9

Once back inside, Gabriella and Keely wrapped Lily up tight in as many blankets they could take from the housekeeper's closet in the hall while everyone who been outside in the snow either jumped into the showers fully clothed with the hot water turned on full blast, not hot enough to scald them but to feel some warmth again, or huddled in blankets in front of the heater trying to regain their body warmth. It was kind of obvious Lily had seen something that drove her to try to escape the hotel, just as Gabriella had tried the other night. Alex curled and uncurled the dexterity back into her frozen fingers, and Jessie complained that the cold here was worse than anything she had felt in New York, but then, she added, she had never tried taking a hike in it in just her underwear. Sonny and Maddie had run down to the kitchen to make some hot chocolate, dumping eight instant packets into a large metal kettle and bringing it up to a boil. They brought it up by elevator on a cart, and although it tasted like weak melted chocolate, the experience forced them all to bond once more. They took turns checking on Lily through the night checking her fingers and toes of frostbite, but by the first lights on the distant orange horizon, Alex and Keely were still awake and feeling the effects of the night.

"Kelly…"

"Keely…"

"I'm never going to get that." Alex spoke and huddled in her blanket trying to hold on to the warmth. "I got a question…" She took a deep breath. "What would you do if I told you I was a wizard?"

Keely sat silently and sipped the weak hot chocolate left over from last night, but by now, it was just warm chocolate flavored water. She mentally processed what Alex had said, looked up to her baby doll like features with the brown eyes and wild dark hair then glanced away with a light yawn.

"What would you do if I told you I was dating a guy from the future?" Keely answered.

Alex sat quiet in her seat as if her mind was processing the circumstances.

"Yes, that's what I figured." Alex stood up and looked in on Lily in the bedroom trussed up and bound in blankets like a giant butterfly waiting to burst from her cocoon. Only part of her face could be seen, but she looked so serene. The toilet flushed in the bathroom, and a minute later, Jessie strolled out still fussing with her large mane of auburn colored locks.

"What do you think she saw last night?" She asked Alex.

"Two creepy brown-haired girls…"

"Who do you think they are?"

"Delbert Grady's daughters…" Kat appeared in the apartment in a white t-shirt and slacks. "According to police reports, he had bludgeoned them both with an axe."

"How many ghosts are in this place?" Alex turned to her.

"Well…" Kat strolled through and peeked in on Lily to see of she was alive. Noticing her breathing, she lifted her head up and tossed her long hair back over her left shoulder. "The most in-depth analysis of this place was in 2005 by William Collins and the Collinsport Ghost Society. They were joined by representatives from at least eight other groups for three weeks here, and they cataloged over fifty-two possible individual entities, but psychic Frank Bannister said the number was far higher because of spirits constantly passing through here back and forth from the other side."

"There's a spirit portal here?" Alex impressed Keely with her knowledge of the field.

"With activity this thick, are you surprised?" Kat answered then changed to subject. "Look, I came to tell you that Teddy's roasting a couple small chickens to eat. If you want one, you better go let her know."

"Who's going to watch…"

"I'll stay with her." Kat answered. "Just go eat…"

"Okay…" Alex and Keely shared glances to each other and turned the way out. Yawning tiredly after their frozen nearly-nude wrestling match last night, Kat felt her ears pop from the altitude and listened to the girls squirreling themselves from the room down to the lobby on their way to the kitchen. Dropping into the chair in the chair by the archway, Kat noticed a few token books in the corner shelf. They looked like the books she saw in a yard sale or a school classroom. Tom Sawyer, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Hound Of The Baskervilles, Gulliver's Travels, and Old Yeller to name a few, but she pulled the Iliad out to peruse. It wasn't a bad time to brush up on her Greek Mythology, but when she opened it, she found one blank pages after another. The whole book was blank. She checked Old Yeller. It too was blank, and so was The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. They were all blank. They were all just props for the setting. What did this mean? Was it another clue that nothing was as it seemed? Out the side of her senses, the water in the bathroom suddenly turned on by itself.

Dropping the blank books to the floor, Kat scowled lightly perplexed and looked to Lily unconscious to the world. High water pressure could make faucets slowly come on by themselves, but in a hotel this size with water pipes running all over the place, was that even possible? Slowly rising and treading lightly on her feet past Lily in her bed, Kat noticed the hot water blasting full forth, steam rising from the sink, condensation from the air filling the mirror. She tried turning it off, but the metal tap was already hotter than she could handle. It also felt as if it had welded itself open, and as she wrestled to turn it off, the faucet in the tub surprised her by exploding on. When she turned to acknowledge it, the door to the bathroom slammed shut on her. The steam was quickly filling the room. Neither one wanted to turn off. The room was getting hotter, the air in the room was turning into a sauna as Kat attacked the door and pounded on it.

"Lily, wake up!" She kicked and pounded on it. "Open the door!"

The Malibu teen barely stirred in bed under the blankets.

Pulling off her shirt soaking with sweat, Kat stood in her bra and slacks and pounded and kicked harder and harder. The room was getting hotter and harder to breath. Beads of perspiration formed on her forehead, ran down her face and neck to her chest and filled her eyes.

"Lily!" She was screaming. "Lily! Open up the door!" Kat felt her lungs searing as she inhaled the hot air filling the room. She pounded so hard that the palms of her hands started bleeding and running down her arms. Coughing and choking, Kat suddenly recalled the window with the snow in it. The weather outside could cool off the room if she could get it open, but she also knew that as well as poltergeists could play games with doors and windows that they could not alter the molecular properties of glass. Sweating and choking, her eyes full of sweat, Kat removed the top off the toilet's water tank and smashed the glass in the window with the ceramic lid as a gust of wind exploded into the room and froze the sweat onto her body. At the same time, the hot water in both taps shut off and the door innocently opened.

Sitting up in bed, Lily looked around the room and pushed the eight blankets off her trying to free herself. What was she still doing here? Five minutes ago, she was back at Southside High School with Miley and Oliver and obsessing over a hard homework assignment, but then two strange girls in blue dresses appeared to her in the school hallway, jarring her awake. Gasping for air, her chest pounding through her sweat-stained bra, Kat staggered from the bathroom, dropped to sit down on the edge of the bed and fought to catch her breath. She closed the door to keep the cold wind trapped to the bathroom.

"What happened?" Lily looked at her not really wanting to hear the answer.

"Oh…" Kat dried herself off with a towel. "The hotel just tried to kill me…" She responded matter-of-factly.

"Those look good, right?" Down in the Overlook kitchen, Teddy looked at the chickens in the oven. Standing by her like an imperfect bookend, Maddie looked in with her long blonde tresses pulled back into a ponytail.

"Good enough…" Maddie responded. "Is this how your mother cooks?"

"Nobody cooks like my mother…" Teddy closed the oven with a slight roll of her eyes and looked around for the bottle of water she had been drinking. Removing the cap and tipping it back to her lips, her brown eyes looked to Maddie once as she sated her thirst then lowered, recapped the bottle and placed it aside in the prep area. "The meat is the hard part, the easiest part is the vegetables. I think we can reheat one of those large vegetable cans from the pantry as a side dish."

"I'll get it…" Maddie looked up to the storeroom. More conditioned to this place because of her job at the Hotel Tipton back home, she had been a part in some way or another in every aspect of hotel work from candy girl, desk job, running day care and even handling bookings. She had never handled cooking for multiple people, but she had never backed away from pitching in and working. Even Marion Moseby appreciated her strong work ethic; he had even wanted her to come along as his assistant when he went off to handle the operations of the passenger accommodations on the S.S. Tipton, but Maddie preferred to stay home as she worked her way through college.

Behind her, Teddy stole a piece from one of the baked chickens and slipped it to her lips, her brown eyes rolling in delight to taste their savory juices trapped in the meat. Clicking the heat down a few degrees, she already heard the voices of the girls enjoying the meals, but with those imaginary words of praise, she also heard a light giggling, and her head rose distracted to the hall beyond the coolers and kitchen manager's office where a slight blonde girl three feet high in pink and white stood looking at her.

"Charlie?" Her lips alighted to a grin that spread to her cheeks and a twinkle to her eyes. "Charlie, are you here with dad?" She shifted her weight and turned on her heel toward her sister who suddenly and distractedly raced up the employee corridor. Turning into the hall, Teddy could see her baby sister running and giggling the long hall behind the length of the lobby heading toward the Gold Ballroom at the far end. The only thing going through Teddy's mind was whether or not her father was here early to do the pest inspection for the hotel and getting to go home early from this isolation. Trying to keep up with the sprightly pixie was something else. Charlie seemed able to keep several feet ahead of her even as Teddy tried to catch up. Charlie vanished around a corner and brought Teddy even closer to the Gold Ballroom, whisking around a corner and vanishing completely this time.

"Charlie…" She began suspecting now the hotel was playing games with her as well. Maddie and the twins, Gabrielle with her boyfriend… This all seemed too similar... This place had ghosts... and it could imitiate people from their pasts. It liked screwing around with their minds.

She now felt the prickly sensation of imaginary fingers stroking the back of her neck as she looked down into the dark maw of a stairwell that would take her to the hotel boilers and the laundry room on the basement. Reluctant to meet what was waiting for her down there, Teddy bid a mental farewell to the shade of her sister and turned back toward the direction of the hotel kitchen certain that Maddie would be looking for her. The humming sound of the air ducts warming the cooling hotel in sections followed her joined by the metallic clink of the metal ducts expanding and contorting from the heat going up, but there was another sound with them. Teddy quickened her steps to escape them rather than see what was making them. From the ballroom, she heard the clinking glass, the faint elevator like music and with them the distant cacophony of murmuring voices… It was like what Gabrielle had described...

Her teeth gritted together and her head lightly shaking, Teddy tried to get ahead of them and past the ballroom. They were just sounds, but she knew to be afraid of what was making them. She heard a hearty male laughter, a spectrum of voices echoing around her from all directions at once and then other voices that sounded much closer.

"Teddy…" A make beckoner directed her closer. A curt gasp from her lips and the Colorado native jumped away from the utility hallway doors. The corridor was empty but for the carts and stacks of rolling tray neatly lined along the length of the trip down to the far end.

"Are you playing the game?" A lady's phantom voice came from the dishwasher room, and Teddy turned just before the hotel manager's office through the wooden doors into the back hallway near the front lobby. From here, she could go around the admission desk, past the front public bathrooms and back to the kitchen or screaming upstairs to hide in a suite, but once she turned the corner for the lobby, she was met by other parties…

"Hello, Teddy…" The apparitions of the Grady twins met her arrival to the lobby. Barely four feet tall with shoulder length brown hair combed and pulled back from their bare blank expressions, Sherri and Teri Grady were dressed in the blue and white attire of another age. They looked up to her non-emotionally, trapped in phantom form and non-threateningly, but yet, their appearances harbored intense dread.

"Will you play with us?"

Shaking, trembling uncontrollably and stumbling backward, Teddy somehow realized that she wanted nothing to do with them. Not wanting to return the way she had come, barred from crossing the lobby, the nearly hysterical young woman felt like a young girl in their imposing presence and backed to the way beyond the lobby stairwell toward the Gold Ballroom. Not sure where she was going, she felt she had been herded into this direction, and hastening her way to find someone, she looked up to see Alex coming at her from around the corner, teeth-clenched, maddened eyes, strewn in blood and weaving an axe at head level toward her face.

In the kitchen, Maddie heard the shrill scream and jumped with a surprised shock, dropping the opened can of California vegetables to her feet, which hit its bottom rim and landed flat on its bottom without spilling an ounce of its contents. Alex and Keely had heard it while coming down the staircase at the end of the hall of photos off the lobby and paused to look at each other. Jesse and Gabrielle stopped from getting to know each other in the hotel's gift shop, and Stella and Sonny stopped from reflecting on their experiences in the entertainment industry while staring out the front lobby windows as the wintry weather keeping them hotel bound. Certain she knew where the scream had come, Sonny took charge and assumed a defiant pose wishing to check the noise. To her ears, it sounded real, and with Stella coming up behind her, she took the bottom landing of the staircase through the bottom arch into the front hidden corridor where Teddy rested splayed on the floor before the table.

"Teddy!" They feared for her condition and rushed to check on her health. Shaking and crying, Teddy couldn't stop trembling and quivering. The place was getting to her… maybe they weren't ghosts; maybe they weren't hallucinations… maybe it was her mind driving her to the brink of hysteria. She had felt the apparition of Alex striking her with the axe, but she vanished once she hot the floor. She looked up to Sonny and Stella unsure what to do to help her; they tried supporting her… that was all they could do…

"Teddy, what did you see? What did you see?" Stella questioned her almost more scared than Teddy to hear the answer.

"We're going to die here…." Shaking and crying uncontrollably, Teddy's eyes were full of tears within Sonny's caring embrace…