by Claryn Vaile
Guestroom doors flew open to the hallways. Frightened people, visitors and staff, hurried to obey Branson’s directions and evacuate the premises. No one on the seventh floor stopped to question the small woman in black, making her way not toward the stairs, but rather toward a predesignated spot on the balcony. Ten panels right of one corner post. Thirteen panels left of the other. She positioned herself deliberately behind the inverted balcony panel and turned toward the corner high above the concierge desk.
For the first time she saw what the mediums had described. Incredibly bright, constantly swirling, and pulsing with the same harmonic resonance as the building’s steel frame. Numberless entities. Shining power. Elemental and ethereal. The Keep’s essence. Given form with stone and iron, consecrated by bone and blood. Empowered by sacred geometry, golden treasure, solstice sunlight, and – until minutes ago – subterranean waters.
This sanctuary shall not be defiled. She fell to her knees before the blazing phenomena, grasped the handle of the third Griffin’s sword with both hands and thrust it aloft.
“Make of me your instrument!” The strange phrasing came naturally form somewhere deep in her subconscious.
A bolt of blinding light flashed from the guardian multitude and set the sword ablaze with heatless flame. Emboldened, Rebecca stood and aimed the blade at the mezzanine balcony far below. Lightning burst from its tip, and the sigil-smattered carpet caught fire. Within seconds, the black lacquered walls were consumed. Spectral spiritual sparks within the flames evinced the complicity of the hotel’s ghosts. Their purge was begun.
Still clutching the handle with both hands, Rebecca swung the blazing sword in a wide arc around the atrium mezzanine, then up to the third floor, continuing the broad sweeps, level by level, to the sixth floor.
Two paper mache griffins suspended in midair combusted phoenix-like, ashes in an instant. Huge sections of the skylight directly above had given way with the winch, exposing glimpses of the glass-bricked top floor through shard-rimmed gaps. Directing her weapon first below, then through the openings, she sparked the devastation of the executive suites on 8 and 9, until the only floor not ablaze was the one on which she stood.
Continuing vibrations of the metal framework spawned an unearthly symphony that swelled throughout the structure, resonating beyond the sirens and the screams. The steel skeleton sang as flames danced from room to room, obliterating all contents. In an instant, Rebecca saw them feeding the blaze, the spirits of the Griffins Keep. They morphed and melded, focused and faded, flashed and flickered out, reclaiming their sanctuary.
What seemed like forever was essentially over in less than 9 minutes.
The flames that had engulfed the sword suddenly spluttered out. The vibrations stopped. The Knights’ spirits abandoned their temporary vessel and returned to their rounds. Rebecca collapsed, exhausted, on the balcony floor.
Suffocating smoke billowed throughout the Griffins Keep atrium. The door of the guestroom directly behind Rebecca burst open and a fresh breeze blew through its broken windows to clear the air. With impressive efficiency, the Keep’s thirteen ventilation shafts worked to remove the smoke not sucked through the broken skylight, which acted as a central chimney. A shaft of sunlight beamed through a space in the remaining stained glass and fell directly onto the silenced Griffin Fountain.
EMTs loaded the Tagawas’ bodies onto stretchers and hustled them out of the building, kicking the severed statue head out of the way. Other than Rebecca, only a handful of firefighters remained to witness the finale.
The fountain gushed back to life, shooting water six stories into the air. Glorious sprays and droplets glittered like diamonds in the sunbeam.
From the fountain’s center urn, something other than water began to bubble.
Glowing globes.
Shimmering energies.
Orbs.
Are they visible to anyone else?
The bright, translucent baubles began to spin around the Griffin geyser in a mesmerizing double-helix pattern, rising upward. Like flocks of birds, they reeled in perfect synchronization, the first of them rising to make room for more emerging from the fountain’s depths. And more. And more.
Below the fragmented skylight, the initial wave of orbs spread out at the seventh-floor level. Soon a second wave hovered below that. The orbs drifted in shifting planes like the mass ascension of hot air balloons in a box formation. Hundreds of them. Layer upon layer. A few darted about the atrium like ecstatic fireflies. The joy, the relief, and the gratitude emanating from the entities washed through her.
Rebecca understood somehow that they were all there – Harrison Griffin, Edward Brookings, Sybil Thorne, Collier Lockhart, Marjory Crispin, Charlotte Woods, Max Barnes, and numberless other spirits -- some tied to The Keep, some just passing through.
The fountain’s eruption suddenly dropped to a burble. The orbs throughout the atrium wavered in anticipation.
Time hit Pause.
Weakened but strangely euphoric, Rebecca dragged herself across the balcony floor to grasp a filigreed iron panel and peer down upon the scene below. A new wave of orbs began to arise from the point where the copper griffins’ wingtips touched above the urn. These moved more deliberately, shone more brilliantly than the others. Indigo. Irridescent. She watched in wonder as they rotated faster and faster.
They’re coming for me. The breeze that had dispersed the smoke had no effect on their trajectory. I know them. I’ve always known them.
Lochlan rushed into the now deserted lobby with Maureen and frantically scanned the topmost open floor.
“Can you see her? What’s happening?” he demanded of the psychic.
Mo found she was incapable of answering as she watched the whirling orbs ascend to the seventh floor where they lifted a small, limp figure dressed in black from the balcony. Surrounding the form like a swirling funnel, they enveloped it in light.
A cry of elation. A flash of transmutation. The dark garment bundle dropped back to the floor beside a charred bronze sword. Riding the ray of solstice sunlight through the fractured glass ceiling, the deep blue orbs vanished, their host increased by one.
Chapter 28
“We had four engines on the scene in under 6 minutes, and of course our priority was getting everyone out,” the fire chief told reporters in the aftermath of the Griffins Keep incident. “It is a testament to the courage and skill of our firefighters that practically every guest and employee was evacuated to safety. The few who were trapped in the service stairwell all survived with minor complications from smoke inhalations.”
The chief shook his head, still struggling to process it all himself.
“The fire moved so fast. It didn’t behave like any fire I’ve ever seen. Our preliminary investigation seems to indicate that the flames in some cases went right through doors to the guestrooms without burning them. As you may know, the superstructure of the hotel is all metal and concrete, so it’s essentially fireproof. But every floor except one and seven was gutted. Furniture, carpets, window coverings – all destroyed. And I understand TITHE had just invested millions in major redecoration.
“The top two floors fared even worse than the lower levels, since many of the interior walls and the floor between them were constructed later, with wooden supports rather than the older fire-resistant terra cotta. The ninth floor in the 45-degree corners was completely destroyed.”
“What about casualties from the falling glass?”
“Surprisingly few and surprisingly minor,” the department spokesman was pleased to report. “It’s almost as if everyone in the lobby was shielded by some sort of invisible umbrella – except, of course, the unfortunate Tagawas.”
“Chief, you said ‘practically’ every guest and employee got out,” a reporter sought to clarify. “Any fatalities?”
The fire official hesitated before answering. “Well, yes and no. Two of the firefighters discovered an older woman collapsed by the balcony railing on the seventh floor. Of co
urse they administered CPR, did everything they could to revive her, got her down to an ambulance immediately. Tragically, it was too late.”
“Was she a guest of the Griffins Keep?”
“No. We’re told she worked here. We’re withholding her identity pending notification of kin, of course. I should add that her death doesn’t appear to have been related to the fire.”
“Are you saying she died of natural causes?”
“Yeah, sure. I understand she was in her late 50s. Heart attack or stroke, we think. Probably happened right before the incident.”
“What about the two men crushed in the lobby by something that fell from the skylight, just before the fire started? Do you think their deaths and the fire were related?”
Denver’s chief of police stepped in to answer this one. “It seems likely the freak accident and the subsequent fire were both caused by the same phenomenon. Several witnesses have reported feeling some sort of earth tremor right before the winch came loose from its moorings and took the lives of Stan and Chad Tagawa, the uncle-and-nephew team that helmed TITHE, Inc., owners and operators of the Griffins Keep since last October. We have no reason to suspect foul play at this point. Let’s just say the tremors – or whatever they were – could certainly have also ruptured a gas line, disconnected wires, created a spark. It’s much too soon to draw any conclusions.”
The Griffins Keep manuscript collection at History Colorado’s Hart Library was so popular with researchers that they had to make reservations weeks in advance to view the materials.
“No special consideration for relatives of past employees?” the 40-ish woman had asked hopefully. “My aunt was the hotel historian 20 years ago.”
The librarian had politely ignored her attempt to jump the queue. “Sorry, no exceptions. We’ll contact you in April to confirm your viewing date.”
Hannah Spencer waited patiently. It wasn’t like she needed access right away for an assignment or anything, although it might lead to a great story for her cyber-mag. This was personal.
“I remember your aunt,” the librarian confided when she confirmed the research appointment with Hannah three weeks later. “Took one of her ‘ghost’ tours of The Keep when I was about 12. I’ll never forget it. She tried to tell us she was wearing the bewitched hair of the dead former historian and that it gave her all of that woman’s knowledge by sinking its roots into her brain. Creeped me out like you wouldn’t believe.”
Hannah smiled. “Sounds like Aunt Becky,” she’d said, shaking her head. “Probably a good thing she had no kids of her own. But my sibs and I always loved her imaginative storytelling.”
When the day arrived, Hannah was escorted to the research room and given a pair of special gloves for handling the artifacts. Over the years, she had gone through many different boxes of Keep files, broadly sampling ephemera of the hotel’s early years. In this age of virtual realities, tangible objects were still unmatched in their power to evoke the past. Old banquet menus, photographs, correspondence, advertisements. They all fascinated her with their glimpse into a more elegant, more discerning era. But her mission today was focused. She had requested one of the old guest registers. Specifically, the volume which included June 21, 1917 – the day the hotel had closed due to a mysterious “explosion” apparently related to tapping a deeper aquifer for the artesian well. Hannah had a theory she was ready to test.
Carefully, she turned the fragile pages covered with distinctive fountain-penned guest signatures until she came to the one stamped with the date in question. Unconsciously holding her breath, she scanned down the columns for any entry that was not like the others.
There.
Hannah rubbed her eyes to be sure she was seeing it right. In the column desk clerks had used to tick off guests when they checked out, one entry was not followed by a checkmark.
Her scrutiny shifted to the signature itself.
She sat back in her chair. After a long moment, she pulled her personal electronic device from a pocket and navigated to the photos.
Hannah had inherited her Aunt Becky’s Bancroft Booklets, the inexpensive little paperbacks that had romanticized and popularized Colorado history for mid-twentieth-century readers. Young Becky had carefully inscribed each booklet at the top of the title page, and Hannah had photographed one of them: “Property of Miss Rebecca Holcomb.”
In retrospect, Hannah would not remember what had prompted her speculation. But she would never forget the moment it was confirmed. The book inscription, the signature of the guest who never checked out on the day of that unexplained phenomenon – The very same.
Rebecca’s name. Rebecca’s handwriting.
Rebecca’s destiny.
“As you can see, the main entrance on the Grand Avenue side of the building has been reopened, easily accessed via elevator from a tunnel under Grand, connected to the parking structure across the street.”
“Capital! The overdue restoration of Mr. Brooking’s masterful vision.”
“Thank goodness arriving guests have a clear view to the Front Desk again.”
“A tunnel, you say? I seem to recall something like that running under Carson to the Silken Rose. Not that I had any personal knowledge of it….”
“That old tunnel has been restored, as has the tunnel running from The Keep sub-basement to the Capitol, for those who enjoy that sort of thing,” the hotel tour guide explained.
“Always liked that third griffin with his sword above the Grand Fireplace.”
“So lovely to see all the velvet sofas and potted palms back in the atrium. Afternoon Tea should be served in the eighth-floor Ladies Ordinary, not the middle of the hotel lobby.”
“The eighth floor has been returned to its original grandeur,” the guide assured them. “The two-story Ordinary, as well as the Ballroom and Banquet Hall, feature all the elegant appointments that graced those spaces when the Griffins Keep opened.”
“I confess I’m disappointed,” a guest groused. “Art Deco was the Bees’ Knees. Much more streamlined than this pretentious Italian Renaissance and fussy Victorian décor. A step backwards, if you ask me.”
“Well, of course, everyone has different tastes, and you can’t please them all,” their hostess granted. “When the hotel was gutted by fire – witnessed by many of you, I believe - Mrs. Kuhrsfeld-Tagawa seized the opportunity to recreate the interior as it had been in the beginning. With the deaths of her husband and nephew, she became the major stockholder in TITHE and the guiding force in The Keep’s renaissance. Her choices held sway, and most people have applauded the hotel’s return to gracious hospitality and the charm of a bygone era.”
“’Bygone era,’ you say? What balderdash! Classic elegance is timeless.”
“I still think it’s appalling that the help are better dressed than the clientele. Do the guest chambers no longer include mirrors?”
The patient guide tried to rein-in her flighty tour guests. “Now I really must ask those of you who keep drifting off to kindly stay with the group,” she admonished. First-time visitors and those long associated with the Griffins Keep were generally courteous and attentive. It was the guests from more recently who always seemed to make a fuss, fretting about what they no longer recognized. The historian understood their disorientation, and tried her best to gently acquaint them with the hotel’s renovated context.
“Here on the mezzanine we’ll see one major alteration to the original layout.” She guided them into the 45-degree corner which once housed the Silver Spoon Club. “Good evening, Curtis,” she said to the entryway greeter. “Just bringing a tour through.” He doffed his railroad conductor’s cap to the guests as they passed.
“This new hotel museum showcases historical Griffins Keep items collected, retrieved, or donated by past employees and friends of the hotel. Many of them were preserved only through the efforts of dedicated associates who understood their importance to future appreciation of The Keep’s character. You are, of course, most welcome to return and li
nger here longer after our tour concludes.” Her guests bounced from one artifact to another around the room, lighting up with personal memories.
“I can’t tell you how many times I polished that silver coffee urn.”
“Look, dear! Here’s the postcard we sent Fanny in 1903!”
“It is the cigarette holder I found on the room service tray that night.”
“I helped carry that barber chair into the sub-basement hiding place.”
“Oh, these marvelous military bandsmen! All 15 of them on display together again. And they look as good as new.”
“Mrs. Kuhrsfeld-Tagawa herself secretly rescued the bandsmen when they were slated for auction,” the docent explained. “She remembered them from her childhood and invested a great deal of money in their painstaking conservation out of personal love for the figures.”
Exiting the museum space, their guide cautioned, “As we move around the hotel, those of you with special sensitivity may encounter some of The Keep’s corporeals. There’s no reason to fear them. They’re probably just as leery of contact as you are, and they’re easily spooked. Please bear in mind that the cameras they use are very fast. Take care not to get caught in one of their photographs if you can avoid it. It seems to excite them, and then they argue about what – if anything – they’ve captured. It can be very disruptive to hotel business.”
In low murmurs, all agreed to move about with discretion. “We certainly don’t want to interfere with the daily commerce.”
“The Griffins Keep must continue as the premiere meeting place and waystation for discerning sojourners like ourselves -- from everywhere.”