Floor Twelve

We had come a long way from the first floor. Before us stood the staircase leading to the twelfth, and I was scarcely ready to confront the man whose mother I killed. My father and I entered much deep discussion on what decision we should make concerning our presence in this hotel.

 We were very capable of finding some crafty way to scale down the walls out the window and escape this place, indeed. Yet we could not. We were not being held prisoner by monsters any longer but bound by our involvement in darker matters. The weighty burden we carried was not of injury, rather of the secrets we sought to uncover.

 That place had a way of drawing me in a terrifying me simultaneously. I have explained this to you many times, but the fear seemed to magnetize me toward the darkness. Since I had managed to learn more of the history of the man in the light, I knew I would not be able to resist it any further.

 The choice was obvious to the both of us… We hadn't come this far for nothing. We didn't know how exactly we were going to make it work, but we were going to keep this hotel no matter what. My father had invested too much in its future, and I in its past. If anyone could renew this hellish hotel, it was Matis and Lyra Gibeau!

 There I stood at the foot of the steps, my shoes heavier than the aged bricks holding this place together. For all the previous floors, I had no knowledge of what waited for me on the next floor. This time, I knew exactly who was waiting for me, and the fear I felt was different. It was a fear of my own emotions, and a fear that I had hurt a man who had already spent most of his life in pain. Nevertheless, it was coupled with a determination to complete my understanding of his history and to possibly heal his wounded soul.

 My legs tensed and ached as I took each step, the sound of the stairs creaking felt like splinters in my eardrums. I could feel each beat of my anxiety-filled heart, the blood in my veins burned with a heat far greater than the temperature it had reached during the chase on the fifth floor. I feared death no longer. Even death paled in comparison to what I was about to face.

 My father and I made eye contact and nodded as we opened the door to the twelfth and final floor together. It creaked louder than any of the other doors had. Its squeal had likely been loud enough to hear three floors down.

 I took a deep breath and summoned the courage to place my right foot down onto the carpet of the floor, my nerves on end. As soon as my foot had made contact with it, I heard the young boy from my vision scream as though death itself had presented its ghastly form to him. I saw his face for a moment in front of me, as though his soul had left his body and confronted me then and there. I jumped backward, bumping into my father as he stepped in as well.

 "It's okay, Lyra. There is nothing here… yet." He assured me, though it wasn't helping!

Of all the things I expected the last floor to be, I hadn't even thought of the setup that was before us then. This floor was riddled with torn and crumpled papers, some completely shredded to oblivion. Office chairs were thrown about and wrecked, some desks toppled. There was ink spilled in several locations, looking like black bloodstains on the carpet, the quills nowhere to be found.

 "The administrative floor. Interesting." Papa commented as he continued to walk forward into the mess. I followed closely behind him, looking around for any signs of life… or death.

 As we continued forward, we located a hall with three doors: one labeled as the "master's bedroom", another as the "master's office", and the other left completely blank. The only thing that made it unique was the shallow scratch marks that covered it. Some of those scratch marks had been made to spell out words, but all I could make out of it was "R…'s Room".

 With the bedroom locked, we tried every key we had to get in, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, we gave up and tried the office instead. Fortunately, this one wasn't locked.

 The office was set up exactly how you might have expected, with one large desk at the center-back of the room and two chairs placed in front of it. The chair behind it was facing backward, large and covered in plush-filled leather.

 "Sit." A familiar voice commanded us, causing the room to shake.

I walked over slowly to a chair and sat, signaling for my father to do the same. I knew whose voice it was, and I thought it interesting that he chose to meet us in an office. Then again, maybe I wasn't.

 "Good evening, Mr. Matis Gibeau and Ms. Lyra Gibeau." He greeted us, turning the chair to face us. Surely enough, it was the very same man that I had expected. His brown hair was now a little bit messy, dark rings showed underneath his eyes, and his skin pale.

 "Monsieur Hurley, I presume?" Papa inquired of him, offering a handshake.

 The man glared at my father, signaling for him to put his hand back at his side. "No. I abandoned that name long ago. That man's legacy is as good as gone." He answered.

 "Then what shall we call you?" I interjected the conversation.

 His gaze shifted from my father's eyes to mine, sending shivers down my spine once more. "Renard." He answered firmly.

 "I don't suppose that is your legal first name?" My father questioned.

 "It matters not. You will address me as Renard." He demanded, his gaze suppressing a seething but somber rage within.

 "Very well, Renard." My father agreed. "Shall the formal settlement of the ownership of this hotel begin, then?" He continued.

 "I would hardly call this formal." Renard commented, tapping his long finger on the wooden desk before him. "Nevertheless, it shall. What is the conclusion of your consultation regarding your presence in this hotel of mine?"

 My father looked at me, signaling that he wanted me to answer. I nodded and looked Renard in the eyes as I spoke. "We have yet to conclude entirely, but we have come close. We simply need a little more information."

 Renard raised an eyebrow. "Have the visions and my direct words to you not supplied you with sufficient answers?" He questioned me.

 "I can think of no more accurate a response than to say no. We lack the proper answers to weigh our options correctly." I explained.

 "Inform me of the answers you lack." He ordered.

 I presented to him there the questions I had, beginning with why he continued to stay in this hotel despite his hatred for his father.

 "Because of the mother of this hotel." He answered.

 "Do you mean your mother?" My father asked.

 "No, Monsieur Gibeau. I mean the coward that refused to protect me from the wrath of my father because of her infatuation with that man."

 "Your stepmother."

 "Precisely. I presume she informed you of her unending obsession with him, and her feelings on her own death."

 My father looked down at his shoes for a moment, then back up with a disturbed look. "Indeed, she did." There was some form of pity in his voice. "She begged your real mother to kill her after learning that her wealthy, charming husband had 'committed suicide'."

 Renard nodded. "Directly afterward, she was discovered by a group of women in the hotel complaining. These women were notorious for spreading gossip. You can imagine their fate."

 My father's eyes widened. "The corpses…"

 "It's all making sense now, isn't it?" Renard laughed, throwing his lanky arms in the air. "Do you recall the journal you found on the second floor? Please, do guess what happened to him!" His smile was a crazed, unhappy smile.

 "He always overheard the gossip." My father responded somberly.

 "Yes sir! He was promptly beheaded." Renard's smile was beginning to fade. "He even had a dog that had ran up to the fourth floor before my mother caught it!"

 I gasped. Was she responsible for literally every death in this hotel!?

 "Oh, and it doesn't end there!" Renard slammed his giant hands on the table, his teeth starting to look pointy and his eyes starting to bulge a little. "You see, there was a certain young lady that witnessed her gouge out the innards of the poor animal! Naturally, there could be no witnesses… the innocent woman had her head forcefully turned upside down! The cracking and crunching still haunt me to this day!" Tears were starting to escape Renard's eyes, his now sharp-looking nails digging into the desk.

 "Finally… she was so proud to have been able to protect her son for once in her miserable life. She discovered that I was watching and without hesitation proceeded to proudly display this to me, warning me that this same fate awaited anyone that she ever found in this hotel again!" He looked downward for a few seconds, then back up at me as though he expected me to say something.

 "Lyra… can you see now why I wanted you to leave? Why I employed every supernatural force in this hotel to scare you away?" He asked, placing his bony hand on top of mine.

 I wanted to yank my hand away, but doing so would have resulted in his nails scratching me. "I can see, Renard." I responded. "I can see that these things must have driven you crazy. So why, then, did you keep her around?" I questioned him.

 Renard sat back in his seat, removing his hand from mine. "Because she was the only one that knew me. Despite her insanity, she was the only source of peace I had. Even after falling ill and departing from her mortal body, she returned with undead determination to protect me." His eyes seemed to almost turn blue for a moment, but they soon began glowing red again. "Then you finished her off."

 The guilt I felt returned to me once more, freezing me in that chair. I broke out into a cold sweat and felt like I might pass out.

 "Then Lyra released her from her curse of miserable insanity." Papa pointed out.

 Renard slammed his fist on the desk and leaned over to speak closely into my father's face. "She took away from me the only person that mattered to me!"

 My father seemed speechless at the outburst, but I was tired of this.

 "And if I didn't!?" I screamed back at Renard, standing up and tossing my chair aside. "She would have taken the person that matters the most to me! Don't you think that she had taken enough lives!? If she had numbed her emotions to the point that she could kill a dog and an innocent woman, do you really think she had the capacity to feel any real love anymore!?"

 Renard raised a hand to strike me but slowly lowered it after taking a deep breath. He tilted his head downward and eyeballed me from the shadow that his hair had cast over his face. "Maybe not. But I still loved her." With that, he picked up the desk with one arm and tossed it aside. His nearly seven-foot-tall figure loomed over us threateningly.

 "Follow me." He ordered as he walked toward the door of the office.

 I looked at my father who simply nodded and began following. I was hesitant, but I soon joined them with an irritated sigh. He led us across the hall to what I then presumed was his own bedroom, the door labeled "R…'s Room". The room was decorated pristinely and neatly, clearly the room of a wealthy man… that is, except for the hole in the ceiling with a ladder leading up to it.

 "Climb the ladder." He commanded us once more after climbing up himself.

 The sign on the ladder was labeled "The Thirteenth Floor". It was considered grave misfortune for a hotel to have a thirteenth floor, though this one seemed like a more recent addition in comparison to the rest of the floors. It was small, basically the size of three bedrooms and poorly built. There were childish toys spread about the floor, remnants of old music discs, and a bookshelf full of educational books.

 "We built this." Renard stated. "Everything from the walls to the bookshelf."

 I walked around and observed the various knick-knacks on the shelves, though I dared not touch anything. "This was undoubtedly a sweet memory for you. I'm sorry things turned out the way they did." I told him softly, approaching him slowly.

 "YOU'RE sorry!?" He hissed, stomping his foot in my direction as he spoke.

 "Yes, I am." I walked forward and took his hand in mine. "You have lived a long, miserable life… trapped here in a place full of rotting corpses and terrifying supernatural forces. In addition to that, you have suffered a greater pain than I did when my mother left me." I assured him.

 "What do you mean?" He was beginning to calm down, his hand becoming warmer in my grasp. Tears ran down both of our faces.

 "You had to live with the remnants of your mother. A loved one that had changed so far beyond recognition, to the point that she was a different person altogether. To have her there, but not there, is a pain I can only imagine." I held his hand tighter with my right hand and grabbed my father's hand with my left. "If anything like that had ever happened to my father, I might have reacted similarly."

 To my surprise, the red in his eyes faded and returned to his normal brown. He gently grasped my hand and wiped away his tears with his other hand. "She practically imprisoned me here. Even as a nineteen-year-old, she forbade me from leaving my room out of fear of someone sneaking in and kidnapping me…" He looked down at me, his eyes now displaying a sense of gratitude. "I appreciate you opening my eyes… Although I miss her dearly, I have for a long while before I even knew you existed. She was gone long before you released her maddened soul." He reasoned with himself.

 "I know you're a good man. You just haven't had the chance to show it. After all, you've had every chance to harm us…" I looked straight into his eyes. "Don't think I didn't catch on to the seemingly unlikely ways that we survived each monstrosity. That zombie on the sixth floor could easily have chased us up the stairs, but you stopped her, didn't you?"

 He fell on his knees, his face now almost at the same level as mine. Without anymore thought, I embraced the scrawny, boney, lanky man. "It's okay… I think I understand you." I assured him. I felt warm in that moment, and I knew he was beginning to heal.

"I've overheard everything, Lyra. Anything you have revealed in this hotel, I know. I know of your personal pains." He continued. "I think I understand you, too. If it were possible that you could stay here, I would have gladly danced with you again."

 "…What?"

 "I know your decision already. You two want to refurbish this hotel, and 'return it to its former glory. I can't allow that."

 Renard stood up and gestured toward the ladder. "Please, depart. I do not begrudge you any further, but this hotel must never return." He stated.

 "Why do you say that?" My father questioned him with a hint of irritation in his voice.

 "It is the product of a sinner, as I am. Both I and this hotel are unworthy of the goodness you have shown us. Neither of us shall exist past this day." Without another word, he grabbed both of us and tossed us down the ladder.

"Leave here, now, or face the same fate as L'Hôtel Hanté."

To be continued