Through the double patio doors, across the lobby, past the desk, and into the elevator bank Ben went. Alone. The clerk didn’t follow this time. In this confined part of the lobby, he could hear a tinkling of Muzak coming from the speakers embedded in the hotel ceiling: the darkest of jokes.
The elevator opened and Ben consulted his key card packet, which was festooned with stock photos of smiling children and young couples holding hands on the stone patio. 906. His room was on the ninth floor.
He pressed the 9 button and watched the doors seal shut behind him. When they reopened, he found himself in a standard hotel hallway, with generic framed photographs lining the walls and cheap sconce lights mounted between them. The whole hallway smelled like wallpaper glue. He came to room 906 and dug out his key card. The black sensor under the door handle flashed red when he placed the card against it. He tried again. Red. He tried a third time, turning the handle. Red. Then he kicked the door.
When he turned to walk back to the elevator, there was a Mouth Demon right in front of him.
All mouths. Its eyes were mouths. Its nose was a mouth. Its long, stringy hair was interrupted by bare patches with mouths where scalp should be. All the mouths were open and drooling green fluid and babbling incoherently. Its breath was a cloud of horrors. The voices coming from the Mouth Demon suddenly filled the hall, sounding like a throng of the damned.
It reached out for Ben, and he could see two hungry mouths embedded in its palms, and more mouths lining its forearms. He backed up so quickly that he fell to the ground and the Mouth Demon pounced on him. Ben screamed in terror as the demon grabbed his hand and bit him on the arm with its hand-mouth, its rotting teeth plunging in, eating away at him like a living tumor.
Ben jerked away from the demon as it ripped a chunk of him free and feasted on it. He got up to run to the end of the hallway and the demon followed, slowly but with purpose. Ben’s arm was festering now, the wound bleeding and widening. He saw teeth growing along the outside of the wound, and a pit forming down into his arm. Soon, there was a tongue. His arm began babbling.
The demon approached. There was a door marked STAIRS but when Ben tried to push it open, it held fast. The demon grabbed him again and bit into his clothing, and he could see more mouths lining its neck, open and waiting to be fed.
The gun. He needed the gun. Why hadn’t he just kept the gun out the whole time? He reached into his bag with his uninfected hand and felt the grip of a weapon, but when he pulled it out, it turned out to be the paintball gun he’d filched from Fermona’s cave. Then he remembered: the faded tome said you had to fill the mouths to beat the demon.
Paint fills things.
He aimed the paintball gun at the monster and blasted a tiny orb of orange latex into its face. One quick shot was enough to make the demon recoil. Ben fired again and again, hitting every possible open orifice at the base of its neck and across its chest. It fell to the ground in pain, covered in nightmarish bursts of Technicolor. Ben watched as the demon tried frantically to spit the latex out, making strange noises and writhing about as the mouths sealed shut.
He rolled the demon over and found more mouths lining its back and legs. He filled those mouths as well, and then filled the hungry wound blabbering on his own arm. Once filled with paint, the maw on his arm closed and the lips sealed shut, fading back into his skin, leaving a lively orange polka dot. When he wiped the paint off, he uncovered a faint white line on his skin that would not go away.
On the ground, he now saw a human corpse. Male. Sunny paint blots all over him. Ben slid down to the floor, resting against the wall, shaking uncontrollably, rubbing the new scar on his arm. He tore off his shirt, checking for new mouths, listening to see if he could hear any more unholy gibberish coming from inside him. But there was nothing.
He ran back to room 906 and frantically tried the key card again. And this time—by God—the light turned green. He turned the handle, hurried into the room, and slammed the door shut, bolting every bolt and sliding every chain. The mouths . . . Oh, God, the mouths. He kept seeing the mouths, smelling their toxic breath. No one would hear him in this generic hotel room. It would be okay. He screamed and banged his head against the door. He took the real gun out of his bag and held it fast to his heart.
After his fifth violent head-butt of the door, he remembered . . .
. . . the tissue of another undead being . . .
There was an ingredient for Voris’s glowing poison right outside that door. Who knew if it would be there for much longer? Perhaps some ghoulish maid service swept through the hotel every hour to pick up remains of the undead. He was gonna need that poison.
He took out the pickle jar and unbolted the door. The man lay dead in the hallway. His nose and eyes had been restored. He looked like any other man. Ben knelt beside him and felt his cheek, which was now cold and hard.
He unfurled the napkin roll from the hotel lounge. The steak knife was serrated and razor sharp.
“I’m sorry,” Ben told the corpse, as he dug into its arm and carved out a small hunk of flesh where a mouth once was. The man’s blood was already coagulated and crumbly. Not a drop of liquid came out of him. Ben dropped the hunk of flesh into the pickle jar and ran back into 906. Again, the bolts and chains.
He wanted to sleep. Needed to, really. But how? He looked at the steak knife. It had cut through the man’s flesh so easily, like digging into a fresh jar of peanut butter. It would be a cinch to draw the knife across his own neck and watch the blood come running out, a quick moment of pain in exchange for eternal slumber. The knife could free him. No more mouths. No more giants. No more mountains to climb or bridges to cross. And no more uncertainty.
No.
He wiped the knife on the cloth napkin and rolled it back up neatly with the fork and the spoon, leaving it ready for room service.
The room itself was a suite, nicer than any hotel room he’d ever been in. He didn’t even know hotel rooms could be this open and spacious. There was a kitchen, and a vast master bath with whirlpool jets, and two king beds in the main bedroom, each turned down and adorned with a single chocolate wrapped in silver foil. On the desk in the corner of the room, there was a vase of fresh flowers, along with a cheese-and-fruit plate and a bottle of champagne chilling in a pewter bucket. There was a small envelope tucked under the plate. Ben set his bag on one of the beds and walked over to the desk, grabbing the envelope and tearing it open, reading the tiny note card inside:
Compliments of the Producer.
Behind the desk was a set of French doors that led to a balcony. He opened the door and saw the outline of the picturesque hills in the darkness and smelled the olive trees perfuming the fresh air. This Producer, whoever he may be, was abusing Ben in the most classic sense. There was trauma, and then there was a gift, and then more trauma, and then another gift. The pattern was unmistakable.
There was no sign of the path beyond the hotel. Whether it had abandoned him, or whether he had to figure out some mindfuck puzzle to conjure its return, he was too tired and frazzled to care.
Just then, a crow flew by and dropped a scroll of red construction paper onto the balcony. He bent over and unrolled it. There were two small handprints on the paper, made with white finger paint, and a poem cut out and pasted beneath it:
Sometimes you get discouraged
Because I am so small
And always leave fingerprints
On furniture and walls
But every day I’m growing up
And soon I’ll be so tall
That all those little handprints
Will be hard to recall
So here’s a special handprint
Just so you can say
This is how my fingers looked
When I placed them here today.
At the bottom, there was the name “RUDY,” written by a kindergarten teacher in black Sharpie.
“God damn you,” Ben whispered softly. “Thank you, but God damn you.”
He placed the paper on one of the king beds, and put Flora’s stuffed fox next to it. There were a great many kiddie board books that Ben could recite from memory. So, on this night, he recited them aloud to the fox and the handprint. He asked the fox, which acted as proxy for Flora, how her day had been. He told a joke to the handprints. He tucked the objects in for twenty minutes before finally kissing them goodnight and covering them with the sheet and blanket. After a quick shower and change into clean boxers and a white T-shirt, he fell into the opposite bed, staring at the door, waiting for something to start banging on it.
Nothing did. He fell into a deep sleep with the balcony doors open.
• • •
When he woke up, he was a tenth grader. In school. The principal’s office, to be exact. He was sitting in front of a stern woman.
Oh, that’s Principal Blackwell. That was her name. Hey, wait a second. . . .
The principal had called Ben into her office and worse, she phoned Ben’s mom at the hospital and made her come in as well. Apparently, Ben’s teacher had read through his journal and was horrified by its contents. Now Principal Blackwell laid the open journal out on her desk for Ben and his mom to see: Severed heads. Pools of blood. Angry missives and threats to kill other students. Hideous creatures covered in frothing mouths. You drew those. You probably don’t remember that, do you? Depression has a way of vaporizing big parts of your memory. Important parts.
“Is this your journal?” she asked Ben.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why would you put these things in your journal?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I get angry.”
“Are you planning to hurt anyone, Ben?”
“No! No, I swear!”
He wasn’t lying. It’s just a journal. You’re free to empty out your mind in there and sort through the trash, aren’t you? That’s what the teachers said to do, man. He was a depressed, only child. The only-est child. The fuck did they think they’d find in that journal: unicorns? He never wanted to really hurt anyone, except for perhaps himself. Wasn’t that obvious? You don’t see me walking around kicking cats, do you?
The principal gave Ben a kind pat on the shoulder.
“If you ever need to talk to anyone,” she told Ben, “my door is open anytime. Or you can visit the guidance counselor, Mrs. Fazio. Okay? We know how hard it is for you, Ben. We’re here to help.”
But that’s not what really happened now, was it? No, not at all. The principal said nothing of the kind. When they see death threats in a kid’s journal and that kid has an honorary prison scar running down the side of his face, along with a record for public vandalism . . . yeah, no, they aren’t cutting that kid any slack. You were suspended for two days. Other kids found out why. Barely anyone at school spoke to you again. The rest of the football team froze you out. That’s what happened. That was the real world for you. Always ready to assume the worst.
• • •
When Ben woke up, Voris was hanging over him. He could tell it was Voris right away: the black eyes, the pupils bright like headlights in the dark, black wings with a span of twelve feet sprouting out of his back. His face was white. Sallow. Black gloves sheathed his seemingly endless fingers.
Ben rolled out from underneath Voris and grabbed the fox and handprint paper from the other bed, tucking them into his backpack. Voris turned his head and gazed at Ben with curiosity. The light in his pupils felt like its own distinct, separate creature. There was no need for him to explain that Ben would soon be under his complete and utter control. The pupils owned him. Voris could not be beaten.
“What do you want?” Ben asked.
Voris floated out from the bed, tucked in his wings, and came to a standing rest on the hotel suite floor. Still staring. Still curious. Ben reached over to his nightstand for the gun. By the time he had a hold of it, it was too late. Voris wrapped his praying mantis fingers around Ben and lifted him up off the ground, his lethal skin radiating through the black gloves. Ben shrieked in pain and dropped the pistol. Soon, Voris would melt through his skin and char his ribs.
Then Voris spread his wings wide and flew out the French doors and over the balcony, up into the sky, carrying Ben in his claws as easily as a crow would a slip of paper.