A Cult of Two
by Harrison Kim
Chapter 7: The Mysterious Voice
That night, I awakened at 3:00 a.m. The light under the ceiling shone right into my eyes. Jimmy could not sleep in the dark. I looked up from my pad on the floor, watched Jimmy above me, lying on his stomach. His hand flopped over the bed.
My heart jumped. I raised myself up on my elbows. Jimmy shifted in his sleep. I gazed up at the light. I felt a presence, something hovering within the space between myself and the glowing bulb.
I glanced over at the chest of drawers, with all the saints standing. St. Jude, St. Christopher, St. Lazarus and the Virgin Mary. A candle still flickered in front of her green jade eyes. Was my guardian angel in the room?
As I looked up, a deep and assertive voice came out of the light. Droning from far away, yet seeming ever so close, the sound felt right inside and outside of my ears. “This...” said the voice — it paused, then started again. Jimmy’s hand dangled beside me — “this is the devil.” Jimmy’s fingers flicked for an instant. I stared up. I heard the voice again, loud and clear out of the ceiling this time. “This,” the voice intoned, “is the devil’s hand.”
I’d heard and seen a lot of odd things lately, from the blinded man on the bus to the intimidating soldiers becoming friendly, to the perfumed papers. I looked at my fingers and mulled the situation over. Where was the intent and purpose of this sound directed? If this was my guardian angel, who was it talking about? Jimmy or me? I lay listening, held my arms up in the air, locked my fingers together and stared at my palms.
Jimmy’s hand moved. He turned over and began to snore. I heard the echoes of the voice, deep inside my head. I breathed in slowly, to slow my heart. After a time, I stood up, walked to the saints’ table and began thumbing through Jimmy’s Bible, the New Testament only.
I flipped through the first chapters and settled on St. John. His was a mellow story full of miracles and positive advice. If the voice sensed I read on the side of good, maybe it would leave me alone, or return with a lighter tone and wise advice. I heard nothing more that night, only the occasional cracking in the old hotel walls. I read until dawn.
In the morning, I asked Jimmy about the voice. “It was either talking about your hand or mine,” I said.
“My hand is pure,” Jimmy replied. He ran his fingers along the doorway of the room. “Could be the demon Aztec in the walls,” he concluded. “Or else the man with the sloping shoulders has penetrated even our innermost defences, and he’s talking through your dreams.”
I thought about the man with the sloping shoulders. “He’s the hotel manager,” I mused. “How could he be the nexus of total evil?” Yet he did possess very bushy eyebrows, and walked bent over, from a back injury, I imagined.
“Sin weighs him down,” explained Jimmy. “There’s nothing wrong with his spine.”
I waved at the salt-and-pepper haired manager as he talked to the maids in the courtyard. He nodded back. Apparently, this man planted poisonous substances in wall cracks all over the hotel. These substances emanated into renters’ bodies.
‘You notice that no one misses their hotel payments,” Jimmy told me. “If they do, they pay in other ways.”
I walked down to the office and asked “Sloping Shoulders” if everyone always paid their rent on time.
He laughed loudly. “That is an exceedingly amusing question!” he said. “And the worst part of my job. Damn people default constantly!”
“Wow!” I said. “What happens to them?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, do they go blind, or get really sick with parasites?”
“Hell no,” he said, “they move out and go rip off some other hotel.”
Copyright © 2021 by Harrison Kim
