Chapter 8
London
The latter part of the dream had started getting fuzzy, and then started flashing by with highlights of his actual past memory.
At some point he had the sensation of going up... up... until he began to focus and found that he was someplace else, lying on something hard and wooden, smelling something a little horrible, and there was a woman's voice...
It was a fancy dining area. The hard wooden area he was laying on was a bar. The nasty smell under his nose was smelling salts. The woman was, well, he didn't know who the woman was.
It came rushing back to him. This was the Tipton.
He was apparently in the dining room, from the look of it. His mind quickly retraced everything that had led up to this point.
How he was coming down the hall back to the lobby when all of a sudden...
God, his head hurt.
"I am so... so... sorry!" the woman was saying.
"Did I hurt you bad?"
"Oh, God." He said as he sat up rubbing his head.
"What happened?"
"I'm so sorry! I ran into you coming around the corner, and I thought you were... well, never mind what I thought you were, but you took me by surprise, and I took my purse and hit you over the head!"
Sitting up, he took a good look at her. She was Asian, had more of a southeastern Asian look to her. She was wearing clothes and jewelry that looked like they must have cost a small fortune.
"Geez, what do you carry in that purse of yours?" Cody asked, still rubbing his head.
"Just the necessities." she said.
"Do those necessities include a weight made of iron?"
She laughed. "No, but just about everything else."
She fished out something out of her purse.
"Aspirin?"
"Yeah, thanks."
She gave him two, and a half drank bottle of water to put them down.
"So, how did I get here?"
"After I knocked you out, I realized what I had done. I freaked out and brought you here."
He looked her over again. She didn't LOOK like she would have been that strong to be able to pick him up and carry him all the way down here.
"You didn't have to do that. I hope you didn't strain yourself."
"Oh, please." she said. "I may not look it, but I'm a lot stronger than most people give me credit for."
"I'm sorry. I don't think I caught your name."
"London. London Tipton."
"London Tipton?" He asked, incredulously.
"The heir to the Tipton fortune?"
She nodded.
"Yup."
"What are you doing here?"
"I came here... looking for something." she looked down.
His face turned serious and he hopped down off the bar, still wincing at the pain in his head.
"You need to get out of here."
She looked at him, with slightly defensive eyes.
He added: "It's dangerous."
"Because of the thing that swallowed everyone up? I know. The whole family knows. I came here to stop it."
"They know what it is?" Cody half yelled.
"Well, not really, but sort of..."
She dug into her purse and pulled out a piece of paper.
"Look, if I show this to you, you have to PROMISE to not ever bring it to the attention of the media. If you do, it could ruin our family."
"I promise." Cody said. "I'm here on the same business you are. I'm trying to stop it, too. It took... my brother."
She looked at him for a second.
"Oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry!"
"Yeah, I am too."
Without and more hesitation, she handed him the piece of paper.
It was a photocopy of what was originally a handwritten piece of paper that was addressed in general to the Tipton family:
To whom it may concern -
Fellow family members who each have a stake in the Tipton empire, I have sent this note out tonight - one copy to each of you - and by the time you finish reading this, you might think me quite mad. I hope you do. I hope nothing at all happens tonight and I am proven to be outright out of my mind, and you are all able to make fun of me, call me names behind my back, and what-not. You must pardon the rushed nature of this letter, but it was only conceived of as an afterthought, and if I felt I had a lot of time left, I would have put far more detail into it. But I don't think I do.
It would be impossible for me to go into detail here about what is exactly going on, even though I have kept a special journal somewhere detailing everything. It is of my sincerest hope that this journal is never found, nor its hiding place. But suffice to say that in the midst of this current crisis and the rushed fashion to which I must attend to everything, none of that is immediately relevant at this point anyways. All that I can ask you to do is read the things that I've written down in this letter and try to keep an open mind. There is nothing about this letter that is written in jest or as any sort of a joke. It is entirely of the utmost seriousness.
It all began on the day we broke ground on this location to put the hotel here. I made a mistake. Indeed, the mistake stretches far back into the past, but this particular day was merely the catalyst to take it into an entirely new direction. What I mean by that I will not be elaborating on. The only thing I have to discuss here concerns the immediate location of this Boston Tipton hotel and its secret:
I was well aware from the beginning that I was building on top of some sort of ancient hallowed ground. This was one of the main things that heavily attracted me to the location for my own personal reasons.
We were not expecting, though, to find anything of the sort as we did when we tunneled into the ground for the basement, and ended up accidentally breaking through to the temple. A very odd site to see in modern day Boston, well older than the first settlers, no doubt. Maybe even unknown to the present day native Americans of the time! One would wonder why I never notified the American Archaeological Association about such a historical find. Well... I had a reason, and it was not a good one. I shall not elaborate why.
I paid the foremen extra to keep quiet, to build the basement around it and make a secret entrance in the wall. We also found stairs that led underground into a chamber with a strange large stone, another remarkable ancient piece of work. There are symbols in the holes, and they are significant to our plight. I've cryptically hid the symbols and their 'translations', which I am calling 'lyrics', around the hotel. Many of them are in the hands of guests.
I can remember them myself, their translations, and the order they go in, but I might not be around for much longer, and they must be available for others to carry on my work should I perish. I had to hide them well, and deceitfully, because It wants to destroy the lyrics. It doesn't want my work to be continued.
It isn't yet strong enough to make a move against me, though it may be able to very soon, but It can destroy the lyrics. It has already destroyed the research I was using to find the last one, and I don't think there are many copies of the manuscript left anywhere in the world, and there is no way I would get my hands on another one in time. This is why I cannot go down to the temple to speak the incantation. I've had no choice but to turn to divination, a specific ritual of divining that which is lost that I've set up in one of my secret rooms in the hotel. There are books and notes there explaining how to go about the process of divining the lyric, should you have to. This must all sound very bizarre and insane and nonsensical, I know, but I really don't think we have much time left, and I have to move quickly.
Let me just say for certain that I believe I and everyone in this hotel is in grave danger. The 'hole' was black and lifeless when I first set foot in the temple, but now the hole spews a type of putrid evil, maybe from the bowels of hell itself. At first, I only had an inkling as to what it actually was, but I see it now. The hotel is being swallowed by darkness. I see the moving shadows sometimes, sometimes I even see the Dark Man himself, and when I turn a corner, there he is, looking at me with that demonic grin, and I scream and run and I don't see him for some time, but I can sense him, he's always there, watching me.
Sometimes the colors in the hotel will take on a greater look of darkness that no one else seems to pay attention to. Other things happen, which are much harder to believe. Like the writing on the walls. This has been seen by several of the staff, though they try to chalk it up to potential hallucination. But I have seen it, and I know it's real.
I have also received several strange phone calls recently, phone calls I swear do not come from this world. Sometimes I will hear knocking, no, a pounding on my door and go to answer it, and no one is there. I know what's going on. It's trying to distract me. To slow me down. To make me fear. I have to find all the lyrics and reverse the incantation before it is too late.
I am not the only one. There is at least one other guest, a man by the name of Jonathan Crowshaw, he senses the evil too. I have seen it in his eyes. I have seen the way he acts. I have heard him talking with another guest about moving shadows. The guest regarded him with as much fake seriousness as one does a member of the mental hospital who claims to commune with the spirit of Abraham Lincoln on a regular basis.
If I am successful, you will not hear anything more about this after tonight. You can think whatever of me you wish. I can handle it. I will be happy with it. If I fail, you will probably see it on the news and know, or at least suspect, that I am speaking the truth. If such a thing happens, do nothing. Don't send anyone else here. Not for at least several years. Don't ever sell this land or let it fall into the hands of anyone else. Wait awhile. Then, maybe, after its power has weakened somewhat, maybe someone can come back here and finish the work.
The stone in the basement gives off the sequence. The lyrics are scattered around the hotel based off a list I have provided, but I have been forced to hide and encrypt it. I cannot risk it being destroyed or the lyrics being found. I know, I know. This makes it all the more difficult. Maybe to the point to where it will be almost physically impossible to carry on my work. But I cannot do it any other way. The guests have been instructed to each take a lyric and hide it somewhere. They do not know what is going on.
I have scattered decoy versions of the lyrics in obvious places for it to find and destroy, if it should wise up and go looking. I don't suspect that It itself is all there. Maybe It isn't sure of what it is, only that it is darkness, and intends only malice and hatred. I don't think it is even familiar with the symbols or the lyrics, or their purpose, just that they are something that has the power to destroy it.
If all the lyrics start coming together, they act as a powerful beacon. It is drawn to the force emanating from the lyrics, when the symbols and translations begin to be brought together.
DO NOT KEEP THE LYRICS AND TRANSLATIONS IN ONE PLACE.
Commit each one carefully to memory, don't copy them down. Find all the lyrics. Divine the last with the ritual, if you can. I have left books and notes on how you can do so. You need to visit rooms 1416 and 1723. These are my secret rooms that I've been keeping ever since the hotel was built, but you can only find the keys in my secret workroom in the basement. The ones we keep in the manager's office are fake.
When you have all the lyrics, go through the secret entrance behind the stone wall in the basement. Stand before the hole and utter them, and I think it will seal up. You must accomplish all this before its power can grow. It is a sort of vampire, I suspect. It feeds off the souls of the living.
As long as any human being stands foot on this ground, they are already marked and being sucked away, even if they do not realize it. Defeat it before you yourself find yourself pulled into an everlasting darkness from which I suspect there is no escape, even should this thing eventually be stopped.
I must go now. The party is about to begin, and I need to try and divine the last lyric before the night is over. Maybe by morning this whole business will be over and there will be nothing to worry about anymore.
Oh, you will need the access code to my workroom. The solution is in the dining room, on the tables. Follow numbers 1-8.
Warm regards, Mr. Tipton.
Cody finished reading it and handed it back.
"So... for all these years, your family knew what was going on here and how to stop it, and they just sat back and did nothing? Worse yet, they actually tried to SELL it?"
"It wasn't really their fault." London said. "The whole family has been as scared as anyone else. This secret has nearly torn our family apart. Plus, how do we know that the what the letter says is what actually happened?"
"So your family is still skeptical?"
"Mmm-hmm." she nodded.
"But nobody ever came by, not even after a few years, to check into the validity of the letter?"
"It was easier to just pretend it never existed. The company has been doing great, everyone has money, why risk your own neck for something that might be dangerous like this?"
"But if they thought it was actually dangerous, why sell it now?"
"Daddy doesn't believe. He thinks his father really DID somehow abduct everyone, or that there was some sort of huge conspiracy, and the other disappearances were just coincidences made more into a media hype. And his philosophy is that if something isn't making him money, it isn't worth holding onto, and if there IS something that can make money, it should be exploited for all it's worth. That was why he approached Zack."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back it up! I thought the Tiptons put it on the market and Zack jumped on it?"
"That was the official story we leaked to the news media. In fact, Zack had made a comment during an interview about a nightclub based off the Tipton hotel which got daddy thinking, and he decided to offer Zack a deal, for a cut of the profits, of course."
"But weren't they demolishing the hotel because they thought it was dangerous?"
"No, daddy didn't think Zack's original idea of putting it inside the hotel would make much money because people would be too afraid. It would be a lot easier to get rid of it and put something new there that people would be less afraid of and attract a lot of customers due to the legend surrounding it."
"So, your father smelled opportunity, Zack smelled opportunity, deals were made under the table, and in the end it was all about money?"
"That's pretty much it."
"Zack..." Cody said with a frustrated voice.
"But daddy didn't believe it was dangerous, and apparently your brother didn't, either."
"But you believe it, and you snuck off by yourself to came here and stop it?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
She looked down.
"For my own reasons."
He had seen her on TV several times before. His main impression of her had been that she was of the rich, spoiled, intellectually challenged brand of human beings on the planet.
She was one of the last of the Tiptons he would have expected to risk her neck in an act of selflessness.
"There's more to it." he chanced confronting her directly with his suspicions.
He caught the look in her face, and though she tried to conceal it, he knew instantly that he had been right.
"No. No there isn't. Would it matter anyways?"
A plea not to dig farther. He decided to let it go.
"I guess not. You have your reasons and I have mine. Mine's revenge."
She nodded sullenly.
"Do you believe?" he asked her.
He caught the look in her face again and she responded; "Yes, I believe."
"Have you seen anything yet since you got here?"
"No, but I can feel it."
No more needed to be said. Cody understood.
"I've seen a few things." Cody said. "I think it's still weak. I was thinking at first that it was some sort of entity that appeared, and when it did, it absorbs you. But I'm beginning to think that's not the case at all. It probably does so slowly. Maybe there is like..."
His thoughts drifted back to his dreams, oddly.
"Another world. Running alongside this one. Sometimes a hole opens up. A connection between this world and that. And whatever comes out of this hole is evil. Whether the hole is created or is just there, I'm not sure, but it can be activated with..."
His room when he was four. Pentagram drawn on the wall. The words 'THEY LET THEM IN!' scrawled near it.
"...unnatural forces. Black magic, maybe. And when it becomes active, it starts sucking you in. Maybe you aren't even in the real world anymore, but you THINK it's the real world because you've become hypnotized, and the things you see seem to be getting more and more powerful, but you're really just crossing over more and more into their world, until finally you have crossed over just enough, and they are able to physically reach out and pull you in and you are trapped in their realm for good."
Some things are worse than death.
"You really think that's what happens?"
"Well, based off what I read in my brother's PDA, he'd been keeping a digital diary ever since he arrived here, and the longer he and those ghost hunters were here, supernatural manifestations started getting more and more pronounced until they began to become strong enough to be a threat. There were some pretty tripped out things running around this hotel from the sound of it. There was no way to get away once it had progressed that far. But this wasn't so long ago, and for some reason, you and I are still here, and there has been no sight of the specific dangers Zack described. Perhaps because, maybe we haven't been here long enough yet to begin getting pulled in."
Her eyes brightened up a little bit. "So, you're saying we have days, then!"
"No, I really doubt that."
She looked downcast again.
"Why?"
"Because it has already absorbed several people recently. Remember, the hotel would go for years and years on dry spells with no one disappearing at all. That's because when there is no one to absorb, it gets weak, like you do when you starve yourself for a long period of time. It was really strong at the beginning, because it had a LOT of people to absorb. It's only had about three recently, but it's fed, and it's stronger. We will go a lot quicker. We might have a few days. We might have only tonight. Maybe even only a few hours. Our time may already be almost up."
She looked scared again.
"Does anyone know you are here?"
She nodded her head no.
"Get out. Save your own skin. I'm here now. I can handle this. If I run out of time, there is no sense of us both being lost."
"I can't do that."
"You have to."
"NO!" she half yelled. Cody stared at her.
Tears started welling in her eyes.
"I have to stay... I... I'm on a mission of revenge too."
Cody nodded in understanding sympathy.
"Who did it take?"
"It hasn't fed on three lately, four... one of them shortly before your brother arrived."
"Who?"
"Todd St. Mark."
That answer really threw him for a loop.
"St. Mark? Isn't that..."
"The heir to our rival hotel chain, yes. We met a few months ago. Both of our families happened to be staying at the same resort. We happened to run into each other and hit it off. He was the sweetest guy I had ever met. We've been having a secret relationship since then. We kept it hidden, because there would have been HUGE problems if either of our dads found out. Harold St. Mark is just like my dad, only interested in money. Both would have flipped their tops if they found out. Now, did you see on the news about Todd St. Mark disappearing without a trace?"
"Come to think of it, I think I did see something like that a while back. Wasn't really paying much attention."
"Well, we had fallen in love to the point where we started revealing deep, personal things about ourselves, and... I told him about the family secret."
"Uh-oh."
"Yeah. That was a horrible mistake. He became enraged that such a secret had been kept for such a long time, and that not one of our family had ever done anything to try and stop it."
"So, he believed it without question?"
"He believed it was a possibility that somebody should have looked into a long time ago. He didn't necessarily believe in what the letter said, but he thought if there was any truth to it at all, and that there might have been some way to stop it, it was an outrage that no one had checked on it yet. We got into a huge argument and I was really afraid he was going to break up with me over it. Yes, I will admit, I'm spoiled rotten. I've grown up always getting everything I've ever wanted. I've always cared less about school, and preferred to spend most of my teenage life skipping off to exotic places like Paris or Milan and spending all my time shopping and socializing, but I really loved Todd. And I started feeling..."
She acted like she was trying to think of the word.
"Guilty?"
"Maybe. Maybe a little. I think I was mostly just scared of being broken up with. I was being selfish. But I never expected that he would take off the next morning to come here."
"And you never saw him again?"
"Two weeks went by. The police launched an investigation. They found out that he had gotten a plane ticket to Boston, but they couldn't figure out where he had gone after that. I found his luggage. It's sitting in the lobby."
Tears started coming up in her eyes again. Cody stepped over and hugged her.
"I'm sorry."
"I... I had to keep my mouth shut. I couldn't take the risk of having the family's secret exposed, much less letting it be known that we'd been seeing each other secretly. If I would have become a suspect, there would have been too many questions. They might even have suspected I murdered him or something. A crime of passion involving heirs to rival hotels."
"Plausible theory."
Cody let go. London said,
"I think there is a hole in your theory."
"Oh?"
"About it... pulling you in slowly. I don't think Todd was here for very long."
"How do you figure that?"
"Because, after the night we had the argument, I never heard from him again. He would have called me at some point. He has never gone a day without calling me since we started seeing each other."
"Maybe he was too upset?" Cody tried to ask gently.
"No. He left me a note. He told me where he was going, and said that he wasn't upset with me, and that he would call me later."
She fished out a piece of paper out of her purse and handed it to him.
"He never did."
Todd's letter. Cody skimmed it over and handed it back to her.
"And, remember that kid that vanished a long time ago? John? Jim?"
"Tim? Timothy Pike?"
"Yes, that's the one. Didn't they say he disappeared shortly after he went into the Ghost Zone?"
She was right. That did put a hole in his theory. However -
"You're right. But I just realized something. Both of those disappearances occurred during dry spells, when there had been no disappearances for quite a long time."
She thought about it. "True."
"Maybe Tim and Todd acted as triggers of some sort. The basis of how that works, I'm not sure. But I think we might have a little time."
"But if we don't have much, though, we should get to work."
"Right. Though I still say you don't have to be involved if you don't want too. I can handle things on my own."
Plus, she might slow me down.
"No, I want to come along."
"There is no sense in both of us being lost."
"I have to. It isn't just about Todd. It's about what he said. We Tiptons HAVE been uncaring and selfish. Maybe this could have ended a long time ago. But we just did nothing and let it get this bad until..."
"It took someone you really cared about?"
She looked down at the floor.
"Alright. We'll go together. We stay together. No splitting up. If things start getting screwy, you or both of us go running back to the city. Let it simmer down for a bit. Come back later if we need to. Let's just take this really carefully."
"OK."
"I think if we play our cards right and play this game very carefully, we might have a shot."
Cody wondered for a second what might happen to all the souls if they succeeded? Were they really dead, or was it possible for them to come back? Or did they simply go on their respective ways to the afterlife? Cody wished, for his and London's sake, that it might be somehow possible to save everybody.