now.
Ghosts.
The thought transgressed. It reminded her of the book she’d picked up at the mall a few days before they left town. When The Inn had been a sanitarium, the doctors and staff had taken some grim liberties with the patients.
After the investigation in the late thirties, hundreds of charges had been filed by the state: rape and sexual abuse, torture, murder. It had gone on for years. Donna couldn’t imagine the sheer horror that had occurred within these same walls. Hence The Inn’s reputation for being haunted, a reputation so notorious that local residents had set fire to the building. Many claimed they’d seen ghosts.
Vera dismissed the book’s revelations as fantasy, but Donna, of late, wasn’t so sure. She hadn’t been sleeping well recently. Often she’d wake at night convinced someone was in the room, or standing just outside the door. Into the wee hours, she could hear the doors of the room-service elevators opening and closing downstairs, but it was strange that she’d never hear the elevators themselves traveling up and down from the RS kitchen to the upper suites. There were other sounds too, more distant sounds, like footsteps, faraway muttering, and something that sounded like a shriek. And tonight, when The Carriage House had closed, she came upstairs to shower before bed and had been absolutely irked by the impression that someone was watching her.
But what bothered her most of all was the dream.
It made little sense, and wasn’t particularly harrowing. Yet she’d had it every night now since they’d moved to The Inn.
She’d dream of herself walking dim, dank corridors, dressed only in her sheerest lingerie. She felt intoxicated and aroused, as if in a trance. As if someone were summoning her.
Someone, or something.
— | — | —
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Vera descended the stairs the next morning at ten, wearing a lightly flowered chartreuse jacket and white chiffon skirt. A bleached stone statue of Edward the Confessor smirked at her on the landing when she evened the jacket’s low-cut brim.
She’d slept in snatches, dragged in and out of sleep. The dream of The Hands had mauled her all night, plied her, twisted her into the lewdest positions. She’d waked just before dawn in a gloss of perspiration, having kicked off the bedcovers in her sleep. One pillowcase was torn, she’d noticed, by her teeth.
More and more now, The Inn’s resistance to light occurred to her. Little sunlight fell into the atrium this morning, leaving only quiet gloom. She went behind the reception desk and down the left hall, to the front office. Feldspar looked up from his desk and semi-smiled when she entered.
“Good morning, Ms. Abbot.”
“Hi, Mr. Feldspar,” she replied. “You’re a pretty hard guy to track down.”
“Indeed.” He set his Mont Blanc down on the blotter and stiffly rose. “I apologize for not being present for your opening night—I was horribly detained writing promotional copy for our new membership brochures. I understand your first night went well.”
