The Second-Best Haunted Hotel on Mercer Street

by Cory Putman Oakes

  “No,” Willow admitted. “I’m going to the Hauntery.”

  “What?” Pierce looked very nearly startled—and for Pierce, that was saying something. He folded his arms disapprovingly. “I thought you weren’t worried about the Hauntery.”

  “I’m not. I just . . . I thought I should see what we’re up against. Just to be thorough.”

  “Thorough?”

  “Yeah. Thorough.”

  “Hmmmm,” Pierce said thoughtfully. “Well, hold on a moment. I’ll ask Bree to cover the front desk so I can go with you.”

  “I can go by myself, Pierce. I don’t need—”

  “Go? Who’s going somewhere?”

  Willow turned as Leonata appeared dramatically in the hallway.

  Leonata was Leo’s drag alter ego. Unlike Leo, who was bald, barrel-shaped, and always looked rather somber in his stiff tuxedo, Leonata was a full-figured platinum blond who preferred bright colors. At the moment, she was wearing a neon-turquoise wrap dress with sky-high silver pumps (closed-toe, Willow noticed, to conceal her Faded toes) and a matching purse covered in tiny mirrors. Willow took a moment to marvel at her masterful makeup and long, talon-like red fingernails.

  “I’m going to the Hauntery,” Willow repeated. “It’s not a big deal. I’ll be back before you—”

  “The Hauntery? Our archnemesis?” Leonata looked shocked, but she quickly recovered. “Are you spying? Is this a spy mission? If it is, count me in.”

  “We can’t all go,” Pierce reasoned. “Somebody needs to stay and run the place.”

  “Not It!” Leonata said, brushing by Pierce and moving to stand beside Willow. “Let the girls handle this one, Piercey.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be on vocal rest?” Willow demanded, trying not to choke on the thick cloud of Leonata’s vanilla-scented perfume.

  “This is vocal rest for me, sweetheart. I haven’t rehearsed my Phantasm cry for forty-eight hours. And I won’t do it now, either. Unless Pierce makes me mad.”

  Pierce just glowered at Leonata as Bree poked her head out of the nearest office, her Nikon swinging around her neck.

  “Leonata! I need ten minutes later today—we still haven’t done your portrait!” Bree’s curly Afro was pulled into a puff on the top of her head today, and Willow spotted an EVERYTHING IS LOVE T-shirt peeking out from underneath her suit jacket.

  “My portrait?” Leonata asked, sounding interested.

  “For the ‘Meet the Ghosts of the Ivan’ series I’m doing on Instagram,” Bree explained. “Everybody gets their own post, except you—you get two! See me when you get back, OK?”

  Willow, who could see that her plan to escape the hotel unnoticed was already dead and buried, sighed heavily as Bree disappeared back inside the office. “Are you sure you want to go as Leonata?” she tried. “I don’t want the Hauntery to know the Ivan’s spying on them. I’m trying to be incognito.”

  “Well, I can’t go as Leo—he’s the number-ten Phantasm on the East Coast!”

  “Eleven,” Pierce corrected her.

  Leonata waved him off impatiently. “Leo would be recognized immediately. Leonata is far more under the radar.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Willow said, blinking at Leonata’s bright dress as she held the door open for her. “Fine, let’s go.”

  “The first Hauntery Hotel opened in 2010 in Arlington, Virginia. It was a modest establishment, boasting only twenty-six rooms and a staff of eighteen. Since then, the Hauntery has grown into a global corporation with three hundred and sixty-eight properties and counting . . .”

  The stooped old ghost in the gray Hauntery uniform droned on, but Willow hardly heard him. Ever since she and Leonata had walked through the Hauntery’s front gates beneath the fluttery sign that read GRAND OPENING: OPEN HOUSE, she’d had to work to keep her jaw off the floor.

  She’d heard of Haunteries, of course. But none of what she’d heard nor the pictures she’d seen online had prepared her for the actual experience. The size of the building—there were ten times as many rooms as the Hotel Ivan! The sheer number of ghost employees. What did they all do? Even the spooky music was weirdly effective. It was all pretty overwhelming.

  And judging by Leonata’s uncharacteristic silence, Willow guessed she felt similarly.

  “The Hauntery’s revolutionary business model,” the guide continued, “which pairs a non-corporeal entity’s—or NCE’s—need to generate fear with a Living guest’s desire to experience fear, has proven to be extremely effective. It has resulted in thousands of happy, loyal ghost employees and tens of thousands of satisfied Living guests worldwide.”

  Willow nodded politely to show the tour guide she was listening. She and Leonata were the only ones on this tour. There had been some confusion when they’d first arrived—everyone had assumed that Leonata was there to audition for a staff role. But once she told the stuffy manager that she was considering booking the Hauntery for an upcoming USO event, they’d been given their own private tour.

  “It’s not really a lie,” Leonata whispered to Willow as their tour guide brought them through the lobby. “I used to be the USO coordinator for all functions concerning non-corporeal troops. It’s how I met Alford—at a concert for deceased World War I veterans.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t work for the USO anymore,” Willow whispered back.

  “Well, the Hauntery doesn’t need to know that, do they?” Leonata said with a conspiratorial wink before turning back to their guide. “Can you tell us a bit more about the property itself? My organization is only interested in booking authentically haunted locations.”

  “Of course, ma’am,” the concierge simpered, gesturing around the opulent lobby. “The original building, as well as several of the building’s ghost residents, dates back to the 1790s, just after the Revolutionary War.”

  “Wait, this building?” Willow asked, indicating the building they were currently standing in. “This building has been here since the 1700s?”

  “Since 1790,” the guide confirmed.

  “I think there must be some mistake,” Willow informed him. “I’ve lived on Mercer Street my whole life, and there’s never been a huge building here before.” For as long as Willow could remember, the property they were standing on had been a mostly empty lot with only a tiny defunct gas station on it.

  “You probably just didn’t notice it before,” their guide said, looking nonplussed. “Our restoration team did a remarkable job returning the structure to its former glory, don’t you think?”

  “I really don’t think I could have—” Willow began, but Leonata interrupted her.

  “What’s remarkable,” she mused thoughtfully, “is that there was a Victorian mansion in Vermont in the 1790s, decades before the actual Victorian era even began. Isn’t history fascinating, Willow?”

  “Oh, yes,” Willow said, trying not to laugh.

  Either the tour guide believed the nonsense he was required to recite, or he was very good at lying, because he continued on, straight-faced. “It’s so important for business entities like the Hauntery to act as responsible custodians of our past,” he continued. “Otherwise we’d be just another moneygrubbing corporation. And who needs another one of those?”

  “Who indeed?” Leonata agreed heartily.

  Their ghost guide continued talking as he led them past one of the two (two!) grand ballrooms. From there, they toured the 1920s-era tea parlor/cocktail lounge, the indoor swimming pool, the outdoor swimming pool—both with ghost lifeguards on duty at all times—and three spacious conference rooms with different themes: dungeon, mad scientist laboratory, and torture chamber.

  Willow leaned in toward Leonata as they explored the torture chamber. “I don’t get it. The Hauntery charges its guests about the same per night as the Hotel Ivan. How do they maintain all of this?”

  “Not everything is as it appears, dumpling,” Leonata replied with a meaningful nod toward a solid-looking chain hanging from the wall on Willow’s right. Willow reached out a han
d, readying herself for the touch of solid, cold metal.

  Instead, her fingers brushed lightweight plastic. The chains were fake.

  Which probably meant that everything else around them was fake, too.

  “The Hauntery allows each guest to tailor their haunting experience to their taste,” the guide droned on. “Whether you’re a family on vacation looking for some lighthearted scares, a couple looking to spice things up with a serious fright, or a business leader looking for an unforgettable team-building experience, the Hauntery is ready to give you the time of your life.”

  The ghost guide paused in the doorway.

  “You might say that we’re just dying to meet you,” he added drolly.

  Leonata let out a rather stilted laugh, but Willow could only smile weakly.

  “What about all of the employees?” she whispered to Leonata as several uniformed Hauntery staff members rushed by, flashing polite smiles that left their faces before they had a chance to reach their eyes. “How can they afford this many staff?”

  “It’s easy to hire four times the staff when you’re only paying them a quarter of what they deserve,” Leonata said, and snorted.

  The snort caused their guide to stop in his tracks. But Leonata gave him a winning smile, and he continued on down the corridor as though nothing had happened.

  “Hauntery ghosts are paid peanuts,” Leonata whispered to Willow as they passed a door marked HOTEL STAFF ONLY. “They only work here to avoid Fading.”

  “Because Hauntery ghosts never Fade,” Willow mused.

  “Exactly,” Leonata said sadly.

  The tour moved upstairs to a resplendent guest suite at least twice the size of the largest room in the Hotel Ivan. While Leonata distracted the guide with questions about the Hauntery’s accommodations, Willow slipped around a corner and backtracked to the STAFF ONLY door. She nudged it open and peeked inside to find a barren, cheerless room. There was a large whiteboard on one wall that had “Employee Rankings” written above a long list of names. Willow could see only two categories: sufficient and insufficient. There was also a large picture of a scowling ghost above a sign that read, “Geoff van Gaff: Worldwide Hauntery Employee of the Month. No Vacation Days for Nine Years and Eighty-Seven Days (and counting!)”

  Willow gulped and closed the door.

  She caught up to Leonata and their guide just as they were entering the (award-winning!) dining room, where Willow and Leonata were each given a tea cookie served by a vacant-eyed pastry chef.

  “Does your restaurant have a Michelin star?” Willow asked as she chewed. The cookie was good—annoyingly good, actually—but it didn’t hold a candle to Chef Antonia’s famous melt-in-your-mouth butter cookies. Willow allowed herself to feel the tiniest bit smug. The Hotel Ivan’s restaurant did have a Michelin star—the first Michelin star to ever be awarded to an establishment with a ghost head chef—and it was one of the hotel’s proudest selling points.

  “Michelin stars,” the guide shook his head in disgust. “Those are a dime a dozen. Hauntery restaurants are staffed only by chefs who have won the James Beard Award. The World’s 50 Best Restaurants Award had to change its name to the World’s 75 Best Restaurants Award because there were so many Hauntery restaurants that qualified.”

  “Oh,” said Willow.

  “We constantly rotate our award-winning chefs through our properties so that our menus are continually updated,” the guide continued. “At the Hauntery Hotels, we like to say that life and death are too short ever to experience the same meal twice!”

  Willow exchanged a look with Leonata, and she could tell they were both thinking about how many times Chef Antonia had served lasagna last week.

  When the tour finally, mercifully came to an end, Willow followed Leonata outside and leaned against the (artfully) dilapidated back wall of the Hauntery for support.

  “Well.” Leonata tossed the business card the manager had given her in a nearby trash bin. “That was . . . interesting.”

  “It’s worse than I thought it would be,” Willow admitted. “The Hauntery makes so much money—they could afford to restore real old buildings and pay their staff fairly. Why don’t they?”

  “They’re all about profit.” Leonata tapped on the fake stone wall at their backs. “The more money they spend on the hotel, the less Corporate gets to keep. Real stone facades, fair wages—those don’t come cheap.”

  “But don’t the guests notice?”

  “They don’t seem to be complaining,” Leonata said with a shrug. “This Hauntery isn’t officially open, so it doesn’t have a Zagged rating yet. But in a few weeks, it’ll have a perfect five stars. They all do!”

  Willow frowned. It just didn’t add up. Of course the Hauntery Corporation wanted to make money; that was the point of any business, even the Ivan. But when Willow tried to imagine her parents lying to their guests about the Hotel Ivan’s history or forcing the Ivan ghosts to give up their vacation days under pain of being ranked “insufficient” on a board somewhere, she just couldn’t. The Ivan might be a bit shabbier around the edges than the glittering Hauntery, but that couldn’t be what mattered most to the guests.

  Could it?

  “I’m glad we came,” Willow said finally. “Now we know for certain that the Hauntery is as different from the Ivan as it could possibly be. People will figure that out. Won’t they?”

  “I hope so,” Leonata said wistfully, not sounding nearly as certain as Willow wished she would.

  They walked home in silence. When the Ivan, with its slightly crumbling brick facade, came into view, Leonata turned to Willow. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something.”

  “Oh?” Willow said distractedly. She was stuck on the tour guide’s comment about tens of thousands of delighted guests.

  “Your mom.”

  Willow stopped walking.

  Leonata took a deep breath. “When someone dies and then rises as a ghost, it’s only natural for that someone’s relatives to have, er, complicated feelings on the matter—”

  “Complicated?”

  “Yes.” Leonata looked down and fiddled with the strap of her purse. “When your mom came back, we were all delighted, of course. And surprised. She’s the first Ivan ever to come back as a ghost, did you know that?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Of—of course you did,” Leonata said hesitantly. “What I mean is, I know there was a lot of pressure on you to be thrilled to see her. And grateful to have her back in your life.”

  Willow squinted at Leonata, confused.

  “What I’m trying to say,” Leonata continued—Willow got the distinct impression that she was avoiding making eye contact—“is that it’d be okay if you weren’t thrilled. Or grateful.”

  Willow stared at Leonata for a long moment before she swallowed and forced a laugh. “What are you talking about? She’s my mother. Of course I’m thrilled I get to have another chance with her.”

  “I know you’re happy she came back. I just mean you don’t have to be excited about the way she came back . . .”

  Willow fought back an image of her mother’s last trip down to the lobby. The way her mother had looked straight at her like she wasn’t entirely sure who she was.

  Willow?

  “She’s fine,” Willow said dryly. “She’s adjusting. It takes some ghosts a while, you know—”

  “Yes, but it’s been six months now. I think it’s time to face the fact that she might be a—”

  “Don’t say it—”

  “A WISP,” Leonata finished.

  Willow winced at the word, and Leonata sighed.

  “I’m sorry, love. But somebody’s got to mention it.”

  Willow drew in a breath. It wasn’t at all rare for a recently risen ghost to be a little confused about what had happened to them. Most ghosts overcame this fogginess within a month or two and managed to settle into healthy afterlives until their eventual Fadings.

  But there was a small fraction of ghosts who ne
ver managed to remember who they had been in life and who never quite came to terms with who they were now. The general rule was that if a ghost didn’t adjust within a few months of their death, they were probably a WISP, which stood for “Woefully Impermanent Spiritual Presence.” WISPs tended to Fade within a year or so.

  Willow swallowed. “It’s only been six months.”

  “I know, but—”

  “She’s still got time.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “My mother is not a WISP!”

  “Of course not, dumpling,” Leonata relented, looking like she regretted bringing it up. “Forget I said anything. Should we go inside? I need to see Bree about my portrait.”

  Willow frowned down at her feet. “You go,” she said. “I need some more air.”

  Leonata hesitated for a moment. She seemed to want to say more, but eventually she turned and walked into the Ivan without another word.

  Willow watched Leonata’s shiny turquoise dress disappear through the front door. But instead of following her inside, Willow kept walking.

  And walking. And walking.

  Walking felt better than thinking.

  Thrilled. Grateful.

  Willow shook her head to clear it of the thought.

  Her mother was fine. It was way too soon to stress out about things like WISPs. They had much more serious things to worry about, like how they were going to make sure that the Freeling family didn’t wish they’d booked their reunion at the Mercer Street Hauntery instead of the Ivan. No matter what Willow had said to Leonata about not being worried, she couldn’t quite shake the memory of the Hauntery’s lavish lobby, that ornate guest suite, the swimming pools . . . She should really get back to the Ivan this minute and start working on a plan.

  But for some reason, Willow didn’t feel like going home yet. She kept walking until she reached the Mercer Street Public Library, whose doors opened automatically to welcome her inside.

  CHAPTER 6

  EVIE

  It had taken Louise about three seconds to run to Evie’s parents and report that Mr. Fox had witnessed Evie doing her illicit Phantasm act. It had taken Evie’s parents about the same amount of time to confine Evie to her room so she could “think about what she’d done.”