by Glenn Rolfe
She checked in last night shortly after 1 am, smiling behind gorgeous brown eyes, her long dark hair pulled back, wearing a knee-length pleather skirt and an Alkaline Trio t-shirt. He wasn't Brad Pitt by any stretch, but he had, from time to time, been able to use his affable charm and vast knowledge of books to counter his lack of strong-jawed good looks.
He and Meghan had seamlessly slipped into a conversion about things that go bump in the night. Jeff had been somewhat amazed and eternally grateful when she decided to grab a cup of the inn’s complimentary coffee and stick around to continue their discussion on all things horror. Turned out she was a big fan of the 30 Days of Night series, as well as Joe Hill’s Locke and Key. She didn't care much for zombies, telling him that she preferred ghosts and goblins. After twenty minutes and another cup of coffee, she finished her drink, wished him a good night, and had disappeared off to her room.
Now, staring at her name on the screen before him, he found himself praying she would make an appearance on his shift tonight. He was also elated to find she had extended her stay from the two nights he had put her in for, to twice that.
Ring, Ring, Ring.
“Front Desk.”
“Hello, this is Kenneth McGowan in room 219.”
“Hi, Mr. McGowan, what can I do for you tonight?” he said, managing to keep the annoyance out of his voice.
“There’s someone that keeps talking to me from the room next door.”
Jeff rolled his eyes, pulling up his Facebook page. “Are they bothering you, Mr. McGowan? Are they keeping you awake?”
“They–” Kenneth started.
The line went dead.
“Hello?” Jeff asked. “Mr. McGowan?”
Nothing.
“Fucking weirdo,” Jeff spoke aloud to the empty lobby.
Kenneth was certainly the strangest resident at the inn. He would probably fit in a little better at an asylum. After a few minutes of checking his Facebook updates, Jeff moved on to his actual duties.
While he was finishing up the rest of his nightly checklist, Meghan Murphy showed up at the coffee station by the desk, barely registering his existence. All he got was a simple nod as she averted her eyes, crossed the lobby and took her coffee into the guest computer room. No hello, no smile. He was confused and disappointed with the 180 in her behavior. He thought they’d hit it off last night, maybe he was wrong. He’d never been great at reading women–Stephen King was much more his speed. Maybe it was something else altogether. Maybe she just woke up, or maybe she just didn't want to give him the wrong idea. Still, whatever magic he thought had been there last night seemed smothered by the cold blanket of rejection.
A tall guy with short dark hair stepped up to the desk.
“Hey, sorry to bug you. I locked myself outta my room. Any chance I can get another key?”
“Sure. Happens all the time. What’s the last name on the room?”
“It’s under Gentry or Curren.”
“Yep, got it.”
Jeff punched in a new key and handed it over. “Nice Evil Dead shirt. You see the re-make?”
“Cool, thanks. Yeah, I thought it was pretty rad. Wish Bruce Campbell would’ve been in there somewhere, but it was still okay.”
“I agree. Ash should have made a cameo.”
“Well, thanks, man. Have a good night.”
“You, too.”
Jeff waited until the tall guy disappeared down the hallway and then, doing his best to shrug off Meghan’s withdrawal, dug the latest Ronald Malfi novel from his bag and returned to a warmer, more comforting place of refuge.
Chapter Five
Knock-knock
Kenneth McGowan stood frozen, gooseflesh dressing his skin as he stood clinging to the door frame of the hotel room’s bathroom. In the darkness, he sat in perfect silence listening to the first of the thing’s little visits.
No doubt about it, The Bruton Inn was haunted. But it was not nearly as haunted as his family. The voices, the sounds, the little visits presented by whatever was hanging around this place were all preferable to the alternative. Shivering, despite the eighty plus degree reading on the room’s thermometer, his mind faded away from the knocking in this present time to a few months ago at his step-father’s estate…
“Kenny, it’s me. It’s Uncle Wes.”
The door to his bedroom creaked like Dracula’s casket as the large shadowy figure of his “Uncle” entered (invaded) his room. Kenneth awaited his fate. The nightly intrusions from “Uncle” Wes had been occurring like clockwork since the odd man’s arrival last winter. He would knock twice, very quietly, announce his presence, then slip in, close the door behind him, and lock it. He stood six-foot-four, the physique of a professional wrestler. Kenneth had tried to fend him off in the beginning, to attempt to dissuade the man from doing his dirty deeds, but it was no use. Kenneth was much too small to physically protect himself, and the verbal threats Uncle Wes whispered in his ear were enough to scare him into total obedience.
The first couple of weeks, it was just some kissing and light rubbing, but the abuse quickly escalated to oral sex, and then, to the inevitable. He had been raped by the man nearly every night for five months before his mother shipped him off to the inn, hiding him away like he had done something wrong.
His step-father was a liar, a cheat, a pedophile, and a known rapist, but he was also the richest man in Avalon. He practically owned the town. And Uncle Wes wasn’t the only rotten soul in his stable, either. Luckily, Kenneth hadn’t been exposed to any of Reni, Tobias, or Hunter’s fun and games. They preferred little girls, namely his cousins Deidre and Holly–their screams could be heard at various times any given day or night. Kenneth watched them both meander through their daily chores, like lifeless pretty things.
His step-father and the man’s collection of Avalon trash, was about a hundred times more frightening and harmful than whatever was living at the Bruton Inn.
As the icy voice began whispering its foul offerings from the other side of the hotel room door, he slouched down on the bathroom floor atop a quilt his grandmother had made for him when he was younger, and shut his eyes tight as if Uncle Wes were with him. The flashbacks struck his consciousness like a wet towel, the shivering intensified as his still recovering rectum clenched in sharp jolts at the phantom memories.
He reached up to the lip of the bath tub, grabbing the little baggy of purple pills he’d appropriated from his mother’s medicine cabinet. He dry swallowed two of them before lying back down and curling into a fetal position.
As the comforting wave of soft blackness enveloped him, the flashbacks dispersed like worms retreating into the earth. The whispers by his door carried on, but he no longer heard the awful things that they said.
…..
At the end of the otherwise empty corridor, Eric Gentry crept back to his room, new room key in hand, hoping not awaken his roommate, Jimmy. He slipped the magnetic keycard into the reader, and paused. He thought he heard crying. Placing his ear to the door, the crying ceased. He backed away and listened, glancing down the well-lit hallway decorated with portraits of old steam engine boats from the early 1900s and black and whites of prominent Maine figures. The depiction closest to him resembled Abraham Lincoln sans beard. The name read: Alfred Greaves Jr. There was something menacing in the man’s eyes. Unsettling.
There was a tingling in his solar plexus that often accompanied feelings of dread. Being a comic book nerd, he liked to refer to it as his spidey-sense. He hadn’t felt it since the night he came home to find his apartment back home in Sausalito, California broken into. Standing six-six and weighing in at a good two hundred and fifty pounds, Eric was big enough to take care of himself in most troublesome situations.
He hadn’t been afraid that night, just uneasy, but ready. This was different.
Butterflies swarmed in his stomach as he left the door to his room and crept down the hall, listening for the cries. Three doors down, he heard the whimpering. He looked at the room
number– 211. He placed his hands on the frame and as stealthily as he could, easing his ear to the door. As if aware of his presence, the whimpering slowed. He took a step back. His spidey-sense was screaming at him to move on, to go back to his room and lock the door. Against those better senses, he returned his ear to the barrier, this time with more urgency, compelled, having to hear the cries again.
What he heard on the other side was not crying, but a quiet cackle. His chest began thundering so hard he thought he might be having a heart attack at thirty-one. Then he heard her speak:
“Come in, Eric. I’ve been waiting for you,” the icy voice of his new mistress welcomed him. Before he could decide his next course of action the door flung open. He was wrenched inward by a force that snagged his entire frame as if it were that of a ten-year-old.
Behind the door to room 211, Eric Gentry’s screams were snuffed out. His eyes rolled into the back of his head at the sight of her true form.
…..
“Guest services, Jeff speaking. How can I help you?”
“Yeah, this is Ben and Gale Thompson in 213. I don’t know what the hell’s going on next door, but it sounds like someone is getting killed over there.”
Jeff’s skin attempted to physically crawl from his body. “Which room did you say?”
He was met with irritation from the other end.
“There’s something fucked up going on next door. Listen, my wife and I are paying good money to stay here. This is fucking ridiculous–Gale, Gale. Get back here.”
“Sir,” Jeff started, “I’m going to ask that you and your wife both stay in your room. I’ll go check on–”
Further from the receiver Jeff heard the man calling to his wife. “Gale, where the hell are you going? Let them take care of this. Gale!”
Jeff hung up the phone and slipped the brass knuckles from his messenger bag into his pants pocket.
As he rounded the corner of the desk, his eyes met Meghan Murphy’s beautiful deep browns. She sat behind the glass window of the computer room, smiling at him, but her eyes looked different, darker. He broke her gaze and jogged toward the elevator at the end of the hall.
Chapter Six
November 14, 1983
Two days after running away from home, Christina met her new best friend, Sarah Ford. Late that night, with seven dollars left in her pocket, Christina hitched up Route 5. Tired, weary, and nearly ready to cave in and call her mom to bring her home, she was picked up, literally and emotionally, by Sarah Ford in her sugar daddy-rented red Pontiac Firebird.
Since running away from home, Sarah had been living with her boyfriend in a shitty apartment in Denver. Something bad had happened. Some sort of fight or physical altercation between them, she hadn’t really wanted to talk about it. She’d taken a Greyhound from Denver to Boston. There, she said she met another guy, this one from Maine. He played in a band and brought her home with him after a show. According to Sarah, that relationship lasted for three months before she was forced to leave him. She wound up shacking up with a married man in Farmington. He stashed his new teen squeeze at the Bruton Inn, supplying her with ample cash and a rental car.
“So this guy just pays for your room, and that really cool car?” Christina said. The sweating bottle of Schlitz in her hand and the warm buzz the alcohol was delivering to her exhausted body felt like paradise.
“Well, I mean, it’s not like it’s for nothing,” Sarah began. “I have to fuck the guy like three nights a week, and suck his dick about twice that.” She paused to light a Marlboro. “He isn’t even good-looking, but he’s fucking loaded.”
“Wow. What about his wife?” Christina reached for the pack of cigarettes lying on the bed between them.
Sarah exhaled, handing her the pink Bic, “What about her?”
Christina lit the cigarette, took a drag, and asked, “Have you met her? Does he talk about her?”
“What do I give a fuck?”
“Do you want him to leave her?”
“No fuckin’ way.” Sarah said, rising up from the bed. She was dressed in a Van Halen t-shirt, and a pair of cut-off blue jeans, and with her long dark curls and perfect ass, she loosely resembled Daisy Duke from the Dukes of Hazzard. She was beautiful. No wonder she had a married man wrapped around her finger. Christina envied her.
Sarah went to the mini fridge by the television, grabbed two more beers and continued, “Tina, just look at this. This is fucking perfect. I get this rad room, money, beer and cigarettes, and that fucking car, and I don’t have to live with this guy or all of his fucking problems.” She handed Christina one of the brown bottles. “If he leaves this cunt, I’ll have to live with him and put up with his small dick every night. No thanks.”
Right off the bat, Sarah had taken to calling her Tina. It was not the first time her name had been shortened. Her Algebra teacher, Ms. Dalton, had also called her Tina. Christina liked her name just fine, but was cool with whatever anyone else liked, especially Sarah. She was in awe of this girl. Sarah had it all; looks, grit, coolness, and she had the attitude to make it all work. Christina couldn’t remember ever seeing a woman so strong, so sure of herself, so in control.
“What will you do if he tells you he wants to leave her?” she asked, scooting her bottom up against the headboard.
Sarah’s eyes narrowed, her expression like a junkyard dog; mean, and nasty. “Let’s just hope for his sake, he isn’t that fucking dumb.”
The look didn’t quite fit her beauty; it was too dark, too heavy. Christina didn’t like it. Sarah Ford was something all right, but Christina wasn’t sure what.
Present Day
The second floor hallway was different, yet the same. It took Jeff a minute to figure it out. The light at the opposite end went out, and he realized what it was–the portraits lining the corridor walls were all upside down.
Approaching room 211, the second light from the end went out, then the next, and then the next. He stopped.
“They won’t stop screaming.”
Jeff turned to find Gale Thompson standing directly behind him. He hadn’t heard the tall blonde creep up on him, and found it unnerving. Her ice cold blue eyes stared beyond him. Turning to see what she was looking at, he was terror-stricken by the two people approaching from the shadowy end of the hallway.
The tall guy from room 213 and a beautiful dark-haired girl he had never seen before stalked in their direction. The big guy, wearing a blood-covered grin, carried something in his hand that was dripping all over the plush maroon hallway carpet. The severed head of Ben Thompson. The dark-haired girl’s long, sky blue gown was also splattered with blood. Black orbs stared out from their skulls in place of eyes. Depthless, yet infinite—no white, no color, just perfect darkness.
Jeff tried to retreat, backing into the tall blonde whose husband’s head was in this monster’s hands, but she didn’t budge. He turned backed to her and found her blue irises had also gone cold. She unleashed a heart-stopping scream as the blood began to seep from the corners of black eyes.
Jeff Braun woke up screaming and sat bolt upright in his hotel bed. Sweat, exuding from every pour, slicked his bare chest and back. He frantically searched for the lamp on the night stand, knocking the alarm clock to the floor. The little black box landed with a soft thud. He found the switch, and with a trembling hand, turned the bedside light on.
He swung his legs out of from under the heavy covers and placed his feet on the plush carpeting feeling the full fibers between his toes. Bending over, he buried his face in his sweaty palms, trying to rub the nightmare away. His right leg was shaking up a storm, a nervous tick he’d had since he was a kid. He saw the dark pools that served eyes of the people from his dream flash across his mind.
He jumped up from the bed. “Fuck.”
He was in room 109. On average, he slept at the hotel about once a week, usually when he hadn’t gotten much sleep the day before, or if he was just in need of a break from his roommate. Last night’s odd trio of events ha
d sunk in a little deeper than he had thought.
He made his way into the bathroom, filled the Dixie cup with cold water, and guzzled it down. He put it on the counter, and picked up his cheap brown wristwatch lying next to a blue and white bottle of toothpaste.
9:38
He’d slept the entire day away. It wasn’t that strange considering he had been up most of the day before and worked until seven this morning, but he usually rose well before sunset when he stayed at the inn. As comfortable as the king-sized beds were, he still had a tendency to wake up after only five or six hours of shut-eye like he did whenever he’d stayed at a friend’s house, or on the floor after a party somewhere he’d never been before; there was an anxiousness that set off his internal alarm clock so as not to overextend his welcome. He chocked it up to the dream.
What a fucking dream, he thought, starting the shower. Letting the water’s heat seep into his skin, washing the perspiration and the nightmare away, he thought of the odd couple in room 213, replaying last night’s peculiar events:
After receiving the phone call from the Thompson’s in 213 about the noise coming from 211, he rushed up to the second floor. Unhappy guests usually get a full refund– Bruton Inn policy. Upon exiting the elevator, he turned the corner to find Mrs. Thompson and her husband, Ben, standing in the hallway staring at the door of the room next to theirs.
“Hi, I’m so sorry about this,” he started.
“Shhhh, don’t you hear that,” Mrs. Thompson said, placing her ear to the door.