Getting out of the elevator on the fourth floor, veering left toward Room 426, he passed that blank, glaring door and his hands automatically grappled with the bulky bellman’s keyring in the pocket of his khakis. He could not look at the door, because looking at the door meant that they could look straight through the door at him. They could make eye contact.
That they didn’t have eyes didn’t matter. That the whole thing was grade school horseshit didn’t matter, either. Fear was simple. No adult rationalization required.
Mike was in the elevator now, two floors above and climbing. He still felt the pull of that closet. Didn’t the elevator always lurch just a little on its way past the fourth floor? Mike had noticed it. He wasn’t sure anyone else had. As if even the elevator were in a hurry to leave it behind.
The things in it.
It was a closet. That was one problem. Where do all the kid monsters come from? Under the bed or in the closet. Dark, smelling of mothballs, full of soft clothes and soft sounds and something like muffled breathing, where reaching in to dig around for that lost shoe meant soft stroking fingers at the back of your neck, a whispering chuckle that was really more like the throaty swallow of something hungry.
When you lifted your head back out into the real world, the stroking fingers were just shirtsleeves, and the furtive sounds of the hungry monster were vinyl garment bags brushing together. But that was what the closet wanted you to think. The closet wanted you to feel safe. An animal thing. A predator thing.
Monsters. Yes. In the closet. Or under the bed. On the fourth floor of the Riverside Inn, there was a really big closet, and what was worse than that? What could be worse than that?
The worst of both worlds.
A closet full of beds.
*
Mike stepped out onto the seventh floor, leaving the bank of elevators behind, the cool fear-sweat prickling his skin. The hotel was built like a giant cracker box, indoor balconies looking down on a central mezzanine with a cafe stuck in the middle of it. This stomach-lurching view was blocked only at the elevator banks.
Heights had never been a problem for Mike. He could stand at the north end, opposite the elevators, and look straight down without flinching. Here the view was panoramic, fisheye, the tops of restaurant patron’s heads like multicolored beads floating in colorless oil. This view made a lot of people sick. The railing was only five feet high. One good push and you were over, tumbling out of control. There was only one law in the crazed outland of that hanging second: Gravity.
Mike stood at the edge and was not afraid. He could see the front desk from here. Brenda was down there, customer service mask firmly in place, doing the dance, making nice with the guests. The daily pretense. Brenda was cute but a little weird. She had asked Mike out once. He had demurred, some threadbare excuse.
Brenda abruptly turned and left the service counter, disappearing through the rear door into the service office. She only left the counter when she had to use the radio.
Static spiked at Mike’s hip and his heart fell. He knew what Brenda wanted before she even said it. Then she did say it, and he was all cold sweat.
“Mike. Need a rollaway for five-fifteen.”
Mike had never told anyone. Hell, no. That would be the walk of shame for sure. And who would he tell? Girlfriends – several of them, even – hang around when you’re a starting quarterback, full ride, pro scouts sniffing for an opportunity to snap you up and set you on the spinning wheel. Hotel managers loved to have you on part-time hire when they could brag about your passing record.
Six foot two, just under two hundred pounds, quick and lean and talented, senior year, and wouldn’t those cheerleaders just love to hear about your closet monster fixation? Wouldn’t your boss be sympathetic, rushing in to rescue you every time a rollaway request came down, the place packed to the rafters, the entire staff in the weeds with returned room service orders and requests for five extra towels?
Doubtful.
Superman didn’t like Kryptonite, but he didn’t walk around telling everybody he was afraid of it, either.
“Mike?”
Had Brenda snapped at him? It wasn’t busy down there. There hadn’t even been anyone at the counter. Brenda never lost her composure, even if that composure was bolstered by a little leafy-green third-party assistance.
She comes to work stoned. So what? Bet she’s not afraid of some stupid beds in a stupid closet.
Of course she wasn’t. Brenda never had to come up here.
“Yeah,” Mike said into his radio. “I’m on it.”
He peered down into the center of the cracker box, the Oasis Bar and Grill seven floors down, and for some reason he thought: If I jumped, it would be quick. There’s nothing between here and there. Nothing at all.
*
Mike stood in front of the closet, on Four. They were rustling around in there. Restless. They had heard him. Heard him thinking, all the way up there on Seven.
Stop it.
If he went over to Room 426, knocked on the door, grabbed the forty-something businessman up from Minneapolis for the propane technology convention, yanked him out of his doorway and made him stand in front of the closet door and just listen, he would hear it. The businessman would hear, too. The sounds. The rustling sounds. Every once in awhile a metallic twang. It was not Mike’s imagination.
The rustling, which was more like chuckling.
Get on with it.
Mike reached into his pocket for the keys. They weren’t there. But he’d had the keys earlier, hadn’t he? Jingled them between his fingers as he walked?
Something bumped against the inside of the door. A heavy something. Then a metallic ch-ch-chhhh, the sound a coiled spring would make if a coiled spring could chuckle.
A bedspring.
“Fucking losing it,” Mike said. Great. So let’s add frequent conversations with self to the list of freakshow quirks attributable to star quarterback Michael Sair, heavily favored to be picked up by the Ravens in time for spring training. For a moment he saw himself, medium shot in a floating blue square, head-and-shoulders, reciting his name and alma mater while his stats super rolled by beneath. Michael Sair, QB,
Terrified by trundle beds in hotel closets.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Mike said, just as the propane technology businessman in Room 426 opened his door and stepped out. He was pale, pasty, and bald. The Pillsbury Doughboy, if you took off his hat and gave him a briefcase. He regarded Mike quizzically, maybe unsure of what he’d heard. Or if he’d heard anything.
“Beg pardon?” he said.
Mike took a step back. “Sorry,” he said, “I was just talking to—”
Jingle, jingle.
He looked down at his left hand. At the set of bellman’s keys in his left hand. The keys that were not in his front pocket because they were already in his hand.
I was talking to my keys, he almost told Pillsbury the propane saleman. I talk to my keys when I’m nervous, he almost said. And since you’re here, would you mind opening this door, dragging out a rollaway, and taking it to the woman in room 515? It won’t struggle for you. It won’t snarl at you. It won’t bother you.
It’s me they don’t like.
Would he say that? Not in a million years, not after a million beers. Pillsbury-sans-hat was already suspicious, a trapped-in-deserted-hallway-with-serial-killer look fixed to his face. He crept around Mike, quick as a mouse to the elevator bank, and was gone. Have a nice day, Pillsbury.
The thing inside the rollaway closet rammed itself against the door, booming kettle drum. Everyone in the hotel had to have heard it, even Pillsbury Propane in the elevator on his way down. The concussion echoed in that open space, before trailing off into nothing.
He had done something. He was sure of it now. Somewhere, somehow, he had done something to piss them off.
*
Finally they let him in. Because it served their purpose. They made him sweat the keys for awhile first – slipping the wrong one in, turning the right one the wrong way, thinking the right key was the wrong key. Finally the door swung open, creepy opening-door sound just like an old Vincent Price movie. Like someone wailing, confusion and terror.
On the other side of the open door were the beds. Rank and file, soldiers at attention, crammed in so tightly when they were all there that it was hard to get one out. It would be no problem today, because one of them was missing –
Mike frowned. That wasn’t right. He had delivered no rollaways since his shift started at seven this morning. Which meant there should be no rollaways missing.
The space mocked him, an empty socket missing its tooth.
The radio crackled again. Brenda. What was wrong with her today? She was on his case about this one. Hard.
Mike stammered something into the radio – by the time it was all over and he was talking to the police, he would not remember for the life of him what he had said – and then quickly, without thinking about it, stepped over the threshold and into the closet.
It was awful in here. Thick air, close, heavy with the industrial hotel fragrances of bleached sheets, disinfectant cleanser, and bare concrete.
And something underneath. A briny smell. Old blood. Mike had worked his high school summers in a slaughterhouse. It was that smell, under the bleach. Inside the closet, no attempt was made to preserve the illusion of excess and extravagance the rest of the hotel strove to achieve. In here it was just a big cinderblock box.
With beds in it.
Mike reached out blindly to grab the sheets of the bed directly in front of him. For a moment it felt to him as if he had grabbed something alive, warm, pulsing. Like skin.
He looked and the bare concrete walls of the closet were black and dripping. Wet. Slimy. The brick was painted black. Spiked chains hung from the walls, the kind from the old Vincent Price movies. And the beds themselves, their twisted, rusting metal frames covered in barbed hooks, some of them so small you wouldn’t know they were there until they pierced your palms in a dozen places. The only place to really grab hold was the mattress, which wasn’t a mattress at all. It was a quivering, rectangular slab of flesh with its own pulse, its own heartbeat.
And its own intelligence. Awareness. Focused on him.
Mike shut his eyes. Corner route, he thought. Post route. Flat route. Screen pass. Swing pattern. Fly pattern. Button hook.
He repeated them, the litany of pass patterns he’d had memorized since junior high school, until he felt it was okay. Mike had always been great with pass plays, but couldn’t run for shit. In his first year at NDS he’d said there’s no point trying to run me, Coach, I’m not a runner, and Coach Bennon had said bullshit, son, you don’t tell me what you can’t do, I show you what you can do, and they’d tried him in all manner of option play setups and finally his coach had said, sonofabitch, boy, you were right, you can’t run for shit. And that was the end of anybody trying to improve Mike’s running game.
There had been one time. One play. Just one.
But he had a great arm, so who cared?
Mike opened his eyes. It was just a bed. He looked at what was tangled between his fingers. It was just a sheet. And it felt like a sheet. The scent of freshly-blooded abattoir was gone.
Mike dragged the bed out, hoping somebody had puked on the floor in the lobby bathroom. He could go clean it up. That would be a lot more fun than this.
He rolled the bed briskly along on squeaky casters. It went smoothly, as if it knew where it was going.
*
The guy answered the door. When it was a family, Daddy always answered the door. It was Daddy’s job to allow entry into the cave, even if the cave was temporary.
His wife and daughter sat on the double bed nearest the window. The girl ate raisins and watched TV. When Mike came in, she looked up at him. She pointed at the screen and said, “I see Dora.”
Daddy smiled, indulgent and mildly patronizing. “She doesn’t get to watch much at home,” he said.
Why did people think the hotel bellman gave a shit how they raised their kids? Daddy looked at him now, expecting the assenting comment. Mike waved at the little girl instead.
Then Mike smiled at Mommy – and watched something very strange happen. Her expression was neutral when he entered, vaguely distracted. Thinking about whatever she had left waiting at home, probably. When he started muscling the bed into the room, her expression abruptly changed. Her attention was wrenched into the here and now. The present. Like a wild animal scenting threat.
The bed. She knew.
Maybe just because she was a mother, that million-years-old instinct to protect the children. Her arm went around her daughter’s shoulders. Mike didn’t think she was even aware of it, any more than she was aware of the gooseflesh crawling her arms, visible from all the way across the room.
Suddenly Mike could think of a million reasons why he didn’t want to bring this bed in here. None were logical, all were preposterous and most would very likely get him fired.
The look on the woman’s face told him he was making the biggest mistake of his life. Mike wheeled the bed into the room.
“Sorry about this,” Daddy said. “She insisted on having her own bed.”
“S’okay,” Mike said. He rolled it through sideways, hating the clammy feel of the freshly-bleached sheets. There was only one spot in the room in which the bed could fit without violating fire codes. Mike settled it in between the bathroom wall and the dresser.
He tripped over his own feet in his hurry to escape, almost hitting Daddy with his forearm. He mumbled a half-considered apology. He was sweating. His stomach was very bad.
At the doorway, he looked back into the room, and there it was again, like the closet. Instead of nice, tidy hotel room, it was the lair of the Marquis De Sade, with sweating stone walls and iron chains.
As its centerpiece, the piece de resistance, the most agonizingly slow and painful torture device ever created by man.
That goddamned bed.
Mike caught a glimpse of the woman’s face again before the door closed, and he saw not just passing unease but the cold, staring dread of a person who knows that they have just been locked in a room with something hungry.
He ran to the elevators.
*
Brenda speared him with one of her intense looks. Her weird looks. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” Mike said. So maybe she was a little pissed about last week’s brushoff. “Are you okay?”
“Sure,” she said. “Why?”
Mike tried the quarterback smile, the one that caused girls to spontaneously undress. “You just seem a little grumpy is all.”
This time the smile was as fake as silicone. “I’m good,” she said. Yes, there was definitely something she wasn’t talking about. Probably the fact that she had seen him at the Rocking Horse on the night he’d claimed he was too busy to go out with her. He’d spotted her hiding in a back corner away from the bar. When he’d looked that way again, she’d been gone.
Mike toyed briefly with the idea of making it up to her, asking her out himself. But what was that? Pity? Never a good motive. She would take it, and expect more, and then more. It would have to end somewhere, and it would not end well. He would never take her to bed. She was not up to his standard.
She was staring at him, half-smiling. Bitter smile.
Like she knew exactly what he was thinking.
In the moment before the fire alarm went off and its deafening WHEEE-awww ripped rational thought away, he heard something that seemed to be her voice in his head, thought-bolt transferred along the same conduit that allowed her to hear what he was thinking.
That was your chance to make good. And you didn’t take it.
There was no time to react to it, whatever it was. The fire alarm took that option away. Mike ran, out of habit, for the elevators, forgetting that the fire alarm system would have kicked in the automatic elevator shutdown. He realized the mistake as he slid past the elevator doors, recovered, sped for the second-floor stairs. Stairwell access to the remaining five floors was at the other end of the second-floor corridor. Mike made for the closest red EXIT sign and hit the door at a run.
He heard the screams as the door shut behind him, and he knew that it was no drill, it was no kid playing a prank, no dumbass drunk college student reliving his playful high school days.
He knew it was Room 515. The bed. The rollaway. He slammed up the remaining three flights of stairs two at a time, popped the door open and lunged through. The stairwell door was directly adjacent to the room.
The man stood in the hallway, his fingers still gripping the fire alarm switch. His face was shocked and wide, a bright lamp, and Mike knew that he had seen it. Daddy had seen it, too.
The man could not speak.
Mike rushed into the room just in time to see the little girl disappear into the folded bed, her arm up and waving, fingers tight together like a bloody salute. Blood everywhere, dark strings and spatters in the sheets. The girl’s mother was pushed up against the wall, her shoulders and arms dotted with her daughter’s blood. She strained at the corners of her mouth, tearing the skin there, trying to stretch her mouth wider to fit a scream that wouldn’t come.
Mike’s brain howled out fragments, repeating tape loop. It ate her ate her blood ate the little girl ate her ate her ate her –
The rollaway heard him. Saw him. Now clearly not a bed, its disguise stripped away in the extremity and clarity of its mission.
It roared like a lion, like a beast of myth, of fairy-tale, and launched itself at him, spitting out pieces of the girl as it came. It was bloody sheet-skin and gaping mouth, lethal spikes of uncoiled bedspring jutting out like teeth or claws or both. It pushed Mike out the door of room 515 and onto the balcony.
We should be on Seven, Mike thought. Five might not be high enough. It was the first conscious indication of a plan, apparently forming subconsciously as he backpedaled out the door into the hallway. This was one of the skills that made him a draft pick. He thought fast and he did it moving.
The bed and its wrought iron frame weighed at least as much as Mike did, with the advantages of momentum and greater bulk. It loomed over and drove forward, crushing him against the low railing. He could smell the little girl’s blood in his clothes, his hair. It was wet in his nostrils.
Mike turned sideways, struggling for leverage. The bed ground his hip against the rail edge, tipping him over. He looked down toward the floor, and there she was. Beneath him. Near the edge of the bar.
Brenda.
You asshole, it wasn’t the beds at all. You didn’t make the beds mad.
She watched him, her face dark and lined, like clay. Waiting for this raving, roaring thing to knock him over the rail. He would land right in front of her. If the fall didn’t kill him, she was there to finish the job.
Mike grabbed double handfuls of the horrible, warm sheet-flesh, feeling it twist and pulse under his grip. His back to the bed, he got his knees up against the rail, cocked his toes, and pushed, driving it away from him.
The weight gave. Mike whirled, blocking crouch, shoulder low. He was ready. When it came for him, he would drive low and hard, flip it over him.
If he was lucky, it would land on Brenda.
It came on, huge and strong but apparently not cunning enough to see what would surely happen if it didn’t slow down, if it didn’t change its approach angle –
Mike felt the rush of air as the door to his left exploded outward in a flurry of splintered wood and brass.
It was the door to Room 517, and the second bed – the one that had been missing from the closet – caught him below the knees and sent him sprawling fifteen feet amid the cracking, grinding agony of two broken legs.
Pain pinned him, precious seconds. But he heard them coming, and knew his only hope was to move. Somehow, move. Mike pulled himself up onto his elbows. His pants legs looked like sausage casings filled with gravel. The pain was enormous, like a wall.
Mike looked back over his shoulder at them. They crouched, stalking animals, watching him. Whatever they had once been, they were now beasts. They were murder. Nothing safe or sane remained.
He could see only one solution. A run play. It had been a fluke, his sophomore year. A pass play gone haywire, leaving him scrambling, without a receiver, cut off and boxed in as the pocket collapsed, forcing him to push straight through the line. Dive play, the most basic running play in football, but he couldn’t fucking run. He’d proved that a hundred times.
In that crazy moment it seemed that everyone on the field had been after him — even his own teammates. The regulated and somehow cordial normal order of the game had been replaced by a completely different game – one that might have been called Kill The Guy With The Ball.
Something had snapped in him, and he ran. He didn’t think. He just ran. And then he stood in the end zone with this stupid look on his face, thinking, what just happened?
Coach Bennon had said sonofabitch, boy. You can run, long as the right thing’s chasing you.
These things were here for him. They were after him. If he ran, they would chase him.
Howling, Mike grabbed the nearest one, stumbled backward on the shattered ruins of his broken legs, and ran, pushing it ahead of him. This was a short blocking run, three yards at the most, but his legs were not just broken, they were splintered, and it hurt, oh my God did it hurt. Mike bore down, dug in his shoulder, tightened his grip and pitched over the balcony, carrying the rollaway bed-thing over the railing with him.
It was in his mind to try to twist, spin around, pull the bed beneath him so he landed on it. He might live if he could do that. But now that he was spinning through space and falling with cool wind tugging at his hair, wasn’t it funny that the air felt cool, it felt good, there were no thoughts in his mind at all and Mike simply closed his eyes and waited. Waited to land on chairs or a table or the metal railing or the bar counter with enough force to snap his spine in half.
They fell. Mike fell. The rollaway fell. The second bed, still leaned against the railing up on Five, now suddenly just a bed again, did not fall. But the bed Mike had taken into Room 515 – the bed that had eaten the little girl – fell, and whatever beast it may have been, it obeyed the laws of gravity, and by chance or design or whatever passes for providence amid our blackest insanities, it landed on the bar counter, and Mike landed on top of it. He felt himself sink into it, and then he was launched out of it like a stone from a slingshot, and he slammed face first into a glass table, shattering the table and breaking his jaw in three places, and then he was on the floor on his back and the carpet was soft and everything hurt. He tried to take inventory but the pain was everywhere, which was fine because he was alive and he had somehow survived a fall from seventy-five feet and that was a fucking miracle.
The bed had shattered the support beams for the gazebo’s roof. Splintered wood staves poked through shredded canvas like giant pencils, slanting skyward. One sheared length of two-by-four lay across a table above his head. If he could reach that high, he might grab it –
Brenda was there. She stood over him, smiling. There was something wrong with her eyes. He could see into them, and somehow through them, and into what she was thinking and then, horribly, into what he was thinking because she could see what he was thinking.
Mike looked beyond her, above her, and saw the other rollaway, the one from Room 517, spiraling down from the fifth floor balcony. It would land directly on top of him if he didn’t move. He had to move. But everything hurt. He couldn’t move. The thing would kill him because he just couldn’t move.
Kill the guy with the ball.
Mike heard the amplified voice of the referee standing next to him in the end zone, whistle blowing, and the crowd’s thunder, and Coach Bennon saying you don’t tell me what you can’t do, I show you what you can do.
He moved, scooting to the right and screaming as he did it. Brenda frowned, took a tentative step forward. She hadn’t expected that he would move. Now the bed was out of position. She looked up and did something. Mike couldn’t see exactly what she did, but it seemed that she was pushing something out of herself, pushing something toward the bed, but it was too late. She got the angle wrong and pushed the bed away from Mike rather than toward him. It hit the edge of the table, a glancing blow that caught the back end of the splintered beam, which was now effectively a spear. The shaft snapped up under the weight of the heavy bedframe, caught under Brenda’s chin and then drove up, exploding through the top of her skull, seven inches of glistening mahogany sticking out of the top of her head like some weird party hat.
She stood upright for a moment, as if trying to decide whether or not to fall over.
Then she fell over.
None of what had happened had been quiet, and the hotel was packed, and as Mike looked up he saw heads poking out over balcony railings on Three, Four, and Six, and then someone was leaning over him saying we called nine-one-one, you hang in there, buddy, can you feel your legs?
Mike could feel his legs, all right. He could feel them all the way into next week. There were more faces, and more voices, and quite a few screams, and the sound of someone puking, and it occurred to Mike that he might puke, but he didn’t. He was just too damned tired. His eyes were heavy. He closed them. When he opened them again, the face considering his was perched atop a paramedic’s uniform, and the paramedic stuck an IV in him and he felt much, much better.
Mike knew he was hurt badly. He wouldn’t play football again. He might not even walk again. He thought about that, and he thought about the cops trying to figure out what the hell had happened here, and what kind of questions they might ask, and he realized that they would never believe the truth even if he tried to tell them the truth.
He would never play ball again. But he would never have to admit he’d been scared of those fucking beds, either.
That seemed like a pretty fair deal.
*
Thanks for reading! Check out more short stories in Depth of Reflection, available from the Kindle Store.
