by Charles Day
On the few occasions that James’s mom and dad had to be away on some clandestine assignment, never more than a week and rarely more than overnight, it was Mrs. Clarke, who ran the pub, who kept an eye on James. Although she was super nice and seemed genuinely fond of James, he had always suspected she worked for the same spy agency that supervised his mom and dad.
Oh, James’s parents never told him they were spies in so many words, but James had always known. What else could they have been, given the skills they taught him from an early age? Mornings were Secret Messages and Invisible Inks; afternoons were Morse Code and Makeshift Weapons. Along the way, he learned how to predict the weather, how to navigate by looking at the constellations, how to pick locks, and how to start fires in the wilderness. He could decipher codes, and he could tie knots. He could memorize anything on a page with the briefest of looks, he knew about disguises to make someone blend with a crowd, and he knew to keep calm and think creatively if captured and tied up. He was adept with a compass and a magnifying glass and a jackknife. He was a boy with skills.
James continued his patrol of McGrave’s, moving from the chatter of the phone bank to the hush of an adjoining candle-lit alcove where another young lady sat at a table before a Ouija board. Her fingertips rested lightly on the little platform that glided over the board’s letters and numbers. Occasionally she would turn from her spirit conversations and jot notes on a lined pad. Some of the hotel guests made reservations from farther away than Indianapolis or Dubuque.
“Good evening, James,” she said without looking up. Her name was Miriam Charles, and she was the hotel’s psychic girl Friday. Part of the day she handled the hotel’s Very Long Distance reservations, and part of the night she told fortunes from table to table in the hotel restaurant.
Miss Charles was already dressed for her evening duties in a long black gown, and her dark wavy hair reflected the dancing flames of the candles. “Sorry, no communications for you this time,” she said, glancing at him fondly. “The Other Side is rather quiet tonight.”
“Hi, Miss Charles,” James said. “Gosh, it looks as if we are going to be extra busy this evening. The hotel is full up. Mr. Nash says things could get interesting.”
“Want to know for sure?” Miss Charles asked.
Miss Charles possessed a versatile arsenal of techniques for telling fortunes including star gazing, palm reading, interpreting tea leaves, casting bones, tossing dice, analyzing bumps on the head, and gazing into crystal balls. Yet of all the arcane methods available to her, her favorite was interpreting cards drawn from a tarot deck.
She didn’t give James the chance to refuse. She produced her well-worn deck and sprang the cards from one hand to the other in a cascade, as a magician might.
“A quick reading,” she said as she spread some of the cards face down across the table. “On the house. Miss Charles knows all.”
She instructed James to slide three cards from the spread.
“These are the cards of the major arcana,” she said. “They never lie.”
James held his breath as she turned the first of his cards face up. It depicted a lady with a sword, sitting next to a pair of scales.
“Justice,” Miss Charles said. Her voice had become deeper, more mysterious. “Interesting. Tonight, you will witness an important act of justice.”
James wondered if he should take Miss Charles’s utterances seriously. Some of the hotel staff thought she merely made up her little prophecies, telling customers what they wanted to hear. Others thought her prophecies were dead on and feared them. Whatever did she mean by justice?
The second card showed a man and a woman holding hands.
“The Lovers!” Miss Charles said. “Why, James, you never told me you had a girlfriend. It appears romance is in your future.”
“Ro-mance?” he said. “I’m eleven! I don’t like girls. I don’t even know any girls. I think the cards are screwy tonight.”
James immediately realized his statement wasn’t quite true. He had known a girl once, the year he was eight, the year he and his family lived in Brazil. Her name was Renata, and she had black hair. The two of them had had real adventures, boating alone on the Amazon despite seventeen-foot-long crocs and even longer anacondas.
But she was only a summer’s best friend, not a romance. Not like Miss Charles and Mr. Nash, the night manager. They were sweet on each other, according to hotel gossip. James wondered what it would be like to be grown up and have a girlfriend like Miss Charles. She was very pretty, but she was also kind of spooky. She knew things.
Miss Charles turned over the third and final card, and her face paled as she beheld its image: a skeleton astride a horse, carrying a scythe.
“Death!” she gasped. “I’m sorry; you’re right, James. The cards are making no sense tonight. We shouldn’t have done this. Silly of me to have tried.”
She hurried the cards back into a pile. She was clearly disturbed at having revealed such a dark indicator.
“Death?” James said. “Don’t worry about it, Miss Charles. Haven’t you noticed? Death pretty much turns up here every night. This is McGrave’s.”
For McGrave’s was indeed unlike any other hotel in Gotham.
“It would be like living in a Saturday matinee horror movie,” the man from the government had said. “Quite fun, I should think.” Almost a year ago, the man had arrived in London, on Christmas morning with Bing Crosby singing on the radio, with the news that James’s parents had died. It was also his responsibility to place the boy, and although he could have sent James to an orphan asylum or a foster home or a boarding school, he instead suggested a job and a home at McGrave’s. As the man explained, he knew that James had spent most of his life in hotels, that James would feel at home in one, and that James and McGrave’s would be a perfect fit.
Gargoyles, carved from Indiana limestone into creatures with terrifying faces, circled the building’s rooftop and kept an eye on the humans far below. Lots of buildings in the city harbored families of gargoyles, but only McGrave’s, if one believed the photographic evidence, harbored gargoyles that perched in different locations on different nights.
Exactly how high did these creatures loom? James should have known, because he occasionally gave guided tours, but this was hard to say. No one knew exactly how many stories the hotel encompassed. Forty-seven floors was the popular estimate, but the count was confused because the elevators occasionally stopped at phantom floors. The doors would glide open to reveal mist-filled corridors. Human-scale shapes could be seen drifting from room to room in the gloom, but no one investigated to determine if the shapes were mortal or even human. From time to time, someone stepped off the elevator at these floors, but no one ever stepped back on. The next time the elevator stopped, that floor might simply not be there at all.
There was also the issue of how many cellars, basements, and sub-basements the building housed. All that could be said was that guests could descend very deep into the earth, to realms best not visited. Visitors and staff swore that something in the wine cellar moaned constantly. Old timers claimed it was the ghost of the English explorer Henry Hudson, one of the first postmortals to gravitate to McGrave’s after the hotel was erected. According to hotel lore, the famous explorer haunted the wine cellar so he could drink there, to console himself over his death at the hands of mutineers. Whatever the reason, the staff was proud that a celebrity ghost, an important historical figure, might choose McGrave’s as its final resting place.
Of the solid, physical floors, those that could be relied upon to be there on a return visit, room accommodations varied greatly. Some rooms had bars on the windows; others had cages inside the rooms proper. Some had vaulted ceilings that permitted bats to circle in the high shadows; others were as small and cramped as the inside of a mausoleum. Some had spacious beds for those who used such items; others had satin-lined oblong boxes that closed.
Locating the hotel in the city was easy. A
ll one had to do was look for the dark cloud that hovered above the building daily. A hundred feet above the high-strung gargoyles, it roosted in the sky like a perpetual harbinger of gloom. Meteorologists debated the atmospherics that could cause such a localized phenomenon, and a few felt it had more to do with magic than science. All they could agree on was to label it cumulonimbus, meaning a dark fluffy cloud that was always about to rain. Once in a while, the cloud crackled with lightning to remind passersby of its presence.
This was one of those times. As Miss Charles scooped her cards back into her box, James heard the cloud’s distinctive rumbling and hoped it didn’t portend that trouble was brewing up there. Trouble visited McGrave’s too often.
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Sample Chapter: McGrave’s Hotel
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