The Empty Room

From the massive woman's mouth came a small girl’s voice,

asking us, “Did you see my baby brother?”

She’d surprised us in the hotel lobby, by the stairwell,

saying she’d been a good big sister, till she lost him.

We escaped her wheedling and got to our room at last,

but in the night we were awoken by a child’s crying.

The crying came from our bathroom pipes,

which the proprietor at length told the history of.

“‘Devil’s veins,’ locals called ‘em a century past,”

he said tapping, “when they saw ‘em installed here.”

Half-awake, I heard the child crying again hours later.

I left my wife sleeping to follow it along the pipes.

I’d left the door ajar, not wanting to wake her or leave her without the key.

The pipes ran along the hall ceiling and bent left and down another stair,

splitting like roots toward the basement.

Needing to find those cries in the pipes made me abandon sense—

my wife was missing when I returned.

I close my eyes now and see

the marks her nails made in the sheets as she was dragged out.

The proprietor was disassembling electronics,

looking for bugs and finding only insects, when I ran in.

He told me how we couldn’t leave,

an exchange had been made, none of it was his choice.

To find her, I would have to become the kidnapper of the child I’d searched for,

the horror I’d feared in the walls.

Where other guests on other floors were kept,

I heard one say, hoarsely chuckling, “Never stop believing.”