Travelers Rest (26 page)

S
tanding there in the room Hector Jones had occupied with his father, he tried to think of the things he knew about his friend—he was a Nez Perce Indian and proud of that fact, he went to Marcus Whitman Middle School, he very much enjoyed snowmobiling, and he insisted vehemently on the superiority of the Seattle Seahawks to Dewey's own favorite football team, the New Orleans Saints. Having gone over as solemnly and completely as possible these memories of his brief friendship with Hector Jones, he took the Winchester Model 1028 break-barrel pellet rifle with mounted scope that shot the distance of three football fields and, as a tribute, laid it on the pillow of the saggy bed. He sighed hard. He wiped his nose with the sleeve of his sweater.

It was difficult to admit that Hector had disappeared. It was real, like Hugh said. It wasn't like Hector had gotten sick and died there in bed—he was just gone, vanished, no trace of him anywhere. That was the only explanation. There was no way Hector was messing with him, hiding behind doors and following him around, quiet as only a Nez Perce Indian could be. It had been way too long for him to jump out now from behind a doorway and scare Dewey or anything like that. It had been all day. It was dark outside again.

And even though Dewey was more than familiar with the strange logic sometimes practiced by other children his own age, he could in no way believe that Hector Jones would have simply left him, that, for instance, his father had returned and said, “Come on, Hector, let's go,” and Hector had jumped out of bed and said, “Okay, see ya, bro,” and left Dewey behind without even bothering to see if he was awake. He
wished
that had happened, he truly did. It was far better to believe that Hector had ditched him than to believe the alternative, but it was the alternative that was the truth, and Dewey's father had taught him about the inescapability of the truth, how the record would always bear it out eventually, even if it took millions of years.

And since he had spent pretty much all day scouring the hotel, he didn't think it was likely that he had missed Hector. He had set out with the flashlight and the pellet gun to investigate every possible means of Hector's disappearance, using the flashlight only sparingly to inspect dark closets and other places where the gray light coming through the dirty windows wasn't enough. He had investigated every floor, wandering through rooms of all different kinds and guessing what they might have been long ago, in another century, when the hotel was a place where you might have actually wanted to stay. There was a room filled with high metal chairs like the ones where his mom got her hair cut, and there was a room that contained an
enormous
pool table larger than any Dewey had ever seen. There was one room with an old piano with keys that didn't work, and another that looked like it might at one time have contained a small, shallow pool, with wide steps leading down into it, almost like a gigantic bathtub. He had walked through what he thought was the ballroom and the kitchen, and then, back behind an area with lots of shelves and cabinets, he found a narrow door shut with a rusted latch, and when he pulled up the hook on the latch and opened the door, he decided immediately that this was the one place not to go into. This was, he knew, the passage under the hotel that Hugh had mentioned.

A long, rickety wooden staircase descended into a hole that the flashlight would barely illuminate. Dewey could see a dirt floor far below but nothing else, only the place where the stairs came to an end and the bare earth spread away from them. The stairs looked like they might collapse if you tried to step on them, and there would be a long drop if they did. But it was more than the condition of the stairs that made him hesitate. A strange warmth was coming from down in the basement, and even though he was only ten years old, the Dooze Man knew enough about physical science to make him wonder what exactly was up with that. He could see how maybe since it was below the ground and…what was the word…
insulated
from the wind and the snow it could be not quite as cold as the air in the big open rooms on the upper floors, but it felt like it might be
hot
if you went down there, which there was not, at least in Dewey's mind, a good explanation for. Maybe there was a big furnace down there that was supposed to heat the hotel, but it certainly wasn't heating room 202, where he resided. There was something funny about it.

And another thing—if you stood there very quiet, as quiet as Hector Jones said he could be, you could hear something that sounded a lot like breathing. Dewey kept still and held his breath but he couldn't tell if he was right, if something really was breathing down there, or if it was just his own blood throbbing, or maybe just his overactive imagination. But he was not in a million years going to go down those stairs, and he felt pretty sure that Hector Jones would have made the same decision. Just to be certain, he prepared himself for the worst and took a deep breath and shouted into the darkness, “Hector!”—and instead of the sound echoing dizzily around the cavern the way he had expected it to, it was more like his shout was swallowed, as if the air in this dark hole smothered and contained it. His heart beating way faster than he thought was probably healthy, Dewey real quick shut the wooden door, fumbled with the latch, and finally fastened it. And then he got the heck out of there. But that was the only place he hadn't thoroughly checked.

He eventually made his way wearily back up the stairs to the second floor, where he lay down on the bed feeling lonely and cold and thinking about how it would be really good to go to Hugh and Lorraine's house and take a hot shower. That was the only thing left to do, really, so he started gathering up his things, the same process he had begun the night before, and then the tribute to Hector occurred to him, and that was why he stood here now, in Hector's old room, saying goodbye to the friend he'd had for just a short time but liked very much.

Hector Jones was gone. All the things he talked about and said he was going to do no longer meant anything. Nobody in the world except Dewey even knew that Hector Jones had said those things. And the same thing could happen to Dewey. It could happen to him at any second—like, literally it could happen five seconds from now, before he moved from this very spot. Or it could happen in fifty years. Who knew? But it could happen.
Would
happen. The grades he made in school that his dad was so proud of, the way he had learned under his mother's supervision how to take out the garbage and wash a load of his own clothes, all the tennis trophies lining his dresser—none of it would matter at all once he disappeared. Your whole life was just sucked away, and it only made a difference to a few people you left behind who remembered you, and then when they were gone you weren't anything at all. Hector hadn't even had a chance to become a souvenir, really, since Dewey was the only person in the whole awful town who knew he'd even been here. But that was important, Dewey told himself, the fact that someone had been here to acknowledge Hector Jones's presence and be his friend. And it made him think of something else: during the weeks before he won the Charleston County Spelling Bee, he had obsessively studied lists of thousands of words that might be used for fourth grade contests—roots, alternate spellings, pronunciations, etymologies.
Souvenir,
he knew, was a French word meaning “to remember.” Hector Jones was not a souvenir but a memory. That made it sound not quite so bad.

Well, it was time to go to Hugh and Lorraine and ask if they could please think of a way to help him. He was only ten years old and he had tried hard and he had done everything he could. He wanted some grown-ups to figure out how to fix things now. Hugh and Lorraine would have to do.

He was getting set to return to his room and grab the rest of his things when he heard, he was sure of it, someone moving in the hallway. His immediate impulse was to shout for help, but something made him stop the noise before it left his throat, and he stood quietly in the dark where he could see what little light filtered into the corridor. Maybe it was Hector…but maybe it was the scary hotel owner instead. Maybe it was his father come to rescue him…or maybe it was something even worse than anything or anybody he'd seen so far. You never knew what was going to happen next in this crazy place. It was best to wait and see.

And then there was the yellow beam of a flashlight, advancing slowly, surely, bobbing up and down. A voice was connected to it, singsongy, the notes of it rising up and down just like the flashlight beam, as if the person coming down the hallway was…what, jumping rope and singing at the same time? It was a female voice, certainly not the hotel owner's, certainly not Hector's, and it made a familiar sound as it went along, until, in a few seconds, it arrived at the very doorway to the room in which Dewey stood motionless. The familiar sound, Dewey realized, was his own name. This surprising development, the fact that this as yet disembodied human voice bouncing down the hallway not only knew but was actually vocalizing his very own name, almost made the Dooze Man pee his pants. It was like the scariest moment in the scariest movie ever made in the history of scary movies, and it was happening to him. Right now. This thought was actually a major help, because it caused him to react instinctually in the manner of a horror movie main character, the one pursued relentlessly throughout the film by the killer, which meant that he backed up very slowly, taking great care not to make the old floorboards creak, into a small space behind a closet door. It was a good thing, because right at that moment the flashlight beam bobbed into the doorway and shined across the snow-swept windowpanes and the old, moldy furniture and the sad, curled-up wallpaper. Dewey inched his way back as far as he could into the space against the wall and held his breath as the intruder came forward into the doorway. It was a woman, not particularly scary-looking by the standards of casual observation—what his mother, so tiny herself, would have called a “full-figured girl,” with long blondish hair and round features—but extremely weird in the current situation, mainly because it appeared that, when she wasn't calling out Dewey's name, she was talking to herself in a steady, high whisper that sounded like a nursery rhyme. The manner in which she bounced the flashlight beam up and down on the curtains, the dresser, was very curious, and Dewey wanted to find a name for it but couldn't quite until she had turned and glided from the doorway and down the hall, and he had come out from his hiding place to approach the doorway and find the woman skipping—
skipping
—toward the stairs. The name he would give to the woman's movements was “childish.” She moved like a child, the way Dewey would expect one of his female classmates at Sumter Elementary School to do.

He followed her cautiously down the stairs to the second floor, where she walked down the hall and disappeared into his very own room. For a minute he stayed close to the stairs in case he needed to make a quick escape, but eventually he was drawn out into the hall and partway down the corridor by the odd show the woman was performing, seemingly for the benefit of no one other than herself—she spoke in a high childish voice and then answered, apparently, in more soothing, rounded tones, and then her voice boomed out like a man's, and she laughed strangely and shouted as if she was afraid, and then made bizarre noises, cluckings and squallings, and spoke to herself in what sounded like other languages. It was as if she were enacting an elaborate drama, or some kind of insane puppet show without the puppets, in which all the parts were hers and she was her own audience as well.

Then the noises stopped, and a dim, shifting light seeped from the room—she had turned on the television. Dewey tiptoed forward until, through the half-open doorway, he could see the woman sitting on the sofa, leaning forward and smiling widely at the TV screen. If he tilted his head far to the left, he could see the TV at a slant, but he couldn't quite make out the picture well enough to see what the woman smiled at. It appeared to be the face of a woman on the screen, large and shifting, but it was hard to get a good look at it from this angle. But the woman sat there forever just looking at the screen, one arm draped across her knees, one hand holding up her chin. At one point she shot up from the sofa, and with a squeal approached the TV and held out her hand toward it, although she stopped short of actually touching the screen. Then she returned to the sofa and resumed staring at the TV. Eventually she lay down and curled into a ball with her arms tucked in tight to her body, and every once in a while she dabbed at her eyes or moved a strand of hair out of her face.

Dewey felt sorry for the woman (he was softhearted, his mother always said), but he was still afraid of her, and he wished she would go somewhere else so he could have his own room back. She didn't seem to be interested in finding him anymore—she'd stopped calling out his name a long time ago—and he was getting tired of standing in the hallway. Finally he gave up and went back to Hector Jones's room. He pulled the pellet gun out from under the covers and he went and sat against the wall with the gun across his lap. He thought about how if he were in Mount Pleasant now he would be doing homework for his world history class—he knew they were supposed to start a group project making a 3-D map of the Roman Empire, which he had been very much looking forward to—and his mom would be nagging him to start getting ready for bed and his dad would be saying, Oh, come on, Julia, let him stay up a little longer and watch TV. He had missed his team's first basketball game after Christmas break, and they had probably lost because Devonte Price would have had to play point guard, and Devonte Price, despite possessing admirable dribbling skills, always got overly excited and put up crazy, impossible shots or threw the ball away. Probably his friend Hunter had used his absence as a chance to move in on Emily Ott, even though he knew Dewey had liked her for at least six weeks. Outside the wind would be warm and salty and the air would smell like pluff mud from the marshes. In the sky there would be stars. He closed his eyes and he could hear his father pointing out the constellations to him—Orion, Gemini, Cassiopeia. Aries, his birth sign, though only his mother paid any attention to astral signs or starry predictions.