by Jeremy Craig
I stared at him tearfully, for the first time feeling like the old man really did understand me. “It’s worth it. I wouldn’t trade a day of it away for anything.” He smiled a tearful crooked smile, wiped his face with his flannel sleeve, and ate the last bite of his steak with no small amount of relish.
Chapter Seven
The murderous spirit of Room 33…
The walk back to the reception desk was a heavy one. Meaning we were drained and stuffed, and that nice warm sleepy full feeling doesn’t pair well in any way with a bottle of melancholy. Regardless of the vintage, no matter what they try to tell you.
Gretta smiled at us in a way that made me a touch squeamish and again pushed her glasses back up her nose. “Had a good visit, did you?” she asked as she riffled through her papers without looking at them as if she was just trying to look busy.
“We did, yes. Now, what’s really in Room 33?” Gramps asked with acidic pleasantness. Gretta sighed and put down the bundle of papers with a soft curse.
“I forgot she was a Clairvoyant… Well, joke’s on me, I guess.” She shrugged. “You still going to take care of it?”
Gramps stared and tapped his finger on the counter. The manager, obviously as well versed with his temper as I was, again sighed.
“Alright, alright, alright, fine. It’s a malevolent spirit. A dark one, too. Makes the poltergeist you banished a few years back look like a playful kitten with a ball of string. No matter what we do the Coven can’t evict the thing—just keeps coming back or killing whoever we send in. Nearly drowned me in the room’s bathtub last week. Nothing you can’t handle, of course.” She winked and smiled unapologetically.
Gramps glared. “You would have had me unwittingly bring my grandson into a room with a Level Ten Spirit?” (Yes, there are ten levels of spirits, and yes, ten is the absolute worst it can possibly get, and yes, they can even hurt Darklings. They’ve even been known to kill a few over the centuries. They are after all akin to the Great White Sharks of the Spirit World). Gretta smiled again and shrugged.
“Do that again, and I’ll burn you at the stake myself,” he growled, and while I’m not sure if he was just saying it because he was angry or not, to me he sounded pretty darn serious. Gretta, however, just laughed.
“Don’t threaten me with a good time,” she scoffed as she unhooked the ornate gold room key from the peg under a tiny brass plaque deeply engraved with a “33” over the room’s mailbox cubby and tossed it to him, never once breaking eye contact Gramps swiped it out of the air.
“You know,” she added mischievously with a suggestive wink, “if you want to tie me up and bring me outside to play with fire, all you have to do is ask.”
Rolling his eyes Gramps made a disgusted noise and propelled me away from the desk with his free hand. We could hear Gretta laughing almost halfway down the hall to the elevator.
It was a roomy little old school one with a gate of the same black and gold coloring that the whole hotel seemed to prefer. It even had a bellhop of sorts—an old bent elevator man, who by the look of him had been there since the building broke ground, or perhaps even the dawn of time.
Gramps hesitated then went very pale and still looking for all the world like he was steeling himself for a dreaded task that there was no avoiding whatsoever. He shuddered as we were beckoned inside with an unnervingly skull like grin.
He gently guided me forward, arm about my shoulder and led me in through the threshold of the very vintage looking convenience. When we passed through it felt like we had stepped into another time and place through stale, uncomfortably warm and thick air. The one who had beckoned to us bobbled his head as we both did a terrible job acting natural and relaxed as he studied us.
The man seemed absolutely ancient. Skeletally gaunt, with huge, clouded misty pale blue eyes that appeared to have the beginnings of cataracts, he had more wrinkles than I could count, a liver spotted bald head, bent, beak like nose, and a creepy, crooked, yellow toothed smile.
“Room 33, I take it?” he warbled wetly. Accepting Gramps’ glaring nod as we stepped in with a croaking cackle, he pushed the button and began to crank at a handle. Peering at me in a way that made me feel both absolutely trembly and curious all at once, he sent me a knowing wink.
“A right fine young man you’ve got there, Arty,” he said with a benign smile, the word ‘Arty’ causing a vein to pulse dangerously on Gramps’ forehead as the elevator man gazed at me unblinkingly. “Oh, yes. Right fine, indeed. A good boy, I take it?” he asked. “I can see you in-em. I bet his father wasn’t too happy about that, eh old boy?”
Gramps said nothing, his fists balling and white knuckling as he pointedly looked at anything but the old man working the crank.
“I see a bit of his mother in-em’ too, eh? How do you feel about that, Arty?” The elevator man asked. The question seemed to finally get Gramps’ attention as he stiffened and sharply turned his head, glaring thunderously at the old man and seemingly about a hair’s breadth from punching him in the nose.
“You knew my parents?” I asked uneasily.
My question deeply unsettled Gramps as he glanced down at me sharply, his face going splotchy and strained.
A heartbeat later he took up, staring daggers at the old man, a worried look lining his brow as he tugged nervously at the edges of his flannel. I got the distinct impression that he wasn’t entirely pleased at what the elevator man might have to say.
The odd old man smiled benignly, affording Gramps a withering look that ended his staring and had him instead peering at the framed safety instructions on the elevator wall.
“Indeed. It’s what I do. I know everyone, you see. Eventually. Although your little family is a bit of a special case, young Master Bright.” He answered while the elevator made a whirring sound as we went up a floor. With a shudder the elevator let out a bell like ring and came to a grinding, rumbling stop. The shiny polished gate creaked open like a graveyard gate well overdue to have its hinges oiled.
“Why is that?” I asked, ignoring the near horrified look on Gramps’ face.
The elevator man smiled at me and shook his head. “Oh, everyone knows Arty Bright, now don’t they? Arty, Arty, Arty Bright, the darkness’s brightest light, eh Arty?” he asked in a sing song voice as he fixed Gramps with a look and a playful wink. “In one way or another everyone does. You’d have to be living under a rock not to… Though, young man, I have the dubious privilege of knowing your Grandfather far better than most. But I certainly won’t hold that over you—as I doubt his sweet mother would have wanted that, eh Arty?”
Gramps never did answer, instead he fished out eight odd looking tarnished gold hued coins from his jeans pocket. They were more hexagonal than round modern coinage and seemed to have skulls stamped into them and were encircled with some odd fish-hooky lettering I didn’t recognize, that made my ears itch and eyes water.
There was something off about them, too. The dull metal exuded an otherworldly wrongness that gave me a horrible case of the willies, like I was unwittingly standing on a grave. “For the accounts,” Gramps mumbled gloomily.
Then, after taking a deep breath he dropped them into the old man’s waiting, crooked, very claw like hand. The elevator man snatched them out of the air, eyed one, bit it, nodded in deep satisfaction, and stuffed them all into his vest pocket for safe keeping.
“Arty, you sir, are a gentleman and a scholar. Catch you on the way down, eh?” the old man cackled, causing Gramps to pale all the more, though he didn’t seem to notice that the elevator man wasn’t looking at him when he said it. The creepy old dude tipped his hat to us and laughed and laughed at this.
With heebie-jeebies creeping up our spines and hairs rising on our arms and back of our necks we stepped out of the elevator.
“Oh, and Benny?” the elevator man called out with a wheezy unsettling giggle. He seemed to have made up my very own pet name, and just hearing it in that wet warbling voice of his made my flesh crawl as I froze a
nd turned to regard him.
“I’ll give yours and your poor excuse for a Grandfather’s best to your departed parents as soon as I can, okey-doke?” He patted his vest pocket happily which clinked and jingled with each pat.
I honestly couldn’t bring myself to answer, I just stood there with a stupefied, mouth opened look on my face, staring wide eyed over my shoulder at him. Though the elevator man didn’t seem to mind, as he simply smiled his absent skull like smile at me as though he completely understood and giggled.
Then, quite unexpectedly his expression became shadowed and serious, a hint of danger flitting about in his eyes. “And for what it’s worth, you’ve a touch of destiny about you boy-oh. I’ll be keeping an eye on you, a close one me thinks, yes a close one would do nicely. Ta-ta, for now.”
Again, he winked and smiled a smile like I’d never seen before that exuded something old, horribly wrong, tainted, and cold, as with a ding of a bell, the gates to the elevator’s doors creaked loudly closed. Neither of us spoke for a long moment, staring at the tiny downward lit triangle that indicated the old elevator and its unsettling bellhop was plunging back to wherever he had come from.
“Who is he?” I asked in a strangled hush.
“You don’t want to know,” Gramps gasped.
“How do you know him?” I asked, not at all satisfied with the answer I’d been given, as I fixed the elevator with an unsettled gaze unsuccessfully trying to shake the awful feeling of shivery shakes I’d had since I’d stepped into the Reunion Inn.
Gramps shook his head and sighed, a very visible shiver running through him as he stared at the elevators closed doors. “Again Ben, you simply don’t want to know.” That said he waved off any questions as he leaned on the wall, pressing his hand to his chest and breathing heavily. After a moment he seemed to have recuperated, and we took a short walk down the black carpeted hall.
We stopped outside what seemed to be one of the place’s most expensive and lavish suits of rooms, thirty-three boldly displayed in polished gold-plated lettering on the mahogany door.
Gramps inserted the key into the lock and turned it. With a click the door unlocked, and he turned the nob and pushed. It swung in silently and things appeared, well, like how an incredibly expensive vacant hotel room should look, I guess.
No blood or vast destruction, no bodies or howling or groaning from the closet. Everything was just, well, normal, I guess. Turns out that’s a frightfully bad sign for a room known to have “spirit issues” of that magnitude.
“Ben,” Gramps said in a library-like hush. “Touch nothing, do nothing unless I tell you to, and most of all, don’t tell it your name,” he warned seriously. The very moment we crossed the threshold into the finely appointed room, the temperature changed.
It got cold, but oddly it still felt warm, and yet, the cold wasn’t from the temperature. It was something more sinister. Like an evil mist that seeped through clothes, flesh, and bone, leaving us shivering.
“Ah. Good. You’re here. Took you two long enough. I’d been told you would be punctual.” An otherworldly form solidified into a man, or something that looked like a man but had dark empty eye sockets where its eyes should have been.
Whatever it really was, it seemed to have decided to look especially suave for the occasion. It wore tailored trousers, polished loafers, a red dinner jacket, and had its thick black hair slicked neatly back. It even seemed freshly shaved, with a fine masterfully shaped pencil thin mustache along its upper lip that twitched as it poured brandy into a sniffer from the room’s bar. It regarded us with what could only be described as a wickedly contemplative hunger.
“You know, service in this dump is almost as bad as it is in the ether realms. The food is brought in. Screams, begs, cries, and all that nonsense, and I end up having to bore myself chasing after it, and it always dies with not a drop of dignity. Shitting and pissing themselves on the carpet.” It sipped the brandy and smacked its thin, bloodless lips, tisking disapprovingly and shaking its handsome head. “I do hope you two don’t plan on being that predictably pathetic, now do you?”
Gramps just glared at it, horror dawning on his face as his fists balled up tightly. Someone had summoned this monstrous thing here just for us.
Taking our silence as a gentlemanly agreement, it raised the sniffer and toasted us with a cruel, unnatural smile on its lips. “Lovely, now. Which of you wants to die horribly first?”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Gramps sneered back, anger in his tone as he drew a long black bladed dagger from somewhere beneath his flannel and fingered its point. Whatever was haunting the room eyed the knife in Gramps’ hand and arched its manicured eyebrow, smiling a smile that will likely haunt my nightmares for as long as I’ve lived.
“Oooh. Goody. Party favors and spunk.” The thing laughed and finished its sniffers contents and poured itself another. “I am ever so fond of dining theater. It’s a lost art, you know. I applaud you, sir.” Again, he toasted Gramps with the sniffer before tossing it back and emptying it.
“Where are my manners? Before I killed her, mother always said it’s nice to introduce oneself before lunch, so here we go. The name’s Jack. Some call me Happy Jack. And yours, of course, are Artur and Benjamin Bright—Darklings, I’m told.” He nodded to each of us politely as he set his sniffer back on the bar and began cracking his knuckles. “Oh, this is going to be fun. It’s been a while since I’ve had dark meat. If I remember right you all taste a bit like stringy veil.”
As if on cue the room darkened and changed, curtains hung in ribbons, sofas and bed were darkly stained and raggedly rent, and the carpet was a thing that would make the strongest stomached of us rush off to hug a toilet. Only thing that was still pristine was the bar, not surprisingly. “Mood lighting,” Jack explained with a shrug as we stared about.
“Well, let’s get on with it.” Happy Jack laughed as he folded his arms over his chest and fixed us with a sneering look that was as evil as it was inhuman. “Come on then. Chop, chop! I’ll even give you the first move, now. Isn’t that sporting?” He laughed wickedly.
Gramps simply walked over and stabbed him. Jack glanced at him almost amusedly, raised an eyebrow, and with a flick of a finger sent Gramps soaring through the air. Jack peered down at the dagger sticking out of his dinner jacket and snorted, then scowled.
“Firstly, that won’t work on me. Secondly,” he drew out the dagger and studied it a moment before it simply disintegrated in his hand into black dust that sifted through his fingers and drifted lazily down to the gore splattered carpet. He dusted off his hands and with an irritated sigh fingered the cut in his coat.
“Secondly, this was my favorite dinner jacket. I’ll take that out on your hide. Wherever did you manage to get that blighted reaper blade anyway?” he continued with mock curiosity as Gramps moaned and weekly tried to swat at him, which brought Happy Jack to a near fit of giggles until I managed to knock over the jagged shell of a whiskey bottle.
He glanced over his shoulder as I struggled to regain my wits and offered me an apologetic wink and needle toothed smile. “Why don’t you sit over there like a good lamb.” I flew across the room into the indicated chair and was inexplicably frozen in place, the air driven from my lungs.
“Good lad,” Jack chuckled approvingly. “Please excuse me while I tenderize the first course.” That said with a mocking bow, he picked up a bottle of liquor from the bar. He uncorked it, gulped down the meager remaining contents and tossed it in the air, catching it by the neck and hefting it like a club.
Gramps had just scrambled to his feet when he was on him, makeshift club battering him into the wall as Jack whistled a jaunty tune with each bludgeoning strike. Gramps groaned, bloodied and bruised as he slid down the wall to the floor. He stared up at the spirit of Jack with a bleary but defiant glare.
Happy Jack adjusted his trousers (revealing pink plaid socks) and crouched over Gramps, sneeringly running his manicured finger along his thin mustache as h
e spoke. “Tell me. How does it feel knowing I’m going to rip you both apart, eat you, and shit you out and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it? And then for dessert, I think I might pay the Spirit World a little visit and eat up everyone you care about there as well. Those nice warm, delicious souls should keep my belly delightfully tingly and full for a good long while. How’s that sit with you, eh chap?”
As a point of interest here, yes, a thing like Jack can devour souls in the afterlife, a thing that is dreaded (even by demons) beyond almost any other fate that is widely known as: The final death. Where everything you are is extinguished and consumed and the final spark of being is irreversibly snuffed out for eternity.
Gramps spat at him in answer. Jack merely chuckled amusedly and wiped his face with a monogramed lace hanky he’d plucked from his dinner jacket’s breast pocket.
I had been stuck there on that grizzly stained gaudily appointed chair, forced to watch and shiver in terror up till then. But at that moment I felt something dark stir, and then a familiar snap in me as something broke that felt hot, almost searing, and I screamed.
Last thing I remember seeing before the world span into darkness was Jack rising and turning to stare at me in something like wide eyed terror. Burning hellish cracks crept all over him and he began to just fall apart into what looked like burning flecks of blackness and dust.
I awoke in a soft, warm bed that was definitely NOT in Gramps’ lodge, as the sheets and heavy, cozy comforter was patterned in black and gold. A ceiling fan swirled lazily overhead, and I couldn’t ever remember a more comfortable pillow. I blinked about, my vision bleary and swimming.