245-The Hotel du Berry

The picture frame was tilted.

Which wouldn't have been unusual in most houses but not in the Hotel du Berry. Danny shifted around the edge of the staircase, long fingers reaching out to straighten the erroneous picture when he heard the creak from above him.

Eyes narrowed, he craned his neck to see into the heavy shadows that were currently holding court in the top landing of his grandfather's once great property. Nothing stirred but the familiar cranky breathing of the old air conditioner unit that was tucked away in the storage closet on the right wing of the landing. Old houses settle, he reminded himself fiercely and he turned back to the frame.

 As his fingers touched the splintered oak, a louder creak emanated from further down the hallway. Danny stopped, his head twisting back to the shadows, fear blossoming in his chest. He scolded himself for his unnecessary fear but he didn't move either. His fingers rested lightly on the frame, it's occupants still smiling up at him  from an odd angle, turning their smiles into drunken grins.

He listened, straining his ears for another broach of sound in the grave quiet of the desolated hotel. The air conditioner sputtered to a silence and the quiet of the Square of Danders crept back into the night. It was mid August and the heat and humidity of a Delta summer was dampening his shirt, pressing the white tee to his chest and pitting the sleeves a yellow gray. Or perhaps it was fear, he didn't care to dwell on it.

He had simply stopped by to pick up Hannah's sweater. She had left it in the hallway when they had come over to show the Hotel to the interested party who had telephoned his sister earlier that week about the possibility of reopening the old building. They had met but it had been increasingly obvious that the agent was more interested in the land the hotel sat on than reopening it's doors. Hannah had been more than willing to sell her the old heap but Danny had refused.

He liked the old building with all its narrow corridors and french windows. He liked the too small bathrooms that guests had never failed to complain about. He had jumped on the feather beds as a child and raced around the gardens looking for the supposed ghosts that his grandfather told him lingered out by the fountain at twilight. He had worked the front counter all through high school and through his summers when he returned back home from college. He had even lived there with Hannah for a while after Grandfather died. His mother had put them in his old room with his old twin boxspring and a roll away bed from the storage shed. She had taken the old cot behind the counter, the one Grandfather had taken to sleeping on after her mother had passed away.

Danny edged up a step, eyes targeted on the deeper shadows down the hall. It was not quiet yet eleven but the wee hours of the morning were creeping into the hallways of Hotel du Berry, filling the empty spaces with imagined faces and potential demons. He drew in a shallow breath, his teeth gritted in a nervous habit he had picked up from some fellow classmate down in State. He passed another step and found himself beside the most recent picture that graced the yellowing walls. He didn't give it a glance- he knew the bright colors of the summer day with the little girl in the watermelon dress and blond pigtails smiling up at the older boy who was offering a slice of cake to the photographer. It had been his grandmother's favorite photo. He remembered the afternoon she had nailed the frame to the wall, defiantly ignoring the mutinous look Grandfather had been giving her from behind the counter.

He had claimed the guests wouldn't mind the old family pictures or the wedding photo of Grandmother, all gray and smoky in her pearls and short hair cut of the twenties but he had been adamant that the guests would resent the gaudy colors of a youngster's birthday party even if it was in the gardens.

He hadn't to worry, days later Grandmother had fallen making one of the guest's beds and had passed a few months later. He had moved the frame down the landing so he could see it from the desk after that. Guests often looked twice at the picture framed between the older opening pictures of the Hotel and the more dire pictures of the wars. But no one ever said anything about the picture. About the bathrooms and the mold and the noise from the street below but never the picture.

A soft thud vibrated down the east corridor. He shifted his attention likewise, gently laying down the cashmere sweater that Hannah had asked him to pick up for her on his way home from the dance recital. The hotel was located off the main road, tall iron fences shaped in Fleur de Lises and crowns lined the property's vast lawns and tall oaks and willows protected it's drive from the elements. It had been closed for over four years now, easy enough to forget until the notices had come from the city. They had claimed it was in disrepair, abandoned and a potential squatter's paradise. The council's will had been simple- tear it down or sell it.

Danny arrived on the top stair, eyes straining to see down the east corridor. It was familiar to him as his own home, more so probably he thought wryly. But he didn't leave the safety of the stairs. Ghost stories Grandfather had told them were seeping through his memory, dredging up old forgotten fears about the bride who had fallen from her balcony on her honeymoon, the little boy who had been hit by a falling branch out in the arbor, and the first owner's son who had died bravely in the war only to return to his rightful home only to find it no longer his.

 Hannah had always begged him to sleep beside her when they were children staying at the Hotel. She always claimed that she would see the Lost Son when she went to the bathroom across the hall in the middle of the night or that the Bride was always staring out the window of the East corridor. Danny had called her a baby and pulled her pigtails but he also slid into bed with her anyways. After all, that's what big brothers did, he would tell himself. It wasn't because of the creaks and moans the house would make in the middle of the night or the silver light that sometimes would pass underneath his door some nights...

He looked for the tell tale sign of silver that Grandfather had warned them heralded the coming of the ghosts. His niece Amber had sat in the dark hallways for days after the funeral waiting to see if Grandpa was coming home. He had sat up some nights with her in the dark, part of her somber watch but Hannah had become more and more upset with her daughter's obsession. Danny twisted away from the East corridor to look down at the West Wing. The white tarp he had taped up after Amber's accident was swaying softly in the silence of the evening.

Danny's fingers clenched. He had taped the tarp back up after he had shown the agent the wing and suites that lay down that way. He remembered warning her to watch her step around the corner where the beams and plaster of the derelict building had come crashing down that fateful winter evening. It had been the beginning of the end, the night he woke up to the crash, the short terrified scream of a little girl, and the crunching that had silenced the scream as quickly as it came.

He knew he taped the tarp back up; he didn't want any other little girl to go exploring, any other person to wander into the building and find the termite infestation had gone further than any of them could imagine- that the silent army had eaten half the wood of the West Wing rotten and almost killed the little girl who had followed the ghost to the attic. Amber had sworn she saw the Bride drift through the door that led to the steep attic stairs, had eased the locked door open but never could remember how, and had been tip toeing quietly, trying to surprise the Bride into giving her Grandpa back when...

She had wound up crushed beneath rotten boards and countless Christmas decorations that accumulated over the years. He could remember skidding down the hall in the dark, the wooden boards slick with age and the carpet runner splotched with dust and insulation floating down from above like a Christmas pantomime's snow. He had seen the little hand sticking out of the debris, the shiny red ribbons that usually hung from the portcullis dying a deeper red as blood soaked into them.

 Oh, yes, Danny remembered the scream as Hannah's sleepy steps faltered beside him and the wide white of Jack's eyes as he looked at his sister's blond hair, turning strawberry red in the light of the wing. Hannah's husband Edward and he had jumped into the debris, picking the large beam and heavy boxes off to reveal the tiny white and red figurine which could have been a Christmas tree angel if it wasn't for the gaping hole in her side where the beam had wedged itself or the gashes that scored her entire left side. Her eyes had flickered open and she has asked for Grandpa before succumbing to her injuries. Hannah had aged ten years that night and as they sat in the waiting room of the hospital. She had turned dead eyes to him and told him she was done with the cursed place and that was that.

Amber had danced beautifully tonight, Danny remembered. Her smile was beautiful enough that one almost didn't notice the large scars that criss-crossed all along the left hand of her body or the slight limp she had when she tried to walk. Dancing seemed to light her up from the inside and even her instructors had noted that the limp was notably absent when she was dancing. It was something, he had told Hannah, something that the Hotel had given back. Hannah had called him an idiot and Edward had just tightened his lips and watched his daughter take her bows.

He released the breath he hadn't realized he was holding. It was easy to slip back into childhood and memories of ghost's in this old abandoned place but he knew better. Ghosts didn't make thumps, or tilt picture frames when passing up the stairs, or take down half a tarp only to think better of it and go back down the other way. But squatters did, as well as people interested in what may have been left behind in the old building. They had had a few problems with the homeless and more than a few break ins but the thieves usually were spooked away by the alarm system and squatters often left dirty rooms but never stayed long.

Danny liked to think the Hotel took care of itself but tonight he would have to do it. He passed the balcony landing that looked down on the dining hall, the tables and chairs with dust clothes over them and the silver chandelier had been taken down and put in storage after the hotel had closed. Nothing of value remained but memories and photographs on the wall. But still, he continued down the hall. The thumps had come from before the turn into the East wing.

He stopped suddenly, a flickering light was coming from the last bedroom on the left. It was a standard sized room but it had the largest bathroom. It hadn't been a popular room though, the noise from the street below often rose up and battered against the windows since no trees stood in its way. The power in the old Hotel was still accessible from the breaker box down in the basement but obviously his guest preferred candle light. Danny swore, his hands closing around the Tiffany lamp that had stood sentry on the hallway runner table since he had knocked the original guard down years ago. His mother had torn him raw for that but Grandmother had simply laughed when told and proclaimed it too old to handle the next generation. She had let Danny pick its replacement, a bright green and blue dappled mushroom lamp that Hannah claimed looked more like a peacock than a table lamp.


It felt heavy and solid in his hand, his fingers wrapped around the black iron base- he took a deep breath and pivoted to face the door head on. The candlelight flickered and then was gone and Danny knew he had been heard. He cursed, kicked the ajar door open and came face to face with the inky emptiness that was room 13A.

The bed sheets were untouched, the dust cover pulled up like a corpse sheet and the bathroom door was open, the mirror reflecting the black of the room back at him. It was a large mirror and he could see the corners of the room as well as the corners of the bathroom and empty shower- it's curtain long gone to mildew and rot.

In short, the room was empty.

Danny opened the closet doors, peered under the bed, and even checked in the chest just to be sure. Whoever his guest had been, they were gone. Danny's eyes caught a sudden movement in the room and he turned to see the lace curtains fluttering slightly in the breeze of the evening air. The window, Danny swore under his breath and in two strides he was looking down into the yard below. It wasn't a short drop but he could see the overgrown bushes had a been bent and broken beneath the window, and the arbor wasn't far from the corner room's view. It was highly likely his visitor had taken a short ride down, rolled, and whisked away into the protective covering of the drive. Danny could see his truck in the drive, but no sign of any other vehicle or person.

He ducked his head back from the window, closed it and stared at the paint flakes that had once sealed the window shut. All the Hotel's windows were painted shut at Grandfather's command. The story of the Bride was often told when guest's complained of the summer heat and he could still hear his crotchety old grandfather grumble at the more stubborn clamors, "You want fresh air? Drag your bed down into the garden and I'll take half off your stay but it better be back up those stairs before breakfast time the day you leave or you pay double."

His Grandmother would sit in her large wing back by the door as he grumbled along and then before the visitors could get an angry word in would happily call out, "And he means it too! Why, I'll never forget the young man from up north who got so hot and sticky, he threw his bed out the window and jumped out on to it and slept in the garden for five nights." She would slap her knee here and bend back down to her sewing before continuing on," And damn it, if the morning he left he hadn't put that bed right back where it belonged before Grumps here had even woken up! He didn't pay a dime for his stay the Hotel du Berry but he certainly made his mark. Go on, Gerald, but them in the Garden room, there's a sweet breeze that comes through the cracks around the window and it faces over the fountain. You'll be comfortable there, or I'll help you drag the mattress down myself."

Guests had loved Grandmother Marianne. Just as much as they loved his own mother's cooking or Aunt Ellen's singing on the weekends. All that ended when Grandfather died. Mother had moved up north with Aunt Ellen and Uncle Jason to open up a restaurant with an old college friend, leaving her two children with the old abandoned hotel. She sent her share of the rent in for a while before she gave it Danny one day. Aunt Ellen had given her share to Hannah. Hannah who had told him she was done with the place but held on to her half all the same.

The night was getting later and Danny locked the window, reminding himself to set the alarm on his way out and come in the morning to repaint the windows shut. Even if the old building was going to be sold off and torn down, he owed it that much decency. To see it through to the end.

He was halfway out the door when he remembered the flickering light.  He turned and saw the half melted candle on the desk, its wick black and twisted and wax hardening on the disk it sat upon. Danny frowned at it for a moment, it was not one he recognized. It was a stark white candle, unlike the cream and forest green that Hotel du Berry used and the candle holder was a pewter color. Grandmother had insisted all the chandeliers and candlebras be a brass- claimed they held the shine longer. The wick and holder in the room were from the outside, Danny was sure of it.

But what kind of intruder brought a candle instead of a flashlight?