The Haunting of Riley Watson

by Alexandria Clarke

  Daniel twisted Tyler’s arm upward so his shoulder rotated at an uncomfortable angle. “Say one more word about my wife, Mr. Watson.”

  “Don’t you mean your ex-wife?”

  That was it for the detective. He kicked open the door to Tyler’s room and threw him inside. Tyler stumbled, landing on the thick carpet. His room wasn’t as big as the resort’s suites. It didn’t have a kitchen or a separate bedroom, but it was across the hall from the gym and it had a back door to sneak out, and that was all Tyler needed.

  Daniel strolled in and sniffed. “It reeks of weed in here. Where is it?”

  Tyler rolled to his knees, his hands bound by the cuffs. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, sir.”

  The detective opened the drawers of the dresser, tossing Tyler’s clothes aside in a messy heap until he located the gallon baggie full of green herb. He brandished it at Tyler. “No idea, huh? No one needs this much unless they’re selling it. I’ll add it to your list of crimes. Your daddy can’t pay your way out of this one.”

  “It’s legal now,” Tyler snarled, struggling to his feet.

  “Not for you to sell it,” Daniel replied. “You got anything else in here I should know about?”

  “No, I’m strictly an herbal man.”

  “Sure you are,” Daniel said. “I’ll be right outside the door in case you change your mind and would like to share something else with the class, so don’t even think about trying to get out of here.”

  “Aren’t you gonna take off these handcuffs?”

  Daniel regarded the red marks around Tyler’s wrists, one foot in the hallway as he contemplated the consequences of leaving Tyler bound. Then he got out the key and unlocked them. “I’m only doing this because I don’t want to have to help you take a leak.”

  “You’re a stand-up guy.”

  The detective left Tyler alone to think about what he’d done like a five-year-old being punished for crying over a lollipop. Tyler flopped on the unmade bed and turned on the TV. As his game system booted up, he sighed and looked through the glass doors. It was dark as hell outside, and the snow crept like white ivy. Tyler rolled to the edge of the bed and tugged a bottle of gin, stolen from the Eagle’s View bar, from beneath the skirt. From the accent table drawer, he popped a pill from a prescription bottle he’d swiped off an injured guest, washed it down with the gin, and settled in to enjoy the effects. A few hours later, once the video games got boring and the high settled down, Tyler’s phone rang. The detective had forgotten to confiscate it.

  “Hello?”

  “Tyler, I need something to take the edge off.”

  Tyler scoffed as he leaned against the headboard. “You got some balls to call me, Liam.”

  “Please, I swear I won’t ask again.”

  “That’s what you said last time,” Tyler said. “I don’t owe you anything. In fact, I think you owe me something. You know how easy it would be to get you fired, man? All I have to do is tell my dad that you and my mom—”

  “Don’t!”

  Tyler grinned as he counted a stack of bills beside his pill stash. The subject was a touchy one, considering Tyler’s mom had died a few weeks ago. He didn’t care. She never loved him anyway, but it felt damn good to get back at all the people who thought she walked on water.

  “Fifty bucks,” Tyler said.

  “For one?”

  “Seventy-five, actually,” Tyler added. “Since you argued.”

  “That’s crazy, man.”

  “You want it or not?”

  There was a beat of silence on the other end of the phone. “Yeah, I want it.”

  “Then come get it,” Tyler said. “But come in through the back. Some cop is sitting outside my door in the hallway.”

  He hung up before Liam answered and tossed his phone across the room. It clattered against the back door. Tyler got up and tugged on the handle. Snow dumped in, coating his bare feet. He shook off the ice, shivered, and shoved the door shut. If Liam wanted the product, he was going to have to work for it. Additionally, if Tyler wanted to bail out of this room, it wouldn’t be through his usual route. He crossed to the main door and pressed his ear against it. Outside, Detective Daniel snored. Perfect. Tyler tried to pull it open, but it wouldn’t budge. The detective had blocked it from the outside.

  Tyler kicked the door hard enough to rattle the frame, hoping to disrupt the detective’s sleep, but he went on with his snoring. Tyler took another pill and chased it with the gin. As the drugs took him up again, his vision swam. He lay on the floor, staring at the white ceiling as his brain drew invisible designs on it. Sometime later—minutes, hours, days—someone came in through the hallway door. Tyler sat up and gazed at the visitor. Everything was hazy and distorted. The lethal combination of drugs and alcohol in Tyler’s system made the visitor’s face blurry.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Tyler slurred.

  The knife—long and thin like an old-fashioned dagger—plunged into Tyler’s stomach before he noticed it was there. He coughed, and the blade slipped through a vital organ. Blood spilled from his lips as he looked into the face of the visitor. It was the last thing he saw before he died.

  11

  The top floor of King and Queens was silent as the grave. The crimson carpet absorbed sound, as did the golden wallpaper that lined the corridor from the elevator to the window at the opposite end. When I careened out of my suite and stumbled into the hallway, nobody heard me scream. Nobody heard my dragging footsteps as I tried to regain control over my legs. My body was on fire. Every hair stood on end, like someone had attached an electric stimulant to each of my nerves. I couldn’t walk, let alone run, from the entity in my suite, so I slouched toward the elevator on hands and knees, praying that someone—anyone with a pulse—would come help me. I crept along, begging my legs to work, and jammed the call button for the elevator. It opened at once, and a fresh yell ripped from my throat at the sight inside.

  A little girl, eleven or twelve years old, stood in the center of the glass elevator, on fire from head to toe. Her skin melted off her face as her clothes turned to ash, but she was stoic and unconcerned. A paralyzing wave pulsed through my body. My muscles seized, forcing me to curl into a ball as the girl stood over me.

  “You’ll die too,” she said. “You’ll all die.”

  “You already said that,” I reminded her through clenched teeth. With every bit of willpower I possessed, I crawled toward the emergency staircase at the other end of the hallway. It was miles away. If I could run, I would be safe in the lobby with Jazmin and Riley within minutes. When I looked back, the elevator door was closed and the button was dim, like I’d never pressed it to begin with. The girl was nowhere in sight. I breathed a sigh of relief and reached the emergency stairs at long last, but the fiery twelve-year-old with melted skin and burnt hair greeted me on the next floor down. The smell clotted like blood in my nostrils.

  “Leave me alone!”

  “I can’t,” she replied, solemn. “You’re the only one who can hear me.”

  “I’m not psychic,” I said, writhing on the cold concrete steps. Every word was an independent effort. “Okay? It was all a ruse. The web show, the crystals, the candles. I did it to make money. I wasn’t trying to contact any ghosts.”

  The girl tilted her burning head to one side to see me better. “If you stop struggling, it won’t hurt so bad.”

  I tried to edge past her, down the stairs, but her blaze blocked my path. “What are you talking about?”

  “The paralysis,” she intoned. “It’s a result of being within range of a self-aware ghost. If you hadn’t been shirking your abilities for your entire life, you wouldn’t be feeling like this right now. Stop” —she moved to block my escape again— “trying to walk past me.”

  I sat down on the steps and clutched my stomach to prevent another surge of internal friction from forcing my luxurious dessert to reappear. “I don’t think I can anyway. What are you talking about?”


  “Are you going to stop running from me?”

  A slab of skin dropped off her face.

  “Can you stop doing that?” I asked.

  The fire extinguished itself, and the girl appeared healthy and normal, save for a silvery glow around the edge of her presence. If I shifted to look at her from a different angle, her image wavered, as if she adjusted to make herself seem three-dimensional.

  “Better?” she asked.

  I grimaced as her voice triggered another muscle spasm. “To look at maybe.”

  “Stop panicking,” she ordered, leaning against the rail of the steps as if her dead feet were dead tired. “Take a deep breath. Maybe close your eyes. Pretend I’m someone else.”

  I tucked my head between my knees and took her advice, drawing in long, even breaths. The first few were interrupted by uncomfortable jolts akin to the feeling of sticking your fingers in an electrical socket, but after a minute, the pangs subsided to a bearable level.

  “That’s it,” the girl encouraged. “Do you feel the connection between us? It’s like a piece of string. Focus your energy on it.”

  This was all new to me. Seeing and speaking to ghosts was a far cry from the hoax of a web show I hosted in the living room of my apartment with fishing wire tricks and smoke machines. Madame Lucia, my alter ego, was an Internet sensation, not a real medium with the ability to contact the dead. To my dismay, my alter ego was closer to reality than I was. Were it not for the little girl in front of me who had died thirty years ago, I would not have believed it myself. I delved into the world beyond this one to look for the string she spoke of. It was there, more like a single strand of spider’s web than a string, hovering in the non-Euclidean space between us.

  “Focus,” she urged.

  Each time she spoke, it disrupted my concentration and zapped me with another jolt. “I’m doing my best. Be quiet.”

  “But you don’t know how—”

  “I’m figuring it out!”

  Rooting around in my own subconscious was like swimming through a muddy swamp. It was a part of my mind I hadn’t accessed before, the part that controlled dreams and deja vu and, evidently, the ability to communicate with the dead. It was uncharted territory, and it scared me to wade through it. The deeper I dove, the more my mind opened up to let the little girl in. Her image solidified and the silvery glow subsided as I focused my concentration. I was able to look up at her without feeling like my arms and legs were going to fall off.

  “How did you know what to tell me to do?” I asked her.

  “I’ve been here a while,” she answered. “I’ve seen psychics come and go. Some of them knew about themselves and some of them didn’t, but none of them were as inclined as you. It’s a shame you’ve been wasting your talent for so long.”

  I brushed dust and dirt from the knees of my jeans. The maids hadn’t vacuumed in a while. The resort had been deserted for several weeks—ever since Thelma Watson’s death—and there wasn’t a point in keeping it up to par.

  “You said your name is Odette, right?” I asked. “A few days ago, I sat for an Odette, but she was a baby. She disappeared. Was that you?

  “Yes, I believe you met my mother as well.”

  “Stella,” I recalled. “God, you both seemed so real. How is this possible?”

  “Stagnant energy.” Odette drew closer, neither floating nor walking. The nearer she was, the colder I felt. Her voice echoed. Could anyone else hear her? “When we died, we were trapped here in the resort. We can’t move on. That’s why I need you.”

  “Who exactly is we?”

  “All of us,” she said. “My mother and I want to leave this place, but the others are upset. They want revenge, whereas we want to make peace with what happened to us.”

  A chill rippled up my spine. “You mean the fire? Is that why you’re like this?”

  Odette’s image wavered, and I thought she might burst into flames again. She remained intact. “The fire, yes. It was horrible.”

  “But it was an accident,” I said. “If you can accept that, you can move on.”

  She grew with indignance, and flames reflected in her pretty blue eyes as if she were standing across from a bonfire. “It was not an accident, but the real story was lost when all of us perished.”

  “Someone set the fire intentionally?”

  Odette tried to reply, but when her lips parted, her scalp caught fire. She fell to her knees, keening as she clasped her burning hair in her hands.

  “I can’t tell you,” she gasped. “They won’t let me.”

  She was too young for this kind of torture. No one should suffer through their own death over and over again. My heart clenched at the thought of Riley, who I’d known for less than a week, in the same position. She too was haunted by the past, but at least she was still alive.

  “Who won’t let you?” I reached out with the intention to comfort her, but there was no safe place to deliver the sentiment. The fire spread to her shoulders. In any case, I wasn’t sure if my psychic abilities extended to physical touch. Somehow, I doubted it.

  “The others,” she forced out. The fire sparked and engulfed the top half of her torso. “I have to go. It hurts too much.”

  “Odette, I need to know more.”

  She braced herself against the wall as she stood up, coughing and hacking as if her lungs were full of smoke. “Figure it out yourself. Find the truth about King and Queens. Start with the fire. If all goes well, you’ll understand why people have died recently here too.”

  She began to fade, the silvery glow growing to absorb her into the hotel.

  “Do you mean Thelma and Tyler?” I said. “Wait, Odette!”

  It was too late. She vanished, taking the inferno with her. I slumped against the wall to catch my breath, but the weight of the last week’s events sat in my lungs like thickening concrete. In less than seven days, I’d gone from a fake psychic medium to a real one, been pranked by faux spirits and stalked by actual ghosts, and dealt with the aftershocks of two murders from the same family. That last one was a doozy. Tyler’s body was discovered that morning, and it would take longer than an hour for everyone to recover. Connecting with Riley after her mother’s death was difficult enough. Now that her brother was dead too, I had no idea how to talk to her. Then there was the not-so-insignificant detail that we were the only two in the entire resort who could see the dead people walking around. While everyone else was concerned with the body count, Riley and I were trying to contain ectoplasm without a Proton Pack.

  The problem was that neither one of us knew what the ghosts at King and Queens wanted. Riley lived here all her life, but it wasn’t until after her mother’s orchestrated fall from the ski lift that she started hearing the dead speak to her. I was blissfully oblivious of everything supernatural—unless you counted my ridiculous web show where my best friend and I performed parlor tricks for views on YouTube—until arriving at King and Queens. Riley’s father, Oliver, hired me to hack her ghostly abilities under the pretense that my shtick was real. He offered me ten thousand dollars to get the job done in under a week, and since I was down on my luck and in need of quick cash, I sucked it up to babysit the kid with the questionable coping mechanisms. Little did I know Riley would be the real deal, and that she’d invoke the same capabilities in me.

  The two of us had a few things in common, which was probably why we related to each other and communicated so well. Riley lost her mom. I lost my dad when I was around her age. We both floated in a world in between those around us. While everyone else went on with their daily business, Riley and I fell behind with no one to catch us. Well, I had Jazmin, who was more supportive than I deserved, but it was brittle ground with most humans when your life was rooted in insanity.

  “Lucia!” Jazmin’s panicked voice echoed up the stairs. Panting, she came up from the floor below. “There you are. Thank God. I was worried.”

  She pulled me to my feet, my clammy hands slipping in hers.

  “Why?”
I asked. “Did something else happen?”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “The elevators stopped working without any warning. I thought something might have—”

  “Odette.”

  “The ghost?”

  “She was in the elevator,” I said. “She must have done something to it. Is Riley okay? Where is she?”

  “Riley’s fine,” Jazmin said, searching my face for answers to questions she hadn’t asked yet. “She’s downstairs with everyone else. What do you mean Odette was in the elevator?”

  I wiped my sweaty palms on my thighs. “I don’t want to leave her alone for too long. You’re the only person I trust beside myself to keep watch on her.”

  “Detective Hawkins is there too.”

  “Yeah, trying to pin down a murderer,” I reminded her. “The Watsons are two for two. First Thelma. Now Tyler. I don’t want Riley to be next.”

  “We won’t let that happen.” She felt my damp forehead. “Lucia, you’re burning up. What happened? You haven’t been gone for more than twenty minutes.”

  “It’s all linked,” I said. “The Watsons’ deaths and the lodge fire in eighty-eight. Somehow, it’s all connected. Odette wants me to find out how. She’s not the only ghost at King and Queens. There are others who died in the fire, and they’re pissed. Riley told me as much before, but I wasn’t listening. Not really.”

  Jazmin forced me to look at her. “Slow down. Take a deep breath. I’ve never seen you freak out this much.”

  “You’ve seen me freak out plenty of times.”

  “Not like this,” she said, holding me steady. “I’ve seen you binge eat and commiserate for days, but this is different. Lucia, you seem—I hate to say it—a little crazed.”

  Her skin was too hot against my face. “Get off me.”

  “Lucia, wait,” she said, following me as I stomped down the stairs. “You know that’s not what I meant. Let’s be real. If I thought you were insane, I would have had you committed a long time ago.”

  I stopped on the next landing. Jazmin, not expecting my abrupt halt, ran into me. She grabbed my waist, either to steady herself or to keep me from running again.