The Cursed Blood, стр. 39
With heebie-jeebies creeping up our spines and hairs rising on our arms and back of our necks we stepped out of the elevator.
“Oh, and Benny?” the elevator man called out with a wheezy unsettling giggle. He seemed to have made up my very own pet name, and just hearing it in that wet warbling voice of his made my flesh crawl as I froze and turned to regard him.
“I’ll give yours and your poor excuse for a Grandfather’s best to your departed parents as soon as I can, okey-doke?” He patted his vest pocket happily which clinked and jingled with each pat.
I honestly couldn’t bring myself to answer, I just stood there with a stupefied, mouth opened look on my face, staring wide eyed over my shoulder at him. Though the elevator man didn’t seem to mind, as he simply smiled his absent skull like smile at me as though he completely understood and giggled.
Then, quite unexpectedly his expression became shadowed and serious, a hint of danger flitting about in his eyes. “And for what it’s worth, you’ve a touch of destiny about you boy-oh. I’ll be keeping an eye on you, a close one me thinks, yes a close one would do nicely. Ta-ta, for now.”
Again, he winked and smiled a smile like I’d never seen before that exuded something old, horribly wrong, tainted, and cold, as with a ding of a bell, the gates to the elevator’s doors creaked loudly closed. Neither of us spoke for a long moment, staring at the tiny downward lit triangle that indicated the old elevator and its unsettling bellhop was plunging back to wherever he had come from.
“Who is he?” I asked in a strangled hush.
“You don’t want to know,” Gramps gasped.
“How do you know him?” I asked, not at all satisfied with the answer I’d been given, as I fixed the elevator with an unsettled gaze unsuccessfully trying to shake the awful feeling of shivery shakes I’d had since I’d stepped into the Reunion Inn.
Gramps shook his head and sighed, a very visible shiver running through him as he stared at the elevators closed doors. “Again Ben, you simply don’t want to know.” That said he waved off any questions as he leaned on the wall, pressing his hand to his chest and breathing heavily. After a moment he seemed to have recuperated, and we took a short walk down the black carpeted hall.
We stopped outside what seemed to be one of the place’s most expensive and lavish suits of rooms, thirty-three boldly displayed in polished gold-plated lettering on the mahogany door.
Gramps inserted the key into the lock and turned it. With a click the door unlocked, and he turned the nob and pushed. It swung in silently and things appeared, well, like how an incredibly expensive vacant hotel room should look, I guess.
No blood or vast destruction, no bodies or howling or groaning from the closet. Everything was just, well, normal, I guess. Turns out that’s a frightfully bad sign for a room known to have “spirit issues” of that magnitude.
“Ben,” Gramps said in a library-like hush. “Touch nothing, do nothing unless I tell you to, and most of all, don’t tell it your name,” he warned seriously. The very moment we crossed the threshold into the finely appointed room, the temperature changed.
It got cold, but oddly it still felt warm, and yet, the cold wasn’t from the temperature. It was something more sinister. Like an evil mist that seeped through clothes, flesh, and bone, leaving us shivering.
“Ah. Good. You’re here. Took you two long enough. I’d been told you would be punctual.” An otherworldly form solidified into a man, or something that looked like a man but had dark empty eye sockets where its eyes should have been.
Whatever it really was, it seemed to have decided to look especially suave for the occasion. It wore tailored trousers, polished loafers, a red dinner jacket, and had its thick black hair slicked neatly back. It even seemed freshly shaved, with a fine masterfully shaped pencil thin mustache along its upper lip that twitched as it poured brandy into a sniffer from the room’s bar. It regarded us with what could only be described as a wickedly contemplative hunger.
“You know, service in this dump is almost as bad as it is in the ether realms. The food is brought in. Screams, begs, cries, and all that nonsense, and I end up having to bore myself chasing after it, and it always dies with not a drop of dignity. Shitting and pissing themselves on the carpet.” It sipped the brandy and smacked its thin, bloodless lips, tisking disapprovingly and shaking its handsome head. “I do hope you two don’t plan on being that predictably pathetic, now do you?”
Gramps just glared at it, horror dawning on his face as his fists balled up tightly. Someone had summoned this monstrous thing here just for us.
Taking our silence as a gentlemanly agreement, it raised the sniffer and toasted us with a cruel, unnatural smile on its lips. “Lovely, now. Which of you wants to die horribly first?”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Gramps sneered back, anger in his tone as he drew a long black bladed dagger from somewhere beneath his flannel and fingered its point. Whatever was haunting the room eyed the knife in Gramps’ hand and arched its manicured eyebrow, smiling a smile that will likely haunt my nightmares for as long as I’ve lived.
“Oooh. Goody. Party favors and spunk.” The thing laughed and finished its sniffers contents and poured itself another. “I am ever so fond of dining theater. It’s a lost art, you know. I applaud you, sir.” Again, he toasted Gramps with the sniffer before tossing it back and emptying it.
“Where