The Second-Best Haunted Hotel on Mercer Street

by Cory Putman Oakes

  With a loud sob, Leo threw himself back down on the chaise and slung an arm over his face. “And now a Hauntery!” he wailed into the crook of his elbow. “How can I possibly be expected to compete with that? We’re doomed! Doomed, I say!”

  “We’re not doomed,” Willow said quickly, with more conviction than she actually felt. A happy, confident staff was the key to a successful hotel. How many times had her mother told her that? No matter what her private feelings were, it was important that she instill confidence in everybody else. “Who cares about Haunteries?” she sniffed. “They’re all part of a stupid, cold, corporate hotel chain—”

  “—that owns three hundred and sixty-eight properties on four continents,” Pierce added.

  “—that doesn’t know the first thing about true haunted hospitality—” Willow continued.

  “—and that boasts a perfect five-star Zagged rating for ninety-five percent of its properties,” Pierce concluded.

  Willow glared at him. “The Hauntery ghosts get shuffled around between hotels so much, they never stay long enough to properly haunt a place,” she pointed out. “We have real history here. We have warmth. Tradition. Guests can tell the difference. Guests can feel the difference. You’ll see.”

  “But the Fosters—” Leo started.

  “The Fosters were a fluke,” Willow informed him, desperately trying to put aside the image of Mr. Foster, red-faced and bellowing, Nothing here is scary! “Even with the bad rating they left us, we still have a four-and-a-half star Zagged rating—that’s plenty of happy, satisfied guests.”

  “So you’re not at all worried about the Hauntery?” Alford asked.

  “No, I’m not worried,” Willow said defiantly, standing up as tall as she could. “My family has run the Hotel Ivan for four hundred years. We’ve survived wars, plagues, stock market crashes, and most of the staff dying. What’s a stupid chain hotel compared to that? The Hauntery should be worried about us, not the other way around.”

  “But my voice!” Leo moaned.

  “Rest your voice, Leo,” Willow commanded, walking to the door. “Because we have a fully booked season coming up. Plenty of guests, which means plenty of fear to go around. We’ve got the Freeling family reunion coming in next week, then the Vermont Vapors next month—”

  “The who?” Leo asked.

  “The Vermont Vapors! You know, the soccer team? They’ve booked the whole hotel for a solid month. They’ll be expecting the best, and we’re going to give it to them. Because we are the Hotel Ivan! If anybody else on staff mentions the Hauntery, that’s what you tell them!”

  She opened the door, prepared to make a dramatic exit of which even Leo would have approved, before she remembered something and swung back around.

  “Oh, and if anybody happens to see Molly’s head, can you give it back to her? Thanks.”

  CHAPTER 4

  EVIE

  The magazine was a crumpled, faded gossip rag. The kind the Living liked to take on planes or on vacation. The type Evie was constantly finding strewn around the lobbies of every Hauntery she had ever haunted.

  In addition to a teasing headline about Professor Torrance’s new research on Fading, the cover featured a large picture of Kathleen Deetz, the founder and CEO of GhouledIn, a professional networking site exclusively for ghosts. The first-ever ghost billionaire.

  The magazine wasn’t the kind of thing Evie thought she would actually enjoy reading. It was a far cry from a Deena Morales Mystery—Evie’s favorite series of books, which chronicled the adventures of brilliant teen detective Deena Morales. But that didn’t matter. She stared at it anyway. She flexed her fingers once, then let them hover over the worn cover, directly above Kathleen Deetz’s smiling face.

  Evie lowered her hand slowly . . . then let out a loud, disappointed groan as her hand went right through the magazine (and the tabletop below) like a hot knife through butter.

  “What are you doing?”

  Evie jumped as Louise sauntered into the Hauntery lobby. Her cousin was still wearing the frilly pink dress from their Spooky Little Girl routine. Evie had changed back into jeans and a T-shirt the moment they’d gone off the clock. She couldn’t stand the way the pink ruffles felt against her skin—the same kind of ruffles that were now swaying back and forth as Louise walked up to her.

  “Were you trying to touch that magazine?”

  “No.”

  “Liar.”

  “Go away, Louise.”

  Louise crossed her arms over her ruffles and sniffed. “You have to be a ghost for a long time before you can start manipulating objects in the Living world,” she informed Evie, as though Evie weren’t painfully aware of that fact. “You’re barely five years dead. It takes most ghosts ten years at least.”

  Evie licked her lips. “I don’t want to wait that long.” She flexed her fingers, preparing to try again.

  “You don’t have a choice about it. It’s the way things are.”

  Ignoring her cousin, Evie extended her hand over the magazine again, then dipped the very tip of one finger toward the cover. She willed herself to feel something. Anything. The remains of the slightly glossy finish, the feel of the paper crease that ran through the middle of Kathleen Deetz’s forehead. Something.

  But there was nothing. Evie felt only empty air.

  Louise laughed. “Why not just try and touch a Living person while you’re at it,” she sneered.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Evie growled at her. Not even the oldest ghost could touch a Living person. Nobody knew why. But almost every ghost got around to being able to touch non-Living objects eventually.

  And if I practice enough, maybe I can do it sooner than most.

  Louise rolled her eyes as though she had heard Evie’s thoughts out loud. “Come on. Some test guests requested us on the third floor. Let’s go.”

  “Play with us,” Evie chorused in perfect broken harmony with Louise.

  The couple at the other end of the hallway jumped. They were a middle-aged duo wearing matching I Survived a Night in a Hauntery T-shirts, which Evie thought was a bit presumptuous, given that Louise told her the couple had only checked in thirty minutes ago.

  “Oh my!” the woman exclaimed, clutching the man’s arm.

  Louise tightened her grip on Evie’s hand. Evie allowed herself to be dragged two feet closer to the couple.

  “Play with us,” they said again. “Please play with us.”

  “Oh, George!” The woman made a show of hiding her face in the man’s shoulder. She had the look of smiley, shivery delight that people who enjoyed being scared often had in Haunteries. “How ghastly.”

  Evie, who couldn’t have agreed more with the woman’s assessment of the situation, was suddenly sure that she could endure this no longer. She squeezed Louise’s hand twice; it was their agreed-upon signal that they should back away and end the encounter.

  But Louise ignored her and dragged them a step closer.

  “Come and join our game,” Louise implored the couple.

  “Um, well, I don’t think . . .” George stumbled as his wife tittered with terrified glee.

  Evie squeezed Louise’s hand again. Again, Louise ignored her.

  “We won’t hurt you,” she went on. “We know lots of games.”

  Evie took a breath. Even if Louise wasn’t going to listen to her, she was going to end this one way or another.

  Evie drew herself up to her full height the way she’d seen her father do before his act. She willed her face to change from the wide-eyed innocence of the Spooky Little Girl to the fearsome, angry expression of a Phantasm. She felt the temperature in the hallway drop. Wind whipped up around her. She rose several inches off the floor.

  Louise, oblivious to her cousin’s antics, continued on in an eerie singsong. “Play with us,” she sang. “Play with us—”

  “—FOREVER,” Evie added in her best booming Phantasm voice.

  It wasn’t quite the roaring, thunderous cry her father had perfected, the o
ne that shook buildings and sent chills down the spines of people blocks away. It wasn’t even a cry at all—just a word, said in the spookiest voice she could summon. But it did echo up and down the hallway and cause a shock of icy wind to whip up the Living couple’s hair.

  The woman screamed. The man gave a strangled, frightened cry, and they bolted down the hallway toward the stairs.

  Evie lowered herself back to the floor and turned triumphantly to Louise. “Did you see that?” she squealed. “Did you see how scared they were?”

  “What I saw was you breaking character,” Louise said accusingly.

  “Whatever. It worked. They were scared. Job done!”

  “We’re not supposed to scare them that way. That’s the Phantasm’s job.”

  “Who says?”

  “Everybody says! Corporate. Our bosses. Your parents—”

  “Me. I say.”

  Evie and Louise both froze as a very tall, very bald, very skinny man wearing a black suit walked down the hall toward them.

  “Mr. Fox!” Louise called, running toward him. “I had no idea she was going to do that! I don’t know what came over her. I—”

  Mr. Fox put up a pale hand to stop her, then turned to Evie. “Ms. MacNeil, is it?”

  “Yes, sir,” Evie admitted. Mr. Fox, the vice president of quality control for the entire Hauntery Corporation, had arrived at the Mercer Street Hauntery just a day after Evie and her family. She couldn’t help but think it was probably a bad sign that he already knew her name.

  Mr. Fox narrowed his eyes at Evie. “Walk with me while I finish my rounds.”

  Without waiting for her to reply, he turned on his shiny heel and walked back the way from which he had come. Evie hurried to follow him after throwing a nasty look at Louise, who stuck her tongue out at her.

  Mr. Fox led Evie down a stairwell, through a door, and into a cavernous underground kitchen. “Launching a business of this magnitude is an enormously complex undertaking,” he informed Evie. “I don’t expect you to understand most of it. What I do expect you to appreciate is that Corporate has sent me here to oversee the opening of this Hauntery location. And I will not be leaving until I’m satisfied that the entire staff is operating at or above the standards set out in the Handbook.”

  He paused to examine a stack of clean dishes, a tub of perfectly round melon balls, and a tray of cookies for that afternoon’s Haunted Tea. He counted each cookie on the tray before nodding to a neatly uniformed ghost maid to take them away.

  “Attention to detail is vital,” he sniffed, then looked down his long nose at Evie. “And what I saw back there in the hallway was not a Handbook-approved guest encounter.”

  “I know,” Evie admitted. “I’m sorry, but I—”

  “Oh, hello, Mr. Fox! Hi, Evie!”

  Patricia Spengler, the ghost who had complimented Evie’s boots when she’d first arrived, appeared from around the corner. Patricia was the Hauntery’s assistant baker, and Evie watched enviously as she picked up a tray loaded with muffins and held it up under the hotel manager’s nose. Patricia had been only nineteen when she died, but that had been more than one hundred years ago, so now she could handle objects in the Living world as easily as anybody alive. Patricia was wearing the drab gray uniform that the kitchen staff was required to wear, and her hair was done up into an elaborate tower of black braids that made her just as tall as Mr. Fox.

  Evie blinked. It was hard to tell for sure, but for a moment, it seemed as though the dark skin of Patricia’s arm, the one that was holding the tray, became several degrees more translucent. But when Evie blinked again, the effect was gone, and Patricia’s arm was no more see-through than that of any other ghost.

  “Would you like a muffin, Mr. Fox?” Patricia asked. “I baked them fresh this morning.”

  Mr. Fox paused. “Are those blueberry?” When Patricia nodded enthusiastically, he shivered and wrinkled his nose. “I’m allergic.”

  “Really?” Evie couldn’t help but ask. “I didn’t know you could be allergic to those.”

  “My whole family is allergic to blueberries, Ms. MacNeil,” Mr. Fox informed her icily.

  Patricia hastily withdrew the tray.

  Mr. Fox turned back to Evie. “Professionalism, Ms. MacNeil. That is the cornerstone of what we do. We are a Hauntery Hotel. Not some two-bit, family-run, fleabag bed-and-breakfast. Like that one nearby . . . uh, what do they call themselves, Ms. Spengler?”

  “Do you mean the Hotel Ivan?” Patricia asked uncertainly. “That cute little place down the—” She cut herself off as Mr. Fox glared at her.

  “Cute is an interesting word for that run-down old pile of bricks,” Mr. Fox said, rolling his eyes. “Amazing that they have the audacity to even call themselves a hotel. Still, they’re one of the oldest independent haunted establishments in the country. Which is why I’m here to personally see to it that they are crushed into oblivion. We’ll show them how we do things at the Hauntery! We don’t stand for mediocrity here.”

  Evie fidgeted uncomfortably at Mr. Fox’s alarming tone. Patricia gave her a sympathetic smile before backing quietly around the corner with her tray.

  “Mr. Fox,” Evie began, “I know what I did wasn’t, strictly speaking, part of the Handbook—”

  “Strictly speaking?”

  “Well, the Handbook does allow for some variation in our act. So I thought—”

  “Let’s see about that, shall we?” Mr. Fox pulled a well-worn, palm-size book from his back pocket. The cover read:

  Official Hauntery Handbook

  Employment Guidelines and Behavioral Expectations for

  All Non-Corporeal Entities

  38th Edition

  Mr. Fox flipped through the pages for a moment, found what he was looking for, then cleared his throat loudly. “The roles of Spooky Little Girls will be played by two young female ghosts of similar height and build, dressed in identical, sweet, old-fashioned attire.”

  Mr. Fox paused to give Evie’s outfit a critical look over the top of the book. Evie crossed her arms impatiently. Hideous as it may be, she knew her dress was, at least, Handbook-approved.

  “Spooky Little Girls will engage hotel guests and their children with friendly requests to ‘play with us,’ ‘come and play,’ or similar. These requests can be accompanied by smiles, giggles, and/or short pieces of adorable ad-lib dialogue.”

  He snapped the book shut with a loud thud. “Is any part of that job description unclear to you, Ms. MacNeil?”

  “No, but—”

  “And was there anything in that description about impersonating a Terrifying Phantasm?”

  “No, but—”

  “But what?”

  “But they were scared, Mr. Fox. Isn’t that the point?”

  “The point, Ms. MacNeil, is that the job descriptions of contract ghosts have been set out in meticulous detail by Corporate. People who have more experience running a hotel than you. You are a contract employee, and you will fulfill the terms of your contract, and only the terms of your contract, or you will be replaced by another ghost who will. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Mr. Fox.” Evie stared down at her shoes, hoping that would be the end of the matter. But Mr. Fox moved a step closer and lowered his voice.

  “I’m aware that you and your family come as a package deal. I’m also aware that yesterday evening, your father gave a Terrifying Phantasm performance that caused three of our test guests to faint and two others to be taken to the hospital with heart palpitations. Corporate was delighted. But even he can be replaced. One phone call to Corporate is all it would take to have new ghosts here tomorrow to replace you all in plenty of time for the grand opening. One more slipup, Ms. MacNeil, and I will make that phone call. Understood?”

  “Understood,” Evie echoed.

  “I don’t have to remind you that a bad reference from the Hauntery Corporation would make it virtually impossible for you or your family ever to find employment elsewhere?”

  “No.�
� Evie ground her teeth together. “You don’t have to remind me.”

  Mr. Fox nodded and wiggled his fingers at her. Evie took this as a sign that she was dismissed and turned toward the kitchen door.

  Ugh, Evie thought to herself. The Living.

  “Smiles,” Mr. Fox called after her. “Giggles. Short pieces of adorable ad-lib dialogue. That’s your value to the Hauntery, Ms. MacNeil.

  “Don’t make us believe you’re more trouble than you’re worth.”

  CHAPTER 5

  WILLOW

  Willow couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn jeans.

  There was a strict business-casual dress code for the Hotel Ivan’s staff. Willow owned four identical pairs of black wool pants with pressed creases down the front. Her mother had called them “slacks,” and Willow always made sure to wear a pair when she was on duty. Which, lately, had been always. She hadn’t even looked at a pair of jeans in . . . she couldn’t remember how long. The pair she had on now was about an inch too short.

  But they would have to do. Normal twelve-year-olds didn’t wear slacks unless they were going somewhere fancy.

  Willow pulled her curly brown hair back into a ponytail. She glanced in the mirror and flinched at the stark white complexion of the girl looking back at her. How long had it been since she’d left the hotel? She desperately needed some sun.

  She flung a backpack over her shoulder and headed for the back door, hoping she’d be able to slip out unnoticed. Antonia, the Ivan’s head chef, glanced up from the stove as Willow passed the kitchen, but she gave only a distracted wave before turning away to taste something that was bubbling on the stove.

  With a sigh of relief, Willow put her hand on the doorknob.

  “Where are you going?”

  Willow jumped and turned around guiltily to face Pierce. “Nowhere.”

  “Is it school?” the concierge asked hopefully. “Are you going to school?”