The Inn

by William Patterson

  Annabel tried, but all she saw was a mass of gnarled trunks and limbs, like thousands of skeletal arms reaching up through the soil.

  “We’re home, sweetheart, we’re home!”

  Jack turned up a side road. The SUV rattled over a surface gutted with holes and bumps.

  “Gotta get this road repaved,” Jack said, more to himself than to Annabel.

  As they rounded a bend, the house came into view. Jack had told her that it was an exceptional survivor of Second Empire French Victorian architecture, and Annabel could see it had once been a very grand house indeed. But now it was quite run-down, with faded, peeling paint that might once have been yellow, but was now a dull gray. Its mansard roof was cut by eight protruding gabled windows and topped by a cupola. A portico supported by two columns ornamented the front door. Around the house, ancient oak trees stood like sentinels, hunched over the structure as if to shield it from decades of wind and rain.

  “I can smell Gran’s rabbit stew from here!” Jack exclaimed, as he turned into the driveway of the house.

  Annabel saw the weather-eaten sign that swung in the slight breeze from an old post. She read it once, and then read it again, as cold fingers played her spine like a xylophone.

  THE BLUE BOY INN

  Below the name was an old engraving of a smiling little boy that looked just like Tommy Tricky.

  2

  “You’re going to have to tell him, you know,” the wizened caretaker told the old woman as they spotted the SUV pull into the driveway.

  “Of course, I know I have to tell him,” she replied. “That’s the whole reason I offered the house to him. I wasn’t about to just put it on the market.”

  “No, that wouldn’t have been a good idea.”

  The caretaker had a long memory. He’d lived in this house for sixty of his seventy-nine years. He had seen a great deal in that time. He’d become inured to most of it. Nothing much shocked him. But still some images remained seared on his mind. The little pink arm, for instance, resting among the cinders. The caretaker had thought, at first glance, that it had been a doll’s arm.

  He had been wrong.

  “He’s going to have to tend to the place,” the caretaker told the old woman. “Your grandson. He’s going to have to do it all eventually. I’m not strong enough anymore.”

  “I’ll explain everything to him,” the old woman said.

  Her eyes narrowed as she watched the automobile come to a stop in front of the house. Its doors opened.

  “But what if he . . . if he’s not willing?” the caretaker asked her.

  A queer smile crusted the old woman’s lips. “I know my grandson. He’ll be willing.” She peered through the window. A pretty girl was stepping out of the passenger’s side of the car. The old woman frowned. “I just wish he wasn’t bringing a wife with him.”

  3

  Getting out of the car—how good that felt!—Annabel walked slowly over to the sign.

  “You never told me the place was called the Blue Boy Inn,” she called to Jack.

  He was busy hauling out their luggage from the back of the SUV. “Yup. It’s had the same name for over a hundred years.”

  Annabel studied the engraving on the sign. The boy was smiling. It wasn’t a nice smile. It was the kind of smile that a little demon might make before polishing off a trapped little girl as a tasty snack. In his hand, he carried a gun, but for Annabel it might as well have been Tommy Tricky’s axe.

  “Why the gun?” she asked Jack over her shoulder.

  Her husband had sauntered over to stare up at the sign with her. “It’s a musket. The place dates to just after the Civil War. He’s supposed to be a Union soldier.”

  Annabel noticed the gold buttons and epaulets the boy was wearing, faded like the rest of the image.

  “Maybe we should change the name,” she suggested. “Put up a new sign.”

  Jack put his arm around her. “Hey, babe, we can’t start messing with tradition.”

  He led her up to the front steps of the house.

  “We’ll get our bags later,” he told her. “Let’s go in and see Gran.”

  The front door was weathered and flaking with old paint. Jack rapped hard with the old rusted knocker.

  “As a kid, coming to this house was always so much fun for me,” he said. “I can’t believe it’s mine now . . . ours, I mean.” He grinned down at Annabel.

  The door was opened by a small old man, his face creased in a thousand wrinkles. His eyes were bright and very blue, practically popping out of his gray face.

  “Hello, Mr. Jack,” the old man said, looking up at them.

  “Zeke!” Jack exclaimed.

  He shook the old man’s hand heartily.

  “This is my wife, Annabel,” Jack said.

  “How do you do?” Annabel asked, doing her best to smile down at the old man, though she found it difficult for some reason.

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Zeke replied, nodding slightly.

  “Zeke taught me how to fish,” Jack was saying as they entered the house. “Taught me how to fire a gun, too.”

  Annabel kept her eyes on the little man. He didn’t seem the outdoorsy type. He was frail and slight, hunched over and unsteady on his feet. His skin was a pale yellow, as if he hadn’t left the house in decades.

  The place felt damp. The pungent smell of whatever was cooking on the stove—Jack had said it was rabbit stew—permeated the small, low-ceilinged rooms, filling Annabel’s nostrils with an unfamiliar aroma she couldn’t call either pleasant or unpleasant. Just strong. The house was very dark. Its small windows were nearly obscured by the bushes outside. Ancient, uneven floorboards creaked under foot. Annabel was sure the house was infested with mice. She repressed a shudder.

  They found Gran in the kitchen. She didn’t rise to greet them. She remained seated at the old wooden table, a tiny figure dressed in black with a face as pale as her caretaker’s. Her shockingly white hair was pulled back from her face and knotted in an untidy bun at the back of her head. Hands like talons rubbed each other as she watched them enter.

  “Gran!” Jack exclaimed, rushing over to embrace the old woman.

  “Welcome home,” she said to him, in a low, yet surprisingly girlish voice.

  “This is Annabel,” he told her, gesturing to his wife to join him.

  Annabel extended her hand. “I’m very happy to meet you, Mrs. Devlin.”

  “You must call me Cordelia,” the old woman told her, taking Annabel’s hand and squeezing it tight.

  Annabel smiled. “All right, Cordelia. Thank you.”

  “I had Zeke air out your room,” the old woman said. “I hope it will be all right.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” Jack replied.

  Cordelia sighed. “It’s an old house. There are a lot of cobwebs. We don’t quite have the strength to keep up with it the way we used to. During the season, we’ve been hiring some college students to come in and give us some help. But now that you’re here . . .”

  Jack was beaming. “We’ll get the place in tip-top shape!”

  “In fact,” Annabel said, “I’m a designer. I’d love to maybe look at opening up the space a little bit. The rooms are so small. If we open things up a little bit—”

  “I wouldn’t go around opening things up willy-nilly,” Cordelia said, cutting her off. Her old blue eyes shone in Annabel’s direction. “The architecture of the house is fragile. You wouldn’t want to open something up and find the whole place falling down on you.”

  Annabel smiled. “Of course not. We’ll definitely work with the blueprints.”

  “Don’t worry, Gran,” Jack said. “We’re not coming in with a wrecking ball. We’ll respect tradition. That’s what you said in your letter to me. That there was a tradition here and that you’d give us the house if we respected it. And we intend to.”

  The old woman smiled.

  Annabel looked away. She had the sudden sensation of claustrophobia. The rooms w
ere so small here, so dark. The ceilings were so low. But it was worse than that. She had the sudden fear that she had been lured into this place with false promises. They would make it their own, Jack had promised. They could start over, build something that was theirs. But if Cordelia was always going to be there, overseeing things, nixing ideas and squelching their creativity, then what sort of life would this be? Once again, Annabel wanted to run. She wanted to throw open the back door and run out through the woods until she found the road, and then hitchhike her way back to New York.

  But there was nothing in New York for her anymore. All her bridges back into the city had been burned, all her tunnels filled in with cement. She was on her own.

  At the Blue Boy Inn.

  This is where Tommy Tricky lives, she heard Daddy Ron tell her.

  How badly Annabel wanted to run.

  4

  Priscilla Morton thought of herself as a ghost hunter. Ever since she’d been a kid, she’d searched out every supposedly haunted house or mysterious graveyard she could find, traipsing all over the south of England, where there were plenty such places. When she and her boyfriend, Neville, decided to take a two-week holiday to the United States, Priscilla had insisted that their first week be spent visiting different haunted inns. She’d discovered that there were as many of them in New England as there were in Old England. Neville, who thought Priscilla’s ideas about ghosts were nonsense, had agreed, only if their second week could be spent in Florida, at Disney World.

  Priscilla had told him they had a deal.

  That didn’t mean Neville was suffering that first week gladly.

  “Really, Priscilla,” he was saying, driving north on Interstate 91 through Hartford, “it’s freezing cold out there. What kind of holiday is this? If we’d wanted cold and gray skies, we could have stayed in England.”

  “You have to admit that inn last night was worth it,” Priscilla replied. “I heard the wailing, just as the innkeeper promised.”

  Her boyfriend scoffed. “That was just the wind. Really, you believe anything.”

  The place in Connecticut had dated from 1799. Two centuries ago a woman had been killed in the room they’d stayed in, and legend had it that her screams still sounded through the house, waking guests and sending them running for the manager. Priscilla had heard the poor woman’s wails and had sat straight up in bed. She’d woken Neville, snoring like a bear beside her, but he’d only grunted and gone back to sleep.

  “I’d say we got our money’s worth on that one,” she said, looking down her list of haunted guesthouses. And it was a good thing, too. The first two places, one in Rhode Island and the other near New Haven, had been busts. No screams, no apparitions. Neville couldn’t wait to get to Florida.

  “The temperature this morning is eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit in Orlando,” he told her. “We could be sitting by a pool right now, sipping margaritas.”

  Priscilla stuck her tongue out at him. She wasn’t sure what she saw in him. He wasn’t very handsome, with kind of a pimply face and stringy hair and a gut that hung over his belt. And he could be such a stick in the mud. Neville didn’t like most of the things that Priscilla liked, be they ghost hunting or bird watching or kayaking. All Neville liked was to watch football and drink beer. But he was good to her, Priscilla supposed. He put up with her. Her mother had always said it would take a rare man to put up with Priscilla’s eccentricities. She was only twenty-four, but she knew that sometimes she acted older. Like how she’d preferred quilting bees to rock concerts growing up. Priscilla had never been into television or fashion or rap music or any of the sorts of things other young girls liked. Even now she would rather go on an architectural tour of old churches than go out to a pub. She and Neville had been dating for three years. Priscilla doubted they’d ever get married. But that was okay by her. She didn’t think she was the marrying type.

  Neville was older than she was, by almost ten years, and Priscilla supposed he stayed with her because, all of her quirks aside, he figured he couldn’t do much better. In fact, he’d done very well. For all her peculiarities, Priscilla was quite pretty, with long, silky blond hair, full breasts, and a tiny waist. If not for the thick, black, oversized eyeglasses she wore, she might have been mistaken for a blond bombshell. She figured if she put her mind to it, she could get a much hotter guy than Neville. But she didn’t have time to put her mind to such things. She’d much rather concentrate on ghost hunting or gravestone rubbing.

  “Where is this next place we’re heading for?” Neville asked, steering the car past the glittering skyline of Hartford. “It’s in Massachusetts?”

  “Yes,” Priscilla replied. “Just keep north on this road. When you get to the Massachusetts Turnpike, you’ll go west.”

  “How many miles?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t read American maps all that well. But I’ll keep navigating.”

  Neville grunted. “We’d better see a real ghost this time, covered in chains. If not, we’re heading out early to Florida.”

  “It’s not my fault that you wouldn’t wake up last night to listen to the wailing of that poor dead spirit.” Priscilla shuddered. “It was absolutely spine-tingling.”

  “You’re crazy. I heard the wind. That’s all it was.”

  Priscilla just snorted. Neville was such a skeptic. Really, what was she doing with him?

  “So what kind of ghosts are at this place we’re headed to?” he asked her.

  She riffled through the brochures on her lap. She found the one that described their destination.

  “The Blue Boy Inn,” she read out loud. “Dates back to the American Civil War.” She read a little further along. “Oh, wow, there could be a lot of ghosts here.”

  “What do you mean by a lot?”

  “It says here that there have been several murders at the inn. And some mysterious disappearances.”

  Neville snorted. “Oh, that’s probably just hype.”

  “No, it’s real,” Priscilla said, reading the history of the place. “The first murder was a girl named Sally Brown. Nearly a hundred years ago. They never found her body, just her blood splattered all over the walls.”

  “Oh, goody, let’s stay in that room,” Neville quipped. He was being facetious. But Priscilla really hoped they got booked into Sally Brown’s old quarters.

  “Then there was this guy Andrew McGurk, whose body was found, but not his head.” She shivered. “And then—oh, this is terrible—a little baby, who disappeared. The only thing they ever found of her was her arm.”

  “I don’t like baby ghosts,” Neville grumbled. “I imagine they cry all the time.”

  “And there’s more,” Priscilla said, glancing down at the description of the Blue Boy. “Quite a bit more.” She looked over at Neville. “I think we’ve hit the jackpot with this place. I mean, if we’re looking for ghosts, this is the place that will have them.”

  “I can hardly wait,” Neville said, as he drove the car north on 91.

  5

  The arthritis in Zeke’s knees and hips burned like a thousand wasps stinging him all at once. Each step up the narrow stairs to the attic was agony. He couldn’t do this much longer.

  It was time to turn this job over to someone else.

  And who better than young Mr. Jack?

  Zeke lifted the old rusted iron key from the ring he carried on his belt, the one that had been jangling against his side all the way up the stairs. He slipped it into the keyhole on the door.

  How many times had he done this particular job? Impossible to count. It seemed all his life. But it wasn’t all his life. There had been a time before Zeke had come to this house, though he could hardly remember that life now, when his life had seemed full of promise. But that was a long, long time ago. Half a century Zeke had been tending to this place. And for almost half of that time, he’d been making this trip up to the attic, twice a day.

  He turned the key in the lock.

  Downstairs, Mr. Jack and his pretty wife
were settling in, unpacking, freshening up. Oh, they had such plans. They were going to clean the place up. Modernize it. The woman spoke of getting something called “wireless internetting,” whatever that was.

  A little smile played across Zeke’s lips.

  They could plan all they wanted. They’d soon learn it wasn’t they who made decisions about the house.

  He opened the door.

  He listened.

  He heard the sound then in the dark, cobwebby room.

  The panting.

  Zeke stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

  6

  Annabel stood gazing out of her window into the cold bare limbs of the trees that surrounded the house. They looked like some sort of petrified aboriginal humans, frozen in the midst of some terrible cataclysm, staring up at the Blue Boy Inn with their arms outstretched to the sky.

  “Lots of possibilities, don’t you think, sweetheart?”

  Jack had come into the bedroom behind her.

  “I think if we knock this wall down here,” he was saying, “we can open up the room to include the bathroom in a sort of master suite. That way we don’t have to mingle with the guests in the hallway when we first get up in the morning.”

  Annabel didn’t say anything. She just kept staring out into the trees.

  “What do you say, baby cakes? Isn’t that a good idea? You’re the one with the artistic eye.”

  She turned around to face him. “I think it’s a splendid idea,” she said, trying to smile. “But I thought you wanted to respect tradition.”

  “I do, sweetheart, but you know I was mostly saying that just to placate Gran.” Jack smiled broadly, his cheeks indenting with dimples, and he took her in his arms. “This has been her home for a long, long time. I didn’t want her to think that we were going to start pulling it down around her.”

  “It needs a lot of work, Jack,” Annabel told him. “Much more than I thought. So many walls and floorboards need to be replaced. The plumbing and electricity needs to be updated.”