by Claryn Vaile
Pete empathized. “Everybody who works here ought to see this stuff,” he said. “Guests, too.”
Rebecca couldn’t agree more. “These are the things that give The Keep its resonance. This,” she concluded, encompassing the archives in a grand sweeping gesture, “all this is what makes the Griffins Keep unlike any other hotel in Denver. Maybe any other anywhere. And when people who work here and people who visit here understand that, they begin to understand its deeply rooted significance, its contribution to the city’s character.”
Pete glanced at his watch. “I’ve gotta go.” He gave the historian an impulsive hug before turning for the door. “Thank you, Rebecca,” he said sincerely, “for putting the little day-to-day hassles in perspective. And thank you, Marjory, for keeping an eye on things.”
Raising a triumphant fist in the air, he proclaimed, “The Keep endures! Long live The Keep.” He poked his head through the gap before closing the archives door. “And heaven help her beleaguered staff.”
Rebecca dreaded the 4:00 private tour scheduled on Halloween itself. Ghost tours for groups of children presented special challenges. They couldn’t care less about the history of the Griffins Keep. A waste of time, the hotel’s backstory simply made them fidget. They wanted to be scared. They wanted to giggle and cling to each other or startle each other. They pretended to see things, to hear things as Rebecca led them around the property. Sometimes they listened to her stories. Sometimes they told their own.
Today’s group was part of a local rec center’s afterschool program for kids. The sugar-charged children running around the lobby had apparently already dived into the Halloween candy. So be it. The historian smiled and determined to have fun with it.
“I was recently possessed by a spirit,” a boy of about 9 announced earnestly to her and the group at the outset. “I actually saw it leave my body. And I’ve been able to see ghosts ever since.”
“Really?” Rebecca tried not to sound patronizing. “Wow.”
The problem with this group was that at every stop on the tour, half-a-dozen little hands shot up.
“I just saw two black eyes right over there on the wall,” announced one young girl, hurrying across the Club room to point out the spot.
“I can see the shadow of a dead lady lying on the floor,” claimed another, tracing the imagined silhouette in the carpet.
“I just saw a white flash like lightning over there,” said a boy, pointing to a fifth-floor corner of the atrium.
“I felt something brush my arm!”
“Did you hear that whispering sound?”
“I saw blood on that wallpaper, and then it disappeared!”
“Let’s raise our hands ONLY if we have a question, guys.”
Rebecca silently blessed their leader for his belated attempt to rein-in their imaginations. But the titillated hysteria continued to rise, despite the best calming efforts of the adults. When it came time to take them to an upper floor, a cluster of mini-drama queens crowded so close to Rebecca that she could scarcely make her way to the elevator.
The historian had insisted that the description of the ghost tour on the website add the note: “These tours are primarily historical and not intended for children.” For all the good that did. Might as well don a big red nose and floppy shoes, Rebecca thought before biting the bullet. Such a rewarding application of my graduate studies in history.
“You have a question?” Rebecca asked when an obnoxious child waved her raised hand incessantly. The historian was in no mood for precociousness.
“Yeah. So is that all your own hair?”
Totally unexpected. The artificial clip-on fastened atop Rebecca’s upswept Victorian do was a close match, but not, apparently, perfect. “You’re very astute.” And very rude,
“I’m a what?”
“Astute. It means you’re clever. You’re unusually observant.”
“Oh yeah!” the pudgy girl exalted, fist bumping her friend. “I so rock!”
“Actually, no one’s ever asked me that before.” And you’re going to regret being the first. “As a matter of fact, this is not all my own hair. This piece,” she said, slowly fingering the add-on, “came from the head of the original hotel historian, Charlotte Woods -- right before they buried her last month.”
Rebecca was surprised to find that she derived a perverse pleasure from the shock on their young faces.
“Eeew!”
“Nuh-uh!”
Rebecca nodded solemnly. “It was her final wish that I rip it from her dead scalp and make it into a hairpiece.”
“Gross, dude!”
“No way. Why would you?”
“Because it’s bewitched. When I put it on, the roots grow into my skull and clear into my brain and inject all her knowledge about the hotel’s history.” Dramatic pause. “It hurts like crazy when I pull it off at the end of the day, but it’s worth it.”
“Get out! You lie.”
“Do I? Are you sure?” She inclined the top of her head toward them and advanced a step. “Touch it if you dare. But I can’t promise her hair won’t start to penetrate your skin, too.”
“I think that’s quite enough,” the group leader interjected.
“I certainly hope so,” Rebecca agreed. “You all know I’m just having a little fun with you, right, kids?”
But for the duration of the tour, no one asked another question.
On Labor Day weekend, Charlotte Woods had passed into the Colorado history about which she had always been so passionate.
Rebecca got news of The Keep’s first historian’s death in an email blast from the Colorado History Museum’s volunteer coordinator. It was sad, of course. But the 89-year-old’s mind had drifted into other realms months ago. Her body finally let her go.
Charlotte and her husband had no children. She had devoted herself entirely to the hotel, its history and its archives. Rebecca was her heir in that regard, and she felt the obligation keenly.
“So much of her spirit is already here,” Lochlan had observed as they sat in the archives the day after Charlotte’s memorial service, remembering the late hotel historian. “We should invite her formally.”
In response to Rebecca’s puzzled look, he’d explained. “There’s an ancient Kabalah ritual that helps searching spirits find their way, welcomes their spiritual light. Be honest. Would you be comfortable with Charlotte here?”
Wary and skeptical, Rebecca had finally nodded.
“My psychic friend told me how to do this.” Lochlan proceeded to write Hebrew symbols and their phonetic pronunciation on sheet of paper, folded it in half, and reverently placed the newspaper clipping with Charlotte’s obituary inside.
“Repeat these words whenever you think of her for the next several days,” he’d instructed. “It opens a spiritual door and invites her in. If this is where she wants to spend eternity – even a little bit of it – she’ll know she can come here.”
They practiced saying the strange words aloud several times, like a chant, before Lochlan had to get back to fixing a leaky toilet. What could it hurt? Rebecca asked herself.
The next morning, she’d entered the archives, surprised to find her PC screen glowing with the start prompt screen. She always turned it off when she left for the day; just must not have shut it down properly last night. But the next day, though she was certain she had shut it down completely, she found the start prompt up again. Pure chance, of course, that this coincided with the Kabala “invitation” to Charlotte’s spirit. Nevertheless, she wondered.
That evening, Rebecca deliberately sat through the entire shut down until there was no question the machine was off
“If you’re really here, Charlotte, turn the PC on once more tonight,” she’d said aloud, feeling silly. The following day, she had unlocked the archives and, before flipping on the lights, she discovered the PC screen glowing again in the dark.
“Oh yeah,” Dawn, the Sales admin assistant, said casually when Rebecca mentioned the odd occu
rrence. “That’s happened to me a couple times. It’s some freak thing in the local network. A ‘wake on LAN’ I think they call it. For some reason it sends a signal that kicks on a bunch of the connected computers for no reason.”
It sounded plausible to Rebecca, with her limited understanding of networking mysteries. But why had it never happened in the archives before? And why two days in a row?
Before Rebecca left that afternoon, after her PC had shut down completely, she crawled under the desk and unplugged the machine from the dusty power strip on the floor.
Drawing a deep breath the next morning, she turned the key in the archives lock, opened the door, and looked toward her desk in the corner. The computer she was certain she had disconnected incandesced impossibly The chill that ran up her spine slowly melted with astonishment and understanding.
Rebecca glanced at the Kabala packet on the archive island and smiled uncertainly. “Good morning, Charlotte,” she said softly as she closed the door behind her. “Welcome home.”
Chapter 11
The day after Halloween was a dreary, windy Wednesday.
“It’s Dia de los Muertos,” Salma announced when she encountered Rebecca at the time clock that morning. “The day when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is thinnest. The day those who have passed can come through to our side. Move with extra care around The Keep today.”
Requests for ghost tours diminished but did not stop with the end of October. Today’s 1:00 private tour finally appeared at 1:55. The organizer had apprised Rebecca when making their reservation that his charges were brain-damaged patients, and they might run unavoidably late.
The amiable woman in a wheelchair pointed and grinned at every turn, exclaiming, “Pretty!” The gentleman piloting her chuckled at the oddest times. The woman with the white cane feared to move without a guiding hand, and the timorous black girl refused to go anywhere until Rebecca explained what was going to happen next. And next. And after that.
How much did they get out of her simplified versions of the standard ghost stories, Rebecca wondered as they toured the lower floors of the hotel. She knew it didn’t matter. It was all about the journey. New surroundings, sensory stimulation, the soothing cadence of storytelling. The two caregivers seemed to enjoy themselves, and Rebecca imagined they appreciated the diversion.
Outbursts were minimal, eyes were wide, and the tour went as well as could be expected – until the showroom stop: Room 864. Rebecca invited everyone to sit after exploring the suite. But a young girl twisted and wracked by cerebral palsy suddenly fell to the floor and began to crawl around the room on her hands and knees, despite her caregiver’s urging to stand up.
“I don’t get it. She’s never done this before.”
The girl shook her head back and forth and declared, “She push me. She push me down.”
Rebecca stared with rising horror. She doesn’t want us here, Mo had said of the haughty spirit she’d sensed in the suite just a few days before. She’s telling me we’re not good enough.
“Who pushed you? Nobody pushed you. Come sit by me,” the caregiver beckoned the girl on the floor, patting the sofa cushion beside her.
Rebecca gamely launched into the story of the party sounds beyond the double doors, as if everything were normal.
“Get out!” the woman in the wheelchair blurted.
“Hush, Olivia,’ admonished the other aide. Then to Rebecca, “Sorry. I don’t know what’s got into her.”
“Get out!” Olivia ordered more loudly when the historian attempted to resume her narrative.
A long-haired patient who had lurked on the fringes of the group, silent until now, covered his ears and howled. The caregivers exchanged anxious glances as the situation unraveled.
“Get out Get out GET OUT!”
Rebecca bolted toward the door of the suite, opened it, and quickly guided the blind woman out, motioning for the others to follow. No one needed urging.
As they headed back to the elevators, Olivia quieted and whimpered softly. The young girl, helped from her knees by a caregiver, stood and wavered, clinging to her arm. The howler stopped and lapsed behind, silent again as they distanced themselves from the suite and its spiritual hysteria.
“What’s coming next?” the reticent girl asked Rebecca in a whisper, suddenly afraid to proceed.
Unnerved, the historian found herself for the first time fearful of that uncertainty. “I wish I knew,” she said, taking the girl’s hand. “But we have to move on.”
By early November, Beaumont, Plotz, and the rest of the former management team had drifted happily out of the picture on golden parachutes, and TITHE brought in their own people to fill the top positions. Rebecca’s new immediate supervisor was a woman. A young woman. They all seemed young. LaTishia Jordan clearly considered Rebecca a relic and made no attempt to hide the fact. “You’re about to retire, aren’t you?” she asked when they met.
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Rebecca said, though it was a day-to-day decision since the TITHE takeover.
“I heard you had money, don’t really need to work.”
“I don’t believe that’s any of your business, one way or another,” Rebecca replied evenly, glowering at Ms. Jordan’s impudence. “I’ve been here five years because I enjoy it. As long as I continue to enjoy it, I intend to stick around.”
Despite her apparent lack of collegial courtesy, Ms. Jordan was The Keep’s new Public Relations Director, and Rebecca was glad to see the PR function brought back in-house. The outsourced firm had never really understood what made The Keep special, because they experienced it only superficially. Rebecca hoped that by immersing herself in the hotel’s daily life, Ms. Jordan would absorb at least some sense of its magic and proud heritage. That, of course, remained to be seen.
“So I see from this job description that you lead tours and answer people’s questions about history. Is that all you do? Doesn’t seem like that would take 30 hours a week.”
Rebecca tried not to sound defensive. “You’d be surprised,” she said. “I hope you can visit the archives soon so I can show you all the things that need to be sorted and filed, all the email and telephone inquiries I get that require research, and all the tour requests I process in a typical week. I also change out the historical display cases across from the Front Desk in the lobby every month or so, and an outside window along Carson Street. I do a history piece for new employee orientation and write for the newsletter. And of course, there are media requests from time to time.”
“Oh yeah, I heard from the old PR team that you were pretty good with interviews. I’ll probably handle most of those from now on. I’ll let you know if I need historical info.”
“There are two excellent books on Griffins Keep history you should read…” Rebecca began, but Ms. Jordan stopped her with a raised hand and shake of her head.
“Like I said, when – if – anybody cares about that stuff, I’ll get it from you.” She cleared her throat and glanced at her agenda. “Now, I want to change the way we’re doing hotel history tours. These online reservations and requests are too inefficient, and people can’t always get the dates and times that work for them. I want you to record your script. We’ll mark the stops with little numbered plaques around the hotel, and we’ll make it available as a self-guided audio tour people can pick up from the concierge whenever. I don’t want you wasting time returning calls for these private tour requests any more. It’s a hassle for Sales and for Accounting. There’s no point.”
Blindsided, Rebecca practically spluttered. “But…but people like the personal touch. They like be able to ask questions. The tours are an important component of our hospitality, an important part of our public relations…”
Ms. Jordan shrugged. “You said it yourself. There are books they can read if they have questions about things the recording doesn’t cover. People want their entertainment on demand. These days they insist on it. Have your complete script ready for me to edit by next We
dnesday. I’ll get the website people working on changing the Hotel Tours page, and I’ll do a press release about the new audio tour as soon as you can record it.”
She looked directly at Rebecca for the first time since raising the subject. She seemed surprised to see something like horror in the historian’s expression. “What?” she asked, genuinely puzzled. “I’d think you’d be glad to finally cut back on leading the tours in person. What did I see in your stats for last year – something like 300 of them? Five years of that? Aren’t you sick of it? You must sound like a tape recording half the time already.”
Ouch. That hurt, because it was true. Rebecca often caught herself saying the exact same thing in the exact same way, tour after tour. It was impossible not to fall into a sort of routine rap after so many repetitions. But she always made an effort to mix it up a bit, to tailor the stories to each group and their interests. To keep it fresh and lively. Most of the time she managed it. But the ruts were getting deeper all the time.
After consideration, Rebecca said, “I think the audio tour would be a great option for some people. But I encourage you not to abandon expert-led tours altogether. At least not until you shadow me on one and see firsthand how it engages and involves our guests in a way no tape recording could.”
“We’ll see,” Ms. Jordan said. “You’ll of course honor the tours already on the calendar. I was actually shocked to see how many are booked in the coming months. And we’ll still have the personally-guided option for special groups. But you need to be open to change,” she admonished Rebecca. “The old ways are all being re-examined, and many are being drastically revised to bring this business into the twenty-first century. Personal tours are quaint, I’m sure. But are they really necessary? Think about it.”
The new owners embarked immediately upon reshaping the hotel in their own image. Rebecca arrived one morning to discover several papier mache griffins dangling from the stained-glass skylight support lattice, and an inflated bouncy castle occupying a corner of the atrium lobby, just as the designer had envisioned. The Griffin fountain was so far unadulterated. Apparently the Bellagio fountain guy wanted no part of the project.