The Haunting of Lake Manor Hotel

by Gwendolyn Kiste

  “Stop it, stop, stop it, you bastard!” the kneeling man cried. In his distress, he punched the shins of White-Noise Man in front of him, and one of them cracked, like glass, allowing more of the crackling fuzz to spool out of the wound and onto the carpet, like a swarm of bugs. Art shrank back, his muscles coiled, ready for the fight or flight.

  “Hey!” he cried, in spite of himself. “What the hell’s going on?”

  Neither of them acknowledged Art’s cry. It was as though he was mute. The kneeling man produced a gun — where did that come from? — and pointed it, trembling, into his mouth.

  Art lurched forward to try and grab the weapon, about to cry “no!” but the shot rang out, stopping Art in his path and sending his hands over his face in reflexive self-defense. When he peered between them, a red spray covered the wall, and the kneeling man now slumped back against it.

  White-Noise Man turned to look at Art. Despite the crack in his leg, he didn’t seem crippled. Cold smothered Art, but he regained the tension in his shaking muscles and gritted his teeth. Before White-Noise Man could move toward him, Art dove into his room. The door slammed behind him.

  His shaking hands fumbled as he turned the lock as far as it would go, and tried to turn it farther. It had to move more. It had to keep him out. When it refused to budge, he scrambled away, falling on his backside and breathing in tiny whimpers. His fingers, clutching the carpet, were bloodless and white. He looked around for his Swiss army knife, desperately trying to control his breathing, certain that a knock would come, signifying it would be him next. What in the name of Christ was it? And where the hell was his knife?

  Throwing up the duvet and sifting through the satchel of mocking cell phone covers yielded no results, and in his frustration at being unable to arm himself, Art picked up the phone, dialing “0” for reception.

  When the female voice came on, he rushed into speaking, but his heart sank when she only responded with “…no connection available. Please hang up, and try again.”

  “No! Shit.”

  A second attempt brought only the same cool, loathsome tones. He thrust the phone back into its cradle in disgust. His cell showed no service. Double shit.

  Faint buzzes crackled somewhere beyond the confines of his hotel room. The hangover was hitting harder now. No, not now. A shake of the head tried to bring his wits back, but his mind still swam. His laptop screen shone dully into his face. Of course! He could get in touch with the outside world online. He sat down, feverish and cold, and typed away. The wifi logo showed he had signal, and he brought up his browser. To his distaste, last night’s messages still shone out, and the response from CrazyLily and a couple of other users who’d weighed in to back her up. “Piss off,” he grunted, typing “local police force” into the address bar. The page flickered and showed a blank, white space. The connection was broken. His skin broke out in fresh goose bumps. “What the hell…?”

  Images of the kneeling man placing the gun in his mouth entered his head, and the sound of the gunshot jerked him back to alertness. Crumpling his face, he tried not to cry. He bit at a knuckle, then bit harder, controlling himself with pain. Refreshing the browser did nothing, but clicking “back” in frustration returned him to the forum he’d been on before. The wifi symbol disappeared, yet a message appeared in the conversation thread even after the connection was broken.

  Is anybody else here waiting for a connection?

  Art tried typing a message — who is this? — and sent it. The lack of wifi didn’t stop it from appearing in the thread and prompting a response moments later. He screwed his face up in confusion and looked around, as if someone were playing a trick on him. A new message appeared.

  This place is strange.

  Anyone else here?

  Ok, well, my wife left me not long ago; she found someone else. I was depressed. When I opened the door to my flat the outside world seemed to throb, like the whole world was a migraine. Couldn’t face the Sun, or the Moon, especially other people. I felt chewed up, like old food, gristle. Didn’t eat. Then stuffed myself full of junk. TV was shit. Internet was different, though; like therapy. Made friends. Friends without faces. No judgment, just comment. Then something happened.

  Art ran his hands through his hair. Tears welled behind his eyes and his face felt numb. “This has got to be a dream,” he whispered, yet he found himself typing a response.

  If you can read this, I’m in an emergency. I’m stuck in room 2 in Lake Manor Hotel. A guy just shot himself outside my room theres another guy with him I tried calling the police but got no signal. Please call police and ambulance NOW.

  After hitting send, he sat hunched over the screen, biting his knuckles in anticipation. The warmth of the room didn’t stop him feeling icy all over. The forum blinked at him, and another message appeared.

  The back of my head feels funny. Pointy bits. I’m going to wait here, for a connection. If anyone else is awake, let me know.

  Art furiously typed. I’m here!!! Call the goddamn police Theres someone been shot outside my room!!!!!

  When no message came back, he got up with a howl and retreated to his bed, repeating, “This must be a dream, this must be a dream,” before closing his eyes and wishing it all away.

  It wasn’t a whisper but a cry that opened his eyes and sent him tumbling from the bed with a bump. His face itched awfully, as though he’d have to tear it off and scratch the raw flesh underneath to stop the tickling sensation.

  He needed air. The window. He fumbled for it, and looked outside, not daring to turn the light on.

  Gentle ripples from tumbling leaves drifted across the still surface of the lake by Lake Manor, shadowy like an obsidian disc, guarded by the stooped backs of the willow trees, as though it were the most peaceful place in the world. Art noticed the window had no handle. He would have sworn there had been one there last night, but as he tried to envisage the previous evening, he couldn’t stop his brow from crinkling and his shoulders from shaking. Scratching at the glass with his nails was hopeless; he’d bitten and chewed them beyond use. At last, he pounded the pane with his fists, at first speculatively, then in great blows. When it didn’t give, he picked the chair up and slammed it against the glass. It bounced off as if both were made of rubber. What the hell… After a handful of innocuous hits he collapsed onto his ass, defeated and out of breath. There wasn’t a soul around: nobody to hear, nobody to help. “Help,” he mouthed at the window, barely hearing himself. “Help me.”

  The cry came again: a baleful, mournful, lingering whimper. The brass curvature of the door handle beckoned to him like a crooked finger. Maybe if he opened it, White-Noise Man would be gone; he could slip by the dead man and raise the alarm downstairs. In his grip, the door handle didn’t feel like polished brass; it felt crackly, the sort of static crackle that reminded him of better times, listening to transistor radios by the lake under the New England sun. The sun was never this cold, though.

  Almost unbidden, he pushed the handle down, his arm becoming a rod of static, wanting this to be over, and to wake. Nothing had changed about the corridor. The same endless ramp of dark, indiscriminate doorways retreating into nothingness it had been before.

  No blood, though.

  Art blinked. No blood. No man. Nothing. As he peered down the corridor, the faintest whiff of a breath passed by the back of his neck, and he turned around. Looking down, he gasped: he was naked again. Completely naked, in front of the girl standing on top of the chair in the corridor. He gasped and clamped a hand over his mouth. She looked about fourteen. Bumps rose beneath teddy-bear pajamas where her breasts were growing. Appalled, he turned his gaze downward to his own disgusting body, withered, neglected and sagging. With her long hair covering her face, and her brow stooped and shoulders shaking to the sound of soft sobs, she hadn’t noticed him. As White-Noise Man emerged from behind her, Art screamed at her to move, but only a cataract of static escaped his mouth, a kind of inhuman scraping noise, pouring onto the carpet lik
e venom. White-Noise Man reached up, smashed a light fitting in the corridor ceiling and threw a rope over it. Fashioning a noose from the loose end, he tossed it over the girl’s head. Art’s hands clawed for the door handle; when his fingers failed to find it, he looked down to see it gone. What what what come on!

  He scratched at the door, but left no mark. It remained implacable, smooth, perfect, as though it had never been touched. He spun around to see the girl being hoisted into the air with a heave. She yelled, her legs thrashing, but the noise was curtailed to a strangled yelp. Swallowing his fear and shame, he bounded over to her, grabbing her by the legs and pushing them up into the air, trying to take her weight. Blasts sprayed off White-Noise Man, deafening and disorienting him.

  “What the hell are you?” he yelled beneath the noise. The girl’s legs were limp and weak, like tubes of straw, but they were still heavy, and his arms began to tire, lactic acid crawling along his muscles, urging him to let go. White-Noise Man spun around to face Art.

  “Leave me be,” Art said. But he couldn’t hear his own voice. She was so heavy, and his arms were tiring quickly.

  White-Noise Man had ditched his creased shirt from earlier. He was naked from the waist up, skinny, sinewy and pallid. Art clamped his eyes shut but gasped as a sharp blow dug into his ribs. He held on grimly. The second blow winded him, and he let go of the girl’s legs. Gravity yanked her down. There was a dull but hideous crack. Art looked up as the girl went limp, and bowed his head.

  Crackles swirled in his ears.

  “You’re not real,” said Art, more to himself than the monster. “This isn’t real. If I look again, she’ll be gone. Just like the other man. Jesus Christ, who were they? Who were they?”

  Only crackles in response.

  Art looked up. Fear — a real, live fear crawling in his guts — didn’t stop him from looking right at White-Noise Man. The creature was inches from him now, and seemed to tilt its head to get a better look at Art. The crackles got louder, as if it were trying to speak. It thrust a hand out and Art recoiled, but the hand shot past him, pointed. Quivering, Art looked, and his jaw slackened.

  The dead girl sat in a chair in the middle of the corridor. No noose, but a bruised bone jutted inside her neck at a hideous angle, making her head sit unnaturally. She was tapping away a message — or something — into her cell phone, of all things, oblivious to Art and her tormentor, like it were the most natural thing in the world for a dead teenager to do. Art blinked. Logic left him. His mind left him.

  The swirl of crackles returned. A strong, electric grip clasped his shoulder and twisted him around, shoving him onto his back. Art’s heart thumped him into action again, but he couldn’t shake the creature off. Its other hand took Art’s throat and squeezed. He panicked, flailing fists everywhere, trying to land a punch. Nothing connected. Breath thinning. Eyes widening. White-Noise Man’s touch fizzed and crawled, like foul parasites burrowing into his flesh. Black spots appeared from the edge of Art’s vision, and a sudden calm struck him.

  No.

  A desperate swing of his arm. He grabbed White-Noise Man’s arm. Dollops of fuzz trickled through his grasp, but he held firm, and thrashed wildly, somehow knocking the arm off his throat and wriggling away. Delicious, painful air rushed into his lungs. Breath in him, he found the vigor to stand, stumble away from the grip of White-Noise Man and crash through the door, into his room. He swiveled and leaned on the door, slamming it shut, fumbling at the lock with barely functioning fingers.

  When the bangs on the door came, he fell back, yelled something nonsensical at the creature, and dove for his laptop. He had to get a message to someone. The door frothed under the weight of the wall of rippling fuzz, unrelenting.

  Furiously he clicked and reclicked on the wifi symbol to make it pick up a signal. “Come on, come on, you bastard!” A new message on the forum caught his eye.

  It’s hard moving to a new school. Hard to fit in, to make friends. Everyone was distant, so…

  He didn’t read on. His gaze was drawn to the fuzz spooling underneath the doorway, a trickle of grey, moldering ashes, leaping like pixels, metastasizing, growing.

  …I made a few friends online. That helped quite a lot. Knowing there are others out there who…

  He typed a message into his forum: THERE IS SOMEONE TRYING TO KILL ME GET HELP GET HELP GET HELP NOW PLEASE SOMEONE!!!!

  The doorknob buckled. The wifi symbol flickered, showing one bar — a signal! The merest signal — and tried to connect. “Yes! Come on, come on, please…”

  …then something happened…

  The door groaned and crumpled in a mess of splintering wood and static. Pools of sprawling nothingness rolled off White-Noise Man as he stepped through the ruined frame and faced Art, who scrambled away from the desk, trembling, quivering, convulsing.

  Amongst the din, he heard the faintest noise.

  Ping.

  His laptop made the connection.

  As Art watched the browser refresh and the message for help send itself into the ether, the white noise dissipated from the floor. It crawled away from the man’s face, into dark and warm cracks and corners of the room he hadn’t seen before. When the man’s fuzz had fled, Art tried to yell but couldn’t make a noise.

  White-Noise Man had Art’s face.

  Art’s legs gave way, and he lashed out a hand to grab the radiator to keep from falling completely, but it was no good. His knees were useless, and couldn’t propel him to safety. The window, rigid, impregnable, taunted him with its view of the pristine lake outside. The second Art strode over and looked Art in the eye. It was just like him: the same tired skin, the same receding hairline and gaunt, overworked face, the same thin lips he saw in the mirror each and every day. But it wore no expression: no fear, no hate, no anger. Its face was a grainy horror, like an old photograph, and there was no light or love in its eyes. This was an empty, wretched thing. Art wanted to speak to it, but couldn’t. His wrists and muscles twitched with cramps and quickened pulse. As he tried to move away, the other Art’s hand slammed his shoulder into the wall, pinning him. All fight seemed to desert him. The only thing he could do was turn his face away to avoid the black, soulless gaze of this empty vessel.

  From nowhere a sliver of silver caught what little sickly moonlight trailed into the hotel room. Art’s gaze was instinctively drawn to the blade. His blade. His Swiss army knife. Even now, he screwed up his brow in confusion. “How the fuck,” he managed between labored breaths, “did you find that?”

  The other Art held the tool before its face, as if studying it, like it had never seen the artifact before, as though it had come from Mars. Strange. The knife did look different: new, unblemished. Straight out of the box. The other Art snapped the large blade, sharp as a razor. It locked with the same old satisfying click it always did, but this click turned Art’s bowels to water.

  The second Art pressed its hand against Art’s face. Ugly, wormlike fingers pushed him against the wall. The blade touched his throat. Art clenched his muscles and tried to thrash, but this thing had a ghastly strength in it: the strength of the dead, and Art was tired. Exhausted. He grasped at flesh that fell into grainy mists, and the hands reapplied their grip upon his face, driving it harder into the wall. Art opened his eyes wide, staring the creature in the eyes, imploring it to spare him. A weak choke burbled from his throat as the blade was drawn across. His heart thrummed in his chest, his throat, his ears, his brain, fluttering with alarm, trying to escape. His mouth suddenly became warm and wet, and full, and his face seemed to shrink. There was no mercy in the eyes of the other creature as it drew the blade fully across before finally letting him fall. Lying, gurgling, in a sticky pool he couldn’t see, he saw the browser on his laptop change to display his favorite news website. He couldn’t make out the headline. Using the last of his strength, he rolled onto his back and surveyed the room, but the other Art was gone. Doom shrouded him, then nothing.

  ~

  Hank adjusted his col
lar and knocked again, louder this time.

  The guest — Arthur Mickels — had missed checkout, and hadn’t answered the phone. Probably drunk. Well, hopefully drunk. Allowing himself the wriest of smiles, he knocked again. After a few more seconds, he turned the key and stepped through.

  Hank blinked a few times and ran his tongue round his mouth at the scene before him. Arthur Mickels lay by the foot of the bed in a sticky pool of blood that had seeped deep into the carpet, his skin bleached white. What looked like an old Swiss army knife lay in the blood.

  “Mm-hm,” he said, closing the door behind him. The mop, bucket and carpet-bleach were all downstairs. Might as well take a look around first.

  There hadn’t been a struggle, evidently. Nothing seemed out of place, apart from the blood. He sighed. That was his morning down the crapper. As he turned to leave, the light from the guest’s laptop caught his eye; it showed a news website. The headline was: Tragic Man and Teen Commit Suicide after Hateful Trolls Plague Them Online.

  “Morons,” he muttered, and left to get the mop.

  Room 4: Blood is Thicker

  By Samanda R. Primeau

  As the car turned in at the foot of the long driveway leading to Lake Manor Hotel, the darkening sky let loose with a torrent of rain, and two girls groaned as one. The rain splattered on Rose’s hand as she jabbed at the button to roll the window up, as if pushing harder would make it go faster. She wiped the window with her sleeve and pressed her nose to the glass, peering out at the forbidding cornices of the hotel. “Ugh. Why does it have to be raining? I wanted to go out and watch Gran take pictures.” Rose, at fifteen, was a nature enthusiast, and had been excited to see the walking trails in the brochures for the hotel.