Blackwake Falls: Fermata Hotel part 2
By atfirstdawn
*Mature content warning for bondage and death
*© Keira Morrison/ atfirstdawn 2012
The Easter Bunny… a gangly, hairy twenty something with buck teeth and large protruding ears…
Mrs Crowley’s recollection of the night in question, had been anything but concise; often falling into opinionated and judgemental ramblings, running a mile before she had moved an inch with the subject at hand. Time and time again I found myself forcing her train of thought back on to the track it had started on.
I couldn’t be sure if she was deliberately trying to annoy me…
The Easter Bunny was a regular; Crowley had noticed him with Charlotte several times on their ways to and from room 28. Despite not knowing his name, Crowley seemed to know everything else about him as if he were a close relative. To Crowley, The Easter Bunny had appeared calm and collected with what could have been an underlying element of impatience or mild frustration. His movements were soft and flowing, caring and almost loving, if not a little rushed but he would always smile towards both Charlotte and Crowley herself despite what was eating away at him on the inside.
“You see, there was this thing he would always do around her, which told me he was nervous, the layman would never have noticed it but it was one of the first things I noticed. He never did it around me but then, he liked me and I wasn’t expecting anything of him, I’m not that kind of person, clearly. Unlike her, who is only in it for what she can get, using him like that is just horrible, she’d use anyone if she thought she could get something out of them, and mind you, she always did, using her youth in the same way as street walker would raise her skirt, it just isn’t right, you’d think even in this modern age young women would still have some sense of dignity but not her, oh no, no, it makes you sick, it really does… Now I, I have self-respect…”
Her pretentious pontificating was a self-satisfying sermon without end. It had come to the point now where interrupting her, for me, had become rather pleasurable…
“So he did what, exactly?” I asked bluntly, mid-sentence with my voice raised over hers.
“Well, if you’d let me finish. I was getting to it…” she took one last long drag from her cigarette, her eyes completely fixed on mine and then crumpled what was left of it into the ashtray with slow and deft precision before reaching for another one… she eventually pulled it from its packaging, lit it, placed it between her lips with her ever constantly shaking hands and took another drag. Then she answered…
“…he’d scratch his ear.”
“He’d scratch his ear…” I repeated with a deliberate blunt tone.
Crowley nodded as she took another drag.
“Which ear?”
“Left ear”
“Anything else?”
“His nostrils would flare up when he spoke.” She delivered matter-of-factly.
Crowley was divulging too much. To her she was leading me on a merry dance, telling me what I wanted to hear and so much more of what I didn’t. However, for me, finding a twenty-something year old man who scratched his ear, flared his nostrils and could land a job as a football mascot without a costume was not going to be hard to find… at the very least he was certainly going to be a site to behold.
“So… you were saying…?” I coaxed.
She took another drag, still attempting to stare me down with her old beady grey eyes. Eventually she got back to it…
“Well, he came in with two others that night and he was scratching away at his ear like nobody’s business, hacking away at it as if he had flees, he’d put his arm down only for a second later to have it up at his ear again. I knew something wasn’t right, I can tell these kinds of things, he didn’t say anything, he didn’t look my way and he didn’t even ask if room 28 was available. He just walked by with his eyes on the floor. The other two though, they couldn’t be happier but not one of them said hello, they just traipsed in here like the owned the place. It isn’t enough that that girl had driven out most of the guests on that floor, I was now putting people up for free, can you believe the cheek of such a thing?”
She continued voicing her outrage until I stopped her again and asked for descriptions of the two men that had accompanied The Easter Bunny. If Crowley was to be believed, then there had been three men in total with Charlotte that night; a stocky, top-heavy man in his late thirties with greasy black hair, thick-rimmed glasses and a full to bursting duffle bag over his shoulder, with him; an old and gaunt looking man, of whom Crowley stressed must have at least been in his eighties, with dark sunken eyes and thin white hair… and of course; The Easter Bunny.
Both offended and intrigued, Crowley detailed the slow hour that passed her by while she sat at the front desk, stewing away in her rage, which further tested my patience, before making her way to room 28’s peephole.
Small isolated communities in the mountains like Blackwake Falls, in literature, are synonymous with unsolved mysteries, sordid secrets and twisted affairs. But even for Blackwake Falls, a town so close to the edge of the map that it is in danger of falling into the precipice beyond, Crowley’s reiteration of Charlotte Chambers’ private life was in a league all its own…
Crowley had been lucky enough for Charlotte to be positioned in direct eye-line of the door. She had made it sound as if she could see everything in fine detail which made me wonder just how embellished her story was as it progressed…
Charlotte was knelt, naked on the bed; her ankles tied to her thighs by thick leather straps and her arms trussed up tightly in a vicious reverse prayer tie. Her long black hair had been fed through the ropes binding her arms, forcing her head backwards so that she helplessly stared towards the ceiling. The Easter Bunny was knelt behind Charlotte with a whitehead medical gag in his hand, Crowley watched as Charlotte opened her mouth compliantly to accept the gag. The metal was pressed between her teeth and against her cheeks and then ratcheted to a seemingly uncomfortable degree, separating her jaws until the corners of her lips appeared as if they were threatening to rip.
“I mean seriously, who would allow themselves to be degraded to such an extent? It never used to be like this, a bit of flesh on show and men were drooling back in the day, now they want their women to look like cattle, herded around in saddles and bridles and paraded in the streets for all to see. I know I for one would never let anyone have that kind of control over me and you certainly wouldn’t catch me in any kind of situation like hers…”
She kept going, her body language and diction becoming more pronounced as she prattled on as if she was someone important enough to make such accusations and not be ridiculed for them.
I clenched a fist around the ball of the hand-made harness gag which my fingers still half covered on the desk. The chains rattled on the scarred and polished wood loud enough to distract her; she stopped, looked me in the eye with a contemptuous glare and continued with what she had seen in room 28. Only this time her retelling sounded more like the description for a ritual rather than a commentary on perverse sex games…
Sickened by the sight and submissiveness of Charlotte, Crowley’s eyes turned to the room and to the two men who had accompanied The Easter Bunny.
The stocky top-heavy man who had carried the duffle bag now wore a white coat, the kind you would see an M.D wear and was tending to a candle standing underneath a crude metal tripod which was stood on top of a nearby chest of drawers; a thin sheet of wire mesh supported a small ceramic pot which stood over the flame as he filled it with a liquid that Crowley couldn’t identify. The Easter Bunny seemed to be talking to Charlotte, comforting and consoling her, as she remained bound and gagged on the bed while awaiting her punishment. Finishing with the candle and tripod, the stocky M.D pulled a blade from the chest pocket on his coat, again Crowley hadn’t been overly helpful in identifying the tool but the medical gag and the white coat gave me reason to believe that the M.D was more than likely brandishing a scalpel. The stocky M.D approached the edge of the bed and stood in front of Charlotte. The Easter Bunny pressed himself closer into Charlotte’s back and held the ropes that bound her arms ever tighter; holding her head still with his left hand the stocky M.D lowered his blade into Charlotte’s open mouth.
The Easter Bunny’s friends liked to play doctor, they liked to play hard.