Page 15 of Room Serviced
Sloane shook her head. “I mean, I’m not a linguist. There are plenty of languages I wouldn’t?—”
From somewhere outside the room came the forceful, muffled whump of a door closing, hard enough to make the attic floor shiver.
Chapter Four
For the next few seconds, it was dead fucking quiet. Sloane and Max both stood perfectly still, the attic floor not even creaking. No sounds came from below. There was nothing, not even screaming seagulls, coming from the roof above.
“That was the ladder door,” Sloane said, and broke into a full-body shiver.
“It might have just been a door down?—”
“No. It was right there,” she went on, pointing at a wall. “The trapdoor with the—with the fucking ladder-stairs thing is right on the other side of that, and it just closed. Fuck.”
Max still had the camera in one hand and was pulling out his iPad with the other. “Is it?” he asked. “I think we came from?—”
“Yes,” Sloane snapped. She was covered in goose bumps and suddenly shivering so hard it made her skin hurt. Maybe ghosts were real and she was standing in a cold spot because some long-dead person had just walked through her, or whatever the fuck it was ghosts were supposed to do.
It wasn’t until Max looked at her, brows furrowed in concern, that she realized she’d made a weird, honking ha! sound.
“Sorry,” she said, and shook her head, then pushed a hand through her hair only to realize her scalp was sweating. Freezing and sweating. There was no way that was good.
“I need to go,” she said, with perfect, placid, total calm, and walked for the doorway.
“Hang on, like, two seconds,” Max said, holding up another camera and taking a photo of the wall. “I need to just…”
Sloane didn’t hear what he said, because she was in the narrow hall outside, flashlight pointed at the floor, everything else pitch black. Dimly, she knew that the ceiling was somewhere about a foot above her head and the walls were maybe six inches from her shoulders, but she didn’t fucking think about it. She did not fucking think about it, because she hadn’t thought about it while coming in and it had been completely fine if maybe not her number one favorite experience.
Back through the weird, small door. That wood is pressure treated, she noted dimly, somewhere in the part of her mind that was still working normally. Around a corner to the left, to the T-intersection, left again to find a pitch-black hallway. Without even a dim square of light marking the outline of a trapdoor.
Slowly, without moving her feet, Sloane ran the flashlight beam along the wooden floor until she saw it: the wooden ladder, neatly folded into three sections, atop a rectangle cut into the floorboards.
“Okay,” she said to herself. Sweat dripped down the back of her neck, cold and itchy. She took a deep breath. “Okay.”
The floor barely creaked when she walked over, knelt next to the ladder, and pushed. Nothing happened. Sloane put the flashlight down with the beam pointing at the wall, made sure she was kneeling with her knees on the solid floor, and pushed with both hands.
The trapdoor didn’t budge. It didn’t even think about budging. But it would budge, it had to budge—they’d come in this way not twenty minutes ago, and for fucking fuck’s sake it was a door. It opened. It had to open. They couldn’t just be stuck in this fucking attic with narrow halls and low ceilings. Why the fuck did an attic even have ceilings?—
“Sloane!”
She turned, and a flashlight beam hit her in the face.
“Sorry,” Max said, and then she could see him, messenger bag still strapped over his chest, a swipe of chalk down one side of his face, eyes wild. “I don’t think you should do that.”
Sloane looked down. She was standing now, with one arm braced on the wall in front of her, one foot on the solid floor, and the other foot on the trapdoor, mid-stomp.
“Then come fucking help me,” she snapped. “It’s stuck or something. I can’t get it back down.”
She stomped again, throwing most of her weight on the trapdoor. Max rushed forward. “Don’t—hey,” he said, jamming his flashlight into his back pocket. “Jesus, wiggle it or something first?—”
“Do you really think”—stomp—“I didn’t try that!?” Sloane was pretty sure she had, but it clearly hadn’t fucking worked.
“Hey,” he said again, apparently the only word he knew. “Hey, listen, if it opens now, you’re gonna fall and break your leg.” She stomped again, and this time she could have sworn something creaked and gave, maybe, a little. “Stop!”
“Max,” Sloane said as patiently as she could, even though she was sweating hard and panting for breath. “We are trapped inside a spooky attic above the part of the hotel where no one ever goes and no one can hear us. There’s probably not much oxygen left, we’re huffing asbestos right now?—”
“There’s another exit.” He held out a hand, like Sloane couldn’t walk two feet by herself.
“I’ve almost got this one,” she said. “I felt it start to give just now.”
