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“Hey guys!” Grant greeted cheerfully, hoping to cut the obvious tension.

“Hey, Grant,” Aurora said with a little wave.

“Yo.” Bachata grunted, and he wrestled the mouse away from Aurora to rewind the clip of footage they were looking at.

“How’s it going?” Grant asked.

“Great,” Aurora replied. “Finn and Cary radioed in that they got pinched. Probably by the same frisky ghost that got you earlier. Lots of weird bangs and boops. Oh, and Bachata found a bug.”

“Orb,” Bachata grumpily corrected.

“What about you?” Aurora grinned. “Anything good on the weather report?”

“Very, very good,” Grant confirmed, “and I got a whole list of fun stuff for you to check out. I’ve got names, maybe even some dates. Also, uh, maybe don’t go by the Eastern Stairs because there maybe might be a killer inhuman presence in it.”

“What?” Aurora and Bachata both blurted out in unison.

“Right, so, there are at least four spirits here…”

Grant gave them the short version of his encounter with Huck and what he’d learned about the other ghosts, and Aurora promised to get started on the research right away. First thing tomorrow, she would hit up the local library and town archives to see what she could find about Precipitation Per Chance and see if there was anything else unusual about the Allan Hotel they’d missed.

They said good night, and Grant headed upstairs to his room. The stairs he took were nearly identical to the Eastern Stairs except they had blocky acorns on the posts instead of lions. There was no inhuman pulsing or ghostly pinching along the way, only tacky forest green carpet with gold latticework framing it along the dark wooden moulding, so he considered it a win.

He had one of the larger suites, which was furnished with a massive antique canopy bed and a plush sitting area. The television was the old tube-style kind and the brass hardware was plentiful, but the room was comfortable and clean.

It wasn’t an accident Grant usually got a nicer room than most of the other cast and crew when they stayed overnight anywhere. It was one of the many ways Cary and Finn showed Grant their appreciation for what he did for them, though it was also one of the things that pissed off Janice. She raised hell over a historian getting better rooms than the hosts of the show, so now either Finn or Cary would quietly switch rooms with Grant without telling her.

This suite was originally Finn’s.

Grant unpacked a few things, got changed into some sweats and a T-shirt, and then tried to figure out how he was going to pass the time until midnight. He knew Huck had told him to stay away from the Eastern Stairs, and he planned to, but…

Damn, he was curious.

The previous inhuman presences he’d felt were nowhere near as strong as the Thing. A common theory was that since these beings were not of this world, they could never fully manifest unless they had a vessel or a host to use as a conduit—which was a fancy way of saying they needed someone to possess. Though Grant had never personally experienced a case of possession, he’d had a chatty inhuman spirit try to persuade him to let them into his body once.

Grant had politely declined.

If the Thing was a demonic being, that would certainly explain the deaths, as this kind of spirit was always extremely violent.

As for how it could be that strong…

Grant didn’t know for sure, but he was beginning to suspect it had something to do with the staircase specifically. Either the wood itself that it was made from or something in its construction that could have brought the spirit here and kept it for so long.

Searching the internet on his phone brought up loads of articles about the horror movies the Allan Hotel had been used in and lists of the many deaths said to have happened here. Most of it Grant already knew from the show’s initial production research, and he’d read a lot of these same articles preparing for shooting this season. He focused now on the websites purportedly sharing the “true” history of the Allan and scrolled for a while.

He found that Myrna’s tour was accurate in its detail though not in its scope.

She was right about the people who had died at the hotel; she’d merely neglected to name about thirty of them.

Not including the hundreds of patients who had passed away here when it was a hospital, there were anywhere from thirty to as high as fifty more deaths. As Grant read on, there was one constant many of them shared.

The Eastern Stairs.

There were multiple falls and trips, but other cases were more subtle—like the traveling salesman who unexpectedly dropped dead. At a glance, it would seem that he died of a heart attack, but alleged eyewitness reports said he’d seen something on the stairs, pointed, screamed, andthendropped dead.

Grant frowned when he found the most recent death, the Allan Hotel employee Myrna had mentioned in her tour. The employee’s name was Emily Lin, and like Myrna had said, she had taken her own life. A vulgar tabloid claimed she’d hung herself from the stairwell railing, and Grant grimaced when he stumbled upon her memorialized social media.

Curiosity drove him to search for Huck, and he was surprised to find a Facebook profile for Henry Huck Sharpe. It was set to private, so he couldn’t see much, and it appeared the last post was from almost five years ago.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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