Spellbound

Original Edition: Three

As we wound up the mahogany staircase, the steps creak under our weight. The ancient floral wallpaper and forest green carpet runners speak to the hotel's historical roots. Frosted glass and brass sconces light the hallways and the musty scent of aged wood lingered in the air. The Rynard was the opposite of the sleek modern hotels that attracted the rich and famous, but it possessed what those cookie-cutter establishments didn't—charm.

Larry chattered on about all the repairs that needed to be done while Hunter pretended to listen. I was bringing up the rear, my mind wandering back to the summers I spent at the Reynard.

Hunter was right: I had wanted the hotel to be haunted. I really wanted to believe that there was some sort of spirit who made mischief every night, scared guests and employees, and even haunted the town on one night of the year when the town celebrated them with the Winter Spirits Festival. And for a while, I did believe in their existence.

When I was younger, all the way up until the end of middle school, I'd see these two identical boys roaming the hotel at night, laughing and horseplaying in the hallways, lobby, and even by the pool. They never spoke to me, and only once did they even make eye contact leaving me flabbergasted by the unearthly colors of their irises. So naturally, I believed they were the spirits that haunted the Reynard and had fully convinced myself that they were actual ghosts.

Until I reached high school and spent my last summer there. I didn't see the boys that year, and that's the minute I stopped believing in the supernatural. If they'd been spirits, I told myself, they'd still be at the hotel, wouldn't they? Where else would they go? They must've just been some local boys who wandered the grounds, maybe members of an employee's family, or hell, maybe they were just imaginary friends—figments of my overactive imagination.

The boys have been restless since your aunt's passing, Larry's words replayed in my head.

"Who were you talking about?" I blurted, and Larry and Hunter turned toward me in alarm as if they'd forgotten I was behind them.

Larry looked at me quizzically and cocked his head to the side. "What's that, hon?"

"Before, when you said, 'The boys have been restless since your aunt's passing.' What boys?"

"The boys who live under the belltower, of course."

The belltower? The one that no one was supposed to be able to reach? The one where I swore I saw someone looking down at me? That belltower?

I knew Aunt Hazel was prone to speaking with unseen beings. I even witness her making them dinner and setting it on the sidetable just outside her quarters. The plates were always gone the next morning, but I always chalked it up to the staff appeasing her over active imagination, playing into the mystery of the hotel. But they actually believed they were real?

Hunter and I locked eyes and he lifted his fingers to his temple and slowly moved the index in a circle. I swatted his hand down just as the older gentleman stopped in front of the room at the end of the hall.

Larry slipped a key in the door, wiggled it, and said, "Rumor had it that Hazel spent years renovating a space for them. Out of state lumber companies would drop off the supplies on the fourth floor in the middle of the night. Of course, those who claimed to have seen the piles of wood and drywall could never prove it. The hallways always looked normal the next day. I'd once overheard her talking about the boys needing a more sophisticated space now that they were older. I don't know if what people were seeing was true, but I believe they are here." The lock gave and he swung the door open. "And grown or not, they are still prone to getting emotional over the loss of a loved one just like us."