by JL Bryan
“Maybe we should head to the basement,” I said. “Work our way from the bottom up.”
“Oh, yeah, the basement,” Stacey said. “We all love dark and scary basements at night. Nothing bad ever happens.”
Jacob looked surprised when I pushed open a jib door and led him into the inner warren of service rooms and supply closets.
“Wow,” he said, as I opened a door to the basement. “All these dark little rooms and stairways with no windows, hidden from the main hotel. It's like someone was trying to build a house for ghosts to haunt. And it worked. These central rooms are like a....chimney, kind of. All kinds of energy flows up and down.”
Ithaca Galloway, I thought. Maybe the inner warren of service rooms hadn't been an original part of the Lathrop's design, but had been introduced during her renovations. It certainly wouldn't have made much sense in the days before electric lighting and mechanical ventilation.
We moved into the cooler basement. I drew my Mel-Meter and watched the readings tick up as we descended the stairs.
“Yeah, this is where they go,” Jacob said. “The sick ones that are still here. They suffer heat, cold, aches, dizziness. Some of them are bleeding from every hole in their face. I'm guessing these are the yellow fever epidemic victims. Their clothes match the era.”
“Hey, you're not supposed to research the locations first,” Stacey said. “Don't feed the psychics, remember? Not information, anyway. I think you're allowed to have snacks.”
“Who did any research? This is one of the most famous haunted spots in town. I'm guessing we'll go upstairs next and I'll find Nurse Stabby Abby waving a bloody scalpel around, am I right?”
I sighed. “Okay. Anything else you can tell us about the ghosts down here?”
He paced in the dimly lit brick room, past the fenced storage areas and doorways to other basement rooms. “This is just where the sick go. Living people might feel ill down here. Spending too much time in this area could make you susceptible to disease, depression, all kinds of bad stuff. Not healthy.”
“Yeah, this place does make me feel kinda sick,” Stacey said.
We continued onward into the basement, the air smelling a little more foul every moment we remained. Imagine the scent of an overcrowded hospital with no cleaners or antiseptics during the hottest days of high summer.
A few machines clanked in the laundry room. Jacob glanced in there, then opened a nearby closet and nodded.
Inside was, possibly, the world's longest linen closet, shelves heaped with crisply folded white towels, sheets, blankets and bathrobes as far as my flashlight could see. It was narrow, like a deep cave.
“The younger ones like it here,” he said. “There's an old staircase at the far end where they sneak upstairs. I think, of all the fever victims, the kids are the only ones brave and curious enough to travel to the upper floors. The adults seem to linger down here, lying all over the floor, focused entirely on their own misery.”
“What a way to spend a century,” Stacey said.
We traversed the long, long closet single file, since it was just about too narrow for us to pass any other way. The door at the far end was dusty and strung with layers of spiderwebs. It gave a rusty rasp as we opened it.
Beyond the door, the stairwell beyond was steep, narrow, and dark, and the light switch did not respond. A moldy smell hung in the stale air.
The steps creaked and sagged beneath my boots as I led the way up. I waved my flashlight from side to side to clear off spiderwebs.
Something giggled under the stairs.
“Holy cow, what was that?” Stacey asked, looking down with her camera.
I pointed my flashlight to the dark gaps between the stairs—I hate those, I'll never live in a place without solid risers between the steps—expecting some pale little hand to reach up and grab my ankle. I didn't see anything in the dusty, brick-lined darkness below.
“It was one of them,” Jacob said. “A small girl, I think. Maybe she wants to come play with you. Or she wants you to go down there and play with her—”
“No sale,” Stacey said. “Ellie, pick up the pace.”
I double-timed it up the stairs, keeping my flashlight pointed below. I'm pretty sure a pair of eyes looked up at me, reflecting my light for half a second before vanishing.
My heart was beating fast and cold by the time I reached the top of the stairs. I shoved against the door at the top, but it wouldn't move. Then I noticed the dusty, grimy hinges were on my side of the door and pulled it open instead.
Five shelves of clean, folded cloth napkins and table linens blocked the doorway I'd just opened.
“Uh, could take a minute,” I said.
I did my best not to make a mess of things, but ultimately the shelves were fully stocked and I had to remove at least two of them so we could crawl through. We finally made it, emerging into a linen closet located in the back of the restaurant.
The three of us, covered in dust and cobwebs, drew puzzled looks from the kitchen staff as we strolled past them. They were scrubbing the food prep surfaces, shutting down for the night. Stacey waved and smiled, as if it were perfectly normal for three filthy people to inexplicably emerge from a linen closet like it was the gateway to Narnia.
“Busy night, huh?” she asked them. They ignored her and went back to work.
On the second floor, Jacob stood outside 208, since we didn't have access to the room. I was pretty sure that Lemmy's parents would be happy to have two professional ghost hunters and a psychic visit their room, but then they might be a little hard to shake afterward. I certainly didn't want them inviting themselves to tag along for the rest of the night.
So Stacey and I waited down the hall a bit, taking video as Jacob wandered near the door, occasionally touching the frame.
“Yeah,” he said. “She's here all right.”
“Any chance she has violent tendencies?” I asked. “I'm guessing yes, based on her mass murder thing.”
Jacob scowled. “You're making her angry.”
“Because of our investigation?”
“No. Calling her a murderer.”
“Is she saying she's innocent?”
“She's saying...” Jacob glanced at the door, then turned the other way, looking at an empty space in the hallway near him. My Mel-Meter detected a strong uptick in energy, and a temperature drop of nine degrees. “Yeah, I'm trying to keep up with her. She's saying what she did was necessary.”
“Why?”
“It was an act of mercy. That's how she sees it. An act of compassion, doing the Lord's work. She says she's explained it all to the woman upstairs.”
“But did she have their permission?” I asked. “To murder them?”
“Okay. I thought you were making her mad before, but now you're really making her mad.”
“Is she the one who cut me?”
Jacob cringed a little, as though someone were screaming at him. “No, no, that was the man upstairs. She's really insistent on it.”
“Which man?” I asked. “Gregor?”
“The man upstairs,” Jacob repeated. “You know I'm not good at picking up names, dates, and numbers.”
“Right, because that would be too useful,” I said. “Okay. So who killed the workman up on the fourth floor?”
Jacob tilted his head, listening, and frowned. “She doesn't know what you're talking about.”
“Do you believe her?”
“She's pretty stuck in her own dramas down here. Nursing, killing...men hanging her from a tree, a mob shouting at her...”
“Can she tell us anything about what's happening on the fourth floor?”
“She says to stay away from there.”
“Why?”
Jacob turned his head as though watching someone walk away down the hall.
“Jacob, why should we stay away?”
“She's incommunicado now. She said it was time to make her rounds, check on the patients. Back to her own memories and obsessions.”
“This whole place is thick with residual hauntings,” Jacob whispered as we explored the hallways of the second floor. “Imagine the floor and walls covered in transparent video screens, all of them overlapping and blurring together. I've never seen it so thick before. I'm trying to look past those, just focus on active, conscious presences...if I include all the residuals, this hotel seriously has too many ghosts to count.”
“They should put that on the brochure,” Stacey said.
We passed the small art gallery, which seemed composed mostly of pleasant landscapes and nature paintings depicting Georgia's variety of ecosystems—the beach at sunrise, the dark Okefenokee swamp, rivers and waterfalls, the verdant Blue Ridge mountains. Another painting showed the obligatory rustic general store made of weathered boards, a faded Coca-Cola sign out front, summoning nostalgia for a rural small-town past you may have never actually experienced.
Lemmy sat alone in the second-floor lounge, doing something that involved cutting up magazines with scissors and pasting them onto construction paper with rubber cement. She waved at me while Jacob glanced into the room and moved on down the hall. The lack of any active ghosts in the room probably put the girl at ease, even if it was only subconsciously.
Then we ducked through one of the nearly-invisible jib doors and headed up through a narrow service stairwell.
On the third floor, things started to get a little crazy.
Chapter Thirteen
The temperature was noticeably colder in the silent hallways of the third floor, and my Mel-Meter ticked up and down between four and six milligaus, which indicated something was stirring.
“Somebody's awake,” Jacob whispered. I didn't think he was talking about the hotel guests behind their doors.
He took a deep, startled breath when we entered the hall where I'd encountered the crowd of wounded soldiers. I felt it, too—a thick, undeniable presence so strong it made my bones shiver in their sockets. I had to fight the urge to turn and run. Stacey looked like she was experiencing the same thing, her eyes huge and her face pale.
I would have liked to warn Jacob about this part of the hotel, but that could have interfered with his work.
“There's a lot of dead men all around us,” Jacob said quietly. “They're missing limbs, they're wounded and scarred. They radiate pain. They're kind of lying all over, on cots, on the floor...and now they're starting to notice me.”
The voices I'd heard before began to return, groans and moans of pain. Jacob jumped.
Ice-cold invisible hands clutched at me, and something narrow and sharp brushed against my hip. I dodged away from it, but didn't get far. I felt the unseen fingers digging into my arm, my calf, my ribs.
Stacey was squirming, too, as if trying to escape the grasp of more hands. The moaning in the air grew louder.
“They're filling me up with memories...” Jacob reached for his head as though he meant to clutch it in both hands, but then something invisible blocked his arms from moving. “Battlefields littered with bodies, so thick the ground was muddy and red. So thick you couldn't walk around them, you had to walk on top of them. Then they're lying on cots...here, I think...the long amputation knives, the bone saws...there was a hand-cranked chain saw that cut very, very slowly...” Jacob howled in pain and dropped to his knees. Stacey rushed toward him, but the invisible hands restrained her before she could touch him.
“We need to get him out of here!” Stacey snapped at me. “They're hurting him!”
“Good idea,” I said. Then I shouted, “Let go of me!”
The invisible hands clutched harder, their moans going more desperate.
“Jacob,” I said, “ask if they know who killed the man upstairs.”
“You...don't get it.” Jacob crumpled on the floor, laboring to breathe. His face was flushed dark crimson. “They aren't...rational.”
I felt cold fingers on my throat now, and I still couldn't move my arms or legs very far. This was getting serious. They weren't choking me. It was almost worse than that—they were slowly stroking me, as if savoring the texture of my flesh.
“What about Abigail Bowen?” I asked. “What do they say about her?”
“They say...we...should talk to her.” Jacob pushed himself up the floor, managing to regain a kneeling position.
“We already did,” I said, while an invisible sharp thing slid up along my back. I thought of that soldier's rusty bayonet and wondered if you could get tetanus from a ghost's weapon. “She said it was an act of mercy. She wanted to end your pain. Is that true? Was she lying to us? Was your suffering truly so bad that you wanted to die? All of you?”
The invisible fingers shuddered against my throat...then, very fortunately, drew back. The hands gripping me all over my body relaxed or pulled away entirely.
“Looks like you said the magic word. I wonder which one it was,” Stacey said. She dropped to her knees beside Jacob and put an arm around his shoulders to comfort him. He seemed to breathe easier now.
“Did they answer my question?” I asked.
“They're all lying down now,” Jacob said. “On the floor, on those cots. Stretching out like corpses waiting to be buried. Wow. They're really still except for one guy.” Jacob stood, pulling Stacey with him. He was looking directly behind me.
I turned, and I saw him again, the soldier with no eyes, his bayonet arm resting on his shoulder. I stepped aside, and he marched right past me. It looked like he would have gone through me if I haven't moved. A ghost walking through you is not a pleasant experience. Imagine chills, fever, loss of coordination, nausea, dread, panic...all at once, sometimes. No ectoplasm slime, but it's bad enough.
“Hey, guy,” I said to him. “Are you the one who's been cutting people? Like me, for example? Or can you tell me who's been doing that?”
I'd really expected him to ignore me, so I was startled when he stopped in mid-march. His head turned slowly to face me, with a creak of dry tendons and muscles. His eyes remained empty, nightmare-inducing sockets that seemed to stare right through me.
Then his head turned to front again, and he resumed his march, vanishing in an eyeblink.
“I think your attempt at conversation failed to engage his attention,” Jacob said.
“That happens all the time. It's why I hate going to parties,” I said. “Can you still see him?”
“He's marching down this way. Not really marching, I think, but patrolling. Like he's been posted to watch the area.”
“What are the other guys doing?” Stacey stayed close to Jacob's side, casting a worried look at the hallway around her.
“Just lying there,” Jacob said. “Playing dead. Well, not really playing, I guess, but they've slipped into a more peaceful state of death.”
“So let's get going before they turn un-peaceful again,” Stacey said.
We stumbled along to the corner at the end of the hallway, where Jacob stopped.
“That soldier's keeping watch on somebody or something in this room.” He pointed to a closed door.
“Uh, that's our room,” Stacey said. “Is he watching us?”
Jacob nodded. “That's why he's marching out here. This might not even be the soldiers' usual area of the hotel. They're in this hall because you're here.”
“Are they watching us in a good way, like trying to protect us from other, more dangerous spirits?” she asked. “Or in more of a waiting to butcher us in our sleep sort of way?”
“He's not sharing,” Jacob said. “It's like it's his duty. Just carrying out orders.”
“Who gave the orders?” I asked.
Jacob just shook his head.
“He might as well be a residual at this point,” Jacob said. “Pacing up and down, up and down, keeping watch...waiting for more orders, I guess.”
“It would be nice to know something about the intent
ion here,” I said.
“I can't help you,” Jacob said. “He's all locked up now. Doesn't trust me.”
“Aw, come on, you can trust Jacob!” Stacey said.
This did not seem to sway the spirit. Jacob could glean no more information from him.
We stopped off in our room to rest for just a minute. Jacob walked around and assured us that he couldn't find anything harmful in the room.
“Some of the kids have peeked in at you, though,” he added. “The fever kids who sneak upstairs late at night. I think they do that to a lot of guests.”
“Poor kids,” Stacey said. “Probably bored out of their minds.”
“And looking for ways to harass the living,” I said.
We did a quick check to see that our nerve center of monitors was running well. Everything looked fine except for the temple room upstairs—the necromantium, according to the book—where our cameras refused to function at all anymore.
I made sure I had a fresh pair of flashlights and a pair of thermal goggles hooked to my belt before we started out for the fourth floor. The goggles were annoyingly heavy and slowed me down, but I didn't want to get caught off-guard up there.
We ascended through a hidden service stairwell. Stacey and I were silent, knowing that we were heading into the dark heart of the hotel. Jacob picked up on our mood, not saying a word.
At the top of the stairs, he leaned against the door and listened.
“Whispering,” he says. “Lots of whispering.”
“Can you make out any words?” I asked.
Jacob was silent for a while, then finally said, “I think they're talking about us. They know we're coming.”
“And they're...really happy about it?” Stacey ventured. “Planning a fun surprise party for us?”
“They sound a little less friendly than that.” Jacob took a breath and clicked on the tactical flashlight we'd loaned him. Stacey and I did the same, trusting him to know when danger lay ahead. The electricity on the fourth floor was hardly reliable, anyway.
We pushed open the door and emerged into lightless service catacombs, the place where Katherine Moore would have worked as a servant while being initiated into Ithaca Galloway and Gregor Zagan's inner circle. Layers of wallpaper and paint remnants clung to the walls. In one room, a table with a sewing machine that must have been a hundred years old stood against one wall, the broken remnants of a chair heaped in front of it. A mess of rotten cloth lay under a layer of dust in one corner.