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And there was a breathless rushing noise, the sound of someone running in the dark—fumbling, tripping, and climbing up to run again.
Frederick Vaughn was drunk as hell and not running very fast, so he was almost easy to catch—almost simple to approach, to seize, and to drag to the ground. The padre caught him like a wolf on a deer, bringing him to his knees in the mud and rolling him onto his back.
“Let me go!” the fugitive demanded, thrashing his head back and forth.
“No! This is madness!”
“Staying inside that place is madness! Actual madness!” Vaughn objected. “I’m going mad as a hatter…madder than that, listening to that godawful voice, in that godawful lobby. You trapped us in there with it—it was all your idea!”
“It is our only chance to survive the storm! And what do you mean, the voice in the lobby?”
Vaughn writhed feebly on the ground, pinned there by the padre’s knees. “You know good and well what I mean! Everyone knows, now. Everyone can hear it…that’s what it told me.” He gave up and collapsed back into the mud. “Maybe everyone else can stand it, maybe it doesn’t make their skull itch, like it makes mine itch. Maybe it doesn’t bother them, and if that’s so, I’m happy for them,” he said, without sounding happy at all. “Why did you follow me…how did you even…how did you see me? How did you…did you find me?”
Before the padre could respond, Vaughn turned his face aside and vomited whiskey, bile, and water.
The padre sighed, and climbed up—offering Vaughn his hand. “Come, I’ll help you. I know the hotel is speaking, but we must get back inside. Only for another few hours,” he promised, having no idea how much longer the storm would last, but he would’ve said anything to hurry the drunk man along. “If we all stay together, and if we can keep the hotel secured, the storm will pass over us soon enough. I’ll help you leave, in the morning. Please, come with me.”
“I don’t know…if I…if I can. I’m sorry, it was stupid…it was so stupid,” Vaughn mumbled, staggering to his feet with the padre’s help. “I’m sorry. I’ve been so goddamn stupid.”
“You’re not stupid; you’re afraid, like everyone else. No one wants to stay, but do you feel it?” the padre asked, turning his head up to the sky. The stars were out, clear and bright, but to the south a blanket of clouds was drawing up fast—and the breeze was getting its momentum back. “Look, over there: It’s the other side of the storm, and it’s coming for us. Out here, you’ll be dead in an hour. Inside the hotel, you have a chance.”
“Do I? Do any of us?” he shook his head, and leaned against the padre as they walked. “I think we used up all our chances. I think we’re done for, now. Same as this whole island, and everyone on it.”
Juan Rios kept his eyes open, and kept looking. The stars were very bright, and he had the ridiculous idea that they were flaring in protest—determined to burn through the coming clouds and shine on regardless. But the eye was passing over them, and every minute that went by, every step they took, the leaves rustled harder in the trees and the seabirds called out to one another with greater and greater alarm.
“None of us will see the morning,” the drunk man mumbled.
The padre adjusted his grip on Vaughn, who kept trying to slide to the ground. “Did the hotel say that?”
“It said a lot of things.”
“Then tell me about them,” he urged. He wanted to know, and he wanted to keep Frederick Vaughn awake and walking; he wasn’t sure if he had the strength to carry him, should he pass out. Besides, it might mean something—did the gaping maw on the lobby floor have the same message for each listener? Or did it craft a new lie for every ear?
“The hotel says…it says that it wants to be free. It will destroy itself to free itself…and it wants to open the windows and doors. It wants the storm to take it.”
The padre frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s…concentrated, Father. Don’t you see? It’s…it’s collected enough evil, enough filthy souls like ours…it wants to be swept off its foundations, and scattered to the four winds. Like…like a goddamn dandelion puff,” he concluded, then he wretched, and rallied. “Like a goddamn dandelion puff with a thousand seeds, spinning in the air. Blown loose by the storm.”
The sick feeling in the pit of the padre’s stomach suggested that there was something true to the man’s inebriated ramblings. There was something right about it, maybe not exactly right, but right enough that he needed to pay attention.
He needed to think about it.
He wanted a word with Sister Eileen and Ranger Korman, and he intended to have one when they returned to the lobby.
But back at the hotel, he sensed more trouble before he saw it.
When he looked, he caught the flicker of candles being moved, carried from place to place in a frantic hunt—or an effort to preserve them. When he listened he heard shouts—threats and warnings, and an appeal from the nun that he couldn’t quite hear.
“Hurry,” he told Vaughn, but Vaughn stumbled and fell—so he picked him up under one arm and half dragged him, half encouraged him, back to the landing where the doors gaped wide and there was pandemonium on the other side.
The padre was exhausted from the run and from lugging Frederick Vaughn, so he flung the drunk man into the lobby and yanked the doors shut. Finished with him for the moment, Juan Rios stepped over the fellow’s moaning form and asked the room at large: “What has happened here?”
Valeria Alvarez was in hysterics, cowering away from the nun while her mother swore and prayed in Spanish—“She’s a monster, she’s a monster. You didn’t tell us she was a monster, you should’ve said something!” She made the sign of the cross again and again, but the nun did not seem impressed.
Meanwhile, Violetta screamed her own set of unrelated horrors: “I saw Sarah, I saw her! She was here, and she said that I should come! She said to open the doors—she told me she needs me! You have to let me go, let me help her!”
Sister Eileen, coolly apathetic toward the Alvarez women, said only, “Sarah is dead, and you’ll stay here…unless you want to follow her into the grave.”
