Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set (131 page)

Chad and Stevie would never notice the parched till. They’d bought the hotel as an “investment” that was actually a tax loss to offset the millions they were making in Palm Beach condominiums. The one time the couple had actually visited the property, they’d decided to book a room at the Courtyard by Marriott in neighboring Boone rather than sleep under their own leaky roof. So Janey’s accounting was a like a whore’s career in a seaport—tight going in and loose going out.

Violet looked so exuberant that Janey wished she’d played a little longer. But Janey tended to burn them out too fast, and with the hotel’s new billing as “the Blue Ridge Mountain’s most haunted hotel,” the job had been getting harder to fill, despite the recession and the fringe benefit of occasional free drinks at the bar.

“We can stick some extra charges on Wayne Wilson’s bill.” Janey stood, the chair creaking with a metallic brittleness that befit the hotel’s reputation. “A set-up fee here, a maintenance surcharge there. We’re giving him the hotel for the weekend, so he shouldn’t be surprised by a few surprises.”

Janey made a slow, stately trek across the floor, which was difficult because of the travel magazines, electric heater, broken lamp, and mop bucket that created an obstacle course on the floor. She made a ceremony of opening the door, which gave a gratuitous creak. She’d instructed maintenance to quit oiling door hinges. She also added extra mirrors in the hall and reduced the wattage of the light bulbs. All to create atmosphere.

Stroke of genius, marketing the hotel as a ghost hunter’s getaway. Hype your cobwebs.
It’s easier than dusting.

“Make sure Mr. Wilson gets what he needs,” Janey said. “He’s talking about making this an annual event.”

“He’s kind of creepy,” Violet said.

“Play along. Act scared. Let him believe what he wants to believe.”

“He asked me if I’d ever had any ‘experiences’ here.”

“A little white lie never hurt anybody,” Janey said, appreciating the irony. She’d busted Violet for embezzling, but here she was promoting dishonesty as simply good business.

As Violet exited in a waft of lavender and apples, Janey smiled, the parchment of her cheeks crinkling. The pleasure was still spreading across her face when the phone rang. Cell phones rarely worked here on the carapace of the Eastern Continental Divide, another advantage to the new marketing angle. The jangling phones and crackling lines added to the mystique.

“Janey, it’s Stevie.”

“Hey, good news. We booked it full for the conference.”

“Good,” Stevie said, though his tone was ambivalent.

“Something wrong?”

“This isn’t easy for me. You know how I much I love the place.”

Janey didn’t fall for it. Instead, her gut tensed in paranoia. “Yes.”

“Chad and I had an offer.”

“An offer? I didn’t even know you were selling—”

“Two mil an acre. Condo project. They’ll knock off a little for the demolition costs, but they want it fast to catch the good interest rates. We couldn’t pass it up, not the way the hotel has been bleeding red ink.”

“How soon?” Janey said, skin tingling, hoping she’d have a good half a year or so to rob the till. Early retirement wasn’t so bad.

“Sunday.”

Sunday? Two days from now.

“I don’t—”

“We’ll be down next week to deal with it. Don’t worry, Janey, you’ll get a nice severance package. Chad and I aren’t monsters.”

“What about the staff?” Janey said, not that she cared. She was buying time to give her racing mind a chance to settle down.

“Don’t say anything so they don’t walk out. Give the ghost hunters their money’s worth. One last hurrah for the old White Horse, eh?”

You can bet your sweet little tush on that one, Stevie.

“Farewell, love.” Stevie hung up.

 The hotel was her life, her identity, her playground. She’d imagined keeping her room on the second floor until they wheeled her out in a zippered bag. Janey gripped the dead phone, unable to face the void that loomed in front of her.

“Two days.”

Had she said it aloud?

She had the acute feeling that someone was watching her.

Janey turned. Nothing.

Paranoia.

But that didn’t mean they weren’t watching.

She wondered if they’d overheard.

Two days.

Chapter 6

Smells like pigeon poop and mummies up here.

Wayne played his flashlight beam along the narrow strip of decking that served as a crawl space. The attic was insulated with shredded newspaper, so it was a miracle the White Horse hadn’t long since burned to the ground, especially given the shoddy state of the wiring. The rafters were crisscrossed with cables and pipes, evidence of the hotel’s attempt to change with the times. The upgrades had been haphazard, and the tangles created the suggestion that monstrous, hairy spiders would come creeping out of the shadows at any moment.

He planned to make the attic a hunt location, but he couldn’t picture running a bunch of forty-something TAPS wannabes up the ladder and through the cramped quarters. One of them might wander off the decking in the dark and plummet through the gypsum ceiling. Even though Haunted Computer Productions was a limited-liability company that owned nothing besides its namesake computer, Wayne didn’t want the hassle or legal fees involved with getting sued. Hunters were required to sign waivers, but a waiver would be nothing more than Exhibit A in a court case that could drag for years.

He backtracked to attic access, deciding to use the main one off the hall closet instead of the one in Room 318. He yelled down through the access hole to the hall. “It’s a no go up here.”

“How about a couple of IR cams?” answered Burton Hodges, the former rock ‘n’ roll roadie Wayne had recruited as SSI’s tech specialist.

Infrared cameras would allow people to watch the attic on monitors. Every waft of dust or wind-blown shadow could become proof of the afterlife. The unbelievable became more real if it was on television, and he could edit together clips to create a commemorative DVD and rake in some extra cash on the side.

The only thing better than sending customers away satisfied is sending them away broke.

“Sure, let’s rig it with audio, too.” Wayne figured the eaves had enough cracks and gaps to allow moaning breezes, and with any luck the place was infested with bats.

Wayne sent his flashlight beam bouncing deeper into the attic. Specks of dust swirled in the orange cone, creating the illusion of a thousand floating fairies. Any digital flash photographs taken up here would result in generous orb phenomena, something the armchair spiritualists accepted as paranormal activity.

Wayne had always wondered why a ghost should choose to inhabit a fuzzy white space the size and shape of a billiard ball when presumably it knew no bounds of time and space. Every professional photographer insisted orbs were the result of lens flare arising from reflections of dust or water droplets, and in the era of Photoshop programs, no digital image was trustworthy anyway.

That didn’t stop the proliferation of “authentic” photos of ghosts, and Wayne himself had included orb photos taken at the White Horse Inn with his promotional materials. He did add a disclaimer at the bottom, stating, “Orb photography is a controversial field and opinions vary on its research validity,” but it was like a beer-can label that warned alcohol could impair your motor skills. The warning itself was good publicity.

As Wayne scanned the crawl space, looking for good locations to post the cameras, the shadows shifted at the far end of the attic. A wall vent covered with wire mesh and wooden slats allowed air to circulate in the attic, and thin slices of sunlight leaked through. Passing clouds could cause a change in brightness, altering the quality of light in the entire attic.

Groovy effect, now all I need is a ragged sheet on a coat hanger...

The shadows shifted again, though the air was still.

Wayne crept forward, keeping his head low so he wouldn’t bump it on the rafters. The flashlight’s globe bobbed in front of him and the boards creaked beneath his boots. The hairs on his neck tingled–
the wiring, it’s an EMF effect on my brain circuitry
–and
the air seemed charged with an expectant weight. A papery rustle in the walls, probably the migration of disturbed mice, sounded almost like a whisper.

Cumulatively, the various phenomena could be called an “encounter,” but Wayne knew them for what they were. Suggestion, a mild alteration in the physical environment, and cultural folklore meant that if it walked like a ghost, talked like a ghost, and shat like a ghost, it was ghost. The image of ghostly turds made him suppress a grin.

Then the shadow moved again.

Mice.

A chunk of darkness pulled itself free and moved near a crusted brick chimney. Wayne flicked his beam toward it, and the black outline grew more vivid.

It was a human form.

A brittle, high frequency pierced his ears and his teeth jolted as if he were chewing tin foil.

The whisper came again, and this time the wind was quiet and the words were clear and in a language mice never spoke outside of Saturday-morning cartoons:
“You’re blinding me.”

Wayne retreated a step and his skull knocked against a support post, sending squiggly lime sparks across the backs of his eyelids. His flashlight bounced to the decking and went out. He wobbled and hugged the post for balance.

The temperature in the attic dropped 10 degrees and the electrical surge rippled from his head to his toes.

The wind, dummy, it’s November. And mice. Yeah. Mice.

He squinted into the darkness, orienting himself by the distant square light of the access door and the zebra-striped vent. The dark form now blended into the black space of the attic, and it was easy to believe he’d imagined the whole thing.

But that didn’t stop his heart from hammering like a man trapped in a coffin.

“Wayne?” Burton called.

He swallowed and his throat chafed as if the air had turned to sawdust. “I’m okay,” he croaked.

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing.”

“I heard a couple of bumps.”

“I dropped my light.” Wayne reached out with the tip of his boot, probing for the flashlight, wondering what he would do if something grabbed his foot.

Burton’s head poked up through the access opening and he swept a flashlight across the attic until Wayne stood in its spotlight like a cabaret dancer on stage. He blinked into the light–
You’re blinding me
–and then glanced toward the chimney.

The shape was gone, just as he knew it would be.

Because it had never been there.

We made a promise, Beth, but neither of us believed it. And lying gets easier as you get older.

He stooped and gathered his flashlight from its bed of shredded paper. He tested it and found it still worked. “Okay, pass me a couple of the cameras,” Wayne said, pulse returning to normal.

He was a little embarrassed at his suggestibility. He’d never considered himself a skeptic, and he wasn’t interested in all the physiological changes that caused people to hallucinate. Ghosts were good business, from campfire storytelling to blockbuster horror movies. With thousands of people running around chasing them with fancy electronics, the poor souls were probably hiding safely under ground instead of rattling chains and slamming doors.

Burton set a plastic case on the decking and slid it toward Wayne. “Two Sony DVMs,” he said. “Hey, it’s cold up here.”

“November in the mountains,” Wayne said. “What do you expect?”

He mounted the first camera so that it would catch the main section of the attic, though one wing of the hotel would not be visible.  He aimed the second camera so it would take in the chimney. He connected the cables that Burton had snaked toward him, and then used the viewfinder to test the chimney cam. As he zoomed in, the camera’s auto focus fixed on a hand print in the chimney’s soot and grime.

Made by a worker’s glove, probably.

He zoomed out and duck-walked over to the chimney, keeping his head low. He ran his flashlight over the bricks and masonry joints. The hand print was gone.

He went back to the camera and set it to record, the satellite hard drive in the control room capable of recording an entire weekend’s worth of footage. “Come on out and play,” he called into the dead air of the attic.

“What’s that?” Burton called from below.

“Nothing,” Wayne said.

What was he expecting? Beth?

Nothing.

Just like always.

Chapter 7

Nailed him.

These New Age flakes were too busy smoking fairy dust, drinking koo-koo Kool-Aid, and gazing into crystals to peek behind the curtain.  Which gave Ann Vandooren all the power of the Wizard of Oz, and by Sunday, Digger Wilson and his band of merry pranksters would wish they’d never left Kansas, or Pluto, or wherever the hell these losers came from.

Ann had hidden a closed-circuit television camera in the corner of the attic two days earlier, renting Room 306 so she could be across the hall from the infamous Room 318. She’d drilled a hole through her closet ceiling and surreptitiously ran two cables into the attic. One cable connected to her multiplexor to store video footage on a hard drive, while the other cable allowed remote operation of a pocket-size projector. She’d borrowed the gear from the Optical Sciences department at Westridge University, where she was a tenured professor of physics.

The trick had worked better than she had imagined. With Duncan’s help, she’d collected footage of herself in a black gown and stage make-up, dancing and cavorting in front of a sheet while floor-level spotlights blazed up from below. In the editing process, she’d turned the image into a reverse negative, so that her body appeared almost translucent. She’d then dubbed the footage in slow motion, creating a rippling, almost sensuous ballet. It had taken an hour to aim the projector lens so that the image appeared to float across the attic, and the dust and sweat had been worth the result.