Collin arrives at the Melville Hotel, new name Hotel Earth under new management. Now, remember, this is "a supposedly haunted hotel on the outskirts of the little community of just over twelve hundred people" where guests regularly disappear and locals see and hear "mysterious things". Yet when we get inside the three story wooden building we come across quite a few people. At least four other guests have signed in that day. One of them is Dr. Raymond.
After being checked in by "a very old and unpleasant looking woman" he's directed to one of the cheaper rooms on the third floor. After a quick nap Collin makes his way down to Raymond's room, passing where "a couple of redneck-looking characters with bulging briefcases were sitting in the lobby, earnestly involved in a game of checkers." p.176 When Raymond doesn't answer his knock he indulges in a little lock picking and "within seconds" he has the door open. Our boy has been learning many new skills.
So he carefully tosses Raymond's room learning that his middle name is 'Winston' and he's a the III. Did I type William last update because that was what was on his nameplate? Well it's Winston now. Keep up. He was born in Bangor, Maine, he's 57, lives in London and travels a lot. He's carting around a number of old books on ancient demon cults and articles on missing persons, including a list of forty people who have disappeared in Montana on I76. This is apparently information that is readily available but that no one has ever bothered to check out. Raymond also has black clothes, lockpicks, a gun and photos of dead bodies in a cave.
At this point Raymond walks in on him and they get to exchange stories about their respective experiences in Africa. Raymond has a nice bangle he found on the cave floor that can protect him from evil influence. Which is good because suddenly a scream!
They rush to the hall only to be bowled over loony tunes style by a black-clad figure who escapes through an "Employee's Only" door. When they get to the room where the scream came from they find several people "milling around" over the body of a dead woman with "the covers pulled down to her waist, revealing naked, shapely breasts." She also has "a bloody, two-inch long cut at the base of her throat." But that's the second thing Collin notices. Another woman "sobbing and shaking" was "blindly pounding her fists into the chest of the man who was trying to comfort her." Which makes me think that maybe he should just let her go. Dude, maybe she doesn't want a strange man holding her while she's in shock. Nobody asked you to. This is the dead woman's sister and Collin needs information so he "jerked her out of the grasp of the older man" and when she struggles against this new strange man hauling her around he backhands her across the face. As you do when someone has just discovered the corpse of their murdered loved one.
So she collapses half-conscious into a chair and Collin decides more but gentler slapping is what is required in this situation and eventually he gets the oh-so-important intel that she saw a man standing over her dead sister. And that his face was horrible. Totally worth assaulting a hysterical woman for that sort of information.
They decide to follow the guy that knocked them over and find themselves in a cellar, the same cellar from the prologue of chapter four. They're attacked by "the Guardian" in the body of Grey, blood dribbling from his mouth who has "All-knowing alien eyes, set in an extremely handsome Latin face" and "strangely distorted Latin features." p.199 What does that even mean? Does he mean Roman or Latino or what?
Mr. not quite a vampire laments the "barbaric necessity" of what he just did; not blood drinking but doing it that way. What way? "I drank the blood but I did not suck it hungrily through enlarged canine incisors." This clears up nothing for me. He scoffs at Raymond's cross but is pants-wettingly scared by his bracelet and the torches he suddenly has. He and Collin light them on fire and keep the Guardian away. He recognizes Collin, calls him 'Camurious' and then makes his escape through a coal chute.
I guess he returns to the cellar after they've gone? Because next scene we're back there with the whole satanic set-up but sporting a dead human this time and a bunch of naked followers including the "old hag" who works at the desk. "The pendulous breasts sagged uncleanly to her protuberant paunch". Thanks for that, man. There are many "misshapen" people there but "none as repellent to the gaze as the hag." p.204
They drink blood and their master tells them they have to find Collin. Fortunately he got Collin's name from the mind of a friend, presumably McPhearson, and they have his rental car license plate somehow. They just need to track down his address and kill him. Mwahaha!
Back in LA Collin, Smith and Raymond sit in a faraday cage and regress Collin through past lives until they get to Camurious. He tells some tale about a possessed pretender emperor and how he killed him and how he found a demon in a cave and killed him and then got killed himself. To be honest I found it a bit boring. Upshot though - he's always been immune to demon possession. And there are two evil entities, I'm taking from this. The demon and the Guardian who possesses a human body.
Also, we learn they followed the Guardian's tracks to a "state work camp" where a lot of people have been brought who were "never sentenced to serve time there by any court in the state" to excavate an old mine. p.217 How do they know that the people there weren't sentenced? It's not like you can just look this stuff up on the internet, it's 1970. I can't imagine they got their names. If they got this fact from people nearby why doesn't anyone look into this apparent forced labor? Maybe these are actually deluded cultists?
Collin heads back to his apartment to relax and finds it ransacked and invaded by the Guardian and a couple minions. There're gonna kill him but first, says the evil immortal spirit, let's sit on the bed and chat.
Still an amusing read but the way women are depicted it feels like the author hasn't quite figured out yet that we are, in fact, human beings rather than simulacrums or vaguely sentient objects. It's been 38 years since this was published though so hopefully he's matured.
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