Housekeeping
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About this ebook
It's fun to believe the Woodbridge is haunted. The charming and colorful 19th-century hotel collects dust and tourists along the Texas side of the Rio Grande, a holdover from a time before rails and fences. The shifting stories of its ghostly past keeps the guests at the bar and boredom at bay, but the hotel's bartender knows better - or does he?
What starts as battle with a malevolent odor leads to an unraveling mystery of desperate lives, forgotten corridors, colonial curses, ghastly cleaning ladies, and black brujeria in this novella-length homage to 19th-Century Gothic horror. A perfect read for Dia de los Muertos.
Robbie Rodgers
San Antonio writer of literature, science fiction, metaphysics, and more.
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Book preview
Housekeeping - Robbie Rodgers
HOUSEKEEPING
ROBBIE RODGERS
Copyright © 2016 Robbie Rodgers
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except as fair use under US and international copyright law.
Smashwords Edition: Year of first publication: 2016
A Guy de Truc Publication
San Antonio, TX
guydtruc.wordpress.com
In memory of Linda Watts Cooper.
Your constant support both confounded and nourished me.
You were more than a fan. You were family.
And for the Fairmont Hotel:
Thanks for the good times, the inspiration, and the memories.
And for creeping me out at times, too.
I
It was fun to believe the Woodbridge Hotel was haunted. The grand, nineteenth-century architecture, once a civilized jewel against a coarse frontier, believably looked the part in every way, though there was certainly nothing to it; through each of my twelve-hour shifts behind the charming, wooden hotel bar, the only evidence of haunting I had ever seen was an infestation of colorful, though sometimes difficult, and times more obnoxiously inebriated, guests.
Sitting alone and a bit out of place, in a modest town not far from the Texas-Mexico border no longer of importance, business at the Woodbridge was slow and sporadic, barely enough to keep her running. But I took pride in running its bar, and I used my position to make up wild stories for the few that came to sit there each day, each new one trumping the last, and would feast upon the shock and delight in their widened eyes as I exhumed each new fabricated history. Last week, it was a salesman who’d taken a local prostitute up to his room and strangled her with the drapery cords, then leapt from his window to what he’d hoped to be (but wasn’t quite) his instantaneous death.
In truth, I can’t even remember who first suggested the possibility of a haunting to me, neither can I recall if I’d learned any actual details, nor whether that person truly believed their own words. Whoever it was (a cook? the concierge?) indicated that the banquet room was where the spirits had their most fun.
That was the very room I had to walk through at the end of every night to shut off the lights. Once those switches were flipped, I'd waste no time hurrying through the dark to the illuminated safety of the lobby. And each time, I’d relish the thrill as I recounted whatever story I’d made up earlier that day, chuckling at my silly, self-inflicted fear as I briskly walked past the room’s mirrored walls, never letting my eyes fall upon them, for a childish superstition worried it might glimpse ghastly silhouettes dancing an extratemporal waltz.
Today, the story centered on the vengeful shades of indigenous peasants whom Spanish missionaries had promised protection, corporeal and eternal, but received misery and murder in its stead, and of the mass grave that lay directly beneath our foundations. I was just reaching the good part of that story with this doe-eyed and impossibly well-endowed farm girl who said she came from Longview. She came in from the lobby around two in the afternoon, long after the pitiful brunch service had cleared out. She had tried to order a cosmopolitan, but I wouldn’t let her.
Try something new. Let’s get out of your shell,
I suggested with mischief.
The color of her low-cut blouse inspired the concoction of Crème de Violette, so I told her, shaken with some nice wheat vodka and finished with a lemon twist, a common cocktail known as a brazen martini, but I was sure she wouldn’t know that. She looked just the type to adore a purple drink no matter how it actually tasted, and I wasn’t wrong. I suggested with nonchalance that we name the cocktail after her.
Tina.
The name tumbled from her pouting lips while her eyes brazenly sought out mine: a challenge of intention, an ocular game of chicken. I tried my best to keep my gaze from wandering downward.
This was the good part, where the abbot sells out the trusting natives to the bloodthirsty Spanish governor and his troops. Tina leaned forward, ensorcelled. As her blue