As they blundered on, he felt as if the hotel didn’t want to let them go. In the darkness, such fantastic ideas seemed horribly plausible.
“I’m scared,” Melissa sobbed, clutching at him.
“Me, too.” He no longer cared about impressing her. All that mattered, now, was getting out alive. He only wished he knew how.
Suddenly, his flashlight beam revealed a short flight of stairs and another door. It wasn’t the one they had entered by, but it would do. Any door would do. They ran toward it. It swung open at his touch, and they burst through it. The door slammed shut behind them.
They were in the hotel kitchen. It was empty.
Disoriented, Casimir didn’t know which way to go.
“That way.” He pointed, randomly, at a door.
But the secret door swung open behind them, and Jerry stumbled into the kitchen after them. In the harsh glare of the strip lighting, whatever pretense they might still have had about him was untenable: nobody could look like him and still be alive.
Jerry — the thing that had been Jerry — stumbled toward them.
Melissa screamed.
Casimir seized a meat cleaver from where it hung on a rack. The weight was unfamiliar in his hand, and he hefted it awkwardly. Then, he swung it.
Melissa screamed again.
The blow was clumsy, but the blade buried itself deep into Jerry’s skull. Water dribbled out from the wound as he — it — staggered back from the force of the blow.
Then, the Jerry-thing stumbled forward again, unconcerned at the cleaver still embedded in its head. Melissa shrieked, horrified.
Where was everyone? Where were the staff? Why didn’t they come running at the commotion? Was the storm so loud? There was no time to consider or plan, only run.
“Come on!” Casimir shoved Melissa toward the door and they stumbled outside into the storm, the rain lashing at them, soaking them, the thunder deafening them. There was no choice but for them to run out into the darkness.
“Maybe we can circle round,” he gasped, uncertain if she heard him over the crash of thunder. He glanced back: the Jerry-thing was not far behind.
They found themselves running toward the lake.
The rain hammered on the ground and the water like a drum, and the thunder continued to echo like cannon-fire as they neared the lakeshore.
Halting, they had nowhere left to run. Despite seeming so slow, the Jerry-thing was not far behind them. Their only chance was to dodge around him.
Lightning flashed, horribly illuminating Jerry’s bloated, cleaver-halved face. Melissa choked, unable to scream any more. Casimir felt vomit rise in his mouth, spat it out, wishing he could just close his eyes and have it all be a dream.
Fighting to remain calm, he told Melissa what to do. He went left and she ran right, skidding on the muddy ground.
He heard a scream and glanced around: the Jerry-thing had caught Melissa by the arm and, although she was struggling, her feet churning up the mud as she kicked and dug her heels in, it was dragging her toward the lake waters.
A primal urge deep within him told Casimir to run: this was his chance to get away, escape back to the hotel. Besides, what was she to him, really?
But he couldn’t abandon her. Somehow, she had come to mean a great deal to him in just these last few days. As much as he wished he could, he couldn’t leave her.
For a moment he stood, undecided, as she continued to fight. Then he began to run back toward the lake, sliding and stumbling as his feet alternately lost their grip or plunged deep into the cloying mud.
Jerry was dragging Melissa into the waters of the lake, seemingly intent on pulling her down to where he had drowned.
Casimir slipped and fell. For a moment, he lay face down in the mud, watching their silhouettes through the screen of rain. He felt detached, as if he were watching it on TV. Then, reality was back and he was struggling to his feet, running again, desperate to save her.
“Melissa!” he screamed, her name merging with the thunder as he flung himself into the lake and half-ran, half-swam after them.
Casimir hurled himself at Jerry and struggled to tear his grip from Melissa.
An elbow smashed him in the chin, and he splashed back into the water, submerging for a moment. As his head broke the surface, he was relieved to see Melissa had pulled away and was struggling toward the shore. But he could also see she wouldn’t make it before Jerry caught her again.
“Run!” he shouted, as he managed to throw himself at Jerry.
He thought he heard her call his name, but was too busy struggling to respond. The chill was draining away his strength, and he was finding it harder and harder to push through the water, while Jerry didn’t seem to tire at all.
“Jerry, please!” he gasped, as he went under again and only just managed to break the surface, once more. But there was no pity in the dead eyes: no life or soul at all remained, only something cold and pitiless.
He glanced back to shore: he could see Melissa vanishing into the dense rain, heading back to the hotel. She was safe. Now, if only he could extricate himself...
His head plunged under again. What was it they said about drowning? Abstractly, he found himself wondering if not dying on the third submergence was a good sign. His body was growing so weak, he wasn’t sure he could survive a fourth ducking. Their thrashing was taking them farther out into the lake, and he could no longer feel the bottom beneath his feet.
Suddenly, the fingers of his left hand caught on Jerry’s pocket and he felt something small and metallic in it. He managed to grasp it and pull it out. It had to be the key. If he could just get away...
With his remaining strength, Casimir reached up and seized the handle of the cleaver that was still embedded in the Jerry-thing’s head and yanked it sideways, using it as a lever to force it to release him.
He had done it! Had he the strength, Casimir would have cheered. He had broken free and the key was in his hand. He began to kick for shore.
Suddenly, a bony hand caught his ankle, halting his escape. Another clutched at his other leg, and another and another and another seized him and, then, the Jerry-thing was there, enfolding him in an embrace. Slowly, they dragged him down into the deep, dark waters of the lake.
Casimir tried to scream in terror and rage, but water rushed in to fill his lungs. Life — death — was so unfair.
His last thought was that, at least, Melissa was safe.
~
A figure, no more than a silhouette in a bellhop uniform through the rain, stood on the lakeshore, watching as the waters settled. Just one more drowning, easily explained away. As long as there were no loose ends.
The figure turned and began to walk toward the hotel and Melissa.
Room 12: The Emancipation of Olive Pickbone
By Brooke Warra
The emancipation of Olive Pickbone was not the type of affair written about in great American plays at the time. She did not gaze at her husband’s face over the crystal at the dinner table (they didn’t own any) and feel her hatred for him bubbling up silently inside of her. No, there would be no dramatic exit for Olive. The deliverance of Mrs. Olive Pickbone took place in a hotel hundreds of miles from her husband, her children, and their ramshackle home. It ended (or began) not with the slam of a packed suitcase but with Olive tearing out of the hotel wearing only a threadbare slip soaked through with cold sweat while she slid barefoot in the mud and the rain and with shaking hands scrambled to unlock her Mercury Bobcat, screaming as if all the ghouls of hell were biting at her ankles. Perhaps they were.
Olive’s hatred for her husband was not the seething kind. It was much as their former love had been, raucous and loud and all-consuming. They were plate smashers. They were screamers. She had left at least a half dozen times already, always leaving with the conviction that she would never go back, but always returning as soon as the fractures or bruises healed, sometimes far before then when she missed the smell and weight of her children. By the time
the screams of passion had been replaced by shouts of malice, there were already five little ones in the home.
Olive thought the word “home” was probably used a bit too loosely in the case of their graying, tumble-down shack. Two stories high, five bedrooms, two bathrooms. When Abe had told her about this one, the fourth in a year, they had been living in a trailer (the kind you hitch to a pick-up truck) on the generous graces of a local farmer in exchange for the children and a then-pregnant Olive picking apples. It had sounded, comparatively, like a palace. It was only after they had moved in that she realized most of the drywall had been torn out, the roof leaked something terrible, and there were river rats coming up through the drains. One of those rats had bit Abe straight in the ass, and that had been a sight to see, him screaming like a banshee and running through the house with a rat clamped to his cheeks, blood everywhere, while she and the kids watched on in horror and amusement. Olive would burst into spontaneous fits of laughter for days afterward. He had eventually beat it to death with a shovel in the yard.
On this night, Olive had walked out of work at the diner where she waitressed, after Abe had come in drunk accusing her of having an affair with everyone from the busboy to the manager. He had smashed up a few of the barstools and punched Mr. Dickie in the eye. After he left, Olive had looked around at her friends and co-workers, some of the girls huddled behind the counter clutching the neck of their puke-pink uniforms and patting nervously at their bouffant hairstyles, at Mr. Dickie who was still dazed and dabbing at a bleeding lip, and had grabbed her purse and fled. She had driven until the Bobcat’s tank was empty, then filled up, and kept driving.
When she saw the sign for the Lake Manor Hotel, almost hidden by the fog and rain, it had become clear to her where she had been going all along, though she had never set out with a destination. Lake Manor, of course.
The last place her mother had been seen alive.
Olive stopped the car at the end of the winding drive and sat, smoking a menthol and staring at the manor through the sheets of rain. The building stood dark except for the porch light. No signs of life, she thought darkly, laughing a little and chucking the cigarette out the cracked window.
Inside she was greeted with a non-committal grunt and a shrug by the woman at the desk whose nametag said “Lissette”. She barely glanced at Olive’s identification and handed her a key on a wooden tag bearing the monogram LM. Behind the desk hung a picture, one of those old-timey ones, in that burned-paper color, in an oval glass frame.
“Your mother?” Olive asked, gesturing to the photo.
Without looking up from the newspaper crossword she was working on, Lissette said, “No.”
“Oh,” Olive said. “You must know the resemblance is uncanny… Well, you know, my mother stayed here once.”
Lissette dropped her pen then as if she had been startled, her newspaper falling to the floor. Before Olive could ask her if she was all right, the bell hanging over the front door sounded as a man came in, shaking off the rain water and stomping mud off his boots.
“Hank!” Lissette said, sounding almost relieved. “This is Miss, uh, excuse me, Mrs…”
“Pickbone. Olive,” Olive said, turning.
“Mrs. Pickbone’s mother stayed here once!” Lissette said to Hank, a bit frantically.
Hank — a tall man, scruffy with a five o’clock shadow; the kind of man you expected to see fixing the boiler in the basement, not bellhopping in a hotel, not even a relic like this one — said, “Is that so…”
“Yes,” Olive said, glancing between Hank and Lissette and unable to read whatever silent messages their eyes were passing back and forth.
“Well, any bags, Missus?” Hank asked, clapping his hands together as if he wanted nothing more in the world than to carry her luggage for her.
“Uh, no, afraid not,” Olive said, not sure why she was apologetic for it; it wasn’t any business of theirs if she traveled with bags or not. It wasn’t any business of theirs if her mother had stayed here, either. Lissette couldn’t have been old enough to have worked here at the time, and that Hank didn’t seem the type to stay in one place too long. She’d seen plenty of his type. She’d married one.
With her thoughts back on Abe, Olive excused herself from the odd pair in the lobby and ascended the staircase to find her room. Once inside the door, Olive crossed the room without turning the light on, took a glass ashtray and pack of menthols out of her purse and set about chain-smoking in front of the window in the dark. She stared out into the night at the storm raging over the lake that was the hotel’s namesake. The lake where they’d found her mother’s body, years before.
“What were you doing, Mama?” Olive whispered just as lightning struck, and in the flash a woman’s form seemed to float above the waters of the lake. Olive jumped, dumping the ashtray into her lap. She shook her head and brushed the ash off the uniform she still wore. “Jesus Christ, Olive Pickbone, get a grip.”
Glancing again out over the lake, Olive saw nothing in the waters other than the ripples created by the rainfall. Nothing to worry about, no specters here, she told herself. Shivering, she stubbed out her last cigarette and crossed the room. She stripped off her uniform and fell into bed wearing only her slip, hoping for a deep sleep.
She didn’t know why she had come here, anyway. She had accepted her mother’s fate years ago. She didn’t know why Abe’s outburst had sent her running, except that this time he had taken it outside of their home. It was one thing to come into work with a black eye and blame it on the doorway: plenty of women did that. It didn’t warrant much outside of a gentle pat on the shoulder by a sympathetic female friend, and the men had the decency to keep their eyes averted. Certainly no one talked about it. But now he had gone and busted up the diner and socked her boss in the mouth. She couldn’t say she was much sorry for that last bit. She hadn’t been having an affair with the manager, but he had a nasty habit of pinching her ass and asking lewd questions whenever no one was looking. So, no, it was all right that Abe had laid one on the old perv. But the girls would talk openly now about all the bruises she’d shown up to work with, or how Abe’s truck was always outside the inn where he sat drinking beer like it was his patriotic duty to do so, rather than working at his door-to-door sales job. They’d talk about how those Pickbone kids were always going to school with ratty clothes and empty bellies because Abe took all Olive’s tips for gambling and booze, and how she’d be better off without a no-good, deadbeat louse like that, and didn’t she see what it was doing to her poor children?
Olive pulled the pillow tight around her ears and let out a howl to stop the voices of her co-workers from buzzing in her head.
“Stop!” she shouted, and they did. With that, thinking of the dirty, upturned faces of her children, Olive fell into a deep sleep.
In the dream, Olive is six or seven years old and her father has just come home. He has been gone all night to go fetch back her mother, who had left home a few days earlier. Irma was the town looney. An embarrassment, her father often said. He’d had to drop her off at a place he called “the clinic” several times for her “sabbaticals”. It was often remarked upon in town what a burden that Irma was on poor Charles, who was always caring for little Olive while Irma, her mother, lazed about in the nuthouse making crochet doilies and talking about her feelings. This time, though, Irma has run off on her own, has packed a suitcase and left in the middle of the night, and Olive’s father has trekked out into the raging storm to find her and bring her back.
“Did you find her, Daddy?” Olive asks, her face hopeful.
“Your ma’s run off,” he says. “She won’t be back.”
With that, he walks out of the room, leaving Olive to make sense of the finality of what he’s just said.
In the hotel room, Olive wakes to the sound of her name. The voice is unfamiliar to her but the tone is firm, almost urgent, a warning.
“Olive.”
Her eyes pop open wide. She cannot breathe. Sh
e cannot move. It takes her a moment to remember where she is, to make out the shape of the little table by the window, the frame of the bathroom door. She remembers now. Lake Manor. She is at Lake Manor with her mother—
No. Her mother is not here. Her mother is dead.
God, if she could just take a breath or stretch. She needs a cigarette, and to pee, badly. It takes some minutes before Olive realizes she is paralyzed, and when she does, she tumbles helplessly back into the dream.
In the dream, little Olive has grown up. She discovers the truth of her mother’s disappearance when her father passes away and she finds an obituary, yellowed and pressed between the pages of his Bible. Of course, part of her has always known. There have been whispers around town, the pitying stares, rumors. But now Olive holds the proof in her hands.
It reads: Irma Goodwin, 32 years of age, passed away this last Friday at Lake Manor Hotel, of a self-inflicted knife-wound to the throat. She leaves behind her husband Charles and daughter Olive.
“Olive!”
The voice again, this time angry with her, losing patience. Olive’s eyes open wide and she is again aware that she cannot draw her breath in, cannot move, cannot even turn her head. She is also aware that she is not alone in this room.
From the corner of her eye, where her gaze is fixed due to her inability to move her head, Olive observes a puddle of water spreading across the carpeted floor. In the puddle, seemingly appearing as she watches, is a pair of feet. A woman’s, she thinks, by the size. In horror she watches as first one, then the other, takes a step toward her. She cannot scream, though she opens her mouth to do so, and nothing but a raspy whisper squeaks out between her lips. The feet move toward her again, making a squishing sound across the soaked carpet.
The Haunting of Lake Manor Hotel Page 14