FRIDAY CONTINUED ...
... Alice usually sings and makes plenty of noise when she is in the shower, though as it so happens to be, things were unusually quiet after Janice had shut the hotel room door. Janice pushed open the door to the bathroom. To her things were indeed very quiet, too quiet in fact. The curtain was pulled around the bathtub which incorporated the shower. The room was fairly well steamed up but there was no water running. Alice was not singing. She was not making any sound at all. The only movement Janice could be sure of was of that with which she was creating herself.
The steam began to dissipate with the door to the bathroom being open. Janice quietly called out for Alice asking if she is alright. There was no response. Steam soon cleared enough to reveal a pool of red on the tiled bathroom floor. What is this? And why does it seem familiar?
Janice slowly and fearfully got closer and closer to the shower curtain and what she saw when she pulled back the curtain sent her running out of her hotel room and down the hallway screaming as loudly as she could. Her father heard the scream, as probably did everyone else in the hotel; he got to Janice before she could get too far away.
There was no way Brian was completely going to calm Janice down but, he did manage to get somewhat of a response out of her when he asked her what was wrong. When Janice had pulled back the shower curtain, she saw Alice lying motionless in the bathtub with both her wrists having been cut across from one side to the other. Blood oozed out from both cuts and dripped from Alice's right wrist onto the floor as her arm rested against the bathtub with the palm of her hand facing upwards.
The reaction to seeing such a thing sent Janice into a frenzy. It had been something she most definitely had not expected to see even with the whole sense of familiarity she had in that moment. Denise stood at her hotel door as Janice told of what she had seen and Denise would soon let out a scream of her own fearing, of course, the worst for Alice.
Brian called for Denise asking her to come out and stay with Janice and stand with her in the hallway so that he could go check on Alice. Both wanting to accompany her husband and not wanting to see possible disaster with Alice, Denise would remain with Janice.
How can a parent prepare for a moment like this? Such a thing is impossible. There must be a plausible explanation for what Janice saw or for what she thought she saw. Still Brian could feel dread for what he was about to head into.
When Brian entered the girl's room, he could hear singing coming from the bathroom. The shower was running. He had not been expecting this, hoping for it, yeah, but not expecting it. Alice appeared to be alive and well. She screamed at her father to get out once she discovered he was near. Being naked and showering, she hardly wanted her father to be in the same room as her no matter the fact that a curtain has been drawn.
Brian refused to leave without seeing his daughter's wrists. One arm at a time, Alice showed her dad her wrists through a gap in that shower curtain. There was not a mark on her, and Brian was left wondering as to what the hell was going on.
At this point and still standing by the door of her parent's hotel room, Janice became overwhelmed by that strange sense of familiarity. It was as if she was in two places at the same time. This however was more than a twin connection acting up than anything else. The feeling was more like as if she was having an out of body experience but rather than floating out above herself, Janice felt trapped in between states. Something had happened to Alice and Janice knew this to be fact.
Such strangeness for Janice, existing between the conscious and sub-conscious while being caught within the real moment she had just experienced and the memory of the dream with the drop of blood hanging in mid-air, if indeed that moment was even a dream at all.
