October 25, 2008
It was a wet and tumultuous night. Desert-dwelling citizens abhorred such weather, more accustomed to endless sun filtering through toxic, smog-choked skies. The caretaker, possibly the only one welcoming the new norm, heard pounding on the back entrance. It was not a human fist but an angry, balled-up preternatural being seeking death and destruction. He swung the door open wide.
“Are you the Exterminator?”
“At this hour, who else would I be?” The stranger stepped out of the wind and rain, dragging a steamer trunk inside. “Christ Almighty, it’s wet out there!” He squeezed the caretaker’s hand; the grip felt vice-like, his palm calloused and hard. “First name’s Jesse, and last name’s Strongblood. And you are?”
“I’m the caretaker.”
“Of course you are.” He let go. “So you’ve got yourself a snake problem?”
“Problem?” More like an infestation.
“I’ll be the judge of that.” He glanced at his steamer trunk. “You want to help me with this?”
“Sure.” The caretaker took hold of the front handle while he gripped the back. They lifted it. The weight strained his arms and shoulders immediately. Mother, what was inside—a pair of corpses? Not wanting to look weak, he shuffled in silence from the garage to the service elevator. There, together, they dropped the load unceremoniously on the floor.
Inside the confines of the elevator heading to the sixth floor, they were suddenly accosted by an overwhelming stench. This time, he spoke up. “God in heaven, what is that smell?!”
“That, my friend, is a heady combination of mongoose piss and tomcat urine. The eau de cologne of my craft—it drives the snakes crazy.” The car came to a stop, and the doors opened. Sliding the elevator gate up, Greene quickly stepped out. Even in the hall, the fumes from the trunk were debilitating. Jesse grinned. “You gonna be alright?”
“Yeah, just give me a second.” Holding his breath, the caretaker reached back in to pick up his end. Together, they carried his belongings out and down the hall.
Except for slight differences in the furnishing, the suite they stood in could have been a mirrored reflection of his own. Eager to breathe again, he handed over the keys. “I’ll be floating around the Imperial somewhere,” he said hurriedly, heading for the door. “You need anything, shout.”
“There are a couple of things.”
Stopping in the hall, he turned slowly in his direction. “And what would that be?”
“Well, rope for starters.”
“There should be some in the maintenance room.”
“Has to be the soft kind.”
“What kind is that?”
“Hemp’s the best, but nylon will do.”
“Okay, well, have a look around. If there’s none there, I’ll order some.”
“Great.”
“And the other thing?”
“Other thing?”
“You said…couple.”
“Oh yeah, I need you to stay the hell away from the garden.”
“What? Why? Can’t I work around you?”
“No, you can’t!” Strongblood stepped forward, his large frame menacing, filling the doorway; his smile turned to snarls. “I’m setting up traps and shit, and I don’t need bozos like you coming in there and fucking things up!”
***
Staying away from the garden and any other part of the Imperial where the Exterminator toiled proved easy. Not wishing to stay idle, the caretaker focused on the ballroom—but not the whole task. That would have required a small army. The dance floor, however, was doable. On closer inspection, he saw the dance parquet had been waxed and polished perhaps days before the hotel shuttered.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
All those years since, hardly a step had crossed the sprung hardwood—not a cha-cha, samba, tango, or twist. Only a superficial cleaning was required before the fun stuff could begin. Skating with the burnisher across the floor and listening to Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4, he performed the pas de deux between man and machine. The work felt so transcendent and Zen-like that his terrors in the garden were almost forgotten. All was well until the third day, that is.
Sometime in the afternoon, during a period of near nirvana, an interloper’s voice pierced the dream. Powering down and removing his earbuds, he listened. Hearing nothing at first, he then noticed the sickly sound of laughter. Charging out of the ballroom into the lounge, ducking behind a pillar, he caught sight of something that would make his blood boil. There, in the elevator, stood the big man laughing with a strung-out whore who could have been in her mid-twenties but already looked closer to death. The joke was clearly on him. Seething, his employer’s words rang in his ears—absolutely no fucking visitors, motherfucker! He picked up a vase, wanting to hurl it, but Legrand’s words came again: “The Imperial is a treasure, a treasure; your job is to protect her.” Placing the porcelain back in its spot, he inhaled deeply, reflecting on his rage and its dark source. He also noticed the filth marring the antique. To make amends, he would come back with a bucket of warm water and a cloth to wipe away his sins.
That evening, after eating and finishing the day’s labor, he was calmer. What options did he really have? Lay down the law or get things done. Returning the garden to its former glory was paramount. He would swallow his bile, put up with the Exterminator’s shortcomings, and give him and whatever women he dragged in a wide berth.
As days became weeks, his tolerance dwindled. He began to view Jesse as his primary nemesis and the snakes as secondary. He even began monitoring his whereabouts. One night, sometime after midnight, he lay face down on the catwalk, peering through the skylights, tracking his lamplights. He wondered, “What kind of lunatic works alone in the dark? And what in God’s name was he doing down there?”
***
In its earliest form, central heating meant steam. An industrial boiler sat in the building’s bowels, along with coal deposits. Descendants of slaves worked nonstop, feeding the beast. This allowed guests in their rooms to luxuriate in warmth—a novelty for the Astors and Carnegies of the world. When steam was replaced by gas, the behemoth wasn’t gutted; it was just transformed. Waste replaced coal as fuel. No jobs were lost. The ebony-skinned men carried on, committing all to the incinerator.
In 1939, a year before the world was engulfed in flames, the Imperial closed. The ashes grew cold. Now, the embers glowed again, stoked by Jesse’s loathing for all legless, serpentine creatures. The caretaker learned this by tracking the foul tincture emanating from his soul. Down in the basement, through the open boiler-room doors, he witnessed the source of his woes in ecstatic labor.
Bare-chested, half-baked, half-mad, and dripping in sweat, the Exterminator moved at a furious pace. He stabbed a pitchfork into a mountain of snakes, stepped back, and tossed the tangled mass into the incinerator. The snakes sizzled and curled. He repeated this again and again until he was tired of being watched. Stopping, resting his fork on the concrete, he looked at the caretaker. “I told you to stay the hell away from here.”
“No,” the caretaker replied, moving toward the light. “You said to stay away from the garden.”
“Listen, asshole, the reason I dig this kind of work is that I’m a free agent—no one to answer to. Nothing’s worse than having a dipshit know-nothing checking up on me, breathing down my fucking neck.”
“Buddy, it’s been more than two weeks; I just want to know where you’re at.”
“You see all this shit?” He swept an arm toward the piles of death. “Where do you think I’m at? Snakes aren’t stupid like rats—you can’t just trap and poison them. Far from it; they’re more like women. They have to be charmed, seduced, lied to.” He took a couple of steps toward the caretaker. “If you had any talent in that area, you’d know what I’m talking about.”
The caretaker felt rage boiling again, but for the job’s sake, he pushed it down. “Dude, all I want is a straight answer. How much longer before you’re done? A day? Two? Another week? I’ve got things to do, a schedule to keep.”
“Tell you what, Paddy,” Jesse said, tossing the pitchfork aside. “You think you can do this shit faster than me? Then have at it; I’ll bill you for what I’ve done.” He wiped the sweat off his face and chest with his T-shirt before putting it back on. “The rest you can deal with yourself.”
“Shit, no! No, I need you to finish the job,” the caretaker said, calibrating his voice to sound less shrill. “I just need an idea…just a ballpark figure, so I can, you know, get on with my work. So…what’s it going to be, another week? Two?”
“Not sure.” He pulled an antiquated spliff from behind his ear. “There might be a whole brigade of those suckers, and if I bug out too early, they’ll just come back in force. Is that what you want?”
“No…No…I…”
As if to emphasize his point, a snake maneuvered out of a pile, darting for the door. Before it could flee more than a yard, Strongblood pounced, snatching it up.
“Cute, aren’t they?” He held the creature up to the caretaker’s face. “No matter how ugly we become, when we’re babies, everyone thinks we’re cute. Everyone wants to defend us, even little squirmers like this.”
He took out a Zippo and lit the flame.
“Mother Nature’s defense mechanism—it makes them that much harder to kill.”
With the diamond-shaped head trapped between his thumb and forefinger, he brought it to the flame.
“But you can’t let that stop you.”
As it smoked and writhed, the caretaker began to feel almost sorry for it.
“Is it necessary, you’re thinking, to be so cold-blooded, so heartless?”
The body went limp.
“My answer is yes, you have to exterminate them all, each and every one, old and young, father, mother…and child.”
What do you think of Jesse Strongblood, the Exterminator, after this chapter?
