PART FIVE
"Man, my dogs are bothering me." Housekeeper Muriel Constanza let herself into one of the empty hotel rooms on the twelfth floor and forced herself tiredly to reach the bed. Sitting down in the privacy of the room, she reached for the remote to the TV and flicked it on to watch her daytime soap operas. With luck, she'd be able to loaf for three hours this time before Moseby hunted her down. Over the Wal-Mart commercials from the TV, she heard the sound of running water from the bathroom.
"That's funny," She told herself. "There shouldn't be anyone here." She forced herself to check out the other intruder beside herself. The bathroom door was already ajar, and the room was filling with steam. Through a break in the misty room, she saw a female figure in the bathtub. Covered in water up to her arms draped out of the tub, the woman had a towel wrapped around her head. Her skin was grave white, but Muriel screamed and ran out of the room when she realized the woman could not possibly be from among the living. She didn't have any eyes.
"Hope you are enjoying your steak." Maitre'd Patrick Kiniski tended to the hotel patrons who ate in the hotel restraunt. Their celebrated chef was Luis Paollo, a culinary master for over twenty years. His dinners added to the refinement of the hotel and the fine atmosphere that existed at staying in the hotel. Patrick tended to the patrons poring wine, recommending Paollo's best dishes and to seating his guests in the dining room or out on the third floor veranda. Turning around one table, he noticed guests at a darkened table he didn't remember sitting anyone at and collected some menus to tend to them as a good host.
"Welcome to the Tipton…." He started advancing on the table. "May I suggest the… uh, uh…" He then began getting the feeling they had both been waiting a very long time. They were both extremely old and cadaverous with the semblance of undead corpses. The woman was dried out - her chest drawn tight against her ribs and her skin parchment thin. The male guest seemed even more ancient with skeletal hands and dried skin atop his nearly bald skull. They were from among the undead and shouldn't be here. Patrick backed from them in fright, and gradually the other guests saw the bodies as well. The female body seemed to respond confused and looked around confused as the dining Tipton guests rose up orderly from the seats and dinners a few at a time and then en masse to depart the room. Quietly disturbed and upset by the sight of the skeletal diners, the other patrons quietly departed the restraunt; some of them holding their napkins to their faces to keep from getting sick. The male figure in his dusty fine attire equally responded in confused silence unable to comprehend the prejudice of the living to eat in the same room with the dearly departed.
From the lobby ahead of the dismayed diners, Esteban had retreated to the custodial closet for a broom, shovel and waste receptacle to clean up the broken glass from the front of the building. Moseby was wondering if debris from the traffic outside on the curb tossed up by cars had shattered the front windows. If that was the case, then, why were they not constantly being shattered? They were also supposed to be unbreakable security glass. Leaving Moseby to figure out the damage, Esteban rolled out a receptacle to dump the glass in and grabbed the broom and shovel that would help him do it. Before returning to the lobby, his eyes glanced up to the long shadows passing against the windows in the doors to the back stairway. It looked as if there were a lot of people traveling up the usually empty stairway, but there wasn't that many people working the hotel. The hotel employees mostly and nearly entirely used those stairs. Curiously peeking into the long stairway, Esteban's eyes widened in stunned apprehension at what he saw. He wanted to run in fear, but he couldn't look away. It was too incredible a sight!
There were countless spirits of vague and immaterial spirits traveling up and down those stairs. Through them, he could see the dark outline of the balustrades and handrails. At the edges of the over-lapping figures, he could tell what they were wearing and the periods they came from. Eternally weary Revolutionary War soldiers, some trussed up in bandages, others supported by canes or carrying spectral rifles and weapons, walked among long dead Civil War soldiers, the ghosts of poorly dressed civilians, well-dressed figures of prominence and even a spectral dog. The voices of children echoed from the afterlife while the phantoms of long-dead children raced their way up to the top floors. One Hessian soldier coming down the stairs with the end of his rifle dragging behind him looked as if he had just left a long forgotten war. Lifting a hand of pallor up to his empty eyes, he saluted Esteban respectfully and continued on his way around a black servant girl of middle age in a transparent gingham dress and then a spectral horseman carrying his head by its long hair. Esteban wondered if he should be afraid, but continued to watch in awe even as one ghost lead his horse clanking and tromping up the Tipton stairs for the afterlife.
"Looks like Day of the Dead came early this year." He noticed the ghost of a shapely brunette Hispanic princess in slight undress beaming her unearthly grin to him upon passing him.
"Maddie?" Up in the penthouse, Zack couldn't understand why he was suddenly afraid of Maddie. "You know us, right? Zack and Cody?"
"And me, uh, uh, uh…." London was forgetting her own name.
"London!" The twins reminded her.
"The names don't sound familiar…" Maddie searched her memories while her eyes fanatically turned left and right as she mentally perused her life. "But I am being such a bad hostess. Drink?" She held her hand up as a bottle of wine lifted up from the liquor cabinet in the room and glided through the air to her hand. Maddie just effortlessly took it from the air as if she had willed it, and giggled under breath as the cork popped itself from the bottle. She was not just herself - she was obviously mentally controlling ghostly energies beyond understanding. London's mouth dropped open in fear of her best friend, and Zack and Cody reacted in disbelief at their new unearthly, and possibly dangerous, babysitter.
"I've seen movies like this." Zack cried out bluntly. "She's possessed, and I'm getting out of here before she eats us!"
"Right with you!" London shared the same sentiment. The two of them bolted quickly for the closed bedroom doors and began pulling, pounding and fighting to get through them. Cody reacted more analytically. His feet wanted to run, and his head was scared as much as his brother, but his heart was reminding him that this was Maddie. A close friend who may have been a source of infatuation for his brother, but she deserved to be helped and reminded of who she really was.
"Why won't these doors open!" London was pounding and kicking at the inside of the bedroom doors.
"Maddie…" Cody responded slowly as he watched her pour two dusty glasses with red wine. "I found you. Please, just come with me downstairs to Moseby. He'll help you."
"Why would I want to go downstairs?" The former candy counter girl reacted bewildered at his request. "We have everything we want here."
"Maddie…" London turned round and started fishing through her purse. "That's a really neat trick you did with the doors!" She grinned vacuously. "I'll give you five hundred dollars to open them again and let us escape!"
"Why do you want to leave?" Maddie looked her and refused to recognize the cash in London's hand. "This hotel is everything to me. It's mine and I can give you anything you want."
"Okay, first of all," Zack became comedically rational. "You're really creeping us out. Two, I think you've got at least someone else, maybe one, maybe five others, in that head of yours, and three…" He took a deep breath before admitting the last fact. "It's not your hotel."
"Zack, no, don't go there!" Cody was waving his hands at his brother.
"Not my hotel?" Maddie asked out loud. Cody slapped his right hand to his forehead in disbelief.
"Never tick off the possessed." Cody told himself under breath.
"Right, it's my hotel." London confirmed it. "My daddy owns it, and if you keep me here, I'm pretty sure it's considered kidnapping, and my daddy never gives into kidnappers." She looked at Cody waving his hands at her trying to get her stop talking. "What's wrong with you? Are you landing a plane or something?"
"Not my hotel?" Maddie repeated herself refusing to accept that fact. "It is my hotel…" She started advancing on London scowling with her long train of skirt trailing from her dress. "I own it. I control it. I rule it!"
"Not as long as I'm around…" London spoke her mind with a bit of attitude.
"Then let's get rid of you!" Maddie's eyes flared bright green again as her right arm lashed out at London. The petite heiress stepped back in time from nearly get her head knocked off her body and gasped holding her chest. The blonde candy counter girl she considered her friend obviously didn't exist anymore. Maddie would never have tried to strike her. Zack and Cody jumped up to hold Maddie back from hitting London again. For a brief second, she seemed to be restrained by the two young boys, but with a scream roaring from her lungs, she tossed them off of herself. Zack flew backward and crashed through the French doors of one of the closets and Cody was tossed backward into the canopy bed, bounced off of it with a cloud of dust and rebounded into a crash to the floor. With that kind of physical strength in her former best friend, what sort of hope did a petite heiress have?
"Oh no, you didn't!" London shook her finger at Maddie, dropped her purse and stood her ground. A stern look, a warning gaze, and she took a pose from her Karate expertise.
"I'll get you kids out in a minute!" Arwin was still in the outer suite trying to free the kids from the room. With a hammer from his belt wedged in the doors, he tried wedging them apart, but they weren't reacting the way they should have been. The wood should have been cracking, the doors should have been widening and the doorway should be opening. Kicking and fighting to open the bedroom doors, he fought to get the bedroom open and wondered why it wasn't. Pushing his weight into the hammer, he felt someone pulling him back from the door. His head turned to see who was behind him and he recognized the short and skinny visage of the ghost of the man who had trained him to work at the Tipton pulling him from the doors.
"Mr. Hennessey?" Arwin considered the man his mentor. Jack Hennessey had died two years ago while retired in Florida. Reaching out in respect to the man's apparition fading away, Arwin realized he had been moved to save his life. Behind him, the bedroom doors crashed open with someone flying through them. Arwin's jaw dropped as London hit the floor and tumbled over to her side. Had she been shot out of a cannon? He turned round again and recognized Maddie coming at him as well.
"Out of my way, cretin!" Maddie swatted him effortlessly out of her way. Her seemingly mild gesture felt like a ton of bricks. Bouncing off the wall near Irene's portrait, his back hitting the wall jarred it loose and it dropped to rest on its bottom edge. A few paces from him, London coughed, tried to compose herself and looked up to someone she thought was her best friend. There was no trace of the Maddie she knew anymore. There was no sign of her spirit, her vivacious smile or her vibrant spark of life. Garbed in that expensive gown, she was vicious, angry and unstoppable.
"Your father…" Maddie's voice was vibrating with another voice coming from her lips. "Purchased my hotel away from me."
"Because my ancestor built it!" London crawled backward through the living quarters for the doorway to the hall. "It's always been the Tipton Hotel!" She inched backward away from Maddie and turned round to lift herself up, but that was when Maddie reached down, grabbed London by the collar and belt and lifted her off her feet. London's breath was coming stronger and stronger. Her panicked eyes mirrored her fear mounting in her body being lifted up off the floor and smashed to the wall. She felt Maddie's fingers on her throat. Her feet kicked at the wall trying to touch the floor.
"Today, the spoiled rotten heiress crosses over!" Another voice came from Maddie's body.
"Maddie…" Zack had stumbled to his feet from the bottom of the closet and ambled forward painfully to brace on the old séance table about to keel over in pain. His eyes full of tears, his breath racing and his face contorted in fear, he watched as Maddie's anger reached a zenith and London fought to get a breath past the fingers tightening on her porcelain neck. If Maddie actually killed London for the things she had done to her in the past, the police would certainly find someway to bring her to justice. He couldn't allow that to happen. London started pleading and fighting for a breath of air.
"Maddie, please…" Zack reached out to her. "Don't do it!" He paused in pain trying to think. "I love you…" His eyes welled with tears of emotion.
"Zack?" His voice resonated with a spark of memory in the blonde one's head. Maddie slightly turned her head and started to recall who she once was.
"You're reaching her!" Cody limped toward the bedroom doorframe holding his left arm close to his chest. "Continue talking to her!"
"Maddie!" Arwin was lifting himself up as well and yelled over the table while at his knees on the floor. "I know you're in there. You don't want to this!"
"Yes, I do!" Maddie slipped backward into her repressed personality and threatened to snap London's neck. "She's made my life miserable! She's treated me worse than a dog. She's lorded over me all she has! She's put me through hell and back! It's my hotel now! I'm finally riding myself of her." Her voice reverted back to herself briefly. "Maddie has nothing. Maddie has no money. Maddie has no one that loves her and takes care of her."
"London did." Cody reminded her. "She treated you not as her friend, but…." He cleared his breath. "As her sister."
"Maddie…" London choked on her voice and searched for a trace of the girlfriend she knew in her killer. "I'm so sorry. Please, please…"
"Maddie," Arwin came up alongside the girls to look into Maddie's eyes. "I heard about the way your family treats you, but you've got another family here that does love you. Hasn't Carie treated you like her daughter, and the boys like their sister. We're your family. Are you going to destroy that?"
"Maddie," Cody continued talking. "We're your family. Haven't we been just like brothers to you, and Moseby almost like a dad."
"Yeah," Zack spoke up as well. "And Arwin's like your crazy uncle."
"Yeah," Arwin spoke up. "I'm like your crazy… hey! Why can't I be her dashing older brother?"
"What am I doing?" Tears started streaming down Maddie's face. Dropping London from her hands, she felt her mind was playing games on her. Who was she really? She didn't want to return to just the candy counter, but she couldn't stay in this room trying to be something she wanted. Her eyes looked down upon her hands at what she had almost done, then to London gasping and rubbing her neck. London's heart pumped a bit differently looking back to Maddie.
"I'm so sorry!" Maddie's voice wavered to her.
"I forgive you." London started tearing up too. Reaching out instinctively with her heart, she pulled Maddie close and held her close. With that, the emotions poured out from Maddie's lungs and her eyes filled up with emotion. Her heart was racing and her head was pounding. Cody and Zack joined them in the poignant embrace to lend their support to the expression of love and honor. Feeling briefly let out, Arwin smirked a bit and joined them too as the room began brightening from the sunlight filling the room. Across the hotel, wafting ethereal energies dissipated into nothing once more.