton’s knife. Had the professor, in his panic, lost it in here? Could he really have been so sloppy? Or had he given it up? Why would he forgo such an advantage? Was it possible that some part of the man, even on a subconscious level, was ready for the game to end? The hunt grows tiring. Sometimes I feel like a cat stuck on my eighth life. Is this what he had wanted from Noel? Someone to take his place? Relieve him of duty?

  Noel carried the knife out and wrapped it in the dead man’s hand, using the fingers to smudge the handle, and left it where it belonged.

  At the row of sinks in the long vanity, he used a disposable razor and the cream provided to clean up six days’ worth of stubble. He gargled and rinsed with the mouthwash and helped himself to a cold bottle of water. He wrapped a towel around his waist, faded it and walked back to the rain shower room.

  He collected his clothes and shoes and carried them out, confident nothing would slip and reveal itself as he pushed a shield ahead and behind and to each side of himself as he exited and strolled back to the grand staircase. He walked barefoot, limping slightly, through the halls, past the front desk, into the casino among dozens of people and he thought, all of you.

  He slipped the clothing into a random trash receptacle.

  Still wearing nothing more than the towel, shivering in the resort’s climate control, he wound his way back to the twenty-four-hour sundry shop and waited until the clerk turned around to restock the shelf behind her counter with more cigarettes. He pulled a green Caesars Palace t-shirt and black drawstring vacation pants from the rack, absorbed them, and spotted a peg hung with cheap flip-flops. He took a guess at the size and quietly carried his new outfit back to the casino and into the nearest restroom. He dropped the towel in one of the stalls, put on his new clothes and re-entered the visible world by thinking, OK, now.

  He reached for the bathroom stall door, realized he needed money, and thought, not yet. He was veiled again before finishing the thought, his mind working like a hyperactive mirror that absorbed light as fast as he could think it, as fast as light could travel, as fast as perception could be manipulated. In the wake of the killing and with the rush of his newfound confidence, he was not concerned with numbers, crowds. He felt ready to blind all of Las Vegas.

  He walked onto the casino floor and studied the tables. A grizzled couple in Western shirts, hats and cowboy boots were having a decent run at roulette. Noel watched them for a moment, walked behind the croupier, waited for the woman to lean forward to flick the ball and grabbed a tall stack of lavender chips marked $100. He put them in his pants pocket, waited a moment for her to bend over again to rake the losing chips from the felt and took another stack.

  He repeated this method at six more tables, spreading the take among roulette, blackjack and craps.

  He returned to the bathroom, dropped his shield and carried the mass of chips to the cashier cage in his full personage. The black woman with braids and red lipstick he had seen earlier this morning smiled and counted him out. He thanked her and walked away with $9000 and change.

  He walked back to the gift shop and bought a Caesars beach tote. He made sure no one was watching at the moment he turned it on again, taking the bag with him.

  At the bar that had been his original destination yesterday morning, he waited until no one was looking in his direction and flipped the switch. The safari man, the brave lion-taming lady, their little red pup tent and the Jeep. Julie’s Adventure People set was looking a little dusty up on the glass shelf above the register, but it was still here, even the monkeys. He climbed over the bar – it was closed and no one was on duty, though this wouldn’t have stopped him – and delivered the toy set into his bag, and climbed back out.

  Into the bathroom, to reappear, so that he might dine in peace.

  He killed an hour at the breakfast buffet, most of it spent chewing and swallowing and groaning with pleasure. He could not remember the last time he had eaten. When he had his fill of bacon and waffles and two bagels stacked with onions and lox, he blinded the mall workers and patrons inside the Forum Shops, which were now open.

  He exited Caesars Palace a little more than an hour later to find more than a dozen police officers clustered around the front desk, running back and forth between the lobby and the hallway leading to the spa. Several were plain-clothes detectives, taking notes, eyeing the lobby coolly. Others were checking IDs and taping off doors to control the crowd flow. No one entered or exited without being carded. If the police had been able to see him, they would have stopped the man dressed in a new indigo-colored Emporio Armani suit, the white tapered dress shirt, gold silk boxers, $2000- TAG Heuer timepiece, and crocodile-skin loafers, but the matching crocodile-skin Armani billfold in his breast pocket would have revealed no ID, only a thick fold of cash.

  Noel repopped in the cab queue and five minutes later was stepping into an orange and white minivan that smelled of roasted almonds and stale air-conditioning. The driver was a kind-faced woman of sixty or so, unseasonably bundled in a thick plaid hunting thermal and a red UNLV baseball cap.

  ‘Where to?’ she asked.

  ‘McCarran International.’

  ‘On your way home?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Had enough fun for one weekend?’

  ‘Or a lifetime.’

  A cardboard can tinkled as the woman fist-popped almonds en route. When the rental car lots came into view, he thought how much more practical it would be to drive. Safer, with a few hours of cruising through the desert to clear his mind and think about what he was going to say to her when he got to Calabasas.

  But the truth was, he was anxious to see Julie, to tell her everything was going to be all right – he had control of it now. Not to mention he’d never been on an airplane before and he really wanted to know what it was like to fly.

  It must have been a Monday, occasion for the exodus from Sin City. The line of three or four hundred people waiting to get through security stretched down the mezzanine and around a corner. After using the restroom to drop out and secure his bag with Julie’s toys he confronted the line and thought, a tunnel, a tunnel over all of you.

  He walked to the cordoned area where the long single line fed into six chutes with their luggage scanners and metal detectors. He ducked under the rope and walked through an empty lane not currently in service. A grating beeping sound erupted overhead. One of the toys must have triggered the metal detector. Many heads turned but no eyes found. He kept walking.

  An hour and forty minutes later he had found what he was looking for, in the terminal for Southwest flights. Judging by the number of people waiting at the gate, this would be a light load heading for Los Angeles. He counted just twenty-three passengers and boarded last. On the plane were more than sixty open seats and nine unoccupied rows from the tail up.

  Twice he got halfway down the aisle before having to double back as someone got up to dig out a newspaper or a book from luggage that had already been stowed, and a third time to avoid a flight attendant who turned abruptly from the rear ga
lley and came marching forward with a fresh stack of pillows. A female passenger in a brown velour tracksuit chose the wrong moment to lean across the aisle and whisper something to her friend, making contact with him. Fortunately it was only the back of her elbow and when she turned to say excuse me and saw no one hovering behind her seat, she only paused in confusion, shook her head and went on with her gossiping.

  Planes are crowded, anonymous, he reminded himself. They are all too busy nervously suppressing their frail mortality to worry about the invisible shoulder bump, the coughing empty seat.

  To be safe, Noel stepped into the galley storage bay beside one of the rear lavatories and killed another ten minutes, until everyone was seated and buckled in. No point in sitting down, only to get boxed in or sat upon by some last-minute straggler. When it was obvious no one else would be boarding, he chose the third to last row, which – along with the two behind him and six in front – he had all to himself. He chose the window seat, for the view.

  Another flight attendant went through the safety announcement and, this being his first time, Noel paid her his full attention.

  Then the turbines were winding up, the plane lurched back from the jetway, and they taxied around to the main runway. The engines began to roar and Noel felt the need to tighten his apparently floating seat belt as the nose lifted and his body made a transparent depression into the seat back. Aloft, he stared through the window and watched Las Vegas become another kind of Adventure People play set, with its plastic model buildings, twinkling lights stabbing into the merciless desert glare, and seeing the traffic coasting silently up and down the Strip he could not help but think of the Matchbox cars he used to play with in his tree house, watching them vanish in his innocent young hands.

  Goodbye, Las Vegas. If you ever saw me, you won’t ever again.

  Despite his inner warnings not to succumb, Noel nodded off before the beverage service began. The hum of the jets and gentle bobbing of the flight lulled him down inside himself, into a maze of corridors and hotel rooms where he was frantic, searching for Julie, knowing that her life depended on him finding her before it was too late.

  Something evil was coming for her, something infinitely worse than Theodore Dalton, and only he had the power to stop it. The building – a sort of mutated, nightmarish version of Caesars Palace with black stone walls and floors wet with blood and long filaments of black algae that bore a strong resemblance to Julie’s hair – trembled as the entity pursued her. Noel followed, shouting after her. She turned and looked back, hearing his voice, but could not find him, could not see him. There was a howling noise beneath him and the deep, undiluted anger of the beast reverberating through the floor bounced him off his feet. He was thrown over a stone ledge, falling down the center of an endless stairwell that spiraled into the abyss, passing porthole windows lighted with flickering candles inside rooms where people from his life – his mother, his father, Lisa, his friend Trevor and the short goblin Dimples – suffered individual agonies as he fell. Then he was slammed into a chair, strapped down, and he could not breathe through the clouds of steam choking his lungs.

  A bell dinged loudly from the overhead speaker and Noel woke to discern the source of his dream. A flashing seat belt sign. Turbulence. The jet was jostling and rocking severely. Sitting so far back, he felt the tail of the plane swinging in greasy, rudderless abandon as the pilots fought to stabilize it. Though he had never flown before, he was pretty sure this was not normal, and this suspicion was confirmed a moment later when a broad plank of air seemed to slap the plane’s belly, throwing them high and slamming them back into their seats with teeth-clacking force. At least three women screamed and the contents of several purses and carry-ons launched around the cabin as if they were all trapped inside the guts of a donkey pinata under assault.

  All of this happened before he’d even had time to check himself and make sure the veil had held. It had, even while he slept.

  The nose pitched down and Noel’s stomach sprang up into his chest as they began to lose altitude with the velocity of a dropped bomb. Yellow oxygen masks on their clear plastic cords plunged from the ceiling trapdoors like an armada of spiders. The captain was stating matters of some importance over the public address and the flight attendants were clutching the tops of the seats as they staggered down the aisle, pantomime-ordering the passengers to bring their seat backs up, install the masks over their faces, put away all sharp objects. Desperate conversations, mouths opening and closing, but Noel couldn’t understand a word being spoken.

  Under the shrieking of the plane’s descent and the blood rushing behind his ears, he couldn’t hear a thing.

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  Noel resisted the urge to follow the herd and don his oxygen mask. He didn’t want to black out or suffocate, but pulling the mask over his head would force him to reveal himself. This might not be a problem given the current panic, with everyone so distracted even the flight crew might figure they had simply overlooked the well-dressed man who suddenly appeared in the back, or that he’d been seated in another row and moved during the chaos. But if all of this resulted in some sort of emergency landing where people would be cataloged, medically examined and identified, he did not want to give himself up until it was absolutely necessary.

  Of course, if they were really going down, not in the conventional ‘emergency landing’ sense but to crash, then staying unmasked (in both senses) would be a wasted effort. It wouldn’t matter who he was or what he had done – he’d simply be dead.

  Did he need the mask? He felt light-headed, and, for that matter, light-bodied, but probably everyone felt this way now. The plane was still traveling at a disturbing downward angle and the fuselage was quaking and Noel wondered, if he kept himself faded through the termination of the flight and its passengers, what would the rescue teams and clean-up crews find? Would they stumble onto an invisible corpse? Or would he lose control of it at the moment of his collapsed mortality, the way Dalton had?

  He reached for the mask, fumbled the flimsy elastic straps, debated and debated, but decided to let it go. Another minute, just another minute, and then if things are still looking like doomsday, I’ll put it on. Because deep down he really did not believe he was going to die. Not here, not now. Not after all he had survived. Surely fate couldn’t be so moronically cheap as to let him get this far only to end his journey by way of a random airplane disaster. Could it? No, of course not. But this, too, was probably something the rest of them were thinking. This can’t be happening to me. It’s not my time.

  Maybe it is our time. Maybe it will never feel like our time, even when it is.

  He flashed back to his big win at the roulette table, on his birthday. When he had felt the universe, or at least his own small bubble in it, buckle under the exploding pressure of his oncoming ten-week blow-out. His life had flashed before his eyes then, and it did so now, in a capsule of that capsule moment, returning him to the vision he had experienced then now as a hastily edited rerun. He had seen his past episodes, the worst moments, the turning points, and then the eye of his mind had cast itself into the future, allowing him a glimpse of the life he would lead.

  It might have been out of order then, and it was definitely out of order now, but somewhere in the flurry of images, impressions and touchstones to come he had seen himself wealthy in New York, hosting a cocktail party in a penthouse apartment. He had seen the liquid waterfall of green on a financial services terminal, where as a witness to privileged information he stood to make a fortune. And before or after those things he had experienced this moment, this life-threatening now, himself trapped on an airplane, the world on the verge of turning upside down just outside his window while passengers screamed and—

  But would you look at this. They weren’t screaming now. The plane was groaning and shaking in its descent, but in all other ways the cabin had gone quiet. The other passengers seated ahead of him were not making a sound. Their heads were bowed, the tubes of their masks stretched dow
n tautly, supplying them with oxygen. But no one was moving, looking around, phoning loved ones.

  He thought he must be mistaken, but when he unfastened his seat belt to rise up and get a better view of them, he saw that he wasn’t. A chill rippled through him as he surveyed the cabin, the passengers, the flight attendant in her jump seat at the front of the plane. She was halfway out of view behind the bulkhead, but he could see her legs folded loosely, one knee fallen open despite the fact she was wearing a skirt, and her head lolling limply with the plane’s rocking, chin against her chest, the yellow mask crooked around her mouth but hiding her nose.

  She was out, they were all passed out.

  So why wasn’t he?

  Noel sat down and rubbed his hands over his face, knuckling his eyes, trying to keep himself awake. He was awake, yes? Alert? Not sleepy? Yes, he was fine. Scared shitless but otherwise fine.

  The next thing he noticed was that the plane had begun to level off. The endless shuddering had lessened, and over the next minute stopped altogether, the sky suddenly as smooth as a down feather bed. The side-to-side pitching of the tail had ceased. Noel looked around hopefully, skeptical but already hurrying into relief. Maybe we’re not going to die! It’s under control, the captain has control of the plane!

  But no one said so. No one else was celebrating, talking, raising their heads. The flight attendant up in the jump seat was still zonked. Neither the captain nor his co-pilots provided an update over the PA.

  The plane was just flying smoothly, level and steady on its course, and everyone was asleep. Oh, Jesus, this was wrong. What if the pilot and his crew were sleeping, too?

  No, no. Don’t think about that. Everyone else panicked, the blood rushed to their feet, they went under from lack of oxygen, that’s all. They’re going to wake up any moment now. The captain will apologize for the scare any moment now.

  But several minutes passed and no one woke up.