Legacy of Secrets

by Ridley Pearson

  These seemed like valid, important questions, ones that needed answering prior to his taking action. And yet, his feet moved almost independently, pushing him forward in a somewhat trancelike, near-catatonic state. He was going into that hotel.

  The question weighing on his brain was: Would he come back out?

  FINN FOUND ONE DOOR that wasn’t boarded up, though it was marked DO NOT ENTER. It was around the side of the golden-brick hotel, with its flaked paint trim and windows scarred silver with grime. Only part of the warning board remained. It leaned against the wall, its stenciled letters a grayish white, a T handwritten into the empty space between words: NOTTE. Finn happened to know what it meant, thanks to an Italian babysitter in elementary school: notte was Italian for “night,” as in buonanotte, or “good night.” That struck him as far creepier than DO NOT ENTER.

  To make matters worse, the doorknob moved easily and the door did not squeak on its hinges. Finn was no fan of the horror movie cliché, but since when did a door to a building closed down twenty or thirty years earlier not make at least a little noise when opened?

  The answer was plain to his eyes: oil streaks ran like tears from the rusted hinges. Finn reached out and touched the streaks; not tacky or dry, but wet and smooth. Somewhat fresh oil, recently applied—and by someone who didn’t want to be heard. A homeless guy, probably. Maybe a few of them. Finn wondered how a group of homeless dudes would take to an eighteen-year-old visitor violating their space in search of a particular room.

  He took his time. He was in no hurry to get mugged. The hallway, off which was a disaster area that had once been the kitchen, was covered in litter, cigarette butts, and yellowed newsprint. He used one of Philby’s laser pointers as a flashlight, which was a little like trying to fill a bathtub with a squirt gun. At a distance of twenty feet, the beam spread out enough to see an area about the size of a basketball. Up close it was nearly worthless, the beam of light about the thickness of a pencil.

  The smells were horrid, a bouquet of cats and highway rest stop wrapped in an aura of stinking cigarette residue. Long, deep scratches marred the plaster walls, like the clawing of a giant beast. The laser caught a pair of three-inch banana slugs in a race from another dimension—not unlike me, Finn thought.

  He had made two visits to Jess and Amanda’s room in the months he and the Keepers stayed in Burbank, courtesy of the Imagineers. He remembered the fourth-floor commissary—a cafeteria offering all sorts of good food—and the game room down the hall. Finn thought that if he used this as his starting point, he just might be able to figure out which dorm room the girls would occupy sixty years hence. The old hotel felt like two buildings joined as one. He recalled confusing intersections of hallways; at one point the girls had led him into an area of narrower halls where, even in the present, the building’s destruction by fire remained on display. Finn pushed all that aside for the moment, intent on finding the fourth floor.

  The first time he felt a cold wind rush past, felt his hair lift and gooseflesh ripple down his arms, he thought of Maleficent. The dark fairy had made the destruction of the Kingdom Keepers a primary goal. She was gone now—Finn had seen to that himself—but remembering her fate was an effort. Finn also had to make a conscious decision not to believe the stories about the haunting of the Tower of Terror. It was said that five people had been riding the elevator when the lightning struck: a bellhop, a movie star and her husband, and a child actress with her nanny. The lightning strike had set the hotel on fire and caused the occupied elevator to free-fall thirteen floors. No bodies were ever recovered.

  It was that last bit that had prompted the lore of the hotel, which was supposedly haunted by the ghosts of the five. In fact, if one believed all the stories, there were many more than five, but who was counting?

  The second time Finn felt the cold, he was on the stairs. He spun around. Where is she? He couldn’t stop his legs from carrying him up at a run. He reached the landing and grabbed the banister to swing himself to the next flight of stairs. His hand stuck to wood iced with frost.

  This time the cold hit him like a pail of ice water tossed in his face. Something had moved through him. Experiencing panic as a DHI was one thing; Finn had learned the train-in-a-tunnel method to settle himself. As his real self, though, he’d rarely tried such techniques, especially while sprinting up a set of stairs. Plenty of times he’d made himself all clear; but that wasn’t an option with Wayne’s transmitter shut down for the night.

  The splash of cold hit him again. This time he heard a voice.

  “Danger…” A girl’s voice. The child actress?

  “Where?” Finn asked aloud. He arrived out of breath at the third-floor landing, shaking with fear, but convinced it was better to try kindness over terror, he stood his ground. He couldn’t be sure it had been a voice, but it had certainly sounded something like one. How many people spoke back? he wondered. Wouldn’t the “natural reaction” be to scream and flee?

  But he wasn’t natural, nor were so many of his experiences. He lived as a projection of light, which wasn’t so far off from a ghost, all things considered.

  Another blast of ice water. “Ahead.”

  The thing couldn’t speak; he wasn’t hearing it, not exactly. As it swiped through him, some kind of exchange took place. But it must hear his spoken words, Finn thought, because it had answered him.

  “What danger?” he asked again, attempting to keep his voice from quavering.

  “Ahead,” he heard with the next chilly blast. And then it was gone; he knew without speaking another word.

  Human or ghost? he wondered, thinking about the danger that lay ahead.

  * * *

  Slowly now, Finn climbed the stairs toward the hotel’s fourth floor. His stomach was lodged somewhere near his Adam’s apple; his heartbeat felt like a drum solo. He tried to swallow, only to discover his tongue was felt.

  Ghosts. A burned-out, abandoned hotel with street people living it. Danger everywhere you looked.

  He pushed on the door to the fourth-floor hallway. It didn’t squeak, just like the door downstairs. Not good, Finn thought, his senses on high alert.

  Stepping carefully around the trash and litter, so as to make no noise, he moved in the direction of the modern-day cafeteria. It shouldn’t have surprised him to find an empty lounge half its present size, but it did. The space had been remodeled in the future. When, if ever, was he going to get used to this time shift? It was one thing to look at pictures or video of the past; it was another entirely to live among its limitations, its fashion, even its language.

  Finn thought he knew the way from this point and moved in that direction: down the bland hallway, left, right; look for the burned-out section and a stairway.

  He turned a corner and froze, looking into a room where an Army-green canvas duffel bag sat on the floor. Fresh clothes were piled in heaps. Finn practically slammed his back to the wall; all that did was turn him around so that he saw into the room across the hall. More clothes there. They weren’t the clothes of street people. His feet moved on their own, his eyes darting. At least two more of the rooms appeared to be occupied. He struggled to process the discovery. Who? Why?

  He found the hallway to the right and took it; was about to take the left when he heard voices of kids his age—definitely not adults. He tiptoed. Three boys. No girls. They were sitting on inverted metal wire milk crates playing cards; they wore blue jeans rolled up over their ankles and white T-shirts. Each dressed exactly the same. Their hair was short and slicked back with oil or wax, Finn couldn’t be sure which. To get where he was going, he had to cross the doorway. One of the boys could easily see him.

  Danger, he thought. Now he knew. Where were the ghosts when you needed them?

  At that very instant, he felt deadened with cold. The same windy voice of a young girl swirled through him: “Right here.”

  Not possible! Rather than excited by the communication, Finn felt paralyzed.

  “We…” It s
ounded like a man’s voice; “…can…” a girl’s? “…help.” Definitely a woman. Finn tensed like someone was choking him. But he’d learned so much as a DHI, as a Kingdom Keeper, that something allowed him to understand several things at once: these were the voices of the other people killed in the lightning strike, maybe even those in the elevator car; they were offering to help him, they weren’t trying to kill him; he could communicate if he simply shared his thoughts.

  Please, he thought, having no idea how any of this worked, or even if it would work. Distraction. Diversion.

  Two drops of water splashed onto the wooden flooring. Sweat, running from his chin. He was talking to ghosts.

  Within a second or two, the boys cried out from within the room. Playing cards flew into the air like windblown autumn leaves. The boys danced like witches around a fire, arms in the air. Finn zipped past the doorway, no one the wiser.

  Instant cold. The girl’s voice again. “Now we need your help,” she said in the same chilly blast.

  He hadn’t realized that was part of the bargain.

  * * *

  Still reeling over the idea of speaking with ghosts and owing them a favor, Finn stepped into the fifth floor’s long, dark corridor. He knew the room wasn’t among the first few; knew it was on the right-hand side. Halfway down the corridor, he slowed, infused with a feeling of nearness: he was getting closer. He tried a door—it squeaked loudly on its hinges. Too loudly.

  Would a group of boys recently scared out of their wits pursue a noise like squeaking hinges? He doubted it. Finn stepped inside.

  The room looked like Amanda and Jess’s. The same size rectangular box. A single window. Enough room for one resident, crowded for two. He didn’t recall so much wall space to the left of the window. Amanda had decorated her half of the room with a string of Christmas cards strung near the ceiling and an entire wall of book cover art. Jess’s side was more stark and purposeful. A secondhand bookshelf, with maps of both Disneyland and California Adventure pinned to the wall. Finn attempted to mentally re-create the decorations in this space and couldn’t make them fit; it was that darn wall space by the window.

  He tried the next room. This looked better—much better! Once inside, he realized that even the door behind him was better placed according to his memory. The window was just right. Everything fit.

  What he was about to do was probably stupid. Finn knew nothing of the space-time continuum, little about Einstein’s relativity, was a newbie to time travel. Still, he had to try.

  Finn stepped forward—and heard low voices from somewhere through the walls. Only then did he realize it wasn’t the squeaking hinges that had kept the boys a floor lower. It was that someone—something—lived up here.

  IN THE DANK, UNDERGROUND cave below the foundation of what had once been Disneyland’s Skyway Station, a small but dying fire burned.

  The Creole woman, who had a dozen tattoos of strange symbols and shapes, nine earrings in her left ear, and thirteen in her right, cast a yellow powder onto the pyre. It flashed bright orange and red before settling into a copper patina green. She nudged two small bones together. No amount of flame seemed enough to warm them.

  But the flashing catalyst had the desired effect. One of the bones stretched like a stick of licorice, bending and moving, snakelike, until it came into contact with the other bone. The movement stopped, but the first seemed to consume the second. The bones knitted into one.

  The woman cackled, the sound more wild animal than human. Another pinch of power. Another flash. In the fire, the two bones found a third.

  AMANDA AWOKE WITH A START, to the sound of squeaking and scratching. Rats! She’d heard the stories; she and Tim had even seen several when they ventured into the dorm basement. She adored Ratatouille, but it turned out not all rats were Remy. Most were ugly black sausages with tails, their darting black eyes beady under a coat of matted, sticky-looking hair. Ick!

  From the sound of it, one of them was currently chewing on a desk or chair leg. The cracking of splintering wood overcame the fear-driven pounding in Amanda’s ears. But she wasn’t about to put her feet onto the floor and offer the animal a midnight snack.

  It felt silly to wake Jess. What could she do that Amanda could not? But that sound! It was as irritating as Styrofoam rubbing on Styrofoam. Amanda’s shoulders pressed into her ears; with chills sparking all over her body, she felt ready to scream. She reached out, fumbling for her mobile phone, unlocked the screen, and turned on the flashlight app, aiming the blinding blue light directly at the desks.

  “What? What?” Jess came awake anyway.

  “Rats!” Amanda said, though the thing had apparently moved so fast she hadn’t seen it.

  “In here?” Jess pulled the covers up to her neck. “Ewwww!”

  The scratching started up again. Both girls craned their heads searchingly into the light from the phone.

  “Over there!” Jess pointed toward the window.

  “Down there!”

  “No! It’s over there!”

  Amanda wrenched the phone’s light in that direction. “See? There’s not even wood on the floor.”

  “It’s…not…on…the…floor!” Jess’s voice sputtered in terror. “Up! Higher!”

  Amanda directed the light up the wall. Her voice cracked as she managed to cough out, “What is that?”

  Within seconds, both girls were up on their bare feet, Jess hurrying to the door to switch on the light. Amanda, meanwhile, walked unsteadily toward the window. “Is this really happening?”

  “If it wasn’t here…this place, you know, I would say we’re both sharing the same dream.” Jess’s voice shook. “But I’m seeing it, too.”

  The window was framed by white wooden three-inch molding that stretched around the frame. With the light on, something abnormally strange was happening in the left molding. Before their eyes, clear as day, a groove was being cut by an invisible tool. Splinters of wood separated from the molding, floating to the floor like leaves falling from trees.

  “Ghosts!” Amanda gasped. “I’ve heard the stories…I never believed them.”

  “I know! Or maybe it’s like when the Keepers are in DHI shadow?”

  Amanda stepped warily toward the unexplained carving. She swept an arm into the area where a person would need to be standing in order to carve the molding. Nothing.

  The splinters of wood and paint continued to separate from the window trim, forming a straight line, perhaps an I or a 1. Then, at the top of the I, a horizontal line began to form. The carving was going more quickly now; whoever was responsible was getting the hang of it. That top line continued and stopped, much shorter than the long vertical line it was now connected to.

  “Okay, so this can’t possibly be happening, right?” Jess allowed fear to color her voice.

  “I know, but it is. What’s going on with that first line? Do you see the way it’s changing? It’s almost like it’s been burned or something.”

  “Mandy, I—I think it’s…aging.”

  The girls stood transfixed. For a moment, neither could speak nor move. Captivated, hypnotized, they watched in awe. It might have been a minute or two. It might have been a half hour. The cuts and grooves grew from a collection of meaningless lines to the letter F.

  “No, no, no!” Amanda fell to her knees. “I am not seeing this. If this happened a long time ago, why hasn’t it been here all along?”

  “Because it’s only happening now back then, I think. Not that I understand it at all.”

  When the next line began to form to the right of that first letter and on a sloping angle away from it, she knew what was coming. She looked over at Jess, tears in her eyes.

  “It’s him,” Jess whimpered.

  More minutes slipped past as a capital W took its place alongside the F. Quite quickly, two periods were drilled in to punctuate each letter. Below the initials for Finn Whitman, the carving began anew. The strokes were decisive now, strong, short, and deliberate. It took only a matte
r of minutes—or so it seemed—for the number 5 to appear, followed rapidly by another number 5.

  It was Jess’s turn to sink to the floor. The two girls sat side by side, chins resting on their knees, arms wrapped tightly around their bodies.

  “It really is him. He’s alive!” Amanda shook, and now the tears fell. Embarrassed, she slobbered through a few attempts at an apology for her foolishness until Jess threw an arm around her shoulder and pulled her in close.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered. “It’s okay. There’s no reason to apologize. You were worried for him. So was I! And here he is, or at least his initials, his message.”

  Before their eyes, the carved initials and numbers continued to age dramatically, the pale fresh wood turning a dark brown, almost black, the paint chipping along the edges. It was like watching a time-lapse video.

  F.W.

  +

  A.L.

  55

  “He’s definitely trying to communicate,” Jess said in an astonished voice.

  “With me,” Amanda said breathlessly. She couldn’t explain to other people—even Jess—what her connection with Finn meant to her. It was a sense of family, of trust. Of safety. His reaching out like this turned her to mush.

  “He had to find the place,” Jess said. “He had to find this room. He had to know it was ours. Do you realize what kind of effort that must have taken? He’s as desperate to hear from us as you were to hear from him. We’ve got to answer.”

  “How?”

  “We carve him a message back.” Jess rifled through her desk, came up with a pair of scissors, and handed them to Amanda. “Quick, while he’s still there!”

  Amanda placed the sharp end of the scissors on the wood, but hesitated.

  “What? Come on! Hurry!”

  “Think about it, Jess! He’s carving something from the past, okay? It travels all these years forward in time and we see it. That makes sense. But it can’t work the other way round. If I carve this wood for the first time now—time goes forward, not backward. He won’t see it. He can’t. It hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen for sixty years.”