The Ninth Nightmare

‘Please,’ the woman begged her, and suddenly a dark runnel of blood slid out of the side of her mouth and on to the pillow.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ asked Katie. She was afraid to approach any nearer in case the woman was suffering from some kind of infectious disease.

The woman took hold of the corner of the quilt with one hand and tried to pull it off her, but she obviously didn’t have the strength. Katie hesitated for a moment and then she reached across and drew it back herself.

‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘What happened to you?’

Beneath the quilt, the woman was covered with a sheet, but the sheet was sodden and shiny and dark. That was the metallic smell that had overwhelmed Katie when she first came back into the room — the smell of blood.

‘I couldn’t stop him,’ said the woman, so quietly now that Katie could hardly hear her. ‘I tried, but he was much too strong for me.’

She tried to raise her head from the pillow, but she couldn’t. Katie said, ‘Don’t try to move. I’ll call nine-one- one.’

She looked around. There was no nightstand beside the bed, no lamp, and no phone. She dug in the front pocket of her jeans and took out her cellphone, but when she flipped it open the screen was blank. Wherever this bedroom was, it was a dead area, out of range of any cellphone signals.

‘Look,’ she said, trying to keep herself calm, ‘I’ve had a little training in first aid. Let me try to stop the bleeding. Then I can go find somebody to help you.’

‘It’s no use,’ the woman told her. More blood welled out of the side of her mouth and the stain on the pillow grew wider.

‘I can try,’ Katie insisted. ‘Look — I can tear up this other sheet and use it as a bandage.’

‘It’s no use,’ the woman repeated.

‘Just let me take a look,’ said Katie. ‘I promise I’ll try not to hurt you.’

The woman shook her head as if she couldn’t understand what language she was speaking in. Katie pinched the blood-soaked sheet between finger and thumb and tugged at it. It felt cold, and wet, and sticky.

‘No,’ the woman whispered.

‘I’m so sorry, but I have to. If I can’t stop the bleeding, you may not make it.’

The woman didn’t argue any more. She just lay on the pillow, staring unblinkingly at Katie with her green filmy eyes, like somebody who wants to remember a friend they are never likely to see again.

Katie pulled the sheet right off her, and folded it back. At first she couldn’t understand what she was looking at. But even when she realized what the red-haired woman’s assailant had done to her, she could still barely believe it, and she stood by the side of the bed, utterly stunned, unable to think what she could possibly do next.

‘I tried to stop him,’ the woman murmured. Her eyes closed and for a moment Katie thought that she might have died, but when she leaned over her, she could see that she was still breathing, with a sticky catch in her throat. Katie couldn’t imagine how she had survived at all, let alone managed to speak.

She waited for almost five minutes, biting the joint of her left thumb as if to reassure herself that she was still real, and that she hadn’t lost her mind, and occasionally letting out a breathy little unh, like a sob. After a while she couldn’t hear the woman breathing any longer, but she couldn’t summon up the nerve to feel her pulse to make sure that she was dead.

She turned around and walked stiffly across to the laundry-room door. The light was still shining inside it, and she prayed that it was still her hotel bathroom. She looked back at the woman lying on the bed. She didn’t know who she was or what she had suffered, but she felt as if she had let her down, even though she had been powerless to save her. Her only consolation was that nobody could have saved her.

She opened the door. Inside, the bathroom was so bright and shiny that she raised her hand to shield her eyes. She closed the door behind her and locked it. She washed her hands in the basin and rinsed the swirl of blood down the drain. She kept her eyes lowered so that she wouldn’t have to look at her reflection in the mirror, in case her reflection was doing something else. Once she had dried her hands she climbed into the empty bathtub and sat there, hugging her knees, her eyes tight shut, rocking backward and forward and waiting for morning, if it ever came.

TWO Room 309

It was less than a half mile to the Griffin House Hotel but John and his passenger had now been sitting at the same intersection for nearly ten minutes, next to a scabby plane tree on which somebody had thumb-tacked a flyer for a missing black-and-white cat.

‘Maybe you want to walk,’ John suggested, looking at the woman in his rear-view mirror. ‘I can bring your bags along as soon as this traffic gets moving.’

‘In these shoes?’ the woman retorted.

John hadn’t noticed the woman’s shoes when he had picked her up at the airport, but judging by the rest of what she was wearing, he had a pretty good idea what they must be like. Although it was a gloomy October afternoon, with winter just around the corner, her eyes were hidden behind enormous beetle-like sunglasses with sparkly diamante frames. She wore a short leopard-print jacket with a high furry collar, on top of a tight purple satin dress with a cleavage that probably would have sent back multiple echoes if you had shouted down it. She smelled very strongly of Boss Intense. Since he had started driving taxis, John had become something of a connoisseur of women’s perfumes, especially industrial-strength women’s perfumes like this one.

‘OK, it was only a thought,’ John told her. He looked up at his rear-view mirror again. ‘First time in Cleveland?’ he asked her.

‘Oh, no way,’ she told him. ‘I was born and raised in Brunswick. A fully-fledged graduate of B-wick High. My sister still lives in Shaker Heights.’

‘Hey, that’s a nice district, Shaker Heights.’

‘I guess, if you like boredom and trees. Personally I hate being bored and who needs frigging trees?’

John raised his eyebrows and thought: Who needs frigging trees? That’s classy. Not the usual caliber of guest he would have expected to take to the Griffin House Hotel.

He adjusted his seat belt around his belly. It was way past two thirty and he still hadn’t had lunch yet. He had been planning to go to Quizno’s on Euclid Avenue when he had dropped this fare off, to pick up a bourbon grille steak sub. He could almost taste it now: prime rib, mozzarella, Cheddar, mushrooms, saute onions, all covered with grille steak sauce and served up on rosemary Parmesan bread. His mouth watered so much that he had to swallow.

‘Staying here long?’ he asked, in a quacky, saliva-filled voice.

‘Not if I can help it. I’m only going to my grandma’s funeral.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. My condolences.’

‘Thanks, but I don’t need condoling. I never liked her and neither would you, if you’d ever known her. What a witch. She had a face like somebody looking at themselves in the back of a spoon.’

The traffic began to inch forward. The woman said, ‘At last. Thank you, Lord Jesus.’

As they neared the Griffin House Hotel, John could see three black-and-white police cars lined up outside, their lights flashing, and two uniformed officers directing the traffic. The hotel itself was an imposing brown-brick building with Gothic windows and elaborate spires and a gray slate roof. It was surrounded by tall ivy-wrapped oaks, their leaves already turned rusty and yellow. A crowd of people were milling around the wide stone porch — police officers and TV cameramen and hotel staff, as well as rubbernecking bystanders.

‘Looks like we’ve got ourselves a little excitement,’ said John. He signaled to turn into the curving driveway in front of the hotel and a police officer flagged him down and made a winding gesture for him to lower his window.

‘Just dropping off a hotel guest, officer. What’s all the flap-doodle for?’

‘Nothing serious, sir. If you want to pull over to the left side there.’