Free The Haunted Halls by Glenn Rolfe Page A

next victim. She hoped Kurt was all right.
    She had taken a liking to Kurt their first day at the hotel. Two people had quit at the start of the busy summer season–something about a guest drowning in the pool. Some of the employees were convinced the death had been somehow supernatural . Rhiannon figured that the middle-aged quitters had seen one too many “reality” ghost shows. She, for one, did not cater to such nonsense, and as it turned out, neither did Kurt. He was shy and nervous around her, but also very funny, very charming in his own way. If he had asked her out that very first day, she would have said yes. She hadn’t felt this way about a guy since junior high. Back then, it had been a stupid thirteen-year-old’s ill-conceived idea of love that sent her jumping from one boy to the next. Any boy who showed interest in her. Once she got into high school, things changed. She discovered women who were loud and in your face. Her idols became Brody Dahl from the Distillers and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. She established a truer sense of self-worth and developed a natural edginess, slipping into a skin that fit like a record needle to a groove.
    She considered herself tough, callous and cool, but sitting in her car, taking the last drag off her third straight cigarette, Rhiannon wondered if there was more than a little of that desperate and sappy seventh grader left in her than she liked to admit. She tossed the filter out of her window and stepped out into the cool evening.
    At the emergency room entrance, she pushed the door open, and approached the receptionist’s desk. A frazzled looking woman with dark hair and black-rimmed glasses, whose name tag read Marci, looked up at her.
    “May I help you?” 
    “Yes, I’m looking for a friend of mine that was brought in from the Bruton Inn, Kurt Costello,” Rhiannon said
    “Are you family?”
    “Well, no. I’m his girlfriend,” she said, chewing her nails as she watched the receptionist tap the keys before her.
    “It looks like he was brought up to the third floor. They want to keep him overnight for observation.”
    “Can I see him?”
    Marci looked back over her shoulder at the clock on the wall. “Visiting hours go until 9 pm. You have about an hour.”
    “Thank you.” Rhiannon turned and headed straight for the elevators.
    The silver doors opened, releasing an elderly gentleman with his arm in a sling. The man paused to look at her, watching her with a cataract eye. Rhiannon diverted her attention from the milky, glazed-over orb as she stepped past him. She was turning to select the third floor when the man spun around and placed his good arm on the elevator doors, preventing them from closing.
    “She’s got him, you know,” he said.
    Rhiannon took a step back. “Excuse me?”
    “You’re too late, you little bitch.”
    Rhiannon watched in stunned horror as the glossed-over eye cleared, like a frosted windshield in a warming vehicle. A gray-blue eye stared back at her, looking more lost and confused than sinister. The bewildered man pulled his arm back and turned around without another word.
    What the fuck?
    The doors slid closed. The elevator began its ascent to the third floor.
     
    …..
     
    Kurt Costello could feel the girl, the thing , whatever she was, and her breath against the flesh of his ear. A river of terror flooded his dizzying mind; all of his thoughts becoming a jumble of memories, unfulfilled dreams, and regrets. The thing behind the sultry voice placed a frozen palm flat upon on his chest. A deep, penetrating sensation beyond the most frigid Maine morning seeped from the deathly hand. All he could manage from his shivering body was a whimper as the cold encompassed his slowing heart. Frost formed on the hairs of his nostrils. His blue lips drained of any sense of their former life. The black dots that reappeared behind his closed lids began to pool together and spread until there was nothing but a perfect blackness.
    “Shh, shh,