The Haunting of Lake Manor Hotel Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Room 13: The Boy by the Lake - Anna Dickinson

  Room 1: Forget Me Not - Thaddeus White

  Room 10: Dark Reflections - David I Thomson

  Room 8: The Lure of Light - Scarlett R Algee

  Room 11: Pretty Green Eyes - EJ Tett

  Room 5: Verity’s Weekend - Joleen Kuyper

  Room 7: Jumbled-up Jack - Christopher Bean

  Room 3: The Long Way Home - Victoria Silverwolf

  Room 6: Horseshoe - Gwendolyn Kiste

  Room 9: A Key to Kill For - DJ Tyrer

  Room 12: The Emancipation of Olive Pickbone - Brooke Warra

  Room 2: Friends without Faces - DG Jones

  Room 4: Blood is Thicker - Samanda R Primeau

  Coming Soon

  The Haunting of Lake Manor Hotel

  The stories in this book are fiction. Any resemblances to any people, places, or events are products of the authors’ imaginations.

  Copyright © 2016 - Anna Dickinson, Thaddeus White, David I Thomson, Scarlett R Algee, EJ Tett, Joleen Kuyper, Christopher Bean, Victoria Silverwolf, Gwendolyn Kiste, DJ Tyrer, Brooke Warra, DG Jones, Samanda R Primeau

  Published by Woodbridge Press

  www.woodbridgepress.ca

  www.facebook.com/WoodbridgePress

  @woodbridgepress

  Cover Art by Laura Bifano

  Cover Design by Debbie Kunellis

  Edited by Nathan Hystad and Samanda R Primeau

  Foreword

  The idea for The Haunting of Lake Manor Hotel came to me while my wife and I sat in a pub having lunch in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. It was last August and New York was a sweltering ninety-five degrees. New York seems to be my muse, and in my three vacations there, I’ve gotten some great writing inspiration each time. I ate a burger and thought about a gothic style mansion from the eighteen-hundreds, and wondered what kinds of stories guests visiting it would tell.

  I had the basis for the book you are now about to read. As a writer, my first thought was to do this collection myself, but this didn’t feel right. I wanted the voices to be different for the horror collection. The next step was to invite authors to take part. After a few weeks I had thirteen authors, each tasked with writing an assigned room number, where they would tell us a story of the guest staying at the hotel.

  Lake Manor was built in 1836 by Charles Hamblin. He made his fortune buying up nearby farmland during a drought, when people could scarcely afford not to sell. A decade later he resold the land back to their families at massive profits. 1857 saw the demise of the area when a horrific plague tore through the population. Ninety percent died and soon the graveyards were full. The poor dumped the plague victims in the lake that was the lifeline of the area; soon after, the dead appeared, angry at the hand they were dealt. Charles Hamblin was among the dead, leaving his now-pocked son, Joseph, in possession of Lake Manor. Joseph held the Manor but raved madly about the apparitions that haunted him. He died at fifty-two of unknown causes, and Lake Manor sat vacant for a decade before it was bought and turned into a hotel.

  Fast-forward to modern times where, Lake Manor has a reputation for being haunted, but there has never been proof, as the staff and local law enforcement never seem to see anything.

  The lovely staff that you will read about in the stories were part of the shared world, and it was brilliant to see where the authors took them, and the events that took place at Lake Manor Hotel.

  Some of the authors are very experienced short-story writers with dozens of publications under their belts, and some of them are being published for the very first time in this book. All of them did a remarkable job with their stories and I couldn’t be more proud of the outcome. I would again like to thank the authors for all of their hard work on the project. I know I asked more of them than your typical anthology. I also really want to thank Laura Bifano, who took time out of her busy schedule to do the cover art for this book. It is an amazing piece of art, and I am so happy that my first published book dons the work of Ms. Bifano. And a huge thanks to Debbie Kunellis, who did the cover layout and text for me. You might not think so, but this cover probably had a hundred emails back and forth before we had the final product, and she was amazing the whole time. A huge thanks to Samanda R Primeau for making all of the red ink on the pages, ensuring we have a wonderful collection void of errors.

  So without further ado, here is The Haunting of Lake Manor Hotel: the first of many books from Woodbridge Press, and one I will forever be proud of.

  Nathan Hystad

  March 28th, 2016

  Lake Manor Hotel sits on the lake’s edge, early in the morning. Mist pours off the water, creeping over the eerily quiet grounds. If you listen closely enough, you might hear something softly splashing in the dark water, or the sweeping of a broom across the old, wooden lobby floors.

  As the sun edges over the horizon, the mist starts to dissipate; another night gone to the other side. The silence breaks as a car pulls into the horseshoe-shaped driveway. The hotel almost creaks in anticipation of its first guest of the day.

  Room 13: The Boy by the Lake

  By Anna Dickinson

  Mum’s crying. Again. I wriggle down in the fat hotel chair and shove my earpods deeper into my ears, but even the thumping bass can’t drown out her sobs.

  “Mum,” I say — okay, moan; I’m a teenager, it’s expected — “do you have to?”

  “Sorry, Lara,” she chokes, shoving yet another used tissue into the pocket of her (hideous) maternity smock. “I’m so sorry, baby.”

  I don’t like it when she calls me that; she’s been doing it since my birthday, but sixteen is not a baby, especially since she’ll be having the real one soon. Apparently she and Dad can fight all the time and cry the rest of it, but that didn’t stop them making me a little brother or sister so I’ll have company shuttling between their separate homes when they finally give it up and accept they hate each other.

  “I’m going out.” I drop my iPod onto the seat and march off downstairs and past the bar, where Dad’s nursing a glass of brown liquid, his skin already flushed, his eyes red and damp-looking.

  He doesn’t like it when she cries, either.

  Outside, it’s better. The sun is hazy and winter-low; damp grass soaks my boots, and best, I’m out of the room, out of the spooky old hotel with its hissing lights and the smell of gas. Who thought ancient, smelly gas lights were a good idea?

  There’s a chill in the wind, so I pull up the hood of my top and wrap my arms round my chest. I could go back and get my coat, but Mum’ll just have soaked more tissues, and the thought of going back and not being able to do anything makes me feel kind of sick. I’m not all selfish and bad, see? Just mostly.

  So I take a deep, deep breath and set off toward the silvery lake in front of the hotel, squelching through the sucky marshland. We’re here in the middle of nowhere so Mum and Dad can make One Last Try To Save Their Marriage, so they can Talk. So far, Dad’s only talking to glasses of whiskey and the slimy barman with the flirty eyes and paint-stained fingers. Mum’s barely talking at all.

  ~

  There’s an avenue of mossy old trees leading down to the water. They’re all gnarled and twisted and, if I narrow my eyes, I can imagine people caught there, screaming as the wood closes over their mouths for the last time. It gives me a nice shivery feeling. The wind makes a whistling, creaking noise in the branch
es.

  Beyond the trees, the lake’s all white with mist. There’s a rickety and dangerous-looking pier sticking into the water. Obviously, it’s irresistible. Its wood, all sun-bleached and warped, creaks and shifts under my feet.

  The water’s dark with weed and muck, and this time, the shiver up my back isn’t pleasant. I wonder if I want to fall in. Maybe Mum’d notice if I came home drenched and shivering. Maybe not.

  As I walk farther from the shore, I notice a figure at the end of the pier, resolving from the mist like a ghost or a phantom. I like the way it makes me feel, putting one foot in front of the other, that touch of something scary that makes my skin tingle. Wondering if the figure is going to turn and have no face — or a skull face — or a rotting zombie face.

  Sort of disappointingly, when he turns, he’s just a boy about my age, with untidy brown hair. “There are bodies in there,” he says, pointing at the water. “Hundreds of them.”

  I drop down onto the wood beside him. “There are not.”

  “Are. There was a plague, and so many people died that they couldn’t bury them, so they dumped them in the lake.”

  I look at him to see if he’s kidding, but though he’s grinning at me it’s more a challenge to see if I’ll flinch. This close, his face is more interesting than I thought: scarred with marks that make him look a little like that zombie I imagined.

  I swing my feet over the dark water. “So there won’t be bodies left now.”

  “They’ll have rotted down into the muck,” he agrees. “It’ll just be skeletons.”

  “Hundreds of them,” I play along, “all tangled.”

  “Yeah. All their ribs meshed together.” He shows me with his fingers.

  “Nice, but I’m not falling for that.” I flip the tails of my hair back, so I can fix him with a knowing look. “They’d have dredged it ages ago.”

  “Not out here,” he says. He has nice eyes. Green, like moss and poison. “Do you want to see?”

  “Sure.”

  He takes my hand. His is warm and marked with the same scars he has on his face; they rub against my palm, a little rough, a little… nice. “Come on.” He slides off the pier and into the water.

  At the splash, something grabs my throat: the smell of petrol and smoke, people screaming. I pinch myself. Hard. The lake only comes up to his thighs, for God’s sake. I slip down after him, the water belling my long skirt out around my legs like black smoke; it’s cold. “You take all the girls here?”

  “Only the ones who look like they’d enjoy it.”

  Mud squelches intriguingly under my feet; muck rises in clouds. “How many have?”

  “So far…” He frowns up at the misty sky, like he’s counting. “…you.”

  “Does it get deep?” Not sure I want Mum’s attention enough to drown myself.

  “Only out there.” He points into the mist. “Here, the bones piled up, and plants grew through them, and the mud and everything mean the lake’s pretty shallow now.”

  We’re walking on the bones of dead plague victims. “Cool.”

  Our eyes meet. We grin.

  Ahead of us, a bit of wood sticks out of the water. A broken tree or something. If I look at it from the corner of my eye, I can imagine it really is bones. I’d love if it were real, if Mum and Dad had accidentally booked the Hotel of Horror for this trip, right next to a lake full of death. See, that’s the dangers of the internet for old people.

  “What’s your name?” he asks, a bit abrupt.

  “Lara. What’s yours?” The tree’s getting closer now, and it’s the weirdest tree I’ve ever seen. Something in my stomach tightens.

  “Joe.”

  I give him a sideways glance, that one Dad used to say showed I’d be trouble with the boys. When Dad still saw me beyond the whiskey.

  Joe’s the first boy who makes me want to be trouble. He goes a bit pink, which makes his scars stand out white, but he doesn’t let go of my hand.

  It’s not a tree, it’s a skeleton. Really, truly. My breath goes short and fast with excitement. The rib cage is open to the sky and the skull’s grinning — like they all do, I guess, but this is the first I’ve seen outside Biology (and I reckon that one’s really plastic). There are other bones sticking through the ribs: hands, like people tried to reach upwards as the lake rose. I wade around to the grinning skull.

  “Who’s this?”

  “A man so wicked, the lake wouldn’t accept him.” Joe rubs a damp hand through his hair, flattening it. “My father.” He sounds so grim, he has me for a moment, and I freeze, my fingers reaching for the smooth curve of bone above the eye-hollows, something cold slithering through my insides.

  But then sense catches up with me. Joe’s only about sixteen, and whatever they did after plagues and things hundreds of years ago, they don’t leave modern bodies unburied.

  “Funny.” I don’t touch the skull. “What’s your father do?”

  “Hangs around the lake.” He grins at me: the kind of grin that shows he might be trouble, too, with his hair otter-smooth and his eyes narrowed against the sun. “I like how you always have a question.”

  “Yeah.” I have more than he knows. “No one ever has the answers.”

  He starts wading back toward the pier. “Story is that if you wade out here when the moon’s up, and recite the right words, you’ll be connected right to the other realm, and a ghost will come and answer your question. They won’t be able to lie.”

  “Why not?”

  “Ghosts can’t. Not to a direct question.”

  The idea wakes something in me. Something that feels like thirst. “Can we do it tonight?”

  Before he answers, my phone buzzes to remind me it’s seven-thirty and — with unfailing parental predictability — time for supper. “You going back to the hotel?”

  “Nope.” He pulls himself up onto the end of the pier again. “I’ll hang out here for a bit.”

  ~

  The hotel dining room is dark and a bit smelly, like the rest of the place. Mum and Dad are already hunched at a corner table, not speaking. I don’t bother apologising, but at least Mum’s not crying. Dad’s the problem tonight. He’s completely off his face.

  Mum clears her throat. “This can’t go on, Michael.”

  He tries to put his chin on his hand, and misses, so his hand slides up his face and smears burger juice through his hair. “I know. It’ll be different tomorrow. This” —he gestures at the bar— “this was all a last goodbye.”

  “Right,” Mum says, as if she might believe him.

  “Don’t be stupid.” I jump to my feet. “He said that last week. He lasted a day.”

  “I mean it this time,” Dad slurs. “I promise.”

  It’s too stupid. I stamp out, past the staring guests and the creepy barman, thumping my feet down like I can break through the floorboards. Maybe I can. I changed into my big, big boots when I put on my jeans. The idea of zombies crawling from the cellars beneath the hotel and eating everyone cheers me a bit.

  What really makes me happy, though, is Joe waiting at the top of the avenue of trees that leads down to the lake.

  I stomp up to him. “My parents are so…” Words fail me.

  “Mine too.” He pushes off a weirdly angled trunk. “I brought you a gift.”

  It’s wrapped in shiny black cloth. My heart does a funny little skip. “Can I open it on the pier?”

  “Sure. Want to do the ghost question now?” We walk down the avenue to the glinting lake.

  “Do we need anything?”

  “Haven’t you summoned a ghost before?”

  “Not recently.”

  We start out onto the pier. The stars are out, the sky right on top of us, blazing with dead light.

  “Well, you know what they say: A handful, a prayer, salt, virgin’s hair.”

  “That’s not much of a rhyme. A handful of what?”

  “Grave dirt.”

  “Shouldn’t we be on land to get that?”

&nbs
p; “As it happens,” he says, sliding into the water with a soft splash, “I have some in my pocket.”

  I slip into the chill water after him. I’ve never met a boy who carries grave dirt in his pocket. Maybe there is such a thing as a soul mate.

  ~

  Out by the skeleton, Joe scatters dirt on the surface of the lake, then salt.

  “Do you have your question ready?”

  I nod, tug out a couple of strands of hair and hand them to him. He already has some of his own in his hand. He smiles, and twists the bits of hair together, brown and black, then drops them on the water. “Do you know any prayers?”

  “Um. For what we’re about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful?”

  The wind rises and I get all excited, the question on the tip of my tongue: What happened on my birthday? But when it dies again, nothing’s appeared. There’s no spectral hand reaching from the Other World or anything.

  “Maybe we need a better prayer?” I suggest.

  He smiles. “I liked yours. Open your gift?”

  I’d forgotten about my present. I pull it from my pocket, getting another shiver of delight at the smooth black cloth.

  Inside, there’s a bone, all smooth and pale and old. A finger, I think, the metacarpal. “I love it.”

  He ducks his head a little, and the moonlight casts his scars silver. “I hoped you would.”

  I lift it toward the skeleton beside me. “Is it one of his?”

  “No!” He swallows. “It belonged to a boy who lived during the plague. He survived, but he never recovered.”

  “Why not?” I stroke the smooth surface, glad the bone doesn’t belong to the old skeleton; something about its skull makes me uncomfortable.

  “Well, first, he felt guilty, because his father caused the plague.”

  “With magic?” It’s a story, after all.

  “Nothing so exciting. People were starving in a drought, and he bought their land, so they went hungry, and when the plague came...”

  I look away from the skeleton’s evil grin. “Everyone died?”