The Invited(58)

They got to the old hotel and climbed the steps. They walked up behind the USED FURNITURE AND ANTIQUES sign, which swung slightly from the rusty chains that attached it to the edge of the porch ceiling. There were three mannequins on the porch: pale plastic women with movable limbs like giant Barbie dolls. They’d been dressed in old-fashioned clothes—ratty mink stoles, pillbox hats, moth-eaten dresses, velvet coats. Their faces were flat, blank, and featureless—no eyes, noses, or mouths. Yet they seemed to stare at Olive and Mike, to emit a buzz from unseen lips, a warning that said, Go away. You don’t belong here.

“Well, that’s not creepy at all,” Mike said, looking at them.

Olive made her way across the warped and splintering porch floor to the heavy front door, Mike skulking along behind her. A crooked COME IN, WE’RE OPEN sign hung in the window of the hotel’s front door.

Mike pointed to the sign above the door that said, THIS PROPERTY PROTECTED BY SMITH AND WESSON, and raised his eyebrows at Olive.

“We are so gonna get shot,” Mike said.

“Don’t be a wimp.”

“You’re not scared of that big old gun Dicky carries everywhere?”

“Guns don’t scare me,” Olive said. And that was true. She’d been hunting forever, had passed the youth hunting course and had her license. She’d gone to the range with her daddy and his friends and shot all kinds of rifles and handguns.

    “It’s not the gun you should be scared of—it’s the crazy man with the gun,” Mike said.

Olive took in a breath, wondered if Dicky was even inside. Dicky lived in the hotel, on the top floor. People said his apartment was where the old ballroom had been. Olive thought it was strange that Hartsboro once had a hotel with a ballroom. But that was back when the passenger trains stopped here. Back when the lumber industry was big. Way back in Hattie’s time. The old train station building was still there, but now it was Depot Pizza and Subs, the one and only restaurant in town these days.

Olive pushed open the heavy door of the old hotel. A bell jingled. She stepped into what was once the lobby. It was now crammed full of junk: a battered rocking horse missing one of the rockers, ugly lamps without shades, unidentifiable objects made of rusty metal. Surely no one would pay money for this stuff. To the right was a long wooden counter, which must have been the front desk back when the hotel was running. It was covered with haphazard piles of junk mail and folders spilling papers. On the wall behind it, a few rows of old room keys on diamond-shaped placards with room numbers hung from hooks. Some of the keys were missing. Olive wondered what all these rooms held now.

Ghosts, a little voice told her. Which made it the perfect place for the ghost club to gather.

She thought she heard something, faint footsteps, a tinkling sound like glass breaking.

“Hello?” she called, her voice timid and lost sounding in the clutter. “Mr. Barns?”

She pictured him watching from the shadows, his gun trained on her.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to be in here,” Mike said. He was about two inches behind her. She could feel his breath on her neck. She waved him back impatiently.

“It’s a store, Mike. Of course we’re supposed to be in here.”

There was another sound from upstairs. A dragging sound.

Mike grabbed her hand, squeezing hard, his fingers warm and sweaty. “Let’s go, Olive. Please?”

She pulled her hand away and moved through the narrow aisles, between dusty tables covered with old postcards and towers of stacked plastic buckets, and came to a massive, curving staircase on the left. The banister was loose, hanging from the staircase at a funny angle, like a broken limb.

    Had her mother really come here? Had she climbed these stairs, wary of the broken banister?

“Hello?” she called again, slightly louder this time. She heard a noise from the floor above her, that dragging sort of sound again. Furniture being moved, maybe. Or something shuffling, dragging a limp limb (or entire body) across the floor.

“Sometimes a vivid imagination is a curse,” her mama used to tell her.

“For real, though. Let’s get out of here,” Mike pleaded, voice low, desperate.

Olive crept up the stairs, staying to the left, next to the wall and away from the failing banister.

“Olive, don’t!” Mike called from the bottom. “What’re you doing?” But she kept going.

There was a loud thump from up above them.

Mike bolted back to the entry. Olive heard the jingling bells of the front door.

“Chickenshit,” she muttered.

She hoped the stairs were not rotten like the boards on the porch floor. It made her so sad, to see all this beautiful wood in such terrible shape. If she lived here, she’d fix it up. Turn it into something special. Maybe a fancy hotel again. Something that would really draw people to Hartsboro. And Aunt Riley could help her fix it up, find all kinds of vintage materials for it. Her dad would have something to renovate besides their little house. And Mama, Mama would definitely come back then, if she learned Olive had a whole hotel…

Sometimes a vivid imagination truly was a curse.

She got to the second floor. The wall-to-wall burgundy carpeting was stained, worn through in places, exposing floorboards. She held still, listening. “Mr. Barns?” she called again. “Are you here?”