Chapter 3: Dead Air
You spent the next day doing what any reasonable person does when a hundred-year-old cannibal says he wants to renegotiate: you asked the bartender.
"Changing the terms," Husk repeated. He was shuffling a deck of cards one-handed, which he did when he was thinking, or when he wanted you to think he wasn't. "Those were his words?"
"Those exact words."
"Huh." The cards fanned, folded, fanned. "Well. Could be anything. Could be he wants two hours. Could be he wants you to start calling him 'sir.' Could be he wants your liver in a jar." He cut the deck and showed you the top card without looking at it. The king of hearts. "Could be something else."
"Like what?"
Husk set the deck down. Up close he looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. There was a faint glowing mark under the fur at his throat, like a collar you could only see in certain light, and you'd learned not to stare at it.
"I've been owned by that son of a bitch a long time," he said. "Long enough to know the shape of him. He don't let go of things, sweetheart. Not ever. He's got everything he's ever bought, every soul, every favor, filed somewhere in that swamp." He picked up a glass and started polishing it. "So if he's talking about changing a deal, it ain't because he's bored of it."
"Then why?"
"Beats me," said Husk, who plainly did not think it beat him at all. "Go ask him. It's almost eleven."
He was already sitting when you came in. No record. Two cups of coffee on the side table, which stopped you in the doorway, because he had never once made the coffee.
"Sit," he said. "Please."
He had never once said please, either.
You sat. The swamp was very still. Even the frogs had stopped. The shadow was nowhere you could see.
"I have been thinking," said Alastor, "about the nature of obligation."
"That's never a good opener."
"Hush. I'm being profound." He turned his cup on its coaster, a quarter turn, then back. "You'll have noticed, I imagine, that I occasionally take a call. On the switchboard."
You had noticed. You had noticed his face afterward, too.
"I'm not going to tell you about it," he said. "Not tonight, and possibly never. But I will tell you this much. A long time ago I said some words to someone. Like you. On a night when I was being very clever and believed I'd gotten the better end of things." The smile held, but it held the way a dam holds. "And now when the phone rings, I go. Whatever I'm doing. Whoever I'm with. I go, and I smile, and I am polite, and I come back. I have done that for a very long time."
He looked at you, then, properly. His eyes in the lamplight were not quite as red as usual. More like the last coal in a grate.
"I find," he said, "that I don't care for the idea of you climbing those stairs because a piece of paper tells you to. So." He lifted one gloved hand and snapped his fingers.
Something in your chest unclenched.
You hadn't known it was there. A small tight knot, the size of a cherry stone, right under your sternum, that you'd taken for nerves or habit or the general strain of being dead. It loosened all at once and was gone, and the air you breathed felt different without it, the way a room feels different when a fridge you hadn't noticed switches off.
"Paid in full," said Alastor. "Consider yourself a free woman, my dear. Go and enjoy your afterlife. Run the night desk, adopt a ghost, let that spider take you dancing." He stood, crossed to the door, and held it open, smiling his enormous empty smile. "It's been a splendid month. Truly."
You looked at him for a long moment.
Then you got up, and you took your coffee, because you'd be damned twice before you left good chicory on the table, and you walked out past him without a word.
The door shut behind you very quietly.
You spent the next day in the hotel kitchen.
Niffty found you there at noon, a one-eyed blur of a woman about the height of the countertop, and stood on a chair to see what you were doing, and asked whether it was a crime. You said it was a roux. She said, "Ooh, is that a crime?" and when you said no she lost interest and went off to stab a cockroach.
A proper roux takes time. Hell had been right about that. You need the flour and the fat and a heavy pot and the kind of patience that people mistake for calm. You stand over it and you stir and you do not stop stirring, not to check your phone (you didn't have one anymore), not to answer the door, not for anything, while it goes from white to blond to peanut butter to the deep red-brown of an old penny. If you look away it burns. If it burns you start again.
Your grandmother had stood you on a step stool by her stove in Thibodaux and made you stir for forty-five minutes while she talked about her sisters, and you had hated it, and you had learned.
You started again twice.
At ten fifty-eight that night, you knocked on the door at the top of the stairs. You were holding a covered pot with a dish towel wrapped around the handles, and two bowls, and two spoons, and no coffee at all.
It took a while to open. Longer than it ever had.
He stood in the doorway and looked at you. He looked at the pot. He looked back at you, and for one second, so brief you'd have missed it if you hadn't spent six years listening for the half-second hitch before a caller told you the truth, the smile slipped.
"The debt is paid," he said. "You're under no obligation."
"I know. You were very clear." You lifted the lid an inch. Steam came out, and the smell came with it: andouille and onion and that dark nutty roux, green pepper, thyme, a lot of cayenne. "I'm not here because I owe you. I'm here because it's eleven o'clock, and I made too much jambalaya, and you're the only person in this building who'll know if I did it right."
Alastor didn't say anything for so long that you started to count again. You got to six.
"You made a roux," he said.
"I made three. Two burned."
He stepped aside.
He ate the first spoonful standing up, next to the gramophone, with his eyes closed.
You had never seen him eat. You'd assumed (based on certain rumors, and the coppery smell under the pipe smoke, and the general vibe of the antlers) that whatever he ate, he didn't eat it from a bowl. But he ate this slowly, with great care, the way you'd read a letter you'd waited a long time for, and when he opened his eyes he did not look at you right away.
"Too much cayenne," he said.
"There is not too much cayenne."
"Far too much." He took another spoonful. "My mother would have slapped you."
"Your mother would have asked for the recipe."
He laughed, then. Not the broadcast laugh. No studio audience. Just a man in a swamp with a bowl of rice, laughing quietly at something a woman had said. It was a much smaller sound than you expected. You liked it much better.
You ate together in the two armchairs, and he did not put on a record, and for a while neither of you said anything at all, and it was the most comfortable silence you had sat in since you died.
When the bowls were empty, you said, "I'll tell you now, if you still want to know."
He set his spoon down. He didn't pretend not to understand.
"I was a dispatcher," you said. "Nine-one-one. Nights. There was a woman who used to call. Denise. Every couple of weeks, always after midnight, always about her husband. And every time, the deputies would go out, and he'd be charming, and she'd say she'd overreacted, and they'd leave." You turned your bowl in your hands. "One night she called, and she said my name. She'd learned it, I guess, from all the times. And then the line went dead. And dispatch said forty minutes for a unit, because there'd been a pileup on the interstate."
The swamp was very quiet.
"I knew where she lived," you said. "I'd sent people there eleven times. So I took off my headset and I told my supervisor I was sick and I drove. It took me nine minutes. He was in the driveway. She was on the ground. He had a tire iron." You looked up. "I didn't brake."
Alastor's eyes were very bright.
"She lived," you said. "That's the part I care about. I died three years later in a wreck on the highway that had nothing to do with anything, and I came down here, and I'm still not sorry. Not even a little. I think that's why I'm here. Not because of what I did. Because I'm not sorry."
For a long time he looked at you. You couldn't read his face. You'd stopped trying to read his face weeks ago; you read the static instead, and the static was doing something you'd never heard, a low warm hum like a radio tuned between two stations, playing both.
Then Alastor stood, and crossed to the gramophone, and chose a record without looking: a slow, swaying number, a clarinet and a muted horn and a piano somewhere far back in the hiss. Not a cornet falling down a staircase. Something you could almost call lovely.
He turned around and held out his hand.
You knew, because everyone at the hotel knew, that the Radio Demon did not like to be touched. He flinched from Charlie's hugs. He stepped away from Angel's elbows. You had once watched him dislocate his own shoulder to avoid a handshake.
His hand stayed where it was. Gloved, long-fingered, very still, as if he were holding it out over a drop.
"I'm told," he said, "that one dances to music one actually enjoys. I am prepared to accept that I may be wrong about the cornet. This once."
You took his hand.
He held you the old-fashioned way, a careful gap between you, his other hand barely resting at your back like he wasn't sure it was allowed there. He led well. Of course he did. You turned slowly across the Persian rug at the center of a swamp in the middle of Hell, and his static wrapped around the both of you, soft as a wool blanket, and you could feel him trembling, very slightly, all the way through the glove.
"Alastor," you said.
"Mm."
"Same time tomorrow?"
His smile, so close to you now, looked different from below. Less like a mask. More like a door somebody had forgotten to lock.
"My dear," he said, "I'd be offended if you were late."
The record spun on. And somewhere down on the ground floor, very faintly, the old hotel switchboard began to ring.
He did not let go.