The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Recent Titles by Graham Masterton available from Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Shadow Theater

  The Boy Behind the Door

  Mother and Son

  Red Stain

  The Night Kitchen

  The Whistler

  Ghost Dance

  The Missing

  Flight to Red Stick

  The Presence of Terror

  The Night Visitors

  Sleep Talking

  Spirit Hunt

  Vanishing Point

  Mirror Image

  Blood Gala

  The House Within

  Vanished

  Bitter Feelings

  Past Sins

  The Door to Yesterday

  Body Count

  Cry for Help

  Back to the Wall

  Walking Powder

  Voodoo Doll

  Recent Titles by Graham Masterton available from Severn House

  The Sissy Sawyer Series

  TOUCHY AND FEELY

  THE PAINTED MAN

  THE RED HOTEL

  The Jim Rook Series

  ROOK

  THE TERROR

  TOOTH AND CLAW

  SNOWMAN

  SWIMMER

  DARKROOM

  DEMON’S DOOR

  Anthologies

  FACES OF FEAR

  FEELINGS OF FEAR

  FORTNIGHT OF FEAR

  FLIGHTS OF FEAR

  FESTIVAL OF FEAR

  Novels

  BASILISK

  BLIND PANIC

  CHAOS THEORY

  DESCENDANT

  DOORKEEPERS

  EDGEWISE

  FIRE SPIRIT

  GENIUS

  GHOST MUSIC

  HIDDEN WORLD

  HOLY TERROR

  HOUSE OF BONES

  MANITOU BLOOD

  THE NINTH NIGHTMARE

  PETRIFIED

  UNSPEAKABLE

  THE RED HOTEL

  A Sissy Sawyer Novel

  Graham Masterton

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First world edition published 2012

  in Great Britain and in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  Copyright © 2012 by Graham Masterton.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Masterton, Graham.

  The Red Hotel.

  1. Baton Rouge (La.)–Fiction. 2. Horror tales.

  I. Title

  823.9'2-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-298-6 (Epub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8189-2 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-444-8 (trade paper)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  Shadow Theater

  Some people say that when we depart from this world, we leave almost nothing behind apart from our possessions, and our shadows. Every time we walked between the sun and the ground beneath our feet, or between a bright indoor light and the wall behind us, we created a negative image of ourselves – not us, but an absence of us.

  Some people believe that sometimes our shadows remain here, especially if we have died without fulfilling all of our ambitions or resolving all of our differences. Long after we have gone, our shadows continue to play out the petty dramas of our lives – even though we ourselves are lying deep under the ground, where we can cast no more shadows; or when we are blowing as dust and ashes in the wind.

  One afternoon, less than a year ago, shadows started to flicker along the corridors of The Red Hotel, on Convention Street, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and both guests and staff heard bumping and high-pitched whistling and persistent grinding noises. They said that it gave them ‘the freesons’, which is what people in Baton Rouge call ‘goosebumps.’

  Some believed that Mrs Slider had returned. Mrs Slider and her son, Shem. Because a few of the older residents in the waterfront district still harbored a strong suspicion about what Mrs Slider and her son, Shem, had done together, although nobody knew for sure, those older residents crossed themselves, and whispered a prayer for protection.

  The Boy Behind the Door

  The rain had been dredging down all afternoon, and both Sissy and Mr Boots had sat out on the pale-green painted verandah for the past hour or so, watching it clatter through the trees and overflow from the gutters and run in rivulets down the winding pathway that led to the road. Sissy was sitting out on the verandah because she wanted to smoke and Mr Boots was sitting out on the verandah because he was wet and he stank and Sissy wouldn’t allow him into the house.

  ‘Some summer,’ said Sissy, but Mr Boots didn’t make a sound. He didn’t even turn around and nod, as if he were agreeing with her, which he did sometimes.

  ‘Excuse me, cloth ears!’ Sissy snapped at him, much louder this time. ‘I said, “One hell of a miserable summer.” What’s your opinion?’

  Mr Boots made a mewling noise in the back of his throat. ‘Jesus,’ she demanded. ‘Where’d you learn that cat language? Have you been fraternizing with that mangy old tabby next door?’

  She took a pack of Marlboro out of the low-slung pocket of her gray hand-knitted cardigan, but there was only one left, and that was broken in half. ‘Shit and a bit,’ she said, and heaved herself up off the swing seat to go into the house and see if she could find another pack, although she doubted that she had any left. She had been trying to cut down lately but it was just one of those wet, miserable days when the gray clouds were almost down to treetop height and it wasn’t even worth going to the market at Boardman’s Bridge because it was raining so hard and today she felt like smoking.

  Sissy always said that if God hadn’t meant people to smoke he wouldn’t have allowed them to discover America.

  She was opening the screen door when she heard the scrunching of a car in the driveway. She turned and saw the metallic-red Escalade owned by her step-nephew, Billy. He climbed out, turning up the collar of his black hill-climber’s jacket, and then walked around the hood and opened the passenger door. A girl in a shiny red raincoat and a matching red rain hat stepped down, and followed Billy up the steeply sloping steps that led to the verandah.

  ‘Hey, Aunt Sissy!’ called Billy. Mr Boots immediately barked and jumped up and started snorting and snuffling and beating his tail against the railings. Billy was a thin, pale, good-looking young man of twenty-six, with a shock of black, gelled-up hair and slightly foxy features and very blue eyes that were always wide open, as if life permanently surprised him. He was the son of Sissy’s sister’s second husband, Ralph, and so he wasn’t really related to Sissy at all, not by blood, but for some reason they had always been as close as two conspirators.

  When he was a small boy, Sissy had taught
Billy complicated Atlantic City card tricks and how to predict tomorrow’s weather from the behavior of garden snails – ‘but mind you don’t stand over a snail for too long . . . they may look innocent but country folk say that snails can suck the shadows out of you.’

  There were plenty of snails around today, because it was so damp, and the verandah was criss-crossed by silvery trails.

  Billy and the girl in the shiny red raincoat came up on to the verandah. Billy smacked the raindrops off his jacket and then gave Sissy a hug.

  ‘How’s it hanging?’ he asked her. He nodded toward the crowded ashtray beside the swing seat. ‘Still smoking like Mount Saint Helens, I see. Thought you said you were giving it up.’

  Sissy coughed and shook her head. ‘It was your mother who said I was giving it up. On principle I never do what your mother says I’m going to do. Never have done, since we were kids, and never will. I would have been married to a loss adjuster called Norman, if I’d done what your mother said I was going to do. Still would be, come to that.’

  She turned to the girl in the shiny red raincoat. The girl was blonde, clear skinned and very pretty, with high cheekbones and a little ski-jump nose and green, feline eyes.

  ‘So who’s this you’ve brought to see me?’ asked Sissy.

  ‘This is my girlfriend, Lilian. But everybody calls her T-Yon.’

  ‘T-Yon?’

  Billy put his arm around her shoulders. ‘When she was little, Lilian was brought up in Lafayette, Louisiana. T-Yon is Cajun-speak for “Petite Lilian”.’

  ‘T-Yon, how about that?’ said Sissy. ‘Well, good to meet you, T-Yon.’

  She shook hands with T-Yon and all her silver and enamel bracelets jingled like Christmas. Sissy was an unredeemed hippy. To the despair of her family, she still wore flowing kaftans and long dangly earrings and braided her hair in a steel-gray coronet. In her day, she had been very pretty, too – one of those flower children who had skipped bare-breasted at Woodstock. Nowadays, when she looked in the mirror, she could still see the ghost of that flower child dancing in her eyes.

  ‘Billy’s always talking about you so much,’ said T-Yon, shyly. ‘In the end I twisted his arm to bring me up here to see you, just to see if you were real.’

  Sissy held up her hand, and turned it this way and that, as if to check that she really was real. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I think I’m real. Most of the time, anyhow. Some days I have my doubts, I have to admit, and I almost believe I’m a ghost. It’s strange, isn’t it, how much your life can change from day to day? You don’t know if it’s the world around you that’s changing, or if it’s you.’

  T-Yon blinked, and it was obvious that she didn’t really understand what Sissy meant. But then Sissy didn’t really understand what she meant, either.

  ‘Come on in,’ said Sissy. ‘How about some tea? Or coffee, if you’d rather. Or Dr Pepper. Or a glass of Zinfandel?’

  Billy said, ‘I’m driving, so I’ll stick to tea. So long as it’s not that tea that tastes like grass clippings.’

  ‘Oh, you mean my mate de coca? That’s very good for you, mate de coca. And stimulating. It contains nought point four percent cocaine.’

  ‘I don’t care if it contains forty-four percent smack. It still tastes like grass clippings.’

  ‘Well . . . if you’re not having any wine, you can drive to the Trading Post for me and bring back two hundred Marlboro.’

  ‘You want me to facilitate your death from lung cancer?’

  ‘Put it any way you like. But please go buy me some cigarettes. In any case, death is only an illusion. I can vouch for that personally. Oh, and buy me some fresh bread while you’re there, would you, and some of that Limburger cheese, and some baloney, and half a dozen cans of Artemis Holistic Dog Food for Mr Boots.’

  ‘You’re a slave-driver, Aunt Sissy, did you know that?’ Billy told her; but he went back out into the rain, climbed into his SUV, and drove off down the hill. Sissy meanwhile ushered T-Yon into the house, with Mr Boots tangling himself up between their legs. Sissy snapped, ‘Stay!’ and shut the door on him. ‘He smells like a goddamn sewer when he’s wet.’

  It was gloomy inside the living room because the day was so overcast, and the gloom gave the room an unnatural stillness, as if it were suspended in time – a memory of a room instead of a real room. Vases of fresh-picked garden flowers stood on every side table – yellow roses and purple stocks and scarlet gladioli – and the walls were covered with a jumbled-up variety of paintings and prints and masks and odd decorations, like a calumet covered with seashells, and a 1920s bridal headdress embroidered with white lace petals. Over the fireplace the mottled mirror reflected the blood red of T-Yon’s raincoat.

  ‘Tea?’ asked Sissy. ‘Here – let me take your things. They’re so cute, aren’t they, this hat and this coat? Little Red Riding Hood rides again.’

  ‘I can get a glass of wine?’ asked T-Yon. Her Cajun accent wasn’t very strong, but it was distinctive enough for anybody to tell at once where she came from. Underneath her raincoat she was wearing a tight, gray short-sleeved sweater and tight black pedal pushers. Sissy could see why Billy had been attracted to her. Apart from being so pretty, she had very big breasts and very slim hips. Around her neck she wore a silver pendant attached to a leather cord. It was embossed with the face of a woman with her eyes closed, as if she were asleep, and dreaming.

  ‘So tell me, how did you and Billy meet?’ asked Sissy, as she came back into the living room with a frosty bottle of Zinfandel and two long-stemmed wine glasses.

  T-Yon had picked up a black-bronze statuette of a dancing devil, with horns and a pointed beard and the shaggy legs of a goat.

  ‘Scary,’ she said, narrowing her eyes and peering into its face.

  ‘Him? He’s only scary if you believe in him.’

  ‘But you don’t? He has such a wicked face.’

  ‘From my experience, T-Yon, I believe that ordinary people are a whole lot wickeder than devils. Human beings – now they’re scary.’

  T-Yon carefully replaced the statuette and sat down on the floral-covered couch. She watched as Sissy poured her a glass of wine.

  ‘Billy and me, we met in bakery class. I was supposed to be making choux pastry but every time I tried to do it I ended up with this big dry lump. Billy came over and showed me how to beat the flour into the water and the butter, and that was how we got together.’

  ‘Billy’s a great personality,’ said Sissy. ‘Never seems to lose his cool. So you’re at Hyde Park, too? How’s it going for you?’

  ‘It’s OK. It’s good. I think if we stay together Billy and me will open our own restaurant when we graduate. My whole family, they’ve always been in that kind of business. Restaurants, hotels. It’s just that – you know.’

  Sissy sipped her wine and waited for T-Yon to say more. It had sounded from her intonation as if she wanted to say more. It’s just that – you know – what, exactly? T-Yon looked back at her, saying nothing, but then she gave a quick, nervous laugh.

  ‘Go on, T-Yon,’ Sissy encouraged her. ‘What are you worried about? Something’s eating you, isn’t it?’

  ‘You can tell that?’

  ‘I think I’ve been living on this planet long enough to sense when a person has something on their mind. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but that’s the reason you’re here, isn’t it?’

  T-Yon blushed. ‘Billy’s always talking about you and I wanted to meet you so much. I’ve been nagging him for weeks to bring me here. But now that I am here, I feel like I’m wasting your time.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, don’t you worry about that,’ said Sissy, flapping her hand. ‘Time is something I have plenty of, in abundance. Ever since my Frank was taken away from me, all those years ago, it’s just me and Mr Boots, and the days go by so slow, they’re like windmills turning when there’s scarcely any wind.’

  T-Yon said, ‘Billy told me all about your fortune-telling. You know – the cards that you use.�
��

  ‘The DeVane cards, yes.’

  ‘He said they’re like Tarot cards? I never heard of them before.’

  ‘They’re kind of like Tarot cards, yes. But for starters, they’re very much bigger, and each individual card is a whole lot more complicated than any Tarot card. For instance, the DeVane cards won’t just tell that you’re going to meet the man of your dreams, they’ll tell you that you’re going to hate his brother, because his brother is unkind to animals, and that his mother cooks so badly that you sometimes wonder if she’s trying to poison you.’

  ‘Wow,’ said T-Yon.

  ‘Well, yes, wow. They’re amazing, if you know how to read them, but they’re not at all easy to read if you don’t have the facility. Me, for some reason, I’ve always been able to read them without any trouble at all, ever since I was ten or eleven years old. Don’t ask me how, or why, but I can see what’s going to happen tomorrow afternoon just as clearly as I can remember what happened yesterday afternoon. With the help of the cards, of course.’

  T-Yon said, ‘Would you read them for me? I know that people usually pay you to do it, and I can pay you.’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing. You’re Billy’s girlfriend.’

  ‘I know, but I don’t want you to think that I’m taking advantage.’

  Sissy stood up and went over to the carved walnut bureau that stood underneath the window. The rain was still gushing noisily over the guttering, where the downpipe was blocked with last fall’s leaves. Frank had always been good at maintenance. He would have been up there months ago with his ladder and his trowel, clearing it out. But the long dead can’t clean out gutters, any more than they can hold us in their arms and tell us how much they used to love us.

  She opened the left-hand drawer and took out the worn cardboard box that contained the DeVane cards. On the front of the box there was a picture of a clown with a red hat and a deathly white face, holding up a complicated key in his left hand and a glass ball in his right. He had an extraordinary expression on his face, the expression of somebody who is still laughing a loud and artificial laugh, but is right on the edge of screaming with fury. ‘Oh, you think that’s funny, do you? You think that’s so–o–o fricking funny?’