Desdemona by Tag Cavello (read e books online free .txt) 📖

black and white, this one a movie featuring Cary Grant and Joan Fonaine.

“Hello, Monkey-face!” Cary Grant sang.

Dante clicked the TV off. He put the controller on the table, right next to what his father had left him for dinner tonight: fifty dollars. Not bad, he thought. I can do a lot with fifty bucks.

Then he remembered he was in the Consorcia. With luck he might be able to afford a burger, fries, and a Coke at the bar. If they even let kids into the bar. If not, he would have to call room service.

There was a menu next to the phone. Dante skimmed it. The meals were pricey all right, all printed in flouncy curly-cues he could barely read. In fact only the kiddy meal would leave him with change enough to tip the delivery boy.

He was not going to order the kiddy meal. Tossing the menu aside, Dante reached for his shoes. He put them on, grabbed a key and the money, and left room 909. If the Hotel Consorcia couldn’t feed him on fifty dollars, he would find a deli down the street.

As it turned out, there was a buffet lounge off the lobby that sold reasonably priced meals. Dante ate Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes in a quiet corner which, through an arched wooden doorway, gave him a view of the bar, where bald-headed old men drank whiskey in the dark, their glasses clinking. None of them spoke, or even smiled. They’d grown tired of the future, Dante guessed. For them New Year’s Eve had long ago lost its ability to enchant. They’d brushed the fairy dust of hope away, knowing it no longer sparkled with the power to give wings to its receiver. Instead, it brought sneezes and coughs. Dante watched one of the men put down his drink and light a cigar. Smoke clouded his face. The smoke of anguish yet to come.

∞

After dinner he found the video arcade, a by no means easy task in this particular hotel. It began with a decision not to ride the elevator back upstairs, but stroll past their shiny doors to the end of the hallway. Here an unusually dark T intersection offered two options: turn left to the convention hall (where the yachtsmen were no doubt discussing old Christopher Cross hits and whether or not Dacron was stronger than Spectra), or turn right into an even darker corridor possessed of undisclosed destinations.

Dante chose right, leaving the glow of the convention to caress his shoulders. That glow quickly faded while the hallway seemed to get more narrow with every step. He passed a janitor’s closet, then an empty room with a black sink counter and a coffee pot. Steam billowed from the pot. Beside it was a white mug, its rim chipped.

Dante was almost past the room when he noticed a poster on the back wall. Hesitating, he afforded it a closer look. It was an oddity. Never before had he seen anything like it, and for the life of him, he couldn’t see its purpose in a luxury hotel.

It showed a flight of black stairs, beneath which floated a pair of tilted, angry green eyes. Beware All Lairs Beneath Old Stairs, a message beneath the picture read.

What it was supposed to mean, besides the obvious (and ludicrous), Dante held no power to fathom. More than likely an employee had hung it there for a joke. Unsettled regardless, Dante walked to the end of the hall. Here a flight of concrete steps, uncarpeted, curved down to what he at first guessed was a parking garage. Expecting to be deposited onto a tier of chrome grills and bumpers, he rounded the curve, only to be surprised by a dim, carpeted room of blinking, blipping screens. Another poster, this one far more friendly, hovered on the wall to the right. It showed a powered-up Pac-Man gobbling colored ghosts, while on the bottom a caption proclaimed: We’ve Got To Stop Eating Like This.

Delighted by his find, Dante entered the room. Huge, black video consoles—all of them lit—formed a corridor of electronic bliss. Better still, there was no one else in the room, so he had his pick of the games.

He started with Ms. Pac-Man and worked his way towards the back, dropping quarters into other games like Galaga and Space Invaders and Street Fighter. Screen lives went reasonably quick, as he wasn’t an especially skilled player. This fact scarcely bothered him. The fact that the room was dark didn’t bother him either, nor that he was alone, until an hour later when he noticed a small, round table with a white card taped to it. On the card was a series of black words. Dante glanced at it once before finishing his round of Tempest. Only then did he afford it another look. In an instant all merriment came to a halt. The card’s message was not a happy one. Far from it.

Closure Of This Retro-Arcade Shall Be Permanent And Absolute, it read, All Games To Be Left On For The Beguilement Of That Which Our Young Patrons Have Feared, And Spoken Of In Awkward Forums. Entrance To This Room Is FORBIDDEN Without Express Permission Of Hotel Management. Thank You.

Suddenly unable to move his legs, Dante looked back along the row of consoles. He now stood at the room’s opposite end, far from the curved steps. He took a deep breath. No doubt the sign, like the poster in the coffee room, was meant to be a joke. Otherwise, why wouldn’t it be hanging at the doorway, rather than all the way back here? Still, Dante felt unnerved, and no longer wished to feed coins to the blinking machines. Letting the breath out, he took a step forward. That was when a pinball machine on his right, Gorgar, kicked a free ball to its piston, and began make sounds like a heartbeat, as if it had somehow come alive.

Beat Me! a voice through its hidden speakers challenged.

It was the voice of a demon, which was appropriate, considering the picture on the machine’s backboard that depicted one of the beasts. It grinned at Dante with long teeth and green eyes.

Boom-Boom! thumped the heartbeat effect. Boom-Boom! Boom-Boom!

Dante looked at the card again.

--For The Beguilement Of That Which Our Young Patrons Have Feared—

Spine tingling, he left the room at a hurried pace, not daring to look over his shoulder as he moved. He reached the top of the stairs and passed the coffee room without a glance.

∞

Back at the elevators, he asked a bellhop for directions to the swimming pool, hoping that time in a festive, public area would help calm his nerves. The bellhop obliged with a smile, along with a neat, crisp hand covered with white glove. Dante put a quarter in the hand, then made his way through the dark lobby, keeping his mind focused on the route he’d been told to use. Through the lobby, to the left, and down a long, wide hallway that led to an enormous glass dome.

The young man’s instructions proved accurate. In less than two minutes Dante was at the edge of a large, rectangular swimming pool. It ran the length of an open foyer that echoed the sound of footsteps, along with that of lapping water. Above spanned the dome, black and starless, as the time was now past eight o’clock. A cloak of darkness also hovered along the far wall, where a row of plain, numbered doors slept, awaiting tenants.

Few were here at the moment. Indeed, Dante could see only one—a slender lady with long red hair, swimming laps in the pool. She wore a green, two-piece bathing suit with ties that streamed elegantly, like tiny kite strings, from her body. Each kick of her legs threw up light, dainty droplets of water.

“Phew!” she breathed, her arms moving. “Phew! Whew!”

Not wishing to disturb her exercise, Dante found a seat at one of the tables. From here he watched, by a series of furtive glances, as the red-haired woman swam from one end of the pool to the other, and back again. She looked quite graceful. Her slender body made scarcely a ripple upon the surface, and the music of her labored lungs was high and pretty. A couple of times she caught Dante watching, but didn’t seem to mind. She even smiled at him once. That was when he noticed her eyes, like her bikini, were green.

Smiling at him again, she drew a deep breath—AHHHH!—and dove down.

Dante counted to ten before she broke the surface, filling her small chest with what sounded like much needed air.

“OH!” she cried, as water sprayed her twinkling eyes. “Goodness!”

“Are you all right?” Dante forced himself to ask.

“Yes!” the woman answered, breasts heaving. “But I should have rested a little first! Whew! Got a bit too confident with my mermaid skills!”

Dante cleared his throat and nodded. He could think of no suitable response to her statement, though one seemed required, as the woman kept staring at him, her smile thin yet knowing. Knowing of what Dante couldn’t be sure, as they had only just met.

Or had he perhaps seen her before? When she next spoke, it was to say that she was a relative Sunny’s, and that she knew the family of her boyfriend—of whom she spoke often, with elated fondness—was staying at the hotel for a yacht convention.

“Sunny has shown me your picture many times,” the woman said, swimming to the edge of the pool to grab hold. “You can only be Dante.” At that moment her smile widened, and her eyes narrowed, so that Dante almost felt he was seeing a shark in the water. “Is my intuition correct? It normally is. My memory too.”

“I’m Dante,” he told her, trying to smile back.

“My name is Hadria,” the woman said. “I’m Sunny’s cousin. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

With that, Hadria got out of the pool, dripping water all over the tiles. Dante put her height to be just over five feet, and guessed her weight to be not much more than a hundred pounds. She fetched a towel from a nearby table, dried herself, then took a seat next to Dante.

Over the next few minutes they exchanged a smattering of simple pleasantries, with Hadria doing most of the talking while Dante punctuated her musings with tiny, awkward crumbs of information about himself.

“Sunny talks about you all the time,” Hadria said again, with a friendly tap on Dante’s arm. “Being in love makes her very excited. Very happy. Of course it does. Everyone loves to be in love.”

Dante noticed that every time she spoke the word love, her green eyes fluttered, and her brow wrinkled, as if she were suffering some minor discomfort. He began to wonder if perhaps this woman had once been in love, and been hurt by it. If so he didn’t care to imagine what kind of man would have inflicted the pain, for Hadria’s beauty was such that it seemed fresh with each anxious glance he sent in her direction. Her red hair, now dry, lay like a curtain of fire over shoulders delicate and narrow. Light freckles sprinkled her cheeks, which were otherwise clear, arcing back to dully pointed ears, each pierced with a small, milky-white stone.

“Moonstone,” Hadria said, when she caught Dante looking. The shark smile had come back to her lips. “The stone of desire. It radiates female energy and stimulates a man’s appetite for love. I’ll loan them to Sunny for you. If you like.”

Mention of his girlfriend caused Dante to blurt out what had been on his mind for several minutes now. “You look like her. Like an adult version of her.”

Hadria tilted her head. The motion must have captured a ray of light reflecting off the pool water, for her green eyes then began to twinkle like stars seen on a clear, cold night.

“Does that mean I interest you?” she asked in a slithering voice.

Here Dante, feeling ridiculous, began to splutter explanations and