Her eyelids drooped so that slits of white were visible beneath them.
Fed up with her, he pulled on his pants, shrugged into his shirt and stepped out into the breezeway, slamming the door behind him. The Dodge minivan he had parked beside was gone. He wished that he hadn’t left his car keys in the room. He could have booked. A thousand dollars? Christ, what was he thinking? She was likely used to selling her ass for fifty, a hundred tops. The cool air soothed him, tuned his anger lower. He dug the loose change from his pocket and went padding barefoot along the breezeway toward the vending machines next to the office. If he got her something to eat, that might placate her. It might be worth driving somewhere—that pancake house back on the interstate might still be serving. Once she was loaded with carbs and sugar he could talk her down from hysteria, open a dialogue, reason with her, and in the end they would share a hug, a semichaste kiss, alas, alack, adios, adieu, we’ll always have the Elfland.
He selected a bag of chips and a Snickers from the vending machines, and then noticed particles of glass on the sidewalk in front of the office—the door had been blown inward and glass shards strewn across the carpeting, as if something had struck it with explosive force. The lights were on, but the night man was nowhere in sight.
Michael stuck his head inside and called out. No reply. He picked his way across the carpet, walking on his toes, and peered behind the desk, half expecting to find the night man’s bullet-riddled corpse, but saw only an overturned office chair and what might have been a dusting of Doritos crumbs on the counter. Going back outside, he surveyed the parking lot, an acreage of blacktop divided by concrete islands and the occasional patch of shrubbery, slots demarked by diagonal white lines, luminous under the arc lights. His sense of unease spiked. There had been at least six or seven cars in the lot, not counting the minivan, and now there were none. What were the odds that their owners had all checked out between midnight and two a.m.? Not inconceivable, he told himself. The Elfland might be a no-tell motel. He scanned the faзade of the building. Yellow lights sprayed from the open door of a second-floor room, silhouetting a short, squat figure no larger than a child. Whoever it was didn’t move a muscle. Michael waved, but the wave was not returned. The figure might have been stone . . . or wood. It looked to be wearing some sort of hat. Like a Santa hat.
Oh, no you don’t, he said to himself.
You’re not going there, you are definitely not buying into the Carole-induced premise that magical Nazi elves have taken over a motel in Bumfuck, Oregon.
“Hey!” he shouted at the motionless figure. “What’s going on?”
Silence.
“Somebody broke into the office! Did you see anything?”
A clattering sounded behind him—like someone running in wooden shoes.
He spun about. Something darted behind a shrub about fifty feet away. Something quick and approximately elf sized. He couldn’t be certain of it—he would have liked third-party corroboration. He was exhausted, coming down from a coke binge, and his eyes were playing tricks.
“Is anybody there?” he called in a shaky voice.
The shrub quivered, as if being shaken. He shot a glance toward the second-floor room. The figure in the doorway was gone.
Michael’s balls tightened. He eased toward the parking-lot exit, choosing a path that led well away from the suspicious shrub, intending to put some distance between himself and the motel, cross the road to the Boron station and take stock. Let his nerves settle and then head back to 120, because it had become clear he was under the influence of the coke and of that nut bag Carole-with-an-e-on-the-end, and he needed to gain perspective. That was all. He’d pull it together, return to the room, grab his keys, and drive. Thinking this made him feel steadier. He’d go as far as Portland and find a motel not named the Elfland, a Comfort Inn, a Travelodge or Best Western, a good old American franchise free of Black Forest statuary and street meat . . .
The lights went out.
Not just the lights of the motel and the parking lot, but also those of the Boron station, the shops, and the winking traffic signal. The darkness was unrelieved. It was as if a dense black cloud had lowered over the town, reducing visibility to almost zero. Power failure. He waited for the lights to come back. When they did not, he moved forward, groping, shuffling along, making for the exit, determined to follow through on his plan of taking stock, pulling it together.
He heard the clattering again. It was louder, closer, issuing from every direction—lots of diminutive wooden feet darting near. As he turned this way and that, tracking the noise, something snagged his shirttail and nearly succeeded in dragging him down. Panic put a charge in him and he ran blindly, his arms pumping. Pieces of gravel stuck in the soles of his feet. He ignored the discomfort and kept running until he crashed into the hedge bordering the lot. Twigs tore at his sides, dug into his chest. He fought to break through the hedge, tearing away handfuls of leaves, but it was impenetrable—he hung there, supported by the bushes. The clattering had stopped, and, but for the wheezing of his breath, the silence was absolute. No semis grinding on the interstate, no barking dogs, no ambient noise whatsoever. He pictured the town cut off from the universe of light and life, adrift on an infinite ocean of nothingness, monsters with mile-wide mouths rising toward the surface, lured by this tasty morsel, and panic took him a second time. He struggled free of the hedge, lost his balance, and fell backward, smacking his head on the asphalt. Splinters of white light lanced through his skull. Dazed, he rolled over onto his side, preparing to sit up.
Overhead, the Elfland’s sign switched on, humming, buzzing, painting on the asphalt a ragged island of illumination upon which he was marooned. The leprechaun on the sign mocked him with a knowing leer. Michael’s instincts prompted him to flee, but he was too enfeebled to do anything other than scrabble at the pavement. He waited for the leprechaun to leap down from the sign, for whatever form the next shock might take.
“Who’s there?” he shouted, and then: “Quit fucking with me!”
Darkness swallowed his words.
He remained lying there, alert for the least sound and hearing none. Moths came to whirl whitely like windblown snowflakes about the sign, and this emblem of normalcy helped restore his capacity for thought. No other lights showed, either in the motel or the town, and that did not make sense, that the sign was the sole source of radiance, unless he were to believe in a reality he wanted to reject . . . And yet he couldn’t reject it. The girl, Carole, she’d never denied being a witch. She must be orchestrating this somehow. That funky singing she did now and again, it could be part of a spell, a retarded Tennessee mantra that helped her focus. She was the only person who had reason to screw with him. Except for Charlie, maybe. Except for Chess. Except for damn near every fucking person he had ever met, everyone he had used and abused while working out his parental issues. Perhaps that’s what was happening here: karmic retribution.
He laughed off the possibility and then had the urge to cry out for help; but even if things were normal, if everyone was safe in their beds and the town was not the empty, abandoned-by-God place he envisioned, there was nobody within earshot. And if help arrived, what would he say then? This redneck bitch I picked up hitchhiking, goes about a hundred five, hundred ten pounds, IQ of a snail, she’s a freak, man, she’s tripping me out, animating the elf population of Whidby Bay. Sure, son, the cops would say. Let’s put you into the nice holding tank where you’ll be protected from her unnatural power. Hey, where’d you get the seven grand? You suppose this white powder might be an illegal substance? Got a pink slip for the Caddy?