by JL Bryan
“Ten-four,” Stacey said. “Copy that. Aye-aye.”
I rolled my eyes just a little as I returned to the stairwell.
With help from my staff keycard, I checked out the major rooms on the lobby level. One had a long conference or dining table and paintings depicting Dr. and Mrs. Lathrop and the hotel's nineteenth-century glory. An immense fireplace sat opposite a huge bay window that looked out onto the street between light blue curtains the size of frigate sails, currently drawn tight against any curious pedestrians on the sidewalk.
I moved to the library, stocked with old leather volumes that I would bet nobody had touched in decades, other than to dust them. Framed maps of colonial and antebellum Georgia adorned the wall, and one pedestal held a globe manufactured in 1899.
Activity seemed elevated here—it was sporadic all over the hotel, as if I were constantly passing ghosts who drew back from me and didn't want to be seen. Better than constantly running into ghosts who want to attack, I suppose.
The first-floor ballroom was an expansive and open space, the exact opposite of the dim, column-cluttered room that Madeline had called “the fourth-floor ballroom” and Stacey and I called “that weird temple place.” Floor-to-ceiling mirrors were embedded along one of the long walls, opposite windows of the same size on the far side of the room, reminding me of pictures I'd seen of the Palace of Versailles. Again, the drapes were pulled tight.
I clicked on my flashlight as I entered, since I didn't want to draw attention to myself by turning on the giant chandeliers overhead. My boots sounded too loud on the floor as I passed the stacked tables and chairs, then the long marble bar. I could imagine years and years of parties and events here, all the memories and emotions piled up like geological strata under the calm, silent surface. Built to accommodate crowds, live music, and dancing, the room was eerie when it sat dark and deserted. This was where the hotel held its glamorous Halloween ball each year.
I exited through glass double doors into the courtyard, where tall heaps of fall flowers bloomed inside raised brick planter islands. Benches and covered swings were nestled here and there among the gardens. The high brick wall offered complete privacy from the outside world. I was a little worried about accidentally stumbling into vacationing couples who might have retreated to the hidden nooks of the courtyard for a little romance, tucked behind arching tree limbs thick with purple wisteria.
My main interest was the massive, centuries-old oak tree at the corner of the yard, whose gnarled, curling limbs were each as large as a sizable tree trunk. Massive old oaks always look as if they're full of secrets, and maybe dark magic hidden somewhere in their twisted, ancient bodies.
Abigail Bowen had been hanged here after a very speedy arrest and trial. I'd glimpsed her apparition here the night before. On top of that, Ithaca Galloway had featured this tree in her own portrait on the fourth floor, holding a branch—possibly from this tree itself—as her walking staff.
I reached out and touched the rough, mottled old bark, thinking of the woman who'd died here. I wondered if Abigail really deserved her nickname, Stabby Abby, or if she'd been a scapegoat, blamed and executed for a crime committed by someone else. The occupying army would have been eager for revenge against a local who murdered their wounded soldiers, possibly too eager to do a thorough investigation. I had no specific reason to believe her innocent, but no real evidence to prove her guilt, either. Maybe Grant could clarify things.
I looked up at the thick branch where I'd seen her from the second floor. I wondered what it had felt like, being strung up in front of a curious crowd like that. I wondered what had gone through her mind at that moment, her last moment of life. I supposed it depended a lot on whether she was guilty or innocent.
“Hello,” a female voice spoke right behind me, startlingly close, almost too low to hear. My fight-or-flight instincts went into high response, and I spun around, drawing my flashlight. My other hand went to the iPod on my belt, ready to blast some potent gospel music if the entity threatened me.
The girl who stood behind me looked solid enough. She wore a black felt hat that looked like it had been stolen from Boy George somewhere around 1983. It hid her face in shadows. Her purple t-shirt depicted, perhaps ironically, a cutesy flying unicorn, trailing a rainbow like a comet tail, and all kinds of glittery junk was glued to her jeans. Brightly colored plastic bracelets decorated her wrists. Overall, nothing about her really said “murderous ghost from centuries past.”
She tilted her head to look at me, a startled expression on her face. A thin, sallow girl with a bad overbite—she was the one staying in Room 208 with the ghost-enthusiast parents from Seattle.
“You scared me,” she said.
“I could've sworn you were the one sneaking up and scaring me.” I looked around for her parents, but they were nowhere in sight. “You aren't out here alone, are you?”
“I didn't leave the hotel!” she said in a rushed, automatic way that told me she'd used this defense before. “I'm still inside the walls.”
“Your parents don't mind you wandering around at night?”
“I'll just tell them some stupid ghost made me do it. They'll believe that. I had to get out of our room.”
“You don't like it in there?”
“Feels like someone's watching. I don't know how they can sleep in there. Makes my skin go crawly.”
“Have you told them that?”
“They just want to see the stupid ghosts,” she said. “All the time.”
“But you don't want to.”
“They never ask me if I want to go all these scary places.”
“Shouldn't you be in school right now?”
“I am. My parents transferred me to Emerald City Free School, where 'the world is your classroom.' So we flew all the way from Seattle just to come here. Why couldn't we just go to Wild Waves and do roller coasters? Or Bellevue Botanical Garden. That's where I want to go, and it's not far from the apartment, so why can't we go there?”
“You like flowers?”
“I like all the plants, not just the angiosperms.” She said the last word carefully and slowly, as though she'd learned it recently. “Um, do you think the hotel would care if I took a couple of these flowers?”
“Probably not, if you just take a few.”
“Good. Because I, um, already did.” The girl stepped back into a nook under an arching tree branch and emerged with a book-sized wooden box painted with nail-polish flowers and decorated with butterfly stickers. She opened the hinged top to show me a few bright blossoms and red leaves taken from around the garden, now flattened under a sheet of clear paper. She pointed to a pink blossom. “This comes from an azalea, I think an Encore azalea. I'm not sure about this one...” She looked up at me.
“If you're asking me, you're barking up the wrong tree,” I said. “I think you know more about flowers than I do.”
“Oh.” She seemed a little saddened by this. “My mom doesn't know about them, either.”
“That's why we have the internet,” I said. “I do know about ghosts, though. Did you see anything in your room? Hear anything?”
“Oh, great. Another kookaburra.” She circled her ear in the gesture for crazy. “You should hang out with my parents. You can all talk about ghosts together.”
“You don't believe in ghosts?”
She shrugged. “I believe in tarantulas, but I don't go looking for them.”
I laughed at that. “I see what you mean.”
“It touched me,” she said, her voice lower. “I woke up and my arm was way out from the bed, like someone was holding it, and I could feel fingers.”
“The ghost in your room was a nurse. They say she sometimes checks people's pulses.”
“It was creepy.” The girl shivered, wrapping her arms around herself.
“Did you tell your parents?”
“They were already asleep. And they'd probably just be happy about it.”
“Maybe they should get you a separate
room,” I said. “I've been in 208. There's a connecting door to the next room.”
“Yeah, like they'd pay for that. Can we stop talking about the ghosts now?”
“Sure. My name's Ellie. We didn't actually meet before.”
“Lemmy,” she said with a wrinkled nose. “It's not short for anything. Just Lemmy.”
“Did they name you after that guy from Motörhead?”
Her only response was an ugh sound.
“You collect a lot of flowers?” I asked, trying to get her back to a subject that neither frightened nor annoyed her.
“Yes. I have six albums of them at home. And I make greeting cards. Want to see one?”
“Sure.”
She handed me a card made of bristol board. A cluster of tiny blue, yellow, and red pressed flowers covered about half of the front flap, and the words “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” had been carefully written in curling, floral letters.
“That's birthday – general,” she said, and it took me a second to realize she was referring to the section where you'd find it at a retail store.
“It's very pretty.”
“It's two dollars if you want one.”
“I do, thanks.” I scrounged out a couple of dollars from my pocket, my change from dinner. I was lucky to have it since I'd left my purse in the hotel room.
“All sales are final,” she added as she passed me the birthday card.
“Ellie?” Stacey's voice crackled over my headset. “I've got...activity.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Right up here,” Stacey's voice whispered. “They're on our floor. Near our room. Cold spots...and footsteps, Ellie. I can hear them through the wall. Coming and going...then coming back again. Wouldn't be so bad if they would just go and not come back. They're heavy, like boots, but I don't see anybody on camera...”
“I'm coming.” I looked at Lemmy, thinking I should tell her to go back to her room with her parents. Then I decided she was probably safer wandering the first floor of the hotel, where ghostly activity seemed minimal. “I have to go. Will you be okay?”
“I was okay before you got here.”
“Good point. Promise me you won't leave the hotel, okay?”
“Duh.” She turned and walked back to the flower garden, resuming her search for blooms to swipe.
I returned through the quiet, empty lobby. The night clerk was nowhere in sight as I passed the front desk and continued on to the ornate brass doors of the guest elevator.
The third floor was chilly, like someone had decided to try for a deep-winter outdoorsy feel. My Mel-Meter indicated it was about forty degrees, not far above freezing.
The hallway was deserted, and the lights seemed dimmer than usual, though they were always on the subtle side. I drew my tactical flashlight to be safe, keeping it off for now.
I passed paintings of people in antebellum garb standing around what looked like luxuriously appointed garden parties. They'd seemed innocuous enough at a glance, but in the current atmosphere they took an oddly sinister aspect. Little knots of wealthy planters and their wives, speaking in whispers to each other. In one picture, they seemed to be watching a young slave man clad in livery and serving drinks. There was something hungry and cannibalistic in their faces.
Voices echoed ahead, from around the corner I was approaching as I headed toward the back of the third floor to meet up with Stacey. They were not the voices of the living, I was almost sure of it from the strange, elongated tones. Not whispers like on the fourth floor, either, but moans and groans, overlapping expressions of human agony, like a classic haunted house is supposed to sound, minus the heavy chains dragging in the attic.
I rounded the corner, ready to face whatever apparitions the house was about to show me.
I saw nothing—primarily because the lights had gone out all the way down the hallway, creating a long, dark tunnel for me to traverse, filled with those agonizing moans.
My flashlight managed to push back the darkness for a moment. Then it faded as if the batteries had abruptly died, though I'd added new ones just the previous day.
“Stacey, what are you seeing?” I whispered. Our room was ahead, just around the next corner. All I had to do was cross through the inexplicably dark hallway that echoed softly with tormented cries.
No answer came. My headset battery was drained, too, which probably meant all my electrical gear had been sucked dry. My flesh crawled with the cold and the certainty of being surrounded by the dead. Not the grateful kind, either, but the definitely-unhappy kind.
They'd sucked all the heat out of the hallway, and now they'd drained the power from my gear. It meant my primary go-away-ghost defensive weapons, my high-powered flashlight and my iPod loaded with holy music, would not function, and also that I was cut off from Stacey.
What worried me more, though, was the question of what exactly the spirits were planning to do with all that energy they'd just gathered.
“Okay.” I took a deep breath, feeling very alone. The doors on either side of the hall remained shut, as if the hotel guests within could not hear these frosty, aching voices—or maybe they could, and wisely chose to stay inside their rooms. Or maybe they were all just sleeping like the dead.
“Stay back,” I whispered to the unseen presences in the hallway. I took one step forward into the darkness, wondering why there wasn't any light from the big window at the far end. The curtains might have been pulled for the night, or the place might have just been thick with dark ghosts.
I took another step, then another, the light from the previous hallway fading much too fast as I walked away from it. The air grew colder and thicker as I went, the moans clearer as if they were already surrounding me. There was another sound, a faint buzzing like....bees? No, flies.
The smell struck me almost immediately after I heard the flies. Rotten meat. Blood. The rancid stink of sweaty, diseased flesh was unmistakable. My stomach clenched in revulsion, and I clutched it, fought down my immediate urge to run and empty its contents, and forced myself to continue walking into the thick of it. The situation was clearly dangerous, but it also might give me some idea of exactly what kind of entity I was up against, as long as I didn't get killed along the way.
“Who's there?” I asked, reluctantly breathing in the rank air in order to do so. “You can speak to me. Or show yourself.”
The moans rose like a chorus of the damned.
Then I heard the footsteps, like heavy boots approaching from behind me.
I spun, ready to face it, whatever it might be. A dark, empty hallway stretched away behind me, the red carpet runner still neatly positioned along the center of the polished floorboards. The spillover light from the first hall kept it partially lit, revealing nothing at all. The boot steps had ceased, too. Just a creeper, I hoped, trying to scare me but too timid to actually face me. Making sounds, then running away, the ghostly equivalent of a ding-dong-dash.
I let out a sigh of relief, then turned back to continue walking.
He was there, just in front of me, standing so close it would have been rude had the man actually been alive. Since he was clearly dead, it wasn't just rude, it also sent a jolt of terror screaming right into my heart. I'm surprised I didn't flop over from cardiac arrest right there. I heard myself draw in cold, rotten air with a gasp.
He was only inches away, a dark but solid apparition, much taller than me, definitely more than six feet high. Pale metallic buttons glimmered down the front of his blue-black wool jacket, the edges of which were completely indistinct from the shadows around him.
He stood close enough that I had to tilt to my head up to see his face, and I quickly wished I hadn't. His skin was translucent. His eyes were vacant sockets, seeming to look deep into me despite the complete lack of eyes. I hate when they do that. It's just deeply horrifying to have black sockets boring into you from a pale dead face.
A black slash ran all the way across his throat. As my brain began to slowly function again after the initial
shock of seeing him, I thought of the infamous throat-slasher, Abigail Bowen.
My mouth opened as if I had any idea what to say to the dead soldier. I couldn't make a sound. If I could have, I probably would have screamed.
Okay, get it together, Ellie, a part of me whispered, making its bid to be the get-tough and get-moving voice in my head. I took a deep breath and held my ground, letting the dead guy make the next move.
He raised his left arm from his side, and something long and sharp slashed through the air by my head. I gasped and dodged away, then turned to see what kind of weapon I was dealing with here.
He swung a pale, rust-dotted bayonet in his left hand, and it continued its upward arc until it pointed directly to the ceiling. The cuff of his Union Army coat slid back just a bit, and then I realized he had no left hand at all, just the bayonet in place of it. If there was a rifle attached below the bayonet, it was still concealed in the heavy coat sleeve...but, rifle or not, the guy definitely had a bayonet for a left hand.
Okay. I've seen things like this before. A ghost's apparition is often a projection of its self-image, which can grow extremely distorted from what the person actually looked like in life. It's particularly true if the person was mentally disturbed or traumatized in life, or became that way after existing as a ghost for years and years. So the bayonet-arm showed something about how far he identified his life with his weapon, or maybe that he identified himself as a weapon, as a killing machine who wasn't entirely human. Totally understandable, really, given the relentless industrial-scale brutality of the Civil War.
I couldn't say that understanding this on an intellectual level offered much comfort. Here was a spirit with a long, sharp weapon for a limb. It might also represent concentrated aggressive psychokinetic energy that could slice and dice me. I'd already been cut once in this supposedly luxurious hotel.
So I wanted to keep my distance.
He didn't come leaping at me with that bayonet, very fortunately for me, but continued its swing until it came to rest on his shoulder, as though he were carrying the weapon in formation rather than being biologically attached to it.
