Blood & Rust Read online

  He took one look at me and said, “My word ...”

  His accent wasn’t foreign, but it wasn’t Midwestern. It was only slightly offset from the universal newscaster accent, but it made me think Canada. “Sir,” I said, doing my best to sound harmless, “I’ve had an accident, I need to get back to my motel.”

  The way he stared at me made me realize just how terrible I must have looked. “Of course,” he said. “Certainly. Come in.”

  I slipped into the passenger seat and pulled the seat belt around myself. In the warmth of the car, my skin began burning, fiery needles racing across my flesh. My clothes began melting immediately.

  “Are you certain that you don’t need an ambulance?” my benefactor asked. “I can drive you to a hospital—”

  “No,” I said. It was a reflex, and I said it much too strongly. He turned to face me, and I saw the beginnings of suspicion grow on his face. After a pause, I said, “Look, I’m all right—”

  “You don’t look all right.” I could see his face harden, and I could feel him beginning to perceive me as a threat. His fear began to fill the car like a fog. I could almost breathe it.

  On the radio John Fogherty was singing about bad moons rising....

  I started talking even before I knew, consciously, what I was about to say. I ran my fingers over clotted hair and said, “Look, this is embarrassing. I lost my job you see—laid off, downsized, whatever you want to call it—got cut off with no benefits, no nothing. Car’s totaled, sent the damn thing into a ditch—black ice. But my insurance lapsed, and hell—I never had any medical insurance to begin with...”

  I amazed myself by the facility with which the lies came out. I fell into a natural patter where the hesitation stops gave me time to think of the next sentence. It only took a few glances into this guy’s eyes to tell I had him convinced.

  “I understand,” he said, “but don’t they have to take you at an emergency room?”

  I laughed humorlessly. “Yeah, and what they’d charge’d wipe out what savings I got left. Then I’d probably be arrested for no insurance on that wreck I totaled. I do not want to look for work with a suspended license.”

  “Head wounds can be nasty.”

  I nodded. “I can go to the free clinic tomorrow. They’ll take that long to get to me in an emergency room anyway.”

  The look of disgust on the man’s face now had nothing to do with me. I had sold him, completely, on a story that I’d constructed out of whole cloth, on the spot.

  Who in hell was I?

  I felt my head again and wondered why I was so terrified of going to a hospital. “Head wounds can be nasty,” said my Good Samaritan. The idea did not make me feel good.

  “The health care system in this country is insane,” he muttered. “Where’s your motel?”

  I fished in my pocket and retrieved the card key. I read off the address of the Woodstar Motel in the dim glow from the dash.

  “Can you give me directions?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, “I’m from out of town. I was following up a job prospect.” The lies were almost easy, as if the conversation was a puzzle and all I had to do was fish out the pieces to fit. He eventually had me fish out a map from the glove compartment. At least I now knew exactly where I was. We were westbound on Route 322, east of Cleveland, Ohio, just outside of Cuyahoga County.

  None of that information held a whisper of a memory for me. All I knew for certain was that everything I had told my benefactor had been a lie.

  The song changed to “Fortunate Son.”

  The drive turned out to be a short one, which was fortunate. Even in the warmth of the car, my breath was shallow, my head throbbed, and I seemed to have no feeling below the waist. More than once I reconsidered my attempt to avoid a hospital, but I never voiced my second thoughts. I was going to follow my instincts all the way, and pray that there was a reason for them.

  Eventually the neon-chrome sprawl of the motel emerged from the drifts beside Route 332. The neon sign merged with the memory my card key had inspired.

  “Here you are,” my benefactor held out his hand and said, “My name’s Park. Lee Park.”

  “Damien Castle,” I said automatically, knowing it wasn’t my name. “Thank you for the lift. I think you saved my life.”

  He shook my hand and his expression darkened. “That remains to be seen, my friend.”

  I nodded as I slipped out. The cold was so searing that I nearly collapsed by the car. It was an order of magnitude worse now that my clothes had partially melted. Immediately the moisture on my skin began to freeze again.

  The Cadillac drove away and I stumbled through a recently plowed parking lot, realizing that I had no room number. I gripped the key in a numbing hand, and realized that there was no guarantee that I still had a room here. I had the sick feeling that I might have only delayed the inevitable.

  The wind sucked my strength as I tried to think. I stumbled toward the motel, leaning on a dirty Chevette that had been half-buried by a snowplow, and was overwhelmed by a sudden stab of aloneness. The night gripped me in a silence so total that I wanted to scream.

  Just as suddenly, the sense of isolation was gone, leaving me shaken and empty. I tried to calm myself, to push back the tide of panic that was making it difficult to think.

  I looked around the lot, and noticed something. The Chevette was the only car that was buried so badly. It had been here a couple of days at least.

  My car, perhaps?

  Even better, I looked down and saw that each room had a parking space marked for it. Room numbers were painted on the curb in front of the spaces. The curb by the Chevette was hopelessly buried, so I kicked away the snow around the empty spaces to either side of it.

  The numbers were 222 and 224. That meant the Chevette belonged to room 223. It was worth a try. If I was wrong, I’d just have to try every single door until I found the one where the key worked.

  I raised my head and began looking in vain for room number 223. I felt a blurry panic when I didn’t see that number on any of the doors facing the lot. It took a minute for me to see a set of stairs leading to a balcony and a second story of rooms.

  I ascended the stairs, the only sound the crunching of salt under my boots. I passed two doors and stopped in front of 223. My numbed fingers fumbled with the card, and I felt the panic begin again. What if this was the wrong motel, what if the room had been given to someone else?

  The card chunked home and a small diode blinked green from the lock.

  Behind me, one of the streetlights illuminating the parking lot buzzed and went out. For the first time I noticed that the sky had lightened from black to a deep aqua.

  As the door creaked open, the wave of heat that blew from the room felt like a furnace. My refrozen clothes began to melt again. I spared one more look at the lightening sky.

  For some unfathomable reason I felt as if I had made it just in time.

  I stumbled into the darkened motel room on legs that felt like stilts carved in ice. I slammed the door shut behind me, not caring if someone else was in the room. Though, even in the near pitch black, with the shades drawn, I was sure the room was empty.

  I took a step and stumbled over a suitcase. I was shivering violently, and salt was stinging my eyes—sweat or thawing blood.

  Ass on the floor, and in total darkness, I began stripping off my frozen clothes. It was a process that felt as though it ripped skin and hair as much as cloth. Wrestling off my boots ignited deep burning pain in my feet, especially my toes.

  For a moment I sat there, naked, shivering. Fiery pain washed over me, leaving bone-deep aches in its wake. Ice trickled down my back as my hair melted.

  I crawled to the bathroom, not bothering with the light. I could feel my consciousness ebbing. There was actually a bathtub in the bathroom, not simply an abbreviated shower stall. I turned the hot water on full and half climbed, half fell, into the bathtub, barely worried about scalding myself. I felt the steam filling the b
athroom.

  My last coherent memory of that first night was of killing the water when the tub began to overflow, thinking I was probably going to die.

  2

  For the second time I woke up in darkness, submerged in cold water.

  For an instant I thought I might be caught in some vicious cycle of hallucination—doomed to traverse some private circle of hell, waking in that sewer and stumbling to the motel over and over and over....

  I had to clamp down hard to keep myself from flipping out.

  Calming down took a minute or ten. It took that long for me to realize that I was still alive. I hadn’t stopped breathing in the night. I hadn’t slipped down into the water and drowned. I’d avoided hypothermia. My headache was gone for the most part. And, when I conducted a prodding search of my extremities under the tepid bathwater, I could actually feel. Sensation was back in my fingers and my lower body.

  All things considered, I felt better than I had any right to feel.

  I probably looked like hell.

  I heaved myself out of the tub, carefully, expecting a wave of vertigo that didn’t come. I was waking up. I felt alive, alive in a way you can only feel after coming pretty damn close to the alternative.

  I stood in the darkened bathroom, dripping, thinking how badly the boys who tried to off me had screwed up. I was going to find them and—

  “Calm down,” I whispered to myself. It was hard. Like the panic that had surged in me before, thinking about my hypothetical attackers gave vent to a deep well of raw emotion. A visceral anger gripped me, abnormally intense even after what had happened. Especially since, with my hole of a memory, I couldn’t say for certain that I was the victim of any sort of attack.

  The problem was that I was certain.

  I shook my head and tried again to force a memory. The strain was almost physical. I clenched my fists and felt a bead of sweat roll off my brow.

  I remembered a brief sensation. A smell like rusty leather, and a heavy wet sound of something falling on....

  On what?

  That was all the memory that would come, the smell of ferric leather and that incongruous, ominous sound. Nothing more would come to me, and my subconscious left me with a deep rage and a feeling that I had been, in some sense, raped.

  “Maybe I don’t want to remember.” I took a deep breath. “Stop talking to yourself in the dark, people will think you’re nuts.”

  I groped for the light switch. A frosty fluorescent flashed a few rattling strobes before it came on.

  The bathroom was a mess. Worst was the bathtub. The water was black with dirt and blood. Water had slopped over and drenched the hex-tile floor, streaking it red and brown. A few towels were sopping in the midst of the mess on the floor.

  I walked over to the tub and hit the lever for the drain, its only response an anemic gurgle. I had to pull out a tangle of hair and twigs from the drain to get the thing to start. I shook my hand off into the john and glanced in the mirror—

  —and got a stabbing pain straight through the temples that made my eyes water. I immediately looked away, as if I’d been blinded by a bright light. The pain faded.

  What the ... ?

  I looked into the mirror again, slowly raising my eyes—

  When the second headache faded enough to allow me some awareness, I was staring into the sink in front of the mirror and gripping the sides of the counter so tightly that my arms were vibrating. The idea of brain damage came to me again.

  But I had felt fine until I had looked directly at the mirror.

  I cast a furtive glance at the mirror without raising my head. I saw my naked waist sliced by the lines of the sink. I saw my hands, veins standing out on their backs, knuckles white.

  I didn’t quite have the courage to raise my head all the way.

  I thought furiously for a moment and came to the conclusion that it was an effect of the light reflecting off of the mirror. Bright lights could trigger headaches. Strobes could start seizures in epileptics. Maybe some weird angle of reflection hit me just the wrong way when I looked directly in the mirror.

  That decided, I grabbed a dry hand towel from the rack and, without looking, hung it up over the bare fluorescent tube that ran along the top of the mirror. Once I was sure it was secure, then I slowly raised my gaze.

  No migraine struck this time, if that’s what had sliced my skull open a few minutes ago. The towel didn’t cover the whole mirror, I could see myself from mid-chest down.

  On the parts of my body I could see, there was no injury, nothing that looked like frostbite. That was good—or not so good, because that left only one place for all that blood to have come from.

  The drain in the tub gurgled as it finally emptied out.

  I prodded my skull—with the towel in place I couldn’t see my head—and found my hair a crusty mess. No area felt particularly sensitive, but I wasn’t going to find any signs with all that clotted hair in the way. I shrugged, sighed, and stepped back into the shower.

  After a long time pulling gunk out of my hair, I emerged from the shower. I felt about as good as I could ever remember. Which, of course, wasn’t saying much.

  As I dried myself off with the only clean towel left in the bathroom, I looked at the hand towel I’d draped over the mirror. I found it disturbing. It was the one concrete sign, other than my memory, that there was something wrong with me. I might not have found so much as a bump under my clotted hair, but it wasn’t normal to have migraines just from peeking into a mirror.

  Maybe it’d just been a temporary aberration.

  Yeah, like the blood. If the blood came from you, that bleeding aberration was pretty damn temporary. Wasn’t it?

  I reached over and touched the corner of the towel. Two ways to test this, lift gently, or yank it away.

  I began to lift it.

  Slowly, it revealed my shoulders and a scar on my left pectoral. Then my neck, the cords standing out as I clenched my teeth. My chin, dark with a few days’ beard. My mouth, pressed into a hard, bloodless line. A nose broken once, severely, and reset. My ...

  ... eyes ...

  “GOD!”

  The pain dropped me on the floor this time. It was as if someone had fired a high-powered laser through my eyes and burned all the way to the back of my head. My palms pressed into the orbits so hard that I felt I might fracture my skull.

  It took a while for me to think straight.

  As the pain faded, I stared at my hands. I became very conscious of my vision. It seemed normal. Nothing was blurred, nothing doubled, the colors seemed right.

  Nothing I remembered seeing in the mirror clued me in either. The reflection that had looked at me, despite the grotesque contortion of pain it had caused, seemed normal. Even the eyes—green, I remember—couldn’t account for the blinding stab I’d felt when I made eye contact with my reflection.

  It struck me as some sort of psychotic pathology, and that really scared me.

  It scared me because I had no obvious injuries. That left me with the strong possibility that the blood wasn’t mine. I had refused to be taken the hospital. I was afraid of something. What if it was the police I was afraid of? I was missing a gun. Was it possible that I had killed someone?

  I climbed, shaking, to my feet.

  Amnesia could be psychological as well as from a blow to the head.

  Was I insane? Could I be a serial killer with a few dozen bodies to his credit? Was I—

  I put my hands over my face and told myself to cut it out.

  I pushed out of the bathroom to get away from that damn mirror. I might be on shaky ground, mentally speaking, but it wasn’t time to be sized for a white jacket that buckled up the back.

  Fumbling for the light switch, I told myself that, for all my erratic behavior, nothing I’d felt or done yet was more out of line than the situation I found myself in. I needed to give myself the benefit of the doubt, since I didn’t think anyone else was about to.

  I found the lights and flip
ped them on, hoping that something in my room would pull loose a memory. But the only thought that crossed my mind upon seeing my motel room was that the place had been tossed by amateurs.

  There are two ways to search a room: thorough and subtle. Subtle is supposed to leave the room so the owner doesn’t know it was touched. Thorough is just like it sounds; you don’t give a shit, you trash the place and sift through the pieces.

  This was neither.

  I tried to push the thought away, blame it on paranoia, but the certainty gripped me and wouldn’t let me go. The feeling grew as I rummaged through a pair of suitcases for clothing.

  As I dressed, I began cataloging the details that told me the room had been searched. Furniture had been moved. The legs of the end table, the wheels of the bed frame, both were slightly off the divots they had worn in the motel’s carpet. The cushion on the one easy chair had been compressed by a succession of rear ends, but the cushion only sat loosely on the chair itself, as if it had just been placed there. The runners that held the carpet down at the front door and the bathroom were loose. The suitcases had been gone through and hastily repacked.

  At least the clothes fit me.

  Dressed, I went over the motel room more thoroughly. The closer I looked at anything, the more evidence I found of tampering—shiny scratches on dull screw heads, an absence of dust on the back of the TV set, nicks on the sides of drawers where they’d been forced off their tracks and replaced.

  I couldn’t check around the mirror above the dresser until I thought of putting on a pair of dark sunglasses I’d found on the night table. The sunglasses prevented eye contact with myself, and that prevented the pain.

  Once I could check the mirror, I found the tampering there as well. Along the edge of the mirror, scratches circled the plugs capping the screws that held the mirror to the wall.