The Hotel Under the Sand (4 page)

It was turning into a bright, clear day, hot as summer but with the tired-looking light of early autumn. Emma remembered what Winston had told her about the Storm of the Equinox coming out of a clear sky. It worried her a little because she was pretty sure that there are two Equinoxes every year, one on the first day of spring and the other on the first day of autumn.

“If this place has such awful weather,” she told herself, “I’d better make myself a much safer place to live.”

So all that day Emma worked hard, walking up and down the beach, dragging more wreckage to her camp. She dug holes and stuck down tree branches and two-by-fours, making a fence to keep the blowing sand out.

That afternoon she found the best thing of all: half-buried in the rippled sand was an aluminum rowboat. Its stern had broken away, but the rest of it was all in one piece.
This will never float again, but if I can dig it out, I can turn it upside down and sleep under it
, thought Emma.
It will be just like a tent, only stronger
.

She spent the rest of the day digging out the boat with a piece of plank, and then dragging the boat up the beach to her camp. It was awfully heavy, but she just kept thinking of how nicely it would keep the winter rain out.
Besides
, she thought,
if it’s heavy, it will be hard for the wind to blow it away
.

So at last Emma set it down by her fire. Night was falling fast, and the smiling moon was already bright. She had just enough time to collect driftwood for her fire and dig a few clams for her supper before it got dark. The clams did taste a lot better when they were baked in the coals, but Emma was so tired she didn’t care very much. She just wanted to sleep. So, as soon as she had built up the fire, she crawled under the rowboat, curled up, and closed her eyes.

BOOM!

It seemed only a second or so later that Emma was startled awake by wind roaring as loud as a freight train. She looked out from under the rowboat and saw no moon, no stars, but only her little fire fanned to hot flames by the gust. Sand hissed by, piling up against the fence she had worked so hard to build, forming hills that rose and rose and then collapsed, rushing on over the face of the dune. Her hair whipped about her face, and the sand stung her skin.

Emma ducked back under the rowboat, trying very hard to remain calm.

“As long as I stay in here where I can breathe, I’ll be safe,” she told herself. “There’s no use in running out into the night and getting lost.”

So she curled up again, and lay there listening to the sand scouring away at the bottom of the rowboat. But after a while it became dark and hot and stuffy, and Emma realized that the rowboat was being buried by the blowing sand. “Oh, no!” she cried, and got on her hands and knees and pushed upward, bracing her back against the boat.

The rowboat lifted clear of the sand, and cool air came in again. But more sand came blowing in underneath, faster and faster, and it buried her hands and feet. She lifted them free, shaking off the sand. The wind was screaming now, so loud she couldn’t even hear the beating of her own heart. Emma realized that if she lifted the boat too high, even as big and heavy as it was, the wind might snatch it away. She was very scared, but she was even more angry.

“No!” she cried. “I didn’t live through one storm just so another one could get me!”

She clung tightly to the gunwales of the boat, stubbornly pushing it up every time the sand grew too high. She had to keep at it for what seemed like hours, and she was getting very tired, when suddenly someone was there under the boat with her.

“Hold on, Miss Emma!” shouted Winston. He grabbed hold of the gunwale too, and lifted the boat clear of another few inches of sand. “Be resolute!”

“What does
resolute
mean?” Emma shouted back.

“It means—you won’t give up!” said Winston.

“Then I
will be
resolute!” said Emma fiercely, and she pushed against the howling wind with all her strength.

They fought the storm for three whole hours, and it got so loud that they couldn’t speak to each other. Emma found it strange that she was alone in the dark with a ghost, but not frightened of him at all.

After a long, long time she noticed that the wind seemed to be dropping at last, and a little gray light could be seen coming in from outside. It seemed to have been a few minutes since they had had to push the boat free of the sand.

“I think you might be safe now, Miss Emma,” said Winston. His voice had a funny echoing quality, because Emma’s ears were still ringing from the noise of the gale.

“Let’s stand up, and lift the boat with us,” said Emma. “That way we can see what’s going on without getting sand blown in our eyes.”

So they stood together, and in the gray light of dawn saw that they were still standing in the oasis of dune grass and blackberry bushes. But it was not in a valley anymore; it was on the edge of a steep-sided bluff of sand.

Suddenly the wind came blustering straight at them. It plucked the boat off their shoulders as though it weighed no more than a straw hat, and tumbled it away behind them, end over end, far away across the trackless waste of sand to the edge of the horizon.

But neither Emma nor Winston noticed.

They were staring in astonishment at what had appeared before them, rising from where the high dune had been. It was a palace of turrets and spires, verandahs and cupolas, scrollwork and gilded weathervanes. In some places it was five stories tall. It was the most beautiful building Emma had ever seen, and brightly burning lights above the fourth-floor balcony spelled out its name:

THE GRAND WENLOCKE

"O
H, MY GOSH!”
cried Winston. He slid down the bluff to 111 the hotel, so excited he didn’t remember he was a ghost and could fly. “Oh,
look
at her!”

Emma slid after him, yelling, “But how can the lights still be on, after all this time?”

“Who knows? It’s as though no time has passed at all!” cried Winston gleefully. He landed on the great front steps and turned, throwing Emma a snappy salute. “Welcome to the Grand Wenlocke.”

Emma reached the bottom of the staircase and looked up at him. His eyes sparkled, and he seemed almost solid as a living person. Cautiously, she put her foot on the first step. It was real and solid too. She climbed the steps, staring up in wonder. The rising sun lit the gilded weathervanes, cut glass, and carved eaves.

“Why hasn’t the wind ever uncovered it before?”

“I don’t know why,” said Winston. “Unless it had something to do with that fence you put up—perhaps it deflected the wind just right! It must have turned the gusts back on themselves, and dug out the hotel. Thank you, Miss Emma!” Winston bowed and tried to open the big front doors for her, but they would not budge. “What the heck?” he muttered.

Emma walked along the verandah and peered through a window. She saw a big Victorian lobby, with a marble floor and Turkish carpets, and chairs and sofas covered in fancy brocade. Right on the other side of the window was a vase, lying on its side on a tabletop. Its flowers had spilled out, and she could see some scattered on the carpet below. They were big, white, frilly tulips, white cabbage roses, and white delphiniums. They looked as fresh as though they had been picked that morning.

Emma rubbed her eyes and looked harder. Was there a faint blue glow, flickering over everything? She leaned closer to see. Her nose touched the windowpane, and she felt a sparking shock.

“Oh!” She jumped back.

Winston was still struggling with the doors. “I can’t think why they won’t open,” he said. Very carefully, Emma put out one finger and touched the door handle. There was another spark.

“There’s electricity all around the walls,” she said.

Winston slapped his forehead. “Of course! It must be Mr. Wenlocke’s Temporal Delay Field,” he said. “Perhaps it’s gotten stuck and stopped time in there.”

“Maybe you could walk through the wall and unlock it from the inside,” Emma suggested.

Winston nodded gamely and tried, but bumped into the solid wall and staggered back. “Well, that won’t work,” he said. “And I’ll bet I know why. That out there—” and he waved a hand at the sea, the sand, and the sky—“is all mist and clouds and confusion. Nothing’s solid. But
this
place is real! So you and I—oh, dear. I hope you haven’t passed—er…”

He stopped before he said it, but Emma knew what he had been going to say. For a moment she was scared. Then she remembered that the electric sparks had hurt, and she was pretty sure nothing can hurt you when you’re dead.

“No, I’m fine,” she said. “Can we fix whatever’s broken so we can get inside?”

Winston looked around and pointed to the far end of the verandah where there was a big sloping hatch like a cellar door. “The Temporal Difference Engine was under the cellars,” he said, “and I don’t think the Temporal Field went down past the fruit cellar. Mr. Wenlocke wanted the port wines to be able to age properly. So we ought to be able to get that door open.”

Emma ran down the verandah to the door. There was still some sand on it, which fell inside as she tugged on the handle. She saw that it wasn’t very tightly closed, with only a loose catch that had come unfastened. Stepping back, she opened it wide. Emma peered down steep steps just barely visible under all the sand that had drifted in. “I see some old wooden boxes with bottles in them,” she said.

“Ah, that would be the port wine,” said Winston, coming to her side.

“And a lot of machinery,” said Emma.

There was certainly a lot of machinery. As they slid down the steps into the cellar, they saw enormous gears and springs and brass flywheels, as though the whole hotel were built on top of the insides of a giant clock. But nothing moved, because sand had blown into the works and jammed the tremendous mechanism.

“Oh, dear,” said Winston, wringing his hands. “I wish I’d been a watchmaker’s assistant, instead of a shoeshine boy.”

There was a brass plate with writing on it mounted on one of the wheels. Emma brushed sand from it and read aloud:

“M. M. de L. Wenlocke’s
Patented New Advanced Practical Temporal Difference Engine
. Self-Winding. Self-Stoking. In The Event of Gears Jamming, Remove Obstruction and Pull Lever to Resume Operation.”

Emma looked up at a big red lever on the wall, beneath which was another plate that read:
LEVER
.

“I think we have to clean out all the sand,” said Emma. She looked around. In one corner were a broom and a dustpan, beside the cases of wine. There was what looked like a very large fireplace bellows in another, and no fewer than seven oilcans scattered on the floor, lying where they had fallen when the hotel sank.

So Emma and Winston got to work. First they swept up all the sand and carried it up the steps and dumped it off the verandah. Then they took turns blowing sand from the gears with the bellows. That done, Emma swept up all the sand they had blown loose, while Winston crawled around among the gears and oiled everything.

It took hours, but when all the sand was gone and the brass was gleaming with oil once more, Emma stepped to the lever and took hold of it. She looked at Winston, who took off his cap and crossed his fingers.

“One-two-three-GO!” Emma cried, and pulled the lever.

With a snap and a hum, the
Patented New Advanced Practical Temporal Difference Engine
came back to life. The gears turned, the wheels meshed, the springs went up and down. Winston threw his cap in the air and shouted, “Hurrah! We’re back in business!”

He took Emma by the hand and ran with her back up onto the verandah, pausing only to close and latch the cellar door. “No more sand in there!” he said. They came together to the big front doors. Winston put his shoulder to them and pushed hard—

And they swung open. Emma stepped across the threshold of the Grand Wenlocke.

It was even more beautiful from the inside. Emma could see the high painted ceiling, with its sparkling chandelier. The stairs were inlaid wood in different colors and patterns. Graceful old-fashioned settees and comfortable-looking armchairs had drifted down the room to one side, like ice skaters, but they must once have been arranged before the big marble fireplace. Sunlight streamed through high windows of diamond-paned glass and into the little shop across the Lobby, lighting up cases of cigars and sepia-tint postcards.

A Grand Staircase led up to the Mezzanine, and on either side its newel posts were crowned with a pair of golden statues, almost life-size: mer-people, holding up twin seashells that were really electric lamps. There were no clocks anywhere. Above the registration desk a panel was carved with words painted in gold, which read: TIME IS FORGOTTEN HERE.

Emma sniffed the air. It smelled like new wood and fresh paint, and lemon oil, and baking bread, and flowers.

“Oh, dear, these have begun to wilt,” said Winston, gathering up the bouquet that had fallen. He took the vase and hurried away through an archway where there was a sign that said
BAR
, and a moment later Emma heard water splashing as he refilled the vase.