Thursday morning found Ben at Savins Real Estate looking for a new place after a night of strange events at the Motel.
When he'd arrived back at the Motel the previous afternoon, Ben had felt an emotion bordering on terror, upon seeing Allan and Cecile already there, sitting calmly outside their room, passing the time of day. He glanced around nervously and felt a nasty surge of fright; the car they'd left in, and followed him in, was still gone. Ben felt a strange sort of dreaminess drift over him. Or more sort of a nightmarishness. Had he made a mistake and followed someone else entirely? But no, he was positive it had been Allan and Cecile in the car when it overtook him. They had looked right at him.
Ben almost dropped his room keys in his haste to jam them into the door. He made himself slow down and take a deep breath. He slid the key into the lock, turned it and walked inside, easing the door closed behind him. A shaky sigh escaped him and he scuttled across the room to sit on a chair on the far side. Any second now, he was sure, they were going to start banging on the door and demanding to be let in.
But they didn't knock and Ben eventually settled down to do some work. The web-site was coming along far too slowly and if he didn't light a fire under his arse and get it finished they'd go to someone who could. No one had contacted him about it yet, but he knew it was only a matter of time. If he didn't start producing something, and quick, he'd be getting all sorts of angry calls from his boss, demanding to know what was happening.
Making himself a cup of coffee, Ben settled down in front of his laptop and started work. After a few minutes of working he quickly became submerged and time rushed by with that queer sort of timelessness that computers everywhere ensnare their users with. Ben had referred to it with colleagues as like being drunk. One second you're sitting down to fix up an image on the site, the next it's four hours later and you're pashing some feral in the corner of the dancefloor.
When Ben finally looked up from that day's work it was almost seven o'clock, two and a half hours later. He yawned and stretched back in the chair and looked at his work. He'd done enough for now, he judged. The site still lacked any images, they were already done and only had to be placed on the page, but all the pages were set-up. All the text was in place and now all he had to do was work on the colours and he'd be done.
Either way, it was enough work for now and Ben set his mind to deciding what to have for tea. He unfolded up out of the kitchen chair, grabbed the keys and walked out the door... and stopped short.
His neighbours were still sitting there in deck chairs outside his room. Waiting for him, he thought. But he realised the idiocy of that as soon as he thought it. As if they'd have sat there all afternoon waiting to see him. He locked his door and hurried across the parking lot without another glance at them.
Ben took his time getting something to eat. He bought fish and chips at Londy's, waiting at one of the tables while they cooked his order. Rather than go home and find his neighbours still sitting there in the dark, watching him with bright, shiny eyes, he decided to stay and eat in the shop. He picked through the meal, eating it a chip at a time, taking longer than seemed humanly possible to eat a piece of battered sea creature and some sliced up, deep-fried tubers.
When Ben did eventually return to the motel his neighbours had disappeared. Chairs and all. Ben stopped in the middle of the parking lot and glanced around, unable to believe they had actually gone, sure they must have moved to a better vantage point. But gone they were, so Ben hurried to his room before they reappeared. As he slid the key into the lock and walked in Ben had a sudden, horrid feeling that they were in his room sitting at the table and waiting for him to return. The room, of course, was empty.
After eating tea and watching a movie on Channel Ten, LA Confidential, Ben shuffled off to bed and fell immediately into a deep, dark sleep. Approximately five hours later he was awoken by the sound of someone hammering on the door of the room.
Ben jumped out of bed with his heart about to explode from his chest, thinking there must be a fire or something. Dressed only in his blue Tigger boxer shorts (Built Tigger Tough) and with the bandages from his run-in with Neil and friends glowing bright around his chest, he threw open the door to the quiet stillness of two o'clock in the morning.
There was nobody there.
The cold air rushed in against his body and he broke out in goose bumps. There was no one in the parking lot, no one outside any of the other rooms. And there were definitely no flames leaping from the roof or the wail of sirens in the distance.
Ben stepped out onto the patio and looked around at the other rooms. A few still had lights on, but most were dark, he could hear a TV going somewhere and in another room, people were having sex, their moans echoing across the parking lot. But apart from that, there was nothing.
Back in his room, sitting on the edge of the bed and too wired to go back to sleep Ben wondered if it had been a dream. He knew from terrifying experience that sometimes he had very vivid dreams. They'd gone on for ages after Kim's death and, for a while, Ben had been afraid they wouldn't stop.
His sister Kim had died when Ben was thirteen and he'd laid a lot of the blame for it at his own feet. Unfortunately, so had his parents.
Out the back of the shed at their old house had been a busted refrigerator. One that had worn out and they hadn't gotten around to taking out to the tip yet. It had been there so long it was a part of their yard, leaning drunkenly with grass growing up around it like some ancient monument built of aluminium and rubber rather than stone.
Ben and Kim had been playing hide and seek one afternoon and Kim went off to hide while Ben dutifully counted to one hundred. At first, he'd been thinking what a great hiding place she must have found, because he couldn't find her anywhere. He looked everywhere around their yard and when he still couldn't find her, he started yelling for her to come out, olly-olly, oxen-free. When she still failed to appear, Ben had gotten scared and run to tell their mum, who also joined in on the search.
"This is your mother, Kim," she'd called sternly. "You'd better come out right now. This isn't funny anymore."
When their father arrived home from work he, too, was roped into the increasingly desperate search.
Walking past the old fridge for what must have been the sixth time, Ben had finally noticed the closed door. Ah-hah, he'd thought. He yanked the door of the fridge open, a triumphant cry of "Found ya!" on his lips.
It died there.
Kim sat amid the sterile and musty smell of the old fridge, arms wrapped around her drawn up knees and her brownish-blonde hair hanging down over her face. Ben knew instantly something was wrong. He reached in anyway, thinking she'd fallen asleep and meaning to shake her awake, tell her he'd found her.
He pushed her shoulder and she slumped sideways, her head tilting back. Her face was white and blue like polar ice and her body was all cold as if she'd been frozen. His parents were walking up behind him as Ben was backing away with his fists pressed against his mouth. His mother's hands closed tightly on his shoulders and he screamed. And she screamed.
Ben's dad pushed past them and grabbed Kim out of the fridge. He lay her on the ground and listened for her breath while his mother stood, locked onto Ben's shoulders and muttering over and over, "Oh Ben, how could you let this happen? How could you...?"
Ben awoke with a startled scream and sat up in bed. For a moment he couldn't remember where he was. Then the blandness of the motel room reasserted itself about him and he relaxed a little.
Despite his nerves, he'd drifted back off to sleep, dreaming about Kim again. Always the same dream, finding her body in the cold, dark fridge, his first thought that she'd been frozen, even though there was no power. Then her purple eye-lids would shoot up and she'd reach for him and Ben would wake-up.
He let out a shuddery sigh and lay back down, staring at the ceiling, convinced that was the last he'd see of sleep tonight.
The last thing he remembered before drifting into an uneven sleep was looking
at the clock and seeing it was only half-past two.
No sooner had he returned to the land of nod than Ben slipped into another dream. Blurred clips of dreams where bright lights flashed across his body like passing car headlights and vague, human shapes cavorted about his bed and poked at his restless body. He dreamt that he went outside and saw a strange man standing there in the dark watching him, he wore a brand new Akubra hat and a Driza-bone coat that was stiff with newness. As Ben went to say hello, a light flashed from behind the man, throwing his shadow onto Ben. Outside of himself, Ben saw his body explode upon contact with the shadow, leaving nothing of him save for a human-shaped burn on the door of his motel room.
It seemed, Ben thought groggily when he awoke, it had been his night for dreaming. First the banging on his door, he was convinced now he must have dreamed it, followed by his sister and finally that strange shit with him exploding.
The last straw had come this morning though, when Ben headed out on his morning walk, only to find his neighbours still sitting there outside their room.
"What?" Ben snapped at them. "Is there something I can do for you? Something you need? Or are you just that fascinated by me?"
No response. Just those shining sunglasses, as soulless and unmoved as the windscreen of a fighter jet.
"What the hell do you want?" he said. "Hasbla englais? Fucking morons," he muttered and stormed off.
His walk ended up taking him to the Real Estate Agents. Ben stopped in front of the window and looked up at it, a little surprised to find himself there.
Sheree, the receptionist wasn't in today. There was another, far less attractive girl doing her job and Ben chuckled at his disappointment. Here he was trying to get back together with Kath and he was getting upset because he wouldn't get to see some other girl. Not that he had any chance of getting Kath back anyway. If there was one thing he knew about abused women it was that they'd stick with their husband for years.
The girl, Geraldine, her name was, had a mannish figure and a big shock of unruly red hair parked above a pair of glasses that could have made windows for a two storey house. In response to Ben's request she gave him a rental list that was over a page long and ninety percent of them were houses. Casino didn't have many blocks of flats, two as far as Ben could remember. And none of the houses available were outside of town.
Ben could live with that. After his first abortive attempt to find a house he had decided living on a place with any substantial acreage was too much work. He didn't move back here to be a damn farmer. Not yet, anyway. Besides, he wanted to get a place quick, preferably somewhere he could move into straight away. After last night he wanted to be out of the motel as soon as possible.
A quick drive-by of all the suitable houses didn't make much difference. Out of a possible twenty rentals he still came up with eighteen. And of the two he'd rejected only one actually had anything wrong with it, it was falling down and due to be condemned, and the other he'd decided against because it was painted an unnecessarily pink colour. So he went back again and struck off the list any that didn't immediately appeal to him. Off went houses without verandas, off went brick houses, off went houses without enough windows. This was more successful and left him with five properties.
With the keys to all five houses securely in hand Ben went back out again. This part was easy. He went and looked at the nicest house first, a sprawling timber hulk on Richmond Road that sat right at the top of the river bank. It was no contest as far as Ben was concerned. The owner approved his application straight away and Ben had paid the bond and moved in by that afternoon.
And good riddance to his creepy looking friends at Settlers.
CHAPTER NINETEEN