From the author of White Horse (“Twisty and electric.” —The New York Times Book Review) comes a terrifying and resonant novel about a woman who uses her unique gift to learn the truth about her sister’s death.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Erika T. Wurth’s The Haunting of Room 904, which is out now.
Olivia Becente was never supposed to have the gift. The ability to commune with the dead was the specialty of her sister, Naiche. But when Naiche dies unexpectedly and under strange circumstances, somehow Olivia suddenly can’t stop seeing and hearing from spirits.
A few years later, she’s the most in-demand paranormal investigator in Denver. She’s good at her job, but the loss of Naiche haunts her. That’s when she hears from the Brown Palace, a landmark Denver hotel. The owner can’t explain it, but every few years, a girl is found dead in room 904, no matter what room she checked into the night before. As Olivia tries to understand these disturbing deaths, the past and the present collide as Olivia’s investigation forces her to confront a mysterious and possibly dangerous cult, a vindictive journalist, betrayal by her friends, and shocking revelations about her sister’s secret life.
The Haunting of Room 904 is a paranormal thriller that is as edgy as it is heartfelt and simmers with intensity and longing. Erika T. Wurth lives up to her reputation as “a gritty new punkish outsider voice in American horror.”
CHAPTER TWO
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I turned in bed, clicked buy on the ghost box, and set my phone on the bedside table, the shadows in the room strange, ominous. I picked my book up, then put it down, my thoughts drifting over to my sister. Naiche and I had been inseparable since her birth, laughing at the same stupid jokes, compulsively watching the same horror movies, especially the paranormal, like The Ring and The Conjuring. We’d had matching circular tattoos inked on our inner wrists on my sixteenth birthday, illegally, secretly, drunk on the tequila we’d liberated from our mother’s kitchen. I still woke up in the middle of the night laughing at something wonderful I’d thought in a dream, my finger hovering over her name in my phone, ready to text her. Sometimes, I stared at that broken circle, knowing that hers had burned away in an incinerator in a crematorium in the middle of Denver, the name of which I’d already forgotten.
“God,” I muttered, switching my light on and sitting up.
The faint sounds of RuPaul’s Drag Race drifted in from the living room, a comforting and familiar backdrop to our millennial domesticity. I closed my eyes against the darkness in my head. I could hear Alejandro’s barbells clank down, hard, and then the patter of his footsteps leading up to my bedroom door.
He knocked.
“Come in,” I said, attempting to smooth my hair down.
He opened the door and sloped into the frame, then walked in, his dark eyes narrowed with concern, his back to the long gold mirror on the wall opposite to me. “Saw your light on. Trouble sleeping?”
“Yeah,” I said, sighing. He sat down at the edge of my bed. “It’s almost the anniversary.” “Yeah,” I repeated, my voice soft, foggy. He leaned in and hugged me, and unbidden, the tears came, Alejo rubbing my back as I cried. He was always so good to me. He always let me cry, never judged me for it, though he never let me wallow too long.
“It wasn’t your fault—” he started, tipping back, but my eyes caught something in the mirror. Something that shouldn’t be there.
My sister was in the mirror, her eyes two blackened bulbs, her hair electric, everywhere, her expression one of terror. I screamed.
CHAPTER THREE
“Olivia?” Alejandro said, standing up, his hands going to his chest in a reflexive, defensive gesture.
I blinked. She was gone.
“What the hell was that?” he asked, one hand reaching tentatively out to my arm.
“I . . . thought I saw Naiche. In the mirror,” I said, my heart still racing, one finger pointing to the offending object. I was used to dealing with the paranormal, but my sister’s ghost was something else altogether. I shuddered.
Alejandro turned around. Peered into it. After a moment, he asked me if I wanted him to get some equipment.
I nodded. We hit the mirror with the EMF meter, Alejo running it carefully from one end to the other. I watched him, my body rigid, my mind locked in a state of confusion and anxiety.
The meter stayed silent. Not one beep.
I closed my eyes. Sighed deeply. “I think I’m just overwhelmed.”
He nodded. “You haven’t been sleeping. And this is a shit time for you anyway.”
“I’m sorry if I scared you,” I said, but Alejandro shook his head and left to get my sleep meds. I’d already taken my usual singular pill, but apparently I needed a double dose tonight. He brought me a cup of water, and I let him tip it toward my mouth like I was a child, or like I was taking sacrament, a ritual my sister and I had participated in whenever we’d spent Sundays at Alejo’s house.
He asked me if I was okay and I nodded, though both of us knew that I wasn’t. He smiled uneasily. He closed the door. I turned, my book in hand, and thought of my sister’s face. Not the one I’d just seen in the mirror, but her true face, her doll’s face, the one that stared at me shyly from beneath lowered lids whenever my mother and I would laugh loudly over red wine. The one that had been just two years behind me watching as I danced with my father, his face red and happy. I shut the light off. The shadows in the room began coalescing into something like a human figure, my mind playing tricks on me. I tried to not look at the mirror, though it felt like it was pulsing in the dark, my heart racing and slowing down, racing and slowing down, the image of my sister in the mirror haunting me, chasing me through the corridors of my mind as I finally, but not blissfully, slipped into a troubled and nightmared sleep.
