About ten minutes later, Gabriella was back in the halls, hoping against hope for a peaceful last walk around the building. She wanted to go home, but there were at least three more hours until that was going to happen. But at least she wasn’t on until morning this time. The idea of sleeping here again was so deeply unappealing, even before counting the significant ghostly dreams she’d have to deal with on her legally required break. She wanted a hot shower, her own bed, and to water her plants before worrying about any of the things that had happened tonight, including whatever was happening at that meeting James was at.

“Bullshit, no layoffs,” Bradley muttered on the comms as Gabriella walked down the hall, away from the safety of their hotel room and down the stairwell.

“I don’t know,” Amelia said. “I feel like they’ve been pretty strict about trying everything before talking about layoffs. So if McGovern says no layoffs, he’s not lying.”

“No, but he might not have all the information,” Bradley said. “It’s McGovern, he never has all the information.”

“It’s the Nashua thing that worries me,” Graham said, the sound of traffic faintly audible behind him. “I know I haven’t been here as long as you all, but I’ve never seen them assign work outside the territories. Even Gabriella’s mother’s house had to be done by Hillsborough.”

“For all the good it did,” Amelia said. “But I know what you’re saying. And it’s weird. And another thing? For all his forcing us to take care of ourselves, this is going to be James interrupting a triple shift to go to a meeting, then come right back to work after. He needs to rest, or he’s going to crash.”

Gabriella tried to tune them out as she got to the first floor and focused on the hallway around her. She could see a shape in the darkness of the room in front of her and she wanted to ignore it so badly. Instead, she pulled on her night vision goggles and was relieved to find nothing there. At least until she pulled them off, turned, and saw Sarah Morgan standing halfway down the hallway. She looked like she had in the first photo Gabriella had seen, gentle and kind like everyone kept saying. As Gabriella stepped closer, the ghost smiled at her.

“Hello?” Gabriella said.

The talk on the other end of the comms went quiet as she stepped closer. “Mrs. Morgan?”

“Be careful,” Amelia said. “Is it actually her or is it an illusion?”

“I see her too,” Bradley said.

“Ma’am, can you hear me?”

Sarah Morgan smiled at her again, but didn’t answer. Instead, she reached out and gently brushed a frozen finger down Gabriella’s cheek. Gabriella shuddered, then took a sharp breath as love, longing, pride, and joy rushed through her in uneven flows. She trembled with cold and emotion as Sarah stood in front of her, unblinking but smiling.

“You still see her, right?” she whispered.

“Yeah,” Bradley said.

And then Sarah was gone, and Gabriella was left with the urge to cry. Underneath all of that was a sadness and something deep and fierce that she couldn’t identify. All she knew was that it wasn’t hers.

Trying to set it aside, she kept walking, passing the portrait of Herbert Morgan. As she walked, the hallway gradually got colder. The doors to all the rooms were open now, some flung open wide while others creaked slowly on their hinges. She caught glimpses of horror in the rooms as she passed, blood trickling from one and staining the gold and red hall carpet just beyond. Beyond another door, a human-shaped shadow swayed from side to side, hanging in the window as the glow from the parking lot flood light sending its shadow over the floor. A vase flew out of the next open door and Gabriella ducked before it came too close. It shattered against the wall, but none of the fragments actually landed when they fell to the floor.

These were all illusions, but Sarah Morgan’s spirit certainly hadn’t been.

“Should I try to talk to her?” she asked Amelia as she passed another darkened doorway, this time emanating an unearthly hum she could feel in her back molars. It was gone even before she’d reached the next door.

There was silence on the other end of the comms as she kept walking. “Amelia? Should I try talking to her? She didn’t feel angry when I saw her a few minutes ago, just so in love and desperately unhappy. It has to be her and somehow she’s anchored to the house. So she’s pulling her strength from it and…Amelia?”

There was still nothing from Amelia. Gabriella had to hope it was another broken comm and fought the urge to pull it off her chest and toss it into the next room she passed. She took out her phone and dialed, but the call didn’t connect. And as she lowered it from her ear, she realized that she should have reached the stairwell by now.

“Shit,” she muttered. “Bradley, can you hear me?”

There was a crackle of something along the line. “Yeah,” he said, breaking through the noise. “Barely.”

“I think it’s time-bending again.”

“Of course it fucking is,” he muttered.

“I’m fine, I’ll start walking downward again,” she said, ignoring her racing heart. “But I can’t reach Amelia and this place is getting seriously messed up.”

“I’ll get her on…” His voice faded out into a crackle of static.

Gabriella started walking, counting door numbers as she went and trying not to look inside any of them. But before she heard anything back from Bradley – whether because he hadn’t reached Amelia yet or because Gabriella was disconnected from them all yet again – she saw Sarah Morgan ahead of her.

“Sarah,” she called, holding her EMF detector and hoping the readings were going through to Headquarters. “Sarah, do you need our help? How can we help you?”

The image flickered out and from the corner of her eye, she could see blood oozing from beneath a nearly closed door. “Sarah, we’re here to help you,” Gabriella continued as she walked a little faster. “How can we help you move on?”

A scream warbled through the hall, muffled and otherworldly. “Keep walking,” she muttered to herself as she sped up.

She was in the low teens now, though that didn’t mean she’d be out of this as soon as she hit Room One.

“Sarah Morgan!” Gabriella called. “Can you hear me? We want to help you! I know you love this place and I also know you’re in pain. How can I help you to move on?”

And then Sarah was there again, her hair neatly pinned on her head and her blue dress neat and clean. She reached for Gabriella, who ducked her hand this time. But Sarah didn’t get angry. Instead, she just shook her head sadly and vanished again as something crashed behind a door to Gabriella’s left.

“Did you hear that?” she asked over the speaker, hoping either of the others were there.

“No.”

It was Graham on the line with her now. “Graham?” Gabriella said as she kept walking, the rooms now in the Two-Twenties for no discernable reason. “Are you back at Headquarters?”

“No,” Graham answered. “I’m on my way back. Are you there? Is something wrong?”

“I’m still at the Wildwood,” Gabriella said, talking quickly as the line started to crackle. “I’m in another time bend. I talked to Bradley, but I don’t know how long ago it was and I don’t know how you and I are talking right now.”

“Hang on, I’ll call hi-hang on.”

She couldn’t hear anything for a second. “Did you hear him on the comms just then?” Graham asked.

“No.”

“I can hear you perfectly and I can hear him, but he says he can’t…alright, he says it’s only been three minutes on his end since you cut out. He’ll try to reach you again. Want me to stay on the line?”

She was about to tell him to hang up, but then she’d be alone in here. And the scent of the forest floor was gradually replacing the sickly smell of old blood. “I was alone out there,” she said, stopping where she was and letting the hand holding the EMF monitor fall to her side.

“What?”

“In the woods. I messed up, and I was alone.”

“Hey, it’s alright.”

Graham was so gentle that Gabriella was embarrassed to have said anything at all. “I’ll stay on the line,” he said.

She kept walking down the hall, now passing Two-Nineteen. “I can hear Gabriella,” she heard Graham say. “Can you?”

“I’m still here,” she said. “I’m trying to walk toward Room One and it sent me back into the Two-Twenties twice.”

“Gabriella, what’s happening in the rooms around you?” Bradley asked, his voice crackling, but solid over the line.

“The doors are closed.”

“All of them?” Now Amelia was back too.

“Yeah.”

“Can you open one?”

“Do I have to?”

Amelia laughed. “Just a crack.”

Gabriella stopped in front of her third rotation of Two Twenty-Five. She swallowed hard, not wanting to show her fear to whatever was here with her. But it was almost a relief as she opened the door and the scent of old blood replaced soil and leaves.

There was a severed head in the center of the neatly made bed, the beam of light from the hallway falling perfectly across it. A man’s head, with blood running from the mouth. As she shone her flashlight around the room, she could see other body parts too, hands and legs and innards scattered over an otherwise charming hotel room. A rope of intestines hung over the corner of a framed painting of nearby Mount Wachusett and she swallowed down her nausea, breathing heavily.

“Whatever you’re seeing is an illusion,” Bradley supplied over the line.

“Thank God,” she muttered. “Sarah, are you here? This needs to stop, we’re here to help you.”

She was just repeating herself now, wasn’t she? “Sarah, why is this happening?” she asked, her eyes still locked on the bloody head on the bed. “Is there something haunting you? Some kind of force that’s doing these things?”

There was silence in response to her question. Nobody else was in the room and she blinked, hoping the illusion would disappear. It didn’t, so she backed out and went into the endless hallway.

“Sarah Morgan, I’m trapped in your funhouse!” Gabriella finally snapped, trudging in what should have been the right direction. “I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I need to pee. So please just answer me or let me out so that me and my boss can help you together!”

She waited for the comments, but none came from either her coworkers or the ghost. She stopped in front of an open door. The room looked completely ordinary for once, but she could see Sarah in the corner now that her eyes had adjusted slightly to the darkness. Her mouth was open in a scream and the front of her dress was soaked in blood.

“Amelia, I don’t think this is a separate entity,” she said as she looked at the energy reader.

“What makes you think that?” Amelia asked.

“She keeps appearing and some of the places where she’s showing up are so violent. I know you felt it too. The violence is an illusion, but this is the spirit. And…it’s hard to explain. But there’s a feeling, like an energy around her. Even when there isn’t an illusion of murder, it’s like…she’s angry. She’s so sweet on the surface and when she touched me, I could feel her love. All of that is real.”

She looked at Sarah, who was still visible in her gore-soaked dress, her eyes tracking Gabriella as she backed away. “But she’s mad too, it’s deep underneath. Maybe it’s buried there, like she had all this anger and hatred inside her too and it didn’t have a way out before this.”

She stepped out of the room, her eyes on Sarah until she closed the door. “I’m going to keep going,” she said. “Amelia, it’s her, it has to be her. She loved this place, but there was so much sadness in her life. She’s haunting this place, but not the same way as, like, the Jarvis Street ghost. If she was the center of poltergeist activity in her past, then of course it was going to manifest again later. It drew from her energy in life, so in death it’s drawing energy from somewhere else.”

“The lights,” Amelia said suddenly. “The electrical issues. She’s pulling from the grid, of course.”

“And she’s so protective of the hotel, but then why is she trashing it?”

Gabriella kept walking, her mind churning over the information as she went. “It’s old electric work, not thoroughly modernized,” she said. “They still have some active knob and tube wiring in there. So the fact that they need to update the electric hid that, especially if no one knew about the poltergeist activity from when she was a kid. They would just assume it was the wiring. There was no way to connect Father McEnerney’s blessing with this case before now because nothing is ever cataloged correctly.”

“I can’t work miracles,” Bradley said.

“I didn’t mean at our branch.”

This felt good, it felt right despite where she was. She might be trapped in a time manipulation with an endless hallway filled with haunted illusions, but she was finally putting the pieces together.

“She died first,” Gabriella said. “And she would have left behind everything she knew. Her home, her husband, her whole life was here. So she stayed. I mean, who knows what he might have done if Sarah wasn’t here to protect the hotel, right? He could have torn it down. Or sold it. Wasn’t that the only time she stood up to him, when he wanted to sell? So of course she stayed to protect her hotel. She loves the place, and she’s so angry. It doesn’t matter that she wasn’t sealed in because she can’t leave anyway. She trapped herself here with her love and her anger. What do you think, Amelia?”

There was no answer. “Shit,” Gabriella muttered as she passed Room Two-Nineteen.

“If she wasn’t trapped here by outside forces, then she wouldn’t degrade like the ghost at the Jarvis Street School,” she said to herself and anyone else who might be listening, maybe even Sarah Morgan herself. “It was the imprisonment that did that last time. But what if…what if she loved and hated her life in equal measure? What if she was so attached to it that she wasn’t going to let go? But she also couldn’t let it go, even if she wanted to. So she stays and stews and resents and hates. And all of that stayed here too, long after Herbert’s death, along with the love. She couldn’t let go of her love for this hotel and her life that revolved around it completely, so she couldn’t let go of the anger either. That’s what’s trapping her here, nothing outside of her. This time bend, this fucking, stupid…” Gabriella let out a slow breath as she looked at the endless line of rooms ahead of her. “It has to be a manifestation of that. If we can help her let go, then she can move on and the activity will stop.”

Hopefully this was recording to Bradley’s computer, even if he couldn’t hear her. She was going to need to remember it all when she got out of this time bend and they could actually make a plan. Gabriella passed Two-Nineteen for a second time, the stained glass windows on the other side of the wall showing only darkness outside. It was late, probably coming up to eleven where time actually had meaning. If they decided what to do around midnight, maybe they could even get it done tonight after all.

Something flew out of an open doorway, narrowly missing her head. It shattered against the wall. “Sarah!” Gabriella exclaimed.

“Gabriella?”

It was Graham again. “Graham, can you see me on the screen?” she asked.

“I’m stuck in traffic,” he replied. “You’re coming through on my comm, I still have it turned on. I should be at the house any minute, but there’s a water main break and they’re redirecting us. And there’s so much traffic for this late at night.”

Two-Fourteen. Two-Thirteen.

The chill that came over Gabriella had her scrambling for her holy water. The brooch pinned to her baggy t-shirt provided some protection, but the fury here felt like it could just melt the jewelry right off of her chest.

The darkened window beside her exploded, glass shards flying out at her just as she turned to pull the small vial out of her pocket. As Gabriella looked up to see what was happening, a searing pain shot across her cheekbone, down toward her mouth. And this time, the hot blood that began pouring from the wound was very real.

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CONTINUE TO CHAPTER 13