Page 38 of Room Serviced
Sloane had a lot more questions regarding the physical nature of ghosts—What were they made of? Did they have mass? If they didn’t have bodies, what produced the sounds of speech?—but knew that none of them were going to get answered, because none of it was real.
“Not that you’d need a physical body to have sex,” was what she finally went with, because this she was pretty sure about. “Maybe Belle was getting herself off while her ghost-husband watched. And I’m sure ghosts have some tricks up their sleeves we can’t even imagine.”
They walked a bit farther, then started heading inland, back toward the resort.
“Okay. I know my answer, but I have to ask: If you met a really hot ghost?—”
“Yes. Definitely. You?”
“Oh, for sure,” Max said, and Sloane wobbled a little in the sand and finally took his arm.
Sloane had always been a fairly light sleeper, so it wasn’t unusual for her to wake up, startled, without knowing why. Half the time, whatever it was had already stopped—her roommate accidentally dropping something at three in the morning, one of the stray cats outside yowling at the moon, a helicopter flying by overhead.
So it wasn’t weird that she woke up in the middle of the night, tense and alert, her heart pounding, and didn’t quite know why. The wake-up ripped her out of a dream she’d been having about work—checking growth in lab specimens, but every time she looked through the microscope, the slides turned into old episodes of Scrubs. She didn’t even like Scrubs all that much.
It was so sudden that she didn’t know where she was at first—weird wall, weird light coming from somewhere—but it didn’t last long.
Right, she told herself, checking the time—2:38 a.m., weird hotel noises. She rolled over to go back to sleep.
It had been a noise from the corner of the room. A distorted, quiet moan interrupted by a bump and then scratching. Then the scratching stopped and the moan was still moaning. It hadn’t even been interrupted. Sloane didn’t believe in ghosts, but she sure as fuck believed in raccoons, burglars, and bored teenagers playing stupid pranks.
“What the fuck,” she said aloud, hoping that that would at least scare off a raccoon or burglar.
Instead, the corner of the room emitted a long creaking sound, followed immediately by a howl, both at the same quiet, steady volume. There was more scratching, and her eyes had adjusted enough to realize that it was coming from the air-conditioning unit in the wall next to the sliding-glass door.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she said, and pulled the blankets off.
Something banged against the glass door, big and vague and shadowy behind the curtains. Sloane screamed, and there was another thump against the wall behind her headboard.
It wasn’t a heroine-in-a-slasher-movie scream, but it was loud enough and long enough for Sloane to feel like an idiot, especially once the shadow behind the curtains disappeared. Whatever it wasn’t obviously hadn’t gotten through, and the door was locked—she’d double-checked. Still, her heart was hammering as she looked around for a weapon, just in case, because she wasn’t going to sit here in nothing but an old T-shirt and her underwear and get murdered without a fight.
The lamp was bolted to the side table. Pillows were useless. The remote? Fuck. There was a free ballpoint pen. Maybe she could stab a murderer?—
She almost screamed again when there was a knock on the door. Then she remembered that she’d made a ruckus at three in the morning, forced herself to take a deep breath, and got out of the bed on the side opposite the sliding glass door. If she grabbed the ballpoint pen on the way and looked over her shoulder, eyes on the curtains the whole way to the door, well, better safe than sorry.
When she looked through the peephole, there was Max, wearing boxers and a very concerned look, his hair flat on one side and fluffy on the other, down around his shoulders. Of course.
“I’m fine,” she said when she opened the door.
“That wasn’t you?”
“No, yeah,” she said, blinking against the light in the hallway. “Sorry—I didn’t mean to…do that. I’m fine.”
“Can I please come in?” he asked, voice still rough from sleep. He already had one hand on the door and was glancing at the room behind her. Sloane was pretty sure the request was a technicality, so she opened it and stepped back, adrenaline still buzzing through her veins.
“Why’d you scream?” he asked once the door closed. Sloane was standing with her back to the closet, and Max cupped a hand over one shoulder, then flipped the lights on and looked over at the hotel room. “You’re okay?”
The room looked like it had when she’d gone to bed: her stuff on one bed, the other rumpled, one pillow on the floor. Zero furious shadow monsters.
“Something outside hit the balcony door,” Sloane said. “It was probably a bird or something or…someone threw, like, a soccer ball—I don’t know. I didn’t see what it was but it’s probably gone now.”
“But you’re not hurt.”
“I’m fine,” she said, and he squeezed her shoulder, hand warm through the worn fabric of her T-shirt.
“Mind if I check it out?” he asked, and he had that same not really asking permission tone as before. He was already opening the closet door. Sloane tried not to feel relieved.
“I don’t think it’s in there,” she said. “If it’s anything at all.”
