Kelly, sixteen, leaned across the seat to look past her sister. “Ugh is right. We’ll never get to go swimming if it keeps this up.”
“Good!” Rose said fervently, checking the skies with a new appreciation. “You and your swimming. Who in their right mind wants to be under the water, unless you’re a fish?” She shuddered.
A voice from the front seat weighed in with finality: “Nobody is going swimming in this lake, rain or no rain, so there’s no point worrying about it.” Mrs. Jordan, their mother, had been adamant from the start that there would be no swimming on this vacation. Lakes were dirty, and that wasn’t even counting the possibility of brain-eating amoebas and the bodies of long-dead plague victims.
“Oh, Mom, don’t start again,” moaned Kelly, as she peered longingly out the window at the vast expanse of water by the hotel. She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again, blinking, squinting to focus.
Rose poked her in the arm. “What? What’s wrong with your eyes?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. I thought it was— nothing.”
“What sort of nothing?” Rose lowered her voice to a whisper, glancing at their parents in the front seat. “Did you see a ghost?”
The girls had been ghost-crazy since learning they were coming to Lake Manor Hotel. The internet was a treasure trove of ghost-hunting tidbits about the hotel and surrounding area, and especially the lake. Stories that purported to debunk the ghost legends only fueled their interest, being filed in the category of “cover-ups,” and their parents had found it necessary to clamp down on their excitement by forbidding them to hunt ghosts. Which, of course, made it more exciting. And more likely.
“No, nothing like a ghost. I just saw … it looked like it was raining upside down. Like the rain was coming out of the lake.” Kelly blushed. “I know it sounds stupid.”
Rose dared to peek, out of the corner of her eye, but the rain was definitely coming down, not going up. She scratched absentmindedly at the back of her hand where the raindrops had chilled her skin. Paradoxically, her hand felt hot. “Yeah, it does. Idiot.” But she looked out the window again, just to be sure.
~
Kelly chomped theatrically at a piece of bacon, as Rose wrinkled her nose and shuddered.
“That’s disgusting. A living being had to die for that, you know.” Rose’s age-old argument was lost on her carnivorous sister, who chewed loudly at her, grinning with her mouth full. Luckily, Mr. and Mrs. Jordan had already finished breakfast and gone outside for a walk — the new day having dawned sunny and clear with no hint of rain — leaving the girls to their manners.
“I didn’t kill anything. It was already dead. I’m just making sure it doesn’t go to waste, and—” She broke off, staring across the room. “Gran’s here!”
The morality of breakfast forgotten, both girls leaped up and ran to hug the small, slender woman who had just bustled into the dining room.
“Gran!” squealed Kelly. “Your hair — I love it!” Elizabeth Jordan’s usual flyaway shoulder-length bob had become a not-at-all-grandmotherly pixie cut since the last time the girls had seen her. “You look young and hot!”
Rose picked up the bag Gran had just dropped, an ancient and battered travel case with stickers of animals and clowns, and looked around for the bellhop. “Why isn’t that man taking this to your room? Where is your room, anyway? Is it near us? We’re at the end of the hall, upstairs. I don’t know what number — they keep changing.” She headed for the lobby without waiting for an answer to anything.
Gran opened her mouth to answer, but Rose had gone. She answered anyway, for Kelly’s benefit. “My room is number four, at the top of the stairs, and the bellhop didn’t seem to be around when I checked in. But I already took my suitcase up. That bag has presents for you girls.” She smoothed Kelly’s dark curls and said, “I like your hair, too — you’re both looking so grown-up. Before I know it, you’ll be—” She stopped, her face draining of color as she looked past Kelly to the doorway. “Why, that looks forevermore like… but it can’t be—”
Kelly turned to see what Gran was looking at, and said, “Oh, that’s Hank, the bellhop. I guess Rose found him. But he’s dropped your bag of presents.”
Hank had stopped dead just inside the doorway to the dining room, and his face was a similar shade of pale as he stared at Gran. When he spoke, his voice shook. “Lizzie? Is that you? I thought I recognized your suitcase. You look just like I remember….”
“Henry? Henry Freeman?” she whispered, almost to herself, then said to him, “I thought you were dead!”
“Yet here I am,” he said, with a trace of a smile.
“After my husband died, I searched for you. There was a story … with your picture…” She peered closely at him, as if to make certain he was actually there.
“And I thought you had died years ago,” he said. “Lissette told me… but I should have known that was… oh, Lizzie, it’s good to see you!” He started across the room, beaming at her.
Kelly looked from one to the other, started to smile, then bit her lip and backed up a step or two. “You two know each other?”
“It was a lifetime ago, young lady — two lifetimes ago — and another world,” said Hank. “We were in the show together.”
“TV?” Kelly asked, wrinkling her brows. She had never heard of Gran’s being an actress.
Hank laughed, and the spell seemed to break. He reached Gran, and she was suddenly in his arms. But she stepped back quickly, and a shadow crossed her face.
She turned to Kelly. “No, my dear, we traveled with the carnival. The Calvin Brothers Carnival. I wasn’t much older than you are now, just out of school, and I ran the photo booth. Henry, here — Hank, now? — he was the handsomest devil who ever worked a house of mirrors.”
Hank blushed as dark as his uniform, but he smiled down at her. “The times we had…. But never mind that. Lizzie, the prophecy!” He glanced at the girls. His hand shook as he reached to touch her face.
Rose bounced back into the room in time to hear this. “Prophecy?” She looked from one to the other, and raised her eyebrows at Kelly. “What did I miss?”
Gran took hold of Hank’s hand. “Not as much as we did. A lifetime wasted, on an old woman’s words.”
Kelly bounced on her toes. “But what were the words? Gran, this is exciting! A real gypsy prophecy, my own grandmother? Who knew?”
Gran turned to give her a penetrating stare. “Who said anything about gypsies, girl?”
Kelly turned pink. “Well, it was a carnival. I just thought…”
“Don’t. Don’t mess with things you don’t understand, child.”
Kelly frowned at this sudden, odd tone from her grandmother.
Rose was about to burst, trying to decipher all of this. “Carnivals? Gypsies? Prophecies? I leave you alone for two minutes and you all turn crazy! Oh, Gran — that weird lady at the front desk was asking questions about you. That’s what took me so long when I took your suitcase... oh, and it’s right back here again.” She bent to pick up the bag, but Gran reached for her hand.
“Never mind that, dear. What did Lissette ask you?”
“Oh, sorry. Umm, she wanted to know if you were a photographer, and I told her you’re the best and did she need her portrait done, and she laughed, all weird-like, and said you’d never catch her that easily. What does that mean, Gran?”
“Nothing important, my dear. Don’t worry about the ramblings of old women. I’ll see to it that she can’t hurt you.”
“Hurt me?” Rose glanced at Kelly, but there was no explanation forthcoming, and she finally shrugged. “So what about the circus and the gypsies?”
~
Kelly rustled through her suitcase, looking for her shorts. “I can’t believe Gran used to be in the carnival with Hank! And after all these years, to find each other here, how romantic is that?” She bent and picked up the things she’d tossed out of the suitcase.
“It’s to die for!” exclaimed Rose,
pausing to clasp her hairbrush to her chest with passion. “And the way he smiled at her — I didn’t think he even knew how. He’s been such a stony-face. But aren’t they cute together? I never thought Gran was interested in boys … I mean, men.”
“Well, she didn’t get to be Gran without our grandfather, you know.” Kelly grinned.
“Sure, I guess, but that was a long time ago. I thought she was, you know, done with that.” Rose turned on the water in the sink, and stood looking at the stream coming out of the faucet as she scratched absentmindedly at the back of her hand. “Hey, you want to go swimming?”
Kelly dropped her clothes into her suitcase and turned to stare at her sister. “What? You hate water, Rose. And you don’t even have a swimsuit.” She crossed the room and reached into the bathroom to turn off the water at the sink. “And what happened to not wasting— ugh! It’s brown!” She twisted the handle, and the stream turned to a trickle of muck and then ceased.
Rose shook her head as if coming out of a daydream. “Hey, you want to go see if Gran’s in her room?”
~
Kelly pulled the door of their room closed and they headed down the hall. When they were halfway to the stairs, they saw Gran in the hallway just outside her room.
“Girls! I was just on my way out. Where are you off to?”
“We were coming to see you, Gran,” said Rose, hugging her grandmother across the camera slung around her neck. “Are you going to the woods?”
“Yes, would you like to come along, dear?”
Kelly squeezed Gran from the other side. “What about Hank?” she teased.
“Henry is working,” Gran said with a smile. “We’ll be having dinner when he finishes his shift. And your aunt, uncle and cousins should be coming in this afternoon, so we can keep busy until then. In the meantime, Rose, let’s you and I see if we can’t capture the elusive mountain lion.”
“Oooh, is that safe?” Rose shivered.
“As safe as anything here,” replied her grandmother as they reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped out into the lobby. She glanced in the direction of the desk, but Lissette was nowhere to be seen.
~
The path crackled underfoot as Rose and Gran made their way into the woods on the other side of an open field opposite the lake. Rose scuffed through the layered leaves, decades of death and decay giving way under her white canvas sneakers. Gran snapped a photo of a warbling bird on a nearby branch.
“So, Gran,” said Rose, toeing a rock into the brush, “what’s this thing with the circus?”
“The carnival, dear. Oh, it’s so long ago, but it seems like yesterday, seeing Henry again. We traveled all through the northeast, for several years. It’s where I started my photography.” She held the camera to her eye and tracked the flight of a bird that had been startled out of the underbrush, but didn’t take a picture.
“Were you in love?”
“Oh, yes. Henry was my first real love. He was such a gentleman — and handsome, too! Nearly as handsome as that boy you had over at Christmas — Joel, was it?” She winked at Rose, who blushed, plucked a twig from a tree and began pulling leaves off it.
“So why’d you guys break up, then? Did he dump you?”
“Well, my dear, sometimes these things just don’t work out—”
Rose interrupted. “The prophecy! You were talking about a gypsy prophecy, in the dining room? Was it foretold that you could never be with him? Oh, a tragic love story, Gran!”
“Don’t get carried away, dear. It wasn’t Romeo and Juliet.” Gran smiled, then looked off into the distance as if struck by a sudden thought. “Although… well… hm.” She shook her head and continued walking.
“Grannnn!” Rose hurried to catch up, plucking at her grandmother’s sleeve. “Tell me about the prophecy!”
“Oh, my darling, it was just the words of a silly old woman. Now that I’m a silly old woman, I know whereof I speak.” She walked along, pointing the camera into the trees here and there, and finally stopped, relenting. “We went to the fortune-teller one night, as she was closing down for the night, and we begged her to tell us our future. She claimed she couldn’t tell us, but of course that only made us want it worse. Henry, silly thing, offered her a kiss — all the girls wanted that, and he was fool enough to think that old women were the same. And she always had an eye for Henry, so I suppose she was. She made a show of refusing, but I realized later that she meant to tell us all along. It was in the form of a poem.” Gran closed her eyes and recited,
“When two are one, then two are done
Though blood is thick, my water’s quick
When trading souls, gone one by one
Life span for two, or else for none.”
“What does that mean?” Rose frowned.
“She refused to explain, but we took that to mean that if we were together, one of us — or possibly both of us — would die.”
“Oh, Gran! That’s awful! What did you do?”
“Well, we carried on as usual, for a while, but the shadow of the prophecy hung over us every time we stopped to think about it. Soon we started finding excuses not to see each other, and we drifted apart. When the carnival had a break in schedule, Henry left to go to college and I moved to Australia to study photography. We never saw each other again. Until now.” Gran knelt on the forest floor to point her camera into a bush.
“So are you going to see each other now?” Rose bent over to see what Gran was photographing. “I mean, you could still die, right?” She picked up a piece of broken china lying in the leaves, and read the letters on the bottom: “Finger bone 12. What the—?” She dropped it quickly and wiped her hands on her pants.
“The crone has no more power over us, dear. We’ve given up a lifetime for her already. It’s time we took that back.” Gran’s face darkened as she looked back toward the hotel.
They turned back and headed out of the forest in silence, each lost in her own thoughts. At the edge of the open field, Rose started around toward the lake; she scratched mindlessly at water droplets beading on the back of her hand, which was red and irritated. Gran followed her, a step or two behind and watchful of everything. Halfway to the lake, they were joined by Kelly, who had come down from the hotel and had a towel slung over her shoulder.
“Whatcha doin’?” asked Rose.
“What’s it look like?” countered Kelly, angling them toward the nearest beach-looking area of the lake shore.
“Looks like you’re getting in trouble.” Rose cast a glance toward Gran.
“Oh, Gran won’t tell Mom and Dad, will you, Gran?” Kelly turned pleading eyes toward their grandmother, who returned an uncharacteristically stoic look.
“Kelly, you must not swim in the lake, and it has nothing to do with your parents’ wishes. There are things here, dangerous things, that you don’t understand, and you must take me at my word. Promise me you won’t go in the lake.”
“What kind of things?” Kelly demanded. “We know about the ghosts. We looked this place up on the internet. But the lake isn’t really full of bodies, is it? I mean, it couldn’t be. That’s just a story. Isn’t it?” She looked uncertainly toward the mist-covered water, waves stirred up by an unseen wind lapping at the rickety pier.
“Well, there are stories and then there are stories,” said Gran, cryptically. “But yes, there are at least a few bodies in this lake. Which is as good a reason as any for you to stay clear of it.” She stopped at the edge of the rocky beach as the girls walked down to get a better look at the fog offshore and the skeletons of trees reaching out of the depths. A pair of marble-green eyes watched them from a dark puddle of mud, which oozed and bubbled, throwing droplets of mud and water toward them.
A commotion from up at the hotel reached their ears, and they turned to see what it was about. A car had pulled up at the top of the drive and was disgorging a number of people of various sizes, some of whom were running around and squealing in excitement.
“The cousin
s!” said Rose, and she turned and ran off up the hill, the lake forgotten. Kelly followed like a shot; Gran caught the towel as it fell off her shoulder, then looked back to the gelatinous pile of ooze. They stared at each other without blinking, for long minutes, before Gran turned to go back up to the hotel.
~
“Gran, come and take our picture!” Chloe, at ten the nearest cousin in age, lifted a hand to wave at their grandmother and fell out of the headstand she was doing on the grass. “Wait, let me get up again.”
Her sister Grace, nine, waited for her to get upside-down and then poked her in the belly, making her fall to the grass again.
“Grace, stop it, you idiot!”
Gran pointed her camera patiently toward the girls and peered through the lens, snapping an occasional shot while she waited for the would-be circus performers to settle in.
“Here, Gran, take one with my phone,” said Kelly, handing her phone off as she went to join her cousins. She held Chloe’s feet up in the air, steadying her so that Grace could do her headstand and lean on her sister. Kelly held one foot from each girl, placing them over her ears and making a face for the camera.
When that shot was complete, Kelly reclaimed her phone and then backed off to take a picture of the cousins with Gran, who had been dragged laughingly into the mayhem.
“So how did it go with Hank — Henry — last night, Gran?” Rose joined the group, putting her own phone back in her pocket.
“Oh, very well, my dear.” Gran and Hank had had dinner together in the dining room after he got off work, and had still been chatting, heads together, when the girls went up to bed. Still, Gran had been bright and cheery, just coming out of her room, when the girls came down for breakfast.
“That’s so romantic!” chimed in Chloe, who had been apprised of the love story the previous day. “Who would think, to find your true love here in the middle of nowhere after all this time?” She sighed.
The Haunting of Lake Manor Hotel Page 17