Lost and Found pt. 4

The Red Queen

The woman sat on the edge of her bed, pressed stop on a dictaphone sitting beside her. Laptop perched on her knees, she scrolled through a vast series of photographs. Her dark red lips are pursed, flawless lined eyes squinting to decipher the details. Most of the images appeared out of focus, blurry, taken at odd angles. On the small corner shelf to her left was a cup of tea, a flickering brown candle, and a pair of jewelry pliers. A USB cord connected her hard drive to a camouflage drone on the bed next to her. She unplugged the cord from her laptop, flash drive inserted in its place. Images dragged and dropped, file transfer complete. She removed the flash drive and fumbled for the pliers, using them to dent one of the pins.

 She stood draped in a large London Fog overcoat, buttoning up the side, red bottom heels peeking from under the hem. Put on a dark green aviator hat over her chestnut curls and dropped the goggles down. Untangled the hood from under her collar and pulled it over her head. She grabbed the flash drive, placed it in her pocket, and opened the door to face a red warning sunrise. 

Nerisse follows the wall to the grand staircase leading to the south wing, fingertips tracing cracks in the wallpaper. As she nears the vast velveteen steps, the air turns cold and resistant. She's moving through quicksand and breathing frost. Her mouth tastes like metal. She licks the back of her hand expecting a smear of blood and spit. Just the latter. But the thick feel of organic copper remains. 

She considers turning back as she rounds the corner. Behind the staircase she spies a slight young woman in faded black jeans, a red crop top, and bare feet. Her platinum ivory hair cuts short above her shoulders, soft gold undertones highlighting her nigh translucent skin. In the Hotel she's known as Althea, anywhere else she's only unknown. One hand lays on her hip as the other shakes a finger at the wall behind the stairs. 

“I don't give a shit what Mademoiselle says, if she thinks -”

Althea stops speaking as if interrupted. She pauses, heaves an exasperated sigh, turns and faces Nerisse with eyes that bring a fiercer chill to the air. Her presence is all consuming, death and life and the birth of deification. She wears the Hotel like a burial shroud and a wedding veil. The space around her is distorted and voltaic. Nerisse can't move any closer, the quicksand is now a wall. Her knees buckle as the taste of blood becomes overwhelming, straightens stick stiff as Althea addresses her.

“Excuse you? This is a private conversation.” The woman rests a hand on the fixed blade tucked in her belt. Nerisse wonders if she's even there at all, but her presence is too visceral to be a hallucination. She looks toward the wall behind Althea, sees nothing past the distortion but the cracked wallpaper. Trembles as Althea keeps eyes locked, still narrowed in suspicion.

“Don't ask me who I was talking to. You can't see her because she doesn't want you to. She thinks you're strange. Stranger danger.” The last words are melodic, a child's taunt.

“Even Hell hath its peculiar laws,” Nerisse stammers as the air fills with static, a low consistent whine growing louder. 

“We have no shortage of dead bodies and lost souls. But even Goethe would agree, this isn't Hell,” Althea points towards the front entrance. “Hell is out there.” 

Althea has grown, not by stature but by sense, her aura fills their corner under the stairs. The Hotel itself is watching them, Nerisse is certain of it. 

She was talking to the Hotel.

She personifies the Hotel.

The Red Queen.

Nerisse backs away from her, tremoring hands clasped against her chest. “Thus by existence tortured and oppressed I crave for death, I long for rest.”

Althea offers a condescending smile. “Everyone here gets what they need. It's in the rules. Maybe you'll get to rest, and maybe you'll get to die. But only the Nine gets to decide what you need.” 

Tears crowd the corners of her eyes as Nerisse searches for a door, anywhere to put this room behind her. She spots the corridor to the pool, turns her wide wet eyes back to Althea. “Two souls are dwelling in my breast, and one is striving to forsake its brother.”

Althea cocks her head to the side, her face softening for a breath. Behind her, the distortion shivers, and a little girl in a vintage Sunday dress appears just long enough to put her index finger to her red painted lips. Soft ginger hair falls around her shoulders. Shoulder. She has one eye. Her smile is cut off at the end. Where is the other half of her face? The ghost fades back into warped wallpaper before Nerisse can put the details together. A gunshot wound had decimated half the girl's head. The dead girl. She appeared now she's gone and she's dead and where is her FACE-

Nerisse moans in wordless dread, trips over her laces as she bolts towards the entrance to the pool. Althea shakes her head and looks turns her attention back to the ghost. 

“I hope she doesn't stay when she dies, she'll drive everyone crazy crazy crazy.”

The Woman stepped over puddles and around trash, approached a dumpster in a dank alleyway tucked in a dead corner of the city's outer reach. She grabbed an empty trash bag from her trench, shook it open, pulled the aviator off her curls and threw it in. She shrugged off a hoodie and her coat, rolled them up and stuffed them inside. The bag is closed and carefully deposited into the corner of the dumpster. 

She tossed her curls in place and straightened the lines of her pinstripe skirt suit. The main drag off the alleyway was just as destitute as the alley itself. Boarded up boarding houses, grey scale gas stations, twenty four hour diners with dead dining rooms. She walked a half mile to a laundromat and stepped inside. 

“Good Golly Miss Molly, and here I was thinkin you weren't gonna show.”

The six foot six man spoke in a faded southern drawl from behind the counter. He had a rash of neon green hair, a bone fragment through his septum, and a lascivious grin. His vintage Sex Pistols shirt was riddled with holes, jeans long since faded from their intended shade. He lit half a cigarette from an ashtray next to the register with a knockoff zippo, crooked his elbow in his hand as he gesticulated overdramatically. The woman clutched the hard drive in her pocket and approached the service counter. 

“You're quieter than a mouse in the shower,” He punctuated the sentence with a long draw, his drawl less amused than before. “Got somethin I need to hear?”

She shook her head and placed the drive on the counter, took two steps back. “No Abdiel, I just need to get going. They know where I am now.”

Abdiel snickered. “Had to give them something, sugar puss. Madder'n hell when they figured the last drive was corrupted.”

Fury threatened to rob her of composure. The woman took a deep breath. “I'm not responsible for what happens to them once they're out of my hands. How the fuck are you supposed to do your job if they know where I am?”

Abdiel's wily smile fell. He snatched the hard drive and twirled it in his fingers. “You realize what kind of embarrassment you caused me? I should rip your heart out your throat.”

He spun on his heels and walked out from behind the counter, approached her slow with wide exaggerated steps. He stopped an arm's length in front of her, held the drive in front of her face. “Wanna tell me what's wrong with this one or are you out to sully my prestigious reputation?” 

The woman said nothing, but the corner of her eye twitched. Abdiel grinned. “You think you're sly as a fox in a henhouse, but I got your number. I got it.” He chuckles and nods as the drive is studied, then let loose a howl. 

“Winner winner chicken dinner! You got some cojones Miss Molly, a snapped pin is a little more obvious than corrupted data, dontcha think?” 

The woman backed off as he drew closer, rattling the entrance as her back slammed against the handle. “I don't know what you're-”

Abdiel pitched the flashdrive at her head, bouncing it off her temple. She winced, distracted as he closed the distance between them. She gasped as he grabbed her by the neck and pinned her to the door, locking it as he whispered in her ear. “Don't worry. I won't rip your heart out your throat, Miss Molly. Our little barter is far too lucrative…”

He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her behind the service counter, kicked the back of her knees to collapse her. 

“...and your throat is so pretty,” he kept a firm grasp on the back of her head, pulling his pants and boxers down. The woman struggled, heaved in air to scream. He let go of her head and laid a closed fist across her cheekbone, sending her to the floor. Yanked her up by the neck and drew her face in close, leaning down til they were sharing breath. She could smell the rot from his gut as he slurred against her lips.

“If you scream, if you bite me, we'll have a sudden change of heart. Do you understand?” 

The woman said nothing. He let her go and threw a southpaw, crushed her other cheek. She crumpled, spat out a crown and stared at the floor. 

“I understand.”

The words were barely out of her mouth when he had her by the hair again, cock driven down her throat. She vomits, gagged on bile and shame. Abdiel laughed as she chokes, stared as her wide grave eyes turned bloodshot. The bruises on her cheeks bloomed as she struggled to breathe through a broken face and a sadist's dick. He held her head in place to cum down her throat, pulling out as she coughs puke and seminal fluid over the front of her tailored suit. 

Abdiel zipped up his pants and stepped over her. “Always a pleasure sugar puss. Next week you'll have something I can sell, or I'll fuck you in half.”

The woman sobbed on the filthy linoleum. Next week. Next week she could buy a little leeway. But then she'd be out of time. 

Abdiel doesn't give threats.

He makes promises.

Nerisse clings her sides and kneels by the edge of the pool, rocking back and forth as images of the specter root themselves in her hippocampus in her head in her head her head was gone half her head was gone oh my God HER HEAD-

She saw Althea standing in front of the mangle faced little girl, eyes narrowed, brow furrowed, toe tapping disdain at Nerisse's interruption. As if the corporeal corpse in blood splattered skirts with gray matter on her cheek was just another guest at the hotel. As if a guest with a hole in her face was as normal as a guest with a whole face. 

Nerisse tries to clear the horror from her head, splashing her hand as she stares at her disrupted reflection in the water. Then past it. Past the surface. Down, down, trickle trickle down. In the deep end, she could see a small circular shadow sitting at the bottom. It bobs and ripples with the waves, despite being eight feet below them. The margins begin to widen, the shadow expands as it drifts across the pool's concrete basin. 

The black mirror releases several viridian tendrils that writhe upward for air. As they reach the surface their tips sprout into bulbs, uncurling broad emerald leaves. She counts five but there could easily be more, so immense they overlap to cover most of the deep end. 

The last two tendrils loom over the blanket of lily pads, blooming two hands above them. One rises into a multifaceted seed head with hundreds of pods, fully maturing from fertile green to antique brown before it settles. The other tendril grows into a brilliant white bud, unfurling hundreds of pearlescent petals, the satin veils at its base reaching almost a meter long. Silken ivory billows as the full bloom rests on the bed of leaves below.

Nerisse scrambles to her feet and backs off from the edge, haunted grey eyes eclipsing her face, jaw unhinged in awe. She watches the expansive white lotus pulsate, zephyrous petals fluttering with each hypnotic beat. She finds herself breathing in tandem with it, chest rising and falling as the lotus throbs. 

The seed pod idly wilts its head to face the ceiling, its movement imperceptible at first glance. Nerisse almost misses the shift, entranced by dancing petals anchored to the voluminous flower. She glances over as the pod reaches its apex. The head erupts, sending hundreds of seeds into the humid air. Each seed arcs upwards and discharges a cloud of opalescent glimmers, descending in a brilliant mist, reflecting starlight on the water.

Nerisse stares in stunned silence as the glittering specks float in featherweight from the glass cathedral ceiling. She's five years old, chasing down dandelion whisps in a long forgotten meadow, reveling at the tenacity of tiny feathered possibilities hoping to land where they can thrive.

She extends her arm as the first of the glints nears her reach, hand outstretched and palm open, overwhelmed by insatiable curiosity. The pinpoint pearl alights on her nail, and as she leans in to study it, she feels a piercing sting on her fingertip. It moves down her digit on eight imperceptible legs, stopping in sudden starts to pierce her skin with needle thin fangs. 

Nerisse shrieks and slaps at the insect, tremoring as the prismatic spiders begin to descend. They fall over the surface of the pool, sending out silken strands to drift away from the water's reach, landing on windows and flood lights and pool chairs. 

And Nerisse. 

She surrenders to panic and scratches them off her arms, but the orbed spiders cling to her hands, biting and stinging as they skitter back up her wrists and under her jacket. She throws the bomber off, tearing hysteric claw marks into her arms. They touch down on her head, burrowing under her hair and creeping into her ears. Her wounds are necrotic where she was first bitten, leathery black scales and oozing pus spreading over her swollen skin. Waves of spiders crawl up her legs, down her neck, across her breasts, hundreds of venomous fangs sinking into her flesh. She clamps her mouth closed, feeling them creep up her nostrils and under her eyelids. 

As the wedding white spiders weave their way between her lips and down her throat, she lets loose a frenzied scream, collapsing as consciousness succumbs to shock.