by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in Hot Chocolate for the Unicorn and Other Flights of Fancy, December 2024
They say that Hot Lake Hotel is haunted, but the shimmer of bluish light in the corner of my room wasn’t waiting for me when I arrived. She came with me. She’s been following me all of my life. Almost all of my life.
I close the door to my room — lucky number 113 — behind me and gratefully pull off the face mask I still wear everywhere. I know that most people have moved on from the pandemic, but between my rattly joints and asthmatic breathing, the last thing I need is to roll the dice on long Covid. So, I still mask up when I go out.
I wonder if Polly would still be masking up after all these years if she were still alive. I like to imagine that she would be. That we’d both be so careful about our exposure and so close, talking all the time, that she’d be the one person I really felt safe letting my guard down around. We’d meet up for dinners once a week, or maybe every other week, and we’d get take-out to share either in my house or her apartment. Or maybe she’d even live in my spare room. We wouldn’t have to mask around each other, so we’d chat and laugh, eating chow fun and playing Bananagrams. I can picture it all so vividly.
Instead, Polly drifts through the closed door after me, looking lost and oh so small. She never grew up. She never grew up because of me.
I roll my suitcase into a corner, throw my jacket onto the wide, white bed, and then sit down beside it. Polly kneels down on the floor. There’s a vagueness in her eyes like maybe the rest of the world looks as shimmery and translucent to her as she looks to me. She huddles on the floor shivering, always cold, in spite of the stuffy warmth of this hot summer day in eastern Oregon.
I’d hoped Polly wouldn’t be cold here like she always has been in the valley, but also, I knew better. We get our hot days in the valley too — especially since the summers started heating up — and I’ve never seen Polly stop shivering. Not once since she died.
“What do you want to do first?” I ask. If anyone else were here, it would look like I were talking to an empty room. I’ve never met anyone else who could see Polly. Not even our parents. Not even Mom. And Polly almost never answers me anyway, so I learned a long time ago not to bother most of the time. But this trip is special. This trip is for her.
I wait a little longer than usual for Polly to answer, but then I start listing off the options — soaking pools, pub, sun room. “There’s even a theater right inside the hotel, but they’re only playing Edward Scissorhands,” I say, tracing my fingers around the edges of the rectangular paper ticket that came complimentary upon checking in.
It’s only one ticket, but a place like this won’t have a full house. I’m sure I could find a seat with an empty seat next to me for Polly. Still, it feels wrong to do something that excludes her like that when I came here especially for her. “I don’t think you’d like Edward Scissorhands. Too scary.”
Polly may be a ghost, and she may have been walking this earth beside me for nearly forty years… But she’s also the same five-year-old girl she was when she died. Unchanging. Untouched by time. She may not talk much, but she looks bored when I watch lawyer dramas, and I catch her smiling if I turn on Disney musicals.
There was a time when I tried to convince myself I’d done Polly a favor. I’d been a bitter, cynical teenager, angry at the world and tired of being angry at myself because she was gone, and I thought, maybe, being an eternal five-year-old, walking through the world unnoticed would be a better way to live. Ironic, since she’s not living.
I’m not always sure what Polly is — a shadow of the past? My own guilt manifested? One of those squiggles that shows up in your eyes for an hour, and when you go to the doctor, they tell you it was a migraine episode, caused by wonky blood flow or something? Maybe I’ve been having some sort of unusual migraine headache ever since I was seven years old and made a fatal mistake, thinking I was just playing a game with my cousins.
“Right,” I say, standing up from the bed, making an executive decision. “Let’s start by exploring.”
I put my mask back on and head back out into the eerie, long hallways of the hotel with their patches of exposed brick, high ceilings, and pipes of electrical wiring that were clearly added on long after it was originally built. This place has a long history: it was an asylum, a hospital, an orphanage. It’s been about everything creepy that an old building could possibly be, and now it’s a hotel. Lucky for me. Lucky for Polly, I hope.
There are large, old photographs hung in the hallway that show how the hotel used to look — not that different, really. So, there’s a weird recursive quality to the photographs hanging like they’re somehow fine art in their overly fancy frames. The carpeting sports a faded floral pattern, and I don’t know what kind of flooring it’s covering, but it’s uneven and bumpy as hell.
Polly and I make our way back to the lobby with its windows made up from so many smaller panes of glass. Then we continue on to the pub. It’s closed and empty, but overnight guests of the hotel can still wander through the darkened space. There’s an eerie quality to a room cheerfully, optimistically filled with chairs and tables, clearly wishing to be occupied, but all of them empty. It’s the perfect place for ghosts, and of course, that’s the idea.
I brought Polly here to see if I can find her friends. Friends who can see her, maybe talk to her, and make it so she’s not entirely alone except for me. She didn’t get to live a life, but maybe, I can find a way to give her a better afterlife than she’s been having so far, following around a disinterested sister living an unremarkable, very quiet life.
I keep exploring the hotel for a while — there’s an old safe the size of a small closet that they’ve got propped open, and guests have left funny notes taped up inside. There’s a courtyard out back with a fountain in it. A couple of other guests are hanging out smoking in the dark back there. I head upstairs to the sun room, despite it being well after sunset. It’s really just another space like the various lounging and lobby-like areas around the pub downstairs. Maybe the sun room is more spectacular with sunlight pouring in through the windows, but mostly, this whole place is a funny, old, rickety hotel, and I can see why people would think it’s haunted. Although, except for Polly, I haven’t seen any ghosts yet.
Maybe after my visit, the Hot Lake Hotel really will be haunted. I think somewhat guiltily that I’m treating Polly like a stray cat who I didn’t mean to take in — looking for anyone else who will take her off my hands.
But why shouldn’t I? I never signed on to spend my entire life haunted by a little sister who didn’t get to grow up. I was a stupid kid who didn’t know what I was doing when I told her to hide in Grandpa’s old chest from WWII. My cousins and I just thought we’d get to play together a little longer if our parents couldn’t find all of us, and well, Polly was the smallest. She fit best in the chest. No one told us it was airtight.
Grandpa should’ve drilled holes in it. He should’ve thrown it away.
My cousins and I got more than we bargained for. After Polly was found — as blue as she still is to this day, but as solid as she used to be before I closed the chest with her inside — all of our plans for heading home were forgotten, obliterated by police and hospitals and mortuaries. It’s blurred together over the years, but a few moments stand out as bright and sharp as they were when they were happening. I remember staring at an exit sign, bright red with clean, simple lines. I don’t remember why or what else was happening while I stared at it, but I remember how it looked. Like any other exit sign, but that was the one that stuck in my mind. Exit signs still make me think of that day.
I don’t know when I realized that Polly was a ghost. I was seven, and I understood that she was dead. I knew no one else could see her, and she didn’t act the same anymore. She didn’t fight with me over toys. She didn’t complain when I told Mom that I’d rather go to a Chinese restaurant or a Mexican restaurant rather than some fast food burger place yet again. In some ways, she was easier to get along with — just a quiet shadow, never asking for full consideration anymore, because she wasn’t really a person anymore. Just a memory. But a memory I couldn’t let go of.
Having finished our tour of the grounds, I swing back by my room and change into my swimming suit, throwing one of the complimentary robes over the top of it and tucking a rolled up towel under my arm.
“Come on, let’s check out the soaking pools,” I say to Polly, trying to talk to her like a person. It feels weird and awkward after all of the years I’ve spent ignoring her, letting her be a smudge of blue seen out of the corner of my eye. She’s sat through so many office meetings, rode quietly in the backseat of my car while I’ve listened to podcasts, wandered aimlessly through so many grocery trips. I had to learn to ignore her. It was self-defense. But now, I’m trying to open that wound back up, maybe dig out the piece of shrapnel that lodged in my heart, keeping the scar from ever fully closing.
The soaking pools are between the hotel and the lake, under the open sky. There are five of them in a row, each of them filled with hot water piped directly from the lake. The lake water is scalding hot. There are danger signs posted all around it, warning people to stay out if they want to stay alive. I wonder how many children have died trying to play in this lake. I wonder how long ago. I wonder if any of them are still around, lonely ghosts, waiting to meet a new friend.
I settle into one of the round concrete tubs. There’s a bench under the water, and sitting on it, the water comes up to my shoulders. Warm and cozy. I can look out on the lake, surrounded by grassy reeds, with steam rising from its surface. Even if there weren’t a history of insane asylums and orphanages associated with the hotel here, I can easily see how someone could look out at the amorphous forms hovering over the lake and imagine ghosts instead of simple steam.
A small figure flies by above in the darkness, and at first, I imagine it’s a songbird because of the size. But it’s too late at night by now for a songbird to fly by. Maybe a small owl? But when it flies by again, I can make out the wings better, and then it chirps and squeaks in that distinctive voice that can only belong to one thing — it’s a bat. I’m soaking in a pool by a haunted lake, watching bats fly by overhead.
“What do you think, Polly?” I ask, trying not to let my tongue stumble over her name. None of us liked saying her name after she died. It was like the entirety of her life, her whole self, got tied up in the way she’d ended, and her name didn’t mean her anymore. It meant death. It meant shame. It meant loss. It meant heartache. “Do you like the bats?”
Polly loved animals when she’d been alive. I don’t remember a lot about her, not really. You’d think I would, since she’s been following me all this time. But I don’t. Like I said, it all starts to blur together when you’re looking at it through the rear-view mirror of time. But I know Polly loved animals, especially cats.
That’s when I notice that Polly has found a cat — a grumpy-looking tuxedo cat with a scar across his nose and paws so big that it almost looks like he has thumbs. This must be Rocky, the cat who has signs all over the outside of the hotel warning not to let him inside.
Polly is crouched down in front of Rocky, who’s lying on his side, tail twitching behind him. I’ve seen animals react to Polly before, not often, but often enough to seem significant. If Rocky can see Polly, I wonder if he can see other ghosts around here. Maybe if Polly and I follow him around, I could find clues as to whether there really are other ghosts here, simply hiding from me the way that Polly hides from everyone but me.
I soak in the hot water beside the lake for a long while. I don’t know how long, because I left my phone back in the hotel room. All I brought out with me was the rolled up towel and the brass key to room 113 tucked into the pocket of my robe. As I watch, Polly strokes Rocky’s side and scritches his ears. The gruff-looking cat seems to like it. Reality and daydreams blend together as I imagine a balrog storming about in the lake, heating the water with the fire under its rocklike skin. Kelpies prance along the scalding shoreline, luring children to their doom, but then, letting those same children ride on their backs, clinging to their kelp-like manes, once they’ve transformed from warm bodies into shivering ghosts — trading their lives for a chance to play with the dangerous, murder-ponies.
Once my fragile, living body has soaked up as much heat as it can take from the hot water, I get out, dry off with the towel, and put the robe back on. “I’m going to bed,” I tell Polly, but she’s too busy following Rocky around as he struts across the carefully manicured lawns to answer me. Or maybe she’s playing tag with some of those other ghost children, the ones I can’t see but have been imagining so vividly. “You stay out as long as you want, okay?”
“Okay,” Polly says. If she were a real, living five-year-old, I couldn’t leave her out here, alone, beside a scalding hot lake in the middle of the night.
But she’s not real, is she? She’s just a memory. No more real than the version of her I like to imagine sometimes who has an apartment across town from me and comes over every week for dinner. The version who grew up, got a job, and made a life for herself. The version who would have been free to fight with me over Mom and Dad paying off my college debt and how unfair it was that they didn’t spend as much on her, while I argue back that it’s not my fault I got into a more expensive college than she did. The version who lectures me on animal cruelty every time I eat meat or even put honey in my tea. The version who bikes everywhere and judges me for ruining the environment by driving a car. The version who hasn’t talked to me for seven years, and neither of us seems to care at all about fixing it.
I don’t know who Polly would have become if she’d gotten to grow up. I don’t know if we’d even still be talking, but at least, she’d be out there, alive, and I would know she was out there. I could pick up my phone and call her, push aside all the trivial differences, and just find out how she’s doing. Hear her voice. Know that the person I shared my earliest years with is still carrying those memories through the world, no matter how differently she saw those years. Maybe between us, we could triangulate the reality of what our childhood was really like, or maybe, we’d just argue over and over again, never really knowing which one of us was right.
There’s an entire world of difference between having a living sister and having lost my sister to a terrible, heartbreakingly avoidable accident when she was five. But right now, in this moment, I go back into my hotel room, lay down on the wide, white bed, and I think about the clean, red lines of a glowing exit sign. And I know, Polly is going to stay here.
I’m done being followed by her ghost.
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