by Tasha Black
Gh0stwr1ter:
Only have a minute - power out, battery dying. Suspect mystery guest may be a vampire after all. Evidence:
- Sent heavy trunks ahead, arrived after dark
- Keeps all mirrors and windows covered
- Never eats or drinks in anyone’s presence
- Never leaves his room until sundown
- Always disappears before dawn
- A man was murdered in the hotel and his crucifix is missing from around his neck
Thoughts?
TadStrange:
How did you not lead with the murder?????
A message popped up on her screen.
Low Battery: 3% of Battery Charge Remaining.
She dismissed it.
When the board was visible again, she could see three messages had been posted in quick succession.
BethsMom1972:
Are you okay, Ghostwriter?
Wra1thGirl19:
That’s a vampire, Ghostwriter
Mos def
TadStrange:
100% a vampire. You know what to do now. We all know exactly what to do when faced with a real vampire.
She most certainly did not know what to do.
TadStrange is typing…
Dru waited with bated breath.
There was the ding of a new message, just as the screen went black.
“What are you doing, Dru?”
Viktor was standing right in front of her.
She jumped, nearly dropping the phone into the snow bank.
How long had he been there?
“My battery died,” she gasped, fumbling her gloves back on.
“Well thankfully, Hailey got through and the police know what’s going on here,” Viktor said.
Dru couldn’t bring herself to meet his eye.
Had he seen what she was up to?
He couldn’t have, from that angle.
Could he?
“Hey guys,” Hailey yelled, heading toward them. “They’re sending a crew as soon as the road is clear. Help is on the way!”
“That’s great, Hailey,” Viktor told her. “We should head back.”
She nodded and the three of them set off toward the hotel again with the wind at their backs.
Did he see, or didn’t he?
He wasn’t letting on if he did, and there was no way to know.
She trudged forward into the snow. At least the hike would be easier on the way back down.
8
Dru stepped into the hotel with a great sense of relief.
She had spent the whole hike back wondering if they would make it, or if she and Hailey would fall victim to Viktor’s appetite.
Just make sure you’re not stuck alone with him…
Surely, he wasn’t really a vampire. She had been hoping that the people on the message board would tell her that she was crazy and there was nothing to worry about. She’d forgotten that most of the people on there were pretty intense. And they ate stuff like this up.
But she had to admit that the clues kept adding up in her own head until the tower of her sanity threatened to topple over.
She was dusting the snow off her coat and stomping her feet to dislodge it from her boots, when suddenly, Viktor’s hand was on her shoulder.
She froze.
“I have to go, Dru.” He leaned close, whispering into her hair. “I’ll see you tonight.”
She watched in silence as Viktor headed up the stairs to his rooms.
The lantern on the desk in the lobby illuminated the grandfather clock. It was nearly seven.
Of course he had to go.
The sun would be up soon.
Dru shivered.
“Are you okay?” Channing asked, approaching her, carrying a lit candle.
Thankfully, no one else was paying her any attention. Hailey was regaling the others with the tale of their walk through the driving snow and her heroic call for help. She seemed to be embellishing it a little, but no one was complaining.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You’ve been up all night,” Channing said. “Can you stay awake another hour to search the victim’s room?”
“I normally go to bed around nine in the morning anyway,” she told him.
“How fortunate for me,” Channing said. “You’re the perfect recording officer.”
It was easy to forget he wasn’t really a detective.
She hung up her coat, and they headed up the stairs toward the Opal Room.
“Won’t you need the key?” Channing asked.
“I’ve got a skeleton key,” Dru told him, patting her pocket.
“Very interesting,” Channing said. “Does every employee have one?”
“Yes,” Dru said. “Well, usually. Howie was looking for his yesterday. He’s always misplacing it.”
“Very, very interesting,” Channing said. “When we get to the room please note that down.”
Dru didn’t think it would be important. The murder had happened in a communal area. There were no locked doors involved. But she supposed it wouldn’t hurt to write it down.
“So are we looking for anything special in his room?” Dru asked.
“We’re looking for anything out of place,” Channing said.
“Like what?” Dru asked.
“We’ll know it when we see it,” Channing told her.
They reached the Opal Room, and Dru retrieved her skeleton key and opened the door.
Before she could step inside, Channing put a hand on her arm.
“Let’s wait here a moment, shall we?” he asked. “Let’s see what we can observe from here, before we step inside and potentially damage the clues.”
That was a good idea. Channing wasn’t half-bad at this.
Dru looked into the room.
Brian Thompson had clearly not been a neat freak. The floor was strewn with various items, including two enormous pairs of boxers, three socks, and an open suitcase.
The bed was unmade, and she could see toiletries on the bathroom sink through the open door at the back of the room.
“Do you see anything suspicious?” Channing asked her.
She shook her head.
“Very well,” he said. “I’ll take some photographs now. After that, we’ll make a thorough search.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for the police?” Dru asked.
“I thought the same thing earlier this evening,” Channing said. “But it’s still snowing, and there’s still a murderer on the loose. We have a responsibility to solve this as quickly as we can, before someone else loses their life.”
Dru nodded. His words were chilling, but he wasn’t wrong.
“Do you have gloves?” Channing asked her.
“Only my winter ones,” she said.
“May I borrow them?” he asked.
She handed the gloves over, and they stepped inside as Channing slipped them on.
There was a slight funk in the air, as if Thompson didn’t bathe as frequently as he should, along with an undertone of some body spray clearly marketed at teenage boys.
“Let’s begin in the near left corner and sweep right and back,” Channing decided. “Do you have your notepad?”
“Yes,” she said, jotting down what he had said before about Howie’s skeleton key.
“Then we will begin,” Channing said, placing the candle down on the dresser.
They worked their way slowly through the room, Dru noting each item as Channing examined it.
She wished they had electricity, or even a good flashlight. They usually kept a tactical flashlight by the front desk, but she was pretty sure Howie took it when he went to look for Chester. He probably still had it. It seemed like the type of thing Howie would hold onto during a power outage.
They continued the search, but didn’t find anything unusual. Thompson seemed to have a taste for luxury that was evident in his toiletries, if not his clothing. But other than the mess, nothing seemed to be actually out of place.
<
br /> After nearly an hour of looking over everything in the room, Channing finally made an actual discovery behind the bedside table.
“His phone,” he said, breathless with excitement as he bent over beside the bed. “It must have fallen back here. That explains why we didn’t find it on him.”
“Oh, that’s fantastic,” Dru said.
At least they knew the killer hadn’t stolen it. And it might have some leads as to whether or not Brian Thompson had any enemies.
They leaned over the little device together as Channing pressed the button to wake it.
But the screen was locked.
Dru sighed.
“It’s been a long night,” Channing said. “We all need some sleep. Let’s lock the room up and hit it again when we’ve had some rest.”
Dru nodded, still looking at the phone. “Can I hang onto this?” she asked. “I’ll try to figure out how to hack into it.”
Dru could no more hack into a phone than she could the Pentagon, but it sounded like the right thing to say. Maybe Channing’s enthusiasm was rubbing off on her.
“That would be marvelous,” Channing said.
Dru slipped the phone into her pocket and they stepped out of the Opal Room.
“I’ll walk you to your room,” Channing offered.
“Thanks,” Dru said.
The sun was shining through the stained-glass window on the landing, the colors saturating the small island of light in the darkness.
“We don’t appreciate the light until we’ve spent some time in the dark,” Channing said thoughtfully.
They set off down the hallway to the servants’ wing. When they reached Dru’s door, she pulled out her key once again.
“Keep your door locked,” Channing advised.
“Of course,” she said.
“I’ll see you this afternoon then,” he told her. “Thank you for your help.”
“My pleasure,” she told him.
“Really, do keep your door locked,” he reminded her, handing her the candle.
She suppressed a shiver as she closed herself into her darkened room.
Alone.
9
Dru put on her pajamas and tried to get herself ready for bed.
The temperature was already dropping in the hotel. Without electricity to ignite the boiler, the only heat was coming from the fireplace downstairs.
Dru sincerely hoped Chester would make some headway with the generator soon. But she was too tired to worry about it right now.
She slipped on a fuzzy sweater over her pajamas and crawled into bed, exhausted to her core.
But sleep wouldn’t come.
All she could think of was Viktor’s icy blue eyes.
Is he, or isn’t he?
She sat up and grabbed Brian Thompson’s phone from her bedside table to distract herself.
Much as she wanted to believe she could figure out his password, the fact that her only real knowledge of the man began and ended with the info in the hotel check-in log made that seem pretty unlikely. Unless he was using his birthday or driver’s license number, she was out of luck.
She tapped the screen to wake the phone and waited while it tried and failed to use facial recognition to unlock.
Facial recognition…
A horrifying idea occurred to her.
They didn’t have a shot at his password, but they still had access to the man’s face.
She would have to wait for Hugh Channing to wake up later in the day, because she absolutely wasn’t going back into the tunnels alone.
Tyler Park’s words over the body returned to her.
Soon, bloating from putrefaction will have his eyes and tongue protruding out of his face.
If she waited too long, facial recognition might not work anymore. Not to mention the fact that it was going to be a lot more gross to even try.
It’s broad daylight, Dru, she coached herself. Just go downstairs, scan his face, and come back up.
She slid out of bed and pulled the dark curtain aside to look out the window.
The snow had slowed down enough that she could see the pink light of early morning reflected on the frosted meadow below.
She slid her feet into a pair of boots before she could change her mind, then headed into the hallway, locking her door behind her. The hall was silent, but she took the servants’ staircase down the back of the wing anyway.
Stepping outside made her appreciate the remaining warmth in the hotel. The wind seemed to reach inside her and whistle right through her bones.
Dru made her way across the patio behind the solarium to the basement door as quickly as she could. A moment later, she was descending the steps into the catacombs, using the ambient glow from the face of Brian’s lock screen for light.
Her own footsteps echoed off the wet walls and she shuddered, thinking about what might be outside the faint glow of the phone’s light.
There were the real things - like rats and spiders.
And then there was her imagination, working overtime, envisioning a murderer around every corner.
Or worse.
Drucilla Holloway, you will not think about zombies.
But she couldn’t help thinking about zombies. After all, she was going to find a corpse.
And this whole thing was starting to seem like a horror movie.
A nasty business, Channing had said.
Dru had nearly giggled at the cliched turn of phrase.
But Hugh was right. Everything about this business was nasty.
She was nearly at the alcove where the bins were kept, when it occurred to her to worry that Chester might have moved the body.
But as soon as she turned the corner, she knew it was still there.
The stench pierced the frigid air, filling her senses.
Just unlock the phone and get out, she told herself.
She stomped a few times, and then paused, wanting to give any rats that might have followed the scent of the body a warning she was coming, and plenty of time to flee.
Dru inched forward, until at least her feet nudged the carpet.
She pulled her sweater up over her mouth and nose and unrolled the carpet. It was harder than she expected, and her makeshift sweater-mask kept falling down.
Finally, enough of the body was revealed for her to do what she had come to do.
As Tyler had said it would be, the victim’s face was marbleized. But his eyes and tongue were not popping out.
Dru held her breath and held the phone up to the face, suddenly frantic that there might not be enough light from the screen to show the face for recognition purposes. Didn’t these things have special cameras that could see in the dark?
But when she turned the phone back, it was unlocked.
Quickly she went into his settings and turned off all of the lock features, aiming it at the man’s face one more time for verification.
She turned the phone off and back on again.
There was no lock screen. She had full access now.
She slipped the phone into her pocket and began the job of rolling the carpet back up.
It seemed to take forever, but at last the body was hidden again.
She headed back down the corridor, eager to get out of the tunnels.
Somewhere in the darkness ahead, a door banged shut.
Dru froze in place.
Footsteps were coming toward her, as if someone had entered from the lawn and was headed toward the trash bins.
It’s probably Chester, she told herself frantically.
But Chester had been up all night working on the generator. And the man valued his sleep.
She had just reached the little alcove where Chester had been working on the shelves the other night.
She ducked into it, hoping whoever was coming hadn’t heard her.
The footsteps rang out, closer and closer.
Dru had a sudden epiphany. She had found that secret door when she was here the other day, maybe she could hide in
it until the danger had passed.
She pushed the panel that she had discovered by accident, and heard the corresponding groan of stone sliding against stone.
Dru held her breath and listened, but the rhythm of the footsteps was unchanged.
She stuck her fingers into the open gap and pried.
A door creaked open and she tried to move into the hidden area behind. With the shelf partially blocking the entrance, it was a tight fit, and her jacket snagged on the edge for a second before she freed it, slipping inside, then pushing the door closed behind her all but an inch, not wanting to get trapped in the dark alcove.
She moved away from the opening and pressed her back to the wall.
There was another groan as the wall before her slid the rest of the way shut in the darkness.
Dru bit back a scream.
You’re not trapped. There has to be another stone in here that you can push to get out, she told herself silently.
But her claustrophobia clutched her stomach with hard, icy fingers and sent sweat sliding down her spine, despite the cold.
It was impossible now to hear if the footsteps were growing closer. The stone blocked out too much sound.
Dru wasn’t sure whether to scream at the top of her lungs for help getting out, or hide for fear of being discovered.
It would be just her luck to be rescued by the murderer and end up joining Brian Thompson in that carpet, waiting for the rats.
She closed her eyes and forced herself to focus on her breathing.
One hundred breaths in and out, and then you can look for the button.
Dru made it almost to fifty before she broke and tapped the phone for light.
She was in some sort of storage closet. There were a few empty wooden pallets on the floor and nothing else.
She pressed the stones all around the door she had entered but nothing happened.
Her hands began to shake, and she put the phone back into her pocket so as not to drop it as she scoured every wall in the room, pressing each stone, one by one.
What if it’s not a single stone? What if it’s some kind of combination?
