“We did.” The woman smiles. “Violet Conroy. You may have passed my Henry on the stairs, trailing that fellow who totes the bags — Henry’s very particular about our things.” She looks around. “It’s a lovely hotel. I adore that staircase — although I’m sure my back won’t be so fond. And the gas lighting, that’s a nice touch.”
Gas lighting? Lisa hasn’t noticed — but yes, this entire area is lit with gas lanterns, the flames yellow and flickery and a little creepy. “I’m Lisa,” she answers, unwilling to offer more; instead, she turns to the little girl. “You’re pretty.”
The child laughs, showing a gappy smile. “Go on,” Violet urges, “say hello, Emily.”
Emily. Lisa swallows her coffee in a hurry; she can practically hear the blood draining from her face. “Excuse me,” she chokes, “did you say—”
“Hannah.” Violet is tousling the red hair. “Come on, Hannah, don’t be shy.”
Lisa drinks the rest of her coffee in a hurry, feeling her heart clamber down from her throat. “You know, I just got here a few hours ago myself,” she says, grabbing her muffin. “I think it’s time to have a good look around.”
Jesus, I’ve got to get out of here.
~
The mist over the lake isn’t nearly as picturesque as it had looked online.
She’d heard ducks out here, or something like them, and had sacrificed her muffin without glimpsing anything. Up close, standing as near to the water as she can without losing sight of her toes, Lisa realizes that the haze is flat-white and immensely thick; her skin and clothes feel damp, as though she’s walked through a dense fog, but there’s none of a fog’s shifting wispiness. She stretches out an arm and can’t see anything past her elbow. Wiggling her fingers uneasily, Lisa looks back over her shoulder and can just make out the lines of the hotel. She pulls her hand back.
Her phone vibrates in her pocket.
Lisa yelps, stumbling as she tries to pull it out, teetering forward toward the water. Don’t fall in, Mommy, they’ll never find you here snakes through her head and of course it’s Emily’s voice, why does it have to be Emily’s voice, and Lisa yanks the phone free and her knees fold and she sits down hard.
Smarting, breathless from the impact, Lisa clumsily wipes condensation from the screen. Some of it smears around the cracks, but it clears enough that she can read the message.
Be good, MMommy
Lisa cries out, but bites her tongue hurriedly, struggling back to her feet, squeezing the phone in both hands as though she can mend the damage through sheer force of will. Somebody’s fucking with her: this has to be a sick joke of some kind—
The message is from her own number.
This isn’t possible. Lisa scrubs one hand on her jeans to wipe her eyes as the screen blurs. There’s no way anyone could — Karen? Is Karen doing this? The idea is ludicrous enough that Lisa snorts, then sniffles heavily. Karen is a worrier, not a prankster. She’d never be cruel enough to do something like this, not when she was the one in the accident.
The phone buzzes weakly as another message pops up.
im wAtching you moMMy
~
Lisa hasn’t left the hotel. She hasn’t even packed her bags. She’s barely left the bed.
It’s too soon, that’s all. She’s rational, she knows this. It’s only been three months since Emily died; it had been foolish for Lisa to think she could go halfway across the country to this spot in the dead end of nowhere and be fine by herself. She hasn’t grieved enough yet to venture so far; that’s why she hears giggles in the empty hallway, and taps on the outside of her window when there’s not even a tree branch nearby, and Mommy in every creak of the floorboards. It’s purely psychological.
But I hear it’s haunted, Karen had said, and that’s why Lisa won’t look in the bathroom mirror, afraid of just whose face she’ll see.
The phone lies beside her on the bed, within easy reach. She can see through the cracks well enough to see that the battery indicator’s in the red, but she has no clue what will happen if she tries to charge it. She’d rather be a grief-crazed mother than the idiot who makes the news by burning down the hotel.
It vibrates. She grabs it.
i lovve you mommY
Lisa slams the phone, screen-down, onto the comforter and curls up in a tight knot to sob.
~
The impact is soundless, a sudden wild careening through traffic and the crunch of the right front headlight into a utility pole. Karen’s airbag deploys. Lisa’s face bounces off the back of the front seat’s headrest and her mouth begins to sting. Wait, hadn’t she been at the market? Why is she still in the car? “Karen?” she asks thickly, but gets no answer.
Karen’s not in the car. Lisa yanks at her door handle, but the door’s jammed and won’t open. She scrabbles at her seatbelt buckle, but it, too, refuses to yield. “Karen?” Lisa screams through mushy lips; cars whiz by outside, frighteningly close. “Dammit, Karen, get me out of this!”
“Mommy?”
“Emily, hold on.” Lisa gives up on her seatbelt and reaches for her daughter. “Oh my God, Emily!”
Emily’s wearing the same white dress she’d picked for the first day of kindergarten, blood spotting the fabric where it’s dripped from her mouth, a bag of hand-picked tomatoes spilled across her lap. Her lips are sticky and red, her eyes blank, her head hanging at an unnatural angle. “Emily!” Lisa shrieks again, and this time she spots Karen: standing outside the driver’s door with someone in a uniform, laughing. Laughing. Joking. “Karen, goddammit, help us!”
Only laughter reaches her, becoming a golden giggle from the child slumped broken beside her. Then Emily says “Mommy,” again, and her head turns with a sick, wet, grating noise on her fractured neck; and her eyes have the lambent yellowness of the lights in the hotel hallways; and her smile is a ghastly crimson grin with gaps in it. Blood bubbles out where a tooth should have been.
“Dance with me, Mommy.”
~
In the bathroom, Lisa has to hold on to the sides of the sink to stay upright, but she manages to rinse her mouth — which twinges oddly — and rinse her face with the coldest water she can stand.
She does not look in the mirror.
She draws a cold bath as well, intent on rinsing away this sick, sweaty feeling. Afterward, she stands on the bath mat and drips, trying not to think of the sound of the blood spattering from Emily’s mouth. “Bad enough I’ve lost my daughter and my job,” she mutters, “and when I get home I may not have a girlfriend either, but my mind? Am I losing my mind?”
She can hear her phone vibrating in the next room.
She towels off and dresses hurriedly.
~
There’s not another message.
Annoyed, increasingly uneasy, Lisa turns to her books. She’d picked these ten because they’re old favorites, read and re-read and memorized, but she can’t concentrate; every time she scans a line, she sees the blood on that white dress, on those precious lips. The way Emily’s gaze had been frozen, the way her head and neck had been so strangely twisted.
That was exactly how she’d looked in the hospital morgue.
Words blur and run on the pages, skimmed blindly, as one book is laid aside for another. By the time Lisa gives up on the distraction, her two neat stacks of five on the dresser are a jumbled, wept-over pile on the floor.
She pushes off the bed, rubbing the back of her neck. The room is almost dark — it’s later than she’d realized — but the last light of evening streams in the window with an odd yellow color, shifting between light and dark as though the sun is trapped in a swift, churning cloud. The flickering is unpleasant to look at, and Lisa is just reaching to close the drapes when she spots the first movement.
There’s another person down at the lake’s edge — no, two — no, several. They sway and writhe and she can’t quite count them, no matter how hard she concentrates; there seems to always be one more, just at the corner of her vision, and every one
of them glows yellow.
It’s a trick of the light, it has to be; but Lisa rubs her eyes until they run, and the yellow people are still there, wavering like candle flames about to go out. They shine like the gas lights in the hallway, and as she watches them join hands and begin to dance in a circle, she realizes that the mist shrouding the lake has almost the same creamy radiance.
Lisa looks away again. “Guess I’ve found the hotel ghosts after all,” she says to herself, but when she turns back to the scene, the people are still there, still dancing, glowing brighter now. There’s a smaller figure in the center of their circle; it looks up, sees Lisa, and waves.
It’s Emily.
Her phone makes a weak noise. Her hands start to shake.
i see yoU momMY you cAnt HIde come danCE with MEe
When Lisa steps off the cobbled walkway, shivering in the thin, white nightgown she’d yanked on because it reminds her of Emily’s white dress, the circle of people is still there, and Emily is still in the center.
She can’t see her feet, and forces herself to walk. The others let her pass, though walking through the ring is unnerving. They’re all stringy-haired and slack-mouthed, faces gelatinous, bodies bloated, eyes staring; they look... drowned.
Except for Emily.
As soon as Lisa has breached the circle, Emily runs to her mother and leaps into her arms. “Mommy, you came! I knew you’d come. I watched you.”
The words are soft around the edges. Something’s wrong: Emily is solid in Lisa’s arms, but it’s a tenuous solidity, as though the little girl’s body might slip into pieces at any moment. Blood streams freely from Emily’s mouth, down Lisa’s nightgown, filling her nostrils with the scent of wet decay. Lisa retches and coughs, struggling— “Honey, let Mommy put you down, please let Mommy put you down” —and as the drowned shuffle closer, Emily kisses her mother on the lips.
Blood. Blood and mud and scummy stagnant water, and Emily’s rosebud lips are sticky, clinging no matter how Lisa tries to pull away. The others are a tight circle around the pair, and when Emily’s small body shakes, disgorging into her mother’s throat a stream of bloody liquid rot, Lisa screams and backs away.
But there’s no way to go back, only forward, trapped by the insistent press of unstable bodies, and Lisa keeps screaming until she’s swallowed by the mist.
~
Of course, no one heard any screams. Douglas Turner doesn’t even know the woman’s name. All the lawman has to go on is a badly broken smartphone, its screen a mess of sand-filled cracks and its battery dead. Still, if the woman has family, they need to be notified. Maybe someone in his chain of command can get it working.
He drops the dead phone in his pocket. The mist shifts and thins as though it’s about to dissipate, as though the sun’s about to burn it away and make it reveal its secrets; and Turner casts his gaze across the water, waiting, waiting.
In all his years in law enforcement, Turner has learned that where Lake Manor’s concerned, no one ever hears much of anything.
Room 11: Pretty Green Eyes
By EJ Tett
There’s a lake, she said, when they’d found the place online, so it’ll be nice. Sophia wasn’t convinced. She knew “lake” did not equate to “nice”, but her girlfriend was easily pleased and that’s all that mattered. The Lake Manor Hotel was supposed to be haunted, anyway, and that was a good enough reason for her to want to go there. Ghosts = fuck yeah.
Maisey could sit by the lake and bird-watch, and Sophia could conduct some sort of séance in their room. It’d be fun. Besides, there was always the bar.
When they pulled up in the hotel parking lot, Maisey still seemed more excited than Sophia felt. Sure, the place looked spooky, but it was also kinda… dull. Everything was grey, from the asphalt of the parking lot to the slates of the hotel roof. Even the sky was overcast — full of thick cloud the color of… really angry doves.
Sophia frowned to herself as she helped Maisey drag their cases from the trunk of the car. Never write poetry. Angry doves?
“Where’s my binoculars?” Maisey asked, the wheels of her case thunking to the ground as she dropped it from the trunk.
“In the glove compartment,” Sophia said. “You didn’t want them damaged, remember?”
Maisey flashed her a lop-sided grin which made her cheeks dimple. God, Sophia loved those dimples. She loved most things about her. The dimples, the golden curls, the green cats-eyes, that waist, that backside… especially that backside. She wiped the smirk from her face as Maisey finished fishing around inside the car and emerged with the binoculars.
“Let’s check in,” Sophia suggested, locking the car. She pulled her case toward the entrance, making it trundle and bounce over the ground. “Room five,” she told Maisey. “I read it was supposed to be the most haunted. Extra scary.”
“I really don’t believe in ghosts,” Maisey replied.
They entered together. The hotel actually looked worse on the inside than it did on the outside. And it definitely smelled haunted. Or maybe that was damp.
Sophia wrinkled her nose and waited for the receptionist to notice them. She took the key and exchanged pleasantries before heading upstairs to find their room.
“This is going to be so great,” Maisey said, as Sophia fumbled with the key. “So relaxing.”
“Uh huh.” Keycard, why couldn’t they have a keycard? Who still uses keys in hotels nowadays? She twisted the key one way and then another, and she was close to giving the door a kick when somebody called, “Miss?”
“Yeah?”
The receptionist jogged down the hallway, an apologetic smile on her face and another set of keys in her hand. “I’m so sorry, but we’ve double-booked the room. We have another lady downstairs and she’s pretty upset… she’s a regular, you see, and she always stays in room five. We have room eleven free for you, if you—”
Maisey took the proffered key with a smile, and said, “That’s fine, thank you,” before flashing Sophia what she was sure was a warning glare.
Sophia gave the woman room five’s key, handing it over with a scowl. Room five would’ve been full of ghosty goodness. Room eleven would be dullsville.
“I want to go down to the lake and paint,” Maisey said, moving to room eleven and unlocking the door with ease. “Did you see the sky? Really moody.”
“Yeah. Clouds like… swollen pillows.”
Maisey laughed, and Sophia couldn’t help but grin. She dumped her case on the bed and went to look out the window. There was a nice view of the trees and the lake in the distance. She smiled as Maisey came and slipped her arms around her waist.
“Thanks for this,” Maisey said. “I know you weren’t keen.”
“If you’re happy, I’m happy,” Sophia said. She turned and kissed her girlfriend. “It’s gonna be great.”
~
Sophia left the hotel and headed into the woods where she’d left Maisey and her paints. Wind made the trees creak and she glanced up at one leaning at a crazy angle, wondering if it was likely to fall any time soon. There was a clear path down to the lake, well-trodden, so she figured even if the tree did fall on her, somebody would come to help pretty soon.
Unless it killed me.
Something brushed her leg and she gasped and looked down, relaxing when she saw it was only a ginger cat. The creature meowed at her, its green eyes flashing in the light, and she bent to give it a pat.
“Pretty kitty,” she told it. “Go and hunt some squirrels.”
She walked on, the cat trailing after her. A little farther, down a slope, her feet slipping on mud, and everything stilled.
Sophia halted, a creeping sensation twisting in her guts. The wind stopped and the trees quietened. She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until, behind her, the cat hissed and made her squeal.
“Jesus Christ!” she snapped at it. “What?”
The cat didn’t answer, damn thing, and whatever had spooked it couldn’t have been too frightening, beca
use it sat on its haunch and lifted a leg to lick its ass.
She frowned. Something behind the cat caught her eye. Something white and smooth. She scrambled back up the slope a little way, cursing the mud on her shoes, and snatched up the object.
It was a broken tea cup. Couldn’t have been anything exciting, could it? Like a… a… broken skull or dinosaur bone.
“Dinosaur bone,” she muttered to herself, grinning. “A teeny, tiny dinosaur.” At the bottom of the cup, in faded ink, were the words, “knee 11”. She shrugged and tossed the tea cup back into the trees, startling the cat.
The clouds opened and the rain came down hard and fast. The cat bolted. Sophia swore loudly and pulled her jacket up over her head, though it didn’t help.
“Maisey?” she called, hurrying down toward the lake. She could see it now, through the trees. Raindrops crashed into its surface, kicking up a hell of a noise. When she reached it, she couldn’t find any trace of her girlfriend, but a bird blind caught her eye and she dashed toward it.
She threw open the door — the wood wet and slimy against her fingers — and almost fell inside. Cursing, she straightened up and pushed her jacket back from her head. It was dark. Eerie. Slats in the walls opened up so twitchers could view the birds on the lake, but only one was open. And in front of this, her back to Sophia, was Maisey.
Her girlfriend was still, and Sophia wasn’t even sure she was breathing. She’ll be dead. I’ll touch her shoulder and she’ll fall backward, dead.
“Don’t be a dickhead,” she muttered to herself. She took a breath to steady her nerves, and stepped forward.
“Come and look at this!” Maisey spun around, binoculars in hand, and Sophia almost pissed her pants. Maisey grinned. “Sorry. Look!”
Frowning, Sophia took the binoculars and peered out across the lake. As with the hotel, everything was grey. Fifty freaking shades. “What am I looking at?”
The Haunting of Lake Manor Hotel Page 6
