A silly effort, yes, but all of these efforts were silly. The hotel would stand, or it would not. A mattress here, a pair of curtains there, the occasional boarded-up portal…in the end, none of it would matter if the storm wanted badly enough to find its way inside.
But the fire doors. They might stand sentinel, a last line of defense.
He regarded the door at the end of the first floor’s east wing: a massive contraption of metal and wood too heavy to be moved by the hands of any lone man…or even the hands of several men. Thus there was a handle on a crank, and using the simple mechanics of a wheel the thing could be drawn and positioned, and locked with an enormous seal that spiraled and clicked…and then would not be moved without the help of a release lever.
These doors were essentially air tight, designed to protect the premises in case of an inferno. Should a fire begin in one room, and spread to others, the wing could be closed off and left to burn. The rest of the hotel ought to be salvageable. Or that was the idea.
Maybe it would work against water, just as well.
Under his breath, the padre mumbled, “If it doesn’t, we really are sealing our own tomb.”
He was surprised to hear a response, faint and very nearby.
At least you’ll have one.
Confused and a little alarmed—had he shut someone into the wing? He would’ve sworn it was empty—he whirled around, saw no one, and then leaned his ear against the fire door. He heard nothing on the other side.
Then he understood.
He closed his eyes. Exhaled. Opened them again, and looked.
Ah, there she was. More solid than ghosts tended to be, in his experience. She might have been standing before him, flesh and blood and a sour expression. He might have reached out to touch her, but he did not. He only stared at Constance Fields, or what was left of her memory.
She wore the same dress, clean in the front except for the blood that came from her nose, dripping even now—in whatever weird afterlife had snared her. She looked calm and bored, and when the padre asked, “Why are you still here?” she shrugged.
Couldn’t leave before, and I still can’t.
“Why were you here in the first place?” he asked, on the off chance that it mattered. “What shall we tell your husband?”
She ignored the first question, or maybe she didn’t. My husband’s been dead for years.
“He has? Is…is he here?”
She didn’t answer that, either. Maybe the storm will wash us all away. Maybe it will clean this place from the face of the earth, and us with it.
“You’re thinking of fire. That’s how you cleanse a place of evil, with smoke and flame, not a flood.” He’d done it before, sometimes ceremonially—with incense and ash, or sage and an eagle’s wing to smudge the fumes into every corner. Sometimes he’d done it more literally with a torch, and left nothing standing.
This place won’t burn.
She turned away from him, pivoting like she stood on a wheel. Her feet never moved, they only hovered half an inch above the floor, and she only glided slowly away. Her back was the same horror it’d been when last the padre had seen her, and her spine gleamed white in places where there should have been skin or muscle.
Even if it weren’t for the storm, there’s no flame hot enough, she said. I always thought hell was hot and dry. But hell is hot and wet, and we who remain here forever gasp, but never drown.
When the hotel was ready, or as near to ready as possible, they regrouped in the main lobby: the Ranger, the padre, Mrs. Alvarez with her daughters Valeria and Violetta, Frederick Vaughn, William Brewer, the Andersons, the McCoy brothers George and David, and Sister Eileen—who’d reappeared after whatever personal errand she’d disappeared to perform.
The hotel had been searched, and there was no one else inside to gather.
The rain fell in earnest then, drops now as big as plums battering the building like so many fists. The sound was not quite deafening, not quite so loud that it could not be spoken over, but it was ever-present and frightful all the same. It was impossible not to hear it. It never faded into the background, but clamored every moment for every ounce of everyone’s attention.
Now twelve people stood in the sizzling gaslights, below the dull spinning of the ceiling fans on their infinite loop, the rattle of their chains no longer audible. The lobby was all black shadows and white-orange glow, cast too sharply now that the windows were covered and there was no more sky showing through—not anyplace, even the little leaded windows on the big front doors, with nothing on the other side but storm and night.
The men and women inside couldn’t even see the lightning now—they couldn’t count on the intermittent flashes to give them a second’s extra glow between the rumbles of thunder. They pealed with the sound of boulders, tumbling down a mountain.
Mrs. Anderson couldn’t bear the water, the rocks, and the rest of the silence, so she nervously told herself the same fairy tale they all recited, when they weren’t too busy praying. “The hotel will stand,” she declared. “Of course it will. It’s the strongest thing on the island, I’m sure.”
“I don’t know about that,” Sister Eileen countered. “There’s a convent a few miles from here, built of stone from the ground up. If anything remains when the storm is passed, it’ll be that.”
“I don’t know,” said the Ranger. “There’s a prison here, built to keep people inside at all cost. Walls thicker than these, and fewer windows. It’s a proper fort, and if anything’s left when the rain has finished, that’s my guess. That’s where I’d put my money.”