The Haunted Halls

by Glenn Rolfe

  There had been one girl last night at the pool with long, dark curly hair, swimming around in a silver two piece bikini that was barely big enough to hold her in place. She’d made eye contact with him numerous times, but seemed to stay in the pool forever. By the time he finally gathered the balls to get into the pool and talk to her, she was gone. He hadn’t seen her leave, but figured she must have slipped away while he was busy gawking at the plethora of other beauties. Still, she was all he’d been able to think about since. Something about her seemed familiar, but he couldn’t quite figure that one out. Whether it was that she looked like someone else, maybe a celebrity or something, or whatever, he felt drawn to her.

  Timothy sat back, killing time watching a showing of The Departed while he waited for the evening to come on. Hope whispered in his mind of getting another crack at the beautiful mermaid from the pool.

  Chapter Ten

  Kurt Costello watched the elderly couple from room 106 pouring themselves tea at the coffee station off to the right of the front desk. Something about them seemed off to him. He couldn’t really explain why he thought this. Maybe he was just projecting his own state of disenchantment. His date last night with Rhiannon had not gone as well as he’d hoped. The movie had been great, but she had been distant, just out of his reach the whole evening. He couldn’t shake the feeling that their date would be a one-time gig. Sure enough, she called out of work today, leaving him flying solo for the Saturday afternoon shift. Jeff, the night audit guy, was sleeping upstairs. He’d told Kurt to call his room if it got too busy. Things were quiet at the moment, but there was a strange currency flowing through the fading rays of the sun-brightened lobby.

  Stepping out from behind the front desk, Kurt watched the elderly couple shuffle back down the first floor corridor. As their cup-free hands reached for each other, a small bit of warmth penetrated Kurt’s somber vibe at this ancient display of affection. He watched as they came to a sudden halt halfway down the hall. The old woman with the long gray pony tail hanging down over her worn-out pink cotton sweater turned her face back in his direction. He could sense, more than see, a blackness reaching out for him from behind her eyes. His stomach tensed. Bile rose in his throat, making its way to his mouth. Engulfed by a sick flash of terror, he cupped a hand to his lips and rushed to the employee restroom in the back office.

  The little old lady’s wicked smile faded. She wasn’t sure why she had stopped here. Their room was two doors down. She glanced past her husband, Harold, through the glass door of the pool area. Standing there, like an angel from a dream, stood a young woman with the eyes of the devil. Millie Kafka dropped her steaming cup of tea, and clenched the little gold cross hanging around her wrinkled neck. There was evil here. She had never been so sure of anything in her long life.

  Harold began coughing, his hot cup of lemon tea joining Millie’s on the maroon carpet. After a few more body shuddering barks, he brought his rough and wrinkled hands away from his face. His palms were full of blood.

  “Harold, Harold? Oh my, oh my, Harold? Someone help!” Millie cried as her husband collapsed to the floor. She glanced back up at the girl in the pool room. The she-devil with the features of a beauty queen, smiled behind the blackest eyes Millie Kafka had ever seen.

  Kurt, his sudden illness past, heard the woman’s pleas for help as he came out from the back office. He grabbed the portable phone from the desk, and dialing 911, rushed down the corridor to where the woman stood staring across from where her husband lie convulsing on the floor.

  “Yes, yes, I work at the Bruton Inn out on Route 5. We n-need an ambulance. Oh my God, oh my God, there’s a man having a heart attack or something,” Kurt said. “Yes, I don’t know, I don’t know. He needs help, please hurry.” The line went dead. “Hello? Hello?”

  Kurt reached the elderly couple, and tossed the phone on the floor. He knelt next to the quivering body of the old man. There was blood all over the guy’s mouth, neck, and hands. Kurt looked up at the wife for help, finding her still gazing across the hall, clenching her necklace and quietly chanting something he couldn’t understand. He turned to see what could be more important than tending to her dying husband. There was nothing–just the door to the pool room.

  Despite the inn being at ninety percent capacity, the hallway remained eerily vacant, cold even. The man’s body stopped its convulsions and lay perfectly still. He was gone.

  Millie Kafka prayed against the demon. The demon that looked like a pretty young girl and smiled like an arsonist watching their work go up in the brightest, most wondrous conflagration. The devil’s eyes dissolved into black hollows, her skin draining of color, leaving her epidermis ashen in its wake. Millie watched in horror, oblivious to the young man kneeling at her dying husband’s side trying to speak with her, ignorant of the blood running from her palm that clenched the gold cross her granddaughter, Abby, had given her for Christmas last year–the thing before her continued to change, revealing its true self.

  The grey skin tightened, highlighting every bone in the body of the ghastly creature behind the glass. Millie watched the long flowing brown curls surrounding the skull-faced demon turn from a dark auburn to a flat white. Pain, blossoming to life in her right arm and chest, whispered of her fate.

  The succubus passed through the pool room door, and spoke empty promises to Millie Kafka’s ears. It made good on only one–the demon swallowed the elderly woman’s last breath. In a final, vulgar display of power, the creature surged forward, disappearing in a flash of invisible energy, blowing the brittle body of the old lady off her feet, and slamming her into the wall at her back.

  An impossible chill permeated the hallway. Kurt stared at the elderly woman crumpled on the floor. The black-and-white framed photo of the Maine capital building lay shattered at her feet. He stared into her dead eyes, holding her husband in his arms, slipping into a state of shock himself. The doors at the entrance flew open. Two paramedics came rushing down the hall. Kurt’s mind swayed. His skin tingled, prompting a rash of goose bumps. He could no longer feel the deceased man in his arms or the emotions that had swam through his mind like a school of fish darting from one direction to the next. He turned to face the man with the white mustache speaking at him, but didn’t hear a word. The corridor went dark as he collapsed to the floor next to the old man’s lifeless body.

  …

  In room 211, Eric Gentry was reunited with the thing that changed him.

  VOLUME II

  Spellbound Moments

  There is a magic in these haunted halls. She knew the moment she set foot within its confines, all those years ago, that she could make this place something more. She was referred to, more in her victim’s thoughts than actually spoken aloud, as the Mermaid, the Dark-haired Devil, the Ice Queen, but somewhere, lost in a pool of sorrow and rage, this lonely young girl once known as Sarah, waits. This powerful thing waits. For those who open themselves up to its glorious crimson charms, to its blood soaked memories, to its spellbound moments of desire–there is a dark promise waiting to be fulfilled.

  After years of lying dormant, silently preparing, her little tribe of breathing ghosts has finally started to come together. Each one of those chosen and blessed with her wonderful talents holds within their fragile psyches their own unique potential. Eric–big, strong, and obedient–is the ultimate weapon. She feels his rage, his love of death, and his compulsion to please. Watching him immerse himself in his work at her whim is something truly invigorating. And then there is poor, broken Kenneth. Sodomized by a friend of the family, and banished to this out of the way inn, left to rot and to remember. So small, lost, and frail–even in his dreams. Through her gifts he shall ascend to a level of depravity and usefulness he has never known. There’s also the pretty girl, Meghan, so easily possessed. Sarah shall play her with delicate precision, like the most dark and beautiful of classical pieces–a dramatic Chopin. There is a special plan for her...soon enough. For now, it is sufficient to toy with her, using her
loveliness to play with the little overnight clerk, Jeffrey, and his romantic reveries. His fun is just beginning.

  Of course, there is one other not yet mentioned, for he is not fully aware of their connection. Oh, their eyes met, briefly, her presence already working its way within him. His secrets can hear her whispers, for they speak the same tongue, they dance to the same rhythm, bleed the same song, and share the same vocation.

  Soon, my sweet Timothy, soon.

  The Ice Queen’s much anticipated gathering would not be rushed. Not a single decadent moment. Not now, not when it is all so close at hand. On the contrary, her intentions are to bathe in every act of wicked defilement, every splattered droplet of blood, and every ounce of pleasure and pain. She waits with desires unbound; as they were in the flesh, so are they now in death. All will be attainable soon enough–once her path of wicked wonders is leveled, once this collection is complete, she will be free to roam these haunted halls.

  Before she could rest, Sarah, the Ice Queen, had a few more enchantments to cast.

  Chapter One

  “Wake up,” the voice whispered in the dark.

  Somewhere in his opiate-induced slumber, Kenneth McGowan shuddered. His dreams were no longer the wonderland of adventurous, childlike imaginings they had once been. In those happier dreams, he had watched himself climb mountains made of Legos; he had ridden an elephant through a city where the streets were crammed with characters from Mary Poppins, Star Wars, and The Never Ending Story; he had played Cowboys and Indians with childhood friends he’d never had. Once, the dreams were his friends, but not anymore. In the time between when his mother abandoned him here in July and this cold October evening, something sour had burrowed its way into the lone solace he had known from his real world of shame. The dreams, no longer holding his hand, had begun filling with vile scenes of overdoses, rape, and death.

  In tonight’s little vision, the attack from Uncle Wes had been relatively easy and expedited. After the act was finished, Uncle Wes exited Kenneth’s hotel room. Then, the most beautiful girl he had ever seen brought him a small wooden TV tray of pretty turquoise pills and a bottle of water. Unable to make eye contact, even in his own dreams, he thanked the girl, taking the pills and bottle of water from the tray she had left while watching her saunter away into the bathroom. He threw the pretty blue-green capsules into his mouth, unscrewed the cap from the water, and closed his eyes as he washed the remedy down. He pulled the plastic bottle from his lips and sucked in a mouth full of warm saline water. His squinty eyes burst open to find that he was submerged in the hotel pool. Panicked, he thrashed his scrawny limbs, helplessly reaching for the surface above, only to descend further from the light and the promise of oxygen; there was something, or someone pulling him. He looked down to find the gorgeous pill delivery girl naked, her breasts jiggling as he attempted to jerk his legs from her grasp. His lungs, taking in more of the warm, salty water, threatened to cave in upon themselves. Ready to quit and give in to death, he found the cold dark eyes of the beautiful dark-haired devil at the pool’s concrete floor. As his lungs quit and his heart slowed, he heard her soft voice, whispering to him from somewhere in the depths.

  “Wake up.”

  Kenneth opened his eyes surprised to find it was still daylight; the constant pill-popping had made a mess of his body’s internal clock and its ability to keep track of time. She was standing at his bedside, calling him from his sleep, from his nightmares.

  “Hello, Kenneth,” the angel said.

  He opened his eyes to find the gorgeous pool creature from the dream standing before him. Dark curls hung down over a body that belonged in one of his cousin Jarod’s girly magazines. He thought he was still asleep.

  “Who are you?”

  “I am anyone you want me to be.”

  As if to show that she was speaking the truth, he watched in awe as her long brown curls straightened, changing color before his eyes, turning from a dusky earth tone to dirty blonde; the small pale lips of her mouth curled downward at the corners, giving her a permanent melancholy look. Cold blue eyes welcomed him home.

  He reached his hand out to her. “Mother?”

  “Yes, dear,” she said in the soothing voice he remembered from his youth, as opposed to the smoker’s rasp she had developed in the years since. “If that is who you desire, that is who I am.”

  He took her hand, gently at first, like that of a tender child in need of the slightest reassurance that she was there with him in a room full of strangers. A change broke over him, his grip on the over-tanned hand tightened. Something more mature passed through his drug-hazed contemplations.

  The angelic girl with the long brown curls hanging over her bare breasts, returned. He stared hungrily at the delicious fullness and wicked promise of her grin. Her dark eyes, now gazing into his, were in a constant state of transference, seemingly changing in easy fluid waves from brown, to black, to something darker, and back again. This impossible display was mesmerizing. The angel pulled his salivating mouth to her chest. He was hers.

  …..

  Somewhere in the fog that had settled in beyond the hotel lobby’s front doors, a phone rang on and on like a broken record inviting Jeff Braun to come out and set it straight. He wasn’t sure what else was hidden within the thick ground cloud that seemed to be alive. So many awful things had already emerged from the endless dispenser of oddities; a seven-foot-tall blond bombshell dressed in a skintight red latex suit; a boy that didn’t speak, but barked–and Jeff understood every word; a centaur whose human half was a large-breasted pregnant woman with lactating nipples–the droplets of mother’s milk still lay glistening before him on the front desk. There were others as well; a teenage girl with a terrific body wrapped up in a form fitting white dress that looked as though it belonged on some Hollywood red carpet–her face pockmarked and oozing a yellowy puss from several pulsating cysts. The parade of bizarre characters had him on the edge of sanity. And now, that incessant ringing–almost as if it were the fog itself calling to him.

  Jeff Braun opened his eyes, the fog-dream of idiosyncrasies collapsing and fading from his half-awake mind; the phone next to his head was ringing. He reached out for it, remembering he had stayed at the hotel. “Hello?”

  “Jeff? Sorry to wake you, but we have an issue down here.” It took him a few seconds to recognize the voice of his co-worker, Rhiannon. Jeff looked at the alarm clock beside the phone.

  7:02

  “Yeah, what is it,” he yawned. “I’m not in until Midnight. What’s going on?” He got up from the bed, stretching out of his sleep.

  “Kurt had to be taken to the hospital.”

  “What?”

  “Kurt’s on his way to the hospital. Get down here–there’s more and I don’t wanna talk about it on the phone.”

  Within a few minutes, Jeff was dressed, and at the front desk.

  “So what the hell happened?” He followed Rhiannon into the back office and closed the door behind them.

  She looked shaken as she paced back and forth. “I was coming to see Kurt, and you know, apologize for our strange date last night. And as I came in through the front doors, I see him down the hall, sitting on the floor with this person in his arms. There’s this old lady standing next to him, and she goes flying back into the wall, like she’s been shoved or something. I started running toward them, and that’s when I see Kurt just crumble to the floor.” She brought a sleeve-covered hand up to her eyes. “Kurt wouldn’t answer when I called out his name, and when I got down there, he-he didn’t look good. I was getting up to call 911, when the EMT’s came rushing in past me.”

  “Holy shit, is he okay?” Jeff plopped down in the chair in front of her.

  “They said they didn’t know. They couldn’t tell what was wrong with him.”

  Rhiannon stood and took her red pea coat from the swivel chair beside him as she wiped more tears away from her eyes.

  “I’m going to drive over to the hospital and see how he’s do
ing. Sorry I had to wake you up,” she said.

  “No, no, don’t worry about that.”

  Rhiannon swung her coat on, passing him on her way to the office door. She opened it, and without so much as a glance back in his direction, started for the lobby exit.

  “Rhiannon,” he said. He watched her turn back looking like she was on the verge of devastation. Stepping around the front desk, peering down the hallway, Jeff said, “Where are the two guests Kurt was helping. Are they okay?”

  “The paramedics said they were both dead.”

  A chill ran down Jeff’s spine. His thoughts drifted back to June when they had found the body of one of their guests floating in the pool. Management had said the guy drowned–plain and simple.

  “I-I gotta go,” Rhiannon said.

  “Of course, yeah, call me when you get there. Let me know how he’s doing.”

  She disappeared out the doors. Jeff glanced down the hall wondering what the hell had happened.

  Chapter Two

  Christmas week, 1983

  The disposal of Sarah’s sugar daddy had gone just as she said it would. Christina had helped her load the bloody body of Gordon Kilpatrick onto a mobile luggage cart before heading downstairs and successfully distracting the old guy at the hotel’s front desk. Sarah never told her what she did with the body; Christina never cared to ask. In the days and weeks that followed, she was amazed, and somewhat frightened at how quickly things seemed to return to normal. She had been certain her sleep would be forever haunted by the killing, but the dreams never came. In fact, she thought of that violent day less and less; the passing days had a neat way of making the details fade.

  Since then, things had been somewhat calm, almost normal. The two girls were getting along famously and having a blast running wild throughout the hotel. They would go for late night swims, inviting cute boys to sneak out of their rooms after their parents had gone to bed and join them well after the pool was supposed to be closed. They spent mornings sleeping until noon, and then made their way down to the fitness room where they would get the married men all hot and bothered. That’s where she met Jason.