Chapter 11
DAMIEN
The pile of sweets soon filled the bottom of the elevator. Damien yelped as a lollipop half out of its wrapper stuck to his trouser leg. It looked too filthy to eat. He picked it off with the stick held delicately between two fingers.
More sweets pattered down, hitting the floor with a rattling like skeletons dancing on a tin roof. They must be coming down from Floor Gluttony. The sweets, by this point, had reached Damien’s knees.
‘Am I going to die like this? Buried alive by sweets?’ Damien asked the universe. ‘It’s not fair. That would be even stupider than my first death! And that’s saying something!’
A gumball bounced off his head. It couldn’t hurt him, being too small, but ten more small sweets later, he felt annoyed, with something gooey stuck to his hair.
Poking her head through the hatch, Nefertiti meowed.
He would swear her eyes held a glimmer of impatience.
She had a good point. If he didn’t want to be crushed by a flood of sweets, then he needed to get out of the rapidly filling lift.
As long as he didn’t leave the shaft, he should still be keeping his promise to remain on duty at all hours.
In fact, he had a duty to find help and get the lift repaired.
Damien wet his lips. A wrapped sugar biscuit bounced off his nose. He gazed up at the small hole in the ceiling and the impenetrable darkness outside. If only Delilah’s wish to share a little of her luck with him could turn out to be real.
What would Delilah do? She’d fight her way back to maintenance and beat Godfrey over the head with a lollipop until he repaired the lift.
That thought brought a smile to Damien’s lips and gave him courage.
Just this once, he wanted to be brave like Delilah.
He wanted to make a decision and stick with it.
He’d promised her that he would repair the lift and take her up to Heaven.
He didn’t want to let her down. He’d spent his whole life letting himself down, but somehow it would be even worse to do it to someone else.
Damien started shoving the sweets into a pile in the middle of the lift. As more fell, the pile grew higher. He climbed up towards the ceiling.
It felt like clambering through a heap of leaves. His feet sank into the pile whenever he rested his weight down. The tower of sweets kept collapsing.
With a curse, he fell to the hard floor on his knees.
He would have usually given up by now. But he had someone else counting on him. And he had Nefertiti with him.
Damien piled the heaviest hard sweets in the middle.
As more kept falling in, they filled the bottom, packed tightly enough to prevent the pile from completely collapsing.
On wobbly legs, Damien stood on top of the sweets.
A crackling sound came from under his feet.
Before he could fall down again, he bent his knees, then leapt up.
His fingers barely fastened round the edges of the hatch, but, grunting, he pulled himself up on to the roof.
The lift shaft was as dark as the inside of a wolf’s throat.
The tiny bit of light coming from the hole below barely illuminated the dirty metal walls.
Where the light stopped, nothing except darkness spread up ahead of him.
At least the flow of sweets had slowed down.
Another lollipop bounced off his back. He took a moment to run his fingers through his hair, shaking off any sweets stuck there.
Nefertiti’s gooseberry-green eyes glowed like twin lanterns in the darkness. She walked over to the wall and gestured with her paw.
Damien trusted her and followed. Tentatively, he felt along the wall. His fingers found the round rungs of a ladder.
In three decades of working in this hotel, Damien had never realised the shaft had a ladder. There had never been an obvious service door. His pulse quickened. This could be his way out. ‘Thank you, Your Majesty. You truly came to your loyal subject’s rescue.’
She inclined her head, then ate a sugar biscuit that had fallen on the lift roof.
Endless blackness stretched above him. He gulped. His palms moistened. What would it feel like if he fell from such a great height? Did his new courage extend this far?
On the other hand, the lift kept steadily filling up with sweets. There was no room to go back. He did not know if it was fear or courage that made up his mind. He grabbed the rung and climbed.
Damien’s body didn’t get tired any more.
No matter how many times he lifted up his weight, his arms and legs remained steady.
The same could not be said about his nerves.
The darkness pressed around him like a living creature.
The sound of his own breathing startled him.
He kept climbing at a slow and steady pace.
To minimise his risk of falling, each time he locked his elbow around the nearest rung before he reached for the one above.
Strange sounds came from the various floors: chewing, screaming, an odd squelching. He clenched his teeth and blocked it all out. A point of light burned above. Damien fastened on to that as his goal and kept climbing.
A voice drifted from above. ‘Hello? Is anyone here? Can maintenance hear me? Godfrey, you usually wouldn’t stop talking even if God Himself showed up to tell you to shut up.
Where are you? I feel like a fool. Of course Godfrey can’t hear me .
. . Should I pray? Would that help?’ The voice trailed off to a mutter.
‘Heather?’ Damien called. His voice echoed oddly up the shaft.
She gasped. ‘Damien? Is the lift moving up again?’
‘I’m afraid not. There’s a ladder on the wall. I’m climbing up. The lift has been buried in sweets.’
‘What a strange afterlife I live, for that sentence to make sense to me. I’ve heard the noise coming from Floor Gluttony. Something seems strange with all of the floors. I’m worried about any guests trapped there.’ Heather sighed. ‘I fear it might indicate something deeper is wrong with the hotel.’
Damien’s hands, groping around, found an alcove.
Interesting. All lifts had a space between the shaft walls and the lift itself, but he’d never before realised his hotel had a big enough gap to allow a person to squeeze through.
It must have been designed deliberately as a secret passageway.
He nudged his feet outward, finding a solid beam, and stepped on to it.
Slowly and carefully, he explored. This narrow walkway seemed to be connected to the ledge where the lift would have opened on one of the floors.
A faint light drifted from under the doors.
It wasn’t such a bad place to take a break.
Not that he had any other places available.
‘I’ve found something,’ Damien called to Heather.
‘There’s a small walkway from this floor to the emergency ladder.
It must have been put in place so the maintenance staff could reach the ladder in the event of a problem.
In a normal hotel, we’d probably have a service door, but this place seems to have been designed to make you walk a tightrope around the edges of the shaft that falls all the way down to Hell. How very Purgatory.’
‘Finally, some good news,’ she cried. ‘There must be a similar walkway on my floor. I can use the ladder to climb to maintenance. Then Godfrey’s staff can use it to climb down to the lift or up to the broken cables. They’ll be able to complete repairs.’
Whether they would be willing to complete repairs was another matter. Damien had been a pessimist all his life. He decided not to say anything except: ‘That’s great.’
‘You’ve been a huge help, thank you,’ Heather said. ‘As acting hotel manager, I’ll find Godfrey and order him into action.’
‘Congratulations on the promotion,’ Damien called.
‘I’ll rest here a bit.’ He believed in her far more than himself.
She’d always been good at facing down difficult guests.
She would be the best person to negotiate with Godfrey.
Now that she had taken over the job of contacting maintenance, what should he do?
Perhaps Damien should find Delilah. He had a strong suspicion that, given she’d been out of his sight for five minutes, she’d got into trouble.