by Steve Bryant
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The author makes no claims to, but instead acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the word marks mentioned in this work of fiction.
Copyright © 2016 by Steve Bryant
MCGRAVE’S HOTEL by Steve Bryant
All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by Month9Books, LLC.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
EPub ISBN: 978-1-944816-78-0 Mobi ISBN: 978-1-944816-79-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-944816-50-6
Published by Tantrum Books for Month9Books, Raleigh, NC 27609
Illustration by Mat Dawson
Cover Copyright © 2016 Tantrum Books for Month9Books
For the whole gang:
Beth, Joshua, Nathan, and Sarah
and
Max, Audrey, and Charlie
Chapter One
The Fortune Teller
“McGrave’s Hotel,” said Miss Frobish as she inserted a telephone jack into her switchboard. Cords crisscrossed the panel like strands of a spider web.
“McGrave’s Hotel,” said a second young lady. “Reservations.”
“McGrave’s Hotel,” said a third. “To whom may I direct your call?”
Behind them, James Alexander Elliott, now almost twelve and wearing a smart bellhop uniform, listened to the chitchat as he strolled past. His uniform was dark green, and three columns of shiny brass buttons decorated the front of his jacket.
“McGrave’s Hotel,” a fourth young lady said. “Oh, hi, James,” she said over her shoulder. “Sorry, no calls for you today.”
“Same here,” said a fifth switchboard operator. “Sorry, James. No messages.”
A sixth young lady merely shook her head as he passed by.
James took the negatives in stride. He inquired at least daily, ever since he’d come to McGrave’s, and the answer was always the same: no messages. This was December 1936, so it had been what? Almost a year now, he calculated. Almost a year since he’d come to McGrave’s.
It was hard for James to fathom that nearly twelve months had passed since his parents had died. It happened when he and his family had lived in London, in a little settlement called Kingston upon Thames. They were staying in a friendly pub with rooms attached, and James and his mom and dad had just decorated the room with a three-foot-tall Christmas tree. They had hung red glass balls all around it and topped it with a foil-covered cardboard star.
Then there had been a brief mission into Germany.
“We’ll be away for two days, kiddo,” his mom had said. “Three tops. Be nice to Mrs. Clarke.”
His dad hadn’t really said good-bye that last time, had merely reached out and ruffled James’s hair. James always thought his dad looked heroic because he wore an eye patch.
On the few occasions that James’s mom and dad had to be away on some clandestine assignment, never more than a week and rarely more than overnight, it was Mrs. Clarke, who ran the pub, who kept an eye on James. Although she was super nice and seemed genuinely fond of James, he had always suspected she worked for the same spy agency that supervised his mom and dad.
Oh, James’s parents never told him they were spies in so many words, but James had always known. What else could they have been, given the skills they taught him from an early age? Mornings were Secret Messages and Invisible Inks; afternoons were Morse Code and Makeshift Weapons. Along the way, he learned how to predict the weather, how to navigate by looking at the constellations, how to pick locks, and how to start fires in the wilderness. He could decipher codes, and he could tie knots. He could memorize anything on a page with the briefest of looks, he knew about disguises to make someone blend with a crowd, and he knew to keep calm and think creatively if captured and tied up. He was adept with a compass and a magnifying glass and a jackknife. He was a boy with skills.
James continued his patrol of McGrave’s, moving from the chatter of the phone bank to the hush of an adjoining candle-lit alcove where another young lady sat at a table before a Ouija board. Her fingertips rested lightly on the little platform that glided over the board’s letters and numbers. Occasionally she would turn from her spirit conversations and jot notes on a lined pad. Some of the hotel guests made reservations from farther away than Indianapolis or Dubuque.
“Good evening, James,” she said without looking up. Her name was Miriam Charles, and she was the hotel’s psychic girl Friday. Part of the day she handled the hotel’s Very Long Distance reservations, and part of the night she told fortunes from table to table in the hotel restaurant.
Miss Charles was already dressed for her evening duties in a long black gown, and her dark wavy hair reflected the dancing flames of the candles. “Sorry, no communications for you this time,” she said, glancing at him fondly. “The Other Side is rather quiet tonight.”
“Hi, Miss Charles,” James said. “Gosh, it looks as if we are going to be extra busy this evening. The hotel is full up. Mr. Nash says things could get interesting.”
“Want to know for sure?” Miss Charles asked.
Miss Charles possessed a versatile arsenal of techniques for telling fortunes including star gazing, palm reading, interpreting tea leaves, casting bones, tossing dice, analyzing bumps on the head, and gazing into crystal balls. Yet of all the arcane methods available to her, her favorite was interpreting cards drawn from a tarot deck.
She didn’t give James the chance to refuse. She produced her well-worn deck and sprang the cards from one hand to the other in a cascade, as a magician might.
“A quick reading,” she said as she spread some of the cards face down across the table. “On the house. Miss Charles knows all.”
She instructed James to slide three cards from the spread.
“These are the cards of the major arcana,” she said. “They never lie.”
James held his breath as she turned the first of his cards face up. It depicted a lady with a sword, sitting next to a pair of scales.
“Justice,” Miss Charles said. Her voice had become deeper, more mysterious. “Interesting. Tonight, you will witness an important act of justice.”
James wondered if he should take Miss Charles’s utterances seriously. Some of the hotel staff thought she merely made up her little prophecies, telling customers what they wanted to hear. Others thought her prophecies were dead on and feared them. Whatever did she mean by justice?
The second card showed a man and a woman holding hands.
“The Lovers!” Miss Charles said. “Why, James, you never told me you had a girlfriend. It appears romance is in your future.”
“Ro-mance?” he said. “I’m eleven! I don’t like girls. I don’t even know any girls. I think the cards are screwy tonight.”
James immediately realized his statement wasn’t quite true. He had known a girl once, the year he was eight, the year he and his family lived in Brazil. Her name was Renata, and she had black hair. The two of them had had real adventures, boating alone on the Amazon despite seventeen-foot-long crocs and even longer anacondas.
But she was only a summer’s best friend, not a romance. Not like Miss Charles and Mr. Nash, the night manager. They were sweet on each other, according to hotel gossip. James wondered what it would be like to be grown up and have a girlfriend like Miss Charles. She was very pretty, but she was also kind of spooky. She knew things.
/> Miss Charles turned over the third and final card, and her face paled as she beheld its image: a skeleton astride a horse, carrying a scythe.
“Death!” she gasped. “I’m sorry; you’re right, James. The cards are making no sense tonight. We shouldn’t have done this. Silly of me to have tried.”
She hurried the cards back into a pile. She was clearly disturbed at having revealed such a dark indicator.
“Death?” James said. “Don’t worry about it, Miss Charles. Haven’t you noticed? Death pretty much turns up here every night. This is McGrave’s.”
For McGrave’s was indeed unlike any other hotel in Gotham.
“It would be like living in a Saturday matinee horror movie,” the man from the government had said. “Quite fun, I should think.” Almost a year ago, the man had arrived in London, on Christmas morning with Bing Crosby singing on the radio, with the news that James’s parents had died. It was also his responsibility to place the boy, and although he could have sent James to an orphan asylum or a foster home or a boarding school, he instead suggested a job and a home at McGrave’s. As the man explained, he knew that James had spent most of his life in hotels, that James would feel at home in one, and that James and McGrave’s would be a perfect fit.
Gargoyles, carved from Indiana limestone into creatures with terrifying faces, circled the building’s rooftop and kept an eye on the humans far below. Lots of buildings in the city harbored families of gargoyles, but only McGrave’s, if one believed the photographic evidence, harbored gargoyles that perched in different locations on different nights.
Exactly how high did these creatures loom? James should have known, because he occasionally gave guided tours, but this was hard to say. No one knew exactly how many stories the hotel encompassed. Forty-seven floors was the popular estimate, but the count was confused because the elevators occasionally stopped at phantom floors. The doors would glide open to reveal mist-filled corridors. Human-scale shapes could be seen drifting from room to room in the gloom, but no one investigated to determine if the shapes were mortal or even human. From time to time, someone stepped off the elevator at these floors, but no one ever stepped back on. The next time the elevator stopped, that floor might simply not be there at all.
There was also the issue of how many cellars, basements, and sub-basements the building housed. All that could be said was that guests could descend very deep into the earth, to realms best not visited. Visitors and staff swore that something in the wine cellar moaned constantly. Old timers claimed it was the ghost of the English explorer Henry Hudson, one of the first postmortals to gravitate to McGrave’s after the hotel was erected. According to hotel lore, the famous explorer haunted the wine cellar so he could drink there, to console himself over his death at the hands of mutineers. Whatever the reason, the staff was proud that a celebrity ghost, an important historical figure, might choose McGrave’s as its final resting place.
Of the solid, physical floors, those that could be relied upon to be there on a return visit, room accommodations varied greatly. Some rooms had bars on the windows; others had cages inside the rooms proper. Some had vaulted ceilings that permitted bats to circle in the high shadows; others were as small and cramped as the inside of a mausoleum. Some had spacious beds for those who used such items; others had satin-lined oblong boxes that closed.
Locating the hotel in the city was easy. All one had to do was look for the dark cloud that hovered above the building daily. A hundred feet above the high-strung gargoyles, it roosted in the sky like a perpetual harbinger of gloom. Meteorologists debated the atmospherics that could cause such a localized phenomenon, and a few felt it had more to do with magic than science. All they could agree on was to label it cumulonimbus, meaning a dark fluffy cloud that was always about to rain. Once in a while, the cloud crackled with lightning to remind passersby of its presence.
This was one of those times. As Miss Charles scooped her cards back into her box, James heard the cloud’s distinctive rumbling and hoped it didn’t portend that trouble was brewing up there. Trouble visited McGrave’s too often.
Chapter Two
The Guest List
James bid adieux to Miss Charles and walked toward the lobby, unconcerned by thoughts of Justice, Romance, and Death. It was time for him to report for duty, and he looked forward to the night ahead.
The fastest route from Reservations to the Grand Lobby was to take the shortcut through the Pearly Gates Gallery. This ritzy shopping corridor featured a hotel gift shop called Last Wishes, a luggage emporium called You Can Take It With You, and a bridal boutique called Beyond the Veil. As he passed the boutique, James paused to look himself over in a full-length mirror. Pleased with what he saw, he felt certain he would pass Mr. Nash’s evening’s inspection. The mannequin brides in Beyond the Veil’s window favored him with painted smiles as he adjusted the small flat cap on his head, tilting it to just shy of rakish.
When James first came to McGrave’s, there were no bellhop uniforms his size, so his had to be specially tailored. The shiny buttons that gleamed against the front of his dark green jacket and the crisp black stripes running down his trousers and around his jacket cuffs gave the outfit an almost military look. He could imagine himself in a military uniform if he were older and if the war everyone was talking about actually started up. That battle would be for another time. Tonight’s battle, as always, was to provide first-rate service to the hotel’s guests. On some nights, that simply meant keeping them alive. On many nights, it meant bringing all of James’s special skills into play.
The six bellhops on night duty stood at attention at the circular Front Desk in the Grand Lobby. In addition to James, there were, in descending order by height: Roderick, Spats, Joey, Mick, and Duke. Although James was a full head shorter and considerably younger than the others, he was pleased to be a valuable member of the McGrave’s staff. He couldn’t carry as much luggage as the older boys, but he quickly learned to compensate by piling baggage on a wheeled cart he had found in the basement, where the coffins were stacked.
“Hands,” commanded Mr. Nash. Mr. Nash was thirty-five, an Illinois boy educated overseas at Trinity College, Oxford, where he had created a bit of an academic stir with his thesis on Victorian ghost stories. His dark hair had begun to turn to gray over his ears, for it wasn’t easy being the night manager at McGrave’s, where the ghost stories were more a nightly state of affairs than the stuff of literary imagining. He wore a dark blue suit with a white carnation in the buttonhole of his lapel.
At once, the boys extended their hands, palms down, fingers straight. Sixty clean fingers passed muster; fingernails sparkled. On cue, the boys then flipped their hands palms up. Clean hands were expected at McGrave’s.
Mr. Nash passed out the assignments and sent most of the boys to their stations. James lingered behind a bit, as he often did.
“Sorry, Jim, boy, no one has asked for you today.”
James appreciated that every staff member knew he was longing for a message from his parents. James knew full well that they were dead, of course, but he hoped they had left a message behind. It must have gone astray.
Tonight, however, something was amiss. James didn’t like the look on Mr. Nash’s face. Mr. Nash’s eyes twitched, his neck muscles looked tense, and tiny beads of sweat collected on his temples. This was unusual, as Mr. Nash was always in command at McGrave’s.
“Is everything all right?” James said. “You look worried, sir.”
“Do I? Sorry, most unprofessional. Unbecoming for an Oxford man. I shall try to better conceal my feelings. It’s that, ah, we’ve had a call. We could be receiving a special guest later this evening. A VIP, to be sure.”
VIPs at McGrave’s were tricky. As at most hotels, they expected the best suites, tiptop service, and world-class flattery. Unlike what was expected at most hotels, some of their requests bordered on the extreme. A bellhop didn’t mind being a late-night servant, but he didn’t want to be
a late-night snack.
“Who, sir?”
“Oh, ah, never you mind, Jim. Never you mind. He is often expected in many places, so he may not turn up at all. No point in worrying you by mentioning his name. Now, off you go, lad. We’ve plenty of our usual run of guests to entertain us. We’re still awaiting a Broadway celebrity, a contingent of foreigners, and a pair of newlyweds. As always, make old Mr. McGrave proud. I know you will.”
The Grand Lobby soared four stories from the marble lobby floor to the frescoed ceiling with its paintings of brooding storm clouds. Its most prominent feature was the gigantic framed painting of Thaddeus McGrave himself. Standing hands on hips, Mr. McGrave glared down at his patrons and staff, and all who looked up at the painting would swear the eyes followed them as they moved about. It was said that, by the middle of the nineteenth century, Thaddeus McGrave owned half the cemeteries and a third of the funeral homes in the Northeast. He had learned early on that there was money to be made from death, and it therefore came as no surprise that he would erect a hotel that was bedfellows with death.
As James studied the painting, he guessed that not all was well with Thaddeus McGrave. From his vantage point in his gilded frame, opposite the grand clock that ticked off the hours in giant golden Roman numerals, Mr. McGrave no doubt did not like what he was seeing and hearing. The talk of an overseas war weighed on everyone’s mood. According to Mr. Nash, Mr. McGrave always felt that death in moderation was a bit of a good thing. It gave a place an edge, a subtext, something to discuss over an evening’s glass of wine, or a reason to keep one eye open during a night’s stay at a chancy hotel. Mr. Nash pointed to the eighteen-foot-tall Christmas tree in the lobby, with glass ornaments shaped like grinning human skulls, as quite the right touch. On the other hand, James realized, death on the scale of war took the fun out of it. It rankled the staff. As James well knew, Chef Anatole, the hotel’s celebrated master cook, couldn’t bear the thought of foreign boots tramping into his beloved Paris, and it showed in his recently uninspired dishes. Maurice, the night waiter, hailed from Austria and didn’t mind if you were displeased with your filet mignon or a little light on your tip, but he gave customers the stink eye if they were German. Mr. Nash worried about bombs falling on his old college in England, and that in turn worried Miss Charles to see him so distracted. As to Miss Charles herself, her fingers were getting chafed from constantly shuffling and re-dealing her tarot cards, but it was to no avail. The cards simply refused to say anything good about Europe. Far above, according to staff whispers, even the gargoyles were getting more fidgety than usual.