Part II, Chapter IX | Bell Knights

“Hold on,” Paris said, suddenly panicking. “If we can’t head back up the elevator, how will we rescue Jericho?”

“To begin with,” Charlotte said, “if we can’t escape the first floor ourselves, then it won’t matter if we can bring my brother and Lady March down here to be trapped with us.”

Paris bit her lip, clearly not happy with that answer but unable to refute.

“Even true loops have points of instability,” Charlotte continued. “We need to split up and check every room, and we probably need to keep doing that until the loop snaps.”

“Split up?” Samira said. “I thought the entire point of us coming down here was to find Oliver to protect us.”

“I can't protect everyone if we split up,” Oliver agreed.

“That may be true, but in order to break a true loop, we need a party to pass through an unstable point while it’s busy containing a separate party across a stable point.”

“How do you even know all of this?” Paris said. She asked the question we had all been thinking, but she had put it off for so long that I falsely believed she already knew the answer.

Charlotte’s expression didn’t change. “The research of House Porter is wide-bearing. Naturally, we’ve come across historical records of supernatural phenomena as well. This may be the first time I’ve experienced it for myself, but it’s not unfamiliar to me. Now, how will we split up the groups?”

“I’ll go on my own,” I volunteered. “Oliver needs to protect the vice-president at least, and I’m sure the rest of you want to go with him as well.” The idea of wandering through the hotel on my own was enough to loosen my stool, but it made sense to me. Of them, I knew for certain that I had some sort of magic. And while it was outside of my control, I stopped those bellthings with that magic, even if it was just for a moment.

“It’s good enough that you’re willing,” Charlotte replied. “But I’ll go with you.”

“I’ll go too,” Samira said. She ran her fingers through her long hair and frazzled it into a mess before she explained herself. “Those students died even with Oliver there already. I’d rather be with a girl I’m actually friends with, and a girl who actually seems to know how to get out of here.”

❧☙

The moment we split off from Oliver and Paris, Charlotte started down a hall right away, ignoring the many doors we passed as we went.

“Hey, hold on,” I said. “What are you doing?”

Charlotte took a deep breath and looked back to face us. “That entire bit back there about unstable true loops? I made it all up. I just needed to get you, Lady Kavesta, away from Paris and her camera. Unfortunately, Lady Samira has tagged along with us as well, but I suppose there’s no helping that.”

“Why would you lie?” Samira said. She held her arms close to her chest, clearly uncomfortable.

“You have no need to know. Have faith and follow me.” She was about to continue forward again, but I grabbed her by the wrist and pulled back to stop her. She was so lightweight and weak. I nearly threw her to the floor with the little bit of force I put into it. I wondered how she managed to survive that bellthing’s attack with such a frail body.

“You can’t expect us to trust you without any explanations,” I said.

She sighed again and closed her eyes, swaying like she could fall asleep at any moment. “There is only one explanation for how we got here, and so only one solution to get us out. The explanation is this: one of the students captured here must have enraged or upset another to such an extreme degree that they triggered an incredibly powerful primal awakening within them. This awakening spawned this hotel inside Arys Academy. The hotel came to us; we weren’t sent to the hotel. Teleportation on this scale is impossible for humans without decades of study, and centuries of… well, that’s besides the point.”

Instead of continuing, she turned back and continued to walk down the hall. It was like she had a very obvious destination in mind, so Samira and I couldn’t help but follow her again. It only took a couple minutes before I realized that the rooms along the hall had all vanished, and all that remained was a door at the end marked Room 113. Charlotte stopped again, and we waited for her.

“Okay. Listen close, Annamarie. The student we’re looking for can be found through that door. Inside, you’ll find a girl suffering from a nightmare she can’t escape on her own. Wake her up. Cheer her up. You know better than anyone, that there’s no one here more capable of doing this than you.”

I turned back to the door, and my feet continued to walk me up to it on their own. Through this very door, there a girl slept, haunted by a terrible nightmare which conjured the true loop that encaptured us. It stitched the suffocating carpet to the floor and pasted a floral sepia to the walls. The idea didn’t seem so absurd to me. My own ability felt even more absurd… I wondered if she would be like me. Hiding in my own head; trapped in it.

“Oh shit,” Samira said. Her sudden yet timid exclamation brought our attention back down the hall behind us, where there were three more bell things, standing shoulder to shoulder. These ones were different, though. Taller. Leaner. They had actual eyes to see with, just two thin slits each above their gaping mouths. They held ornate rapiers with bell-like pommels, and they began their march when their eyes met ours; their march sounded like the cracking of whips.

“Go,” Charlotte said. “We’ll be fine.”

I didn’t want to argue with her, so I set myself to run for it, but Samira caught my arm before I could. Her eyes flitted across the floor, and the pressure on her grip couldn’t decide whether to slip or tighten. “Tell her that I’m sorry too,” she decided to say.

I nodded, though I didn’t understand why she had said it.

My hand gripped onto the lever of the handle and pushed in. The door opened to a dark hotel room, the same as any other. I flipped the switch to light it, and found the bed unclothed, empty, and without the girl who should’ve been there. Then with a flicker of the lights, pink sheets appeared on the bed, made neatly yet imperfect as if someone had just slept in them. Tentatively, I stepped over to it and felt them; they were still warm to the touch.

The bathroom door to my right slammed shut and the light flickered along the bottom slit from inside. A pounding followed the flickering, and the door seemed just about to burst from its hinges.

“Let me out!” a voice cried. “Isa! Don’t leave me all alone!”

Unafraid, I rushed to throw the bathroom door open, but the light inside shut off right away when I did. Behind me, the bedsheets had vanished again.

Nothing could be seen through the darkness of the bathroom, and the light of the bedroom could do nothing to help illuminate its insides. I felt around the inside wall of the bathroom for the light switch and pressed it up and down, but it did nothing. In this room a girl sleeps, haunted by a terrible nightmare, and only I can save her.

I took a deep breath, then stepped in.

The floor swallowed my foot like tar, but I refused to pull away, pushing deeper instead. The black barely rose above my lower shin, so I pulled my other leg in and continued on.

It didn’t take long to find her. She laid atop the tar, strands of it gripping to her like little hands. She held a witch hat to her chest, tight like it might fly away.

“Sylvia!” I said, trudging through the rest to reach her. I took her by the arms to pull her from the tar’s grip, but she didn’t budge. “Wake up!”

Faces appeared in the black and pulled her deeper. They clung to her tighter. “It’s all your fault,” the faces said. “No one bothered to care, so she ended up like this. Our sweet Sylvia. You’ll end up like all the rest. She can’t trust anybody. No one but us.”

“Shut up!” I said, my strength waning, still unable to pry her from them. “The only ones who can decide that are her… and me.”

“Ridiculous,” the faces said. “Why you?”

Why me? Why her? A girl like Sylvia, resigned to such a state. When we first met on that bus, she decided to call out to me. She sat right up front, but was alone, and wanted to sit next to me. She was so bizarre that I never did thank her for that. It didn’t need to be me. It didn’t need to be her. But it somehow turned out that way, and my heart unraveled with these feelings. Its threads swirled about us, banishing the faces of tar into silence, and tied us tight together.

“Open up,” I murmured, my eyes drooping from a sudden drowsiness. “I’ll save you.”