Page 36 of Room Serviced
“The fuck?”
“An interdimensional swimming hole,” she went on. “A tree that has its roots and leaves in another reality. A secret passageway to the land of the Fae. You didn’t eat anything, did you?”
“Are you serious?”
“No,” she said. “But you know you can’t do that, right? Eat anything that?—”
“Of course I know that!” Max said, mildly insulted. “Everyone knows that! No, I found a secret compartment off one of the passageways.”
“Do you want me to guess what was in that, or are you gonna tell me? Poison. Lots of poisons, from the garden.”
“White sidewalk chalk and black-light paint markers.”
Sloane rolled back onto her stomach, which sadly hid her nipples but gave Max a nice view of her ass, which he appreciated. “Wow,” she said, rubbing her face with both hands. “How often does this happen?”
“What, ghosts hiding their materials in secret compartments?” Max asked casually.
Sloane took her hands off her face and gave him a look that was half taken aback, half amazed, and Max started laughing.
“It’s not uncommon,” he said, shrugging. He was still scrubbing through a couple hours of night-vision footage, all of it plants moving in the breeze. “It’s not usually this intense, though. Usually it’s doctored footage of some shapes or clumps of fake fur glued to a tree, stuff like that. A whole pentagram is pretty unusual. Mostly it’s people who really, really want to interpret something strange in a particular way.”
“People like you.”
Max grabbed the water bottle on the nightstand next to him and flipped the top open. “Pretty much, yeah,” he said, and took a long drink.
“But the only things you’ve ever proven are fakes and charlatanry.”
“You like that word a lot, huh.”
“It’s a good word! You should try it.”
Something popped up on the video, so Max stopped scrubbing for a moment and leaned toward the screen. Sloane pushed herself up and crawled over to look.
On the screen, a cat sauntered past the camera, sniffed some of the plants, and then walked into the poison garden.
“Ghost cat?” Sloane asked, grinning, and Max flipped her off.
“Fake stuff is still interesting,” he said, and waved a hand vaguely at the ceiling above them, meaning Take the pentagram upstairs, for instance. “People fake things for a reason, you know? Sometimes it’s because they want cheap advertising for their hotel around Halloween”—Sloane snorted—“and sometimes it’s people who want tourist money. But mostly it’s people who truly believe and want other people to believe, too. As far as I can tell, they mostly think they’re…helping other people along.”
“People believe they’ve had real ghost encounters and then make fake ghosts so that other people think they’ve had real ghost encounters,” Sloane said, like she was trying to wrap her brain around it.
“I didn’t say it made sense. I said it happened,” Max said. “And, you know, people want this stuff to be real. They want crazy animals to exist and for aliens to be out there and for dead people to not really be gone, so they go for it. Charlatanry aside, I get it. I can’t blame them.”
“I can blame charlatans,” Sloane said.
“They’re mostly not, though.”
She sighed and shifted until she was sitting up, facing him but looking at the balcony. They’d opened the curtains and the door again, so they could see the green courtyard below and the occasional person walking across.
“I don’t blame people for wanting to believe in this stuff,” she finally said. “It would be cool as hell if you found Bigfoot or if I talked to my grandma again. I just…don’t think either of those things will actually happen.”
“That’s why I got you to come,” Max pointed out. “It’s more fun if you can argue about it.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“Oh, not at all,” he said, and grinned over at her. “I was definitely hoping we’d fuck. But for the record, I’d have had a great time either way.”
“Wow,” Sloane said, and Max would’ve sworn she was smirking as she pulled her laptop back into her lap. “I can’t believe you had ulterior motives when you invited me to the sex hotel full of horny ghosts.”
