Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set

Chapter 42

“Shit,” Burton said.

The lights had blinked just as his group was settling into Room 318, then the power dimmed and went out after one final surge.

“Flashlights, everybody,” he said.

As the individual lights clicked on, throwing erratic dots of orange around the walls, Burton paged the other SSI members on his walkie-talkie. No answer.

Cody, Kendra, and The Roach out, and Digger on the ropes. Jonathan out of contact, too.

He tried the walkie-talkie again. Outside the window, the lawn was dark, the only illumination cast by the half moon stitched behind a gauze of fog. The hunters in Room 318 didn’t seem alarmed by the power outage, talking in occasional low whispers and enjoying the gloomy atmosphere.

Burton felt his way along the wall to the door. “Be right back,” he said to the group before slipping out of the room. He dreaded having to deal with the vacant-eyed Violet, but maybe the manager had turned up.

Yet another person gone AWOL…what is it with this place? Is it eating the guests?

With the lack of power, the ambient noises of the hotel—televisions, elevator, bar—had given way to almost complete silence. Those few guests not on the hunts were likely reluctant to leave their rooms. The creak of his footsteps was magnified, and only when his beam glanced against a mirror could he see more than five feet in front of him. He debated checking in at the control room, but the equipment there would be useless even if someone were manning it.

Burton turned the corner and headed for the stairwell. The woman stood there with her arms folded, and he almost bumped into her. She would have seen the flashlight approaching, but she hadn’t called out. He recognized her from one of the earlier panel discussions, where she had sat in the back and cracked her knuckles, a sour expression on her face as if she had eaten bad eggs and they had given her gas.

Her onyx pupils absorbed the flashlight beam and there was no glint reflecting from her eyes. She was a stolid statue, carved from rock by a civilization long gone, except her full lips lifted in a grin that showed most of her teeth. Her breath washed over him in a sulfuric wave.

“Power’s out,” he said, in an excuse to move past her, lowering the beam from her face.

“Power’s in,” she said in a taunting voice.

“Excuse me?” One of Digger’s rules was that every guest should be treated with respect, no matter how odd or flaky, because the paranormal community was small. The customer was always right, even the psychotic alien love child.

“I took it,” she said.

He aimed the light at her name badge. Eloise Lanier. He tried humor. “Do you mind giving it back?”

Her smile dropped. “I’m not finished with it yet.”

“Okay, Miss Lanier. Did you lose your group?”

“They’re down there.” She rolled her eyes toward the floor.

“Yeah, that’s where I’m headed. Do you have a flashlight?”

She reached out and snatched his away before he could react. “Now I do.”

She held the flashlight over her head like it was a chunk of meat and she expected him to leap for it like a dog. Her face was steeped in shadows.

“Ma’am, this is an emergency,” he said, biting back his irritation.

“More than you know.” She brought the flashlight down in an arc, crashing it on top of Burton’s skull. He grunted and staggered away, stunned by the blow, sparks of purple and electric lime jumping across the backs of his eyelids. He touched his head and felt the wetness of blood.

As he recovered, anger surged through him, joining the pain to give him a burst of energy. “What the hell was that all about?”

“Bad attitude,” she said.

He tried to place her, wondering if she were one of the unstable drama queens Digger had warned SSI about. He recalled her name from the program as one of the speakers on a panel he hadn’t attended. If she were an aspiring para-celeb, going psycho at a paranormal conference might get her some infamy and the ensuing Internet hits.

He decided to give professional tact one more chance. “I’m sorry you’re not enjoying your stay—”

The flashlight swung again but this time he was ready. His experience as a rock ‘n’ roll roadie paid off as he ducked the blow and came underneath, jabbing his fist toward her elbow. He’d been raised never to hit women, but preservation instinct overrode it and he smacked her hard enough to force her to drop the flashlight. As it hit the carpet, its batteries jostled free and the hall went utterly dark.

And she was on him, sour breath oozing across his face. She was six inches shorter than he, but in her dark fury she seemed to have grown two feet. She knocked him back against the wall, and her weight bore him down.

“Christ, lady,” he yelled, but he no longer had any restraint. As she pressed him against the floor, he wriggled to escape, feeling along her shoulders until he found her face. He’d claw her eyes out—

“Yarggg,” he squealed, as she bit one of his fingers hard enough for a tendon to pop. He yanked his hand free and balled it into a fist, then pounded it against her back. It was like beating a sack of sand.

Her hair scratched Burton’s face. Her smell was metallic and smoky, as if she’d been sweating in a foundry all day. Her weight crushed his lungs. He fought for breathe, still startled by the suddenness of the assault.

“Get off, bitch,” he said, throwing an elbow against her. He’d been in a few bar brawls, but rolling around in the neon-lighted beer and piss seemed almost normal compared to this struggle in the dark.

“I’ll make you my bitch,” she said, and her voice seemed far too large and distant to have come from her foul mouth.

He gave a twist and felt her body shift, and then he rolled the opposite way, using her momentum to toss her aside. He shoved her away with his feet, drawing sick satisfaction from the cracking of her skull against the wall. He rose to his knees, not sure whether to look for the flashlight or find the stair banister and flee. Before he could act, cold rivers of pain sluiced along the length of his left arm.

He touched the wound and his fingers came away wet. Blood? Did the lunatic have a knife?

Then she was on him again, only now she seemed heavier, more solid. He raked at her, caught the turgid tendons of a flexing wrist, but her strength had grown. Barroom bad-asses sometimes freaked out on meth or angel dust, taking on the strength of ten in their panic. But Eloise Lanier had gone from zero to eighty without even hitting the pedal.

He grabbed her face again, but her skin was slick and scaly, not like flesh at all. As he gouged for her eyes, his fingers stung as if he’d grabbed a fistful of barbwire. He wrapped his bleeding hand around a hank of her tangled hair, tugging at it to pull her filthy mouth away from his. But he was weakening, and her cracked, grimy lips pressed against his. He tried to scream, but she bit his tongue.

Commotion and lights down the hall....

“What’s going on?” someone shouted, but the words sounded as if they’d poured through a wall of cotton. The agony in his mouth was indescribable—mostly because he could no longer form words.

A flashlight beam swept over and past him, and he turned to see Eloise—no, not Eloise, not a human, but something scaly and lumpy wearing her clothes—skitter away and down the stairs, trailing a reptilian tail behind it.

Burton almost smiled at the illusion, understanding the grim trickery the mind played when the body went into shock. But the pain in his mouth was too intense, and the spreading pool of liquid beneath him had probably leaked from his blood vessels, and the hunters from the room must have heard the noises and come to investigate.

“Shit, what was that?” said one of the hunters, and a woman screamed, and another said his name, and a flashlight beam bobbed across his face, then another, and he wanted to open his eyes and he realized they were already open.

“Eloise,” Burton tried to say, but all that came out was a fresh gush of salty, stinging hurt, and he shut up.

Now that his eyes were open, all he wanted to do was close them and block out the pain, the lights, the gasps and whispers and frantic chatter.

“What happened to his mouth?” somebody said.

Burton wondered the same thing, but somehow he couldn’t narrow the words into a cohesive thought, and even with his eyes closed, the image of snapping dragon’s teeth burned into his brain, plunged in the feverish forge where the flames went white-hot.

Go toward the light.

It was the corny joke of all paranormal investigators, though some took it more seriously than others. But Burton didn’t have much choice, nor was he laughing now, because the light was a distant spark dimming to yellow and then to red, finally blinking out and giving way to a rapidly cooling darkness.