“Okay,” Vaughn said, looking around the room. “Now what?”
Sam spoke up. “I say we finish exploring this level and work our way up. I just peeked in that back room, but I’m guessing if we dig around further, we could probably find room keys, assuming there are rooms, right?”
“Yeah, that makes sense,” Al agreed.
“Then let’s go.”
Vaughn was about to cork the scotch, but Al stopped him, taking out a hip flask from his pocket. “No reason not to take some for the road,” he explained with a wry smile.
“Only if you share, old man,” said Vaughn.
The group proceeded back to the lobby. Sam and Sarah opened the door to the back office and began to look around. The rest followed, though the space was tight for five people, leading each person to examine just the area within their immediate reach.
A small desk in the corner contained a series of large black ledgers, and Sarah opened one.
“Hey, look at this. It’s a reservation book.” She leafed through the pages. “But…it’s empty.” She tried another book, and this one had writing, but only in the first few pages. “Here we are. We have reservations starting Friday, September 15, 1905. That must have been the first day they were open.”
Sarah turned the ledger around so the others could see. Names were printed in perfect penmanship, and beside them, room numbers. Dr. Henrietta Carr, room 702. Dr. Alexander Winchell and Wife, room 801. Waldorf Astor, Master. The names continued on through the first weekend, with more being added Saturday, but no check-out times were recorded at all, despite a column dedicated to such entries.
“And that’s where it ends.” Sarah frowned. The rest of the book was blank. “They were only open for a single weekend?”
“I’m more concerned with the fact that they didn’t check out,” replied Vaughn. “Sam, I love ya man, but if we find skeletons in those rooms…”
“I’m sure it’s just an oversight,” Sam responded with confidence. “The hotel must have run out of money, or something. Maybe financiers didn’t come through after all. Who knows. But if people had died down here, that means they would have gone missing, and we’d have grown up telling ghost stories about it.”
“Technically,” Janet interjected, “the fact that none of us knew anything about this place, not even as legend, is what worries me. How could such a thing be kept a secret?”
“It must not have been secret at the time,” said Sarah, pointing to the names. “These people knew about it. And I’m guessing these are people with money.”
“Maybe the hotel was only open in secret to an elite few,” Sam reasoned. “Perhaps the grand opening would have come later, but some special individuals, powerful men and women with connections, got a sneak preview.”
Sarah was still puzzled, a crease deepening between her eyebrows. “But this place must have cost a fortune to put together. A luxury hotel completely below ground? You’d think it would have been open for decades, especially if you’re right that Eaton Rapids once had money.”
As Al had referenced earlier, the city had once thrived as a tourist destination, attracting the wealthy from across the country and beyond. The land had indeed been blessed with a vast reservoir of magnetic mineral springs, which were quite popular—and profitable—to those who believed in the water’s curative powers. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Eaton Rapids boasted a number of luxury establishments, each boldly advertising spas and mineral baths and miracle cures from any imaginable ailment.
Sam realized something, and turned to Al to confirm it. “This place…we’re going to find mineral baths here, too, aren’t we?”
Al nodded. “Yes, I suspect as much. This would have been near the end of the magnetic mineral bath boom, although we only recognize the downturn through the benefit of history. At the time, I’m sure the builders of this hotel assumed the bath’s popularity and subsequent riches would go on forever.”
Janet felt understanding creep across her face in the form of a smile. “Oh, of course,” she began. “The wells that found the springs had to be a hundred feet deep, right? About as deep as this hotel. So imagine the marketing of it—only ‘The Eaton’ has mineral baths that come right from the source.”
“I see what you mean,” agreed Sam with enthusiasm. “Why settle for hotels that bring the healing water to you, when we can bring you to the water!”
“I’m also guessing,” added Al, “that we’re also going to find an underground water wheel wrapped around one of the springs, which is powering all this. In fact, Sam, when you’re ready, I’m sure there’s enough left over to power your club up there, too.”
“Really?”
“Of course. Even the old mill on the corner once had all its electricity powered by a water wheel. And if it’s enough to power a huge industrial complex, I’m pretty sure it’ll be enough to cover some cheesy disco lighting.”
Vaughn stiffened a bit at “cheesy disco lighting,” but said nothing.
Sarah was beginning to feel relieved. This had all been so bizarre, she hadn’t known what to think. But hearing the seemingly inconceivable attributes of the hotel described in practical detail, she began to realize that what they had discovered wasn’t impossible after all. It was turn-of-the-century science, not magic. The miracle was in finding the place intact, not the place itself. Maybe now she could greater share in her boyfriend’s giddy excitement, without the “this isn’t right” pit in her stomach.
Janet found the key box. It was hidden behind an old framed photograph on the back wall, embedded into the plaster like a gun safe. Opening revealed fifty sets of keys, each one with a label describing the room or location number. About forty of these keys were rooms, and the rest were staff locations—housekeeping, linen closets, and maintenance, though most were abbreviations that weren’t obvious out of context. She strung the keys onto a large brass keyring which sat at the bottom of the box.
As Janet had the only purse, she was nominated for the task of carrying them all. After feeling the extra weight on her shoulder, she made an annoyed grunt, asking “didn’t these people ever hear of a skeleton key?”
Vaughn found something interesting, and useful, as well—several copies of a mimeographed sketch of a cross section of the entire hotel. The first floor, as expected, was labeled “Lobby | Ballroom | Dining.” The second floor said “Laundry | Maintenance.” Floors three and four were each labeled “Single Rooms.” The fifth floor just said “Baths,” confirming Sam’s hypothesis. Six and Seven were “Double Rooms,” Eight was “Suites,” Nine was “Gameroom | Apothecary,” Ten was “Transit—Coming Summer 1906,” and Eleven was “Mastersuite.” An icon showed the twelfth floor as the exit, the room they had discovered the elevator, and there was a drawing of the train station at the top, which would have theoretically been level thirteen, but was unlabeled, as the elevator didn’t travel that high.
“Funny how the ‘Mastersuite’ is still the top floor, even though it’s underground,” remarked Janet. “Can’t imagine it has much of a view.”
“Kinda slick that it’s a single word, though,” said Vaughn. “Mastersuite. Sounds sophisticated.”
Sam was struck instead by the description of the tenth floor. “Transit? Transit to where? Eaton Rapids doesn’t have a subway system.”
“Maybe they would have,” Sarah replied, “in 1906.”
“Hmm.”
Al interrupted. “Hey, Sam.” Al had found something as well—a gun. It was sitting at the bottom of a cabinet along with boxes of ammunition.
“Whoa, wasn’t expecting that,” Sam responded.
“Oh sure,” teased Vaughn. “Cause all this other shit, you were totally expecting.”
Al gingerly picked up the weapon, being sure to aim at the ground, just in case. “Looks like a Colt double action revolver, from…” Al was squinting at numbers etched into the grip. “From 1895 or 1896, I’d say. UMC ammo here, 38 caliber. Damn good
gun.”
“How do you know so much about handguns,” Vaughn asked.
“Lived in Detroit for thirty years. You pick some things up.”
Vaughn laughed. “Come on.”
“Nah, my dad had a lot of old guns. He may have even had one like this, or even an older model. It should still fire just fine, and the ammo looks new.”
Sarah was uncomfortable. She had never liked guns, and lacked Al’s confidence that a 100-year-old pistol was “just fine.” She imagined it going off on its own, taking off one of their feet, or worse, in the process. “Can we just, put that back, please?”
“Are you sure?” asked Al. “It’s a hell of a find.”
“No, she’s right,” Sam concurred. “I want to leave everything just where we found it, at least for now. I gotta come down here with a good camera, and maybe Professor Ransom from MSU. This needs to be well documented. And besides, Sarah’s right, I’d feel safer with it back in the drawer, to be honest.”
Al shrugged. “Hey, your hotel,” he said as he replaced the revolver.
Sam couldn’t help smiling at this. My hotel.
“So are we ready to go?” Janet was by the door.
“Absolutely,” said Sam. “Vaughn, let’s bring your spotlights, just in case we need them. Otherwise, let’s look around here a little more, and then move on to…” He paused, glancing at the mimeograph in his hand. “Laundry and Maintenance,” he finished.
They all left the small office, but Sam stopped and turned back around as he reached the exit. “Hey, I’ll catch up,” he called to the others. “I want to bring the ledger.”
Sam reasoned that it might be fun, if not altogether useful, to bring the record of which rooms had been rented, and by whom, as they explored the higher floors. And, he thought, if they found anything left behind, they’d be able to place it to a specific person. “We found the lost watch of Mr. Richard Porter,” he could proclaim at the inevitable press conference that awaited him. “And we know that the founder of Miller’s Ice Cream once occupied the penthouse suite, as evidenced by the following…”
His thoughts stopped cold. Something had caught his subliminal attention, near the far floor. He had felt a breeze brush past him, and there had been a quick movement of something, by something, visible only from the very corner of Sam’s eye.
Sam’s breath quickened, along with the pace of his heart. Was it just his imagination? Surely there couldn’t be anything alive down here. Surely it couldn’t have been…
But it was. A mouse.
It ran out from behind a bookcase, fearless, directly at Sam, running straight up his left leg. Sam’s blood-curdling scream echoed like a foghorn through the lobby, and Vaughn and Sarah raced back to the room to see what had happened. They found Sam stumbling, ghost-white, panicked beyond all reason, flailing his hands wildly, kicking with his feet, shouting “get it off get it off get it off!”
Vaughn caught his friends body almost in mid-air, and Sarah helped brace him on the other side.
“What, Sam, what is it?” demanded Sarah.
“A mouse!” he shrieked, momentarily ashamed at the unmanly sound.
“Sam, where?”
But it was nowhere. Sam couldn’t see it. It wasn’t crawling on his body anymore, and didn’t seem to be anywhere on the floor. He instinctively, and with dread, checked the bottom of each shoe, just in case. No mouse. In a moment, he calmed down, embarrassed, but was still trembling as they joined the others in the lobby.
“There was a mouse,” Sam explained, sheepishly.
Janet chuckled. “You had the balls to take an elevator to nowhere and you’re scared of a little mouse?”
“He’s terrified of mice,” Sarah explained, in Sam’s defense. “Since he was a kid.”
“There wasn’t any mouse,” said Al.
“Yes there was. I’m telling you, it crawled up my leg.”
“It couldn’t have been a mouse,” explained Al. “They wouldn’t go this far underground unless there was food, and there’s no food here. Some old canned shit in the kitchen, but that’s it. Nothing a mouse could eat, not in a century.”
Vaughn spoke up. “If Sam said there was a mouse, then there was a mouse, and that’s that.”
Al began to protest, thought better of it, and held his hands up in surrender.
“It’s alright,” said Sam, without enthusiasm, but regaining a measure of excitement. “Let’s go check out the next level.”
They turned and walked in the general direction of the elevator, but as they got closer, it was obvious that something was wrong. It took a moment for someone to realize what it was.
“The elevator!” Sarah gasped. “It’s not here!”
The elevator car was indeed absent. Just one gate, the gate to the empty shaft, remained.
“Now, don’t panic,” said Sam, reassuringly. “It’s probably programmed to return to the top floor after a while, just like the elevators of above-ground hotels are programmed to return to ground level.”
“Not sure how you think a Victorian elevator could be ‘programmed,’ Sam,” Vaughn remarked dryly.
“Late Victorian,” Al corrected. “Queen Anne.”
“But look,” Sam persisted, pointing above the elevator entrance. There was a curved brass line with numbers 1 through 12 etched above it, and a black arrow that now rested on the “12.”
“See? It’s fine. We just have to press the call button to bring it back.”
Before anyone could press the button, however, they heard the dull whir of the motor, and the floor indicator began to move, to “11,” then “10,” then “9.” Sam shot a quick glance to Al.
“Don’t look at me,” Al protested. “I didn’t touch a thing.”
The elevator car continued downward, to “5,” then “4,” then “3,” then “2,” until they could see the bottom of the approaching car through the exterior gate.
Instinctively, uneasily, Sam took a step back.
six
Sam had once teased Sarah that her friends from high school had been largely like herself, in that they were all trying desperately to be unique. He pointed out that they each had at least one tattoo with some supposedly spiritual meaning, they each had at least one piercing which their parents did not know about and would not approve, they each smoked clove cigarettes they did not inhale, they each had nearly identical music collections of unintelligible metal and underground folk, and they each wrote endless streams of dark, non-rhyming poetry with at least one gratuitous use, per poem, of the word “fuck”—or, when they were older and even more angsty and anarchistic, “cunt.” When a parent or teacher would stumble upon one of these scribbled pseudo-gothic ramblings, each young middle class rebel would scream the same tired argument of “you just don’t get me,” slamming their bedroom door behind them in a dramatic act of sedition. Then, ultimately, each would sob to their friends via telephone or, when it became popular Sarah’s senior year of high school, the online blog community of Livejournal.
“That’s a pretty damned sexist generalization of my friends,” Sarah had countered, and further retaliated by pointing out the “layered levels of loserdom” that comprised Sam’s own chosen companions. But she grudgingly agreed with Sam’s observation that every one of Sarah’s “type” seemed to have one friend on the side who didn’t fit this mold, who wore floral skirts instead of studded black jeans, who dated the handsome jocks instead of the brooding bass players, and who enjoyed playing the game of pretty, preppy, and popular. Sure, these “outcast” friends would never have hung out with Sarah’s group, but one-on-one, the friendships were real. There seemed to be, Sam argued, a genuine need of every rebel girl to connect with at least one person who wasn’t. For Sarah, that friend was Kedzie Duffield.
Going by “Duffy” in high school and “Kedz” in college, Kedzie was well-liked, fun, confident, and, yes, popular. She had a smile that came almost too easily, in any situation, as if he
r gums were lubricated and any twitch could cause an involuntary full-faced grin. In high school, of course, she had been Homecoming Queen, and then Prom Queen. Every boy she dated looked like he belonged in a pinup calendar of shirtless firemen. And all the while, Sarah both despised and loved her.
Kedzie and Sarah could each have excelled in academics, but both chose, for their own reasons, to be good at high school without being great. They ended up being accepted to, and attending, the same college—and as luck would have it, each ended up in the same dorm, one floor apart, their freshman year. While their friendship was a relative secret in the cliquey world of the ninth through twelfth grades, in college, having a variety of different, interesting friends was encouraged. There were no weird looks when they sat together at lunch, so they ate more lunches together. Though they each retained separate interests, they even developed, for the very first time, a few mutual friends.
Sarah soaked up the additional intellectual challenges of college, and had continued onto a Master’s program, while Kedzie had entered the “real world” first, working as a receptionist at a local law firm. Sarah had been pushing Kedzie to become a paralegal, and maybe even attend law school, but she had shown no real interest. Kedzie wanted to find a cute boy, settle down, and be a mom. Sarah would rant and rave at this, quoting everyone from Gloria Steinem to Ani DiFranco in her defense, but Kedzie would remind her friend that even these feminist icons were, in fact, married, and that it was her choice to prioritize work and family as she saw fit. To Sarah, this suggested weakness, but to Kedzie, it felt like something she could control.
It didn’t help matters that every boy Sarah dated would become a drooling mess at the sight of her friend. Even Sam had conspicuously asked, on more than one occasion, that Sarah should “see if Kedz wants to come out, too.” But through it all, her friend had been there for her every time it had mattered, through bad breakups, through a DUI which involved vomiting on an officer’s boots, through the emotional breakdown that led Sarah to call a professor a “fascist” in front of a packed classroom, through “the Tony thing,” and a hundred other minor and major life crises that only Kedzie, and maybe Livejournal, knew anything about. And Sarah had been there for Kedzie as well, through similarly bad breakups, failing classes, the death of Kedzie’s mom, and most recently, the unplanned pregnancy, which she was choosing to carry to term, despite the father dumping Kedzie the second he found out.
The Eaton Page 5