Blackwake Falls: Fermata Hotel
By atfirstdawn
*Mature content warning for bondage and death
*© Keira Morrison/ atfirstdawn 2012
December 21st, 2 a.m.
The Fermata Hotel, a miserable and entirely unwelcoming little establishment located in the suburbs of Blackwake Falls.
The place stood four storeys tall, had less than fifty rooms and stuck out like a sore thumb, loud and proud with its flickering neon and sorry excuse for a courtyard; lined with fractured ornate planters and a weathered, out of commission water fountain depicting a wingless angel attempting to spill the contents of an empty urn, its heavenly extremities lay shattered and half submerged in the accumulated filth in the basin under its feet. The sharp glow of green above the narrow entrance illuminated the frost of the mid-winter night’s air like nuclear fog from a comic book, while the O and the T of ‘hotel’ remained silent in the darkness.
The ageing and bloated Mrs Crowley was standing to attention behind the counter in the foyer as if she had been waiting for me. Her expression was one of impatience and aggravation, I hated her on sight.
The interior of the foyer was as old, decayed and diseased as Crowley herself; with cream-turned-grey walls that had been dyed with a thick ash-yellow that clung like a viscous liquid to the high corners of the room caused by the nicotine and tar that hung in the air.
I introduced myself and stated my business.
“…a private detective, the movies say I shouldn’t speak to the likes of you.” She said, lighting a cigarette with hands that gently trembled with an uncontrollable constant.
She was wholly unlikeable.
I didn’t dignify her remark with a response. She had lit a cigarette and made herself comfortable behind the counter. She’d talk.
I took the blood-stained hand-made harness gag from my trench coat pocket, placed it on the counter, the chains of the gag rattled against the scarred polished desk with an echo. I asked if she recognised it. The gag was made entirely of metal and latex; a large silver chain fed through a large white ball and connected to three other chains with hooks, rings and locks attached to them, one chain was silver whereas the other two were white and black respectively.
Crowley took a drag and exhaled slowly. There was something inherently serpentine about her and I felt a familiar sickness rise in my gut that told me she knew too much or at least liked to think she did. Eventually her eyes led her head to the harness; she stared at it, her eyes judging the object with a silent and powerful conviction of opinion. She smirked with the cigarette in her mouth, her lips stretching and losing their colour…
“Such an ugly thing, so dehumanising, to think what young women like her get out of such a thing.”
Her answer hadn’t surprised me…
The call had come through like all of the others, straight to answerphone; buried beneath the countless messages left by suspicious husbands, paranoid parents and bounty hunters looking to share a reward or cash in on a finder’s fee.
The message had been concise enough to earn my curiosity, detailing only an address…
She had been beautiful, once… tall, slender, long dark hair and soft features…
The chains embracing the young woman’s body had raised her about six feet off of the ground, she hung horizontal in what would have been a strict hogtie… had her left leg not fallen free and added extra torque to her remaining bonds, pulling her limbs into a tight and twisted reverse cradle.
The scene, however perverse, had looked almost artistic. The setting, an abandoned warehouse that had been listed as condemned following an earthquake three years ago. Dust and jagged debris still littered the cracked expanse of the stone floor, sinisterly outlined by the natural light of the night and above it all hung the absence of life personified in the corpse of the young woman, the moonlight illuminating her newly paled lacerated skin and highlighting the gleaming metal of the chains which bound her.
Her body had been suspended high enough for me to look her in the eye; so I did, and the silent answers that poured from her distant empty eyed gaze filled me with a stinging rage that I could barely contain. The chain hooked through the ring at the top of the hand-made harness gag, which had then been tied off around the chain at her ankles, had no doubt forced her to look into the eyes of her killer… he had known exactly how he had wanted her and she had known exactly who he was…
The hand-made harness gag had obviously been either an insult or a tribute to the young woman and a rational mind knew it would lead me somewhere. I unhooked the chain and removed the gag, as I did a build-up of thick, partially congealed blood caused by internal bleeding splattered over the cluttered and cracked stone floor of the abandoned and condemned warehouse.
I held her head in my hands noticing a crumpled piece of paper that had been stuffed behind the gag. I dextrously pulled the paper out of her mouth before gently lowering her head, leaving it free to hang lifelessly from her shoulders.
The barely eligible words ‘Fermata Hotel’ had been scrawled on the paper… Convenient…
I recalled the young woman’s face from memory and asked Crowley to describe her. She wasn’t lying, the young woman had stayed here and Crowley had seen her, a lot of her.
I asked Crowley the young woman’s name, room number and how she knew that the harness gag had belonged to her…
Charlotte Chambers, white, English and wild…
Crowley detailed a number of nights where she and other guests had been disturbed by the loud comings and goings of men from room 28, Charlotte’s room. Apparently Charlotte had rented the room on a daily basis and paid double each time by way of an apology for any inconvenience from the night before, this had been enough for Crowley to continue to put up with her.
I asked Crowley for permission to investigate Charlotte’s room.
“Can’t” she said abruptly, taking another drag from the cigarette lodged between her shaking and uncertain fingers “Bug problem.”
“Bug problem?” I repeated with gloriously thick cynicism.
“Don’t want you disturbing them.”
She seemed to be genuinely pleased with herself for denying me access to the room with such an implausible reason. I stared at her blankly; I didn’t have the authority without a badge to force my way into the room without her calling the monthly paid authorities to remove me, and I wasn’t in the habit of drawing unnecessary attention to myself, so I kept her talking…
Crowley became more animated as her story wore on; eventually she got to the meat of it…
I imagined the scene, hell, I imagined the whole sordid night…