Speed Dating with the Dead

by Nicholson, Scott

  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.”

  “Congratulations, we’ve solved the energy crisis,” Gelbaugh said, drawing a snicker from Cappie. “While I have you here, can you give me some tips on the stock market?”

  Amelia’s response was drowned out by the roar of the furnace, which vomited a wave of flames toward the group. The heat wafted across Wayne’s face, not hot enough to burn but plenty enough to get his attention.

  A couple of people shouted, and someone dropped a camera to the dirt. Most of the group headed toward the stairs, but the flames were already rolling back upon themselves, like a tidal wave that had smashed against a cliff, and the fire drew back into the furnace.

  It glowed almost white for a moment, condensing into a shrinking globe, and then winked out, leaving the basement pitch black.

  Chapter 41

  “Okay,” Kendra said, more bravely than she felt, kneeling over Cody. “Come on out.”

  She shined the light around the attic. Dust swirled from all the activity, and something fluttered in the distant eaves, a disturbed bat or bird. Cody’s breathing was heavy but even, so he wasn’t too seriously injured. But she’d have to lead him out of the attic before the Brat Pack played any more of its games.

  “That boy,” Cody wheezed. “He’s the leader.”

  “Rochester,” she called out. “Are you a scaredy cat?”

  He appeared three feet in front of her, smirking, his hands behind his back. “Cat? I thought I was a rat.”

  He brought her sketch pad out from behind his back and opened it to her drawing of him as the Rat-Faced Boy. “Not bad, but I think my whiskers are a little longer in real life.”

  She blinked, as his face seemed to sharpen for a moment, drawing his nose to a point and exaggerating the size of his two front teeth.

  “Cody,” she said. “Are you seeing this?”

  “Be cool,” Cody replied, still too weak to stand. “Demonic haunting.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she said, trying to remember Dad’s lessons on the various classifications of paranormal activity. She had tuned them out as yet more Digger blabber, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that “demonic” was not good.

  If I live through this, I’ve got one hell of an idea for my next character. How would Emily Dee handle this?

  Well, Emily Dee wasn’t a ghostbuster or a priest, more of a ninja Goth, and this situation didn’t really call for a flying skull kick. And she’d already tried screaming for help. That left relying on smarts. She stood and faced Rochester, figuring that the best approach was to show no fear.

  “Help me out here, Cody,” she said. “What do demons want, exactly?”

  “Different things,” he said.

  “Like my soul?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Hey, Stick Figure, why don’t you ask me?” Rochester said.

  “Because you’re acting childish,” she said.

  “I am a child. I just happen to be dead, so I’ve been one for a long time.”

  “I liked you better when you were sneaking around and playing pranks,” she said. “I’d think a demon would find a better host to possess. That one looks like it has worms.”

  Rochester’s face narrowed and his teeth grew sharp again, his nose twitching in rage.

  Oops. Maybe I better get a clue from Cody about how to handle this before I get my face bitten off.

  “So, Mr. Future of Horror, what’s the next move?” she asked.

  Cody raised himself to a sitting position, still rubbing his neck. “Well, a demon only has power over you if you invite it in,” he said.

  “You invited us just by coming here,” Rochester said. “So bow down.”

  Kendra’s feet flew out from under her and she banged hard on her knees, kneeling beside Cody as if the two of them were repentant sinners seeking forgiveness. Kendra had not been raised in the church, but she was offended both by this mockery of religion and the ease with which she could be manipulated. She tried to rise, but a great weight had settled on her.

  “So,” Kendra asked Cody. “What does the book say about how to handle this?”

  “There’s no book.”

  “I don’t suppose I can all of a sudden ask Jesus into my heart?” she asked Rochester, planning to do the exact opposite of whatever he said.

  “Be my guest,” he replied. “Jesus and me, we’re on the same team. Working for the Man, putting in time until time’s up.”

  His delivery had changed, voice older and almost weary. She glanced toward the direction of the access door, but it now seemed impossibly far away.

  “Where are Bruce and Dorrie?” Kendra asked.

  Rochester shrugged. “Around.”

  “We already knew the hotel was active,” Cody said. “If you’re a demon, why do you hang around with all these ghosts? Are you a scaredy cat like she said? Maybe you’re afraid of the dark.”

  “I’m only afraid of one thing,” Rochester said. “And if you can figure it out, I might—” he gave a rodent grin—”might—let you live.”

  “There are worse things than being dead,” Cody said, leading Kendra to wonder what those things were and how he knew.

  “Suppose we don’t want to play your guessing game?” Kendra said. “What if we just walk out of here and pretend you don’t exist?”

  “Free your spirit and your feet will follow?” Rochester adjusted the collar of his plush jacket and thrust out the sketch pad. “I don’t think you could leave without this.”

  She propelled herself forward, but it was difficult to launch from a kneeling position, and she fell into the shredded paper that served as insulation. She was reminded of a rat’s nest her dad had found in the garden shed behind their house, and how much of it had been paper nibbled from Digger’s comic-book collection. The nest had smelled of old hair and pee, and this insulation was almost as bad.

  A hand latched onto her, squeezing hard enough to hurt, and she figured Rat-Face was digging his creepy little paws into her, but when she glanced up, it was Cody stooping over her. The gypsum beneath her cracked, and she was reminded of Cody’s warning: Be careful, or you’ll step straight through to the floor below.

  Sounded like a good idea.

  “Okay, Rochester,” she said, as Cody helped her rise. She gave her best Emily Dee leap into the a
ir, and landed squarely on the spot where she had been lying. The gypsum splintered and bent, but didn’t collapse. She glanced at Cody, who caught on, and he jumped beside her, their combined weight too much for the ceiling material.

  She just had time to hear Rochester’s squeal before she was flying through the air, weightless, seeming to hang forever, or at least long enough to grab Cody, and then she struck the wooden floor ten feet below, and all was black.

  Chapter 42

  “Shit,” Burton said.

  The lights had blinked just as his group was settling into Room 318, then the power dimmed and went out after one final surge.

  “Flashlights, everybody,” he said.

  As the individual lights clicked on, throwing erratic dots of orange around the walls, Burton paged the other SSI members on his walkie-talkie. No answer.

  Cody, Kendra, and The Roach out, and Digger on the ropes. Jonathan out of contact, too.

  He tried the walkie-talkie again. Outside the window, the lawn was dark, the only illumination cast by the half moon stitched behind a gauze of fog. The hunters in Room 318 didn’t seem alarmed by the power outage, talking in occasional low whispers and enjoying the gloomy atmosphere.

  Burton felt his way along the wall to the door. “Be right back,” he said to the group before slipping out of the room. He dreaded having to deal with the vacant-eyed Violet, but maybe the manager had turned up.

  Yet another person gone AWOL…what is it with this place? Is it eating the guests?

  With the lack of power, the ambient noises of the hotel—televisions, elevator, bar—had given way to almost complete silence. Those few guests not on the hunts were likely reluctant to leave their rooms. The creak of his footsteps was magnified, and only when his beam glanced against a mirror could he see more than five feet in front of him. He debated checking in at the control room, but the equipment there would be useless even if someone were manning it.

  Burton turned the corner and headed for the stairwell. The woman stood there with her arms folded, and he almost bumped into her. She would have seen the flashlight approaching, but she hadn’t called out. He recognized her from one of the earlier panel discussions, where she had sat in the back and cracked her knuckles, a sour expression on her face as if she had eaten bad eggs and they had given her gas.