Post #491373 by Cammo on Sun, Nov 1, 2009 9:29 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHFK1yKfiGo

Angie's Ghost Story Part 20

There was NO WAY we were going back in there this time.

He looked at both of us and smiled his Big Ottawa Government Man Smile and told us all about how he knew exactly what to do and how the whole thing was going to be real good and we should come to work every day and he’d take care of everything, don’t worry. He calmed us down and we all walked slowly back up the steps into the front hall.

Mrs. Aldon was standing there with her purse and her coat, looking terrified. She stared at us, then at Mr. Tilden’s foot.

He wasn’t wearing his shoe.

“Come on, Mary, we’ve something to talk about.” He said, and they both walked into her office. The door slammed shut.

“Well, that’s it,” Cindy smiled, “he knows what’s going on and tomorrow we can do the Big Scrub. I think it’s gonna be OK.”

We heard some loud voices coming from the office, then it was quiet for a while. Finally Mr. Tilden came out, he walked right past us, nodding and smiling to himself. Then he just walked out the front door.

“Ahem. Girls.” Mrs. Aldon was trying to get our attention, “ah, I have some news for you.”

Oh, great. She looked really flustered. Here’s where we get fired. She walked towards us, straightening her hair and pulling down on her jacket.

“Mr. Tilden wants to turn the hostel into a tourist attraction.”

Huh?

“He wants you to take all the crosses down. We won’t have the place blessed. He wants people to come here from all over the world to...”

“WHAT?”

“To see the ghosts and spend the night in a real haunted hotel, and we’re going to raise the ra...”

“Is he crazy?” Cindy and I couldn’t believe what she was saying.

“No, Mr. Tilden is definitely not crazy. If we can raise the per-night rates by twenty percent over the next year, we...”

“What?”

“We can actually make a profit, assuming fifty percent occupancy by this time...”

“But...”

“...next year, and that will pay for the next five years of...”

“But...”

“LOOK girls, I know what’s going on and I don’t like it any more than you, I don’t agree with everything he wants to do, but its out of our hands and we’d like to take care of you two for this summer...”

“But... but nobody will stay here...”

“So we’re prepared to double your salaries and still keep you on a two-person shift. That way..”

“DOUBLE?”

“Yeah, huh? Both of us?”

“Both of you, that’s right, we’ll double your salaries and you can keep your normal hours...”

“That’s,” Cindy was calculating, “twenty four an hour? For eight hours that’s like, ... about... two hundred dollars a DAY?”

“Yes, it’s a hundred ninety two a day, and I think it’s a great offer, Mr. Tilden is convinced the ghosts actually like you two because...”

So the long and short of it was that they’d pay us more money per day than we had ever seen in our lives. Cindy and I ended up both buying cars that summer, they were used cars but I bought a Honda hatchback mini-station wagon. Harvest Gold. Remember those? Cindy got a giant Green Ford Granada. She called it the Jolly Green Giant. We had enough money left over to buy a set of skis for next winter, new clothes, and a LOT of records. And they still kept paying us, it was amazing.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, because here’s how we dealt with the ghosts.

We never went inside.

As soon as Mrs. Aldon left each day, we’d take the chairs outside to the right of the front door, there was a grassy patch there and we’d just sit outside talking about stuff for the rest of the night. It was great, the summer nights were nice and warm and we’d just have to get up when somebody came in, which was easy cause we could see them coming up the steps from way back.

A few days of sitting outside gave Cindy some ideas; she brought a hibachi and we grilled hotdogs one night. Then we brought hamburgs, and soon it became a tradition every night, later we’d invite our friends and they’d all hang out. My friend Mike Jilka would bring his guitar some nights and we’d sing rock songs. It was pretty fun. We got rid of the hibachi and bought a real barbeque. More and more students staying at the hostel would join us, and over the summer it got to be a pretty big party outside every single night. There were no neighbors to complain about us downtown - it was all closed businesses and government buildings around us.

The only problem was answering the phone, we’d have to go inside when it rang. Sometimes people would have problems with noises, or seeing things walking through their room and vanishing, or things not working, sometimes the phone would ring and nobody would be on the other end. We didn’t like going inside. It was distracting.

Then one night, when Mrs. Aldon had just left, Cindy got this gleam in her eye. Something was up, I knew her pretty well now and something was UP.

“Angie, we’ve been through a lot together,” she said. “And when I find something important I want to share it with you.”

“Yeah, OK.”

“So let me tell you that there is a place on Earth that’s just like Heaven. It is. God in all of his wonder created this place, and made it good. He made it so good he made a lot of them, sometimes three of four, sometimes more in every city.”

“Uh, yeah. What?”

“I’ll let you in on this place, but don’t go telling everybody else. The place is called Radio Shack.”

And she brought out a little Radio Shack plastic bag she had in her pocket. Then she reached into the bag, smiling, and brought out a little package of wire. She held it out to me so I could read what the package said.

“Fifty Foot Telephone Extension. $11.95. Radio Shack.”

Well, that solved the phone problem. We just ran that line into the hostel through the window, plugged it in, taped it down to the floor, clicked the phone into it outside, and plopped it right down on the grass beside us.

Our final trick was to make our outside area look more official by bringing a small table with us. We sat the phone on it. When people would complain about some strange thing happening inside, we’d look businesslike and pretend to call somebody on the phone. It didn’t work so well, so we finally got a big black book from an art store that we could write down the complaints in.

Every complaint for the rest of that summer went in that book. We never actually did anything with the entries, but it really made people feel better that we were writing down the time and their problem. We’d tell them we’d take care of it in the morning. It didn’t matter what the problem was, we’d take care of it in the morning. That was The Policy. When we’d ask their names and home address, they’d get shy and usually say that it wasn’t that big a deal and they’d go away. That book worked like magic. Little did we know it, but we had become Perfect Government Employees.

“What should we call it?” Cindy asked me one night.

“What? The book?”

“Yeah,” she picked it up. “We could write it in the front. How about ‘Morbid Memories’?”

“Hmmm... or ‘Specters I have Known?”

“Department of Unearthly Complaints? That’s us.”

“Or just ‘The Official Handbook of the Haunted Hostel. It’s simple.”

“Nah. The Clue of the Vampire Nuns, Yet Another Nancy Drew Mystery.”

“The Book of the Dead, and How To Avoid Them, By Angie and Cindy”

The whole time I we were talking, I had been doodling this little picture of Cindy and I inside the front cover. We were sitting in lawn chairs, grinning, toasting marshmallows in a big bonfire. The hostel beside us had a huge sad-looking ghost sticking out one of the windows, looking at us. Cindy looked over my shoulder, laughed at it, and then took my pen and drew a little hat on the ghost. The hat said “Ministry of Terrorism” on it.

That’s what we called the book. I still have the drawing, it’s framed and hanging in my living room.

THE END