Then she runs her hands over her face and cracks her shoulders.
“Awake,” she says. “Definitely awake.”
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” a voice says.
It’s a man dressed in black, youngish and more handsome than anyone deserves to be.
“I’m Clay,” he says.
She blushes. “I’m Christiane.”
For the next hour, they talk about nothing, about the history of the hotel, and the man that built it, and the ghost stories that haunt every old building on earth. Clay’s words are spun sugar, and she devours every syllable no matter how cloying the taste.
At least she’s not alone. Even if her head is spinning faster than before.
“It’s getting late,” Christiane says, and sips what’s left of her fourth whiskey sour.
“It is late,” Clay says, and moves in closer. “My shift ends in ten minutes.”
He smiles, a keen coyote’s smile, and Christiane smiles back, even though she knows she shouldn’t. She doesn’t usually smile at strange men, especially a man like Clay. His gaze, so direct, should scare her, but then nothing much scares her these days. Everything she’s loved has crept quietly away from her, so there’s not much he can do to wound her worse than she’s already been wounded.
At exactly midnight, he flicks off the lights in the bar and leads Christiane to his room. She follows, figuring she has nowhere else to be.
They stay up until dawn. His sweat is sweet as honeyed bourbon, and he kisses her as if to steal every gasp of air her lungs will ever take. She should make him stop, should tell him it’s too much, but she likes the breathless feeling. It reminds her of the wind whipping around her on the track.
It reminds her of freedom.
When they’re done, Clay doesn’t fall asleep. Instead, he stays awake and runs his fingers over every crevice in her body as if she’s a roadmap.
He ends hastily at a gash in her leg. “What happened?”
“An accident,” Christiane says, and laughs, because of course it was an accident. Nobody gashes her leg on purpose.
“How?” He asks as if he genuinely cares, though Christiane doubts a few hours at the bar and in his bed count for actual affection.
“It was on a racetrack,” she says, humoring his curiosity. “My fault. I caused a pileup going into a turn. Injured two other jockeys, and killed three horses.” She inhales sharply. “Including my own horse, Forio.”
“Wow,” Clay says, and withdraws his hand as if he suddenly fears the pain she inflicted is contagious. “How did it happen?”
“I saw someone on the track.” Christiane stares out the window, where the figure materializes once again on the lake. “But when they played back the video, there was nothing there. Just my imagination, they said.”
The sun rises, and still she and Clay recline among the mountains of starched sheets.
“So you said your mother wanted to send you here,” he says. “How about your father?”
“My father’s dead,” Christiane says plainly. “Hanged himself eight years ago.”
Clay’s eyes darken, and he hesitates.
“That’s terrible,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
Christiane shrugs and moves for her stockings and skirt.
“Not your fault,” she says, and dresses herself in under a minute.
Back in her room, Christiane tries to phone her mother again. No luck, so she spends the rest of the morning wandering the estate.
Outside, it’s quieter than she expects. The trees are bare, and there are no birds singing on stray branches. Flowers in the vast gardens are wilted and browned like the hand of death waved over them and sucked the color from their stems.
Christiane sighs and wishes she was anywhere else, like on Forio at her family’s stables, back before the accident. Even another horse that looked like Forio might help her forget for a moment. Anything to make her forget.
Though she doubted her mother would send her to a place with horseback riding lessons, Christiane had still hoped she might see a stable somewhere on the property. But even if there were proper trails and horses fitted with saddles, it’s the off-season, so there would be no riding this time of year anyhow.
She doesn’t want to go near the lake, not after her dreams of drowning, so she stays back from the shore, kicking stones and singing softly to herself.
Up ahead, the ground is disturbed. Something was digging. Christiane kneels carefully and digs her fingers into the earth. It’s cold, yet inviting. There’s nothing there, not that Christiane can see. But then why was something digging? Christiane can’t help but wonder. Handful after handful of dirt flies into the air until her knees and arms are covered in black muck.
Finally, she comes across something buried deep. She can’t tell what it is, except that it’s long and thin and pale.
She shivers and reaches out to touch her discovery. It shudders in reply and reaches back for her. This is no buried treasure. The interred thing is alive.
It stretches toward her. A finger. No, not just a finger. A whole hand. A wrist. An arm. This is a body. Someone is beneath the ground, wrenching Christiane into a grave.
The trees rustle around her as Christiane screams and thrashes against the thing holding her. It heaves her body harder and pulls her into the earth, up to her elbow.
“Stop!” Christiane wails, though she knows it will do no good.
This thing wants her. Just like the figure in white from her dream.
At last, she pulls away, her body flung backward against the chilled earth.
“There’s something out here,” she screams as she stumbles into the lobby, dirt-caked and heaving.
Lissette and Clay follow her to the spot near the shore, but it’s not at all like she left it. The ground is packed down and secure. Even the grass is settled as though no one’s been there in months.
“It was... here.” Christiane crouches to the ground and presses her hands into the soil, desperate to find the exact spot.
“It looks fine, Christiane,” Clay says, kneeling beside her and placing a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Are you sure this was the place?”
“I don’t know,” she murmurs as they escort her back to her room.
Am I crazy? she wonders to herself. They’ve already decided I’m crazy. Maybe they’re right.
Her mother always reminded her how madness runs in her father’s side of the family. As though her mother was perfectly sane and couldn’t possibly fathom any madness being in her lineage.
Clay tucks Christiane in bed.
“I have a few minutes,” he says. “If you want to talk.”
But talking isn’t on his agenda. He wants something else from her. A second round, maybe, or something else, something worse. Christiane doesn’t know which it is, and she doesn’t care to find out.
“I’m tired,” she says, and rubs her eyes in case he doesn’t believe her. “I need to rest.”
Clay kisses her forehead before leaving her alone in the room. She waits to hear his footsteps retreat before she grips the phone and calls her mother.
Please answer. Please.
“Hello?” the voice on the other end says.
“Mother?” A wave of relief rises over Christiane. “Oh, thank god!”
“I can’t hear you, darling. What was that?”
“You need to send someone to get me immediately,” she whispers, cupping her hand over the receiver. “This place isn’t good. It’s not safe here.”
The line clicks, but not the type of click to end the call. Christiane knows this sound, from all of her own eavesdropping on her mother’s phone calls.
Someone is listening in.
“Christiane?” Her mother’s voice squawks over the line. “Are you there?”
You have to say something, she thinks. If you don’t say something, they’ll know you heard them get on the line.
Her lips quiver as she tries to speak. “I’m sorry, but I have to go now, Mother,�
� she says. “I have a headache and need to lie down.”
Though she doesn’t mean it at first, Christiane hangs up the phone, and a sudden pressure inside her head overwhelms her. She droops to the bed and is out instantly.
~
The woman in white returns to her, this time not in the earth, but once again on the water.
Only now she has a voice.
“Christiane!” the woman calls to her in a sing-song lilt. “Oh, darling, it’s time! You don’t want to be late to your own party!”
Christiane stands like a pillar of salt on the shore, and even as she tries to step backward and flee, the ground shifts beneath her, and the dirt cements her in place while the woman in white reaches out and takes her hand.
The drowning lasts longer this time. Maybe days. It’s hard to tell time when your head is held beneath water.
~
When Christiane awakens, she coughs up black liquid. It’s not much, not even enough to be sure it’s the same as from the dream lake.
The moonlight peeking through the window illuminates the water as it spreads over the pristine comforter like engine oil. Christiane tries to rub it away, but the stain is stubborn.
There’s something else in the room. A shadow hangs over her, a silhouette of a shape swinging from the light fixture. She squints in the darkness.
It’s a noose.
Shrieking, Christiane topples out of bed and scrambles across the floor to the window.
Like the water from her lungs, the rope does not vanish. It’s real. Black and knotted, same as the one her father used when he couldn’t take any more.
He never told anyone except Christiane, but her father saw the woman in white, too.
And although he did his best to resist her, the woman in white always gets what she wants.
She’s after me now. Christiane sobs to herself. She wants to keep me here forever.
Because she screamed, both Lissette and Clay are now outside in the hall.
“Christiane,” Clay calls, and pounds on the other side of the door. “Let me help you.”
Christiane shakes her head.
I can’t trust them. They were listening in on me, weren’t they?
Prying open the window, she scuttles through and climbs down the lattice.
It’s the road she needs, but this place is powerful. The lake wants her. The dead want her, too.
When her feet touch the sand, Christiane sees them there. The gray cadavers rising up out of the water.
“No,” she says, and stumbles backward from the shore.
It’s no use. No matter which way she turns, the lake is there. It’s everywhere. It’s inescapable. And every time she looks, there are more bodies. A hundred bodies now, at least, drifting above the lake, feet not touching the water.
“This isn’t real,” she whispers. “This can’t be real.”
But the hand that emerges from the fog and wraps around her throat feels real enough. The woman in white is here. She’s always been here. She’s been calling Christiane to this place, and now she has her.
“Hello, darling,” she says. “So glad you could make it.”
Like a prima ballerina, the woman twirls again and again into the water, dragging Christiane with her. The waves are heavy as a stone thrust into her chest, and Christiane screams, but water rushes into her mouth and down her throat, silencing her for what seems like forever.
At the bottom of the lake, in a sandy grave, waits her father. He smiles at Christiane, the same smile he flashed across the breakfast table every morning for twenty-five years. So normal. As if he and his only daughter belong in this watery crypt.
The woman in white smiles, too, and helps Christiane settle cross-legged in the earth, the three of them reclined there, a macabre family settling down to Sunday supper.
Above them, the other bodies bob placidly, as though they weren’t invited to this reverent occasion.
The water convulses in Christiane’s lungs, but it brings no pain and no fear. Perhaps this is the most natural thing in the world. Perhaps this is destiny.
I could stay here, she thinks. I could be happy. Maybe there’s no use in fighting.
The woman in white gazes at her and smiles.
That face. That face that drowned Christiane over and over again.
No, she decides at once. She’ll swim. She has to swim. The shore is right there beyond the waves. She can’t let them hold her here, the anchor of their ship. She doesn’t belong among the dead. She doesn’t know where she belongs, but it can’t be here.
She flails once, hard and fast, and breaks the grasp of the woman in white, breaks the grasp of her own father, and she reaches the surface in an instant.
All the bodies are gone.
A light is on in the hotel, and someone from faraway calls her name. She won’t answer. She doesn’t trust them. She can’t trust anyone.
It might be too far to town, especially sodden in the cold night, but she has to try, so she starts down the road that carried her to Lake Manor Hotel.
In the crackle of dead leaves behind her, someone else is trying to reach town, too. Someone tracking her every step.
Maybe her father.
Maybe Clay or Lissette.
Maybe something else.
Water streaming down her body like tears, Christiane takes one careful step after another. That’s all she can do.
Just keep walking, she tells herself. Keep walking, and don’t look back.
Room 9: A Key to Kill For
By DJ Tyrer
Casimir ran his finger around the inside of his collar as the bellhop unlocked their hotel room and deposited their bags inside. He didn’t like the way the man looked at him as he handed him the room key, and was glad when the bellhop turned away and he could close the door.
As he took out a hankie and dabbed his brow, to the accompaniment of a sigh, Melissa went through the suite, dropped her little case onto the bed and flopped down happily beside it.
Casimir couldn’t believe Melissa could seem so casual; he could feel the blood drumming in his temples.
He sighed again. “I was certain they were on to us.”
When they had arrived at the hotel, the woman at the front desk had asked a lot of questions, especially as to why he had specifically requested room nine.
“Don’t worry, honey,” Melissa replied with a smile, “whatever it was they were looking for, it clearly wasn’t us.”
He shrugged off his jacket and shook some life back into his limbs, feeling stiff after the drive, saying, “Well, I just hope they pay us no more attention. The last thing we want is the staff poking around, wondering what we’re doing.”
“You worry too much,” she said, stretching out on the bed with a contented sound. “Lie down, relax, enjoy yourself.” She patted the bed beside her.
It was a tempting offer. It was late; they hadn’t been able to leave any earlier without risking attracting attention. But they weren’t here for fun. He looked at her, brow furrowed. “You do remember why we’re here?”
“Hmm? Of course.”
“Oh, I thought maybe you imagined we were here on holiday, the way you’re just lounging there.”
“I’m sorry, but I thought maybe we could enjoy ourselves a little, while we’re here. I mean, you have paid for the room and it is a good one.” She gestured languidly at the suite.
Room nine of the Lake Manor Hotel was an approximate c-shape cupping an en suite bathroom. Casimir was standing in the lounge area where their bags had been deposited. The other section of the ‘c’ was where Melissa was relaxing on the bed. The upper halves of the walls were papered in a patterned green, which matched the tapestry curtains hung about the four-poster bed, while the lower halves were panelled in a rich, dark wood. With a fire crackling in the grate, the room was perfectly appointed for a chilly early-winter’s day which had held the promise of frost in the air.
Melissa was determined to enjoy their stay, regardless.
/> “Look,” he said, walking over to the bed, “the sooner we find it, the sooner we can leave — and, the sooner we leave, the sooner we can start our new lives.”
Melissa pouted and pushed herself up on one elbow. “Oh, pooh. You’re no fun, Casi. What’s the big rush?”
He took a breath and fought the urge to roll his eyes. “If anyone finds out about it, they’ll come after us — and they won’t be polite in asking questions. You know exactly what Uncle Vanya is like.”
Vanya Putin was neither an uncle nor a relative of the Russian president, and was certainly not known for an avuncular disposition.
“That key,” he went on, “is, well, it’s our key to a hell of a lot of money: enough that people would kill for. Understand?”
She nodded, clearly irritated. “Sure, right.”
“Good. Look, this is business. Serious business. Keep that in mind.”
“Okay, okay.” With a sigh, she rolled round so that she was sitting on the edge of the bed. “Fine, what do we do first?”
That, of course, was the question. Jerry Cadzow had successfully embezzled ten million. Casimir was the only person who knew what he had done — as his accountant, it had been his job to help launder it into bearer bonds, which had been deposited in a safety deposit box in the city. Having had the foresight to add his name as a trustee, all he needed to access the fortune was the key. Which was why they were here.
Jerry had booked into the hotel, but had never booked out. According to the police report, he had drowned in the lake; Casimir suspected he might have had a little help doing so. The safety deposit box hadn’t been touched, and the key hadn’t been listed amongst his belongings, which meant he had to have hidden it somewhere.
“Where would you hide a key?” he asked Melissa. “I mean” —he waved vaguely about the room— “it could be anywhere.”
“Um, well, it can’t be somewhere it would be found,” she said, after a moment’s thought. “If he left it in a drawer or something, someone would have found it, surely?”
He nodded. “Look for nooks and crannies.”
The Haunting of Lake Manor Hotel Page 12
