Page 12 of Room Serviced
“I think…” he said, then pulled out his phone, turned on the front camera, and stuck it through. In the dim light of the screen, they could see a bolt on the other side of the door. “Yup, there it is.”
The door swung in when he pushed it, and Sloane made a gentlemen first gesture. Max gallantly stepped through, and she followed, still so close he could feel the warmth of her skin. Once on the other side, they took a minute to check out the back of the door: dusty wood, a simple sliding bolt so new it was still shiny. Max wasn’t a hardware expert, but the screws holding it in place looked distinctly modern.
“I wonder what hardware store the ghosts go to,” Sloane deadpanned, and Max sighed.
“No whimsy,” he said, and she poked him in the ribs. “Hey.”
They left the door open—Sloane didn’t say anything, but she didn’t look like she wanted it closed—and followed the corridor another ten feet until it opened onto a small, dark room.
“I think we’re above the hallway,” she said, her flashlight playing along the top of the wall. They were still standing in the doorway, side by side, arms touching from shoulder to elbow. From Max’s bicep down, it was bare skin on bare skin. He wasn’t entirely thinking about ghosts or hotel layouts.
“No, that’s the other way from the entrance,” he said after a delay.
“The first hallway, where you thought the entrance was and it wasn’t. That far wall is the back of the room where the ladder is.”
“That sounds right,” Max agreed, because it did and because Sloane had taken a couple of looks at some very confusing blueprints and led them directly to where they wanted to go. The floor creaked when they stepped into the room, but that was nothing new.
“So now we’re in the—uh. What the fuck?”
Sloane’s flashlight beam illuminated a chalk circle on the floor. There was a star in the middle of the circle, symbols drawn around the outside, and five melted lumps of wax at each point of the star.
They stared at it in silence.
Finally, Sloane spoke. “Are you kidding me?” she asked conversationally.
“What?”
“A pentagram with candles? You can’t be serious.”
Max had one hand in his messenger bag, reaching for his camera. He paused, then looked up at her.
Sloane looked…annoyed. She did not look haunted, or spooked, or even particularly surprised by this brush with the paranormal.
“Satan worshippers aren’t even real,” she said, and finally Max figured out what she was talking about.
“I’m pretty sure they are,” he said. “I mean, there’s something for everyone, right?”
“Were you super sweaty earlier because you were up here decorating the floor?”
“If I were going to try to bamboozle you, I’d do a better job,” Max said, and she looked so irritated that he couldn’t help but grin. “Come on. A chalk pentagram? There’s not even a circle of salt around it. You gotta have the salt, otherwise the demon will escape.” He turned the camera on, then looked up at her, pretending to be horrified. “You don’t think the demon escaped, do you?”
Sloane was examining the floor again and didn’t bother to look back up while she flipped him off.
“We’re in the attic of the Bellwether, and we just found a pentagram on the floor,” Max narrated. “It’s pretty spooky up here, even during the day. We’re right above what used to be an illegal speakeasy during the 1920s.”
“Illegal speakeasy is redundant,” Sloane said, just out of frame.
“That’s my lovely assistant,” Max explained.
“Neither of those things is true.”
He kept the camera trained on the pentagram, which looked like it had been made with sidewalk chalk, and looked over at Sloane.
“You’re lovely,” he said simply. Sloane made a face, and he laughed. “Why are you arguing with me?”
“Lovely is a whole type,” Sloane said. “There’s a personality element. Lovely people are…I don’t know, gentle and nice and pleasant.”
“My lovely assistant and I will have to agree to disagree,” Max said. “Anyway, looks like someone might have been doing some summoning up here, though it’s hard to tell of what. There are no scorch marks, so it’s possible they were unsuccessful.”
