23. The Crew's Last Ride.
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Room 450
Tony and Jon walked to the front desk in the dilapidated lobby of the shabby old hotel and set down their bags.
Behind was a disinterested woman in her mid-twenties with a name tag that read Connie. She looked up from a cheap horror paperback.
“Yes?” she said, exhausted by having to expend the effort.
“A room please,” Tony said. “Two of them, actually—two rooms. On the fourth floor.”
Connie looked at the two young men, their faces studded with residual acne. They reminded her of those cartoonish comedy duos with one slim-and-tall (Jon), one short-and-fat (Tony). Beyond this oddball pair were the crew’s other two members—a boy in glasses with shoulder-length hair parted down the middle; a blonde girl with a mousy face. The girl waved cheerfully.
“I’m Holly,” the girl said, “and this is Martin. Go ahead and wave, Martin.”
The boy did.
“That’s wonderful,” Connie said. “$59.99 per room. Do you want me to do the math on that?”
Tony had already set a credit card on top of the desk. Connie filled out the paperwork and Tony faked his dad’s signature.
“Thanks, Mr. Sandoval,” Connie said, then reached into the desk’s bottom drawer and pulled out four sheets of paper. “Gonna need everyone to sign these.”
It was the special waiver for those requesting to stay on the Palmer’s fourth floor, letting the hotel legally off the hook for any incidents, “physical or mental,” that may occur from spending a night on the premises. Something to add to the fun for these types of thrill seekers.
“Those staying on the fourth floor can examine only their own rooms and the communal hallways,” Connie droned from memory, “but if you’d like to take video or EVP or use any other devices to further investigate any phenomena, there’s a $25 charge per room. Cash only for that.”
The four friends rustled through their pockets and, between them, came up with $50.
“Do you have a preference for rooms?” Connie droned.
Tony leaned onto the desk with his elbow in an attempted to present a casual suaveness.
“We were told to ask for dealer’s choice,” he said.
“Someone told him that was special code,” Holly yelled from behind, with a roll of her eyes.
“Of course,” Connie said, and plucked two random keys from the drawer and set them on the desk before returning to her paperback.
Tony grabbed the keys, and the crew walked into the main hallway. They took a left to the elevator bank for the South wing. A car dinged upon arrival.
They went inside, pressed the “4” button—its plastic covering scuffed from years of use—and waited for the lift’s ancient engineering to get cranking. The door closed and, after a moment, the carriage stirred as if it was being roused from a long nap. It slowly rose.
“I’m nervous as shit!” Holly shouted.
The others giddily laughed at the outburst.
It was the end of summer, and this was the crew’s last hurrah.
In a few weeks, each member would scatter off to various points for their next chapters. Holly off to private school, Tony and Jon to state college, Martin hanging around the suburbs for a few years at the local community college before whatever was next. The crew wanted one last overnight road trip, and when Jon lobbied for ghost-hunting at the Palmer, it was an easy sell.
Ever since Tony got a Sony DV camera for his birthday, the crew had been shooting nonstop, leading to the inevitable amateur attempts at special effects. They made it look like Holly was getting her head cut off. They jumped in the air a bunch of times so that it looked like they were floating in awkward stutters. They tried trick shots on the basketball hoop before Tony’s asshole brother ratted them out for banking the ball off the windshield of the family minivan.
But it was their ghost investigations that were the most fun.
They’d go to noted “haunted” locations around town late at night, shoot as many digital cards’ worth of footage as they could, then hunker down in Tony’s basement to examine their proof of the great beyond. They’d see shadows and claim they were demons, then convince themselves that out-of-focus dust specs were really orbs containing spirits of the dead. They even gave themselves a name: “The ParAbnormal Crew.” Tony had spat it out one night, and while it wasn’t great, no one had any better ideas, so it stuck.
The elevator clanged to a stop and opened onto the fourth floor with a listless ding. The crew stepped off.
This floor had a different feel than the lobby. Colder. Damp. The wallpaper was browned, the carpeting a dark green, stained and trampled. The smell of stale cigarette smoke simmered in the air.
The elevator car stirred and then shuffled off to wherever was next, leaving them to stew in a thickening silence.
“Boo!” Tony shouted from the top of his lungs.
Everyone jumped save Martin, whose fear response made him freeze like a possum.
“You little shit,” said Holly, slugging him in the bicep.
“Alright, enough fun, let’s go,” Jon said.
They passed an alcove where a torn and abused vintage yellow couch sat. Holly put the back of her hand against her forehead in theatrical exhaustion, spun around and collapsed back-first onto the couch. A cloud of dust puffed up into her face.
“Bet you wish you hadn’t done that,” Tony said.
Holly answered with coughs as she staggered back up.
“They really let this floor go, huh?” Martin said.
“Kind of like your mom,” Tony said, then immediately, “I’m sorry, I like your mom. It was just a reflex.”
Martin stared him down for a moment, then offered a hand. Tony took it and they went through the fourteen sequential steps of the crew’s secret handshake. Apology accepted.
Jon snatched the keys from Tony’s dangling grip. The plan was for a pair to each spend the night in one of the two rooms with cameras and microphones—they’d “borrowed” extra equipment from Tony’s jerk brother—and then go through the footage tomorrow.
Jon stuck his once-white Adidas shoe out onto the carpet.
“You kidding?” Tony said. “What are we, twelve?”
“Any better ideas?” Jon said.
After a moment, Holly, Tony, and Martin shrugged and stuck their shoes out as well. Jon began the sorting process.
“Bubblegum, bubblegum, in a dish,” he said. “How many pieces do you wish?”
Out went Tony, out went Martin, which meant Jon and Holly got Room 450, while Martin and Tony got 409. Two completely separate parts of the wing.
Martin and Tony started down the hall, and when they turned the corner, Jon reached out to hold Holly’s hand. She clutched it back.
“Did you rig it?” she said.
He smiled.
They’d made out a few weeks ago, after Jon had strategically dropped off Tony and Martin first so that Holly could join him in the front seat of his parents’ Dodge. As the car idled in front of Holly’s house, with the dashboard light shining on their faces, she leaned over for the first kiss, and kept going for an hour until a neighbor knocked on the window and told them to get moving. That was the last time they’d been alone with each other, until tonight.
Jon opened Room 450 and they walked in.
He set his bag on the bed. Holly came up next to him to examine the camera, but before she could, he grabbed her in a bearhug and they fell onto the bed. They kissed for a minute, but when the momentum began to shift into the next gear, she released her arms and placed her hands on his shoulders.
“Alright, buster,” Holly said with a smirk. “We have to get to work. I take my ghost hunting seriously, you know”
She stood off the bed and unzipped the bag, purposefully ignoring Jon’s pout. She removed the camera and began examining the room through its side viewfinder.
The phone rang. Jon picked it up.
“Hello?” he asked, then rolled his eyes.
He pressed the speaker button. Holly heard a hissing, wet voice on the other end asking if they were ready to die.
“Good one, Tony,” Holly called out. “Very believable.”
“So, like, what’s the plan?” Tony asked, his voice returning to its normal pitch.
“Did you read anything about where the good hauntings are?” Martin asked over the phone.
“These are all good questions,” Holly admitted.
“Just hang out and see what you can find,” Jon said.
He hung up the phone and raised an eyebrow to Holly, then patted the bed next to him.
“Maybe this area is worth investigating a little more...” he said.
She rolled her eyes and blew him a light kiss. Jon saw the camera’s red recording light blink on.
“Here is Jon on the bed at the infamous Palmer Hotel,” she narrated. “Wave hello, Jonathan.”
He did so with a plastered smile, then gave her the finger. She panned the camera around the room.
“There’s the wall. Boring. And there’s the ceiling. Also boring,” she said. “Here’s the desk with the lamp on top.” She walked into the bathroom and flicked on the light. “And here is, you know. And here’s the mirror, which means, here is me.”
She waved. In the viewfinder, she lingered for a moment on her eyes, as if attempting to learn what she herself was really thinking. She returned to the bathroom, panned past the bed where Jon again raised a middle finger, and walked to the window.
“Here is our view from the fourth floor. Which is supposed to be the spoooookiest floor.”
Through the viewfinder, a blur of red swept downwards. It was gone in an instant.
Holly jumped back, the camera shaking in her hand.
“Shit!” she shouted, then winced in preparation for the sound of impact.
“What?” Jon said, standing up from the bed.
Holly dropped the camera to her side and stepped hesitantly to the window. She peered on her tip-toes down into the courtyard. When that angle didn’t work, she opened the window and leaned out onto the fire escape into the flickering red glow of the rooftop sign.
“What?” Jon said.
“I think I just saw someone fall,” Holly said.
“Um,” Jon said. “What?”
“Someone fell right past this fucking window,” Holly said. “I think.”
A knock on the door.
Jon ran to the door and peered through the peephole but saw only an empty hallway.
“Very funny,” he called through to the other side.
No response.
“I said very funny,” he called again.
Still nothing.
He unlocked the door and slowly turned the doorknob so that the latch just barely retreated from the lip. When it did, suddenly the door pushed open. Jon let out a loud, sharp yelp at the movement.
Tony’s smiling face appeared in the cracked door.
“I finally fucking got ya!” he said.
He turned behind to slap Martin a high-five, and they entered.
“We were bored,” Martin said, and slumped onto the bed. “Where’s Holly?”
At her name, she ducked back inside from the fire escape and told them what she thought she’d seen.
“Should we call the front desk or something?” Martin asked.
“And what, tell them we think we saw a person jump off the building?” Tony said. “But they’re not down there now?”
They discussed the pros and cons. Martin picked up the camera and flipped open the viewfinder. He began browsing through the footage Holly had shot.
“Guys...” Martin said.
They gathered around.
As 12:00 a.m. blinked in the upper right corner, a smudge of red flashed outside the window.
Martin called the front desk.
“We get that now and then,” Connie droned. “More often these days. I’ll look if it makes you feel better.”
She called back a few minutes later, saying that all was fine and normal in the Palmer’s courtyard.
“Can’t make any promises for the rest of your night though, mwahahahaha,” Connie said.
Then came a click and the dial tone.
The clock rolled to one o’clock, then two as the crew kept trying to figure it out. The skeptic’s classic “tricks of the light” were winning the debate. Around three, Tony lay face down on the carpet to “rest his eyes,” and that was it for his night. Holly went next, curling into a ball on the bed. The crew was down to two.
As the dawn painted the sky, Martin and Jon climbed out onto the fire escape. They softly spoke to one another as they watched the opposite tower’s windows blink away, one by one.
As dawn rose, silence descended upon them as they sat groggy and sleepless. Martin broke it by admitting to Jon how he was feeling left behind, what with everyone going away. Jon said that nothing was actually changing, that they’d all be back for Christmas soon enough, then the summer. He said that the crew would never break up. But he knew it was a lie.
When the sunlight hit their shoes dangling off the edge of the fire escape, they crawled back inside. They both found space on the carpet next to Tony, and got a few hours of sleep before it was time to check out.
Artwork by Tiffany Silver Braun.
If you like Tales from the Palmer Hotel, tell a friend. If you really like it, the suggested donation for the series is a one-time payment of $6.66. Venmo (@Rick-Paulas) or Paypal (rickpaulas@gmail.com).