Free Jacaranda by Cherie Priest

lie in pieces, murdered by the carnivorous hotel—their remains unceremoniously scattered about the lobby.
    Maybe none of them would live to see the dawn, and there would be no one left to dig any graves.
     
    He finished his task and returned the tools to the shed, closing it up behind himself. Although he’d removed his frock, he hadn’t done so in time to keep it from all of the sweat and mud. It was filthy, and so was everything else—but what could he do about it? He considered the sink in his room, but upon second thought, the hotel must have some sort of formal laundry.
    Without too much difficulty, he found it down a corridor on the first floor. Lined against the wall were washing machines the size of wheelbarrows, but he didn’t know how to use them; so he was relieved to discover a huge sink of the ordinary variety. Beside the sink sat a bar of soap as big as his shoe.
    He rinsed his frock and left it to dry, hanging beside a row of pillowcases clipped upon a line. He hoped it would air out quickly; he felt naked without it. But in the meantime, he borrowed a uniform shirt—something too large, something that might have been Tim’s. It was free of blood and mud, and Tim wasn’t present to object, so the padre buttoned himself inside it.
    Back in the lobby, he found nothing.
    No one. Just a large wet spot on the floor, and a chaise with a missing cushion. Sarah had vanished, and so had her pail and mop, and whatever rags she’d used to scrub the place.
     
    “You should see this.”
    He jumped, and turned around.
    “I’m sorry,” said Sister Eileen. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
    He waved her apology away. “It’s fine. I’m glad to see you again,” he confessed, and only then realized that he’d been worried for her well-being. In such a place, with such a terrible darkness swirling at its center, he was comforted to see that she was still standing. She made him feel less alone.
    “I’m sorry I left you, but I was overwhelmed. Now come with me, if you don’t mind. You should see her room. You should see where it happened. You should see what it did.”
     
    Constance Fields had been dead a little less than two hours.
     
    In that time, she had been buried and the evidence of her death had been largely erased; and in that time, Sister Eileen had gone to the woman’s room and let herself inside. “I found it like this,” she said, nodding toward the ceiling, the walls, the bed, the curtains, and every other surface that had been splashed with blood. It was all drying to a brownish crimson, leaving the linens stiff and the floor sticky.
    “It’s strange,” the nun said, and then let out an awkward little laugh. “I mean, it’s all strange, obviously—but the front of Constance’s dress didn’t have a spot of blood upon it—not until her nose began to bleed. All the damage was behind her; she must have turned her back on it, and refused to look. Isn’t that…strange? Don’t you think?”
    “Not in the slightest,” the padre replied with a shrug. “If something with that kind of power attacked me, I wouldn’t want to see it either. We’re speaking of something that kills with creativity and malice, and so far, no one’s set eyes on it, and lived to tell. If it seizes a woman from behind, and uses her body to paint a room with blood, or if it grabs a couple and hangs their skin like wallpaper…there’s no pattern to it, no rules the dark force follows, as far as I can tell. None apart from strangeness.”
    “And just like that, the strangeness becomes the ordinary. It’s the one thing we can predict.”
    He agreed, but did not mention it—for his attention was dragged away from their conversation, yanked from detail to detail in the ruined hotel room. A broken bedpost, a long, curved arc of blood spray on the mirror. A steamer trunk half unpacked, its rumpled contents strewn across the floor—where bloody footprints were ground into the rug. “It’s a mess,