Olin said something, only a single word, but too low for Mike to make it out.
“I beg pardon?”
“I said no.” Olin looked at him almost apologetically.
Mike sighed. Olin thought he was a liar. When you got to that point, the only choices were to put up your dukes or disengage totally from the discussion. “Why don’t we leave this for another day, Mr. Olin? I’ll just go on upstairs and brush my teeth. Perhaps I’ll see Kevin O’Malley materialize behind me in the bathroom mirror.”
Mike started to get out of his chair, and Olin put out one of his pudgy, carefully manicured hands to stop him. “I’m not calling you a liar,” he said, “but, Mr. Enslin, you don’t believe. Ghosts rarely appear to those who don’t believe in them, and when they do, they are rarely seen. Why, Eugene Rilsby could have bowled his severed head all the way down the front hall of his home, and you wouldn’t have heard a thing!”
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Mike stood up, then bent to grab his overnight case. “If that’s so, I won’t have anything to worry about in room 1408, will I?”
“But you will,” Olin said. “You will. Because there are no ghosts in room 1408 and never have been. There’s something in there—I’ve felt it myself—but it’s not a spirit presence. In an abandoned house or an old castle keep, your unbelief may serve you as protection. In room 1408, it will only render you more vulnerable. Don’t do it, Mr.
Enslin. That’s why I waited for you tonight, to ask you, beg you, not to do it. Of all the people on earth who don’t belong in that room, the man who wrote those cheerful, exploitative true-ghost books leads the list.”
Mike heard this and didn’t hear it at the same time. And you turned off your tape recorder! he was raving. He embarrasses me into turning off my tape recorder and then he turns into Boris Karloff hosting The All-Star Spook Weekend! Fuck it. I’ll quote him anyway. If he doesn’t like it, let him sue me.
All at once he was burning to get upstairs, not just so he could start getting his long night in a corner hotel room over with, but because he wanted to transcribe what Olin had just said while it was still fresh in his mind.
“Have a drink, Mr. Enslin.”
“No, I really—”
Mr. Olin reached into his coat pocket and brought out a key on a long brass paddle. The brass looked old and scratched and tarnished.
Embossed on it were the numbers 1408. “Please,” Olin said. “Humor me. You give me ten more minutes of your time—long enough to consume a short Scotch—and I’ll hand you this key. I would give almost anything to be able to change your mind, but I like to think I can recognize the inevitable when I see it.”
“You still use actual keys here?” Mike asked. “That’s sort of a nice touch. Antiquey.”
“The Dolphin went to a MagCard system in 1979, Mr. Enslin, the year I took the job as manager. 1408 is the only room in the house that still opens with a key. There was no need to put a MagCard lock 374
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on its door, because there’s never anyone inside; the room was last occupied by a paying guest in 1978.”
“You’re shitting me!” Mike sat down again, and unlimbered his minicorder again. He pushed the RECORD button and said, “House manager Olin claims 1408 not rented to a paying guest in over twenty years.”
“It is just as well that 1408 has never needed a MagCard lock on its door, because I am completely positive the device wouldn’t work.
Digital wristwatches don’t work in room 1408. Sometimes they run backward, sometimes they simply go out, but you can’t tell time with one. Not in room 1408, you can’t. The same is true of pocket calcu-lators and cell-phones. If you’re wearing a beeper, Mr. Enslin, I advise you to turn it off, because once you’re in room 1408, it will start beeping at will.” He paused. “And turning it off isn’t guaranteed to work, either; it may turn itself back on. The only sure cure is to pull the batteries.” He pushed the STOP button on the minicorder without examining the buttons; Mike supposed he used a similar model for dictating memos. “Actually, Mr. Enslin, the only sure cure is to stay the hell out of that room.”
“I can’t do that,” Mike said, taking his minicorder back and stow-ing it once more, “but I think I can take time for that drink.”
While Olin poured from the fumed-oak bar beneath an oil painting of Fifth Avenue at the turn of the century, Mike asked him how, if the room had been continuously unoccupied since 1978, Olin knew that high-tech gadgets didn’t work inside.
“I didn’t intend to give you the impression that no one had set foot through the door since 1978,” Olin replied. “For one thing, there are maids in once a month to give the place a light turn. That means—”
Mike, who had been working on Ten Haunted Hotel Rooms for about four months at that point, said: “I know what it means.” A light turn in an unoccupied room would include opening the windows to change the air, dusting, enough Ty-D-Bowl in the can to turn the 375
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water briefly blue, a change of the towels. Probably not the bed-linen, not on a light turn. He wondered if he should have brought his sleeping-bag.
Crossing the Persian from the bar with their drinks in his hands, Olin seemed to read Mike’s thought on his face. “The sheets were changed this very afternoon, Mr. Enslin.”
“Why don’t you drop that? Call me Mike.”
“I don’t think I’d be comfortable with that,” Olin said, handing Mike his drink. “Here’s to you.”
“And you.” Mike lifted his glass, meaning to clink it against Olin’s, but Olin pulled his back.
“No, to you, Mr. Enslin. I insist. Tonight we should both drink to you. You’ll need it.”
Mike sighed, clinked the rim of his glass against the rim of Olin’s, and said: “To me. You would have been right at home in a horror movie, Mr. Olin. You could have played the gloomy old butler who tries to warn the young married couple away from Castle Doom.”
Olin sat down. “It’s a part I haven’t had to play often, thank God.
Room 1408 isn’t listed on any of the websites dealing with paranormal locations or psychic hotspots—”
That’ll change after my book, Mike thought, sipping his drink.
“—and there are no ghost-tours with stops at the Hotel Dolphin, although they do tour through the Sherry-Netherland, the Plaza, and the Park Lane. We have kept 1408 as quiet as possible . . . although, of course, the history has always been there for a researcher who is both lucky and tenacious.”
Mike allowed himself a small smile.
“Veronique changed the sheets,” Olin said. “I accompanied her. You should feel flattered, Mr. Enslin; it’s almost like having your night’s linen put on by royalty. Veronique and her sister came to the Dolphin as chambermaids in 1971 or ’72. Vee, as we call her, is the Hotel Dolphin’s longest-running employee, with at least six years’ seniority over me. She has since risen to head housekeeper. I’d guess she hadn’t changed a sheet in six years before today, but she used to do all the turns in 1408—she and her sister—until about 1992. Veronique and 376
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Celeste were twins, and the bond between them seemed to make them
. . . how shall I put it? Not immune to 1408, but its equal . . . at least for the short periods of time needed to give a room a light turn.”
“You’re not going to tell me this Veronique’s sister died in the room, are you?”
“No, not at all,” Olin said. “She left service here around 1988, suffering from ill health. But I don’t rule out the idea that 1408 may have played a part in her worsening mental and physical condition.”
“We seem to have built a rapport here, Mr. Olin. I hope I don’t snap it by telling you I find that ridiculous.”
Olin laughed. “So hardheaded for a student of the airy world.”
“I owe it to my readers,” Mike said blandly.
“I suppose I simply could have left 1408 as it is anyway during most of its days and nights,” the hotel manager mused. “Door locked, lights off, shades drawn to keep the sun from fading the carpet, coverlet pulled up, doorknob breakfast menu on the bed . . . but I can’t bear to think of the air getting stuffy and old, like the air in an attic. Can’t bear to think of the dust piling up until it’s thick and fluffy.
What does that make me, persnickety or downright obsessive?”