10. Graham Goes Through His Motions.
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The Fourth Floor
With the tip of his finger, Graham traced a streak through the grime coating the windows of The Winthrop’s top floor. Disgusted, he made a mental note to fire the young man in charge of this duty. But that anger disappeared the moment he saw her through the sliver of glass that he’d cleared.
She stood on the cobblestone street below. Her long, dark coat was lit by the flickering flames of gas streetlamps. She leaned against a lamp pole, as if waiting for the right time to pass between the carriages clattering down the avenue. At regular intervals she’d step onto the cobblestones, then seem to feign a cramp in her leg and turn back. She was trying, he reasoned, to lure new clients with her apparent helplessness, with that faint purse of red lips across her pale face.
Graham thought she looked like an angel.
He retrieved his vest from the closet, buttoned it up, and put on his long black cloak and black leather gloves. He grabbed his top hat off the nearby hook and, holding it before him, left the room. The sharp heels of his tanned leather shoes clacked and echoed down the wooden hallway. He paused at the iron gate that separated this, his private floor, from the stairwell that led to the living refuse below.
Outside the gate was young Isaac, alert in his chair. He inserted a key into the lock and pulled it open for the boss.
“Need a hand, sir?” Isaac asked.
“I won’t be long,” Graham said, descending the stairs. “You can retire for the evening.”
“Yes, sir,” Isaac said.
Graham walked down The Winthrop’s four dusty flights, at this late hour lit only by gas lamps. The wooden banister was chipped and scuffed, loosened from its bolts. He’d have Isaac fix that later.
When he had purchased this rickety structure years back, Graham had named it “The Winthrop” without any particular rationale. It wasn’t a family name, it wasn’t an homage to something from his past. It simply sounded illustrious and vaguely continental. Something to sucker in the city’s new entrants seeking “opportunity.”
And sucker the suckers it did. As he crossed the landings, Graham heard their dreadful symphony crescendo down the thin walls of the hallways. The bedframe creaks and fleshy, sweaty slaps. The night phlegm and drunken moans. The screams and shouts and open-mouthed slurps as the guests guzzled their slop.
Graham put these appalling sounds and ghastly smells out of his mind, choosing to instead preoccupy himself with thoughts of what he’d shortly do to the angel.
He reached the ground floor lobby and heard the grandfather clock, ticking time away in the sepulchral room. He walked to it, examined his reflection in the glass clockface, and used the aid of the candlelight to smooth his mustache hairs. He checked his watch, placed his top hat upon his head, and made his way into the chilled October night.
Outside was a vendor selling roses. He snatched one and paid with the flick of a coin. He then crossed between the horse-drawn carriages and approached the lovely young woman.
“Lovely night,” Graham said.
“Lovely,” the woman said softly, her breath making wisps in the cool air.
“Got a gift for you,” he said.
Graham extended the rose.
She took it in her small, spindly hand, inhaled deeply from its petals, fluttered her eyes.
“A gentleman,” she said. “And how might I repay you?”
Graham stepped to his side and with a flourish of his arm gestured to The Winthrop.
“That’ll do,” she said, and took his elbow.
They stepped between the carriages and into the hotel. Upon crossing the building’s threshold, he removed his top hat, and led her to the staircase.
“How far?” she managed.
“To the top,” he said.
“Of course,” she whispered.
Another minute and they’d reached the gated entry to the fourth floor. Graham retrieved a key from his pocket and unlocked the gate; they passed through, letting the gate shut and lock behind them.
“Can’t take too many chances in this flophouse,” he said, pocketing the key.
She ignored his comment, taking in the floor’s layout. The hallway had eight doors, four to a side, each with a flickering gas lamp casting stark shadows against the wallpaper. They looked like twin displays of miniature phantoms dancing to their own peculiar rhythms.
“Quite a lovely space, sir,” she said.
Her host remained quiet.
The woman started hesitantly down the hallway, noticing that mounted in the spaces between the doors were oil paintings nestled in ornate wooden frames. Each depicted a natural scene augmented by the progress of man. Forests felled to make way for a wide road, a rail line carved around a mountain rim, a dam strangling the passage of a river.
“Been to some of the lower floors before,” the woman said, “but never seen anything like these down there.”
“You wouldn’t,” Graham said. “This is my personal collection. I paint when the mood strikes me. I would rather tailor the decor to my own specificities then be left to the whims of others.”
“Smart, sir,” the woman said. “Well, where are we off to then?”
“That is up to the lady,” he said. “Which room do you prefer?”
She unshouldered her long coat and let it fall to her ankles, exposing a long skirt and a grey, frilly blouse. She crossed the hallway with a flirtatious skip and grabbed the nearest door handle. She turned back to Graham, who licked his lips in anticipation. She giggled as she withdrew her hand and continued on.
“I like this game,” she said, and let her nails run across the vinyl wallpaper, making a prickly sound in her wake. “Any room, eh?”
She skipped across the hall and reached for another door. She put an ear against it, then pulled away, shaking her head.
“Nah,” she said. “Tiger behind that one.”
She crossed the hall to the opposite door, twisted the handle, opened it, and jumped inside, disappearing from view.
He leaned against the wall and pictured the room she’d walked into.
It was his favorite, larger than the rest. It had a small rotunda in the ceiling’s center. Its walls were hung with his proudest works: the paintings he’d made of angelic forms, like hers. Brass lanterns were hung from iron hooks near the paintings so that these sprites appeared to be dancing playfully in the trembling light. Along one side was a row of windows, adorned with embroidered white curtains that rippled in the breeze.
With his eyes closed, Graham imagined tonight’s moon, clear and rising above the patch of trees along the river. He considered how its light would shine upon her fair skin. How her eyes would be illuminated in pale moonlight and lantern orange as the life behind them faded away.
Graham began to count. When he had reached ninety, he began to stroll to the door. At one hundred, he stepped inside.
She was standing at the window, looking out onto the young city.
“It’s quite lovely from up here, isn’t it,” he said.
But her attention had been fully appropriated by the view. She continued staring out the window.
As he approached, Graham watched her eyes in the glass reflection to see if they were tracking him. With her attention diverted, Graham reached into his billowing cloak and withdrew his knife.
Graham lowered the blade to his side to conceal it—but only clumsily, halfheartedly. It was always safer when they were taken by surprise. That shock in recognition, then their immediate resignation as the act commenced. But another part of him rather enjoyed it when they caught on early enough to steel themselves—to put up a fight.
He looked into the mirrored window; the woman now completely ignored him. She was oddly focused intently on some point in the night sky.
Graham watched her raise her hand and offer a gentle wave, but he couldn’t make out to where it was directed. He watched the wave slow down as her eyes shifted and locked onto Graham approaching behind her. And then onto his knife.
She turned as he lunged forward. The hunt was on.
Graham’s blade carved into the flesh of her side, piercing through and rending the curtain. But despite taking the blow, she’d spun away, and Graham’s momentum carried him forward, pressing him against the window.
The impact jammed his wrist, and he winced as he turned to face her. As he did, he sensed a flash of movement to his left—and felt the concussive impact crash down upon his skull.
Sometime later, Graham awoke with a huffing gasp. Tracing his teeth, he tasted blood.
The back of his head throbbed. He twisted into a lurching crawl before pulling himself, grimacing, into a seated position on the floor.
The room was empty. The quivering gas lamps provided only dim amber, but in that faint light he caught the glint of his knife where it rested on the floorboards. He crawled to collect his blade.
She just had to choose this room, Graham thought. While it was his favorite in decor, The Knife had its own challenges.
The Noose and The Broadsword gave enough distance from his prey, while The Revolver and The Crossbow turned marksmanship into a joyful exercise. But The Knife and The Poison were tied for the most difficult. And then, of course, the remaining two doors for freedom. The odds were fair, he felt. Sporting.
Graham seized the knife and slowly stood. He steadied himself against the doorframe, then crept into the hallway. He saw that the iron gate to his private floor was still locked.
“My lady?” he said.
He began to open the remaining doors, one by one.
“Just a misunderstanding is all,” he offered, before loudly admitting. “Forget that line. I don’t disrespect you enough to imagine you’d believe that.”
He opened The Revolver and saw her right away.
This room had a flat ceiling, a small bed in the corner, a row of windows facing the brick wall of the building next door. In the corner was an easel, placed here so that he might capitalize on his regular fits of inspiration. The painting it held was now covered in a white cloth.
And beneath it, there were the young woman’s legs, quaking in fear. He walked to it.
“This doesn’t need to be all that difficult, my love—” Graham said.
His words, however, were interrupted by a loud boom. A smoking hole appeared on the canvas.
It was all so very confusing to Graham. He heard the pitter-patter of her dainty footsteps running behind him—how? Stranger still was the smoke he smelled, in the air and yet somehow also coming from inside his body. But the oddest thing of all was this new feeling in his chest, as if it was collapsing inward.
He sat down to consider all this for a moment. As he did, his eyes turned back to his easel. The white sheet had blown away, revealing his work.
It was a piece he’d been tinkering with for months—a lonely lighthouse at the end of a cove, a wall of cresting waves approaching behind. The bullet had gone right through the largest wave.
Graham put a hand to his chest and pulled it back to examine his palm, now slick with blood.
He heard the screams of the woman echo down the hallway, then the clattering of the iron gate as she threw herself against it over and over again. But that was no longer any of his concern. Graham was transfixed by the painting.
The tableau of the lighthouse had come in a dream, but his rendition was not yet complete. Something was amiss. It lacked some essential element, leaving his vision as-yet unrealized.
He lay on his back, now more tired than ever, drowsing off to the shouts of the woman, crying for someone to unlock this gate. To let her through. To let her back outside, to her preordained place under the street lamps. And then her wails died down as another voice came from the other side of the bars.
Isaac, his young study. A key rattled in the lock, and he told her she had nothing to worry about.
Graham sat back up, newly energized, and gripped his blade again.
As he waited for his assistant and his prey to enter, he took the time to consider again what his painting was missing.
Artwork by Tiffany Silver Braun.
If you like Tales from the Palmer Hotel, tell a friend. If you really like it, the suggested donation for the series is a one-time payment of $6.66. Venmo (@Rick-Paulas) or Paypal (rickpaulas@gmail.com).