“Ah, Burt,” Cody said with a sad sigh. Kendra touched his shoulder in a gesture of compassion. She’d liked Burton, and Dad would be devastated, but right now she was too shook up to feel much grief.
“It wasn’t one of the ghost kids that did this,” Kendra said.
“Ghost kids?” said Gruff.
“How many are in your group?” Kendra asked. And have you seen Digger Wilson?
“Eleven,” said a short woman whose silhouette was barely visible at the edge of the Bic’s light. “Burton told us to wait in the room when the power went out, but then we heard the fight.”
Cody tried the window, but it was sealed by ancient coats of paint. He yanked the curtain, pulling the rod down with it. A little more twilight leaked onto the landing. Cody wrapped the fabric around the wooden pole and held it out to the man with the Bic. “Torch.”
“This is going to stink,” Gruff said, but he applied the lighter. The linen curtain burst into a smoldering, oily flame.
“Are you the only group on the floor?” Kendra tried to remember the list of haunted rooms where the hunts would take place, but they all jumbled together. Digger said it didn’t matter whether the hunt location had activity or not, as long as people got their money’s worth. But he’d assumed there was no difference between a cold spot and a dead spot, and now it appeared the entire hotel was one big open grave, spilling out creepy spirits and things that should have been left buried.
“The rest went to the basement,” Gruff said. He snuffed out the lighter now that the torch crackled. A bit of curled ember fell to the wooden floor but Cody stomped it out.
“Smell that?” Cody said.
Kendra’s nose was full of Burton’s raw stench, but she took a sniff. “Smoke.”
“Yeah, but it’s not from this.” He waved the torch. “Come on, people.”
Gruff didn’t like being bossed by a teenager. “Where you going?”
“Out.”
“Them stairs are dangerous,” he said in his Southern accent. “Earthquake or something. You could fall right through.”
“I’m not staying here and waiting for the roof to fall in,” said an elderly woman, in a high tremulous voice. A shawl was draped around her frail shoulders and her darting eyes glittered in the torchlight. She tried to step past Burton’s corpse but slipped in the blood. One leg flew to the side and her bones clattered as she landed and skidded down a few stair treads.
“Dear Christ,” she muttered, moaning in pain and writhing, holding her left ankle. “Broke it.”
Kendra was immediately by her side, squinting at the injured limb. A bone appeared to bulge beneath the pale skin and flaccid muscle. “We’d better get her down.”
“Here,” Cody said, passing the torch to a rotund man in a leather jacket. “Lead them down.”
Cody stooped and picked up the old lady, cradling her in his arms. “Hang on, ma’am,” he said, as she whimpered at the sudden movement.
The smoke was thicker now, and undeniable. “Musta had a short,” Gruff said. “Blew some fuses.”
People who had huddled in the second-floor hallway moved past Gruff and the body, some of them refusing to look down at the mess. The pool of blood had spread so that it now dripped from the landing and onto the lower step in a sickening rivulet. Cody followed the leather-jacketed man, intent on not hitting the old woman’s leg on the shaking stair rail. Kendra counted the group members as they passed to make sure everyone escaped.
“Eleven,” she said. Cody had already made the turn in the stairs, which creaked under the combined weight of those descending, but enough torchlight lingered that she could see Gruff’s scowl.
And you make twelve. Did we gain somebody?
“A nut with a knife,” he said.
She glanced down at the descending group, and a woman looked up at her.
Mom?
The woman—the illusion of her mother, nothing more, surely nothing more—waved at her to follow, and then she made the turn and was gone.
Kendra took a step but slipped in the blood. The man caught her arm and squeezed hard enough to hurt.
“Easy,” she said.
“No, honey, it ain’t easy,” Gruff said. “It’s real, real hard.”
She looked at him, and his eyes were just as dead as Burton’s, the smoky moonlight pushing gray across his skin, the moustache lifting to reveal blunt teeth and a mocking grin. She recognized him now, though it was only through her artistic talent of sizing up facial features.
“Rochester,” she whispered.
“Among other things.”
She tried to pull away, shouting Cody’s name, but another rumble came and the stairs skewed sideways. The wall broke open at the end of the hall, spilling night into the hotel. The smoke made her cough, and the first flickering flames rose from below. The ghost hunters yelled frantically over one another, now fully aware of the danger.
“Maybe if you draw me purty, I’ll let you live,” Gruff said. “Just long enough.”
Her sketch pad was on the landing, forgotten in the chaos. She thought of the fantastic creatures she’d drawn on those pages, the imagined ghosts and disembodied spirits. Her morbid art now seemed like a survival instinct, because she had already dreamed the worst and could so easily accept the unreal.
“What do you want with me?” she said. “You could have anybody.”
“Don’t you get it?”
Her arm was almost numb under his grip. She wondered if Cody had noticed her absence, or if he was so intent on playing hero that he only had room for his ego. A few stair balusters fell from the landing above, clattering against wood.
“I just want out of here,” she said.
“You came back.”
“I’ve never been here before.” She tried to tug free as the hotel groaned around them, timbers snapping overhead.
“You think Digger brought you here for no reason?” Gruff’s face morphed and shifted in Rochester’s, looking almost silly because it still had the moustache, but then the face grew hairy, pointed, and rodent-like, two yellow incisors gleaming in the moonlight. “You don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
In her panic, she couldn’t remember what Cody had said about demons. Something about power. The only power they had was the power you gave them.
“You can’t have me,” she said.
The rodent face twisted and became softer, rounded, clear as a photograph. It was the woman she’d seen on the stairs, the woman who’d spoken to her the night before.
Her mother.
Kendra quit struggling. The smoke grew thicker and flames crackled below like rumpled cellophane.
“I only had you for a while,” her mother said, and though the voice was feminine, Kendra knew it was really Rochester’s. Kendra saw a lot of her own reflection there—the dark hair and moody eyes, the broad nose—and her panic was dampened by sadness. It didn’t seem right that her mother would stay thirty-two forever, would always wear the face in the photograph on her dresser back home, would remain constant while Kendra grew up and older.
Just like my characters. Made from scratch. Not good or evil, just drawn that way.
“What?” Kendra said, coughing against the acrid smoke. “Do you want me to die here? Afraid to be alone?”
Mother’s voice hardened, became a chorus. “We’re never alone.”
The floor tilted, and Burton’s body slid across the landing and thumped down a few steps, rolling over so that his arms were splayed as if in jubilation.
Her mother—demon, she’s a demon, a ghost kid in disguise—released Kendra’s arm and she fell against the wall. She glanced out the window, expecting to see fleeing guests on the lawn or the distant red lights of emergency vehicles, but the grounds were still and empty under the moonlight. Smoke drifted toward the surrounding forest like an army of ghosts, melding with the mist in the shroud of night.