Post #490883 by Cammo on Thu, Oct 29, 2009 5:56 PM

Angie's Ghost Story Part 17

“Uh, no.” I answered.

“There was an inscription we found ...” she stopped and thought, “Where did you meet the thing on the stairs? Was it about the 6th floor? Inside the stairwell?”

As a matter of fact... “Yeah, I think so,” I told her. Cindy was stuffing crosses into her big dress pockets. Bree got up and went back to her kitchen. I heard her opening shelves, rummaging around, then she came back with a little piece of paper.

“It was drawing something on the wall when you saw it on the stairs, right?” she asked.

“Yeah, with its finger, like it was tracing a drawing it saw there.” The memory of it was giving me the creeps again, I saw it’s finger reached out, scratching the wall, intent, ignoring us at first, hunched over...

She stood up. “Let’s go. Bring the crosses.”

Cindy helped me stuff as many as I could fit in my pockets. Then we went up to the 6th floor landing.

On the way, huffing up the stairs, Bree told us that on the little set of stairs where we had seen the thing, there had been an inscription on the wall. Painters had found it when they were fixing up the place. It was really old, barely visible, and it was weird, the words had seemed kind of crazy, but they had mentioned a vampire so the painters had written it down before they had painted it over. We came out onto the 6th floor, marched down the hall and Bree pulled the paper out.

She opened the door to the stairs.

“Yeah, that’s where we were.” I said, not wanting to go in.

”Right there?” Bree asked, pointing up a few steps to the right.

“Yeah.” I looked around and there it was, the little cross on the chain that I had thrown. Cindy saw it too, looked around cautiously, and threw one of her wooden crosses in. She didn’t say anything, she just threw a cross in, and snatched the gold one up.

"That's where the writing was found eight years ago." Bree went right to the step, sat down and read the slip of paper. This is exactly what she read to us:

"I am a non-veridical Vampire who will vanquish you all. One by one I will ornate your odorous flesh with famished fangs. But Who? Are there 94 or 95 steps to the 9th floor? A book on the top shelf will lead you on the right path." Also, below the words, in a circle - "S3a".

“The NINTH floor?” Cindy said.

This was all way too strange for us.

Bree turned to the wall, and taped the paper up so it could be read by everybody.

“It’s a warning, see? I think it should go back up.”

“Can we get out of here now?” I asked, backing up.

“Sure,” she said, standing up, “did you know Jack the Ripper used to send the same sort of warnings? It was like he wanted to get caught. So did the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco, he even used to send hints in coded numbers and letters, just like... our friend.”

We all started walking back down.

“Is there a ninth floor?”

“And so did Son of Sam.” Bree said.

“What’s the ninth floor?”

“Oh. It’s, sort of, an attic. I think nuns used to live up there, it was their dormitory. Whatever you do, don’t go up there.”

Something about the words ‘nuns’ made Cindy freeze for a moment.

“Promise me you won’t try to go up to the ninth floor.” Bree said, seriously.

That woke Cindy up.

“This place has Vampire Nuns in the attic? I, WE promise not to go visit the vampire nuns. We swear to God Almighty we won’t visit any devil nuns anytime, anywhere, for ANY reason, right Angie?”

“Cross my heart and hope to...” then I grinned, “I promise.”

“You know, I’ve got a friend who’s working at the information booth this summer, the one beside the canal, y’know?” Cindy told us, “All she has to do is point to the brochures the tourists can take. That’s it. She doesn’t even give them the brochures, she just points. But she thinks it’s the worst job, she hates it, you know why?”

“Why?”

“Cause she has to wear a hat. It says ‘Ministry of Tourism’ on it. And she makes two bucks more an hour than we do,”

then Cindy paused and shook her head,

“...vampire nuns in the attic. I quit.”

Then we spent the next few hours hammering all the crosses over every door and haunted part of the hostel we could reach. It ended up looking like Crucifixland when we were done, and then Cindy called her mom and her aunt and her priest at the local church, telling them it was OK to come and bless the whole place the next day, Sunday. The priest apparently promised to bring gallons of holy water with him. We were going to wash the entire 8th floor in holy water, I’m not kidding. Bree called Mrs. Aldon about it and she agreed too, and said she’d call her boss to approve the funds because the priest wanted to be paid for a hard day of vampire-destroying work. He probably thought we were all crazy.

An hour later, Mrs. Aldon called us back.

“Tell the priest to not come on Sunday.” she said. Bree couldn’t believe it, but it turned out that Ken Tilden, the appropriations head of the hostel, wanted to see the whole place first. He wouldn’t let us make a move until he had looked around. Right now.

“He wants to see the ghosts?” I asked.