As
the rumbles faded away into the white noise of rain, Madame Klopp tittered
enthusiastically and rubbed her pink and squelchy hands together beneath her
hunched shoulders. I watched her eyes roll in their sockets and considered
that, in a town full of Peter Lorre impersonators, she was the best I’d seen. I
cleared my throat preparatory to speaking and she jumped in her sneakers, as if
she’d forgotten I was there.
‘So,
Madame Klopp,’ I started. ‘What is that? Dutch?’
‘Maybe,’
she squeaked, irked, ‘maybe not. Why so nosy?’
I
frowned looking down at her. ‘It’s my job to be nosy, Madame Klopp. Why so
secretive?’
She
hunched over again, looking left and right. ‘Secrets and lies. Secrets and
lies. Which is which? They’re my secrets and I will keep them.’ She stuck out
her lower lip truculently.
‘Never
mind,’ I said raising a hand in defeat, at which she cringed, hissing, again.
‘Look, there’s a stranger staying here at the hotel; not from around here.
‘Looks like Roy Orbison on a bad hair day. Do you know which room he’s in?’
She
took a cautious step towards me, a strange gleam in her eyes lighting up her
face. She stared at me as if I had suddenly become an object of exceptional
rarity and interest. She pulled gently at the rubber tip of one finger letting
the fabric snap back repeatedly into place.
‘What
does he want with the bug?’ she wondered out loud in a sing-song cadence, as if
I wasn’t part of the conversation.
‘Bug?
No, Madame Klopp, I’m trying to find out about a guest here at the Hotel. A
funny little guy from out of town...’
‘Yes!
Yes!’ she said, eagerly nodding her head and showing her peculiar milk teeth.
‘The bug! The bug! The stinky one who hides his face! The one who never walks
in the light! The one who never fills in his breakfast menu! He who wards his
portal with the sign of “Do Not Disturb”! His room will be very hard to clean,
I think. Very hard...’ Her eyes glazed into the middle distance as she
contemplated the Augean task ahead of her. I gave her a few moments but the
monologue seemed to have reached a terminus of some kind.
‘...And
the number of that room is...?’ I prompted, circling an extended finger.
She
reached forward convulsively and clutched my coat, looking over her shoulder
and all around as she did so. ‘It’s coming out into the hall,’ she whispered
frantically up at me, ‘I tried all of the elixirs, the sprays. It’s in the
carpet now – I can sense it. Soon all will know. Soon Management will know. It comes! There is no stopping it!’
‘What
comes, Madame Klopp?’
‘The
smell!’ she hissed in a fevered
undertone which ended in a stifled scream. She backed up hard against me and
bit the wrist of her pink glove. I rolled my eyes.
‘Sure,
sure: the smell,’ I spun her around by the shoulder, an action that induced the
weirdest wincing expression I think I’ve ever seen on a human countenance. ‘Can
you take me there, Madame Klopp? To the room with the smell?’
She
was shaking her head violently before I’d even finished. ‘No: I mustn’t,’ she
whispered desperately; ‘it is... forbidden!’
I
sighed. Reaching into my coat pocket I pulled out a ten-dollar bill. ‘Perhaps
this will help offset the taboo?’ I said.
She
snatched the note out of my hand and held it up to what little light there was
in the stairwell. Then, stuffing the bill beneath her bra strap, she nodded,
gurgling with delight.
‘Sure,
sure!’ she chortled, ‘you come: I show you!’
She
led me up the stairs to a door and opened it with a key; stepping through, we
were in the hushed interior of the Hotel. The wallpaper was tired and garish,
the carpet was even moreso, threadbare in places of high traffic. Madame Klopp
slinked over to a cart piled high with towels and cleaning products parked
against the wall behind a struggling pot plant: the conveyance was slightly
higher than she was, but she pulled it out of its parking site and hauled it
forward. As she did so, she snatched a pager off the side of the trolley and quickly
scanned it with an angry hiss.
‘The
fool at the Reception Desk summons me to the Fourth Floor,’ she snarled darkly;
‘apparently, there is vomit.’
I
nodded sagely. ‘Well, I’ll try not to keep you from that,’ I said. ‘If you
could just show me quickly...?’
‘He
needs to be quiet!’ hissed Madame Klopp, with a chopping motion of her hand.
‘The way opens before us...’
So
saying she heaved the cart into motion and crept forward as though ninjas were
on the lookout for her. I followed closely behind her, keeping pace. The
trolley had a single malfunctioning wheel that squeaked irritatingly once every
rotation: I developed the strong impression that it was emulating the contents
of Madame Klopp’s head. We moved slowly through the benign otherworldliness
that signals the common areas of hotel floors – hushed, artificial, and
expectant.
We
turned a few corners and I started to sense that familiar Gilman House scent of
rising damp. We were up on the sixth floor according to the signs, so the odour
was somewhat alarming on that score; but then, the Hotel has been here since
the early 1860s so I figured that the damp had had plenty of time and
opportunity to go mountaineering. Eventually, the stench reached fever-pitch,
and even the lackadaisical standards of Innsmouth hospitality would have
baulked at such an intensity. We had reached a door around which a spreading
black halo of mould had stained the wallpaper, woodwork and carpet.
‘Behold!’
Madame Klopp stepped timidly forward and waved her rubber-clad arm dramatically
‘Room
664,’ I read.
‘The
bug is within,’ my crazy guide intoned, ‘it marshals its forces for the coming
battle...’
‘“Coming
battle”?’ I repeated, ‘what are you on about?’
‘It
seeks the stone,’ she hissed with
Shakespearean delivery. Then: ‘Do not talk of the stone! It means nothing to
him! Yes, and that is why you must say nothing of it! He will discover nothing.
Are you certain? No. Then say nothing! Very well – I will not mention the stone.’
She stood, tensely, near her cart, looking everywhere but at me. I narrowed my
eyes at her, then turned to knock on the door.
‘It
is not nine o’clock, detective.’ The rhythmic, gurgling voice sounded like
there wasn’t an inch of wood and a bunch of air between myself and its owner;
in fact, it felt like it was emanating straight out of my own head.
‘Yeah,
I know,’ I chuckled, ‘I just thought I’d pop up and get a clearer idea of what
sights you’d like to take in tomorrow.’
‘At
four o’clock in the morning?’ the voice echoed hollowly.
He
had me there. ‘Well, no time like the present they always say.’ I winced at how
lame this sounded.
There
was a significant pause. ‘Very well,’ the voice said. ‘The door is unlocked:
come inside.’
I
grabbed the doorknob and turned it. As I pushed the door inwards, sticky noises
indicated how much mould had generated to form a seal around the entry. A wave
of fungal stench wafted out into the corridor. Patting for the light switch, my
hand slapped squidgy wetness on the wall by the side of the door, so I fumbled
in my coat for my torch instead. Wiping the moisture off my hand onto my
sleeve, I clicked on the light and stabbed it into the room beyond. The first
thing I saw was Roy Orbison’s face, creased down the middle, lying on the
mouldy carpet. I panned my light upwards.
There
before me was a creature so bizarre that I froze in my tracks. Its head was a
lumpy ellipsoid that flexed spasmodically; the body which supported it was pale
and pinkish, reminding me strongly of something like a grasshopper, or an
albino cockroach; about it, like a fuzzy cape, membranous wings twitched and
flickered like ruddy, unburning fire. Mostly though, I noticed the spiky legs
and claws that were slashing towards me at deadly speed.
‘Die!’ said the voice in my head, and the
grotesque ellipsoid pulsed with a range of pinkish fairy lights.
I
sunk my hand into my coat pocket: an icy fist gripped my heart as I realised my
gun was gone.
Boom!
Boom! Boom! The epaulette on my coat ripped free and the right sleeve burst
into flame. The pulsing head of the insectoid thing before me exploded into a
gooey mess and the deadly trajectory of the pincer appendages was suddenly
interrupted. The creature fell backwards into the room and skittered around
like an arthropod hit full-on with a spritz of insecticide. I slapped at my
coat to kill the fire and rubbed my suddenly-deaf ear.
Behind
me, Madame Klopp picked herself up off the floor and rushed to look at her
accomplishment, both pink rubber hands still gripping tightly to my Desert
Eagle. The look on her face was that of a small child whose Christmas dreams
had all just come true.
‘Vengeance!’ she shrieked, and loosed
another round into the twitching spiky mess before her. I hastily snatched the
gun out of her paw, pressed the safety and pocketed it again.
‘No
offence, Madame Klopp,’ I said, ‘but next time you want to borrow my gun, you
need to ask. What are we going to do about this mess?’
She
turned her head in my direction; it took some time for her eyes to catch up.
‘Mess?’
she said. ‘This mess is yours.’ She skulked back to her trolley and wheeled it
around.
‘I
am needed on the Fourth Floor,’ she said ponderously; ‘there is vomit.’
To
Be Continued...
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