Pandemonium

Lew put the Audi in park. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“Come on, you want to sleep in the car?” I got out and crunched toward the house, hands in my armpits, shivering. Lew reluctantly followed me. The air smelled faintly of rotting fish; the lake was somewhere behind the hotel. I patted the plywood shoulder of the Shug as I passed and went up the front steps. The porch creaked, naturally. Next to the door were a pair of broad-backed rocking chairs, a wicker table between them, and farther down, a porch swing on metal chains.

The front door was a two-part affair, a screen door in front of a wooden one. Nailed to the face of the wooden door, where the knocker would be, was a glossy hunk of driftwood, vaguely squidlike: bulbous and shiny on top, multiple twisting limbs below, each limb turning up at the end into a sharpened point like a fish hook. The black wood gleamed like it was still in water. The screen door was ajar. I opened it, tried the knob of the wooden door, and found it locked.

Lew cupped his hands to one of the narrow windows beside the door. “Can’t see a thing through these curtains,” he said. “But I think the night clerk’s been laid off.”

I touched the driftwood and ran my finger along the bulb and down one limb. It wasn’t wet, exactly, but the wood seemed oily and slightly gritty. I delicately touched the tip of the tentacle, dimpling the skin of my finger, and the porch light came on. I jumped, Lew jerked upright—and then we looked at each other and cracked up.

The lock clacked significantly and we stifled ourselves. The door opened six inches on a chain. A small white-haired woman glared up at me, mouth agape. She was seventy, seventy-five years old, a small bony face on a striated, skinny neck: bright eyes, sharp nose, and skin intricately webbed from too much sun or wind or cigarettes. She looked like one of those orphaned baby condors that has to be fed by puppets.

“What are you, drunk?” she said. Her voice was surprisingly low and sharp.

“No! No ma’am.” I glanced at Lew, daring him to laugh. “You just startled us.”

Lew sidled up behind me, raised a hand. “Hi.”

“Do you know what time it is? ” she said. “You shouldn’t be out at this time of night.”

“We’d like rooms,” I said.

“Or cabins,” Lew said.

“I don’t check in people after eleven,” she said. “I can’t put you into cabins that aren’t prepared.”

“Please,” I said. “We’ll take anything you have. You don’t have to do anything to the cabins.”

She stared at me for a second, blinked. “You’re the boy who called.”

“That’s true,” I said, politely allowing the “boy” comment to slide. Last night we’d searched for every Harmonia Lake number we could find. The town had no chamber of commerce, no police station, not even a gas station. We came up with six phone numbers, five of them residential, none of them O’Connell’s. The remaining number was for the motel.

“I told you I’d give her your message,” the old woman said.

“I know, I just thought we’d—”

“She hasn’t stopped in yet.”

“That’s fine, I understand,” I said. “For tonight, though, we’d just like to—”

“She hasn’t got a phone.”

“You mentioned that, yeah.”

Her eyes looked past me, and then she seemed to come to a decision. She shook her head, disgusted. I said, “Listen—”

She shut the door. A chain slid back, then she opened it again a few inches. “All right, then. It’s almost morning. I suppose I can check you in. Besides, I’m already awake.”

She disappeared from the doorway. I looked at Lew, then pushed open the door. The old woman was already in the next room, walking