The Piano || 𝘤𝘰𝘭𝘣𝘺 𝘣𝘳𝘰𝘤𝘬

|13| Go shop XPLR merch now! Link in description!

They spent the morning in their room, playing different games and trying not to get bored. The phones were useless, except for the few games Ashley had on hers. At first, the others laughed at her for having multiplayer games on it but soon they proved to be more useful than all the others' phones. And they used the time to take some pictures of each other in the hallways so they would have something for Instagram accounts later.

As promised, Kris and Colby tried to get some sleep after lunch. Despite the coffee the two had been drinking all over the morning, their eyes seemed to fall shut every second they could spare. Sam and Ashley left the rooms with their phones and cameras, not knowing what to do in their spare time. They had agreed to wake Kris and Colby up at seven pm.

"We have now, what? Five hours until we can wake them up?" Sam narrated to the camera. They were talking silently, not wanting to disturb any of the other guests, even though there shouldn't be any on their floor.

"Yeah, and we're going to try and find anything to spend our time. What we didn't tell Colby or Kris, we took a few devices with us. Just in case." Ashley winked at the camera.

"First, we thought we could just walk around the hotel. I think there's a library somewhere, as well as some sort of greenhouse on the back of the hotel. We thought we'd just come here, talk to the spirit, and go away... well." Sam chuckled. "This brings back memories from when we used to just walk around the haunted places and hope to find something."

They were now walking down the hallway, in the other direction than where they usually went.

"Are we even allowed to film here?" Ashley questioned, admiring the decorations of the hallway.

"I think so. Justin and Nora said nothing when we walked through the lobby with the camera. Several times."

"I feel like they just stopped giving a fuck after I ran down in the middle of the night, followed by you guys shouting and filming," Ashley laughed. "I hope they don't have to get used to crazy ghost hunters running around in the middle of the night."

"After this video?" Sam asked. "Not to brag or anything but I don't think so. This is probably the most active spirit we've ever encountered."

She grinned. "All thanks to me," she said with a nonchalant shrug.

Sam playfully rolled his eyes. "Come on, don't get- Oh, wait, where are we?"

They had descended different stairs on the other end of the hallway. Those had been significantly less elegant than the main staircase, and more hidden. If Ashley had been counting correctly, they were now standing on the third floor, looking at a basic door with a green emergency exit light next to it, pointing further down the stairs. On the fourth and fifth floors, there were only doors as well, but they had small windows, showing them the hallways that looked a lot like the one on the sixth floor. This door had no window and pointed in another direction than the others.

"Third floor?" Ashley suggested. "Open it, let's see if there's another hallway behind it."

Shrugging, Sam pulled the door open. It revealed two rows of bookshelves on both sides of them.

"Would you look at that," Ashley exclaimed. "We found the library! That was quick." She stepped out of the door, looking at the bookshelves. The room's roof was surprisingly low, hardly higher than a normal room's roof. It wasn't at all like the old library she'd expected, she could easily reach the highest shelf of books. No high ladders or aesthetic chandeliers, sadly.

The light was coming from a few reading desks scattered between the shelves, there was only one window at the end of the room. When Ashley emerged from between the two bookshelves where the emergency exit was, the entrance of the library was on her left, and the window on her right. A few hotel guests looked at her as she walked through the library, regularly pulling out books from the shelves and setting them back. The only sound filling the room came from people turning pages in the books and discussing them silently.