“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.
Draft, probably blowing through the ventilation system.
“About that promise,” Wayne said. “It wouldn’t be the first we’ve broken. We both said ‘forever,’ remember?”
He sat on the chair by the desk so he could survey the entire room, including the bathroom with its clawfoot tub, tiled floor, and gray wallpaper. He could spare a couple of minutes. He owed her that much. Promises were cheap.
The lights blinked.
“Are you afraid?”
He wasn’t sure if the words were in his head or if they had wended from the corners of nowhere.
He waited 30 seconds, listening to the distant thrum of the ventilation system and the squeal of the elevator. That gave him plenty of time to consider the question, whether he had posed it to himself or not. It was the kind of question that had only two answers, and both were wrong.
If Beth appeared, all the failure would come sluicing down in a gray avalanche. His skeptical convictions would be challenged, and he’d be forced to change the way he viewed the world. He didn’t want to be knocked out of his comfort zone. He preferred to think of Beth in a better place, far removed from the worries of this troubled plane. If he’d dragged her from eternal bliss just to satisfy his whims, he’d have yet another reason to feel guilty.
“I tried,” he said. “I wanted to be there for you but I didn’t know how.”
The shadow in one corner of the room grew lighter, though the sun was sinking outside and purple dusk crawled across the mountains.
“I haven’t done so bad with Buttercup,” he said. The claim felt thick on his tongue, as if he had licked dust.
Wayne fumbled in his pocket for his EMF recorder, made sure it was off, and laid it on the desk. Such a toy embarrassed him, here in the face of awesome mystery.
A distinct outline fuzzed a few feet from the wall. Wayne held his breath.
The outline grew threads and walked.
And here she was.
Eight years after cancer had ravaged her, eight years after her heart had given one final flutter that barely registered a green quiver on the monitor, several thousand long days since she’d entrusted Wayne with guiding Kendra to adulthood, and here she was. Not all of her, to be sure, but even through the tears dimming his eyes, he could tell.
“Beth.” His voice didn’t crack, but everything else did.
He sought the features of her face in that amorphous mass, but the threads were swirling, fading in and out like a fog in the breeze. Her hair, her legs—is that her funeral dress, or wedding dress?—and the hand reaching toward him all shifted in the twilight, and he couldn’t tell if she were smiling or grimacing. The eyes, the holes in her face, were black and deep and told nothing.
This was the only ghost he’d ever wanted to meet, and now that she was here, he wished he were dead, too.
“Beth, I’m sorry...”
The sibilant trailed off into a sigh. Stupid. Time for apologies is past. What have you got for her? What does she need? What can you pour from your empty cup?
He wanted to stand and move toward her, meet her halfway. If the door between worlds were opening, then maybe he’d see more and understand. But he could trust neither his legs nor his eyes.
The air was brittle with anticipation, as if the ions were charged. A faint smokiness rode above the musty, cleaning-chemical smell of the room. The smoke was pungent enough to sting his nostrils and reminded him of the old coal-burning furnace from his elementary school, tucked away in a brick shed and surrounded by piles of reddish-gray cinders.