Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Somehow, Max made an iPad look like a clipboard. Not literally—it still had a screen and everything—but with the way he was carrying it around and pointing at things, she’d have sworn he was carrying a clipboard. He had clipboard energy.
“You’ve really got clipboard energy,” Sloane told him as he was glancing between something on the iPad and the path in front of them.
“Thanks. Clipboards are hot,” he said. “And people who use clipboards are attractive, responsible, motivated individuals. Also, no one questions you if you’ve got a clipboard. Go stand over there and look ghostly.”
It was late afternoon. The sun hung low over the ocean. The temperature was starting to dip with the breeze coming in from the water. Sloane was still in a tank top and shorts, and this was the fourth location they’d scouted to set up equipment.
“I have a better idea,” she said. “How about you point that last camera literally at anything, and we go have drinks in the hotel bar.”
“The Byron.” He fiddled with something on the camera.
“They named the hotel bar after a fuckboy who had a kid with his sister?”
That, at least, got Max to look up at her. “He what?”
“I mean, allegedly,” Sloane said, backtracking a little. “And I think it was his half sister.”
Max rubbed his hands over his face. “Oh, well that’s fine. Half sister. Cool.”
“And he had a pet bear in college.”
“Where the fuck did he get a bear?” Max asked, now completely distracted from the camera. “England doesn’t have bears.”
Sloane had never considered that aspect of it before.
“I mean, if you wanted a pet bear, I could get you a bear in, like, five minutes,” Max said, gazing into the distance with his arms folded over his chest, deep in thought. “But England in the seventeen…hundreds?”
“Eighteen hundreds?”
“Either way, different story. You’d have to import a bear.”
“This would be a great chat at the bar, over drinks,” Sloane said as the breeze picked up a little more. She shivered and put a hand on top of her head to hold her hat still, even though she’d tied on the chin strap. Hard to be too careful where giant sun hats were concerned.
Max just shook his head, smiling. “Go be a ghost.”
“Look,” Sloane said, taking a step closer. They weren’t close or anything now, but she did notice the way his eyebrows twitched. “We both know that when you see the footage, you’re going to point at a shadow and say Ooh, that’s weeping Mildred, the harridan of the coast—”
“Marguerite, but go on.”
“—there she is, isn’t she ghostly, the stories are true and spirits are real.”
“You’ve figured me out,” he deadpanned and crouched behind the camera again.
It was boxy and green, and Sloane was pretty sure it was a trail camera—the kind rangers used in forests to take pictures of bobcats and coyotes—but it wasn’t like that made less sense than anything kind of camera.
“Go walk from there to there and channel Marguerite so I can make sure she’ll be in the frame. Apparently that’s her route.”
“Marguerite doesn’t have a route,” Sloane called over her shoulder as she headed to the spot at the base of the steps.
A flagstone path led from there down to the beach, where a jetty stuck out into the water.
She had to hand it to Marguerite: It was a pretty dramatic spot to haunt. “She doesn’t exist. Ready?”
“Look ghostly,” Max called as she started walking. Whatever the fuck that meant.
She got about ten feet before he shouted, “Oh, come on. Ghostly.” Apparently he was going to be difficult.
“Wooo!” Sloane shouted back, waving her arms over her head. “I’m incorporeal and fake!”
“Spirits are usually a little more graceful.” Now he was standing up straight again and looking way more amused than Sloane would have preferred. “Less arms! More fingers! Back straight!”
Sloane straightened her back, turned around, and flipped him off with both hands. It got a laugh out of him, a big, loud laugh that sounded a little like a honk and seemed like it surprised him. Sloane grinned and felt something warm coil in her stomach.
“Do I have to go on the jetty?” she shouted when she got to the beach.
“Nah, don’t die,” Max called back. “Okay, we can go inside now.”
Inside, it turned out, did not mean to the hotel bar, which Sloane considered incredibly misleading. She told Max so.
“I didn’t say the bar was next,” he said as they, at least, headed back into the building where it was ten degrees warmer and one hundred percent less windy.
“You insinuated it.”
“I’m starting to regret inviting you along as my assistant,” Max said as he pulled up some sort of building plans on the iPad.
“No, you’re not. You’re having a great time torturing me.”
He led them up the broad staircase, onto the mezzanine, and into a hallway.
“Torturing you,” he said, but he was smiling.
“I had to stand in the freezing cold and act like a ghost.” She’d taken her giant hat off and gestured with it now, accidentally knocking into a sconce on the wall. “Oh, sorry,” she told it, and Max snorted.
“I’m glad you survived your tribulations,” he said. “Think you can survive one more?”
As if on cue, the lights in the hallway flickered. Sloane suddenly felt very alert.
“Was that you?” she asked, eyeing the iPad.
“Was what me?”
“All the lights just flickered.”
Max glanced up and looked around. “It’s an old building. That happens. They probably started the microwave and the toaster at the same time.”
“The microwave,” Sloane repeated, flatly. “And the toaster.”
“Yeah, I can’t use them both at the same time in my apartment, or it’ll flip the—”
“I know that.”
“How do you know my apartment’s circuit-breaker situation?”
“Everyone’s apartment is like that.” There were probably apartments that weren’t, but Sloane had never lived in one. Even her parents’ house in Last Chance had a one-hot-appliance-at-a-time rule. “I mean. I think they are.”
“They did keep building houses after 1970,” Max said, and Sloane laughed.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Yeah, me neither,” he said, shrugging and smiling, and there was that weird warm twist in her stomach again. “Anyway, the doorway should be here somewhere.”
“I thought we weren’t going into the attic.” Her stomach dropped at the thought.
“No, there’s apparently creaking and moaning from the attic,” Max said, consulting the iPad and then looking up at the ceiling. “It’s the crawlspace we’re not looking at.”
Confirmation that there was at least one enclosed space she didn’t have to enter should have made Sloane feel better. Instead, it mostly reminded her that the crawlspace existed, which meant she had to think about going into the crawlspace, and that made her skin feel unpleasantly cold.
“Ah,” she said. “So we’re looking for a door?”
“Yeah, but it’s not any of these,” Max said, still distracted. Which was probably good because Sloane was pretty sure she was making a face. She’d never been much good at not making a face.
They were in an interior hallway with white walls, dark hardwood floors, and matching doors. It wasn’t inherently spooky, but the longer they stood there, the more Sloane remembered every creepy movie she’d ever seen that featured a hallway.
To distract herself, she leaned in, her arm against Max’s, and looked at the iPad.
“Here’s us,” he said, turning it so she could see. “We’re right there on this floor, and the entrance to the attic is”—he swiped to another picture—“on this floor here. Which should be…” He gestured to indicate the hallway, which had zero attic entrances.
“Can I see?” Sloane asked, and Max handed over the iPad.
The pictures—both hand-sketched layouts of the building—looked like they’d been drawn at different times, by different people, with differing artistic abilities.
It made them hard to match up. After a moment, Sloane sat down on the floor so she could think.
“Okay,” she said, after a minute. “I think the entrance is off this room, right here.”
Max crouched behind her, down on one knee.
They weren’t touching, but she could feel his breath on her shoulder and the closeness of his chest to her back, and when he said, “Yeah, I think you’re right,” it sent a shiver trickling down her spine.
The Hotel Bellwether was a fucking maze. At least, the original part was. The first building on the site had been considerably smaller than what was there now, and none of the expansions seemed to have taken the existing buildings into consideration.
At least, that was what Sloane told herself as she stared at several different walls in several different storerooms, wondering why the attic stairs clearly indicated in the blueprints weren’t there.
“Maybe they’re sealed off,” she said, scanning the wall and ceiling yet again. “Maybe that’s why the ghost is so pissed off. They can’t get out.”
“There’s probably a missed marketing opportunity here,” Max said, sounding thoughtful. “They should renovate the attic, put some rooms up there, and make it Flowers in the Attic themed.”
Sloane turned to stare. Max blinked, and after a moment, raised his eyebrows.
“Have you ever actually read Flowers in the Attic?” she asked.
“I think I started it once when I was, like…thirteen, but I only got a couple pages in. Why?”
“Right,” Sloane said, and looked back down at the iPad. Max had internet access and knew how to Google; he could find out about Flowers in the Attic for himself. “I want to try one more thing before we give up.”
“This can’t be up to code,” Sloane said. A thumbnail-sized chunk of plaster landed on Max’s hair as the ceiling opened up with a sound she could only describe as dire. “There’s no way we’re supposed to be doing this.”
Dust and white bits fell gently to the floor—all lit by a single light fixture in the middle of the ceiling—as Max coaxed down some contraption that looked positively medieval. They were in a small room, surrounded by shelves piled high with sheets and blankets.
“Brian said we had free rein of the place except the top level of the library, the reception area, and any open bars and restaurants. And most of the rooms, obviously,” Max said.
The trapdoor descended with a jolt and a creak, and he reached up to unfold more stairs.
A ladder? An unholy combination of ladder and stairs?
“And this is clearly a storeroom with an attic entrance, so we’re in the clear. ”
He got the stairs/ladder all the way down, placed its feet on the floor, then shoved against it like he was testing his weight. It didn’t budge.
“Does Brian know there’s a creepy attic entrance in a storeroom that’s in the back part of the old building, away from the other storerooms? That can only be accessed by one set of stairs clearly built before fire codes existed?”
Finding the room with the attic stairs had been an adventure, that was for sure.
This part of the Bellwether connected to the main building only on the ground floor and to the west wing only via a third-floor walkway, for some reason.
The stairs and hallways here were narrower than in the main part of the hotel, and if Sloane thought about it too much, she was pretty sure they were closing in. Mostly, she wasn’t thinking about it.
It was creepy. Not haunted creepy, but if they had turned a corner to find a group of rats gathered around some sort of altar, she wouldn’t have been surprised.
“Let’s assume he does and that his permission includes this,” Max said, looking up the ladder/stairs and into a rectangle of darkness. Without looking back down, he tucked the iPad into his messenger bag, pulled out two flashlights, and handed one to Sloane. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. It’s an attic,” Sloane said, which was all completely true. She was fine! It was just an attic! It was obviously not a haunted attic! Ghosts weren’t real!
“I should warn you that there might be stuff living up here,” Max said apologetically. “Definitely spiders. Maybe rats and possums, that kind of thing. Usually they’d rather scurry off than attack.”
Sloane shrugged. “As long as they’re not plague rats.” Max made a face like maybe he hadn’t thought of that, but went first up the ladder/stairs.
They creaked a little but held, and then she could see him standing up at the top, shining his flashlight around. The walls looked…close.
“Huh, interesting.” Max’s voice sounded swallowed by the space. “It looks like this part of the attic is walled off?”
Sloane pulled a hair tie from her pocket, tied her hair back, and climbed the contraption.
Once she was at the top, Max moved a little further in, giving her space to stand.
Not that there was much space: The passage they were in was maybe three feet wide by…
seven feet tall? No, less. Six and a half?
Sloane stopped looking at it and focused on Max instead.
He’d walked a little further, floor creaking under each step.
Dust floated through their flashlight beams. The air was warm and still and smelled like her grandfather’s garage. It was suddenly so quiet.
The opening for the ladder/stairs was walled in on three sides, which left nowhere to go but after Max. He was saying something while reaching out hand out to touch a wall, but Sloane couldn’t quite make it out.
She took a deep breath, tried not to cough, and followed after him.