The Inn

by William Patterson

“What do you mean?”

  Jack sighed. “A long time ago, my grandparents ran a very successful inn. They had learned the secret from those who had owned it before, and they carried on, doing what was right and good for the house. But then—”

  His face darkened.

  “But then what, Jack?”

  “Then my father came. After that, they stopped being good to the house.”

  “Your father?”

  “Yes. You see, darling baby angel cakes, that was what I had forgotten. How my father changed things during that short period when we were here.”

  “The period when your mother and your sister died?”

  Jack frowned. “My father let his emotions overrule his better judgment. He gave in to his heart and didn’t listen to his head.” He smiled. “Now, my mother had the right idea, only she never lived to see it. You had the right idea, too, my darling Annabel, but unlike my mother, you can live to enjoy the fruits of your labors.”

  “I can . . . live?” Annabel asked.

  “Of course, baby cakes. But not if you go out into that terrible storm.”

  Annabel allowed him to slip his boots off her feet. “So you’re saying,” she asked Jack, “that the house will make us successful because of some idea I had?”

  “Yes, honey baby lover.” Jack tossed the boots, one by one, across the floor. “You wanted to do the place over!”

  He gripped her by the shoulders and stared at her with his insane eyes.

  “You removed the bricks!” he said triumphantly.

  “The bricks,” Annabel repeated, “from the fireplace.”

  “That’s the secret of the house, baby. Where all its wondrous power comes from.”

  “And . . . removing the bricks will make us rich?”

  “Yes.” Jack beamed. “Annabel, my dearest love, I know what a terrible year you’ve had. You want success as much as I do. You want to be able to show those assholes back in New York that no one can keep Annabel Wish down for long. Annabel Wish is going to come back, better than ever! She’s going to run the most popular, successful inn in New England! No—in America! Maybe even the world!”

  “I don’t understand, Jack.”

  He laughed. “What don’t you understand? Didn’t we envision making this place a success? Didn’t we see it as a first-class destination?”

  “Yes,” Annabel said. “That was what we talked about. . . .”

  “Well, it can be.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “So long as we are good to the house.”

  “And how can we be good to the house?”

  He smiled again. “We give it what it needs!”

  “And what does it need?”

  “I’ll take care of that part, Annabel,” Jack said, standing now, apparently assured that he had gotten through to his wife, convinced her to do things his way. “You needn’t worry yourself about that.”

  “Jack,” Annabel asked, “did you kill Priscilla? Paulie? Your grandmother?”

  He looked at her with a kooky grin on his face. “Me? Of course not, angel pie. Why would I kill them?”

  “Who did, then?”

  He sighed. “The house killed them.”

  “The house?”

  He nodded. “It had to. Because we weren’t giving it what it needed. We could have handled it on our own. But now that I understand what we need to do, I’ll take care of things. We won’t have any more guests going missing.” He laughed again, that terrifying yelp that sounded like a fox caught in a trap in the woods. “That wouldn’t do very well for business, would it?”

  He’s mad. Insane. No question about it. He killed them, and he’s blaming it on the house. I’ve got to get away from him.

  But...

  Annabel realized she was safer if she just went along with Jack for now. He saw some kind of life together in this crazy house. She needed to act as if she shared his hopes and dreams. She needed to patronize him, placate him, get him to trust her again. And then, when the storm subsided, maybe she could find a moment to make a run for it.

  “So, I’ll take care of the house,” Jack was saying, stepping over to the window to look outside at the still roiling storm, “but you’ll have your own responsibilities, sweetheart.”

  “Whatever I need to do, Jack, I’m willing,” she told him. “You know that.”

  “I do know that, angel cake.” He smiled over at her before returning his gaze out the window. “You’ve had as bad a time as I have. We both need a new start.”

  “That’s why we came here,” she said.

  “Yes, it is. But I had no idea the kind of success we could have here, if we were willing to do what was necessary.” He frowned, looking back over at her. “I’m not sure if we’ll be able to trust Zeke for much longer, sweetheart. So you’ll have to take over from him. Your job will be the attic.”

  “The attic?” Annabel asked.

  “Yes. Sweetheart, it’s time you learned about the attic. You see—”

  Suddenly a voice from downstairs interrupted him.

  “Annabel!”

  She recognized the voice. It was Chad.

  “Annabel!” he was calling. “Are you here?”

  Annabel saw Jack’s eyes change. They had calmed, become almost sane. Now they were suddenly wide with rage. Her husband spun on her.

  “You’ve been fooling around with him, too, haven’t you?” he snarled.

  “No, no, Jack, I—”

  He leapt at her, clamping his hand over her mouth. Dragging her off the bed, he brought her back to his closet and shoved her inside.

  “You stay in there, you bad girl,” he spat. “I’ll deal with your lover!”

  “No, Jack, no!” As the door closed against her, Annabel screamed, in a last desperate warning and call for help, “Chad!”

  The closet door slammed shut, leaving her in darkness. She heard Jack turn the lock.

  “No, Jack, no, please, don’t lock me in here—”

  “Turn around,” came the voice of Daddy Ron, seeping through the door. “Turn around and see who’s behind you.”

  Annabel screamed.

  89

  “Annabel!” Chad shouted.

  She’d called his name. She was somewhere upstairs.

  Perhaps he’d been a fool to call for her. But the house had been so deathly quiet when he’d finally made it up to the top of the basement stairs. Chad had assumed he was the only one here. Maybe they’d all left, not knowing he was wounded in the basement. He could have tried going out into the storm on his own, trudging to a spot where he might have better cell reception, and calling his father or Chief Carlson. But he couldn’t have left without calling to Annabel, just in case she was still in the house.

  And, it appeared, she was. She had called back to him. But now she was silent.

  “Annabel!” Chad called again.

  The trip up the basement stairs had disturbed the makeshift bandage his shirt and sweater had provided over his wound, and he was bleeding again, pretty profusely. Chad didn’t think he’d make it up the stairs to the second floor, where Annabel’s voice had appeared to come from. He should just take his chances going outside and making his way through the snow, calling the cops as soon as he could. He’d already seen that the phone was gone from the kitchen wall. The only hope to get help was to get out of the house.

  But as he neared the front door, Chad clearly saw there was no way he could get out. The snow was packed solid against the door and all the windows.

  The only way out would be through a second-floor window.

  And he couldn’t leave without checking on Annabel. Maybe she’d been wounded, too, and had passed out after trying to call to him.

  He had no choice. He had to go upstairs, or he’d stay here on the first floor, bleed out, and die.

  But first, he ripped off a tablecloth from a hall table and wrapped it around himself as best as could, making a tourniquet to stanch the bleeding once again. It wasn’t going to last long, but it would have to do for now. Ch
ad didn’t have a lot of options.

  He began making his way up the stairs.

  90

  “Sorry, chief,” Adam told him, hanging up the phone.

  “The county has none of its largest plows to spare. They said they’ll get down here as soon as they can, but that might be days. The storm has completely immobilized everyone.”

  “This is crazy,” Richard grumbled. “When this is over, I’m demanding bigger plows at the town meeting. The selectmen better go along with it. I don’t want to hear any noise about money. Winters are just going to keep getting worse around here, and we need to be prepared.”

  “Hey, chief,” Betty called. “Were you expecting a fax from the town library?”

  “No,” he said, barely hearing her.

  “Well,” the secretary said, approaching him with a thick stack of papers, “they just sent you over twenty-seven pages of town history.”

  “Just put it in my in-box,” Richard told her.

  Betty complied.

  Richard was trying to think of an excuse to convince state officials to send them one of the massive snowplows they kept up at Great Barrington. But even if he said somebody up at the Blue Boy had some major health issue and needed help right away, they’d no doubt insist there were people all over western Massachusetts in the same position. If only he could—

  Twenty-seven pages of town history.

  All of a sudden he remembered his conversation with Agnes Daley.

  But there’s no denying, chief, that ever since, lots of people have died or disappeared up there.

  Richard reached over and grabbed hold of the stack of papers Betty had placed in his in-box. Sure enough, they were from Agnes Daley.

  Making use of being snowbound here in the library, Agnes had written in her careful penmanship on the cover sheet. So glad the board of directors installed a generator. You were asking about the history of the Blue Boy the other day. You seemed dismissive of what I told you. Here’s some newspaper coverage from back in the day, chief. Give it a read. A.D.

  Richard glanced over what Agnes had sent. They were microfilm printouts of old newspaper pages. The date on the first was from 1869.

  REV. FALL HANGED FOR MURDER, the headline read.

  There was an illustration of a man dressed all in black dangling from the end of a noose.

  Richard looked at the next page. It was from a year later.

  WOMAN FOUND DEAD, DISMEMBERED

  NEAR FALL’S CHURCH

  The murders up at that place really did stretch back a long time.

  Another headline:

  FORMER CONGREGANTS CLAIM

  REV. FALL PRACTICED

  BLACK ARTS, SATANIC RITUALS

  The piece seemed like bad gothic horror fiction to Richard, but he read it anyway.

  Former congregants of the late Rev. John Fall, hanged here three years ago for murder, now claim that the disgraced pastor forced them to participate in the black arts. Fall’s goal, these congregants insist, was to cast a spell that would open a portal into the netherworld, where he could harness the daemonic beings within to do his bidding. He possessed books filled with spells and incantations for such a nefarious purpose.

  “Ridiculous,” Richard murmured.

  The rest of the pages were more recent—coverage of the deaths of the various people at the Blue Boy Inn, including the reports of Jack Devlin’s missing sister.

  But at the very end of the pile was another piece, dated December 26, 1915. It was one of those humorous little items newspaper editors often used as fillers. Agnes’s neat, precise handwriting ran across the top of it.

  This little item wasn’t about Rev. Fall or any mysterious death, but the headline jumped out at me. What do you think?

  Richard looked down at the article.

  CHILD CLAIMS TO HAVE SEEN BLUE ELVES

  Richard read the piece.

  Little Millicent Collins of Bangor, Maine, five years old, visiting the Blue Boy Inn in Woodfield with her parents, claimed to have seen “three little elves with blue faces” poking their heads out of the parlor fireplace. Could Santa have left behind some of his helpers on Christmas Eve?

  Somehow the image of those three blue faces looking out of the fireplace unnerved him even more than tales of opening portals to the netherworld. All of this talk of witchcraft and spells and demonic rituals was absurd, of course. But, nonetheless, Richard was even more disturbed and anxious after reading it.

  “I’ve got to get over to the Blue Boy,” Richard said, banging his fist on his desk. “There’s got to be a way!”

  “I’ve got a pair of snowshoes,” Adam said, shrugging.

  “I’d give it a try,” Richard said, “but I doubt I’d get very far.”

  “What you need,” Betty said, poking her head around the corner from her outer office, “is a snowmobile.”

  “Of course!” Richard said. “Where can I get one?”

  “Well, my son has one, but it’s at our house.”

  Richard jumped to his feet. “Have him ride it over here!”

  “In this storm?” the secretary asked.

  “Betty, that’s what snowmobiles are for!”

  She scowled. “Maybe the kind the Navy uses in the Arctic, but Richard, my kid uses his just for fun.”

  “Then find me a better one,” the chief barked. “Why doesn’t the department have snowmobiles for our regular use anyway? We’re living in the goddamn Berkshire mountains, aren’t we?”

  “I’ll make some calls,” Betty said.

  “You, too,” Richard ordered Adam.

  “Yes, sir!” his deputy said, picking up his phone.

  Richard looked out the window. It was becoming increasingly difficult to see outside. The snow had nearly walled them in. Only at the very top of the window could Richard see a bit of sky, and that was just a furious flurry of white.

  I have to get over there. He had never felt so sure about anything. His gut was telling him something terrible was taking place. I’ve got to get over there or Annabel is going to die.

  He couldn’t get the image of those three little blue elves in the fireplace out of his head.

  91

  In the darkness of the locked closet, Annabel tried to keep her wits about her, but this was too much. She tried to hang on to the reality of the present, but she was fast sliding down a very slippery chute into the past. She was a little girl, locked in the closet by Daddy Ron, and Tommy Tricky was somewhere in the darkness behind her, waiting to devour her with his sharp blue teeth.

  She saw a little man in the basement eating a human arm.

  “No, no, no,” Annabel moaned, and commenced banging on the door. “Jack! Let me out! Let me out! Oh, please, let me out!”

  Behind her, she heard something scurrying in the darkness among her husband’s shoes.

  “He’s not real,” she said out loud.

  “Don’t get him mad,” came Daddy Ron’s voice through the door.

  The closet seemed to be getting smaller. It was closing in on her. It was like that time she’d been trapped in the elevator. The walls had been moving in on her from all sides, and Annabel had feared she would be squeezed to death. She had utterly decompensated then, ending up in a puddle on the floor. She needed to fight that—stay clear in her mind—if she was to survive this. Because being locked in the closet wasn’t the worst horror. Beyond the door her husband had become a madman, and surely he would kill her like the others.

  But it was hard to resist panic when she heard the scuttling behind her.

  The closet was almost completely dark. Annabel could not even see her hands in front of her face. The only light came from the small space between the door and the floor. She got down as close to the space as she could, irrationally terrified that she’d breathe up all the air in the closet and suffocate. She could see out into the room through the space. She could see one of the boots on the floor that Jack had removed from her feet. She could see the bottom of the dresser.


  Annabel leaned in close to the space to gulp in some air.

  What was Jack going to do to Chad? Maybe Chad had gotten away. Maybe he’d gone to get help.

  That wasn’t likely. Not in this storm.

  Annabel heard the scuttling again. Except this time it wasn’t behind her. It was right beside her. Right beside her face as she pressed it to the bottom of the door, gulping in air.

  She moved her eyes.

  Beside her own hand was another. A very small hand, with fingers that resembled the claws of a squirrel or a raccoon. It was hard to say for sure in this darkness, but Annabel thought the hand was blue.

  She screamed.

  92

  Richard slammed down the phone. “Nothing,” he grumbled over at Adam. “The town doesn’t have any snowmobiles and the county can’t get any to us until the storm lets up. We won’t need them then!”

  Adam shook his head. “I haven’t had any luck, either. A friend of mine has one, but I can’t reach him.”

  “Do you even know how to ride one?” Betty asked the chief.

  “I’ve been on one,” he told her.

  She smirked. “That doesn’t mean you know to steer it.”

  “We didn’t have much need of them in Boston. But several years ago we were helping search for a missing girl up in New Hampshire. I . . . I rode a snowmobile then.”

  Betty’s smirk deepened. “You rode one?”

  “Yeah.” Richard sighed. “Right into a tree.”

  Betty laughed. “Our great hero to the rescue.”

  “Is your son good with his?” Richard asked her.

  “Sure. But as I said, it’s just a beginner’s model. Frank and I bought it for Danny last Christmas. It’s just a small Ski-Doo.”

  “Ask him if he knows who else might have one in town,” Richard said.

  “I’m one ahead of you there, chief,” Betty told him. “I already called him, and he’s trying to find you a good-size one.”

  “Thanks, Betty.”