Page 39 of The Monster of Hotel No. 7
My throat grows tight but I don’t blink. “Have you?” I ask quietly, knowing the answer.Tell me your horrors. Let me ease them for you. We don’t have much time here.
His eyes seem to darken. “Tell me what you were going to say. What am I?”
“Handsome,” I blurt out, feeling my cheeks heat in the cold of this strange room. “You’re…gorgeous.” I inhale the scent of mildew down here but alsohim,dark roses, and earth, dangerous and strangely seductive. “That’s what I was going to say,” I mumble when his expression doesn’t change at all.
He says nothing. Does nothing.
I want to scream and force words from his pouty mouth.
He justlooksat me, as if he loathes me for the compliment. Or maybe… as if he’s never heard one before.
Seconds pass. Minutes. My face is hot in the cold room, and I can’t look at him any longer when he’s staring at me this way.
I take another step back, sweeping my gaze over the cement floor, littered with dirt or plaster from the half-finished ceiling. I turn for one single second to look over my shoulder at the nightlight beside the black box. It isn’t macabre at all, I see now, it is only out of place, but boring and plain, emitting a pale-yellow glow, and I have no idea why it’s in here. It doesn’t seem like something he would’ve decorated with. It’s covered in dust while the box seems spotless. Did he bring that here, before? What’s inside?
“What is this place?” I ask when he continues to stand there in silence, and I face him once more. The room is rather small, and while there’s an entryway behind me like there’s a door beyond him, I am not interested right now in creeping further through this underground horror show.
As long as he doesn’t try to force me into that chair, I tell myself I won’t run again.
“Why is the nightlight here?” I press, crossing my arms over my body so they cover a little of my waist. I think of the bruise from the needle and can’t shut up. “What’s in the box? What did you inject me with?”
His expression shifts, lines around his eyes relaxed slightly, as if the thought of drugging me calms him. Instead of loathing, he looks at me like I am the most interesting person on the planet and yet he’d still like to throttle me. Or put me to sleep before he pokes at me.
I’m about to keep going, ask question after question until he chooses one to reply to, but he parts his lips and I stop, waiting.
“Stein was away,” he says haltingly. “That’s why I came back. He took his worst guards and left for the first time in… a long time.”
I want to clap for getting some kind of answer. But I’m only more confused. “Stein has been with you? Since when? He only stepped down in April. Where were you before that?”
“Not far,” he answers the last question slowly, and I take it as a win that he's responding at all.
“Does Stein live with you? Why did you leave in the first place—”
“Sit in the chair.”
I grit my teeth and glance at it, the lower part angled down, the wide arms with beige straps dangling from them, metal buckles. There are more straps at the waist, over the chest, along the legs. This isn’t a standard-issue chair. No dentist would get away with some shit like this.
The only plus is there’s not a light above it, and no instruments of torture that I see in this nearly empty room. They could be inside that box, though.
“What will you do to me?” I ask quietly, dragging my gaze back to his.
“I have to go back tomorrow.”
My heart sinks and I open my mouth to tell him that’s not going to happen, but he keeps talking.
“I want to touch you. I want to let you talk to me. But I can’t answer any of your questions if we’re just like this.”
“Why not? This is how normal people—”
“Stop using that word with me.”
“So you strap me down and poke and prod at me and I get to ask you questions?”
He nods once. “Yes.”
It’s so simple, inside his head. And I know he is twenty-three, like me, but it’s as if he’s younger, in some ways. Like despite his horrors, he was sheltered, locked away as he was.
I think of his hands around the guard’s throat. The way he twisted the man’s wrist.
