Beside him, sharp and sad: Yes.
She was very close, and so he could see her a little, mostly in shades of gray and white, the contrast muddled in the dark, and in her death. Her eyes were empty and black, and her neck was crooked—her head held off to the right, and the sight of her was all the more jarring because of the angle.
He couldn’t meet her gaze, not really. Not like that.
He wanted to jump back away from her, but he planted his feet on the rug and tried to steady his breathing, to keep the fear tamped down. But if he’d ever been tempted to run screaming away in fright, surely this was the time—when the yellow-haired dead thing in a night dress lolled its head to one side, and then the other, loose as a wheel on a broken axle.
He swallowed hard, forcing himself to hold his ground. “Sarah, you stayed.”
I should have left, because I could have left. But I was so afraid, Father. And when I did this, she gestured toward her neck with one long, white hand. I broke the only vow I’d ever made. The only one that meant anything.
“But…between us, the sister and I…we thought the hotel had killed you—like it killed Constance Fields, and the people before her.”
She shook her head sadly, or she tried. It swayed back and forth, her neck rolling around her shoulder and back again.
Until I took my own life, the hotel had nothing to keep me with. Now it makes me stay. Now it has that power. Look at me. Look at my choices, and look at what I’ve done. Look at what I’ve undone.
“You left Tim…” he said thoughtfully. And then, with a sudden shock of absolute panic. “Oh God, where is Tim? Is he dead too? I haven’t seen him since he gave you the doll!”
Nor have I, she said, sounding as sad and confused as when she was alive. But he is not dead, or else, I think…I think I would know. I think he’d come to me. The hotel doesn’t need for us to be alone, it just needs for us to serve.
At the back of the hall, toward the rear exit all barricaded shut, he heard something click, shift, and pop.
“What was that?”
We can only serve.
“We?”
Emily is here too. She never left—I don’t know how, or why.
“Miss Nowell is dead, too?”
She also serves, yes.
“You keep saying that—but what do you mean? What does the hotel want from you? Why does it collect you here, and keep you here even after death?”
She sighed, long and low and slow. It was almost the sound of air leaving a corpse, a last breath drawn out for posterity. Behind her, another series of noises, in another room down the hall.
We have to open it up. That’s what it wants—it wants to let the storm inside. The hotel and the storm…they’re working together. Two sides of the same penny, you understand? As above, so below. Isn’t that how they put it?
“That is how the devil put it.” His voice was dry, and his ears still picked up the commotion, room by room. Outside, the wind was rising, and the rain was coming again—in fits and starts, but it’d be worse by a thousand-fold soon enough.
I’m sorry, she said. Her broken, lopsided form retreated…skating slowly away, and growing fainter by the foot. You tried to help, and you couldn’t.
“That’s not true,” he insisted. “I can still help—I can still stop this!”
I’m sorry. But it’s coming around again.
She was gone, vanished as if she’d never been there in the first place.
“Wait, no!”
The hotel replied with a shocking explosion—as every door on the floor flew open at once, smashing against the walls and letting in a dozen gusts of ocean-smelling air. The doors banged and flapped, and he knew without looking that likewise every window was open in every room. A sickening, rising pitch to the wind announced that his time was nearly up, as surely as the first-floor hallway was compromised…
…and the floor above it, he was sure.
Upstairs more doors yawned and smacked in the gusty hallway over his head, and he could only pray that the other fire doors had not been touched.