by Kim Hornsby
“Sunglasses would be ultra-cool, but you have pretty eyes that point wherever you turn them.”
I’d think about sunglasses for these public situations. After all, I was a performer and loved an audience. The waitress arrived and spoke directly to Eve who ordered us tea then asked for an “extra grande order of greasy fries.” That girl could pack away more food and never gain an ounce. We’d just eaten a big lunch at Spook Central of leftover spaghetti from last night’s dinner and only three hours later, Eve was ordering the biggest plate of fries they had.
Since I’d entered the hotel, I’d had a sense that I’d been here before, which was strange without vision, the usual sense to trigger such a thought. It came and went quickly, then, as we waited in The Aristocrat, I had a flash of memory of a dinner party in this very room, many years earlier. I’d been pretending to laugh in a group of people, but had actually been so full of sorrow, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever feel happy again. But I couldn’t remember ever being in this hotel before.
“There’s our man,” Eve whispered to break my train of thought. “Gavin is seeing the guide dog on the floor, looking at you, and now coming over. Nerd alert.”
Gavin Smythe, the hotel manager, had contacted me a few weeks ago to tell me of the ghost on the seventh floor. We’d exchanged emails and then spoke on the phone last week. This was a dream case for a paranormal investigator, summoning the ghost of a child who follows other children down the hall into the elevator.
“You must be Bryndle,” a deep voice said, not sounding like a nerd.
I stood. I wasn’t good at greeting people as a blind person but turned towards the voice and extended my hand. “Gavin.” A cold, soft hand took mine and shook gently like he was afraid of hurting me because I’m blind. I attached a firm shake back to show him who he was dealing with.
“Please sit down. This is my assistant, Eve.” I gestured towards where I thought Eve was and took my seat, always assuming the chair was still behind me, exactly where I’d left it.
“Thank you for coming. I’m very grateful you chose the hotel as one of your cases.” Gavin was under the impression we were overloaded with amazing ghostly opportunities when really, we only got this type of case every month or two.
“Our pleasure. This ghost is intriguing. I know you’re busy, so I’ll get right to business. What can you tell me about the ghost?”
Eve’s fries arrived, and I heard Gavin say, “charge it to me,” to the waitress before he answered my question. “Guests and employees have seen the ghost of a little girl on the seventh floor for years. According to what they’ve said, she’s somewhere between eight and ten years old, long dark hair, wearing a winter coat and carrying a muff, the hand warming accessory from olden days.”
I nodded. The child was probably from before the 1950’s when muffs were used instead of mitts for little girls of a certain stature.
Gavin continued. “She looks like a real child who’s lost her way. Not see through.”
I meanly made a mental note that Gavin didn’t know the word transparent.
“Guests have approached her to see where her parents are and she disappears through the wall, into room 714. Other times, she’s been in the elevator and people have tried to talk to her, but she doesn’t make eye contact or answer. She doesn’t appear to hear them. Other times, she’s been seen knocking on the door of 714 crying and when the guests inside opened the door, she disappears. She’s never been seen inside 714.
“Why 714?” I asked trying to look at Gavin just above his speaking voice.
“A tragic death occurred in that room in 1922. A businessman shot himself and died.”
“What was the man’s name?”
“Clement Halliday. I’ve tried to research the name and come up empty.” He wanted me to think he’d done all he could before calling us.
“Is there a time of day when the girl appears most often?” Middle of the night is the time most spirits can come through, but I needed to know if she was an everyday at four p.m. kind of ghost.
“Doesn’t seem to be a specific time. On the few occasions our staff and guests have seen her since I’ve been here, it’s usually late at night.”
I took a sip of the tea, realized it hadn’t any sugar and set the cup on the table, out of the saucer, intentionally. “Eve, can you add one teaspoon of sugar?” I turned to where Gavin sat. “Are there people staying on the seventh floor tonight?” I’d asked him to avoid booking guests in for our night’s investigation.
“No one. It’s all yours.”
“Excellent. And we’re free to use the room across the hall from 714?”
“Use any room you like. Will you need two nights or one?”
“Just one,” Eve said through a mouthful of fries.
I nodded. “We’ll start our investigation around ten, see what we get.”
“Will you tape for your show?”
“We will. And we’ll show you anything we get tomorrow morning. Eve will have you sign waivers for legal purposes. I’m sorry I can’t ask you to join us, but ghosts are shy, and we operate with only the three of us.” I didn’t want a person I did not know at a summoning, especially because I knew basically nothing about the ghost or about Gavin. I wasn’t sure of his reason for calling us.
Just in case, I didn’t want to expose the spirit of a child to a non-believer.
Chapter 6
After living in a drafty old house of creaky oldness, our hotel room was charmingly warm and inviting. Even though the wall with the window looking out on the street was red brick, the room was modern with two queen beds swaddled in white, pristine sheets and tightly pulled blankets. Eve told me all this as I sat on my bed and listened, imagining the room around me.
Hodor’s Costco dog bed was set beside mine but as an added precaution, I’d covered my queen bed with a freshly-washed blanket from Cove House to keep black-haired Hodor from giving away the fact I let my dog sleep with me on the bed. Not that we expected to do a lot of sleeping in this room but if things went well, we might get to lie down here and there, try to get some zzz’s before we met with Gavin the following morning for breakfast in The Aristocrat.
I’d slept in until eleven in anticipation of tonight’s crazy schedule. I assumed Eve and Carlos did too because I didn’t hear from either of them until well after I began putting lunch together.
Having a pre-investigation nap was not necessary so I played a game on my laptop called Nightjar that had vocal cues to allow blind people like me to game. Nightjar was recommended on a “Things Blind People Can Still Do” site and I liked the challenge it provided. That and the fact that Benedict Cumberbatch narrated, and I happened to love that man enough to consider myself a Cumberbitch. Sherlock was one of my favorite shows when I could still see his intriguing face and now that I was listening to him on my laptop, I had to admit his voice was equally intriguing.
We’d made a plan to try a summoning at eight p.m. seeing the ghost had wandered down the hall around that time before, following two young children coming back from an evening out with their parents. If that time didn’t work, we’d try again later and keep going for a few hours. Eve had the keys to all the rooms around 714 in case the ghost went through the wall and we needed to follow.
My plan was to first attempt contacting the girl in the hall, then the room, then the elevator. Patrons were warned that one of the elevators would be out of service at midnight for a few hours and the other elevator had been programed to not stop on the seventh floor. If we needed to leave the seventh floor for any strange reason, the door to the stairs had been bolted from our side and we could easily lift the bolt and flee if things got wonky.
Eve was munching on something that snapped over on the other bed, while Carlos moved between both rooms talking to Eve about Electronic Voice Phenomena. He loved to capture voices on high frequency sound waves, being the one of us three who had no psychic abilities to communicate with apparitions. His super power was tech stuff.
“Sounds like fun,” Eve called back, knowing that for Carlos, his tech stuff was what made ghost hunting fun. Standing around waiting for me to tell them what I heard or saw didn’t cut it for Carlos. He wanted in on the sightings, or at least confirmation. He needed toys that produced information. Before Carlos joined my team, I’d always been proud that I didn’t need to rely on equipment like some ghost hunters without clairvoyance, but Carlos had come along and convinced me to purchase fun toys of the ghost hunting kind. Aside from making him feel proactive, he’d also argued that when he caught stuff on tape it made the episode more scientific rather than asking our audience to trust that I wasn’t lying about hearing a ghostly voice. Our reactions to his data were fun to capture on tape too. Eve often squealed and screamed when a voice came through.
My mother called to say good luck which was very unlike her and ask if she could sleep at Floatville tonight, which was more like her.
“Can’t stand Ron’s apartment, eh?” I said.
“We decided a night apart might be good for our health. We don’t get much sleeping done,” she added.
I detected a lie but wasn’t sure if they actually did a lot of sleeping or if it wasn’t my mother’s choice to sleep alone. “Why don’t you go back to your own house?”
“It still smells funny. I’m going to have to get some air fresheners or candles or something.”
“Or open the windows,” I added. “You can crash at Floatville tonight. The hidden key is now six inches down in a blue pot that holds a dead plant to the left of the front door.” I’d recently moved the key because Rachel was really good at finding the thing, sneaking in and trying to pretend she hadn’t borrowed my floating house for a day or two when I knew she had, not only by the lingering scent of White Diamonds but by the way she never made my bed.
“I have it in my hand. I just thought I’d ask this time because you got so mad last time.”
Wow. Either Rachel was getting too good at hide the key or I was not good enough. I laid down on my bed, closed my eyes and thought about where to hide the key, a place where my mother would never find it. Maybe dangle it off the dock on a piece of invisible fishing line, thirty feet down.
When eight p.m. rolled around, it turned out I had nodded off. All that sleeping with Restless Rachel last week had me down a couple hours of zzz’s. When the alarm started its tinkling music, I opened my eyes, and reached to silence the thing on the bedside table.
“Rise and shine,” Eve said. “It’s ghost time.”
My cousin had already done my makeup and only needed to touch up my blue-tipped hair which tonight was swept off to the side like a sideways soft dip ice cream cone. Eve liked the look and thought it went well with my image. I’d chosen some skull earrings and necklace, to compliment my floor-length black dress and army boots but then thought twice about skulls. I wasn’t about to dress like a kindergarten teacher to be more child-friendly but made the decision to remove the earrings, on camera, just before everything began.
We’d brought the Boo Bear, a piece of equipment that resembled a teddy bear but was so much more. It was an EMF recorder that was able to detect all sorts of things including temperature--“It’s getting chilly in here!” and magnetic fields--“Are you my new friend?” I intended to carry that imposter around all night, hoping to attract an eight-year-old girl.
I stepped into my dress, with Eve’s help, the taffeta of the skirt swishing, and remembered the last time I wore this frock was New Year’s Eve with Harry eighteen months earlier. We’d believed we had all the time in the world to enjoy New Year’s Eve parties at the top of the Seattle Space Needle with friends. We hadn’t even had another seven months before the accident took his life along with my eyesight, in one selfish swoop.
“I doubt if the ghost appears, she’ll even notice your jewelry.” Eve zipped the dress up, fixed my décolletage and left me lacing my army boots with three-inch heels. Looking bizarre was part of my schtick. I wouldn’t wear normal clothes on camera when there were costumes to be worn in the world.
As a teen, I’d always yearned to go to a school long enough to be in the drama club, but I’d only get as far as the first rehearsal and then Rachel would announce we were taking to the road again and school would have to wait. My brand had developed gradually, the Moody look taking off the night I was called to a summoning in the small town of Carnation outside Seattle. I’d been on my way to a costume party with Harry, dressed like a 1940’s movie star that night and never looked back, eventually changing to Rock Witch Chic, or something like that. Stevie Nicks’ early photos with Fleetwood Mac often gave me ideas for my next outfit and in the days when I could see, Harry and I would spend hours combing the downtown second-hand clothing stores for anything that looked like a renaissance witch might have once worn it.
When Carlos and the machines were ready, I turned the TV on for Hodor, told him to stay, and we entered the hall, leaving my dog in the room. If the first try did not produce a response, I wasn’t beyond trying to summon a child with my dog. Most children adored dogs. First, we’d try Boo Bear.
In the hall I felt around the doorways, Eve narrating to give me the room numbers. Our room was one down and across the hall from 714. “I want to do the opener in front of 714,” I said. “My back to the door.” I hadn’t told the world I was blind and as far as my fans went, the rumor of being blind was just that. I’d recently shown them a video of me playing soccer to dispel the idea that I had lost my sight but that was when Caspian was present and kicking a soccer ball in Cove House’s foyer was possible. Thinking of Caspian led me to wonder if he was walking around Cove House in our absence wondering where the heck we all went. My heart hurt to think he might come back in our absence, but I’d left him notes in my bedroom, on the kitchen table, on the front door and on the table in the third floor hall foyer, explaining we’d be back in three days and at the time of our departure, he’d been gone a full week. He liked to know these things.
According to Eve, Carlos had set up two laser grids in the hall, the red crisscrossing beams shining against the hall wallpaper. If a ghost passed the grid, the outline would be seen and for that reason, Carlos also had cameras on the grids. Along with Boo Bear, Carlos used a MEL meter to take electromagnetic readings and temperature changes and swore by those things. When something spiked or made an unusual sound, Carlos occasionally handed the camera to Eve so he could check his toys.
Eve had me primped and ready, saying I looked dark and schoolmarm-y, like a badass ghost hunter. I worried my noisy dress might be caught in the audio, but Carlos said the swishing of the taffeta didn’t interfere with the EVP meter.
“I’m ready when you are, Carlos.” I now stood in front of room 714 waiting for the go-ahead. I always got a bit nervous before the camera switched on even though we weren’t live, but I preferred to do one take on everything. Going back to redo the same words over and over had me losing enthusiasm a tiny bit, every time.
“Here we go,” Carlos said. “4, 3, 2, …”
“Investigation 67, The Grand Hotel, Portland, Oregon, Seventh Floor, April 30th.” I paused knowing this was where Carlos would start the show. “Good Evening, Mood Peeps. Moody here. We are in Portland, Oregon, on the seventh floor of The Grand Hotel, a structure built in 1908 by a family who made their wealth in the lumber industry. We’re investigating the claims of the apparition of a little girl often seen outside room 714, crying and troubled. In my arms, you’ll notice I’m carrying a teddy bear and for you die-hard Mood Peeps, you might recognize Carlos’s toy, Boo Bear. This is no ordinary bear. Boo measures EMF levels, something that indicates an apparition is close. We’re hoping to draw the spirit to us with a bear.” I held up the bear with his little red backpack. “The ghost of this little girl has followed other children down the hall. Once, she got in the elevator with a family and is often mistak
en for an Alive because she doesn’t float and isn’t transparent. She doesn’t respond to conversation and often ends up at the door to room 714 crying. What is this poor child crying about? Carlos, turn on the equipment and let’s find this ghost.”
I stood staring ahead, hoping I was looking directly into the camera. Apparently, we’d gotten pretty good at deceiving the public this way. If I wasn’t looking directly into the eye of the lens, Carlos simply adjusted the camera, so I was. “How’d that look?”
“Awesomely gruesome,” Eve said from behind the camera across the hall. “Do you feel anything, Bryn?”
“Not really.” I held my arms out from my sides, the bear in one hand, and tipped my head back to empty my mind and allow other thoughts to consume me. As I did so, something rushed in.
There was someone with us.
Someone close, but I couldn’t tell who it was. The feeling of being watched made the hair on my arms stand on end. “I get something.” I held the little bear in front of me. “Do you like my teddy bear? He needs a friend. Teddy is looking for a little girl,” I said in a nicer voice than I usually used.
I waited.
And waited.
Carlos’s meter beeped normally, but still, I felt that someone was close.
I pretended to look around, hoping I wasn’t facing the wall and looking as blind as I am. I’d recently started thinking about telling my fans about my challenge. This pretense of being sighted had turned me into a liar, something I tried every day not to be.
“My teddy bear wants to know why you are so sad?” I backed up to feel the wall behind me and slid down, an act that reminded me of the bloody bedroom and the trail of Caspian’s blood from shoulder level to the floor. “Can you tell the bear what’s wrong?” I sat the bear in front of my old-fashioned looking boots, his backpack full of equipment and out of view. I propped Boo against the heel of my boot and took a deep breath. Sometimes on investigations, I forgot to breathe much. I closed my eyes and listened.