Every single member of the staff was very
nervous. It was well known by them that when the McAllen family decided to
visit, it was a trying moment for the hotel and everyone in it. But the
McAllen’s were very rich and they knew they could use that kind of clients.
Rich people were not coming to the hotel anymore, or maybe to the region…
Anyway, not many wealthy heirs and heiresses wanted to visit Lake Flora in the
summer. Other vacation spots had become more popular and the lake had lost some
of its former splendor. But the McAllen’s were a family of traditions and they
had come to the lake every year for sixty years, so they weren’t going to break
that custom.
The day they arrived, every single staff
member had to stop whatever it was they were doing and just run to the main
hall and line up on either side of the red carpet they had installed
exclusively for the event. The other guests, which were not many, had been
barred from the main hall and had to use the service elevator in order to get
to the their rooms or from there to anywhere else in the hotel. Some of them
complained but as none of them were as rich and famous as the McAllen’s, their
opinion was not very important. That sounds awful, especially when the hotel
always cared about every single guest with care. But this time it was different
because the McAllen’s were the difference between a definitive closure of the
hotel or their permanence in the business.
When they arrived, everyone was as still as a
statue but that didn’t mean that people weren’t excited or curious. After all,
it had been a year since they had been there for their last visit and many
staff members had entered the hotel after that so they were really excited
about meeting people that were practically royalty. If nobility existed in any
way in this country, the McAllen’s would surely be a very important and
powerful family, maybe even more that they already were. Arthur McAllen, the
main figure, had made his family richer by buying several mines around the
world as well as having an almost complete monopoly on several markets such as
bananas, sugar and tea.
He was the first one to come in and every
single staff member had to bow as he passed. Mister McAllen seemed overjoyed
and the first thing he said to the hotel manager was that the place was as
beautiful as he had always remembered. He congratulated everyone and moved on
to the main counter. After him, came Lady McAllen. She was a true noblewoman,
daughter of a duke from England. Her father owned several newspapers. She walked
among the people, greeting some of them. And then came the children. The girl
was already a women, very beautiful but visibly very annoyed by the whole
concept of spending her holiday in the lake. She rushed over the red carpet and
joined her parents fast.
The young boy that followed him was ecstatic.
He looked at everything, greeted some of the staff and asked a kitchen maid if
she knew if there were monsters in the lake. She laughed at the comment but the
hotel manager gave her a look of disapproval, which stopped her laughter. The
last person to come in through the door was the mother of Arthur McAllen.
Everyone in the region and the country knew Callista McAllen very well. She had
been the wife of a governor that years later became prime minister. And he had
been a particularly bad prime minister. Many people said he had died of an
illness related to madness but no one was really sure. The truth was every
staff member looked at her, interested by her story.
The older woman crossed the red carpet, oblivious
to the preparations for their arrival, getting to her son and demanding him for
a bed in order to rest her feet. A waiter gave each one of them lemonade, made
with fruit grown in the hotel surroundings, and then several younger bell boys
rushed outside and started taking the luggage to the presidential suite. They
all signed the guest book and then the manager asked Arthur McAllen if he would
like to pose for picture. It was kind of a tradition of the hotel, so the
family complied although only the men were happy to do it. The women looked
annoyed and tired. So the photographer, who happened to be the groundskeeper,
had to do it fast.
Moments later, everyone was in the
presidential suite, their empty luggage in a big closet and all their clothes and
belonging in drawers and closets all over the room. The place was very
overwhelming, if one wasn’t very used to the golden glow of its walls and the
overpowering smell of the perfume used when the maids cleaned up the bedroom
and bathroom. It was just too much for every one except for such a wealthy
family as the McAllen’s. The women decided to rest and retired to their rooms.
The men changed clothes and decided to take a walk. When they arrived to the
hall, the red carpet was no longer there or staff members. Everything was back
to normal. But they didn’t really pay attention. They just crossed the main
doors and went outside.
Arthur and his son walked towards the lake and
there, the father would tell his son several stories about the monster that many
had claimed lived beyond the surface of the lake. Some said it had wings, some
others said it was like fish but huge in size. Father and son threw stones at
the water as they shared stories about the mythical beast. They also explored
the woods around the hotel and discovered the place were the lemon trees grew
high and mighty. For Arthur, this place brought the best memories from his
childhood and he wanted to past that on to his son.
But his wife and daughter weren’t as happy to
be there. The next day, her wife refused to have breakfast in their private dining
room, and preferred to eat alone in their bedroom. The daughter wasn’t a much
easier person to handle, especially because she did come out of her bedroom. In
just a few hours, the staff had come to hate her even more than any other guest
in their time there. She was bossy and very rude for such a rich family. She
would tell them how to do their chores, even as she had never moved a finger in
her life to do anything. And she tired everyone by always saying that her
future husband was a commander in the army and he would have the power to
improve this lost region and make it productive, instead of just a place for
old people to catch some sun.
But the elderly person in her group would not
have agreed. The oldest McAllen was maybe the nastiest and that was because she
insisted, every morning in sitting in the main table of the dining hall down in
the ground floor. She wanted to seat where her dead husband also sat when he
was governor and prime minister. The thing was Callista McAllen had lost it
several years ago. Her son was too kind and didn’t want to realize it but she
was losing her mind by the minute and she was becoming more and more demanding
and rude because of it. She even attempted to hit a waiter on the second day
because he had delivered her tea colder than she liked it.
And
the McAllen’s never apologized. The waiter had to leave for the kitchens
immediately and he was relocated to another part of the hotel, were he would
not be affected by Callista’s insanity. Besides minor incidents like that,
everything was going very well with the McAllen’s summer stay. The manager love
to do the counts of how much money he would win by the end of the season. He
was relieved more than happy because it was not mystery that the hotel was
going under: there was not that much money to pay every single person that
worked there and attendance had been so low that year that they had even though
of closing for some time. That’s why the McAllen’s had to be treated like
royals.
But then one night news from the capital came
in and everyone was awoken by the man carrying the letters, because it wasn’t
just one but many. He demanded to see Arthur McAllen, who had to be woken up
and rushed into the ground floor. There, the man gave him all the letters. And
every single one of them told exactly the same story: their neighboring country
had attacked a border post and then a whole border town. It was war and the
government had demanded for the wealthy to help them in this hour of need. McAllen
asked for a pen and paper to write his response, that he was going to give all
the money he could to the cause. But the man that had brought the letters
stopped him and told him that not only they required his money, but his
presence to in the battlefield.
Everyone in the hall became mute. And it was
the first of many silences they would hear for the following years. The war grew
larger and more and more lethal. Arthur McAllen would die months later, as well
as the commander who was going to marry his daughter. The hotel closed indefinitely
the following winter and no one would ever hear about Lake Flore until after
the war, when it would become synonym of madness, as the hotel was bought by
the ministry of wealth fare and then transformed to an asylum. The McAllen
tradition and dynasty died in the war, as the women died of sorrow and the men
of war.
