12

It had snowed again over night. The wind had picked up and blew the flakes around in a furry. The outside hedge topiaries that had just started poking out from under the snow the day before were now covered back up, and the hedge maze itself was covered up along its long north side. Down in Sidewinder, the news advisories were reporting power outages, and police were conducting traffic under failed traffic lights, yet despite the surly natives and the grumbling locals scraping the umpteenth foot of snow off their cars and vehicles, the chatter of laughter and happy voices accompanied grammar school students building people and objects from the snowflakes. Despite this scene, no one looked up to the mountains up above Sidewinder around Mount Lee rising up above the Larimer River. No many locals spoke about the Hotel Overlook, not especially since the nasty business that had happened there since the Mafia used it in the Thirties or most recently the school teacher in 1980 who went nuts and tried decapitating his wife and son. Nowadays, they just grinned and pretended to be friendly to the paranormal investigators who came through town trying to meet the ghosts there.

During the winter, they knew the place was closed and nearly inaccessible as the deep snow blocked the long road up the mountain. Even the random hiker, hunter or ice fisherman on the Larimer River barely looked up there during the off-season, but if they did, they wouldn't suspect the small population of stranded young ladies currently presiding up there as if the vast mountain lodge was their own private sorority house. None of them peered or looked from the windows this umpteenth morning of many. The snow had reburied the entryway up to the second floor, but the other entry way was only partially covered. It took Alex several tries just to push the door open, but she eventually pushed it open wide enough for her to push her way through it. She was clad in her white sweater and long form-fitting white pants again, but this time, her clothing was splattered in several layers of red and crimson. Sonny's blood splattered her across the face, and Teddy's blood type was dripping from her hair. She had started with Gabriella in the hall, surprised Stella near the kitchen and after Sonny kept going until she had found everyone. Maddie even tried pushing her over the balcony on the third floor, but after smacking her head into the wall a few times, she never realized she had been tossed down the elevator shaft until it was too late. Dazed and confused, Alex strided out from the hotel splattered in blood and dragging the fire axe; she wasn't sure what to do with it. It had started slipping from her fingers when she dismembered Lily, but it was now sticking to her fingers since she had impaled Kat in the lobby on the broken chair.

Striding forward down the front drive, her legs sinking a foot and a half through the snow, Alex knew she had to get to town and tell everyone what she had did. Someone had to come pick up her friends' bodies from the Overlook now that their spirits had joined the place. Dazed and confused, the former sorceress just stared down the direction of the long drive down the mountain. Her breath freezing into mist before her, her bloodied clothes freezing the fabrics to her skin, Alex sniffled a bit as the cold ravaged her lungs. She was already feeling the pangs of pneumonia hitting her with the forefront of a runny nose and the early pangs of a headache taking over her head. Still dragging the axe, she had scraped a long line in the snow and ice as she reached the tree line. When she looked down to the first bend in the road ahead of her, she heard a car coming from nowhere. Someone was coming to meet her…

Midway down the incline, Alex heard the brakes of a 1967 Chevrolet Impala braking and coming to a stop. It was dark blue in color, almost black… Sam Winchester raised up out of the passenger side first, his brother, Dean, coming up after hitting the brake and placing the car in park to grab their rifle.

"Alex… stop where you are!" Dean screamed to her with worried concern. "We know what happened!"

"I killed them…." Alex was crying and she marched down in the snow. "I couldn't stop myself…" She was ashamed of what she had done.

"Put the axe down!" Sam yelled at her.

"I couldn't stand staying there another day…" Alex bawled, her emotions pouring from her heart. "The same faces… day after day after day…"

"We know, Alex…" Dean watched her coming closer. "Just drop the axe!"

"But I'm free…." Alex's hair was sticking and drying from the blood in her into a hard shell around her head. "They're free…"

"Alex, drop the axe… Please…" Sam started coming closer to her coming down the snow-covered incline.

"We're free now…."

"I know, Alex…" Sam started reaching for her. She had to be frozen by now. Her nose was running, and she was shaking and trembling, but some of it could have been from the shock of what she had done. He started reaching to take the bloody axe from her sticky fingers…

"You can't make me go back!" She screamed at the tall dashing figure before her and swung the axe at him, but Dean's finger flinched on the rifle, and she felt the front of her face going out through the back of her head through in a splatter of bone, brain tissue and liquefied blood spraying around as her body flailed around in a nearly complete circle and dropped her into the pink snow. The shock of witnessing her death forced her awake, and Alex woke up with stunned alarm. Sonny sat on the edge of her bed pulling on the same hotel loafers they all had been wearing in the hotel. Maddie and Gabrielle were talking and giggling in the outer room. Stella had come up eating from a bowl of pineapple chunks taken a can.

"I'm out of the bathroom." Sonny looked trustingly to Alex. "Teddy dropped off some fresh towels…"

"Yeah…." Slowly sliding from bed and pushing her feet to the floor, Alex reacted numb and scared of her thoughts. That wasn't her… she could never kill anyone. She might have teased Justin or turned Max into her little sister in the past, but she knew she couldn't kill anyone… at least that's what she told herself. Her pulse racing, her heart still pounding, she tried to get herself back to normal. When she showered her body scent off, she felt she was still trying to clean off imaginary blood. Was she pre-destined to kill everyone around her? Was that what the hotel was doing? Was she somehow unconsciously conjuring these girls to her to kill them? Lily could hear her crying briefly in the bathroom when she came looking for her, but she tried to ignore it when they went down together to join the others.

The scents of eight more chicken fryers filled the kitchen downstairs and became what was known as breakfast, lunch and dinner for the day. They were easier to cook and smaller to handle than any of the larger chunks of meat in the freezer, but as much as everyone wanted something other than chicken, no one wanted to bother with the mess with cooking anything over twelve pounds, like a roast or a turkey. Anyone wanting to cook for themselves in the kitchen was free to go for it. Sitting next to Kat, Jessie smelled the sweet odor from the hotel shampoo filling her senses and looked up next to Sonny by her. She had reheated the last of the soup from the other day, making it more like vegetable soup in a beef broth with another can of vegetables. Several of the others ate chicken and dropped their bones into their plates. The sound of teeth cracking on tough chicken meat and the smacking of lips on the soft meat filled the air as they gathered once again en mass to discuss the previous week's events and compose a list of notes to keep each other aware of in the Overlook.

"Okay…" Sonny was eating fruit cocktail from a can poured into a bowl. "What all do we have on the list?"

"Creepy little girls, phantom bands, spirits that look like us and people we know…" Keely had transcribed the list from their experiences.

"A cursed train room…" Jessie made a face showing she was tired of this place.

"An undead audience, nightmares…" Keely looked up. "Is there any place in this hotel where we're safe?"

"Oh-oh-oh…" Alex cleaned her hands of the chicken with paper towels. "Phantom housekeepers…. My first day here, I trashed that hall right over there…" She pointed beyond Stella and Maddie to the hall alongside the lobby beyond the row of glass doors. "And something not only cleaned up the broken glass, but replaced the shattered glass in the photos returned to the wall."

"Is such a thing possible?" Jessie asked Kat.

"I've heard of ghosts leaving footprints and imbibing the occasional glass of sherry…" Kat tossed her vibrant head of long dark hair back. "But I have never heard of phantom housekeepers or repairmen…" She looked back to Jessie. "At least not on that scale… but…" She sighed tiredly amidst her haunted group of white-clad sorority sisters. "Look, at this point, it's not just ghosts getting to us. This place is getting into our heads as well…" She paused still trying to make sense of this place. "There is a reason this place stopped using seasonal caretakers. The location, the setting, the loneliness, the same constant faces every day… one of us is going to snap, and when it happens, I don't want to be here."

Alex looked away discreetly.

"Could that be why we're here?" Maddie decided she had enough chicken and placed her plate down. "To take us to the brink of insanity then… document it?"

"I think at this point that even a sociology experiment into the paranormal would have stopped." Gabriella spoke up. "I mean… Sonny's heart almost stopped…" She gestured one by one to each girl. "Jessie came close to a nervous breakdown, Lily nearly froze to death outside trying to run from this place, Kat had to break out of a bathroom before she was scalded to death, I was terrified for my life from something I will never get out of my head, and we're all having bad dreams. I think we need to find a way to expedite our freedom from this place. Like smoke signals or… fireworks… someone in town has to know we're up here."

"Why would you trash a hall?" Teddy looked at her with puzzled confusion.

"Because the phantom operator wouldn't transfer my call…" Alex glared at Teddy as if she was starting something, but Teddy backed down and looked around to Gabriella, Sonny, Maddie and the other girls trapped with them in this place.

"There is one thing I've noticed about this place." Gabriella had placed bits of her chicken into a bowl of chicken and noodles she had heated up from a can. "This place always seems get to one of us when we're alone." She looked around the other nine faces sitting in the circle. "Why can't we create a buddy system that none of us are never apart for something to happen?"

No one immediately started talking. It sounded like a reasonable solution, but they all gradually started agreeing with each other. Alex and Sonny had already been bonding as friends, Maddie and Gabriella and Keely and Lily had been getting close in their groups of two. Agreeing separately, they each started founding new ways to tolerate this place.

"Didn't some once say something about a transmitter?" Lily still didn't want here after her nightmare last night. "Where are we on that?"

"Still not getting a signal…" Gabriella confessed. Alex and Teddy shared further secret furtive glances.

"Are you using it right?"

"There's only about so many ways you can use it." Gabriella answered Lily. They heard the wind whip up again outside the hotel howling over the roof and over its eaves and garrets. The ten girls drew silently nervous to be at the mercy of the natural and the supernatural, tapped in the line between two worlds.

"Look…" Teddy spoke up. "This is a hotel. It has to have everything a guest could want, and that means it has to have snow supplies. I really think we should be finding supplies to hike down the mountain."

"Where do you think we should look?" Alex cracked opened her second can of soda and lifted the carbonated drink to her lips.

"A basement?"

"You mean the downstairs laundry room or the loading dock beneath the kitchen." Teddy rationalized. "Come on, we've been running loose in the place for almost a month… taking over rooms, exploring offices, free-loading, breaking into every nook and cranny… Where have we not been yet?"

"The attic?" Jessie answered.

Looking at each other over and again, they all started breaking apart separately leaving their dishes, silverware and trash in chairs, on tables and windowsills and hidden in plants as they lined up in pairs and apart to take the stairs from the lobby. If as Alex claimed there was a phantom force keeping the place neat and tidy, they were going to exploit it, but taking the stairs made them realize that attic access would not be available to the guests. It had to be from one of the third floor employee access corridors, but all they found was that the place had a fourth floor as well. Teddy and Kat had taken off together through the utility hall looking for supplies they could use and found the garage for the snowmobiles. It was empty, but they were already rationalizing things to do with the tools and leftover parts. In the fourth floor corridor in the hall off the staircase to the hotel apartments, Maddie and Gabriella found a spiral staircase off the hall that seemed separate from the rest of the hotel. It went up into the coned roof over the lobby on the top of the place. The door up top was smaller, and more crampt, but it wasn't locked, and they broke into the room with barely any effort.

"Whoa…" Lily followed Maddie and Keely with Sonny leading the way. They were definitely in the ancient timber rafters of the hotel and walking a dusty wooden floor that they were not meant to find. Each section of the hotel was separated as another room with the eaves stacked with boxes or made into caged off areas to store old out-dated hotel files. Illuminated by single light bulbs hanging freely from the think wood beams, Gabriella peeked into a box marked Christmas supplies, and Sonny noticed the dusty cases of band instruments and recalled her encounter. One section looked caged off to hold and preserve the old files of the hotel. Jessie and Stella found old guest books, stacks of dried yellow newspapers and boxes of the hotel going back to the Forties and Fifties. Alex poked through old trunks and pulled out albums of newspaper clippings and framed photos of hotel events. There were old decorations, the remains of stuffed animals that at one time must have decorated the place and on high shelves over head level, several pieces of luggage left behind by forgetful guests. Sonny fretted about finding mice or rats, but Gabriella mentioned that she didn't see any droppings to suggest there were any small animals. Jessie turned a corner and found a doorway in the end wall at the end of the corner. The door wasn't locked and it didn't seem to be barred in anyway. She twisted the knob and swung the door open.

"Girls…" Jessie stood and looked back to the seven other ransacking girls looting the attic. "You won't believe what I found!" She swung the door open further to a deep fifty-foot long hall with a pitched ceiling filled with discarded clothing. The floor was covered in a foot deep of layered forgotten clothing scattered on the floor, the sides lined with racks of dresses and evening gowns not yet disturbed. It looked like a giant closet for some very messy girls. A few pieces hung sloppily over the wood beams of the roof or were left tossed into garret windows. A few of the racks had been pulled into the center of the room and left discarded where they had been placed. They were all in different colors, styles and time periods; some of the gowns were even quite slinky and revealing.

"I'm a size fourteen…" Someone echoed and they stormed the room like children in a candy store clearing a path and disturbing dust pulling up and pillaging the giant clothes closet looking for attire to fill their personal closets. Some of the worst pieces looked at if they were from the psychedelic Sixties or the swinging Seventies. Maddie found a pair of blue jeans in her size, and Gabriella and Lily posed in front of each other of long evening gowns. Stella sneezed several times from the dust they were stirring up.

"What do you think this room is?" Keely was the furthest into the room lifting up blouses and skirts trying to fashion complete outfits.

"It must be the dressing room for the ball room entertainment." Stella guessed as she lifted a baroquely designed full-figure dress.

"Three floors up?" Lily raced around looking for stuff close to her size.

"You think there's a room full of shoes and accessories?" Sonny giggled in her easiest clothes-shopping spree ever.

"I'm not wearing anything until I gently wash it first. "A wad of clothes over her arm, Jessie had found a high-heeled shoe with an ankle strap and was digging around for its twin. "Where did you say the washing machines were?"

"Down the hall beyond the ballroom and down the stairs…" Alex noticed Maddie had gone to check the next door on the far wall. "What's there?"

"Another stairwell and another door…" Maddie called back.

"What's in it?" Lily called across the attic. Tossing her armful of blouses, pants, gowns and dresses into the blank spot by the door, Maddie stepped through and strided across a top landing. Through the doorway, they watched Maddie open the door to the next section of the attic, step through and pull on the light switch. Standing still, the remaining seven waited for her return. It took her a few extra seconds for her to return, but she eventually came back toward them dusting cobwebs out of her hair and sneezing from more dust.

"Boxes…" She sneezed again. "Air-conditioning filters, cleaning supplies and stacks of sheets and blankets in plastic wrap…" She sneezed again from the ground wood dust from the rafters filling her nose.

"We still have more attic to explore…" Gabriella looked around with a flapper's feathered headdress on her head. She found a man's fedora on the floor and placed it on Keely who started posing with it. Intermixed in the clothes on the floor were other things like undergarments, old hosiery from the Forties and the old-style corsets and bras from the Sixties. They were raiding someone's messy closet storage, but whoever owned this women's attic department of clothes and attire was obviously long gone and not coming back.

"Why do you think the hotel dumped all these clothes to the floor instead of hanging them?" Stella had dumped a box empty of its contents to fill up with everything she was taking with her from this room.

"Maybe we're not the first girls to trash this room for free clothes…" Maddie was carting her free wardrobe out in a suitcase she had found in the window. Almost everyone by now was reaching their limit on what they could carry. Alex was still grabbing stuff. Gabriella and Jessie were still searching for interesting items. Alex stopped to pause and think about what she had said. Could this be evidence of cycles of girls brought here, abandoned and left to kill each other?

"Whoa, this place is dusty…" Jessie sneezed and noticed someone else in the room. She looked like Alex with white skin and much shorter hair dressed as a flapper from the 1920s with a feathered headdress. Transparent and nearly immaterial, she sneaked to the distant open door Maddie had left open and looked around to the girls searching the room for extra clothes and attire and accessories, grinned secretly to Jessie with her finger held lightly to her lips to be quiet and vanished into the light unseen as if she was glad to be released from the room.