Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set (141 page)

“All this talking doesn’t help,” Burton said. The walkie talkie on his hip squeaked and Wayne announced, “Okay, all groups head for their next scheduled stop.”

Burton ushered the group to Room 318, counting to make sure no one had dropped out, though he wouldn’t mind losing a couple of them.

“Hey, the light doesn’t work,” someone said.

Burton retrieved the flashlight from his belt and flicked it on, pointing it into the dark room.
Good move, Wayne. Pulling the fuse will keep them guessing every time.

“Watch your step,” he said. “Let’s see what the FLIR picks up.”

He passed the instrument to the person closest to him. Even with the door open, the room appeared thick with darkness. The flashlight barely dented it. Burton whacked it on his thigh, though he routinely added fresh batteries before every hunt.

“I feel a cold spot,” said the Kool-Aid woman.

Burton was willing to bet she felt hot spots, too. And maybe even purple polka dots.

“Margaret, are you here?” Cappie bellowed.

“Easy, now,” Burton said. “No need to provoke yet.”

“Come out,” the Kool-Aid woman said. “You don’t have to be afraid.”

That’s a good one. Ghosts afraid of people.

“Did you hear that?” said someone on the far side of the room.

“Shhh.”

“What was it?”

“Tapping. Up above.”

Burton found himself squinting in the darkness overhead, though he kept his flashlight trained on the floor. Since Digger was staying in 318, he’d stowed his personal gear in the closet and locked it. That sealed off the attic access, so unless someone had ascended the closeted stairwell off the main hall, then the noise was likely caused by animals.

Still, opportunity knocked.

“Tap once if you’re Margaret Percival,” Burton said in a calm voice.

The room fell silent, and wood creaked in the distance as the inn settled.

“Tap once if you’re with us,” Burton said.

Nothing but Cappie’s labored breathing. Burton flicked off the flashlight and closed the door, figuring absolute darkness would inspire reaction.

The door swung open again.

Burton turned, knowing he’d been the last to enter. The hallway was empty. “Is that you, Margaret?”

Burton wished he’d thought of the trick. Fishing line, a hidden spring, even a subtle kick of the heel would have been enough. Was Wayne at work behind the scenes?

No, for all his boss’s enthusiasm, Wayne was not the type to rig an encounter. And Burton’s few solid paranormal experiences were enough to convince him that there was more to this world than met the eye. Ghosts happen.

The room was quiet, and Burton could feel all eyes fixed on the doorway. “You’re welcome to close it now.”

“I’d crap my pants if it did,” somebody said.

“Shhh.”

The tension in the room was like a taut, quivering wire. Burton took an easy step toward the lighted rectangle of carpet. If he played it right, the open door could give the guests a weekend’s worth of talking points.

“Margaret, we’ve—”

Creee-kuh-BLAM
.

The door swung closed so fast that Burton dropped his flashlight, and the wall shook with the force of its slamming. One woman screamed, and a man who sounded like Cappie issued a breathless curse. Furniture banged as several people fled deeper into the dark room. Burton mentally counted the steps to the door, then moved to it and tried the handle.

It was stuck.

“Easy, folks,” Burton said.

“The door closed by itself,” said one of the faceless hunters.

“No way,” Cappie said. “This isn’t a poltergeist room.”

“Yeah, but it could be something that even a poltergeist doesn’t want to mess with,” Burton said, scooping up his flashlight. He swept his flashlight across the room and into the squinting, confused faces.

“She’s here,” whispered the Kool-Aid woman.

“What’s the FLIR saying?” Burton asked the man who was looking into the device’s small monitor.

“Seven of us,” he said. “Warm blooded.”

Burton passed his flashlight to the woman on the left. “Hold this,” he said. “I want to get some infrared video.”

Burton backed against the door, pretending to fumble in his pack while he surreptitiously tested the door handle. Still locked.

The flashlight blinked out and the room was once again nearly dark, with only the dim green lights of cameras and EMF recorders to break the endless expanse of black.

“Shit, gone dead.” The man banged the flashlight with the palm of his hand.

“She’s charging up,” the Kool-Aid woman said. “My camera just drained.”

Burton had once been in a séance where the medium had allegedly dredged up the spirit of a mass murderer, and whether it was the power of suggestion or the real thing, the room had fairly crackled with tension and expectation. This room had the same electricity. Burton wondered if Wayne or Cody was monitoring the remote cams in the control room.

He reached for the walkie talkie on his hip. He thumbed the “send” button and said, “Wayne, we’ve got phenomena in 318.”

He released the button and realized there was no wireless signal. The walkie talkie didn’t even hiss. He clicked the button a couple of times. Dead.

“
Your walkie talkie’s broken, too, isn’t it?” said the Kool-Aid woman, with spaced-out satisfaction.

“Dead spot,” he said.

“Exactly. Margaret wants her room back, and we’re in it.”

“She can have it,” said the man with the flashlight. “I’m outta here.”

The beam jittered as he took a few steps toward the door, throwing the room into a kaleidoscope of images: the Kool-Aid woman’s blissful smile, the FLIR meter tilted toward the center of the room, a couple standing by the bed holding hands, Cappie fiddling with his digital camera.

Burton blocked the door. “Easy. You’re breaking hunt protocol.”

In truth, SSI policy was to allow any hunter to break off at any time, for any reason, whether diarrhea, boredom, or fear. But Burton didn’t want to deal with the fallout from a roomful of adults trapped against their wishes. Plus he’d have to come up with a reasonable explanation for the locked door. Even if the door had been locked from the outside, it had a privacy latch that should have released the lock with a turn of the handle.

The man pointed the light into Burton’s face. Burton forced his facial muscles to relax into a smile. “This is what we paid for, right? The Trophy Room.”

“Yeah,” the Kool-Aid woman said to the man. “You’re going to scare her off.”

“Jesus,” said the man with the FLIR. “There’s something here.”

He turned the small monitor around until it showed the seven other people in the room outlined as orange-red figures. A bluish-green shape flickered in the middle of them. Burton grabbed the flashlight and pointed it at the spot, but it was only an open expanse of carpet. The shape solidified on the screen, then began undulating.

“Margaret,” the Kool-Aid woman gushed, with an air of worship. “I knew you’d come.”

Burton checked his EMF meter but it had drained as well. Fully charged, it was good for at least six hours, and he’d only been using it for an hour. The only evidence of the phenomenon was the FLIR, which had a digital drive for recording.

“You guys see this?” said the FLIR operator.

The man who’d been holding the flashlight pushed past Burton and lunged at the door. “Hey, it’s locked!”

The bluish-green shape on the FLIR never quite took on a human outline, though many forms were suggested as it shifted. Several of the hunters had moved forward to watch the meter, while two–the couple holding hands–edged closer to the door. Burton kept the flashlight trained on the carpet.

“It’s moving,” said the FLIR operator, and something brushed Burton’s face like the cool, slimy tentacle of an octopus. The man at the door rattled the handle and then moaned.

“Get it off me,” he said, and then the door swung open with such force that the man landed on his ass, blinking into the explosion of light from the hallway. The FLIR now showed only the orange forms again, depicting the warm-blooded people in the room. Whatever had caused the anomaly had now evaporated.

The overhead light flickered, blinked, and then stayed on, leaving the group of hunters looking at each other with a mixture of fear, awe, and disbelief.

Burton checked his equipment and found it working again. He thumbed the walkie talkie and spoke into it. “Control Room, we’ve had a doozy.”

Chapter 20

Noonie.

The word had taken on a double meaning for Wayne and Beth, in the way long-time companions formed their own language. At first it had been a code word for their lunchtime sexual encounters, when they invariably ended up late returning to work. The word had evolved into a synonym for Beth’s vagina, though Wayne always found it too cutesy for a place that served up such powerful mysteries, mind-blowing pleasures, and the miracle of a child.

The word had been theirs, and he couldn’t imagine how Amelia Gordon had learned of it. If the board had spelled out “Beth” or “wife” or “I’m here,” he would have dismissed it as coincidence, but she had picked the one word he couldn’t deny. Wayne stared down at the abandoned Ouija board in 218.

“Beth,” he whispered.

The thought of her name somehow seemed safe, because he’d carried her inside him for years. But saying it aloud gave it weight and imbued it with the power of possibility. Making a wish was foolish and believing in ghosts was an act of cowardice. If he really thought he knew better than God, then he would pick up a bottle and hide in the sewers of his own ego and fear.

“Beth,” he said aloud.

I can’t believe in you. Not like this. I believe in how you used to be.

Wayne touched the surface of the Ouija board. The planchette still lay on the floor, where it had fallen after Amelia’s fainting spell.

Amelia had talked about  an angel in the ceiling. Room 318 was directly above.

Do I want to know? If I got an answer, would I accept it? Or would I rather cling to the stories that have given me comfort over the years?

Comfort.

No, it wasn’t comfort.

It was survival.

The board was slick and relatively new. He’d bought it as a prop after one of his conference guests had complained that the discussion panels were too tech-oriented and boring. “You can learn all that stuff on the Internet,” said the crank.

So he’d started sexing up his events, tossing in psychics, palm readers, and everything but one-armed, mud-wrestling midgets, and if he could figure out a way to tie those into the paranormal instead of the plain old abnormal, he would do it in a heartbeat. The Ouija board always drew a crowd because people longed for oracles and throughout history had searched for messages in everything from animal intestines to tea leaves.

During their honeymoon, when they’d played with the Ouija board, that’s what they were doing—playing. As they knelt at the coffee table, drinking wine in their bath robes, they summoned Margaret. All for laughs, all for foreplay, all part of the fun of a haunted hotel.

But then the talk had turned serious, and as a cold wind blew in from nowhere, Beth gazed into his eyes and made him swear. Wayne gave an uncomfortable giggle, playing along. So he’d nodded and smiled. An agreement and an invitation.

When Beth had made The Promise, Wayne never imagined he’d outlive her. He was still drinking in those days. Not so much that it had drowned their relationship, but plenty enough. They were too young to acknowledge the inevitability of middle age, let alone mortality. When you had forever, promises were cheap.

The pact was simple: if one of them died, the other would return to the White Horse Inn. The deceased would try to make contact from the spirit world. Harry Houdini had made the same promise, and as far as anyone knew, the greatest magician in history had not found a way to pick the locks of the afterlife and make a successful return.

Wayne might even have forgotten the pact, throwing it on the pile of somedays and pledges and promises, if she hadn’t reminded him of it as she wasted away in a hospital bed. A mastectomy hadn’t stemmed the spread of cancer, and when it showed up in her pancreas and liver, she swore off the chemotherapy and kept her pain medication to a minimum, wanting to be alert for her final days. Wayne went in the opposite direction, crawling into a bottle and pickling himself like a living laboratory specimen.

Beth didn’t scold him or judge him, and her unconditional love radiating from dimming eyes filled him with shame. In some ways, alcoholism was an even more insidious disease than cancer, because it gave the illusion of choice. Beth’s mother, who always knew best even when she knew nothing, had taken on Kendra, showing her granddaughter how to react to the death of a loved one: the stages of anger, denial, fear, acceptance, and then deep, abiding sorrow.

And when the countdown came, when the heart monitor beeped erratically and Beth’s breathing became ragged, she beckoned him close and whispered, “I’ll see you at the inn.”

She smiled and her gaunt fingers gripped his sweaty ones, and Wayne could only nod. Later, days after the funeral, he realized she’d been referring to the White Horse and the glib deal they’d made years before, fresh after making newlywed love in Room 318.

It took a while, but here I am.

Wayne picked up the planchette, half expecting it to throb with unseemly warmth.

It was plastic, made in China, nothing divine about it.

He hurled it across the room and it bounced against the television.

The television switched on.

“–OPEC has pledged to boost production so that heating oil prices will stabilize for the holidays. Crude oil is currently trading at seventy-eight dollars a barrel and–”

Wayne shut it off.

“Okay, Beth,” he said. “If you want to speak to me, do it directly and not through cheap electronics.”

The curtains fluttered even though the window was closed.