The Hollow Hour

TThe Trailways bus came down off the ridge into Coalbank a little after five, with its lights on and its wipers going against a fog that had come up off the river while the sun was still out. Elias watched the town arrive in pieces: a tipple standing over the railroad yard like a black barn on stilts, a row of company houses with their porch lights on, an Exxon station, two churches, a five-and-ten with a hand-lettered sign in the window that said FREE THE HOSTAGES. Then Depot Street, and at the bottom of it, where the street met the river, the Lilliard Hotel.

It was four stories of dark brick with a stone cornice and a name cut over the door in letters a foot high. Half the upper windows were dark. On the roof, small against the evening, stood a short steel mast with a red light on top, and painted along the side of the building in fading white were the words WCVF 1340 — THE VOICE OF THE VALLEY.

The lobby smelled of floor wax and radiator heat. There was a staircase with a red runner worn pink in the middle, and behind the front desk a small, straight-backed woman of about seventy in a cardigan, with a radio at her elbow playing a Conway Twitty record low. She looked at Elias's suitcase, and then at Elias.

"You'll be the new night one," she said. "Mrs. Varney's upstairs. Mezzanine. Mind the fourth step, it talks."

The fourth step did talk. Mrs. Lavada Varney met Elias at the top of it: a tall woman in her sixties in a camel coat she had not taken off, with reading glasses on a chain and the quick, sorting look of somebody who had been paying bills for a long time.

"You found us," she said, and shook hands hard. "Good. I'll show you the room and then I'm going home, because I've been here since six this morning and Delbert will be here at five-thirty tomorrow and that's the only way this place runs."

The mezzanine ran round three sides of the lobby, behind a wooden rail. There was a front office with a typewriter under a cover, a record library with shelves to the ceiling, a closet where a Teletype machine chattered to itself under a plastic hood, and at the far end, two doors side by side. One had a small window and a sign: STUDIO B. The other had no window, and a deadbolt, and nothing on it at all.