Courtney Summers - Defy the Dark

The Spruce Street Guest House is on Old Main, which was the center of town during its heyday in the late 1800s. Back then, when coal mining was Pinnacle’s chief industry, this place was the Wild West equivalent of a bustling metropolis, complete with eight saloons, a brothel or two behind the tracks, and plenty of gunslingers who went around shooting people whenever they had a bad day. When the coal mine dried up, so did Pinnacle, and for a long time it really was a ghost town. During the tech boom of the nineties, it came back from the dead. Now there’s a brand-new “downtown,” centered on a strip mall anchored by a Super Target. But the buildings on Old Main were abandoned, and they developed a reputation for being haunted by the ghosts of those gunslingers and their victims.

Personally, I think it’s all a big gimmick, but the first thing I learned when I moved here was that the locals take their legends seriously. Every Halloween, Pinnacle dusts off Old Main to create a quote-unquote ghost town for the annual Pinnacle Spooktacular, a week of “family friendly” activities celebrating the ghostly remains of the town’s outlaw past. It culminates in the Spooktacular Spectacle, a dance in the ramshackle theater on the eastern end.

The guesthouse is on the western end. We can’t hear the music down here, though I know the party’s still going on. By now all the little kids have gone home, and the few teens who remain are being edged out by adults in sexy zombie nurse costumes. I saw some of them lurching around half drunk on my way to the guesthouse.

McKenzie heads out of the kitchen and I follow. The only sounds are the whisper of our footsteps and the occasional groan of the floorboards. It’s in pretty good shape for a building that’s been abandoned, and I know it’s because the Pinnacle Spooktacular has renovated it—discreetly, of course—to make sure that tourists don’t accidentally fall through the floor on the ghost tour.

Still, it’s definitely got a creepy vibe going on. We walk down the long hallway toward the front of the building, passing the door to the basement, a dining room with a crooked chandelier, the decrepit powder room, and finally the main parlor, where all the furniture is draped with yellowing sheets. In the foyer, a staircase that used to be grand sweeps down from the dark second floor, and McKenzie turns to face me.

“Have you heard the story about this place?” she asks.

I shrug. “Somebody died?”

Her lips curve up in a slight smile. “Yeah. Somebody died.” She starts up the stairs. “This used to be a boardinghouse, and one of the people who stayed here was a woman named Ida Root. She was from the East Coast and came out here for a teaching job. She didn’t have a lot of money, so she ended up sharing her room with another girl, Elsie Bates. Ida came back from school late one night, after dark. She was feeling sick and decided to go straight to bed.”

McKenzie stops at the top of the stairs and waits for me, the flashlight beam pooling on the floor. The last step creaks under my feet. “What happened then?” I ask.

“In the morning, Ida woke up. Elsie was right there in the room with her . . . except she was dead.”

McKenzie’s a good storyteller, and a shiver runs down my spine.

“Somebody murdered her and wrote a message on the wall in her blood.”

I step closer to McKenzie, so there’s only a foot of space between us. She holds her ground, but the flashlight wavers in her hands. “What did it say?” I ask.

“That’s the weird thing,” McKenzie whispers. “There’s no record of that. But there were plenty of rumors going around town about Ida and Elsie. Whether they were more than friends.”

McKenzie’s expression is unreadable, but warmth flushes across my own face, and it pisses me off. I’ve heard this story before, although it’s usually set in a college dorm or at summer camp. I can hardly believe that McKenzie thinks I’m going to buy it.

“The room where Ida stayed is the third door down,” McKenzie says. “Want to take a look?”

“You think her ghost is in there?”

“Maybe,” she says coyly.

The door has an old-fashioned crystal handle, and McKenzie fumbles with it for a few seconds before she gets it open. She goes inside, but stops abruptly.

“Oh my God,” she says, her voice quivering. “Oh my God.”

I follow her in. The moonlight shines through the window, which is hung with lace curtains. The room has a rusted metal bed frame in it, the mattress long gone. A chipped pitcher and basin rest on a bureau that’s missing half its drawers. A rocking chair is pushed into the corner, the woven seat eaten through in the center. McKenzie trains her flashlight on the wall over the bed. A word is scrawled there, red letters dripping down the peeling wallpaper.

DYKE.

A shock jolts through me, hot and cold all at once. I become aware of a dim buzzing in my ears as I stare at the word. The whole effect is, I have to admit, very well done. The drips look just like blood, and it ties in perfectly with the story McKenzie just told me, although I know that the word isn’t about Ida and her maybe-girlfriend Elsie.

It’s for me.

I’ve been to the Dyke March in San Francisco and seen women with the word tattooed on their shoulders or written across their chests in lipstick. I’ve never used it to describe myself because it sounds so old. But it doesn’t bother me, either. It stopped offending me a long time ago.

Seeing it like this, though, is a lot different from seeing it tattooed on a girl’s arm with a heart around it. I feel like I just got my breath knocked out of me. As if someone came over and shoved me, then spit in my face.

I hate Pinnacle.

All the frustrations I’ve felt since I moved here knot up inside me in a burst of hot anger. I want to punch the person who wrote that on the wall.

I know that McKenzie’s watching me, trying to figure out why I didn’t scream and run out of the room in terror. I’m not sure what to do. To buy time, I walk past her to the wall and reach out to touch the red letters. “What are you doing?” she cries.

The stuff that was used to write the word is still a little damp, and it rubs off on my fingers. I sniff it.

“What is it?” she asks.

It’s sticky and has a chemical smell that I recognize. It’s fake blood. They probably bought it at the Super Target in the Halloween aisle. “I don’t know,” I say impulsively. “It’s kind of . . . warm.”

“It’s warm?” She sounds confused.

“Yeah,” I lie. I rub the fake blood residue onto the wallpaper, leaving a streak next to the D . “I heard a different story about this house,” I say as I turn to look at her.

She visibly stiffens. “You did?”

“I read it on the town blog.”

“Oh?”

Her tone is skeptical, and I wonder if I’m pushing it too far, but the anger inside me is developing a reckless edge. “Yeah,” I say. I cross the room toward the window so that I can peek at the backyard. There’s nobody there, or at least nobody I can see. “You want to hear it?”

McKenzie hesitates. Then she says, “Sure, why not.” It’s not a question. She’s acting all cool, but I can tell she’s trying to figure out if I know what she did, and if so, how.

It’s so clear to me that the word on the wall isn’t real to McKenzie. It’s a four-letter word chosen for dramatic impact. She doesn’t get that the word and her ghost story suggest that a woman was murdered in this room for being gay. She probably thinks it’s funny. I almost choke on my disgust for McKenzie. But I force myself to swallow it, because now I know what I’m going to do.

“I read that back when this place was a boardinghouse, two chicks died,” I say. “One was probably the girl you told me about—the one who died in this room. But another girl died here a couple of days later.” I pause for dramatic effect. “She hanged herself in the basement.”