Chris was surprised to discover that his tenth floor suite included full VIP room service and a marvelous view of the fall color that stretched as far as the eye could see. After a shower and changing his clothes, he tried to reach Kesl, but the call went straight to voice mail.
Disappointed he couldn’t share his encounter with the one person he could talk to, Chris tried to put the fragmented pieces of his experience with the Bigfoot together. As he usually did, when facing a problem in engineering, he began to pace: first in his room and then in the hallway. Was his mission, as he was beginning to think of it, an urgent matter? As he walked, that sense of being watched by a Bigfoot was a clear presence. He turned a corner and came to a dead end where the service elevator was used by hotel staff to provide room service and other amenities. Stopping in front of the shiny steel elevator doors, the sense of being watched grew stronger. He pressed himself against the doors. The feeling seemed to be coming from beneath him. He needed a key card to access the elevator. Then he spotted the nearby emergency stairs.
Chris hurried down the ten flights two steps at a time. The sense of being watched filled him with a mixture of hope and dread. On the first floor of the casino, the stairs opened onto a hallway. Exit signs pointed to a set of double doors leading out into the parking lot. An emergency alarm would activate once he pushed down the lever. Curiously, the feeling did not come from outside. He turned and walked up the hall, passing private, high-stakes poker suites, which were tucked away from the eyes of the average casino goer. Each door was marked by a single number. The first door he approached swung open before he reached it and Chris watched a small man with a cowboy hat stumble into the corridor. He teetered by, mumbling what sounded like a steady stream of swearwords.
None of the doors he approached opened to his finger pressed against the scanner. As he continued down the corridor toward the main casino floor, the sense of a Bigfoot watching him continued to grow. Chris paused beside the last door before the corridor opened onto the main floor of the casino. The sense of Bigfoot presence was the strongest yet. The door had no number and looked more like a custodian’s closet than an entrance to an upscale private poker room. He almost turned away when even in the air-conditioned comfort of the casino he began to sweat and felt a slight chill at the same time. A sudden impulse had him press his finger to the room’s scanner and the door’s electronic key lock released. The room was dark. The sense of the Bigfoot was almost overwhelming in his heightened state of awareness. Chris turned on his phone’s flashlight and ahead was another door. He resolutely walked to it. The door wasn’t locked and no scanner was necessary to open it. He walked inside.
The room was dimly lit and he could make out the figure of a tall creature in the center of the room. Immediately he was transfixed by the glow of the Bigfoot’s eyes. He knew all about this phenomena that had been reported so many times by Bigfoot researchers. The ability of Sasquatch to generate luminescent light. Chris even believed he had seen it a couple times in the field. But even knowing the fact, he couldn’t move. It was as if he had no will of his own but stayed in place at the whim of the Bigfoot.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw another figure move out of the shadows. An older woman pointed a gun at his head. Still he couldn’t move. He couldn’t even acknowledge her presence.
“You can’t move,” the woman said. “Who are you? How did you get in here?”
Her voice broke some of the spell of the paralysis and he was able to turn his head to see the woman clearly. She bore a striking resemblance to Echohawk, and he decided to take a chance.
“You must be Ayasha. I know your nephew, Larry Echohawk.”
The woman’s eyes flashed and her finger tightened on the trigger. “You’d better hope what you say next will save your life.”
Chris swallowed hard in a dry throat. He managed to point his chin at the Bigfoot and say, “I know she can talk.”
The Bigfoot responded, “How do you know?”
“I talked with two of your kind this morning.”
Ayasha barked, “Bullshit!”
Chris managed to keep calm, even looking down the barrel of the gun and despite the strange smell coming from the Bigfoot. “I talked to the Bigfoot from the Olympic Peninsula. At least, he was there when I was twelve years old. I knew you were here. I can sense it. I can’t explain it but I’ve been able to do it since this morning.”
“Really?” Auntie exclaimed.
“I think I’ve been drawn here to help with what’s been going on.”
“Help with what?” the Bigfoot asked in a voice that was a little more conciliatory.
“With whatever is going on. The killing of the Bigfoot. I was investigating the one that was killed last night.” Chris stopped. The feeling of dread returned as he turned his attention fully from the Indian woman to the Bigfoot. The creature seemed to be talking but Chris couldn’t hear anything. “What’s it doing?”
“She’s talking to the Bigfoot you mentioned. They use infrasound. It travels a long distance and we can’t hear it.” She chuckled. “You think there are ghosts in this room?”
Chris knew the theory that infrasound explained the presence of ghosts that people felt and was probably what made him sweat outside the room. The creature must have been communicating with other Bigfoot.
The Bigfoot nodded approvingly and finally spoke aloud. “Tell us about the person you call Stephen Kesl.”
“I …”
Auntie interrupted. “Go sit over there.” She pointed with her gun to the chair beside the Bigfoot.
She repeated Kesl’s name and a screen next to her lit up. Chris could see she was listening to some information that was being imparted to her through her personal assistant earplug. After a few minutes she lowered her gun. “Where is he?
”Here in the casino.”
“He may be able to help us. Bring him to us.”
“Just like that?”
She nodded.
Chris pursed his lips and pointed at the pistol in the woman’s hand. “How do I know you won’t use that against him?”
The Bigfoot said, “We don’t kill.”
Chris remembered the two other Bigfoot had said the same thing. Besides, there was an innocence in the creature’s human-like features and a strange detachment in the way she spoke, as if she had no capability of lying. “All right, I’ll trust you.” He pointed at Auntie. “But she has to put that away first.”
The Bigfoot motioned to Ayasha and she stowed the pistol in her vest.
Without a backward glance, Chris left the room. Outside he scratched his head. Thank God for Kesl.