5

She did not recognize this room. Rising tiredly and exhaustedly, Sonny Munroe woke drained of energy and still half asleep in a large double bed in a basic hotel room apartment looking out to a dining area separated from her room by a half-closed curtain in an archway and another far bedroom. The mirror on the bureau in the room reflected her sleepy face on her as she widened her eyes a bit more trying to break the sleep from her face. This room was fair, a little homey with a glass door closet, a door from her bedroom to the hall and another door into her bathroom. It was not the first time she had woke up in a strange hotel. Since she had left the TV show "So Random," she had been on a coast-to-coast American tour from New York to Los Angeles, and her mother acting as her manager was often having security escort or carry her to bed and put her to sleep, but this was the first time she had been allowed to sleep late in what seemed like days. It was also the first time her mother had dressed her in a long sheer nightgown that turned invisible when she stood in the light.

"Mom," She called out. "When's my interview with Conan O'Brien?" She called out and wandered into the bathroom. She found a strange toothbrush and toothpaste. It was definitely not her own, but she was not going out without brushing her teeth. The bathroom had a small closed plate glass window over the toilet partially filled with snow and when she opened it for the fresh air, a blast of cold air hit her hard and froze her so fast she might as well have been in the Arctic. Burbank seemed so much colder than she recalled.

"Mom, can you hear me?" Sonny called out again with her toothbrush in hand about to brush her teeth. No response. There was no sign of a clock in the bathroom, but the alarm clock by the bed read 10:43. For some reason, it felt much later than that. Logic dictated her mother was possibly down getting breakfast, but that didn't make sense since they always had breakfast brought to the room before going over their day's schedule. Nothing about this morning felt right. Most of the time she was up at five or six in the morning and racing off to a photo shoot or to the local auditorium to prepare for her concerts. After three minutes of brushing her teeth and an eight-minute shower, she was wrapped in a towel and walking out to get dressed, but when she opened the closet, she failed to find her wardrobe and suitcases in the closet. On metal hangars down the rod were a row of over twenty-five white long-sleeved shirts and sweaters with accompanying white slacks. Her big brown eyes blinked a bit confused, and her slender lips parted in disbelief.

"Where are my clothes?" She asked herself then checked the bureau. One top drawer was full of rows of white socks neatly folded and placed in the drawer in squares. The next drawer was fill of full of a jungle of bras and underwear. Next drawer, white t-shirts… next drawer, white sweat pants… Everything was white...

"You've got to be kidding me?!" Her nervous tension and frustration built up to a fevered pitch. When her eyes looked up, her gaze fell on something in the mirror. It was a word painted in a child's handwriting on the bathroom door behind her, but when she looked back, the bathroom door was still open just as she had left it. When she looked back into the mirror, the door was open. It had to have been an optical illusion; it had happened so fast that she didn't even see what the word was. Sighing and fretting, she thought back to Nashville when her crew misplaced part of the sound gear and then to Denver when her bus arrived late for a radio interview and she had to do it by phone. She couldn't even find her cell phone now plus it looked like her clothes were now missing. Stuck with the ivory white attire with the monogrammed shirts, Sonny tried to make the best of it and dressed in what her mother had left for her. The one phone in the room might as well be a prop because she couldn't get a signal on it. Ready to start screaming, the statuesque beauty tossed her long dark locks back after dressing in what she had and realized she'd have to face staff and locals unprepared as she went off to find her mother and assistant. The other room in the far end of her quarters was vacant. More suited for a child, the single bed in it looked as if it hadn't even been slept in. Descending down a few steps to the door to the pastel blue hallway, Sonny stepped out into a hallway adjacent landing near a bright tan painted stairwell and railing. The walls were pale blue in color, the carpet a deep azure blue in color. Crossing over to the room across from her, Sonny rapped lightly on the door looking for her personal assistant.

"Marcie?" She knocked and checked the room. The door was unlocked, but the room was far less simple than her own. A double bed, bureau, table, writing desk and small TV mounted to the wall with a wintry landscape painting over the bed and a wide mirror on the wall near the bathroom door. Sonny heard the tapping of feet coming down the stairs behind her and turned her head over to the stairwell.

Garbed in two light blue matching dresses, two brown-haired girls holding each other's hands came strolling down from the top floor from the stairs. They weren't scary nor intimidating, but Sonny beamed to them passing by her. Strolling forward to her and looking up to her in unison with two mournful round brown eyes, they glided past the corner of the railing and the bench in front of it then broke gaze with her to stroll down the steps to head downstairs. They were quiet and surreal little angels dressed for another time, but then that's possibly how their mother dressed them. When Sonny looked down at them, they somehow knew she was looking at them, paused to look up at her then wandered out of the way of Sonny's eye line and vanished.

"Wait a minute…" Sonny came around and ambled down the twisting staircase to the first floor and emerged on to a larger hotel corridor lined with occasional benches and tables and decorated with Native American blankets and objects. The carpet was obtuse with red, orange and brown patterns and the walls ivory white with the far wall filled with dozens of black and white photos of a time before her own. Nearing the end, she noticed the girls a bit further away from her and casually strolling away from her.

"Excuse me?" She called to them disappearing from her. "I'm a bit lost, could you girls help me? Can you help me find the…

…lobby?" She turned the corner and found herself alone in the hall separated from the room she was looking for by several interior wood doors with paneled glass. Peeking through, Sonny looked up and noticed a dimly lit lobby of columns, chairs, seats and sofas stretching almost thirty feet with the hotel admission desk down the left side of the room. The middle of the room stretching to the far end was left open for traffic, but during the busy season, this place must have been full of people, travelers and guests. The first sitting area by the first entry was occupied by a number of girls talking and discussing something at the moment she was not aware she would be a part of yet. All dressed in the same limited similar white attire they had been left, they looked like agents employed by a single company or coven and appeared as if they were eating breakfast from a cart left adjacent to them. Sonny noticed the attire left for her matched their clothes, but the five drew quiet and watched her surreal arrival with distant stunned curiosity. The scent of baked chicken filled the lobby, but the five attractive young ladies stopped talking when she appeared and watched curiously ambivalent as Sonny strided up to the hotel counter, looked over it and then strolled up to meet them.

"When does the desk clerk get back?" She asked.

"We don't know." Jessie answered and sipped from a can of juice. Placing her plastic plate empty with her fork on it to the table before her, Gabriella had hopped up and whispered something in Maddie's ear. Upon recognizing Sonny and telling Maddie who she was, they began sitting up straight and grinning to be near a celebrity.

"Oh…" Sonny looked around the lobby and realized it seemed deserted. "How about two little girls? Did you see them?"

"Oh crap…" Alex had been standing and leaning on the pillar annoyed and nearing another stress-filled fit. The fifth girl to this unplanned and demented stranded list of forced hotel guests was Kat Harvey, the daughter of psychologist and paranormal consultant James Harvey. A deep exasperated sigh from her lungs, she looked around the faces of her band of abandoned hotel colleagues and rolled her eyes still trying to understand their extremely odd predicament.

"I'm looking for my mother." Sonny revealed. "Has anyone seen her?" She noticed something else. "Why are we all wearing the same clothes?" She noticed their matching white sweaters and slacks.

"Someone else want to tell this story?" Alex spoke up. "I'm getting tired of repeating it."

"I've got it." Maddie set her plate out of her lap and hopped up grinning as Jessie and Gabriella shared her awe of meeting Sonny. "You're Sonny Munroe, aren't you?"

"Yes, I am…" Sonny grinned a bit like the small town girl demeanor she really had to encounter someone being star-struck with her TV actress turned pop star status and watched Maddie hopping around briefly a bit excitedly.

"I don't know how you're going to like this, but…" Maddie finally continued and looked over her new friends. "We're kind of snowbound here…"

"We are?" Sonny looked over their variety of faces. "Kind of early in the year for snow, isn't it?"

"Not for the Adirondacks…" Gabriella lifted her eyes a bit eagerly. "You see, in the higher elevations as we get higher in the atmosphere…"

"Now is not the time for a science lesson…" Jessie rolled her eyes at her.

"Snowbound?" Sonny looked from Maddie to Alex and back to Maddie. "We got phones right?"

"No phones, no outside contact…" Kat shifted in her chair. "We're like Survivor except with all the comforts of a five-star hotel haunted by the ghosts of two creepy little girls."

"What?" Sonny reacted confused. "But I've got a concert on Friday…"

"Looks like you're going to miss it." Alex mumbled.

"But… but…" Sonny didn't understand this at all…"Someone knows we're here."

"We haven't exactly confirmed that yet." Jessie spoke.

"It also doesn't really tell us where we are…" Maddie spoke. "Or how far we are from the nearest city."

"It's the Hotel Overlook." Kat replied casually. The girls looked at her as if she had just confessed to murder. How could she know that so fast when they had been here a week and found barely anything with the name of the hotel on it. Jessie looked at the "H" and "O" letters on her sweater and on Kat and Gabriella's outfits and realized the connection.

"How do you know that?" Maddie asked.

"My dad's a paranormal investigator." Kat announced proudly of the fact. "He wrote about this place, and I recognized the room from photos in a National Geographic. We are currently twenty-five miles over land from Sidewinder near the Rocky Mountains State Park in Larimer County, Colorado, and the road is so treacherous in the winter that it closes down between Early November until Late April." Kat lifted her up her plate up to her face from the table by her, pecked at her chicken and broccoli with her fork and slipped it into her mouth.

"We're stuck here until April? Left here by some practical joker with too much time on his hands?" Jessie tilted her head forward and leaned back defeatedly in her chair.

"What?!" Sonny reacted and looked to Alex. "How is this possible?"

"Around here, nothing's impossible." Alex mumbled out loud.

"Kat…" Gabriella shifted their group's attention to the fifth member of their retinue. "What else do you know about this place?"

"Well…" Kat stood and looked at the snow piled up against the window up to her chest. "The hotel was built in the Late 1800s on what was reportedly Native American burial ground, and I think a few Indian skirmishes might have even been fought here during the construction. It was built to be a stopping place for the rich traveling from east to west and at one time, it fell into the possession of the mob. A number of murders are said to have occurred here." She paused. Sonny had sat down near Jessie, and Alex finally took the empty seat across from Maddie.

"During the Fifties, it was used as a boarding school... very briefly..." Kat volunteered the history openly and clearly as if she were telling a fireside ghost story. "But in the Sixties, it was reopened after a period of neglect, but by this time, it wasn't becoming cost efficient to keep the hotel and the road to it open over the winter, and they began closing it. The owners started hiring a number of caretakers to run the hotel during the off-season, and that's when the worst part of the hotel's history gets the most gory. Around 1970, the hotel hired a man to live in the hotel with his family to maintain it over the winter, but the isolation must have got to him because he went nuts, killed his family then blasted his own head open with a rifle."

"Oh..." Maddie placed her hand to her mouth a bit sick.

"This is why I hate ghost stories." Jessie looked around their circle of faces. "They always go too far!"

"Not all ghost stories go toward the gory..." Kat had worked enough with her father on investigations to know the field almost as well as him. "A few years later, another caretaker here went crazy and attacked his family with a polo mallet, but the hotel chef..." She paused trying to think. "I think his name was Torrance, but I think that's actually the name of the family... the chef came by to check on the boy the couple had just before getting bludgeoned by the father within an inch of his life. The whole story was so gratuitous that the hotel closed down for a while and a movie was made on it with Jack Nicholson... It reopened a few years later... monitored this time in Sidewinder by computer."

"I bet we could get a signal we're here if we shut down the AC and the boilers." Gabriella looked up.

"Wouldn't we freeze to death before anyone could get here?" Jessie looked to at her. "Girls…" She tapped the front double pane glass of the lobby keeping the hotel warm from the five feet of snow out front. "That is not cotton candy out there."

"Wait a second..." Sonny reacted both annoyed and incredulous at this morbid history. "What I'm hearing is that I'm trapped with you girls in this spooky hotel where a history of caretakers have gone nuts, and we can't leave?" She scanned their apathetic faces.

"Oh, but that's not the best part…" Alex responded by shifting in her seat and lifting her head over to Sonny. "Don't forget… we're also trapped here with the ghosts of two demented little girls in blue dresses and possibly others still lurking about…." She looked over to Kat. "I think that's the best part." She responded sarcastically.

"I don't believe in ghosts." Gabriella announced.

"You will…"

"You know…" Gabriella sat up straight. "This could all be just one sociological experiment. Six random subjects in a highly subjective environment to read and study our reactions to a variety of…"

"In the middle of my concert tour?" Sonny reacted.

"I was taken from my bed in a Manhattan penthouse where I was in charge of the four Ross children." Jessie spoke. "Have we completely glossed over the fact that we have been kidnapped and dumped here? Oh, and let's not forget… I'm pretty sure if I was going to undertake an experiment with several strangers that I would have to sign some sort of, oh, I don't know, waiver or contract…"

"She does make a point." Maddie agreed with her.

"Look, what do we know here?" Gabriella rose and took the floor. "One, we are snowbound in a large luxury hotel with plenty of food and resources to live comfortably here for six months…"

"Six months is a ridiculous amount of time to trap us here for a social experiment in supernatural paranoia." Maddie spoke up.

"Alleged supernatural activity." Gabriella corrected her. "Two, whoever brought us here for whatever reason is able to freely traffic here, drop us off and then get out unseen…"

"Someone is going to be looking for me!" Sonny reminded them.

"And me!" Jessie insisted.

"We've all got families and people who are going to be looking for us." Gabriella added. "Three, Sonny, you and Kat are the most recent to arrive here. We have to presume that someone will be coming here to dump off others with us after you just as Maddie and I were left here after Alex had been here a while."

Alex silently lowered her head into her hand resting on her elbow on the arm of the chair and stared into nothing.

"That sounds logical." Maddie realized what she was saying.

"I say we stay up a night and watch the road up to the hotel." Gabriella took charge with a plan. "We can do it in shifts of a few hours each. We've got this whole hotel to move around in and look for anyone arriving here by cover of darkness."

"It would have to be a snowplow." Maddie proved she could be smart. "A helicopter coming up and down the mountain would make too much noise." She looked to Alex sitting with her back to the admission desk. She had been oddly distracted through most of the discussion as if something was bothering her.

"If I had my magic, I could get everyone out now." The Waverly Place princess told herself in her head. Gabriella's proposal sounded clear, but she didn't think it was going to be that easy or that simple. Whoever had placed her here had known enough to take her wand and turn off her magic abilities, and that required someone with mystical powers from the magic community. A mere mortal practical joker would not be able to trap her so easy as they were proposing. Something else had to be at work here, someone who knew about magic.

"I'm a wizard." Alex imagined herself confessing, but then she could also imagine the girls believing her just as well as them attacking her, gagging her and trapping her in a closet for sounding crazy. She debated more internally over whether she should tell. She had almost told them before just as Jessie showed up, and she was still debating inside her head whether to go ahead and tell them, but then a cold chill danced behind her and the hairs on the back of her neck started sticking straight up on her. Gabriella was a few windows away and trying to describe the layout of the grounds that she had seen from the third floor. Several feet away in the darkened access hallway to the Gold Ballroom, Alex saw the ghosts of the two young girls again standing and watching. They noticed Alex and then looked at each other… then silently turning away to vanish behind the hallway beyond the stairs to the second floor.