“But occasionally it is not so easy to find such an explanation, and for the following story I can find no explanation at all. It came out of the dark, and into the dark it has gone again.” ~The Room in The Tower, E. F. Benson
The homesteader had trouble getting his shoes pointed toward the door the next morning, and squandered several hours in desultory habit, which he attributed to seasonal allergies. To need so little sleep must have been love, or so this was the way a younger man might describe it. Liam tended to conflate fate with resignation, so could never say if he was choosing or being chosen when he followed moods he otherwise did not confidently name. He ambled around his easel and worktable, but was unable to muster the enthusiasm needed to scrape off his neglected palette.
Eventually he left the house.
The fresh set of eyes scrutinized the scene in the brothel window, while the corpulent colleague, as colorless as pages in the log book, pondered, “What does it mean?”
A change was recorded in the log: Monster removed body in 1136.
The second half of the declaration was at least true. The sofa was unoccupied in the mirror’s reflection, and nothing of the body was seen in the area.
David pulled up in a snit to pop an antacid in his mouth, plaining, “Does Howard mean a bear? God knows the place has no doors. It would be easy for a roaming carnivore to get into that building. Why call it a monster?”
Liam mumbled, “I don’t know what Howard is talking about, unless someone in a Hazmat suit turned up last night to remove the body.”
David was spooked. Rattling his mostly empty bottle of antacid tablets from the doorway, he recommended, “If I were you, I would start looking for another job before tumbleweed take over the lease.”
This advice was not discounted.
The new development was incomprehensible, as the relieving observer repeatedly searched the corners of 1136.
Ungodly silence persisted throughout that afternoon, and in his petulant boredom the on-duty observer grubbed in the crawlspace where Howard stored his cardboard mattress; a newsprint sketchpad was uncovered. There was little question to whom it belonged since a palindrome penciled on the tablet’s cover read, Draw, oh Howard.
Female nude studies occupied many pages, such as were never assigned in the art instructor’s class. Mannequins across the way conceivably supplied the poses, although each sketch was made at close quarters and from perspectives the brothel’s windows did not afford.
Liam could not connect the subject matter to his former student, since Howard showed no talent for anatomy. The dilettante tended to abandon his drawings prematurely, and embellished his opuscules with squiggly lines that indicated seals of approval. To the student’s mind, this was a finished work to which a limited attention span could add nothing more. And yet, these nudes contained none of the daydreamer’s signature flourishes. Moreover, ragged tears among the pages suggested the hasty removal of other drawings. The instructor could not imagine worse drawings being thrown away than those that were kept.
On reconsideration, the clumsy execution of the nude figures may have been a collection of blind contour drawings: as where the artist cannot visually inspect their effort-in-progress, so must proceed by continuous contact of drawing stick to paper in the manner of a mechanized plotter or Etch-A-Sketch.
Someone other than his friend conceivably seized the occasion of the drawing pad. Perhaps the unsighted new hire was making nightly sorties into the brothel to familiarize himself with the merchandise, and assembling, by touch, an inventory of mannequins and their locations.
One additional sketch was found at the end of the pad that did not depict a mannequin or anything recognizable: a dark chiaroscuro drawing composed of powdery layers of stick charcoal. The view described an atmosphere, with a quarter inch of white paper left unmolested at its center. This suggested a close, suffocating space, or a look through a narrow tunnel. But how could such confinement be drawn in so little light? The undertaking, regardless, demanded no less than an hour of meticulous shading.
Liam’s replacement was scheduled to arrive at five o’clock, and when he did not show, an emergency number taped to the broom closet door was called. The phone was heard to ring in the main office through the wall; no one, other than himself, was on premises to answer it.
The coffee pot was empty, but the observer was not inspired to brew additional fortification for his extended stay. Adhering to his few duties was not strenuous work, although he struggled to stay lucid as the sun failed, with one eye out for quarry and the other straying into the darkening corner where a fax machine sat.
The Koreans were down to using safety lights, yet Liam’s binocular lenses were awls in those places where illumination was weakest. He was certain he detected baneful shapes in the back of 1136, away from the window. When late sunlight rallied on the far side of the tower, an officious ray carved a ravine between the opposing buildings. It diffused in a way to descry the bottoms of two sets of mannequins’ feet staged on 1136’s bed. Their soles bobbed like boats tied to a dock. One pair of feet facing up straddled another facing down. Though this arrangement was consistent with the lewd masquerade, no animatronics were involved with these dummies.
The bed frame and posts lurched with a single decipherable contraction, but nothing in the act of copulation was natural. Yet the plastic extremities were being employed like titillating lures, in the way a crab might fasten stinging anemones to its claws as weapons. Lateral movement—against scrolls of the French headboard—betrayed its half-human form! The entity again rubbed the hollow torsos of mannequins together like a cricket’s hind legs. Their pinkish lampshade abdomens gave off faint phosphorescence just as the failing sun passed out of the window.
This signal was brief, like a combusting and then smoldering match head. A parasitic thought had been unleashed and empowered to make zombies of other witless bodies, including his…
Liam broke his paralysis and leaned forward in his chair, gasping. The binoculars lay on the low-pile carpet beneath the desk. They had not been pressed to his cheeks as he supposed, and could only wind up on the floor if they fell from his lap while he dozed.
The possibility of coffee was reconsidered.
Leaving the platform for the main office, the observer was less hesitant to explore. He scavenged for clues, but all the office desks were locked up, and none of the millefiori paperweights bore critical paperwork.
The window from this side of the tower possessed another view of the brothel: one never shared with observers. The back of the brothel was left unfinished by Korean laborers and presented only a staging area. Inanimate figures of a different kind were wrapped in sheets of bubble plastic and tucked in out-of-the-way corners. These ‘dummies’ did not fit the bordello’s narrative, and instead resembled an industrious spider’s bundled, set-aside meals. From the shapes of their encasements, many physiques appeared to be kneeling or on all fours, and their inclinations bespoke of harrowing deaths, chrysalises, and unsettling metamorphoses. The detective could not help but connect this entomological impression to his earlier daymare.
Why was this window not available for the hired observers to use since it included background on the Koreans’ clandestine to-doings? More to the mystery, Liam kept coming up short a window each time he counted off the location of this storage area. Its relation to 1136 could not be worked out precisely.
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