Hotel Nigh

Chapter 28

The Escape

"Jason... Jason," I heard my name being called.

It took a moment or two before I realised I was... lying down? Whatever I was lying on was hard and cold. I wasn't in bed? Surely it must have been the early hours of the morning by now, and I had to be in bed, right? So why didn't this feel like a mattress?

Groaning, I began to stir. There was a sigh of relief from the side of me as I fluttered my eyelids. The room was very bright – wherever I was. And I was... on the floor? Realisation struck me a moment later and I bolted up into a sitting position, only for the room to commence spinning and my body to tremble from side to side. Holding a hand to my head, I groaned. It was throbbing, especially at the back.

I swore before my gaze landed on Melina. "Are you okay?" I asked her.

She nodded. "My head hurts too. He knocked you out and then he knocked me out, but I think less hard. I wasn't out for as long as you." She grimaced. "The door's locked."

"How long were we out for?"

"Not long. Minutes. I checked. I saw the time on the phone on the desk and checked my phone when I woke up. Danny won't have had much chance to get away just yet. With locking the door, I'm sure he will be in the tunnel now." She held her phone out to me to reveal a vast crack running through the length of it. "I dropped it when he knocked me out. He got me behind the head, too. He grabbed me and turned me around, and..." she trailed off.

"He must have an extra key," I replied, my memory of what occurred before I was knocked out was slowly being pieced together. "We took the key from the box to unlock the door. He must have had a spare. Do you think there were two originally in the box or something? Or he put it back?"

"I think he put it back."

The light bulb had worked in the light that was dangling precariously from the brick ceiling. Even the walls were just bricks. The only adornment in the room was the desk and light. The desk seemed to have various things on it, but upon inspection a moment later, I realised it was just what we already knew, except that someone before Danny had also known about this room. There were photographs, and even the same one of Jenson Rogers, Mr. Perry and Mr. Wellington.

Melina, I realised, had begun wandering around the room to the far corner where a brick was lying aimlessly on the floor. There was a gap not too far away from her in the wall where it had been yanked out of. She scoffed. "Danny didn't have a weapon on him. Not that I could see. He literally only wanted to lock us in here and knock us out."

"Why wouldn't he kill us?" I asked aloud, my gaze still scanning the documents that littered the desk.

"Because I don't think he found the necklace, and if he came back down here, then two dead bodies would really make this room... rank."

"I can't believe we didn't see it," I replied, shaking my head and turning to face her.

She was still loitering by the brick on the floor that had a corner coated in blood. Holding a hand to the back of my head, I realised it was mine. It wasn't a lot, but it was beginning to matte in my hair, causing me to grimace as I tried to wipe my hand on my jeans.

"We thought it was Gerald because we didn't think that the person had to have been working here and living here already. Danny's probably had loads of time to think where the necklace was. That's probably why he applied for this job considering he was last in the army. He favoured the fame and glory instead of... fighting for his country. Selfish," I added. "He was selfish."

She said nothing but frowned in the direction of the gap in the wall. "Come here, and look at this," she instructed softly. "This brick hadn't been properly fitted into the wall, and there's some sort of a gap behind it. I don't particularly want to reach into the wall," she confessed, gaze locked on the gap, "but do you think something could be in there? Surely when he realised we were close and heading directly to this next room, he had to turn out the light and pull this brick from the wall. He knew it was here..."