The Sneak Inn

A sneak peek into a spirited hotel.

It used to be a hotel for lovers. Back in the fifties. 

Valentines, affairs, “special friends.” 

All of them sought out The Sneak Inn.

It looked like a storybook cottage from the front, tucked between ancient green forest and a burnt orange support beam for the Golden Gate Bridge.

Fog cover hid it from view most of the time. Held tongues hid it the rest.

Inside, it looked a little bit like a magic tavern — one that did light entertainment. There was a bar, a piano, a tiny stage on the main floor.

Couples used to go there to watch shows, music. Dancers, up close magic. They would sip jewel-colored liquid from small, green glass goblets.

They would smile at each other, and politely ignore the other couples smiling at each other around them.

Very cozy.

Quite hush-hush.

Then, after the evening’s cup was empty, the guests would go upstairs,  to small but beautifully appointed rooms. Silk and velvet would kiss their skin. Damask-covered walls would dampen any sound.

Moonlight would paint their faces as it reflected off the water and headlights on the road, through stained glass portals.

And late at night when all the guests were asleep — or very much in bed — the owner of the hotel — a man who looked like Errol Flynn, Eartha Kitt, and Elvis Presley rolled into one — would finally fix himself a drink. 

Then he would play the piano.

Quietly, at first.

Then like a man whose whole soul was on fire.

Then a trap door would open up in the bar floor, and up the spirits would come to dance.

They were shimmering, slithering, shimmying things. Happy spirits.

And hungry ones.

They drank the music like wine, and would dance their way up the stairs, and into the souls of those lovers gathered there.

Then the spirits would feed.

It wasn’t blood they were after. Just love and secrets. Regrets and other ecstasies.

They were greedy, but fair. When they ate a little bit of lovers’ souls, the specters replaced what they took with a little bit of their own spirit’s smoke.

A spirit’s soul behaves a little differently than our own, but is just as tricky.

After they had eaten, the spirits would dance down the stairs again to return to the spirit world beneath the little hotel hideaway. 

And every morning,  as The Sneak Inn snuck into daylight, the lovers would wake with their own memories in their own minds — and the spirits’ memories, too.  

They would confuse their lover’s touch with a stranger’s scent.

They would see new shadows on each other’s faces, and new ways those familiar faces caught the light.

They would feel the presence of secrets between them — their own, and something new.

For some, this strange, haunted feeling kept them coming back to The Sneak Inn.

For others, it meant the end of the affair.

But all of that is forgotten now, because the night the piano-playing hotel owner died was the night the trap door bar floor door closed, forever.

Or did it?

Because someone has finally bought the rotten old property, three or so decades later. 

It’s the glittering, glamorous, eighties now, and The Speak Inn’s hunting lodge, fairy-cottage thing sticks out like a sore, old-fashioned thumb.

It just won’t do. 

Someone has plans for The Sneak Inn — big plans.

But the spirits have big plans, too.

The spirits are hungry, after all.

And they’re just dying to dance.