The Haunted Halls

by Glenn Rolfe

  Jason Perry was a short, stocky but handsome man in his early thirties. He told her he was on vacation from his job at the fire department back in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He was staying at the hotel with his wife and two little boys. Christina and Jason flirted with each other for most of the week; in the fitness room, down at the pool and now, here at breakfast. He confided in her that part of him wished he had come alone. The admission sent her blushing all the way over to her table in the back corner of the dining room. Sarah, who had been watching them all week, started in as soon as her paper plate hit the tabletop.

  “Tina, you should get that hunk to come upstairs. He’s totally into you.”

  “Ah, I don’t know. That feels…weird,” she said.

  “Come on, don’t tell me you wouldn’t like to get those muscly arms wrapped around you. I mean, just look at him.”

  And she did. Even watching him from across the room playing with his two adorable little boys made him that much more attractive. Christina knew it was wrong, the guy was married, but she couldn’t deny that she was crushing on him pretty hard. Against her better senses, serving her own desire for affection, she waited for him to refill his coffee cup, and shied toward him.

  “Hey,” she said, saddling up next to him at the coffee station.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “I was wondering. If you aren’t tied up all night with the family, maybe you could stop by my room. You know, just to hang out for a bit before you guys head home.” She read the nervousness in his eyes. “I mean, if you wanted to, maybe you could say you needed to come downstairs to work out or go to the store for something.” She couldn’t believe she was actually doing this, but after initiating the offer, the last thing she wanted was to be rejected.

  She watched him glance over her shoulder toward where his family was seated. “Yeah, yeah I think I’d like that. What time should I stop by?”

  “Honestly, whenever. Whatever works for you.” Christina couldn’t stop the smile from spreading across her face.

  “There it is,” he said, grinning in return.

  “There what is?”

  Jason lowered his voice, leaned in closer and said, “That gorgeous smile. How can I say no?”

  Christina, getting momentarily lost in his beautiful hazel eyes, felt the heat flooding her rosy cheeks.

  “It would have to be later though, like eight or nine,” he said.

  “Sure.”

  She watched his eyes light up as Sarah strode up on the other side of him and whispered something in his ear. A mix of jealousy and fear wrestled within Christina’s guts as she watched her roommate stare at Jason like a starving wolf eyeing a piece of fresh meat. She was certain that she had just made a huge mistake.

  Just after 9 pm, there was a knock at the door.

  Sarah charged past Christina to get to the door. Christina’s bad feeling about where this would lead crawled over her fading excitement like a spider over a sleeping baby.

  She watched Sarah step aside to let the nervous looking man in. He was already wiping the sweat from his palms on the thighs of his blue jeans. He gave Christina a modest nod. “Hey Christina, Hi Sarah.”

  “So did you go with the workout, or are you at the store right now?” Christina jumped up next to Sarah.

  “Actually, I’m meeting an old friend.” A handsome sparkle gleamed behind his gleaming eyes.

  Christina started to say something else as Sarah stepped in front of her. She watched as Sarah stripped off her t-shirt and jumped on Jason like some horny slut from a porn flick. It happened so fast, she didn’t have time to process what was going on.

  Tits hanging out, Sarah wrapped her long legs around Jason who made only the feeblest attempts to pull his face away before quickly giving in, melting like butter as Sarah shoved her tongue down his throat. She only stopped to turn and bark at Christina, “Jesus Tina, get out of the way.”

  Christina retreated in defeat, flooded with an awful sense of déjà vu watching the salacious act unfold before her. Jason’s face was flushed pink, but his once nervous eyes were now hungry flames desperate to be stoked into full roar. Sarah undid his jeans and slipped them down to the floor, crawling back up to take his exposed manhood in her mouth.

  “Oh my God,” he said.

  After a minute of getting him worked up, Sarah rose, and then hauled Jason down on the bed with her, spreading her legs for him. “Give it to me,” she said, tearing at his broad back.

  Sarah slipped a hand under the pillow by her head and produced something shiny. Christina snapped out of her dead end daydream. Jason’s thick, muscled back tensed. His ohs and yeahs came faster. Sarah swung her arm up; Christina blinked at the flash of light reflected from the object in her hand. Jason’s roar of ecstasy was interrupted–Sarah slid the straight razor across his throat. Blood gushed from the split skin like water from a spilled paper cup. Jason’s face went pale. He sat up, gurgled out in an incoherent sentence and dropped back down atop Sarah lurching and twitching until he fell still.

  “What the hell are you doing? Why? Why?” Christina rushed to the bedside, already in tears.

  Sarah slithered out from beneath the man, her face and chest covered in blood, murder weapon in hand, and hellfire burning in her eyes. “Stop right fucking there. I swear to hell, I will gut you next.” The threat hung between the two girls as Sarah smiled under a mask of blood.

  Christina bolted for the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. She wanted to purge the gut-wrenching feeling and the guilt that accompanied it to the porcelain god. She wanted to get the sickness that was Sarah Ford out of her system before it set in and took hold. In between her heaving, she cried for what she had done. She cried for the life she had just helped to destroy. She mourned for the wife that was now widowed, and the children now fatherless. Her moment of depthless sorrow was cut short by the horrific series of sick wet thuds–like the sound of mud slapping blacktop–coming from the room beyond the closed door.

  She rose to her feet, wiping vomit and saliva from her mouth with the bottom of her t-shirt creeping toward the sickening sounds. Placing her hand on the bronze knob, unaware that she was holding her breath, she pulled the door open wide just as Sarah buried something shiny into the bloody mess on the floor. Blood splatter rained down over Christina’s bare feet. A scream worked its way up from the bottom of her eternally damned soul, tearing through the room like a the wail of a chainsaw.

  Before she could stop, she was tackled off her feet by the psychotic girl with the meat cleaver in her hand. They landed hard on the floor. Christina’s breath shot from her lungs halting the scream–the back of her head smacked the solid tub behind her. Stars danced before her horrified eyes as she fell back into oblivion.

  When she came to, Christina found herself lying on the bed. Fresh blankets, the second set Sarah had now bought at K-Mart, now covered the scene of the crime. Sarah sat at the end of the bed smoking a cigarette, watching another episode of Three’s Company. Christina wondered if it had all been some sort of bad dream. She tried sitting up, but was hit by a wave of light headedness and nausea that dropped her back onto the fluffy pillow behind her.

  “I wouldn’t try to go anywhere if I were you,” Sarah said. “You’ve probably got a concussion.” Sarah turned her corrupt eyes toward her. “And don’t worry about your admirer–I disposed of him myself. Every last bit of him.”

  The psychotic look in the girl’s eyes confirmed Christina’s worst fear–she was stuck in an unholy union with this devil in the land of blood and murder. She knew what she had to do.

  Present Day

  Dressed more for a party than a man heading for a dip, Timothy Laymon strutted down the hallway like he was Brad Fucking Pitt. He wasn’t sure where his newfound confidence was coming from, but he liked the way it fit. He stepped up to the elevator and hit the down arrow before turning to check his look one last time in the floor length mirror on the wall across from the elevator doors. Dressed in a dark blue bu
tton up shirt, and a pair of black jeans, he double-checked his freshly shaven scalp. There were already fresh sprouts of hair growing where such a thing shouldn’t be possible. The elevator arrived with a bing. He finished tying his canvas shoes and stepped in.

  The interior of the elevator, although quite warm and a bit too stuffy, was a very appealing blend of stainless steel and mahogany–it was beautiful. Before the doors slid shut, a large hand appeared in the dying crack of light. Timothy stepped back, allowing room for the guest to enter as the stainless steel door slid open. This man stood well over six feet tall and must have weighed around two hundred and fifty pounds. He was dressed in plain black shorts, a black t-shirt, and bare feet. It wasn’t just his size that was intimidating, it was his eyes. There was darkness in them. Darkness that made Timothy drop his own nervous gaze down to the maroon carpeting sporadically patterned with gold lobsters. He dared a glance out of the corner of his eye, and wished that he hadn’t. The towering figure flashed a crooked grin.

  The elevator descended to the ground floor, and the bing sounded again. Timothy felt swallowed by the dark shadow cast, both figuratively and literally, by his companion. He stepped out of the too-cramped space, alleviating the heaviness of the moment then headed left, toward the pool area. His new shadow followed.

  Chapter Three

  “Do you like what you see?”

  Kurt tried to open his eyes to match the face with the sultry voice, but was greeted with blinding light and black dots. It felt like he was lying on a sheet of cool metal. His head weighed a thousand pounds and he couldn’t stop shivering. “I-I…I can’t see anything,” he said. “W-w-where am I?” An icy cold hand clasped his bare shoulder.

  “Don’t worry that pretty little head of yours,” she said.

  He could feel the cool touch move through his body as the fingers ran through his hair. “What…what are you doing? W-wh-what’s happening to me?”

  She gripped her fingers into his hair, pulling so hard he was sure she would rip the follicles out. He cried out then tried to move his arms to protect himself, and couldn’t. The woman continued to pull on his hair. His scalp was threatening to rip. He tried lifting his arms once more, straining with all the force he could muster in his weakened state, and was met with intense white heat where his right arm ripped free. His screams filled the small room. “What are you d-d-doing to m-m-me?”

  “I’m going to let you in on a secret,” she said. Her cold breath spread over his mouth like a second skin. “You’re dead.”

  …..

  Rhiannon drove her Ford Escort into the parking lot of the Hollis Oaks General Hospital. She didn’t like hospitals; they reminded her of sickness, of death. Her Grammy Lilly had passed from cancer last fall in this very building. Rhiannon had gone to see her three times a week until the very end. Even now, looking at the large building, she could sense the ghost of the monster with no cure hanging around, waiting for its next victim. She hoped Kurt was all right.

  She had taken a liking to Kurt their first day at the hotel. Two people had quit at the start of the busy summer season–something about a guest drowning in the pool. Some of the employees were convinced the death had been somehow supernatural. Rhiannon figured that the middle-aged quitters had seen one too many “reality” ghost shows. She, for one, did not cater to such nonsense, and as it turned out, neither did Kurt. He was shy and nervous around her, but also very funny, very charming in his own way. If he had asked her out that very first day, she would have said yes. She hadn’t felt this way about a guy since junior high. Back then, it had been a stupid thirteen-year-old’s ill-conceived idea of love that sent her jumping from one boy to the next. Any boy who showed interest in her. Once she got into high school, things changed. She discovered women who were loud and in your face. Her idols became Brody Dahl from the Distillers and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. She established a truer sense of self-worth and developed a natural edginess, slipping into a skin that fit like a record needle to a groove.

  She considered herself tough, callous and cool, but sitting in her car, taking the last drag off her third straight cigarette, Rhiannon wondered if there was more than a little of that desperate and sappy seventh grader left in her than she liked to admit. She tossed the filter out of her window and stepped out into the cool evening.

  At the emergency room entrance, she pushed the door open, and approached the receptionist’s desk. A frazzled looking woman with dark hair and black-rimmed glasses, whose name tag read Marci, looked up at her.

  “May I help you?”

  “Yes, I’m looking for a friend of mine that was brought in from the Bruton Inn, Kurt Costello,” Rhiannon said

  “Are you family?”

  “Well, no. I’m his girlfriend,” she said, chewing her nails as she watched the receptionist tap the keys before her.

  “It looks like he was brought up to the third floor. They want to keep him overnight for observation.”

  “Can I see him?”

  Marci looked back over her shoulder at the clock on the wall. “Visiting hours go until 9 pm. You have about an hour.”

  “Thank you.” Rhiannon turned and headed straight for the elevators.

  The silver doors opened, releasing an elderly gentleman with his arm in a sling. The man paused to look at her, watching her with a cataract eye. Rhiannon diverted her attention from the milky, glazed-over orb as she stepped past him. She was turning to select the third floor when the man spun around and placed his good arm on the elevator doors, preventing them from closing.

  “She’s got him, you know,” he said.

  Rhiannon took a step back. “Excuse me?”

  “You’re too late, you little bitch.”

  Rhiannon watched in stunned horror as the glossed-over eye cleared, like a frosted windshield in a warming vehicle. A gray-blue eye stared back at her, looking more lost and confused than sinister. The bewildered man pulled his arm back and turned around without another word.

  What the fuck?

  The doors slid closed. The elevator began its ascent to the third floor.

  …..

  Kurt Costello could feel the girl, the thing, whatever she was, and her breath against the flesh of his ear. A river of terror flooded his dizzying mind; all of his thoughts becoming a jumble of memories, unfulfilled dreams, and regrets. The thing behind the sultry voice placed a frozen palm flat upon on his chest. A deep, penetrating sensation beyond the most frigid Maine morning seeped from the deathly hand. All he could manage from his shivering body was a whimper as the cold encompassed his slowing heart. Frost formed on the hairs of his nostrils. His blue lips drained of any sense of their former life. The black dots that reappeared behind his closed lids began to pool together and spread until there was nothing but a perfect blackness.

  “Shh, shh, shh. You have a higher purpose. I promise,” she said.

  Kurt’s last fragment of life wheezed from his open mouth and into the white sterile room in a cloud of vapor.

  …..

  Rhiannon walked into Kurt’s icebox of a hospital room, and screamed.

  Chapter Four

  Christmas Eve, 1983

  On Christmas Eve, sitting in a darkened movie theater with her psychotic roommate lost in Tony Montana’s drug-crazed bloodbath in Scarface, Christina was mentally preparing to do what had to be done. If she was going to get away from this wicked girl, she was going to have to lower herself to the bitch’s level.

  After the three-hour movie came to its ultimately depressing climax, they walked arm in arm to the little powder-blue Volkswagen Bug that Sarah had acquired. As they drove the 40 minutes back to the hotel, the local rock station played an array of new songs that she normally would have enjoyed. But under the circumstances, Def Leppard could just as well be the Carpenters.

  As far as she knew, Sarah didn’t have a clue about her true feelings. Since the night of Jason’s death, Christina had shoved the burning rage and complete hatred for her down deep. She had tried her
best to appear as the desperate friend she’d been when they met. She knew she’d have to catch Sarah off guard.

  They pulled into the near-empty lot of the Bruton Inn and headed in through the back entrance.

  “I think I’m gonna go for a swim.”

  “Cool,” Sarah said.

  Christina was certain Sarah would find her way down once she got bored with the TV. Sarah Ford may have had a tough and confident exterior, but it was one predicated on having to project it upon someone.

  Minutes later, Christina entered the large pool room. It was empty, as it should be–pool hours were posted stating a firm ten o’clock closing time. Christina and Sarah had yet to adhere to this rule, even after being caught by the old pervert at the desk that ran the night shift. He could care less. They let him watch them swim, which made Christina’s skin crawl, but it afforded the girls the freedom to do whatever they wanted within the hotel walls.

  She didn’t bother using the changing room, deciding to drop her clothes in a pile at her feet, baring her naked body to the empty room that smelled of chlorine. At the moment, the odor also represented the smell of something else–her impending freedom. Slipping into the navy blue one-piece that Sarah had picked out for her, she stepped to the pool’s edge and dove in. She slid through the water, skimming mere inches above the pool’s concrete floor, before heading back up toward the light and air above. She broke the surface, bringing her hands up to clear the water from her eyes, and nearly jumped out of her gooseflesh skin under Sarah’s heavy sparkling gaze.