Dark Shadows &Friday the 13th The Series
Crossover
Hands Down
Chapter 3
After a quick "huddle" and a light dinner to satisfy a day's worth of fasting, Mickey, Ryan and Jack prepared for the dinner. Ryan was in a tux and had his hair slicked within fifteen minutes, whereas Mickey took a little more time. "You women," he called through the bathroom door opened only a crack. "What on earth takes so long just to get ready to go out somewhere?"
Ryan heard the sputter of the styling gel as Mickey squeezed it into a soft cone onto her palm then throw the squeeze bottle in the sink. "No one said you had to wait for me," she replied. She ran her fingertips through the puddled goop and painstakingly raked it through her wet curls. "You can go down to the lobby and look for Jack. I'm sure he's already waiting."
Ryan scoffed. "Yeah, that's for sure."
"Ryan!" she cried, thumping her sticky, gel-laden hands onto the counter.
"All right, all right," he mumbled. "Just hurry up, will you? This thing starts in an hour and we don't even know how to get there yet."
Ryan scooped up his rather thinly stocked wallet and stuffed it into his tux pocket along with the room key. With the top button of his shirt still left casually unbuttoned and the untied bowtie hanging limply from both sides of his collar, he left and followed the swinging hall lantern lights toward the stairs. The hotel was small, Ryan admitted wholeheartedly. It had two floors above the ground lobby entrance and diner and had only 27 rooms. The halls appeared to have received a clean coat of blue paint recently, looking glazed and plastic. As Ryan descended the narrow staircase to the first floor, he spied fancy gold room numbers that the upper floors obviously were lacking tacked onto pine doors. They must have been in the middle of a hell of an overhaul when this busy season suddenly sprung up, Ryan surmised. It still had him dumbfounded that a town out in the middle of nowhere land with probably only a citizen count of 300 could ever experience this kind of overfill.
"What a crazy place," he commented amusedly to himself. He stopped in front of a mirror at the end of the hall to comb through the gelled, slicked back mobster-style hair once more—but he didn't touch the bowtie. He wasn't ready yet to choke to death. It was bad enough that Jack had convinced them to go with him to the convention, but Ryan knew it was for the best. God knew there wasn't anything else in the vicinity that could have kept he and Mickey amused and as much as he enjoyed a good comic book, he hadn't brought enough to last a week's worth of nights without television.
The mirror he faced was a large round shape fastened to a decorative, gold metal anchor which didn't seem too well fastened to the wall. He reached out to touch the pimply surface and the metal was as cold as ice. His confused expression reflected back at him, along with a cold, uncomfortable feeling of being watched. Slowly Ryan craned his neck. The hall was empty. He glanced down the staircase. No one. Not even a security camera to be found. Ryan held his breath. There wasn't a sound to be heard. His heart began to race as the feeling of being watched became even stronger. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up pin straight. He took a slow step forward, and then another, each time seeing an inch further down the hall beyond the corner.
"Hello?" The apprehension in his own voice made Ryan uncomfortable. He listened intently. Every part of his body was stiff with anticipation. Nothing moved. No reply. Ryan shook his head. He let out a fluid breath and turned back toward the mirror and reached up to arrange his itchy collar. "You're losing it, buddy, really losing—"
Ryan stopped dead and his eyes widened in terror. A grey form appeared over his shoulder behind his reflection. Instinctively Ryan knew it wasn't a living person that had just walked up the hall. He sensed a malevolent rage wreathed into that invisible stare that was so rancid that he swore he could smell it, like singed hair. Chills and a billion injections of adrenaline ejected into his blood stream. He opened his mouth but that frozen cry lodged itself vigorously in his throat. The face was so pale, the lips blue and purple. He couldn't see the face's features clearly because it was so far away as if were trying to hide around the corner, but the eyes....the eyes.... He blinked and the form vanished, but a frozen hand fell onto his shoulder.
"Oh shit!" he hollered not caring who heard him. He jumped into the stairwell and tore off his tux jacket in a frenzied attempt to rid himself of the lingering sensation of the disembodied hand's grip. A round, encompassing rush of what sounded like wind, or a sigh, swept through the hall and escaped through an unseen portal. He even thought he heard a slight zip of electricity. Ryan frantically searched the hall, the ceiling, looking but finding nothing but a silent, empty corridor. Only a slight rocking of the hanging lanterns met his wandering gaze. Brown and yellow shadows were thrown onto the walls edged to the floor and back again. It took a few good minutes for Ryan to convincingly pep talk himself into stepping back up out of the stairwell before he actually did it. Warily his eyes darted back to the mirror. Nothing but a neat row of quaint hotel doors, the same doors he saw when he looked the opposite way. He rubbed his shoulder intensely as if he were trying to rub off the memory of that icy touch. The feeling of being watched had vanished but he was too spooked to truly be relieved. "Goddamn," he muttered, and took a few sporadic breaths. "Goddamn. Goddamn, friggin'...." Ryan didn't waste another second more than he had to before he spun around and continued down the staircase.
Suddenly a strong wave of smells bulldozed his senses: beer, gravy or sauce, ocean salt, burnt coffee grounds, and a bungle of men and women's colognes trampled in the mix. He followed the overwhelming odors in a daze wondering where they could possibly have come from so suddenly. An army of men and women in business attire, suits and ties barricaded the middle of the tight staircase as he reached the first landing. Each person had a cell phone sewn to their earlobes, talking over each other, through each other, but seemingly not to anyone at all while their other hand gripped handles of blue suitcases with red trim on wheels. None of them seemed to take any notice of him, the pale, haunted looking, half-dressed young man. Ryan could just imagine someone mistaking him for a drunk or high straying wedding party usher. Perhaps that was why they ignored him.
He tried to push past them, knocking into suitcases, elbows, snagging wires connected to cell phone earpieces. Behind the coagulated swarm of businesspeople approached another large noisy group, making the passageway even thicker like blood sealing a freshly torn wound. The noise and the smells made Ryan's head swim. His thoughts were jumbled inside his mind and the conversations billowing up around him hung like fog around his head. Three blonde children all about the age of ten scampered past, straining their voices in a competition for loudest racer. One of those six Nike sneakers pounded like a meat tenderizer onto his toes. Ryan stopped to grab hold of the rail, clenched his teeth and groaned in pain when a large woman in a peacock feather-laden hat, accompanied by two younger men in grey suits and obnoxious ties, bumped into him from behind.
"Watch it, you fool, you'll wrinkle my coat," she bleated to the man behind her on the left. Ryan's eyes were tearing up from the smoke of her cigar waving right in front of him. The woman turned and directed her pouting round face down toward Ryan. "Well?" she demanded in a terse Maine accent. "Are we going to shove off or are you practicing to be a Greek statue? Move it!"
Ryan raised his hand curtly in reply and limped onto the next step. When at last he made it to the lobby he was surrounded by people. The tiny area between the front stained glass doors and the lobby desk (where a haggard- looking desk clerk slaved over an aged computer) was so crammed with people that Ryan couldn't even get off the last step. The stairs happened to be located dead center of the lobby. He still felt chills ripple through his body and the hairs on his neck and arms were still strung out as if he had were full of static electricity. All the people, the realness of the scene before him made him begin to doubt what he thought he experienced. True, he had that "hand" they were searching for on his mind as he was walking. Could his overactive imagination have whipped up that little scene simply from that little mental suggestion? Or could it have been real? Ryan shook away the thought. Until he had reason to dismiss it, he knew he couldn't believe he hadn't actually felt that cold hand, nor could he ignore those eyes or that oppressive, crushing feeling of hate they emanated. It wasn't his imagination. But the fact that he had to walk back through that hall later on that night to get back to his and Mickey's room didn't thrill him.
"Ryan!"
The voice that called out his name he recognized as Jack's but at first he couldn't locate him. Finally he spied a tall, weighty man in a tux and well-groomed rust and white beard over near the doors. He almost didn't recognize Jack if it hadn't for his floppy tweed hat that looked like it housed a few apples under, accented with a neat upturned brim. He was waving his hand and calling out again. Ryan waved his hand in reply and squeezed his way over.
"This place is a mad house," Ryan shouted over the noisy pandemonium of guests.
"You could call it that," Jack nodded with a smile in his eyes. "I called you three or four times, but I guess you couldn't hear me over the commotion." His mouth continued moving but Ryan couldn't hear what was being said.
"What?" he raised his voice and leaned a little closer.
"I said these people must have just arrived by train, because the last one rolled in a only about a half an hour ago. I spoke with the clerk about it."
Ryan nodded half-heartedly. Beads of cold sweat were forming over his brow and he used the rented tux shirt cuff to swipe across his forehead.
"Are you all right?" Jack inquired as he slid his hat further back on his head. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
Ryan's heart sank. If that's fate's way of displaying her sense of humor, he thought miserably, I'm not laughing. He yanked his coat onto his arm and averted eye contact. "No—no, I'm fine. I, uh, I just—just the crowd and everything. Let's wait for Mickey outside, huh? It's warm in here and I'm already tired of carrying around this jacket."
Crossover
Hands Down
Chapter 3
After a quick "huddle" and a light dinner to satisfy a day's worth of fasting, Mickey, Ryan and Jack prepared for the dinner. Ryan was in a tux and had his hair slicked within fifteen minutes, whereas Mickey took a little more time. "You women," he called through the bathroom door opened only a crack. "What on earth takes so long just to get ready to go out somewhere?"
Ryan heard the sputter of the styling gel as Mickey squeezed it into a soft cone onto her palm then throw the squeeze bottle in the sink. "No one said you had to wait for me," she replied. She ran her fingertips through the puddled goop and painstakingly raked it through her wet curls. "You can go down to the lobby and look for Jack. I'm sure he's already waiting."
Ryan scoffed. "Yeah, that's for sure."
"Ryan!" she cried, thumping her sticky, gel-laden hands onto the counter.
"All right, all right," he mumbled. "Just hurry up, will you? This thing starts in an hour and we don't even know how to get there yet."
Ryan scooped up his rather thinly stocked wallet and stuffed it into his tux pocket along with the room key. With the top button of his shirt still left casually unbuttoned and the untied bowtie hanging limply from both sides of his collar, he left and followed the swinging hall lantern lights toward the stairs. The hotel was small, Ryan admitted wholeheartedly. It had two floors above the ground lobby entrance and diner and had only 27 rooms. The halls appeared to have received a clean coat of blue paint recently, looking glazed and plastic. As Ryan descended the narrow staircase to the first floor, he spied fancy gold room numbers that the upper floors obviously were lacking tacked onto pine doors. They must have been in the middle of a hell of an overhaul when this busy season suddenly sprung up, Ryan surmised. It still had him dumbfounded that a town out in the middle of nowhere land with probably only a citizen count of 300 could ever experience this kind of overfill.
"What a crazy place," he commented amusedly to himself. He stopped in front of a mirror at the end of the hall to comb through the gelled, slicked back mobster-style hair once more—but he didn't touch the bowtie. He wasn't ready yet to choke to death. It was bad enough that Jack had convinced them to go with him to the convention, but Ryan knew it was for the best. God knew there wasn't anything else in the vicinity that could have kept he and Mickey amused and as much as he enjoyed a good comic book, he hadn't brought enough to last a week's worth of nights without television.
The mirror he faced was a large round shape fastened to a decorative, gold metal anchor which didn't seem too well fastened to the wall. He reached out to touch the pimply surface and the metal was as cold as ice. His confused expression reflected back at him, along with a cold, uncomfortable feeling of being watched. Slowly Ryan craned his neck. The hall was empty. He glanced down the staircase. No one. Not even a security camera to be found. Ryan held his breath. There wasn't a sound to be heard. His heart began to race as the feeling of being watched became even stronger. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up pin straight. He took a slow step forward, and then another, each time seeing an inch further down the hall beyond the corner.
"Hello?" The apprehension in his own voice made Ryan uncomfortable. He listened intently. Every part of his body was stiff with anticipation. Nothing moved. No reply. Ryan shook his head. He let out a fluid breath and turned back toward the mirror and reached up to arrange his itchy collar. "You're losing it, buddy, really losing—"
Ryan stopped dead and his eyes widened in terror. A grey form appeared over his shoulder behind his reflection. Instinctively Ryan knew it wasn't a living person that had just walked up the hall. He sensed a malevolent rage wreathed into that invisible stare that was so rancid that he swore he could smell it, like singed hair. Chills and a billion injections of adrenaline ejected into his blood stream. He opened his mouth but that frozen cry lodged itself vigorously in his throat. The face was so pale, the lips blue and purple. He couldn't see the face's features clearly because it was so far away as if were trying to hide around the corner, but the eyes....the eyes.... He blinked and the form vanished, but a frozen hand fell onto his shoulder.
"Oh shit!" he hollered not caring who heard him. He jumped into the stairwell and tore off his tux jacket in a frenzied attempt to rid himself of the lingering sensation of the disembodied hand's grip. A round, encompassing rush of what sounded like wind, or a sigh, swept through the hall and escaped through an unseen portal. He even thought he heard a slight zip of electricity. Ryan frantically searched the hall, the ceiling, looking but finding nothing but a silent, empty corridor. Only a slight rocking of the hanging lanterns met his wandering gaze. Brown and yellow shadows were thrown onto the walls edged to the floor and back again. It took a few good minutes for Ryan to convincingly pep talk himself into stepping back up out of the stairwell before he actually did it. Warily his eyes darted back to the mirror. Nothing but a neat row of quaint hotel doors, the same doors he saw when he looked the opposite way. He rubbed his shoulder intensely as if he were trying to rub off the memory of that icy touch. The feeling of being watched had vanished but he was too spooked to truly be relieved. "Goddamn," he muttered, and took a few sporadic breaths. "Goddamn. Goddamn, friggin'...." Ryan didn't waste another second more than he had to before he spun around and continued down the staircase.
Suddenly a strong wave of smells bulldozed his senses: beer, gravy or sauce, ocean salt, burnt coffee grounds, and a bungle of men and women's colognes trampled in the mix. He followed the overwhelming odors in a daze wondering where they could possibly have come from so suddenly. An army of men and women in business attire, suits and ties barricaded the middle of the tight staircase as he reached the first landing. Each person had a cell phone sewn to their earlobes, talking over each other, through each other, but seemingly not to anyone at all while their other hand gripped handles of blue suitcases with red trim on wheels. None of them seemed to take any notice of him, the pale, haunted looking, half-dressed young man. Ryan could just imagine someone mistaking him for a drunk or high straying wedding party usher. Perhaps that was why they ignored him.
He tried to push past them, knocking into suitcases, elbows, snagging wires connected to cell phone earpieces. Behind the coagulated swarm of businesspeople approached another large noisy group, making the passageway even thicker like blood sealing a freshly torn wound. The noise and the smells made Ryan's head swim. His thoughts were jumbled inside his mind and the conversations billowing up around him hung like fog around his head. Three blonde children all about the age of ten scampered past, straining their voices in a competition for loudest racer. One of those six Nike sneakers pounded like a meat tenderizer onto his toes. Ryan stopped to grab hold of the rail, clenched his teeth and groaned in pain when a large woman in a peacock feather-laden hat, accompanied by two younger men in grey suits and obnoxious ties, bumped into him from behind.
"Watch it, you fool, you'll wrinkle my coat," she bleated to the man behind her on the left. Ryan's eyes were tearing up from the smoke of her cigar waving right in front of him. The woman turned and directed her pouting round face down toward Ryan. "Well?" she demanded in a terse Maine accent. "Are we going to shove off or are you practicing to be a Greek statue? Move it!"
Ryan raised his hand curtly in reply and limped onto the next step. When at last he made it to the lobby he was surrounded by people. The tiny area between the front stained glass doors and the lobby desk (where a haggard- looking desk clerk slaved over an aged computer) was so crammed with people that Ryan couldn't even get off the last step. The stairs happened to be located dead center of the lobby. He still felt chills ripple through his body and the hairs on his neck and arms were still strung out as if he had were full of static electricity. All the people, the realness of the scene before him made him begin to doubt what he thought he experienced. True, he had that "hand" they were searching for on his mind as he was walking. Could his overactive imagination have whipped up that little scene simply from that little mental suggestion? Or could it have been real? Ryan shook away the thought. Until he had reason to dismiss it, he knew he couldn't believe he hadn't actually felt that cold hand, nor could he ignore those eyes or that oppressive, crushing feeling of hate they emanated. It wasn't his imagination. But the fact that he had to walk back through that hall later on that night to get back to his and Mickey's room didn't thrill him.
"Ryan!"
The voice that called out his name he recognized as Jack's but at first he couldn't locate him. Finally he spied a tall, weighty man in a tux and well-groomed rust and white beard over near the doors. He almost didn't recognize Jack if it hadn't for his floppy tweed hat that looked like it housed a few apples under, accented with a neat upturned brim. He was waving his hand and calling out again. Ryan waved his hand in reply and squeezed his way over.
"This place is a mad house," Ryan shouted over the noisy pandemonium of guests.
"You could call it that," Jack nodded with a smile in his eyes. "I called you three or four times, but I guess you couldn't hear me over the commotion." His mouth continued moving but Ryan couldn't hear what was being said.
"What?" he raised his voice and leaned a little closer.
"I said these people must have just arrived by train, because the last one rolled in a only about a half an hour ago. I spoke with the clerk about it."
Ryan nodded half-heartedly. Beads of cold sweat were forming over his brow and he used the rented tux shirt cuff to swipe across his forehead.
"Are you all right?" Jack inquired as he slid his hat further back on his head. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
Ryan's heart sank. If that's fate's way of displaying her sense of humor, he thought miserably, I'm not laughing. He yanked his coat onto his arm and averted eye contact. "No—no, I'm fine. I, uh, I just—just the crowd and everything. Let's wait for Mickey outside, huh? It's warm in here and I'm already tired of carrying around this jacket."