by Steve Bryant
“How could I forget it, Martha?” he replied. “You were the cat’s meow.”
Apparently unsure as how to react to this ghostly intrusion, Frau Grimm crouched in the shadows of a corner. Her legs folded up into a conveniently small package.
James meanwhile used the intrusion as cover to slip his free hand into his trousers pocket. He fetched his jackknife and flicked the large blade open with one agile thumb.
“I say, Martha.” Mr. Beaumont added. “What, pray tell, is that? There in the corner. We shall have to complain to management about the size of the cockroaches.”
James took this awkward moment, with the spider lady frozen in a corner, as the opportunity to bolt. He sliced through the webbing with two quick swipes of his knife and leaped toward the door. Frau Grimm was not quick enough to bar his escape, seemingly confused as she was by the two semitransparent lovebirds that had barged into her domain, talking of cockroaches.
“Run!” James commanded. He snatched Fawn’s hand, and they began running full tilt toward the elevators.
“James, what is it?” she said, keeping up as fast as she could.
James pushed the Down button frantically, but the doors seemed to ignore his urgency. They didn’t budge.
“Spider” was his one-word answer.
They turned, looked back down the hallway, and gasped as the thing suddenly appeared.
“Make that a big spider,” he said. “I hate spiders.”
The spider with a lady’s head looked about, saw them, and charged immediately. It amazed James that anything so large and so terrifying could move so fast.
“It’s coming!” Fawn shouted.
As she spoke, the doors behind them finally crept open.
They leaped backward into the elevator and quickly pressed L for Lobby, but this time the doors failed to close automatically. Frantically pressing the Close Door button didn’t help: the doors stood maddeningly wide open as the enormous spider seemed to pick up speed. Trapped in the exposed chamber, James and Fawn clung to each other and awaited the attack.
Fortunately, seconds before the creature reached them, the doors condescended to close, followed by a terrific wham as Frau Grimm smacked into the closed portal. There was a brief vertical lurch, and the elevator at last began its slow descent. For the third time that night, James wished Mr. Clancy could do something about the contraption’s velocity.
Above them, they could hear a horrendous wrenching of twisted metal.
“Oh, bad news,” James said. “She’s ripping the doors open.”
There were a few seconds of silence after the wrenching stopped, and then they heard a soft thunk on the ceiling of the elevator.
Fawn threw her arms around James.
“Oh, James,” she said. “She’s up there. We’re trapped. She can tear this elevator open before we ever make it to the lobby.”
Immediately they heard a new assault, this time on the metal mere inches above their heads. The clanging and banging sounded angry.
“I‘m going to try something,” James said. “Something scary.”
He held his finger over the Emergency Stop button and watched the lights indicating the floor levels.
Thirty-six, thirty-five, thirty-four, thirty-three, push.
The elevator lurched to a halt, apparently between floors. There was a whump followed by an “Ouch!” on the ceiling. All the panel lights flashed.
James pushed the Open Door button, and the doors parted to reveal a phantom corridor. Flickering candles offered faint illumination, and a heavy fog obscured precisely where the floor lay and how far the passageway extended.
“Quick,” James said. He pushed the L button again, and he and Fawn jumped into the mist a heartbeat before the doors closed and the elevator, with its creepy hitchhiker, continued on its way. When they looked back, they saw no elevator at all, nothing but a passageway that trailed off into the murk. The doors through which they had come no longer existed.
“I don’t know where we are,” said James. “I only know she can’t follow us here.”
In this shadowy nether world, dead leaves scattered past their feet, the damp fog chilled the air, and the candles glowed like small pale suns in the mist. Something drifted past in the eerie haze that looked like the ghost of a little girl. It waved to James and Fawn as it went by.
“This is so amazing,” Fawn said, looking around. “You work in a very interesting hotel, James. And you saved me. Thank you.”
James wasn’t convinced he had saved anyone. After nearly a year at McGrave’s, this was the first time he had dared occupy one of the mysterious ghostly floors.
“Um, you might not want to be too hasty with the thanks,” James said. “I don’t know if anyone has ever made it back from here. I think we are in some sort of world of the dead.”
Fawn smiled. “Leave that to me,” she said. “I am who I am. I am my father’s daughter, and I know a thing or two about death. That’s why I was more worried about Mr. Lesley than about the Godfrey girls. I can sense the difference between dead and kind of dead. I knew that no harm was going to come to those girls.”
“So you can bring us back from the dead?” James said.
“I can’t bring anyone back from the dead,” Fawn said. “Neither can Dad. It would undermine the very definition of ‘dead.’ I think I can bring us back from here though. This is nothing but a sort of cosmic way station, a jumping off point. Trust me?”
“Please.”
“Then hold on, James. This is going to feel weird.”
As tightly as she could, Fawn wrapped her arms all the way around James, pinning his own arms to his sides. He could feel the crush of the bow on her dress against his chest. Her cheek was against his, and he was staring at the little spider clip in her hair.
The corridor started to spin, and the candles began to circle them. First slowly, then faster until the individual flames became a continuous ring of light. James felt as if he might faint, and then they crashed painfully into a solid wall. The circle of light vanished, and everything went black.
Chapter Sixteen
The Haunted Wine Cellar
“Oof!” James said, opening his eyes in the dark chamber. “Are you okay?”
The two carefully disentangled.
“I think so,” said Fawn. “Where are we?”
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, James became aware that he and Fawn were back inside the same elevator, the one they had so recently escaped. The wood paneling was the same. The ceiling of the compartment had been ripped open, and they could see straight up some forty-seven floors. Faint light from the stack of rooms leaked into the shaft, and cables and pulleys hung high above them like black pendulums. The elevator’s doors had been wedged open, and the floor indicator lights no longer functioned. The elevator was dead.
“Whooooooooo,” came a long, sad moan.
“I know where we are,” James said. “I’d recognize that moan anywhere. We’re in the wine cellar.”
They stepped into the cellar and saw no sign of Frau Grimm.
The cellar was a labyrinth of wine. Here among a hundred thousand varieties, divvied out in a maze of casks and kegs and bottles and Egyptian amphorae, were the fermented grape beverages that accompanied the entire history of modern civilization. Here were wines from five thousand years older than those of Queen Siti’s time to the latest connoisseur selections of December 1936.
Often dispatched to this subterranean maze to select a bottle for a special guest, James knew his way around the complicated layout. Cautiously, he led Fawn down what he hoped would be a safe passageway. A left turn at recent Bordeaux vintages, a right turn at Rhone Valley.
Both he and Fawn jumped when they almost bumped in to someone emerging from an aisle of Portuguese offerings. It was Henry Hudson, the bearded English sea explorer, looking dandy if not quite opaque, a white ruff decorating his neck.
“Beware,” the ghost said s
omberly. “Beware.”
The ghost passed by James and Fawn and walked right through a rack of Rieslings.
Even more alert after the warning, stopping every few steps in the dim pathways to listen for the pitter-patter of not-so-little spider feet, James moved cautiously with Fawn at his side, testing the void ahead with an extended hand and sniffing the air for the spider lady’s meaty aroma.
“I don’t like this,” Fawn said.
“I don’t either,” said James. “These passageways are tricky though. The wines go back centuries. If we can get deep enough into the maze, I don’t think she can ever find us.”
Privately, he worried about ever getting back out again, to the safety of Mr. Nash and the others, but concealment seemed a more pressing concern.
“Ick!” Fawn said as they turned down another corridor. “James, let go.”
“I’m not touching you,” he said. “Here, take my hand.”
“I … can’t,” she said. “James, I can’t move.”
James suddenly found that he couldn’t either. It had been all but invisible, Frau Grimm’s latest snare. The mammoth web extended from floor to ceiling, crisscrossing the gap between wine racks with an impregnable grid work. With their forward motion impeded by its silvery sticky strands, James and Fawn tried to spin and tug and yank to wrest themselves free, a struggle that only resulted in their becoming more hopelessly tangled.
“Nuts,” James said as he paused for breath. “I’m so sorry I brought you here.”
“I’m sorry we left the phantom corridor so soon,” Fawn said. “We probably should have stayed longer. I was showing off.”
They said nothing for a time, thinking. James had entangled both arms and thus could not retrieve his jackknife. The best he could hope for, by extending his fingers as far as possible, was to reach a wine bottle. Even if he did, he would not be able to swing the bottle to damage the web, as most of the length of his arm was immobile.
Nevertheless, he had been trained to relax and to think in such situations, having escaped from numerous traps his parents had simulated for him. What would the famous escape artist Houdini have done? Houdini had escaped from handcuffs and jail cells and packing boxes wrapped in chains and tossed into a river. A spider web would likely have been child’s play.
Presently, a plan evolved, a long shot, but it might work. James extended his hand just enough to grasp the neck of a 1925 Port. Once he had it, he could use it to tap an adjacent bottle.
He tapped rhythmically: tap-tap-tap TAP-TAP-TAP tap-tap-tap, and so on, repeatedly.
“What are you doing?” Fawn asked.
“I’m sending the SOS signal in Morse code,” James said. “My parents taught me to use it when I was seven. We used to drill in the afternoons, then talk to each other in the evenings by tapping. Every few transmissions, I’ll alternate by spelling out W-I-N-E C-E-L-L-A-R. We’ll have to hope someone hears us.”
Alas, after at least ten minutes of this, they seemed to have been heard by the wrong party. From a distant aisle of wine, James could hear the familiar clickety clickety clickety sound of a giant spider making its way toward them. James stopped tapping immediately, but it was too late.
The clickety clickety clickety kept getting closer.
Both James and Fawn recoiled when the creature clicked its way into view on its eight powerful legs. It sickened James to see any spider, much less one on this mutant scale. Frau Grimm was as hairy as the tarantula that terrorized James as a baby.
The oversized arachnid recited more of the operative jingle: “The Spider turned him round about, and went into his den, for well he knew the silly Fly would soon come back again.”
She smiled her wide smile.
“Welcome back, my children,” she said. “I knew you would come back to me. You must understand that I really couldn’t let you go. You seemed to have tumbled onto my secret, and I couldn’t have that revealed. What was it that tipped you off, eh? Was it the flies? They are my secret vice, so delicious.”
“Keep me and let her go,” said James. “She has nothing to do with the hotel.”
“Oh, so noble,” said Frau Grimm. “A pity that this is only between us, liebchen. It has nothing to do with hotels. Indeed, I think I shall begin with her and let you watch.”
The spider scooted up to Fawn, braced itself on four legs, then tilted upright and used its other four legs to begin wrapping Fawn in a tight silk cocoon. The silk, like sticky lengths of wet spaghetti, shot from spinnerets in the creature’s abdomen. The work was impressively skillful.
Fawn’s eyes widened in terror as she watched herself being wrapped like a gift.
“I’ll explain what will happen next,” said Frau Grimm. “I’ll inject her with venom. I have particularly large venom glands, I must say, so the process will be quick. The venom will turn her insides into liquid, and I will suck the liquid out as if she were a milk shake.”
“What sick egg sac did you hatch out of?” said James.
Frau Grimm stopped spinning for a moment and turned slowly toward James.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot. You haven’t seen my fangs yet.”
She shook her head violently from side to side, and two large horizontal fangs protruded from her wide mouth. They both pointed inward, toward each other. So that’s what she had been hiding in those cheeks.
“Hard to talk thith way,” she said. “Leth get thith over with.”
Fortunately James’s insult seemed to have distracted her from her plan. Instead of injecting Fawn immediately, she started nodding from one victim to the other.
“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” she recited, the familiar children’s choosing rhyme that would ghoulishly decide who would be liquefied first.
“ … moe! Ah, lucky boy!”
Her terrifying face, with its pincer fangs and blazing eyes, loomed toward James’s, and her buggy breath was ghastly. Instead of feeling afraid, James felt overwhelmingly sad. It had been nearly a year since his parents had died, and still he had received no message from them, no words of good-bye. Now he was to die too, and he would never receive last words from them, even if any had been sent. Compounding his grief, Fawn was to die soon as well, and he felt immensely guilty for having allowed her to tag along. You must keep her safe. You must allow her to face no danger, whatsoever, he had promised. If only he had obeyed Mr. Wu.
James almost shut his eyes to avoid facing the end, but then a flash of silver changed everything.
At first Frau Grimm’s eyes looked surprised. Then her head tilted a few degrees clockwise, paused, and finally slid off and away from her body and plopped onto the floor. A few seconds later, the great body of the giant spider slumped to the floor in a heap beside its decapitated head. The now-dead eyes stared upward in disbelief.
The silver flash had come from the sword in the hand of Queen Siti, standing before James and Fawn in her trim new figure, brandishing the weapon as she must have done three thousand years ago after smiting the Hittites.
James at once remembered the Justice card he had drawn earlier in the evening: a lady with a sword. Justice indeed.
“Goodness,” the mummy said, regarding the late Frau Grimm. “What is that thing?”
“You can walk!” James said.
“You can speak!” Fawn said.
“You can speak English!” James said.
“I picked it up from the British tourists,” the mummy said. “If you lie there long enough, you can learn practically anything. For your sakes, one of those things was Morse code.”
James and Fawn were overjoyed at this turn of events.
“Impressive that you know Morse code,” James said. “How on earth did you hear us?”
“Listening is another skill you pick up lying in state for a long time. In a building, you can hear almost every sound being made, from the winds blowing across the roof to the hum of your modern electricity. The trick is to separate out the different
sounds, to learn the significance of each.”
The mummy performed a deft set of maneuvers with her sword to cut James and Fawn free of the web.
“I wanted to thank you two for the bath,” the mummy continued, openly admiring the clean linen strips that defined her. “After lying in the desert sands for three thousand years, a girl gets dusty.”
James had his knife out now and was helping to cut Fawn free of her silk wrapping. He had to peel the sticky strands away with his hands.
“I also wanted to thank you for these,” the mummy said, tapping her hips with her hands. “I haven’t felt this trim since I was a girl of twelve, playing Senet and other board games with my brothers.”
She gave the body of Frau Grimm one last disgusted look.
“This thing is starting to smell,” she said. “Do you two mind if we get out of here?”
The three walked happily toward the elevators.
“That white dress you disguised me in earlier,” the mummy said. “With the beads and lace? I thought it was very becoming. Is that what they wear in your world?
Chapter Seventeen
The Airship
“Did you hear that?” James said.
James and Fawn were walking from Queen Siti’s suite back to the elevators. James was about to return Fawn to her father at last.
“Hear what?” Fawn said.
“Nothing, I guess,” said James. “I thought I heard something that couldn’t be.”
A few steps onward, he stopped again.
“That time,” he said. “Did you hear it?”
“Nothing,” said Fawn. “James, are you trying to frighten me?”
“It sounded like, well, that’s impossible, but it sounded like Frau Grimm.”
“Maybe it’s her ghost, come back to haunt us,” Fawn teased.
“Yeah, maybe.”
As they walked a few steps farther, they heard the click of a door closing to one of the rooms behind them.
“That is definitely weird,” James said. “No one has a room in this wing. It was a security precaution for the Egyptians. They are the only ones with rooms on this entire floor.”
