Room 201. The Scarlet Room.
Three girls, linked arm in arm, entered the Broken Hill Hotel in a fit of forced, nervous giggles and high pitched, faked joy. They were all just shy of their twentieth birthdays and though there was that latent, teenager immaturity lurking within their heightened excitement, it wasn’t completely unwelcome in the sparse, clinical liminal space that was the hotel’s front foyer. Candace, the night desk clerk, eyed the girls with the suspicion of a hired guard, every move they made catalogued with judgemental pique and noted in a thick, personal chart she kept inside of her brain. This chart held significant information on every guest who visited the hotel.
Candace was damned serious about her job.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t appreciate a bit of fun, even if her blank countenance refused to show it.
When she spoke, she barely moved, as though she was made of glass: “Do you have a reservation?”
The girl on the left wore a black, fringed leather jacket that hadn’t been cool since 1985 and Candace wondered if she’d stolen it from her mother’s Gen X closet. Long, well manicured nails painted black framed her cell phone as she held it up revealing the QCode. Her name was Heather.
Figures.
Candace set her smooth, perfectly pale fingers clacking on the keyboard as she took all their names and added small hidden notes for herself that resembled markdown instructions.
TY Dr DF. Too Young, Drinkers, Drunk Friend.
LF.
An afterthought. Leather Fringe.
“Can we get a room on the ground floor?” the girl on the far right asked, her long red hair ironed razor straight. She was also wearing a jacket, an acid wash denim number , with a silk purple blouse underneath and a pewter goat’s head at her neck on a bulky silver chain that clashed with it. A not so subtle symbol of witchcraft. Candace had to fight the urge to roll her eyes. Great, a trio of *those* girls.
“Room 201, the Scarlet Room,” Candace stated, happy to disappoint. “It’s what you booked for the discounted price, there’s nothing on the first floor available.”
The girls didn’t care about the slight dig, and the girl named Heather and the other girl, Naomi, pressed tight against their friend in the middle, who hadn’t yet said a word and looked, to Candace, to definitely be under the influence of a mind altering substance.
She added the note to their reservation. TB. Tripping Balls.
Their messed up friend scratched at her throat. She was the most underdressed of the three, her thin body tucked into a long, dark blue sundress that had mudstains on the hem. There were thick scratch marks at her neck and chest. “My throat hurts.”
The two girls exchanged frightened glances, which Candace mentally noted, annotated and placed in her mental file. On their receipt she added: DC. Damage Control. She wouldn’t waste her time with Amy, who could barely get through a simple laundering shift without crying. She’d make sure they’d get a visit from Gladys the head housekeeper in a couple of hours. That was plenty of time to figure out just how much of a pile of trouble this trio was going to be. It was already late, and a gaggle of druggies weren’t going to cause any commotion on her watch. Especially not now, when she was due for her mid shift nap.
~*~
The Scarlet Room was so named not after the colour but after Gone With The Wind, the interior a ridiculous exaggeration of the Union South in the southern States, the history not only imperfect but steeped in a weird celebration of racist imagery. There were black dolls dressed in colourful rags, a heavily brocaded rose curtain and, much to anyone with taste’s horror, a framed Union Jack with a picture of Hattie McDaniel pasted in the centre of it. Was the art piece supposed to be ironic? Heather found it gross.
“My neck hurts,” Vanessa complained.
Heather ignored her and unceremoniously plunked her into a wicker chair that had corn dolls woven into the base in a neat circle. Vanessa collapsed into it like a leaking bean bag. She sat at an odd angle, her limbs bending the wrong way.
“Is it going to work?”
Naomi answered Heather’s question with a shrug. “I think as long as we keep the window open it will be fine. You can’t have anything blocking the energy, not even a screen.” She poked at the window screen with a well manicured nail, done in exactly the same style as Heather’s, only the colour was different, a deep, congealed blood red, long and curved. “Aluminum. There’s rust in the edges which adds a small amount of iron. Help me get this out of the window, it will block us for sure.”
They hadn’t paid a damage deposit, but Heather didn’t care. She found a butter knife in the drawer of the kitchenette, along with molasses and an old Aunt Jemima dispenser that was definitely *not* politically correct. Who the hell designed this room, the KKK?
She had to bend the frame of the screen to get it out, but she could already feel the rush of power the night contained the second she set the opening free and the black moon’s energy seeped into the room unencumbered. Naomi was already arranging and lighting candles, contrasts of black and silver, six in all. She lifted up the cornrow rug at the base of the bed and pushed aside the small breakfast table, leaving a reasonable amount of space to create the pentagram. She took her blessed salt out of her backpack and, with steady hands that Heather had always admired, she created a perfect circle. Two equally balanced triangles, one inverted over the other, completed her pentagram. At every crosspoint she placed a small, blue stone. Sapphire, for purification of purpose.
They were not going to accidentally send Vanessa to hell.
With the ritual items in place, Heather finally felt like she could breathe. She collapsed onto the edge of the bed, half expecting it to be stuffed with either feather down or straw, depending on whose Union State room this place was supposed to represent.
“We have to get her in front of the window,” Heather noted, and Naomi was already on the other side of the wicker chair, Vanessa lolling within it as they shifted it in a more central and closer position beneath the black moon’s limited light.
Naomi tapped her long, clawlike nails on the back of Vanessa’s chair. Vanessa scratched at her throat, the wounds she created starting to bleed. “Do you think we’ll have to wait until midnight or can we start earlier?”
“It needs to be dark enough,” Heather said. She sprinkled orange essence over herself, hoping the citrus would be an effective barrier. Naomi preferred to use patchouli, which Heather considered overkill. They left Vanessa unadorned. They needed her to absorb as much of what was thrown at her as possible.
“I say we start later, maybe at 1:00.”
Naomi scoffed. “Night is night.”
Vanessa scratched and scratched. “My neck hurts.”
“You know as well I do that’s not true, one minute before midnight can nullify the spell and then what do we do? The next black moon won’t be around for years, do you want to babysit her in this state until then?” Naomi shuddered as she looked on Vanessa and the way she kept cracking her neck back and forth, as though she was determined to take her head clean off and reposition it better. Maybe she was.
“I’m just saying for convenience’s sake…”
“Convenience is sloppy. We do it at 00:10, not a second before or after.” She lit an orange candle on the kitchenette counter and then hastily blew out the flame. “It’s your fault we’re in this mess.”
“I wasn’t the one who called her up with the Ouija board. I also wasn’t the one who suggested we go to her fresh grave and dig her up, to make sure she wasn’t trapped in there.”
“She was,” Naomi reminded her.
Heather let out a low curse. “You just had to try it.”
There was a knock at the door and Naomi and Heather froze.
“Hello,” a terse voice announced. “Housekeeping.”
“We’re busy,” Naomi shot back. “Come back later.”
“I cannot. I have to bring towels.”
Before they could stop her the housekeeper used her FOB and let herself in, brandishing a handful of white towels that she held carelessly in her grip. She did not have her cleaning cart waiting behind her as she walked into the room. Her gaze, rimmed in thick kohl and dark grey eyeshadow, took in the candles, the pentagram on the floor and the open window before Vanessa, who was still slumped in her seat. She sighed and tossed the white towels onto the top of the bed.
“You girls, you’re all the same. You really made a mess didn’t you?”
What was that accent? Romanian? Russian?
She had a lot of nerve coming in here judging what they had to do…
“What was it? You killed a boyfriend who was cheating by mistake, sent his soul to hell and now you want to fix it? Hex an enemy and now her angry spirit is seeking revenge?” She poked at Vanessa’s shoulder with a bony finger. She remained sitting at an odd angle in her chair. The housekeeper sighed sadly over Vanessa’s state, her cruel, judgmental stance full of questions.
“My neck hurts,” Vanessa told her.
“What the fuck?” Heather railed on the housekeeper, grabbing her by the shoulder and forcing her to face her. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
The older woman focused Heather, who felt a strong invisible force shove her back, though the woman never touched her. She stumbled and fell onto the white towels, which twisted of their own accord into the shapes of giraffes and fish. “I am a sorceress of the Dawn’s Heretic Order, Fourth Chalice and you, you little upstart, aren’t even an acolyte!”
Heather stared at her.
“And you work as a housekeeper?”
“Sister Gladys,” the housekeeper said, outstretching her hand and revealing the long, black nails she sported as Heather sat up with her grasp. She shrugged. “I like the location and the work is easy. We all need a side hustle.”
“We met Vanessa at the Bata Store,” Naomi reminded Heather, who scoffed at the memory.
“Ah, yes, Vanessa.” Gladys turned her attention back on the dizzy girl in the chair. “Is this why you are all here? Did you put a sleeping spell on her?” Gladys smirked when she put her hand on Vanessa’s shoulder, only to recoil in horror, holding her fingers as though they were frostbitten. She wrung her hands together to wrench the horrible sensation off. She turned on the two girls. “Dear God, what have you done?”
Naomi and Heather exchanged glances. Heather bit her thumbnail, chipping her blood red nail polish.
“She was part of our coven,” Heather explained.
“We should have known but she never said anything,” Naomi quickly added. “I mean, she seemed so happy, it still doesn’t make sense.”
“We loved her more than our family. I mean, she is our family. You’d think she’d confide in us, the people who cared the most and yet…”
“My neck hurts.”
“Oh shut the fuck up, Vanessa.”
Gladys inspected the thin line piecing the flesh tightly together at the girl’s throat. “I can’t believe you managed to do this. I have been working on this spell for most of my sorcery career and have never had success. What is your secret?” She watched the empty way Vanessa sat in the chair, like an understuffed animaguri. “Then again…There’s something important missing.”
“Her soul,” Naomi said.
“We tried but we can’t bring that back. All we managed to do was bring back her body and the trauma and nothing else.” Heather gave Gladys an imploring look. “If you are what you say you are, you have to help us. It’s part of the code. We need to make her dead again. We can’t have her like this, only a quarter of who she is and always reminding us of how badly we failed her as sisters and as friends.”
“She should have told us,” Naomi countered.
Gladys sat on the edge of the bed, her fingers petting the silk covers. “It is not a likely end for a witch, erasing herself.”
“She slit her throat one night after we’d had a seance in the graveyard. We were at Naomi’s, watching the new Witch Hunter Robin anime. She seemed fine. We ate popcorn and talked about Naruto and then she went to bed in the guest room and then in the morning…” Heather’s eyes welled up with tears, her voice choked. “She was gone.”
“She used a ceremonial knife she’d taken from my altar,” Naomi said. “Slit herself ear to ear. Made a hell of a mess. I had to throw out all my pillows. There’s still a bleach stain on my Hello Kitty bath mat.”
“All we really wanted to know was why.” Heather hiccuped a sob. “It wasn’t fair to us to leave us the way she did.”
“No, I don’t suppose it was. But you are stupid girls and you went into a cemetery at night to conduct a seance. Did you not think you could become infected with the ways of the death? You picked the wrong grave, and she suffered for it.” Gladys gave the black moon near hidden in the night beyond the bedroom window a respectful nod. “So you are planning on harvesting its power to send her back?”
“Of course,” Naomi said. “We can’t have her flopping around like that. And she only ever has one thing to say.”
“My neck hurts,” Vanessa said, right on cue.
“I wish we could slice her vocal chords,” Heather moaned. “Why are those working just fine?”
Gladys thought for a long moment.
“What a waste,” she said.
“I know,” Naomi agreed. “I mean, we bring someone back from the dead just to send her back into the grave.”
“No.” Gladys stood up proudly, shoulders back and committed to her cause. “That is a waste of a powerful spell. Don’t you understand? You can have your friend back. You just have to fix the spell.”
“We can’t do that,” Naomi scoffed.
Heather hesitated.
“We can’t leave her like this, Naomi.”
“But Heather, she means we have to…”
“You bring one back you put one in, that’s how it goes.” Heather hugged her arms close around herself, the fringes of her leather jacket hanging around her like a reedy black curtain.
Gladys fixed her in an icy gaze. “Do you doubt the power of the black moon? Do you doubt what you have already done?”
Neither girl would answer.
“We fix this by going all the way,” Gladys stated. She held out her hand.
Naomi frowned. “What do you want?”
Your sacred dagger.” She gave her an evil smile. “I know you still have it.”
~*~
Candace was surprised when Gladys approached her at the front desk, looking slightly disheveled.
“You never came back after I sent you,” Candace said, her lips barely moving. “Was everything all right?”
Gladys gave her toothy smile that revealed a golden molar. “Of course it is. Tell me, are those two new maids arriving tomorrow? The ones who were exchange students from Japan?”
Candace checked the inbox, noting the stream of Japanese Kanji and her personal note: ‘Keeners’. “Yes, they will be here at 8:00 am, according to the schedule. Amy is training them.”
“Amy is no longer working for us.”
Candace frowned.
“How? I never saw her leave.”
“A boyfriend in town, apparently. She’s run off with him. Left us high and dry. Thank the stars for the Japanese.”
Candace wasn’t buying it. Amy was a homely girl with barely a brain cell to rub with another and this job was probably the pinnacle of her career in housekeeping. She wanted to broach the subject further, but a nagging sense of dread hit her as she looked on Gladys and her breathless state.
“Some people are just easy to replace,” Gladys said.
Candace was surprised the teen girls who had spent the night in the Scarlet room were up so early. They already had the hotel FOB key in hand, ready to turn it in. Candace’s shift ended in exactly ten minutes, and it felt jarring that they were leaving this early and she was the one stuck checking them out.
The girl with the leather fringes dangled the FOB key in her grip before sliding it towards Candace.
“You get a complimentary breakfast,” she reminded them.
The girl in the middle was especially fresh faced and vibrant. Whatever she was on the night before had clearly worn off. “I could die for a Timmie’s. Thanks anyway.”
Candace heard snippets of conversation as they left, arm in arm.
“We’re lucky she found someone to trade off souls with. Honestly, Vanessa, it was a real mess, thank stars the room is already red.”
“What was her name?” the girl on the outside left asked. “Should we light a candle in remembrance of her sacrifice?”
“Don’t be stupid.” Leatherfringe girl tossed her thick blonde hair over her shoulder as they left the building and headed for the parking lot. “Vanessa, how do you feel? How is your neck?”
“It feels a little bruised. I don’t know how to explain it. Like I’ve got a pebble stuck in there.”
“Remnants,” the blonde said, shrugging. “A hot coffee and a quick chant will swish it right out of you.”
“It’s so good to have you back, Vanessa,” her other friend gushed.
“I know,” Vanessa said as they left the front foyer, their confident steps taking them out into the cool morning breeze where the sky clung to grey. “I feel like I’ve been opened out of a box. Weird, right? Like I’m a package with all new things inside.”
Shiny, sickly sweet things, Candace thought as the door closed behind them.
‘TM’ she wrote on their receipt.
Too. Much.
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