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NOTE: These stories are
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Closing Circles
A "Vorare" Story
By
Ivan Ewert
Start at the beginning of the Vorare series

The motel had much to recommend it to a man in Gordon's situation. It was a single-story ranch with a neon sign that theoretically worked in the nighttime hours, and a more low-tech sign advertising a room rate of thirty-nine dollars per night. It lay precisely outside the city limits of Hermantown, which Gordon assumed placed it fully beyond the pale of anyone who might have honest reasons for seeking lodging - anyone other than himself, of course. After all, his reasons were honest, just inexplicable.

Wind chimes attached to the door handle announced his presence with a song designed more for attracting attention than for cheer. It took only a second for a heavyset woman with a massive twist of chestnut hair put her head around a door to call, "Be right there ..." The words trailed off as she saw Gordon's appearance, but she quickly put a false smile on her face.

The smile worried Gordon. He knew what he looked like - it had been his biggest concern. Even after using the sink in a roadside gas station to clean his face, the ragged state of his filthy clothes had guaranteed no warm welcome anywhere. Still, he held the cash in his hand, which he had hoped might make clear that he was serious about at least trying to rent the room.

"Okay," she said, coming back out, "what do you want?"

"I'd like a room for the night."

"You ready to pay for it?"

"Forty dollars, right?"

"Forty-six with tax." She looked at the wad of bills in his hand. "An' if you're paying cash I want it up front."

Gordon counted out four bills and, with a look of embarrassment, smoothed them with his hands on the counter in front of the woman. She didn't raise an eyebrow, simply took the money and began punching information into the desk computer. Gordon had expected some kind of questioning, and had even prepared a story in his mind to explain his appearance. The quiet of the lobby outside of the tap-tap-tapping of fingers on keys made him nervous, and he decided that the best defense was, after all, a good offense.

"I got left behind while camping," he said. "Well, not so much left behind as robbed by a couple new 'friends'. I woke up and they were gone. They took the car, my extra clothes ..."

"Took the tent down around your ears? Or maybe you were in a cabin, right? Either way you left your sleeping bag an' backpack behind, which explains why you don't got it now. And you were sleeping in your clothes, with your boots on." Gordon looked embarrassed as she easily dissected his lie. The right corner of the woman's mouth hitched up in a half-smile. "It's okay, Chief. You paid, and a crackhead wouldn't. I don't give a good goddamn why you're in this fix."

She looked at him more closely as the ancient printer ground out a receipt. "You do look like someone beat the hell outta you, though. You want a doctor?"

"No - no, thanks."

"Yeah, thought not."

"Thanks anyway."

"Sure. I'm a reg'lar Florence Nightingale." She tore the receipt from the printer and thrust it at him. "You either check out or pay for another night by ten tomorrow morning. I don't want you bringing any guests in after eight o'clock. There's a liquor store down the street an' a decent hot dog stand next door to it if you get hungry, or you can order delivery from the room. They don't always come out this way, though."

"Thanks," he said weakly. "Look, I'm, uh ... I'm sorry about the lie."

The look she gave him was a strange mix of scorn and surprise. "I said it's okay, so forget it. Not like you're the first guy come in with a story, Chief. You're in room nine."

"Thanks," he said again, and made his way into the parking lot.

"Your powers of persuasion are truly a thing to be admired, O my host." The voice of his wound was muffled but audible in the crisp afternoon, and Gordon was suddenly relieved to hear the familiar cadence and pattern of words that fell from this unnatural mouth. He was out of practice when it came to meeting people, and he fell quickly back into a sense of camaraderie with his strange ally.

"What the Hell was I thinking?" He laughed. "Can you tell if she's going to call the police?"

"No," came the simple answer, "Though I think she won't. This place smells of trouble and despair, age and decay and sweet silent secrets. I think that such a woman would turn elsewhere for help than the agents of law and order, and that only if she needed it."

"Yeah, she didn't have much of the shrinking violet about her, did she?" Gordon reached room nine and unlocked it, walking into a room covered in cheap, dark paneling. A double bed sat in one corner, covered in tan sheets and a deep brown comforter. The opposite wall was taken up by a large mirror that hung above a long desk. A television was set in a ceiling mount in the corner next to the mirror, also facing the bed. To his immediate left was a green-and-white bathroom which looked reasonably clean, if extremely small, and the smell of bleach almost overwhelmed him with his first steps into it.

"Ugh," he muttered, and then gave his reflection a wry smile. After months of living in the forest, caked in his own blood and going without sleep, running from cannibals and speaking to an open wound in his own arm, the fact that a tiny motel room could still evoke disgust struck him as a funny thing.

He stripped off his shirts and tossed them onto the bed, turning to the mirror for a fresh look at himself. He had remained long and lean after his imprisonment, the muscles of his abdomen, chest and shoulders looking like nothing so much as a cross. The crimson of the wound in his arm began to deepen as he watched it, and what had seemed supernatural but somehow understandable in the deep of the woods now appeared much more sinister in the cheap fluorescent lights of a cheap room.

The lips of the wound slid together, then apart. "Go to the door," it said, and Gordon obeyed. Again he felt the hot rush of blood to his arm, the wet sensation that he had known before turning the leaves of the forest into dollar bills.

"What's this about?"

"Hold me over the door. We shall draw a line in the sand, O my host, a line which will defend and protect our hearth and home from all who would do you harm."

He was dubious. "They'll be upset if we bleed on the carpet."

"Yours will not be the first," it said ominously. "Perhaps you have nothing to fear, and perhaps I am womanish in this desire to protect you; but regardless, you will give your blood to the threshold and the window, and will bleed out a line which the Ghouls dare not cross."

"I thought you said I didn't have to concern myself with them any more."

There was a thin hiss - a hiss which shook the bones of his entire forearm. "And if you listen to my good and kind and free advice, O my most sweet and gentle of hosts, you will not have to concern yourself. Yet if you close your ears and assume the world wishes you no more evil, well then! You and not I shall be responsible for all that comes hereafter."

"I don't ..." He had been about to say that he didn't like the sound of that, when his eyes caught the shower to his left. It had been nearly a year since he had known how it felt to be truly clean, had been since the day he awoke on the Farm. The sight and thought brought hot tears springing to his eyes, and he held his arm along the length of the door.

Gouts of hot blood erupted again from his arm, spurting a thick dark stain along the carpet and splattering the bottom of the door itself. With a deep sense of numbness he walked quickly to the window, trailing small drops as he walked, and smeared his forearm across the wood paneling of the walls below the glass. He remembered photos he had seen as a younger man, looking through books of famous crime scenes, and his stomach drew itself into a hard, tight knot below his ribs.

"Is that all?"

"Oh yes, my sweet and charming. Now we are well protected and as safe as we might be within the woods, or at your own mother's breast." The blood had ceased to run down his arm now, lapping in reverse once more against the edges of the wound.

"Can I get you in water?"

"I am yours to command, O my gentle host, and yours to do with as you see fit. Soak me in all the waters of the wondrous wide world, and I shall give you no complaint."

The sibilant voice of the wound was practically joyous now, a joy unreflected by its host, who stripped off boots, socks, pants and underwear before turning the hot water in the shower and simply standing on the tiled floor, soaking in the heat of the steam, the humid warmth that built swiftly in the room. When he put his hand under the water, it was hot enough to bring further tears to his eyes, but he stepped in nevertheless.

Gordon spent five minutes in the simple luxury of letting the hot water course over him, feeling the grit and dirt in his hair trickle down his back and along his flesh, flicking the water from his hands as it ran rust-brown and black from his skin. He scrubbed vigorously at every inch of his chest, took up a towel from the rack outside and soaked it in hot water, using its surface to rub fiercely against his back. As he washed his eyes fell only once upon the wound, and he saw that it had stretched its edges apart to let the water pool within the space below his flesh, saw the steam rising from the heat of the water in that pool, and felt so unnatural within his own skin that he kept his eyes closed tight for the remainder of his shower.

He had just finished the tops of his feet when the hot water began to give out, turning tepid and unpleasant against his back. With a small groan of protest he felt for the handle and turned it off, grabbing the second thin towel in both hands to run in circles over his hair, his neck, his chest.

When he emerged from the shower he looked to the door, and he froze as a sudden hysteria welled up inside of him. The inside of the door now held an image of a man, a shadow burned into the wood, featureless and unclad but still managing to convey a sense of terror and agony. Gordon thought back to the shadows on the walls of Hiroshima, the images he had seen as a schoolboy in student films and as an older man in documentaries.

"What is that?" He screamed, "What is it? Where is he? Who ..."

"I have told you, O my host. It is a wicked and dangerous world you re-enter, and through my wards have you escaped the harm the world wishes upon you. Did you not mark the fact that a truck sat in the parking lot, that a man heard you speak to me?"
 
"No," said Gordon quietly, "No, I didn't."

"Fear not," came the purring whisper, "for my eyes marked him, and our blood warded him away. Look on what becomes of those who would do you ill, O my gentle master, look upon them and rest yourself in comfort. None shall surprise or harm you. None shall ever lie to you. You shall never want for wealth so long as we both draw breath, and you shall never want for the power to be your own man and master, until the very end of days."

Gordon reached a hand out to the shadow imprinted on the door, and with a brush of his hand wiped some of the black soot from the wood. His fingers, which had moments ago been truly clean for the first time in months, now looked solid black against the dark walls of his room.

He knew he no longer needed sleep, and so he turned the thermostat up as high as it could go and lay on the bed, naked yet warm, considering the stain on his fingers until the light of dawn came slowly through his window. Then he reached for his clothes and began to dress, his fingers still sooty and his clothes stiff with filth. His thoughts were turned southward, back toward the lands of the Farm.

Story and image by Ivan Ewert, Copyright 2007