10
What had started as one had become four and then became six only to escalate to ten. The mystery of a few stranded girls had become only deeper as a few had turned into several. If Alex had wanted to strand herself here and live content by herself with a huge hotel all to herself, she could have done it. She had the mystical and psychic ability to do it. Sitting alone in the kitchen and sipping her chocolate milk and nibbling at her peanut butter and jelly sandwich, she tried rationalizing the situation. Could her evil clone have returned and stranded her here to take over her life? If so, shouldn't someone have noticed the difference and come looking for her, but if that was the case, why were the other girls here? Did her evil half think far enough to pick and strand other girls to keep her company? That hypothesis didn't make sense when she thought it out, but then neither did the one with a bored nutcase dragging them out here and just abandoning them to live together in distant seclusion as if he was collecting attractive women in one huge collection. The fact that she had lost her powers and the fact her abductor was getting in and out unseen and leaving several female captives meant whoever it was had to have mystical powers. That seemed likely… very more likely the more she thought about it, but considering it convinced her that she had to tell the others she was a wizard, but without her powers, how could she prove it? She needed them to trust her.
"Hi Alex…" Kat had strolled in wearing a white t-shirt and shorts. "Are you alone?"
"Yeah…" Alex finished off her sandwich then sipped the rest of her chocolate milk. "But then so are you."
"I think we're the only ones not completely freaked out by this place." Kat had strolled up to a huge pot of soup she had started with chunks of pot roast and a few cans of vegetables. She stirred the carrots, peas, corn and potatoes around in the pot, noticed the chunks of roast coming apart in the brew and replaced the lid to it. It was a large six gallon pot, enough to make soup to last a few days for ten girls, but then, they weren't quite sure if the hotel might give birth to new girls popping from the other rooms. So far, new faces had popped up every two days, but it was two days since Teddy and the others had arrived and they had not seen anyone new… unless the current weather had proved even too inclement for their abductor or he was taking a break. She and Alex lifted their heads to the wind whistling over the place.
"Sounds like a female spirit lightly gasping…" Kat described it.
"Sounds to me like ten girls who are never going to see their families again…" Alex strided over to put her dishes in the sink then place her large hotel-sized container of jelly in the industrial cooler with the eggs and containers of milk.
"You really don't know that…" Kat looked up from her cooking.
"I can guess…" Alex gasped herself and pulled her hair loose to adjust the clip holding it out of her face. "I'm going to go check on Sonny. I left her reading under the windows in the lounge area…"
At the end of the hotel beyond the wall opposite Room 237, Sonny dozed before the fire in the large fireplace of the Colorado Lounge. Large rugs with Navaho and Apache motifs hung down the walls watching over her as the light blue colors of the wintry weather permeated the room through the twenty-foot high windows overlooking the back of the hotel. The room looked both grand and otherworldly as both electric lights and the illumination from snow outside fought to overtake the mood of the room. Listening to the crackling of wood and popping of air busting from pockets in the block of wood dragged in from outside, Sonny had dropped off while reading. Kat had said the books in the second floor apartment had been blank, but by time they got to them, they had print in them. The books in the cabinets of the lounge also looked normal, and Kat hesitantly passed off what she had seen as a figment, but Sonny was so tired these days. During the day, she was stressing and waiting to be retrieved from this place by her mother, and at night, she was hearing phantom marching bands, invisible girls running and giggling through the halls and other strange sounds. Jesse had said she had heard a couple making love upstairs above her room, but no one had bothered to check until the rays of morning. Teddy had also heard the girls giggling and confused them with her baby sister, but she also heard other sounds… champagne bottles popping, the clinking of glasses, voices and footsteps, particularly near the lobby and the area of the Gold Ballroom on the other end of the hotel. More disturbing were the brief glimpses of people vanishing around corners, thin cadaverous shadows resembling anatomy skeletons in dried out suits and faded long gowns. Even worse were the nightmares. Sonny had lived through a few, and she was certain the others were remaining silent about the disturbing images in their dreams, namely, Stella, Keely, Maddie and Kat… than risk the odd looks and stares trying to decipher them.
Stirring on the large leather sofa she was stretched out on, Sonny blinked her doe-like eyes and yawned, her blue and gray plaid blanket slipping off her as she yawned again, her book, "American Gods," by Neil Gaiman slipping closed from her chest where it once rested open now falling to the floor and closing title side up on the floor between her and the table. She hadn't finished the peanut butter and jelly sandwich Alex had made for her. The crusts and a quarter of it rested on the Overlook china dish. The fire was still burning silently. Her eyes rounded trying to pop the sleepiness from her fine facial features, and she grunted tiredly remembering where she was. A glance around the Native American features of the room, and she pulled her long brown hair back behind her left ear, fighting back another yawn from erupting from her lips as she nibbled through the last of her sandwich and rolling around the contents of her chocolate milk at the bottom of her glass to stir them. Tipping back the glass to finish it off, she placed it back down by her plate and reached down to retrieve her book.
Sonny winced and held her right arm horizontally across her chest and hurriedly sat back up after extending her fingers around the binding of the book. It felt as if her stomach acid was burning up the center of her chest, but there was another sensation of discomfit she was experiencing. Her head was feeling both numb and heavy at the same time. Trying not to blame Alex for her sandwich-making experience, she tried to stand to get on her feet, but the lightheadedness forced her back down to her seat.
"Alex?" She faintly murmured as she looked to the end of the room to the direction of the lobby. Lightly trembling, her head and body swaying lightly back and forth, she looked nervously scared and shuddered as her stomach and head both told her something unnatural was happening inside her. Her brown eyes peering left and right, she tried lifting herself up once again and felt a million pinpricks all through her body. What was happening? Did Alex slip her something? She'd never had these feelings before. Dropping to the sofa, she instead landed on her hands and knees on the floor scared and terrified as she crawled out from between the sofa and the table. Shaking uncontrollably, she just wished she could vomit and get out of her whatever was bothering her, but whatever it was, it was actually getting worse. Her body was quivering as if she was freezing, but her head felt hotter than she thought was possible. Struggling to stand on her feet was making her feel worse, and after pushing herself up by the coffee table, she staggered to her left and braced herself on the wall, her hands falling on the fireplace mantle chin high in front of her.
"Alex?" Looking to the end of the room, she wept terrified to be sick and alone with a tear rolling down her face and past her petrified lips. She felt as if she couldn't get a breath as if her sweater was tightening on her chest, and as she struggled to hold herself up, she noticed she couldn't lift her arms. Her sweater was holding her arms from reaching over her head, and as she forced her arms up, she ripped her sleeve open under arm. That's when she noticed in her sick delirium what she hadn't noticed before. Her sweater was just shrinking on her. Her sleeve was bound up short around her elbow, her abdomen and midriff was showing and her form-fitting slacks seemed much more form fitting and ill-suited for her size. That's when her terrorized eyes realized the terrifying truth from the mantle now dipping down lower in front of her… she was getting taller!
"No-no-no-no-no-no…" She begged hysterically under her breath in shock. "Someone stop it!" Her panic-stricken inaudible voice could barely scream. She was going into shock. She could feel the seam of her slacks ripping wide open up her legs, the top of them tightening on her hips, and a million threads in her sweater coming undone and turning her sweater into a mass of threads hanging from her body. Her heart was pounding faster and faster, her head darting back and forth terrified someone was about to enter the room and freak out at seeing her over eight feet tall. Her left hand reached up and pounded the ceiling with a thunderous impact as her breath came faster and faster, a single breath ripping her bodice free of earthly restraints just before she starting falling backward…
"She's hyperventilating!" In the real world, Maddie was screaming as they pushed the table away from Sonny on the floor. She and Alex were trying to wake the TV star from her nightmare as Stella paced around her and watched uncertain what to do. Alex had come and found Sonny choking to make a breath and clawing at her throat. Her eyes were open, but she wasn't awake.
"Sonny, wake up!" Crazed with worry, Alex shook her. "Wake up!"
"Hit her chest!" Stella screamed unable to turn away.
"What?!"
"I saw it in a movie!" The gifted seamstress confessed as Alex and Maddie looked at each uncertain what to do.
"Paper bag!" Gabriella dropped and scattered the contents of a drawer from the cabinet on the other side of the room and came running with a white paper bag she had opened and blew into once to inflate. Mentally thanking her health teacher Miss Hudgins from East High, she dropped down next to Maddie and showed them what to do. Watching from the floor, Alex watched as Sonny seemingly broke from her trance and looked to Stella standing over her then to her and over to Maddie and Gabriella. Her breath was coming slower at last, but then Alex tried offering her the last of her chocolate milk on the table. Her heart still racing in her chest, Sonny wrapped her hand over Gabriella's hand holding the bag to her mouth then shook her head furiously against drinking anything. Maddie comfortingly stroked Sonny's hair back to assuage her fears.
"We've got to get out of this place…" Lily understated the obvious. She and the other girls were in the game room of the hotel which was limited to five outdated video games, a dartboard and three pool tables to take their interest until April 1 and the re-opening of the road down the mountain from the Overlook. Jessie and Teddy were faking a half-hearted game of pool, and she and Keely were throwing darts at a bull's-eye. Kat came strolling into the room looking for them, hesitated and lightly posed on one leg near the phone booth then brushed her hair back for a sip of water from the fountain. Teddy hit the five-ball into the pocket at the table and came around the corner pretending to be an expert player trying to figure out how to bounce the three-ball off the felt into the same pocket.
"I don't know if I can do this for four more months." Jessie sighed. She thought she'd heard a distant whistle, looked around once then shrugged it off.
"By time, we're rescued…" Teddy attempted her shot. "We might all be expert pool players." The three-ball hit the felt but deflected into another direction. "Or not…"
"Hey…" Jessie came near Lily and tugged at her sleeve as Keely took her chance with the darts. "Did Miley ever use one of those to turn into Hannah Montana?" She pointed at the phone booth.
"She's a pop star, not a costumed superhero!" Lily announced with a sarcastic eye roll. Behind her, Kat's head cocked to the side, and she turned round searching the room.
"Did someone hear a whistle?" She asked.
"I did…" Jessie confessed.
"So did I…" Keely added to the enigma as the distant sound occurred again. This time, they all heard it. There were four doors in the room. The double doors exited out to the hallway going toward the secondary entrance, the single door to the same hall and then another door into the game room's storage room. Standing near the phone booth near the hall, Kat stepped out and heard the whistle more clearly in the hall and then sound of a rhythmic clicking. It was coming from the room across the way. Teddy, Keely, Jessie and Lily had followed her out of abject bored curiosity and watched as Kat rationally reached up and flipped on the light switch to the darkened room. Jessie was expecting a dead body or a floating immaterial corpse, but the switch instead illuminated a series of lighted backdrops on the walls fully revealing a vast table top train set on counter surfaces extending through the room. Their reticent curiosity now turned to childlike awe as they perused almost a hundred and sixty square feet of a model train setting at waist level encompassing just over half the size of the room. The walls were painted landscapes to give the illusion of the set going off into infinity, and the ceiling was painted like a night sky as the five girls wandered through gasping at the model town, and the three toy trains speeding over bridges through the tiny town, going in and out of mountains barely three feet tall and charging through tiny suburban settings. Her eyes bending down to peruse the tiny setting, Teddy guessed the model was in a one by eighty-seven scale, pretty typical for model train enthusiasts, but the level of detail was incredible. It looked like a model set version of Sidewinder, she recognized the scale model for the House On The Rock, a local landmark for the area. The others were just as impressed. They could take hours just studying and analyzing the little situations on the set and the hand-crafted attention to detail to artificially create cliffs, trees, structures, ponds, creeks and the town. Keely bent down to gaze eye level with the table upon a small one-room schoolhouse with children playing in a miniature schoolyard setting, and Lily stood shining over a small movie theater with people lined up outside a ticket booth. Jessie watched the train coming out of the mountain down on to a trestle over the other train entering another tunnel and then noticed a tiny sign identifying the city as Sidewinder. It wasn't the real city, but at least they saw green grass and green trees on a scale far beneath them. Lily rolled a tiny sports car through imaginary traffic to the fake train depot at the edge of the table then noticed a sign in the room, "Please Don't touch The Exhibit." Under that, it said, "Please Don't Leave Children Unattended In The Room." After gazing in child-like awe at the hours of handcrafted people, houses and properties created to enhance the trains, Kat lifted her eyes and noticed the control switch at the end table near the end of the room. The whole model was in a "G" pattern with the center reserved for the guests to control the trains of their choosing and gauge their speeds. The switches offered enthusiasts ten minutes for a quarter, ten minutes for fifty cents and a dollar for thirty minutes to run each train. She pictured several men reliving their childhoods by playing or watching the train set in here, then wondered why they were lured in here. Was the train on a timer when it wasn't used, or had Alex or Maddie left it running earlier in the day.
"I know two boys who would love this!" Jessie announced knowing Ravi and Luke Ross back home. "When I get home, I'm definitely bringing them back here."
"My dad once started one of these for my brother PJ…" Teddy looked up and around their faces. "But he stopped once he realized how much work and time it took." Lily imitated a car horn and rolled another of the cars, but Kat stopped her and lightly scolded her. Keely was still obsessing over the effort it must have taken to make a tiny Gothic haunted house marked "For Sale" in a tiny realtors sign to the other figures or the tiny wedding scene near the church with the model bride and groom and dozens of well-wishers. Beyond that was a miniature cemetery with a lone gravedigger seemingly waiting and staring out to the doorway of the room.
"Okay, I think I've seen enough…" She strolled for the doors. Teddy and Kat turned as well, but Lily looked back to Jessie standing and gazing over the partial model of the Overlook itself against the end of the room. According to the model, the train whizzed by just at the bottom slope beyond the trees. She wondered how close this model of the city was to the real thing. Could there be a real train just down under the trees in the distance of the real hotel?
"Jessie?"
"Just a minute…" Jessie worried about the Ross kids back home and gazed down over the fake hotel's parking with a scant five cars parked out front then down its driveway pass where the red locomotive had rolled to a stop near a crossing, blocking the motorists of a tiny Hot Wheels Dodge Charger. Struggling to pull herself away, she gazed at the miniature schoolhouse, to the miniature gas station and then to the diminutive fishing hole in the corner by the door. Kat must not have switched it off right, or it was controlled by a timer, because the train started again and the red locomotive pulling a line of silver passenger cars started again separate from the other two, making the bend to turn back on itself, go through a tunnel and emerge on the other side of the model Overlook on its way over a train trestle through the center of the tiny village of stores, brownstones and businesses. When she turned round, the lights went out on her and left her in darkness to the sound of the train in the room. Could they as well as the train set be on a timer?
"Guys?" Jessie partially stumbled and felt around for the door to find her way out, pulling open the door and quickly hastening forward to find herself not in the same hall as before. The hotel was changing around her, and instead of the simple hotel corridor she found herself in the aisle of two long rows of empty benches facing forward to the front of the room. The walls were lined with a series of windows of flashing images like a subway car, and she slowly began to realize what this room was from the jostling vibration under her feet. She was in a train passenger car like the one she had seen in the model train set, and it was a very powerful illusion to her eyes and ears. It was almost as if she was actually in the model. Looking around confused and disconcerted she tried to leave the illusion by going out the way she had come in, but the door behind her wouldn't open again.
"Teddy? Lily!" She pounded at it. "Let me out!" She even heard the train whistle blowing and felt the empty passenger car gently tilt on the sharp turn. "Guys, I think I'm really tripping out here!" The train now began slowing, and Jessie leaned bent back and pounded the door with her body with the entire car coming to a full stop on the tracks. Out the corner of her eye, she saw the sign welcoming her to the model of Sidewinder, Colorado and then the shadows of the frozen figures outside now brought to meet her shrunk down to their size. Stumbling lightly as the train finally stopped, she noticed the door at the far end of the passenger car sway open from the momentum.
"Teddy!" Jessie was screaming as loud as she could. "Alex! Maddie!" She rushed out and down to the platform of the model train station now blown up several times to her size. Was this her fault? Did she get hypnotized into this bizarre predicament by staring too long into the model or had she actually get sucked into it by the ghosts? She saw manikins around her of people frozen in normal situations. Kids running, a mother pushing a stroller, a train conductor strolling by her, a female figure in the ticket window and workmen hoisting and moving luggage to board. Beyond them, she saw all the aspects of the model town, the figures, the Matchbox cars and Hot Wheels posing as real cars and trucks, but she could also look up and see the sky over her transformed into a very distant darkened ceiling very much like a starry sky. It was bad enough she was snowbound in a haunted hotel, but now she was shrunk down to the scale of a model train set? What was happening here?
"Teddy!" Jessie was screaming and staring off the horizon of the table for help. Her shoes had clicked across the plastic model train station and now crunched on the Styrofoam grass like fake green snow. "Somebody! Please wake me up!" She caught her breath and screamed again. "Get me out of here…" Part of the darkness in the horizon moved, and Jessie realized it was a figure. Someone was still in the room at normal size near the door, and as they drifted closer, Jessie recognized Gabriella coming up on her. Compared to her, she looked almost a thousand feet high because the closer she came to the table there was more and more of her to see until all Jessie could see was the huge wall of Gabriella's form-fitting pants coming up to the table and her sweater another hundred feet beyond that. She couldn't even see her face from the model, and Jessie realized how horrifying it was to be this small for the fake people at this size. Worse yet, she watched as Gabriella reared her right hand up and tried to crush her under her hand.
Nearing the Colorado Lounge, Teddy, Kat, Lily and Keely heard Jessie screaming her head off behind them and froze where were and looked back the way they had come to see Jessie scrambling out of the model train room on her hands and knees on the floor into the hall. A brief look to Kat, and they were racing back with Lily to find out what had happened. Lily slid to the floor by Jessie shaking and stuttering in shock. Her eyes were as wide as dinner plates. It had to be the most frightening manifestation yet.
"Jessie?" Teddy and Kat tried comforting her. "Jessie? What is it?" The raven-haired Manhattan nanny was shaking controllably and trembling so much they couldn't stop her. "What did you see?"
"Her heart must be pounding like crazy." Keely held her hand and wrist. "I can feel her pulse throbbing like a freight train."
Her face contorted with worry, Lily started peeking back into the model train room.
"Don't go in there!" Jessie screamed. "Lock it, block it or seal it off!" She couldn't stop shaking, but she was awake from the dream and back to normal size with the girls. "But don't go on there!" She broke down crying and held on to Teddy for solace weeping and trembling. Gently rubbing her back, Teddy looked to Keely then Lily and took a deep breath wondering if the ghosts had plans to kill them or just drive them out into the cold.