in midstride as it stalked out of some dimly rendered swamp on thickly muscled thighs, its crotch conveniently shadowed. The head was bald and round, mouth agape, neck gills fanned. It stared down at me with black goggly eyes.
“Oh Lew?” I called out. “Lew!”
He looked at me, scowling. I nodded at the sign. The billboard was faded and peeling, but below the painted monster the huge block letters were clear enough: have you seen the shug?! And then below that, slightly smaller: museum & gift shop—
harmonia lake motel 2 mi. on right.
Lew shook his head, then crumpled the remaining pages and tossed them in the backseat. “Fucking MapQuest,” he said. The Harmonia Lake Motel and Shu’garath Museum and Gift Shop was a Victorian stack of narrow windows and peaked roofs disappearing into black sky. A long, slope-roofed porch wrapped the house in a shadow mouth, toothed by gray posts. The windows were dark except for two narrow, faintly glowing panes on either side of the front door.
A light high on a telephone pole shone weakly on the empty parking lot. Two gravel roads, not much wider than walking paths, led from each end of the lot and disappeared into the woods; signs pointed toward cabins 1–2 and 3–5.
On the lawn in front of the house, a man-size wooden cutout of the Shug held its own rectangular sign, white letters dimly visible: bait.
Lew put the Audi in park. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Come on, you want to sleep in the car?” I got out and crunched toward the house, hands in my armpits, shivering. Lew reluctantly followed me. The air smelled faintly of rotting fish; the lake was somewhere behind the hotel. I patted the plywood shoulder of the Shug as I passed and went up the front steps. The porch creaked, naturally. Next to the door were a pair of broad-backed rocking chairs, a wicker table between them, and farther down, a porch swing on metal chains.
The front door was a two-part affair, a screen door in front of a wooden one. Nailed to the face of the wooden door, where the knocker would be, was a glossy hunk of driftwood, vaguely squidlike: bulbous and shiny on top, multiple twisting limbs below, each limb turning up at the end into a sharpened point like a fish hook. The black wood gleamed like it was still in water. The screen door was ajar. I opened it, tried the knob of the wooden door, and found it locked.
Lew cupped his hands to one of the narrow windows beside the door. “Can’t see a thing through these curtains,” he said. “But I think the night clerk’s been laid off.”
I touched the driftwood and ran my finger along the bulb and down one limb. It wasn’t wet, exactly, but the wood seemed oily and slightly gritty. I delicately touched the tip of the tentacle, dimpling the skin of my finger, and the porch light came on. I jumped, Lew jerked upright—and then we looked at each other and cracked up.
The lock clacked significantly and we stifled ourselves. The door opened six inches on a chain. A small white-haired woman glared up at me, mouth agape. She was seventy, seventy-five years old, a small bony face on a striated, skinny neck: bright eyes, sharp nose, and skin intricately webbed from too much sun or wind or cigarettes. She looked like one of those orphaned baby condors that has to be fed by puppets.
“What are you, drunk?” she said. Her voice was surprisingly low and sharp.
“No! No ma’am.” I glanced at Lew, daring him to laugh. “You just startled us.”
Lew sidled up behind me, raised a hand. “Hi.”
“Do you know what time it is? ” she said. “You shouldn’t be out at this time of night.”
“We’d like rooms,” I said.
“Or cabins,” Lew said.
“I don’t check in people after eleven,” she said. “I can’t put you into cabins that aren’t prepared.”
“Please,” I said. “We’ll take anything you have. You don’t have to do anything to the cabins.”
She stared at me for a second, blinked. “You’re the boy who called.”
“That’s true,” I said, politely allowing the “boy” comment to slide. Last night we’d searched for every Harmonia Lake number we could find. The town had no chamber of commerce, no police station, not even a gas station. We came up with six phone numbers, five of them residential, none of them O’Connell’s. The remaining number was for the motel.
“I told you I’d give her your message,” the old woman said.
“I know, I just thought we’d—”
“She hasn’t stopped in yet.”
“That’s fine, I understand,” I said. “For tonight, though, we’d just like to—”
“She hasn’t got a phone.”
“You mentioned that, yeah.”
Her eyes looked past me, and then she seemed to come to a decision. She shook her head, disgusted. I said, “Listen—”
She shut the door. A chain slid back, then she opened it again a few inches. “All right, then. It’s almost morning. I suppose I can check you in. Besides, I’m already awake.”
She disappeared from the doorway. I looked at Lew, then pushed open the door. The old woman was already in the next room, walking
away from us. Her silver hair, I could see now, was waist-length, and braided. She wore a pink bathrobe over red sweatpants. The front of the old house was divided into three sections. The middle area was taken up by a picnic table covered by a red-and-white checked vinyl tablecloth. To the right was a dark room illuminated only by a red Coca-Cola sign over the beverage cooler in the corner: the gift shop? Shadows suggested many shelves stocked with cheap crap. The old woman went left, into what I supposed was the hotel lobby, crossing the room to step behind a pressboard-and-veneer front desk. If not for the desk, the room would have passed for any homey cottage circa 1972: oval braided throw rug, a cockeyed green cloth swivel chair, and a plaid couch-and-loveseat combo. Covering the dark paneled walls were dozens of small framed photographs, interspersed with mounted, waxy fish of alarming size, nailed to the wall in midgasp.
“You should have told me you were coming,” she said. “You could have made reservations.”
“You’re full?” Lew asked incredulously.
“Cash or credit?” she said.
I reached for my back pocket, not looking at Lew. The bastard let me pull the wallet all the way out before he said, “Credit.”
“And we need two rooms,” I said. Lew shook his head but didn’t press me on it. Maybe he wanted his privacy as much as I did. She laid his credit card on a hand machine, racked it like a shotgun. I picked up one of the brochures on the desk, a photocopied trifold, black print on 30-pound yellow paper. The front had the same picture and logo as the billboard. Had I seen the Shug?! Yes, and too many times. These people could use a graphic designer.
“You don’t have Internet access, do you?” Lew said. “It doesn’t have to be high speed.”
She squinted at him. People either got Lew or they didn’t. She handed his card back to him. “You’re in three, he’s in four, next to the washhouse. Breakfast starts at five-thirty.”
Lew looked at me, one eyebrow raised. Washhouse?
The old woman escorted us outside, pointed down the gravel trail to the left, and waited on the porch while Lew and I got in the car and rolled slowly in the correct direction. The first cabin, barely visible in the dark, was only a dozen yards from the parking lot. Lew pulled in at the next gap in the trees. The Audi’s headlights revealed a miniature peak-roofed house, maybe twenty-five feet long and fifteen wide, set on cinder blocks, surrounded by
