Mersey Jacobs walked up the path towards the hotel with a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach. She wasn’t sure why, but something didn’t feel quite right. She slowly turned her key in the entrance doors and there it was waiting for her, just like that. A dead rat, identical to the one she had seen before, lay on the welcome matt. It was just as bloated, just as bloody.
Mersey grabbed a shovel from the closet and ran outside towards the front garden. She found the patch of earth where she had not so long ago, buried the horrid thing; the uneven mound of soil told her it was here. With rasping breaths, she dug and dug, wiping her brow every so often and taking a breath, but eventually she had to accept, there was nothing buried here. Somebody had dug it up, she knew it, and planted it at her front door. She would even go so far as to suggest it had even been put there by somebody the first time. Michelle had told her on the way home in the cab that the Pest Control had been and gone and they hadn’t found any rats. She also told her that she had seen a dead rat the same day her mother claimed to, in the exact same place.
Mersey marched back inside the house, her heart hammered like a drum inside of her chest. She stood in the middle of the lobby and stared at the giant painting behind the reception desk.
“What do you want from me?” she said, in a small voice.
When only silence answered her, she screamed “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”
A sudden gust of ear-piercing screams seemed to come from every corner of the hotel, echoing off the walls and entering Mersey’s ears like daggers.
“Stop” Mersey appealed at the painting, yet the cries continue to torment her.
Unable to control herself, she felt the rage submerge her like a virus. Like cancer. As crazed as a madwoman she ran up to the painting, pulled the shovel back in her two hands and swung at it. A loud crack ran up the middle of the painting.
“This is our hotel” Mersey said “Leave us alone.”
She slashed away at the painting, watching the haunting faces disappear as chips of wood flew everywhere. Her eyes and nose ran but nothing could stop her whilst she was tormented by the cries. Eventually, the screams stopped and Mersey collapsed on the floor, breathless. She looked up at what she had done, seeing a huge gaping hole in the centre of the painting Using the shovel for support, she stood up and saw something inside of the hole. As she moved closer, she realized a cardboard box was inside.
She reached inside and delicately pulled out the small box, wiping off the cobwebs as she did so.
The box consisted of black and white photos and an old yellowing newspaper article. She picked up the first photo, instantly recognising the family. They were the people from the painting, the mother, the father and the baby. There were more recent photos too; different stages of the family’s lives. The baby as a toddler, being fed in a high chair by his mother; the toddler as a boy, with springy fair hair, sitting on the front steps and smiling, sweet dimples fixed into his cheeks. There was something so familiar in the boy, Mersey felt as if she knew him, as she stared into his smiling face. She looked at the final photo, a picture of a girl with long dark hair, she looked just like Michelle. Holding the girls hand, was a teenage boy. Suddenly it all made sense to her. Mersey let out a gasp, but at the very moment she was smothered with something and hauled backwards.
She was staring up at the ceiling when a face appeared in her vision.
“Sorry Mrs Jacobs, but I have to do this” Adam said grinning down at her wickedly.
Mersey tried to let out a scream to find that a sock had been shoved in her mouth. She attempted to wriggle out of his grip but he was too strong for her. Pulling her up from the floor, he tied her hands behind her back and dragged her by her ankles. Mersey recoiled at the agony in her back as she was heaved out of the lobby like a sack of potatoes.
“I’m sorry” Adam said his voice sincere “but you’re just getting in the way.”
She was pushed into the broom closet and watched the darkness engulf her as he shut the door.
At that moment, she heard the sound of the hotel entrance door open.
Michelle was home.
YOU ARE READING
The Jacobs Hotel (Haunted)
Horror"A perfect cross between American Horror Story and The Bates Motel" When Michelle and her mother Mersey Jacobs buy the old hotel in Lakeside Village, they're hoping for a change in their lives. However they soon realise they may have got more than...
