Roblox Doors

Chapter 5 - The Door

All things considered, if you've been trapped in a hotel for a hundred years with a bunch of other maniacs, the last thing you'd expect is a polite knock on your door, willing to be let in. Certainly, Seek wasn't expecting it. In his one hundred and eight years of living here, he had never gotten a knock on the door. Not as far as he could remember, anyways. There it was again. 

"Seek..? Are you there?"

No mistaking it now, he supposed. Seek opened the door, to be met with Halt's shimmering ghost. She gazed at him with those brilliant diamond eyes; hesitated. Stood there awkwardly. Seek looked at her irritably. 

"What?"

"N-Nothing. Just... If you see anything... strange... just tell me. Ok?"

Seek fixed his gaze on the ground. "Yeah, whatever. Just go away."

He  turns, slamming the door shut in her face.

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I've been trapped in this hotel for 108 years with nothing but a few numbers to keep me company.

100 doors. 

15 entities. 

0 promises fulfilled. 

They promised a better life here. They promised to help. 

I'm surprised I listened. 

I didn't know what was wrong with me at first. My parents wouldn't speak to me. That was the first warning. I never knew why. Teachers made me work away from the other children so I wouldn't hurt them. I was sent to therapists, doctors; given dozens of prescriptions supposed to make me normal. None of it worked. Sometimes I remember waking up to find scars all over my body and blood plastered over my hands. I couldn't remember how it got there. Only a few years later did I realise that the blood was my own. But then again, I can't remember many things. I can't even remember how I died. 

All I remember is the pain.

Then I came here. To this place. They gave me a job. For the first time in my life, people loved me. I was a wonderful actor. I even daresay I looked dashing with that smart suit they gave me. I just wished that they told me why they gave me it. Not the suit. 

The mask. 

I think they thought that if they hid my face, my scars, my pain, then they could hide the monster within.

They were wrong.

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Rush awoke. 

He was shaking, every tendril of shadow he owned was trembling, and his brain was still trying to recall what had happened. He glanced around him. He was still in room 60. 

follow me

It was quiet. It was that voice in his head. Rush was too afraid to name it. 

follow me

There it was again. 

Rush hesitated, then heaved himself up and tensed, trying to decipher the hushed whispers, trying to figure out where they came from.

follow me follow me follow me follow me follow me

There was a hole in the wall. A tear through the bleak wallpaper. Rush squeezed himself through to be met with cold stone and mouldy wooden support beams. 

The whispering was getting louder. He was getting

closer closer closer 

and he pushed through to the other side to be met with soft, golden light. Three chairs strapped together in the centre of the room. A glittering painting on the wall, that shone with age. It displayed a celestial star that beamed with that topaz shade of yellow just like the rest of the room. 

This painting does not seem to have a title. 

The voice was pulling him in. There was a gate on the other side of the room. 

push it open

Rush pushed it open

and breathed.

In front of him was a smooth wooden frame that glittered with the same shimmering golden light, and above it was a brass panel labelled 000. The door had rusty dark chains clinging to it, and through the tangled mess of metal there was an ornate, cracked, skeleton lock. It was like a gateway, a window through to another world; a reminder that the Hotel was not entirely separated from the world that it had once been a part of. Rush felt his shadow make contact with the glistening door, and in that moment, he knew exactly what he had found.

What he had found was the entrance to the Rooms.