Trapped in Room 217 Read online

  Jayla sucked in her breath and waited. Everything was completely still. She strained to hear something—anything. All was quiet until—

  Footsteps again. Something was walking around in the dark with them.

  And it was getting closer.

  “I hear that,” Dion whispered, practically in tears. “Someone is walking toward us. What are we going to do?”

  Jayla touched the knob again. It could lead to an exit or it could open to something unpleasant. She thought of the ghost maid in their room and realized doors meant nothing to the supernatural.

  “It’s getting closer,” Dion said again. He pressed himself up against his older sister until they were both mashed up against the rough carved wall of the dark tunnel.

  Jayla listened to the sound. There was another footstep, then another. Each one was closer than the last. There was no way to deny it. Whatever was down there with them was getting closer with every step.

  Just then, the doorknob started to rattle.

  “Dion?” Jayla asked, in a frantic whisper. “Are you touching the doorknob?”

  “No,” Dion said. “I’m covering my eyes with my hands!”

  “What?” she cried. “Why? It’s already dark.”

  “I just am, okay?”

  Jayla inched away from the door, guiding her brother with her. Something was on the other side of the door trying to come out and something else was coming their way. As much as she hated to admit it, it felt like they were trapped.

  The knob continued to rattle as Jayla looked toward what she hoped was the other end of the hallway. A bright round light appeared in the dark, making her squint. She didn’t know if it was a spirit orb like they sometimes showed on TV or something else entirely. With her eyes adjusted to the dark, she couldn’t see anything for a moment.

  With every step, the light got closer and brighter. Jayla opened her mouth to scream, but Dion beat her to it. His small voice echoed through the dark passageways.

  “Hey, hey,” a kind, older voice called in the dark. “No need to shout, young man!”

  Dion stopped and Jayla held onto his shoulders to protect him. She could feel her brother tremble with fear.

  “Who’s there?” Jayla called into the darkness. She was afraid of what the answer might be and even more afraid there would be no answer at all.

  The light turned and illuminated an old face. It looked like a disembodied head, floating in the pitch black.

  “Whoa,” Dion cried. “What are you?”

  “Oh, come on,” the voice replied. “I know I’m not pretty, but I’m not that scary looking! I’m Reuben. I’m the head caretaker of The Stanley Hotel.”

  “You’re not some sort of monster?” Dion asked. Jayla cringed as soon as he said it.

  “Oh, no,” Reuben replied. “I’m not anything of the sort. Just an old guy who helps take care of this place. But who, might I ask, are you?”

  “I’m Jayla and this is my brother, Dion,” she said. She didn’t like to tell anyone too much about themselves but didn’t feel like there was much choice. “We’re visiting from Chicago with our dad.”

  Reuben moved the light away from his face a little, which made his big nose and deep wrinkles look less frightening.

  “Nice to meet you two,” Reuben said. He didn’t seem upset that they were somewhere they shouldn’t be, and not nearly as scary as anything they’d seen in the past day.

  “Can you get us out of here?” Dion asked.

  Reuben reached out his hand for Dion to take.

  “That’s why I’m here,” Reuben said. “You two shouldn’t be down here in the first place. Not unless you’re on a tour.”

  “Okay,” Jayla said. “Sorry. We didn’t know.”

  “I tried to tell her,” Dion said.

  Jayla shot Dion an icy look.

  Dion put his small hand in Reuben’s. Jayla held onto her brother and let the old man guide them through the dark corridors, using only the beam of his flashlight to guide the way. In time, they reached the wooden staircase that they’d descended what felt like hours ago.

  All three of them climbed up and exited into the bright hallway near where the tour groups gathered. An old black-and-white picture of the hotel hung on the wall next to them. In it, The Stanley looked old, empty, and foreboding. There were a few almost faceless figures walking around the front of the enormous hotel.

  In the light, Jayla got a better look at the caretaker. He was wearing a dark green jumpsuit with his name embroidered over his left chest pocket. A worn leather tool belt hung around his waist. Reuben had a long beard, speckled with white and black hairs. He was mostly bald, except for the horseshoe of hair circling the back of his head. His bright brown eyes looked kind and wise, as if he knew plenty of things worth knowing.

  “Thanks for your help,” Jayla said. “We’d be down there the rest of the week if you hadn’t come along.”

  “It’s no problem,” Reuben said. “And I’m sorry if I scared the two of you.”

  “Everything about this hotel is scary,” Dion blurted. “Our room is haunted too.”

  “Is that right?” Reuben replied. “Are you in Room 217 by chance?”

  Hearing their room number startled Jayla. She let out a small gasp.

  The old guy just nodded and sighed. “Can you tell me what’s happened in your room?” he asked.

  “Well, okay,” Jayla said. “Last night while we were sleeping, it got really cold, almost like someone left the window open. When I opened my eyes, I could see a woman walking toward me.”

  “Let me guess,” Reuben said, sliding his flashlight into his utility belt. “The woman was wearing a maid’s uniform? Like something out of the olden days?”

  “Yes!” Dion cried. “That’s exactly it. She was messing with the wall before she turned around and left, I think. That’s what Jayla said, anyway. I didn’t see it all because I hid under the blankets until she was gone.”

  Reuben nodded and scratched the side of his beard a few times.

  “The Stanley Hotel has a history of ghosts and strange things happening,” the caretaker replied. “People who love spooky stuff come from all over the world to try and see what the two of you have seen. There have been paranormal investigators from TV shows, writers, and even thrill seekers who just loved to try and scare themselves.”

  “Those people sound nuts,” Dion said matter-of-factly.

  “Maybe,” Reuben said. “But it’s been part of this hotel for a very long time. Something about this place draws the living and the dead to it.”

  Jayla shuddered. The idea that a hotel could draw ghosts and other creepy things to it made her blood turn cold. From the sounds of it, there was more than one ghost inhabiting the halls, rooms, and underground tunnels of The Stanley Hotel.

  “We heard voices and laughing in the tunnels,” Jayla said. “I wasn’t sure if that was the ghost from our room following us or what was going on. I think it drained my phone so that we couldn’t see anything.”

  “Yeah,” Dion said. “And we found an old door somewhere down there. Whatever else was hanging out there in the darkness was laughing at us. It even made the doorknob we were standing next to rattle and shake like it wanted to get out.”

  Reuben shook his head knowingly as he closed the door to the tunnel.

  “What was behind that door?” Jayla asked. “We thought about opening it, hoping it would lead us out of the tunnels.”

  “Just an old maintenance closet,” Reuben said. “And I’m not sure what happened down there with the lights. I don’t think any of the spirits meant to harm or scare you. I do know one thing though. I’m positive that whatever was down there with the two of you wasn’t Elizabeth.”

  Jayla and Dion stood silent for a moment. “Who is Elizabeth?” Jayla finally managed.

  “The ghost in
Room 217,” Reuben said. “Her name is Elizabeth.”

  Chapter 6

  A Maid’s Work is Never Done

  “So the ghost has a name,” Jayla whispered. “How do you know that?”

  There was a squawking sound from Reuben’s belt. He held up a finger before he reached behind and pulled a walkie-talkie from a clip behind his back.

  “Go ahead, Jack,” Reuben said and waited for a reply.

  Jayla turned to her brother and saw that Dion’s face was almost frozen in fascination. They weren’t going crazy. There was a ghost in their room and she had a name. There were a million questions Jayla had for the old caretaker. If anyone knew the answers, it was Reuben!

  “Okay,” Reuben said into the mouthpiece. “I’ll be there in a few.”

  “Hurry, man,” Jack said on the other end. “Everything is getting wet.”

  The walkie-talkie had blue tape around the end of the floppy antenna, and it looked like it had seen better days. Jayla watched as Reuben clipped it back onto his belt.

  “I don’t know what these guys are going to do when I retire,” Reuben said. “You’d think something as simple as a burst pipe in the music hall was the end of the world or something.”

  The old guy turned to walk away, and Jayla saw her chance to get answers quickly slip out of her grasp.

  “Just one more second, please,” Jayla pleaded. “What can you tell me about Elizabeth?”

  Reuben stopped for a moment, but she saw he was eager to get to where he was going. He looked down the hall, but turned back.

  “Her name was Elizabeth Wilson and she was a maid here at the hotel back in the early 1900s,” Reuben said. “There was a storm and an accident and she—”

  “Are you on your way?” Jack cried through the walkie-talkie. “It’s pretty bad, man!”

  “Look,” the caretaker said to Jayla and Dion. “I’m really sorry. I need to get over there to take care of this. I don’t move as fast as I used to.”

  Reuben started to walk away, when Dion spoke up.

  “Is Elizabeth going to hurt us?” he asked.

  “Not a chance,” Reuben replied. “She just does her thing and has never hurt a single soul.”

  Something about the way Reuben said “soul” made Jayla shudder. Before they could ask him anything else, he disappeared down the polished hallway, heading deeper into the hotel.

  “Nice guy,” Dion said, staring off down the corridor.

  “Right, but could this place be any creepier?” Jayla replied.

  She looked up at some of the old framed photographs on the wall. People from decades ago looked back at her with empty stares. Suddenly, every old-time face she saw seemed a little more frightening to her.

  Was Elizabeth Wilson one of the faces in the pictures? Jayla wondered. She blinked and shook it off. There was no way she was going to let stories of ghosts and creepy tunnels get the better of her. Besides, Reuben said Elizabeth would never hurt a soul.

  But would she hurt a living person? Before they were nothing more than a soul?

  Jayla knew she was probably overthinking the whole thing. She sometimes took people way too literally.

  “So what are we supposed to do?” Dion asked.

  “For one thing, let’s stay out of the tunnels,” Jayla said, smacking her little brother on the shoulder. “I’m supposed to be taking care of you while Dad’s working.”

  “Hey,” Dion said. “The tunnels were your idea!”

  Jayla shrugged and nodded. Being lost in the dark and scared out of her wits took a lot out of her. She wasn’t sure what else they could do, so she thought it would be best if they headed back to the room.

  “We should probably do our homework anyway,” Jayla said.

  “I don’t have any homework,” Dion said. “I’m seven.”

  “Then you can read one of your eight thousand books. Let’s just stay out of trouble for a few hours,” Jayla said. “Before anyone else finds out we were in those dumb tunnels.”

  __________________

  A few hours passed. Dion was stretched out on their dad’s cot, reading Adventures of Robot Randy, while Jayla laid on their messed-up bed, struggling with her math homework. She’d been given her last test to correct and review. Her math teacher, Mr. Pullman, thought she could do better than a C-minus. Jayla wasn’t so sure.

  As she flipped over to the last page, Jayla groaned. It looked like nothing but red marks and a complete nightmare. She wasn’t sure which was scarier, having a ghost in her hotel room or knowing she had many more years of math homework ahead of her.

  Feeling discouraged and distracted, Jayla picked up her freshly charged smartphone and opened up the web browser. She glanced over at Dion, who was lost in the little robot’s adventures, and went back to her phone.

  She typed “ghosts Stanley Hotel” into the search engine and waited for the two seconds it took to find something.

  There were more than three hundred thousand results.

  “Holy cow,” Jayla whispered, scrolling down and reading the top several lines of the first few entries. There were pictures and stories, by people who had stayed at the hotel, posting about what they’d seen.

  She opened some of the pictures and saw people with photo-flash-washed faces. Near them were little balls of light they called “orbs.” Jayla squinted and zoomed in on the images, trying to see what the big deal was. She wasn’t sure why they were so excited to see little colored circles on their photos.

  You should see what I saw, Jayla thought, opening another link.

  In the article was a picture of a bunch of people sitting around a window near some fancy-looking stairs. There were a few blurry, smudge-like figures on the steps. One of them looked like a little girl watching the people.

  “This place is infested,” Jayla whispered.

  “With bugs?” Dion asked, not taking his eyes off his book.

  “No,” Jayla replied. “Just . . . never mind.”

  Realizing she wasn’t going to find what she was looking for, Jayla tried another search thread. This time she typed “Stanley Hotel Elizabeth Wilson.”

  What appeared made her gasp. The links that popped up mentioned the name that Reuben the caretaker had given them. They also contained their room number, 217. The old guy wasn’t just messing around, trying to creep them out.

  Is this the only room she haunts? Jayla wondered and quickly looked up from her phone.

  She peered at the bathroom and the door leading out into the hallway. There was nothing weird about either of them, but she thought the moment she looked away, the ghostly maid might show up.

  Almost afraid of what she’d find, Jayla opened the first article. There was a story about something that took place one night at the hotel in the early 1900s and what happened to Elizabeth. Though it was likely going to keep her awake all night, Jayla scrolled down and read the entire story, shaking her head the entire time. She couldn’t believe what she was reading.

  “What are you doing?” Dion asked. His copy of Randy was closed and his bookmark was in his hand. It was the universal sign that her little brother had finished yet another one.

  “I found out what happened to Elizabeth,” Jayla said, wondering if she ought to say anything else.

  “Tell me,” Dion said. He tossed down his book and jumped onto the bed.

  “Back in 1911, the power went out in the hotel,” Jayla said.

  “They had power back then?” Dion asked.

  “I guess so,” Jayla replied, but shook her head. “But be quiet so I can tell you.”

  “Fine, okay,” Dion said.

  “While all the rich people were downstairs eating and dancing and everything, they had maids come up and light the gas lamps that were in each of the rooms,” Jayla said, skimming the article again. “They were there as a back-up in case the hot
el lost power.”

  Dion was quiet, as instructed. Jayla could tell by looking at his face that he was preparing for the worst.

  “So there was a gas leak in our room at the time that no one knew about. When Elizabeth came in with her candle to light the lamp, there was a huge explosion,” Jayla explained.

  “It killed her?” Dion asked, looking up at his sister. His eyes were unblinking and serious.

  “Actually,” Jayla said. “It didn’t. The explosion blew her down to the first floor. She ended up in the dining room below our room.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I know,” Jayla said. “The explosion destroyed around ten percent of the hotel. But Elizabeth? She only ended up with two broken ankles and some minor burns.”

  “That’s crazy,” Dion said. “She must’ve been part superhero or something.”

  Jayla explained that Freelan Oscar Stanley, the owner and namesake of the hotel, paid for all her hospital bills, and when Elizabeth was healed up, she was made head chambermaid.

  “Mr. Stanley told her she could have a job at the hotel for life. And she worked here pretty much until she died,” Jayla said, reading the bottom of the article. “And they said that’s when her ghost started to appear.”

  “Why is she still here?” Dion asked. “You think she really liked working at the hotel? I would’ve quit after getting blasted through a hole in the floor.”

  Jayla shrugged. It didn’t make sense. She wasn’t sure exactly what happened after you died, but she didn’t think being trapped in Room 217 sounded right.

  Why was Elizabeth still here?

  She put her phone down and saw Dion staring off toward the bathroom door. He looked like he was in deep thought. Jayla started to worry that she’d completely traumatized the kid. He tilted his head and squinted.

  “I don’t remember hanging up our towels,” he said suddenly.

  “What are you talking about?” Jayla asked.

  Dion pointed to the bathroom, then scrambled off the bed as if following his own finger.

  “When we took showers this morning, we just threw the towels on the floor,” Dion said.