Page 63 of The Haunted Hotel

“You’re not the only one at fault here,” I admit slowly. “When I was younger, I knew I had a grandad in England, but I’d convinced myself he didn’t want anything to do with me because I never heard from him. At any point in my adult life, I could have gotten on a plane and come over here to meet him, but I didn’t.”

“You’re there now,” she reminds me. “Be gentle with him. If he’s as cantankerous as I remember, you’ll have your work cut out, but underneath it all, he’s a good man.” She gives a small laugh. “You’re a lot like him, actually.”

“How so?”

“It’s like your father got all the sweetness and sunshine in your family. You and your grandfather are two peas in a pod. Grumpy and as prickly as a porcupine, but when you love, you love with everything in you. So go, get to know your grandfather, and I’m here anytime you need to talk.”

“Actually, there was something I wanted to ask.”

“What’s that?”

“When we lived here at Ashton House, did I have a friend who came to play? He would have been a little older than me, maybe eight or nine? His name was Artie.”

“Artie?” She sounds surprised. “Wow, that’s a name I haven’t heard in over thirty years.”

“Was he a friend of mine, then? Did he live locally? I was just wondering if he still lived around here.”

“Morgan,” she says gently. “Artie wasn’t real. He was your imaginary friend.”

“What?”

“It started as soon as you were able to talk. You were always going on about your friend, Artie. Your father and I would watch you have entire conversations with him in front of us, but there was no one there. I was a bit worried about it when you hadn’t grown out of it by the time you started school, but Elliott…” She trails off.

“What?” I ask curiously.

“Whenever you talked about Artie, Elliott would have this little smile on his face, like it was a secret only the two of you were in on. He said to just leave you and that eventually you’d grow out of it. I guess you did because you never mentioned him once we moved to New York. It was like you left him behind with all of your other memories.”

“I guess,” I mutter.

“So,” Mom says, and I smile because I know that tone. “Tell me all about this Ellis.”

20

Ifind myself taking a deep breath as I stand outside my grandad’s room. This will either go well or very, very badly. Raising my hand, I knock and wait. And wait… and wait.

I know damn well he’s in there. Ellis said he hasn’t left his room in decades, not since my father died and we left. A small kernel of guilt lodges in my chest and no matter what I do, I can’t seem to dislodge it. I may have only been a kid at the time, and Mom did what she had to do, but I can’t help thinking about the fact we had each other and then Warren and Royce. Grandad had no one, and he’d lost his wife as well as his only son.

Turning up now is probably too little too late, but I have to give it a shot. Not to soothe my conscience or because of some misplaced sense of guilt, not even out of pity, but because I’m his only remaining family and I want to get to know him. I’m glad he has Ellis and the others. They all stepped up and took care of him when we didn’t.

Maybe we should have.

I shake my head—going around in circles isn’t going to help. Raising my hand to knock again, I freeze when the door opens a crack and my grandfather’s face appears, his eyes narrowing suspiciously as he looks me up and down.

“Oh, it’s you,” he mutters. “Should’ve known. Ellis just knocks and walks straight in.”

“Hi,” I greet him awkwardly. It’s weird looking at him. It’s like looking at a much older version of myself in the mirror, not just his features but right down to the drawn-down brows and the glower. “Can we talk?”

He stares at me for a moment and huffs, then turns around and disappears, leaving the door to swing open. Right or wrong, I take that as an invitation, however gruffly offered. I step inside and close the door behind me with a quiet click.

Grandad doesn’t stop or sit down, he just continues across the room, his slippers making a swishing sound on the carpet. He enters another room and leaves that door open as well. I stand uncomfortably in his sitting room, not sure if I should follow or not.

“Are you coming in or not?” he shouts in annoyance after a moment. “I haven’t got all day. I could be dead soon.”

My mouth twitches and I remind myself to have patience. After all, this is probably going to be me in fifty years. I head through the doorway, only to draw up short and stare, my mouth falling open. I think I’d expected this to be his bedroom, but instead it’s a huge room with the largest train set I’ve ever seen set up in it.

There’s enough space to walk the periphery of the room, the train table sitting right in the middle. Clearly custom-made, it’s a massive oval shape with the centre cut away so you could stand in the middle of it. I’m guessing it has a hinged pass-through somewhere to access it.

The table itself is covered with tiny fields and valleys, tunnels and stations. There’s a little village and some roads, and tiny little people stand along the platforms edging the train tracks. The tracks themselves wind around the table and intersect at little signal boxes and sidings. A small version of the FlyingScotsman chugs around one track, pulling pretty passenger carriages. On a second track is a goods train with trucks and cargo.