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then, doing his best to shrug off Meghan’s withdrawal, dug the latest Ronald Malfi novel from his bag and returned to a warmer, more comforting place of refuge.
     

 
     
     
    Chapter Five
    Knock-knock
    Kenneth McGowan stood frozen, gooseflesh dressing his skin as he stood clinging to the door frame of the hotel room’s bathroom. In the darkness, he sat in perfect silence listening to the first of the thing’s little visits.
    No doubt about it, The Bruton Inn was haunted.  But it was not nearly as haunted as his family. The voices, the sounds, the little visits presented by whatever was hanging around this place were all preferable to the alternative. Shivering, despite the eighty plus degree reading on the room’s thermometer, his mind faded away from the knocking in this present time to a few months ago at his step-father’s estate…
    “ Kenny , it’s me. It’s Uncle Wes.”
    The door to his bedroom creaked like Dracula’s casket as the large shadowy figure of his “Uncle” entered (invaded) his room. Kenneth awaited his fate. The nightly intrusions from “Uncle” Wes had been occurring like clockwork since the odd man’s arrival last winter. He would knock twice, very quietly, announce his presence, then slip in, close the door behind him, and lock it. He stood six-foot-four, the physique of a professional wrestler. Kenneth had tried to fend him off in the beginning, to attempt to dissuade the man from doing his dirty deeds, but it was no use. Kenneth was much too small to physically protect himself, and the verbal threats Uncle Wes whispered in his ear were enough to scare him into total obedience.
    The first couple of weeks, it was just some kissing and light rubbing, but the abuse quickly escalated to oral sex, and then, to the inevitable. He had been raped by the man nearly every night for five months before his mother shipped him off to the inn, hiding him away like he had done something wrong.
    His step-father was a liar, a cheat, a pedophile, and a known rapist, but he was also the richest man in Avalon. He practically owned the town. And Uncle Wes wasn’t the only rotten soul in his stable, either. Luckily, Kenneth hadn’t been exposed to any of Reni, Tobias, or Hunter’s fun and games. They preferred little girls, namely his cousins Deidre and Holly–their screams could be heard at various times any given day or night. Kenneth watched them both meander through their daily chores, like lifeless pretty things.
    His step-father and the man’s collection of Avalon trash, was about a hundred times more frightening and harmful than whatever was living at the Bruton Inn.
    As the icy voice began whispering its foul offerings from the other side of the hotel room door, he slouched down on the bathroom floor atop a quilt his grandmother had made for him when he was younger, and shut his eyes tight as if Uncle Wes were with him. The flashbacks struck his consciousness like a wet towel, the shivering intensified as his still recovering rectum clenched in sharp jolts at the phantom memories.
    He reached up to the lip of the bath tub, grabbing the little baggy of purple pills he’d appropriated from his mother’s medicine cabinet.  He dry swallowed two of them before lying back down and curling into a fetal position.
    As the comforting wave of soft blackness enveloped him, the flashbacks dispersed like worms retreating into the earth. The whispers by his door carried on, but he no longer heard the awful things that they said.
    …..
     
    At the end of the otherwise empty corridor, Eric Gentry crept back to his room, new room key in hand,  hoping not awaken his roommate, Jimmy. He slipped the magnetic keycard into the reader, and paused. He thought he heard crying. Placing his ear to the door, the crying ceased. He backed away and listened, glancing down the well-lit hallway decorated with portraits of old steam engine boats from the early 1900s and black and whites of prominent Maine figures. The