McGrave's Hotel (12 page)

The three girls moved in a semicircle, closing slowly toward James and Fawn. The one dripping blood licked her lips.

“Would you like a part in our play, James? Would your
girlfriend
? We can arrange it for you.”

Without taking his eyes off the vampires, James reached back with his hand, pushing on Fawn’s tummy to guide her backward toward the door. He walked backward himself. “Please be gone by morning,” he said.

He felt like adding that Fawn was
not
his girlfriend, that was
nuts
, he was just
eleven
, but a continued conversation to discuss possible romantic relationships did not seem advisable. Instead, he and Fawn whirled through the door.

As the door slammed, they could hear “Kidding!” followed by a
wham wham wham
as all three Godfrey girls smacked the salon air with their wings. James could picture them rising into the shadows of the higher reaches of the room.

“Good grief,” he said in the safety of the hallway. “I think auditions are over.”

Will You Walk Into My Parlor?

“She doesn’t need a sedative,” James said as he and Fawn approached the Bridal Suite. “She needs a flyswatter.”

Given the whole of the night’s events, Mr. Nash had counseled a head-in-the-sand policy vis-à-vis the events in Victor Lesley’s suite. If the young ladies and Victor Lesley were out by morning, according to plan, then whatever went on in the suite was of no concern to McGrave’s Hotel. “When you check in here,” he said, “you take your chances.”

The events of Frau and Rupert Grimm’s suite, on the other hand, were a more serious threat to McGrave’s reputation. Despite his suspicions about the widow bride, Mr. Nash was willing to let Detective Durbin sort out the legal give and take of the matter. If only Frau Grimm could be appeased for three more hours, thanks to the pitcher of warm milk and small honey pot James was currently delivering, then she too could be shooed out the door come sun up.

From inside the suite came a wretched rasping noise. James and Fawn agreed that Frau Grimm must be snoring.

“This should only take a minute,” James whispered. “I’ll leave this tray on the end table by the sofa. There’s no need to wake her. Then we can
finally
return you to Mr. Wu.”

Fawn waited in the corridor as James entered.

It was dark inside, and Frau Grimm appeared to James as a great dark mass occupying the mammoth bed. The loud rasping snore continued, and the meat-like smell James had first associated with the lady now overpowered her store-bought fragrance.

Gingerly, James approached the table and bent over to deposit the tray. He noticed something white on the table and realized it was the long gloves that Frau Grimm had always seemed to wear.

From behind him came a loud
clickety clickety clickety
sound, coupled with the end of the rasping. James spun about. The dark mass on the bed was gone, and the bathroom door was closing. Apparently the lady had to use the facilities. A thin line of light appeared beneath the door behind which a loud thrashing ensued. What was going on in there?

James decided it would be best to leave as stealthily as he could. But when he tried to walk toward the door, he found he couldn’t. His left leg seemed to be caught on something. He reached down to feel what had snagged his leg, and suddenly his arm became immobile. He pulled hard, but his arm refused to move. What sort of trap had he walked into? Why did the room seem so sticky?

The bathroom door slowly opened, and the light spilling into the bedchamber revealed the cause of James’s predicament. He was caught like a fly in a vast spider web, a silvery sticky lattice that extended from the floor to the ceiling. His right arm was still free, but it would take great care to not submit it to the same fate as his left. Something very creepy, like the foreleg of a giant insect, wrapped itself about the door and continued to ease it open.

What James then beheld rivaled anything he had ever seen at McGrave’s. With incredible speed, the creature skittered
clickety clickety clickety
into the room. Silhouetted against the light from the bathroom, James could perceive that it was a spider as big as a desk. It stood balanced on six of its legs and raised two in the air, pointing at James as if to help determine his location. Impossibly, its head was unmistakably that of Frau Grimm.

James comprehended at once that she had
always
been a spider, but her many capes in the Grand Lobby, her robe in the bedchamber, and her white gloves concealing a lack of human hands had obscured that bizarre condition. At least four of her legs had always been hidden from view. No wonder she walked so peculiarly.

While anyone would rightly be frightened out of his socks at such a vision, James was doubly frightened, given his lifelong fear of spiders. Why did she have to be a spider?

“My little man!” said Frau Grimm. “You have brought me my milk. And my honey. And my … snack. Did you come to discuss a secret?” Her smile was wider than ever.

James couldn’t speak. What do you say to a giant spider? Especially one that a few hours ago bit off the head of its husband?

“Do tell me your little sweetheart is nearby,” said Frau Grimm. “Right outside that door, perhaps? Would you like to invite her in? Or shall I? She had the most darling little hairclip. Like a spider.”

“She’s not there,” James said. Quietly, he struggled against the web, but it refused to release its hold.

“I shall call her, yes?” the spider lady said. “Oh,
liebchen!
”

To James’s surprise, it was not Fawn who entered the room at that moment, but the Beaumonts. They didn’t bother to open the door, but melted right through it, like water passing through a screen door.

“Oh, Blaine, dear,” said Mrs. Beaumont. “Look, it’s the Bridal Suite. How divine. Remember our honeymoon?”

“How could I forget it, Martha?” he replied. “You were the cat’s meow.”

Apparently unsure as how to react to this ghostly intrusion, Frau Grimm crouched in the shadows of a corner. Her legs folded up into a conveniently small package.

James meanwhile used the intrusion as cover to slip his free hand into his trousers pocket. He fetched his jackknife and flicked the large blade open with one agile thumb.

“I say, Martha.” Mr. Beaumont added. “What, pray tell, is that? There in the corner. We shall have to complain to management about the size of the cockroaches.”

James took this awkward moment, with the spider lady frozen in a corner, as the opportunity to bolt. He sliced through the webbing with two quick swipes of his knife and leaped toward the door. Frau Grimm was not quick enough to bar his escape, seemingly confused as she was by the two semitransparent lovebirds that had barged into her domain, talking of
cockroaches
.

“Run!” James commanded. He snatched Fawn’s hand, and they began running full tilt toward the elevators.

“James, what is it?” she said, keeping up as fast as she could.

James pushed the Down button frantically, but the doors seemed to ignore his urgency. They didn’t budge.

“Spider” was his one-word answer.

They turned, looked back down the hallway, and gasped as the thing suddenly appeared.

“Make that a
big
spider,” he said. “I
hate
spiders.”

The spider with a lady’s head looked about, saw them, and charged immediately. It amazed James that anything so large and so terrifying could move so fast.

“It’s coming!” Fawn shouted.

As she spoke, the doors behind them finally crept open.

They leaped backward into the elevator and quickly pressed L for Lobby, but this time the doors failed to close automatically. Frantically pressing the Close Door button didn’t help: the doors stood maddeningly wide open as the enormous spider seemed to pick up speed. Trapped in the exposed chamber, James and Fawn clung to each other and awaited the attack.

Fortunately, seconds before the creature reached them, the doors condescended to close, followed by a terrific
wham
as Frau Grimm smacked into the closed portal. There was a brief vertical lurch, and the elevator at last began its slow descent. For the third time that night, James wished Mr. Clancy could do something about the contraption’s velocity.

Above them, they could hear a horrendous wrenching of twisted metal.

“Oh, bad news,” James said. “She’s ripping the doors open.”

There were a few seconds of silence after the wrenching stopped, and then they heard a soft
thunk
on the ceiling of the elevator.

Fawn threw her arms around James.

“Oh, James,” she said. “She’s
up
there. We’re trapped. She can tear this elevator open before we ever make it to the lobby.”

Immediately they heard a new assault, this time on the metal mere inches above their heads. The clanging and banging sounded angry.

“I‘m going to try something,” James said. “Something scary.”

He held his finger over the Emergency Stop button and watched the lights indicating the floor levels.

Thirty-six, thirty-five, thirty-four, thirty-three,
push
.

The elevator lurched to a halt, apparently between floors. There was a
whump
followed by an “Ouch!” on the ceiling. All the panel lights flashed.

James pushed the Open Door button, and the doors parted to reveal a phantom corridor. Flickering candles offered faint illumination, and a heavy fog obscured precisely where the floor lay and how far the passageway extended.

“Quick,” James said. He pushed the L button again, and he and Fawn jumped into the mist a heartbeat before the doors closed and the elevator, with its creepy hitchhiker, continued on its way. When they looked back, they saw no elevator at all, nothing but a passageway that trailed off into the murk. The doors through which they had come no longer existed.

“I don’t know where we are,” said James. “I only know she can’t follow us here.”

In this shadowy nether world, dead leaves scattered past their feet, the damp fog chilled the air, and the candles glowed like small pale suns in the mist. Something drifted past in the eerie haze that looked like the ghost of a little girl. It waved to James and Fawn as it went by.

“This is so amazing,” Fawn said, looking around. “You work in a very interesting hotel, James.
And
you saved me. Thank you.”

James wasn’t convinced he had saved anyone. After nearly a year at McGrave’s, this was the first time he had dared occupy one of the mysterious ghostly floors.

“Um, you might not want to be too hasty with the thanks,” James said. “I don’t know if anyone has ever made it
back
from here. I think we are in some sort of world of the dead.”

Fawn smiled. “Leave that to me,” she said. “I am who I am. I am my father’s daughter, and I know a thing or two about death. That’s why I was more worried about Mr. Lesley than about the Godfrey girls. I can sense the difference between dead and kind of dead. I knew that no harm was going to come to those girls.”

“So you can bring us back from the dead?” James said.

“I can’t bring anyone back from the
dead
,” Fawn said. “Neither can Dad. It would undermine the very definition of ‘dead.’ I think I can bring us back from here though. This is nothing but a sort of cosmic way station, a jumping off point. Trust me?”

“Please.”

“Then hold on, James. This is going to feel weird.”

As tightly as she could, Fawn wrapped her arms all the way around James, pinning his own arms to his sides. He could feel the crush of the bow on her dress against his chest. Her cheek was against his, and he was staring at the little spider clip in her hair.

The corridor started to spin, and the candles began to circle them. First slowly, then faster until the individual flames became a continuous ring of light. James felt as if he might faint, and then they crashed painfully into a solid wall. The circle of light vanished, and everything went black.

The Haunted Wine Cellar