13
Something stirred Sonny awake from her sleep. Opening her eyes from a deep sleep, she scowled, rubbed her eyes and checked the alarm clock by the bed. It was three thirty-three. Alex was still deep asleep next to her in her room. Blinking a few times, Sonny yawned and assumed the position to drift back asleep, flipping her pillow to the cooler side and reconfiguring her arm under it. She had missed her concert date, and thinking about it made her eyes fill with tears. What was she doing here? She wasn't stranded on an island. She wasn't a plane crash victim on a mountain, and she wasn't wandering the desert looking for water. She was snowbound in a strange hotel filled with ghosts. Had the circumstances been more rational, she wouldn't be here. It wasn't as if she had come here to go skiing and then was told the mountain pass was out and she'd be stuck here a while. Someone who knew this place was remote and deserted for six months out of the year had dumped her here? Could her assistant Marcie be behind it? Could Roland her security guard have been paid off as she was placed in a casket, shipped here and then left in the room of this hotel with Alex, Maddie and Gabriella. She didn't know any of these girls a year ago. How could she be sure Alex was not actually a part of it? She sounded genuine, but how did she know? One girl left to live here by herself, okay? Three more girls five days later, possible. Kat and herself two days later, maybe… But Teddy, Keely, Stella and Lily in one night two nights later? That required at least two people for each of them to undress each of them, redress them, place them each in a room with a wardrobe of identical white outfits with the hotel logo and then slip back out without being seen. It sounded possible, but it was so far-fetched. What was the reason? What was the motive? If this coven of abductors was carrying away young women with a certain attraction factor, why dump them here? How could they get in and out and down the mountain so easy while they couldn't? Was there possibly a helicopter-landing pad in the premises?
The phantom drummer on the third floor started up again. He drummed up his advance percussion beat in the overhead room and struck up the band once more. Cocking her head, Sonny grimaced with uncertainty to realize it was starting again. The phantom marching band was at it again. She rolled over and started shaking Alex awake.
"Alex…" She shook her by the arm. "Alex!" The brunette Waverly Place princess wouldn't stir, meanwhile the marching started again on the same route as last time, marching out of the room and descending the stairwell outside of the room.
"Alex…" Sonny opined regrettably that her new best friend could not wake to hear the sounds of the marching band upstairs. Her face contorted with frustrated fear, Sonny lamented her fate as the solitary witness to the drums, horns and marching coming down blaring outside the room and raced to catch them in the act. Maybe it was ruse for her abductors to keep sneaking their victims into rooms in the Overlook, or maybe it really was a phantom band of decaying ectoplasmic musicians trying to keep from getting bored. Sonny leapt to her feet and charged through her apartment on her way to the hallway, throwing open the door and catching view of a murder scene.
Teddy lay dead and bludgeoned at the stairs in a pool of her blood, and Gabriella was left lying at the floor outside the door, mouth open in chock and twitching from her attack. The walls were marked in blood, the residue of it coated part of the railing where someone had been pushed over to her death. Standing over Lily at the far side, Alex stood dripping and chopping her to bits with an axe. Realizing she was being watched, she stopped and turned toward Sonny watching her, lifting the axe to her shoulder and peered back with a sticky mound of her long tresses covering up one side of her red-spotted face marred by her murder spree. Trembling in shock, Sonny screamed and jumped backward into the steps up into her room. The lights went on as Jessie sat up in her single bed. Maddie and Gabriella had pushed it out for her after taking a big bed from one of the other rooms. They started rushing from their room, and Alex woke from her forced slumber. The vision had vanished, but the shock of seeing it was still heavy in Sonny's mind.
"Sonny?!" Maddie came after her crawling on the floor. "Sonny?"
"She's going to kill us!" Sonny was screaming. "Alex is going to kill us!" They all looked to Alex standing next to them on the landing. She was stunned speechless and shaking her head. Was Sonny sharing in her bad dreams now? Within minutes, Teddy had come from the end of the hall to find out what was going on, and hear what had happened. Sonny described what she had seen and said she wanted to move to yet another room in the hotel to sleep. She no longer wanted the apartment, and neither Jessie, Maddie nor even Gabriella wanted to stay in it alone so it meant moving further away from the lobby to other rooms. Eventually Sonny apologized to Alex for the accusation, and calmed enough to stay the rest of the night in her initial room, but she was not staying another night under the phantom band from upstairs. By morning and the rays of sunlight, the hotel seemed less haunted, and the girls forced to live in it were once again feeling safe to traverse the halls.
"For two hundred rooms in this place…" Keely remarked. "We're running out of rooms…" She told Lily. They had heard the story Sonny had described of her vision from Teddy when she had returned to their room, but with the brunette members of their party vacating that space, Lily wanted to try it out for one night in case phantom Miley returned carrying her head under her arm.
"I'm really starting to hate this place…" Lily confessed as they strolled as casually as possible down the hall for the kitchen to find something for breakfast. "I'd really prefer to freeze to death on the mountain to getting the crap scared out of me by crazy ghosts…"
"You don't think…" Keely looked to her with big beautiful blue azure eyes strained with worry. "The ghosts are trying to drive one of crazy enough to kill each other, do you?"
"You had to say it…" Lily mumbled. "You had to say it…" She took a few steps and stopped. "Oh god… what if the clothes we found belonged to other girls slaughtered here before us?"
"Suddenly I'm much more concerned over whether I used enough detergent…" Keely mumbled and turned her head to the rustling noise. Someone was moving around in Room 202 over the lobby. It was right next to the room Maddie and Gabriella had stayed in to watch the front entrance for their abductors. First they thought it might be the ghosts, but then they wondered if this was where Sonny had moved to after last night. Stepping back, they listened as the doorknob rattled and turned and a hazel-eyed beauty they didn't recognize strolled out wearing the hotel's monogrammed white t-shirt with the regular white form-fitting pants. It was happening again... another new face in the hotel, only this time, she looked exactly how they remembered the entertainer known as Kelly Clarkson. Her hair was back to wild brunette brown, exactly how it looked when she won her recording contact on American Idol in 2001 instead of the wavy blonde locks she had changed it to in recent years. She also looked leaner and curvier, nothing like the modern singer who often struggled with her weight and confessed openly to having a hard time keeping her size down to a manageable level. Looking hot and attractive, she stood outside her room in the same white attire everyone else in this hotel was wearing and looked up to Lily and Keely coming toward her suddenly jumping and squealing in excited female idol worship.
"Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!" The two squealed and jumped up and down star-struck in excitement and got her to stop before them. "Miss Clarkson!" Keely caught her breath first unable to stop smiling. "I am such a big fan! Your song, "Catch My Breath," is like a personal anthem of mine. Every time I hear it I have to stop what I'm doing to listen to it."
"Kelly…" Lily tried to play it cool. "I'm Lily… Miley's friend. You probably remember me best as Lola Lufnagle back when Miley was still calling herself Hannah Montana… We met at Taylor Swift's birthday party in Malibu."
"I'm sorry…" The girl smirked considering pretending to be the singer again to make their day then changed her mind. "But I'm not Kelly Clarkson. I just seem to get that a lot."
Lily and Keely lost part of their excitement and looked at each other.
"Yes, you are…" Lily insisted. "We've met five times…"
"Sorry…" The confused brunette shook her head and continued looking through the hall aimlessly for someone she knew, knocking at the door of the empty room next to hers and calling for her parents. Lily dropped her jaw feeling a bit snubbed, and Keely reacted a bit perturbed by the confusion. The girl looked so much like Kelly that there was no mistaking her. They watched her heading down the hallway.
"Well, see if I download your next Top Forty hit…" Lily gasped and headed the other way to see what there would be for breakfast.
Back in the hallway outside Room 237, Alex and Sonny had checked out Suite 238 and hoped the morbid history of the suite next door hadn't touched it. Neither of them wanted to be alone, and Gabriella, Maddie and Jessie were going to try it with Kat in Sonny's old apartment. Leary of ghosts for the time, they had searched the room tirelessly looking for possible hidden cameras and microphones for the umpteenth time in case they were being watched, checking the lights, air vents, furniture, bathroom and every part of the room, but they were still not convinced the room was clear. There had to be a reason they were in this hotel to live apart from the world.
"Seems clear…" Alex headed out with Sonny behind her. "We just need to get our clothes"
"I hate these outfits." Sonny mumbled under breath as they departed the suite for breakfast. "If someone was going to leave us clothes, you'd thing they'd have given us a better variety."
"I try not to worry about it…" Alex was not as picky about what had been left for her. "Besides, we got all that neat stuff from the attic in the downstairs washing machines, and we're probably going to be here for five more months until the hotel opens, and we're found." She and Sonny strided down the hall to the elevators. "And then we'll be the hotel's problem… and whoever decided to desert us here."
"Do you really think this is some sort of social experiment?" Sonny asked and hit the button for the first floor.
"I don't know what to think." Alex sighed and lightly shook her head. "Every time I think I have a grasp on what's happening, something…" She heard the door of Suite 236 behind them open and a beautiful regal looking redhead with long vibrant curly locks emerge and close the door behind her. They had not seen this girl before her in this hotel. She was completely new. It was happening again. More attractive young girls were waking up in the hotel for the first time and dressing in the clothes left for them to stroll out and get answers. Clad in the same white attire as themselves, the tall beauty reacted unsure and disconcerted emerging from the room, but then she saw Alex and Sonny at the elevators and composed herself to approach them with the proper decorum to approach strangers.
"Ladies…" She held her head up regally as a victim of her wealthy background. "Might you direct me to which room of the hospital I might find Jack Dawson?"
Alex and Sonny looked at each other and dropped their mouths open speechlessly as the same time the elevator doors opened to the floor.
"This isn't a hospital…" Alex informed her. "It's a hotel."
"I see…" The cultured redhead was a bit confused. "Well, I guess an Iceland hotel would be the best place for the other survivors…" She looked up and down the hall. "Might you direct me to the hotel lobby?"
"Down the stairs, bear right and keep going forward…" Sonny directed the lost princess.
"Thank you…" She reached to take Sonny's hand and briefly hesitated. "Rose Dawson…" She introduced herself with a light smile.
"Sonny Monroe… Alex Russo…" Sonny introduced herself and Alex with a bit less emphasis on etiquette. Unused to wearing her new attire, Rose thanked them with a light bow and turned to find her male companion in the location. The younger ladies were both stunned and confused. They had reached the point they knew to expect new random faces of girls appearing here, but where did she get the idea they were in Iceland? Was it because of the endless snow outside, and why would she think she was in a hospital? Survivors of what? They stepped into the elevator before it closed.
"I am not getting used to this place at all!" Alex discomfited with exasperated frustration.
"What the hell is with this place?" Sonny spoke too quickly.
"Better question…" Alex mumbled. "Where the hell are we?" The doors opened behind them to the Colorado Lounge on the first floor as another strange girl they didn't recognize looked behind herself to them and hurried out of the way. There were several new girls in the hotel this morning, more than a few... maybe alost fifty, all of them wearing a combination of white sweaters or t-shirts with white pants, and they were all crisscrossing and gathering in the room confused and unprepared and asking questions. Where were they? What was this place? How did they get here? Did anyone have a cell phone? Whatever was happening around them and to them had multiplied last night and then doubled. They recognized Stella wandering around another shorter thinner redhead, and Kat came down the stairs stopped twice by a mature older woman of more demure attraction and then by another young girl with bright blonde hair. No one knew what was happening or how they had got here. All they knew so far was that they had woken up in a strange room in a non-familiar hotel surrounded by strangers.
"Holy crap on a cracker…" Alex saw several new faces. "It looks like our abductor hit the jackpot last night!"
"Alex!" Jessie and Maddie came running from around the corner to the employee corridor. They looked over-wrought and about to have a nervous breakdown. They didn't want to be here, but right now, all they had each other. "Someone must have broke a wall down some where because suddenly we're from a population of ten to almost a hundred!"
"Did we unleash something from breaking into the attic?" Sonny wondered aloud. "I feel as if we're in an episode of "Lost." The snowbound version…"
"What do you want me to do?" Alex did not want to be the leader to this forced female community or the blame of the kidnapping ring gone out of control. "Send everyone home? Quite frankly, I want to be the first one to go!"
"Look!" Maddie was hysterical. "I don't mind pitching in and helping with the cooking, even with Teddy and Jessie helping, but I am not taking responsibility for feeding a entire hotel!"
"It looks like the Christian Church version of the Playboy Mansion." Jessie quipped looking around. Several of the members of the sudden female population seemed to be speculating what was happening. A few thought they like others had been booked into hotels on their retinue, but then they all started noticing they were all left the same type of clothes to wear and realizing something odd was happening. No one had a strict body type or hairstyle. While everyone looked to be in the early twenties to mid-thirties age range, everyone in the room was dressed in the same white attire as Alex and the earlier girls. Unless someone did something, things were going to be getting bad very quickly…
"Could this be happening because we broke into the attic?" Maddie repeated Sonny's query. "Did we unleash something?"
"Excuse me…" Zoe Brooks from Pacific Coast Academy in California crossed before them. "I'm looking for Chase Matthews… He's got big blue eyes, brown hair, a smile that melts butter…"
"He sounds just dreamy!" Jesse started shining.
"Seriously!" Alex tried snapping her back to reality with the mystery before them. Turning around exasperated and frustrated, Alex sighed close to Maddie and mumbled under her breath. "Could this situation get any more bizarre…"
"Tricia! Nikki!" The Kelly Clarkson look-alike now appeared on the balcony over them, looked down to Sonny and Alex and started racing down past two more other girls on the stairs to get to them in a hurry. The two of them reacted confused, somehow they were going to be confused with someone else; it was a sort of a pattern to the madness by sticking all these strange girls together in one place to encounter each other. They all looked like someone to someone else. Kelly rushed up to Sonny and Alex, hugged them and came to a stop before them.
"I can't find mom or dad anywhere in this place." She looked at Sonny and Alex and reacted as confused as the others. "Why are we all wearing the same thing?"
"Kelly…" Sonny knew Kelly Clarkson from a concert tour with her. "What are you talking about?"
"Kelly?" The girl looked to Maddie. "Maddie, what's going on here?"
"You know me?" Maddie was awestruck!
"You've only been my little sister for almost twenty years…" Lainey Collins looked around the room grateful to have found some faces she recognized. Tricia was her twin sister and the spitting image of Sonny, Maddie and Gabrielle were her young sisters, named exactly like these girls, and Nikki and Lisa her baby sisters looked exactly like Alex and Jessie. They all went to school at Collinsport High School in Maine where they drove the boys crazy, and their parents even more frantic. Maddie had been named for the candy girl at the Tipton Hotel who used to baby-sit her as a little girl when her parents lived in Boston, but Maddie Fitzpatrick was apparently unaware of that connection just yet. She looked to Sonny and Alex with stunned surprise, but Lainey hung near the girls for the moment because they looked identical to her siblings, but none of the girls recognized her except for her semblance to a certain American Idol alumni.
"Please don't tell me there's someone else in the world who looks like me!" Alex reached up as if she had a headache.
"Wait, there's mom!" Lainey cried out and pointed across the room.
"Mom?" Sonny reacted and watched Lainey hurry over to a petite blonde beauty wandering confused through the room. Much like the other girls, the woman wasn't sure where she was or who all these other younger were. One minute, she was struggling to get to sleep for the early shift at the hospital, and next thing she knew she was waking up in a strange hotel room with white clothes in her closet. It seemed to be the same confusing predicament for all these girls by the looks and the sounds of these conversations. Some girls were still wandering the hotel, others found their way to the lobby area and were told that others were coming here looking for answers. Lainey confronted the woman.
"Mom, where's dad?"
"I'm sorry…" The beleaguered woman turned and looked around trying to rationalize this predicament. "I'm not who you think I am…" She turned around trying to find answers as to why she had wakened up in this place with no memories of having arrived here or checking in to this place. Dana Harridge hung near lawyer Georgia Thomas because she resembled her sister. Kristin Baxter came hurrying down the stairs of the balcony happy to find others, and Lindsay Munroe used her analytic detective skills from the New York forensics lab to realize no one knew why they were here, much less how they got here. Fresh from Omega Beta Zeta sorority at Windsor College in Ohio, college student Cici Cooper also looked for answers no one had or could answer. Another young student from Hollywood Arts High School named Tori Vega was wondering how she got spirited from her home to this winter resort. She wandered past another perplexed beauty named Hermione Granger, an attractive prodigy who glanced confusingly through the room at her practically "mystical" relocation to this place without her own special abilities. There were young girls around her at about her age looking for hotel staff, there were older women here too, maybe thirty to thirty-five or even forty years of age, but it was quite obvious, it was nothing but women and they all were comparatively attractive with some looks and they had all been left the same range of attire in their rooms. Something very weird was going on here, and Alex, Sonny, Maddie and Jessie with the others could only watch in nervous anxiety. How could their mysterious problem escalate so fast and so massive? It became obvious they were not dealing with mortal abductors unless there was an organization of them in the hundreds using this hotel…
"Mom?" Lainey's baby doll face took on a sheer amount of terrified fear and worry to be alone that she clung a few feet close to her mother's duplicate scared and unsure where to go. Liz Masterson looked back at the panicked young girl as a red-haired college student named Lily Finnerty mouthed off at her for bumping into her. This girl was petrified so far from home. She couldn't stand to leave her abandoned after she had latched on to her as a mother figure. Gasping and turning back around, Lizzie beamed to take her under her protection and took the girl close hugging her close as Alex and the others watched. Were they mother and daughter? Someone had to do something. Rose Dawson had drifted into the room behind Teddy and Kat by now. It was very apparently no one was getting any answers. Someone had to take charge!
"Excuse me?"
"No, I don't work here…"
"Excuse me?"
"I don't know anything."
"What?" Lizzie looked around. "Good grief!" She stepped from the floor on to a table to get her voice above all the others and blew a whistle through her fingers that caught the attention of the room. Everyone suddenly stopped talking and wandering around and looked up to her.
"Ladies…" She got their attention. She beamed charmingly around their lovely and attractive faces as everyone slowly one by one turned to face her. "Hello… My name is Dr. Elizabeth Masterson, and I am the head of emergencies at St. Thomas Hospital in Detroit… Now, who's in charge here?"
Anyone who knew Alex and had been here more than a few days suddenly pointed to Alex, Maddie, Jessie and Sonny huddled out of the way in a secret conversation at the bottom of the stairs near the elevators. One by one, everyone started turning to face Alex and her posse of friends. Maddie was first to notice all eyes on them then Alex noticed as well. They were not running a hotel for other abduction victims, but now it looked like they had no choice.
"You've got to be kidding me…" Alex mumbled under a silent hundred eyes on her.
"Alex, you have to say something!" Sonny encouraged her.
"You can't make me!"
"Alex…" Maddie faced her. "You're the only one who knows more about what's happening here than anyone else."
"Crap and a half…" Alex wished she had her magic to vanish and forced herself to be responsible. It was a lot harder now that she knew was could be blamed for what riot might happen here. A few girls imprisoned in a desolate hotel were hard to believe, but almost a hundred? This was inconceivable. In her way, artist Lizzie McGuire and Chicago socialite Jackie Burkhart parted the way on the steps as Maddie, Sonny and Jessie followed Alex up the stairs to lend her support and stop on the landing over the piano. Dancer Chelsea Daniels turned around to see her as writer Sabrina Spellman and actress Penny Parker came closer. College student Lily Finnerty glanced around the room past party planner Molly McCleish looking for a familiar face, and antique collector Melinda Gordon wandered confused into the room. Stewardess Amelia Warren had been plucked from her nap on a plane over France. How did she get off the plane? How did she turn up here? No one knew anything, and it had become quiet enough to hear the mountain winds blowing the snow around beyond the hotel. Jessie counted the numerous heads and faces turning to face them, and Sonny and Alex shared a look as if they had been friends for longer than their time together. The one thing these numerous ladies all had in common besides their attire was that they were all women and each of them in their own ways were attractive or physically appealing in form. Journalist Topanga Lawrence looked up and around confused and perturbed with interior decorator Kelly Kapowski slipping up in front of Manhattan lawyer Christine Sullivan and restaurateur Prue Halliwell.
"Hello…" Alex gasped nervously on the landing over the piano. "My name is Alex Russo. I'm from New York City. You're possibly wondering what's going on here, and to tell the truth…" She looked to Lainey near Dr. Masterson then to Teddy on the far balcony and Rose in the archway down under her. "I really have no idea…" She paused as light whispers and gossip slipped unheard.
"I can tell you what I do know…" Alex forced herself to continue. "We are now in the Overlook Hotel, a hotel in the Colorado Rockies that is only open six months out of the year because of how treacherous the road is during the winter. We are here now during the winter months during the time it is abandoned. Why? I don't know. By whom? I have no idea."
Lainey made a face realizing Alex was not her sister Nikki and realized just how alone she was here among these strangers.
"I was here alone by myself for five days until Jessie, Maddie and Gabriella suddenly appeared out of no where…" Alex continued. "Sonny and Kat appeared two days later, and two days later, Lily, Teddy, Stella and Keely… I have no idea how they much less myself got here, but I'm so glad they are here otherwise I might have killed myself than deal with the loneliness. I'm so sorry you're all here, but I don't have any idea how we got here or how to get us out of here.
"My best rational explanation, pure and simple is… abduction…" Alex continued. "One person… or a team of people working together… have deserted us here to live in the hotel until it reopens in the spring… but why? I don't know." She now got a multitude of voices and queries and ladies talking and overlapping. They all had jobs, families, responsibilities they had to get to in their lives. This was not a plane crash where they were forced to survive – this was a coerced forced vacation.
"Wait, wait, wait…" Penny Parker, a blonde struggling actress from Pasadena, California, looked up to Alex from her left and spoke up. "We've been abandoned here? Someone has a cell phone right?" She looked around.
"If someone has a cell phone, " Alex spoke up to their angry and cofused faces. "Get a message out and get us out of here, but I'm pretty sure no here is going to be left with any communication devices."
"What's a cell phone?" Jackie Burkhart turned to Lizzie McGuire.
"You're kidding, right?"
"What about the land line?" Crimson-hared Olive Pendergast from the University of California in Los Angeles looked up. "Internet access?"
"For all we know…" Gabriella spoke up. "The snow has knocked out the phones, and the hotel has no Internet access, but we do have a transmitter radio on the premises and we're still trying to get a signal on it, but with the mountains..."
"What's an Internet?" Jackie annoyed Lizzie again.
"Where are you from? The 70s?"
"How the hell can someone sneak in and out of here to leave us here and not get caught?" Twenty-year old Sabrina Spellman stood up on a table. Her mystical powers as a witch had left her as well. Hermione and Sara Bailey, a school psychologist from San Francisco, California were in the same predicament. The only person with any out-standing ability was Melinda Gordon from Grandview, Pennsylvania, and as she looked around the room, she saw figures she knew were ghosts. Two girls in blue dresses looked at her and wandered off, a male figure with a thin mustache in deep pallor who was wearing a tuxedo lifted his drink to toast her and on the balcony over Alex, three ladies dressed as flappers from the Twenties stood watching over the balcony at the invasion of the living to their hotel. It was a scant few, but she felt so many others here…
"Trust me…" Alex stared at Sabrina. "I have been asking that question since we got here."
"I'm hungry…" Plucked from South Connecticut State University, which she attended to be near her boyfriend at Yale, Lily Finnerty felt a bit overwhelmed to be surrounded by all these attractive women, but if she was included, maybe someone thought she was good enough to be included with them. Denise Sherwood, the wife of Colonel Frank Sherwood of Camp Marshall in South Carolina looked at her and raised her hand.
"Alex, honey…" She responded concerned and earnest. "We do have food here, right?"
"We have a fully stocked pantry and freezers with food." Maddie answered the question. "But I am not experienced to cook for a hundred people."
"Fifty-eight…" Gabriella corrected her.
"Fifty-eight…"
"Does anyone here have restaurant experience?" Christine looked toward the crowd.
"Crap and a half…" Someone cursed behind Sabrina and Hermione. "I run a soup kitchen in Nantucket." Helen Chapel rolled her eyes from under her blonde locks. "Can I have five volunteers and about an hour to get something prepared?" There were a few whispers as Denise offered to help and Maddie, Teddy and Jessie joined in to show the way to the kitchen. The daughter of a wine-maker in the San Fernando Valley, Hallie Parker relented to help as well. By now, Melinda drifted forward closer to Alex.
"Alex…" The buxom beauty looked up from her long tresses of dark brown hair. "There's something about this place you haven't told us, isn't there?" She looked over to the phantom of the stout balding phantom of a middle-aged man only she could see.
"Yeah…" Alex groaned reluctant to tell.
"The place is haunted…" Kat spoke up.
"Way to confess, Kat…" Alex looked annoyed at her, but now the whisperings really started. A few seemed to be believers of supernatural activity, several were anxious to see something, others remained steadfast to their skeptical beliefs. Lainey grinned eager to experience something to tell her father, and Cece turned to Lizzie and Sabrina to recruit potential roommates.
"How haunted is it?" Her voice resounding with her British accent, Hermione Granger had had her experiences with ghosts in the past. "How many ghosts are there?"
"So far…" Melinda looked over to her. "I've counted seventeen…"
"You're psychic, aren't you?" Prue Halliwell looked to Melinda.
"Psychics read the future… I see ghosts…"
"Let's not worry about ghosts here, okay…" Christine had been searching the tables and drawers to gather pencils and index cards. "Look, I am a lawyer for the Manhattan Municipal Criminal Court Building in New York. Let's just find out who everyone is. Everyone, take a card, write down your name, birth date, address, room number where you can be found... oh, and today's date." She looked up to Alex and the girls on the landing over the piano. "I want you girls to give me the dates you appeared here. Next, we'll talk about getting ourselves out of here."
"If my friends, Leonard and Sheldon, were here, they could probably get us out of here." Penny quipped knowing their tenacity for building things, but she could also almost predict Howard's disgusting comment upon hearing about her being trapped in a hotel with beautiful girls. She took a pen and card and sat between Lainey Collins and Lily Finnerty on the sofa near the piano. Others sat on the floor at tables, Alex and the girls stood writing at the stairway railing, but Christine's plan to account for everyone was taking shape. Penny and Lily slowly looked to Lainey at the end of the sofa.
"You're Kelly Clarkson, aren't you?"
"You know…" Lainey kept writing without looking up. "If one more person asks me that, I'm bludgeoning them with a pencil and turning them into a ghost…"
Alex, Maddie and Gabriella looked down off the railing.
"Great… our first psychopath." Maddie retorted. "Now, we know who's going to kill us…" She wrote her name and address in Boston, following it with her birth date by her name and her room number at the bottom. Alex had listed her first day here as December 11, which meant it was December 16 when she had arrived. However, Gabriella had written down her first day as December 20. Could Alex had been alone here longer than she thought? Could they have missed Christmas and New Years Day? How far were they into January? One by one, they all finished their cards and gave them to Christine talking to Denise, the army wife. Hallie Parker was bonding with Lizzie McGuire as friends. Hermione had retreated to a sofa to write in a notebook she had found, but eventually everyone regrouped in the employee lounge behind the lobby area to eat their first meal of the day. Maddie had claimed they were down to twenty-two industrial cartons of eggs in the kitchen, but who ever had been here to deliver the new tenants to the place must have restocked their eggs and milk. It was just another mystery to add to the place. Helen did know how to make scrambled eggs in mass quantities with the kitchen equipment plus she knew how to use the other gear to stretch it by adding chopped onions, green peppers and grated cheese for omelets to feed fifty-eight. Working in this big hotel kitchen was kind of fun, but she did not want to be trapped doing it. Giving everyone free range to the kitchen was risky, but it seemed to be the best solution. After everyone had had their meet-and-greet breakfast and had their first-hand experience with the cold weather and snow stretched out around them, Christine gestured to Alex and lured her into the manager's office.
"Alex…" Christine guided the young lady into the office and closed the door. "Something even weirder is happening than you believe…"
"You're just now figuring that out…" Alex took a chair as Christine took the position at the desk. The cards filled out by the women in the Overlook had been stacked across the desk in ten stacks, the second one from the end was the tallest.
"These are the cards in order of when everyone arrived here." Christine placed her finger on the first one. "Think you were here first?"
"I know I was…" Alex was getting that creepy feeling again. "I spent five days here by myself without seeing anyone."
"Honey…" Christine flipped over the fifth card, which was Alex's then Maddie, Gabriella and Jessie's cards next to it. "You were here ten days…."
Lightly trembling, Alex's eyes started welling with tears. Ten days? Ten days by herself and her family never came looking for her? That was impossible! They loved her! Justin knew spells that could find her in seconds! How could they not come looking for her?
"What…" Her lungs filled and emptied with air as she wept. "How…" She choked up realizing her family wasn't looking for her. "Whose cards are before me?" She tried fighting the grief.
"Here's where it gets really weird…" Christine was not sure how to explain it. She showed Alex the first card. It read: "Rose Dewitt-Bukater (Dawson), born: October 11, 1890, Residence: 11456 Surrey Square, London, Middlesex County, England, Arrival: April 15, 1912, Room 236."
"Remember she was asking about other survivors?" Christine looked to Alex. "If I were to venture a guess, I'd say she thinks she was plucked off the Carpathia after getting rescued from the Titanic. That date…" She showed the card to Alex. "Is the day after the ship sank!"
"She was plucked out of history?" Alex realized out loud. Leaning forward, Alex flipped the next card. It read: "Joanie Cunningham, born: February 10, 1943, Address: 1612 Maple Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Arrival: January 13, 1960, Room 412."
"I met that girl twelve minutes ago…" Christine revealed. "She's eighteen!"
Third card: "Jaclyn/Jackie Burkhart, born: September 24, 1961, Point Place, Wisconsin, Current residence, Carnegie Apartments, Chicago, Illinois, Arrived: January 13, 1980…"
"Same day as today, twenty years apart…"
The next stack consisted of four cards for Sabrina Spellman, Prue Halliwell, Helen Chapel and Christine Sullivan… each dated January 13, 1993. Alex looked up to Christine.
"Except for Rose…" Christine revealed. "Everyone thinks it's the same day of different years… we've been abducted from out of space… and time… Jackie, Rose and Joanie have no idea what year it is yet, and… maybe us…" She sadly shook her head.
"What do you mean by that?" She looked to the cards before her. The next card was hers; Maddie, Gabriella and Jessie had the next stack as they should have ten days later of the same month. Sonny and Kat had the next day of arrival two days later. So did Teddy, Lily, Stella and Keely another two days later. The ninth stack was everyone who had appeared today on January 13, 2013. There was one more card at the end. Christine had already seen it. Alex was scared to pick it up and read it, but she forced herself to look at it.
"Victoria Elaine (Lainey) Collins, born September 13, 2000, address: 35 Seaview Road, Collinsport, Maine, Room 202, Arrived: January 13, 2018…"
Alex looked up in shock.
"Alex…" Christine looked as if she was in shock. "I think we're the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel…."