The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2015 Edition

by Paula Guran

  I could collect this data myself, however.

  I had a theoretical model. The next step was to compare it to observation.

  Downtown there was one hotel with a famous glass skywalk across to a coliseum where a certain major music act was performing. I’d seen the lines snaking back from ticket booths all week, and the parking garage next to the coliseum already showed evidence of illegal tents. There were columns in the newspaper about college students renting their apartments for the weekend and getting enough to pay the month’s rent.

  I’d had enough bad luck. Perhaps I was due a touch of providence. Lady Science will eventually smile down at the strictest of her adherents, yes. The most devout.

  It took some work on my part too, however.

  At what I deemed the busiest period at the registration desk, when the three clerks manning the counter seemed almost to the end of their shift, perhaps making them less conscientious regarding matters of policy—any problems they cause will be problems for the next shift—I ambled up, began making my case. It took theatrics and intimidation and finally the threat of a diabetic coma (I had purchased the requisite bracelet identification at a thrift store) coupled with assurances that I was not a fan of the music act in question, that this wasn’t an emergency born of poor planning or fervid fandom.

  I got the Elvis Room.

  Walking away from the registration desk, I peeled the wrapper off a bar of candy, bit into it for the glucose. It tasted like victory.

  And, while Roderick had no data on which guest is selected to die as punishment for letting that last room go, the fact he didn’t know meant that it was rarely, if ever, the Elvis Room.

  I slept peacefully. The thread count of the sheets had to be in the thousands.

  The next morning found me stationed in the lobby, where not one but two bodies were wheeled through. From, judging by the attendant crying friends, two different rooms.

  Going by the age of the mourners, I assumed the bagged bodies were in keeping. Which meant an overdose, most likely, except that one of those friends’ shirtfront was still bloody. That the friend wasn’t in handcuffs suggested that she’d tried to revive or console the dying. And the blood meant violence. Which was a lot less passive an interference or nudge than I’d suspected.

  I wanted to ask, to confirm, except I had to allow the possibility that the culprit was not yet apprehended. Meaning my questioning would put me under suspicion, which would stall the experiment. And right when it was producing such fine results.

  Risking my current posting with my absences, I became the oldest fan of this music act, and followed them to their next two cities. The time I wasn’t able to get the Elvis Room, there were no bodies. The other time I wasn’t able to get it, there was a body, but this was due to the scene I’d seen made at the registration desk, which resulted in the Elvis Room being taken by an obviously pregnant party.

  It wasn’t the kind of proof that would hold up in a professional journal. But it wasn’t anecdotal or apocryphal, either.

  I was onto something.

  The next vital bit of cultural trivia was delivered to me by a junior in college whose shoes didn’t quite match. He was leading a ghost tour in a city I’d just had to move to when my previous posting evaporated in the predictable manner; his outfit’s pamphlet had been in the shelf under the night clerk’s registration desk. I only went at the last minute, when my neighbors on the fifth floor started into the second episode of their police procedural show on television. It wasn’t that I minded the noise, just that I’d already heard that episode, from the last neighbors.

  That’s unfair, though.

  The real reason I wandered out into the night was that I was at the bitter end of two weeks of aimless reworking of the parameters of my work. The momentum was gone, the promise of my early findings about the Elvis Room not leading to an obvious next step, as you always hope will happen.

  On the stairs down to street level, I passed only a single other walker. I nodded once and stepped aside, as climbing is more difficult than descending.

  The other guest passed without looking up, his hand skating a breath over the dull handrail.

  It made me remember my age, grasp the handrail myself.

  The bus was right on time, as promised in the pamphlet. I was one of four passengers, and, as the bus was open-top, we were all glad to have worn the light jackets that otherwise would have been unnecessary.

  Len, my lore-filled junior, managed to fix our attention on his tip jar four separate times during his well-rehearsed opening remarks, and then, thanks to a headset, he continued to narrate as he drove.

  The first stop, of course, was the local cemetery, some of the headstones reaching back to the seventeenth century. Whether the stories he relayed had any basis in fact, I have no idea. Perhaps there really is a coven of vampires buried there. Perhaps there is one more grave than there are headstones. Maybe we should never eat fruit of any tree that grows within that low fence. Maybe the fog there is transportive in nature.

  Next was an old convent I didn’t know existed. Len painted for us the image of missing children and particularly carnivorous nuns. It was all in good fun. The convent had long been condemned, probably now counting as a historical monument it had so many layers of graffiti festooned on its once-imposing walls.

  Three of the other passengers clapped when Len’s “surprise” sound effect (a woman’s scream) burst through the speakers.

  Having our backs straightened was what we had paid for, after all.

  Sixteen years ago, I would have wanted to track their galvanic skin response, their respiration, the dilation of their pupils.

  Another lifetime.

  I was after bigger game now.

  And Len, unbeknownst to both of us, was my guide.

  Before the next stop, though, I should introduce my third wife. She had been the last to board, and was the least prepared, the least invested in the goings-on. Rather, it seemed this long, meandering bus ride was simply an escape for her. A place to sit where life couldn’t harry her.

  As I would later come to find out, Len didn’t make my third wife pay for these rides. They were her dinner break; she waitressed at the restaurant down the block from my hotel, and traded him baskets of rye bread with spun aluminum cups of whipped butter for the ride.

  In the updraft from the bus’s open top, her long blond hair lifted like tentacles behind her, and I’ve always maintained a preference for long hair.

  So is love born.

  I wasn’t very invested in the haunted tour myself. At least, not until the old boarding house.

  Because we were in a residential area, Len was able to pull over against the curb and step up from the seat, an open book in his hands. His voice took on shades of the pulpit, of the reverential, of the sour.

  The book was thin, available after the tour for ten dollars, no tax.

  One chapter contained the reproduction of a journal kept by the former operator of the boarding house in question.

  I leaned forward, licked my lips as I do in eagerness, an affectation I’d once been known for, in my first post-doc posting. I didn’t even realize I was doing it until the breeze chilled the moisture I’d left.

  The passages Len read for us, his voice occasionally falling into a serviceable waver, documented this boarding house operator’s observations over the course of seventeen years. And the stories her guests would occasionally share with her.

  Because she only had the eight rooms to let, and because the house was creaky even in 1922, she always had a thorough count of her boarders, and a running awareness of who was where and when.

  Thus it came as a surprise to her when a boarder would ask about a new boarder they’d passed in the hall, or on the stairway.

  There were no new boarders.

  With regularity, this continued to happen, year after year. There was never anything malevolent or unsettling about the sightings, either. Only in retrospect did they approach anything s
pooky. And even then, not necessarily spooky for the boarder, who would assume the landlord was wrong about a new boarder, or hiding a new boarder for reasons all her own. Or it could even be someone who had unaccountably walked in the open front door, used the hall as a hall, then exited out the back.

  To this proprietress, though, a Shay Matheson, the accumulation of the sightings led her to form a theory of her “immaterial boarders,” as she called them (perhaps a play on “borders,” yes): they were simply the souls who had passed on, but for one reason or another, had yet to move on. Perhaps that’s how the afterlife works, even; while your paperwork’s being processed, your soul weighed against a feather, you while away the days in the waiting room, with the living. As a final goodbye, possibly. Or maybe it’s that certain souls have to serve penance with us. Or maybe some people just can’t let go as fast as the rest, and so doom themselves to walk the old pathways until they remember what they’re supposed to be doing. Where they’re supposed to be going.

  For the purpose of my experiment, Shay Matheson’s conjecture concerning the reason for the walkers’ presence was of no use.

  Her explanation for their passings in the halls, however, it was a revolution in thinking.

  Most who opine on the purpose of ghosts ascribe to them motivations in keeping with our all-too-human motivations. Not Shay Matheson. She understood that the dead are a completely different species.

  Her suspicion as to their passings in the halls and on the stairs was that, if her boarder saw this “ghost” and took it for real, for alive, then for a few steps, maybe even a minute or two, this “ghost” could also believe it was alive. She proposed an essentially parasitical relationship, one whereby the host, us, doesn’t have to lose nutrition or body mass or reproductive capability, but idle attention. Passing glances. Assumptions.

  Further, she proposed that, if this were the case, then these lonely dead people would be drawn to places of crowded anonymity. Her boarding house. Train stations.

  Hotels.

  Sites where we’ve been socially conditioned not to engage, which would reveal their essential lack; they’re dead, they’re ghosts. Sites where you don’t question the personhood of that other body in the elevator car, but instead just stare straight ahead, pretending you’re all alone.

  Your efforts to deny that other rider actual presence is the most obvious statement of that presence.

  These spectral walkers are drawn to it like a moth to a candle.

  Hotels are their churches.

  For steps at a time, they’re alive again.

  There’s a reason that other guest pacing you, three steps ahead, is so silent.

  It’s that, under his hat, he has no eyes.

  Though there were brief nuptials to get through two weeks later, and what we called a placeholder honeymoon up in 566 (room service, room service, room service; apparently waitresses have a fetish for it), my mind was churning with possibility.

  I wanted to be with Julia, my new wife—of course—but I also wanted to be out in the halls, putting my research through the paces.

  Except for the Heisenberg Principle.

  The fact I knew about the walkers introduced something to the experiment which would alter the data in ways that could ruin me a second time.

  No, this time my proof had to be irrefutable.

  Observational, yes, but also second-hand. From reliable sources.

  The most reliable I could find on short notice.

  Not hotel employees, trained in the fine art of superstition and possibly trying to drum up tourist dollars, and not paid subjects, willing to tell me whatever I wanted to hear, as I was the one dangling the check. And, as I desperately wanted to hear it, my critical faculties would be compromised from the start, such that I would essentially be colluding with my subjects, suborning perjury, as it were.

  It was the first spat of our new marriage.

  Without telling Julia the parameters, I poked and prodded her with slight variations on a fixed set of questions. Not so she could be my first subject, but so I could hone the questions.

  I needed a set that would elicit candor, that would resist fantasy, and that would operate like those coin sorters, where the pennies all fall into one basin, the quarters another, where a dime is never mistaken for a nickel:

  1) How many nights per year, approximately, do you stay in a hotel?

  2) For business or personal reasons?

  3) How many guests do you think you encounter?

  4) Do you pre-book?

  You start with the slow pitch, yes, such that they can suspect this just another marketing survey. In the case of this experiment, however, I quickly realized that, once the questions graduated to fast-pitch, they were begging the question:

  5) Have you, in your travels, encountered any fellow guests who you later found not to be corporeal?

  6) Did you nod to them, or wave, or attempt to converse?

  7) If you had a pet, how did that pet react?

  8) Would you happen to have a timestamp for this encounter, for purposes of pulling security footage?

  I sympathized with Julia, for her annoyance. Reluctant to share the experiment, though, I feigned idle curiosity, fed her the smallest portion: the existence of an Elvis Room in every hotel.

  She shrugged and looked at me as if wondering just who she’d married, here.

  I shrugged back: here I am, deviant curiosities and all.

  During her evening shifts, I would sometimes release my night course an hour early and ease from registration desk to registration desk. At first there was no system; I’d just been driving home when I’d suddenly found myself sitting in the ten-minute lane of a second-rate hotel. Now there was a grid. I was working my way across town, like playing checkers.

  That was where the system lost any semblance of rigor, however.

  To be more accurate, it wasn’t the system that was failing. It was me. Those hours of freedom from teaching, in which I could have been productive, I was, simply put, whiling them away in the lobbies of these hotels.

  While there, I found it important to leave my tie knotted close to my throat, and to carry my shoulder bag. Otherwise the evening desk clerk would either query me him- or herself, or have security do so.

  My loitering would never have been allowed to continue in Las Vegas, of course. There, if you run one table, you can’t just change casinos and do it all over again. Their management talks to each other.

  Hotel management doesn’t need to be quite so vigilant.

  When queried, I had been sent by my current school to meet a visitor, was here on school business. I even had a sign of sorts made up: a piece of copy paper and black marker. Not with a guest name the clerk could check, but for self-identification: the school I was currently contracted with, which my identity card supported, when necessary.

  All I had to do was prop the sign up on the end table or couch, and I could sit for an hour, for two if I thought Julia would buy that class had gone long.

  I was waiting for inspiration to strike, for the apple to fall, for a disinhibiting symbol to synthesize and simultaneously release the next step of my experiment.

  All I had thus far was enough, perhaps, to bolster an article on folklore or urban legends.

  What I needed was a revolution, a revelation. A new career, a new life. If the world wouldn’t accept me now, then I would change the world, make it hinge upon the results of my experiment.

  And, though it goes without saying—and this would never be part of my published findings—I did find myself believing. I had stood there in the lobby of that concert hotel, and watched the bloody-sheeted gurney creak past.

  Though I told myself that if I hadn’t insisted upon the Elvis Room, someone else surely would have . . . still.

  My rational mind argued that the science was worth the sacrifice. That this is what a haunting actually is: torturing yourself with a looped event from the past that your mind can find no easy label for. What doesn’t fit,
it just bounces around in your head; I’m hardly the first to propose such a theory. Only now, I guess, you could say I was living it.

  In a way, then, sitting in these hotel lobbies, it could be construed as a sort of apology—me standing close to a fire I had started, as if the heat could burn the sin away.

  Unless I was waiting to overhear a belligerent would-be guest demanding the Elvis Room, then quietly rooting for him or her, and camping out by the coffee machine, waiting for the emergency personnel to arrive.

  Three weeks into this cycle, this tailspin, a hotel guest sat down beside me, waited for me look up.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said, wowing his eyes out for emphasis. “Guess I fell asleep. It’s already midnight for me.”

  I let my eyes move from his face to the sign that had drawn him to me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Your ride, he’s—I’m waiting for someone else. We house all the college’s guests here.”

  “Oh, man. Who?”

  My jaw moved around the shape of an imaginary professor’s name, but then I noticed the desk clerk was tuned in, here.

  “She’s from Biology,” I said.

  “Two of us?” the man said, and though the muscles forcing my face into a polite smile held, I’m pretty sure, I could feel the scaffolding starting to collapse.

  “Let me just—” I said, rising to follow my index finger to the guest phone, stationed near enough the side door I could slip out.

  I had the phone to my ear when the clerk tapped me on the shoulder.

  I swallowed, re-cradled the receiver.

  “Perhaps it would be best if I called your guest for you,” he said, reaching across for the phone.

  “I don’t want to wake her,” I said back, my hand holding the receiver down.

  The clerk chuckled, didn’t want a scene.

  “Then maybe it would be best if you were to wait outside. Across the street. There’s a bar.”