Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The Sick Party in Rm. 445

This one’s a little different, since nobody who witnessed it still works at the Hotel Palmserston but you can find it in old city papers.

On Halloween, 1970, a group of people checked into what was then a double, room 445. Their plan was to go to a masquerade in town but split the hotel bill. A total of 8 people went to the room afterwards, and ordered room service. They also had a lot of candy, since a mock “trick or treat” event had been held at the masquerade.

The room was left a huge mess, and the people who had to clean it ate some of the candy that had been left in the room. Within a day, everyone who’d eaten something on Halloween night was in the hospital suffering from life-threatening sepsis. Of the 8 people who had trashed the room, one died and one had to have a length of intestine removed. Everyone spent months in the hospital.

Survivors tried to sue the Palmerston, saying that they had been poisoned by the room service food. But no one else who had eaten in that night–onw of the kitchen’s busiest–got sick, and it’s devilishly hard to catch sepsis from a bad meal besides. And none of the maids who’d eaten the candy got sick, so that couldn’t have been the culprit.

In the 1990 renovations, rm. 445 was split into two singles, 445 and 446. But to this day, no one wants to deliver food to either room because of what happened 40 years ago. Luckily, as far as anyone knows, nobody’s had room service or Halloween candy in there since.

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The 3:14 AM Flushes

Plumbing for a hotel the size of the Palmerston is incredibly complex, but since 2000 the hotel invested heavily in a completely new system that gave every room a new low-flow but high-pressure commode.

It also seems to have disturbed something in the plumbing system other than water or sewage.

A computerized master system keeps track of water usage in the Palmerston, and it routinely goes rather quiet after 1am or so. But according to the people who monitor it, a toilet somewhere in the hotel flushes every night at 3:14pm sharp.

It never seems to be the same toilet twice in a row, though the same ones have been active repeatedly at 3:14. It seems to affect the units regardless of their age, too. The occasional housekeeping staff that have encountered the phenomenon report being scared to death, too, by the sudden noise.

No one can say why that late hour seems to trigger random flushes, but one thing is pretty clear: they never happen in occupied rooms.

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The Triskaidekaphobic Elevator

The Hotel Palmerston has a central elevator lobby, where banks of elevators serve the various floors. Four elevators run from floors 1-12, another four run from floors 13-24, and a further four serve the “executive levels” 25-30. That’s pretty standard in hotels as old as it is, given that each used to be manually operated by a bellhop.

Cabs 5-8 make up the second bank of elevators, serving floors 13-24. And Cab 7 will, for whatever reason, never stop on the 13th floor. It will call at floor 12, at floor 14, or go all the way up to floor 30 and back down without opening its doors.

You might notice that Cab 7 is newer than the others, though they’ve tried to make it blend in. This is because it’s been replaced three times with the hope that this strange behavior might stop. They even switched Cab 6 and Cab 7 in 1974. But no matter the actual cab that is Cab 7, it will not stop on the 13th floor for any reason.

Ultimately, the hotel management closed the 13th floor and renovated it into a luxury restaurant. It’s now accessible only with a room key from Cab 5 and Cab 6. One would think this meant the end of any strangeness, but a few years ago a grease fire broke out in the 13th floor restaurant. The firefighters used the override key to take every elevator up to 13, but Cab 7 still deposited them on the 12th floor all the same.

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“Think about it,” Jenkins said. “People hurt things that’re ugly and we have a soft spot for things that’re cute. Jellyfish, your usual kind, ain’t cute.”

“It’s still unnerving,” I replied. “Can they…can they see from those eyes?”

“They ain’t eyes,” said Jenkins. “Just look like it. They seem like they know what they’s doing, but it ain’t so. Just instinct.”

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Gerlich gasped into his oxygen mask as he switched out the depleted cylinder for a fresh one. The cool air flowing over his ragged lips had a calming effect, and within a few moments he was ready to continue his incantations.

“Are you sure you feel up to this?” the Aleayn buzzed. Gerlich nodded, and flipped the eyepiece that connected him to the Aleayn’s system down to cover his right eye.

The initial incantation was simple, an invocation of the spirits of the dead that were bound nearby. Muffled by his mask, Gerlich summoned those spirits in the form of luminescent wisps of spiritual energy that snaked and spiraled about his forearms as they rose from the ground. Anything of the lives they had once lived had long since faded away, leaving the spirits as little more than energies with no direction or purpose.

Next, the carefully carved conduit was set in the middle of the room, a human head hewn from living crystal. Gerlich began the incantation with one hand, and controlled the magnetic fields produced by the Aleayn with a control box gripped in the other.

“It’s not enough to infuse the energy into the object,” the Aleayn whispered. “You need to give it both new form and new function.”

“And that,” gasped Gerlich, “is the hard part.”

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Fallen Isle was so named because it had once been a series of sea arches, but the Great Storm of 1713 had blown away all but the sturdiest, leaving an arched sea stack that supported a few trees a quarter of a mile from the mainland across a deep and swift inlet of the Outer Banks.

People who bought the single house built upon it did so because of the privacy. The only access was by a steel ladder, installed in the 1910s and replaced every 40 years, and everything that came to the island had to be hauled up that ladder or with an old block and tackle. A freshwater lens bubbling from the continental shelf below yielded water to anyone willing to pump it.

The first owner of the island listed in land records, one John Smith, was known as “the old misanthrope” and had the home built after retiring from a prosperous career in dry goods and disinheriting his family. He personally interviewed interested buyers before his death, and local tradition held that the home had misanthropy written into its contract of sale and deed.

That continued, unbroken, through five owners and the summer of 2012, when the last one vanished.

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“Woman with Decapitated Wight”
Kopjie Van Der Eyck, 1537

This painting depicts an unknown woman with the decapitated head of an undead wight that she has killed, as well as the shortsword, held in her other hand, with which the horror was presumably dispatched. This falls into the category of “supernatural exterminator paintings” that flourished in the Amsterdam school ca. 1505-1587, though is is not nearly so well known as De Jong’s “Man with Necklace of Vampire Teeth” or Visser’s “Children with Speared Dire Rat.”

The subject of the painting is unknown, though research suggests it may be Anna Van Buren (fl. 1517-1541), who worked as a supernatural exterminator in Rotterdam. Van Buren was part of a subset of supernatural exterminators who were women; they were expected to deal with horrors that were notably female (like banshees) or male horrors that entered female spaces. There is an account from 1536 about a “wighte” that bedeveled the convent of St. Genevieve; whether this is the same, none can say.

It’s noteworthy that Anna Van Buren is wearing very practical, almost masculine, clothing–as befits the nature of her job. The short sword and decapitated head are believed to be props or replicas that were embellished by the artist; the wight in particular is clearly rendered by someone who has never seen one in real life.

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