At this hotel, check-out time never comes!

Check-Out Time

© 2014 Mark Rigney

All things must pass––or so we’re told. When Reverend Renner responds to an invitation sent from a long-demolished hotel filled with ghosts of guests from times past, he soon discovers that checking out will be a lot harder than checking in. His sometime friend and investigative partner, Dale Quist, heads to the rescue, but it will take more than brawn and benedictions to put this particular hotel out of business. All things must pass, indeed– but that doesn’t mean they have to go quietly.

Enjoy the following excerpt for Check-Out Time:

The invitation arrived in a classy linen envelope with gilt edging, but I, being busy, ignored it. Mail these days is junk by definition, and I often feel that mine exists only to give me a modicum of exercise as I scoop it from the welcome mat, where it lands after cascading willy-nilly through my old brass mail slot. Have I mentioned that I adore my mail slot? I do. I love it both for its antique nature and because it is all but unique in my mailbox-dominated Slabtown neighborhood.

Once I have my mail in hand, this is what happens: I toss it without regrets or hesitation into my hand-painted recycling bin. (I refer of course to my indoor bin; the plastic outdoor bin, provided by the city, is simply and irredeemably green.)

True, around the holiday season the odd greeting card arrives to break the monotony, but on the day of that particular envelope’s fateful appearance, it was already late April, with Easter gone and Beltane beckoning. Let’s face it: for the bulk of the year, the mail’s only purpose is to sell me something I don’t need or, on occasion, to beg for handouts. I never say yes, even when the cause is noble, in part because charity is inherently problematic—it does nothing to alleviate the root causes of whatever requires this latest round of charitable giving—and in part because my money is already spoken for. Yes, my stubborn refusals produce lingering pangs of guilt, but given my salary and my situation, what spare change I can scrounge goes right back to where it is needed most: my church, my congregation. The Unitarian Universalist Church of South Traverse City, Michigan.

Not five days later, on a Thursday, a second invitation arrived, this time half buried by a set of local circulars, the kind that advertise replacement windows, car washes, and ground chuck for such and such a pound. This last was not in any way a temptation no matter what the price, since I have not let so much as a morsel of red meat pass my lips since nineteen ninety-eight. However, the grisly image of the red-inked meat did serve to highlight the fastidious cream-colored envelope lying sideways atop it, emblazoned with my address and name, “Reverend Renner,” neatly printed in raised gold ink. Curious, I plucked it up and expertly slit the seal, using grandmother’s elephant-ivory opener, an Edwardian prize kept all these years expressly for this purpose. Preparing to be disappointed, I withdrew the matching cream card within.

In handsome cursive, it read:

The Neil House

Your Reservation (Complimentary) is Confirmed

The Favor of a Reply is Requested at your Earliest Convenience

The Neil House 41 N. High Street, Columbus, OH 43215

I was puzzled, to say the least. Columbus is perhaps nine hours by car south of Traverse City, and it was not a location in which I had spent any time. I had certainly never stayed at any hotel called The Neil House, nor had I made plans to travel there in the future.

As I continued to stare, quietly flummoxed by the card in my hand, I became aware of a vague tingling sensation that began in my fingers, traveled up along my wrists, then deadened and died, only to reappear as a sort of itch, a rash-like burn at the tops of my shoulder blades. Next, the hair on the back of my neck rose suddenly, as if I had just rubbed against a carpeted wall in a heavily air-conditioned building. It was all I could do not to tense simply from the expectation of a static shock.

No, I thought. Not fair. Not with life going along, for once, so nicely, so calmly; not when terms like “settled” and “placid” were threatening to become the norm for my existence rather than the rarified exception. Why, when I had almost put behind me the nasty business of Lizzie and Ed and the dead, angry bear, did something of this nature have to come knocking at my door? I had even, almost, forgiven myself for my part in Lizzie and Ed’s demise. No, I will not say demise. That is too formal, too distancing. I had a hand not in their demise but in their deaths. Their brutal, bloody dismemberment.

Sadly, and all thoughts of the bear incident aside, there was no denying the nature of the alarming sensation now prickling my skin and creeping, frost-like, along my scalp. I was once again in the undeniable, ineffable presence of the supernatural, and what was to blame? The elegant yet unassuming piece of cardstock in my hand.

Of course I dropped the card. What other sane reaction was there? And at once I felt better, to a degree, but in the same instant I recalled the earlier message. The recycling had not gone out, which meant I now had two of these missives in my home. Puny as they were, I felt as if I had been invaded.

It took some minutes of rummaging to unearth the first letter—junk mail truly does accumulate at an appalling and unconscionable rate, and the people who send it have a choice spot reserved in the lowest pits of hell (that same hell whose existence I deny to my wary, credulous parishioners)—but eventually I found it. I tore it open. Inside, there lurked the same note exactly, and on the same paper, too, with but a single variation: the absence of the word “complimentary.” Apparently, when I did not immediately reply, the senders, whoever they were, had felt the need to sweeten the pot.

Even that thought irked me. Poker is more Dale Quist’s line than mine, and the same goes for poker metaphors. Dale Quist is, as a select few people know, one of a truly miniscule number with whom I share my unwanted affinity for the arcane. Dale Quist, who adores poker and anything else that might hint of testosterone, masculinity, and beer. Dale Quist, who has bailed me out of more than one uncanny encounter over the last several years, and whom I have bailed out in turn. Dale Quist, who I of course thought of immediately upon slitting that first envelope, but had I made a move to contact him? No. I simply would not would not stoop to doing any such thing. Not out of any sense of pique, mind (as a man of the cloth, I am above such things), but because if I didn’t call Dale, I could maintain the illusion that nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

In fact, by that point I had quite convinced myself that if I didn’t raise any sort of alarm, I could deny the entire episode. I could consign those envelopes, like the recycling, to a kind of experiential oblivion: out of sight, out of mind.

Is there anything in the cosmos more powerful than the human capacity for denial? Possibly the thing in the Leelanau peat bog; yes, very likely that—but otherwise? Not in my experience.

So thinking, I threw on my coat, tossed both letters into the recycling, and lugged the entire container, brightly decorated (as I believe I have mentioned) with various Taoist motifs, outside to the main recycling bin, which I keep in my stand-alone, not-long-for-this-world garage. (My garage slumps painfully to the south, a tendency I attribute to a penchant, on its part and mine, for warmer weather.) Then I trotted back inside, freezing cold but well pleased with myself, and quite ready to return to my latest pet project, how to improve labor opportunities for prisoners newly released from incarceration. As the Bible famously put it, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Matthew 25:40 may be only a snippet of scripture, but it’s a snippet well worth grappling, since it provides the basis for the twin works of charity and its bigger, tougher sister, social justice.

I fell asleep at my desk, as I sometimes do, but not until quite late at night; eleven-thirty, I think it was, or possibly later. When I woke, I dragged myself to my bedroom, stripped off my clothes (I sleep, except on the coldest of nights, in the nude), and fell like a log into my bed. As I drifted off, what few thoughts I had centered not on the Neil House (whatever that might be) but on prison populations, recidivism, and workforce statistics.

On normal days—and let us thank all the apostate, heretical, and godly powers of the universe that most days are normal—I am an excellent sleeper. On hitting my pillow, I fully expected to wake next at six in the morning, at which point I would commence another day of study, visiting parishioners, and sermon prep. I was particularly ready to dive back into the next week’s sermon, covering Tolstoy’s briar patch of a short story, “The Three Questions.” I am ashamed to admit that I did not first encounter this tale via Tolstoy himself, but from Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. Either way, the three questions, as ultimate questions do, burn and scorch. Loosely put, the trio comes down to these: when is the best time to take action? Who is most important? And finally, what is the right thing to do?

I drifted to sleep on a raft of profound thoughts, my course set for work and dawn, but instead, I shot awake—wide awake—at two thirty-eight a.m.

What had woken me? Two thirty-eight is not an hour I enjoy seeing displayed on my clock, not unless that number is followed by the letters p and m. On guard, I let my gaze rove around my bedroom, lit so dimly that I could barely make out the mess of discarded clothes littering the floor and draped like shrouds over every available surface. (Yes, under cover of darkness, I can almost believe I am a neat freak; denial, as I have mentioned, is a remarkable boon companion.) Nothing seemed amiss or out of the ordinary, and yet I could feel all over again that tell-tale tightness in my shoulders, the almost diagnostic tingling in my scalp. It was spreading, too, growing sharper. Something was approaching, I could sense it, and whatever that something was, it was advancing on my house with a steamroller’s steady, mindless deliberation.

It was a windless night, and the leafless late-March trees made no sound, conspiring with the patchy remains of Wednesday’s minor snowfall to blanket the world in silence. I strained my ears, listening, but I heard nothing, not even the gentle purr of distant traffic. I strained my eyes, as well, but my blinds were pulled, and within my bedroom, there was simply nothing unusual to see.

Touch, taste, smell: these also betrayed nothing unusual, and yet I remained certain that my home and I were being stalked.

And then, at last, my ears caught the faintest of sounds: the thin metallic complaint of hinges lifting, rising ever so gently. I caught a papery shushing, the rustling shiver of one surface rasping against another, and then a barely audible slap, as of something small dropping lightly to a carpeted surface. Lastly, I heard the hinges swing back to rest with a definite metallic click-click-click. These were sounds I knew all too well; they were sounds to which I even looked forward, despite all, by day. But past midnight? No—for what I had just heard, at nearly three o’clock in the morning, were the sounds of a fresh delivery pressing through my mail slot.

And if I was getting mail, then that meant that someone, or something, was lurking directly outside my door.

It took me a full minute at least before I was able to pry myself from bed and tiptoe into the living room. I suppose some basic sense of propriety, or perhaps an even more basic sense of terror, should have prompted me to dress first, but that particular voice was silent for whatever reason, and so I arrived in my living room wearing nothing but my glasses (small and round) and my birthday suit. There stood my front door, looking as solid as ever, and sure enough, on the mat below lay a single cream-colored envelope. I did not require a light to know that it bore my name, in gold ink.

“With trembling hands,” isn’t that the stock descriptor most often employed when a person, irrationally (or perhaps deservedly) nervous, reaches for an omen that they know will provide only the worst of bad news? So it was with me. I crept forward, hoping against hope that whatever spectral delivery person had slipped this missive through my mail slot was now long gone, but feeling all the while a dreadful certainty that as soon as I drew close enough, my door would explode inward, and I would be set upon by sharp-clawed, slavering demons bent on my immediate elimination.

Thank all that is holy, that last did not happen. The door held firm, nothing burst through, and when at last the letter was in range, I reached out. With trembling hands, and a hammering heart.

Did I swallow hard as I held that tiny, inoffensive envelope, and was my throat suddenly dry? Oh, absolutely. I embodied, in that moment, every possible gothic stereotype—which of course infuriated me. I stand all of five foot two and am generally perceived as mousy and effeminate, so to actually live up to the expectations suggested by my physique is beyond embarrassing, it’s simply unacceptable. And yet there I stood, buck naked and reduced, in my own house, to a quivering, quaking wreck. And all because of a letter. Mere stationery!

Annoyance at last trumped my fear, and I tore the letter open, eschewing grandmother’s ivory opener in favor of my fingers. Fright made me clumsy, but I got it open at last, and I withdrew an even fancier card than those I’d seen before. Even in the half-light of the two forty-eight darkness, I could just make it out:

The Neil House

Please Present this Card at the Bar

for One or Two Complimentary Drinks of Your Choice

(gratuities appreciated)

The Neil House 41 N. High Street, Columbus, OH 43215

Oh, the petulance I felt after reading that card! The sheer unfairness of it! I wanted so badly to tear it to pieces, to scream to the Heavens, “Why me?” Why, again, did it have to be me?

But I did no such thing. I am not wealthy, and while I am not likely to beat so much as a rabbit in a drinking contest, I am no teetotaler; nor was I in any position to spurn an offer of what promised to be free drinks of the highest caliber. So instead of doing to the invite what those imagined door-smashing demons might have done to me, I gathered my wits and marshaled my forces. I marched to my bedroom, found a bathrobe—no, let me be truthful, I found a lovely silk kimono, complete with a fetching bamboo motif—and I decamped in a huff to my study where, bathed by the blue and frankly ghostly light of my computer, I commenced to learn whatever the internet and the remaining night would divulge about the needy, assertive edifice announcing itself as the Neil House.