The National Lottie

Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII

The Blogosfear Part II

Elle was past cold, so much so that her fingers burned and she was finding it difficult to manoeuvre the room key in the old lock. The fake cobwebs and gaudy crepe paper lanterns which adorned the already dim corridor made it almost impossible to see the room number. Room B? She could have sworn she passed room 1408 at the start of the hallway.

The hotel room was as cold as it had been on her arrival. Thin, unlined, aging curtains hung clumsily from a wire around the bay window which looked out over the broken down cars in the parking lot. A digger worked in the distance, methodically stripping back soil to transform the landscape. The windows had been nailed shut, presumably as a security measure although Elle couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to trespass in such a place never mind pay for the discomfort as she and her fellow lodgers had done.

The television in the room didn’t work and from the amount of dust resting on the machine she surmised it had been some time since anyone had attempted to summon life from small curved screen. The room smelled like stale phosphorus and the ceiling was yellow with stains. Elle suspiciously eyed the gold plated “no smoking” sign glued to the back of the door and gathered her things for dinner.

Always one to follow the rules, Elle had spent most of the evening on the porch steps of the hotel working her way through a packet of cigarettes which she had stored at the bottom of her suitcase and promised herself she would not smoke. She had polished off a bottle of home-made ginger wine and listened to the men inside laugh and booze their way into the early hours until, finally crushing the last butt underneath her stylish yet affordable boot, she headed for her room and back to the damp and the cold. The only positive aspect of her stay so far was that her room was situated on the ground floor and she was spared the haul up the rickety stair case to the rooms on higher floors.

Once inside the bedroom Elle performed her usual checks. She bolted the door and turned on every available light. She pushed the spare pillows under the bed and drew the curtains so that they over lapped on each other. Despite this, the room was still drearily dark and uninviting. She considered taking a shower but the bathroom was even less appealing that the caretaker’s offer of a midnight stroll along the cliffs.

Somewhere in the small hotel a child howled. Elle imagined tired parents fawning over the infant, rocking it back and forth, praying for silence and sleep. Oddly the noise from the screaming child was comforting. It reminded her of home. Home, where each night the girl in the next room would practice her own form of scream therapy spending hours shrieking and wailing into her pillow and Elle would drift to sleep knowing that she was not the only one who suffered.

Elle chastised herself for being weak. This was her deal. One night each month, away from home, learning to be self sufficient again, putting the pieces of her life back together. One night. Somewhere new. Random. Unknown.

She placed the torches on the antique bedside locker and opened the loosely fitted drawer and stuffed it with a towel. She held the blanket between her chin and neck as she briskly slipped on her father’s old cotton t-shirt, which she used as a night dress. As the bare flesh of her legs touched the cold sheets an icy flash of static electricity raced through her body. She gritted her teeth and quickly gathered herself into a ball breathing deeply in an effort to relax her muscles against the cold. It wasn’t long until the waves of tiredness pressed upon her eyelids and Elle reluctantly gave way to the sleep.

She was there again. The damp smell had turned putrid and it burned her nostrils. She thought she could smell something burning but no sound or light came from under the door. The pungent odour was much worse than it had been before and caused acid to rise and fall in her throat. The air was heavy with dust particles and each breath felt like tiny shards of glass scratching down her windpipe. Elle could no longer deny it. She took a deep, painful breath and found herself back there. Back in that place. Always that place.

Her hands and feet were bound with barbed wire and each movement caused the already septic flesh on her joints to peel and flake and bleed. Her right leg was shattered and twisted unnaturally so that her toes pointed backwards towards the ground. The floor beneath her moved with a slow hum and various rodents scampered around her. Feeding.

She did not want to raise her head but the pain in her neck was unbearable. The ache was dull and heavy and she guessed that she had been asleep for some time. In this place, Elle prayed for sleep. She wished to go to sleep and never wake up again. She stretched her face towards the ceiling. She knew what hung there and did not dare open her eyes to it.

Elle so wanted to cry but no more tears would come. Her stomach ached with hunger. A pain that she would not, could not succumb to. Each movement was agony but staying still hurt even more so. Suppurating sores had appeared on her back where she pressed against the wood and she leaned forward to allow her flesh to feel the cool of the room. For the briefest of moments she contemplated escape from this place.

Overhead something moved. Broken light strained through the cracks of the trap door in the ceiling and cast a thin square of light onto the stairs. Shards of yellow fell on the rotting corpse not ten feet away from her. A bulging eye torn from its socket. The slack, ripped jaw and the beaten, bloodied face.

Elle’s heart swelled forward in her chest with grief. Anger no longer seemed drive her. She had depleted her stores of rage now there was only grief – grief and pain and a desire for it to end.

She was delirious. In the past weeks, the pain had reduced her to the level of an animal. Disjointed memories of unconnected things appeared in her mind only to disappear before she was unable to identify or understand them. A man who could have been a lover, a woman who may have been her mother, a young boy dying in the rain, blood, like colours running in a child’s painting, burning flesh and hunger. There was no past and no future in this place. Only the here and now. And again came the rise of black bile to her mouth.

Dust fell from the floor board over head and she knew it would soon, once again, be time.

The trap door lifted and light bounced off the brass crest on the lock. The horned, two-headed lion, a stake driven through one of its two skulls winked at her as the light bounced into the cellar scalding her eyes. She winced against this new pain and the disfigured shadow of her tormentor swallowed the room. Her demon’s toothless smile, his rank stale breath against her face, the flash of a blade and then the pain.

The pain shot like lightning through her body throwing her consciousness back to the four poster bed of The Darkhill Chambers Hotel. Elle was soaked in cold sweat. She reached for her pills on the locker. They were not there. She attempted to reach the bathroom before soiling the bed but her legs were too weak. Her crutch had fallen and a dreary, psychological residue of pain still lingered within her. She faltered and emptied the contents of her stomach onto the threadbare rug protecting the old wooden floorboards. She lay half in, half off the bed, panting for breath. Salty tears ran down her nose and into her mouth.

Unable to haul herself back into an upright position, Elle’s hands rested on the rug to support her body weight. She stopped moving and took three long, deep breaths to steady herself. The room was bright and quiet. No matter how far she travelled to escape her demons they always found her in her sleep.

Something beneath the weave pressed into her palm. It felt like a coin on the surface of the floor. With a sigh she shifted her body back onto the bed and folded back the rug. The two-headed beast winked. Something shifted in the shadows of the bathroom and the trap door shuddered and burst open.

In her last moments, Elle noticed a single red eye watching from the attic window on the west wing of the building.

Part IV

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.