The Hotel Under the Sand (12 page)

There were people coming up the front steps onto the verandah. They looked very strange, and there were a lot of them.

W
INSTON THREW OPEN
the big doors and saluted the strange people. “Welcome to the Grand Wenlocke!” he said. “Er—”

Emma was astonished by the tall couple who stepped into the Lobby. They were extremely thin and dressed all in black; black veils hid their faces. One wore a stovepipe hat and the other wore a wide-brimmed bonnet, so Emma guessed that one was a man and the other was a lady.

They bowed very low and the man said something in a language Emma had never heard before. It sounded like birds twittering. There did seem to be a question mark at the end of it, though.

“I—er—I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t understand,” said Winston.

The couple stared at him, and then turned slowly and swept the Lobby with a long glance. Their eyes glowed green in the darkness behind their veils.

“Pardon me!” said Masterman, pushing his way from behind Captain Doubloon and Mrs. Beet. He walked up to the strangers, with Shorty cringing in his arms, and he bowed very low. Then he said something to them in what sounded very much like their own language. The couple swayed from side to side and answered him.

“How does he know what they’re saying?” Emma asked Winston.

“He’s a Wenlocke,” said Winston, shrugging. “All the Wenlockes had unusual talents.”

Masterman turned to the others and said, “They said they would like to stay here.”

“But however did they know the hotel was open at last?” asked Mrs. Beet. “Winston telegraphed the news, but the lines are broken!”

Masterman spoke to the strangers again in their own language, and listened gravely as they replied.

“The lines went into the Dunes, and so the People of the Sands heard the news,” he translated. “And they told the Sea People, and
they
told everybody else.”

“Well, then, we’re in business!” said Winston, saluting. “Please step this way, folks!”

Everything was happening very quickly, but Emma knew what to do. She ran behind the front desk and opened the Guest Register. “Sign in here, please,” she said. She dipped the pen in the inkwell and held it out to the thin couple.

They drifted forward. The gentleman put out stick-like fingers and took the pen. As he signed, Emma looked over his shoulder at the door and saw Masterman welcoming in more guests.

The thin gentleman finished signing his name. Emma looked down and saw that he had written
E. FREET;
at least, that looked like what it said, but his handwriting was so spidery it was hard to be sure. Emma smiled her most polite smile and pulled a key from one of the pigeonholes behind the desk, the way she had seen motel clerks do.

“And how long will you be staying?” she remembered to say.

The gentleman held up four skinny black fingers. Four days? Weeks? Months? Emma was about to ask, but then she remembered that it didn’t matter at the Grand Wenlocke. Mr. Freet reached into his coat pocket and took out a small bag of black silk. Opening it, he poured a pile of emeralds on the counter, and looked at Emma as though he were asking whether that would do.

Emma poked through the emeralds and selected four of the nicest ones. “That ought to be enough,” she said. She handed them the key and said, “Winston, show Mr. and Mrs. Freet to Room 222.”

“Right away, Miss Emma!” Winston picked up their luggage—though all they had were two large hatboxes—and led them away up the stairs.

The next to sign in were the People of the Sands, robed and hooded, who rode green camels the size of Labrador Retrievers. But the camels were much better behaved than dogs, for they sat down nicely by the potted palms when their masters dismounted, and neither barked nor tried to jump on anyone. The People of the Sands took a while to sign in, for they all had very long names, like
Grittleth-Rides-Like-the-Wind Scouringale
. Even so, their camels waited patiently.

When the People of the Sands had all been checked in, Emma looked up at all the other strange people waiting for rooms. Some of them were even stranger than the Freets and the People of the Sands. In fact, she was pretty sure she had seen some of them in illustrations in books about ancient mythology. Emma knew they were supposed to be imaginary, and yet there they stood in the hotel lobby, chatting to one another about the weather and how crowded it was in Paris or St. Kitts this time of year.

Emma decided that if she was running a hotel that had been frozen in time for a hundred years, and a ghostly bell captain was helping her, then maybe the guests weren’t so strange after all. She did her best not to look surprised as she checked the others in.

There were several people, very elegantly dressed, with sharp and haughty faces. They might all have been fashion models. They talked among themselves about other glamorous hotels they had stayed at, in famous places. They left a glittering dust where they walked, and several times Winston slipped in it as he carried their luggage. They all had names
like Arcturus
and
Cassiopeia
and
Orion
.

Last came some noisy ladies and one very big man, who signed in as
D. Eleutherios & Party
. They wore animal furs tied around themselves, as though they were cave people. They carried picnic hampers that seemed to be mostly full of fruit, and kept dropping leaves and bunches of grapes everywhere. It took a long time to register them, but they didn’t seem to mind; they amused themselves by singing and dancing as they waited.

A
LTHOUGH THEY HADN’T
talked it over ahead of time, somehow everyone knew what to do.

Emma checked in the guests, one after another, and Masterman made sure that the guests who had not been checked in yet were seated comfortably in the Lobby. Winston carried all the bags and trunks and showed people to their rooms. Mrs. Beet went down to the Kitchens, of course, and got to work cooking for everybody. Captain Doubloon sidled into the Bar and mixed a big bowl of punch for the guests.

When at last everyone had been checked in, Emma looked in astonishment at the cash box, which now overflowed with strange loot. Besides the emeralds, there were gold and silver coins stamped with pictures of turbaned kings, bottles of rare perfumes, black pearls, filigree chains, bangles set with rubies, a sapphire the size of a tennis ball, and a vial of something pink that was supposed to cure melancholia.

Emma beckoned to Masterman to come see. “I guess you don’t have to feel bad about Captain Doubloon getting your old treasure,” she told him. “Look at all this new stuff! I think we’re going to be all right now.”

“Of course we are!” said Masterman smugly, rolling up his sleeves. “This is the Grand Wenlocke, after all. We’re all rich as kings now. We can lie around on silk pillows and have servants bring us chocolate!”

“Er—with respect, Master Masterman, we’re going to have to work a lot harder than that,” said Winston, as he came down the Grand Staircase. “Your great-grandfather knew that running a first-class hotel takes a lot of effort. Who’s going to wait on the guests in the Dining Room? Who’s going to make their beds and keep the floors swept?”

“You are,” said Masterman, looking very surprised even to be asked the question.

Winston shook his head. “I’m in Heaven, so I don’t get tired, and I can work all day and all night long. But there’s only one of me, you see? And I can’t be in two places at once, let alone twenty. Besides me, Mr. Wenlocke had a staff of ten chambermaids and ten bellboys. And there was a man to serve drinks in the Bar, and there were three kitchen-maids to help poor Mrs. Beet. What are we to do?”

“I know how to make beds,” said Emma.

“Good! Then you can be the chambermaid as well as the desk clerk,” said Masterman.

“Not all by myself, I won’t,” said Emma hotly. “You’ll have to help me. Two people can make a bed much faster than one.”

“But I’m a Wenlocke!” Masterman exclaimed.

“A gentleman would help a lady, sir,” said Winston. “And all the Wenlockes were gentlemen, you know. Except for the girls.”

“Haar! I’ll bet the little lubber don’t know how to make a bed, nohow,” said Captain Doubloon, stumping in from the Bar.

“That’s not true!” cried Masterman. “At the horrible old Academy, I had to make my bed as neat and tight as an empty envelope. I’ll show
you!
I bet I can make beds ten times better than a sloppy old sailor.”

“Sailors ain’t sloppy,” said Captain Doubloon. “Sailors is very clean. We keeps everything shipshape!”

“I’m glad to hear that,” said Winston. “Because we need someone to do the laundry, and I’m sure you’d be better than anybody else.”

“I’ll bet he doesn’t know how to wash clothes,” said Masterman, not very nicely.

“Why, you little—of course I can wash clothes!” blustered Captain Doubloon. “Show me that laundry, by thunder, and you’ll have the cleanest bed linens you ever seen!”

“Good!” said Winston happily. “That’s settled, then.”

So three days went by, or so it seemed—time stretched out so strangely in the Grand Wenlocke that Emma was never sure. If the weather was nice, the morning sunlight seemed to take forever to trickle across the Lobby, and the bright noon light filled up the long halls like slow flood water, while the gold and purple sunsets seemed to last half the night. Dim or foggy weather, on the other hand, just sped by like smoke on the wind.

Emma worked very hard, but it made her happy to see how nice everything looked, and to see the strange guests enjoying themselves. The Freets stayed most of the time in the Conservatory, lying motionless side-by-side on a pair of deck chairs. They seemed to like the perfumes of the flowers.

The People of the Sands found an indoor swimming pool—it had the word
NATATORIUM
over the door in gold letters, but there was only a pool inside, though a very big one. They spent all their time in the water, floating peacefully while the camels paddled to and fro. The beautiful people, on the other hand, spent almost all their time in the Theater, watching movies they had brought. The Theater turned out to have a cabinet full of silent movies by a Mr. Méliès, but the beautiful people preferred to watch their own. Emma peeped in once and saw that the movies just showed the beautiful people themselves, lying on the sand at beaches or wearing evening dress at fancy nightclubs.

Mr. Eleutherios and his ladies sat up through long, long nights in the Bar, laughing with Captain Doubloon and drinking lots of punch, and sometimes Mr. Eleutherios played a sort of a guitar. By day they all lay out on the verandah in deck chairs in the shade, and complained that the sea was too loud.

And while they were all enjoying themselves, Emma and Masterman would help Winston clean up their rooms. At first Masterman grumbled a lot, but he soon became very proud of the way he could put the clean sheets on so smoothly they looked like newly fallen snow, without one wrinkle or crease. He became quite fussy if he didn’t think Emma was doing it right.

At last Emma let him make all the beds himself. Instead, she would make sure there was fresh soap and clean towels in all the bathrooms, while Winston scrubbed the bathtubs. Mr. Eleutherios and his ladies always left their bathtubs a mess, full of squashed grapes.

There were no vacuum cleaners in the Grand Wenlocke, but Masterman found an old-fashioned carpet-sweeper. He took off the push-handle and invented a way to rig the sweeper up to a little harness. He put the harness on Shorty, who ran happily up and down the corridors pulling the sweeper to and fro.

When each room was tidy, Emma and Masterman would pick up big armfuls of sheets and towels and take them down to the Electrical Laundry. This was a vaulted hall under the hotel, opening off the Kitchens. All down one side of the room were giant tubs of hot water that filled from copper boilers, and the mechanism of the Difference Engine powered big paddles that sloshed round and round in the tubs.