The Lure

A Short Story by Jeremy Gardner

For a hundred and eight years the Norman Hotel stood sentinel over the town of Barlow, like the gnomon at the center of an enormous, ominous sundial. Old-timers called it “The Bank” or “The Norm,” but to their children (most of them now in their forties and fifties) it had a number of more dismissive nicknames, “The Blight,” “The Thumb,” “The Tomb,” “The Eyesore,” and most derisively: “That Big Pile of Shit on Central.”

Their grandparents would have called it simply, “The Building.”

Not long after it went up, a biblical-scale citrus blight swept across the state, decimating the orange groves and laying waste to the very industry that had necessitated the hotel’s construction in the first place. Barlow slowly wilted in kind.

In those post-bust years, The Norm found its footing for a time as a bank, and then a mostly empty office building, before a bizarre stint as a bible college. Baptist. A massive antenna was erected on the roof to facilitate the broadcasting of fire and brimstone sermons. Eventually, mercifully, it was converted to low-income housing, but when the last of its residents died or were driven out in the eighties, The Norman sat empty for decades. A twelve-story concrete middle finger in the middle of town.

The stubborn erection on a corpse.

From the outside, it was a mausoleum. But on the inside, it was very much alive. Waiting. Stirring. Becoming something else.

The first time Patrick delivered there, the girl was on the sixth floor.

One large cheese pizza. Nothing else. No toppings, no bottle of pop. The precise minimum order required for delivery. He confirmed the address three times before he drove out there.

“This is in the Norman building? Is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Downtown on Central?”

“Yep.”

“In Barlow?”

“Listen bud, just take it to the tallest building you see when you walk outside. I’m on six.” She hung up. She sounded cute.

In the Peppy Pizza parking lot, he tucked the hot bag into the backseat and shot a look over the roof of his car. Even two miles away, in the dark, The Norman loomed over the town like a fairy tale tower. And on this night, halfway up the edifice, for the first time in his lifetime…

— “I’ll be damned.”

A single window glowed warm with orange light.

On the radio, a call-in show about ghostly encounters and bigfoot sightings warbled while the building pulled him through a maze of backroads and side streets toward it, until he couldn’t see the top floors anymore. Until the whole thing filled the windshield.

The old hotel exhaled when he opened the front door. The lobby was dark and cavernous. Mid-century sofas and ghost-sheeted armchairs slouched in the shadows like toadstools.

In the elevator, ancient cables squealed awake and winched the car up the throat of the building like the last of too many tequila shots. Pat fussed with his hair in the mirrored wall because she sounded cute. Sometimes he couldn’t stand himself.

He knocked on 606.

“Just a sec!”

When the door swung open, he knew he was in trouble. She was cute.

“Hi.” She smiled. An invisible fishhook pulled a dimple in her cheek. “Come on in, I just gotta find my wallet.”

He mumbled something but didn’t move. The room was a grenade in a wardrobe. Clothes in piles and heaps and draped on everything. Everywhere but on hangers or in the drawers.

“You can set the pizza on the dresser there.” She picked up a pair of pants. Turned out the pockets. “Sorry, it’s such a mess.”

“It’s okay. I don’t live here.”

She laughed at this. An endearing little snort. Put her hands on her hips. “Is that why you won’t come in? Because it’s messy?”

“No that’s not it at all.”

“Then can you just… have a seat here while I—

“It’s fine, really. Take your time.”

She gave up looking for her wallet entirely. Cocked her head and crossed her arms. “Why won’t you come in?”

“I’m fine right here.” It was becoming banter. A playful rat-a-tat routine between them.

“But I asked you to.”

“And I politely declined.”

“Isn’t the customer always right?”

“Rarely ever, actually.

“You think I’m gonna rob you or something?”

“No. Maybe not you…”

“What does that mean?”

“Well… Okay, long story short: We had this driver. Krystof. Polish guy. Found himself in a similar situation. Pretty lady. Very polite. Invites him in. He thinks nothing of it… Until her boyfriend comes out from behind the door and clocks him with a tire iron. Steals his money, takes his car. They had to sew his ear back on. Now we don’t go inside.”

She smiled, demure. “You think I’m pretty?” He stuttered. She made an exaggerated show of pushing the door open all the way against the inside wall. “Nobody here but me. I won’t bite.”

“You ever notice how the only things that say they won’t bite are things that do?”

At this she rolled her eyes and shook her head and suddenly the His Girl Friday shtick evaporated. She stomped straight to the bedside table and magically, immediately found her wallet. Pat did his best to rekindle their flirtation. “Ohh, wow! Look at that, you found it—” but she just paid him and took the pizza and slammed the door.

In the elevator back down, he told his stupid reflection he blew it, and by the time he woke the following morning he didn’t remember ever having met her at all.

The Norman had a way of making people forget.

That night, before it had erased her entirely, he dreamt of her; but her face was a blur and his brain replaced it with that of his ex-wife. After the lunch rush the next day he made an extra mushroom, extra cheese, and took it to her house. Their old house. She opened the door just wide enough to tell him he couldn’t drop by whenever he wanted. He said he was sorry for the five hundredth time. She said he should have thought of that before he did what he did with Cat Benatar, the cover band singer with the whiskers and the tail and the pointy ears.

He offered her the pizza, “I made your favorite.”

“I’m making a lasagna,” she said. And then, “Don’t come here anymore.”

He gave the pie to a crust-punk kid with a skinny cur sitting outside the gas station. On his way back out all the mushrooms were picked off and piled on the curb for the dog.

“What, no pepperoni dude?”

A few nights later he got an order, just before closing. One large cheese pizza. Nothing else. He said there must be some mistake when she gave him the address.

“That’s the old Norman hotel.”

“It sure is.”

“But there’s nobody at The Norman.”

“Well then I must be a ghost.” She sounded cute.

Outside he saw the light on in the tower across town for the first time again. On the radio someone said they found a bottomless pit in Oregon. They had lowered a mile-long cable with a recorder in a bucket on the end. They played a bunch of screeches and wails they claimed were the sounds of Hell. In the elevator he checked his breath in his cupped hand. Pizza, everything always smelled like pizza. She was a blonde that time. Showing more skin. In lieu of the lost wallet ruse she opted for blatant seduction. It backfired. Scared the shit out of him.

The Norman didn’t eat again that night.

Patrick parked at a roadside motel and sat in his car watching old videos from his fifteen minutes of fame. Clips of him doing stand-up. The beef jerky commercials that changed his life. He played The Jerky Devil. A redskinned demon with yellow eyes. Big horns and cloven hooves and a thick New Jersey accent. His catchphrase was “Quit jerkin me around!” It was a national ad campaign. Bought him the house his wife would take in the divorce. He didn’t watch the clip from a club in St. Louis titled, “Jerky Devil Guy Meltdown.”

He slept right there in his station wagon. Dreamed he was back on stage, bombing hard. The girl from The Norman was the only one laughing. From somewhere in the back, at one of those tiny cocktail tables with the tealights, she heckled him. “Quit jerkin me around!”

The next night she was on the third floor. Short red hair and glasses that time. A dog-eared book under her arm. The room was neat and warm and she was playing shy and lonely. He asked what she was doing there. She spun some yarn about her father buying the building and asking her to help him remodel it. She was an art student.

The elevator growled at him on the way down. Frustrated. Like a giant, empty stomach.

A week went by. He got a call for a large cheese. No toppings, no pop. She sounded cute though. He triplechecked the address. Saw the lure light in the sky across town for the first time, again, and then listened to a trucker on the radio talk about seeing a dogman running alongside his rig in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming. He was going sixty miles an hour, easy, the trucker said, and the dogman kept pace. Pat sat in his car to hear how the story ended. It wasn’t very satisfying. The dogman just disappeared into the prairie.

In the elevator he fixed his hair and wanted to punch his own pathetic face; and when the doors dinged open on twelve, someone was screaming.

“Help!”

His first instinct was to go back. Go down. Get out. He mashed the lobby button over and over. Such a coward. Then he heard her calling out again.

“Hello!”

Halfway down the hallway, a wedge of light spilled from an open doorway. Patrick hugged the opposite wall and crept toward the room.

“Is anybody there?!”

“I’m yes, I’m… hello? Are you okay?” He poked his head inside. The room was quiet. Tidy. He caught sight of himself in the mirror above the sink on the far wall and nearly laughed at how panicked he looked.

“Can you please help me? I’m—

“Where are you?”

“I’m in the bathroom, I…” The bathroom. The only blindspot. “Please just… I fell—”

“Okay let me call someone—”

“No, no, don’t! I’m so embarrassed.”

“Okay just, hang on.” He pushed the door open, flush to the wall. No one behind it. “I’m coming to help.”

When Pat finally crossed the threshold, the whole building shuddered. The lights flickered and hummed with excitement. He set the pizza on the dresser and made his way toward his reflection. Just outside the bathroom he stopped and covered his eyes with his hand.

“Are you decent? Should I… Hello?” Silence.

“Okay, I’m coming in.”

To the extent that it made any sense at all, it took him a moment to make sense of what he saw when he turned the corner into the little room. To his left, there was a shower. Right where it should be. Water running, steam filling the space. But there was no sound. He tore back the curtain and found the tub empty. There was no girl. And where the back wall should have been, all square tiles and grout, there was instead an impossible corridor. A void that stretched out in every direction. Black as deep space but for a lantern glow of light, like a firefly, a hundred yards away.

“Please, help me!” Her voice echoed up as if from a well and rushed him, urgent and forceful like a gust of wind. He stepped through the spray of the shower and into the darkness beyond it.

“I’m coming!” He tripped over something that scraped and scattered across the floor. He fished his phone out and fumbled the flashlight on.

Pizza boxes.

Kicked out like big breadcrumbs through a dark forest. He flipped one open with the toe of his shoe. Large cheese. No toppings.

“What is this?!”

“Are you coming or not?!” This time there was laughter.

He held his phone light out and squinted into the black and saw, with mounting horror, that the little glow in the distance was merely the tip of something else. Something huge and ancient and undulating. A lure at the end of a leviathan tongue.

She called out one last time, from all around him, “Quit jerkin me around!”

She didn’t sound so cute anymore.

Patrick flailed his little torchlight out to either side and above him, and the last thing he saw before the building swallowed him up were rows and rows of sharp, wet, recurved teeth.

They found his car in the parking lot the next day. They searched the Norman room by room, floor by floor, all the way to the roof. No sign of him anywhere.

On the radio show that night, someone called in with a story about a building that eats lonely people. She sounded cute.