Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Thrillers

by Scott Nicholson

  One of the victims had been a stock broker who had suffered a heart attack during his honeymoon, and though the urban legend maintained he’d died on top of his new wife, the Rescue Squad report said he’d been discovered on the floor with half a corn dog in his mouth and an empty bottle of champagne sitting in a tin bucket of water.

  The second was a jumper, a documented death in which a distraught tool fabricator had launched into a frothing rant about a two-timing, backstabbing bitch before launching himself off the balcony in a fall that would likely have resulted in nothing more than a few fractures if he’d have missed the lamp post. You could call it coincidence, you could call it bad luck, but it made for a better campfire tale if you called it “the Wicked Hand of Evil.”

  The third victim was the most interesting to Wayne, because it didn’t have the glib familiarity of the other deaths, which were not much different than those suffered at any of America’s century-old hotels. As the manager, a powder-dry walking mummy named Janey Mays, had put it, any building with a few generations behind it would end up with a slate of strange happenings.

  Janey hadn’t recognized him from his long-ago visit. But why should she? He was young and happy then, a clean-shaven newlywed and 100-percent demon free.

  “What do you know about Margaret Percival?” Wayne asked Violet.

  “Just the stuff in the register.” Violet opened the television cabinet as if to make sure the maids hadn’t stolen the TV.

  “West Virginia woman, checked into this room in February, 1948.”

  “I don’t think the color scheme has changed since then.” She whacked the dark floral pattern on the velour curtain, and a lazy haze of dust spun in the sunlit window.

  Margaret was a war widow, in town for a reunion of the Camp Creek Sisterhood, a collective of well-to-do white teenagers who spent the summers of the Great Depression in their one-piece, baggy swimsuits, canoeing, singing “Tomorrow” around the fire, and talking about boys, when they weren’t sneaking off in the dead of night to meet them at movie theaters and fumble in the dark.

  Perhaps the reunion was an opportunity to recapture the lost innocence of youth, or perhaps Margaret was seeking a veneer of respectability after a notorious past. But she never made it to the reunion luncheon, because between the hours of 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. early one Sunday, she vanished from the face of the Earth. Police reports hinted that she might have been in the “family way,” and a single mother and alleged prostitute might sneak across the border to get rid of the problem.

  Hotel management built their businesses on reputation, and mysterious disappearances were the kind of publicity they wanted to avoid. It was a measure of how far the White Horse Inn had fallen that it was now cashing in on its seedier, supernatural side.

  Just like me. We’ve both been ridden hard since our paths last crossed.

  And there was a fourth case study, totally off the record, one that Wayne carried in his guts like a latex glove full of broken, bloody glass. He’d delayed his return as long as he could, but Beth might not wait forever.

  Violet moved over to the bedside dresser, where the alarm clock was blinking. “Old wiring,” she said. “The radio cuts on by itself, too.”

  “Let me guess. I’ll be awoken at three every morning by the theme song from ‘The Exorcist.’”

  The room’s angles, like those of the rest of the inn, were off by two or three degrees in every joint. Sagging floors and ceiling joists, warped window casings, and uneven spaces between cracks in the crown molding projected a sense of decay and despair.

  The unease came from an expectation of order, and the skewed geometry made a distinct impact on the brain. It added a pressure that caused skin to tingle and lungs to stutter, all tricks the mind played on the body. Combined with the out-of-whack wiring that scrambled the electrical signals of the brain, the structure made a wonderful laboratory for the living.

  And a fun playground for the dead.

  Violet reset the clock while Wayne examined the size of the room, calculating how many hunters the place would hold. He could have booked the room in private, set up some gear, and conducted his own private little tea party, but hosting a paranormal conference gave the necromancy the sheen of respectability. Plus it offered the fringe benefit of not facing his demons alone.

  But he should have left her out of it.

  He peeked through the curtains. Below, Kendra was perched on a concrete bench, pencil flying, lost in her own little fantasy world. She was portable and self-sufficient, and Wayne not only encouraged those attributes, he took full advantage of them.

  “You don’t believe in ghosts?” Wayne asked.

  “Do you?”

  “Depends.”

  “Talk to the maids. They know it all.”

  “The honeymoon sheets keep no secrets, they say.”

  “Depends on the secrets,” she said, opening the closet door.

  There’s more to you than meets the eye. Too bad. This could have been fun.

  He followed her, trying to detect her natural scent beneath the various aerosols the housekeepers had used to refresh the room. He kept a prudent distance, though the closet opening was tiny, and the best he got was a whiff of something that smelled like it had a celebrity’s name on the bottle. He had no intention of being one of those aforementioned losers, but he wanted to stay in practice in case he ever felt romantic again. Since Beth, the means and motive had rarely coincided.

  Violet pointed to the closet ceiling, where an access panel was cut into the gypsum board. “You get to the attic here,” she said. “Miss Mays said you had all access for the weekend.”

  Wayne passed up the chance for a lame double entendre, and he couldn’t recall the access from his previous visit. But they’d spent more time in the bed than in the closet. “Was this access in existence back in 1948?”

  “You’re thinking Margaret Percival slipped though here, found another way outside, bypassed the front desk and her security deposit, left her Packard in the parking lot, and hitchhiked away to start a new life?”

  “It’s one theory.” Wayne noticed black streaks on the wall, probably made by the shoes of people who had scrambled upward in search of the missing woman’s spirit. Margaret was an Internet urban legend, and Wayne had researched more than a few sketchy photos on various paranormal sites.

  “The service stairs run along the back, to the kitchen and laundry rooms. Margaret could have used the side doors, except those were kept locked because the manager didn’t want the hired help to sneak out, either. This was back before excessive fire and safety regulations.”

  “I noticed the sprinkler system was an add-on,” Wayne said, indicating the sprinkler system that hung suspended six inches below the ceiling. “These pipes don’t do a whole lot to promote elegance.”

  “The White Horse gave up on elegance in the 1960s,” Violet said. “Since then, we’ve been selling ‘quaint.’”

  “With appropriate rate increases along the way.”

  “A hotel is like a woman, Digger.” Violet made a sudden turn and her face was eight inches from his, but for only a moment, and then she flitted back to the dresser, where the alarm clock was blinking again. “She not only gets better with age, she makes it an asset.”

  “But her wiring gets a little more temperamental,” Wayne said. Blinking lights and power surges gave a thrill to those who accepted them as proof of visitation. If they needed so little to believe, then who was Wayne to question their faith? It was no different than seeing the Virgin Mary in buttered toast or the devil’s face in the smoke of a terrorist attack.

  Or believing in the face that stared back from the mirror. Where was the proof in that?

  “We undergo our annual inspections, and our hotel is up to code,” Violet said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have guests waiting.”

  Wayne stepped into the bathroom, where a cast-iron, claw-foot tub sat off the floor. He and Beth had played there, soap bubbles, laughter, candles, and champag
ne. The dripping faucet, inaudible in the bedroom, echoed with a stony resonance. The bad lighting and the rippled, frosted mirror over the vanity would give suggestible people plenty of shivers.

  “This will do,” Wayne called. “But I’ll need a cot brought in for my daughter. And some paranormal activity for my customers.”

  “Sorry, we don’t have any Indian graveyards,” Violet said. “No axe murders, no hung preachers, no hillbilly vampires.”

  Thunder rolled down the hall, accompanied by giggles of mirth. Wayne frowned. The hardcore purists didn’t like busy, noisy traffic that contaminated their evidence, and children were the worst. He didn’t recall anyone registering children for the conference, and while he didn’t forbid it, the ghost-hunting crowd generally followed an adults-only rule. After all, they tended to miss bedtime.

  “I thought the hotel was blocked off for the conference,” Wayne said, tightening the faucet handle to no avail. “I didn’t know there would be small children here this weekend.”

  “The children are always here,” Violet said, and by the time Wayne entered the bedroom, she was gone, out the door with not even a whisper of its closing.

  Nice exit line.

  Children underfoot or not, Wayne had picked the perfect place to stage his traveling freak show. But he’d already known that, because of the promise he’d made 17 years ago. Much had changed since then, including his view of promises.

  He went downstairs to retrieve his gear and his daughter, dreading the weight of both.

  Chapter 2

  Maybe ghosts are like clouds on a windy day. The ether merges in tapestry—then is torn away, and all you were is never again. A memoir writ in invisible ink.

  But that was the sky and dreams and imagination, Emily Dickinson crap, and this was the real world. Real, real, real, no matter how deep inside your head you hid or what games you played.

  Kendra Wilson ran her pencil lead across her sketch pad, threading spidery gray lines over the paper. She roughed out the hotel’s main entrance, a set of double doors featuring large oval windows. The glass was beveled and tinted, so she drew them as if they were dewy eyes, complete with pupils. It was the kind of doorway that looked right back at you, just what you’d expect from the most haunted hotel in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  Kendra wasn’t sure what was spookier: the idea that dead people might still be checked into the hotel’s many rooms, or that the structure itself might have taken a life of its own, sucking in the dust and detritus of the years and imitating the breath of those who had passed through its halls.

  Dad would laugh at either notion. Then again, Wayne “Digger” Wilson had built a cottage industry on such lame curiosity, and he had a lot of money riding on the White Horse Inn’s reputation, whether it was “the most haunted” or merely grim and gray and in serious need of a makeover. But Dad was busy scoping out the cold spots, or else the blonde bimbo who headed up hospitality, so Kendra couldn’t get his opinion on the matter.

  Which left her by herself, alone with the creatures she set down on paper and the games inside her head.

  And they wonder why I don’t play well with others. At least the ones I can’t erase.

  Kendra let the pencil tip float over the page, eyes almost closed. She’d read in one of Dad’s books about automatic writing, or “ghostwriting” as some called it, where psychics supposedly tuned into voices from the other side. They’d drift into a trance and scrawl out messages from beyond, whispering exactly the types of sweet nothings the living wanted to hear.

  I’m fine over here on the Other Side. It never rains, the flowers are always in bloom, and even the old folks are good-looking. It’s sort of like Southern California without the smog and plastic surgery. Come on over when you get a chance, but don’t forget the cheese dip.

  Her art induced an equivalent trance, but despite being dragged along to a dozen of North Carolina’s darkest destinations, she’d yet to witness so much as a stray bit of cigarette smoke. So she wished herself into dreams and nightmares, summoning up specters that delighted her fellow sophomores and horrified Bradshaw, the guidance counselor.

  Yet even with her obvious talent, she was going nowhere. Her high school art teachers summed up her ouvre as “comic-book doodling,” and even though coffee-shop geeks and Hollywood producers read nothing but books that were mostly pictures, if you wanted to be serious, you had to render nudes and faded roses and geometrically precise duplications of European townscapes. Or close your eyes and pee on the canvas a la Pollock.

  Even her pencil was ludicrous, the Big Fattie, the kind favored by kindergarteners with stubby fingers. Never mind that her mother had given her a box of them before leaving her with the Digger and six billion other people who would never understand.

  Thanks, Mom. Preesh that whole abandonment thing.

  So forget fitting in the real world. Instead, she was developing an imaginary milieu for Emily Dee, her time-traveling Victorian heroine who was half steampunk, half literary hero. The trouble was that a fictional character based on Emily Dickinson didn’t get into a whole lot of graphic action, unless Kendra copped out and threw in a vampire and let the eternal maiden have some sexual intercourse. And all she knew about either of those subjects was the stories she’d read in books.

  “Whatcha drawing?”

  She almost snapped her pencil lead because the voice was unexpectedly close to her ear.

  Whoa. Survival mechanisms failing. Must reboot.

  Kendra looked up from her sketch pad into the round, freckled face of a boy maybe 11, with plum-colored eyes sunk in the dough of his skin. His red mop of hair seemed too big for his skull. A vague fishy odor permeated the air around him, though his breath smelled of licorice.

  “Just some stuff,” she said, not interested in twerp pesterage at the moment.

  The boy peered over her shoulder, and his hoarhound-flavored panting nearly curdled the yogurt in her stomach.

  “That looks like the door,” he said.

  “Bingo, Biscuit Head,” she said.

  “Except it looks creepy. Like it’s going to eat you.”

  “It is going to eat you,” she said in her most matter-of-fact voice.

  The doors parted, glass rippling with the reflection of clouds and blue sky, and a pudgy, middle-aged man stepped out of the darkened lobby. He was dressed like a Salvation Army bell-ringer, in a uniform that would have looked official if not for the threadbare elbows and the creases in the bill of the service cap. The ruddy cheeks suggested either a fondness for the bottle or a Northern European bloodline. “Bruce,” he shouted, just another cranky parent.

  “Gotta go,” the boy whispered.

  Kendra nodded, not wanting to give the twerp actual acknowledgment by speaking. She concentrated on her drawing, visualizing the bellhop as a shimmery Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

  “How many times do I got to tell you not to bother the guests?” said the Marshmallow Man, and Kendra imagined his voice echoing inside a wavy dialogue balloon.

  “Sorry,” Bruce said.

  “I’ll make you sorry.”

  “I was just–”

  “Just nothing. Get in here.”

  Welcome to reality, Bruce. You got a sucky name and a dorky dad and you’re about to get reminded that children should be seen and not heard.

  She just had time to sketch the Marshmallow Man’s outline before he stepped back into the shadows, letting the doors swing closed in a flash of silver and azure.

  “It already did,” Bruce whispered, as if he were still at her ear. She glanced up from the page, expecting the boy to swing the doors open again, but he was already inside.

  The twerp moves fast to be such a chunky monkey. Already did what?

  She shrugged down into her coat so that the fleece liner covered her neck. Despite the brightness of the day, the November wind carried the promise of winter and the air was a good 15 degrees colder than in Raleigh. According to Dad, the White Horse had been the summer retreat of
governors and industrialists at the turn of the previous century, when the state ran on tobacco and denim instead of education and research. Apparently the wealthy elite had enough money and sense to climb back off the mountain when the leaves fell. Now the trees were knobby old crones and the slopes were nothing but brown and gray, the colors of dookie and death.

  Only Dad would pick such a dumb season to host a conference, but he said the rates were cheaper and fewer Normies would be around to spoil the fun and mess up the readings.

  Kendra parked her pencil between her teeth and rubbed her hands together, trying to flush some feeling into her fingers. The wrought-iron bench was cold and hard, corroded with age and centered on a little flagstone semicircle away from the main walk. It was surrounded by the bones of rose briars and stunted boxwood, and across the lawn a few skinny ornamentals leaned like sickly witches. A mottled concrete statue of a generic angel knelt in the grass, the Matron Saint of Lost Causes praying for a Clorox makeover.

  The hotel itself was three stories of skewed architecture, peeling paint, and sagging green shutters. A veranda ran the length of the bottom floor, and the entrance featured a stack of gabled arches that peaked fifty feet up with a small cupola that resembled a bell tower. The roof line was uneven, the forest-green shingles cracked and buckled. The whitewashed siding was faded and scabbed with flakes.

  An extension had been tacked on to the eastern wing, with little attempt made at matching the materials and style. A wooden fence surrounded the pool, but the gaps in the boards were wide enough to allow passage to any small children willing to drown, though she guessed the pool was either emptied for the season or frozen over.

  A narrow strip of crumbling blacktop led through the woods from the main highway, and the dense, tangled hardwoods hid the nearby town of Black Rock. Isolated by the surrounding forest and perched on the edge of the ridge, the hotel seemed forgotten by the world. The place probably made a lovely postcard in the summer, but right now the White Horse looked ready to gallop off to that Great Glue Factory in the Sky.