Speed Dating with the Dead

by Nicholson, Scott

  “Gotta go,” the boy whispered.

  Kendra nodded, not wanting to give the twerp actual acknowledgment by speaking. She concentrated on her drawing, visualizing the bellhop as a shimmery Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

  “How many times do I got to tell you not to bother the guests?” said the Marshmallow Man, and Kendra imagined his voice echoing inside a wavy dialogue balloon.

  “Sorry,” Bruce said.

  “I’ll make you sorry.”

  “I was just–”

  “Just nothing. Get in here.”

  Welcome to reality, Bruce. You got a sucky name and a dorky dad and you’re about to get reminded that children should be seen and not heard.

  She just had time to sketch the Marshmallow Man’s outline before he stepped back into the shadows, letting the doors swing closed in a flash of silver and azure.

  “It already did,” Bruce whispered, as if he were still at her ear. She glanced up from the page, expecting the boy to swing the doors open again, but he was already inside.

  The twerp moves fast to be such a chunky monkey. Already did what?

  She shrugged down into her coat so that the fleece liner covered her neck. Despite the brightness of the day, the November wind carried the promise of winter and the air was a good 15 degrees colder than in Raleigh. According to Dad, the White Horse had been the summer retreat of governors and industrialists at the turn of the previous century, when the state ran on tobacco and denim instead of education and research. Apparently the wealthy elite had enough money and sense to climb back off the mountain when the leaves fell. Now the trees were knobby old crones and the slopes were nothing but brown and gray, the colors of dookie and death.

  Only Dad would pick such a dumb season to host a conference, but he said the rates were cheaper and fewer Normies would be around to spoil the fun and mess up the readings.

  Kendra parked her pencil between her teeth and rubbed her hands together, trying to flush some feeling into her fingers. The wrought-iron bench was cold and hard, corroded with age and centered on a little flagstone semicircle away from the main walk. It was surrounded by the bones of rose briars and stunted boxwood, and across the lawn a few skinny ornamentals leaned like sickly witches. A mottled concrete statue of a generic angel knelt in the grass, the Matron Saint of Lost Causes praying for a Clorox makeover.

  The hotel itself was three stories of skewed architecture, peeling paint, and sagging green shutters. A veranda ran the length of the bottom floor, and the entrance featured a stack of gabled arches that peaked fifty feet up with a small cupola that resembled a bell tower. The roof line was uneven, the forest-green shingles cracked and buckled. The whitewashed siding was faded and scabbed with flakes.

  An extension had been tacked on to the eastern wing, with little attempt made at matching the materials and style. A wooden fence surrounded the pool, but the gaps in the boards were wide enough to allow passage to any small children willing to drown, though she guessed the pool was either emptied for the season or frozen over.

  A narrow strip of crumbling blacktop led through the woods from the main highway, and the dense, tangled hardwoods hid the nearby town of Black Rock. Isolated by the surrounding forest and perched on the edge of the ridge, the hotel seemed forgotten by the world. The place probably made a lovely postcard in the summer, but right now the White Horse looked ready to gallop off to that Great Glue Factory in the Sky.

  Which made it perfect for Dad’s little enterprise.

  Speaking of the Digger, it’s about time for him to pretend he cares whether I’ve been abducted for sex slavery yet.

  Kendra blew into the cup of her drawing hand and continued the sketch. Usually she created a creep factor by warping the angles just a little in her architecture, aiming for a Gothic flavor, but in this case the reality was almost weirder than her fantasized depiction.

  All she needed was a shadowy figure to appear in one of the second-floor windows.

  The late-afternoon sun glinted off the glass as she surveyed the hotel’s one hundred eyes. A curtain billowed inside one of the rooms. She fleshed it out as a spirit in her workbook, knowing she could fine-tune it later, move in with erasers before applying the ink and making the ghost permanent.

  She glanced up again and saw someone standing beside the curtain. She nodded and smiled. The figure stepped back into the darkness of the room. She silently counted over three windows from the middle balcony, planning to verify the room number later and deduce the identity of the occupant. Probably one of them was trying to spook her. Dad’s events brought out the crazies, those who believed in things they couldn’t see.

  But maybe she was just as unhinged, believing in things that didn’t exist until she put them on paper. Dreams, lies, memories, games. All the same. Ether.

  A memoir writ in invisible ink.

  “Hey, Buttercup.”

  He was somewhere up there. She peered into the shadows of the upper balcony. He wore the darkness like his out-of-fashion tailcoat, a stage prop that was as hokey as his act.

  Kendra bent to her sketch pad again.

  Children should be seen and not heard, butgrownups should be seen and heard only when it’s time to dole out some allowance.

  She had no problem drawing him as a ghost. He’d been dead to her for years, deader even than Mom, who was really dead.

  “Up here, Buttercup.”

  A pet nickname, copped from William Goldman’s “The Princess Bride.” She sighed and let Big Fattie fall from her fingers. It rolled across the pad and fell to the ground, bouncing off a flagstone.

  “They say one of the guests jumped from this balcony,” Dad called, with a pleasure in his voice that approached glee. “Got skewered on that lamppost.”

  His arm came out of the shadow and pointed to one of the tall metal spires that girded each side of the walk. Kendra pictured a shish kebab of writhing arms and legs, red sauce spurting out like a busted ketchup pack at a greasy roadside diner. The image would have been gross if it weren’t so comical. Compared to the modern teenybopper slasher movies, Dad’s attempts at shock were like Casper the Friendly Ghost on a sugar high.

  But he’d been polite on the drive up the mountain, even letting her pick the music, and she’d been working him for a new graphics program, so she could spare a little feigned affection.

  “Nothing like a suicide chump to get the Groovy Ghoulies riled up,” she called to him.

  “That’s my girl,” he said, stepping back inside the inn.

  If Digger Wilson actually believed in evil spirits, he had no problem leaving her to deal with them on her own. Then again, she’d learned at an early age that everyone had to face their demons alone.

  Whether the demons are real or just drawn that way.

  Kendra continued her work superimposing a set of human features over the entryway, not realizing until she was nearly done that the eyes she’d drawn in the glass were her mother’s.

  She got busy with the eraser.

  Chapter 3

  J.C. hated the goddamned basement.

  The rusted cast-iron pipes that hung suspended from the floor joists dribbled black goo, and old fiberglass insulation hung down like rotted cobwebs. The dirt floor was cluttered with broken chunks of concrete, dusty bottles, short lengths of pipe and copper wire, and a clutch of three-legged chairs. A brass bed was set up along one cinder-block wall, no doubt erected as some sort of joke, because the mattress was fuzzy with mildew. A plastic red rose lay where the pillow would have been, the kind of punch line his dick-headed supervisor Wally Reams would think was hilarious.

  The breaker box for the hot water heaters had been on the blink, and Reams had filled out a work order and put J.C.’s name on it. J.C. always got the crap jobs, but since the White Horse maintenance staff consisted of three other guys, one with a V.A.-approved wooden leg compliments of Saddam’s little poke in George Bush’s eye, then the odds were against J.C. anyway. Besides, every fix-it call was a crap job in a place as
ancient as this.

  The place smelled of rotted newspapers and mouse turds, and the dirt floor was packed to mud. The coal-burning boilers that had once heated the inn were now corroded shut, miles of pipes carrying their filthy air.

  J.C pulled a flashlight from a loop on his overalls and flicked it on. The breaker box was on the far side of the room, and screw-in glass fuses were scattered across the dirt, glinting in the flashlight’s beam. He could be across, check the fuses, and be done in less than a minute. If the problem lay with the main circuits, then Reams would have to call in a real electrician. J.C. was a licensed plumber but he could barely twist a bread tie, much less mess with 220 volts of juice.

  It was probably the goddamned Mexicans’ fault. They’d punch the buttons on every washer and dryer at the same time, speeding things up with nary a thought to the power drain. Most people, all they wanted was to flip a switch and have the light come on. Not many cared about the complex science of electrons. J.C. didn’t blame them. All he wanted was a fast paycheck, so maybe he wasn’t that different from the Mexicans after all.

  But the job wasn’t as simple as the work order made it sound. For one thing, the breaker box was in the darkest part of the basement, behind a row of support beams and a couple hundred feet from the rickety wooden stairs. For another, the basement always gave him the willies.

  He’d heard the stories, and once in a while a shadow shifted out of the corner of his eye, but nobody in his right mind paid attention to the corners of his eyes. Pegleg had sworn to an encounter with The Jilted Bride, a woman supposedly abandoned at the altar a hundred years back and killing herself as a result. Of course, in Pegleg’s version, he’d done her seven ways to Sunday on the rotted mattress, adding a few more stains to the canvas and leaving her with a smile on her face as she vanished. The vision of Pegleg in the buff, flashing all his nubs, was more frightening than any ghost. But alone in the basement, with the pipes groaning, the wood creaking, and the raw sewage plop plop plopping, the blood ran a little faster and the short hairs tingled a little.

  He flipped the switch to trigger the set of bare bulbs that dangled from the floor joists. Dead.

  Shit fire, Miss Mays. Somebody better call maintenance.

  He tried to laugh but the dusty air clogged his throat.

  Despite the flashlight, he was reluctant to leave the foot of the stairs, where light leaked from the doorway above. The darkness had a border, and stepping over it would mean hostile territory. The laws over there were unknown, and you could break them without even knowing you had trespassed. But the laws on this side, with that bitch Janey Mays holding the purse strings and his parole officer marking time, were just as cruel.

  Life was full of choices. Walk through shit and black hell and check the goddamned breaker box or stand in the unemployment line with the rest of the garbage Janey had tossed over the past year.

  He put one toe to the edge of the darkness. He could have sworn the line of blackness oozed forward a couple of inches, and his leg shivered as if a frosty mouth had exhaled over his Wolverine work boot. The basement was always 10 degrees colder than the building’s interior, but the place was so drafty the temperature fluctuated anyway, no matter the season. That’s why guests were always bitching about the ventilation, which caused Janey Mays to chew J.C. a new asshole, and he’d run around with duct tape, weather stripping, and nails, but all the patchwork did was send the drafts to new locations and start the merry-go-round all over again.

  The air in the basement, though, was still and dead. J.C. had failed science in the seventh grade, but he remembered the teacher droning on about the moon and how you couldn’t breathe there, and in the pictures of astronauts they all had on those bozo helmets with the black masks and lots of tubes running into different parts of the white suit. J.C. had never wondered about their breathing. He’d been more curious about where all the piss and shit went, and the teacher said they ran their piss through a filter and drank it again. And people called them “heroes.” J.C. called them “dumbasses.”

  “A small step for man and a big step for mankind,” he whispered, mangling the astronautic catchphrase.

  He thrust the flashlight in front of him and entered the darkness. The dirt floor was as slick as a plastic sheet covered with Crisco, but he didn’t look down at it. His focus was on the breaker box, which seemed to have moved farther away from him. Something rustled to his left, and he flicked the light over to the boiler.

  The damned thing grinned at him with those rusty metal teeth, the old valves glittering like eyes that had been snapped open from a long sleep. The blacker darkness inside it quivered, a tongue of coal ash and cinders. Decades ago, men like J.C. stood down here half-naked, shoveling coal into that beast’s belly as it spit glowing embers onto their sweaty flesh. Compared to that kind of work, J.C.’s little mission was a tiptoe through the tulips.

  And if he didn’t get the hot water going soon, Janey Mays would blow her smoke in his face and flash that wrinkled, mummified grin.

  As he crossed the room, stubbing his boot on a busted cinder block, he fished in his tool belt for a screwdriver. He would need it for the breaker box, he told himself, though he held it like a weapon and the job would more likely require pliers than a sharp blade.

  Flup flup flup.

  The sound came from the boiler, which was now 20 feet behind him. J.C. had been called on to exterminate bats before, but they hung out in the attic and were easy to catch in the daytime. The White Horse had enough mice, rats, and possums living within its walls to pick up the place and carry it away, but those rodents made sharper, scurrying sounds. Flup meant wings.

  J.C. moved faster, and he was almost to the breaker box when the boiler clanged. To hear Pegleg tell it, the thing hadn’t been fired since 1962, but Pegleg had only worked the White Horse for two years and he could create facts on the spot, anything to keep his jowls flapping and his hands idle. Of course, Pegleg’s war wound made a trip down the stairs too risky, and his arthritis hated the damp, and his eyesight was gone to hell since Saddam’s boys had let loose all them chemicals, but at least the important equipment still worked and you could just ask the Jilted Bride, because he’d done her seven ways to Sunday and–

  The bed creaked.

  J.C. knew that sound as well as any man, because he’d gone through two wives and had screwed his way down a whole trailer-park row during his teenage years, and a fuck squeak was a fuck squeak.

  Most likely it was a couple of them ghost hunters. They were a weird enough crowd, probably liked to bang in graveyards and haunted houses and coffins. He cleared his throat, but they didn’t stop like normal folks would. Maybe they wanted an audience.

  A couple of the check-ins had been hotties, and he wouldn’t mind getting a late-night plumbing repair call from them, because he’d sure fix their leak.

  But no way was he going to swivel the light over to the bed. He might see the Jilted Bride laying there getting drilled by something black and oily and monstrous, maybe something with giant, raggedy wings that went flup flup flup as its hips rose and fell.

  The creaking fell into a rhythm, along with the flupping, but J.C. zeroed in on the breaker box and he could see the problem–somebody had unscrewed the fuses and left the holes empty.

  One of the ghost hunters might have snuck down here and tried to kill the lights. Maybe even the people on the soggy mattress. Just the kind of thing to add a little shock to the system. But not knowing how the place was wired, or that the main breaker box had been moved to the ground floor during the last overhaul, the dumb shits had just gone for the only fuses they could find. Except a couple of the fuses were still intact, buttoned up across the top row.

  Creak flup creak flup creak flup.

  If it was fucking–and J.C. would bet a case of Busch Lite on that–then the ride was going slow and steady, the kind women always said they liked until you actually did it and then they got all impatient.

  He didn’t want to play t
he light on the ground and look for fuses because he was afraid of what he might see. He fumbled in his belt pouch for new ones, but when he started screwing the first one in, the one above it gave a half turn counterclockwise.

  All by itself.

  Creak flup creak flup creak flup.

  J.C. gulped and twisted the fuse home, then plugged the five other holes. Lastly, he secured the top one again, screwing a lot more frantically than the things–people, it’s people–on the bed.

  Finished, he back-pedaled, the rectangular light from the basement door spilling down like the stairway to heaven. Not so far, not so dark, though the basement air smelled like sulfur and smoke, as if the boiler was fired up and gasping. And the air that had been cool was now stifling and thick, the darkness like a cloud of ash.

  All he had to do was breathe and walk, though, and he’d have a story that would top anything Pegleg had to offer. All he had to do was put one Wolverine in front of the other, eyes straight ahead, and–

  CREAKFLUP CREAKFLUP CREAKFLUP.

  The bed rattled with urgency, and the creatures–ghost hunters, it’s just freaky ghost hunters–appeared to be speeding up for liftoff.

  Despite himself, J.C. turned toward the noise, though he kept the flashlight beam ahead of him. The sounds had been joined by wet sloshing, like somebody had dropped six bags of pea soup on the party. Porn flicks were ten bucks a pop down in Fantasy Land Books, a corrugated, windowless warehouse on the backside of Black Rock that had no books but plenty of magazines, plus some video booths in the back corner that J.C. wouldn’t have entered on a dare. But J.C. wasn’t much of a peeper, and his last three-way had ended in a divorce and a confrontation with a .38 revolver, so the group scene wasn’t his thing, either.

  But he was feeling braver now that he was closer to the stairs and could chalk it all up to his imagination. Here was a chance to make the story even better. A ringside seat at a ghosthunter orgy. Pegleg could gnaw his fucking shin to splinters in jealousy