Door Number 3 was the closet to end all closets with rows and rows of shelves loaded with high heels, jewelry, scarves, sweaters. Racks lined the walls, brimming with dresses. Everything you could ever want or need was in there. I stepped inside as I remembered I hadn’t brought a change of clothes from home, not even a pair of underwear. I picked up a pleated teal dress from the closest rack and held it up. Shockingly, it turned out to be my size. I moved to the sweaters and examined one. It too was my size. Every pair of shoes were exactly the perfect fit.
My hairs stood up on end. Why was there a closet crammed with clothes my size? How would my uncle know my size? And I recalled my father stating his fear that Uncle Bollard wanted to take me. This seemed like an extreme amount of guessing for a man I hardly knew. Creeped out, the urge to find my uncle overwhelmed me.
No. I needed to call my parents, maybe the police. Hunting for my phone, I checked every surface, corner, and drawer in the bedroom, closet, and bathroom. I found fancy odds and ends, but nothing of mine. My bag was missing. I didn’t even have my flip-flops. All I had were the clothes on my back.
Suddenly distressed, I panicked because I couldn’t remember if the ring was in my bag. In desperation, I patted myself down and found the ring still squeezed into my shorts’ little pocket. I slipped the ring on my finger, vowing to not take it off again.
I let out a sigh and moved on to the next issue: locating my uncle and a phone.
I opened the final door.
One step out and I was shocked.
Carved into the white marble of the ceiling and walls were animals: a white lion in mid-leap, a llama eating grass, a lemur hanging off an elephant trunk, and every animal imaginable. Mesmerized, I wandered down the corridor, gawked at the animals, fish, and insects, and struggled not to trip over my own feet. Engraved into the wall were the words, “Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
Dominion. No kidding. Pretty sure whoever owned this place had dominion over most of the planet. I couldn’t imagine how much this cost. Millions wasn’t an exaggeration. And here I was walking around in my bare feet and a Barton High sweatshirt.
A little way down the corridor, a woman knelt in a pile of dust. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and a fine sheen of sweat covered her forehead. Chalky dust covered her hair and face. A steady chink chink echoed through the otherwise empty hall.
“What are you making?” My voice echoed and filled the marble expanse.
Her eyes held steady on her work as she hammered her chisel. “You can’t tell? Great, after eight hours of work, and you can’t tell it’s a wallaby.” Once she said this, I saw it, but to be fair, I wasn’t all that familiar with wallabies.
Eight hours. She had to have seen Uncle Bollard walk down the hall. “Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to interrupt, but I am looking for a man. He’s older, with white hair, and he’s thin. Like super thin, like he-could-be-used- as-a-kite thin.” I wanted to add rude and awful but didn’t.
“I get it: thin,” the woman said and focused on her chisel as if she was a breath away from one bad chip. “Sorry, doesn’t ring a bell. Look, I’m on a strict timeline. Don’t you have anything better to do?”
Oh, I did, like finding my uncle and getting an explanation on how I had ended up in this place. “Where are we?”
She let out a heavy sigh. “L’Autre Bête. That should have been covered before you even got here. Now move along. The royal heiress rises in three hours, heaven help us all.” She ran her dust-coated hands over her hair, adding another layer of dust. She didn’t care. The woman was so intense, she still hadn’t bothered to look away from the wall.
Royal heiress. The statement rang familiar, except here in this hallway, I doubted this heiress was a poor, sick, old woman and had every likelihood of being an actual royal. “Is there a real princess here?” I came in closer, my bare feet stepping in the powdered marble. I whispered to her, “It’s Princess Charlotte, isn’t it? Is she as adorable as she is on TV? Is Megan here too? Because she is seriously the best.”
“I don’t know her name, and why else are we here but to appease the royals? God, you’re new here. Trust me, you don’t have the time, not with a Merric down the hall. One wrong step, and that’s it. End game. You’re gone.”
Merric? I guessed they were the people Uncle Bollard worked for or a different hotel guest, a rich hoity-toity piece of work. Either way, the sooner I found my uncle, the better because he had a lot to explain and quick. “Well, I haven’t been assigned a job yet.”
“Everyone has a job here.” Click, click, clunk.
“I have no clue. My uncle explained nothing to me.”
She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. “You need to change or at least put on shoes. First impressions are very important to the Merrics.”
“Okay.” This was a huge problem since I didn’t know where my bag was and even if I did, I hadn’t packed clothing. Worse yet, my flip-flops were missing. “Anything else?”
“You should already know this. Always be busy and never get on their bad side. It’s better to avoid conversations altogether; just ‘yes, your Majesty, no, your Highness’. Bow when you greet them. It doesn’t matter what you are doing, drop it and bow or
