Haunting at the Hotel Page 9

  The laughing gets louder. It echoes. Shivers go down my spine. Why isn’t anyone else in the house awake to witness these horrible sounds? Where are Reese, Harris, and January? Where is Byron Bookbinder? Where are Sunny and Cricket and Fernando di Cannoli?

  We are alone. All alone with the laughter.

  The hallway feels, suddenly, so very small, and my breath catches. Because I’m staring straight down the length of the corridor, at a red door with a brass knob.

  The sound is coming from inside the Dead Room.

  Eliza realizes it too. She stiffens. We take baby steps toward the door, holding hands tightly. It’s not too late to turn around. I don’t want to run, but something in my gut tells me we shouldn’t stay either.

  Shadows shift under the door, and the cackling gets louder and louder and louder. It sounds almost like screams. . . .

  * * *

  TO TURN BACK AND FIND THE HOWLING, CLICK HERE.

  TO TRY TO ENTER THE DEAD ROOM, CLICK HERE.

  * * *

  WE’RE TAKING TOO long to crack Fernando’s wall safe, and who knows how much longer January can keep him distracted? I need Eliza’s help.

  Eliza points to the top right slice. “Look at this one: B-A-A-M-E-L-L. It’s missing the letter T. When you add T back into the word and unscramble the letters, it makes meatball.”

  “Oh!” I say. I feel like this puzzle is finally clicking for me.

  I point at the slice at two o’clock. “C-K-C-I-N-E. It looks a lot like chicken.”

  “So it was missing the H,” Eliza says. “I think we should keep track of the missing letters, and so far we have TH.”

  “O-N-S-O-N?”

  “It makes you cry when you cut it.”

  “The cheese?” Frank says.

  I groan. Why is everything farts with him? “Frank, it’s onions. So our missing letters are THI.”

  “I think you can get the next one. With that many Ps, it should be obvious. And it’s the most popular pizza topping ever.”

  “Anchovy?” Frank suggests.

  “We said most popular, not least popular, Frank.”

  “Moving on,” Eliza says. “The second-to-last wedge is hard. Because the missing letter appears in the word twice. But just try to think about what kind of sauce goes on pizza.”

  “Red!” Frank shouts.

  “But what’s another name for red sauce? It’s also a main ingredient of ketchup,” Eliza says, trying to draw the answer out of us. “After this slice, I think we’re done!”

  “Wait, what about the last wedge?”

  Eliza grins. “Well, here’s a hint: we already mentioned that topping in this conversation. Got our missing letters? Then let’s get in this safe!”

  * * *

  IF YOU THINK THE ANSWER IS 13, CLICK HERE.

  IF YOU THINK THE ANSWER IS 30, CLICK HERE.

  * * *

  “WE CAN’T POSSIBLY go looking for that dog!” I say. “It’s three times the size of each of us!”

  “Yeah, but if you put us all together, we’re the size of that dog!” January says.

  “No . . . we have the perfect hiding place here, so let’s not leave.”

  Eliza nods in support.

  “I thought you were detectives. Don’t you want to detect?”

  “We can’t detect if we’re mauled by literally the biggest dog I’ve ever seen,” Eliza says.

  “Come on, you cowards!” January growls, taking my hand and pulling on it. “We can’t stay in here!”

  “That’s exactly what we’re going to do!” I say, pulling my hand away from her and folding my arms.

  “Fine,” January says. “If that’s how you want it!” She plops on a couch across the way, glaring at me.

  I don’t know why January is so eager to risk her neck, but I feel good about my decision to hide. I fiddle around with my walkie-talkie and wipe my forehead. Man, it is hot in here.

  I look across the room at January, on her phone. And Eliza, sitting on the floor with her knees to her chest. They’re both glistening with sweat.

  “Does the room seem warm to you?” I try to ask. But the words don’t come out. My tongue is so dry. I stand up. The thermostat reads one hundred five degrees and steadily climbing. One hundred six . . . one hundred seven . . . one hundred eight . . . one hundred nine. Someone messed with the temperature in this room—we have to get out of here!

  “Eliza! January!” I croak, but they’ve both totally passed out.

  My vision swims, and then I lay my head down on the couch. Just a quick catnap. Then I swear I’ll tackle the dog problem. . . .

  CASE CLOSED.

  THIS IS TOO much! We can’t follow a murderous-looking ghost into a room called the Dead Room without any plan or reinforcements. I have no choice but to run!

  I back away, and Eliza goes with me. We head toward room 237. We are screaming and screaming—it’s hard to hear where my screams end and Eliza’s screams begin.

  I get to our door when I hear it—a light growl.

  “Eliza,” I say quietly. “Where’s our room key?”

  “I . . . I have it somewhere.”

  Grrrrrrrrr.

  “Eliza?” I say more urgently. “I’m going to need the key now.”

  “I’m looking!” she cries. “I’m looking! I don’t know where—”

  “Eliza!” I shout. She looks up. At the end of the hallway is a big, ferocious, bearlike dog.

  We shriek so loud, my throat is raw. “AHHHHHHHHH!”

  The dog comes thundering toward us. It leaps—I close my eyes.

  It smacks straight into a couch cushion. One of the ones from the fire den. Mom is there, holding it like a shield.

  “BAD DOG!” Frank scolds.

  “Let’s go!” Mom says. “Back this way!”

  I’m so happy to see them, I could cry.

  We run to the stairs, the dog on our tail. Only, downstairs in the lobby, there are four more dogs, just as big, just as ferocious. We can’t go down there.

  The original dog is behind us—blocking our way to our guest rooms.

  It seems like there’s only one place we can go. The ghost and the dogs are forcing us all to the same place. . . .

  The Dead Room.

  It’s the one place I don’t want to go.

  I look down. Could we outrun the dogs? Or outsmart the dogs? Is it worth a chance?

  “Carlos,” Mom says, her voice a warning. “Don’t—”

  How much am I willing to risk to avoid the Dead Room?

  * * *

  TO GO TO THE DEAD ROOM, CLICK HERE.

  TO GO DOWNSTAIRS AND FACE THE DOGS, CLICK HERE.

  * * *

  I KNOW IT’S the peach lever.

  First letter is in SHARP but never in DULL.

  Second letter in EYES but not in a SKULL.

  Third letter is in ALWAYS but never FOREVER.

  Fourth letter you can find in any WHICHEVER.

  Last letter is in FINISHED, but not in an END.

  Together you’ll know which lever to bend.

  P is in sharp, but not in the word dull.

  E is in eyes, but not in the word skull.

  A is in always, but not in forever.

  C is in the word whichever.

  H is in the word finish, but not in end.

  It’s peach!

  I pull the lever, and the door clicks open. We tumble into the kitchen. Except for Frank, of course, who is still stuck to the pole. The kitchen is empty but for the hum of appliances—and there is a trail of green ghost slime that snakes across the floor and leads into the old dumbwaiter.

  “A ghost!” I whisper, as Mom goes to the sink and fills a bowl with warm water.

  “Carlos, there’s no such thing,” Eliza says, “and I’ll prove it!” My best friend bends down and feels the ghost slime. She sniffs it. Then, delicately, she tastes it.

  “Eliza!” I gasp. “Gross! That’s something Frank would do!”

  She grins. “It’s not ghost sli
me.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s jelly! Jelly with green food coloring.”

  Mom brings the bowl of warm water over to Frank. “I have to raise the temperature of the pole without burning your tongue. So Frank? Stay still.” She pours the warm water all over the pole and his tongue. She has to fill up twice, and by the third pour, Frank’s tongue starts to come loose.

  The fourth pour does the trick, and Frank’s tongue lolls out of his mouth like a dog’s. “Don’t do that,” he says to Eliza and me. “Not fun.”

  “Like we’d ever do that, Frank!” I say. “Only you.”

  Mom grabs some slices of turkey out of the fridge, a loaf of bread from the pantry, and two different condiments. “After that, I think we deserve dinner. And until we figure out who locked us in that freezer, maybe we better eat it alone.”

  “So what did you find, Mom?”

  “Huh?” she says, squirting more mayo on her turkey sandwich. We’re all sitting cross-legged on Eliza’s bed, sharing the food and talking about our progress in the case. Frank is eating very slowly, occasionally letting his sore tongue take a rest between bites.

  “You talked to Sunny earlier, right?”

  “Oh yeah.” Mom takes a big bite of sandwich. “What a bust!”

  “You didn’t get anything out of her?”

  “On the contrary,” Mom says putting her sandwich down. “She had lots to say about how this hotel is going to the dogs. Kept talking about how Reese was ruining the hotel. She used the word disgrace a lot. Come to think of it, Sunny didn’t seem to think highly of Harris either.”

  “And what led you outside?” Eliza asks.

  “Outside, I was looking for any sort of mechanism that would explain the hauntings,” Mom says. “Some special-effects equipment, something like that.”

  “And did you find anything?”

  “A speaker,” Mom says. “And . . . this.”

  She lays out a paper in front of us. It looks a little charred along the edges.

  Eliza swallows her bite. “What’s that? Looks like a map. Pass the ketchup, Frank.”

  “What’s the magic word?”

  “Please,” Eliza says.

  “Nope!”

  “Pretty please.”

  “Nope!”

  “Here,” I say, snatching it out of his hands and throwing it to Eliza.

  “Hey, no fair!” Frank says. “I was the ketchup king!”

  “Here, be the lord of mayonnaise.”

  “It’s never as good,” he grumbles.

  “So, is it a map?” Eliza says.

  “Could be,” Mom says through another bite. “It certainly looks like a map—it has a compass rose and everything. I found it burning in the firepit. Good thing I dove for it, hmm? Seems like someone was trying awfully hard to get rid of it.”

  “You what?” I choke. “You dove into a fire for it?”

  “I used tongs. Don’t get any ideas, daredevil,” she says to Frank, who looks like he would love nothing more than to dive recklessly into a fire.

  “So . . . what does this mean?”

  “I have no earthly idea,” Mom says, rolling up the map and sticking it in Eliza’s backpack. “You three called me on the walkie-talkie before I had a chance to follow it, and now it’s too late for today. It’s not a good idea to explore the woods alone at night. Luckily I have three genius sidekicks I can drag with me first thing in the morning.”

  “Uh, Mom,” I say. “Hate to break it to you . . . but I think you’re our sidekick.”

  She laughs and ruffles my hair.

  * * *

  Night Two

  * * *

  “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

  I jolt out of bed. The clock blinks 2:29 a.m.

  “Is it a ghost?” I say, turning the light on.

  “There is no ghost, Carlos!”

  “Oh yes there is!”

  Eliza shakes her head and gets out of bed. “There’s no reasoning with you!”

  “Me?” I say. “At least I open my brain to other possibilities. At least I don’t shoot down every theory that comes my way.”

  “You’re shooting down my theory!” Eliza says.

  “Yeah, because it’s wrong.”

  “Then explain the green jelly—”

  There’s a knock on our door. “Carlos,” Mom says. “It’s me.”

  I open the door to find Mom and Frank standing in their pajamas, determined looks on both their faces. “Let’s go.”

  Unlike the haunting yesterday, there are no noises in the walls or flickering lights or glowing footprints. The atmosphere doesn’t feel charged. And there is hustle and bustle across the lodge—all our suspects running to the source of the scream.

  In the middle of the lobby, I see the reason for the shriek. On the floor are these weird symbols . . .

  They’re written in fake ectoplasm. Also known as green jelly, as Eliza figured out yesterday. She gives me a snobbish look, but I will prove that ghosts exist, by the end of this.

  Everyone—Harris, January, Fernando, Cricket, Sunny, and Byron—is standing at the top of the stairwell, looking down at the symbols with a bird’s-eye view. The only person on the floor of the lobby is Reese, who is shaking.

  “It just . . . I saw it glide across the floor. I swear—it was just here! It’s out to get me! It left this message!”

  “Where did it go?” Mom asks.

  “I—I don’t know! It just disappeared.”

  “See? Sounds like a ghost,” I whisper in Eliza’s ear.

  “Sounds like Luther Covington,” she replies in a low murmur. “The only one who’s not accounted for right now.”

  Mom quietly says, “You three—see if you can decode the ectoplasm message while I deal with Reese and the others.” Then she faces the group. “If you all could follow me into the fire den.”

  “Now?” Sunny groans. “I want to go back to bed!”

  “Precisely!” Byron says pompously. “Writing a book is a toil, even with the best of slumbers. But now my REM cycle has been agitated . . . tomorrow will be an agonizing workday! I must return to my torpor!”

  “Not yet,” Mom says. “Now follow me.”

  Everyone obeys. It’s amazing how Mom can command a whole group of people to do something they don’t want to do, just because she tells them to do it. I want to take notes from the master . . . but Mom has left me with a job to do. Now that the lobby is empty, we have a very short time to figure out what this message means.

  I look at the message again.

  “What is this?” I mutter.

  Eliza frowns. “This looks familiar. . . .”

  “Is it an old cipher you read about in a book?”

  “Nope!” Frank says, sliding down the banister. “It’s wingdings!”

  We follow him down the stairs.

  “What’s a wingding?” I say.

  But it’s Eliza who explains. “It’s a computer font . . . it turns words into symbols.”

  “How do you know that, Frank?”

  But Eliza answers again. “Frank likes to turn all my homework into wingdings before I print it out—luckily Mom, Dad, or I catch it before I hand it in like that. Except one time . . .”

  “Ha! That was funny!”

  “It was not!” Eliza says.

  I walk over to Cricket’s front-desk computer. Let’s get the key to the code, then.

  * * *

  IF THE MESSAGE SAYS THE GHOST IS COMING FOR REESE, CLICK HERE.

  IF THE MESSAGE SAYS THE GHOST IS COMING FOR HARRIS, CLICK HERE.

  * * *

  “EAST,” I SAY, as I turn the arrow to the east.

  Suddenly the floor begins to rumble. At first it’s a tiny tremor—but it grows into a giant earthquake.

  The four of us huddle together, arms wrapped around each other, as the room continues to shudder and quiver and wobble. All we can do is brace ourselves and hold on for dear life. But how long can the structure of the building withstand thi
s earthquake? How long before this room—or the whole lodge—collapses?

  There’s no sign that the shaking will stop any time soon. This is a disaster . . . a natural disaster.

  CASE CLOSED.

  I RUN FORWARD and push the nearest mannequin. It knocks into two behind it . . . and soon they’re all falling like dominoes.

  “AUGH!” shouts our one culprit as she topples, and the other one gets trapped under three of the bodies.

  Eliza shines her flashlight in our culprits’ faces. One we already know: the betrayed sister. The other is a complete shock.

  “J-January?” Reese sobs. “But why?”

  January snarls. “Because it’s the only way to get our family off this stupid mountain!”

  Suddenly I remember the conversation we had with Harris in the hallway—about January being lonely on the mountaintop. About needing some friends. But to go this far is just crazy.

  But she really could do it. Now that I think about it, January was practicing her sound-mixing skills. I bet putting together a haunted soundtrack of howls and shrieks was a breeze for her.

  “You don’t scare as easily as I thought you would, Mom,” January says. “So we had to switch our plans.”

  “If something happens to you, the hotel goes to your daughter,” Sunny says.

  “And then I could sign it over to Aunt Sunny. And then we can all have what we want.”

  “Um . . . except for Reese,” I say.

  “What do you mean by if something happens?” Eliza says, but neither Sunny nor January answers.

  “Aren’t you going to say SORRY?” Frank says.

  Sunny and January look at the floor. I’ll take that as a no.

  “We would have gotten away with it too,” Sunny snarls. “If it weren’t for you kids!”