Chapter 4
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.”
“If you fall through the ceiling and break your leg and your skull and god knows what else, you’ll never prove me wrong about the ghosts.”
Sloane looked at him for a long moment. She could feel sweat sliding down her spine and between her boobs to soak into her bra, which was one of her least favorite sensations.
“You can’t prove a negative,” she pointed out.
“You can’t prove anything if you die falling out of an attic,” he said. “Come on. We’ll be out in two minutes.”
Sloane wanted to snarl. She wanted to shout that he was dumb, and his hand was stupid, and he looked like an idiot right now, and he was a moron for believing in ghosts even a little bit, and that he should go back into the room and lock himself in and lie there on the floor until a demon finally came and ate him, but she didn’t.
Instead, she made herself step off the trapdoor, take his hand, and grab her own flashlight off the floor.
“If you’re wrong or if this takes more than five minutes, I’m smashing through the hotel ceiling.”
“Oh, I know.” Max’s hand was firm around hers as he pulled out the iPad.
“So not only did they wind up swapping husbands, Caroline sold the sculpture through some kind of art dealer, and guess who bought it,” Max was saying.
“Um,” Sloane answered. She was walking carefully, flashlight beam on the floor directly in front of her, trying not to think about how long they’d been walking. It had probably been two minutes, and she knew that. But it didn’t feel like two minutes.
“Shirley and Harold,” Max said, like Sloane was making conversation and not occasionally grunting at him. “Who put this big, ugly bronze thing that kinda looks like a vagina up in their front yard, where Shirley knows Caroline will have to see it all the time.”
Sloane came to a T-intersection and stopped, shining her flashlight a little way along the hallway to their left.
“Keep going straight,” Max said. “Should be about twenty more feet.”
“Shirley slept with Harold and bought an ugly sculpture just to get back at Caroline for letting her dog dig up her rose bushes?” Sloane finally asked. She felt like her brain was responding to Max’s Last Chance gossip on a three-second delay.
“In fairness, they both slept with each other’s husbands,” Max said. “I mean, that part worked out for everyone, sounds like. Except maybe their adult kids. But only one of them lives in town anymore.”
As soon as Sloane had agreed to not stomp her way through the ceiling, Max had led her off and started the epic tale of Caroline, Shirley, Harold, and the sculpture. It had been…soothing, actually.
“Next time you visit your parents, I’ll take you to go see it,” he said. “Okay, I think we’re just about there.”
They weren’t. They were at another blank wall because Max didn’t know what he was doing, couldn’t read a map, was going to—
She took another step and realized there was a doorway on the right, with stairs leading down. They were narrow and dark and dusty, but when Max shone his light down them, the wall at the bottom had a handle and a lock. Sloane felt lightheaded with relief as they descended the stairs.
“Can you put your light on this?” Max asked when they’d reached the bottom.
The space behind the door was shallow, only a few feet deep, and she was standing a few steps up.
This staircase was even narrower than the halls had been, cobwebs and dead bugs and god knew what else collected in the corners of the steps—
“Fuck,” Max muttered.
Sloane closed her eyes. “What happened?”
“Nothing, nothing,” he said, and she could hear that he was using that voice again. That voice was probably supposed to be soothing and nice and make people trust him when he said that monsters were real and the exit was this way.
“You need help?” she asked, totally calm, keeping her eyes closed.
“I don’t think this is a two-person—” There was a metallic clunk and Max swore under this breath. “Shit. Okay. The map says this lets us out into…” The door rattled as he pulled on the handle. Max swore some more.
“Let me know if there’s anything,” Sloane said, her eyes still closed, still standing a few steps up, still not touching either wall.
“Can you shine that around and see if there’s anything else on the door?” Max asked, tugging again. “Maybe I missed a latch or—”
The door opened inward with a shudder and a creak straight out of a horror movie, and it knocked Max onto his ass on the step below Sloan.
But none of that mattered because it opened, and so did her eyes, and she could see a floor and a railing and walls that were at least ten feet away, and suddenly tears were pricking at her eyeballs.
“Okay, so this is the library,” Max said, standing up and opening the door as wide as it would go before walking through it.
Sloane was through the opening so fast she nearly knocked him over by running into his back when he stopped five feet outside the door to look around.
“Sorry,” she said. Fuck, she was trying not to cry? And her skin felt weird? At least it was dark in the library. All the lights were off, no one around except books and desks and the glow of the exit signs at either end of the two-story room. “Sorry, sorry.”