by Glenn Rolfe
“I’m so sorry,” she said, her hand inches from his face.
His eyes shot open, startling her and sending her flailing backward.
“Wait for me,” he said. Blood, thick and dark with death, drooled from the corners of his mouth and then his eyes, “Wait for me.”
She hit the wall behind her as laughter erupted from the end of the corridor where the nightmare began.
She dared a glance at the awful sound of joy in this place of cold death. She recognized more faces…Kenneth–the weird kid that heard voices, the big guy–Aaron or Eric, a well-dressed gentleman she couldn’t place, and a girl. The girl slipped behind the others before Rhiannon could identify her.
A voice spoke within Rhiannon’s spinning mind, “The Ice Queen is here.”
Chapter One
Rhiannon woke from the horrible dream tangled in the sheets of the bed Jeff offered up to her. Jeff was curled up on the cramped couch to her right. She slid her legs out from beneath the heavy comforter. The nightmare was already receding from the shores of her mind, dimming behind her growing alertness. Good, she thought. Stepping over to the couch, she grabbed the thin blanket that had fallen from Jeff in the night and covered him. He made a snorting sound and fell silent again. Rubbing the sleep from her itchy eyes, pieces of the dream floated into places they didn’t fit. Even with the brilliant sun bursting through the window, she shivered. Menacing clouds floated in the distance outside. A storm was coming. She gazed down at Jeff sleeping with his mouth hanging open–“catching flies” her mother would have said–and wondered what he would do when he woke up. Would he go home? Would he leave her here alone? She hoped not. He had mentioned wanting to head into Hollis Oakes to do some research on their situation. She wondered what that situation was. What they were dealing with and if they should they even bother trying to find out. Maybe those desk clerks who quit last June had the right idea.
Still fully dressed from the day before, Rhiannon slipped on her canvas sneakers and headed out the door feeling an icy trace of the dream. She needed a hot cup of coffee.
“Hey Rhiannon, I didn’t see you come in?” Carla said.
“Hey Carla, I had a pretty rough night. Ended up staying here.” Rhiannon poured herself a cup of regular. Carla Dunn was in her forties, thrice divorced, and a round mound of sweetness. She was the housekeeping manager and had worked at the Bruton Inn for almost ten years. Rhiannon normally found Carla’s cheerfulness to be the perfect yin to her yang, but today seemed to be carrying a bitter taste too strong for even Carla’s joyful glow.
“What’s up, Hon? Boy trouble?” Carla said as she neatened up the coffee station behind Rhiannon.
“Can I ask you something?” Rhiannon set her coffee cup down and placed a hand on her hip.
“Sure, anything, Hon,” Carla said.
“Have you cleaned any of the rooms on the second floor yet?”
“Sweetheart, I’ve been here since–” Carla checked her watch before continuing, “–7:30 this mornin’. I’ve been bustin’ my rump all day.”
“No, no, no. I was just wondering if maybe you found anything… strange.”
Carla set down her cleaning rag, stepped back, and looked Rhiannon over like she was a nutzoid. “Strange like what?”
“Nothing, forget I said anything. I’m not awake yet.” Rhiannon grabbed a second coffee cup.
“Well if you ain’t awake yet, maybe you better double-fist that caffeine.” Carla grabbed her rag, threw it in the front pocket of her apron, and turned to leave.
“Carla?”
“What is it, Hon?”
“Do you believe any of those stories about this place being haunted?”
“You really must have had a bad night. You just drink that coffee and get yourself ready for your shift. You’re on in half an hour, ain’t cha?”
Rhiannon sighed. “Yep. Guess I should get ready.”
Carla turned and waddled down to the housekeeping office singing an out of tune Stevie Wonder song that Rhiannon’s mom used to listen to.
Rhiannon wasn’t sure whether Carla had purposely ignored the question about the ghost stories or not. If anyone would know the truth behind the whispers it would be Carla, but Rhiannon didn’t have time to worry about that at the moment. She did need to get ready for work. Standing before the elevator, stacked-up coffee cups in hand, she remembered her uniform was still in her car.
Damn it.
She set the drinks down on the coffee station, ran by the empty front desk, and stepped out through the lobby doors. The air was still cool from the wet night, but the sun’s warmth felt good on her skin. She walked over to the Escort, glad she had slept in her clothes and had her keys tucked in her back pocket. She unlocked the door and almost freaked. Her heart skipped a beat at the sight of a green Subaru. An invisible weight pressed down upon her. She imagined the girl with the brown curls and the old man with the milky eye. A family of three stepped from the sidewalk and moved to the vehicle. The heaviness lifted. She shook her head.
Fucking ghosts.
…..
Jeff was at the front desk staring into the fog outside the lobby doors, waiting for the parade of freaks and weirdoes from his last dream; waiting for something to emerge from the swirling ghost clouds behind the glass doors searching for a way in. The automatic doors rattled to life and drifted open. Uninvited, the mist rolled into the lobby. Jeff stared at the foggy apparition, certain it was scanning the open space for him. The room was perfect silence save for his hyperactive breathing.
The temperature had dropped. The mist rolling in and encircling the furnishings in the lobby took shape and began to crystallize into a shape before him. Jeff could see his breath as a flurry of small cracking and crunching sounds accompanied the formation of the icy sculpture. There was a body trapped within the ice. Climbing the front desk, reaching out, he swiped his hand over the frost and saw Meghan. She was standing perfectly still with her hands up before her shoulders, eyes closed. His mind conjured a vision of Han Solo frozen in carbonite.
“I’ll get you out,” he said, the words dying the second they hit the air. The cold, sucking the color from the room, slowed his thoughts. He’d never been in a meat locker before, but he imagined this was probably pretty close to how it felt. He needed to free Meghan. Making a fist, he pounded on the solid block of ice with the underside of his hand. After the first few strikes, her eyes flew open.
“Meghan! Hold on.” He struck the ice again and again until pinkish smears appeared. Jeff stopped and looked at the side of the hand covered in crimson and trembling uncontrollably. The skin had split. Blood spilled from the open wound thick and slow like molasses from a tipped container. He watched an impossible amount of blood running down his wrist and to the floor. Meghan gazed at him from behind her icy cage, an odd grin stretched around her face.
Thup.
He glanced back at his palsied hand to find his pinky missing. A gaping hole gushed red onto the counter where his missing digit lay unattached, pointing away from him.
Thup, thup, thup.
One by one his other fingers followed, dropping like dead leaves from a maple tree. Crimson syrup flowed like sap to the tiles below. The lobby floor had become a pool of blood. His blood. Lightheaded, his stomach twirling like a washing machine on spin, the remaining warmth drained from his face.
“Jeffrey,” a voice said.
He looked at the melting glacier now sitting in the red pool. Meghan was free from its grip from the waist up. He raised his bloody, fingerless hand toward her, his eyes flashing back and forth from the blood pool to where she stood. His twitching hand touched the skin of her cheek. Meghan’s eyes turned dark–two black marbles glared back at him. Mesmerized, he fell forward face-first into the lake of blood.
“Nooo!” he said, screaming himself awake, hitting the floor with a thud.
Searching his arms for the open wounds, he realized it had been another nightmare. They were becoming more frequent. He turned o
n his side, propping himself up on an elbow. He was on the floor of his hotel room.
A vision of an ice angel flashed across his mind. He shivered remembering the dream. He recalled falling. He caught himself rubbing the sides of his hands where, in the dream, the skin had opened. There were no such wounds. “I need to get the fuck out of here.” He stood up and ran his fingers through his disheveled mop of hair.
There were some books he wanted to find at Barnes and Noble. From the look of the bruised-looking sky outside, he knew he’d better get going.
…..
“Hey,” Rhiannon said as Jeff walked up to the front desk. She smiled.
“Hey,” he said. “Did you sleep okay?”
“No. I had some crazy dreams.”
“Me too.” He hesitated long enough to let her know his probably weren’t too pleasant either. “I did some research online last night after you passed out on the chair over there. I was looking up ghosts and what they are and what they can really do. A lot of the stuff I found was all movies or book related, pretty much a bunch of BS. The take that made some sense, at least to me, was one about ghosts who haunt places where they were murdered. It’s like they’re trapped. Like they didn’t die right. ”
Rhiannon lowered her voice. “Are you talking about the guy who drowned this summer?”
“Maybe, I don’t know.”
“But what about the hospital,” Rhiannon said. “How the hell does that explain the girl,” she looked around, “the thing that chased me last night?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, it was the closest thing I could find.” He sipped his coffee. “I’m not saying I believe any of it. Not yet anyway, but something’s going on around here. Can’t you feel it?”
“I wish I didn’t.”
“Maybe you can do some digging on this place while I’m gone,” he said, zipping his sweatshirt.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m heading over to Hollis Oaks. There are some books I found on the Barnes and Noble website about local Maine folklore–ghost stories, haunted lighthouses shit like that. I want to see if they have any of them in the store.”
“Well, I guess I’ll be here,” she said.
“I should be back in an hour or two. I’m on tonight, and I’d rather not go home to my hammerhead roommates, especially when we might have some action going on here.”
“Yay,” she mocked. This shit was not what she considered fun. She wondered if Jeff would be so cavalier about it if he had been chased by a ghost and a creepy old man. She didn’t think so. “I’ll see what I can dig up.”
“Are you staying again tonight?”
She thought of her empty apartment. Aside from Mr. Mittens, there was no one there. No way did she want to be alone, even if it meant staying here. At least Jeff and the other guests were around if something happened like what she experienced last night with that bitch and the crazy old man. “Signs point to yes,” she said.
“All right, I’ll see you in a bit.”
Rhiannon thought of last night’s chase as Jeff strolled out of the lobby. For whatever reason, it felt like something that happened in a dream, so far away. Maybe it was the daylight holding back the fear that had gripped her so tight. Maybe it was something else.
Chapter Two
Her boys were resting. They would need to be at full strength for the fun she had in mind. Sarah moved to the bathroom, the light turning on as she entered. Standing before the mirror, admiring the body that had belonged to Meghan Murphy, she grinned. Her breasts were a little bigger, her cheek bones more defined, but one thing was off. She watched the long black hair begin to scrunch up and curl into the ringlets she was used to.
“There,” she said.
She walked out to the bed and found a gray piece of luggage tucked halfway beneath it. She reached down and hauled it out placing it upon the comforter. Undoing the clasps and the zipper, she opened the bag and found what she was looking for. From the girl’s clothing, she chose a red plaid skirt, a t-shirt, and a pair of tall black boots.
“Team Edward?” she said, reading the front of the shirt aloud. She wasn’t sure who or what Edward was, but she didn’t care, the shirt was black–her favorite color.
She zipped the tall boots up to her knees. “Let’s go for a little walk.”
…..
As the afternoon moved along, a number of guests asking how to get to Hollis Oaks in search of food, a movie theater, or just an actual city, kept Rhiannon busy. She made it through the first three hours of her shift without thinking about the night before. That changed as soon as the morning crew began to clear out for the day.
“Hey Rhiannon,” Pauline said, sticking her head out from the back office. Pauline Walters was the general manager. She had stopped in to catch up on a few things and ask Rhiannon about what had happened with Kurt and the two elderly guests.
“Yeah.”
“Can you come back here real quick so we can go over this before I head out?”
Rhiannon followed the rotund woman to her little office in the farthest corner of the back room. Pauline’s waddle always made her think of penguins.
“So I got Jeff’s version of what happened from his message.” She sat down behind her desk, the chair squeaking in defiance. “But he said that you got here right after it happened.”
“That’s right,” Rhiannon said, taking a seat beside Pauline’s life-sized cardboard cutout of Steven Segal. Normally the ponytailed 80s action hero made her laugh, but she couldn’t find her funny bone today if she had a PhD to do so. She turned her head back toward her boss and began to gnaw at the skin around her fingertips.
“So what did happen?”
Rhiannon sat in silence, replaying the sight of the old woman falling back into the wall and Kurt crumpling to the floor with the woman’s husband in his arms. “I’m really not sure. I came in and saw them all lying on the floor in the hall. I started to dial 911 on my cell, but the EMT’s came rushing in. The portable phone from the front desk was lying next to Kurt. He must have called for help before he...fainted or whatever.” Rhiannon envisioned him in the hospital room, remembered the flat-lining drone of the machine he was hooked to, the doctors rushing in past her, just as the EMT’s had, and the girl crossing the room.
“Are you all right?” Pauline said.
Rhiannon shook the memories away. “Huh? Yeah.”
“You don’t look so good. Here.” Pauline reached down and brought up a bottle of water. Rhiannon took it, unscrewing the cap. “Are you going to be okay? I mean with working tonight. I know you and Kurt were friends.”
“Yeah, I’ll be okay.”
“Carla is upstairs finishing up the rooms that checked-out late. She should almost be done. I’m only a phone call away if you need me.”
“Thanks,” Rhiannon said.
“Well, I think I have all that I need from you. I just have a couple phone calls to return, and then I have to get out of here.”
Rhiannon stood and headed for the door. “Pauline,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Do you believe any of the ghost stories about this place?”
Pauline laughed. “Lord no. I’ve been here for the past two years as acting GM and I haven’t seen anything. Don’t go jumping out of your skin and quitting on me.”
“I wouldn’t do that. I like this job.”
“Good. Is that all?”
Rhiannon looked at her gnawed off nails. “Yeah. Thanks.”
When she returned to the front, a girl with dark curls was waiting at the desk.
“Hello, what can I do for you?” Rhiannon said, setting her water by the issue of Rolling Stone she’d already read.
“Hi, my name’s Sarah, I was wondering if you could come up to my room and check something for me?”
Chapter Three
Jeff continued to check his hands for wounds that weren’t there. He rolled down Route 5 cranking the local rock station, WKIT. Rumor was Stephen King actually owned
it. As he headed toward Hollis Oaks, he thought of the first copy of The Shining that he’d ever read. He’d found it while doing a paper route down in Portland back when he was in his early-twenties.
One of his favorite stops on his route was the Franklin Towers, a sixteen floor apartment complex in the center of town. The Towers loomed over the sleeping city like a sentry. Each floor of the old building held ten apartments on either side of an open room that served as a lobby. These lobbies had either a couple old couches or some rocking chairs or recliners. There were always magazines and books strewn about on one piece of furniture or another. Jeff made sure to scan the paperbacks every morning, adding a couple Dean Koontz and Stephen King novels to his collection. In all the time spent doing the route, he had only ever seen two breathing people in the building. He was there before most people had a chance to grab their first cup of coffee, so it never seemed odd until he did bump into someone. One of those people, was Mrs. Shelby who lived in apartment 86 on the fifth floor. She waited for him Sunday mornings to give him his tip, usually five bucks. The other person he ran into was a one-time encounter that he would never forget.
Jeff was in the elevator, waiting to deliver his last six Sunday Telegrams, exhausted from a morning of heavy lifting–the Sunday paper was a monster in comparison to the daily editions. When the elevator door slid open to the sixteenth floor he was startled at the sight of the man sitting on the tan pleather couch in the community space. The guy was hunched over holding a hand to his bloody forehead and looking confused, lost. Conflicted on whether to ask the man if he was okay or to just mind his own business, Jeff’s legs carried him away from the open room. He delivered all but one paper. The last copy went to an apartment on the other side of the floor. Approaching the lobby, he imagined the various ways the man on the couch had come to his current bloody state–they all involved someone getting attacked. He stopped shy of the open room, the last paper of the night in hand, and contemplated skipping it. He could just take the stairs and never look back. A blanket of dread–warranted or not–swaddled him like a baby.
