The Hotel Under the Sand (2 page)

“These aren’t just sand dunes,” said Emma to herself. “These are the Dunes.”

She had once owned a book with pictures of the Dunes. It had said that the Dunes were far away, on a wild and lonely seacoast, very hard to find. Very little was known about them. Was there water in the Dunes? Looking at the bright, dry sand, Emma realized that she was very, very thirsty.

As she stood up there in the wind and the sun, wondering what she ought to do, Emma heard a tiny peeping sound. It was just barely there, under the hiss of the wind and the roar of the sea, but it was there. Balancing carefully along the spine of the dune, she walked in the direction from which she supposed the sound was coming. The sound grew clearer, and Emma recognized it for the singing of frogs.

Where there are frogs, there must be water
, thought Emma. She hurried along the dune and the sound got louder. She came over the top of the sand-hill, and saw below her a green place where a creek went winding down to the sea. Cattails grew there, and beach myrtles, and dune grass, and blackberry brambles. Emma slid down the high face of the dune and ran to the creek’s edge. The peeping of the frogs stopped at once, but Emma could see them now: they were perched all over the blackberry leaves, tiny froglets, green as emeralds and golden bronze, like jewelry scattered between the white flowers and black and red berries.

Emma cupped her hands and drank the clear water. When she had drunk all she wanted, she picked blackberries and ate them hungrily. The frogs hopped away from her hands to leaves farther away, but didn’t seem to mind that she was there otherwise.

Now that I have water
, thought Emma,
I’d better make myself a house to live in
. So she followed the creek back down to the beach, to where all the old shipwreck debris lay scattered. For the next hour she dragged planks and sheets of tin and fiberglass to the creekside, propping them up and leaning them together to make a sort of hut for herself.

During one trip down to the sea’s edge, she saw lots of little holes in the wet sand, just the shape of keyholes, and here and there a seagull poking its beak into the sand as though it was digging for something. She smiled to herself. Emma had lived beside the sea before, and she knew what the holes meant.
There are clams under those holes
, thought Emma,
and I can dig some out to eat for dinner
.

And that was what she did. When she had finished her house, she dug down with her hands, as the little waves rolled in and splashed her ankles, and caught the big slippery clams that were trying to get away from her by burrowing down deeper into the sand. Soon she had eight of them, like big glassy cobblestones, and she pried them open with a piece of broken boat propeller.

The clams were raw, of course, but Emma was very hungry.
It’s just like eating sushi
, she told herself. She ate them all, and they weren’t as bad as you would think, but she decided they would have been better if they were cooked.

This made her think about fire. She would have to build a fire before night came, to keep warm and perhaps to signal any passing ships. Emma knew that people sometimes made fire by rubbing two sticks together. She found the driest sticks she could, far up above the tide line, and rubbed two of them together for what seemed like hours, until her hands were tired and she felt like crying; but she couldn’t make fire.

At last she threw down the sticks. “I won’t cry,” Emma told herself. “I’ll look around the shipwrecks some more. Maybe I can find a can of gasoline!”

She searched and searched, and actually it was a good thing Emma didn’t find any gasoline, because if she had tried to get a fire going with it, it would probably have exploded. But she found something even better. Lying in a heap of broken plywood and seaweed was a plastic cigarette lighter, which had been lying in the sun so long it had faded to white on one side. Emma wondered if it hadn’t been ruined by seawater. She held it up close to her face and flicked the wheel. How happy she was to feel a quick burst of heat, and hear the tiny hiss!

So as the long evening shadows began to stretch over the Dunes, Emma made a fire just outside her hut, feeding it carefully at first with dry dune grass and then putting on bigger pieces of driftwood. For a long time she watched the fire, as the red sun sank down and the purple night fell. The stars came out, and a bright crescent moon hung above the sea and threw a track of silver on the calm water. Emma watched the moon on the water and didn’t feel quite so lonely. It was almost as though the moon were a person out there, smiling at her and telling her not to be scared.

She watched the sea, hoping to see the lights of ships. She wondered where she would go, if a ship did rescue her.
I
have no place of my own anymore
, she thought,
but maybe I can make one
.

After a while Emma put her head on her arms and slept, listening to the frogs and the soft boom of the surf.

The storm hadn’t taken everything she had, after all. It could never take away her brave heart, or her cleverness.

I
N THE MIDDLE
of the night, Emma woke up. Her fire had died down to ash and coals, only brightening now and then when the wind swept across the sand, so she was a little cold. She sat up to put a few more sticks on the fire.

The moon had vanished into the sea, but there were seven million white stars lighting up the sky. Emma tilted back her head and stared up at them in amazement. She had never seen so many stars, living in a city, or understood that there really is such a thing as
starlight
. They lit the Dunes with blueness, under the night, and reflected like points of fire on the black night ocean.

Straight above her, the Milky Way trailed across the sky. To the West it went down to the horizon, as though it were smoke from a ship’s smokestack. To the East it went all the way down to the top of the high dune. Right where it met the top of the dune, it looked strangely cloudy. Emma saw two stars close together in the cloud, as though they were a pair of eyes looking down at her.

“That’s funny,” she said to herself. “That cloud looks almost like a person standing there.”

But when the two stars seemed to blink, and when the cloudy person began to float down the dune toward her, Emma needed all her bravery not to jump up and run away. Instead, she reached out and took hold of the biggest stick from the fire, and held up its burning end defiantly. She didn’t shout. Instead, she just watched the person come nearer and nearer.

The closer it came, the more it began to take on solidness. Emma glimpsed bright brass buttons, and gold braid on a white uniform, and very shiny polished black shoes. A white cap floated on the cloudy head, with a gold badge winking in the firelight. Gradually the rest of the figure took shape, until only the face and hands were a little transparent. The ghost of a young man in the uniform of a bellboy stood just at the edge of her fire, looking at her with a wistful expression.

“Ahem,” he said. He had a nice voice. “Er… I don’t suppose you have any bags I could carry for you, do you, miss?”

“I’m afraid I don’t, no,” said Emma, who, in addition to being brave and clever, was also extremely polite.

“Any letters I could take to the post office for you? Any shoes you’d like polished?” said the ghost hopefully.

“I’m sorry, no,” said Emma. “I lost my shoes when I was blown here by a storm.”

The ghost flinched at the word
storm
, and wrung his hands. For one awful moment Emma thought he might emit a ghastly scream and shoot upward through the air, the way ghosts do in horror movies sometimes. Instead he coughed and stood straight, flicking a bit of sand from the front of his tunic.

“I’m so sorry to hear that, miss,” he said. “Very unfortunate thing to happen, yes indeed. What about some room service? Is there anything I can do for you at all?”

He seemed so desperate to please that Emma felt she had to say something, so she said, “Well—I’m a little thirsty. Could you get me a drink of water?”

“Right away, miss!” The ghost smiled radiantly and saluted. Then he appeared to be thinking, and his smile faded a bit. “Of course… I don’t know where any glasses are, or the water pitcher, any more.”

“You could bring me water in a clamshell,” said Emma. She picked up one of the shells she had saved from her dinner, and offered it to the ghost. “There’s a creek right over there.”

The ghost took the shell from her—she was pleased to see that it didn’t fall through his transparent hand—and floated over to the creek, where he filled the shell and came back at once. “Happy to oblige, miss,” he said, offering her the shell.

Emma took it from him. “Thank you,” she said. She thought about the time she had stayed in a hotel and said apologetically, “I’m sorry I don’t have any money, or I’d give you a nice tip.”

“Oh, that’s not necessary, miss!” said the ghost, saluting once more. “Service is its own reward, that’s my motto!”

He watched her, beaming with pleasure, as she drank. Emma set down the shell. He didn’t go away, and she wondered how to ask him what he was doing there without seeming bad-mannered.

“It must be very interesting being a bellboy,” she said at last.

“Bell
Captain,”he
said proudly. “Bell Captain Winston Oliver Courtland, at your service, miss! And whom do I have the pleasure of serving, miss?”

“I’m Emma Rose,” she said.

“Dee-lighted, Miss Emma!” Winston replied. “Can I do anything else for you?”

“You could sit down by the fire,” Emma suggested. “Would you like to tell me about yourself?” It was the least rude way she could think of to ask him who he was and what he was doing there, so far from anywhere in the middle of the night.

“Certainly, Miss Emma.” Winston sat in midair, as though he were perching on the edge of a chair, and cleared his throat. “Though I’m afraid there’s not much to tell about
me
. I was an orphan, you see. Left in a peach crate on the front step of the Courtland Boys’ Home. As soon as I was old enough to earn my keep, I was put to work shining shoes.”

“Did you run away?” asked Emma.

The ghost looked shocked. “Why, no, Miss Emma. I wouldn’t have been so ungrateful as that. Not when the kind people on the Boys’ Home Board of Directors had given me a roof over my head and the clothes on my back. I wanted to make them proud of me. I became the best shoeshine boy they had ever seen. And so I got promoted, you see, to one of the really nice shoeshine stalls in the Grand Hotel in town. What a swell place that was! Gold lettering on the door and everything.”

Emma thought his story was rather sad, but knew it would be impolite to tell him so.

“And I worked so hard there, that they said I was diligent enough to be promoted again,” said Winston, smiling dreamily. Perhaps he looked a little more solid just then, because she could see that he had once had big dark blue eyes and a handsome face.

“What does
diligent
mean?” asked Emma.