Blackwake Falls: Fermata Hotel part 4
By atfirstdawn

*Mature content warning for bondage and death
*© Keira Morrison/ atfirstdawn 2012

The post-apocalyptic courtyard of the Fermata Hotel still retained an underlying level of menace under the deep red glow of the early dawn. The courtyard’s wingless angel standing in filth tipping its empty urn, the cracked expanse of concrete beneath my feet and the luminous neon sign that bathed the dead land in a sickly electric green were all iconographies that were fast becoming instantly recognisable to me…

It had taken me less than an hour, after I had received Crowley’s call, on foot to reach the Fermata Hotel from the Easter Bunny’s house in the suburbs of the city. I had knelt for what had felt like hours, clutching Charlotte’s blood-stained harness gag in one hand and The Easter Bunny’s blood drenched corpse in the other, before Crowley’s phone call to The Easter Bunny’s impersonalised and unused cell phone broke the silence of the room’s post suicide malaise.

With an undercurrent of fear in her voice she had asked for Jason, presumably The Easter Bunny’s real name. Without replying, I cancelled the call, planned ahead and left for the hotel…

Pushing open the fragile glass double doors that led into the foyer, I stepped through and saw Crowley doing her best to appear invisible; slumped forward with her head staring at the floor and her shoulders hunched up at her neck… My hands were still covered in The Easter Bunny’s blood, without saying a word I dragged my fingers and palm across the scratched wooden desk in front of her, leaving a dark red trail behind me before continuing up the flight of stairs at the far end of the room.  

The same thick, ash-yellow, viscous fluid that clung to the walls of the foyer also stained the walls of the staircase as if Crowley had smoked hundreds of cigarettes on each respective step on the way up to the next floor of the hotel. The steps themselves were rather narrow, forcing me to hold on to the banister which itself was coated in a thin film of tar and dust, I sneered with each grip I made for leverage until I entered the corridor of the next floor.

Crowley’s previous excuse of not wanting the bugs in room 28 disturbed probably hadn’t been a lie judging by the overall state of the hotel but there was something else in room 28, something that Crowley didn’t want discovered… the door to room 28 was ajar, a feeble sliver of yellow light filled the crack of space between the door and its frame. I took a breath, stepped back and bolted through the door.

I scanned the room, finding what I knew I would, but was instantly distracted by the state of the room. Crowley hadn’t lied, at least not about what Charlotte had endured. The pools of dried blood on the bed and floor, the lashes of it on the walls and ceiling… the aftermath of Charlotte’s torture was present and accounted for. I stepped backwards, taking in the room in its entirety while recalling Crowley’s reiteration of the events that had occurred two weeks ago in the same room. The scene played out in front of me; the ravaging of Charlotte’s mouth at the hands of the M.D’s scalpel, the lacerations dealt to her skin by the razor wire, the acid used to cauterize her wounds… and the meat hooks… I had learnt nothing new by viewing the room but now, The Easter Bunny’s actions felt lateral and sane, knowing that Charlotte had endured far worse than what had befallen her in this room for over a period of two weeks…  I couldn’t help but wonder if The Easter Bunny had tortured Charlotte out of a misplaced sense of proving his love to her by giving her what she wanted, the pain that she apparently loved so dearly, or if he had killed her to end her pain at the hands of the M.D… perhaps a pain she could have endured but a pain that he never could. A whispering breath caught my attention…

The old man, the one who had arrived at the hotel with the M.D and The Easter Bunny two weeks ago. Crowley had mentioned the M.D and The Easter Bunny escorting a barely conscious Charlotte Chambers out of the hotel the morning after the night before, dressed in only a leather coat, her arms hanging over the shoulders of the two men as they walked her through the foyer, out of the door and into the distance… she had said nothing of the old man… nor had she mentioned him during her reiteration of Charlotte’s torture, presumably, like Crowley, the old man liked to watch…

The old man whispered again from his chair at the far end of the room, his limbs limp, his head hanging to the side over his left shoulder and his lank white hair covering most of his face. With a few tentative steps I approached the old man and took his jaw between my fingers with one hand and brushed his hair out of his face with my other, dying his hair a dark red with the blood still lathered on my hands. The old man’s skin was weathered and grey, sagging and wrinkled; his eyes were a pair of milky white slits… any other discernable features were lost to his aged skin. He was incredibly, almost impossibly old.  

“Who are you? Do you know what happened here?” I asked, keeping my voice as soft as I could.

The old man whispered again and smiled a sickly smile. I gripped his jaw tighter.

“Don’t screw with me! I don’t have the patience for you! Now speak up!”

The old man’s head fell limp in my hand; his whispering breath turned to a hiss and then eventually fell silent and motionless. I let go of his jaw, letting his head loll backwards on his shoulders as I grabbed the collar of his moth-bitten jacket and jerked him forward, his head still facing the ceiling.

“What do you know about White Water? What do you know about me?” the only questions I had ever cared to ask to begin with.

The old man remained motionless. Still holding on to his jacket collar, I turned my attention to his clothing, scanning his body for anything that could give me a lead into Charlotte’s background or anything that could lead me to the M.D… The old man’s body twitched, I glanced back at him and was met with the thunderous internal thud of bone on bone as he head-butted me with such a force that it caused me to arch my back and clasp my bloodied hands over my face. As I held my head to quell the agony of the blow I felt a distant and painful tremor echo through my legs and I suddenly I found myself falling my entire length and landed temple first on the threadbare carpeted floor, the world around me pulled into the distance leaving my immediate surroundings a mystery as I instinctually rolled into the middle of the room.

I rested on my knees and elbows, clutching my head tightly in my hands until a thick and hurtling force impacted my ribs and sent my body careening through the air towards the bed at the far side of the room, onto its mattress and bouncing into the wall that it stood beside. I gasped for breaths that I could barely find and tried to roll off of the bed but the old man was already straddling my body with his hands around my throat.

I struggled against his impossible grip with numb and flailing extremities as the darkness around me dissipated and granted me a moment of clarity. As I struggled, the old man’s features began to warp, his hair was already now a light blonde, his wrinkles had all but disappeared and his eyes were a glistening icy blue. His skin no longer sagged, instead, it appeared smooth and radiant and glowed under the artificial light of the room; he was growing younger before my eyes… and stronger.

Out of desperation and fear, as he continued to choke the air from me, I jerked and bucked my body under him and eventually sent him crumbling into the foetal position with a well-placed knee to the groin. Seizing the opportunity, I threw my body to the side, bringing a strict elbow into his jaw which knocked him from the bed and on to the floor. Scurrying from the bed as fast as I could I took the kneeling regenerating man’s head in my hands and delivered a swift knee into his face which sent him stumbling backwards across the room and eventually to the floor near the far wall.

With thick and overly large feeling fingers, I fumbled at my belt, drew my 9mm and trained it on the regenerating man who sat seemingly miles away from me.

I could feel my eyes sliding around in their sockets on their own accord as I tried to focus on my target. My mind felt hazy and was rapidly losing any edge that it had left to the threat of a looming darkness just above my head. I wanted to close my eyes, I wanted to drop my weapon and melt into the floor; the pain in my head, neck and my ribs had melded together into an overpowering throbbing sensation and with each pulsating beat dragged me closer to the abyss waiting for me behind my eyes.

The regenerating man began to crawl to his feet; I held my gun tighter wondering if I had the strength to pull the trigger.

“Sssstay… w-where you are… did you not… think that I wouldn’t… be.. be prepared… for sssomething like thisss?” My tongue felt numb and to my own hearing sounded as if I was replacing most of my words with intelligible slurs.

The veil of fog was still heavy over my eyes as the regenerating man reached his feet. His face was a white blur with two black holes for eyes and a growing dark cloud in the middle that could only have been blood; perhaps I had broken his nose.

My arms felt stiff, and it became increasingly difficult to keep my weapon held out in front of me, let alone keep it trained on a target. The regenerating man took a step forward towards me.

I pulled the trigger of my 9mm as a shadow from out of the corner of my distorted vision brought something long and heavy down over my arms. The shot rang out but there were no screams of agony or anguish, other than my own due to the newly rising pain in my forearms.

The dark floor came to greet me as an external power from behind forced me down into a pool of Charlotte’s coagulated blood. My new position was so welcoming, the pressure from my limbs had been relieved leaving me with a faraway echo of pain that the comforting darkness would surely chase away… I closed my eyes as an array of chains and meat hooks were dropped beside me.