Haunting the Jerome Hotel

7/ Is it George March...or George Marsh (?)

This time he did hide under the blankets.

He counted to ten, twenty.

He couldn't stay like that, he knew he had to leave before his wife (what wife?) arrived.

He sat up, threw the pillow across the room.

A wave of dizziness had him retching off the side of the bed, last night's dinner steaming onto the floor. George gagged and hollered like a miner stuck in a dark shaft, no light, no air, the sound of falling rocks dimming his senses.

George, hanging onto the last of his sanity, knew none of it was happening. He was hallucinating. He was dreaming. He'd had too much sun. Too much beer. Too much Jerome. Too much Janine, his ex-girlfriend. Hell, it didn't matter.

What did matter was that he leave. Immediately. Right now. In his tan shorts and boat shoes (if he could find them, bare-assed and barefoot if not.) Leave behind the jeans, the contaminated tee-shirt, the too-warm sweaters, the socks and hiking boots, all could stay and be damned. As for his shaving kit, it had been in the bathroom, probably gone AWOL along with the flush toilet and stall shower. Chalk that up to a loss, he wasn't about to bang on the walls in an attempt to find his razor.

Suddenly George had to pee, and this normal, everyday function stilled his confused thoughts, set other urges in motion.

He wasn't about to use the bedpan, so he decided to head down to the lobby, use the bathroom there. And if that was missing, he'd piss on that old-timey switchboard, the clerk in her flapper gear, and if that nurse-ghost showed up again, he wouldn't stop at pissing....

With an angry grunt, George rolled to his side—

—A jarring pain wrenched another howl from his throat.

Groaning, clutching his legs, George rolled to back center, his oasis in the midst of chaos.

What the hell happened? But he knew, he could see: the iron slats of the hospital bed were raised and he'd slammed against them.

George clutched at his right foot, cursing. Last night this was a queen-sized bed, but the nurse, some phantom work crew, had swapped it for something narrow. And those iron bars, how could he have gotten into bed with those damn things in the way?

He couldn't; it was impossible.

Except. He had fallen asleep—passed out. And the nurse had popped (out of the floorboards?) those bars into place. She must have taken the carpet, too.

"You've had a conk on the head," that's what she'd told him before he'd (maybe) fallen asleep. "Quite a nasty one. You've been out of it for days..."

Yes. Maybe that was it. A concussion, that would explain how badly he was feeling. His confused thoughts, the paranoia. The nausea and aching body.

That's when George March bellowed: "I am not George Marsh!"