The Travelers

No one really knows why restoration stopped on the abandoned Saint Julian’s hotel, where commoners and kings once came to relax in luxury. Built around 1900, it sits in the Rockies, halfway up a mountain, near the train station that used to welcome hundreds of first-class passengers at the height of ski season.

Now the hotel slumps like a fat nobleman who has fallen asleep during revelries, eyes closed, mouth gaping, head thrown back, oblivious to the surgery begun on his mouth and left cranium.

We, a colony of expatriate writers, were looking for a new home. We searched up all we could find about the history of this significant hotel: how it had formerly entertained tourists with its casino, grand ballroom, and week-long billiards tournaments. During both world wars, recreational business slowed, but once hostilities ended, people returned, craving indulgence and escape. The hotel changed hands a few times, and each owner had a new vision, new tricks to try, but still, nothing quite “took.”

At its half-century mark, visitors preferred coming by car or limousine, so the rail line closed down. The hotel became fully modernized—no small feat, considering the isolation and difficult terrain. Three workers died while stringing electricity and phone lines. The grand ballroom was replaced by a night club, and the dark oak-paneled interiors were overlaid with blond minimalist teak.

A century after it opened, the hotel got satellite dishes and refreshed its stale décor with playful post-modernism. Ownership passed to a numbered company that began restoring the original Gothic Revival look. Recently, even that company decided to bail.

***

We were writers whose picturesque riverside colony had been flooded one time too many. We were looking for higher ground, so our real estate agent gave us a list of available properties: former sheep farms, vacant religious schools, abandoned dance halls. No place resonated as strongly with us as Saint Julian’s. A scouting party of four took the old Land Rover along a spiderweb of secondary roads that encircled the mountain.

We were a motley crew. Besides me, a wannabe writer who had gambled her life savings on a literary career, there were three authors in different niches: JT, who churns out books on optimism and self-reliance; Pookie, who tackles all kinds of nonfiction subjects from astronomy to zoology; and Bruce, author of torrid romances such as Rendezvous at The Ritz and Passion at The Plaza. I hung around these wildly successful authors, hoping to learn by osmosis the bestselling writer’s outlook.

The roads were rough, and the real estate agent’s directions were vague. Going around a narrow bend, we encountered a long-bearded hiker holding a shepherd’s crook, the kind a bishop wields in processionals. He wore a cassock smeared with dust—a pilgrim, Pookie guessed.

Pilgrims? In this day and age? We rolled down a window and offered him a lift.

He declined, saying, “The way is the end.”

We rolled up the window and drove on. “The way is the end,” Bruce mimicked the old man’s sepulchral tones and downturned mouth. “What does that even mean?”

“Search me,” I laughed uneasily.

“Can you imagine,” JT said, “getting cooped up with some creepy old evangelist?”

We all poked fun at the man, except for Pookie, who wanted to interrogate the old codger as research for her next book—on America-based pilgrimages.

 We forgot about him as the Land Rover bumped along, sometimes diving through a tunnel of trees, sometimes flying through an open glade with a magnificent view of the Rockies. Finally we found a road leading from the abandoned rail line to Saint Julian’s.

 Enroute, we saw abandoned mines and faraway ranches, but no real neighbors—none of the modest dwellings you might expect for those who tended hotel grounds, prepared the food, and laundered the sheets. Pookie said, “Inferring from similar European models, this hotel may have originally been a self-contained place like an abbey, with staff residences on the non-scenic side.”

“Miss Know-it-all,” muttered Bruce.

“Hey, free research for Seduction in Saint Julian,” I suggested, trying to keep things light. We were cooped up for long hours; tempers were fraying.

We drove and drove until at last the hotel was in sight. It was built on a large earthen platform. Pookie, who had written about Mound Builder civilizations, speculated that ground-penetrating radar might find a more ancient structure below, with pre-Columbian archaeological anomalies entombed beneath the hotel.

“Some people…” Bruce grumbled.

I gestured: zip it! And he quieted down.

We drove along the access road until we reached an enclosure of tall, dangerously spiky rods, spaced about six inches apart, that surrounded Saint Julian’s hotel.

The ornate iron gate shrieked open—a gust of wind nudging a broken latch, we surmised. Scrambling out of the Land Rover, we observed the hotel up close: sad and dilapidated, with crumbling mortar, worn-down bricks, and some stones altogether missing, especially near the partially restored left wing. Although the grounds were overgrown and neglected, certain doorways and paths remained clear—signs that someone still resided there.

We marched up to the weathered oak door and Pookie lifted the darkly spotted brass knocker. Once, twice, thrice, she let it fall. A figure emerged from the shadows, a boy dressed in faded tunic and leggings.

“We’re here to see the hotel,” Bruce said.

“Hotel?” the boy cocked his head.

“The agent said we could take a look,” JT said.

“We are not expecting anyone today,” said the boy.

Pookie literally had her foot in the door and that prevented the boy from shutting us out.

“This hotel is for sale,” JT asserted, “and we are interested buyers. We need to speak to your parents. May we come in?”

“I was born under a curse,” the boy said. “I had to escape my family.”

We stepped back to take a second look at the waif. He was thin and had deep-set eyes dark as onyx.

His gaze traveled from one face to the next. I swear I felt a chill.

“Ahhh, a curse, is it? It’s a tough life,” JT said empathetically. “We’d like to hear more about it… but first, could we speak to the adult in charge?”

“Over there,” the boy said, pointing toward a grassy patch so overgrown we could scarcely see wrought iron tables and chairs among the vines woven through and around them. Farther on, we glimpsed a stand of three birch trees, their ghostly white trunks shining.

“We don’t see anyone,” I said. We exchanged glances among ourselves: Do we really need to see the hotel today? But we have come so far.

“Go speak to them,” the boy insisted. “They will listen.”

Looking about, shuffling our shoes, we maintained a long silence at the door. Things were not going well. I was ready to give up on this god-forsaken place.

 Pookie thanked him and we made our way into the west yard, studying “the potential” of the place, searching for the adult in charge—any adult. Inhaling its atmosphere.

Perhaps that is when we fell under the spell of Saint Julian’s. In springtime, the place would look so lovely, we purred amongst ourselves, once the trees’ dead branches were removed and the vines were trained to grow over the trellis and pergola. We daydreamed how the colony would flourish as fellow writers, taking breaks from wordsmithing, would tend the new growth, and how that would spiritually nourish them in turn. We’d plant beds of crocus and hyacinth to welcome the spring. We’d establish ground cover of alyssum and cotoneaster to be summer’s delight.

Inexorably, we were drawn to the birch trees, whose leaves, ruffled by the wind, faintly whispered, Come. JT placed his hand on the trunk of the biggest birch tree and smiled. “The old one likes us. He thinks it’s time to welcome scribes among the commoners and kings.”

“Put away the rose-colored glasses,” Pookie said. “The question is: will the colony flourish? Will writers come to remote places?” But even she began nodding.

 I needed to know more—I’d volunteered to report to the colony in full. Why was the hotel listed for sale? What were the terms and conditions? How many bedrooms, how many meeting rooms? The agent had confirmed someone at the hotel could answer our questions—but no one, it seemed, would answer.

 We lingered in the east yard, debating what to do. We were annoyed that the hotel management, or whoever was selling on their behalf, could not meet us as arranged. Bruce said, “Let’s not be upset. The disorganization works to our advantage. No other buyers will put up with these scatterbrains, so we’ll get the place for a song.”

 We returned to the front door. The boy again slipped out of the shadows, which were lengthening as evening fell. He was carrying a bucket—an old, dented tin bucket—a relief in its solidity. He was hell-bent on his chore. “God be with ye,” he said, waving as he passed. “We will meet again.” He turned his gaze to me, and I flinched.

Caught off guard, we forgot to press him for entry to the hotel. And he was out of sight before we got up the nerve.

We glanced into the west yard again, where he’d been headed with his bucket. How did we lose sight of him so fast? An icy breath stirred the air, and I sensed he was nearby, but I said nothing. I did not want to be “the flaky one.”

 We looked shamefacedly at each other: JT, Pookie, Bruce, and I. We were left with a troubling sense of trespass. Of invading the space of vulnerable persons who were only tangential to the hotel owners’ transactions. We heard stairs creaking. We listened to leaves rustling. We were startled when a loose gate somewhere banged. And banged again. As writers, we understood life in the shadows, and we soon slipped away into the twilight’s chill.

The indigo gloom darkened to inky blackness as we drove away in silence, with only our headlights drilling through the gloom ahead. We drove a long time to get back to town. Maybe it only seemed longer because of disappointment.

Out of the blue, Pookie, our ruthless nonfiction writer, declared, “I don’t believe in hauntings.”

“Amen,” Bruce murmured.

We nodded. We shivered; we trembled at an eerie noise; we vibrated as our spines tingled. We were relieved to be away from the melancholy boy and the mausoleum of the hotel built atop the primeval mound.

Pookie read us her notes on the legend of Saint Julian.

Julian was born into a wealthy European family in the early fourth century. Local legend said that when he was born, the witches put a curse on him: the boy would grow up to kill his parents. Upon hearing of the curse, Julian’s mother wept, and his father demanded that the baby be killed. The mother begged for her son’s life to be spared.

Around age ten, the boy asked his mother why she cried so often, and she told him about the curse. The boy was horrified and swore he would never murder, especially not his beloved parents, and vowed never to see them again.

Julian ran away from home and, although young, made a new life for himself far away. He grew older, met a good woman, a wealthy widow, and married her.

Twenty years after their son ran away, Julian’s parents went looking for him. Had they stopped believing in witches or were they simply yearning to see their first-born child? We don’t know. They found his new village. Julian’s wife was delighted to welcome her husband’s parents, whom she had never met. They were tired from their journey, so she gave them the best bed to sleep in and went to gather food for a feast.

Meanwhile, Satan went to Julian and hissed, “Your wife has a lover who is visiting her right now.” Julian rushed home and saw a man and a woman sleeping in the best bed in his house. He was so enraged by his wife’s infidelity that he killed them both on the spot—thus fulfilling his curse.

When Julian discovered what he had done, he was so filled with remorse that he vowed to spend the rest of his life doing charitable works. He built a hospice to welcome travelers, especially the sick and weary, and he became known as Julian the Hospitaller.

Saint Julian Hospitaller is invoked as the patron of hospitality by travelers far from home who pray in hopes of finding safe lodging.

We eyed each other nervously. Saints, legends, long-ago people: what connection did these have to modern life?

Bruce asked, “Who do you think that boy was? The runaway Julian?”

We fell silent, remembering the tunic and the bucket—and what the boy had said. I thought but did not say: No child should grow up under a curse.

Back in town, we resumed our daily rhythms. We witnessed final closure of the riverside property. The agent sent us other sites to see, but none piqued our interest like the faltering hotel.

 The writers’ colony urgently needed a roomy place, quiet surroundings, so we took to the mountain roads again. The scouting party traveled for hours on an empty highway. Up ahead was a solitary hiker with an enormous shepherd’s crook. We were in a daze and didn’t recognize the pilgrim. Only when we lowered the window to offer him a ride, did the sense of déjà vu hit us.

Slowly, sadly, he declined our offer. “The way is the end,” he insisted.

“I’m writing an article about pilgrimages,” Pookie blurted, “could I ask you some questions?”

He ignored her. “The boy didn’t let you in, did he?”

“A mix-up in communication,” JT said, “that’s what our agent told us.”

“He would not let me in, either,” the pilgrim mumbled.

“Come with us,” said JT, ever the optimist. “Strength in numbers. He’s sure to let us in if he sees we are uniting.”

The pilgrim shook his head. “I must go. I must go alone. The way is the end.”

“Who is the boy?” we asked. “Is that young Julian?”

“I must go,” the man repeated, and he walked away, leaving us open-mouthed with perplexity.

 We kept driving. Driving and driving: the road seemed endless. We passengers felt restless; the riverside colony was closed; our desks were in storage. Back in town, we snapped into modernity, but we had a hunger, a yearning. We were looking, still looking. The dream of Saint Julian infected every conversation. We combed old newspapers and read about the former glory of the hotel, and we imagined a future, shared glory. We planned how to complete the restoration of the left side, how to bypass the boy with the bucket and how to work around the stand of birch trees.

One day, the agent called to say the listing had disappeared.

We told ourselves to stop ruminating on that ruined place, the magnet of commoners and kings.

Yet think of it we still do. It stains our dreams. Images return again and again under the temporary paralysis of sleep. Each time, a ghastly permutation. The pilgrim becomes a ghoul with empty eye-sockets. The boy has bloodied hands; the dented bucket contains entrails; we place our hands on the birch trees only to find they are tombstones bearing our names.

Saint Julian’s contaminates our thoughts. JT dashes off a new book aimed at the hospitality industry but it reeks of dread. Pookie writes about curses, prehistoric mounds, and the legend of Julian the Hospitaller. She sends it to her agent and immediately goes to the emergency ward, suffering heart palpitations. Bruce begins writing Seduction in Saint Julian’s but it mutates into Sepulcher in Saint Julian’s. We hear him shrieking as he types the final scene. I drift further from writing than ever before, forcing myself to type, but my hands continually cramp up.

The temptation to return is strong. One last look will cure us. It will set our minds at ease. We climb into the Land Rover and start driving on the road to Saint Julian’s hotel. The lonely, winding, uphill road. The way is the end, we reassure ourselves.

Even now, I gasp as I dictate this report on the futile move of the writers’ colony. I pause. I struggle to keep my throat from closing up.

The way is the end. The way is the end.