Kendra wasn’t sure what was spookier: the idea that dead people might still be checked into the hotel’s many rooms, or that the structure itself might have taken a life of its own, sucking in the dust and detritus of the years and imitating the breath of those who had passed through its halls.
Dad would laugh at either notion. Then again, Wayne “Digger” Wilson had built a cottage industry on such lame curiosity, and he had a lot of money riding on the White Horse Inn’s reputation, whether it was “the most haunted” or merely grim and gray and in serious need of a makeover. But Dad was busy scoping out the cold spots, or else the blonde bimbo who headed up hospitality, so Kendra couldn’t get his opinion on the matter.
Which left her by herself, alone with the creatures she set down on paper and the games inside her head.
And they wonder why I don’t play well with others. At least the ones I can’t erase.
Kendra let the pencil tip float over the page, eyes almost closed. She’d read in one of Dad’s books about automatic writing, or “ghostwriting” as some called it, where psychics supposedly tuned into voices from the other side. They’d drift into a trance and scrawl out messages from beyond, whispering exactly the types of sweet nothings the living wanted to hear.
I’m fine over here on the Other Side. It never rains, the flowers are always in bloom, and even the old folks are good-looking. It’s sort of like Southern California without the smog and plastic surgery. Come on over when you get a chance, but don’t forget the cheese dip.
Her art induced an equivalent trance, but despite being dragged along to a dozen of North Carolina’s darkest destinations, she’d yet to witness so much as a stray bit of cigarette smoke. So she wished herself into dreams and nightmares, summoning up specters that delighted her fellow sophomores and horrified Bradshaw, the guidance counselor.
Yet even with her obvious talent, she was going nowhere. Her high school art teachers summed up her ouvre as “comic-book doodling,” and even though coffee-shop geeks and Hollywood producers read nothing but books that were mostly pictures, if you wanted to be serious, you had to render nudes and faded roses and geometrically precise duplications of European townscapes. Or close your eyes and pee on the canvas a la Pollock.
Even her pencil was ludicrous, the Big Fattie, the kind favored by kindergarteners with stubby fingers. Never mind that her mother had given her a box of them before leaving her with the Digger and six billion other people who would never understand.
Thanks, Mom. Preesh that whole abandonment thing.
So forget fitting in the real world. Instead, she was developing an imaginary milieu for Emily Dee, her time-traveling Victorian heroine who was half steampunk, half literary hero. The trouble was that a fictional character based on Emily Dickinson didn’t get into a whole lot of graphic action, unless Kendra copped out and threw in a vampire and let the eternal maiden have some sexual intercourse. And all she knew about either of those subjects was the stories she’d read in books.
“Whatcha drawing?”
She almost snapped her pencil lead because the voice was unexpectedly close to her ear.
Whoa. Survival mechanisms failing. Must reboot.
Kendra looked up from her sketch pad into the round, freckled face of a boy maybe 11, with plum-colored eyes sunk in the dough of his skin. His red mop of hair seemed too big for his skull. A vague fishy odor permeated the air around him, though his breath smelled of licorice.
“Just some stuff,” she said, not interested in twerp pesterage at the moment.
The boy peered over her shoulder, and his hoarhound-flavored panting nearly curdled the yogurt in her stomach.
“That looks like the door,” he said.
“Bingo, Biscuit Head,” she said.
“Except it looks creepy. Like it’s going to eat you.”
“It is going to eat you,” she said in her most matter-of-fact voice.
The doors parted, glass rippling with the reflection of clouds and blue sky, and a pudgy, middle-aged man stepped out of the darkened lobby. He was dressed like a Salvation Army bell-ringer, in a uniform that would have looked official if not for the threadbare elbows and the creases in the bill of the service cap. The ruddy cheeks suggested either a fondness for the bottle or a Northern European bloodline. “Bruce,” he shouted, just another cranky parent.
“Gotta go,” the boy whispered.
Kendra nodded, not wanting to give the twerp actual acknowledgment by speaking. She concentrated on her drawing, visualizing the bellhop as a shimmery Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
“How many times do I got to tell you not to bother the guests?” said the Marshmallow Man, and Kendra imagined his voice echoing inside a wavy dialogue balloon.
“Sorry,” Bruce said.
“I’ll make you sorry.”
“I was just–”
“Just nothing. Get in here.”
Welcome to reality, Bruce. You got a sucky name and a dorky dad and you’re about to get reminded that children should be seen and not heard.
She just had time to sketch the Marshmallow Man’s outline before he stepped back into the shadows, letting the doors swing closed in a flash of silver and azure.
“It already did,” Bruce whispered, as if he were still at her ear. She glanced up from the page, expecting the boy to swing the doors open again, but he was already inside.
The twerp moves fast to be such a chunky monkey. Already did what?
She shrugged down into her coat so that the fleece liner covered her neck. Despite the brightness of the day, the November wind carried the promise of winter and the air was a good 15 degrees colder than in Raleigh. According to Dad, the White Horse had been the summer retreat of governors and industrialists at the turn of the previous century, when the state ran on tobacco and denim instead of education and research. Apparently the wealthy elite had enough money and sense to climb back off the mountain when the leaves fell. Now the trees were knobby old crones and the slopes were nothing but brown and gray, the colors of dookie and death.
Only Dad would pick such a dumb season to host a conference, but he said the rates were cheaper and fewer Normies would be around to spoil the fun and mess up the readings.
Kendra parked her pencil between her teeth and rubbed her hands together, trying to flush some feeling into her fingers. The wrought-iron bench was cold and hard, corroded with age and centered on a little flagstone semicircle away from the main walk. It was surrounded by the bones of rose briars and stunted boxwood, and across the lawn a few skinny ornamentals leaned like sickly witches. A mottled concrete statue of a generic angel knelt in the grass, the Matron Saint of Lost Causes praying for a Clorox makeover.
The hotel itself was three stories of skewed architecture, peeling paint, and sagging green shutters. A veranda ran the length of the bottom floor, and the entrance featured a stack of gabled arches that peaked fifty feet up with a small cupola that resembled a bell tower. The roof line was uneven, the forest-green shingles cracked and buckled. The whitewashed siding was faded and scabbed with flakes.
An extension had been tacked on to the eastern wing, with little attempt made at matching the materials and style. A wooden fence surrounded the pool, but the gaps in the boards were wide enough to allow passage to any small children willing to drown, though she guessed the pool was either emptied for the season or frozen over.
A narrow strip of crumbling blacktop led through the woods from the main highway, and the dense, tangled hardwoods hid the nearby town of Black Rock. Isolated by the surrounding forest and perched on the edge of the ridge, the hotel seemed forgotten by the world. The place probably made a lovely postcard in the summer, but right now the White Horse looked ready to gallop off to that Great Glue Factory in the Sky.