Magic Girls of Multiverse Inn: A Reverse Portal Fantasy, page 1
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Chapter 1
If someone had told me a week ago that I had inherited something from my old anthropology professor, I would have laughed. Especially if they had claimed that “something” was an inn.
When I got the phone call about it earlier this week, I’d put the lawyer-administrator person on the phone through the wringer with questions. I’d been sure it was a scam. I knew shit like that happened all the time. A simple data leak could’ve revealed me as an alumnus at Summers University, and then it was just a matter of the scammers Googling the college and finding creative ways to swindle. The most common scheme I’d heard of was fraudsters claiming they were from the university and seeking donations over the phone.
But to my shock, this call had been legit. My old Anthropology 101 professor had left me the inn he owned in his will.
For real.
The fact that Professor Wersnop had owned an inn in the first place was confusing enough to me. Last time I’d checked, this guy had been on tenure at the university. From what I remembered, he had been cranky with most people and a little offbeat in general, but he had also been a smart and well-respected scholar, so people had forgiven him for it. Intro to Anthropology had just been a prerequisite for me before I started classes for my architecture major, but that hadn’t stopped old Professor Wersnop from making an exception to his crankiness when he decided I was his favorite student.
But that had been five years ago. I hadn’t heard from the guy since before graduation.
Now he was gone, and I was on my way to look at the inn he had apparently left to me personally in his will.
Which still seemed insane to me. I didn’t think it would even begin to sink in until I saw this place with my own eyes and learned more about the whole situation.
Fortunately, that was exactly what I was about to do.
As I pulled into what looked like a nice suburban neighborhood in the town of Arcton, I thought this was an odd place to find an inn, unless it was a quaint little bed and breakfast type place.
Some of the houses I drove past were almost as bright as the fiery reds and oranges of fall against the pale gray sky of Oregon as I followed my phone’s GPS through the tree-lined neighborhood. This part of the state was quiet and serene, and only a small trace of the weirdness of nearby Portland existed here. Other than their absurdly bright colors, these houses were a display of suburban neatness that made me glad I was driving a nice rental car instead of the old, rusting station wagon I drove around back home in Arizona.
As a low-paid architecture intern and fresh college grad, the station wagon was the best I could afford for a daily driver at the moment. I’d had enough money saved to spring for this unexpected weekend trip, but not enough to feel great about making regular payments on a nicer ride.
These modern, well-tended houses were nothing like my own home, either.
Down in Arizona, I lived in a cramped studio on the eighth floor of an apartment building with an elevator that only worked half the time. The price had been hard to beat, but I found myself wishing regularly that I were able to afford a place where I didn’t have to trek up one hundred and twenty-eight outdoor stairs in the sweltering heat.
Now, as I drove through the neat, quiet houses of this Oregon neighborhood, I allowed myself to imagine living here instead for a moment.
It was cool, shady, and quiet. The autumn chill up here felt especially blissful to me after the scorching summer I had endured in Arizona, and this neighborhood’s houses were mostly two stories tall, sometimes three. That meant a maximum of forty-eight stairs to be climbed at any time, and they were all indoors.
I sighed as I pushed away this little fantasy and turned the corner with a small flicker of excitement at the fact that the mystery inn was about to come into view.
Then my jaw dropped.
“What the hell?” I muttered.
I slowed down as I pulled into the cul-de-sac and saw a huge, towering old mansion that looked incredibly out of place in this nice suburban neighborhood.
But then again, this mansion, or inn, or whatever it was, would’ve looked out of place almost anywhere. Except maybe on the set of a horror movie.
I parked at the curb and snatched my phone from its dashboard mount to make sure I was at the right place.
“Arrived,” the GPS app informed me in a cool, robotic female voice.
“Kay…” I stabbed a finger at the end button and returned my gaze to the inn on my right.
It was painted in a shade of deep matte black that seemed to drink in every ounce of the pale gray daylight like a black hole. I guessed that it was four stories tall, except in the places where it had random, precarious-looking turrets and towers that jabbed up to bring it even higher.
“The fuck kind of Addams’ Family shit is this?” I muttered.
The inn was a bizarre, rambling display of Queen Anne and carpenter gothic architecture that gave off a distinctly haunted aura, and my confusion at the fact that this place had been left to me personally doubled.
But according to the address the administrator had given me, this was definitely the right place.
The sign hanging over the gabled doorway caught my attention next. It was a slab of jet-black wood with the words “Multiverse Inn” painted on it in tall, swirling white letters.
“Interesting,” I muttered.
A cheery, bright-eyed woman in a pantsuit who I guessed was the executor of the will was now coming out of the ancient, arched double doors that fronted the inn. She struggled for a moment with opening them both, but then gave up and switched to just opening one. It still seemed like a bit of a challenge, and the sleeve of her ruffled blue shirt even caught on the dark, splintered wood for a second.
I chuckled at the little huff she let out and the way her lips pursed in instant irritation.
The woman quickly recovered, and she left the door slightly open behind her as she walked out to meet me with a polished smile.
“You must be Samuel,” she said cheerfully once I joined her on the sidewalk. “I’m Nora. We spoke on the phone.”
“I go by Sam,” I corrected with an awkward smile. I accepted her handshake and glanced at the huge, decrepit inn behind her. “Nice to meet you. So… This is mine, huh?”
“I know, it’s a lot.” She turned to lead me inside and spoke over her shoulder as she went on. “But believe it or not, this does happen sometimes. People leave things to others they hardly know– or sometimes, people they don’t know at all. This isn’t even the weirdest inheritance I’ve dealt with, to tell you the truth.”
“Yeah,” I said, although I still felt something bordering on disbelief as I followed her inside. “But… well, I thought that was something that just happened to beautiful women, or like… unsuspecting long-lost relatives.”
We had already gone over the bare basics of this on the phone, but now that I was here and seeing this with my own eyes, I felt like I needed more than ever to know more about the life of the professor who had gone through the trouble to leave me, an ex-student who had taken a single class with him, this entire inn when he died.
Admittedly, the inn had clearly been converted from an ancient-looking mansion that was now abandoned, crumbling, decrepit, and haunted-looking. It was made up of an eyebrow-raising mishmash of architectural styles, too. Inside, I could see that someone had taken the time to sweep the dust off the lower surfaces, and to replace all the lightbulbs with matching, steadily white LEDs. But overall, it looked shabby as hell, although it had obviously been the opposite about a hundred or so years ago. In fact, it must’ve been the height of luxury at one point. The elaborate crown molding alone proved as much.
But that point was undeniably a long time ago.
“I wish I had more answers for you,” Nora said with an apologetic look. “I only have the paperwork my firm gave me, but apparently Professor Wersnop was pretty private after quitting his job at the university and moving up here. By all accounts, he was a real character.”
“I do remember him being a little eccentric,” I admitted, although privately I couldn’t imagine the smart yet kooky guy going completely off the deep end. “And there wasn’t anyone else the professor would’ve left this place to?”
The administrator shook her head. “He didn’t have any surviving family. Although the neighbors did say he got a bit, err, odder over time. Apparently he became extremely interested in some type of, umm, supernatural studies.”
“Supernatural studies,” I repeated as I glanced around and took in the sight of the questionable artwork that adorned the place. There were odd paintings everywhere, including one that looked like the mythical Bigfoot, and I even spotted stone sculptures that looked like mixtures of garden gnomes and gargoyles perched at various heights in the room. Maybe I had been wrong about the professor not going off the deep end. “Are you sure he was, uh…”
“Sound of
I shook my head in amazement again. The professor had already been getting up there in age when I’d taken his classes, but he had been full of life, energy, and cunning.
I had to admit, I was feeling a little overwhelmed. What the hell was I going to do with this place?
This didn’t seem like a necessary thing to say aloud as the administrator looked at me with a knowing expression.
“How about I leave you with these for now?” she suggested as she reached into her purse and came out with a ring of jangling keys. “You can have a look around and see how you feel about it, and then give me a call. I’ll also give you the number of the real estate agent and appraiser for this place, so you can skip some unnecessary phone calls if you decide you want to sell.”
I accepted the keys and business cards she handed me, and I nodded mutely as I looked around.
“And…” I glanced back at the administrator as I finally found my voice. “If I decide not to sell, then…?”
“You’ll definitely still want to get in touch with the appraiser,” she advised. “We actually hired a couple people at the last minute, and they both told us different things. Then they got overwhelmed by the size of this place, not to mention all the nooks, crannies, and junk lying around. Both of them quit. I figured we’d wait to take any more action until you’ve had a look at the house, and then go from there.”
“Sounds good,” I agreed as I looked around again. “I could definitely use some time to process things.”
“Perfectly understandable,” Nora said with a smile. “I’ll leave you to it.”
She heaved at one of the heavy, wooden double doors again, and I hurried over to give it a hearty tug to open it for her.
Then I closed it behind her and turned around to face the empty inn with the keys in my hand.
There were thirteen of them in total. All of them were big, metallic, and Victorian style, but other than that, no two keys were the same.
The plain black key was clearly the one that unlocked the heavy double doors at the front of the inn.
“Okay…” I muttered to myself and looked around. “Guess I’ll just… take a tour.”
It still seemed crazy that my old anthropology professor would become obsessed with some sort of speculative mumbo jumbo. During lectures about folklore, I had personally seen him shut down dozens of Bigfoot-related statements with reactions like, “Pseudo-science isn’t welcome in my classroom,” and my personal favorite, “Please learn how to read before you interrupt me.”
Now that I was here, though, I couldn’t deny that I was interested to see if I could find any hints of what convinced Professor Wersnop to abandon the university in favor of exploring the “supernatural,” whatever that meant. Was he obsessed with the idea of a multiverse, or was the name of the inn just one random piece of his odd, supernatural dabblings? Or maybe he hadn’t believed in that stuff at all. Maybe this was some elaborate ruse to reel in paranormal enthusiasts to stay at the inn. That would honestly fit with the clever, kooky, funny professor I used to know.
I started my tour by looking around on the ground floor to see if there were more doors down here. There was only one, and it was a lock-free sliding door that separated the “lobby,” which looked like it had once been a huge, old-fashioned parlor, from the area that I discovered was basically a kitchen. The wood wainscoting that covered the bottom half of the walls was almost as splintery as the front doors, and the peeling wallpaper above was a faded, dusty shade of olive green. The kitchen was lined with empty old cabinets with glass panels that were mostly missing. One wall had a huge hollow in it with something I recognized as a Cornish range, which was better known as a cast iron stove to most people. It was a big iron contraption that had a stovetop, an oven, and a place for an open fire.
“Damn,” I murmured. I reached out and rapped the iron with my knuckles, and it made a faint, hollow thud.
The thing looked like it belonged in a museum, and so did a bunch of other stuff I saw as I strolled around the ground floor of the mansion-turned-inn. There were paintings everywhere with elaborate frames of fading, gilded wood. Some of these were completely abstract and full of swirls, arcs, and spirals. Others were fantastic, fanciful, and flat-out weird, and I realized the administrator hadn’t been lying when she said Professor Wersnop had become more than a little odd.
I tore myself away from a painting of a leafy jungle with cleverly hidden faces in the bark of the trees, and then I roamed back to the front parlor room to look for the stairs I knew had to be here somewhere.
I didn’t spot them right away, mostly because the walls in this area were covered with a confusing framework of wood that arced out from the surface in several places. It almost seemed like someone had started with crown molding, but then went crazy with it and extended it to cover the entire wall with elaborate designs from floor to ceiling.
There were regular alcoves with decorative wood surrounding the empty spaces like a picture frame. Most of them were shallow and held paintings that fit neatly inside. The three alcoves in front of me were bigger, though.
The shortest one held what looked like a horse that had been stolen off a merry-go-round, but it had painted stone flames coming out of its mouth like a dragon.
The alcove in the middle was shallower, and it had a tall, surfboard-sized wooden sign wedged into it.
Or at least, I assumed it was a sign. It was made up of a bunch of mismatched wooden planks crudely hammered together, and it had a jumble of objects stuck to the front of it.
As I gave the sign a closer look, I suddenly recognized the objects as coins, although they weren’t the type of coins I’d anticipate finding at a bank in this day and age. They were all different sizes. Some of them were oddly lumpy-looking, and they were made from an assortment of different metals. A few were even made of wood, and there was one that I was pretty sure was a sand dollar.
After a few seconds of squinting at the sign and trying to figure out what the hell the purpose of it was, I realized that the coins were arranged into misshapen letters that spelled out the words “Venturer’s Base.”
Weird.
But then again, I guessed anything that wasn’t weird might actually look out-of-place here.
The alcove on the far left was just a few inches taller than my six-foot-one height. It had something hanging in it that I first thought was just a decorative tapestry. It was another piece of artwork with swirling designs of purple thread and pearl beads.
But then I felt a draft of air from behind it. I reached out and cautiously lifted the thin curtain to the side, and I saw a tall, narrow hallway filled with shadows.
“Here we go,” I muttered.
I reached into the hallway and slid a hand up and down the dusty wall until I finally found a light switch. It was clearly one of the newer additions to the house, but I still was only half-expecting it to work.
I was pleasantly surprised when a steady white glow flared into life overhead from a bulb that matched the others in the downstairs rooms. And the light revealed a hidden staircase.
I slowly made my way up the creaky, zigzagging wooden stairs. They had small landings that were incredibly narrow and probably not anywhere close to being up to code. Still, I reflected that it was a hell of a lot better than trekking up the one hundred-plus stairs that led to my apartment in the Arizona heat.
The fact that I owned this inn was still barely sinking in, and I ran over the baffling scenario again in my mind.
I had just graduated with my bachelor’s degree from the university just a few hours west of where I had grown up down in Arizona. I didn’t have any family I was close to after childhood, but in college I had made some pretty solid friends.
Still, out of all those people, none of them would’ve left me a damn inn. Even if it was pretty much falling apart.
