Hotel Nigh

Chapter 01

Booking a Room

"Is there any service here?"

A sinisterly scrawled note was posted through my letterbox in the middle of the night. It woke me up – the sound of the letterbox shutting and banging against the door. At first, I didn't realise what it was. I thought it was something transpiring outside, so I turned over on my side and went back to sleep only minutes later. It was only when I went downstairs the next morning did I see the note lying on the mat underneath the letterbox. It had been the noise I heard in the night.

There was no address on the note. There wasn't even any writing on the outside of the envelope in general. The sender had travelled to my home in the middle of the night. The sender knew me already. The sender acknowledged enough to already know where I resided. But my location of residence wasn't that secretive, after all.

Jason McCann, an owner of a small, dingy apartment in the middle of Burnmeadow – that was me. It was a quiet village that not many people knew about with a church, few shops and glorious meadows accompanied with spectacular views – a bit of giveaway due to the name of the village. It was quaint, actually. The occupants were close with one another. All except one introvert. And logically, that introvert was I.

But right now, I was in the lobby of a hotel, banging furiously on the bell that had a label stuck to it saying RING FOR SERVICE IF NO ONE BEHIND DESK. The grammar left a lot to be desired. Maybe it said a lot about the hotel I was about to be a lodger in.

"Hello?" I called out, dropping my suitcase to the floor beside me.

Leaning over the desk, I saw the TV that was concealed underneath on top of the actual desk with a mass of envelopes and letters. Right opposite me was a pigeon hole system for mail. It had different slots for different rooms of the hotel and on the other side there were employees. Well, I presumed the hotel rooms were names and not numbers.

"I'd like to book in please," I hollered. In my pocket, the letter was burning a hole. It felt like my hand was twitching by my side, just ready to nervously fold the edges or something, but I resisted it, no matter how much it was goading me.

There was a justification to my pale skin and shortage of vitamin D in my body that's primarily from the sun. It wasn't a secret, either. It was plastered on all the local newspapers from Burnmeadow and surrounding areas near the vicinity. My peculiar pastime, when the newspapers were printed, was cutting all the articles out about Ethan.

Ethan McCann was my brother. He died at the age of twenty-three, and I am two years younger. His death was only recent. It was no concealment that he favoured the downtown lifestyle with the excessive drinking, midnight gambling and dancing with drugs. Needlessly, he had to wander around to local towns for his lifestyle preference, but he still managed it.

One night, on the way home, he was murdered. It was a brutal murder that only a sociopath would commit. Ethan's body was lying on the floor in three different places. No one was aware of the motive of the murder. The police ruled it down and deemed it as, "He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Turning around from the desk in annoyance, I checked out the lobby. It wasn't vast, but it wasn't minuscule either. There were two sofas in the corner with a coffee table and a vending machine on the other side near the entrance to the dining room, bar and kitchen. Opposite the double doors of the entrance to the hotel were the stairs leading up to the first floor of rooms. There were even stairs that descended underground.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," a gruff voice announced abruptly.

Turning back around to the desk, quite a large man was entering the desk area through the door at the back near the wooden pigeon hole mail system. He turned to me with an apologetic smile that didn't quite match up with his deep voice. I kept my arm leaning on the desk, ignoring the scorching sensation that the note was providing me in my pocket.