Ghost College (Supernatural Selection #1) Read online

  “So, have you ever had any experiences here?” Wayne asked, eyeing the décor and fighting the rush of memories.

  “I’ve never had a honeymoon, and I would choose somewhere a little more exotic than the North Carolina mountains. Like maybe Dollywood or Paris.”

  “I meant ‘supernatural experiences.’“

  “Just those brain-dead zombies who hit on me at the bar.”

  Wayne was only half listening. The master bedroom of Room 318 had changed little since his stay 17 years earlier. The roses on the wallpaper had yellowed, and each wall held an autumnal mountain landscape. Imitation Queen Anne furniture, chipped and scarred by cigarette burns, a plush purple carpet in which rodents could reproduce, and the king-size, four-poster bed were the same as his honeymoon night.

  Even the throw pillows appeared unchanged, skinned in greasy satin and leaning against the headboard the same way his and Beth’s heads had leaned on a cold autumn night. Before they opened the door.

  “The manager’s pleased you chose the White Horse for your conference,” Violet said.

  I didn’t choose. I was chosen.

  “You have quite a reputation,” Wayne said. “Nobody keeps their ghosts secret for long.”

  “Ghosts are good for business. Especially in the off-season.”

  “It should be good for both of us.”

  “We booked about 50 for the weekend.”

  “Too bad you can’t charge your invisible guests. You’ve got at least three here in 318.”

  “Ah, you’ve been browsing the Ghost Register,” she said, referring to the journal at the front desk where guests and staff had faithfully recorded their encounters.

  One of the victims had been a stock broker who had suffered a heart attack during his honeymoon, and though the urban legend maintained he’d died on top of his new wife, the Rescue Squad report said he’d been discovered on the floor with half a corn dog in his mouth and an empty bottle of champagne sitting in a tin bucket of water.

  The second was a jumper, a documented death in which a distraught tool fabricator had launched into a frothing rant about a two-timing, backstabbing bitch before launching himself off the balcony in a fall that would likely have resulted in nothing more than a few fractures if he’d have missed the lamp post. You could call it coincidence, you could call it bad luck, but it made for a better campfire tale if you called it “the Wicked Hand of Evil.”

  The third victim was the most interesting to Wayne, because it didn’t have the glib familiarity of the other deaths, which were not much different than those suffered at any of America’s century-old hotels. As the manager, a powder-dry walking mummy named Janey Mays, had put it, any building with a few generations behind it would end up with a slate of strange happenings.

  Janey hadn’t recognized him from his long-ago visit. But why should she? He was young and happy then, a clean-shaven newlywed and 100-percent demon free.

  “What do you know about Margaret Percival?” Wayne asked Violet.

  “Just the stuff in the register.” Violet opened the television cabinet as if to make sure the maids hadn’t stolen the TV.

  “West Virginia woman, checked into this room in February, 1948.”

  “I don’t think the color scheme has changed since then.” She whacked the dark floral pattern on the velour curtain, and a lazy haze of dust spun in the sunlit window.

  Margaret was a war widow, in town for a reunion of the Camp Creek Sisterhood, a collective of well-to-do white teenagers who spent the summers of the Great Depression in their one-piece, baggy swimsuits, canoeing, singing “Tomorrow” around the fire, and talking about boys, when they weren’t sneaking off in the dead of night to meet them at movie theaters and fumble in the dark.

  Perhaps the reunion was an opportunity to recapture the lost innocence of youth, or perhaps Margaret was seeking a veneer of respectability after a notorious past. But she never made it to the reunion luncheon, because between the hours of 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. early one Sunday, she vanished from the face of the Earth. Police reports hinted that she might have been in the “family way,” and a single mother and alleged prostitute might sneak across the border to get rid of the problem.

  Hotel management built their businesses on reputation, and mysterious disappearances were the kind of publicity they wanted to avoid. It was a measure of how far the White Horse Inn had fallen that it was now cashing in on its seedier, supernatural side.

  Just like me. We’ve both been ridden hard since our paths last crossed.

  And there was a fourth case study, totally off the record, one that Wayne carried in his guts like a latex glove full of broken, bloody glass. He’d delayed his return as long as he could, but Beth might not wait forever.

  Violet moved over to the bedside dresser, where the alarm clock was blinking. “Old wiring,” she said. “The radio cuts on by itself, too.”

  “Let me guess. I’ll be awoken at three every morning by the theme song from ‘The Exorcist.’“

  The room’s angles, like those of the rest of the inn, were off by two or three degrees in every joint. Sagging floors and ceiling joists, warped window casings, and uneven spaces between cracks in the crown molding projected a sense of decay and despair.

  The unease came from an expectation of order, and the skewed geometry made a distinct impact on the brain. It added a pressure that caused skin to tingle and lungs to stutter, all tricks the mind played on the body. Combined with the out-of-whack wiring that scrambled the electrical signals of the brain, the structure made a wonderful laboratory for the living.

  And a fun playground for the dead.

  Violet reset the clock while Wayne examined the size of the room, calculating how many hunters the place would hold. He could have booked the room in private, set up some gear, and conducted his own private little tea party, but hosting a paranormal conference gave the necromancy the sheen of respectability. Plus it offered the fringe benefit of not facing his demons alone.

  But he should have left her out of it.

  He peeked through the curtains. Below, Kendra was perched on a concrete bench, pencil flying, lost in her own little fantasy world. She was portable and self-sufficient, and Wayne not only encouraged those attributes, he took full advantage of them.

  “You don’t believe in ghosts?” Wayne asked.

  “Do you?”

  “Depends.”

  “Talk to the maids. They know it all.”

  “The honeymoon sheets keep no secrets, they say.”

  “Depends on the secrets,” she said, opening the closet door.

  There’s more to you than meets the eye. Too bad. This could have been fun.

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  Also available:

  The Body Departed

  A Ghost Story

  by

  J.R. Rain

  (read on for a sample)

  Chapter One

  I stepped through the wall and into my daughter’s bedroom.

  She was sleeping contentedly on her side. It was before dawn and the building was quiet. The curtains were open and the sky was black beyond. If there were any stars, they were lost to the L.A. smog. The curtains were covered with ponies, as was most of the room. A plastic pony light switch, a pony bed lamp, pony wallpaper and bedspread. Someday she would outgrow her obsession with ponies, although I secretly hoped not.

  A girl and her pony. It’s a beautiful thing.

  I stepped closer to my sleeping daughter, and as I did so she shifted slightly towards me. She mewed like a newborn kitten. Crimson light from her alarm clock splashed over her delicate features, highlighting a slightly upturned nose and impossibly big eyes. Sometimes when she slept her closed eyelids fluttered and danced. But not tonight. Tonight she was sleeping deeply, no doubt dreaming of sugar and spice and everything nice.

  Or of Barbies and boys and everything in-between.

  I wondered if she ever dreamed of me. I’m sure she did at times. Were those dreams good or bad? Did sh
e ever wake up sad and missing her father?

  Do you want her to wake up sad? I asked myself.

  No, I thought. I wanted her to wake up rested, restored and full of peace.

  I stepped away from the far wall and glided over to the small chair in the corner of her room. We had made the chair together one weekend, a father/daughter project for the Girl’s Scouts. To her credit, she did most of the work.

  I sat in it now, lowering my weightless body into it, mimicking the act of sitting. Unsurprisingly, the chair didn’t creak.

  As I sat, my daughter rolled over in her sleep, facing me. Her aura, usually blue and streaked with red flames, often reacted to my presence, as it did now. The red flames crackled and gravitated toward me like a pulsating static ball, sensing me like I sensed it.

  As I continued to sit, the lapping red flames grew in intensity, snapping and licking the air like solar flares on the surface of the sun. My daughter’s aura always reacted this way to me. But only in sleep. Somehow her subconscious recognized, or perhaps it was her soul. Or both. And from this subconscious state, she would sometimes speak to me, as she did now.

  “Hi, daddy.”

  “Hi, baby,” I said.

  “Mommy said you got hurt real bad.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Mommy said that a bad man hurt you and you got killed.”

  “Mommy’s right, but I don’t want you thinking about that right now, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said sleepily. “Am I dreaming, daddy?”

  “Yes, baby.”

  We were quiet and she shifted subtly, lifting her face toward me, her eyes still closed in sleep. There was a sound from outside her window, a light tapping. I ignored it, but it came again and again, and then with more consistency. I looked over my shoulder and saw that it was raining. I looked back at my daughter and thought of the rain, remembering how it felt on my skin, on my face. Or, rather, I was trying to remember. Lately, such memories of the flesh were getting harder and harder to recall.

  “It’s raining, daddy,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you live in the rain?”

  “No.”

  “Where do you live, daddy?”

  “I live here, with you.”

  “But you’re dead.”

  I said nothing. I hated to be reminded of this, even by my daughter.

  “Why don’t you go to heaven, daddy?”

  I thought about that. I think about that a lot, actually. I said, “Daddy still has work to do.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “Good work.”

  “I miss you,” she said. “I miss you so much. I think about you every day. I’m always crying. People at school say I’m a crybaby.”

  “You’re not a crybaby,” I said. “You’re just sad.” My heart broke all over again. “It’s time to go back to sleep, angel.”

  “Okay, daddy.”

  “I love you, sweetie.”

  “I love you, too, daddy.”

  I drifted up from the small wooden chair and moved across the room the way I do—silently and easily—and at the far wall I looked back at her. Her aura had subsided, although some of it still flared here and there. For her to relax—to truly relax—I needed to leave her room entirely.

  And so I did. Through the wall.

  To hell with doors.

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  About Scott Nicholson:

  Scott has written 12 novels, including the #1 bestseller in Mystery & Suspense Disintegration, The Skull Ring, The Red Church, Speed Dating with the Dead, As I Die Lying, Drummer Boy, and Forever Never Ends. Other electronic works include Burial to Follow, Crime Beat, and Transparent Lovers, and the story collections Ashes, The First, Head Cases, Zombie Bits, Gateway Drug, Curtains, and Flowers. With J.R. Rain, he wrote the urban fantasy Cursed! and, as L.C. Glazebrook, he wrote the paranormal romance October Girls. He lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where he plays guitar, raise an organic garden, and work as a freelance fiction editor. Please visit him at: www.hauntedcomputer.com.

  About J.R. Rain:

  J.R. Rain is an ex-private investigator who now lives in a small house on a small island with his small dog, Sadie, who has more energy than Robin Williams. Please visit him at www.jrrain.com.