All right. I don’t like you, and you don’t like me…
As long as she could remember, Dru had wanted to be a writer like Nana Jane. Or, maybe more accurately, like Edgar Allan Poe.
Now that college was over, and it was all in her grasp, she found herself struggling with writer’s block for the first time in her life.
This spooky hotel was supposed to fix all that. It was isolated and creepy, and she would be up all night every night. What better conditions could there be for writing the Great American Horror Novel?
Dru noticed some flecks on the blank page. She must have splashed some of her drink on it when she’d popped the top. That wouldn’t do. She opened the lower desk drawer to grab some fresh paper.
Just as she bent to reach it, something crashed against her window from outside and she jumped, knocking over the rest of her Diet Dr. Pepper, and slamming her shin into the open desk drawer in the process.
Carmel-colored bubbles spread across the desk.
She had just enough time to grab the typewriter and move it to the bed before the low-calorie mess covered the surface.
Cursing quietly, she grabbed a t-shirt and used it to mop up the dark pool. At least diet soda wasn’t sticky.
She strode to the bathroom and dumped the shirt in the sink. Sighing, she grabbed a towel and wet it a little, then headed back to the desk to wipe it down.
Thankfully, it didn’t seem like she’d done any damage. She dried everything off with the part of the towel that wasn’t wet and threw that in the bathroom sink, too.
“Laundry day soon,” she mumbled to herself as she grabbed a sheet of paper for the typewriter and pushed the drawer shut again.
Only it wouldn’t close all the way.
“Great,” she said to herself, setting down the paper and trying to close the drawer with both hands.
It still wouldn’t close the last inch. It was almost like something was stuck back there.
She had probably knocked something loose from the drawer above when she banged into it. Though she was pretty sure that drawer was empty.
Dru knew she should just ignore it and get back to her writing, or she would end up getting nothing done before her shift started.
Write now, fix the drawer later, that was undeniably the best course of action.
She crouched down to ease the drawer completely out of the desk, hoping she would be able to get it back onto the ancient tracks again once she had retrieved whatever was blocking it.
It was dark back there. She reached into the shadows, trying not to imagine something reaching back.
Her hand met something soft and skin-like.
She yelped and yanked her hand out.
“Come on, Dru,” she chided herself.
She slid her phone out of her pocket and turned on the flashlight. In the shadowy recess behind where the drawer had been, there was a small, leather-bound book.
She reached in again and pulled it out.
The old leather was soft in her hands. It looked like some kind of journal. But of course, it wasn’t necessarily old. New journals that looked like old journals were all the rage.
She opened it to a random page, wincing as the spine cracked.
The leather was still in good shape, but the paper was yellowed, and the glue had gone pumpkin-colored and dry.
She gazed down at the words on the page, and was greeted by what seemed to be a jumble of random letters, in a script that seemed oddly familiar.
Dru studied it for a moment, words and sentences coming into focus. But nothing she could understand. It definitely wasn’t in English.
But it also didn’t seem to be in any language she’d ever seen before.
She immediately started shuffling through the possibilities in her head.
So much for getting any writing done tonight.
3
Dru headed downstairs for her shift a few minutes before midnight, lugging the typewriter with her, and hoping Howie wouldn’t stop in and complain that she was moonlighting.
He usually reserved his little pop-ins for Hailey’s shift, and Dru was grateful for the relative peace, especially when she had work to do.
As she suspected, she’d gotten too ensconced in the strange journal to get much writing done, but it was putting her into a curious mood that she hoped would soon morph into inspiration.
Throwing a few of the words into an online translation program had brought up nothing, though she hadn’t tried for long. The internet on the mountain was so slow it was genuinely painful at times. So it seemed the journal would stay a mystery at least a little while longer.
Hailey spotted Dru as she approached the front desk, and gave her a quick smile and a yawn before heading off to bed. Hailey was definitely not a night owl, and her light was usually ready to go out by the time Dru took over for her.
Dru wished her a good night as she put the journal and the typewriter down on the desk, then logged into the ancient desktop computer there. It probably dated back to the Clinton administration, but it had a wired connection, which made it the speediest piece of tech in the building. It wasn’t much, but she typed in a web address and watched the machine chew on it for a full minute.
Hailey had stashed her drink and a few of the leftover snacks on a shelf under the long counter. Dru took a sip of her room-temperature soda and waited for her forum to load.
When she first decided to write a horror novel, she’d gone online to find writers’ groups. But most of the users were chatting about sales and craft, not about actual horror.
A friend had given her a tip about an online forum for fans of a popular ghost-themed reality show. And while that forum hadn’t yielded much, it had led her down a rabbit hole that wound her up in a forum for the defunct TV show Ghost Getters.
In the show, married couple Dan and Lily Getters had toured the country’s most storied haunted houses with pseudo-scientific ghost-hunting technology, all while wearing tragically unhip ‘90s outfits. Though it was canceled after only two seasons, Ghost Getters had been elevated to the status of cult classic by both ironic and earnest viewers.
The forum Dru frequented was decidedly on the earnest side.
Once the landing page loaded, her username, Gh0stwr1ter, popped up with a tiny typewriter icon, and she entered her password.
A reassuring ping from the computer alerted her that she was logged in.
It looked like two of the other regulars were active too.
Before she could scroll through what she had missed one of them was already typing a message to her.
TadStrange:
Gh0stwr1ter! You made it!
She smiled and typed back, fully aware that her feeling of contentment was just a trick of her endorphins, and that this didn’t count as actual human contact, but not caring one bit.
Gh0stwr1ter:
Sure did!
TadStrange:
Any paranormal activity yet?
Gh0stwr1ter:
Not unless you count a dead rabbit.
WraithGirl19:
Wicked!
TadStrange:
That’s definitely suspicious. Any unlikely drafts or doors slamming?
Gh0stwr1ter:
Not yet. Just the rabbit.
WraithGirl19:
#jealous
TadStrange:
Maybe ActionPark will be on later. He has a copy of that book, I’m sure he wants to hear how you’re doing.