Their car emerged from the long,
forested driveway and into the clearing where Mason Manor rose from the forest
floor. It gave the impression of a fortress.

Steven had looked at pictures on
the internet, but they didn’t do it justice. Whoever designed it had drama in
mind, a desire to make a statement. It had a central building of dark wood and
brick walls, and extensions sprawled outward in several directions. There were
few flat surfaces to the façade, which made it hard to immediately distinguish
its footprint, giving off an impression of detail and complexity. Steven had
read it only had twenty guest rooms, so he felt it looked much bigger than it
was. It reminded him of buildings that take a lot of looking at before you
understand their layout.
Whoever built it had an ego
, he thought.
It
was meant to throw you off, to let you know who’s boss.

And it looks haunted.

He parked the car near the front
doors. There was only one other car in the small parking lot.

Steven and Roy walked into the
entryway. They stopped at the base of a beautiful staircase. A small hallway ran
down the left side of it, lined with cream colored wainscoting. It had an old,
classic feel. Steven noticed that it was tastefully decorated and every detail
was well maintained.

A tall muscular man appeared at
the end of the hallway and walked toward them. He stuck out his hand to Roy and
Roy shook it. Halfway through the shake he abandoned it and pulled Roy to him,
giving him a hug. Roy gave Steven a sheepish look as the man wrapped his arms
around him and patted his back.

“It’s so good to see you, Roy,”
the man said.

“You too, Pete,” Roy replied. The
man released him and stepped back a little.

“This is my son Steven,” Roy said.

“Nice to meet you, Steven,” Pete
said, extending his hand. Steven half expected a hug but he didn’t receive one.
He was fine with that.

The sound of steps in the hallway
caused all three to turn and look. Approaching was a thin woman of about
thirty. The lights in the hallway were dim and the brighter lights from the
kitchen beyond caused her to appear as a silhouette. As she got closer Steven
could see she had beautiful features, short brown hair, and a friendly but intense
stare. She was as tall as Steven and she exhibited an immediate sense of
business and purpose. She walked up to Steven and extended her hand, which was
thin and delicate.

“My daughter Sarah,” Pete said.
“Sarah, this is Roy and his son Steven.”

“Welcome to you both,” she said.
Her voice was pleasant and welcoming, but it had a slight weariness to it, as
though she’d rather be somewhere else. “Please come in,” she said, motioning
them into a large drawing room off the entryway.

The furniture in the room was
exquisite, a mixture of antiques and modern. There was a small bar at the far
end, made of polished mahogany. Very old black and white pictures lined the
walls. Steven noticed the manor in several of them. They all sat.

“Nice place you have here,” Steven
commented. “Impressive. It looks huge from the outside.”

“It is huge,” Pete replied. “The
house was built in the middle of the 19th century. The owners kept adding on to
it over the years and eventually they wound up with more rooms than they knew
what to do with. We made it a bed and breakfast when we purchased it twenty
years ago.” He paused. “You look good, Roy. How long has it been — six, seven
years?”

“Since the fortieth reunion, you
mean?” Roy asked. “About that.”

“It was seeing you at the reunion that
reminded me of your…” he trailed off. Pete seemed at a loss for words. Steven
noticed that Sarah, sitting in a chair across from him, shifted in her seat
uncomfortably.

“Ability?” Roy offered.

“Yes, ability,” Pete replied,
“that’s what I meant. I wasn’t sure what to call it.”

Steven saw Sarah roll her eyes. “I
take it you don’t share your father’s perspective of my Dad’s ability?” Steven
asked her. She seemed like a direct and up-front person, and Steven felt he
should return the courtesy.

“I don’t, no,” she said. “But Pete
thinks you can help us and I’m fine with anything that will help. Right now
we’re, well, I’ll just be honest with you, we’re in trouble. We have no income.
Buying this place back from the people we sold it to was a big mistake.”

“Now Sarah,” said Pete, “we both
agreed to do it.” He turned to Roy. “We got if for a song!” he half laughed.
“Couldn’t pass it up.”

“But we should have passed it up,”
Sarah responded. “There was a reason they sold it back to us at a loss.”

Steven was a little confused. “Do
you mean you sold this place to someone, and then bought it back?”

“Yes,” Pete replied, “about five
years ago. We’d owned it for fifteen years and it was very successful. We made
good money selling it. I thought I’d retire. The new owners decided to play up a
ghost angle on the place. The manor has always had stories attached to it; it’s
old, so how could it not? It’s like a miniature version of the Winchester
house, with its strange history and all.

“Well, it backfired on them. A
complete mistake on their part. They lost business, and after they ran it into
the ground they put it back on the market. They tried to make a profit on it,
but ultimately they had to lower the price. No one wanted to buy it. Eventually
it got so cheap I talked Sarah into buying it back.”

“The ghost marketing was a bad
idea, but that wasn’t what did them in,” Sarah said. “It was the deaths,” she paused.
“In the rooms.”

“Deaths?” Roy asked.

“We never had a problem when we
owned it,” Pete said. “Occasionally someone had a heart attack or something,
that’s gonna happen over time at any hotel or place where people stay, I
guarantee it. But I think in the fifteen years we owned it no one ever died
here.”

“But,” Sarah said, “that’s not
what happened with the new owners. They had five deaths in five years, and all
from the same thing. Word gets around. They began to lose business, and that’s
what caused them to sell.”

“I honestly thought people would
come back,” Pete said. “You know, ‘previous owners return the place to its former
reputation’, that kind of thing. I just assumed people would come back. But
then we had a death here a month ago, and since then we’ve dropped more than fifty
percent. Normally this time of year we’d be full.”

“How many guests are here right
now?” Steven asked.

“You’re it,” Pete said. “Not a
single booking until two days from now. That’s the trouble. These deaths have
scared away business. I was hoping you could help, Roy. Use your abilities to
understand what’s going on here.”

Roy shuffled in his seat. “Well,
we’ll have to see about that. What do you mean they all died from the same
thing?”

“Hemorrhaging,” Sarah said. “The coroner
said the death was caused by some type of virus that caused them to bleed out
through their skin. It was extremely gruesome – I hope to never see anything
like it again. The previous deaths were the same. Keeping that kind of thing
quiet isn’t easy, but when it’s happened five times already you can’t suppress
it. The staff talks, word spreads.”

“Do you think it was a virus?”
Steven asked.

“We had this place sanitized like
you wouldn’t believe,” Pete said. “I suspect the previous owners did, too. Like
those cruise ships with mysterious diseases. We did everything we could think
of.”

“Did they all die in one
particular room?” Roy asked.

“No,” Pete said, “all different
rooms. But we had the whole place scrubbed from top to bottom when we took it
over and again after the death. I don’t have to tell you, we’re afraid it will
happen again.”

Steven began to feel
uncomfortable. He’d agreed to accompany his father on this trip to help out one
of Roy’s old friends but he wasn’t aware it would involve exposure to a virus.
He cleared his throat, trying to notice if it felt normal. His hands suddenly
felt dirty and he wished he had some sanitizer.

“Aren’t the two of you afraid
you’ll catch it?” Roy asked.

Sarah sighed. “That’s a very good
question. I suppose to some degree I am. But the thing my father and I keep
coming back to is that we ran the place for fifteen years without a problem, and
we seem fine now. Maybe we developed immunity to it.”

“And,” Pete added, “what kind of
virus does that to a person? The coroner couldn’t tell us exactly what the
virus is, what’s its name, how it’s spread. They didn’t identify a specific
virus. They just
think
it’s a virus because they don’t have any better
ideas.”

“You think something else is going
on?” Steven asked Pete.

“Yes, I do,” he said emphatically,
and he scrunched his red face into a frown. “From the moment we bought it back and
I started walking the halls and interacting with the guests, I knew something
was happening here that wasn’t happening before we sold it. Something hidden. I
don’t know what it is, but I sense it, and I think it’s responsible for all the
trouble.”

Sarah rolled her eyes again.

Steven and Roy looked at each
other. Roy cracked a smile. Steven involuntarily smiled back.

“We’d be happy to take a look into
it,” Roy said.

Pete leaned back in his chair, looking
up at the ceiling. When he lowered his head he had an enormous look of relief
on his face. “I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to hear you say that!”

“Dinner is nearly ready,” Sarah
said, standing. “Let’s go into the kitchen and we can talk more.”

Dinner was served in a large
ornate dining room adjacent to the kitchen. The four sat around a table
designed to accommodate a dozen people, and the three other tables in the room,
all of similar size, sat empty. Steven noticed a buffet table against a wall
which was empty as well. Sarah had prepared dinner on four plates and Pete was liberally
pouring wine. Roy and Pete talked about old school days for a while before the
conversation returned to the problems in the house.

“How many rooms do you have here?”
Roy asked.

“Twenty two. Nine in the south
wing, eleven in the north wing, and a couple in the central part of the house.
Some of them are regular rooms and some of them are suites with multiple rooms.”

“It’s a shame this trouble is
impacting your business,” Steven said. “This place is really magnificent. The
grounds are beautiful. People should enjoy it here.”

“They used to,” Sarah said. “We
were always full; many times we were running a waiting list. The skiing in the
winter always kept the place full, and in the summer the lakes nearby were a
huge draw. The place had a reputation.”

“A damn sight better one than we
have now, I’m afraid,” said Pete, who had begun to show the effects of the
wine.

“You mentioned earlier the place
always had a reputation for ghosts?” Steven asked.

“It did,” Sarah said, “but I think
that’s primarily due to the people who worked here. It all came from them. To
this day the maids say silly things, and we just ignore them. Their talk would
spread and some stories would stick. Just like the talk about the deaths.”

Pete rose from the table. “That’s not
true!” he said dramatically. “I’ve got a book that’ll prove you wrong!” he
said, pointing a friendly finger at Sarah, and turning to stumble out of the
room.

Roy, Steven, and Sarah sat in the
empty dining room, hearing Pete in the distance.

“Look, you know I think this is
bullshit,” Sarah said. “I’m sorry to be blunt, but I’m only doing this because
he insists. It’s an idiotic idea. If I had my way, we’d have this place back up
on the market tomorrow, even if we took a beating.”

“Sorry to hear that,” said Steven.
“This is quite a wonderful place you’ve got here.”

“It doesn’t mean anything to me
anymore,” she replied. “I had it for fifteen years of my life, made a success
of it. Then we sold it, moved on. I didn’t want it back. That was all Pete.”

“He talked you into it?” Steven
asked.

“Yes,” she replied, “and against
my better judgment I went along with it. It was a lame idea, and I knew it. His
vision of reclaiming the place was foolish.”

“You don’t seem like the kind of
person who’s a pushover,” Roy said. Steven wondered if Roy was trying to get
more out of her or just wanted to push her buttons. He could tell Roy didn’t
care much for her.

“No, I’m not,” she said. “He
appealed to my sense of nostalgia. He’s old and he lives in the past. It clouds
his judgment; I shouldn’t have let it cloud mine. It was a stupid idea on his
part and I should have told him so.”

“And you just didn’t have enough
of your inner bitch turned on to say ‘no’?” Roy asked.

Steven cleared his throat and turned
his hand toward Roy to stop him. Then he turned to Sarah.

“You’ll have to forgive him, he’s
a little tired from the travel.”

“Nothing to forgive,” Sarah said.
“If my inner bitch had been turned on I definitely would have told him to go to
hell. I sure wish I had. You two can walk in here and admire the place, wonder
why it’s a problem, whatever. But you don’t have to juggle the books, try to
figure out how we’re going to pay the next electric bill. Pete doesn’t either.
He just putters around fixing things. Leaves all the hiring and firing to me,
all the bookkeeping, all the taxes, mortgages, insurance, you name it. I was
done with it five years ago, now I’m trapped back in it again, but worse.”

Steven felt a desire to change the
subject. “Are you married?” he asked her.

“With this job?” she said. “It’s
eighteen hours a day. No time to meet anyone.”

“You’re pregnant now,” Roy said.

Sarah stared at him, surprised. Sarah
was clearly not happy with what she had just heard. There was a long awkward
pause.

BOOK: 2 A Haunting In Oregon

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