6
"Maddie… Maddie…"
"Yes, Mr. Moseby…" Maddie jerked awake at the candy counter of the five-star posh lobby of the Tipton Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. It was among the top five hotels in the city, frequented by ambassadors, politicians, famous celebs and captains of industry. Ronald Reagan had once stayed here. So did Babe Ruth, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio and Thomas Edison. Almost everyone famous from Errol Flynn to Katy Perry had once stayed here. It was a twenty-five-story luxury hotel owned by Wilfred Tipton, the owner and chief stockholder of Tipton Enterprises. The place was built to resemble the palatial castles of England with a sunken lobby and a huge crystal chandelier to meet guests. The furnishings were gold and polished mahogany with only the very best museum level pieces to greet guests and an elderly doorman who tipped his had to guests as they entered. The carpeting was a bold yellow tan with a sitting area where guests comfortably sat and relaxed with a newspaper or a quick smoke. A British businessman sealed a deal with his German and American counterparts near the elevator as Maddie lifted her head and looked around. Blinking her eyes tiredly, she hoped Mr. Moseby didn't notice her dozing, but she had no idea why she was so tired. It was as if she'd been awake for a hundred years.
"Maddie!" He slammed his hand palm down on her counter.
"Yes, Mr. Moseby!" She jerked her head up with her brown eyes stretched open wide to fight her fatigue. Her boss was a short thin African American man with a shaved head. Dressed in the hotel's blue blazer and light blue slacks with a pale powder blue tie, he looked at her with a perplexed looked and thin confused grimace on his thin lips. If he ever smiled, he might have looked like Stymie of the "Our Gang" shorts.
"Madelyne…" He spoke like a frustrated boss with his mind on a million details. "Mr. Collins in 613 would like a basket of candy in his room."
"Mr. Collins, sir?"
"Yes…" Moseby confirmed it. "Get a basket ready and take it up to him." He turned and hastened back to the check-in area. Maddie looked down upon her hotel uniform. She had not worn this blue shirt and red skirt in almost five years since Mr. Moseby left the hotel to run the accommodations on the SS Tipton. The new manager, Stacy Orpington, had even made her an assistant manager with a blue blazer and white uniform to wear while she was still employed. She had to be dreaming. It had been years since she had been the hotel candy girl, but she played along with the scenario. Without looking, she picked up a basket of chocolate bars and black licorice to take upstairs, it was Mr. Collins' preferred choice, and walked into the elevator in her dream state and out of it almost instantaneously, finding herself much quicker as usual in this dream setting on the sixth floor that now looked oddly familiar. The walls were a crisp white; the carpet was Native American pattern of red, brown, orange and green. This was a far cry from the warm gold and blue colors of the Tipton. The red doors of the elevator chimed close behind as she lifted her eyes to realize she wasn't alone.
"Hello Maddie…" The two twin brunette girls looked up at her. It was not seeing that which woke her up, it was the scream, and somehow, Maddie realized it was her screaming she had heard. It sounded as if someone was bludgeoning her to death. Her heart pounding, her breath racing, the young girl inside her was too terrified to go back to sleep. Sitting in the light blue glow of the window, Gabriella looked over to her from watching the road going past the front entry. The snow had stopped, but the sky was still overcast. The moon on the other side illuminated the clouds and spread its glow over the white blanket of snow stretching around the hotel. Wrapped in a blanket on the windowsill, the lovely young science prodigy looked astutely upon Maddie and lifted her head up with the poise of a British princess.
"Bad dream?" She inquired lightly.
"Odd dream is more like it." Maddie gasped and swung her legs over the end of her bed. This wasn't her original room in the place, but it did have two beds for both her and Gabriella and it was closer to the lobby and the downstairs kitchen. Unlike her room, the closet was not full of clothes to wear during her stay, but the bathroom did have a large round tub to soak in, not that she really wanted to take a bath in a haunted hotel where she was jumping and reacting to every noise in the place.
"I noticed you was dreaming." Gabriella added matter-of-factly. "You were deep into REM sleep. I could hear your breath get quicker." She paused. "How have you been sleeping?"
"Not good…" Maddie confessed. "It is kind of hard to sleep when you might be part of some secret social experiment into the paranormal."
"Maybe… I'm not so sure. Come look at this." She gestured to Maddie by furling and unfurling her arm toward her. Awkwardly ambling toward her on her tired legs, Maddie turned her back to the window and hopped up on to the sill where she could look down on the front entrance, the outside topiary and then the hedge maze a few yards out and across from the front driveway.
"What do you see?"
"It's what I don't see…" Gabriella's analytical brain was at it again. "Do you notice it?"
"What?"
"The snow is completely undisturbed in the driveway." Gabriella revealed. "If someone was driving the twenty-five miles from town, we should be seeing disturbed snow in the driveway. Even with fresh snow falling, any new snow would be piling over the disturbed snow pushed up and piled up by a snowplow coming up the mountain. The tracks from a vehicle would still be perceivable."
"Maybe they're coming around the back way through the supply dock." Maddie compared the way the Overlook was run to the day-to-day operations of the Hotel Tipton.
"That's entirely possible…" Gabriella thought about it. The light from one lamp on in the room made her looks as equally ethereal and phantom-like as the alleged spirit guests of the hotel. "But let's analyze this. Let's say someone was for some reason drugging young girls and abandoning them in a deserted hotel with more than adequate supplies to live by themselves as part of some experiment. Ignoring the motivations to do such a thing, this person would have to somehow drug his target in her presence or with a delayed narcotic while still being able to reach her and secretly spirit her out of her home or location."
"Sounds fishy to start with…" Maddie rubbed her eyes trying to stay awake. "How would he be able to avoid getting caught?"
"By drugging their family and associates." Gabriella answered.
"But Sonny was taken from a hotel from under her mother, security guard and assistants." Maddie realized. "They were all drugged?"
"Or gassed." Gabriella felt as if she could be a mystery writer as good as author Temperance Brennan. "Gases dissipate slowly in the bloodstream, but we could have been drugged several times during transport. If that was the case, don't you think we should have some memory of waking up while we were being transported over state lines and into a vehicle capable of navigating treacherous mountain roads in the middle of winter?"
Maddie didn't know how to respond to that query.
"Now let's say our abductor has successfully left one girl here, Alex, and does return five days later not just with one girl but with three and two of them are from entirely different cities in different parts of the country."
"It would have to be more than one person." Maddie was picking up on her line of reasoning.
"What assurance do these people have that they can slip in and out to leave not just one girl but two more girls two days later and still not be discovered by the first four girls on their next arrival?" Gabriella pointed out the one odd flaw in their theory. "How would they be getting in? Through the front entrance which has the most direct route to the upstairs rooms but a high factor of being discovered or through the loading dock which has the worst access to the rooms and the least possibility of getting discovered?"
"Maybe there's an underground way in through the grounds or…" Maddie realized the possible truth. "They're gassing us each night that they're coming."
"Maybe these hauntings we're experiencing aren't ghosts, but hallucinatory effects from the gas." Gabriella rationalized. "It could explain the bad dreams too."
"Another thing…" Maddie realized the biggest hindrance to this scenario. "Why were we singled out? None of us knew each other before today, and besides knowing people who look like each other, we don't have anything in common. We have to have someone in common. Someone who knows us and has enough details on our lives to successfully take us from our homes." She paused to glance down over the front of the hotel. "However, none of this explains why we're not finding disturbed snow from vehicles arriving under the new blankets of snow." Maddie looked outside the window. There was not a light burning on the grounds or from the hotel. It was just light blue to dark gray snow all around then and a gull bright sky overhead with a bright spot hiding the moon overhead. A few snowflakes started falling again, and Gabriella slid off the windowsill to pour herself some more coffee from the thermos taken from the kitchen. Screwing off the cup from the top of the thermos, she set it by the lamp and then screwed off the smaller cap from inside of it, tipping the thermos over to fill the cup part with coffee to keep her awake, but she didn't get very much. It was just enough to cover the bottom.
"How are they getting us here?!" Maddie asked out loud and looked to Gabriella jostling the thermos. "Out of coffee?" She asked.
"Yeah…" Gabriella looked up to her. "Will you be okay as I run to the kitchen and fill it up?"
"I guess…" Maddie shuddered not wanting to be alone, but she also didn't want to be wandering the hotel in the dark. "Lock the door on the way out…" She took her turn on guard at the window.
"I'll be back as fast as I can…" Gabriella promised and unlocked the door, slipping through it and locking it again as she closed it, carrying the thermos close to her chest as she moved through the vast hotel interior. This part of the hotel wasn't much different than the hallway on the second floor over the lounge area at the far end of the hotel. Same white walls with the same dark brown doors and Native American carpet. The hall turned toward the elevator down to the lobby but down a bit more was the employee access area to the employee corridor behind the admissions area and the manager's office. It was a more direct route to get where she was going without passing through the dark lobby, and it was illuminated by more lights along the way, but the second she reached the stairs over the corridor, Gabriella heard the humming electric neon lights go off and on again. Could the snow be affecting the power? Partway down it happened again, bathing her in pitch darkness except for the emergency lights for a few seconds before coming back on. Once they came back on, she hastened her steps to the bottom and made a hairpin turn to the employee corridor on the first floor.
That had been kind of an unnerving experience, but it hadn't scared her. As she turned for the kitchen, she heard something else. She heard an uneven rhythmic pattern going on the atmosphere of the place. It sounded like music, but not just regular music, but old big band music like what Miss Arbus had played for her and her friends in school as an example of music from before their time, but who would be playing music this time of night? To her ears, it seemed to be coming from the Gold Ballroom behind her. Not really interested in leaving Maddie upstairs any longer than she had to be, her over-powering curiosity was imploring her to go check it out. Leaving the thermos on the counter by her, she tilted her head a bit perplexed and headed down further to check out the sounds. It was not just music, it sounded like a lot of voices… a lot of voices talking in levels over each other. She could hear glasses clinking, men laughing and women partying. It sounded as if there was a band playing the post-World War Two music of the Thirties and Forties and when it finished on the loud tones of the trumpet, it sounded as if there was over a hundred people cheering and applauding.
Lifting her head to peek into the room, Gabriella saw the room full of men and women dressed up in the richest attire. Where did these people come from? There had to be almost two hundred people in period apparel; the men were all in suits; the women in every sort of fantastic dress they could wear. Their looks resembled the black and white photos of this place…. men with hair slicked back, women wearing spectacular hair ornaments and wearing red lipstick with powdered faces, all laughing or drinking and celebrating what was once the Big Band era. The room was alive with activity with excited partygoers and cheering patrons of the arts. Clapping and applauding, they stood with their faces directed toward their host accepting their loud accolades and bravados. Dressed in a black tuxedo and tails, Troy Bolton grinned to his fans from the stage area then noticed Gabriella standing in the doors to the kitchen area and extended his hand to her to come join him. He looked more handsome than he had ever looked. His brown hair was combed back, his big blue eyes beaming to her with a broad grin on his steely jaw. He gestured to her more and more and the room called on Gabriella to join them. The clapping and applause was getting louder and she started to turn away only to be stopped by guests tugging her back in to join the party. Troy's hand took her left hand in his and tugged her on stage where the young girl looked around as a terrified waif before all these strangers in Roaring Twenties Big Band attire. She was dressed too casually from her time; she felt too out of place for these 1920s enthusiasts. Troy tenderly stroked her chin to face him.
"Remember our song?" He reminded her and began singing it. "Living in my own world…" He looked toward her very much in love with her. "I didn't understand… that anything could happen when you take a chance…" Their phantom audience began applauding and cheering at the sound of his voice. It was as if they wanted the chance to hear the modern music.
"I never believed in…" Gabriella started confused and terrified as the room applauded and cheered her decision even louder to give in to the party. "What I couldn't see… I never opened my heart to all the possibilities." Feeling safe near him, she couldn't stop looking at him. He was here. He was real, and they were together in this hotel.
"I know that something has changed." Their voices united in harmony and eyes joined before a band in white suits in a room illuminated in bright lights. "Never felt this way, and right here tonight… This could be the start of something new… It feels so right to be here with you..." Gabriella's heart went all aflutter as she turned around Troy and glanced briefly to her admirers watching her, but what she now saw petrified her down to the core of her soul. Instead of a room of people, she was staring at a room of skeletons in old suits, dusty dresses and cobwebbed poses, some of them perched in chairs or lurched over tables with skeletal-skull-faced waiters frozen in place standing among them carrying trays with glasses. It was a room of the dead, cold and dark and covered in blankets of dusty spider webs. Dozens of skulls and eyeless facing staring up at her from the seats and chairs, they resembled a forgotten army of undead within the tomb of an ancient Mayan pyramid opened for the very first time. Her voice erupted from her lungs in one loud scream and without even trying she found herself charging from the room on her two feet out the back way of the room without even looking behind her. Her eyes open wide, her teeth clenched in shock, she screamed again and went crashing over carts with drink containers on them and stumbling over chairs stacked in storage.
Hearing the screams, Alex and Sonny came running out of the brightly lit kitchen and looked left and right up and down the corridor, watching Gabriella franticly trying to break into the manager's office then trying to get into another room. They finally caught her about to break through to the front lobby area and pulled her back. She looked at them and screamed unable to recognize them. Hysterical, terrified and lost in her head, she fought with them briefly as they tried to get her into the kitchen prep area.
"Gabriella!" Sonny tried holding her, but she was fighting to get free from her. "Gabriella!" The East High alum was trying to crawl out of the room trying to escape. Neither of them could hold her.
"Gabriella!" Thrashing around about the floor trying to hold the frantic girl, Alex grabbed her and forced her arms around her, holding her in a forced hug around the shoulders. When she did that, Sonny noticed a foot long wooden staff like a magician's wand fall off of Alex and go skidding under the table. Ignoring it for the minute, Sonny realized Alex had calmed their hysterical roommate and the petite beauty gasped for air and broke down crying.
"We're here." Alex's soothing words comforted her. "We're here…"
At the end of the Overlook peering off the end of the hotel and the bottom of the hill from an unlocked second floor room, Kathleen "Kat" Harvey waited for Alex to return to the room and replace her on watch that she could go to sleep. Gabriella's reasoning of how they had been abducted and deserted here sounded logical, but when she poured over it mentally, the thirty-three year old interior decorator and part-time paranormal investigator somehow felt there was a paranormal factor in it they were overlooking. Maybe she had been to too many haunted houses and was starting to see ghosts and spirits in everything, but then this place was often described by other investigators as something as an entity. What was it that William Collins, the novelist and researcher, said about this place? He called the hotel "a magnet for the strange and psychotic," an allusion to the woman who came here to take her life here for no apparent reason in 1975. Ray Stantz of New York Paranormal called the place "a living testament to the evil and the horror of the Mafia" because of what came down here during Prohibition. Her very own father called the grounds cursed, and paranormal blogger Buffy Summers once predicted that by the end of the decade, the Overlook was likely going to be in the news again. Could she have been predicting one of them going nuts and killing the others?
The door unclicked open and closed again. Kat looked back as Alex's vague shadow entered the room.
"That didn't take long." Kat spoke. "Can you pour me a cup of coffee before you stretch out?" She looked out and around the grounds. "We should have turned the parking lot lights on. We could see a lot further with them." She paused. "I bet the grounds lighting are controlled by a switch somewhere in the office. Maybe by an auxiliary door…"
She heard Alex make a low guttural gasp behind her head.
"Alex?" Kat turned around and saw a tall wizened figure in the room with long blonde hair like a female corpse in a loose rotted dress propped up near the corner of the bed. It had vacant blank eyes, lips peeled back around dead crooked teeth, dried tight wizen features and ruined tangled hair hanging in tatters down its back. Taken for a start, Kat hopped off the window and to her feet, hitting on the light and bathing the room in illumination. Taking just a second, the figure had vanished, but it had certainly left an impact on her. A scream frozen on her lips, Kat stood with her feet planted to the floor realizing what she had seen. It had been a ghost!
"Casper…" She mumbled the name of a friendly childhood spirit from her youth. "I wish you were here…"