He muted the television. The shower murmured from behind the bathroom door, but aside from its constant hiss there was nothing much to be heard. The detective cast a narrow gaze through the window, combing the grounds below for something to pin this new discomfort on but coming up empty-handed. It was simply that something had come into the air—something aside from the faint scent of complimentary hotel soap—and try as he might, Ulrich couldn't keep its disruptive influence from whittling at his nerves.
He dared not breathe a word of this feeling to his client, lest he incite another hysterical episode, but he sat up and trained his eye on the hefty door of the room, wondering if, perhaps, the psychical stimulus he was reacting to originated on its other side.
On their way up, he'd heard precious little from the other rooms along the stretch. The seventh floor of the hotel was only sparsely occupied, he wagered. Just then, the stirrings of some nearby tenant would have proven a comfort to him; absent such commonplace noises he couldn't help but fixate on the quiet and ascribe something of the uncanny to it.
Hands behind his back, Ulrich began traipsing across the room. He strolled past the bed, eyed the thermostat for a beat, and then proceeded toward the door. The dense thing offered no peephole—a serious design flaw, to be sure. Hearing alone could account for any presence in the hall, and with his prickly ears he lingered there awhile, waiting. Finally, hearing nothing, he sighed and returned to his window-side post.
It's paranoia, that's all it is, he thought to himself with a frown. Paling around with this high-strung character is putting you on edge. He tugged at the collar of his shirt and availed himself of the thick window, raking the distance for signs of activity. The rightmost edge of the pane brought into view what looked like a hotel employee lingering outside their car, fussing over a cell phone. Across the way, one of the tall streetlamps blinked off and on, the bulb evidently in its death throes. He could make out a section of the field beyond the hotel, and saw in it tall grasses and puddles and all manner of unremarkable wild growths. See? he assured himself. It's nothing.
Yet all of his assurances could not account for the eeriness permeating this otherwise comfortable room. No reasonable inner-talk could deflect the chill from his spine or settle the writhing in his guts—and though he would have liked to pin this latter on his chili dog habit, the fact remained that his stomach had weathered far greater abuses without an ounce of this same discomfort.
No, something was wrong. Just beyond the feeble reach of his senses, something ominous was gathering. This stimulus did not appeal to sight or hearing, but to some deeper, more interior sense. Ulrich began nibbling on his thumbnail, gaze still riveted to the view outside. He expected to find some dark figure lumbering through the field at any moment—or else to glimpse some phantasm cavorting in the parking lot.
From inside the bathroom, Jonathan cut the tap and was heard to step out. Without the spray of the shower head echoing faintly from within, the quiet soared in influence and the detective's distress grew in tandem. Any moment, the fretful client was going to step out and start asking questions—start demanding things of him—and it was possible, too, that he'd pick up on this sour note in the air and react poorly. What could Ulrich hope to tell him?
Struggling to affect nonchalance, the detective crossed his legs and set his gaze on the television, watching the black and white film without bothering to turn the sound back on. Act natural. If you don't, the kid's going to freak out...
Moments later, Jonathan staggered out of the bathroom in a fresh set of clothes. He had a towel draped over his head and a cotton swab sticking out of one ear. “I will say,” he began, “you were right about a shower, Mr. Ulrich. It felt great.”
The detective grunted, pretending to focus on the screen.
Giving his head a thorough scrub with the towel, Jonathan took a seat on the edge of the bed and stretched out. “What're you watching?” he asked, turning to the TV. Then, at noticing the thing was muted, he arched a woodsy brow. “Why's the sound off?” One thing led to another in the young man's mind, and before Ulrich could proffer an excuse, he dove into a line of nervous questioning. “Did something happen while I was in there? Did you hear something?”
“No,” offered the detective, scooping up the remote and shutting off the unit.
“Oh...” Jonathan fidgeted a little, studying the carpet. “Well, what's the plan now, Mr. Ulrich? Are we just saying put here?”
The detective leaned back against the arm of the sofa and gave his lanky frame a stretch. The strange feeling in the air hadn't abated, though thankfully the young man appeared utterly oblivious to it. If Ulrich could just continue projecting calm, perhaps they'd get through the night without another meltdown. “I've been keeping an eye on things. There doesn't appear to be much movement down there.”
“Ah, that's good.” Jonathan peered toward the window longingly, as if itching to get up and look for himself, but stayed put.
“I was thinking about going for a walk—taking a more involved look at the grounds, yeah?” Ulrich stood up.
“Oh... y-you're going to... leave?”
“Just for a bit,” offered the detective, soothingly. “I want to ensure everything's on the level.”
“B-But what if—” the client began to stammer.
Ulrich threw up a hand to stifle him. “So, look, we're on the top floor now, yes? There's no way for your buddy Ansel to get up here without taking the stairs like the rest of us. He'd have to slip past hotel personnel, wait for an elevator, risk being caught on camera—and all of that seems like an awful lot of trouble for an obvious horror-show like him, so I wouldn't worry about it. One small point of concern is the door, however.” Ulrich walked over to it and ran a palm against the wood. “There's no peephole, which makes it hard to know who's standing on the other side.
“This is what I'm going to recommend. We're going to have a special knock, you and I. When you hear this special knock from outside the door, you'll know it's me and that it's safe to open up. It'll go like this.” The detective raised his fist to the door and delivered two firm knocks. He then paused before delivering another three in quick succession. “Knock-knock, pause, knock-knock-knock. Simple enough, yes?”
Jonathan appeared more than a little unsure, and spent close to a minute practicing the prescribed cadence on nearby surfaces. His pattering against the wall and nightstand approximated the special knock the detective had assigned after a few attempts, but this was too slight a protection for him. “If he gets all the way up here, I don't think a door will stop him!”
“Relax,” offered Ulrich—and with such an edge to his voice that relaxation was anything but feasible. “I won't be gone long. You hired me to protect you, remember? Don't you trust my instincts?”
Jonathan frowned, evidently rehearsing a gentle dismissal of these dubious “instincts” in his head.
Ulrich broke in before the client could utter a word. “Gimme fifteen minutes, OK? Fifteen minutes.”
Fiddling with his phone, the client set an alarm. “OK, but just fifteen minutes...”
You're really going to time me? thought Ulrich in disgust as he started for the door. I might have to take my time getting back up here, then—make him squirm for an extra thirty or forty seconds... He slipped through the door before Jonathan could stammer out another protest and shut it softly behind him.
The hall was quiet. The overhead lights had been dimmed after sunset for the comfort of lodgers, and no matter which way he looked he could find no evidence that anyone else was staying along the seventh-floor stretch. As he began a slow tour of the hall, he did discover a smattering of doors with DO NOT DISTURB placards dangling from their handles, but the utter stillness that seemed to take hold of the entire floor was so oppressive that he doubted even these rooms were occupied.
Thankful for the opportunity to stretch his legs and spend a bit of time away from his nagging client, Ulrich inspected the entire floor from end-to-end. He strode past the quiet elevators and peered into the vending room. Helping himself to a few nuggets of ice from the hotel machine—which tasted a far cry from the delectable ice at Peter Cat—he crunched and shuffled to the stairs, beginning a careful descent down the sparsely-lit stairwell.
With only the clopping of his shoes for a companion, the detective buried his hands in his pockets and fell deep into thought. He was being paid good money to keep an eye on Jonathan, but at that moment the job struck him not merely as banal, but foolish. The young man, obviously out of his mind, had hired Ulrich to take part in his delusion. Any other PI worth his salt would have rightly shooed him away. A job was a job, and Jonathan's money spent as well as anyone's, but Ulrich couldn't help feeling low for having signed on. The kinder thing to do would have been to send him away. Now you're going to play nanny to him all night, assuring him that the big, bad monster isn't going to gobble him up...
He arrived, rather unexpectedly, at the landing for the ground floor. Shoving his way through the door, he found himself once again near the elevator bank and lobby he'd earlier surveyed. It remained as un-busy as it had been during their arrival, if not somehow quieter. Even the middle-aged woman at the reception desk—the sole survivor of the red-shirted staff he'd seen on the way in—appeared utterly bored. Not noticing the wandering investigator, she slumped at her post, chin nestled in her palm and eyes tiredly scanning the pages of a magazine.
The hawker of newspapers and nicknacks had packed up by this late hour, and the bellhops were nowhere to be seen, leaving every quadrant of the ground floor meagerly lit and eerily unpeopled. The detective struck out for one of the side doors with a mind toward walking the perimeter of the building, and he slipped into the humid night unnoticed by any but the blinking dome cameras in the lobby ceiling.
At meeting the warm breeze, he longed immediately for the air conditioning and unfastened another button on his shirt. Perhaps when this little jaunt of his was through he'd avail himself of the shower in the hotel room and cool back down. He passed by the lit fountain, the water flowing through it reduced to a trickle, and eyed the row of cars parked alongside the building's nearest flank—likely those of night-shifters. Keeping to the sidewalk, he monitored the far edges of the property, seeking out signs of movement or anything that could be construed as threatening. Except for a lone rabbit dashing across the field in the distance and the cooing of some strange bird on a far-off bough, he met and heard no one.
As he went, Ulrich now and then peered up at the hotel, counting the windows and trying to figure out which room was 717. Recalling the view from their window, he hustled around one corner, then the next, striving to locate it. Finally arriving beside the courtyard he had partially glimpsed from up above, he planted himself on the edge of the sputtering fountain and gazed up toward the top floor. The curtains of every window in the stretch were shut, but he thought he sensed light issuing from one near the end. That was room 717, he felt sure. Well, thought Ulrich with a sigh, you've walked around the entire building and haven't seen another living soul. I guess there's no boogieman on the way after all...
Catching a glimpse of movement in the corner of his eye as he reclined against the warm stone of the fountain, Ulrich realized he'd spoken too soon. He pressed himself to the masonry and remained very still, allowing his eyes to swivel toward the empty field which sat beyond the fringe of the parking lot.
It was not, at that moment, as empty as he'd suspected.
From the polar opposite end of the field, which was cluttered with squat trees, there appeared the arresting shape of a lone walker, rendered in stark relief for moonlight. This was not so strange a thing—restless hotel employees probably went out for walks during their lunch breaks all the time—but for the curious, shambling gait of the figure that had only moments ago emerged from a veritable wilderness at property's end. This lonesome specimen had a sway about him—drunkenness?—which, coupled with his seemingly deliberate progress toward the building, could not but unsettle the detective. Careful not to betray his position, Ulrich turned and watched more closely, monitoring the figure's advance and attempting, however fruitlessly, to get a better look at him.
Though the detective could not make out the figure's attire with certitude, the drab, night-adjacent colors were anything but the red polos worn by the staff. This was a hotel guest, then, returning after a bender at a local bar—though what bar could possibly exist beyond that dense wall of trees was anyone's guess. Hugging the edge of the fountain, Ulrich leered as the shambling form crossed the field and started onto the sidewalk that would, in short order, lead to their meeting.
But the figure did not proceed all the way down the sidewalk. Still masked by shadow, Ulrich could not get a very clear look at him as he suddenly paused in front of the hotel, mere steps from where the detective himself had stopped to take a gander at the seventh floor. Stock still and silent, the figure loitered there a moment, his hidden gaze seeming to inch up and down the building's height. Then, with a furtive turn of the head as if to ensure no eyes were upon him, the figure scanned the field and parking lot.
That the midnight walker's gaze had grazed the very fountain Ulrich presently cowered behind was not in doubt. But if the figure had seen him, he made no indication that it was so and instead proceeded from the sidewalk, approaching the side of the building with a startling purposefulness.
What happened next, Ulrich could not have predicted in his wildest dreams—and at gaze of it, he felt himself go slack against the fountain.
Quite at odds with the established laws of gravity, the figure grew near the hotel's stone facade and proceeded to walk up it. Showing no signs of struggle as he stood perpendicular to the ground, the nighted figure began a slow upward stroll, the soles of his feet keeping to the side of the building as surely as they had only moments ago kept to the sidewalk. It was a singular illusion—it had to be—though as Ulrich watched the figure climb effortlessly toward the second story of the edifice, his already shaky faith in that hypothesis had begun to crumble.
The figure advanced silently—casually, even—up the side of the building.
And to the detective's incredulous eye, there seemed no mistake about where he was headed.
“Jonathan!” spat Ulrich, springing from his post at the fountain and breaking into a full-on sprint for the door. There was no time—the fiend would soon arrive outside the window of room 717 where the nervous client was stationed. And if the thing, whatever he was, could climb up the side of a building, then a mere window surely wouldn't keep him out.
The detective rushed into the hotel through the main doors, banging into a knot of baggage carts and sending them sprawling about the corner of the lobby. The sleepy woman at the desk jerked terribly for the sound, and when she spotted the racing detective she reached instinctively for the phone. He didn't spare her so much as a passing glance as he hooked around the corner and nearly collided with the elevator.
Ulrich was faced with a decision between the stairs and elevator—and finding the glowing indicator of the latter idling on some upper floor, felt the choice had been made for him. Launching himself into the stairwell, he grasped the rail as though it were a rope and pulled himself up three steps at a time, his aged knees buckling with every awkward gallop. Out of shape and hardly able to draw in enough breath to sustain such an exertion, the detective gasped and coughed his way up the first flight, then the second, banging his elbows on the walls as he sought to steady himself. By the time he neared the fifth floor, the sweat rolling into his eyes from his brow left them stinging.
The detective kicked open the door to the seventh floor, which crashed into the wall with a terrible bang. His furious ascent of the stairs robbed him of the ability to recover from such a feat, and losing his balance he fell face-first onto the carpeted floor, legs jittering and pulse pounding. He dragged himself a little ways on all fours, then took hold of a nearby door handle, pulling himself to his feet. Keeping one hand pressed to the wall for support, Ulrich jogged as quickly as he could down the hall, the room numbers a terrible blur. He counted them as he went, pawing the sweat from his eyes, and came finally—with no little relief—to room 717. “J-Jonathan!” he called, pounding heavily on the door. “Open up!”
From inside the room, very near the door, there issued a faint rustling. “Uh...” came the nervous voice from the other side. “Is that... is that you, Mr. Ulrich?”
The detective punched the door so hard his knuckles left imprints in the wood. “Yes, of course it's me! Open up! Now!”
Still, the client hesitated. “Is... is it really you?” he asked again. “The... the knock. You didn't do the secret knock.”
The secret knock? Unable to remember how the childish cadence had gone, the livid detective balled up his fists and laid into the door with a fury more akin to the drum solo of Led Zeppelin's “Moby Dick”.
Finally, after Ulrich's knuckles had become sore and puffy, Jonathan opened the door. “W-What's going on?” he asked, only to be shoved aside. The client fell to the floor with a yelp, eyeing the detective with bald terror. “What're you doing?”
Shuddering and drenched in sweat, Ulrich said not a word, marching instead to the curtained window. He bunched up the drapes in both hands and yanked them forcibly from the valance. The decorative metal rings holding them in place fell to the ground in a shower of dust as the fabric was pulled aside. The moonlit window was immediately bared—and a thin, crooked presence dwelt on its other side.
“What the—?” screamed Jonathan, scrambling back toward the door. “It's... it's him!”
There stood, rather impossibly, a figure on the glass. The soles of two filthy sneakers were pressed to the outside of the pane, and the legs rooted to them remained stick-straight. At the waist, however, this uncanny figure had achieved a sharp rightward bend, and was presently engaged in a wide-eyed study of the detective.
And what terrible eyes they were.
The face looking in from the window was a bloated caricature of that which Ulrich had glimpsed in the photos of Ansel Mulligan; an ill-fitted Halloween mask that only vaguely resembled the man. The figure's head was hideously swollen, seemed to burgeon, as though on the verge of rupture. Black eyes bulged and lips stretched in a smile of untenable tightness, like a tired rubber band set to snap. There was no light in those eyes; they burned with a darkness so consuming it pained the detective to stare into them.
Without a sound, the monstrosity placed a hand to the glass, putting on display an assortment of vein-studded digits that overwhelmed the knuckles joined to them. This thing, whatever it was, appeared to be wearing Ansel Mulligan's body like a glove—a glove two sizes too small.
The detective staggered back a few paces, his furious pulse oddly lulled by the sight of the hideous thing. Where only moments ago he'd lacked the strength to stand upright, the icy chill that now claimed his limbs saw him go straight as a rod.
Jonathan cowered by the door, mumbling and whimpering, arms wrapped over top of his head.
The detective, though, didn't hear a word of that. Instead, breathing raggedly, he met the thing's black gaze and uttered, “What are you?”
With an elegant twist of the upper body that Ulrich could only deem serpentine, the figure suddenly stood upright and continued its walk up the side of the building. Its soundless tread continued past the window, and the thing fell out of sight soon thereafter, evidently heading for the rooftop.
No longer held by the creature's noxious stare, the detective drew away from the window, dropping to one knee and giving Jonathan a violent shake. “C'mon, c'mon.”
The client glanced up at him, then to the window, mid-sob. “W-What? Where'd he go?”
Taking a fistful of Jonathan's shirt, Ulrich dragged his sputtering charge to his feet and planted him against the door with a hard thud. The detective's eyes bore into the client's with such an intensity that the blubbering man couldn't help but cease his trembling. “He's headed for the roof. He's going to sneak into the building from there. We don't have a lot of time, so pull yourself together. We need to go. Now.” He gave Jonathan's shoulders a hard squeeze. “Understand? Now.”
Jonathan nodded dumbly, wiping tears from his cheeks and standing aside.
Gray-faced, Ulrich opened the door and, canvassing the hall, promptly dragged the client out after him. The pair kept to the righthand side, their walk graduating into a run as the bank of elevators entered into sight. Mashing the button, Ulrich pressed his back to the wall and kept a close eye on the opposite end of the corridor, waiting for the terrible figure to materialize.
Moments later, the ding of the elevator spooked them both, and when the doors slid open the duo barged inside. Ulrich jabbed the button for the ground floor and then laid on the one labeled CLOSE DOOR till the metal things began sliding shut. Only then, with the two of them beginning a slow descent toward the lobby, encased in steel, did they dare relax. The detective slumped, combing back his sweat-slick hair and watching the indicator lights flash in sequence. “Man, that was close.”
“Do you think that anyone else saw him standing outside the window?” chanced Jonathan. “Will any of the cameras—”
It was at the junction between the third and fourth floors that the two of them felt it. The elevator, hitherto descending smoothly, suddenly jerked. From up above there came a resonant crash, as of something very heavy falling onto the top of the cabin. The lights dimmed at this noise, and within seconds the elevator had stopped moving completely—frozen between the second and third floors.
Ulrich hit the first floor button again. He jabbed the alarm button, too, resulting in a discordant bleating from some klaxon. Neither saw the elevator budge an inch, however.
“Why'd it stop?” asked Jonathan, fingers locked around his hair. With red, teary eyes, he looked ready to start yanking it out by the fistful.
“Oh, I'm sure this happens all the time,” muttered Ulrich, pacing around the cabin like a caged animal. “Just... just a hiccup.”
“Are you sure you hit the right button?” chanced the client.
“Let me see...” Ulrich whipped around and pounded at the control panel with the heel of his shoe, stamping it repeatedly till half of the buttons on the console were scuffed and lit. “Well, one of those must've been the right one, no?”
The pair settled into uneasy silence while waiting for the descent to continue. Surely, it was only a matter of time before the staff discovered the elevator wasn't working right. Someone would alert the front desk before too long...
“Do you... do you smell that?” asked Jonathan, shuddering in the corner.
“I'm not in the mood for jokes,” warned Ulrich.
“No, I mean it...” Jonathan sniffed at the air a few times, frowning. “It smells kind of... weird in here, no?”
For the first time since boarding, Ulrich stopped to study the air. He sucked in a great lungful through his nostrils and tried to assess it. The air had a certain staleness to it—the staleness typical of enclosed spaces—but there was something else, too. It was a vaguely moist scent, quite unlike the humid night air he'd lately sampled on his walk. “A little earthy, I guess,” he muttered with a noncommittal shrug.
Jonathan drank in the air awhile longer. Then, raising his eyes to the ceiling, his lips began to tremble. “I know what it is...”
“What?”
“The... the smell is... it... it's like the smell of the reptile house at the zoo...”
The cabin was suddenly infiltrated by a new and unexpected noise. From up above, there sounded a quick succession of knocks—but not so quick that the particular pattern eluded their ears.
Knock-knock, pause, knock-knock-knock.
It was the special pattern Ulrich had devised on the fly, and the only two people in the world who should've known it were at that moment standing in the elevator.
“OK, no, we're getting out of here,” blurted Ulrich, mashing once again at the buttons and then focusing his ire on the pair of metal doors. Jamming his shoulder up against the edge of one, he pushed and grunted in an effort to part it from the other.
Jonathan tapped the alarm button repeatedly, the shrill chirp of the bell echoing through the cabin till the two of them were nearly deafened. From above, there was a momentary silence—the silence of one amused, perhaps, at having gotten a rise out of his captives.
But it was not to last.
The ceiling of the cabin featured a small rectangular opening blocked only by a flimsy panel. This was intended, they supposed, to allow easy access for workmen to the upper reaches of the mechanism and to the elevator cables, but the thing which presently pushed the panel aside and stared down at them from the dim shaft almost certainly lacked the necessary qualifications.
Burning black eyes skewered them from the pocket above, and for the first time that evening the miserable being felt moved to speech. “Hello, Jonathan,” oozed the words from that taut mouth. Dense threads of drool seeped from the edges of the figure's thin lips, and just visible in the low glow of the elevator lights were two rows of needle-sharp teeth in far greater number than any man should possess.
At sight of the monstrosity, Ulrich's panicked efforts were doubled. He punched and kicked at the inside of the elevator, stamped on the floor and jostled the steel doors with all his weight, uttering one string of curses after another.
There was no exit. Unless the elevator decided to complete its descent, open its doors and spit them out on the first floor, they were now well and truly trapped with the nightmarish thing.
For his part, Jonathan began to scream. His ringing falsetto proved nearly as deafening as the alarm, and he wavered on his feet, leaning against Ulrich for support. There was something else, too—the client had taken to clutching his left arm, near the wrist, as though badly injured. The skin along his forearm had grown conspicuously hot and red, though so far as the detective knew, he'd sustained no injury.
Secure in his dominance, the grotesquerie in the elevator shaft dropped into a low squat and cocked its foul head to the side. Those thin, ragged lips, tensed to the point of snapping, finally parted; robbed of their tension, they sagged into a ropey maw within which glistened dozens of pearly, conical fangs. The breath which seeped from this mouth, at first intermingling with the stuffy air of the cabin and then serving to overpower it, reeked of sour death.
“W-What do you want?” demanded Ulrich, grabbing Jonathan by the shirt collar and pulling him back. He stood now between the beast and its prey, broad chest puffed out and fists balled.
The bulging black eyes widened till Ulrich felt sure they would shoot from their sockets. “Him,” came the smooth, masculine voice that had once belonged to Ansel Mulligan. It extended one of its plump, misshapen fingers toward the client.
The detective wondered how it would look when someone, eventually, cracked this elevator open. What would they find? Ulrich's broken body and no sign of Jonathan? Or would the monstrosity find time enough for a second course and gobble them both up? No—he wouldn't think of it, wouldn't quit fighting till death overtook him. He took a step back, pressing Jonathan to the wall, and scanned the interior of the elevator in a frenzy.
The buttons weren't responding and the doors were locked, but there was one other feature he'd previously overlooked, which he briefly considered now. Mounted beside the control panel was a little steel door which he'd previously dented with a wild punch. He hurriedly yanked it open and discovered a fire extinguisher resting inside. It's better than nothing, he thought, wrenching it out of the compartment and aiming the hose upward.
A fetid laugh escaped the creature's sagging lips and, holding onto the edge of the rectangular opening, it began to lower itself into the cabin.
Ulrich yanked the pin from the red cylinder as though it were a grenade, and then, straining upward, aimed the nozzle at Ansel's face and squeezed the handle. A dense white cloud shot forth. The pressurized flow from the nozzle streamed across the ceiling of the elevator at once, and within moments of the initial wave the form of the invader fell out of sight. He didn't stop there; even as he lost visibility in the haze, the detective continued spraying into the narrow opening, eager to hamper Ansel's progress. Over the hiss of the extinguisher there came a sudden thrashing, as of the creature's body striking the sides of the opening in a hasty upward retreat. A fit of sputtering gasps and coughs echoed from the shaft above.
The jostling of the elevator was so forceful that, at first, neither Ulrich nor his client noticed the unit had begun to descend. It was only after Ulrich had pulled back and ceased the spray that the pleasant ding of the second floor's indicator alerted them of their downward progress. As the cabin began to lurch toward the first floor, the thumping in the ceiling reached a fever pitch. Frantic scurrying could be heard overhead as the unseen creature sought purchase against the stony walls of the shaft.
The elevator landed on the first floor, and after a tasteful pause the doors slid open with the usual ding. Outside, with a ring of keys in hand, was a mustachioed maintenance worker in a ball cap and red polo, along with the no-longer-sleepy receptionist Ulrich had startled on his way back into the hotel. “Sorry,” began the clerk before setting eyes on the occupants, “I heard the alarm going off and thought the elevator might have gotten stuck. It does that from time to time, so Rick here brought the keys to...”
Jonathan crawled out onto the lobby floor on all fours, clutching at the handyman's legs, and Ulrich shambled out behind him, still white-knuckling the extinguisher. His sweat and the debris from the recent spray had combined on his clothing into a pasty mess, and he coughed a good, long while as he staggered around the elevator bank.
Neither the maintenance man nor the receptionist said anything; both were too stunned at the mess to speak. They gawked at the powdery duo in bald disbelief, then surveyed the hazy elevator.
Finally, clearing his throat, the technician pulled his tear-stained pant leg from Jonathan's grasp and started into the elevator.
“Something's up there,” gasped Ulrich, pointing up at the ceiling. “In the shaft.”
The maintenance man looked to the opening in the ceiling, the rectangular panel still askew, and peered into the upper darkness beneath hooded lids.
Except for extinguisher debris, he would go on to discover nothing of note in the shaft.