All the while the whispering continued. Frannie said to Newp, “I think she has the right idea.” But why weren’t they in their rooms? So it must be worse in the rooms. Was that possible?
Frannie approached the set of couches. “Ma’am?”
“Yes?” the woman looked up, instantly putting her hands on the shoulders of the nearest child, the bow. “What is it?” She looked Frannie up and down, and Frannie felt suddenly self-conscious about the torn, soaked dress she wore.
“Could my friend and I have some of that cotton?”
“Oh. Oh! Of course.” She rifled through her purse.
As the woman handed over bits of cotton, Frannie said, “If it’s the sound coming from the dome you’re blocking—that’s right, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” A vigorous, nervous nod.
“Why don’t you go back to your room?”
The woman pressed the cotton balls in Frannie’s palms and leaned forward as her voice took on a deeper tone. “It’s worse up there.”
Frannie put the cotton in her ears and gave some to Newp, who drew closer but was also exhibiting the same nervous tic turning again and again towards the glass walls through which they could see the dome.
With the cotton in her own ears she now heard the whole world at a distance. She sat for a moment on the loveseat. “I need to find my parents. They're still in this hotel. I'm pretty sure, anyway. You said the sound is worse up in the guest floors?”
“Oh, yes. Up there it sounds like an alarm going off. It shouts.”
Frannie turned to Newp. “Could you go to the front desk and find out the room?” Newp disappeared and Frannie asked the woman, “When did it start?”
“Yesterday,” she said. “We were… it drove us to the lobby. But we were strong enough to stop here. We just huddle. We go to the bathroom in pairs, you know?” She pointed across the lobby. “The bathroom’s over there, by the way.” Frannie took in the interior stone walls and the facilities.
“Has the hotel staff told you anything?”
The woman shook her heard. “I think—I think they don’t know what to do either. They all try to act normal, except every now and then one of them breaks and runs for the dome. It’s hard to ignore.”
“Why haven’t you left—driven away?”
“The car was totaled,” the man interrupted, leaning forward on the couch. “Someone bashed into it. Now the roads are all blocked. We may try to walk tonight. Then again, we may go swimming.” Then he laughed, and Frannie’s blood ran cold.
“Frannie.” Newp returned, raising his voice a little unnaturally, probably because of the cotton in both their ears. “Your folks are in Room 714.” He held up a brass key. “I said we were family.”
Room 714 was an empty wreck, the wind whistling and the ocean roaring outside on the balcony. The glass doors had been torn away and Frannie felt a sickness in her stomach as she touched the bed. The backpack squirmed and she brought Emmett out, removing the tape once more.
Emmett tore across the room, stopping at the end of the balcony and looking out. “Ohhhh,” he said.
“What is it?”
“He calls to all the sons of Adam,” the golem said. “Penamue demands and cajoles and he whispers and he pleads.”
Frannie raised her voice. The whispering on the air had turned up around her and she found she had to shout no matter what. “What about my parents? Do you know where they are?”
“I have not that kind of knowledge,” said the golem. “But smart men know how to hide”
“Frannie,” New said. “Let’s scram—there’s nothing up here.”
But Frannie held up a hand because she’d noticed a book on the table. KNOWING YOUR RESORT. She flipped it open, the shouting of the demon growing so loud she could barely move, it wanted to control her fingers. She flipped pages. There was a diagram of the dome and a history of its construction, map of the hotel, even a clever little feature with a hula girl named Maile who answered printed questions like “How much pineapple juice do guests go through every day?”
“How do you service all these rooms and towers without overwhelming guests?
“Why, that’s simple,” said Maile. “We use tunnels.”
Frannie determined that she would put Emmett away no longer, instead letting him ride in the top of her pack. She headed straight down into the serving hallways in the back of the lobby, trailing a thin line of Emmett’s blue mouth smoke.
A door: Maintenance and Service Only.
In and through. Down the steps until they spilled out into a concrete hallway painted shiny industrial gray. The hallway was empty, lit brilliantly with ugly yellow bulbs. It stretched on twenty yards or so, then turned black at a corner, presumably going on into infinite darkness.
Still at the start of the tunnel, Newp said, “Great idea, Fran, but…”
“Shh.” She took the cotton out of her ears. The whisper seemed far away down here. She put her fingers to her lips, and they began to walk the length of the hallway in silence. They turned at the end, stopping to regard the utter darkness as the tunnel plunged on.
She breathed and found a light switch and flipped it.
Her heart leapt as she suddenly saw perhaps a hundred and fifty men, women and children in all kinds of dress, staring back at her intently. “Good job, guys,” she said.
The people in the front nodded and a woman said, “What’s going on up above?”
“Still the same.”
“Frannie,” came her father’s voice, and she smiled as he pushed through, her mother close behind. “oh, I found you,” she said, holding them both. “Oh, I found you.”
“Why are you trailing smoke?” her mom asked.
Chapter 50
They stood near the front desk and Frannie tapped the glass, indicating the dome across the green. “We gotta get in there.”
“That’s insane,” mom said. “Why would you need to do that?”
“Because it’s my fault that he’s here,” she said.
“No, because your father’s fakakte brother got you involved in his secret Kabbalah bullshit. Don’t kid a kidder. You couldn’t you fall in with a motorcycle gang like the other kids?”
Pop smirked. “What happens if you and Saul go in?” She looked at him and saw that his attention was perfectly held, he was treating her as a respected expert, a part of Saul’s family business. His respect made her want to learn the world and repair it all.
“As far as I can tell,” Frannie said, “the Book Man—that’s what we call the guy gathering people in there—will somehow suck, and this will sound strange, but he’ll suck the future out of people. But we need to get close to him anyway.”
“It doesn’t look guarded,” Newp said.
“Well, why would it be?” Frannie answered. “It’s like fly paper. He wants them to come. And then they stick.”
Frannie and Newp laid out their arsenal: they had a dybbuk box, the golem, and a few medallions. Finally Frannie took her mom aside.
“Okay.”
“Honey,” mom said, hugging her. “Is there anything I can say to you?”