An Unwanted Guest(23)
He feels so restless. He leans forward and practically presses his nose against the cool glass of the window. He sees that a massive branch has broken off the enormous old tree on the front lawn and lies shattered in pieces, dark wood against sparkling white. He feels his wife come up behind him. Hears her say, ‘You aren’t thinking of going out in that.’
He hadn’t been, but now she’s decided it. ‘Yes.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she says, as if scolding one of the kids for some hare-brained idea.
He moves over to the coat stand near the door where most of them had left their coats the night before, their boots below them on the mat. He finds and pulls on his winter jacket, bends over and slips off his running shoes, and pulls on the winter boots that he arrived in.
‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’ Ian says, but without the overlay of hysteria and the need for control Henry detects so frequently in his wife’s voice.
‘I won’t go far,’ he tells Ian, pulling on his hat. ‘I just want to get some fresh air.’
‘Make sure you stay away from any power lines,’ Ian advises him.
They’re all standing watching him, as if he’s some kind of canary, testing the conditions.
Henry turns around and opens the front door. He feels the cold air hit his face, and everyone’s eyes on his back. He steps out onto the porch and pulls the door closed behind him. It’s now that he notices the wind – how wild and loud it is. From inside the hotel it sounds like a constant, dull roar with the occasional shriek, something far away, but out here it’s alive, it’s a monster, and it’s much closer. He looks towards the forest at the edge of the lawn and sees how the wind is whipping the tops of the trees back and forth. And the noise – it’s like a keening. Worst of all is the creaking, sawing sound as the wind brings its force to bear on the ice-laden branches of the tree in front of him. He closes his eyes for a moment and listens; he imagines that this is what an old wooden sailing ship might have sounded like at sea, in a storm. Then he opens his eyes and lifts them up to the tree, wondering if any more branches are about to come down.
He’s been still now for some moments and he knows they’re all watching. He grabs the porch handrail and looks down. There’s a thick coating of ice on the wooden stairs and he steps carefully, holding on firmly to the rail. It’s very slippery, but he makes it to the bottom of the three steps without incident and stands there. He’s beginning to wonder what he’s doing out here. He starts walking – not walking, walking is impossible – but sliding his feet along the ice, trying to keep his centre of balance low. It’s like walking after Teddy on the ice rink at hockey when he was little, just after the rink was flooded, only the rink was flat, and this ice slopes all over the place.
Without warning, Henry’s feet go right out from under him in spectacular fashion and he lands heavily on his back, winded, not twenty feet from the front porch. He lies there trying to get his breath back, wheezing loudly, looking up at the clouds, feeling like a fool. He hears the front door open behind him. That will be his wife, telling him to come back in.
But before she can say anything there’s a frightful cracking sound overhead. He turns his head towards the tree. His heart jumps in his chest as he realizes what’s going to happen. He closes his eyes as part of a branch comes down and lands with a shudder no more than a few feet away. He slowly reopens his eyes.
That branch could have killed him.
Unable to get back up on his feet, Henry crawls and slides on all fours back to the front porch and then hauls himself to standing at the front steps using the handrail.
The front door is wide open, and everyone is looking at him, alarmed. They practically pull him back inside the hotel.
Once he’s regained his composure, his wife says, ‘If you want something to do, you can go and help Bradley try to clear the walk out to the icehouse.’ He looks back at her in annoyance and she adds, ‘He told me there aren’t any trees there. It should be relatively safe.’
Candice feels rather sorry for Henry, who is clearly frustrated at being trapped here. Most of them seem to feel that way. Either longing to get out, like Henry, or hanging listlessly about, like Ian and Lauren.
She’s got plenty to do – as long as her battery holds up – and plenty here to interest her. She wanders over to Dana’s body to have another look. She can feel the others’ eyes on her, disapproving, as she lifts the sheet. This time she looks more carefully at the head injury, and then at the blood on the stair, and her heart beats a little faster at what she sees. Then she wanders back to the fireplace and stands in front of it for a moment, lost in thought, warming her hands. She really can’t afford to let herself be distracted by this. But she suspects that someone murdered that poor girl.
Lauren startles her out of her thoughts by asking, ‘What kind of book are you working on?’
Candice smiles a little evasively. ‘Oh – I don’t like to talk about it. I never talk about what I’m working on until it’s finished,’ she says apologetically. ‘I find it just sucks all the energy out of the project.’
‘Oh,’ Lauren says. ‘I thought writers always liked to talk about what they were working on.’
‘Not me,’ Candice replies.
Gradually the guests begin to leave the lobby, scattering in different directions, subdued by the tragedy that has occurred in their midst. Bradley had brought a couple of oil lamps and some matches and left them on the coffee table, but most of them opt to use the torch app on their iPhones to help them find their way up the dark staircase and around the unlit corridors upstairs. It’s unnervingly dark once you leave the ground floor, where the windows across the front of the hotel let in daylight.