Page 32 of The Monster of Hotel No. 7
Finally, after he unlocks and I push closed three more doors, we step into a space filled with glowing lime verdant.
I recognize it immediately.
My eyes latch onto the rabbit in formaldehyde with the pink eyes, back lit green from a strip of lights around all of the shelves lining the room. It’s surprisingly large for being this far beneath the hotel, square, with a sterile table and a patient bed adjacent it. The very one I was on, I’m surprised to see that although the sanitary paper is white, the bed itself is black and it looks to be made of plush leather.
But there istheneedle, on the steel table, empty, the plunger pushed into the barrel, the metallic tip glinting in green.
The lack of liquid inside doesn’t make me feel better. There are metal drawers attached to the table, and I can only imagine what lies within them.
The hum I heard before buzzes in the space, and it must be some sort of extra cooling system because I am shivering as I stand inside the last door, closed all on its own at my back.
I lift my gaze to the other shelves surrounding me. There are so many jars, some smaller like Mason jars and others so much larger with wide necks, but all are sealed with varying lids; some wooden and others much more permanent. Wet specimens, all of them, frogs and an octopus and a lizard and what looks like a fetal mouse. Formaldehyde or maybe ethanol cushions their bodies and…
I twist around suddenly, realizing there are more behind me, the shelves all in black and rising from the floor to the high ceiling above us, no lights on overhead. The sole illumination is from the green rows on each shelf. There is a bat behind me, crabs of all kinds, something that looks like pale white shrimp, and there is only a gap for the black, skinny door we entered.
My breath is coming sharply, the scent of something bitter in the air, tamped down by the cold. I swear I see little clouds as I exhale, my hands clenched into fists. When I spin again, Sullen is standing by the steel table, hands in his pockets, hood over his hair, eyes fixed on me. His posture is strange, chin jutted forward, neck slightly bent, and I don’t know if he’s angled this way to reach for me if I decide to bolt or if he is only watching me in fascination.
I see a cased opening behind him, leading into only darkness, another gap in all of the dead animals floating around us. I wonder what’s through that entranceway. I wonder if I want to know.
If I’ve already made a terrible choice willingly coming down here.
I think of the potentially dead guard. Cosmo on the floor. What he said, about all the things Sullen could have done to me.
But I also remember Shella Croft letting me go, even though Iknowshe knew Sullen was there. What does she understand of him? Perhaps she doesn’t agree with the many shadowy corners of Writhe, or simply just of Stein Rule.
Thinking ofhim,my limbs feel shaky, and I wish I was wearing somethingmore.What will he do, if he catches us? Now I’m an accomplice. Now one of Writhe’s men is injured, at best. I will share that punishment.
I flick my gaze back to Sullen, who still watches me in silence.
I remember what Mom said, about the date of his disappearance. Two years. I knew it was in October, but I spent so long after he went missing tossing and turning in my bed at night thinking certainly he would come back, show up, maybe even creep into my house and find me in my sleep, that the days blended and melded together and I hadn’t quite realized it was exactly the anniversary today—or yesterday, as it were. There was something else, too, some memory of eyes I don’t want to face, the day before he vanished.
“Why did you come?” I ask quietly, clouds of cold only semi-transparent as they leave my lips. It’s like being inside of a walk-in freezer, this room. I wonder if whatever he spiked my drink with made me warm, because I don’t remember freezing quite so much before, lying on that table as if I were his patient.
“Why did you write me?” he counters.
It’s as if now that the chaos of the others has fallen away—and he must have known that’s what we would need when he returned me to the bathroom no doubt after he somehow realized everyone would be looking for him—we can confront one another without distraction.
And I am no longer sedated on a gurney.
It should make me feel stronger but somehow, I am more nervous than before.
“Why not?” I give his question one of my own. “Did you…read them all?” He mentioned I sent them, called them pathetic, but maybe he grew bored with them.I can only hope.My neck flushes hot as I imagine every childish, desperate word I penned, trying to reach out for someone who never seemed as if they wanted to reach for me.
He lifts his chin and I note the high collar of his shirt, black around his throat, but there is the lump there underneath, hiding his disfigured skin.What happened to you? Why do you blame me?
“Yes,” he answers me, and I don’t see shame in his expression. But he gives nothing away as he watches me.
“Did you ever…think of me?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you write back?”
“I… tried. But I never finished.”
I let that and his missing words go. “Where were you, before tonight?”
“Away.”
