Hotel Minnesota

Minnesotans have a special relationship with the seasons–especially with winter. Being in tune with the seasons is a survival skill, there.

But Cara ignored the biting below-zero windchill and the blizzard warnings as she packed her car. It’s Minnesota in winter, Cara reasoned. There’s always snow. And she really didn’t want to wait until tomorrow to drive to her cousin’s wedding.

She knew her scratchy throat and tight head presaged a cold, and she would rather travel tonight before the sneezing and the stuffiness set in. She could leave after work, get there late, and be able to sleep in and relax in the morning before the big event.

So even though both her mom and her little Jetta protested–diesel engines do not like the cold–she headed out, watching the sun sink to her left in an increasingly steely sky as she traveled north up I-35.

Four hours to Grand Marais. Five, if she stopped for a late supper in Duluth.

But as she descended into the Duluth harbor, the air was already swirling with snowflakes. She decided to skip supper. She was already halfway to her destination and making good time as she left the interstate behind and drove north up Highway 61 along the Lake Superior shore.

She could always slow down if the snow got heavier: better to arrive late than not at all.

She was somewhere past Castle Danger when the wind picked up, buffeting the compact car and tossing snow around like a child shaking a souvenir snow globe.

The road in front of her flickered in and out of existence between gusts coming off the lake. To her right, past the thin guardrail, the shoulder dropped into the nothingness of Lake Superior. Cara gripped the steering wheel, knuckles the color of the snow outside, and forced herself to breathe slowly as she drove. 

She had only another hour to go. It was an hour too far.

Better to arrive tomorrow than not at all. She had to stop for the night.

Ahead in the distance, she saw a sign advertising lodging, and her decision was made.

A few white-knuckled miles later, her faithful little Jetta navigated the ice-covered exit and she pulled up in front of the Wendy-Go Lodge.

The man who stood in the doorway, staring out past the wooden sign emblazoned with the hotel’s name, was a true Minnesotan, a burly blue-eyed descendant of Vikings. He held the door with one hand and a Coleman lamp with the other as he ushered Cara inside.

“Thank heaven you made it!” he said as the door sealed out the wailing wind behind them. “What the hell are you doing out on a night like this anyway?”

“I was thinking the same thing myself,” she muttered. “Do you have any vacancy?”

“We did. Now we don’t. You just took the last room.”

Odd, for a small resort to be full this time of year. This was definitely not peak tourist season. “Is there a hockey tournament in town or something?”

“No. Come over here; I’ll get you checked in.”

The registration desk was lit with two more Colemans, and it opened up into a great room that could only be described as kitschy northwoods chic. Timber beams crossed the open ceiling, and a great chandelier fashioned from deer antlers, arranged in a six-pointed star, hung from the center beam. The light flickering from the six points barely penetrated up into the shadows. The pine-paneled walls were hung with deer antler sconces. Candles burned in the deer-antler sconces on the pine-paneled walls and the half-dozen round tables clustered in the room.

A number of blonde people worked on a late supper or an early nightcap at those tables. 

Well, Cara thought, it was Minnesota. She had her fair share of Scandinavian genes.

The far wall was dominated by a great stone fireplace, where the dancing flames cast wavering shadows against the walls.

“Power’s out with the storm,” the proprietor explained, gesturing vaguely to the lamps and candles. “We have a backup generator, so there’s heat. Don’t need any of our guests freezing to death, right? But we need to conserve power with the generator. Hope you don’t mind a little mood lighting, eh?”

Cara sneezed. Yep, she was definitely getting a cold, and this trip wasn’t helping. “As long as it’s a warm bed, it’s great,” she said.

The proprietor shoved a clipboard across the counter at her. “Just fill out the top part for now,” he said. “We can take care of everything else later. You need help bringing your things in?”

She hefted her overnight bag. “I’m good, thanks.”

He passed her a key. “Room 206, up the stairs to the left. Let me show you the way.” He hoisted his Coleman. “Once you’re settled, come on back down to the lounge and we’ll get you a drink. A night like tonight needs a brandy by the fireplace.”

Cara wasn’t much for hard spirits. “Got any pinot grigio?”

“I’m afraid not. Not since October, anyway. Not a lot of tourists this time of year, and the locals prefer something with a little more kick. Or beer. I’ve got both Pabst and Schlitz on ice.”
 
“Maybe I should just get some rest. I think I’m coming down with something.”

Several of the guests had noticed her presence and were giving her good-natured waves. “We won’t keep you up too late, I promise. I’m Bob,” the proprietor added, holding out his hand. “I run this place. Well, my wife and I ran it, until last spring. I’m just trying to do as good a job as she did. This way.”

The soft murmur of conversation followed them as they walked through the lounge. One of the guests touched Bob on the arm as they passed.

“Sorry to hear about Susan,” the guest said.

“Well, it’s for the best,” their host replied. “She went before she got too bad. We knew she was about to get a lot sicker, and she really didn’t want that.”

Several other guests murmured indistinct condolences, and Bob’s gaze flicked between his visitors in acknowledgement.

Once in her room, Cara splashed water on her face and considered her options. She really should go to bed. She could feel the stuffiness gathering in the back of her sinuses. On the other hand, everyone in the lodge was in the great room. It must be a family reunion, she thought. Not a lot of tourists this time of year. And Bob was so friendly. Well, it was his job, of course. But he seemed to genuinely enjoy that job. 

What the hell, Cara thought. She was starting to relax, coming down off the adrenaline surge that had gotten her here. One drink wouldn’t kill her and might actually help her sleep.

Ten minutes later she was nursing a Pabst, tracing patterns in the sweat off the bottle, and getting to know the locals. Or guests, she corrected herself. Obviously they wouldn’t be staying in the motel if they were local.

And they all knew Bob; they all went way back. Repeat visitors, of course, meant that the proprietor was doing something right.

Pictures of local natural attractions, in rough wood frames, adorned the walls. She recognized Split Rock Light House–you couldn’t call yourself Minnesotan if you didn’t know what that looked like–and Gooseberry Falls, from years of family trips. She stared at another picture of an odd forked river, knowing she had seen it somewhere before.

“You ever been?” the woman sitting across from her asked, following her gaze. “The Devil’s Kettle’s not all that far from here.”

“Ah.” Now she recognized it. The river split over a sharp precipice, half of it becoming a normal waterfall and half of it disappearing into a hole in the ground. “No, I never have.”

The man at the table behind hers leaned over. “You should see it sometime. It’s way more impressive in person. No one knows where the water goes.”

“Underground, obviously,” the woman retorted.

“Well, yeah…but after that. They’ve dropped dye and all sorts of objects and even GPS trackers down into there, and it’s all never seen again.”

“It comes out somewhere underground in Lake Superior, so they say.”

“That’s just speculation; they don’t really know. The bedrock around here isn’t the type to form underground waterways.” His voice dropped into conspiratorial tones. “Me, I think it must be magic of some sort.”

Cara almost laughed, but he was so earnest. She wasn’t entirely sure he was joking.

“I’ll have to put it on my bucket list,” she said softly.

Conversation flowed around her as she continued to peruse, and try to recognize, the pictures. Tettegouche Falls, the Duluth Lift Bridge, the rugged Superior shoreline. Bob joined her table just as her gaze came to rest on the last picture, the one next to the registration desk. 

This one was not a natural wonder or tourist attraction. Black-and-white and labeled 1969, this one showed a couple standing by an older version of the lodge sign with a vaguely mod vintage font. The man was handsome in a lumberjack sort of way. The woman was a rare beauty with long raven hair, high cheekbones that could cut flesh, and tip-tilted, feline eyes.

“The original Wendy,” Bob said, “and her husband, who was also a Bob. Sue and I stayed here on our honeymoon one of the first years the lodge was open. We came back over the years, talked about how much fun it would be to run a place like this. And then 3M was cutting jobs, and I was offered an early retirement, and Wendy and Bob wanted to sell…and here we are. We had to keep the name, of course. Wendy was the heart of this place. Hell, she still is.”

The other guests were nodding to themselves. Cara assumed they’d all heard a version of this story before. 

Bob stood up and abruptly disappeared into the office, then returned carrying a dusty unlabeled bottle and a tray of shot glasses. He passed the glasses around the tables, hoisted the bottle.

“Been waiting to crack into this,” he said, “and tonight’s the night!” He twisted the seal and made the rounds, pouring a draught into each glass.

“What is it?” Cara asked as he filled hers.

“Homemade,” he replied, winking.

She sniffed it, the fumes traveling from her nose and burning in the back of her throat before she’d even taken a sip. She held off on tasting it; this was some special sort of moonshine. Hell, she thought to herself, the moon wasn’t even shining tonight.

She shook her head. She must be tired; it would be time for bed soon.

Once everyone had a shot, Bob poured his own and then hoisted his glass.

“Sometimes we drink to forget. Tonight we drink to remember. To Wendy!” he saluted.

“To Wendy!” came the chorus, and a dozen glasses tipped back.

The liquor lit its way down Cara’s throat and she coughed as it worked its way from her stomach through her nerves, suffusing her limbs with heat.

“That’s got a kick,” she muttered.

Bob laughed and poured her another shot.

One by one, the candles on the tables guttered and died and the logs in the fireplace burned down to embers. One by one, the hotel guests slipped away as the room became darker. And one by one, Cara drank the shots that Bob poured for her.

At some point she laid her head on the table.

And at some point she lifted her head to realize she was the only occupant of the spinning, darkened room.

She stumbled toward the stairs at the back of the room. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed before that the stairs went down as well as up; most hotels didn’t have basements. She walked down the stairs, not questioning why this seemed like the most natural thing in the world. A tiny voice in her head–the voice that always let her know after-the-fact when she was making poor decisions–told her that she was very drunk, and she was not going to have a good morning, and this was not going to help her impending cold. She was drunk; and there was no helping that now. She ignored the voice.

The nondescript door at the bottom of the stairs opened into a nondescript hallway with another nondescript door that opened onto another set of stairs.

She kept going, some self-preservation instinct making her hold the railing tightly as she descended the stairs.

The candles set into the antler-shaped sconces became less frequent, casting little pools of light that did not quite touch. She stepped through the shadows, and each pool of light was like surfacing from water to catch her breath before diving into the darkness again.

She did not remember which realization came to her first, that the walls had turned from concrete to rough-hewn stone, or that she could hear, somewhere in the distance, the sound of running water.

The darkness closed around her as she kept going, cloaking her so completely she failed to notice when she was no longer in the passageway.

The flickering light ahead was a fire and she was in a cavern. Unlike the fire in the great room, which had boldly pushed the night away, this fire struggled to keep from being smothered by the darkness. The smoke it produced swirled around the figures surrounding it. Cara walked the well-worn path toward the humming voices and the whispering water, the echoing noises sounding both close and far away. On the far side of the fire, silvery flashes hinted at the presence of the underground river winding its way through the cave.

She didn’t wonder about the other people. She knew they were the other guests of the hotel though she could not recognize full faces in the smoky light. Firelight glanced off a nose, an eyebrow, a pair of lips. It didn’t matter; she knew them. They nodded greetings as she came up to the fire but otherwise neither questioned nor acknowledged her presence.

Bob stepped into the light, briefly doubling in Cara’s drunken vision before becoming one person again. 

“We are gathered,” he said, “for the feast. One of us made the choice to leave us, but a new guest has come. Be welcome, all of you.”

He stepped past the fire, and Cara heard a splash before he reappeared with a large silver cup. Chalice, said her drunken mind, goblet. She couldn’t giggle, she told herself sternly. This was serious, even if she wasn’t entirely sure what this was.

Bob held the goblet aloft. “First, a toast to whet the appetite. The unkilled beast awaits. May we partake in the feast so we do not become the sacrifice. May we always be the devourer and never the devoured!”

“May we always be the devourer and never the devoured,” the voices around her murmured, and the goblet was passed around, each person taking a healthy draught before giving it to the next.

Cara repeated the words as the goblet came to her, and she tilted the last of the liquid into her mouth. It trickled down her throat, icy and clear, tasting of minerals and wilderness, pine forests and rocky shores, and the untamed places underground. It was the sweetest thing she had ever tasted, intoxicating in its own way as the moonshine.

“Now,” Bob said, pulling something from his belt that glinted in the firelight, “we feast!”

Other glints appeared in others’ hands, firelight gleaming off of keen edges.

A low moan–that may or may not have been the north wind swirling through the underground tunnel–rose from the back of the cave.

Cara heard the clank of chains.

Something moved, shrouded in the smoke, in the shadows beyond the fire.

Smoke stung her eyes as Cara peered at the half-glimpsed thing. She had the impression of antlers rising from a gaunt brow, cadaverous limbs stretching from a too-skinny torso. She blinked, trying to determine what she was seeing. The weakly fluctuating fire and her own blurred vision conspired to keep an image from coalescing.

Bob approached the shape that might have been alive, that spoke with the wordless voice of the wind, and raised the steely glinting edge in his hand to make a quick swipe. A streak of red that owed nothing to firelight splashed against the rock floor and Bob lifted something to his mouth. One by one, the other guests, the other feasters, did the same. 

Cara should have been horrified. The small after-the-fact voice tried urgently to whisper to her, but her foggy mind could not acknowledge it, could not acknowledge anything but what was in front of her, the here and now, and then somebody slipped something into her hand, something warm and slippery and alive, and she had no choice but to raise it to her own mouth.

It sat upon her tongue, salt and iron and heat, and for an instant her mind and memories were not her own and she saw the periodic feast stretching back before history and the brotherhood-sisterhood-purpose of the feast and the consequences of refusing the feast and the stretching gaunt never-ending hunger and the sacrifice, and the smoke cleared and she saw, for just an instant, a shadow of angular limbs held in chains and high sharp cheekbones and the pain of a private hell in tip-tilted catlike eyes.

And then she swallowed and the heat entered her body and the darkness took her.

***

Cara sat upright, blinking in the dazzling sunshine reflecting off the snow outside her window. She had forgotten to charge her phone, and the bedside clock blinked a steady 12:00. She had no idea what time it really was, but the sun being high in the sky was not a good sign.

The fragments of the odd, intense dream swirled away as she dressed and crammed clothes into her overnight bag and nearly ran down the stairs to the registration desk.

She found Bob working the omelet station at the lodge’s breakfast bar. 

“You can check out if you’d like,” he told her, “but you can’t leave.”

She stared at him, wide-eyed.

“Not until the snowplows come through, anyway. I don’t think your little car would even make it out of the parking lot at this point. Sit and relax, I’ll make you some breakfast.”

“But I have to be in Grand Marais by noon!”

“Plenty of time. It’s only about twenty minutes from here once you get on the road.”

Cara tried to connect distances and times in her mind, but the numbers didn’t add up. “I guess I got farther than I thought last night.”

“You were damned lucky, being out in weather like that, is all I’ll say. How’re you feeling this morning?”

“I–” Cara paused and evaluated herself for the first time. How many shots of moonshine had she drunk last night? She’d been awfully blurry when she’d stumbled from the lounge. She should have a cotton mouth and a splitting head this morning.

She didn’t.

In fact, she realized as she took a deep, experimental breath, her throat no longer felt scratchy and there was no pressure in her sinuses. Her impending cold was gone, a false alarm.

“I feel great,” she said, wondrously, truthfully.

“All that fresh north shore air.” Bob winked at her. “It’ll do you wonders. Now have a seat and tell me if you’d like your omelet with ham or with sausage.”

The plow rumbled through not long afterward, and, fortified with a deluxe three-egg ham-and-cheese omelet, Cara paid for her lodging.

“You’ll come see us again, right?” Bob told her as she hoisted her bag to leave. “We’re open all year, and any time of year you’ll like it here. Summers get a bit touristy, of course, but it’s always good to meet new people. I’ve met a lot running a place like this.”

She turned back to him as simple math failed her again. “How old are you anyway, Bob? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Well, I’ve been running this place for nearly thirty years already. God-willing, I’ll be here another thirty.” 

Thirty years since he’d taken early retirement. Even if early retirement meant mid-fifties…

She blinked at the man with the salt-and-pepper hair and healthy build, and she realized that he looked no older–younger, in fact–than her own father. Even though, if math didn’t fail her, he had to be at least her grandfather’s age.

Drifting fragments of memory swirled in her mind like snow in a blizzard, not quite ready to land.

“Good north shore fresh air.” He winked once again. “See you next year!”

And as she loaded her bag into the car and flipped the sun visor down against the blinding brilliance of new-fallen snow, she knew, without a doubt, without knowing how or why, she would be back again.