Speed Dating With the Dead (2 page)

Maybe ghosts are like clouds on a windy day. The ether merges in tapestry—then is torn away, and all you were is never again. A memoir writ in invisible ink.

But that was the sky and dreams and imagination, Emily Dickinson crap, and this was the real world. Real, real, real, no matter how deep inside your head you hid or what games you played.

Kendra Wilson ran her pencil lead across her sketch pad, threading spidery gray lines over the paper. She roughed out the hotel’s main entrance, a set of double doors featuring large oval windows. The glass was beveled and tinted, so she drew them as if they were dewy eyes, complete with pupils. It was the kind of doorway that looked right back at you, just what you’d expect from the most haunted hotel in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Kendra wasn’t sure what was spookier: the idea that dead people might still be checked into the hotel’s many rooms, or that the structure itself might have taken a life of its own, sucking in the dust and detritus of the years and imitating the breath of those who had passed through its halls.

Dad would laugh at either notion. Then again, Wayne “Digger” Wilson had built a cottage industry on such lame curiosity, and he had a lot of money riding on the White Horse Inn’s reputation, whether it was “the most haunted” or merely grim and gray and in serious need of a makeover. But Dad was busy scoping out the cold spots, or else the blonde bimbo who headed up hospitality, so Kendra couldn’t get his opinion on the matter.

Which left her by herself, alone with the creatures she set down on paper and the games inside her head.

And they wonder why I don’t play well with others
.
At least the ones I can’t erase.

Kendra let the pencil tip float over the page, eyes almost closed. She’d read in one of Dad’s books about automatic writing, or “ghostwriting” as some called it, where psychics supposedly tuned into voices from the other side. They’d drift into a trance and scrawl out messages from beyond, whispering exactly the types of sweet nothings the living wanted to hear.

I’m fine over here on the Other Side. It never rains, the flowers are always in bloom, and even the old folks are good-looking. It’s sort of like Southern California without the smog and plastic surgery.Come on over when you get a chance, but don’t forget the cheese dip.

Her art induced an equivalent trance, but despite being dragged along to a dozen of North Carolina’s darkest destinations, she’d yet to witness so much as a stray bit of cigarette smoke. So she wished herself into dreams and nightmares, summoning up specters that delighted her fellow sophomores and horrified Bradshaw, the guidance counselor.

Yet even with her obvious talent, she was going nowhere. Her high school art teachers summed up her
ouvre
as “comic-book doodling,” and even though coffee-shop geeks and Hollywood producers read nothing but books that were mostly pictures, if you wanted to be serious, you had to render nudes and faded roses and geometrically precise duplications of European townscapes. Or close your eyes and pee on the canvas
a la
Pollock.

Even her pencil was ludicrous, the Big Fattie, the kind favored by kindergarteners with stubby fingers. Never mind that her mother had given her a box of them before leaving her with the Digger and six billion other people who would never understand.

Thanks, Mom. Preesh that whole abandonment thing.

So forget fitting in the real world. Instead, she was developing an imaginary
milieu
for Emily Dee, her time-traveling Victorian heroine who was half steampunk, half literary hero. The trouble was that a fictional character based on Emily Dickinson didn’t get into a whole lot of graphic action, unless Kendra copped out and threw in a vampire and let the eternal maiden have some sexual intercourse. And all she knew about either of those subjects was the stories she’d read in books.

“Whatcha drawing?”

She almost snapped her pencil lead because the voice was unexpectedly close to her ear.

Whoa. Survival mechanisms failing. Must reboot
.

Kendra looked up from her sketch pad into the round, freckled face of a boy maybe 11, with plum-colored eyes sunk in the dough of his skin. His red mop of hair seemed too big for his skull. A vague fishy odor permeated the air around him, though his breath smelled of licorice.

“Just some stuff,” she said, not interested in twerp pesterage at the moment.

The boy peered over her shoulder, and his hoarhound-flavored panting nearly curdled the yogurt in her stomach.

“That looks like the door,” he said.

“Bingo, Biscuit Head,” she said.

“Except it looks creepy. Like it’s going to eat you.”

“It
is
going to eat you,” she said in her most matter-of-fact voice.

The doors parted, glass rippling with the reflection of clouds and blue sky, and a pudgy, middle-aged man stepped out of the darkened lobby. He was dressed like a Salvation Army bell-ringer, in a uniform that would have looked official if not for the threadbare elbows and the creases in the bill of the service cap. The ruddy cheeks suggested either a fondness for the bottle or a Northern European bloodline. “Bruce,” he shouted, just another cranky parent.

“Gotta go,” the boy whispered.

Kendra nodded, not wanting to give the twerp actual acknowledgment by speaking. She concentrated on her drawing, visualizing the bellhop as a shimmery Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

“How many times do I got to tell you not to bother the guests?” said the Marshmallow Man, and Kendra imagined his voice echoing inside a wavy dialogue balloon.

“Sorry,” Bruce said.

“I’ll make you sorry.”

“I was just–”

“Just nothing. Get in here.”

Welcome to reality, Bruce. You got a sucky name and a dorky dad and you’re about to get reminded that children should be seen and not heard.

She just had time to sketch the Marshmallow Man’s outline before he stepped back into the shadows, letting the doors swing closed in a flash of silver and azure.

“It already did,” Bruce whispered, as if he were still at her ear. She glanced up from the page, expecting the boy to swing the doors open again, but he was already inside.

The twerp moves fast to be such a chunky monkey
.
Already did
what
?

She shrugged down into her coat so that the fleece liner covered her neck. Despite the brightness of the day, the November wind carried the promise of winter and the air was a good 15 degrees colder than in Raleigh. According to Dad, the White Horse had been the summer retreat of governors and industrialists at the turn of the previous century, when the state ran on tobacco and denim instead of education and research. Apparently the wealthy elite had enough money and sense to climb back off the mountain when the leaves fell. Now the trees were knobby old crones and the slopes were nothing but brown and gray, the colors of dookie and death.

Only Dad would pick such a dumb season to host a conference, but he said the rates were cheaper and fewer Normies would be around to spoil the fun and mess up the readings.

Kendra parked her pencil between her teeth and rubbed her hands together, trying to flush some feeling into her fingers. The wrought-iron bench was cold and hard, corroded with age and centered on a little flagstone semicircle away from the main walk. It was surrounded by the bones of rose briars and stunted boxwood, and across the lawn a few skinny ornamentals leaned like sickly witches. A mottled concrete statue of a generic angel knelt in the grass, the Matron Saint of Lost Causes praying for a Clorox makeover.

The hotel itself was three stories of skewed architecture, peeling paint, and sagging green shutters. A veranda ran the length of the bottom floor, and the entrance featured a stack of gabled arches that peaked fifty feet up with a small cupola that resembled a bell tower. The roof line was uneven, the forest-green shingles cracked and buckled. The whitewashed siding was faded and scabbed with flakes.

An extension had been tacked on to the eastern wing, with little attempt made at matching the materials and style. A wooden fence surrounded the pool, but the gaps in the boards were wide enough to allow passage to any small children willing to drown, though she guessed the pool was either emptied for the season or frozen over.

A narrow strip of crumbling blacktop led through the woods from the main highway, and the dense, tangled hardwoods hid the nearby town of Black Rock. Isolated by the surrounding forest and perched on the edge of the ridge, the hotel seemed forgotten by the world. The place probably made a lovely postcard in the summer, but right now the White Horse looked ready to gallop off to that Great Glue Factory in the Sky.

Which made it perfect for Dad’s little enterprise.

Speaking of the Digger, it’s about time for him to pretend he cares whether I’ve been abducted for sex slavery yet.

Kendra blew into the
cup of her drawing hand and continued the sketch. Usually she created a creep factor by warping the angles just a little in her architecture, aiming for a Gothic flavor, but in this case the reality was almost weirder than her fantasized depiction.

All she needed was a shadowy figure to appear in one of the second-floor windows.

The late-afternoon sun glinted off the glass as she surveyed the hotel’s one hundred eyes. A curtain billowed inside one of the rooms. She fleshed it out as a spirit in her workbook, knowing she could fine-tune it later, move in with erasers before applying the ink and making the ghost permanent.

She glanced up again and saw someone standing beside the curtain. She nodded and smiled. The figure stepped back into the darkness of the room. She silently counted over three windows from the middle balcony, planning to verify the room number later and deduce the identity of the occupant. Probably one of them was trying to spook her. Dad’s events brought out the crazies, those who believed in things they couldn’t see.

But maybe she was just as unhinged, believing in things that didn’t exist until she put them on paper. Dreams, lies, memories, games. All the same. Ether.

A memoir writ in invisible ink.

“Hey, Buttercup.”

He was somewhere up there. She peered into the shadows of the upper balcony. He wore the darkness like his out-of-fashion tailcoat, a stage prop that was as hokey as his act.

Kendra bent to her sketch pad again.

Children should be seen and not heard, butgrownups should be seen and heard only when it’s time to dole out some allowance.

She had no problem drawing him as a ghost. He’d been dead to her for years, deader even than Mom, who was really dead.

“Up here, Buttercup.”

A pet nickname, copped from William Goldman’s “The Princess Bride.” She sighed and let Big Fattie fall from her fingers. It rolled across the pad and fell to the ground, bouncing off a flagstone.

“They say one of the guests jumped from this balcony,” Dad called, with a pleasure in his voice that approached glee. “Got skewered on that lamppost.”

His arm came out of the shadow and pointed to one of the tall metal spires that girded each side of the walk. Kendra pictured a shish kebab of writhing arms and legs, red sauce spurting out like a busted ketchup pack at a greasy roadside diner. The image would have been gross if it weren’t so comical. Compared to the modern teenybopper slasher movies, Dad’s attempts at shock were like Casper the Friendly Ghost on a sugar high.

But he’d been polite on the drive up the mountain, even letting her pick the music, and she’d been working him for a new graphics program, so she could spare a little feigned affection.

“Nothing like a suicide chump to get the Groovy Ghoulies riled up,” she called to him.

“That’s my girl,” he said, stepping back inside the inn.

If Digger Wilson actually believed in evil spirits, he had no problem leaving her to deal with them on her own. Then again, she’d learned at an early age that everyone had to face their demons alone.

Whether the demons are real or just drawn that way.

Kendra continued her work superimposing a set of human features over the entryway, not realizing until she was nearly done that the eyes she’d drawn in the glass were her mother’s.

She got busy with the eraser.

Chapter 3

J.C. hated the goddamned basement.

The rusted cast-iron pipes that hung suspended from the floor joists dribbled black goo, and old fiberglass insulation hung down like rotted cobwebs. The dirt floor was cluttered with broken chunks of concrete, dusty bottles, short lengths of pipe and copper wire, and a clutch of three-legged chairs. A brass bed was set up along one cinder-block wall, no doubt erected as some sort of joke, because the mattress was fuzzy with mildew. A plastic red rose lay where the pillow would have been, the kind of punch line his dick-headed supervisor Wally Reams would think was hilarious.

The breaker box for the hot water heaters had been on the blink, and Reams had filled out a work order and put J.C.’s name on it. J.C. always got the crap jobs, but since the White Horse maintenance staff consisted of three other guys, one with a V.A.-approved wooden leg compliments of Saddam’s little poke in George Bush’s eye, then the odds were against J.C. anyway. Besides,
every
fix-it call was a crap job in a place as ancient as this.

The place smelled of rotted newspapers and mouse turds, and the dirt floor was packed to mud. The coal-burning boilers that had once heated the inn were now corroded shut, miles of pipes carrying their filthy air.

J.C pulled a flashlight from a loop on his overalls and flicked it on. The breaker box was on the far side of the room, and screw-in glass fuses were scattered across the dirt, glinting in the flashlight’s beam. He could be across, check the fuses, and be done in less than a minute. If the problem lay with the main circuits, then Reams would have to call in a real electrician. J.C. was a licensed plumber but he could barely twist a bread tie, much less mess with 220 volts of juice.