Oh Dex, where are you? I thought as I rested my head against the window and watched the landscape slid past into a mess of twinkling lights. How could everything have changed so fast?
“Where are we going, by the way?” Ada asked, turning to face me, half of her hidden in the passing shadows.
Before we left Portland, I quickly found a hotel for us to stay at for a few nights. It seemed clean and safe (and, like all other hotels in the city, expensive), which is all I needed at a time like this, but even though I gave the cabbie an address, I had no idea where in New York it was.
“I don’t know,” I said.
I caught the cabbie eying me in the rearview mirror. “Uptown, Westside,” he said in his thick accent.
Normally I would have pretended to know where that was, just to save face, but I didn’t have it in me. Instead, Ada leaned forward in her seat and started talking the cabbie’s face off, seemingly delighted by our first “real” New Yorker. It should have annoyed me that she was acting like Dex’s life wasn’t at stake, but it didn’t. She was keeping me calm and sane, which in turn was keeping me focused.
The thing was, there was no game plan. Once off the plane, I had called Maximus but once again it went to voicemail. I had a few voicemails of my own but they were from my parents. I’d checked, just in case they were from Dex or Max, but the minute I heard my mother’s shrill voice, I erased it. I knew I had to deal with it, but I just couldn’t, not until I had a plan.
Now that I was in Manhattan, I was feeling rather stupid and unprepared. I had acted on impulse and impulse had brought me here with no plan at all and because of that, I had no idea whatsoever how we were going to find Dex.
On the plus side, I knew we were in the right place. Whether Dex was here or not, I knew we were where we were supposed to be. I could feel it, deep inside my bones, like there was some truth at the center of my marrow. Underneath the flashy lights and the slick streets and the throngs of people passing in the warm night, there was an undertone to the city that reeked of madness.
I’m sure it had nothing to do with New York itself. It was because I was here and so was something else. Something malicious and sinister, something black and oozing and hateful that clung to the legs of passerbys and on the side of the buildings and permeated the air. I couldn’t quite see it but I could sense it and whether it was a trick of the eye or the glare of the window, I could catch glimpses of this evil sticking in patches around me.
Ada didn’t seem to notice at all. She was all wrapped up in the glitz and glamor, as any girl her age should be. But it didn’t stay that way for long.
It turned out our hotel was located just off Broadway and a bit north of all the shows. If memory served me correctly, this was the neighbourhood that Jerry Seinfeld had lived in. The hotel was smaller and more posh than I had imagined, then again I was used to staying in motels with Dex, so what did I know?
After checking-in, Ada and I got into the empty elevator. The hotel was quiet at this time of night. Our room was on the ninth floor and though it wasn’t the speediest elevator, it started to slow down around floor five.
Then it slowly came to a stop on floor six.
Ada and I exchanged a glance. All the fine hairs at the back of my neck stood up and it wasn’t because I was afraid of an elevator malfunction.
Something was on the other side of the elevator doors. Something I didn’t want to see.
I swallowed hard and tried to calm my heart which started jumping about in my chest. My mouth was suddenly dry and I opened it, wanting to say something to Ada but not sure what to say. I wanted to warn her.
But about what?
The elevator doors groaned and slowly began to open, one two-inch crack at a time. At first I saw someone passing on the other side, a tall shadow, the white gleam of an all-seeing eye as it looked right at me, but as the doors opened wider, there was nothing there but the empty hallway.
A shiver rocked through me. This was only the beginning.
“That’s weird,” Ada said but her voice was nothing more than a ragged whisper.
“Yeah,” I agreed, knowing that nothing was just weird when it came to me. Weird was what you called abnormal things when you were normal. Weird you could write-off. We couldn’t write-off any of this. There was no such thing as strange occurrences – everything had a purpose. Everything was very real and very dangerous. There was no way any of this was going to be easy.
Thankfully, the elevator doors began to close and we were whisked up to our floor. Ada seemed to forget the “weird” incident the moment she saw our room. While it wasn’t very big – just a desk, a chair and two twin beds off of a tiny bathroom – it was very sleek and modern, the kind of pink and white scheme you’d see on any trendy show or in a magazine.