by JL Bryan
“You know there isn't. Now let's get to work.”
The freight elevator did that thing again—creaking and rattling as it approached the fourth floor. The overhead lights flickered as the metal doors opened.
We rolled the cart out into the work area. Plastic sheeting, loosely attached to vertical wooden studs in the partially demolished walls, swayed like heavy sails in a gentle breeze, though I couldn't say I heard any air conditioners running up there.
“Let's go this way,” I said, pointing in the opposite direction from the jib door that led into the wacko dark-temple room. I wasn't in a hurry to return there.
“What's this way? Do we have a map?” Stacey asked.
“I think we can manage without a map.” I walked along the aged brick wall housing the elevator shaft. An open doorway led into a kitchen with a brick fireplace and a massive wood-burning stove flecked with rust. Cobwebs hung everywhere.
We opened one creaky pantry door after another, finding mostly dead bugs, though Stacey let out a little hiss when she found a row of sealed mason jars in one high cabinet. They were filled with unidentifiable black gunk.
“Ugh, what do you think this is?” she asked me.
“Dip your finger and have a taste,” I said. “Maybe it's blackberry preserves.”
“I think they passed 'preserved' a long time ago.” Stacey curled her lip a little as she closed the cabinet. “They really haven't updated this place in a hundred years.”
“Just too haunted,” I said. “I've seen it before. Somebody could make a fortune flipping these old buildings and mansions all over town, if they knew how to get the ghosts out. A lot of places are left abandoned or underused because of them.”
“Hey, we know how to get the ghosts out—” Stacey began, and then a loud crash sounded from the next room, like dishes and glassware shattering on the floor.
Without a word, we dashed toward the strange sound in the dark room, like a couple of teenagers running to their doom in any horror movie.
Tall batwing doors led us into a spacious dining room with a vaulted ceiling. The windows were shuttered from the outside, sealing out most of the light while protecting the antique glass in the tall panes against hail and hurricane winds.
The table at the center could seat a dozen people, and the matching chairs were still there, too, intricately carved wood with a grapes-and-nymphs design, the red upholstery at their arms and seats thick with years of dust. The chair at the head was noticeably taller than the others, its high back engraved with goat-headed men. It sat in front of a giant ship-stone fireplace, built from big round ballast stones used in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to weigh down ships from Europe.
Enormous pictures adorned the wall. One was a painting depicting a heavyset, lantern-jawed woman in a long white dress dripping with black lace, her hair braided up, her eyes big and dark. She held a thick, crooked branch in one hand, with little green leaves sprouting out of it here and there, and posed in front of the big oak tree in the courtyard, the same one from which Abigail Bowen had been hanged in 1864. With the staff and the funky dress, plus the little stars and moons on her jewelry, she gave me the overall impression of some kind of 19th-century Druid or Wiccan. Or maybe somebody who got their jewelry from a box of Lucky Charms cereal.
The little brass plate on the portrait frame confirmed my suspicion that this was Ithaca Galloway, the wealthy Boston widow who'd purchased and renovated the hotel at the end of the nineteenth century. We were standing in her private apartment, which had been preserved like a time capsule since then. Well, a poorly sealed time capsule that let in tons of dust and spiders.
Ithaca had shared the apartment with a gang of supposed psychics and other hangers-on. They were depicted in a large, framed black and white photograph that hung on the wall, an assortment of about twenty men and women, most of whom appeared to be in their twenties or early thirties, a fairly young crowd. They wore funky attire even for the day, the women's dresses hung with lace, dark stones, and more jewelry featuring stars and moons in imitation of Ithaca's attire. The men looked thrift-store fabulous in their assortment of top hats, vests, ascots, and so on—again, funky dressers even for the Victorian era. There were more women than men, I noted.
Ithaca sat at the center of the picture, in the same monster-sized dining chair that occupied the head of the table in front of me. She looked to be in her late forties in the photograph. A man about ten years younger sat just beside her, an intense gaze in his eyes. He looked like a barbarian, with a long, thick, unkempt beard that didn't quite fit with his neatly tailored white seersucker suit. Something about the look on his face and his position next to the throne made me think of Rasputin, the mesmerizing faith healer to the last imperial family of Russia. I hoped Grant Patterson's research would turn up some information about him, since the photograph was not labeled to identify the people it depicted.
“So, what crashed in here?” Stacey examined the hardwood floor with her flashlight. “It sounded like a ton of breaking glass.”
“I can't find anything broken,” I told her. “It might have been an auditory apparition, or an energy echo of some past event.”
“It sounds a little scary when you get all sciencey about it.” Her light went to the goat-men decorating the big chair at the head of the table. “I think I saw this same chair in a Marilyn Manson video when I was a kid. Or maybe a horror movie.”
“Satyrs. Looks like old Ithaca was into ancient mythology.”
“Or Satan.”
“Yeah, or Satan,” I agreed. “But that's not your typical Spiritualist area of interest. Neoclassicism was more of a hot topic among the upper-class types in the nineteenth century. I'm going with satyrs until further notice.”
We set up a night vision camera and a microphone, then unlocked the high, ornate dining-room doors and moved on into another dusty, arched hallway. There was a big sitting-room type area with large but tightly shuttered windows. Antique, heavily padded chairs and couches were here in a cobwebbed jumble, as well as an old piano in the corner, and a massive black grandfather clock against one wall opposite the fireplace.
“This must have been where Ithaca and her psychics hung out, probably chatting about contacting the dead or whatever,” Stacey said.
We took a few readings, but there was nothing unusual about the temperature or electromagnetic fields in the room, so we didn't set up any of our dwindling supply of gear. We moved on, leaving REM pods along the hallway behind us like a trail of bread crumbs so they could alert us if some entity showed up.
Stacey and I unlocked a door across the hall from the kitchen and dining area. We stood in the doorway for a moment, trying to process what we saw.
“That's...interesting,” Stacey said.
Her comment was an understatement. We'd apparently discovered the fourth-floor bathroom, outfitted with several clawfoot tubs around the perimeter—I counted seven of them—and a luxuriously deep black-marble bath at the center. I could have spread-eagled in the center of that big tub without my fingers or toes touching any of the marble edges.
“More Greco-Roman stuff?” Stacey asked, shining the light along the walls. Peeling frescoes depicted more satyrs and nymphs, along with columns, fountains, and a cave full of fiery lava. “They bathed together because the Romans did?”
“Maybe. It seems pretty culty to me. Breaking down personal barriers to make people submissive to the group. There were a lot of little attempts to create utopian societies in America in the late 19th century. The Oneida community required all property to be held in common, and everybody was married to everybody else at the same time. That didn't work out. The Shakers, on the other hand, required celibacy even within marriage.”
“So...how did they have kids?”
“I have no idea, but they've managed to outlast the Oneida commune for more than a century. Anyway, it's possible Ithaca Galloway was trying for some kind of planned community up here. A utopia devoted to commun
ication with the dead.”
“Call me a negative Nancy, but wouldn't the people of Savannah have a major problem with that? This is a pretty religious city, even now. Back then...I can just imagine the scandal.”
“I hope there was a scandal. Grant is especially gifted at discovering those. It's possible they managed to keep their activities secret at the time. She might have just been seen as an eccentric wealthy Yankee lady with a large entourage. We'll learn more soon.”
In the next room, we found sinks, marble counters, and a row of private water closets outfitted with the sort of old-timey chain-box where Michael Corleone hid his gun in The Godfather.
“You'd have to redo this whole floor to make it into hotel rooms or suites,” I said. “Knock down walls, add a new plumbing system, new electrical, the works. No wonder every owner has kept putting it off.”
“Well, that and the killer ghosts,” Stacey said.
My equipment didn't indicate any activity in the bathroom area, so we moved on down the hall, leaving another activated REM pod on the floor behind us.
The next room we unlocked was like a dark oven, the air thick and hot as it rolled out into the cool hallway where we stood. A smell permeated the place—acrid and sour, like somebody had broiled a rotten possum in there. It was bigger than the other bedroom-cells, the windows shuttered tight like all the rest. Our flashlights revealed a bare bedframe and other bedroom furniture jammed into one corner.
“There's no cobwebs,” Stacey whispered. “All the other rooms had cobwebs. This place must be hot enough to deep-fry spiders.”
“Well, thanks for making me think of deep-fried spider legs,” I said. “Yeah, something's discouraging the living critters from coming in here.”
“Thermal camera?”
“Yep. And pass me a REM pod while you're busy with that.”
I activated the hefty plastic saucer-shaped device and set it on the dusty hardwood floor. Almost the instant I let go of it, the lights began flashing, and the speakers let out a woo-woo alert like the sound when you blow across a glass Coke bottle, only digitized. The manufacturer could have gone with a less eerie sound, if you ask me.
“Is someone here?” I asked. The REM pod immediately fell silent. I took a shot in the dark: “Ithaca Galloway? Am I speaking to Ithaca? Or maybe one of her friends?”
The pod stayed dark and silent.
“Thermal goggles.” I held out my hand to Stacey, since she was between me and the luggage cart.
“Your thermal enhancement spectacles, Master Eleanor,” Stacey replied in a weak attempt at a posh English accent.
I strapped the heavy, boxy thermals onto my head, then looked around the room. It was all red, giving the space a hellish appearance, and it was a stark contrast from the relatively cool atmosphere in the hall. I could not find a source of the ambient heat, or any shape or apparition to indicate the presence of a specific entity. If Ithaca was here, she was keeping herself well-hidden.
“Can you tell us about the man who just recently died in the other room? Someone pushed him off a ladder. Was that you?” I asked.
No obvious response came for a moment. Then the room cooled slightly, just a few degrees, all at once, as if the presence had retreated just a bit.
“I'm not seeing anybody,” Stacey said. I glanced over at her orange-red form leaning over the room-temperature shape of the thermal camera on its tripod. “You?”
“No, nobody's coming out to play.” I removed my thermals and looked around with my own eyes again. “You'd better not hurt anybody else,” I said to the unseen presence.
“Ooh, threatening,” Stacey whispered, and I scowled just a little.
“Let's see what's in here.” I crossed to a heavy, closed door near the bed and heaved it open. A sizable walk-in closet lay on the other side, with only a few old garments on its shelves and hooks.
It grew more interesting when we realized it was a walk-through closet, with another door at the far end. In fact, we'd just emerged from a wall of empty shoe racks that closed automatically behind us, becoming almost invisible like any of the jib doors throughout the hotel.
I had to test several keys before I managed to unlock the door at the end of the closet.
It opened onto a much larger room. A monster of a bed occupied the center, some of its dark curtains pulled back and tied to the thick columns of the posters, others left in place to create a lightless cave inside. Spiderwebs shrouded the entire thing.
Deeply upholstered chairs sat near a huge arched window—shuttered, of course—and more were placed by the cold marble fireplace. Built-in bookshelves flanked the fireplace, running all the way to the corners. A couple of large rugs on the floor had been eaten to thread by moths.
“Another bedroom,” Stacey said. “Connecting bedrooms! Scandal!”
“Our rooms connect,” I pointed out. I approached the dresser, made of the same heavy black wood as the bookshelves. The mirror above was a huge circle, squared off by a heavy wooden frame that surrounded the mirror with little shelves. Long-dried drips of yellowed candle wax protruded downward from a few of the shelves like rows of sharp yellow teeth.
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall...” Stacey intoned, shining the flashlight toward me.
“Don't try it,” I said. “It might answer you.”
“You think it's cursed?”
“Judging by the scale of this room, I'm guessing this was where the rich widow slept. Who knows what kind of black magic she might have practiced in here?”
“But you don't believe in that stuff.”
“These days, I take everything on a case-by-case basis. Anyway, an obsession with dark things can give rise to a very wicked ghost.” I opened one little drawer and tiny cabinet after another, searching the dresser, but found them all empty.
“My Mel-Meter's kicking up a little,” Stacey said. “One to two milligaus right here by the bed.”
I found similar readings near the mirror, but zilch in the rest of the room. “Worth a night vision camera,” I said, and Stacey set one up quickly, encompassing both the bed and the mirror in its frame.
“So who do you think had the connecting bedroom?” Stacey asked. “Beardy Rasputin Guy?”
“You got the same impression, huh?”
“Don't cut me out of the historical research on this one,” she said. “I want to know what kind of weird stuff was happening up here.”
“I'll get you your own box of dusty documents.” I took a few more readings and double-checked Stacey's camera on its tripod. Then we passed through a narrow room, possibly once a private sitting room or office, and out through a pair of huge double doors into the main hall. We were around the corner from the door where we'd entered.
We found a short sort of receiving room, with the fancier guest elevator at one end and double doors at the other, small padded benches along the sides under mirrors and old paintings. The main purpose of the room seemed to be added security for the people on the fourth floor, keeping out stray hotel guests. The doors opposite the elevator had little glass lenses installed, giving a view of any visitors who might arrive before they could be admitted deeper into the fourth floor.
After that, we continued along the main hall, laying a few REM pods behind us, and finally reached the more familiar area with the row of small bedrooms and the weirdo black-temple room. Stacey sighed as I pushed open one of the double doors to the temple area, which were ornate on this side, with more occult symbols and hieroglyphs, even though they were a virtually invisible pair of jib doors on the other side.
“I guess we need to change out the batteries...” She shook her head and went to work with the cameras and microphone we'd set up the previous day.
The air in the room felt heavy and cold. I set out our last few REM pods around the circle of empty sockets built into the floor. They flickered, just slightly.
When we were done, Stacey began rolling the luggage cart toward the hidden jib door in the side wall, the quickest path t
o the freight elevator. I followed, my boots clicking on hardwood.
All four of the REM pods around the center of the room let out their digital woo-woo sounds, making us turn back. The rows of lights on top of each pod flickered and pulsed, which indicated something was interacting with their electromagnetic fields.
“Who's there?” I asked, shining my flashlight around the room.
The temple room seemed to be growing darker, moment by moment, as if black clouds were seeping out of the walls and corners, absorbing our flashlight beams until they were too weak to reveal anything. This kind of total darkness means a very heavy presence haunts the area.
My Mel-Meter detected sudden falling temperatures, and so did the goosebump-o-meter all over my skin.
Then the whispering began. The low voices spilled out all around us, filling up the room, as if a crowd of spirits emerged from the walls, floor, and ceiling and moved toward us from every direction. All our gear went wild, the REM pods chiming ceaselessly, my meter showing surges of eight to ten milligaus.
Stacey and I looked at each other. Her face was bleach-white, and I'm sure mine was the same. The hotel was infested with ghosts. It was like an eruption of them, drawn to our presence, bringing darkness with them.
“Should we run?” Stacey whispered.
“Did one of you kill a man?” I asked the whispering darkness as it closed in around us.
The voices seemed to grow louder and more agitated.
One of our REM pods, flashing and chiming as fast and loud as it possibly could, slowly rose several inches from the marble-tile floor and hovered. It turned in place, like a flying saucer, all the while flashing and beeping.
I felt a chill pass through me. This was some very focused psychokinetic energy, pointing to an active, conscious presence in the room with us.
“We just want to ask some questions,” I said.
The hovering REM pod flew at me at high speed, fast enough to make a whooshing sound as it passed through the air. I barely managed to dodge aside. It cracked into the jib door behind me, then tumbled to the floor, dark and silent.
