Speed Dating With the Dead (27 page)

His lips curled in anger. “Don’t call me that.”

“Just like a rat—sneak around in the dark and stink.” The words were louder than she’d intended, but she was scared and didn’t want the brat to know. She forced her hand to hold the beam steady on his puckered, pointy face.

“Take it back,” he said.

She glanced around, but all she saw were shadows. Why didn’t Cody answer? Had he dropped off his flashlight? Where were Bruce and those other kids?

“Why are you guys playing games?” she said, then aimed the beam behind Rochester. “Oh, I get it. Bruce, you’re such a dork.”

Rochester fell for the trick and turned to look behind him, and she glimpsed a dark depression in the flesh of his neck. It was an unbroken line, with mottled skin around it. As if....

No. He couldn’t have hanged himself, because then he’d be dead. Just like Bruce. And I don’t want them to be dead.

Because then I’d have to believe all this crap.

Maybe Cody was in on it, using her as bait in some bizarre research project. He could have set up his audio recorders, decimeters, and other devices beforehand, then tried to scare her so he could measure her skin temperature, pulse rate, electromagnetic energy, and screams.

Probably even the kiss had been part of it, causing her to let guard down, make her vulnerable to his suggestions of demons.

Now it made sense. Bruce grabbing her book, leading her on a chase, Cody conveniently guiding her to the attic, planting ghost stories in her ear—

Christ, my first serious crush had to be wasted on an asshole.

The Future of Horror. If this is what the future looks like, then put me down with Emily Dee in the churchyard sleep. I’ll die a virgin, and the sooner the better.

She had to admit, though, Rochester’s make-up job was pretty decent. He turned back to face her again, and she studied the black folds of skin beneath his eyes and the pale cheeks. Even the fey little Victorian get-up had the air of stage costume.

The kid was a pretty good actor, but ten-year-old boys already had a lot of creepiness inside and it wouldn’t take much to bring it to the surface. Like maybe fifty bucks and the promise of a good laugh. Or a credit on Future’s Web site.

She reached out, planning to push him back into the fluffy shredded paper that served as insulation. With any luck, he’d hit a soft spot in the ceiling and tumble through to the third floor. The flashlight dipped with the movement, and she lost her balance. She grabbed where his shirt should be, but her hand went cold and she clutched air as she fell.

“Cody!” The cry was a mixture of anger and fear, because now
she
was the one falling toward the insulation.

The attic was a kaleidoscopic swirl of dust, brown rafters, and white, plastic-coated wires as she fell. Just before she landed, she saw Dorrie peeking from behind the brick chimney. Then she was choking in the shredded paper, the flashlight lost.

Something creaked beneath her and she pictured the gypsum ceiling and its ancient cracks. If she struggled, the ceiling might give way. She’d probably survive, but it wouldn’t be fun, and it was hard to get revenge from a hospital bed.

She coughed, her throat tickled by the thick dust. “Cody, you bastard.”

“Over here.” His voice was strained and far away. How had he reached the other end of the attic, navigating the maze of support posts and wires in the dark?

From somewhere to her left, the flashlight cast a muted glow, as if it were half buried. She had the sensation of swimming as she fought for traction, and for a horrible second, she imagined she was in a dark morass of thick liquid that would suck her down and into... into what?

The hotel.

The hotel will pull you down and drown you and keep your bones inside forever, and no one will ever know where you went.

“No one will ever know,” Bruce whispered from the darkness.

As her knuckles struck a floor joist, she yelped in pain. But the pain was solid, as was the wood, and she clung to it, dragging herself to her knees. Her vision was bleary from the paper as she squinted into the depths of the attic. “Cody?”

“Run for it,” he said, and she once again wondered if he was playing with her. He sounded scared himself, and she recalled the wistful tremor in his voice as he’d said “Multiples.”

She didn’t know about demons, but three kids were sure as hell tormenting her. She gained purchase on the floor joist and spied her flashlight nestled in the insulation ten feet away. Crawling the beam so that she didn’t test the ceiling, she recovered the flashlight and pointed it toward Cody’s voice.

He hovered in the air, his face stricken and pale, mouth open and gasping for breath. His hands were at his throat, and his legs flailed six inches above the attic floor. He made a rough sucking sound, as if swallowing rocks, and it was then she saw the wire descending from the roof.

Kendra shouted his name and ran toward him, somehow managing not to trip. Rochester taunted her from the shadows: “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

“The old gray goose is dead,” Dorrie sang in an off-key, nasally whine.

By the time Kendra reached Cody, his eyes were bulging and glazed. She ducked between his legs and placed her head between his thighs, lifting him. Maybe that would buy him time....

Unless this was part of the act, and cameras were trying to capture his spirit leaving his body. A suicide video would really rack up the Web hits.

But she couldn’t think about that now, or the warmth of his crotch against her neck, or the laughter of the hidden children. She was working on instinct, and if she could release the tension on the wire, then Cody could untangle it.

But he didn’t kick her away, and air whistled into his lungs as his windpipe opened above her and he fought for breath. She couldn’t see what he was doing, but his arms were busy, and then his full weight was on her and they both fell. She thumped her hand again—luckily not her drawing hand—and the gypsum groaned beneath them. Cody rolled over, still wheezing, and she shined the light on his face.

“Thanks,” he croaked, and she sent the beam to the wire that descended from the roof. The wire was still swaying, two bright points of copper protruding from its frayed end.

“Is this for real?” she asked, sensing the small forms of the children looming around.

He nodded, grabbed her hand, and gave it a weak squeeze.

Chapter 40

“Roach is still missing, and so’s Cody,” Burton said.

Wayne Wilson looked around the control room, checking the monitors. Though a few people had dropped out of the night hunts, probably due to exhaustion or excessive celebration, there were thirty people in the room. He’d have to divide them into three groups—one led by Burton, one by Jonathan, and the last for himself.

That left no one to monitor the video screens and coordinate the schedules. Most likely Cody would show up in a few minutes, but he couldn’t delay any longer. The hunters were already irritable, infected by the unease that permeated the hotel. Wayne wanted to get them rolling before they had time to revolt.

Beth, please watch Kendra for me. If you’re really an angel.

Cristos Rubio, standing alone in the corner of the room, raised his cupped hand in an imaginary toast. Wayne wasn’t sure whether the psychic was smirking or smiling in approval.

“Okay, Burt, you take the first ten and head for room 312,” Wayne said, more decisively than he felt. “Jonathan, take the next ten to the dining room and set up. With any luck, you’ll get an appearance from the Waiter.”

“Right, Chief,” Jonathan said.

“I’ll take the rest to the basement,” he said. “My group will be a little bigger but we have plenty of room down there to spread out. That should keep us all occupied for a couple of hours, then we’ll regroup when we lose a few stragglers.”

“You get Gelbaugh,” Burton said. “And Amelia George.”

“Sure,” Wayne said. “I’m feeling masochistic tonight.”

Jonathan silenced the murmuring crowd with a commanding bellow, and Wayne ran through the hunt logistics. As the crowd divided, Burton took Wayne aside. “Listen, I know it’s none of my business, but do you think Cody and Kendra—”

“None of your business.”

“Right.”

Wayne checked the monitors. The attic cameras were stable, showing no activity of any kind. The hall cameras showed sparse traffic as people went from room to room, headed for the bar. He glanced out the window and saw the fog had settled around the hotel, and the lamps on the lawn threw off fuzzy halos of light.

The surrounding forest was obscured, and the lane leading from the main road was swallowed by the mist. It was as if the hotel had broken loose from the world and floated into a forgotten sea.

“So, when does my guaranteed ghost show up?” Gelbaugh said, when Wayne was left alone with his group.

“The night is young.”

“But we’re getting older by the second.”

“And closer to death,” said the short man in a sailing cap.

“The spirits are active tonight,” Amelia said, gripping her husband’s arm for support.

The basement provided enough dark shadows, cobwebs and weird noises to keep the whole group happy. Even Gelbaugh should come away with something to grumble about. Wayne just wanted to survive the night, before he stopped by the bar for another round, Kendra got pregnant, and his dead wife made another appearance.

“Okay,” Wayne said to everyone. “You guys are lucky because we get the basement. Everybody got a flashlight?”

Nods all around. Wayne passed out a couple of audio recorders, EMF meters, and spot thermometers to some of the more inexperienced hunters. They probably wouldn’t produce any useful data but they would feel more involved. He gave one more glance at the bank of monitors, wishing Kendra would pop up on one of the screens.

You just have to trust her. After all, she’s the adult in this family.

He led the group down the hall, Gelbaugh sniping from the rear. By the time they’d reached the first floor, Wayne was thirsty. Jimmy Buffett’s voice spilled from the bar, preaching rum and sand as a way of life, and the laughter and clinking glass begged for Wayne’s attention. He swallowed hard and hurried past without a glance inside.

“Get ready to rock, people,” he said, navigating the narrow hall that led to the basement door. He stood aside to let the hunters pass while he fished the key out of his pocket.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Cappie.

“What?” Wayne said.

“The door,” someone said.

Wayne moved through the crowd. Written on the door in red letters was the word “Stay and play.” The paint was wet and running down the wood, as if the perpetrator was waiting around the corner to see the effect of his prank.

The door was unlocked, held in place by the deadbolt. Wayne opened it, and fecund darkness oozed up from below. The air had changed since his first visit the morning before. Now it was rich with the musk of decay and fungus. He flipped the light switch but the darkness held its ground.

“Bulb’s out,” he said. “Ready with the flashlights.”

“‘Play’ indeed,” Gelbaugh said. “What’s next, a brood of bats erupting to the accompaniment of cheesy organ music?”

“The place is 150 years old,” Wayne said. “What do you expect?”

He descended the wooden stairs, following his own flashlight beam, sweeping it around to verify that the basement floor was relatively level, though pocked with broken rocks, depressions in the soil, and building materials left over from long-ago repairs. Reaching the bottom, he stood to the side and illuminated the stairs to aid the rest of the hunters. Once everyone was down, he launched into the obligatory backstory.

“The basement has no particular legend attached to it, though one of the workers reported smelling pipe smoke,” Wayne said, though the olfactory hallucination had actually been reported on the second floor. Still, those were the kinds of legends that traveled well, and probably one of the hunters would end up smelling some scorched Prince Albert.

He flicked his beam to the rusting hulk of metal. “That furnace over there is said to light all by itself. As far as we know, no deaths have been recorded down here, though there’s evidence that this site is near an old Civil War stockade where prisoners probably died of disease if they weren’t killed outright.”

“Come now,” Gelbaugh said. “Surely there’s an Indian graveyard right under our feet. Or a pet cemetery.”

“Yeah,” said Cappie. “Or maybe a serial killer buried his victims here in the crawl space.”

“Shut up,” Amelia shouted, her voice swallowed by the dirt and dangling insulation. “Don’t you feel the energy?”

She lifted her arms as if about to conduct an orchestra, and then performed a slow, graceless pirouette. “It’s all around us.”

“Christ, if she faints down here, we’ll never get her up the stairs,” said a woman who had witnessed yesterday’s aborted Ouija-board experiment.

“My meter’s going wild,” said a man on the edge of the crowd. The device was a K-II EMF reader, so Wayne downplayed the value of the evidence. Most likely the man was standing under a bundle of electric wires. Still, the excitement in his voice was enough to distract Gelbaugh and the sailing-cap man from their razzing.

The hunters, who had spread out upon reaching the ground, now instinctively gathered more closely together. The basement was cool with the November night, the crumbling foundation walls full of cracks and loose masonry.

“If you’re here, let us know,” Amelia said.

“We came here just to meet you,” added her husband.

“Make my millennium,” Gelbaugh said, quoting the movie “Beetlejuice.”

“If you need energy, you can draw some from me,” Amelia said. Her flashlight dimmed.

“Feel that?” someone asked.

“It touched me!” shouted the man with the K-II meter.

“I think we got an active.” Wayne’s ears popped as the air pressure subtly changed. The floor resonated with a deep, steady thump—
da boo boo da-boo
—but it was clearly caused by the lower registers of the bar’s sound system. It had the rhythm of a heartbeat, as if the hotel were alive and slumbering.