Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set

Chapter 49

Bad move.

Kendra had ducked into 318 because it was the first open door she’d found while feeling her way down the smoky hall. She’d hoped to escape through the window, but it was jammed tight and the lattice framework was too narrow. Even if she broke the glass, she wouldn’t be able to slip through. She looked down at the crowd milling on the front lawn, hoping to spy Cody, but also hoping he’d noticed she was missing.

Dad must have escaped. If he’d been in the basement, he’d probably been one of the first to spot the flames. No doubt the same short-circuit that had caused the power outage had also ignited the hotel. The place was a real tinderbox and wouldn’t withstand the flames for long.

She ran to the other window, saw two forms on the lawn behind the hotel.

A row of red strobe lights made a wash across the treetops, emergency vehicles rolling in from Black Rock. If she could only hold out for a couple of minutes, trucks with ladders and firefighters would arrive on the scene. She’d wave and some hunky hero with an ax would climb up and smash the glass and chop apart the frame, then escort her down to safety. Dad and Cody would be impressed and—

The door slammed shut behind her.

In the darkness came the unmistakable sound of bedsprings. Then came the rhythmic creak made by jumping feet and a soft whisper:

“Lock the door and throw away the key, stay and play with Mommy and me.”

“Bruce,” she said, not turning around.

The boy repeated, with more insistence: “Lock the door and throw away the key, stay and play with Mommy and me.”

His jumping grew more violent and she expected to hear his head thump against the ceiling. He repeated the line again, nearly shouting.

And the rain began. Kendra squinted and sputtered against the deluge, realizing the sprinkler system had activated. A little late, perhaps, but working nonetheless. Except she now believed something else controlled the White Horse Inn, a malevolent brat that abused its toys and pouted when things didn’t go its way. And now it was taking a whiz, letting loose all its frustration and rage, drenching her so that her clothes stuck to her body.

“It’s no good, Bruce,” she shouted against the spray.

“Stay and play...stay and play...stay and play....”

“I can’t stay,” she said.

The beating red rays of light were closer now, pushing up from beneath the trees and down the lane that led from the highway.

“Stay and play,” it said, but it was no longer Bruce’s voice. A woman’s.

A spotlight tracked across the front of the hotel, momentarily illuminating her face. It was Ann Vandooren, the woman Cody said had rigged a prank camera.

“I’m not staying and I’m not playing,” Kendra said, trying to sound tough, though it came off more Dr. Seuss than Emily Dee.

“You should have been mine,” Ann said, moving closer to Kendra, hands upraised, ignoring the falling water.

“I didn’t do anything to you.”

“Besides getting born, you mean?”

Kendra backed to the window, flipping wet hair out of her face. All she could make out of the woman was her sinister silhouette, but the form didn’t matter that much, whether it was Bruce’s, Burton’s, or Eloise Lanier’s. They all drew water from the same well, and they all wanted her dead, for some reason.

Christ, what a comic book this is going to make. Assuming I ever get out of here.

But “here” was where it had to end, right?

According to her mother’s ghost, she’d been conceived in this very room. Her first spark of life had glinted when Digger’s stone had struck her mother’s flint. She’d crawled out of the mysterious pool of spirit matter and became the quirky kid with the crooked smile and a talent for doodling, the sad kid who watched her mother waste away at an age when her biggest worries should have been soccer and long division, the troubled kid who had to grow up way too fast because her father needed a parent.

This was where it all started.

The spotlight swept by again, the sirens blaring nearby, and the carpet was warm under her feet, the falling water mixed with smoke and steam. The room was fog, and she could be left here and lost forever, to wander the seams between living and dead, or maybe this was the dream an infant had suffered in the womb of Beth Wilson on the way to being stillborn.

Maybe she was already dead.

And had never been.

A memoir writ in invisible ink.

“You’re the life he never had,” Ann said, but it wasn’t Ann. It was Margaret Percival. It had always been Margaret Percival.

“Kendra!”

Dad was just outside the door, banging, kicking, screaming her name.

Her name.

Kendra Wilson.

She had been born after all, and she was alive.

“You took his life,” Margaret said.

“I didn’t take anything that wasn’t mine,” Kendra said, water streaming down her face, eyes stinging, the tears flushing away as fast as they escaped.

She flung her arms out in the fog, knowing Margaret could see her, because Margaret saw everything in the hotel. Margaret was the hotel.

“Because you still have this,” Kendra said, shouting over the hissing of the water and the pounding on the door and the creaking of imploding lumber. “All yours.”

She lunged toward the door, bracing for the collision, wondering if Margaret would be as yielding and suffocating as damp cotton, as sharp and brittle as an iceberg, as splintery and hot as a burning hotel. No matter the material, or the immaterial, Emily Dee was kicking ass and taking names and writing it all down in a little book.

The room was suffused with a sudden glow, as if a thousand candles had been struck to life, the water drops sparkling like amber and rubies. Ann Vandooren’s face emerged from the exotic mist and she swiped out with a hooked stack of talons, going for Kendra’s face. But someone—something—caught Ann’s wrist, twisting it behind her back, yelling at Kendra to run.