"I want to go home."
"Sweetie, it's only for a week and a half. Your father – "
"Mom, it's not about him. I just want to go home. I...I don't feel good."
"Zacari, that excuse isn't going to work this time. The least you can do is try."
"Mom, please – "
"Zacari."
Zacari pressed her phone to her ear curled deeper into the sofa. Her mother hadn't scolded her in a while. She squeezed Lela to her chest, who was openly sitting on her lap. It didn't matter, as long as she convinced her mother to come pick her up. It was more reasonable to wait in Room 218, but if it was really Norman Baker's old office, it was the last place she wanted to be. She was camped out in the foyer instead. Initially it'd been jam-packed with guests, but one by one they retired to their rooms, and Zacari was practically alone. Her father wasn't answering her calls. Even Allison was gone, replaced by the overnight receptionist, a college-aged girl with bubblegum pink headphones either scrolling through her phone or flipping through a People magazine.
Calling her mother had been a last resort. Zacari was still angry for forcing her on this trip, as if it could somehow fix the thing broken between her and her father. But she was scared.
"Please," her mother sighed on the other side of the phone. She sounded so tired. "I get it, I really do. Your father is a difficult person. But he loves you. Just do this for me."
"But, Mom – "
Zacari stopped. It wasn't worth the argument. If she really pushed, her mother would understand, maybe for the wrong reasons, but she'd understand all too well, and the trip would be cut short and Zacari could return home. But her mother would be upset for weeks. Not at Zacari, but for Zacari. As much as she loathed this trip and her father, Zacari wanted her mother to be happy. Maybe stomaching a haunted hotel and her father was worth that.
"Okay," she resigned.
"Thank you, sweetie." The relief in her voice was evident. "I love you so much. Just try to have a good time, okay?"
"Okay."
"I love you."
"Love you too."
She ended the call somewhere between tears and hurling her phone across the foyer. Lela snuggled under her arm comfortingly.
"Excuse me," dripped a voice patronizingly. Zacari looked up. It was Ed the Bellman, closer in range than she preferred. The slopes and slumps of his face were mottled like overdone lasagna with a off-centered bulbous nose and two two piggy eyes peering out. He oozed sanctimony. "The Crescent Hotel doesn't allow dogs."
"I'm sorry, I just thought –"
"Thought what? That we'd want your rat defecating all over the carpets?" He shook his head in a disgusted manner. "Do you even have a room here or are you just soliciting?" The "s" in "soliciting" took too long to slide off his tongue. Zacari's face burned. She wished she'd kept Lela pocketed.
One of the front doors creaked open and woman in mismatched pajamas and a pink-frocked trench coat slipped inside. Zacari recognized Allison's blond dye job and curvy frame. She met her gaze desperately.
"Oh, hi, love, sorry I didn't catch you after the ghost tour," she trailed off as she surveyed Ed's scowling face. "Is there a problem, Ed?"
Ed puffed his chest. "This little hoodrat is camping out on the couch, with a dog no less."
Zacari jutted her chin forward even as her throat swelled with unleashed tears. Allison turned to Ed and intertwined her precise and pretty nails. "You know very well she has a room, and our guests are welcome to sit where they please."
Ed's meat-pie face turned a nasty shade of maroon. "Well, the dog must go," he blustered. "This is a strictly no-pets hotel. It could ruin the building's integrity."
"Oh, please, it's a chihuahua, not a Great Dane. Anyways, she has special permission to bring her dog."
He narrowed his eyes. "Is that so? By whom?"
"Me."
He opened his mouth into an angry, wobbling "o," but Allison cut him off before he could begin.
"What did you call our guest, Ed? Little hoodrat?"
It didn't seem possible for him to turn a single shade deeper, but he descended somewhere between rust and blood. "My apologies," he said curtly in Zacari's general direction before hastily finding himself needed elsewhere.
A half-beat of quiet passed between Zacari and the receptionist. Zacari cleared her throat. "Uh, thanks."
"He's insufferable," Allison sighed. "I'm glad I stopped by when I did. I forgot charger, and I had enough battery to last me until tomorrow if I just needed an alarm, but I just can't take a bath without my audiobooks. I'm spoiled, I guess. Also, you don't have to hide your dog anymore. Everyone noticed her in the first place. Her tail sticks out of your pocket."
"Ah." Zacari looked down sternly at Lela. She wagged her tail sheepishly.
"But anyway, you're welcome to stay down here as long as you want, Zacari."
"You know my name?"
"Oh. Well." Allison took particular interest in the lace at the hem of her shirt. "Your dad fixed a leak in one of the employee sinks, and we got to chatting. He told me all about you. Good things, of course."
A tiny swell of pride bubbled up inside Zacari, one she was certain she'd squashed years ago. It was, of course, immediately followed by annoyance.
"Oh. Just wondering," she shrugged.
"So..." Allison eyed her with a growing smile. "Did you enjoy the ghost tour?"
A chill swept down Zacari's spine. "I saw a ghost this morning, didn't I?"
Allison grinned. "I think you did, lucky girl. But, just so you know, I really did have Ed sweep the grounds, just in case I was wrong, but like I said, he didn't find anyone. I'm positive you saw the ghost of Norman Baker. Oh, I'm so jealous! I haven't seen so much as a shadow. I hope that makes you feel a little better, maybe?"
"Yeah, a little." No, not at all. She was beginning to prefer the idea of vagrant watching her from the woods. Baker's spidery fingers beckoning her replayed in her mind. Why her? What had she done to bring back some dead quack doctor?
The camera.
Of course. She'd unearthed something that wasn't meant to be found. The camera had been hidden in the floorboard for some reason, but it only now seriously occurred to Zacari that that reason might be dangerous. Her mind raced. How did situations like these resolve themselves in horror movies? She either died, beat the ghost, or put the thing back in its rest place. The latter was preferable.
"Good. Have a good night, Zacari."
"You too."
The synapses in her brain fired like shotguns to imagine her room as a place devoid of ghosts, but they missed the mark utterly. But she couldn't stay in the foyer forever, so she climbed the staircase to Room 218 anyway. The halls of the hotel seemed to pulse with life, until she realized it was her own heartbeat, a slow thrum in her ears.
Lela whined as she reached Room 218.
"I know," Zacari answered. She scratched off a bit of the black paint, leaving a trail of lavender in her wake. It should have been a nice color, but it wasn't. She unlocked the door and braced herself as she pushed it open.
The room, of course, was unreasonably cold. A chill swirled around her ankles as she stood at the threshold. The light from the hallway gave a hollow illumination of her room, leaving everything, the bed, the lounge, a crumple of clothes, to appear concrete. Not my room, she corrected herself, stepping inside. Norman Baker's old office. She hurriedly flipped on the switches and lamps, hoping they would brighten the room, but each light fell transparent against the cold.
"Please don't murder me," she singsonged, but like the light, the humor fell through the floor. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She swore to whatever God that she'd be satisfied with Handleton, and never disrupt historical artifacts for the sake of vlogging if she could only come out of this un-possessed. "Baker?"
Then, a change in the room. A serrated edge to the cold.
She reached in her backpack and removed the camera. She pulled off the cap, and steadily, she brought the camera to her face and looked through. There wasn't a reason for it. She just felt she should.
The camera provided a shrunk, fish-eyed view of the room - moonlight parting the curtains, carcassed takeout boxes atop the minifridge, an unpacked heap of her clothes at the foot of the bed. Nearly unchanged, except for the man sitting on the lounge.
She yelped and nearly dropped the camera. Outside the camera's view, she was alone in the room. The velvet of the chair hadn't even the slightest impression that someone had been there. She peered through once more. The man sat there, and when she lowered the camera, he did not. She inhaled sharply, and shakily brought the camera eye level and slowly approached the lounge.
The man who'd beckoned her at the edge of the woods sat on the lounge and stared at her directly. He had one leg loosely crossed over the other and was smoking a fat cigar. The smoke spiraled and unfurled above him like a bottom-up Christmas tree, thick and hazy as though he'd been smoking long before Zacari walked in. But no amount of smoke diminished the effect of his eyes, two bleached stones of sapphire sharpened to spades, breaking through and past Zacari.
She hastily lowered the camera, but this time, the man remained.
"Hello, my friend."
Zacari shrieked and Lela howled.
She turned and dove for the door, but before she could wrench it, the deadbolt snapped counterclockwise. She frantically twisted at the deadbolt, but it refused to give. "No, no, no, no..." A fierce cold needled into her palms and she jerked her hands back and watched frost flower from the deadbolt and across the door. The smell of tobacco filled her nose, rich and regrettable, with a faint, underlying stench of rot. She spun around wildly and searched for an exit, but they were disappearing before her one by one. The bathroom door flew shut and encrusted with ice. The windows slammed shut in gunshot fashion, and following like a scuttle of spiders were the rasps of their latches locking. Frozen fractals laced across the windows, and Zacari's gut said they were as efficient as they were pretty. There was nowhere to go.
"You want it?" she hollered in a wobbly voice. She threw the camera to the floor. "Here. Take it." She sank against the door and seized Lela. Lela urinated uncontrollably all over Zacari's hoodie, warm and wet to stale and cold. "Don't kill me."
The man exhaled a plume of smoke and fractionally lowered his cigar. His suit was more vivid, his lavender tie more potent than before. An unearthly air emanated from him, like déjà vu or the murky shreds of a dream she'd had. His long face curled into a thin-lipped smile.
"I see you found my camera." His voice dripped like morphine.
She squirmed. "You can have it back." Her heart and stomach knotted into one nauseous, bleating lump. I wish I hadn't come here. I wish I hadn't found the camera. I wish Dad would just come back here –
"No need," he dismissed with a wave of his hand. The motion was somehow fluid and skeletal. "It houses our connection, and I have been in desperate need to speak to you, Zacari, dear."
"Me?"
"Yes."
She waited for him to elaborate. He didn't. "Why?"
"You were curious enough, brave enough, to find my camera. My reputation precedes me, I assume. You know who I am."
"Norman...Baker?" Zacari said in a small voice.
He beamed. "Yes. Dr. Norman Baker."
"Dr. Norman Baker," Zacari corrected herself quickly. She wondered when the possession would begin, if her death would be speedy or her soul would be devoured bit by bit, and she'd be nothing more than a shell of herself.
Norman Baker smiled again, with teeth this time. "Please, call me Norman. We have a lot of work to do, you and me. You see, Zacari, I need your help."
The cold of the door seeped through the back of her hoodie. Zacari laughed hysterically, looking to Lela for support. "Please tell me I'm crazy."
Baker placed his elbows on his knees and rolled the cigar between his fingers. "You're perfectly sane," he ensured her.
Convincing coming from a ghost, she thought. "Are you going to hurt me?"
"I'm a whisper of what I was. How could I hurt you?" Zacari pointedly fixed her gaze on the iced-over locked windows and bolted doors, then back to Baker. "A precaution," he addressed, as if it were obvious. "I wanted to speak to you privately. There are other...beings...in my realm that would like to interfere. It isn't to keep you in, it's to keep others out."
Other beings? Zacari's skull was on the brink of splattering gray matter across the lavender walls.
Baker sighed, mistaking her silence. "You are cautious. I understand, I was the same way in life." He looked down at his hands. The hands of a pianist, a puppeteer, a surgeon. "I know it's hard to believe, but my life, my hospital, have been terribly misconstrued. I made mistakes," he admitted, looking straight into Zacari's eyes. "Many mistakes. But believe me when I say I was truly trying to help others."
Her spine prickled as his diamond eyes examined her reaction. She wanted to cut her gaze away, but his eyes held her there. She was deep-rooted into the floorboards, slowly becoming wooden, a puppet of herself.
Lela gently nipped Zacari's ankle. She tore her eyes away and shook her head, as if she were trying to dispel water from her ears. "Your medicine was a sham," she said. "You killed people. Why should I trust you?"
"I suppose you shouldn't," he said. The response startled Zacari. "Not everyone gets the chance to tell their slice of history, slim as it might be. You are not only my chance, Zacari, but my patients' chance. As I'm sure you know, winners write the history books, Zacari, dear."
She nodded, in agreement for the first time. "What do you want exactly?"
"My story told. The real one."
She was quiet. His story. It couldn't hurt to hear him out, could it? Besides, everyone knew he was a quack already. There must be a few minor details he wants to tailor out. Now this, this was fantastic content for her channel. Even if she had to spin it in the form of a story. How could she pass this up? And if she was being honest, any distraction from her father was welcomed. He hadn't even answered her messages. She could be dead in a gutter and he wouldn't know the difference. If her mother could find good in him, whatever soul-searching that called for...Zacari could manage that with this Baker person, who was, in every aspect, doubly more interesting than her father. How often did an adventure topple into your lap belly up?
"Please, Zacari." He stood. He was tall, thin, the sinewy sort of muscle on a passing deer, but it was a hungry hand that extended in an offering. "Give me a chance."
The room seemed to have a heartbeat of its own as Zacari approached Baker. As she came closer, the smell of smoke was replaced with a wet smell of rot.
Lela's tail folded between her legs as she yapped at Zacari, but Zacari ignored her. She took Baker's hand, and the world disappeared in a swirl of steel and lavender.