“It makes you a hotel manager.”
“I suppose. In any case, Vee and Cee turned that room—very quick, just in and out—until Cee retired and Vee got her first big promotion.
After that, I got other maids to do it in pairs, always picking ones who got on well with each other—”
“Hoping for that bond to withstand the bogies?”
“Hoping for that bond, yes. And you can make fun of the room 1408 bogies as much as you want, Mr. Enslin, but you’ll feel them almost at once, of that I’m confident. Whatever there is in that room, it’s not shy.
“On many occasions—all that I could manage—I went with the maids, to supervise them.” He paused, then added, almost reluctantly,
“To pull them out, I suppose, if anything really awful started to happen. Nothing ever did. There were several who had weeping fits, one who had a laughing fit—I don’t know why someone laughing out of control should be more frightening than someone sobbing, but it is—
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and a number who fainted. Nothing too terrible, however. I had time enough over the years to make a few primitive experiments—beepers and cell-phones and such—but nothing too terrible. Thank God.” He paused again, then added in a queer, flat tone: “One of them went blind.”
“What?”
“She went blind. Rommie Van Gelder, that was. She was dusting the top of the television, and all at once she began to scream. I asked her what was wrong. She dropped her dustrag and put her hands over her eyes and screamed that she was blind . . . but that she could see the most awful colors. They went away almost as soon as I got her out through the door, and by the time I got her down the hallway to the elevator, her sight had begun to come back.”
“You’re telling me all this just to scare me, Mr. Olin, aren’t you?
To scare me off.”
“Indeed I am not. You know the history of the room, beginning with the suicide of its first occupant.”
Mike did. Kevin O’Malley, a sewing machine salesman, had taken his life on October 13, 1910, a leaper who had left a wife and seven children behind.
“Five men and one woman have jumped from that room’s single window, Mr. Enslin. Three women and one man have overdosed with pills in that room, two found in bed, two found in the bathroom, one in the tub and one sitting slumped on the toilet. A man hanged himself in the closet in 1970—”
“Henry Storkin,” Mike said. “That one was probably accidental . . .
erotic asphyxia.”
“Perhaps. There was also Randolph Hyde, who slit his wrists, and then cut off his genitals for good measure while he was bleeding to death. That one wasn’t erotic asphyxiation. The point is, Mr.
Enslin, that if you can’t be swayed from your intention by a record of twelve suicides in sixty-eight years, I doubt if the gasps and fibrillations of a few chambermaids will stop you.”
Gasps and fibrillations, that’s nice, Mike thought, and wondered if he could steal it for the book.
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“Few of the pairs who have turned 1408 over the years care to go back more than a few times,” Olin said, and finished his drink in a tidy little gulp.
“Except for the French twins.”
“Vee and Cee, that’s true.” Olin nodded.
Mike didn’t care much about the maids and their . . . what had Olin called them? Their gasps and fibrillations. He did feel mildly rankled by Olin’s enumeration of the suicides . . . as if Mike was so thick he had missed, not the fact of them, but their import. Except, really, there was no import. Both Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy had vice presidents named Johnson; the names Lincoln and Kennedy had seven letters; both Lincoln and Kennedy had been elected in years ending in 60. What did all of these coincidences prove? Not a damned thing.
“The suicides will make a wonderful segment for my book,” Mike said, “but since the tape recorder is off, I can tell you they amount to what a statistician resource of mine calls ‘the cluster effect.’ ”
“Charles Dickens called it ‘the potato effect,’ ” Olin said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“When Jacob Marley’s ghost first speaks to Scrooge, Scrooge tells him he could be nothing but a blob of mustard or a bit of underdone potato.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?” Mike asked, a trifle coldly.
“Nothing about this strikes me as funny, Mr. Enslin. Nothing at all.
Listen very closely, please. Vee’s sister, Celeste, died of a heart attack.
At that point, she was suffering mid-stage Alzheimer’s, a disease which struck her very early in life.”
“Yet her sister is fine and well, according to what you said earlier.
An American success story, in fact. As you are yourself, Mr. Olin, from the look of you. Yet you’ve been in and out of room 1408 how many times? A hundred? Two hundred?”
“For very short periods of time,” Olin said. “It’s perhaps like entering a room filled with poison gas. If one holds one’s breath, one may be all right. I see you don’t like that comparison. You no doubt find it overwrought, perhaps ridiculous. Yet I believe it’s a good one.”
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He steepled his fingers beneath his chin.
“It’s also possible that some people react more quickly and more violently to whatever lives in that room, just as some people who go scuba-diving are more prone to the bends than others. Over the Dolphin’s near-century of operation, the hotel staff has grown ever more aware that 1408 is a poisoned room. It has become part of the house history, Mr. Enslin. No one talks about it, just as no one mentions the fact that here, as in most hotels, the fourteenth floor is actually the thirteenth . . . but they know it. If all the facts and records per-taining to that room were available, they would tell an amazing story
. . . one more uncomfortable than your readers might enjoy.
“I should guess, for example, that every hotel in New York has had its suicides, but I would be willing to wager my life that only in the Dolphin have there been a dozen of them in a single room. And leaving Celeste Romandeau aside, what about the natural deaths in 1408? The so-called natural deaths?”
“How many have there been?” The idea of so-called natural deaths in 1408 had never occurred to him.
“Thirty,” Olin replied. “Thirty, at least. Thirty that I know of.”
“You’re lying!” The words were out of his mouth before he could call them back.
“No, Mr. Enslin, I assure you I’m not. Did you really think that we keep that room empty just out of some vapid old wives’ superstition or ridiculous New York tradition . . . the idea, maybe, that every fine old hotel should have at least one unquiet spirit, clanking around in the Suite of Invisible Chains?”
Mike Enslin realized that just such an idea—not articulated but there, just the same—had indeed been hanging around his new Ten Nights book. To hear Olin scoff at it in the irritated tones of a scientist scoffing at a bruja-waving native did nothing to soothe his chagrin.
“We have our superstitions and traditions in the hotel trade, but we don’t let them get in the way of our business, Mr. Enslin. There’s an old saying in the Midwest, where I broke into the business: ‘There are no drafty rooms when the cattlemen are in town.’ If we have empties, we fill them. The only exception to that rule I have ever made—
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and the only talk like this I have ever had—is on account of room 1408, a room on the thirteenth floor whose very numerals add up to thirteen.”
Olin looked levelly at Mike Enslin.
“It is a room not only of suicides but of strokes and heart attacks and epileptic seizures. One man who stayed in that room—this was in 1973—apparently drowned in a bowl of soup. You would undoubtedly call that ridiculous, but I spoke to the man who was head of hotel security at that time, and he saw the death certificate. The power of whatever inhabits the room seems to be less around midday, which is when the room-turns always occur, and yet I know of several maids who have turned that room who now suffer from heart problems, emphysema, diabetes. There was a heating problem on that floor three years ago, and Mr. Neal, the head maintenance engineer at that time, had to go into several of the rooms to check the heating units. 1408 was one of them. He seemed fine then—both in the room and later on—but he died the following afternoon of a massive cere-bral hemorrhage.”
“Coincidence,” Mike said. Yet he could not deny that Olin was good. Had the man been a camp counselor, he would have scared ninety per cent of the kiddies back home after the first round of campfire ghost stories.