The Chosen

“I’m sorry,” Feldspar offered. “I suppose we all have them from time to time. They say that dreams, particularly nightmares, represent abstract depictions of our darkest desires.”

If that’s true, I need to be locked up, Vera thought. She remembered the dream-figure’s face, once it had turned: pallid, malformed, hideous. Rheumy, urine-colored eyes peered back at her with irregular irises. A cluster of pale slimy tentacles emerged from a mouth like a knife-slit in meat…

When you have a nightmare, Vera, you don’t fool around. But what in her subconscious could be so demented that her mind would produce such awful images in her dreams? Am I that screwed up? she wondered.

Feldspar obliquely smiled, something he rarely did. “I’m very enthused, Ms. Abbot. Things are just going so well.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Vera said, though she still had yet to see any evidence of The Inn’s success. Evidently, room service was still blowing the restaurant away. “Oh,

I meant to mention something to you. Remember Chief Mulligan? He seems to have disappeared.”

Feldspar’s eyes narrowed quizzically. He ran an unconscious finger across his bright amethyst ring. “I don’t understand.”

“One of his deputies called me, said he never returned to the station after he dropped by here.”

“How queer,” Feldspar remarked. “I suppose they believe he was abducted by one of The Inn’s evil ghosts.” Then Feldspar chuckled.

Even Vera shared the laugh, but then she kept thinking: Mulligan. And his fairly direct implications. Feldspar had admitted to a checkered past, though she hadn’t asked him to elaborate. And what she asked next went against all good judgment.

“May I ask you something? Personal?”

“Of course,” Feldspar invited. “Personal questions are always the most enlivening.”

“Well…” Vera hesitated. “The other day, when I was telling you about Chief Mulligan’s visit—”

“And his suggestion that we might be involved in some sort of corruption,” Feldspar added for her.

“Yes, and all that. You said that you had been in trouble with the authorities once in the past.”

Feldspar nodded. He poured himself another shot.

“I realize it’s none of my business,” Vera tacked on, “but I can’t help but be curious…”

“Ah, you want to know exactly what happened. Well, as you know, I’ve always been in this business in one way or another. My employer always had great faith in me—”

“Magwyth Enterprises, you mean.”

“Correct. I’ve managed resorts similar to The Inn, all over the world, the very best inns, facilities that make our inn here pale in comparison. Well, it was at one such inn that I gave my associates a bit too much leeway in the way things were to be run. I’m afraid some improprieties occurred, and my associates, unbeknownst to me, took it onto themselves to engage in some rather unusual management practices.”

Vera’s brow twitched.