Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set (140 page)

“Sure, I’m off, but then I’m scheduled the rest of the week until Friday.”

“Good,” Janey said.

“The only trouble is the goddamned hotel is going to be bulldozed,” Rhonda said. “What’s going to happen to me then?”

“How did you—”

“I know everything.” The voices blended into the unwholesome chorus. “Battle Axe.”

Maybe the hotel wasn’t a living thing, with its own memories and desires. Maybe those belonged to something deeper, something that dwelled in the basement.

“That’s one of our names.”

Maybe more than one thing lived in the basement.

Janey let the phone slip into her lap. She leaned forward and gazed into the abyss. Now it was staring back.

One last try, one last test, one last link to the sane, real world.

She dialed 9-1-1.

The phone made a strange noise and she looked at the digital readout on the handset. 6-6-6.

She punched the “9” and the “6” appeared.

Janey giggled, pointing the gun across the room as the shadows crept over the edge of the mattress. A little inner voice–remarkably similar to that of the demented kitchen worker–whispered “
Swim for it, Janey
.”

She let out a cracked laugh and rose on the bed, the bedsprings groaning beneath her. She took a long step, the cold gelid blackness oozing around one ankle, and then she launched herself, a crippled swan dive, the gun clenched in one fist.

She hit without splashing, flailing her arms for traction, but there was nothing to push against.

Nothing.

And then she was under.

Chapter 18

Dad would never find her here.

He probably wouldn’t even notice she was missing until it was Sunday afternoon and time to pack up. That took some of the steam out of her anger. No need to waste a good temper tantrum.

She wedged into the tiny break room, plopping her sketch pad on the scarred wooden desk. A glass ashtray overflowed with wrinkled, yellowed butts. A stack of magazines leaned precariously—
Sports Illustrated, Motor Racing Digest
,
People
, magazines for people who couldn’t read. An auto parts store’s calendar on the wall was three years out of date, and a shelf was piled with cleaning supplies, oily hardware, and dented cans of paint.

Mom, looks like we’ve painted ourselves into a corner.

It was an old game, one they played in those early years when “Mommy was okay, but the doctors just want to make sure.” They’d get out the color pencils, oil pastels, and watercolors, create strange houses and gardens, and then work all the way up to one corner of the page. When only a little white was left, Mom would give the trademark “Looks like we’ve painted ourselves into a corner. Two choices: stay stuck, or more paper.”

Kendra opened her pad.
No choice. Only more paper
.

“Hey.”

Kendra nearly knocked over the magazines. She calmed herself, because she didn’t want the little twerp to know she was startled. She remembered the name his dad yelled at him.

“Bruce, don’t you know it’s rude to sneak up on people?”

“I didn’t sneak up. I was already here.”

Now she smelled the licorice, so powerful that she didn’t know how she missed it. Probably because of the rank, tarry odor of the cigarettes. Bruce sat on a worn plaid couch, cotton oozing from its arms like clouds exiled from a summer sky. He had a black eye, and the eyeball surrounded by the puffy skin was bloodshot and dewy.

“You bump your head?”
Or did your daddy bump it for you?

“Yeah. On Rochester’s fist.”

“Rochester?”

Bruce shrugged. “Ah, he’s a big bully. Never mind him.”

“This place looks like a good hideout,” she said, her annoyance subdued by sympathy.

“Well, the only folks who know about it are those who been around a while.”

“How long have you been here?”

He shrugged again. “I’m a kid. It feels like forever.”

“Does your dad work here?” She couldn’t believe she was actually tolerating the twerp, much less making conversation. But after being around grownups for so long, the change was a little refreshing. Plus he looked like he could use a friend.

“Yeah. My mom’s dead, too. How come you draw so much?”

My mom’s dead, too?
“It’s what I do. Everybody’s got a gimmick, right?”

“Can I see?”

Kendra slid the pad over to the edge of the desk. “Knock yourself out.”

Bruce moved from the couch, the licorice aroma stronger now, and behind it came that rank, fishy stench. The boy could stand a bath.

“It looks like the third floor,” Bruce said. “Those kids look funny, like they’re from a cartoon.”

Kids?
Kendra checked the rendering of the hallway. It was a pretty quick perspective job, the angles of the hallway receding toward the horizon to the vanishing point. No great shakes, even with the decorative table, vase, and plastic flowers on them. She’d fuzzed in some lines to capture the shadowed areas, planning to cross-hatch them with ink later and throw in some sort of spook for the fun of it, or maybe Emily Dee with a samurai sword or something for the manga crowd.

“It’s just a hallway,” she said. “I’m not finished yet.”

“Do you always put faces in your pictures?”

“Another gimmick. I want to do my own comic books when I grow up. I figure since my dad already has a name in the paranormal world, it will be easier to get a publisher. Go out as ‘The Digger’s Daughter.’”

Bruce leaned closer. Kendra usually didn’t let anyone see her work in progress, but she figured the kid would be good for some ideas. Except the fish smell was overpowering now that he was an arm’s-length away.

“So, got any ghost stories?” she said, expecting the same urban-legend crap the front desk had dished out. “Anything weird happen to you here?”

He touched the paper with his fingertip and traced out a shape. Then she saw it, the deeper shading where she had turned her pencil lead sideways and raked out a series of zig-zags. It looked like two small figures standing at the back of the hallway, waiting in the shadows.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said, with a shudder in his voice.

“Smart.”

“Will you draw a picture just for me?” One corner of his mouth lifted in a weak attempt at a smile, and his pale, injured face looked so forlorn and pitiful that Kendra felt ashamed for thinking of him as a twerp. After all, if her mother hadn’t died, she might have had a little brother and–

She looked away from the hollow eyes and the glistening, bruised flesh around his nose. “Sure thing, Bruce. You want Spiderman or Batman?”

“I don’t believe in heroes, either. Draw something scary. Like the two kids.”

Kendra flipped the sketch pad to a clean sheet and began roughing in the end of the break room. “Sure. I’ll have them sitting on that couch like they’re going to bite the legs off whoever comes in the door.”

Bruce giggled, and the sound gave a flat echo off the walls. The kid had moved a little closer, and the room was too small for such intrusion on her personal space. But probably he just wanted to see her work.

“I don’t know what they look like, so I’ll make one fat and one skinny,” she said.

“Dorrie’s the fat one,” he said. “She eats all the cupcake crumbs when everybody’s asleep.”

The kid’s got a good imagination. He’s probably like me— his dad leaves him to entertain himself so he escapes into his own little world.

“Is this fat enough?” She squiggled out a peanut shape. “Man, she’s totally breaking the couch in two. Whoever walks in the door is going to lose their legs
and
their arms.”

Kendra rounded out the figure and went to the next, glancing up so she could get the perspective right. “There’s Dorrie, fat as a donut hole,” she said. “Now for–”

Jesus.

For a split second, Dorrie was sitting there, pouting in a plain brown frock, hair in a terrible page cut that made her face look even rounder. Her fists were clenched on her knees, as if she were going to spring up from the couch and punch somebody. Twelve, maybe, swollen with her first period, confused about the changes of her body, chunky boobs already sagging.

Kendra blinked and the vision cleared. “Man, I hope Dorrie doesn’t mind being ugly.”

“I wouldn’t say that if I were you.”

But Kendra was already adding the details she’d just imagined. When inspiration flowed, you bottled it. “Okay, tell me about the other one.”

She decided to make them Emily Dee’s mortal enemies. The creepy kids who terrorized an old hotel. It probably couldn’t be an on-going series, because there were only so many storylines you could squeeze out of one location, but maybe it could fill up a graphic novel and catch some Hollywood producer’s eye. Another dumb haunted house story, just the way they liked them.

“Rochester’s even meaner than Dorrie,” Bruce said. “He’s got a pointy nose and he smells like mice. You know how mice smell, when they die behind the walls? My dad has to put out the poison every winter, because they move in when it gets cold. The poison sure tastes yucky.”

Kendra chuckled.
High-larious, kid
.

She drew a stick figure, giving it a long rodent’s tail. She wanted to get the job finished. Bruce stood there, not blinking, silent, holding his breath. And, worse, now she could
smell
the mice, like that high school science lab where the hampster cages never shook that odor of death.

“Rochester the Rat Boy,” she said with cheerful bravado. She realized she was afraid to look up, lest Rochester was sitting there with his red, beady eyes and sharp, yellow incisors. The gaunt rendering horrified her.

She gave him oversize Mickey Mouse ears and ripped the sheet out of the pad. In her haste, the rip was uneven, dissecting a chunk of Dorrie’s head. “Here you go, Brucie. No charge.”

Bruce was gone.

She forced herself to look at the couch, and it was empty. Bruce couldn’t have squeezed past her to the door without nudging her chair. Maybe there were other entrances, ones she couldn’t see. Even if the walls held secret passages, it was hard to imagine someone sneaking away without a revealing creak of wood. But if Bruce had been stuck here playing for years by himself, he’d probably figured out the best hiding places.

“Dorrie Dough-Face and Rochester the Rat Boy,” she said aloud.

The company of fictional characters provided no comfort. Her fantasy life, the cherished escape from a world where her mother had abandoned her and her father regretted the inconvenience, had turned on her, and she didn’t like it. Because if that went bad, then what else did she have left?

The pictures added up to nothing.

Painted into a corner.

On the bottom of the sketch, she scribbled “To Bruce, for the forever inn,” before adding the flourish of her initials. One day she’d be as famous as Jack Kirby, Moebius, and Todd McFarlane rolled into one, and her initials would be gold. In the meantime, a girl could always dream.

Always and forever.

She left the drawing on the table and headed for her room, clicking on her walkie talkie. Maybe Digger had actually noticed his daughter was gone and was fuming because he needed some help. He would be huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf in a cancer ward, muttering curses under his breath, his blood pressure rising. His impatience and frustration would only be rivaled by his helplessness.

She wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Chapter 19

The group was really getting on Burton’s nerves.

Ninety percent of paranormal tourism was about keeping the travelers safe while delivering the illusion of danger. That’s why the liability waiver was so loaded with phrases like “inherent risk” and language that implied the hunter might end up being the hunted.

So Burton wasn’t above the occasional “Look, did that shadow move?”

The tactic never failed to draw a few gasps, and once in a while a newbie would get so shaken the hunt would be disrupted. Then a twenty-minute debate would ensue as people recounted their versions of what they did or didn’t see, and those with cameras would flip through the thumbnails. Burton would review the evidence and reluctantly validate whatever happened to appear in the images, whether it was an orb, a flash of light, or the Second Coming of Harry Houdini. All in a day’s work, all part of the show.

But sometimes a group collected at random would yield such an obnoxious array of personalities that Burton felt like he was punching a time clock in a Portajohn business instead of serving as a shamanistic guide to the land of mystery and spirit. When you got right down to it, shit was shit, and you didn’t want to step in it, either here on Planet Earth or in the otherworld.

And the dude in the Henry Fonda fishing cap was a two-hundred-pound bag of shit that was bursting at the seams.

“Where’s the Percival Ghost?” whined Cappie. “You promised us the Percival Ghost.”

“There are no guarantees in ghost-hunting,” Burton said.

“She may not even be dead,” said an unfortunate woman whose make-up was thick enough to make an undertaker proud. She was way too old to put Kool-Aid-blue highlights in her hair. Her T-shirt read “Ghosts believe in me,” and Burton figured she was a paranormal slut who’d get in bed with any group or ideology that whispered “boo.”

“She’d be dead by now, one way or another,” said a woman who looked over the top of her glasses like a librarian. “Even if she didn’t die in 1948, she’d be well over a century old.”

“Maybe that’s why her ghost isn’t here,” Cappie said.

“One theory is she was killed at the inn and her body was taken off site,” Burton said. “That could explain the lack of any evidence. She could be an intelligent spirit and moving between the place she died and the place where her body is buried.”

“True,” said the Kool-Aid woman, as if such things were established fact. “If she were a residual, we probably would have seen her by now.”

“With all this foot traffic, we’ve probably stirred up enough dust to hide an elephant,” Cappie said.