Ghost Tour

by Claryn Vaile

  Reluctantly, Rebecca agreed. Please don’t let me see anything, please don’t let me see anything she prayed silently as they entered the now notorious suite.

  “This is strange,” Rosslyn said, moving slowly through the bedroom toward the dressing room. “She’s gone. Completely gone. I no longer sense any trace of her.”

  Miranda perched on the upholstered bench at the foot of the bed and said simply, “She was getting too ugly. We sent her to visit The Monster – Hennie and me. Hennie knew how to lure her down to the Club. We found the spot and summoned it.” Her smile of satisfaction was chilling. “And no one who goes down with The Monster ever comes back.”

  The two older women exchanged astonished glances. After an uneasy pause, Rosslyn declared, “Good riddance, then,” appraising her daughter with a new sort of worry. “I think it’s time that we, too, moved on.”

  Rebecca had been able to get keys to two of the newly decorated rooms. The first was one of the smaller rooms on the fourth floor. The space which had appeared cozy with Victorian appointments seemed overwhelmed by the large-scale furnishings and lamps that now crowded it.

  “Someone should have told this designer that big does not equate to elegant,” Rosslyn said, trying to take it in.

  “Wait till you see a corner suite, with all the same elements, plus.” Rebecca took them next to 732.

  “Oh dear…..” The psychic sounded almost fearful as she proceeded slowly through the entry hallway into the sitting room, taking in the vinyl-framed flatscreen TV, the button-tufted vinyl sofa and chairs. “I feel as if I’m in a padded cell.”

  After walking through the bedroom, the mother and daughter rejoined Rebecca with stricken looks on their faces. “I’m hearing that we should sit for a while,” Rosslyn said.

  “Do so carefully,” Rebecca warned. “This furniture isn’t very sturdy – or comfortable.”

  For several moments, the three sat in silence, listening to the rhythmic clicking of the ceiling fan’s stainless steel blades. A workman chipping away at the exterior sandstone outside one wall sounded like something was trying to claw its way in.

  “It’s all so cheap looking, like a Super 8 Motel or something,” Miranda said quietly. “None of this fits here.”

  Rosslyn agreed. “And it feels terribly empty. Not physically, but spiritually.”

  She tried adjusting the oversized pillow at her back before tossing it on the floor in disgust. “These changes are more than superficial. This cold décor reflects a deeper, callous disrespect by the new owners for the hotel’s character. It’s very disturbing. I’m hearing the spirits crying NoNoNoNo, over and over again.” She stood and began to pace the room.

  “Mom, what’s ‘pablum’?” Miranda asked, seemingly out of nowhere.

  “I’m sorry…What?”

  “Pablum. What does it mean?”

  Unsure, Rosslyn looked to Rebecca.

  “I think pablum used to mean a sort of baby food,” the historian offered. “But over the years, it’s come to mean anything bland or tasteless.”

  “Oh,” Miranda said. “That makes sense then. Harrison Griffin himself is right over there, by the window, looking around the room and shaking his head. He’s saying, ‘Pablum. Unworthy pablum.’”

  Rebecca looked in the direction Miranda indicated and was taken aback to actually see the hotel founder -- insubstantial, indistinct, but unmistakably Harrison Griffin. For a split second only, his gaze met hers and he doffed his bowler hat, bowing his heady. Then the apparition winked out, leaving Rebecca to wonder if she’d actually seen anything at all. Automatically, her hand went to her chest and felt the horn talisman, hidden beneath her blouse. She wore it all the time now.

  Rosslyn stood completely still, attending to the disembodied voices only she could hear. “Something worse is coming. Much worse. What else is going to change?”

  Rebecca told them about the plans for closing off the atrium and capping the artesian well. Rosslyn’s eyes rolled up and she stiffened.

  “This cannot happen.” The ferocity in her voice was subdued only with great effort. “The spirits – the Knights – they’re telling me ‘We will bring down vengeance before we let you take away the Sunlight and the Living Water, the elements that empower this place.’”

  The psychic trembled as she repeated the awful message. “’We will bring it down – and the city with it.’”

  The weather was all wrong for a mid-June morning in Denver. Dark clouds smudged the sun. Lighting darted across the eastern horizon, frenetic but silent. Late afternoon thunderstorms were common in the summer. But not storms at 9:00 a.m..

  Strangest of all was the wind. It gusted cold out of the northeast. As Rebecca made her way from Sixteenth Street to the Griffins Keep, skyscraper canyons funneled and twisted the blasts, whipping her hair and her skirt around her.

  From beneath the streets, there arose a surreal sound. Wind whooshing through the sewers. Breath sucked into, then blew out of the drain vents, producing an eerie polyphony that ranged from deep, guttural moans to banshee howls, like tortured minotaurs lost in a subterranean labyrinth.

  “Have you ever heard anything like this?” Rebecca shouted over the noise to Fredrick, the veteran doorman.

  He reached up to hold onto his hat. “Never in my 23 years at this entrance,” he said uneasily. “But then again, the wind never comes out of the northeast. Must be creating some sort of weird air currents in the sewers. Great sound effects for a horror film.”

  Things were as unsettled within The Keep as without. Business as usual was impossible.

  “Time clock’s out of order,” Rebecca told Dawn as she sat down at her desk in the sales office.

  “The whole computer network is down,” Dawn reported. “The reservations system, the switchboard, the cash registers. Nobody can even get their cellphones to work in the hotel. The tech support guys are doing what they can, but they’re overwhelmed and can’t identify the source of the malfunctions. All the businesses they support in this part of the city are experiencing the same facility-wide failures.”

  “Electro-magnetic disturbance,” Lochlan said when Rebecca found him in the paint shop, “It’s the energy of spirits, their interface with the physical world. This is a warning shot across the bow, a small taste of the havoc they will wreak when closing The Keep portal disrupts their afterlife journeys. Disabling computers and cellphones is only the beginning. Transformers will blow. Security systems will fail. Banking and communications and navigation systems will fry. The spirits will make sure the whole city feels their anguish and pays for their entrapment.”

  “Surely you exaggerate. These are momentary glitches...”

  “Up to this point, yes,” Lochlan said. “But when pacemakers fail, cars stop in their tracks, and planes fall from the skies over Denver, it will be too late to avert the catastrophe.”

  Chapter 26

  Everything was apparently back to normal the morning after the mysterious electro-magnetic disruptions. Rebecca did not recognize the young man in cook’s white who approached her as she was clocking in. But he obviously knew who she was.

  “You used to be the hotel historian, right?” he began. “I remember you from that ‘Ten Things You Should Know about Griffins Keep History’ video they made us watch at new employee orientation. I’m Will Whitby. Hi.”

  “Hi, Bradley. Nice to meet you. Is there something I can help you with?”

  “Well, yeah. Maybe. I hope so. I know the old hotel guest registers got auctioned off a few months ago, right? But didn’t I hear they went to the History Colorado Library?”

  “Most did. And to be honest, it’s a far better place for them. Once they’re processed, they’ll be available to researchers who request them.”

  “Any idea how long that will take?”

  “I know they’ve got a huge backlog of materials to inventory and catalog. And they count on part-time volunteers to do a lot of it. Could be quite some time before anyone can get to them.�
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  “Well, I need to get to them – really just one of them – soon. My mom’s 50th birthday is coming up next month, and I want to give her something really unusual. Her grandparents – my great-grandparents – spent their honeymoon at the Griffins Keep in 1917. So I thought, wouldn’t it be great if I could get a photocopy of the page with her grandpa’s signature from back then?”

  “It would be a very unique gift, but I don’t see how…”

  “I was thinking, maybe if you explained my request to the History Colorado guys and asked to see just that one register, they might grant you some kinda special permission. Or maybe you could volunteer to work on the Griffins Keep stuff, and while you’re there, you could snap a picture of his signature without anybody minding.”

  ”I suppose it’s possible. I’ve known the registrar for years. And I’m sure he’d understand my interest in the things from The Keep. Do you have the exact date or dates that your relatives stayed at the hotel?”

  “Oh, sure! It was June 21. Mom says they used to always talk about how they were here on the only day the Griffins Keep ever closed. You probably know all about it. I guess they were drilling down for the well, and there was some kind of freak explosion that blew out a corner of the building or something.”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “So anyway, do you think you can help me?”

  Rebecca had actually been thinking about volunteering to process The Keep materials for HC ever since she’d learned they acquired them at the auction. Who better? Doing a favor for a fellow hotel employee was just the impetus she needed to offer her services.

  “We don’t even know if the register for that date is among those that History Colorado acquired,” she cautioned. “But I’ll see what I can do.”

  The Hart Library at History Colorado Center was thrilled to have Rebecca’s help with processing the Griffins Keep items. It did her historian heart good to see the guest registers, banquet menus, and other ephemera being properly preserved at last. The registers were currently stored in six large acid-free boxes.

  She crossed her fingers that the guest book including June 21, 1917, was among HC’s recent Keep acquisitions. She’d already checked for that date in the few rescued registers she and Lochlan had hidden in the secret sub-basement storage room. If June 21, 1917, was not in the Hart collection, she would have to conclude it had never been recovered by Charlotte when she first scavenged the building to create the hotel archives, way back in the 70s. Regrettably, the series had significant gaps.

  Understanding the challenges of late middle-age, a staff member had offered Rebecca the loan of a magnifying glass. Carefully opening one volume after another, the historian wondered why she had never sought out the register from that notorious day in June 1917 before this. Charlotte had, of course, scanned every page of every book in search of famous signatures years ago. But many of the 10” X 16” fabric-and-cardboard-bound historic registers were so damaged and deteriorated that Rebecca had dared not touch them unless she had a very compelling reason. With peeling covers and shredded spines, it was miraculous that some of them held together at all. A few of them didn’t.

  Gingerly, she lifted a fragile register from the bottom of the third box. The first page was stamped “May 3, 1917;” the last date, “July 16, 1917.” Bingo! She held the elusive register in her cotton-gloved hands.

  She turned the fragile yellowed pages a few at a time, delighting anew in the distinctive handwriting, narrowing in on the date Bradley’s great-grandparents had honeymooned at the Griffins Keep, all those years ago.

  There it was, stamped in red at the top of the page. Rebecca ran her finger down the columns, searching for the newlywed Nathaniel R. Williams’ signature.

  What she found instead would change her reality forever.

  “Are you all right, ma’am?” the library staff member at the reference desk asked as an unsteady Rebecca walked toward the exit 10 minutes later. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  The historian blinked at the young woman, as if awaking from a dream. She shook her head, but answered in the affirmative. “Yes, thank you,” she said. “I found more than I ever could have imagined.”

  For the next two days, Rebecca was uncharacteristically withdrawn and introspective. When she was finally ready to share her epiphany with Maureen, her longtime friend struggled to wrap her head around it.

  “I don’t know what to say to that,” Mo stated honestly.

  “I’m not surprised.”

  Silent for some time, Mo tried to fit the bizarre new peg into differently shaped holes.

  “On the one hand, it explains so much,” she finally said. “But on the other, it presents a whole new set of mysteries.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “I thought the discovery of the golden treasure was big. But this…this totally trumps anything.”

  “The overriding questions at this point, as I see it, are How? And Why?”

  “Wish I had answers, Beck. But this is way beyond me, beyond any psychic insights I might have. My advice is to seek out those mediums who seem to be so attuned to the spirits of The Keep’s past. Especially the one who’s tapped into the Masonic and Knights Templar stuff.”

  “Margaret,” Rebecca said. “She’ll be almost as blown away as I am.”

  “I think you should confide in Lochlan, too. He knows so much about the building, its secrets and its powers. Plus, he cares about you. I suspect you’re going to need all the support you can get in the very near future.”

  The ancient talisman around Rebecca’s neck seemed to grow warmer. She was going to need some magic, as well.

  Margaret and Molly arrived in the Keep lobby early the next morning. “The spirits told us we needed to come to you even before you called,” Molly explained. “They’re very worked up over some new development. Do tell!”

  “Could be the fact that this atrium is about to be closed off from the sunlight and that the Keep’s artesian well will soon be capped,” Rebecca said.

  “Oh no!” Margaret exclaimed. “Those changes are bound to disrupt – if not completely block – the spiritual flow of The Keep. But that’s not what the spirits brought us here to learn. It’s not just about the hotel. It’s about you. What’s changed with you, Rebecca? You seem somehow distant, distracted. We’re here to help.”

  When the historian told the sensitives about her experience in the library a few days earlier, their reactions mingled shock and awe. They knew about the notorious day of the hotel’s only shut down. And they understood the implications and the gravitas of Rebecca’s disclosure.

  “I think we both sensed something remarkable about your connection to The Keep the first time we met you,” Molly said. “Of course I can’t speak for Margaret, but I confess I’m a little envious. As far as I know, this is unprecedented.”

  Her fellow medium stood and walked carefully around the construction disarray still littering the lobby. She paused near the Madonna image in the onyx, unaware of how close she was to the golden treasure, and scanned the open balconies encircling the atrium. She closed her eyes and concentrated.

  “The Keep spirits are telling me the time is nigh,” she said. “But they seem to be blocking me out for the first time. I’m sensing they plan to communicate their intentions directly to you, Rebecca – and only to you. They won’t tell me what they need. I keep getting something about ‘back to the bones.’ I’m hearing that phrase over and over again, more voices joining in with each repetition. They’re not referring to the same bones the Freemasons hinted at around Halloween. I’m sorry. I can’t tell you what it means.”

  Molly, in the meantime, had made her way just beyond the far side of the front desk. She cast her gaze to the space below the skylight in the corner above the concierge desk, the place where she’d sensed The Keep’s driving force – its essence – on her initial visit back in October. It seemed to Rebecca a long time ago.

  “The hotel guardians hav
e a mission for you,” Molly told the historian, without taking her eyes from the seventh-story corner. “May the angels grant you strength.”

  Rebecca nodded solemnly. “I await their instructions.”

  Back to the bones. What was Rebecca to make of that? Stripping bare, returning to basics. If only that could happen with the Griffins Keep! Slash away decades of alterations forced upon the structure so brilliantly conceived and aesthetically wrought. Purge the physical and philosophical perversions that daily dragged the beloved beauty further from its higher purpose.

  But how, without destroying the hotel all together?

  Rebecca’s latest assignment from Ms. Jordan was to “revisit” the recorded self-guided tour script.

  “People like it, but it has way too much elaboration and way too many stories,” she explained. “Who wants to hear that much about the history of an old building that doesn’t even look like it used to? Don’t waste their time with stuff that’s not here anymore. I need it cut by half, just a few factoids for each stop.”

  Aye, aye, Cap’n! Rebecca thought. Stuff that’s gone, waste of time. Got it. Out of sight, out of relevance. Rebecca gnashed her historian teeth. Tell that to our ghosts.

  Feeling more obsolete than ever, Rebecca stared at the script hardcopy. She missed the days of regularly delivering the information live and in-person, missed the challenge of tweaking it to speak to the interests of each distinctive tour audience. No room for the personal touch in a TITHE universe.

  After whittling Harrison Griffins backstory to almost nothing, she proceeded to condense the hotel’s special features to bullet points:

  Italian Renaissance architecture.