Page 64 of The Haunted Hotel

I draw in a breath and kneel so I’m at eye level with the table and can study the details. It must have taken years to build this…or decades, I think, glancing up at my grandfather, who watches me intently.

“You built this?” I rise, taking in the small paint stains on his fingers and a half-finished cow shed sitting on top of a piece of folded newspaper on a table behind him.

He shrugs.

“It’s incredible,” I tell him.

“It helps kill the time until I die.” He shrugs again and shuffles towards the small table where he picks up the cow shed and resumes painting with a thin paintbrush. The table’s obviously his work desk; it’s covered in plastic containers filled with grass, trees, and shrubs. Spare tracks, tiny pots of model paint, and jam jars filled with different sized brushes also litter the surface.

“You bought me my first train set,” I murmur as another memory flickers through my mind. “For Christmas, when I was little.”

He pauses his painting for a second but doesn’t look at me. “You were three.”

“I’m sorry,” I say quietly and although he still doesn’t look at me, I can tell he’s listening because the strokes of his brush have slowed and he’s painting the same spot over and over. “I should’ve come to see you sooner.”

He doesn’t respond so I keep talking. Maybe it’s easier this way. I can get out everything I need to say in one go.

“I barely remember being here. Mom told me that the therapist said I’d repressed my memories because of the traumaof losing my dad, and I guess… I guess it was easier to stay away as I got older because I didn’t think you’d want to see me.”

He stops what he’s doing and finally looks up at me, those dark eyes so turbulent and so similar to my own.

He opens his mouth to say something, then stops and stares at me for several long moments. “Did you have a good life?” he finally asks. “In America, with your mother?”

“Yes,” I say honestly. “My stepfather was a good man. He loved me like I was his own and treated me and Mom well. I have a brother too. We were inseparable when we were younger, and we’re still very close now.”

He continues to watch me, something working behind that pensive gaze. “I’m glad,” he says. “Your mother was right, you were better off. There was nothing here for you but sadness.”

“Once perhaps, but I’m here now,” I murmur. “Can’t we start over?”

“You look like him.” He nods to the wall behind me.

When I first entered the room, my attention had been captured by the trains, and I’d missed the walls. The walls filled with framed photographs of me, I realise with a start. The first six years of my life captured in colour. Not just me, though; my mom is in some of the pictures, so young and happy. Grandad is there too, with an attractive woman who I think was my grandmother. There’s a fleeting recognition there, a brief memory of the smell of violets and of being held gently.

Finally, my gaze lands on the pictures of my dad. Elliott Ashton-Drake. I could have been his twin when I was in my twenties, but now I’ve already outlived him by over ten years. It’s hard to think he only made it to his twenty-ninth birthday, so that’s where our similarity ended. He never had the chance to age, instead remaining that smiling young man immortalised in photos. It hurts deep inside, in a place that I’d thought had long since healed.

A life cut short, and so many people hurt.

I take my time studying the pictures, ones I’ve never seen before. My mother had told me once when I was ten years old that she had a photograph of my father for me. That if I wanted it, I could have it. Most of the pictures of him she’d left here because at the time she hadn’t intended to make the move permanent, but there was one picture of the two of them, a strip they’d taken in a photo booth when they’d first met.

She’d seemed so sad when she offered me the last part of my father she had, and I hadn’t wanted her to be sad, so I said no. I didn’t need to see it, and we never spoke of it again.

Now, seeing the story of his life told in still images hurts in a way I never allowed it to before. I pause at a picture of me and Dad together. I don’t know where we are, but I can’t be more than four or five. I’m sitting in the cab of a locomotive and grinning widely with his arms around me.

“We took you to The National Rail Museum in York that day.” He nods towards the photo. “It was like all your Christmases had come at once. You cried for an hour when it was time to take you home. Wanted to take all the trains home with you. I think you’d have had them all parked on the front lawn if we’d let you.” He chuckles and it’s so unexpected that I find myself staring at him in surprise.

“Elliott got all the sunshine in the family,” he continues as he keeps his eyes on his model and half-heartedly swipes the paintbrush over it. “Got that from his mother. You always took after me. Grumpy little shit when you didn’t get your own way. Bossy too.”

“The apple didn’t fall too far from the tree, then.” I raise one brow, and he looks up and grins, which transforms his whole face.

“No,” he says. “Just skipped a generation. Ellis reminds me a lot of your dad. Kind and sweet, smiley. Always ready to help,always thinking of other people, sometimes to the detriment of himself. I suppose that’s why I took to the lad. That and the fact that you can’t help but love that boy even if you tell yourself not to.”

I know he’s talking about himself, but it hits a little too close to home, and I turn to the photos while my heartbeat settles.

“Ellis says you don’t leave your rooms.” I turn back to him once I have my equilibrium under control once more.

He shrugs. “It wasn’t a conscious decision. I didn’t wake up one morning and say to myself, I’m never leaving this room again. It happened so gradually. A day became a week, a month… a year… ten. There was nothing left out there for me.”

“But there is. There’s Ellis, Rosie, Aggie. People who care about you.”