Cranberry Cove, page 1
Contents
Copyright
Praise for Hailey Piper
Also By Hailey Piper
Foreword is Forearmed
One: Arrival
Two: Inside
Three: Okay
Four: The Storm
Five: Before
Six: After
Seven: Ghost
Eight: The House
Nine: Superstition
Ten: Princess
Eleven: Method
Twelve: Sex Magic
Thirteen: Blink
Fourteen: Magic Man
Fifteen: Watching You
Sixteen: The Return
About the Author
Cranberry Cove
Copyright © 2024 by Hailey Piper
Print ISBN: 979-8-9881286-3-2
Cover Art & Design by Lynne Hansen
Interior Design & Formatting by Todd Keisling | Dullington Design Co.
No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission, except for inclusion of brief quotations with attribution in a review or report. Requests for reproduction or related information should be addressed to the Contact page at www.badhandbooks.com.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, products, corporations, institutions, and/or entities in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously without intent to describe actual characteristics.
Bad Hand Books
www.badhandbooks.com
Praise for Hailey Piper
“One of the most powerful rising voices in genre fiction”– Paste Magazine
"[Piper's] fiction is remarkable in its range."- Esquire
“Delightfully fucked-up and tremendously imaginative.” – Vulture
“Glorious and visceral."- Chuck Wendig, New York Times Bestselling author of Wanderers
"Fresh, fantastic."- Josh Malerman, New York Times Bestselling author of Bird Box
“Thrillingly original."- Rachel Harrison, USA Today Bestselling author of Black Sheep
Also By Hailey Piper
Standalone
Queen of Teeth
A Light Most Hateful
No Gods for Drowning
Cruel Angels Past Sundown
Your Mind is a Terrible Thing
All the Hearts You Eat
The Worm and His Kings series
The Worm and His Kings
Even the Worm Will Turn
Song of the Tyrant Worm
Collections
Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy
The Ghostlands of Natalie Glasgow
Foreword is Forearmed
Idon’t set out to shock anyone. That’s never been my way. There are the feelings and thoughts I want to explore and express, and there’s the story that lets me do it. Sometimes, the story shocks, but that’s incidental. I can’t decide that. We all keep colliding with each other, and life comes out of those interactions, but my outlook is never “see if you can handle this” and then throwing a live wire at you. At most, there is a book.
But I also don’t set out to reassure. The only thing I can assure you of is that there will be wonderful and terrible people in your life, and that sometimes you will confuse the two, and sometimes they will be the same person, and sometimes they’ll surprise you.
This is a laborious way of saying, this is a bleak book. It might not be for you. I write lots of different kinds of stories, set in cities, caverns, made-up lands, outer space, and it would be surprising for all of them to fit any one particular reader. Yes, this one involves hauntings and creepy places, subjects you might expect of me, but it also involves discussions and confrontations with abuse, sexual harassment, and assault. I’m grateful to Doug Murano for lending book space to this warning, Lynne Hansen for giving the book a stunning and appropriate cover, and my wife J for encouraging the story to be told.
That story only reaches you if you choose to read it, and that is entirely up to you. Cranberry Cove awaits.
Hailey Piper
January 2024
One: Arrival
Cranberry Cove. The name gave Emberly Hale visions of an enormous gored-out cranberry seated on the desolate corner of Washington Avenue and Mayhew Street, its entrance a chewed-away cavern of fruit guts and scarlet intestines.
She never came to this side of town, hardly anyone did anymore, where plywood coated the windows and glass littered the sidewalk. No reason to see what Cranberry Cove really looked like until today.
As Conner Bohme parked his gray Mazda at the opposite corner’s curb, Emberly took in the full and disappointing view through the windshield. Cranberry Cove was a corner hotel, spreading along either sidewalk with Cranberry jutting in blocky vertical letters down to the horizontal Cove above the gaping entrance. It wore a similar grayed-over atmosphere as its neighboring businesses and apartments, clinical depression having taken physical form in their brick and mortar and grime. Planks covered the lobby windows, but no one had bothered to board up the higher floors. If ghosts rented spectral rooms, they would get the same high view as the living visitors before them, only upon a more decayed side of town than back in the hotel’s glory days.
Conner unlatched himself from the car first and slammed the driver’s door harder than he needed. Emberly slipped out after him from the passenger side. They both stared at the hotel, and it stared right back.
“What the hell made our dear prince come here?” Conner said, shaking his head.
“It’s been abandoned since the ‘70s,” Emberly said. “Duke probably thought no one would bother him, Kristof, or Tyrone’s guys while they showed product and talked out a deal.”
More than anything, Duke was too green, and he had seen too many movies. He was the type to believe professional arrangements took place in shitholes like Cranberry Cove, and now his rudimentary blurring between cinema and life meant Emberly and Conner had to march down here, putting truth to celluloid fantasy. Life would imitate film when it should have been the other way around.
But then, wasn’t Emberly putting the blame on Duke for coming here? She bit her tongue, and the pain derailed that train of thought.
Conner scratched his arm where a nicotine patch hid beneath his jacket. Once upon a time, they both wore denim and street clothes to these types of situations. Since Emberly’s wardrobe change toward dark blue jacket dresses like the one she wore over her tall pale form today, Conner had taken to fitting a black suit and tie over his brawny figure. Each carried themselves with professional airs these days, as if they were better people than before. Pretending helped.
“It’s ridiculous,” Conner muttered, starting toward the Mazda’s trunk. “His father has fingers in too many establishments for the prince to bother with this ancient gutter of a place.”
“He’s twenty-two,” Emberly said, following him. Her wavy chestnut hair stroked her shoulders in the wind. “He couldn’t have known the Cove’s reputation.”
“Shouldn’t matter.” Conner smoothed short dark hair from his boxy pinkish face and popped the trunk. “Neither of us are that old, either, but we know better.”
His math checked out. Cranberry Cove shut down over fifty years ago, and were the man responsible for its poor fortune and worse reputation still skulking its halls, he’d have to be in his seventies or eighties by now, or older. No way the past should have mattered.
And yet what could the past do besides haunt the present?
Emberly glanced beyond the open trunk toward the hotel’s naked windows, free to glare down on the intersection without eyelids of wood, and in some cases without curtains. Cranberry Cove kept watch.
“Ricard wasn’t clear on his directive, was he?” Conner asked. “He can’t expect the guy to be hanging around.”
Did Conner mean the guy from decades ago? Or did he mean the guy who’d hurt Duke Morrison, eldest son of their employer Ricard Morrison and heir to his many businesses, legitimate or otherwise?
Emberly guessed it didn’t matter. They had the means to deal with either. She reached into the open trunk and slipped a black semi-automatic shotgun into her arms, where it clacked against the brass buttons of her jacket dress. Its metal was warm in her hands, baked by summer heat caught in the car trunk.
Conner lifted the shotgun’s identical lover, slammed the trunk shut, and led Emberly toward the opposite street corner.
The hotel had stood abandoned only five decades, and yet a primordial pit opened at its front, where living creatures fell into nests of sharp nails and vicious teeth.
“We’ll find out who did it.” Emberly nudged her shotgun muzzle against the ajar lobby door, its hinges squeaking in the wind. “Or who didn’t. Look for clues. Rule out Tyrone’s people so Ricard won’t have to make war.”
Conner let his shotgun dangle as if swinging a small child back and forth. “Like we’re fucking cops?”
“Not at all,” Emberly said, smiling with her back to the door. “We’re expected to get results.”
Conner coughed a laugh and then gestured ahead. “Ladies first.”
Two: Inside
Strips of ceiling plaster drooped in great boneless fingers across the lobby. Dust and garbage coated a tipped-over trolley, the check-in desk, and the pots of long-dead plants. The broad gray-brown rug made squish-squish noises underfoot. Emberly smelled mildew and old clothes, but her imagination danced with the hotel’s name, suggesting a cranberry scent too. Summer heat thickened the air.
“There could be homeless snuggling u
The outdoor light seeped milky through grime-caked glass into the lobby, around rusty-nailed planks and moldering curtains. A breath of radiant sunshine lit the top of the main stairway, suggesting an open room upstairs with an uncovered window. It was almost hopeful.
But between the stairs rising from the lobby and the stairs running down from the second floor, a thick shadow blanketed the stairway landing.
Emberly stared into it, waiting for her eyes to make out the corner, a pattern on the wall, anything. It remained an unfading oily cloud.
Conner kicked at a soggy patch of wall. “Should’ve torn this place down.”
“It’ll have its day,” Emberly said, heading for the check-in desk.
“Sure,” Conner said. “Somebody’ll give a shit about this patch of town for a change, feed the whole thing to a herd of bulldozers, and stick up a condo nobody can afford to live in. Exactly as abandoned as it is now.”
Emberly couldn’t argue with him; she’d seen those exact steps of progress play out too many times in too many places. She craned her neck over the check-in desk. No computers, no touchscreen registration, only empty cubbies where moldering logbooks must have been kept. Everything here was analog and decayed.
A clumsy thud drew her eyes again to the stairway, where Conner pressed a shoe on the lowest step. The unseen landing above taunted with hairy darkness.
“You don’t want to check the pool’s changing room?” Emberly asked. “Dining hall?”
“It didn’t happen down here.” Conner chinned up the stairs and then mimicked with his shotgun muzzle. “It happened up there.”
Emberly elbowed the check-in desk countertop, as if it would cough up answers at a touch, and then followed Conner to the stairs. An argument seemed pointless. He’d driven out on Ricard’s order, no reconnaissance or caution. Emberly had at least skimmed a news article first.
She hadn’t expected much for a hotel abandoned long before the internet could properly digitize its every movement. The one article she had bothered to read dispelled any notion of Cranberry Cove as a haunted hotel in the classic sense of ghosts, specters, and the like, only to be notoriously unsafe for what little attention it still gained, with barely a whisper about the alleged crimes of yesteryear.
Alleged being the article’s word, and a bullshit one. That anyone had reported at all seemed a miracle, and those who had done so wouldn’t have gained anything by inventing such stories. While Emberly refused to spend hours poring over microfiche in the local library, she guessed any newspapers from the time of the hotel’s downfall had sandwiched the true wording of the crimes into conveniently obscuring language.
It hadn’t helped. Even in the days before business social media accounts and Yelp reviews, word of mouth must have spread far enough to tarnish the hotel’s reputation until the owners finally shut it down. Whether they meant to do so briefly or forever, the latter became Cranberry Cove’s future.
That did not erase the reputation. It lingered across time, same as the hotel itself.
“There’s no cursed room in particular,” Emberly called up the stairs. “From what I read, it happened in different rooms back in the day.”
“I don’t care about back in the day,” Conner said, a shrug in his tone. “I care about yesterday. And now.”
He reached the landing between lobby and second floor, and his details and shape vanished as if black curtains now draped around him. Only the sheen of his shotgun muzzle told Emberly he stood above her.
The shotgun aimed up. “How far does it go?” the dark landing asked in Conner’s voice.
“Seven floors, for good luck,” Emberly said. She climbed in slow steps. “It was only men. The ones who reported it.”
“I know that much from its reputation.”
“Shouldn’t I take point then?” Emberly reached the landing, enclosing herself in darkness with Conner.
“It doesn’t matter,” Conner said. “Seven floors, ten rooms each? We’ll have to split up if we don’t find anything where the prince—where it happened.”
He emerged from the landing onto the next flight of stairs, and Emberly hurried behind him. They found a sister darkness at the far end of the second floor, but it broke into clear light where Room 2A’s door hung wide open. Gray daylight clawed across the mottled carpet at the top of the stairs. Emberly almost felt it beckon. The other doors stood shut tight, only meager lines of light breaching their undersides.
Duke hadn’t sat alone in Room 2A at first. He’d waited with Kristof O’Keefe, another of Ricard Morrison’s crew, for Tyrone’s representatives to show up. To hear Kristof tell it, he left the room to check on the sound of someone knocking on a hard surface. Polite, like room service requesting entry.
Might’ve been Tyrone’s guys, he’d said.
But it wasn’t room service or somebody working for Tyrone. As far as anyone knew, no one from Tyrone’s end had bothered to show up on his behalf and meet with Duke to examine the sampling of his father’s arsenal. Maybe they had mixed up the address, or maybe they had seen the look of Cranberry Cove and skittered off with common sense tucked behind their teeth.
Tyrone’s men or not, someone had found Duke alone in 2A. Someone had hurt him.
The room was any other hotel hole. A bathroom opened to the right of the door, and a small dresser sat across from the twin beds. Someone had long ago swiped the boxy old television from its top, but they’d left the indent lines in the wood behind. A dust-coated blue lamp perched atop the nightstand between beds, free of lightbulb and lampshade. The ceiling light hung dark. Balls of crumpled newspaper, candy wrappers, and trash-filled plastic bags littered the floor, suggesting someone had squatted here more recently than the hotel’s closing in the ’70s. Both beds stretched naked of bedding, but a briefcase sat atop the nearest.
Kristof had left the product sample behind when he helped Duke get away. Neither said whether they’d seen anyone else.
“It took three reports to bring Cranberry Cove to its knees,” Emberly said. “Nobody wanted to stay after that.”
“Not even women?” Conner flicked open the bed-top briefcase, where pieces of a scoped long-range rifle waited to be assembled. “If it was only men involved.”
“If is the key word. Who could trust that distinction would stay the case?” Emberly peeked over Conner’s shoulder—every piece of the rifle remained in its functionless solitude. “Incidents like those don’t get reported all the time, from anyone, but especially men. Look at Duke. We only know because Ricard told us. People might’ve kept firm secrets back then, like they do now.”
“Meaning there could’ve been women, too.” Conner shut the briefcase with a metal tick. “We’ll take this with us.”
Emberly’s nod led her gaze to a row of red dots along the mattress. “Likely there were more than three men back then. Out of the whole, what percentage would report at all?”
“Sure you want to brave this place?” Conner asked, pacing toward the door. “I can handle it alone.”
Emberly bit her cheeks not to laugh. Conner’s unflinching bravado, no matter where they went, could be both insulting and hilarious. If there was anything here to find, he wouldn’t be the one to find it. His mind was all thumbs.
“I can take it.” Emberly tried to make this statement co-exist with her longing glances at 2A’s entrance. “I’d do anything for Ricard.”
“So would I,” Conner said. “I’m not afraid some freak will come at me, but this place is a ghost town, and I’m no believer in ghosts, which means something else is likely to crawl around. Something worse.”
Conner neared the door, shotgun in one hand, briefcase in the other. He eyed the bathroom, a dark place that rejected the generosity of the main room’s daylight.
He then turned back and offered a gentle smile. “If you’re scared—I mean, everything with this guy, let’s say he’s the same one? He’d take one look and know you’re a woman. But if he knew about your past, how you showed yourself then, he might misunderstand. We’re the enlightened kind, but you never can tell. It’s not always like it is with Ricard. Not all good ones.”
