“Do you ever get tired of playing investigator?” she asked lightly, drumming her fingers against her thick quad. “You ask more questions than my mother.”
“Questions that you’re avoiding the answers to.”
Evelyn’s lips tweaked in a smirk. “If you must know, I did hook up with a hot city slicker last night.”
“Oh, really. Who?”
She shrugged and looked away. “Someone I met in a bar. Doesn’t matter now. I’ll never see them again.”
If she was lying, I couldn’t tell. I closed my eyes and let the steam from my tea waft across my face. The warm chamomile leaves unfurled, their arms reaching upward to fill my nose with their subtle scent.
“You should get some sleep,” Evelyn advised. “If you’ve been reading that journal all night, it’s bound to be affecting you.”
So I ambled up to the loft for a nap.
A door snapped shut in the hallway, waking me from a trance. I lifted my feet from the sofa, but wait… hadn’t I been sleeping upstairs in the loft?
Our room opened to the corridor, as if the wall meant to keep the suite private from the rest of the hotel had been demolished while I slept. Everything was positioned in a slightly different place than usual. The kettle lay upside down. My toothbrush stood on its tip, balanced on the corner of the coffee table. Evelyn’s owl-shaped locket dangled from the chandelier, rotating slowly. I reached for the locket, but the gold burned white-hot. I drew away, sweating.
A beautiful woman in the hallway captured my attention: Angelica. She walked from her room, wearing the Saint Angel complimentary satin robe that hung in every room and holding an empty ice bucket. She nodded and smiled to an invisible being, then continued on to the vending room. The walls became transparent, so I could watch as she fit the bucket into the ice machine and pressed the button.
The ice machine whirred loudly, but nothing came out of the dispenser. Angelica whacked the flat of her palm against the side of the machine and tried again. Still no luck.
“Need some help?”
The garbled voice did not belong to anyone in particular. In fact, it belonged to everyone at once. It was low and high, husky and smooth, masculine and feminine, all at the same time.
Angelica moved aside for her helper to try the machine. A shadowy figure stepped into the vending room. It shifted the ice machine to the side.
“What are you doing?” Angelica asked.
“Helping,” replied the unknown entity.
The shadow looked up, through the walls, and stared straight at me. It had no face, only a gaping mouth that dripped with blood.
My eyelids flew open. The loft was dark. I lay on top of the bed covers, wearing the same satin robe that Angelica had been abducted in. The silkiness of the fabric against my skin made me queasy. I cast off the robe and threw it into a pile on the floor as I tried to separate the dream from reality.
It was dark and cold. Evelyn, who usually adjusted the temperature before we went to sleep, was not there. I checked the time. It was ten o’clock at night. I had slept the entire day.
The details of the nightmare slipped away, like water running out of cupped hands. Shivering, I put on one of Evelyn’s oversized thermal shirts and ventured into the hallway. I traced Angelica’s path from her room that night.
In the vending room, I pressed the button for ice. The machine dispensed a few cubes then made an awful clanging racket. When I pressed the button again, the motor whirred, but no ice fell out.
I braced my shoulder against the machine and pushed. It scraped a few inches across the floor, revealing a piece of the wall behind it. The thick plug for the machine had shifted, falling halfway out of the outlet. Instinctively, I pulled the plug out entirely.
The outlet covering, not secured with any screws, popped off the wall. I knelt and peered into the electric box, using my phone light to see past the wires. A small black button looked out of place. Hoping to avoid electrocution, I eased my finger into the box and hit the button.
A pneumatic hiss of air released as a section of the wall depressed and slid out of place. Heart pounding, I shined the light into the darkness. It reflected off a shiny metal chute.
I heard Evelyn’s voice in my head: Don’t do it, Jack.
Yet, I couldn’t stop myself from clambering through the opening and sitting at the edge of the chute. I dangled my legs against the slippery metal but kept hold of the edge to stop myself from sliding. It wasn’t too late to turn back.
I let go.
A yelp of surprise escaped my throat, but the ride was surprisingly short. I sped down the chute like a child on a playground slide. After a quick drop, I landed softly.
I clambered out of an industrial-sized laundry basket full of stale sheets, dusted my pants, and looked around. I’d come to a service room with a shallow ceiling. A large washer and dryer occupied one corner of the room, but they were covered in thick layers of dust and hadn’t been used in years. Old mini fridges were stacked in the opposite corner.
I wandered out of the first room and into the hallway. In my head, I envisioned the blueprints from the Saint Angel’s in-house museum. The chute behind the ice machine must have led me to the thirteenth floor, which didn’t exist to the Saint Angel’s guests.
This floor, it appeared, had once been dedicated to maintaining the Saint Angel, but fell into disuse in recent years. The broken machines, dusty linens, and piles of expired non-perishable room service items were evidence of that. The space seemed mostly devoted to storage.
I wandered through the
