The Red Hotel Read online

  It took her nearly two hours. Floor by floor, she went down through The Red Hotel, using the witch compass to sense for Vanessa Slider and her son, Shem, and scattering some of her herbs and spices on the carpets to see if they had left any footprints, or drag marks, or any evidence at all that they had been there.

  On every floor, she could still feel that pervasive coldness, that bitter sense of resentment, as if somebody had maliciously left a waiting-room door wide open so that everybody inside would feel an icy-cold draft. The trouble is, nobody else seems to feel it but me.

  If Detective Mullard had sensed it even slightly, he wouldn’t have been so dismissive, and he wouldn’t have walked off like that and left her. And Detective Garrity hadn’t shown any awareness of it, either, even though he dealt with evil on a daily basis. As for Everett – he flatly refused to believe that there were any spirits here – or at least he didn’t want to believe it. Spirits were seriously bad for business.

  She had just stepped out of the elevator on the third floor when – off to her left – she saw a dim figure flit across the corridor, from one room to the room directly opposite. The figure looked like a woman, but she was silhouetted by the window at the end of the corridor, so it was difficult to tell if it was the same red-haired woman in the pale green dress that she had seen on the roof. Also, strangely, she appeared to be out of focus, like a figure seen through bright early-morning fog.

  Maybe I need some new eyeglasses, thought Sissy. But she went up to the door through which the figure had disappeared and took out her witch compass. She moved it slowly left and right, left and right. The needle trembled once, and then trembled again, as if it had caught the faintest hint of something, but after that it spun aimlessly around. Darn. Even if that out-of-focus woman had been a spirit, she was gone now.

  Sissy started to walk back to the other end of the corridor, but she had only just turned the corner when she thought she heard a woman say, ‘—deserved it? What do you care?’

  Sissy froze, with her head cocked to one side, and listened. It was difficult to tell where the voice might have come from. On the one hand it had sounded very close, as if the woman were standing only a few inches behind her, but on the other hand it had sounded muted, as if she had been shouting from a long way away, or through a very thick wall. Maybe it was a TV, with its volume turned right down.

  She waited and waited. A whole minute passed, then another. I must have imagined it, she thought. But then she heard a young boy’s voice. He was shouting, too, but his words were suppressed in the same way that the woman’s had been. She tried to make out what they were saying to each other, but it wasn’t easy because their voices were not only muted, but they came and went, like voices on a long-wave radio.

  ‘—hate doing this—’ the young boy shouted. In fact, he was almost screaming. ‘—it’s horrible!’ He had a strong local accent, and he pronounced it ‘hawble’.

  A pause, and then the woman shouted back at him: ‘Quit your griping, will you? You think this is horrible? At your age I had to do things a whole lot worser’n that—’

  ‘—come you never do it, then—?’

  ‘—’cause I told you to do it, that’s why—’

  ‘—it’s horrible. It makes me barf—’

  ‘—pick up that goddamned cleaver and get on with it—’

  Sissy shuffled around and around, three or four times, trying to make out where the voices were coming from. It didn’t sound as if the woman and the boy were inside any of the rooms. It was more like they were deep inside the walls – very close by, but muffled by brick and plaster and wallpaper.

  The woman shouted one thing more, although Sissy couldn’t understand what she meant. She thought it was something like ‘—stab ornery Anne—!’ but she couldn’t make any sense of it.

  After that, the third floor became completely hushed – except for the usual hotel noises and the sound of traffic in the streets outside. Sissy waited for another minute or two, and then decided to continue with her spirit-hunt. She made her way back to the elevators, and as she did so she heard a sudden outburst of jazz music from somewhere down below – Muskrat Ramble if she guessed it right. Everett must have started rehearsals for his grand opening gala.

  She was beginning to flag a little and her ankles were beginning to ache, but she hobbled around the rest of the third floor as quickly as she could. Nothing. Not a single shiver from her witch compass. No more foggy women. No more voices.

  ‘You’re here someplace, Vanessa,’ she repeated, in a challenging whisper, as she waited for the elevator to take her down to the second floor. ‘Come on – why won’t you show me where?’

  Down on the second floor, guests were beginning to arrive, chatting and laughing, and bellhops were showing them to their rooms. As they passed her in the corridor, Sissy took care to make sure that they didn’t see what she was doing, a batty silver-haired woman in a multicolored silk kaftan and strings of chunky beads, swooshing her witch compass slowly from side to side like a Geiger counter. But she picked up no more psychic disturbances at all.

  She was sure now the spirits were here, somewhere in the building, and as she stood waiting for the elevator to take her back down to the lobby, she tried to think what she ought to say to Everett and T-Yon, and Detective Garrity, too.

  No doubt about it – there is a presence in The Red Hotel. In fact I’ve even seen it. It could be Vanessa Slider. She’s my number one suspect, but I don’t have any proof of it. All I can tell you for sure is that she means you no good.

  What can we do about it? I really don’t know.

  Whether it is her or not, I have a very bad feeling about this, and I can’t even trust my cards to tell me how to keep you from harm.

  The elevator doors chimed open, and she saw her own reflection standing inside. She suddenly realized that she looked less like an ageing flower-child, and more like a witch.

  Mirror Image

  When she stepped out of the elevator, Sissy found that the lobby was already packed. A jazz quartet in Derby hats and candy-striped silk vests were tootling away beside the reception desk, although they were finding it hard to make themselves heard over the chatter and laughter of more than three hundred people crowded around the fountain – local dignitaries and their wives, restaurant and hotel critics, newspaper and TV and radio reporters, as well as the entire LSU Tigers team, along with their managers and their cheerleaders in their purple-and-gold uniforms. The noise was deafening.

  She weaved her way across the lobby to Everett’s office. Everett was there with T-Yon and Luther and a big-bellied man with a beard who was wearing a white jacket and checkered pants, whom Sissy took to be The Red Hotel’s head chef.

  Everett was running through the last-minute details of the buffet they were going to be serving after the formal opening speeches.

  ‘We’re serving all of our specialties, right? Crawfish and cornbread cake, charbroiled oysters, shrimp Vacherie. How about the cedar-roasted redfish?’

  T-Yon had pinned up her hair and was wearing a low-cut tube dress in startling red, with a large red silk flower pinned to the front.

  ‘Well, look at you,’ smiled Sissy.

  ‘How did it go?’ mouthed T-Yon, very quietly. Everett gave them a sharp glance but continued with his list of buffet dishes. ‘Did you find anything?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure what to tell you,’ said Sissy. ‘I saw a strange woman who seemed to vanish into thin air; and I heard some voices that seemed to be coming from out of the walls.’

  ‘My God. So there is something here.’

  ‘My witch compass seems pretty certain of it, and so am I. I can feel it in my bones. But I don’t have any evidence that’s going to convince your brother. It certainly didn’t convince that Detective What’s-his-face.’

  ‘Garrity?’

  ‘No, the other one, in that terrible green suit. I was up on the fifth floor and the witch compass was giving me such a strong indication that th
ere was a spirit in one of the rooms there that I called him up to take a look. Which he did – very grudgingly, I may add – and then he left me without so much as saying that he didn’t believe me.’

  T-Yon said, ‘I guess it is pretty hard for people to believe. I can hardly believe it myself. If I hadn’t seen those two people in my room . . .’

  ‘I’m trying to think what to do next,’ Sissy told her. ‘The trouble is, I don’t really know what Vanessa Slider wants – assuming it is her – or if she’s just causing mischief. You know, like a poltergeist. But I’m very worried that somebody else is going to get hurt, or maybe killed, even.’

  ‘I’ve been trying to talk to Ev about it,’ said T-Yon. ‘But he has so much invested in this hotel, so much money, so much hard work.’

  ‘I know. But maybe that’s one of the reasons why Mrs Slider is so resentful.’

  ‘You said you saw a woman. Do you think it was her? What did she look like?’

  Sissy described the red-haired woman in the pale green dress, and how she had escaped down the stairwell to the fifth floor, and then disappeared.

  ‘I can’t think where she went. I had a very strong feeling that she was Vanessa Slider, or Vanessa Slider’s spirit, but then I might have been deluding myself. Or worse than that, this spirit might well have been deluding me. You saw how it made all my cards go blank, when we did that second reading, and then today I swear to God it invented a card that doesn’t even exist. That really freaked me out, T-Yon. I don’t have anything more powerful than my DeVane cards and if I can’t rely on those, I don’t know what I can do.’

  ‘Maybe we should just wait and see what happens. Everything’s going OK at the moment. Maybe she won’t do anything terrible. Maybe she can’t do anything really terrible – like, she’s only a spirit, after all.’

  ‘Believe me,’ said Sissy, ‘spirits can do really terrible things, if they want to. I’ve seen it happen, often enough. If there’s anything more dangerous than a jealous spirit, I’m glad I don’t know what it is.’

  At that moment, Detective Garrity knocked at the door. ‘Detective?’ said Everett. ‘Any news of anything? We’re all clear to go, right?’

  ‘Sure but I’m looking for Mullard. You haven’t seen him lately?’

  ‘No, Detective, sorry.’

  ‘I saw him a little less than an hour ago,’ Sissy volunteered. ‘I came across some psychic disturbance on the fifth floor and I invited him to come up and take a look at it. Which he did.’

  ‘Psychic disturbance.’ The black turtle eyes didn’t blink.

  Sissy looked across at Everett who was staring at her with his eyes narrowed as if to tell her, ‘Just you be careful what you say, you old hippie. This is no time for scaremongering.’ The head chef just looked puzzled, and obviously didn’t understand what she was talking about.

  ‘I have this English measuring device back from the time of witch trials,’ Sissy explained. ‘People used it to detect if there was any kind of malevolent presence hiding in their house, or in their barn, or their cowshed, or wherever.’

  ‘Malevolent presence.’ Detective Garrity enunciated the words as if they were a foreign language.

  ‘That’s right, malevolent presence. And between Room Five-Oh-Nine I think it was and Room Five-Eleven, the device was showing positive. So I asked Detective Mullard to come see for himself.’

  ‘OK. So now where is he?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Detective, I have no idea. I don’t think he believed what I was telling him, so he left without saying a word, which I thought was rather impolite of him. I didn’t even see him go.’

  Detective Garrity tugged thoughtfully at his pointed nose. Sissy guessed that he wanted to ask her more about the ‘malevolent presence’ but it was obvious that Everett was beginning to lose his patience.

  ‘Maybe we can discuss this later,’ said Everett. ‘Right now, we’re up to our ears. The opening gala starts in twenty minutes and we have about eleven thousand details still to sort out.’

  ‘OK,’ said Detective Garrity. ‘But if you do see Mullard, tell him I need to talk to him urgent, would you.’

  ‘Of course,’ Sissy told him. For the first time, however, she began to wonder if Detective Mullard actually had walked out on her. After all, she had heard the door to Room 511 close only once, when he first went in there. If he had taken a look inside and then walked out again, she would have heard it close twice.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said to Everett, ‘but do you possibly have a master key I could borrow? I think I need to take another look at those rooms on the fifth floor.’

  ‘Is that really necessary?’ asked Everett. ‘Why don’t you go out there and grab yourself a Sazerac and spend the rest of the day enjoying yourself?’

  ‘Oh, go on, Ev,’ said T-Yon. ‘I’ll go with her.’

  Everett’s phone buzzed, and he picked it up. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Go ask Clarice Johnson, she’ll let you in. But, please, Sissy – you can see what’s happening here. All of these people are here to laissez les bon temps rouler. So be discreet, will you? No more talk of malevolent what’s-their-names, if you don’t mind.’

  Sissy made a zipper gesture across her lips, and then said, ‘Promise. No more talk of malevolent what’s-their-names.’

  Clarice was busy working out a new room-cleaning schedule when they knocked at her office door, but she seemed to be pleased to have an excuse for a break.

  ‘This is driving me plumb crazy,’ she said, as she took them up to the fifth floor in the service elevator. ‘Cancellations one minute, new bookings the next. And each time the guests leave the room we have to clean it all over.’

  ‘Still no news of Ella-mae,’ said T-Yon.

  ‘Her momma came to see me,’ said Clarice. ‘She was in pieces with the worry. I tried to give her some hope, but, between you and me, I believe that poor young girl is gone for good.’

  They reached the fifth floor and Clarice led the way to Room 511, her large hips swaying from side to side as she walked.

  ‘Mr Everett says that everything is OK now,’ she said, over her shoulder. ‘But me, I’m not so sure. I still got this uneasy feeling, if you know what I mean.’

  Sissy said nothing. She had promised Everett that she wouldn’t spread alarm and distress, and she always kept her promises. The only promise she had so far failed to fulfill was the promise that she had made to Frank that if anything ever happened to him, she would find herself another husband.

  Clarice took out her master key and opened the door to 511. ‘There you go, Miss T-Yon. Do you want me to stick around?’

  Sissy said, ‘No, thanks, Clarice. This won’t take long.’

  ‘Well, you’re welcome,’ Clarice told them, and went swaying away.

  Sissy and T-Yon stepped into the room and looked around. Sissy opened the closet doors, but all she found inside was coat hangers and plastic laundry bags and a small guest safe.

  ‘Check under the bed for me, could you?’ she asked T-Yon. ‘I’m a little stiff these days, when it comes to bending.’

  T-Yon knelt down and lifted up the bedcover. ‘No . . . no boogie men under the bed.’

  Sissy reached into her bag and took out her witch compass. She laid it in the flat of her hand and slowly circled around. ‘I don’t know . . .’ she said. ‘It feels like there’s something here, but I’m not sure what it is.’

  ‘I don’t feel anything,’ said T-Yon. ‘Maybe that Detective Mullard just gave himself some unauthorized time off. He kept telling me that he was jonesing for a cheeseburger from Downtown Seafood.’

  ‘Well, you could be right,’ said Sissy. ‘In fact, that does seem more likely, when I come to think of it.’ But she was just about to put away her witch compass when the needle abruptly jerked toward the bathroom door.

  ‘Wait up,’ she said. Very slowly, she swung the witch compass from side to side, but the needle remained pointing in the same direction, and it was actually trembling, like a gun dog that senses a quail.


  She approached the bathroom door and opened it. There was nobody inside. Only a gleaming white bath with old-style brass faucets, and a shower, and two handbasins, and a mirror that completely filled the opposite wall. She could see herself peering in through the door, holding the witch compass in the palm of her hand.

  T-Yon said, ‘What is it, Sissy?’ and came up close behind her.

  Sissy shook her head. ‘The compass . . . it definitely seems to sense something, but . . . I don’t know—’

  ‘My God!’ screamed T-Yon, right in her ear. Her voice so high pitched that it was almost inaudible. ‘My God, Sissy! Look! Look in the mirror! Oh my God!’

  Sissy stared at the mirror but she could still see nothing but herself. Behind her, though, T-Yon’s eyes were wide and her face was rigid with shock. She clutched Sissy’s shoulder and pointed at the mirror but she didn’t seem capable of getting any more words out.

  ‘What?’ said Sissy. ‘What is it, T-Yon?’

  ‘Can’t you see them?’ squeaked T-Yon. ‘They’re looking at us! They’re looking straight at us! They know we’re here! Oh my God, can’t you see what they’re doing?’

  ‘I don’t see anybody,’ said Sissy. ‘Only you and me, nobody else. Who is it, T-Yon?’

  T-Yon tugged at the sleeve of Sissy’s kaftan. ‘We have to get out of here! We have to get out of here now! They’re looking at us, Sissy! They know that we’re here!’

  Sissy grabbed hold of the bathroom door-handle and quickly pulled it shut. She took T-Yon out into the corridor, although she deliberately dropped her bag on to the floor so that the outside door wouldn’t close by itself. T-Yon was shaking and she wouldn’t release her grip on Sissy’s sleeve.

  ‘T-Yon, what did you see in there? I didn’t see anything at all in the mirror except our reflections.’

  T-Yon took several deep breaths, and then she pressed her hand over her mouth to calm herself down.

  ‘Who were they?’ Sissy asked her. ‘How many of them were there?’