Notes: By the end of part 2, AI will be ready to move into the hotel. Beginning with part 3 I’m going to move away from the storylines of episodes until the Darla arc is introduced. I want to do one or two parts that explores the growing personal & working relationships for Angel, Cordelia, Wesley & Gunn before the bad times arrive.
PART 2
Hotel California, by The Eagles
On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair. Warm smell of colitis, rising up through the air. Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light. My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim. I had to stop for the night. There she stood in the doorway. I heard the mission bell. And I was thinking to myself this could be heaven or this could be hell. Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way. There were voices down the corridor. I thought I heard them say…
**~**
Prologue
Angel, Wesley and Cordelia stood in the large, dust-laden lobby of The Hyperion Hotel. Surrounded by high reaching walls stained and worn with age their eyes drifted over the sheet covered furnishings.
“Sixty-eight rooms, sixty-eight vacancies,” Angel announced, Cordelia thinking he sounded like a Miss America flunky turned too peppy tour guide.
“California Spanish, deco influence, I’d say built in the late 1920’s. It appears to have been abandoned for quite some time.” Wesley surmised as he inspected the lobby, the palms of his hands pressed against the backside of his hips.
“That’d be my guess. This used to be the heart of Hollywood. No telling how long it’s been empty.”
“From the looks of it…years.” Cordelia offered her opinion, unconcerned it not had necessarily been asked for. She tugged at one of sheets watching the dust flutter into the stale air. If that crazy vampire thinks I’m gonna help him clean hotel hell he’s…well crazy. Even a vision girl has to set boundaries.
“Hmm,” Angel hummed spying the strategically unhidden looks of disgust and defiance.
“What’s the interest Angel,” Wesley asked. “Why are we here?”
“I need you to look into its history. Find out who owns it now and why they’re letting it stay empty.”
“Who’s the client.”
“I, uh…we are; Wes, you’ll need to access police files,” Angel continued hurriedly. “Focus on cold cases, homicides, and unsolved missing persons. Start at the beginning, take it up to the present day.”
“I think Mr. Cryptic Much is trying to tell us something Wesley. So this is the place you wanted to show us? You want this to be our new office and your new home?”
“You two have already discussed this?” Wesley asked, a little miffed he had not been included in the private conversation. “So this is more than just a sudden interest in real estate.” It was a statement, maybe even a huff but definitely not a question. “Very well then, the sign out front belongs to Melman Realty and Development, I’ll get the number, start by finding out you has it on the market.”
Chapter 1
“The hotel officially closed its doors on December 16th, 1979. Oh my, on that morning the concierge, Roland Meeks, made his morning wake-up calls with a twelve gauge shotgun, room to room. The hotel has been empty ever since.”
“Guess so, I mean who wants to risk having their head blown off if they oversleep. Hey look at this,” Cordelia added peering into her laptop. “Melman Realty and Development may own the hotel but they can’t tear it down because it was declared a protected historical landmark. They’ve been trying to unload it for ten years…no buyers.”
“Mmm, no wonder, even a cursory inspection of these records indicates a storied legacy of murder and mayhem dating back to the hotel’s construction in ‘28, when a roofer leapt to his death taking two coworkers with him.”
“Yeah this is all really interesting-not, but what are we doing exactly?”
“Doing?”
“Yea doing, I know Angel thinks it’d be a good place to live and operate the agency, and why I have no idea, but why the snooping into the past?”
“Didn’t Angel share that detail during your private conversation concerning the hotel; the one that didn’t include me?”
“Gees Wesley, there was no private conversation and no excluding, paranoid much?”
Cordelia’s eyebrows rose in surprise as her sight landed on a particular photo. “You know that cursory inspection thing you were doing, well curse a little deeper and take a look at who was staying at the hotel in 1952.” Cordelia suggested shoving the black and white photo in Wesley’s face.
Wesley scanned the printout of the old photograph spotting Angel in the background. “Well, now we know one thing for certain.”
“Yup, it’s not that vampires don’t photograph, it’s just that they don’t photograph well.”
“I mean we now know Angel had a personal connection to The Hyperion.”
“So, why didn’t he just tell us?”
“Perhaps he was ashamed to.”
“Hmmm.” Damn brooding, no one knows my pain vampire. Pain in the butt is more like it.
***
He sat in his room, lit a cigarette and listened to the music seeping through the thin barrier of the wall. He brought the glass to his lips.
The sound of gunshot invaded the room un-muffled by frail wood and cheap wallpaper. He drank his blood undaunted by death.
The door locked with the bolt of a latch, the bottled blood slipped into the ice bucket.
“I’ll be finished here in just two shakes, sir.”
“You’re not the maid.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“There’s no cleaning trolley outside, those sheets are dirty and you’re the wrong color.”
“I’m sorry, the door was open, and I was just…I didn’t mean…”
“I’ve got nothing here to steal.”
“I wasn’t trying to steal from you, honest; I can explain.”
“Not interested, just go.”
“I can’t.”
“I’ll help you.”
“Where is she? Look pal, this really isn’t something you want to get involved in.”
“That’s true, which is why you’re gonna turn around and go away.”
“Send her on out here; that way I don’t have to come in there and get her.”
You’re not coming in here.”
“You won’t mind if I just come in and take a look around then.”
“Gee, I guess I do mind.”
“Gosh, I mean that was…I know we got off on the wrong foot, my name is…”
The door slammed shut.
He stood outside alone, cigarette tucked between two fingers. The sky was clear, the moon and stars hung low.
“World ends in ten minutes.”
He ignored the intrusion taking another deep pull from his cigarette.
“The guy in 215 killed himself.”
She continued to talk, he continued not to listen.
“Can you imagine that wallpaper being the last thing you see before you go?”
“Maybe it was the wallpaper that drove him to it.”
“I know you didn’t want to help me before, but you did and I need to thank you for that.” “You’re gonna miss the end of the world.”
The guy in 215 was murdered. There’ll be police and questions, I though you’d want to know in case you’ve got something to hide.”
“Everyone has something to hide.”
He lit her cigarette, she pulled the satchel from under the bed.
“Why take it?”
“I don’t know, angry, scared; I’ve been passing since I was 15. My blood isn’t pure, it’s tainted.”
He smiled, slight and brief. “It’s just blood, it’s all just blood.”
“Nobody believes that. I’m not one thing or the other. I’m nothing.”
“I know what that’s like.”
“I am something, a thief. What am I going to do? I’m trapped.”
“You’re not trapped.”
“If I leave now it’ll look suspicious, if I stay and the cops find this…”
“They’re not gonna find it, ‘cause I’m gonna help you.”
He picked up the satchel, placing a hand on her back he led her from the room.
He stepped from the elevator, the hall full of angry people; they clustered around her.
“I didn’t mean anything, please, I’m sorry.”
“Now you’re sorry. I thought you didn’t have anything to be sorry for. Stop lying”
“It wasn’t me.”
She looked at him, tears wet her face. She accused him.
“It was him. Look in his room. He’s got blood. He’s a monster.”
They knocked him down beating him relentlessly. They dragged him into the open hallway above the lobby. He didn’t fight back only stared at her until his vision blurred.
“Get him over there.”
“Come on. String him up.”
The rope was thrown over the rafter, the noose slipped around his neck. She screamed as they pushed him, his body dropping until the rope’s end was reached.
“Swing, you freak. Yea, that’s right, you had that coming.”
The sway of his body became still, his eyes closed, the crowd silently melted away.
He was alone, eyes snapped open. He took hold of the rope above his head pulling himself up and free of the strangling noose. He dropped to the lobby floor below. The evil took form taunting him, laughing at him.
“Well, I don’t know about you but I’m stuffed. God I love people; don’t you? They feed me their worst and I serve it right back to them and the fear and prejudice turns to certainty and hate and I take another bite. What a beautiful, beautiful dance. Oh, you got your feelings hurt, didn’t you? See what happens when you stick your neck out for them? They throw a rope around it.”
He wanted to leave, he had learned his lesson but the evil wanted to laugh and taunt and feed.
“And you thought you’d made a friend. News flash you had. That’s what made her the yummiest morsel of all. You reached her buddy, restored her faith in people. Without you she would have been just another appetizer. But you plumped her up good. Now she’s a meal that’s gonna last me a lifetime.”
He wanted to leave. He had learned his lesson. “Take them all.”
Angel stood in the hallway looking at the closed door. Room 217, he had lived there once in 1952.
Turning from the door of his old room Angel headed to the basement. Spying a chair, he used it to reach over the old, dirty piping anchored from the ceiling. His hands tapped over the pipes landing on a familiar object. He pulled the satchel layered in dust like everything else that had been left behind from its hiding place.
***
Hours later Wesley and Cordelia sat on the floor; numerous folders arranged in front of them, each dated with the year of its contents.
Wesley held a newspaper clipping its headline reading Bellhop Arrested For Murder. “Frank Gillnitz, he worked as a bellman the year that Angel was in residence, we should put him in ‘52.”
“But he wasn’t executed until ‘54. Shouldn’t we put him in the 1954 folder?”
“He wasn’t executed until ‘54, but the crime he committed, the murder of the salesman and the storing of the body in the hotel meat locker occurred in ‘52.”
“It’s kind of like a puzzle. The who died horribly because Angel screwed up 50 years ago game. Do you think that’s what he was ashamed to tell us?”
“Could be, probably,” Wesley reluctantly admitted.
“Screw this,” Cordelia hissed scattering the folders with a sweep of her hand. This isn’t solving anything. The broodmeister is gonna have to open up and tell us what happened, then we’ll talk about it. All of us so don’t get whiny about being left out,” she inserted as a warning to Wesley. “Then we can fix it and move on…but hopefully not to hotel hell.”