Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set (154 page)

“Thanks,” he croaked, and she sent the beam to the wire that descended from the roof. The wire was still swaying, two bright points of copper protruding from its frayed end.

“Is this for real?” she asked, sensing the small forms of the children looming around.

He nodded, grabbed her hand, and gave it a weak squeeze.

Chapter 40

“Roach is still missing, and so’s Cody,” Burton said.

Wayne Wilson looked around the control room, checking the monitors. Though a few people had dropped out of the night hunts, probably due to exhaustion or excessive celebration, there were thirty people in the room. He’d have to divide them into three groups—one led by Burton, one by Jonathan, and the last for himself.

That left no one to monitor the video screens and coordinate the schedules. Most likely Cody would show up in a few minutes, but he couldn’t delay any longer. The hunters were already irritable, infected by the unease that permeated the hotel. Wayne wanted to get them rolling before they had time to revolt.

Beth, please watch Kendra for me. If you’re really an angel.

Cristos Rubio, standing alone in the corner of the room, raised his cupped hand in an imaginary toast. Wayne wasn’t sure whether the psychic was smirking or smiling in approval.

“Okay, Burt, you take the first ten and head for room 312,” Wayne said, more decisively than he felt. “Jonathan, take the next ten to the dining room and set up. With any luck, you’ll get an appearance from the Waiter.”

“Right, Chief,” Jonathan said.

“I’ll take the rest to the basement,” he said. “My group will be a little bigger but we have plenty of room down there to spread out. That should keep us all occupied for a couple of hours, then we’ll regroup when we lose a few stragglers.”

“You get Gelbaugh,” Burton said. “And Amelia George.”

“Sure,” Wayne said. “I’m feeling masochistic tonight.”

Jonathan silenced the murmuring crowd with a commanding bellow, and Wayne ran through the hunt logistics. As the crowd divided, Burton took Wayne aside. “Listen, I know it’s none of my business, but do you think Cody and Kendra—”

“None of your business.”

“Right.”

Wayne checked the monitors. The attic cameras were stable, showing no activity of any kind. The hall cameras showed sparse traffic as people went from room to room, headed for the bar. He glanced out the window and saw the fog had settled around the hotel, and the lamps on the lawn threw off fuzzy halos of light.

The surrounding forest was obscured, and the lane leading from the main road was swallowed by the mist. It was as if the hotel had broken loose from the world and floated into a forgotten sea.

“So, when does my guaranteed ghost show up?” Gelbaugh said, when Wayne was left alone with his group.

“The night is young.”

“But we’re getting older by the second.”

“And closer to death,” said the short man in a sailing cap.

“The spirits are active tonight,” Amelia said, gripping her husband’s arm for support.

The basement provided enough dark shadows, cobwebs and weird noises to keep the whole group happy. Even Gelbaugh should come away with something to grumble about. Wayne just wanted to survive the night, before he stopped by the bar for another round, Kendra got pregnant, and his dead wife made another appearance.

“Okay,” Wayne said to everyone. “You guys are lucky because we get the basement. Everybody got a flashlight?”

Nods all around. Wayne passed out a couple of audio recorders, EMF meters, and spot thermometers to some of the more inexperienced hunters. They probably wouldn’t produce any useful data but they would feel more involved. He gave one more glance at the bank of monitors, wishing Kendra would pop up on one of the screens.

You just have to trust her. After all, she’s the adult in this family.

He led the group down the hall, Gelbaugh sniping from the rear. By the time they’d reached the first floor, Wayne was thirsty. Jimmy Buffett’s voice spilled from the bar, preaching rum and sand as a way of life, and the laughter and clinking glass begged for Wayne’s attention. He swallowed hard and hurried past without a glance inside.

“Get ready to rock, people,” he said, navigating the narrow hall that led to the basement door. He stood aside to let the hunters pass while he fished the key out of his pocket.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Cappie.

“What?” Wayne said.

“The door,” someone said.

Wayne moved through the crowd. Written on the door in red letters was the word “Stay and play.” The paint was wet and running down the wood, as if the perpetrator was waiting around the corner to see the effect of his prank.

The door was unlocked, held in place by the deadbolt. Wayne opened it, and fecund darkness oozed up from below. The air had changed since his first visit the morning before. Now it was rich with the musk of decay and fungus. He flipped the light switch but the darkness held its ground.

“Bulb’s out,” he said. “Ready with the flashlights.”

“‘Play’ indeed,” Gelbaugh said. “What’s next, a brood of bats erupting to the accompaniment of cheesy organ music?”

“The place is 150 years old,” Wayne said. “What do you expect?”

He descended the wooden stairs, following his own flashlight beam, sweeping it around to verify that the basement floor was relatively level, though pocked with broken rocks, depressions in the soil, and building materials left over from long-ago repairs. Reaching the bottom, he stood to the side and illuminated the stairs to aid the rest of the hunters. Once everyone was down, he launched into the obligatory backstory.

“The basement has no particular legend attached to it, though one of the workers reported smelling pipe smoke,” Wayne said, though the olfactory hallucination had actually been reported on the second floor. Still, those were the kinds of legends that traveled well, and probably one of the hunters would end up smelling some scorched Prince Albert.

He flicked his beam to the rusting hulk of metal. “That furnace over there is said to light all by itself. As far as we know, no deaths have been recorded down here, though there’s evidence that this site is near an old Civil War stockade where prisoners probably died of disease if they weren’t killed outright.”

“Come now,” Gelbaugh said. “Surely there’s an Indian graveyard right under our feet. Or a pet cemetery.”

“Yeah,” said Cappie. “Or maybe a serial killer buried his victims here in the crawl space.”

“Shut up,” Amelia shouted, her voice swallowed by the dirt and dangling insulation. “Don’t you feel the energy?”

She lifted her arms as if about to conduct an orchestra, and then performed a slow, graceless pirouette. “It’s all around us.”

“Christ, if she faints down here, we’ll never get her up the stairs,” said a woman who had witnessed yesterday’s aborted Ouija-board experiment.

“My meter’s going wild,” said a man on the edge of the crowd. The device was a K-II EMF reader, so Wayne downplayed the value of the evidence. Most likely the man was standing under a bundle of electric wires. Still, the excitement in his voice was enough to distract Gelbaugh and the sailing-cap man from their razzing.

The hunters, who had spread out upon reaching the ground, now instinctively gathered more closely together. The basement was cool with the November night, the crumbling foundation walls full of cracks and loose masonry.

“If you’re here, let us know,” Amelia said.

“We came here just to meet you,” added her husband.

“Make my millennium,” Gelbaugh said, quoting the movie “Beetlejuice.”

“If you need energy, you can draw some from me,” Amelia said. Her flashlight dimmed.

“Feel that?” someone asked.

“It touched me!” shouted the man with the K-II meter.

“I think we got an active.” Wayne’s ears popped as the air pressure subtly changed. The floor resonated with a deep, steady thump—
da boo boo da-boo
—but it was clearly caused by the lower registers of the bar’s sound system. It had the rhythm of a heartbeat, as if the hotel were alive and slumbering.

Flashlight beams cut swaths through the darkness.

“Did you see that?” a woman whispered.

“Behind me,” said the excitable K-II operator.

“Ghosts don’t reveal themselves to just anyone,” Amelia said. “You need to be sensitive.”

Wayne played his flashlight around. Due to the disordered layout of the support walls, he couldn’t see much of the basement. But something flickered orange at the edge of his vision, and he thought at first his beam had reflected off some stray ductwork or abandoned machinery. Then he realized the glow was emanating from within the furnace.

“Flashlights off,” Wayne ordered.

“Bossy, aren’t we?” Gelbaugh said, though he complied along with the others.

In the pitch black, the throbbing of the bass notes took on even more power, and the muted light in the furnace was readily apparent. Wayne assumed someone had built a fire in it earlier, perhaps as a joke. The same person who had painted “Stay and play.”

The darkness skewed perception enough that Wayne couldn’t clearly judge the distance to the furnace, though he’d guess it was a hundred feet from the stairs.

“What’s that?” someone said.

“The haunted furnace,” Gelbaugh said. “Digger did a great job of setting that one up.”

“I haven’t been down here yet,” Wayne said.

“Maybe one of your minions. Paranormal activity or your money back.”

A flashlight clicked on and the beam bounced as its owner fled toward the stairs. “It touched me again,” said the K-II operator. “I’m done.”

“Touch
me
,” Amelia implored, addressing any spirit in the vicinity, desperate for attention.

“Careful,” Wayne hollered after the fleeing man, whose feet banged up the wooden steps. He switched his light back on and aimed it at the man’s back.

“A broken neck and we’ll have a new legend,” Gelbaugh said.

Cappie, who had become Gelbaugh’s ally in skepticism, added, “Let me guess. The door is locked from outside.”

The K-II operator hammered at the door. “Let me out,” he said.

“Shakespeare said, ‘All the world’s a stage,’” Gelbaugh said. “And that was long before the age of reality shows.”

A couple of the others turned on their flashlights, illuminating the K-II operator as he rapped his hairy hands on the door.

“You serious?” a woman said.

“Great,” Amelia’s husband said. “Spending the night down here when we’re paying a hundred and fifty a night for a bed.”

“Don’t worry,” Wayne said. “I’ll get maintenance.”

As he clicked on his walkie-talkie and removed it from his belt, he tried to picture how the door could have locked itself. It was key-operated from either side, and didn’t have a latch or button like a privacy lock would. Mechanically, the door was designed against accidental locking. But the White Horse now seemed intent on breaking the rules.

“Burton?” he said into the walkie-talkie.

“Here’s where they wait five seconds for dramatic effect,” Gelbaugh said.

“You’re a jerk,” Amelia said to him, which elicited a bark of derisive laughter.

“Cody?” Wayne hoped the teen—and Kendra—were now back in the control room.

“Whoa, we’re really locked in,” someone said. “They won’t hear us until the bar closes, and knowing this place, that could be four in the morning.”

Wayne tried again, not wanting the hunters to panic. “Jonathan? Anyone from SSI?”

The K-II operator was nearly in a state of panic now, tugging on the door handle and pounding the wood with the base of his flashlight. Cappie lit a cigarette and headed up the stairs. “Easy, man,” he said. “No need to break your gear.”

Wayne tried the walkie-talkie again, glancing at the furnace.
Is the fire brighter now?

If someone had built a fire, it should be dying down, not growing larger. But the bed of red embers pulsed in time with the bass notes, growing brighter as it drew oxygen. The brusque aroma of sulfur and coal smoke was overwhelmed by Cappie’s cigarette.

“Flashlights off,” came Wayne’s voice, but he wasn’t the one who said it.

The flashlight in his hand went dead, as did the others.

“Hey,” somebody said. “I didn’t do anything.”

The furnace roared to life with a
whoosh
, flames illuminating the rusted metal and open grate. The fire cast fingers of yellow light along the slick walls.

“Whoa,” Gelbaugh said, trying to maintain his acerbic ennui. “Did anyone bring marshmallows?”

“How’s it doing that?” a man said, shielding his eyes against the brightness. “There’s no wood in it.”

“As long as it stays in there, we’re fine,” Wayne said, though the metal was now ticking from the heat. Had he ordered the group to turn off flashlights? He couldn’t afford to become disoriented.

“What are you sensing?” Amelia’s husband asked.

She closed her eyes, her face pink, shadows crawling across it like small rodents. The group fell silent and waited, even the man at the door, who had given up on the lock.

“The one from the Ouija session,” she said.

Wayne swallowed, wondering if Beth was making an encore appearance. Despite his denial, her memory—her possibility—had fueled him with anxiety, and that was part of his eagerness to leave the White Horse. Promises were lies to comfort the dying, and everyone was dying, all the time, moment by moment.

I’ll never drink again, I’ll take good care of Buttercup, I’ll meet your spirit at the White Horse Inn. I’ll love you forever.

Amelia turned slowly, as if homing in her inner radar to a weak and distant signal. Her mouth opened, and the words that issued forth were from a different, younger voice.

“In the walls,” she said.

“Who are you?” asked her husband, obviously trained to coax out the spirits Amelia channeled.

“You know,” Amelia said.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“To feed the fire.”

“The fire in the furnace?”

“Yes.”

“Did you make it burn?”

“Yes.”