Page 39 of Room Serviced
“I’m looking for a—ah,” he said, and pulled the iron off its spot on the wall.
“An iron?”
“A better weapon than a ballpoint pen.”
Sloane looked down at her hand. She’d forgotten she was holding it, and in retrospect (and better lighting), it wasn’t as threatening as she’d maybe hoped.
“I had to think fast, and the lamps are all attached to the furniture,” she said as Max hefted the iron in his hand and walked into the room at a half crouch. He looked objectively ridiculous, but in a shirtless way. In a ready-to-brain-an-intruder-with-an-iron-because-she’d-screamed way, which Sloane appreciated.
He walked around both beds—nothing—and then held the iron up high and pulled back the curtains with a flourish, revealing…
…a smudged glass door and the balcony behind it, empty except for two chairs and a side table, which were supposed to be there.
They looked at each other, then around the room. Max tossed the iron onto the bed and then ran that hand through his hair.
“I think something did hit your window,” he said, looking at the smudge. It was about head height and…smudgy. “Does San Diego have owls?”
“Maybe?” Sloane said, and walked over to join him, tossing the ballpoint pen onto the desk as she did. Were there owls here? She didn’t even know if Los Angeles had owls. It had bats—did that count?
There was a zero percent chance a bat had made that noise or that smudge.
“I’ve heard of birds getting confused and flying into glass doors,” Max was saying. “Something about the reflection looking to them like?—”
The corner of the hotel room howled, a thin, tinny sound that was nothing like a real howl but still made them both jump, and Sloane grabbed Max’s arm as the howl kept going, long and weird and quiet. Max grabbed the iron, crouched again, and crept toward the air-conditioning unit installed in the wall next to the sliding glass door. Finally, the howl stopped, and Sloane realized something.
“Oh, what the fuck,” she said. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Max straightened up, iron down at his side, and stared at the AC unit. “I think it came from there,” he said, pointing.
“It’s haunted,” Sloane said, and sat on the end of the bed, then rubbed her face with her hands. “What the hell.”
Max kept staring at the AC unit. He didn’t look awake just yet. “Wait,” he said, and was interrupted by the sound of something scrabbling, then the quiet, spooky moan that had awoken Sloane ten minutes earlier.
“That’s what woke me up, by the way,” she said. “And then the thing with the window happened.”
“It sounds like a recording,” Max said, walked over, and knelt about two feet away from the unit. “Why is there a creepy recording in your air-conditioning?”
“Isn’t that why our rooms got moved? Haunted air-conditioning?”
Still staring at the AC, still on his knees, Max shook his head and said, “This is the weirdest one of these trips I’ve ever been on, and I almost got killed by a man-eating tree.”
There were several seconds of total silence, and then Sloane said, “A what?”
“I guess it was a people-eating tree. I don’t think it had a gender preference,” Max corrected himself. “Sorry.”
“That’s not…” Sloane started, then chose to abandon that line of discussion and pick it up later. During the daytime, preferably.
Max turned his head to look at her, presumably waiting for the rest of the sentence, but instead a pained, pre-recorded groaning sound emanated from the air-conditioning. They both looked at that instead, and Sloane half wanted to start laughing and never stop, and half wanted to chuck the thing off the balcony.
Instead of either of those options, she said, “Can I come sleep in your room and deal with this in the morning?”
Max suddenly looked more awake. “Of course,” he said. “Or, if you want, we can switch.”
Sloane stood, looking over at Max. He was still kneeling in front of the suspicious AC unit, wearing nothing but boxers, and Sloane couldn’t remember why they hadn’t shared a room in the first place. Clearly having her own room hadn’t worked out all that well.
“Not really,” she said, shrugging. “Unless you’d rather switch.”
“I can’t sleep in here,” he said, seriously. “The air conditioner’s haunted. I do have to record it, though.”
