Sarah woke up, instantly. She was still groggy, and it took her a few minutes to remember that she wasn’t in her own bed. She was awake, in a hotel room in a resort on St. Simon’s Island, one of the barrier islands dotting the U.S. southeast Atlantic coast. Wide awake and lying beside a sleeping man.
“Scott,” she whispered. “Are you awake?”
“I am now,” he said. “Why are you awake?” He lifted his watch toward his eyes and squinted.
“It’s two a.m.”
“Just thinking things over.”
“Again?” He sat up and pulled her over, into his arms. “Didn’t we go through everything at dinner last night? Isn’t it all decided?”
“I know, but I guess I’m still getting used to the idea. I’ve been working at becoming a singer for a long time. It seems weird to be giving it up.”
“Don’t think of it as giving it up. Think of it as having a stove. You’ve got four burners, you’ve had a pot with the singing idea boiling on the front burner and nothing on any of the others. So, you start up three more pots... or maybe just one more... and you put the singing pot to the back burner.”
If there was one thing Scott did, frequently, it was metaphors. He thought he might like to be a writer, but his writer pot was on a back burner, while his ‘life coach / boss of Sarah’ pot was on one of the front burners.
Dentist was on the other one.
“I am going to put the singing dream on hold for now. I know it’s time. But I’m thinking of going back to school. Maybe take a program in songwriting.”
“How are you going to make a living at that?” He was up on one elbow now, staring down into her face in the semi-dark. “Sarah, I thought we ended up with a plan, after all that talking at dinner last night.”
Yes, a plan, a good plan, if plans ever are. Take the admin job offer from Daedalus Software Inc. and start paying off those credit cards.
Or rob a bank, maybe. Or take up calligraphy, then learn how to re-create signatures in helpful places.
Hah.
Maybe try writing comedy, rather than songs?
After a few minutes, Scott fell asleep. Sarah stared at the white ceiling for what felt like four hours. She wanted to stay and at the same time, she wanted to run. She knew she would feel much better if she could only make a decision, a real decision, not a convenient one, like the position she’d expressed to Scott last night.
The next day they took a long walk on the beach. Sarah let the views of the ocean panorama and the sound of the waves calm her down. Scott was right, the indecisiveness was killing her.
She knew she had to be practical . . . but why? To please everybody else? (Somebody always seemed to be less than impressed or pleased, no matter what she did.) Because it was time to be a grown up? (That time had probably come a long time ago.) To have an easier, more secure life than the one that seemed go along with chasing a dream? (Secure, yes, but sold out.)
That night, Sarah was awake at two a.m. again. “Scott, I smell something weird.”
“Not the sort of comment that helps with weekend getaway sex,” he muttered. She could see that he was smiling, though.
“I’m serious! It’s like something is burning, don’t you smell it?”
She had his attention now. “What’s burning?”
“It smells like . . . toast.” And it did. It was as unmistakable as sewage on a hot day.
“Burning toast. Uh-huh. Do you want me to get up and take a look around?”
She could see that his eyes were closed. “No, it’s gone now, anyway. Maybe you can get back to sleep.”
“Thanks, you’re a sweetheart.” He reached out to squeeze her hand, giving her another sleepy smile, and then, rolled over. His rumpled hair and dear, familiar back, took the edge off the sarcasm.
He was asleep in seconds, his breathing like the rumble of distant thunder, but Sarah couldn’t settle. She got up to go to the bathroom. As she turned the corner, she saw a flash of white near the hotel room door.
Opaque, white, rectangular. Fuzzy. About five feet tall, she told Lisa at the front desk, just a few minutes later, after they’d come running down the grand staircase.
She and Scott looked strange, she knew, with resort robes on over their PJs, his gray hair wild and unbrushed, her face pale and drooping, with no makeup. But she’d been in a hurry to get downstairs so that the staff could send someone up right away to investigate. She’d tried the hotel phone but couldn’t get a dial tone, then tried her cell phone and couldn’t get service.
“I think I heard something, too,” Sarah said.
Lisa stared at her, no expression on her face. “Heard what?”
“It was like a moaning, a crying sound. Sad.” Sarah looked past Lisa to the office behind the desk. “Are you going to send someone up to our floor?”
“There is no one here but me,” the young woman said. Sarah could see that she was trying hard to maintain eye contact but she kept glancing toward her computer screen and the hand she had down by her right hip, holding what was probably a phone.
“Maybe we could speak to the manager.” Scott put in.
“It’s nearly three a.m. He comes in at seven.” Lisa surrendered to her addiction, pulled her phone from her pocket, and stared at the screen for a few seconds, her thumb stroking the glass.
“Please let him know we’d like to see him, would you?” Scott said. He put a hand on Sarah’s back, to guide her and to show he was on her side, as they walked toward the elevator that they’d avoided earlier in their race down to the lobby.
The resort was an historic gem, located near the railway line that opened up the area to tourism a century ago. It faced the Atlantic Ocean and almost every room on the five floors had a view that went on for miles. There was a turret at the south end, containing one luxurious room that Sarah had considered booking but the price was quite a bit higher. In the end, she decided to be practical and go for the slightly cheaper room, one floor below. She was regretting that decision now.
When they got back to their room, Scott pushed open the door and they peeked inside. Sarah was unwilling to step over the threshold, so she waited in the corridor while he went in, looked around, then returned.
“It’s fine, Sair. No burning toast smell, no white apparitions. Nobody’s there.”
She grabbed his arm and pointed to the corridor wall, unable to speak. In the space across from their door, there was a rust-colored smear of paint.
“I think it’s an arrow,” Scott said. It seemed to be pointing toward a stairway at the end of the hall.
Really! Sarah couldn’t help herself. In an instant, for some reason, she wasn’t scared at all. She was excited. She might regret it, but she knew that what she felt was delight, not fear.
“Come on!” She took Scott’s hand and headed for the stairs. He was not unwilling, and she would remind him of that later.
The stairs were made of the same lovely wood that had been used throughout the resort, giving the place one more touch of the luxury and high style that could be felt all the way to the deck chairs by the pool and on the beach.
Sarah almost ran up the first set of stairs. Partway up, she saw a smudge of orange-red color. Like paint. Or mud. Or blood.
“It’s another arrow!” Sarah gripped Scott’s arm. “Ssshhh!”
“Why do you want us to whisper?”
“So that we can sneak up on whoever’s there.”
“Nobody’s there, Sarah.”
When they reached the top, she saw that there was just one room on the whole floor. They were in the turret. “I read about this room in the brochure,” Sarah said. “The Turret Room. Some famous general once stayed here. And there was a death in here once—an unhappy wife.
They never did establish how she died.”
“Don’t let your imagination run wild, Sarah,” Scott said. “Ghost stories flourish all over the South like the Spanish Moss on the trees, but that doesn’t mean that any of them are real. Quantity doesn’t equal proof.” He turned back toward the stairs. “I think we should wait till morning. We’ll tell the hotel staff about the paint on the wall then.”
“We tried talking to the hotel staff already,” Sarah said. “I want to go in.”
“It’s probably locked,” Scott said, as he turned the knob.
It was not.
The room was very familiar to Sarah, because of her online research before she’d picked the island and the resort. The bed had a shiny, green silk cover on it, a polished mahogany headboard, and matching night tables. Sarah was no expert but it looked as though they were actually antiques and not just good reproductions.
Shutters opened to the ocean view and the window was raised to full height. A late summer breeze blew through. It wasn’t bad—not worth three hundred dollars a night, though, Sarah thought. She noticed the sixty-inch TV mounted on the wall, looking very out-of-place in this space, surrounded by heavy wood furniture, Tiffany lamps, and prints hung in ornate, gold frames.
Then, on the wall above the bed, she saw more of the same rust-colored paint.
“Scott, look!”
Lady Gardenia cannot sleep
Beneath the words, she saw a scrawl that might have seemed like a signature.
She and Scott backed out of the room, ran down the turret stairs, into the third-floor corridor and out to the grand staircase. If Sarah thought she could get away with sliding down the banister to get there faster, she would have.
She came crashing into the lobby and pulled up in front of the reception desk. Scott was not far behind here. “Lisa!” Sarah inhaled several times, trying to catch her breath and her dignity. “There is a ghost in The Turret Room!”
Lisa just looked at her, not fazed a bit by this information. “What?”
“Writing on the wall in The Turret Room.” Scott took over.
Sarah debated with herself about whether she should add ‘in blood’, then decided against it. Lisa didn’t seem like a fellow adventure-seeker.
“Come and see. No one will miss you here for a few minutes. It’s three o’clock in the morning,” Scott said.
“Writing on the wall?” Lisa repeated. “We should call Housekeeping.”
“There’s nobody else here until seven, you said.”
Lisa muttered something that sounded like “I can’t even”, then picked up a key card on a ring from the desk. The three of them went back up to the top floor, where the door to The Turret Room was now locked. Maybe Scott had pulled it shut and it locked automatically? He denied it but it didn’t matter anyway. Lisa had a pass-key.
Scott and Sarah followed her in. The three of them stood, looking at the bed and the wall above it. There was nothing there.
Sure enough, the wall was clean. The soft yellow wallpaper showed no sign of any writing.
Lisa raised an eyebrow at them. It wasn’t quite rolling her eyes but it might as well have been.
Later that day, as Sarah and Scott walked the beach, they couldn’t talk about anything else but the ghost writing. Scott tried to start a conversation about her career plans but she had the feeling he was going in that direction because he thought that he should. As soon as Sarah changed the subject back, he was right there with her.
“It didn’t look to me like paint,” Scott said. “I’ve seen paint.”
“It might have been blood.”
“It might have been.” Scott steered them closer to the water’s edge and they walked along, watching their bare feet make imprints in the wet sand. “You know, I think I’d like to change rooms.”
“Me, too,” Sarah said. “I was excited about it all last night but thinking about it today, I just would rather be somewhere else.”
“I don’t want to check out,” Scott said. “We prepaid for the room and I hate to waste that money.”
“All right, we won’t go home,” Sarah said. “But we need a different room.”
“But not that Turret Room.”
“Oh, I don’t think they’d try to give us that one,” Sarah said.
But when they consulted with Lamont, the daytime manager, they didn’t have any options. He had nothing available, he said, and nothing would be opening up this weekend. Their choices were to stay in their own room or move up to the room in the tower at the very top.
Lamont seemed to be less interested in their experience than in the hotel’s reputation.
“Please tell me, ma’am, that you’re not going to leave us a bad review about this,” he requested.
“We haven’t thought anything about any reviewing,” Scott replied. “We’re just trying to deal with the fact that there seems to be a ghost here.”
That wasn’t enough assurance for the manager. “You know, to some guests this would be a good thing. An attraction . . . an amenity, even!”
Sarah grinned back at him. “I see your point, but it’s just that we aren’t in that group and we want a different room.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Lamont said, which Sarah understood to mean not right now.
Over lunch at the poolside restaurant, Sarah told Scott that her opinion of the whole experience was changing. “I mean, it is kind of exciting. Once I got past the first few minutes of freaking out, I was really curious about what we’d see. Or hear. Or smell,” she said, sipping her sweet tea.
“What do you want to do?”
“Let’s go take another look. In broad daylight. Lamont offered us that room, let’s tell him we’re thinking about it and get the key.”
They climbed the stairs to the upper floor, and when they opened the door to the corridor, Sarah felt right away that they weren’t alone. The door to The Turret Room was slightly open.
The writing was back. Lady Gardenia will not sleep. And again, there was a signature, with the L and the G more obvious this time.
Sarah got her phone out, a move she’d regretted not making the first time, at three a.m. This time, she would have photos—proof that she wasn’t imagining things.
The news of the haunting of the resort spread like pollen in April. By the time Lamont had seen the photos and Sarah had posted them to her favorite social media sites, most of Georgia was chatting about Lady Gardenia. Once the staff and Sarah’s friends started sharing, thousands of people all over the world were engaged. The photos were retweeted and posted to numerous ghost hunting websites; the hotel’s reservation system got a sudden and dramatic bump.
When Sarah and Scott returned to the hotel after a shopping trip to the village, Lamont was waiting for them. He motioned them toward a small grouping of armchairs in the lobby and as they sat down, one of the servers brought them each a glass of wine.
“My compliments,” Lamont said. “And my thanks.”
“We were a bit concerned you would be annoyed with us,” Scott said. “For going into the room and taking the photos.”
“The phone’s been ringing all afternoon. We’ve got bookings till next February. We haven’t even had a chance to think it through, how we’ll leverage this, but I know we’ll come up with a few things. Maybe a Saint Valentine’s Day “sleep with a ghost” special.”
Scott laughed. “I’m glad everything’s cool.”
“I do have something I’d like to give you, to say thank you for all of the PR you’ve given us and the business it’s brought in. We’d like to give you a free night, as our guests. Covering everything.”
“Parking too?” Scott asked. “Resort fees, maybe?
Free breakfast? A spa day? Maybe a nice meal in one of the restaurants?”
Sarah punched him lightly on the upper arm. “Stop it! Thank you, Lamont, we’d love to stay another two days.”
“All of those things will be covered too, sir.”
“Thank you.”
The next morning, instead of checking out, Scott answered a knock at their door and handed over their bags to a bellhop, ready to take them to their new room. He led them to the end of the hall, up in a service elevator, and stopped in front of the door to The Turret Room.
Sarah was thrilled. Scott was not so sure.
“You know, I think we might just as well go on home,” he suggested.
Sarah had already moved in, unzipping her suitcase, pulling out her toiletries bag, and spreading her things across the dresser top. “But Scott, I want to stay. It’s an adventure.”
“Sair, are you just using this as one more way to avoid making your decision about work?”
“I don’t think so.” She continued into the bathroom and laid out her toothbrush, her moisturizer, and her perfume. She wasn’t that tidy, particularly, but she needed a moment and some space from her husband.
He followed her in. “You know, I don’t care what you decide to do, just that you decide. The indecision is making you miserable. Making us miserable.”
She knew damn well that he cared a lot about what she decided to do and that it wasn’t just the indecision he objected to. “I’ll decide soon, Scott, I will. Just not today. How many times in your life do you cross paths with a ghost? I can’t think about that other, mundane stuff. Not today, not tonight.”
“What’s going to happen tonight?” he asked.
“We’re going to wait up. Plug the phones in, so they’re fully charged. Order some food—it’s going to be a long night.”
He laughed. “Okay, but can we watch the game until eleven or so? I don’t think the ghost will mind.”
She fell asleep before the second half started and Scott had no one to compare notes with when he noticed a man in a uniform cross the room from the bathroom to the door. At first, he told Sarah later, he couldn’t believe his own eyes and he thought he’d imagined something, or somehow transposed something he’d seen on TV over the space just beyond it. But it was a military uniform, not a football uniform, and the man had long sideburns and a moustache, not shoulder-length dreads.
Scott rubbed his eyes a few times, then reached across the couch to try to shake Sarah awake, all the while keeping his eyes on the man.
“What? What is it?” she demanded, and in that instant, the man in the uniform vanished.
They stayed awake the rest of the night, hoping he would reappear. Finally, just after dawn, they went downstairs to tell Lamont the latest.
“I’ve been in touch with some supernatural investigation organizations,” he said. “We’ll have some people here to set up special equipment and keep watch.”
“We’d like to stay another couple of nights,” Sarah said.
Scott stared at her. They hadn’t discussed this.
“Yes, that’s all right,” Lamont said. “The room’s available for a few days, until the ghost-hunters get here, with their equipment. You might never get another chance,” he said to Scott. “That room is going to be so famous . . . ”
Throughout the evening Sarah drank about a quart of coffee and guzzled five shots of a high-energy drink. She refused to allow Scott to put on the TV set, saying that it put her to sleep almost always, and way too fast. She had a good book and he had a magazine; they played music and talked whenever their eyes needed a rest.
About midnight, her determination paid off. The man in uniform was standing near the window. Sarah clutched Scott’s arm and he put a finger up to her lips.
Unnecessary. She couldn’t have spoken even if she’d wanted to. The ghostly soldier crossed the room and stopped just beside the door. She had a feeling he was going to leave and she wasn’t going to let it happen this time. Without any plan, she rushed at him, her arms open—and was absolutely stunned when her hands encountered a human body. He was alive, and if not exactly kicking, he was certainly wiggling and shimmying, trying to get out of her grasp.
“Hold him tight, Sarah!” Scott said as he ran over to his suitcase, then back with two ties he’d brought in case they went out to a fancy dinner. They pushed the man into an armchair and tied down his wrists.
“Okay, let’s hear your story.” Scott was breathing as if he’d just run a marathon, his chest heaving under the track jacket he liked to wear in the evenings. He switched on the overhead lights.
The man in the chair was about forty years old, short, slender, and quite a bit too small for the blue uniform he was wearing. He chewed on the edges of his moustache for a moment, then seemed to exhale, then deflate.
“What the hell, alright. They’re not paying me enough for this kind of crap.”
“Who are you and how did you get into our room?”
“Braden West—say, you’re not in the biz by any chance, are you?” He looked hopefully from Sarah to Scott.
“Producers? Location scouts, maybe? Writers? Nah, not writers, that wouldn’t help.”
The light was dawning for Sarah. “You’re an actor.”
“I am. Here on a break, seeing the folks, when this gig came up.”
“Who hired you?” Scott asked.
“Can’t say,” the actor said, suddenly seeming to realize that he might have said too much already.
“We’re not anything to do with the movie business,” Sarah said. “What kind of actor are you, to be doing this?”
Braden shrugged. “You do what you have to. You make a living.”
“This seems a bit low, faking ghost visitations,” Scott said.
“For gullible tourists,” Braden finished. “Gives a bit of a kick to their vacation, doesn’t it?”
“But it’s not really acting, is it?” Sarah persisted. “It’s just flitting in and out, and fooling people.”
Braden was staring at his shoes. “I did have bigger dreams. But you have to go to New York or L.A. to get anywhere.”
“So, go. What’s stopping you?”
“It’s not that simple. Besides, I can’t seem to make up my mind.”
“Enough of this, Sarah,” Scott said. “I’m calling the manager.”
“Just one more question. Did you do the writing on the wall? Are you Lady Gardenia, too?”
Braden nodded. “Actor. Writer. Set designer.”
“Forger,” Sarah commented.
“Yeah, well, we’re not in your audience anymore,” Scott said as he held open the door for Braden to make his exit.
That night, Sarah and Scott went to bed and to sleep without speaking. The next day, they saw Lamont in the lobby but he denied any knowledge of the fake soldier and the bogus writing.
They also saw Braden West hustling out of the front door, toward a taxi.
Scott stepped in front of him. “We have a few more things to talk about.”
“Not a chance,” Braden said, waving a piece of paper under Scott’s nose. “NDA.”
They watched him take off in the taxi. “NDA?” Sarah asked.
“Non-disclosure agreement. He probably made some money.”
Sarah sighed. “It’s a strange world.”
That night, as they got into bed for their final night at the resort, Sarah said, “It was fun, though, wasn’t it?”
“Sort of,” Scott agreed. “I’m still not sure what I think about it all, though.”
He flipped on the TV set and Sarah pulled the covers up around her ears. Suddenly, she jabbed Scott in the side with her elbow. “Do you smell that? That burning toast?”
“Yeah, this time I do. I hear some kind of scratching sound, too.”
“Where’s it coming from?”
They listened. There was no way to avoid it—the scraping was coming from the wall right behind them.
They froze, clutching each other’s hands. “Don’t turn around, Scott,” Sarah said, in a low, breathy voice.
He shook his head and squeezed hers even tighter. “I won’t, Sarah,” he said.
“Won’t what?” she asked.
Scott didn’t answer for a long, long time. Then he let go of her hands and sat back. “There’s nothing there, anyway.”
They sat out several moments of time frozen, then Sarah made a determined, superhuman effort to overcome the nausea she felt.
“I want to take a look. Don’t you want to look?”
Scott stared at the TV set as intently as a hypnotized two-year-old. “No.”
Sarah sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees. The same feeling of delight and excitement that she’d had a few days before suddenly returned. She didn’t feel fear anymore; she felt safe, in a weird way.
“Well, I’m going to look,” she said. Slowly, she turned and faced the wall behind them.
Lady Gardenia, do not sleep.
“Scott,” she whispered. “Are you awake?”
“I am now,” he said. “Why are you awake?” He lifted his watch toward his eyes and squinted.
“It’s two a.m.”
“Just thinking things over.”
“Again?” He sat up and pulled her over, into his arms. “Didn’t we go through everything at dinner last night? Isn’t it all decided?”
“I know, but I guess I’m still getting used to the idea. I’ve been working at becoming a singer for a long time. It seems weird to be giving it up.”
“Don’t think of it as giving it up. Think of it as having a stove. You’ve got four burners, you’ve had a pot with the singing idea boiling on the front burner and nothing on any of the others. So, you start up three more pots... or maybe just one more... and you put the singing pot to the back burner.”
If there was one thing Scott did, frequently, it was metaphors. He thought he might like to be a writer, but his writer pot was on a back burner, while his ‘life coach / boss of Sarah’ pot was on one of the front burners.
Dentist was on the other one.
“I am going to put the singing dream on hold for now. I know it’s time. But I’m thinking of going back to school. Maybe take a program in songwriting.”
“How are you going to make a living at that?” He was up on one elbow now, staring down into her face in the semi-dark. “Sarah, I thought we ended up with a plan, after all that talking at dinner last night.”
Yes, a plan, a good plan, if plans ever are. Take the admin job offer from Daedalus Software Inc. and start paying off those credit cards.
Or rob a bank, maybe. Or take up calligraphy, then learn how to re-create signatures in helpful places.
Hah.
Maybe try writing comedy, rather than songs?
After a few minutes, Scott fell asleep. Sarah stared at the white ceiling for what felt like four hours. She wanted to stay and at the same time, she wanted to run. She knew she would feel much better if she could only make a decision, a real decision, not a convenient one, like the position she’d expressed to Scott last night.
The next day they took a long walk on the beach. Sarah let the views of the ocean panorama and the sound of the waves calm her down. Scott was right, the indecisiveness was killing her.
She knew she had to be practical . . . but why? To please everybody else? (Somebody always seemed to be less than impressed or pleased, no matter what she did.) Because it was time to be a grown up? (That time had probably come a long time ago.) To have an easier, more secure life than the one that seemed go along with chasing a dream? (Secure, yes, but sold out.)
That night, Sarah was awake at two a.m. again. “Scott, I smell something weird.”
“Not the sort of comment that helps with weekend getaway sex,” he muttered. She could see that he was smiling, though.
“I’m serious! It’s like something is burning, don’t you smell it?”
She had his attention now. “What’s burning?”
“It smells like . . . toast.” And it did. It was as unmistakable as sewage on a hot day.
“Burning toast. Uh-huh. Do you want me to get up and take a look around?”
She could see that his eyes were closed. “No, it’s gone now, anyway. Maybe you can get back to sleep.”
“Thanks, you’re a sweetheart.” He reached out to squeeze her hand, giving her another sleepy smile, and then, rolled over. His rumpled hair and dear, familiar back, took the edge off the sarcasm.
He was asleep in seconds, his breathing like the rumble of distant thunder, but Sarah couldn’t settle. She got up to go to the bathroom. As she turned the corner, she saw a flash of white near the hotel room door.
Opaque, white, rectangular. Fuzzy. About five feet tall, she told Lisa at the front desk, just a few minutes later, after they’d come running down the grand staircase.
She and Scott looked strange, she knew, with resort robes on over their PJs, his gray hair wild and unbrushed, her face pale and drooping, with no makeup. But she’d been in a hurry to get downstairs so that the staff could send someone up right away to investigate. She’d tried the hotel phone but couldn’t get a dial tone, then tried her cell phone and couldn’t get service.
“I think I heard something, too,” Sarah said.
Lisa stared at her, no expression on her face. “Heard what?”
“It was like a moaning, a crying sound. Sad.” Sarah looked past Lisa to the office behind the desk. “Are you going to send someone up to our floor?”
“There is no one here but me,” the young woman said. Sarah could see that she was trying hard to maintain eye contact but she kept glancing toward her computer screen and the hand she had down by her right hip, holding what was probably a phone.
“Maybe we could speak to the manager.” Scott put in.
“It’s nearly three a.m. He comes in at seven.” Lisa surrendered to her addiction, pulled her phone from her pocket, and stared at the screen for a few seconds, her thumb stroking the glass.
“Please let him know we’d like to see him, would you?” Scott said. He put a hand on Sarah’s back, to guide her and to show he was on her side, as they walked toward the elevator that they’d avoided earlier in their race down to the lobby.
The resort was an historic gem, located near the railway line that opened up the area to tourism a century ago. It faced the Atlantic Ocean and almost every room on the five floors had a view that went on for miles. There was a turret at the south end, containing one luxurious room that Sarah had considered booking but the price was quite a bit higher. In the end, she decided to be practical and go for the slightly cheaper room, one floor below. She was regretting that decision now.
When they got back to their room, Scott pushed open the door and they peeked inside. Sarah was unwilling to step over the threshold, so she waited in the corridor while he went in, looked around, then returned.
“It’s fine, Sair. No burning toast smell, no white apparitions. Nobody’s there.”
She grabbed his arm and pointed to the corridor wall, unable to speak. In the space across from their door, there was a rust-colored smear of paint.
“I think it’s an arrow,” Scott said. It seemed to be pointing toward a stairway at the end of the hall.
Really! Sarah couldn’t help herself. In an instant, for some reason, she wasn’t scared at all. She was excited. She might regret it, but she knew that what she felt was delight, not fear.
“Come on!” She took Scott’s hand and headed for the stairs. He was not unwilling, and she would remind him of that later.
The stairs were made of the same lovely wood that had been used throughout the resort, giving the place one more touch of the luxury and high style that could be felt all the way to the deck chairs by the pool and on the beach.
Sarah almost ran up the first set of stairs. Partway up, she saw a smudge of orange-red color. Like paint. Or mud. Or blood.
“It’s another arrow!” Sarah gripped Scott’s arm. “Ssshhh!”
“Why do you want us to whisper?”
“So that we can sneak up on whoever’s there.”
“Nobody’s there, Sarah.”
When they reached the top, she saw that there was just one room on the whole floor. They were in the turret. “I read about this room in the brochure,” Sarah said. “The Turret Room. Some famous general once stayed here. And there was a death in here once—an unhappy wife.
They never did establish how she died.”
“Don’t let your imagination run wild, Sarah,” Scott said. “Ghost stories flourish all over the South like the Spanish Moss on the trees, but that doesn’t mean that any of them are real. Quantity doesn’t equal proof.” He turned back toward the stairs. “I think we should wait till morning. We’ll tell the hotel staff about the paint on the wall then.”
“We tried talking to the hotel staff already,” Sarah said. “I want to go in.”
“It’s probably locked,” Scott said, as he turned the knob.
It was not.
The room was very familiar to Sarah, because of her online research before she’d picked the island and the resort. The bed had a shiny, green silk cover on it, a polished mahogany headboard, and matching night tables. Sarah was no expert but it looked as though they were actually antiques and not just good reproductions.
Shutters opened to the ocean view and the window was raised to full height. A late summer breeze blew through. It wasn’t bad—not worth three hundred dollars a night, though, Sarah thought. She noticed the sixty-inch TV mounted on the wall, looking very out-of-place in this space, surrounded by heavy wood furniture, Tiffany lamps, and prints hung in ornate, gold frames.
Then, on the wall above the bed, she saw more of the same rust-colored paint.
“Scott, look!”
Lady Gardenia cannot sleep
Beneath the words, she saw a scrawl that might have seemed like a signature.
She and Scott backed out of the room, ran down the turret stairs, into the third-floor corridor and out to the grand staircase. If Sarah thought she could get away with sliding down the banister to get there faster, she would have.
She came crashing into the lobby and pulled up in front of the reception desk. Scott was not far behind here. “Lisa!” Sarah inhaled several times, trying to catch her breath and her dignity. “There is a ghost in The Turret Room!”
Lisa just looked at her, not fazed a bit by this information. “What?”
“Writing on the wall in The Turret Room.” Scott took over.
Sarah debated with herself about whether she should add ‘in blood’, then decided against it. Lisa didn’t seem like a fellow adventure-seeker.
“Come and see. No one will miss you here for a few minutes. It’s three o’clock in the morning,” Scott said.
“Writing on the wall?” Lisa repeated. “We should call Housekeeping.”
“There’s nobody else here until seven, you said.”
Lisa muttered something that sounded like “I can’t even”, then picked up a key card on a ring from the desk. The three of them went back up to the top floor, where the door to The Turret Room was now locked. Maybe Scott had pulled it shut and it locked automatically? He denied it but it didn’t matter anyway. Lisa had a pass-key.
Scott and Sarah followed her in. The three of them stood, looking at the bed and the wall above it. There was nothing there.
Sure enough, the wall was clean. The soft yellow wallpaper showed no sign of any writing.
Lisa raised an eyebrow at them. It wasn’t quite rolling her eyes but it might as well have been.
Later that day, as Sarah and Scott walked the beach, they couldn’t talk about anything else but the ghost writing. Scott tried to start a conversation about her career plans but she had the feeling he was going in that direction because he thought that he should. As soon as Sarah changed the subject back, he was right there with her.
“It didn’t look to me like paint,” Scott said. “I’ve seen paint.”
“It might have been blood.”
“It might have been.” Scott steered them closer to the water’s edge and they walked along, watching their bare feet make imprints in the wet sand. “You know, I think I’d like to change rooms.”
“Me, too,” Sarah said. “I was excited about it all last night but thinking about it today, I just would rather be somewhere else.”
“I don’t want to check out,” Scott said. “We prepaid for the room and I hate to waste that money.”
“All right, we won’t go home,” Sarah said. “But we need a different room.”
“But not that Turret Room.”
“Oh, I don’t think they’d try to give us that one,” Sarah said.
But when they consulted with Lamont, the daytime manager, they didn’t have any options. He had nothing available, he said, and nothing would be opening up this weekend. Their choices were to stay in their own room or move up to the room in the tower at the very top.
Lamont seemed to be less interested in their experience than in the hotel’s reputation.
“Please tell me, ma’am, that you’re not going to leave us a bad review about this,” he requested.
“We haven’t thought anything about any reviewing,” Scott replied. “We’re just trying to deal with the fact that there seems to be a ghost here.”
That wasn’t enough assurance for the manager. “You know, to some guests this would be a good thing. An attraction . . . an amenity, even!”
Sarah grinned back at him. “I see your point, but it’s just that we aren’t in that group and we want a different room.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Lamont said, which Sarah understood to mean not right now.
Over lunch at the poolside restaurant, Sarah told Scott that her opinion of the whole experience was changing. “I mean, it is kind of exciting. Once I got past the first few minutes of freaking out, I was really curious about what we’d see. Or hear. Or smell,” she said, sipping her sweet tea.
“What do you want to do?”
“Let’s go take another look. In broad daylight. Lamont offered us that room, let’s tell him we’re thinking about it and get the key.”
They climbed the stairs to the upper floor, and when they opened the door to the corridor, Sarah felt right away that they weren’t alone. The door to The Turret Room was slightly open.
The writing was back. Lady Gardenia will not sleep. And again, there was a signature, with the L and the G more obvious this time.
Sarah got her phone out, a move she’d regretted not making the first time, at three a.m. This time, she would have photos—proof that she wasn’t imagining things.
The news of the haunting of the resort spread like pollen in April. By the time Lamont had seen the photos and Sarah had posted them to her favorite social media sites, most of Georgia was chatting about Lady Gardenia. Once the staff and Sarah’s friends started sharing, thousands of people all over the world were engaged. The photos were retweeted and posted to numerous ghost hunting websites; the hotel’s reservation system got a sudden and dramatic bump.
When Sarah and Scott returned to the hotel after a shopping trip to the village, Lamont was waiting for them. He motioned them toward a small grouping of armchairs in the lobby and as they sat down, one of the servers brought them each a glass of wine.
“My compliments,” Lamont said. “And my thanks.”
“We were a bit concerned you would be annoyed with us,” Scott said. “For going into the room and taking the photos.”
“The phone’s been ringing all afternoon. We’ve got bookings till next February. We haven’t even had a chance to think it through, how we’ll leverage this, but I know we’ll come up with a few things. Maybe a Saint Valentine’s Day “sleep with a ghost” special.”
Scott laughed. “I’m glad everything’s cool.”
“I do have something I’d like to give you, to say thank you for all of the PR you’ve given us and the business it’s brought in. We’d like to give you a free night, as our guests. Covering everything.”
“Parking too?” Scott asked. “Resort fees, maybe?
Free breakfast? A spa day? Maybe a nice meal in one of the restaurants?”
Sarah punched him lightly on the upper arm. “Stop it! Thank you, Lamont, we’d love to stay another two days.”
“All of those things will be covered too, sir.”
“Thank you.”
The next morning, instead of checking out, Scott answered a knock at their door and handed over their bags to a bellhop, ready to take them to their new room. He led them to the end of the hall, up in a service elevator, and stopped in front of the door to The Turret Room.
Sarah was thrilled. Scott was not so sure.
“You know, I think we might just as well go on home,” he suggested.
Sarah had already moved in, unzipping her suitcase, pulling out her toiletries bag, and spreading her things across the dresser top. “But Scott, I want to stay. It’s an adventure.”
“Sair, are you just using this as one more way to avoid making your decision about work?”
“I don’t think so.” She continued into the bathroom and laid out her toothbrush, her moisturizer, and her perfume. She wasn’t that tidy, particularly, but she needed a moment and some space from her husband.
He followed her in. “You know, I don’t care what you decide to do, just that you decide. The indecision is making you miserable. Making us miserable.”
She knew damn well that he cared a lot about what she decided to do and that it wasn’t just the indecision he objected to. “I’ll decide soon, Scott, I will. Just not today. How many times in your life do you cross paths with a ghost? I can’t think about that other, mundane stuff. Not today, not tonight.”
“What’s going to happen tonight?” he asked.
“We’re going to wait up. Plug the phones in, so they’re fully charged. Order some food—it’s going to be a long night.”
He laughed. “Okay, but can we watch the game until eleven or so? I don’t think the ghost will mind.”
She fell asleep before the second half started and Scott had no one to compare notes with when he noticed a man in a uniform cross the room from the bathroom to the door. At first, he told Sarah later, he couldn’t believe his own eyes and he thought he’d imagined something, or somehow transposed something he’d seen on TV over the space just beyond it. But it was a military uniform, not a football uniform, and the man had long sideburns and a moustache, not shoulder-length dreads.
Scott rubbed his eyes a few times, then reached across the couch to try to shake Sarah awake, all the while keeping his eyes on the man.
“What? What is it?” she demanded, and in that instant, the man in the uniform vanished.
They stayed awake the rest of the night, hoping he would reappear. Finally, just after dawn, they went downstairs to tell Lamont the latest.
“I’ve been in touch with some supernatural investigation organizations,” he said. “We’ll have some people here to set up special equipment and keep watch.”
“We’d like to stay another couple of nights,” Sarah said.
Scott stared at her. They hadn’t discussed this.
“Yes, that’s all right,” Lamont said. “The room’s available for a few days, until the ghost-hunters get here, with their equipment. You might never get another chance,” he said to Scott. “That room is going to be so famous . . . ”
Throughout the evening Sarah drank about a quart of coffee and guzzled five shots of a high-energy drink. She refused to allow Scott to put on the TV set, saying that it put her to sleep almost always, and way too fast. She had a good book and he had a magazine; they played music and talked whenever their eyes needed a rest.
About midnight, her determination paid off. The man in uniform was standing near the window. Sarah clutched Scott’s arm and he put a finger up to her lips.
Unnecessary. She couldn’t have spoken even if she’d wanted to. The ghostly soldier crossed the room and stopped just beside the door. She had a feeling he was going to leave and she wasn’t going to let it happen this time. Without any plan, she rushed at him, her arms open—and was absolutely stunned when her hands encountered a human body. He was alive, and if not exactly kicking, he was certainly wiggling and shimmying, trying to get out of her grasp.
“Hold him tight, Sarah!” Scott said as he ran over to his suitcase, then back with two ties he’d brought in case they went out to a fancy dinner. They pushed the man into an armchair and tied down his wrists.
“Okay, let’s hear your story.” Scott was breathing as if he’d just run a marathon, his chest heaving under the track jacket he liked to wear in the evenings. He switched on the overhead lights.
The man in the chair was about forty years old, short, slender, and quite a bit too small for the blue uniform he was wearing. He chewed on the edges of his moustache for a moment, then seemed to exhale, then deflate.
“What the hell, alright. They’re not paying me enough for this kind of crap.”
“Who are you and how did you get into our room?”
“Braden West—say, you’re not in the biz by any chance, are you?” He looked hopefully from Sarah to Scott.
“Producers? Location scouts, maybe? Writers? Nah, not writers, that wouldn’t help.”
The light was dawning for Sarah. “You’re an actor.”
“I am. Here on a break, seeing the folks, when this gig came up.”
“Who hired you?” Scott asked.
“Can’t say,” the actor said, suddenly seeming to realize that he might have said too much already.
“We’re not anything to do with the movie business,” Sarah said. “What kind of actor are you, to be doing this?”
Braden shrugged. “You do what you have to. You make a living.”
“This seems a bit low, faking ghost visitations,” Scott said.
“For gullible tourists,” Braden finished. “Gives a bit of a kick to their vacation, doesn’t it?”
“But it’s not really acting, is it?” Sarah persisted. “It’s just flitting in and out, and fooling people.”
Braden was staring at his shoes. “I did have bigger dreams. But you have to go to New York or L.A. to get anywhere.”
“So, go. What’s stopping you?”
“It’s not that simple. Besides, I can’t seem to make up my mind.”
“Enough of this, Sarah,” Scott said. “I’m calling the manager.”
“Just one more question. Did you do the writing on the wall? Are you Lady Gardenia, too?”
Braden nodded. “Actor. Writer. Set designer.”
“Forger,” Sarah commented.
“Yeah, well, we’re not in your audience anymore,” Scott said as he held open the door for Braden to make his exit.
That night, Sarah and Scott went to bed and to sleep without speaking. The next day, they saw Lamont in the lobby but he denied any knowledge of the fake soldier and the bogus writing.
They also saw Braden West hustling out of the front door, toward a taxi.
Scott stepped in front of him. “We have a few more things to talk about.”
“Not a chance,” Braden said, waving a piece of paper under Scott’s nose. “NDA.”
They watched him take off in the taxi. “NDA?” Sarah asked.
“Non-disclosure agreement. He probably made some money.”
Sarah sighed. “It’s a strange world.”
That night, as they got into bed for their final night at the resort, Sarah said, “It was fun, though, wasn’t it?”
“Sort of,” Scott agreed. “I’m still not sure what I think about it all, though.”
He flipped on the TV set and Sarah pulled the covers up around her ears. Suddenly, she jabbed Scott in the side with her elbow. “Do you smell that? That burning toast?”
“Yeah, this time I do. I hear some kind of scratching sound, too.”
“Where’s it coming from?”
They listened. There was no way to avoid it—the scraping was coming from the wall right behind them.
They froze, clutching each other’s hands. “Don’t turn around, Scott,” Sarah said, in a low, breathy voice.
He shook his head and squeezed hers even tighter. “I won’t, Sarah,” he said.
“Won’t what?” she asked.
Scott didn’t answer for a long, long time. Then he let go of her hands and sat back. “There’s nothing there, anyway.”
They sat out several moments of time frozen, then Sarah made a determined, superhuman effort to overcome the nausea she felt.
“I want to take a look. Don’t you want to look?”
Scott stared at the TV set as intently as a hypnotized two-year-old. “No.”
Sarah sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees. The same feeling of delight and excitement that she’d had a few days before suddenly returned. She didn’t feel fear anymore; she felt safe, in a weird way.
“Well, I’m going to look,” she said. Slowly, she turned and faced the wall behind them.
Lady Gardenia, do not sleep.
‡
©Copyright Gail Hulnick. All rights reserved.