Chapter 2: Requests Line
The shadow, it turned out, had only wanted to bring you a coaster.
It set the little cork circle on the side table by your elbow, straightened it with a long dark finger, and went back to the wall. Alastor watched you watch it go. "He's very particular about water rings," he said, and that was the whole of the first night: you refused to tell him your sin, and he told you, at length, about the correct way to season a cast-iron skillet, and the record was Bix Beiderbecke, and it was, you told him, dreadful.
"It's 1927," he said, aghast. "It's sublime."
"It sounds like a trumpet falling down a staircase."
"That is a cornet."
"Then a cornet falling down a staircase."
He laughed so hard the chandelier swung.
By the third week you had a system.
At ten-forty you left whatever Charlie had you doing (she had discovered, in your first forty-eight hours, that you could keep six conversations straight at once and would not panic if a guest set something on fire, and had made you something she called Night Desk Coordinator, which meant you sat in the lobby after dark and answered the hotel phone in your old voice). At ten-fifty you went up to the kitchen and made two cups of chicory coffee, black, because he took it black and would not say so but drank it faster when it was. At ten fifty-eight you knocked on the door at the top of the stairs.
At eleven exactly, it opened.
The questions came first. He liked to start before you'd sat down.
"What is a podcast?"
"It's a radio show you download."
"Download from where?"
"From the internet."
"And who decides what goes on it?"
"Anybody. Anybody can make one. You just need a microphone."
The silence that followed was the silence of a man who has been told that the cathedral he built by hand is now available as a flat-pack kit. "Anybody," he said.
"My dentist had one."
"About what?"
"Teeth, mostly. And his divorce."
Alastor put his coffee down very carefully. "That is the most obscene thing you have said to me."
Sometimes it went the other way. You asked him what New Orleans had sounded like in 1925, and he went quiet, not the dangerous quiet, a different one, and then he told you: the ice wagon in the mornings and the streetcar bells on St. Charles, the calliope off the riverboats, men shouting oysters, oysters, and a band two streets over that never seemed to stop. His mother had sung while she cooked. She'd made a jambalaya so good he had once, at nine years old, tried to marry the pot.
"What happened?"
"She said the pot was spoken for." The smile flickered, which it almost never did. "I have been looking for a decent jambalaya for a hundred years. Hell is full of cooks and not one of them has the patience for a proper roux."
You filed that away. You filed everything away. It was an old habit from the headset: listen for the thing under the thing. With callers it was usually the dog barking in the background, the TV that suddenly cut off, the second voice that said give me the phone. With Alastor it was smaller. The way he never sat with his back to the door. The way he told stories about his mother and never once about his father. The way that, every few nights, a call would come through the hotel's old switchboard, a woman's low laugh crackling over the line, and he would stand and say, "Excuse me, I'm afraid I'm wanted," and come back an hour later with the smile fixed so hard on his face it looked nailed there.
You didn't ask about that. Not yet. You were patient. You'd been the patient one your whole life.
He asked about your sin every night. It was the last question, always, after the coffee was gone and the record had run out.
"And tonight? Will you tell me tonight?"
"No."
"Was it murder?"
"Not telling you."
"Arson? Embezzlement? You have an embezzler's posture."
"I have a desk job's posture."
"Did you kill a man?" he asked, leaning forward, eyes bright. "Did you kill a man with your bare hands?"
"Good night, Alastor."
"Good night, my dear," he said, and the door closed behind you on a sound like a hundred radios laughing.
You did not tell anyone at the hotel that you were starting to look forward to it.
You didn't have to. Angel Dust worked it out on his own, because Angel Dust had a nose for that kind of thing like a bloodhound has a nose for a fox. He was a tall white-and-pink spider demon with too many arms and a voice like a cigarette ad, and he'd decided on day two that you were his new project.
"Babe," he said, sliding into the chair across the night desk, all four elbows on the counter. "Babe. Sweetheart. Light of my life. You've been goin' up to Smiles's room every night for a month."
"It's a contractual obligation."
"Uh-huh. And the coffee? Is the coffee a contractual obligation? 'Cause I've seen you make it. You make his with the good chicory. You make mine with the stuff Niffty found in the dumpster."
"Yours is the one I like."
"Rude." He propped his chin on two hands. "Look, toots, I'm only sayin' this 'cause I care. That guy doesn't do friends. Hell, he doesn't do people. He does deals and he does ownership and he does that thing where he stands real close and smiles till you wanna claw your own face off. Whatever you think's happening up there?" He tapped the counter. "It ain't happening."
"Nothing's happening," you said. "We talk. He plays me bad music."
"Uh-huh," said Angel again, and then, softer, "Just don't give him anything you can't get back. That's all."
That night, for the first time in thirty-one nights, you were late.
It wasn't on purpose. A guest on the second floor had locked himself in a closet with what he swore was a ghost, which was funny until it turned out he was right. Charlie panicked. Vaggie got the spear. You took the hotel phone off its cradle and walked the man through the same breathing you'd once walked a pregnant woman through on the shoulder of I-10, while Vaggie argued with the ghost through the door in rapid furious Spanish. By the time the ghost agreed to leave, it was eleven-nineteen.
You ran up the stairs with two cups of coffee slopping over your wrists.
The door was already open.
He was standing just inside it, in the doorway, as if he'd been there a while. The static around him had a different texture tonight. Thinner. Tighter. Like a wire being wound.
"You're late," he said.
"There was a ghost."
"Nineteen minutes late."
"There was a ghost, Alastor. In a closet. I had to talk a man through a panic attack while Vaggie threatened a dead Victorian in Spanish."
He looked at the coffee. He looked at your wrists, which were red where it had splashed. For a moment his face did nothing at all, which on Alastor was more alarming than any expression; the smile stayed, but everything around it went flat, a painting of a smile.
Then he stepped aside to let you in.
He didn't put a record on. That was how you knew something was wrong. He sat in his chair and you sat in yours and the gramophone stood silent with the needle up, and out in the swamp something croaked and was quiet.
"The terms say eleven o'clock," he said at last.
"I know."
"The terms were quite clear."
"I know. I'm sorry." You set his coffee on its coaster. The shadow, you noticed, had come off the wall to stand behind his chair, arms folded, like a bouncer. "Are you going to do something terrible to me? Because if so, I'd like to finish the coffee first. I put the good chicory in it."
His eyes flicked to you. "You were with the spider earlier."
"Angel was at the desk. He talks. You know Angel."
"What did he say?"
You considered lying. Then you remembered that you'd told him on the very first night you wouldn't, and you remembered too that he had been standing in the doorway, waiting, for nineteen minutes, which was not the behavior of a man collecting a debt.
"He said you don't do friends," you said. "He said whatever I think is happening up here isn't."
The silence went on long enough that you counted it, out of habit, the way you used to count the seconds after a caller stopped talking. Seven. Eight. Nine.
"And what," said Alastor, "do you think is happening up here?"
You thought about the coaster. The coffee. A nine-year-old boy proposing to a pot of rice. The woman's laugh on the switchboard, and his face when he came back.
"I think," you said carefully, "that you're the only person in this hotel who's ever asked me a question and actually waited for the answer."
He didn't move. He didn't speak. Behind him, his shadow unfolded its arms.
Then, slowly, he got up, and crossed to the gramophone, and lifted a record out of its sleeve: not jazz this time, a slow old ballad, a woman singing in French, warm and scratched and impossibly sad. He lowered the needle. He didn't turn around for a while.
"A smile," he said to the record, "is how a man shows he's in control. My mother taught me that. Always smile, darling. Nobody can hurt you if you're smiling." The needle hissed. "I've been smiling for a hundred years. I find that most people smile back at me because they're afraid not to."
He turned his head. Not all the way. Just enough that one red eye caught the lamplight.
"You've never once smiled at me because you had to," he said. "I've been watching. I notice these things."
You did not know what to say. That was new. You always knew what to say; it was your entire job.
So you said nothing, and you let the French woman sing, and after a while he sat down again, and you drank your coffee, and when the hour was up he did not ask you about your sin. He walked you to the door instead. He'd never done that before.
"Same time tomorrow," you said.
"Yes," he said. And then, as you reached the top of the stairs: "My dear?"
You turned.
He was in the doorway again, a tall red silhouette against the green swamp-light, and his smile was the same as ever, and his voice was not.
"Tomorrow," said Alastor, "I'd like to discuss changing the terms."
The door shut. And for the first time since you'd arrived in Hell, the static on the other side of it didn't laugh.