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  Now Melody breathes over the hotel window and traces his name onto the cold glass. She glances at the London sidewalk until the condensation thickens and beads. Droplets of water slip down the pane, pulling Lewis’ name into the low-hanging clouds of morning.

  He doesn’t come back.

  Melody calls his phone and it vibrates on the nightstand beside her. She picks it up, clutching the cold plastic as she circles the room. Lewis’ jacket hangs in the closet. His clothes wait folded inside his suitcase, still seated on the luggage stand positioned at the foot of the bed. His shoes lay tossed beside the door where he kicked them off the night before.

  Melody bends down and picks up the shoes, the flimsy canvas fabric still damp from the rain. She sets them together beside the door, positioned back against the wall next to her own rain-soaked flats.

  “I really don’t want to go,” echoes a British voice in the hall.

  Melody listens, drawn to the soft feminine accent from outside. The polite British tone is a change from the condescending upward whine of the girls at home. She leans against the door and glances out the peephole, its mutated circle view revealing the two maids in the hallway, a brunette and a redhead waiting for the elevator to arrive.

  “Your hands are shaking,” the redhead says.

  “I tend to avoid the third floor,” the brunette says. “Especially this time of year. October’s when most of the activity occurs. I don’t like to mention it. There’s no sense in scaring the guests who don’t know.”

  “About Room 333?” the redhead asks, her voice lowered to a hush.

  “I believe in all those things,” the brunette says.

  The elevator opens and the brunette pushes the linen cart into the waiting car, its wheels squeaking. The doors ease closed again and Melody watches the empty hallway until the light above the elevator counts up to the next floor.

  Morning fades. Rain continues to fall. The elevator doors open and close over the course of the day; taking passengers and exchanging them with new guests. Lewis is never one of the people to return.

  Melody lies on the bed, soft sheets draped over her body. She’s motionless, tense—unable to move. Creaks sound from above and she glances at the ceiling. She clenches her fists, reminding herself that she’s in room 233. Her gaze traces the creak of the footsteps and she realizes which room is above.

  She wonders what sort of activity the brunette was so afraid of.

  Evening arrives. Their reservation time at the five-star restaurant down the street passes.

  Melody takes the elevator to the hotel lobby and explains to the receptionist that her boyfriend’s gone missing.

  “His name is Lewis Peterson,” she says. “I haven’t seen him all day. He never told me he was going anywhere. He hasn’t tried to call. I haven’t heard anything.”

  The receptionist nods. She’s a pretty blonde with the name “Pippa” printed on the tag on her chest. Pippa says she’s sorry, that she hasn’t seen Lewis, though her accent makes it seem almost like she isn’t actually sorry at all, making the entire conversation feel like a scene in one of those British cringe comedies that Lewis always forced Melody to watch. He’d sit beside her unable to control his laughter but Melody could never understand what was so hilarious about awkward misunderstanding.

  Now she laughs because she doesn’t know what else to do.

  Pippa looks at her and cringes.

  “I’m sorry,” Melody says.

  This is where the comedy would cut to a commercial break, except British television doesn’t really have commercials. Pippa stares and time keeps going; British time that makes Melody feel like she’s eight hours ahead of herself.

  Melody calls her sister, but her sister was never a big fan of Lewis.

  “I hate to say it,” her sister says, “but he probably left you. He’s probably been talking to some British chick all this time. He probably set up this whole vacation just so he could meet her.”

  Melody shakes her head, the sobs burning up her throat. “All his stuff is here,” she says. “He didn’t take anything with him.”

  “Why would he need it?” her sister asks.

  “He wouldn’t just leave,” Melody insists. “Lewis would never do something so cruel.” She speaks with authority, her voice quickly tainted with whine as she thinks about all the times she and Lewis would argue and he’d storm off and slam the door, only to return with flowers and a sorry expression. The flowers always came with a card with his written sentiment:

  You’re a Melody.

  Evidence.

  Facts.

  Proof.

  Her sister’s sigh sounds like ghostly static over the line. “I know it hurts, Melody, but what else could have happened? You can’t deny that it’s the only logical explanation.”

  Love isn’t based on logic, Melody thinks. Then another set of creaks sound from the room over her head and she glances up, her fingers gripping the phone.

  The next morning she goes back down to the lobby. Pippa’s there, smiling her polite British smile. Melody can’t help but feel anger when she remembers her sister’s words from the night before.

  Some British chick.

  Pippa says that Lewis never appeared on the lobby’s security footage.

  “Okay.” Melody swallows, shifting on shaking legs. She braces her hands over the desk and forces herself to meet Pippa’s pale-faced expression of ambivalence. She wants to ask if she can watch the entire tape of dead night footage, but she knows how stupid and unstable she’d look if she said it aloud.

  Her cold palms slip from the desk as she backs away. Her fingers curl into fists as she paces unsteady over the lobby’s marble floor, back to the elevator. She rides inside the car, picturing Lewis wandering the hotel halls without his shoes. She thinks of him knocking on a closed door that isn’t theirs and a chill slips over her. The feeling buries deep inside her stomach, creating an ache that cripples like plane turbulence.

  She returns to the hotel room and brews a coffee from the machine. It doesn’t taste right. It’s muddy on her tongue, tainted somehow. The mug says I Love London, except the word love is a picture of a red heart. She thinks how stupid it is that the little heart is supposed to mean love when it looks nothing like the pounding organ in her chest.

  They were supposed to ride the London Eye on their third day. This is what she tells the police officer in his blue uniform. He doesn’t look at her, just scribbles her rambling down in his tiny notebook. He nods and asks, “When was the last time you saw Lewis?”

  She thinks about the sex they had the night of their arrival, how even in a different bed their lovemaking was exactly the same. She lay underneath him pretending to enjoy his attention until he came and rolled beside her, saying, “I Love You” without any real enthusiasm.

  Melody laughs, remembering now that she fell asleep while he was still on top of her. She wonders if he even said he loved her at all.

  “Excuse me?” the officer asks. “Ma’am?”

  “We were fucking,” she says.

  The officer makes a face and then writes in the notebook. He tells her that he’ll call if any new information arises. After he leaves, Melody lies in the middle of the bed, her arms stretched out across its width. Instead of Lewis’ face it’s just the ceiling over her. She stares at the intricate details of the moulding around the light, focusing on the creaking footsteps of the guests in the room above.

  At night she opens the mini bar and she takes out a bottle of cream liquor, drinking it back with another cup of coffee from the machine. She looks at herself in the bathroom mirror, repeating the vulgar word she said to the officer.

  “Fucking.”

  The word sounds blunt in her American accent.

  The coffee’s stale but the liquor brings back some of the taste. She chugs its lukewarm comfort in large gulps, thinking of all the times Lewis came home with take-out dinner and a bouquet of flowers. He’d always set the flowers down on the table and tell her how
much he really loved her, how sorry he was that he always took her for granted.

  You’re a Melody.

  She thinks about all the bouquets she received over the course of the last four years, all the pretty arrangements that yellowed and withered and died on that dining room table. She thinks about how all bouquets are really just detached flowers in the process of dying.

  “Fucking. Fucking. Fucking.”

  She knows how bad it sounds. She knows how much time she’s wasted.

  “Fucking idiot,” she says. “You’re a fucking idiot.”

  The floor creaks above her over the course of the night. Melody leaves the room and wanders down the hallways with the I Love London mug clutched in her grasp, the ceramic marked with dried remains of stale coffee. She holds the mug up to random doors, listening, thinking of what she’d hear if Lewis was behind one of them with another woman.

  Love is only an emotion, and emotions are only signals sent from the brain, signals telling her body what to feel and how to react.

  What she feels now is gut instinct.

  The idea that Lewis’ disappearance is unexplainable makes her heart pound in her chest. The idea that he’ll never come back fills her body with adrenaline, and she wanders the entire span of the hotel’s second-floor hallway, holding her mug up to every door, searching for evidence that the hotel is haunted, proof that her suspicions are real.

  She isn’t stupid anymore.

  She boards the elevator and presses the button to investigate the third floor. The doors close in front of her. The lights in the car flicker. Her fingers flinch over the mug and she stands frozen, waiting, but all she hears is the ghostly moan of the car starting.

  The elevator creaks and shudders before landing on the third floor. The doors rustle open. Cold air filters in, prickling her flesh like the London air she hasn’t felt since she arrived in the hotel. She peeks out the elevator, glancing at the sealed door of the room directly above hers.

  Room 333.

  She doesn’t get out.

  Melody’s sister used to say that starting over wouldn’t be so bad.

  The hotel is full of ghosts, different spirits in transition. This is what Melody learns, eating room service breakfast in bed with a computer on her lap. There’s a ghost with a gaping wound in his face that wanders the hotel’s hallways. There’s the ghost of a German prince that spends his days walking through closed doors. There’s a ghost known for tipping guests out of bed while they sleep.

  Melody spends the day with her research. She reads about the ghost of a Victorian doctor who threw himself out the window of room 333 after killing his new wife on their honeymoon. Now the doctor’s ghost haunts the room above her, first appearing as a fluorescent orb of light that slowly takes shape of a man with arms outstretched, a dead gaze and no legs. Melody wonders how long the doctor must have been with his wife before he realized he’d been wasting so much time.

  The rain patters against the window. Melody sets her computer on the bed and approaches the glass, staring deep at London’s dreariness until she sees the reflection of her own gaze in the clouds.

  You’re a Melody.

  Lewis’ words used to sound so sincere but Melody has no idea what they mean now that the creaks above her are getting heavy. She hears the moans, the sounds of the couple upstairs fucking.

  She looks up and swears she can feel the heat of Lewis’ breath in her ear.

  Losing Lewis used to be her biggest fear.

  The fifth day is Melody’s last in London. She packs her clothes and her toiletries. She makes the bed and cleans the room of her presence. She has no souvenirs except for the I Love London mug. She picks it off the desk and leaves all of Lewis’ possessions behind.

  The creaking above her continues, only this time it’s a series of stomps that she can no longer ignore. Adrenaline builds inside of her as she pulls her luggage into the hall. She enters the elevator and waits until the doors slide closed. She touches the button on the panel and the elevator moans again, taking her up.

  The air is cooler on the third floor. Its cold caress flushes Melody’s cheeks. She clutches tight to the mug’s ceramic handle and carries herself toward the haunted room. The gold numbers on the door glisten under the hallway light.

  333

  The door is propped ajar by the maid’s cleaning cart. She pushes against its weight and a gush of frozen air slips from inside.

  Neither of the maids notices Melody’s presence. Their shadows shift in the bathroom. She recognizes the voices of the brunette and the redhead from her first morning in the hotel.

  “They should board this room up, pretend it doesn’t exist,” the brunette says.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” the redhead says, “but why do you even work here if you’re so terrified of ghosts?”

  The redhead sounds like Melody’s sister, sounds like all the girls back home who knew better than Melody ever did.

  “I love this hotel,” the brunette says, her fondness echoing. “There’s so much history here.”

  Melody presses in, her muscles working against the room’s magnetic pull of energy. She holds her breath against the cold, her goosebumps like pinpricks that penetrate deep into her flesh, tickling her bones. The air thickens around her, tightens her limbs.

  The maids don’t notice as Melody meanders into the nightmare of the room. Discarded clothes lie scattered on the floor. Half-empty drinks wait to be finished on the nightstand. The bed’s a mess, its mattress partially shifted off the box spring, almost as though something had shaken the two lovers from their passion. Sweat-stained sheets lie crumpled on the floor.

  Chills brush over Melody’s shoulder like a bony hand slipping over her skin, digging deep into her chest and squeezing her lungs. The foul taste of the coffee fills her mouth and trickles down her throat. The room’s frigid air dries her eyes. She swallows and blinks, biting her tongue against the overwhelming sensation of her eyes being sucked inside of her head.

  A creak echoes through her eardrums but there’s nothing in the room. Melody’s grasp tenses around the mug.

  “Can you feel that?” the brunette asks, her voice a shaking from the bathroom.

  “Feel what?” the redhead asks.

  “Something’s in here,” the brunette shrieks.

  Melody ignores the panic. She glances at the window, where Lewis’ name is scrawled in her writing. She shakes her head. She blinks and the name is gone, replaced with a blank canvas of fogged glass.

  You’re a Melody.

  She shudders, hearing a rustle against her ear. Her gaze locks on the window, on the droplets of water that form and trickle down. The dripping lines waver across the glass, slowly forming the crude shape of a bouquet of withered flowers.

  CREDITS

  All of the stories in this collection are reprinted with the permission of the author, except for “Grin on the Rocks,” “Historical Hotties,” “Modern Beasts,” “Plot Points,” and “Slippery Slopes,” which are original stories, and are appearing here for the first time. “The Paper Bag Princess” originally appeared in ManArchy and was later reprinted in Cease, Cows. “Masturbating Megan’s Strip Mall Exhibition” originally appeared in Moonsick Magazine under the title, “Masturbating Maggie’s Strip Mall Exhibition.” “Blue Hawaii” originally appeared in Nova Parade and was later reprinted in The New Black. “Cat Calls” originally appeared in Exigencies. “Tourist” originally appeared in PANK. “College Glaciers” originally appeared in Punchnel’s. “Ghost Story” originally appeared in Revolt Daily. “Thinspiration” originally appeared in Out of the Gutter. “Better Places” originally appeared in Pulp Modern and was later reprinted in Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up to No Good.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to everyone at The Writing Cult. While I’ve never actually met any of you in person, and our only interactions have been through the depths of the Internet, I’ve enjoyed getting to know you all over the years. I love reading your stori
es and seeing your daily adventures unfold on Facebook. Your companionship during all those late-nights spent procrastinating in lieu of writing has been more than comforting. You’ve made me a great writer. Here’s to many more conversations about how great Steve Buscemi is.

  REBECCA JONES-HOWE lives and writes in Kamloops, Canada. Her stories have appeared in PANK, Punchnel’s, Out of the Gutter and Pulp Modern. She was the winner of Lit Reactor’s 2012 WAR writing competition. This is her first collection of short fiction. For more information visit her at http://rebeccajoneshowe.com/ or on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Rebnation.