Haunting the Jerome Hotel

8/ George meets George

"I am not George Marsh!" he yelled again. As if hearing him, the television blared static.

Growling, George March threw the bedpan at the grainy picture. It missed, bounced against the wall, left a dent. 

He didn't notice, his attention completely focused on the screen: My god, that guy looks like me! 

It was George, no doubt about it, arm-in-arm with a pretty woman, another of him yelling at miners, one of him being carried on a stretcher down Main Street.

George March was watching himself, but it wasn't him—"that's not me!" he gasped—but even this George had to admit that the other George was his look-alike, his doppelganger, his long-lost twin (if he'd had one) a strange limb on a family tree he didn't know existed.

"My name is George March," he told his dead ringer, voice low and firm. "Born in 1962, Seattle, Washington.

"Who the hell are you?"

If the man in the docudrama was George Marsh, it was a case of mistaken identity. Deliberate as hell. George Marsh, in all his pixelated, black and white glory, was (apparently) a murderer. He'd killed a miner, started a riot, burned part of the town.

Tying a dead man to a living one with a similar name, creating some kind of boffo ghost story to launch the Jerome Hotel, was a damn clever PR stunt, George March thought. 

And a damn bad idea.

"I'll get you for this," George promised, stomach churning, skin prickling. He'd sue when he got back to Portland, put the Jerome Hotel out of business...break the owners so completely they'd dynamite this piece of shit hotel (hospital) off the cliff and send its broken pieces into the gully below.

George touched his forehead. Burning up, he was hot and sweating, quaking cold in the next instant. He fumbled with his glass, spilling it down his chest, onto the bed. The effort exhausted him, sent the room spinning again.

Panic pressed his head in a vise, maybe that ghost-nurse had more than a cold, maybe she'd infected him with some kind of deadly disease.

That got him moving. Cursing, fingers fumbling, he worked the iron bars until they dropped with a clang.

Nothing about this was funny, or clever. It was slander, maybe libel, he wasn't sure of the difference. But the whole thing sparked a terror that rolled him out of bed. He sat on the edge and examined his swollen ankle. He'd twisted it, wrenched something, broken the baby toe; it lay snapped to its side, like a broken neck.

The television fizzed again.

There, on the screen, the ghost-nurse leaned over George Marsh. It was easy to see: That George, was in this room.

"You're fine, Mr. Marsh," his ghost-nurse spoke. "A bit fazed from the riot where miners threw rocks, knocking you out. A conk on the head," and when she touched that George Marsh with long slender fingers it looked like she was touching modern-day George, who watched the scene in abject horror.

Whoa! Wait! That isn't me—that was, is—Marsh! I am not Marsh, don't know any Marsh. I am on vacation here from Oregon, got here last night.

With great effort, George March ticked off his movements: his flight into Phoenix, dinner alone, the long drive to Jerome, finding this hotel and checking in. He counted down his possessions: car, cell phone, laptop; all the electronic gadgets that marked him as a modern man, not some hated mining supervisor named Marsh who apparently had been a patient in this hospital—a patient in this room—almost 80 years before.

He thought about the invitation he'd received in the mail. High quality paper, embossed with the logo of the Jerome Hotel, inviting him to be the first guest. He knew this for a marketing ploy, he subscribed to historic publications and had attended countless lectures on American history. Still, he needed a vacation, someplace warm. He decided to bring Janine...who dumped him a few days before the trip. After that, he'd spent all his free time in the bottle, the days a blurry wash.

That he was miserable now, paranoid and seeing ghosts where there were none, well, he only had himself to blame. Even so, George March was desperate to soothe his quaking self. If he could glue these happenings to a shred of logic, he'd believe.