The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2015 Edition

by Paula Guran

  He should never have gone out. He should never have come here in the first place. If he had more time maybe he could figure things out, even though figuring things out had never been his strong suit. He’d made so many bad mistakes. And now in the still, cold air he realized he’d let them in.

  Steve Rasnic Tem is the author of over 350 published short stories and is a past winner of the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards. His story collections include City Fishing, The Far Side of the Lake, In Concert (with wife Melanie Tem), Ugly Behavior, Celestial Inventories, Onion Songs, Twember, and Here with the Shadows. An audio collection, Invisible, is also available. His novels include Excavation, The Book of Days, Daughters, The Man in the Ceiling (with Melanie Tem), Deadfall Hotel, and, most recently, BloodKin.

  “The Elvis Room”—the one room you save back, in case a president or rock star happens to land unannounced at the front desk . . .

  The Elvis Room

  Stephen Graham Jones

  Because of an error in measurement, a matter of less than most machines can even calibrate to, my career in experimental psychology hasn’t been a career at all, but a series of nine-month contracts punctuated by weekly-rate hotel rooms.

  I’m the mad scientist the tabloids say would “weigh the darkness,” yes.

  For eight days in August of my twenty-seventh year, newly minted and not unphotogenic, I was something of a sensation, both in the paranormal circles and in syndication as a two hundred and fifty word “story of interest.” The directors and the writers were thrilling the audience with their horror stories, but I was putting a scale to that horror. I was making it real.

  Of course there were the expected comparisons to 1901, when the human soul had been “weighed”—those famous twenty-one grams, irreproducible in dogs—but my conditions were much more controlled, and not nearly so sensationalistic. Whereas that measurement of twenty-one grams had been either hailed as the triumph of religion over science or bemoaned as that which would finally make faith unnecessary (1901 was the height of the Victorian spiritualism movement), my experiment was pure curiosity: it had grown from a case, from a patient. That’s vastly different than presupposing an afterlife, then finding a way to prove it.

  Yet the public digested the two exactly the same.

  I was able to protect “Mary,” anyway. Patient 039—a number I just made up, like the name. Better that this experiment’s fallout settle on only one of us.

  Her problem was monophobia (also known as “autophobia” or “isolophobia”) and extreme nyctophobia. The first is the fear of being alone. The second is fear of the dark, a common, widespread problem, and not just limited to children. After all, human eyes haven’t evolved to penetrate the darkness of the savanna night—or the closet, with the light off—and where we can’t see, there our imaginations can populate and propagate. The unseen terrorizes specifically by remaining unseen; it’s an axiom for a reason.

  And “monophobia” is perhaps not the most apt term for her anxiety, but “paranoia” is so reductive; in actuality, her fear of being alone stemmed from her distinct sense that she was never completely alone.

  She had been referred to my sleep lab not because my new colleague thought I could cure her, but because he knew I needed raw data on the fear response: galvanic skin response, respiration, blood pressure. Already I had three lifelong night terror sufferers spending their nights with me for a token bit of my grant monies (fast evaporating). Granted, what I was investigating could be considered peripheral to the major lines of inquiry, most of which involved treating the Big Three (schizophrenia, depression, the dementias), but I was ambitious, was trying to find my fulcrum with which to overturn the world.

  My study had been born when a certain pamphlet found its way to my inbox: American Indians on campus were calling for a return to “traditional” hair-lengths. It wasn’t for anything religious, but because long hair supposedly magnified the natural world, tuning their scalps in to the slightest breath, forty feet away. It was apocryphal, of course, and very much in keeping with pirates wearing hoops through their ear lobes to sharpen their vision. But what if, right?

  My grant was partially funded through the Defense Department, yes. Anything to give soldiers more advantage on the battlefield. Or less disadvantage.

  In order to properly track the possibility of this, however, I first had to establish a baseline of physiological responses, which would cumulatively and quantitatively map out what people call the hair on the back of their neck “writhing” or “standing up” to alert them that they’re being watched.

  And being watched is at the bottom of most cases of nyctophobia: you can’t see into the darkness, but you can be seen.

  As for Mary, she had long, flowing hair, perhaps even “sensitive” hair—what my then-wife would have said was hair from a shampoo commercial. She had been a twin in the womb, but was the only one born. It was a story she dwelt on, and the source of much of her anxiety.

  I admitted her to my lab and she signed all the requisite releases, and that first night I watched her, and followed her readings, and my colleague had been right: there was something distinctly haunted to her demeanor, to her bearing, to her postures, once she’d acclimated to the new room, the cameras. It was in the way she would sometimes look behind her, to what my monitor insisted was just another empty corner.

  In the womb with twins, one will often eat the other. It’s just the natural course of things.

  Her parents never should have told her.

  Finally she fell asleep, and all her readings leveled out.

  We did this four times, and her charts were beautiful, her terror so unadulterated that I could understand her impulse to trust it.

  On the fifth—and fateful—night, then, sitting in the lounge with her, I told her that I could prove to her that her fears were baseless. That she had nothing to be afraid of, or to feel guilty for. To reiterate, here, I wasn’t supposed to treat her, just document her. This was strictly outside the purview of my study. But you can only watch someone struggle with a stubborn jar for so long before you offer to help. Especially when the contents of that jar can save their life.

  “But she won’t show up in pictures,” she said, anticipating my methods.

  “Because she’s not real,” I told her.

  I was too proud of my discipline, yes. My—and all scientists will admit this, at some level—my denomination.

  The human mind was a computer bank, to me. I could simply change the punch cards, reprogram a life. Stimulus-response, the world conforms to reason; I was a product of my lengthy education. There were no dark corners, as far as I was concerned. Just shadows we haven’t bothered to shine our lights into yet.

  I was going to shine my light into Mary’s corner.

  She would be a footnote when I finally published, a fortuitous benefactor of the early parts of my study. No, of my rigor, and my ability to balance experimental psychology with the individuals it’s supposed to eventually benefit.

  A friend in another department had a lab where he was measuring atmospheric pressures and the smallest fractions of weights, in an attempt not to find dark matter—though if it resolved in his data, he had assured me he wouldn’t complain—but to deliver his findings and conclusions to the Department of Weights and Measures. His findings on decay, on specific gravities, on not only how many angels would fit on a pinhead, but their percent of body fat. His world, infinitesimal as it was, was the physical, while mine was the interior, the, according to public opinion, “subjective.” But, in my hubris, I could hotwire them.

  Two nights later I led Mary into his chamber and left her there, retreated to the booth with my friend.

  Once the pressure settled in the chamber and my friend had established her tare-weight so as to rezero his superfine scales, I had him turn the lights off. My hope was to show Mary that her fears were baseless: the chart of her time in the chamber, in the dark, would be level. No s
pikes to indicate a presence, malevolent or otherwise. This was all assuming that there actually were no such thing as the immaterial. My grounding for that, which she had to agree with, was that “ghosts” or whatever surely at least interacted with light, yes? Even if they never touched the floor or were completely permeable, holograms in a sense, still, our eyes were built to read surfaces light was reflecting off of, right? Meaning that, if these presences Mary insisted upon were actually there and interacting with her, then they had to be interacting with her through the physical world. Otherwise there could be no interaction.

  And of course, once the lights went all the way down to black, Mary’s sobbing screams filled the booth.

  My friend made to release the door—his laser-cut bars of copper and vanadium never screamed for their lives—but I stayed his hand, convinced that two full minutes of zero change on the charts would prove to Mary that her certainties were all in her head, and could thus be talked through and dealt with in a proper, rational setting rather than continually recoiled from, and allowed to dictate her life. I wanted to give her back control, and the freedom that came with it.

  Except—that famous measurement.

  Not at the height of Mary’s panic attack but right after, something in that darkness of the chamber did in fact move, or seem to.

  The atmospheric pressure dilated ever so slightly, as if, perhaps, a hummingbird had opened its mouth, emitted a single, invisible breath.

  And the weight shifted in tandem with that.

  I, of course, told Mary that the variance on the charts was within the baselines, no environment is truly hermetic, but she fell away from me, ran off across campus in her lab-issue nightgown, to finally get picked up in hysterics at a coffee shop.

  When she said my name hours later, through a battery of sedatives and well-meant cups of coffee—does nobody check with anybody else?—I was brought in, and when she argued that my tests had proven what she’d already known, had confirmed her worst fears, that her dead sister was stalking her, my friend was compelled to turn those charts in. Nothing less would satisfy her. And I don’t blame him, for handing them over, for admitting to everything; he was going to be in enough hot water for having loaned his equipment out to another department, for an unauthorized rogue experiment, one involving human subjects, when he was only cleared to glove up, handle precious metals.

  By the time the night’s events were whittled down to two lines on a report, they seemed no less than a revolution.

  Once the papers got their hooks into it, my experiment was “proof of ghosts.” When I’d been trying to establish the opposite of that.

  In a matter of months, my funding disappeared, my papers started getting declined for the conferences, and I had to look further and deeper for teaching opportunities I’d formerly kept in my hip pocket as insurance. And all because my friend’s equipment had been so impossibly fine: that much-discussed change in atmospheric pressure—I’d never anticipated that her papillae, expanding into ‘goose bumps,’ could actually be measured. That didn’t explain the subtle addition of weight, but my friend reluctantly opined that it had probably been the result of a moving subject on a scale designed for stationary objects. Inertia and momentum; they don’t teach that in Intro Psych.

  I didn’t seek the fame or notoriety out, but it found me all the same.

  My wife left shortly after. It was understandable. My reaction to the published results and to my department’s disavowal was, like Mary, to rush back, insist upon the validity of the experiment. In the existence of ghosts, yes. In the undeniability of the data. That the data was more valid, even, if there can be a spectrum or a gradient of validity. Like penicillin, like Teflon, this was something we’d stumbled upon, not something we’d set out to prove.

  It was a mismeasurement, though. That wasn’t even consensus, it was just assumed. No one was trying to replicate our work.

  Public opinion had always seemed vapid, until it was levied against me.

  The conferences I began to get invited to for a brief time, they also hosted panels on UFOs and Bigfoot. I was being exiled to the fringes, just another “shrieker,” as my major professor used to call them: those who are so far from the center that they have to scream and pull their hair to be heard.

  Those conferences, however, unlike the ones I’d always known, paid.

  A second wife came and went, not willing to commit to my nomadic lifestyle, to what she called my lingering bitterness, and ten years slipped past, and then five more, and then a sixteenth year, and I still hadn’t found that fulcrum I knew had to be there to flip the world over onto its back.

  At some point in a fall like this, you stab your hand out for a handhold. Not from reflex, but because you’ve been dwelling on notions of redemption for years already. On giving the world its comeuppance.

  And so was born my second experiment.

  Just like the first, it was born of observation, of happenstance: as my life was more and more spent in hotels, I began to take note of my fellow travelers. To study them and their habits, their small compulsions and superstitions that they probably weren’t even aware of. And I began to pick up the lore. Not the usual clutch of urban legends, either—disappearing hitchhikers and the like—though of the same family.

  And some assembly was required.

  The first component wasn’t even a folk tale, it was just something I picked up from a hotel manager’s daughter. In trying to negotiate a cheaper rate for my monthly stay than for the weekly I was already being charged, I had to work my way up the administrative stream, as it were. And she was the last step before the main office.

  It was all pleasant, of course; I’ve found that abrasiveness doesn’t go nearly as far as a display of academic fatigue with the process, with a sense that the two of you at this table are in this together, and it’s not about the two of you at all, but this issue. Of rate.

  In watching her page through her binder to show me occupancy trends and the like—she’d come prepared to these negotiations—I noticed there was always one vacancy, even when the final report noted how many people had been turned away.

  “The Elvis Room,” I said, sitting back.

  I’d just made the term up, but it was obvious what it meant: the one room you save back, in case a president or rock star happens to land unannounced at the front desk.

  The manager’s daughter had laughed and turned the page, and we’d continued with our argument, which finally bled into her mother’s office, with the result of five dollars off per week.

  It was hardly worth it, had been something of a pyrrhic victory if I’m going to be honest, as well as an indicator of the station I’d fallen to, but that night I couldn’t stop thinking about the Elvis Room, as I’d coined it.

  Over the next few weeks I consulted with scholars from the humanities, who in turn directed me to texts dealing with urban legends and folk beliefs.

  As it turned out, the Elvis Room was from the same branch of formative superstition that kept thirteenth floors of hotels from being called that. I’d heard this years ago, but never investigated. A quick walk through the lobbies of downtown confirmed it, though: the rows of buttons available for passengers to push, they were usually arranged so as to obfuscate that missing, surely evil “13.”

  We’re a funny species.

  As for the lore surrounding what I was now confidently calling the Elvis Room, it wasn’t something I could glean from a bank of buttons, then grin over to myself.

  To find out the truth about it, I had to interview fourteen managers and nearly twice as many assistant managers. Just one disgruntled, former manager would have sufficed, but I had no way of finding such a person. So my approach had to be more scattershot and time-consuming. But such is science.

  The assistant manager, who finally admitted that standing orders for the industry were to always leave one room empty, was named . . . Roderick, say. As Roderick understood, the reasons for the Elvis Room had nothing directly to do with �
��ghosts” or “hauntings” or anything so fantastic. It was just numbers. Statistics.

  Once records had started to be kept and, a decade or two after that, collated, then compared from city to city, season to season, chain to chain, the bookkeepers began to notice a certain unsettling trend. In guest fatalities.

  So long as one room was left unoccupied, then guests by and large woke up, made it to breakfast. Those instances where a boisterous guest—an Elvis or a president, yes, a cattleman or a couple who couldn’t be relegated to the manger—insisted upon registering for that last room, though, well. Nearly without fail, a guest would suffer a stroke or a heart attack in the night, or worse, and the rest of the guests would then be not just inconvenienced by emergency personnel, but spooked, perhaps unlikely to stop by this particular hotel again the next time through.

  Which is what it all came down to for the hotels: repeat business. It makes sense for them to leave one room empty, if it means a guest will leave under his or her own power, possibly to return. Guests who are carried out feet-first are poor promotion.

  “Is there any pattern to the—the victims?” I asked Roderick.

  “What do you mean?” he said back.

  He had a way of emphasizing just exactly when you had his full attention. He did it by hardly ever looking at you otherwise.

  “Like, is it the guest who takes that last room?” I said. “Or is it someone who’s there for a second night? Lone occupancies or doubles? Second floor or twelfth?”

  “Online bookings or last-minute, too tired to drive to the next town,” Roderick went on, completing my list. He shrugged it off, though: “The pattern is that someone dies,” he said, as if I were missing the point.

  I thanked him—a good data collector knows when the subject is tapped—promised again to guarantee his anonymity, and passed him the meager sum we’d agreed upon.

  Next, I had to crunch the numbers myself. Which involved finding those numbers but—the same way looking over a mathematician’s shoulder would be less than gripping—allow me to offer those rough counts are available. Moreover, as near as I could tell from organizing them in columns and rows, Roderick’s claim held; in cases of guest deaths, hotels are reluctant to share information, as any press in that regard will perforce be bad press.