Checkout
Avery had been pretending to graduate for eleven days, and until Jude put his hand under Tessa Wynn’s skirt in the back of the rental van, she thought she was getting good at it.
They were not being subtle.
Tessa sat sideways across the rear bench, one bare knee hooked over Jude’s thigh. His hand had disappeared beneath the hem of her black dress. She kept talking to Cass about the guest list as though the movement under the fabric belonged to someone else.
“Forty-three confirmed,” Tessa said. “Maybe fifty if the film students bring dates.”
Cass held her camera between her knees and scrolled through her phone.
“The film students always bring dates. It’s the only way they can prove they know women.”
“They don’t know women,” Maya said. “They’ve met actresses.”
Felix laughed from the driver’s seat.
Nina looked at him from the passenger side.
“Eyes on the road.”
“My eyes are on the road.”
“You’ve checked the mirror six times.”
“Because something obscene is happening behind me.”
Tessa smiled.
“Nothing is happening.”
Jude leaned around her shoulder.
“I’m holding her phone.”
“With which hand?” Avery asked.
The van went quiet for exactly one second.
Then Felix slapped the steering wheel.
“There she is.”
Tessa pulled Jude’s hand from beneath her dress.
He was holding her phone.
The screen was unlocked to the private CHECKOUT invitation page.
Avery looked out the window before anybody could study her face.
They had left campus thirty minutes earlier. Apartment blocks and fraternity houses had given way to fields, then wooded hills and a reservoir that flashed silver whenever the road curved near it. Rain from the previous night still darkened the shoulders.
Avery had taken the aisle seat because she was supposed to be coordinating load-in. Instead she had spent most of the drive pretending to check a spreadsheet that no longer mattered.
Everyone else in the van believed they would walk across the commencement stage in five days.
Avery had failed Senior Integration Seminar because she stopped attending in March and submitted a final project assembled mostly from old work, three paragraphs lifted from Jude’s marketing thesis and a spreadsheet that still contained the words FIX THIS SHIT in one of the formulas.
The department chair had used the phrase academic deficiency.
The registrar had used degree delayed.
Her mother had already mailed graduation announcements.
Tessa had ordered a cake.
Avery had told no one.
Jude nudged her knee with his boot.
“You all right?”
She looked at him.
He had grown his hair longer since they broke up. Tessa liked running her fingers through it when she was bored. Avery knew because Tessa had done so for most of the drive.
“I’m sitting in a van that smells like warm vodka and Felix,” Avery said. “I’m perfect.”
Felix glanced toward the mirror.
“That is the scent of leadership.”
“It’s mildew,” Nina said.
“It’s a rental.”
“You spilled something under your seat.”
“I haven’t spilled anything yet.”
Maya lifted a plastic grocery bag with two fingers.
“Who brought mushrooms?”
No one answered.
She looked toward Tessa.
Tessa raised both hands.
“They aren’t mine.”
“You made the purchase list.”
“I listed alcohol, mixers, ice, condoms, batteries and tape. I did not list hallucinogens.”
Felix reached one arm backward.
“I can dispose of those.”
Maya moved the bag away from him.
“No drugs tonight.”
“That feels targeted.”
“It is.”
Felix lowered his hand.
Maya placed the bag beneath her seat and looked around the van.
“I’m serious. We can drink. People can smoke outside. Nobody takes anything they can’t identify, nobody mixes pills, and nobody makes me hold their hair while they swear they’re dying.”
Cass kept scrolling.
“That happened once.”
“It happened four times.”
“Not to the same person.”
“That does not help.”
Tessa leaned forward between the seats.
“It’s a private party, May. Everyone invited knows the rules.”
“Everyone invited believes rules are challenges written for less interesting people.”
“That’s why you’re here.”
“I’m here because you said this was the last one.”
“It is.”
Maya looked toward Avery.
“So was Black Valentine.”
Avery closed the spreadsheet.
“Black Valentine was the last one before spring break.”
“The Wake was the last one before graduation.”
“The Wake got shut down before midnight. It didn’t count.”
“It counted to the landlord.”
“It counted to the fire marshal,” Nina added.
Felix lifted one hand from the wheel.
“And to the city attorney, who was very clear that I should never again use the phrase immersive smoke environment.”
Cass aimed her camera at him.
“Say it again.”
“Immersive smoke environment.”
She took the picture.
The flash filled the van.
Jude looked toward Avery.
“You didn’t answer.”
“About what?”
“Whether you’re all right.”
Avery met his eyes.
He had asked the same question eleven days earlier when she walked out of the registrar’s office. She told him she was tired. He accepted that because they no longer had the kind of relationship in which he could insist.
Now his knee rested against Tessa’s.
“I’m fine.”
Tessa watched the exchange.
She always noticed the part of a conversation nobody acknowledged. It was one reason people followed her. She could tell when someone wanted to be kissed, forgiven, challenged or rescued, and she usually gave them whichever response kept them closest.
She looked at Avery for another moment, then turned back to Cass.
“Did you bring the archive drives?”
Cass tapped the padded case beside her.
“Four years of evidence.”
“Edited evidence,” Maya said.
“Curated.”
“Deleted.”
“Some things don’t belong in a retrospective.”
“Like felonies?” Felix asked.
“Like you naked on a mechanical bull.”
“That was art.”
“That was freshman year.”
“That was my body before life became cruel.”
Nina stared ahead.
“Your body is twenty-two.”
“Exactly. Ruined.”
The van rounded another bend.
Hotel Vane appeared above the trees.
Conversation stopped.
It stood on the far side of the reservoir, built into a wooded slope where the road climbed toward the old dam.
Five stories of dark stone and pale plaster rose behind an overgrown circular drive.
A copper roof had turned green. Ivy covered half the eastern wall and reached the boarded windows of the third floor.
At the center, a narrow tower rose above the roofline.
The hotel’s name remained over the entrance in corroded brass letters.
HOTEL VANE.
Three letters had fallen.
From a distance, the sign read:
HOTEL V E
Felix slowed the van.
“That is much bigger than the pictures.”
“That’s what she said,” Jude murmured.
Nina turned around.
“Can we go eight minutes without making something sexual?”
Tessa looked toward Jude.
“No.”
Avery watched the hotel grow larger.
The building had been closed for nineteen years. The official reasons were mold, structural failure and a dispute between the owner’s children after his death. The unofficial reasons changed depending on who told the story.
A bride had drowned in the reservoir on her wedding night.
A bellhop had murdered three guests and continued answering the front desk after police found his body.
An entire floor had been sealed because the rooms changed places.
Students who broke in claimed the desk bell rang by itself. Several swore the internal phones still worked, though the hotel had no active line.
The most common story concerned Room 413.
If someone called the front desk from that room after midnight, a man answered and asked how many people were staying.
The caller was supposed to lie.
No one agreed what happened if they told the truth.
That uncertainty had sold nearly every invitation.
Tessa pressed her hands against the seat in front of her.
“Tell me that isn’t perfect.”
Maya looked at the tower.
“It looks diseased.”
“That’s a form of perfection.”
“We are not using the fourth floor,” Nina said.
Felix glanced at her.
“Because of the ghost?”
“Because the survey says the western corridor is unstable.”
“Coward.”
“I’m the only reason you have insurance.”
“We have insurance?”
“No.”
The van turned through a gap in the rusted gate.
Someone had cut the chain recently.
Avery looked at Felix.
“You said the caretaker gave you a key.”
“He did.”
“To the gate?”
“He gave me the kitchen entrance key.”
“Who cut the chain?”
Felix shrugged.
“Teenagers. Ghosts. Bolt-cutter enthusiasts.”
“Did you tell anyone where we were going?”
“Only the caretaker, the rental company, everyone on the guest list and the guy at the liquor store who asked why we needed thirty pounds of ice.”
Nina said, “The location doesn’t go live until ten.”
“I know.”
“It is six-thirty.”
“I understand clocks.”
“You posted the tower on your story.”
“It was artistic.”
“You geotagged it.”
Felix looked offended.
“I did not.”
Cass checked her phone.
“You did.”
“Shit.”
Tessa leaned forward.
“Delete it.”
“It’s been up twenty minutes.”
“Delete it anyway.”
Felix handed Nina his phone.
She removed the post.
Avery watched the trees surrounding the drive.
Nothing moved between them.
The hotel’s front doors had been boarded from inside, but the brass revolving door remained visible behind cracked glass. Someone had painted a white figure across the plywood: a long-limbed man in a bellhop cap.
Beneath it were the words:
THE NIGHT CLERK KNOWS YOUR ROOM.
Cass lifted her camera.
“Leave that.”
“We didn’t paint it,” Nina said.
“Exactly.”
Felix parked beside the loading entrance.
A box truck containing speakers, lights, folding bars and generators pulled in behind them.
Only Malik climbed out.
He raised both hands before Tessa could ask.
“Ben and Harper bailed after the cop let us go.”
“Why?”
“They said this place was cursed.”
“They knew where we were coming.”
“They thought Hotel Vane was the fake location.”
Tessa stared at him.
“We have seven people to unload an entire truck.”
“Eight,” Felix said.
Maya pointed at herself.
“I am not moving speakers.”
“Nine if the Night Clerk helps.”
Nobody laughed.
Malik looked at the hotel.
“What happened to the sign?”
“It got old,” Avery said.
“No. The new sign.”