The Hotel Under the Sand (3 page)

“Why, it means being careful, and thorough, and—well—always doing your very best to please,” said Winston. “Taking extra pains to do your job right, by gosh. So I became a bellboy, with a blue cap and a nickel-plated badge. And I was such a hardworking bellboy, in no time at all I got transferred to the Empire Hotel in the city. That was an even grander place! Stained-glass windows in the Lobby and all. I got to wear a red cap then, with a silver-plated badge.

“And while I was working there, a great man came to stay at the hotel. His name was Masterman Marquis de Lafayette Wenlocke the Fifth. He was a brilliant inventor, and as rich as a king. Came from a fine old family. I ran errands for him all summer, just as diligent as I could be, and when the day came to pack his bags, he asked me if I’d like to come out here and work for him.”

“Did you say yes?” asked Emma.

“Did I! Why, I just about jumped for joy. You see, he’d been busy all summer, drawing up plans for a great new hotel he was going to build, out here on the coast. It was going to be positively the most spectacular place ever constructed, a marvel of design, with everything up-to-date and first rate. The Ritz, the Savoy, the Waldorf-Astoria—oh, the Grand Wenlocke would have beaten them all hollow!”

“Would have?” said Emma. “Didn’t he build it after all?”

Winston didn’t answer for a moment. He faded back to transparency, sitting there in midair; his brass buttons lost a little of their gleam. At last a tear ran down his cheek, glittering like stardust.

“Oh, he built it, all right,” said Winston, and sighed heavily.

W
INSTON THE
G
HOSTLY
Bell Captain wiped away a tear and spoke in a firm voice.

“I may as well tell you the whole truth about Masterman Marquis de Lafayette Wenlocke the Fifth,” he said. “He
was
rich as a king, and he
did
come from an old family, but the fact was, his family had a sort of unsavory reputation. They had a castle and some lands in Europe, but nobody knew where they got their money. I heard that one of the Wenlockes had been a Royal Astrologer to some king over there, and another one worked as an alchemist for some fellow named Prince Rudolph.

“But Mr. Wenlocke, he was just as nice a gentleman as you could hope to work for. Nothing stuck-up about him at all! Even if he did look sort of sinister, with that pointed beard and those black eyes of his.

“And there did used to be some mighty strange characters who came to those parties he threw. He said they were his investors. It wasn’t my place to have opinions about them, of course, I just handed around the trays of those funny green cocktails they all drank, and served them those funny little black hors d’oeuvres they liked to eat. ‘Winston,’ I said to myself, ‘these folks are as far above you as the moon, so you just keep your lip buttoned.’“

“So what happened?” Emma asked.

Winston sighed again. “Mr. Wenlocke had decided to build a hotel out here in the Dunes,” he said. “People told him he was crazy to build a hotel on the edge of nowhere, in a place no roads led to, miles and miles away from shops or railroad lines. But he told them that people would find ways to get here. In the meantime, he’d build a steamer pier, and bring everything in by steamship.”

Emma remembered the double line of pier pilings she’d seen down on the sand at low tide. “Oh! But that must have been a long time ago. The pier’s all worn away now.”

“It’s been more than a hundred years, Miss Emma,” said Winston mournfully. Emma shivered at such a spooky thought, and added a few more sticks to her fire.

“Anyway, Mr. Wenlocke wasn’t crazy. He knew how to figure the angles! ‘Winston,’ he said to me, ‘What’s the worst thing about a holiday by the sea?’ Well, I’d never had a holiday by the sea, but it seemed to me there wouldn’t be anything bad in one at all, and I told him so.

“‘Wrong!’ he said to me. ‘The worst thing about a holiday by the sea is,
it’s never long enough
. The days and the weeks slip by too fast, and before you know it, you’re back on the train going home to the sad, dull, grimy old world. But what if you took your holiday at a hotel where time could be
stretched out?
’ “

“See, Mr. Wenlocke had invented a way to slow down time! I wasn’t nearly smart enough to understand everything he told me, but as near as I can recollect, he had a machine that would sort of project a bubble of slowed-down time around things. He called it a
Temporal Delay Field
.

“He’d designed his hotel so that you could stay there for weeks, or months, or even years, as long as you pleased—but when you left, only a weekend would have passed in the outside world.”

“What a good idea,” said Emma, remembering how fast summer vacations always went by. “But wouldn’t it have gotten boring, staying in one hotel for months and months?”

“Not
this
hotel,” said Winston proudly. “It was immense. You should have seen the blueprints! There would have been ever so much for a guest to do. Glassed-in gardens where you could play croquet and a club for the gentlemen, and a theater, and a library, and three big bathing pools! And heaps more.”

“But what would people have lived on, all that time?” Emma asked.

“Why, there was a pantry with ten years’ worth of canned food,” said Winston. “And a wine cellar, and a preserve cellar, and a brand-new Electrical Icehouse to keep things frozen. And everything was powered by Mr. Wenlocke’s wonderful invention.”

“What was that?” Emma inquired.

Winston leaned forward in the air, looking very serious. “It was a new kind of engine, specially patented. It was the first and only one of its kind in the world. It could run on anything—sand, sunlight, seawater. Now that I come to think of it, I’ll bet that’s why Mr. Wenlocke decided to build his hotel here! Plenty of everything he needed. If only he’d known…”

Suddenly Winston looked as though he were going to cry. He faded again, and to keep him with her, Emma asked quickly, “And this engine made time slow down?”

“Yes,” said Winston, growing a bit more solid. “It ran the electricity, too, and ran all the pumps and the condenser that filled the water cisterns—for the engine produced the purest distilled water when it ran, instead of smoke or ash. Mr. Wenlocke had it all piped into tanks for the hotel’s use. That was one of the things advertised on the brochures: Absolutely Clean Drinking Water! I couldn’t begin to tell you how it all worked, but it did. It was installed before the hotel was even finished.

“Mr. Wenlocke set himself an opening date—March 22, just at the very beginning of the season. He booked all the rooms months in advance, to the
very
best people, and the builders worked around the clock to get the Grand Wenlocke finished in time. All the furnishings went in, the pantry was stocked with the most expensive delicacies, and all those rich people from Back East and Europe sent their trunks on ahead to be ready when they arrived by steamer. And I was made Bell Captain, and given a white cap and a
gold-plated
badge!

“But no sooner had the last carpenter hammered in the last nail, and the last painter put on the last piece of gold leaf, than an awful catastrophe happened.” Winston did begin to cry now, and transparent tears rolled down his transparent cheeks. He gulped back a sob.

“What was it?” Emma hoped he wouldn’t get so upset that he’d vanish completely. “Please tell me!”

“It was the Storm of the Equinox,” said Winston, in a broken voice. “The fiercest and most terrible storm of the year. Nobody had ever built anything here in the Dunes before, so nobody knew what could happen. It came out of a clear starry sky. One minute everything was calm, and then—it was like an explosion!”

Emma nodded. She knew all about storms.

“The wind rose with a shriek that made your hair stand on end,” said Winston. “It beat the sea flat so it looked like dented tin. It tore into the Dunes and sent up columns of sand a half-mile high, and in an instant you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. The moon disappeared. There was nothing outside the windows but flying sand.

“I ran down to the big front lobby, where all the rest of the staff were huddled together. We were the only ones there, you see, because the first guests weren’t going to arrive until the next morning. That was where we were when we felt the first shudder, and heard the first awful CREAK.”

“What was it?” Emma demanded.

Winston drew out a transparent handkerchief and mopped his streaming eyes. “The storm had begun to drive sand out from under the foundation of the hotel,” he said, and blew his nose. “The whole place was tilting. And at the same time, sand was being driven
over the
hotel, so it was being buried! Mr. Wenlocke came running down the stairs from his grand suite, and he used some pretty bad language, I don’t mind telling you.

“He shouted for us all to get out, to get to the band pavilion on the steamer pier, and he led the way himself. Everyone ran away through those big double doors… except me.”

“Why didn’t you go too?”

“Because I thought I ought to stay at my post,” said Winston. “I was the Bell Captain, after all. I hadn’t got where I was in life by shirking my duty! And… oh, if you’d seen the Grand Wenlocke, you’d know why I stayed. I loved her, from her parquet floors to her coffered ceilings trimmed in gold. She was the finest hotel in the whole world. She was my
home
. My first real home.

“But Fate had other ideas. The wind got so loud the crystal pendants on the lamps shook, and then suddenly the floor pitched from beneath my feet as the hotel went up on end. I went sliding all the way down the marble floor of the Lobby and was catapulted through the front doors into the storm.

“I scrambled to my feet and turned around in time to see the entire hotel sinking like a ship under the waves of sand, disappearing before my eyes. The last sight I saw was her sign, all those hundreds of little electric bulbs spelling out THE GRAND WENLOCKE, still shining away through the darkness as the Dunes engulfed her.

“I shouted, and tried to dive after her. I think I intended to try to dig her out. But the sand blew so fiercely I couldn’t see, and then I couldn’t breathe, and… I guess I got buried too.”

"T
HAT’S SO SAD!”
said Emma. “Didn’t anyone ever try to dig down and find you?”

“I don’t think anyone did,” said Winston, tucking away his handkerchief. “If Mr. Wenlocke got away alive, he must have been a ruined man; all his money was in that hotel. When he was moving in I helped him carry strongboxes of gold up to his suite, and he told me he’d put them away himself in his hidden safe place.

“And what would he have told all his investors, when the hotel sank? Some of them seemed to be—well, not very nice people. He would probably have had to go away and live incognito somewhere.”

At this point Emma noticed that Winston seemed to be fading again, although he was no longer as upset as he had been. Looking around, she saw that the sky was getting lighter. The long night had ended, and the stars had gone home.

Winston’s voice continued, getting softer now: “In all this time, you’re the first person I’ve seen. I thought you were one of the guests, arriving at last. Sometimes I get confused…”

His voice trailed away into silence, and, as Emma watched, Winston began to vanish: first his face and hands, and then his white uniform, and finally there were only the gleaming brass buttons and the winking gold of his badge. Then the first rays of the rising sun touched the high dune, turning everything gold, and she could no longer see where he had been at all.

“At least he wasn’t a scary ghost,” said Emma to herself.

She got up and added more sticks to her fire, because she knew it’s important to keep your fire going when you’ve been cast away. Then she went to the creek and washed as well as she could without soap or towels. The frogs watched her, and politely hopped from leaf to leaf as she picked blackberries for her breakfast.